7 posts tagged “movies”

This ‘n that:

• I’m about a week away from the last page in the current paper journal and in spite of trying for more than a month now haven’t been able to get its replacement through BookPeople, the usual source.  I’ve used these journals since I started keeping one on paper in late 2001 and this is my seventh and I’m bummed I can’t just go out and buy another.  I could order it directly from the maker (michaelrogerpress.com) but that’d require a minimum of 6 @ $14 each and I’m not sure I’m quite that committed.  So instead when I was at BookPeople Saturday for the writing group I bought a 3-pack of softbound Moleskines which are just about the same page size and line count.  Everyone I know who uses these products swears by them but I’m not sure how much of that is usability and how much is just hype so we’ll see if I’m ready to switch.  One of those Rogers journals lasts me about a year and if 3 Moleskines don’t I’m probably not.
• 5 episodes in and I’m still loving Sarah Connor.  And I feel a lot better after IMDBing Summer Glau to find out she’s actually 27.  That barely-legal air she casts was really starting to make me feel slimy.
  
• Sad to see Roy Scheider dead at 75.  He was one of my favorite shoulda-been-a-leading mans.  My friend Pete met him in 1986, actually canvassed him for Greenpeace while we were working Tiburon that year.  Pete said Scheider was completely friendly and down-to-earth and I thought the fact that he lived not on Belvedere nor up in the hills but in a modest house right on the lagoon that separates Belvedere from the mainland fully supported that.  Probably my favorite role of his was in Sorcerer (which I didn’t see for the first time until 1996) though it was good to see him when he popped up in unexpected places like Romeo Is Bleeding and even Third Watch, for chrissakes. I always thought of Scheider as someone who really cared about the craft of acting, not the business aspect – Jaws being such a huge success must have blown his mind, at least briefly.  If this is true he was of a breed that’s getting harder and harder to find each decade.  We’ll miss him.  I was almost late to work today because LowerManhattanite, bless his heart, posted a clip of the car-chase from The Seven-Ups in its 10-minute entirety and I had to watch the whole damn thing before the sun was even up.
  
• Loved this Austinist article on riding the bus because so much of it’s completely dead-on.  I also enjoyed Mike Dahmus’s piece regarding his experience on the 30, my old nemesis from the pre-UT commute (the line, not Dahmus).  Reading them I wonder: don’t I have some good stories from my 5+ years riding the bus in Austin?  (Apart from the suspected weenie-wagger one, of course.)  If not, why?  Apart from that I generally don’t talk to strangers.

Maggie Gyllenhaal will take Katie Holmes's place in the next Batman movie.

Which is called The Dark Knight so I'm presuming it's an adaptation of the Frank Miller comic.

Two great tastes that are bound to taste great together.

More ADD (commensurate with the madness attending school's beginning), more bits 'n pieces:

• Cap Metro proposes to raise its fare to $1.  That’s not raising, that’s doubling.  They’re even having community forums so people can tell The Man what they think about this plan.  What the fuck do you think they’re going to think?  I don’t care much myself because I ride free as long as I work at UT, but shit.  That’s going to hurt some folks, bad.  OTOH, a bus ride that still costs 50 cents in 2007?  What kind of neverland have we been living in?  Even at a buck it’s still cheap compared to every-damn-other city I’ve been to.
• If I can’t see Karl Rove made to do the perp walk for his misbehavior, I’ll happily take Alberto “Toady” Gonzales instead.  But given that there’s a fat fucking chance of that either, I’ll settle for him resigning in some semblance of disgrace.  Yesterday was a good day.
• Latest eMusic goodies: Josh Ritter, Hello Starling; Okkervil River, The Stage Names; Imperial Teen, On.  Next up: Imperial Teen, The Hair, the TV, the Baby and the Band; Art Brut, It’s A Bit Complicated; New Pornographers, Challengers (whenever eMusic decides to make it available).
• Sitting in Meeting for Worship Sunday I realized I had specks of glitter all over me.  This included my face, someone later told me.  On my pack too, even.  It came from a pile of loose glitter in the lobby that I offered to help clean up and damn, that stuff gets everywhere.  But considering last time I wore it was in my burner days, this week is an appropriate time to revisit the look.
• Recent non-Sopranos discs: Happy Endings (fun even if perhaps a little too self-conscious but my god do I love to look at M. Gyllenhaal) and music docs The Fearless Freaks (Flaming Lips) and We Jam Econo (Minutemen).  Never listened a lot to either band but now Soft Bulletin is on order from the library and Double Nickels on the Dime is in the eMusic queue.  Even on the small screen the performances pack a punch.  
• One of the Minutemen performances was filmed at Bard in ’85.  They were still using the south end of Kline Commons dining hall for shows then, apparently.  Totally weird to see the place where I took almost all my meals for four years, and in specific the corner where the miscreants gathered, in such an unexpected context.
• One frequent visitor to the miscreant’s corner was my band’s bass player’s girlfriend, a dancer.  Her last name was Gyllenhaal.  Back then I couldn’t believe that was anyone’s real name.
• I signed up to volunteer again at this year’s ACL fest.  I’m a sucker.

