Two movies

I have two movies to offer today, but it'll be short, because they both, um, sucked.

Fear and Trembling
This is a French film about a Belgium woman going to Japan to work. She works at a horrible job doing a horrible job of getting along with her coworkers. She claims in the beginning of the movie that she wants to be Japanese, and then spends all of her time being European.
This movie commits the worst sin of all - it's boring. There are moments that I think were supposed to be funny, but they were boring too.
My advice - don't watch this.

The Grocer's Son
Another French film. Yes; last night was French film night at my place.
Okay, if this film had been called The Mildly Neurotic Shopkeeper's Boring Son - they would have nailed it.
I recommend that you skip this one.

Last night's movie: 50/50

50/50
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard and Anjelica Huston.
Directed by: Jonathan Levine

Okay first things first. The cover of the DVD case of the version of this movie that I watched, has two quotes. The first is from Graham Fuller of Vanity Fair, "a laugh-out-loud comedy." and the second is from Richard Roeper, "one of the best of the year." (Hey, the box doesn't have the first letters capitalized.) On the back cover, it states that Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calls this film, "achingly hilarious and heartfelt." Now I'm not sure if perhaps they got to watch a different cut of this movie than I did, but I was crying a lot more than I was laughing. Not tearing up or getting misty-eyed or some other euphamism. I was crying, had to blow my nose, the whole bit.
I don't want to imply that this makes it a bad movie, on the contrary, I quite liked it.

I put off watching this film for a couple of days since getting it. You know how it is, you've just got to judge if you can handle something sad or depressing. Well, that was the first 50 of it. The second 50 of it was Seth Rogen. I don't dislike the guy. I thought he was hilarious in The Pineapple Express. But, that's his thing - he's that character in every movie.
Well, that first 50 was a good call on my part, because this film is a downer for great big parts of it. (See above - you know - where I said I was crying.) Ultimately I felt I was having a good enough day, so I went for it anyway. Good call on my part, both the waiting for a good day and watching this film. And I can only say that because that second bit - the 50 I assigned to Rogen, is probably like a 15 or 20. Ya, he still largely played the same character as in Zach and Miri Make a Porno, but he also had good chemistry with Gordon-Levitt. There are parts where his character is definitely concerned about his friend and I thought he did a pretty good job of doing it. Sure, he still couldn't say more than a couple of lines without profanities and his character was high a lot, but that's a lack of imagination on the writers and director. Hey, look at me! I'm actually sticking up for Seth Rogen as an actor. Go figure.

What happened (if you haven't seen the movie you should probably stop now - go on; nothing to see here):
Gordon-Levitt's Adam and Rogen's Kyle are best buds who work as producers at a radio station. Adam has an artist girlfriend, Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) who he thinks he might be ready to take it to the next level with. Pretty early in the film, Adam goes to a doctor concerned about a back ache that he's had for weeks and is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that is fairly far along. Adam tells Rachael and gives her an out - she can leave now, no harm, no foul. She tells him that she wouldn't dream of leaving him. Adam waits a few days to tell his mother, Diane (Anjelica Huston) that he has cancer - which he does by inviting her over to dinner where she clearly thinks that he's about to announce that he's asked Rachael to marry him. Adam is referred to a therapist, Katherine (Anna Kendrick) who is as new at her job as he is with dealing with cancer - he's her third patient ever.
From the very beginning, Rachael is distant at best. She drives him to his chemotherapy treatments but won't come in to the hospital because of the "bad energy". In no time at all she's dropping the ball - leaving him stranded at the hospital until late at night when she should have been there in the afternoon, etc. At a gallery event, from which Adam has stayed home because he didn't feel up to going, Kyle sees Rachael making out with another guy. Not only does he see her, but he takes pictures to show Adam. So, Adam, with support from Kyle, kicks Rachael to the curb.
What follows is a middle section of the movie where Kyle wants to use Adam's cancer to get them laid, which Adam eventually agrees to go along with. This is juxtaposed with Adam's awkward visits to Katherine.
The doctor's try everything, and the only chance that Adam has left is to have a very dangerous surgery. Before the surgery, Rachael tries to get back with Adam, pretty much stating that her other guy dumped her, but Adam is strong and tells her to fuck off (his words were, "Get the fuck off my porch".) Yay for Adam.
The surgery happens, and not only do Adam's parents and Kyle show up in the waiting room, but so does Katherine. Adam survives and the cancer is beaten. The movie ends with a first date between Adam and Katherine.

