Friday Bonus Funny Blog Post Time!!!

I know some of you have kids, and/or don't normally make it to the the 1130 late night show, let alone the 1230 one. I've become a bit of a sleep deprived person lately, and so have made it far into the Late Late Show as of late.

My Late Show of choice is The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. He took over the spot occupied by Tom Snyder (think Charlie Rose with a combover) and Craig Kilborn in early 2005. He actually auditioned for the slot in late 2004 while I was unemployed and kept hours that kept me awake until 2am. He made it to where he was one of the four finalists, and I thought he was funny, and so I started watching him after they hired him. I mentioned that I thought he was funny to several of my friends, who sort of brushed it off, till they got the chance to watch and ended up agreeing with me.

Does music sound better live?

I decided to write this post after listening to a new CD I just by Davd Gilmour, entitled Live in Gdansk, which is the result of a concert the former Pink Floyd guitarist gave to end his European tour, and honor the anniversary of the Solidarity movement founding in Poland. It is a 2 cd set that mixes both songs Gilmour is famous for from his Floyd days, as well as songs from his most recent solo album, entitled On an Island. My friend Mike, who is the music encyclopedia version of my movie knowledge, made me a copy of that album shortly after its release. (Shamless plug: If you are so inclined and like music, he hosts a radio show entitled Progscape Radio, from 8 to 11, every Tuesday night. You can get more information at http://www.progscaperadio.com/). I enjoyed it, and listened to it a few times in the car, and then to be honest with you, I forgot about it for a while.

That is, until I was listening to the new Gilmour live cd. Incidentally, I was reminded of the performance thanks to a showing of the concert on one of the digital HD cable channels (Thanks, Comcast.). I decided to pick it up the next time I hit the local Best Buy, which I had done earlier this week. I realized how much better the songs sound in concert. I always thought Floyd was a band that is better live. I also sort of went through a bit of a Floyd phase in college (then again, who didn't?), and ended up picking up the live album Pulse as a result. I always liked the 2 cd set for one reason--it had a blinking light, which I could always see reflecting off the walls of my dorm, making me think the smoke detector in the room was on the fritz a few times, but I digress.

The answer is a quick yes, and I offer an example that should come as a shock to approximately NONE of you who know me well. (Please contain your surprise) Pearl Jam is easily one of these groups. I've seen them three times in concert and I think that they are a group that spreads its wings in front of an audience. To be more specific, the wisdom of the addition of organ/keyboardist Boom Gaspar is proved over and over during the course of a live show. I must admit that I had my doubts when they brought him in for the Riot Act album, but then I actually saw him play as part of the band in 2006 in Camden. His playing adds another layer to the music and brings out more of the subtleties in the playing of the other musicians in the group. Furthermore, as a group, they leave it all on the stage over the course of a show, and as a fan, that is all that we can truly ask from a band. My heavy handed bias towards the group aside, they do sound incredible live.

Does this hold true for other groups? Yes, Dave Matthews Band and U2 come to mind as specific examples. Dave and his band seem to spread their wings in a manner similar to Pearl Jam, but have more a free flowing power. Plain and simple, U2 blows your ass away. No other words are necessary. Also, Rush is awesome live. In fact, seeing them live is something I think everyone should do at least once. It does their talent justice to see them play live. I became a convert as a result of seeing them last June.

Some groups do not sound that great live. Jack Johnson, I am looking at you. I think the group running around playing under the name Everclear fits into this category as well.

How do you know how good/bad a movie is?

Well, actually before I go any further, the purpose of this blog at this point is currently the discussion of movies. In the future, I do plan to discuss other stuff, but right now, I am tackling the cinema. Some of you asked, and I wanted to address it.

Now that I have that out of the way, I am going to address something I mentioned last night in my blog. Using the critics and the reviews you see in the commercials, is there a way to tell if a movie is good or bad. I say yes there is, and I am going to tell you how. It's very simple.