Some of the things making me go smiley-smile lately:

• Girl Talk’s Night Ripper.  I know I’m a bit late to this particular party but 2006 evidently wasn’t The Year of the MP3 Blog for me.  This album is just plain fun, silly without feeling gratuitously frivolous.  I’m a lot quicker to recognize the classic rock samples (Boston… Kansas… Pilot!) than the hip-hop, because in fact I’ve never heard any of the latter before.  That doesn’t keep me from knowing that the “we want some pussy!” underneath the “I… love… you…” refrain from “Silly Love Songs” belongs to 2 Live Crew.  (Some things you just know if you were reading the papers in 1991.)  Mashing those two songs together works, hideously well.  Same thing goes for the whole album.  Greg Gillis patched a winner this time.

• The lawn next door.  Over the weekend landscaping came in and laid down a whole lot of sod over the stubbly weeds and bare earth masquerading as a yard.  The green won’t last long – sod never does in this town unless you’re willing to get all Stepford-meticulous in its care – but maybe it’ll help deter the next batch of tenants from taking out the posts and using it as an extended driveway like the last did.

• Knowing it’s another two weeks and more to wear shorts at work before the students return and I have to sort-of dress like an adult again.

• Under Siege 2, which I found for $5 last night on a trip to Half-Price to get Grapes of Wrath for next week’s book group.  Last time I checked this wasn’t even on DVD.  Admittedly this is a bad, bad movie, with next to no believability (Die Hards one and two mashed together, substituting a train through the Rockies for skyscraper and airport?) and one of Seagal’s woodenest performances ever.  And check out that long long list of continuity errors!  But a very young Katherine Heigl shows the beginnings of some considerable acting chops that you can now see fully developed on both big and small screens, and Bogosian is delightfully over-the-top batshit crazy – a performance to equal Fishburne’s Jimmy Jump in King of New York.  Plus some excellent chop-sockey, lots of flurries of gunfire and unnecessary blood-smears, and as many bodies falling from high trestles as you could want.  This one’s in the Mindless Action Top 10, easy.

• Recent reading: Mystic River by Dennis Lehane and Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte.  Both are excellent but going to need bumping until Grapes is done so I hope it's worth it (my only Steinbeck experience to date is The Pearl).  The garbage book is particularly interesting because I, like pretty much every other American, have no idea where stuff goes when I throw it away as well as no comprehension of the amount of crap 300 million citizens of the world's richest country create for disposal.  That, and I knew Liz when we went to Bard.   She was a little bit nuts and I'm guessing still is but her work is every bit as thorough, cogent and well-written as I expected.

• Retaining money in savings rather than shoveling it into the maw of CCCS.

• News that my neighbors downstairs are leaving next week for 9 days of vacation.  Ah, blessed quiet.

• The new iMacs.  Not that I’m going to buy one of those either.  But I can’t wait to see Apple’s sales figures for Q4 of this year.  (Also, 10x the .mac space?  Time to finally sign up for one of those, eh.)

Bonus: “Smash Your Head” from Night Ripper.  Never thought I’d love hearing Elton John sped up to chipmunk-speed, let alone used as a counterpoint to Biggie Smalls.  These are some pretty mind-messing times to live through, no lie.

For the record, I have yet to read a single sentence of any Harry Potter book, ever, this weekend’s main frenzy thus passing me by.  You know it’s a frenzy when the Channel 8 traffic guy, an ex-frat boy if there ever was one, reports on the expected jams leading into the Arboretum area where some big release-day parties are and in doing so pimps the book by saying its entire title… I think that used to be called “payola” in the old days.

I haven’t even seen the movies, except for a stretch of the first one on broadcast TV one night.  No doubt hacked to bits from the original theatrical release, which may be why I found it not all that compelling.  But I know my compulsive tendencies enough to be sure that once I start with the first book, if I like it (and no doubt I will) I won’t stop until I’ve devoured all there is to be found, book and film and commentary alike.  

That’ll wait.  Right now I’m busy demonstrating my come-lateliness with season three of The Sopranos.  Episode 1 last night.  Boy, that interweaving of “Peter Gunn” with “Every Breath You  Take” – was that clever, or what?  Give me six years and I’ll catch up on everything.