My thoughts:
This movie was predictable, but delightfully executed. If they had spent a little less time working so hard for some of the laughs and instead put that energy into the gravitas that Adam was feeling, I think the whole film would have been better for it. The scene where Adam finds out he has cancer, is amazing - his doctor is practically mumbling, showing almost zero bedside manner. Adam doesn't know what he's being told so stands up and looks out the office window, while the doctor seems not to notice because he is so focused on all the technical/medical terms. Very moving stuff.
You know from the time that you see Rachael that she is going to do Adam wrong. When you first meet Kyle, you see that he's the buffoon buddy with a heart of gold. Diane is the overbearing mother that will do anything needed if Adam will just let her in. Katherine is the novice therapist who breaks some rules with Adam and you know, even before Rachael is caught cheating that Adam will end up with Katherine.
Would I have liked this film to be less obvious from the beginning? Sure. Was the film ruined for me because of it? Not really.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a fine actor. He's come a long way from 3rd Rock from the Sun. He handles Adam in a very believable manner - he's just another guy doing the best he can with the hand dealt to him. The real testament for me is whether or not I can separate the actor from the character. Maybe it was visual in this movie, but once Adam loses his hair, I stopped thinking of him as Gordon-Levitt and thought of him as Adam.
Seth Rogen plays the rough-around-the-edges best friend. I don't know Rogen personally, but I don't imagine this character was that different from who he really is. Could I ever get past the fact it was Rogen to hink of his character just as Kyle? No.
Bryce Dallas Howard is new to me, or at least unknown. I thought of her as Rachael, whom I thought of as a bitch for how she treated Adam, but who I also thought of as a bit boring, her character seemed a bit flat. But it was one of those performances where I felt that she was giving the director exactly what he wanted - I blame him and not her.
Anna Kendrick was great as Katherine. I knew that I had seen her in other films such as Up in the Air, but she was the chacracter from the get-go. If she were famous, it might have taken longer, but it still would have happened early. She does an excellent job of walking the line of someone using book learning and someone developing a hand's on feel (pun intended) for her patients. I expect good things from ths young lady in ovies to come.
Anjelica Huston. What more can I say? I never felt like I was watching Huston - it was Diane the whole time. It is very easy to see why she is one of the best actresses of her generation.
What more can I say? This movie is all about the characters, and I didn't think anything about special effects. Which turns out to be a testament to just how good of a job they were doing, since they obviously had to make Gordon-Levitt look as if he had cancer. They were flawless in this film.
My closing thought is to make sure you have plenty of tissues and someone to watch this with.

I feel that I should give this film a letter grade, so I'll give it a B. Above average work, but not the best I had ever seen. I would definitely recommend this movie to others, with the caveats above.

I've got the music in me

I spend a fair amount of time every day listening to music. Typically about two hours listening to tunes from my own private library, and another two to four hours listening to music chosen by others. What? Ya, my iPod and the radio.

I live in such a small radio market that I'm always surprised that I can find anything I even half way like to listen to - thank goodness for National Public Radio, other public radio programs and a local public radio station that has the decency to play these shows.
I listen to David Dye on the World Cafe when I get a chance and to Gregg McSomething-or-other on Under Currents. I get a fair amount of new and alternative music through these two programs. When push comes to shove, usually a couple of times a month, I listen to commercial radio because the public radio station is off the air for one reason or another. Oh, and on Saturday evenings when the public radio station is playing jazz.

I don't think a lot of other people are that much into music around here. I know that others listen to music, and I occasionally get them to talk about it, but it's not the high point of their life. Maybe I'm just trying to be a hipster in a town without hipsters. If I succeeded and were the only hipster in town, would I really be a hipster? Don't I at least need one peer to recognize my hipness? But, you know, what is hip? Hipness is, what it is.

a dream that woke me in the night

It's Christmas time and the weather has been cold but surprisingly dry making everything look washed out and faded. I'm at the house in Falls City but it's not cluttered like I remember, it's bright and clean almost cheery in comparison to the outside world.

My brother is younger than he is now, but older than I ever remember him for a shared Christmas. When was the last one we spent together as kids? Was I a Junior or Senior in high school? He looks to be in his twenties and just as unhappy to be here as I am. "I don't want to be here." he tells me. "Why are we here?"

My mom calls us from the other room, "Boys, don't forget to turn the lights off before you go upstairs. I'm going to bed now."

The two of us look at each other. "Was that...mom?"

"Ya, I think it was." I answered.

