movies « Kenny Smith | Omnes hic sumus discere.

movies

journalism / links / Monday / movies / Samford / video — Comments Off
24
Oct 11

When life throws you Mondays …

Busy schoolwork day. I wrote three brief link posts on my blog for journalism students, one on the new faces of poverty another on the return of the police blotter and linked to an interview offering a little bit of social media advice for journalists. I’d like to think most people have gotten that figured out, but every once in a while someone does something that makes you wonder.

So those are the posts that I have been copying here from time to time. I can never make up my mind about how I want to present them. They’ll probably be reprinted here again next week, just out of habit.

One of the neater things I saw today. A six-year-old donates her birthday to help donate clean water to people in need. The founder of the non-profit recorded her a personal video:

The high touch is still a very valuable thing. Sending personalized notes like these at the right time to the right people makes for memorable content, and maybe some devoted followers.

The rest of my day was spent grading a few things and, mostly, preparing a big presentation on infographics for tomorrow’s class. There’s something like 40 pages of slides, a handout and the thing is still growing.

Oh, and there’s also a current events quiz for tomorrow’s class. MUHAHA.

Watched The Captains this evening. The preview:

Lileks‘ take on it:

The idea is simple and brilliant: he interviews everyone who played a captain on Star Trek. He’s a very good interviewer. The subjects are varied … In the end it’s about Bill, and life, and work, and what you lose, and death, and what you make in life. There’s even a big trip to a convention, and one scene that just about grinds your heart into a fine dry paste – which you can reanimate with your tears, if you please. Recommended.

This really became an excuse for Shatner to travel around and talk with people about himself while asking a few questions. At least that was the way it was edited. Maybe no one is as interesting as him. Scott Bakula and Patrick Stewart remain the most likable of the bunch, because they aren’t not crazy, bitter or overcome with ego. Chris Pine might be too cool for school, but he’s only in a fraction of the film, so it is difficult to tell. I call Kirk-level shenanigans.

Pardon me. My phone is ringing.

[…]

Step-father. He has dialed me by accident. I hear him speaking pointedly about … something. There’s someone else’s voice. And what sounds like some news-type talk show on in the background.

He is the only person that accidentally dials me. I think maybe my number is one of the hot buttons on his phone. It doesn’t happen often, but about once a year I’ll find myself comically yelling “HellllllOOOOOOOOOOO!”

This time I thought, What if he is flying? The recorders might not like my tinny voice in the background making jokes.

Why it has taken me that long to think that is a bit problematic. But I’ll distract myself with this question of morality: If someone unknowingly calls you, and you listen in, are you eavesdropping?

Because, you know, what if he were speaking pointedly about me?

He was not. When he realized his phone was on we had a little chat. Turns out he was talking about companies who are only out to get the consumer. Lots of folks can relate.

errands / movies / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
9
Aug 11

There is a quiz at the bottom of this post

Visited the financial adviser. She advised that I should have more money. This must become a repetitive part of her day. But, then, the degree of serious intonation could change on grave market days. Now you really need more money.

I am reminded of the line from the country song, some one told the narrator that Wall Street fell, but, he said, he was so poor that he could not discern the problem or understand, really, the implications as it directly related to his hard scrabble lifestyle.

Instead, his father went to work for Roosevelt, moved, and bought appliances. And the middle of the century was born.

Where can people move today? The moon. What a great concept this would be. Now all we need is a catchy name and acronym. Lunar Citizen Division. When they get up there they can build the solar system’s largest LCD screen, which would be perfect. On those clear nights you could watch reruns of Seinfeld, and forget about all of your problems down here. “Sure, the financial adviser said I needed to think about my medium term investments, but Jerry’s date has man hands! No soup for her!”

Our friend the financial adviser is very nice, happy, laughs a lot and complimentary and optimistic. I suppose they all have to be at this point, right? Besides, she works on the second floor of a two-story building. Not a lot of options there like you read about from the 1930s. The Roaring Twenties gave way to the Howlin’, Splattin’ Thirties. No one speaks of these things if they don’t have to. (And, of course, no one wants to see that happen today for a variety of reasons. I only mention it to say the following.) We leave such heavy lifting to Jean Claude Van Damme.

What a terrible movie. But the most recent quote on YouTube is great: “Man, 2004 is going to awesome!”

I suspect that it will, young man, I suspect that it will. Someone else, meanwhile, commented about a plot hole in a Van Damme film. And that’s why you should never read YouTube comments.

