Go see "The Dark Knight"
Intense, brilliant and awesome
Worthy of the Hype
Wow. Frickin' wow. Totally worthy of all the hype. Intense. It felt like two movies worth of experience, at least (in the best possible way). So dense. Heath Ledger is as amazing as everyone has been touting (or expecting). Not once was I pulled out of the movie by bad CG. Brutal without being graphically gory.
Though this movie obviously requires some suspension of disbelief, there was only really one thing that snapped my suspension of disbelief for a nanosecond but then I got over it and was back in this amazing film.
My one complaint, and it is oh so minor, Christian Bale's voice when he's batman and not Bruce Wayne. It's just too gruff and affected. It makes him hard to understand and sounds like he's desperately in need of a bat-lozenge for his throat. As one comedian put it after "Batman Begins", it's a little like cookie monster playing Batman.
"DO YOU HAVE A COOKIE FOR BATMAN?"
I WILL be seeing this movie again in the IMAX. It almost demands multiple viewings to process it all.
In another interesting twist, my acting career idol, Gary Oldman, plays probably the most boring, normal, plain part of his career. A part that's so not "Gary Oldmanesque". And yet, in a strange twist, it being so different in itself kind of makes it Gary Oldmanesque! Don't get me wrong, he does a great job and I love his character, he's just so normal, plain and kind of boring (the character, no Gary Oldman).
See this movie. Multiple times. Genius.
For quite some time now I've been looking at getting an iPhone. I am constantly at auditions and such where I need to know my availability and would have to say "I'll let you know when I get home and check my Google Calendar".
Now before you even say it, I don't want to carry around a good old paper calendar/notebook/whatever. I share calendar's with several people so we can easily see each other's availability and I don't want to have to document things in multiple places either.
Continue reading "The Quest for the iPhone"Joss Whedon's new online project, Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog is online in three installments for free until July 20. Catch it now, or pay for it later!
When I was a kid, I had the album "Chipmunk Punk". This was a 1980 album of Alvin and the Chipmunks doing 9 songs that were not really in any way, punk, but were pretty cool and influential to me. This album actually introduced me to a lot of songs that I would later come to really love. At the time, I had never heard of "The Knack" and I don't think I had heard of most of the other songs on the album either. I just knew I liked the Chipmunks as we had a cool clear red album of theirs from 1969.
Recently I was thinking back on this and realized just what a weird album this was. The track listing was:
Side A
Now the first thing I noticed is that one third of the songs are from The Knack. Now don't get me wrong, I love The Knack's debut album "Get The Knack" which spawned all three of these songs, but to have three of nine songs by The Knack, who I had never even heard of at that time, seems an odd choice. Were the producers friends with The Knack? Did they get a hellaciously good deal on song rights?
Secondly, though I remember very specific changes they made to the lyrics to make them more kid friendly, those three songs from The Knack are racy! They're all about trying to get laid. Sure they changed "Til she's sitting on your face" to "Til she's sitting in your place" but a few lyrical changes do not change the overall subject of the song.
I don't really remember realizing at the time what these songs were about, but again in hindsight, WHOA! How did this album get made?
"You thought you heard her saying 'Good Girls don't'...but she's been telling you 'Good girls don't but I do."
"Frustrated" is all about blue balls, basically. Some girl not putting out.
"My Sharona", all about lusting after this young teenage girl.
Again, I ask, HOW DID THIS ALBUM GET MADE AND RELEASED? All I know is I'm glad it did, because I played the hell out of it and was introduced to some awesome music. I own every one of those songs on CD by the original artists. Except for "How Do I Make You". I can't remember how that one goes but I remember I liked the Chipmunk's version of it. Somehow I listened to this album repeatedly without ever really realizing how inappropriate some of the songs probably were for a nine year old boy.
I had an experience a few weeks ago that made me realize just how lucky i am to live a fairly prejudice-free life. I am generally surrounded by non-prejudiced people in a fairly non-prejudiced town, at least to the point where something like this actually took me by surprise which is a good thing.