1. I have a group of critics that I use as my point of reference. The more of them that like the better, the more likely it is that I will like the movie. In no particular order, they are: Roger Ebert, Peter Travers (from Rolling Stone), David Ansen (from Newsweek), Richard Corliss (from Time Magazine), and Entertainment Weekly's two headed reviewing monster, Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum. Be aware though, Corliss and Ansen's duties at their respective publications have evolved into more of movie columnists than reviewers. They count as a 1/2 vote each.
2. A corollary to that rule of thumb is this: The more of the other major major media outlets that like it, the better. By major, I mean New York Times, USA Today stature stuff.
3. What does the Philadelphia Inquirer think? If Stephen Rea and/or Carrie Rickey like it, I won't, and if they hate, I'll like it. I haven't agreed with either of those idiots for 15 years. That said, this rule doesn't only apply to those in the Philly area. If you still read the paper and they review movies, insert the name of a critic you usually disagree with here and apply it.
4. I don't trust Ben Lyons. He is a tool, and his father is a much better critic. Talent skipped a generation. Besides, he LIKES everything, and it's annoying.
5. The more obscure the review on the ad, the worse the movie is. If they are using a review from the film critic in Bumblefuck, Iowa, chances are it might not be all that great of a film. Also, the smaller the print, the worse the source. Don't believe me, "The Spirit" had very obscure good reviews in small print, and it got savaged at the box office and by the critics (ex.: one critic actually used the phrase "there's two hours of my life I won't get back" in his review. )
6. Don't trust the blogs or their reviews, with one exception which I will get to in a second. Movie blogs such as Ain't it Cool News, Dark Horizons, etc. usually get catered to a bit, so I don't know if they are the most unbiased people out there. I think the one site I would give any credence to is Rotten Tomatoes, since they have a critic rating that averages the reviews of all critics together.
7. Pete Hammond likes everything too, and he seems to see more movies that Ben Lyons.

If you choose to follow these simple rules, you may find that you are seeing better quality movies. Case in point: Out of those in the top five with reviews of Drag Me to Hell currently posted (Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly), the praise is unanimous in favor.

How I Might Spend my Summer Movie $

Since summer is my time of year to hit the movies harder than I do during the rest of the year, I've been giving some thought to what I would like to spend my $10.50 on at People's Plaza, my usual theater of choice.

Here is what I am thinking so far, and what I am on the fence about. I think I'll go in order of release date (also listed in parentheses. Dates are current as of today. If the studio changes them, don't you come bitchin' to me.)

• Drag Me to Hell (May 29)--To be honest, I could use some opinions on this one. It looks scary, and it's Sam Raimi returning to the horror genre that gave him a name. On the down side, it's scary, although as far as that goes, I have a pretty high scare threshold. If anything, it may be a matinee. You know, so I come out of the theater into the daylight. That might be a little less scary and minimize my need to have a "Brownstain moment" (think about the meaning, and you should be able to figure out how scary I think this might be. I can't actually take credit for the term though, it's actually courtesy of my friends Shane and Alley).
  
• The Hangover (June 5)--just because it looks freaking hilarious. I mean, the movie has Mike Tyson air drumming to Phil Collins. Oh, and Bradley Cooper's in it. We've been tight since his Will Tippin days on Alias. I won't get into too much detail in my little tangent here, but there are times I view myself as that character in a few respects.
  
• The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (June 12)--I've got to be honest with you, I don't want to see this one for John Travolta or Denzel (ok, maybe him just a little. He IS a good actor). To be honest, this one makes my list on director alone. Tony Scott has become a great filmmaker in the past few years, and I am curious to see how this turns out. I would say that he and his brother are easily my favorite directors out there right now, but the nod would go more to Sir Ridley. Oh, and a screenplay by Brian Hegeland (L.A. Confidential, which is in my personal top 10) doesn't hurt either.
  
• Public Enemies (July 1)--this is actually a definite for a few reasons, namely Michael Mann. I am a fan of his visual look of his films, specifically his use of digital cameras (to find out what I mean watch Ali or Collateral sometime), as well as his music choices in movies. I would even go so far as to say, he is the best director in terms of being able to choose music or a movie (sorry Cameron Crowe, but you run a very close second.) Oh yeah, and the movie features Christian Bale and Johnny Depp (t, who unlike the vast majority, who like them for their looks, are great actors. They are on my "Read the Phone Book" list. In other words, if you made a movie where they read the phone book for two hours, I would watch it. Oh yeah, and (another of my favorite actors) Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover doing some horrible accent that I doubt Hoover had. It's going to be fun watching the three of them just act the hell out of things.
  