"But, she's, you know."

"Ya, dude. I know."

I go up to bed but have a hard time getting to sleep. My room is cold and I'm going over and over in my mind the evening just ended. When had ___ looked so young? How many years since mom had died? It crosses my mind several times that I must be dreaming, or more correctly having a nightmare, but the details are so rich and vibrant, so multi-sensual from the distinct sound of my brother, to the slight musty smell of my blankets, to the cold ear on the side not on the blanket. But the most telling sign of reality is the passing of time. While my recalling here is leaving out the mundane - using the bathroom, brushing my teeth, changing out of my clothes, sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the wall with a sense of hopelessness born out of spending yet another holiday away from friends knowing that my small family would mostly be hanging out in seperate rooms except at meals.

Sometime in the middle of the night I wake up. It's far too bright in the small bedroom. At first I think a car has pulled up outside and the headlights are shining through my window. I entertain for half a moment that ___ has come to rescue me or at least join me. Instead, I see that it is snowing and has been snowing for a while. The lot next door, shouldn't there be a house there? is covered with snow. It's hauntingly beautiful. Instead of crawling back into my bed, which hasn't proved to be quite warm enough, I dress and decide to go downstairs where I can make a hot cup of tea.

I walk past a smallish sized plastic Christmas tree with perhaps half a dozen gifts around it and wonder if any of them are for me. I know that my mom would have put at least one under the tree for me. It wouldn't be anything I wanted, or could use, but I appreciated it all the same.

I make my tea and sit at a counter in the kitchen for I don't know how long. Eventually, and still in the night, my brother joins me for much the same reason as I'm there, and brews a pot of coffee for himself.

Maybe it's the smell of the coffee, or the snow, or the fact that it's Christmas morning, but my mother wakes early and talks to us from the other room where the tree and gifts are.

She calls out to me to come look at the gift that was dropped off for me after I went to bed. As I go to the room my mom is in, she goes to the kitchen. It is beginning to greatly unnerve me that I have yet to see her. ___ comes with me and I can sense that he is feeling the same.

The gift is large and has a card on the front. There are several smaller gift bags around it, and by the way they are all setting apart, I know that they are for me as well.

How is it that someone came after I went to bed, but I didn't hear them and my mother did? I've always been the light sleeper of the family, while mom and ___ have literally slept through fire trucks with sirens blaring right ouside our house.

Before I read the message in the card or read the name signed at the bottom, I know the handwriting. When I see that it is signed by ___ I am only surprised that after all that we went through that she would send a gift, perhaps delivering it herself.

I decide to grab a shower before breakfast, something to hopefully warm me up. I begin to second guess that I've correctly identified the proper ___. How many girls by that name have I known? But, I know that I'm not wrong. I'm trying to picture how she must look now as I pull back the shower curtain and stare at what I see, completely lacking any understanding of what I am looking at.

The moment hangs suspended as my brain processes what is before me. The first thing I identify is the smell which is salty and acrid, the smell of a large amount of blood. Only then do I realize that the six inch long piece of something that I've been looking at, that I've been staring at, is a human leg near the ankle and the thin three inch pieces of something around it and resting on it are fingers no longer connected to any hand. Upon this realization I can clearly see that each sports a finger nail.

Bile rises in my throat and I think that I am going to sick all over the bath tub full of body parts, and chunks of body parts. I know that it's ___. I just don't know it it's only her. There seem to be too many pieces for just one woman to be in the tub.

I mercifully turn, finally tearing away my stare from the god awful sight and leave to find my brother so that we can call the police.

I don't recall sicking up, but the taste of it is strong in my mouth, so I must have. ___ has called the police after viewing the horrifying scene for himself.

In a matter of moments, I had gone from feeling lonely and depressed, knowing that ___ was not coming to get me or to be with me, to feeling ecstatic at having ___ pop back into my life and thinking for a moment that she might be at the house or coming to the house, only then to stumble into a mind-numbing terror of discovering that she was already at the house.

I feel the vomit rising again and then ___ asks the question that had been skirting around the edge of my consciousness.

"How come we haven't seen mom? She always leaves the room right before we enter. I mean, mom's really dead right?"

The first response that pops into my mind is that the other person we've been sharing the house with must have killed ___ and is impersonating our mother. But, another thought slowly starts to form...

"___ how old are you?"

"I don't know. Don't you know?"

"What year is this? Which Christmas?"

"How the fuck do I know?"

