movies, two buck schmuck

Two Buck Schmuck Gets A Hairline Fracture

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Tonight at the 9-ish shows at the LaGrange Theatre, here were my choices:

Wild Hogs — Seen it!
Georgia Rule — A Garry Marshall comedy, starring Jane Fonda and Lindsay Lohan. I’d be afraid to attend because my heart would explode with warmth and laughter.
Blades Of Glory — Like Talladega Nights on ice. Though I would probably enjoy Will Arnett and Amy Poehler’s supporting roles as a vicious ice-skating couple in this movie, I didn’t feel like seeing a comedy tonight.

Which leaves us with:

Fracture — a “suspense” “drama” starring Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins.

I don’t believe I have noted it previously, but all the movies I have seen up to this point at the LaGrange have been in Theater 1, the curvy seated room with dim lighting and no drink holders.

Tonight, I saw the majesty of Theater 2. It was a perfectly acceptable theatre, a little on the smallish side, with the screen not quite big enough for the projected images. But it had bright enough lighting for me to read my cherished Movie Fun Facts prior to the movie, and cup holders as far as the eye could see (which isn’t terribly far in Theater 2). One kind of disturbing thing about Theater 2 — you have to walk down a very long, blood-red corridor to get to it. Zoiks!

Hey, have you ever heard of the well-respected film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum? He’s actually turned me onto many interesting films — for example, the works of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Apart from periodically providing capsule reviews of recent releases, Rosenbaum also writes weekly columns in the Chicago Reader that are articulate and often thought-provoking.

Now that I have gotten *that* out of the way, here’s his review of Fracture in its entirety (taken from here):

An engineer (Anthony Hopkins) goes on trial in Los Angeles for trying to murder his wife (Embeth Davidtz), and the prosecutor (Ryan Gosling) attempts to push through what appears to be an open-and-shut case but isn’t. With its lavish architecture and Spielbergian lighting, this absorbing thriller has a high-toned look, but director Gregory Hoblit and writers Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers got much of their training in TV cop shows, which shows in the adroit way they semaphorically abbreviate certain characters and plot developments to slide us past various incongruities. The main interest here is the juxtaposing of Gosling’s Method acting with Hopkins’s more classical style, a spectacle even more mesmerizing than the settings.

Rosenbaum actually gave this movie a “Reader Recommend” (the equivalent of a “thumbs up”). One thing that I have noted in particular with regards to the more “intellectual” film critics, is that occasionally when reviewing a piece-of-shit mainstream movie, they focus on some dumbass component that makes them think the film is somehow watchable. This film wasn’t just a turd, it had teeth, too. Seriously, “semaphorically abbreviate”? The juxtaposition of Gosling’s and Hopkin’s acting styles, a mesmerizing spectacle? Are you fucking kidding me?

This movie was not just boring, it was relentlessly boring. I am not exaggerating in saying that I looked at my watch *at least* ten times during this movie.

The one bright spot in this movie was that in a few scenes Ryan Gosling was wearing a shirt for Camp Ki-Shau-Wau, apparently an old Boy Scout Camp once owned by the Starved Rock Area Council.

My bleary, reddened eyes opened briefly at the sight of the words Starved Rock on his shirt, because that’s a lovely northern Illinois state park I have had the pleasure of hiking. From what I can tell, Camp Ki-Shau-Wau is not located in the park, but a little ways down the Vermillion River. It appears that the camp has been converted to a resort.

Why not learn more about Starved Rock? On the Starved Rock page, do you see those background images of the park drifting behind the happy, active, middle-agish seated couple? Watch those pictures for about two hours, and you’ll get a sense of how it felt to watch Fracture (except the couple was Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins, and they were spectacularly mesmerizing in their contrasting acting styles).

That was nice how I tied that all together, wasn’t it? You didn’t think I could pull it off, did you.

That’s why they pay me the big bucks, ladies and gents.

rock 'n roll, youtube

Hello, Yourself

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SamuraiFrog has posted a song of the week, Hello, It’s Me by Todd Rundgren.

