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The Pelican Brief is a ridiculous movie
In short succession 2 podcasts I listen to covered the movie adaptation of The Pelican Brief. If you watched it back in the 1990s you probably didn’t realize how bananas the plot of this movie was. It sounds OK in short summary – some evil corporations kill 2 US Supreme Court judges to prevent a…
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Review: The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture
The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon My rating: 4 of 5 stars Glen Weldon takes us through Batman’s history and evolution and how it was affected by the culture in which it was written. I knew bits and pieces of the story from other histories of comics, but…
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All Journey and No Destination: Friday and Fast Times at Ridgemont High
By complete coincidence I ended up watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Friday (each for the first time) back to back this week. I watched Fast Times because it was being covered by Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson were covering it on Unspooled, their film podcast. As for Friday, well, that’s a slightly more…
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Perfect Blue
I used to hate Hunger Games because I considered it to be yet another example of America getting credit, fame, etc from another culture’s work; Battle Royale in this case. Eventually, I got the Hunger Games Trilogy from a Humble Bundle and read it, realizing that while the plots were the same in the abstract…
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Two-for-One Racism
I was watching Gold Diggers of ’49 the other day with my daughter as we made our way through old cartoon shorts. That’s how I grew up – on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other WB shorts along with the Disney shorts. Sometimes, late at night, they’d show the black and white cartoons like…
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Throwing Emby into the mix
In my ideal home setup, I’d have computers in every room. I’m not horribly far off, but it’s mostly via old laptops and computers that I’ve retired from regular use or had donated from family members. As more of our movie purchases become BluRay (and with 4k video around the corner), some of those old…
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Happy Star Wars Day
May the Fourth Force Be With You!
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3 Things I don’t like about Gone Girl
I haven’t seen Gone Girl, but my wife condensed the 2 hour movie into a 30 minute play-by-play summary. There are three things I don’t like about the plot. (In case it’s not obvious….spoilers ahoy) In a world in which women already have a hard time getting their rape allegations believed, the plot point in…
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Is All About that Bass a net positive message?
This isn’t the first time I mention this song on here. But I’ve been thinking about the lyrics a lot recently as it continues to play on the radio at the gym. A conversation on twitter yesterday with @AprilTara spurred me to put my thoughts on the blog. At first blush, the lyrics seem to…
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Marx Brothers
Watching Marx Brothers A Day At The Races with my two year old. She likes it. But asked me, “Daddy, why doesn’t that man talk?”
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Why isn’t it @donald_faison ?
Yesterday I saw the new Star Wars trailer. I told my wife I was disappointed that if they were going to have a black Storm Trooper, they didn’t pick Donald Faison. His Storm Trooper on the Robot Chicken Star Wars specials is my favorite part of the specials. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to…
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Mascots and Bowdlerization
As I read with my daughter I realize I had forgotten a large part of The Car in the Hat. Also watching the old Disney shorts with my daughter. Both Mickey Mouse and the Cat in the Hat were often jerks before they became mascots for their companies. Now they are goodie two shoes.
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Boo from Monsters, Inc
Now that I have a two year old I realize that Boo’s drawings are way too advanced for a kid who can’t even speak in full sentences.
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Watching Netflix on Kubuntu
A little while ago I wrote about watching Netflix on Fedora 20. Also works on the latest Kubuntu with the latest updates installed. Also, at least with Kubuntu, I didn’t need to modify the user agent. It just automatically worked with Google Chrome. I didn’t try with Chromium, but I’d read that didn’t work.
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A thought while in the pool today
I’d love to see either (or both?) Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith take on an updated film adaptation of Catch-22. The dialog is so important in the book and those guys are masters of dialog.