He’s still working, by the way. Four movies this year and three next year, so good for him. You’ll see none of them, and they’ll all have a fighting chance of being better than Time Cop.

Mowed the lawn. Specifically the back of the property. The front and sides were shown who is the landscaping boss around here at an earlier date. I was drenched, not from exertion so much as humidity. We will soon need new ways to define area stickiness. Gross, hardened syrup sometimes just doesn’t cover it as a descriptor.

Also cleaned one gutter, pulling some 38 pounds of leaves and sediment from the aluminium tray. This is good news: they are well mounted. If that had been shoddy craftmanship they’d have landed on the ground long ago.

This was the first real exercise of our new ladder. It is one of those folding, finger-pinching modular jobs. One ladder which can take on 35 shapes. You must make your own transformer noises, but I spend a considerable part of my youth in the 1980s, so this is not a problem.

I’m not sure how many of the positions the ladder creates will actually be useful, only that we can reach our largest ceiling, and yet the thing is light enough to be carried by one person and can be stowed without drastically changing any current storage plans. I meticulously work on storage plans, carefully arranging the stacking and order of things on the likelihood that they will be needed in any emergent scenario. Occasionally I realize I’ve mis-prioritized, or worse, mis-judged the odds of a scenario and must reshape the attic, or the garage or some other small area. It doesn’t keep me up nights, but I have had moments of clarity about these things in that fugue before you open your eyes in the morning.

So the ladder fits in the scheme of things nicely. Until it bites off an index finger. And you could see that happening.

Meanwhile, we are still waiting on the coupler for the washing machine. That’s an inconvenience. And I have some words on slides. Now I am memorizing the things I want to say around them. It is an unfortunate waste of your morning to see someone read word-for-word, from a screen. I give one lecture in one class where I do that. And that is the first one. I put up lots of words, speak slowly and repeat them. This is crucial information for that class that should stick with the students for years. And, then, I tell them never to do that in a presentation. But be sure you got the completeness of my very important message.

After that my presentations are usually one or three words each. I have not yet reached that higher level of existences where my PowerPoint presentations are nothing but bad clip art. Perchance to dream.

Today’s pop quiz: What does this butter and the United States economy have in common?

The answer is not: neither one should be left on the counter.

cycling / memories / movies / video / weekend — Comments Off
9
Jul 11

Sizzle and ouch

Lord, it was hot today. Walked out onto the back porch and was slightly baked by the convection currents. The thermometer suggested the heat index was 110 degrees.

I have a reasonable tolerance of heat, but be it psychological or physical, anything over 106 just hurts.*

So I hid inside and read. I watched a little television. I caught up on the site. Everything is up-to-date. The July photo gallery is current. Until very recently the photo gallery section was criminally behind. No more.

Also, I transferred a lot of video from blip.tv to boxes holding iframes here. Blip is great. I still use them, but I like to have them linked on the home site, too. So that got done.

Late in the afternoon, when it was only 92 or so, I took The Yankee’s bike to the bike store for a tuneup.

“You’re the guy that brought in the Felt, right?”

That’s right. Good memory.

“I fixed it. It will be ready on Tuesday.”

These are nice guys, they give good advice and have actually offered us a few freebies, but I hope they never run the world. Dropped my bike off late Friday. It was ready by late Saturday. I can pick it up on Tuesday?

I caught up on Falling Skies, TNT’s newest superlatively promoted summer program. Aliens invaded and they’re stilling kids. Somehow John Carter, who left ER to become a librarian and then a professor of history, must save them.

The acting is a bit wooden, but it is post-apocalyptic with optimism, and so that deserves a look. My rule of thumb for science fiction is three episodes. Intrigue me by then or lose me forever. I’m giving Falling Skies a fourth episode, but only because of Will Patton. Tomorrow night’s episode better give me something more. (I’m sure they’re all rushing in to re-write and re-shoot as they read this.)

I even cleaned off a bit of the Netflix queue. Watched it already? Delete. Indy film? You get a short leash. I nixed one this evening because, for the first three minutes there was no dialog. There was a lovely window shot, an introduction to two characters who just stared at each other and then a dream sequence. Three minutes worth of this. Gone.

I did watch One Week, which offers a grim scenario — you get a cancer diagnosis, decide you don’t like much about your life and then buy a motorcycle.

Even if you don’t care for the movie, the scenery is worth seeing alone. Beautifully shot film.