I guess I’m pretty Rundgren-deficient or something. I don’t really know any of his work — I only know that he occasionally wears crazy sunglasses.

I liked the song.

Its title is the same as the last song of Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs For Drella.

The Songs For Drella version is more of a song about saying goodbye.

Here’s a video of it. I believe that with the hair helmet Lou Reed is sporting in this performance, I have now satisfied the mullet quota for my blog for the remainder of the year.

cicadas, word fun

An End To Another Cicadian Rhythm

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Not much going on lately in Brookfield, cicada-related at least.

The noise has settled down to what one might hear on a normal summer day. The bugs that used to be flying around are now corpses on the ground.

All in all, this emergence was (for me) unexpected, kind of gross, and pretty cool. I’m looking forward to the next one.

Oh, a side note — my post is punning on Circadian rhythms, a term I learned in a converation a while back with Bubs, in regards to how he had lost his due to working crazy hours.

Here’s some other Rhythms that haven’t entered the common lexicon as of yet.


Chicletian Rhythm – The amount of time it takes to chew a piece of Chiclets gum before it becomes stale and you have to add another piece.


Cardassian Rhythm – Some Star Trek backstory alien race mating-ritual nonsense that I presume exists, and that probably already has a series of fan websites devoted to it (but I am not willing to look for).


Serjtankian Rhythm – The amount of time elapsing between the hearing of a song by System of a Down.

life's little slices

L’il Train Vignette

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This morning on my train car, the guitar intro to ACDC’s “Back In Black” kicked in.

A late-middle-aged woman reached into her purse to pull out the cell phone that was producing the music.

As she sipped a box of juice (the kind normally seen in the hands of a toddler), she admonished her son over the phone for forgetting his basketball shoes.

movies

I’m Exmausted

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I think I may have lost some zazz at some point.

I can’t work 16 sweaty hours per day so easily anymore. I’ll survive, but I’ll be exmausted (that’s when you’re so tired you use the letter ‘m’ instead of ‘h’ because it takes less breath).

I was working all weekend on a friend of mine’s movie (as my two year old calls him, “friend Andy, friend Andy?”).

30 or so hours of strenuous filmmaking later, I’m sore and achy, and jittery at hearing a fan in our bedroom while I’m falling asleep (I keep on thinking, we should probably shut that thing off, it’s going to be bad for recording dialogue).

Still, a really fun weekend.

shopping

I Have Shopping Faux Pas, Too

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Just to prove to you I’m not some wiseass who never exhibits less-than-savvy shopping behavior, I present this humble post.

First, please note that part of this post has been encoded because my mother reads this blog.

Mom, there is nothing really that awful in this little vignette, but I felt I should at least protect your eyes from seeing it without readying yourself.

To read the message below, copy the text and paste it into the “Input” box on the top right of my blog, hit the “En/Decode input” button and read the text that displays in the “Output” box.

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Lbh xabj jung’f jbefr guna tbvat gb Gnetrg sbe bayl gjb vgrzf, pbaqbzf naq znffntr bvy?

Ergheavat gur pbaqbzf ng Phfgbzre Freivpr yngre orpnhfr lbh zvfgnxrayl tbg gur jebat xvaq.

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shopping

A Hopefully Obvious Shopping Faux Pas

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I can safely say, that without doing even the slightest bit of research, the Internet contains the following advice from at least a handful of people:

If you’re shopping at Target, don’t wear a red shirt.

Now, I realize that not everyone has a connection to the Internet, but surely these sage words have also been transmitted through our culture’s rich and vibrant oral tradition.

Yet still, when I visit our local Super Target, which one would assume is only populated by superintelligent supershoppers, I swear that half the customers are wearing red.

To these people, I implore you:

Note: There is one exception to this rule. If you intentionally wear red so you can hover around a busy aisle, sporadically adjusting items on their shelves and looking somewhat busy, for the sole purpose of saying, “I don’t work here” when shoppers come to you asking for help, by all means wear red.

Asshole.

jung vf fcybgpul?