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (August 7): I must admit that I am very much on the fence about this one. Let's see how many reasons I can come up with. We'll start with that it is really like the cartoon. That's fine, since I don't expect it to be, but I would like it to look a little like the damn show, and not just like every other damn action movie involving military out there. Secondly, Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Mummy Returns, Van Helsing) is directing. The man is a hack. I would go so far as to say that he makes Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, XXX, Stealth) look like Sir David Lean (he directed Lawrence of Arabia. If you haven't seen it, stop reading and go spend four hours watching. This movie is where the term epic originates from), and I think Cohen is a bit of a hack. If Sommers would stop trying to be Michael Bay, his films might not be half bad. Oh, and now for the most important reason: the trailers for this film leave me underwhelmed. At the risk of giving too much information, when I saw the trailer for Iron Man, it gave me a bit of a chubby. I saw that movie the night it came out and loved it a lot. The trailer during the Super Bowl left me pretty much not caring and not being very impressed. I think I thought it actually didn't look very good at all.
  
• District 9 (August 14)--aliens are kept in prison camps in South Africa. I must admit that I am curious about this one based on the trailers alone. The fact that people who have seen the movie are raving only whets my appetite even more.
  
• Inglorious Basterds (August 21)--mixed reviews from the premiere at Cannes aside, I want to see Tarentino's take on World War II. That, and quite frankly, Eli Roth looks he is getting off beating up on Nazis with a baseball bat in the trailers. Oh, and the fact that Quentin has a headlining actor still at the height of his powers career wise (Brad Pitt) in this movie, I am curious to see what he does with him.
  
• The Boat that Rocked (August 28)--this is about as "art house/indie film" as I go during the summer. The movie talks about the pirate radio that pervaded Britain in the late 60's/early 70's. The fact that Nick Frost (Simon Pegg's cohort in Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead) is in it doesn't hurt either. To be honest, it's an ensemble cast that might just make things work well, because of the direction of Richard Curtis, who did the ensemble thing quite well with Love Actually. Yes, I actually just admitted that I like that movie.
  
• Pandorum (Sept. 4)--depending on your definition of summer movies, this might not fit, but since it opens on Labor Day, which generally is regarded as the end of summer, I put it in anyway. In the movie, two crew members on a space ship, played by Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster (Tangent alert: see 3:10 to Yuma, not for Bale or Crowe, but for his portrayal of psychopathic outlaw Charlie Price, is as fucking brilliant as I've seen anyone play psychotic in a long time. The fact that he didn't get nominated for acting awards for this role is a travesty), who wake up in space with no memories of who they are. Director Paul W.S. Anderson does well with space. His last movie set there, Event Horizon, scared the absolute shit out of me, when I saw it in the theaters. And yes, I went to a matinee showing of that.

There you have it. A look at the movies I will take a gander at, after I consult my list of reviewers. I think I will talk about that in the next entry, whenever that may be.

A Tuesday morning funny. Or at the very least I find it funny. And it's my blog damn it.

Only a few of you might know this, but I am a huge fan of racing, more specifically the open wheel kind. In other words, the cars that run in the Indy 500. I also like to watch the Formula 1 cars that race in mainly in Europe. Heck, I even get up at 7:30 on Sunday mornings to watch the races live (I am NOT hardcore enough however to stay up to watch the races from Asia that start at 1:30 am or later. I tape those since I'm one of the five people who still don't have TiVo or a DVR .)

My favorite Indycar driver is Dario Franchitti, who incidentally is married to actress Ashley Judd, who is in my opinion a sports lovers dream wife, in that she will go and support her man at the track, but is also a season ticket holder at the University of Kentucky and a rather vocal fan. Vocal enough in fact that I've heard if Dario goes with her, he sits several rows away.

I guess being married to an actress has rubbed off on him though. The link below is for a commercial that ran during the 500 on Sunday for Indy Downforce, the official fan club of the circuit. I found this funny enough that I almost choked on my soda.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYcA3t2VgB0

Fu**king Amateur? No. Fu**ing Good--Surprisingly

“You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”— The Matrix

I have got to be honest with you, the quote above is how I have felt lately when it comes time to go to bed. I lay there, and at a point in the day where it is completely normal to wind down and get some much needed rest, my mind is still rolling along like an Indycar stuck in 5th gear and headed towards the wall—out of gas with no way to stop. It’s like my brain is telling me that there is a lot of creative things rolling around inside it, and that they need to get out. If nothing else, maybe doing this will help me sleep better at night. Or at least I hope so. I write for a living, and I am coming to the realization that I am good at what I do. A few of you have told me that I should write more, so this is for all of you. See? I finally got off my butt and sidled up to the keyboard. Are you happy now?