I was at a band gig when one of my band mates was talking about his family trip to Disneyworld. This individual is a very generous generally great guy but he's also an old country boy farmer. Sometimes these things just don't seem to go together, such as when him, his wife and their teenage daughter were talking about how they happened to be at Disneyworld for gay pride day. And, oh my goodness, they were surrounded by GAY PEOPLE! Shock! horror! And, I quote, "It was disgusting!"
I sat there kind of fuming trying to figure out exactly how to handle this. I had no idea what to say or do. I wanted to speak up but in a non-confrontational way that would hopefully reach them and make them think instead of just alienating them but I just couldn't think of anything to say. I ended up muttering sarcastically, "Oh no, gay people," but no one really heard and I didn't want to make a point by repeating it or whatever. I think the real shame is that their daughter, who is a bright, intelligent girl, is having this kind of thing put in her head.
There are so many people in the world and the vast majority of them are going to be different from you in at least some ways. Sometimes you have close friends who are good people and yet have some pretty major differences from you. Sometimes that can be really hard. I actually wondered, albeit only briefly, "Do I really want to be in a band with people like this?"
After seeing "Wall-e" (which, by the way is one of the best movies ever) my brain decided to start thinking about my favorite movie robots. So here's my top 10 favorite Movie/TV robots (not necessarily in any particular order):
I'm sure I'll probably think of a ton more that I'll wish I'd put on here as soon as I publish this, but those are the ones that first came to my head so that says something about them. Keep in mind these are MY favorite robots. The ones that for whatever reason made an impact on me. Many people may cry "Where's Johnny 5? Optimus Prime?" Etc., but there are many famous and iconic robots that just don't hold any personal value to me. I never saw "Short Circuit". I never watched "Transformers". Daleks and "Blade Runner" replicants aren't actually robots. So those are my picks. Feel free to add your own in the comments!
Random bonus tidbit:
I always thought "Gort" was cool too but I never actually saw "The Day the Earth Stood Still." In fact I think I first became aware of Gort on the cover of a Ringo Starr Album.
The 48 hour film competition is going on again this weekend. Once again I had a gig on Saturday so I couldn't be in any films so instead I offered to help my friend, Greg, write his.
Last at 7:00 P.M. Greg received his info. His genre was "Road Movie", the character we had to include was "Zack Needham, take-out delivery driver", the prop we had to use was a baby block, and we had to use the line "That was a good one."
Me, Jess, Larry, Greg, Hillary and Chris all went to eat and brainstorm, then we adjourned to Greg's house to start writing.
Me, Jess, Larry and Greg then proceeded to write from about 9 P.M. to about 2 A.M. I have to say I think we wrote a pretty damn good 7 minute film. Absurd, crazy, funny, and out there. I then emailed Greg a bunch of music I'd compsed for past projects that he could use in this one for various scenes. This will be the first thing I've ever helped write without directing and starring in it too. It's kind of weird but kind of cool too. can't wait to see what we have at 7 P.M. tomorrow!
After an epic battle involving support tickets with my web host and Movable Type, we finally slew the goblin that was eating my comments. I believe that everything is back in working order. If not, feel free to email me.
As some may have noticed, my blog is way wonky. I have no idea how long it's been broken since I only just noticed but for quite some time now the ability to comment has probably been broken. I am in talks with both Movable Type support and my web host trying to figure out what's up. For the moment, comments and trackbacks are disabled to try and reduce the errors that they cause.
Well, not exactly. We've been discussing getting a new bed for some time. It seems like a rarity that either one of us gets a decent nights sleep without feeling achy, crunchy or like we need to see a chiropractor. This is a bummer to us because about 2 years ago we spent a good amount getting what was supposed to be one of the best mattresses at this particular shop. I was not looking forward to trying to figure out what mattress to try next. You just never really know until you've slept on it for a while so "trying it out" in the shop is pretty much useless.
Cut to today. After getting an insanely great amount of clothes for both of us at Goodwill for only $100, we headed to Costco because I wanted to look for this little portable AC unit a friend had told me about to use in the room we call "The Cave" where my computer and home studio resides. For some stupid reason the AC vent going to this room is about half the size of all the others so it gets warmer than the rest of the house.