____________________

I woke from this dream at exactly 3:39 this morning. As I process the red LED numbers I think to myself that it is still well within the witching hour.

Anybody that knows me, knows that I'm a lucid dreamer. I like to recall my dreams. Not for revelatory or psychic purposes - I think very little about dream interpretations, and would certainly never trust any self-analysis even if I was into interpreting dreams. I like to recall dreams for the fantastic stories I am telling myself.

But not last night's dream. It's many hours later and the dream is as clear as my memories of yesterday, in some ways more so since they are something above the banal of my real life.

There are no voicemails or emails from my brother, so I presume he's alright. Nore is there any indication from ___ or ___ that anything is wrong, though if ___ has been brutally murdered, I would not expect to her from here. Less literally, if she feels that I have murdered our whatever it was we had, I wouldn't hear from her.

No more analysis. It can only make me more depressed and nervous than I already am.

Misfits S3 E05

So Misfits doesn't name it's episodes other than the number, so technically this was episode "5" just like two other episodes, one each in seasons one and two.

If I were naming this episode, I would call it "Kelly in a Coma".

What Happened: Some chick swaps bodies with Kelly and said chick is in a coma. Rudy has to undergo therapy sessions and Curtis wanks off in a closet. Pretty typical stuff for this show.

Kelly's body tries to get together with her boyfriend who has said that he can't see her anymore (remember she's in a coma) so he is going to stop coming to the hospital, not to mention coma girl's mother has decided that she should be taken off life support which will result in her death.

Rudy has to undergo anger management therapy, but it upsets him so much that he splits into his two halves, and the dominant half goes back in after sending the "sensitive" Rudy away. Sensitive Rudy is hanging around outside, and after the session, the counselor is sitting in her car and crying as she has just been dumped. Need I tell you how this works out? Sensitive Rudy hooks up with her, and the next day when it's time for another session, dominant Rudy gets a hand job from the therapist and then tells her to shove off.

Curtis has found a new way to pleasure himself, I mean herself - he turns into female Curtis and masteurbates in a closet, until Alicia walks in on him (he turns back into his normal self upon hearing the door opening). She tells him that she can't believe that he's doing that, and then Simon comes in, and in a rare moment of insight figures out that Curtis was wanking off and asks Alicia why she's there.

Kelly who is not Kelly decides to keep Kelly's body, even if she has been dejected by her boyfriend. The group tries to force her to go with them, and she stabs and kills the probation worker when he comes in on them. If ever a bloke needed stabbing, this guy did (unlike the first two probation workers).

Seth, who was supposed to have been on a date with Kelly comes around and gets drawn in to solving the problem, because Alicia uses her ability to 'see' where Kelly has gone off to after the stabbing and finds that Kelly is in the coma girl's body.

So the group does the only thing they can, snag the body before the life support is turned off, and take her back to the Rec Center.

They get them switched back with the help of the boyfriend, and then Kelly and Seth kiss while the others use his car to get rid of the probation workers body.

Thoughts: Meh. No, seriously. There are some funny bits, mostly with Rudy which is surprising to me since I hadn't really liked his character much. Either one of them.

This episode felt like one of those mid-season filler episodes where they slightly advance some story arcs while wasting the viewer's time. In this case it was Kelly and Seth kissing, and perhaps Curtis in the closet - pun intended, maybe?

What is up with Alicia's power? At the beginning of this season (perhaps I will go back and write them up) she makes such a big deal out of choosing not to have a power when they all got new ones. Episodes 1 and 2 both have interchanges between her and other characters to this point. Then suddenly she's using her power, and noone, not even Simon, mentions anything about it. Not even a, "so you do have a power..." Nothing.

There are only 3 more episodes in the season, so I'll watch them, but, really; meh.

This Morning's Guilty Pleasure

No, not that. I said "guilty" pleasure.

I don't have a whole lot of guilty pleasures at the moment, because I don't feel guilty about what I'm doing. Those that I do have are almost all media related. This morning it was a song. I have a few guilty pleasures stuck in my exercise playlist, such as "Le Disko" by Shiny Toy Guns.

There is nothing quite like hoofing it down highway 42 in the fog singing along to this song - it's quite up tempo and helps keep your rate up for sure.

Attention Rick Santorum

Dear Senator Santorum,

Please continue to do exactly what you've been doing. If you keep it up, I have no doubts that you can indeed become the Republican candidate for President of the United States of America. Please, take more unscripted questions, and feel free to elaborate even further on your answers.

Sincerely,

An Obama supporter.