That brief intro out of the way, who am I? To the great majority of you, I hope I am a friend, or at the very least acquaintence, and it’s likely that we met either at work, or school.

A few of you see me as your “movie guy.” If you want to know if a movie is good, or what date a film comes out, you come see me. I also possess a “Rain Man”-like ability to know who is in what movie with whom, and what other movies they’ve been in, and with who.

Hey, if nothing else, it comes in handy at parties. I may have been the co-worker who took his PTO and went to the movies (Spiderman and Star Wars Episode 2 are specific examples that come to mind, but I’m sure if I gave it some thought, I could come up with a few more). In case you can’t tell, I like movies.

So, let’s to the reason I really started to write this blog post in the first place. Let me start by saying that I put myself out on a limb for all of you. As we are all well aware, the nation’s economy has taken the crap of most of our lifetimes, and so, to say the least, we all think a little harder before dropping down our hard earned coin.

With movie prices in my neck of the woods at $10.50 for a non-matinee, non-IMAX show (depending where you live, your price may vary up or down), I try not to spend my money on crappy movies although it DOES happen (e.g. I went to see The Soloist on its opening weekend, and disliked it so much, I walked out of a movie for only the second time ever). With that said, I think enough of all you out there to that I would like to provide you with a service—telling you what you should spend your hard earned disposable income on at the local cinema. I like you all enough to feel OK with making that sacrifice.

My first such sacrifice: Terminator: Salvation. As I am sure we are well aware, this movie has gotten publicity for all of the wrong reasons, including on set meltdowns, (Christian Bale, I am looking at you. Oh, and thanks for the help on the title of this post.), and that constant fanboy need to second guess.

There are some who feel McG should not have been selected as the director for the latest installment of the venerable franchise, despite the personal endorsement of one James Cameron (he directed the first two movies in the series, and this other independent movie called Titanic. It won 11 Oscars, maybe you heard of it.). To some, these two factors, and the dearth of negative reviews that preceded the movie top of the list of things not to like. On the contrary, there are a lot of things to like about this movie.

I will start with the performance of one Sam Worthington, who, in my opinion is pulling a Hugh Jackman with this movie. That is, he is using a big-budget vehicle to show that he has star power. I really do feel that this movie is Sam’s breakout role. In a nutshell, on one level, the movie is about him, and his quest to “see the wizard,” if you will. In this case, the wizard is SkyNet. He takes the role of Marcus Wright, a Terminator in denial, and humanizes it, literally. There are scenes in this movie that Worthington actually made me start to well up watching. Also, his subtle love affair with resistance pilot Blair Williams (played by an underused Moon Bloodgood) also adds another dimension to an already dense movie. Worthington oozes an emotional intensity, best displayed in the scenes he has with John Connor (played by Christian Bale).

Despite his blow up on the movie set during filming, and whispers that it may not be an isolated incident, Bale continues to prove that, if nothing else, he is the most versatile actor of his generation (for crying out loud, he’s gone from Batman, to John Connor, and will next play an FBI agent in the upcoming Public Enemies). He brings intensity to any role he plays that cannot be denied. It is this intensity that gives moviegoers pulse pounding intensity for their movie dollar. Without giving too much away, a scene where he tells the Terminator ready to “go ahead, just do it” (kill him), comes to mind.

Bale’s intensity is helped along by the subtle use of special effects. Not to say that are no special effects used in the film, but their use is very subtle and understated, which seems to be a recurring theme throughout the movie. This is one of the positives for me as far as a reason why McG is a great choice to direct this film. He used the effects to further the story, not to just blow his wad and make noise (Michael Bay, I’m looking at you. Pick a movie of his and you will see what I mean).

Overall, McG has crafted an excellent film, one which fills in the gap created by the time travel in other movies (for example, the one that explains how Connor meets Kyle Reese, a real motherfucker—literally. Think about it). That said, while it doesn’t hurt to know the back story of the Terminator saga, it isn't a necessity either, making for an accessible movie for devotee and novice alike.

Should You See it: Yes, blow the $10.50, if you are going by yourself. If you are taking a date, I leave the choice to see a matinee up to you.

What’s Next: Not completely sure, but I think it might be a movie that is one of the trailers that accompanies this film, The Hangover, the latest effort from the director of Old School.