As soon as we walked in they had these queen size memory foam mattresses for only $600. Now anyone who had ever looked at a memory foam mattress will know that this is a pretty incredible price. We had always wanted to try one but had never seen them for less than a metric ton of money. We asked about their return policy and Costco has an awesome policy of "if you don't like it, we'll take it back. Period. Doesn't matter how long it's been. No time limit." I strongly felt that this was the bed we needed to get.
So we didn't find the AC unit I was looking for (my friend, Greg, is going to pick one up for me from Sam's Club where he saw it), but we ended up with a memory foam mattress for about the same price we paid for our old one! And three tubs of sabra hummus which is the best hummus ever. It is THE reason we got a Costco card.
On other fronts, I've been hella busy with acting gigs, some Production Assistant work, our own short films, gearing up for our first feature, and many other things. Life is generally good and I hope to stop being such a crappy and infrequent blogger. I film for about a week on an independent feature this week, I'm the lead in another indie feature shooting next month and have a part in a third indie feature in July.
Grand Theft Auto IV has also sucked up a huge part of my life. It's awesome and addicting. Rock Band still rocks We had the best Rock Band session ever Saturday night at Greg's home theater. Though he has it on Ps3, we brought our Xbox because, of all our friends, we by far have the most songs since we have bought almost all the downloadable content. We played for about 6 hours getting our band all the way to the Hall of Fame gig, but by that time we were all tired so our attempt at the brutal 8 song setlist to get into the Hall of Fame will have to wait until next time.
That's about all my brain has to spit out at the moment and even all that is the highly condensed summary. Ya'll come back now! Ya hear?
The Movie Musketeers tackle Indy 4!
When Larry and I made "The Brazil Nut Dance", we had always envisioned it a certain way but at the time were unable to finish it the way we wanted. Well now my knowledge has grown and it finally exists as it was conceived in our minds.
A while back I was involved in making a series of webisodes called "Gettin Rich". They're sort of infomercial parodies. Well now you can check 'em out!
Gettin Rich: Roadkill
I got a random email from my band's website telling me that I might be interested to know about an Ebay auction. This auction happens to be for a cassette of a band I was in in the '80s. For some reason that felt pretty cool.
On another random tangent, in the past two days I had a total of 4 projects premiere that I was involved in. One was a 20 minute Sci-Fi piece that turned out really cool, one was a three camera studio shoot of a scene from "North By Northwest", one was a small role in a short about an evil garden gnome, and one was a fake trailer for "B21", a parody of the movie "21" with Kevin Spacey as the teacher who get MIT students together to go to Vegas and count cards and make lots of money. In our, I played the Kevin Spacey teaching Austin Community College students to "count balls" at bingo parlors. It turned out pretty damn funny. Even the opening cracked me up: "From the film makers who watched the trailer for the movie '21'..."
Been incredibly busy on the acting front. Not that I've ever been that good about blog updating but I like to pretend I have an excuse. In the past two days I played Michael Clayton (George Clooney played him in the film) for a student directing class and also did a scene from North By Northwest where I played Cary Grant's role. This was for a college production class where we performed in studio with a three camera setup. We rehearsed it many times so the camera people could get their shots and the control room could get their switching between shots choreography down. It was quite a lot of fun.
I'd seen "North By Northwest" but it was some time ago. The scene we did was the scene in the train car where Cary Grant first meets Eva Marie Saint. It really struck me how incredibly saucy this scene was for its time. A sexually aggressive woman industrial designer. Kudos to Ernest Lehman!
As a side tangent, Larry and I have both been trying to be healthier in our eating habits. In an effort to remain healthy yet indulge our sweet tooth, Larry concocted a brilliant treat. We had already been quite the fans of sugar-free chocolate Jell-o pudding. Now it is important to note that that pre-made stuff isn't nearly as good as the powder that you add milk to and make yourself. Trust us. So Larry had the idea of mixing the pudding mix with some milk and ice and making a milkshake. from there we also added some peanut butter and for nutritional value added a scoop of "Muscle Milk" supplement. This has now become one of our absolute favorite treats. Totally sugar-free, only as much fat as the milk you use and can be a great dessert or a meal replacement if you add the Muscle Milk. Chocolate-peanut butter icy shakes. You'll thank us.