*When we got married the heat index was around 122 degrees. We were married outdoors. We are very smart.

football / memories / Monday / movies / Samford — Comments Off
18
Apr 11

Random Mondayness

I interviewed a former Heisman trophy winner this morning. Had a very nice chat. When I type up the notes in the next few days I’ll give you a little more insight into the piece, which is a freelance article I’ve been asked to write for a summer publication. So come back for more details on that later.

Hint: It was not Gino Torretta. He had a similar outcome to his post-Heisman bowl game, however. Like Torretta, it happened in the Sugar Bowl.

Much of the rest of the day was spent making recruiting phone calls, reading and grading. These things have seemed to take over most everything lately. But that’s fine. I enjoy talking with prospective students, though I get a lot of machines and write a lot of email. I do love to read. And grading is … well … everyone needs to have things graded.

This evening I visited the Galleria for the first time in probably a year or more. On Twitter I wrote, “Places I’ve been less crowded than this mall: Nevada desert, Belizian rain forest, Alabama library, IRS parties.” It was amazing how dead most of the place was.

Just for context, I worked there for part of my senior year in high school. A classmate helped me land the easy job of selling coupon books in those little mid-mall kiosks. You don’t antagonize people, you wait patiently for them to come to you. And the hourly pay, for a high school student, was extravagant. (I think I was making about $9 an hour.) Anyway, one night while I was not selling coupon books to the random passers by, a famous Southern winter storm descended upon us. Everything closed up quickly. This was like that. (Incidentally, that particular night, there was no snow if I remember correctly.)

There was no bad weather tonight, either. Just the economy, the Internet and people tired of malls, apparently.

I went looking for clothes sales. Finding none, I also left the mall.

Speaking of mall culture … Who’s ready for a third in Bill & Ted’s storyline? Besides Keanu, I mean.

“When we last got together, part of it was that Bill and Ted were supposed to have written the song that saved the world, and it hasn’t happened. … So they’ve now become kind of possessed by trying to do that. Then there’s an element of time and they have to go back.”

Ghostbusters III doesn’t look like a bad idea in comparison, now, does it?

Friday / friends / movies / photo / video — Comments Off
15
Apr 11

“He’s for everyone of us!”

The shrubs are trimmed. At least the ones in the front yard. You can’t see halfway down the side of the house or the lovely foliage in the backyard from the road, so they don’t exist. And, hence, they will be sheared to within an inch of their life on another evening.

But my, doesn’t the front look good. Except for the shrub right by the garage. It has an unruly spot. It has the bangs of a seven-year-old boy who wouldn’t sit still in the barber’s chair. And one along the side, where I sliced off the new growth to reveal … big odd holes in the shrubbery’s formation. It looks like the swamp scene from Flash Gordon. This terrified me as a child.

I think it was because Timothy Dalton is the antagonist.

The rest of that clip plays out after Flash tricks Barin into thinking he’d been poisoned by the evil creature with the hero climbing down the vines. Barin says to the fog “Oh thine chase is on! But I will use my resources poorly and pursue him myself, giving these fine green jump-suited fellows the early weekend.”

Then there’s more fog, some oddly pliant quicksand and then hawkmen. Just your average day in the yard, really.

That movie only made back about 80 percent of the original budget. They’ve probably made up the difference in licensing, syndication and DVD sales. Meanwhile, this is interesting: George Lucas had hoped to remake the original Flash Gordon (1936), but when he learned that Dino De Laurentiis had already bought the rights, he wrote Star Wars (1977) instead. Sam J. Jones, who played Flash, was last in front of the camera in 2007. Now he is the CEO of an international security company providing diplomatic and executive protection for high profile clients around the world.So I guess that worked out.

So, yes, half the shrubbery has been brought under control. The rest later this weekend. Brian showed up mid-afternoon. The storms followed soon after. And hail. We got hammered by frozen pellets of angry intention for about 90 seconds. It covered the yard.

Hail

It hurt my head. I’m just going to save that story and a few more pictures for Sunday.

Dinner with Brian and Shane, our realtor, and his Brian. We ran into two of The Yankee’s students at Niffer’s. We should really find a second place to eat.

We spent the evening staring at the radar. The Yankee knew what was coming: Brian would unveil his newest meteorological toys and have about 15 views between us. Everything missed us. Part of town lost their power, but nothing blinked at our blissful cottage. The bulk of the storm was well north, and then, late, some that hit to our west.

At midnight, as the threat of anything dangerous happening in our little corner the death toll was four ranging, from Oklahoma through Alabama. One small central Alabama town was digging itself out from a direct hit in the late hours and had several people missing. Tomorrow’s news already looks grim.