Just a few little thingies to catch up.

• Currently partway through four tomes - Mona Simmons, The Lost Father; Don DeLillo, Falling Man; Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven; Ann Fadiman, Ex Libris – and they’re all very good books but I haven’t picked even one up in days because they’re not mindless and junk-food enough for my recent mood.  Have to get cracking on the LeGuin soon though as it’s being discussed at next week’s book group.
• Started taking Lexapro yesterday, my first try at antidepressants in years.  I messed up on the starting dose and took too much, although I’m not sure that’s why I came wide awake at 3AM and stayed that way until about 20 minutes before the alarm went off.
• Saw the new Die Hard movie last week.  It was way too fun and outdid its predecessors in every form of excess, from automatic-weapons fire to preposterousness of premise.  It was nice to see what Timothy Olyphant looks like without his Deadwood mustache too, even if he’s just as scary.
• Finished Me and You and Everyone We Know over the weekend.  I started it a few weeks ago and stopped halfway through because a) it was annoying as hell and b) it was still too sweet and heart-melting to rush through.  In the end b) won out and now it's on my Buy Later list.  (Even if I've decided I like John Hawkes better in his garb in Deadwood.)
  
• Watched the first 25 minutes of When The Levees Broke last night.  This is going to be rough going; must be why the Netflix disc has already sat on my desk for a month.
• Fucking Bush.
• Spoon’s new album, or Ga5 as I’m going to call it, is available on eMusic and I can’t wait to download it.  Gimme Fiction was a left-field surprise that I'm still savoring two years later.
• The thoughtful folks at work bought a wireless keyboard and mouse for my desktop.  All nice and pretty white, just like the iMac itself.  I've finally entered the Era of Bluetooth.  Now I suppose I'll have to get the same for home as well...
• (OK, it wasn't so much they were being thoughtful as they had to spend down their group account before the new fiscal year begins.  I like it anyway.)
  
• It now hasn’t rained for 3 whole days.  Must be some kind of record.

Today’s the last day of operation for the downtown Alamo Cinema in its Colorado St. location, and through the courtesy of my friend Jette all kinds of people are coming out of the woodwork to give mini-memoirs about the place.  I’m amazed at the passion some of these accounts display.  Living here it’s easy to forget that in the Alamo we have what is virtually a one-of-a-kind business.  (So far Owen's is the best explanation of what makes that so.) 

Or it’s easy for me to forget, because I’m not a devoted (more likely obsessive) obscure-film geek like some of these people.  For me the Alamo has always been mainly about a good, comfortable place to watch a movie – comfortable meaning seats that accommodate my wide shoulders, and rows with plenty of space in between them so I’m not having to get up every time someone further down the row has a tinkle call mid-film – and get some decent (if a bit pricy) food served during it.  And about having pre-show ads that are oh so much more entertaining, and thoughtfully done, than anything you can possibly get in a regular theatre these days.

(The meal-and-a-movie concept didn’t at first strike me as all that special because I’d just moved here from Oakland, where the Parkway Theatre had just started doing the same thing.  I thought it was going to be a nationwide trend and am still wondering why it isn’t.)

For the record: I deeply love the Alamo.  For the reasons mentioned above, it’s essentially spoiled me for seeing a movie anywhere else.  But my type of Alamo experience can be had at any of the satellites just as easily – and I’ll always choose the Village over the newer, relatively soulless South Lamar location - and most of the movies I want to see are current fare of the sort played at them.  What gets saved for downtown is mostly stuff you gotta deeply love film for.  

A quick inventory of all the times I can remember going to the original Alamo:

• 4 Mister Sinuses (Red Dawn, Terminator, a Christmas show, Die Hard)
• 1 Spike & Mike
• Near Dark
• O Brother Where Art Thou
• Bike Like U Mean It
• Clara Bow revival (and I was dragged to that)

9 times in six and a half years?  I’ve been to the Village more than that. (I would've liked to include last Saturday's Serenity/Buffy singalong on the list but that sold out quicker than you can say "Nathan Fillion as a gynecologist?")  Truth is I found downtown way too claustrophobic, especially those stairs which would get thronged just a little too quickly before and after shows.

Yet I know of some people who virtually lived there, and I’m glad it’s been there for their sake, as well as for the sake of Austin period.  It’s a pretty special thing we’ve got going on here, and I’d be a lot more broken up if the dt Alamo was going dark completely instead of just moving.  Maybe I’ll go to the new location more.

Right now I kinda doubt it, though.  I find 6th St. crowds even more loathsome than Warehouse District ones.