On Sunday, there was a part of my that knew I wouldn’t be able to make it to work today and I didn’t. I’m still coughing and spitting up green stuff, but again much less frequently than on previous days. Other than my headache, body ache, sore throat and the actual coughing, I feel fine. There’s no fever, which is good, I almost never need to blow my nose and when I do it’s either a yellow, mustard-colored stuff that is easily wiped away by the Kleenex, or this dark yellow/greenish stuff with a bit of dried blood in it that has to be removed via “snot rocket”. The cough, meanwhile, continues to annihilate my voice. But that’s OK, because I rather enjoy sounding like the killer from No Country For Old Men.
Day 2 of administration of Claritin-D for sinus infection. Things seem to be better, but I’m coughing up green stuff, my nostrils are dry and bleeding a little bit and I’ve just started having to spit every three seconds. My voice is still largely missing and going ahead with the photoshoot today that I planned a month ago may have not been the best thing for me today, but it did make my spirit feel better. I’m trying to sleep but I can’t seem to get there because of the constant spitting, heaving and dryness. And it still really hurts to swallow, which doesn’t help my water intake. Hopefully, I’ll get so exhausted that I just pass out. Thank God tomorrow is Sunday.
So there’s something wrong with me. Every spring-ish into summer-ish I experience what can best be described as a sinus infection. Cough medicine doesn’t work, nothing works. I basically let myself suffer through it for the duration of several weeks until it magically goes away.
Sometimes, I can be a real idiot.
I remember seeing a doctor years ago about it and he gave me antibiotics which did the trick. But the thing is, I hate doctors. Just never liked ‘em. Until I saw the show “House MD”. Now I really, really hate doctors, unless my doctor were Gregg House. But, anyway.
Last year, like every year, I had been suffering through coughing and retching that was literally tearing up my nasal and throat passages until there was blood in my mucus and phlegm, and screaming for someone to kill me, when my buddy Jorge told me to try Claritin-D. The pharmacy was closed so I couldn’t get it, but I did get something else which was similar and did the trick after a few hours.
This year, I got it started around Monday and it got bad Wednesday. So today, Friday, I finally got up the nerves to go to the pharmacy at a nearby Wal*Mart and got me some Claritin-D. I then ate lunch. I began noticing the effect before I finished eating. I went to Sonic and was drinking a Poweraid Slush, by the way, which is what I washed the pill down with. Hey, it’s almost water, right?
So it’s over an hour a later. I have a very, very slight cough that creeps up every 10 minutes or so where I then have to blow my nose. But the 10 minutes is turning into 15 minutes pretty quick.
And the best part? I’m getting my singing voice back. Coldplay karaoke here I come!
Okee dokee. It took me all day but I finally got around to 1. purchasing a proper hosting provider for my website, 2. got the whole blog migrated to the new site, 3. got the domain pointed at the new location, 4. figured out the WordPress Codex just enough to make a simple, but effective personalized blog and dynamic website. I decided to go with as little color as possible so that my photos would show up very well against the background without being cluttered.
Now all I need to do is go through the entire website and make sure all the links point to where they are supposed to and that all the outward pointing links open in a new window. All the plugins seem to be working fine and I’ve so far had no problems adding photos and galleries to the site. I’m adding color to the site via photography rather than website images and colorful backgrounds and such. To that end I am also adding photos to older posts, such as adding scans of posters to movie reviews.
After I’ve made the site pretty I will look into re-implementing comments and enabling user registration (part of my scheme to properly control the site). I’ve also been integrating Google Analytics for all my sites. Now I just need to learn Flash and MySQL and I’ll be all set (just kidding: I hate Flash). But I’m not really a computer nerd, I just look like one when the camera’s not attached to my face.
Well, I finally did it. I finally submitted my application to Apple for consideration of inclusion as a content provider in the iTunes Store today. They say it’ll take a few weeks before they get to it. I also registered my name as a domain name which points directly to my music page on this site. I don’t really know what I’m getting into right now, but if all goes well, I’ll not only be submitting my music, but my independent films, as well. It’s nice completely owning my own material.
Quick Review
Synopsis: Red-headed step child of a family of cops decides to aid in the take down of a drug ring
Pros: Great cast. Violent stuff is pretty decent. Eva Mendes masturbates in the first two minutes.
Cons: Borrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiinnnnnnnnnnng!!!!!!!
Overall: This movie blows. It has a great cast but the script sucks and the director can’t direct. He even says on the (scripted) commentary that he had zero interest in the action scenes (namely a car chase which had great potential to stand along side the car scene from Children of Men), and his inability to craft anything mildly interesting after the first half hour is mind boggling. Look at the cast and be amazed at how not even they can save this garbage.
Long Review
Well, I got a chance to watch We Own The Night and I must say; other than the names of the main cast members, there isn’t a whole lot to like about the movie. It really, really drags for one thing. Now I’m all about the realistic depiction of police paperwork and procedure, but great movies like Heat, Se7en, Bullitt, The French Connection and American Gangster do that and they weren’t boring at all…and that’s if Night showed any of that stuff to potentially make it boring…which it didn’t.
The problem with Night is that it doesn’t know what it is. “Am I a taught police thriller? Maybe I’m a gripping family drama coupled with a tragic love story? No, no: I’m a badass action flick with a jaded anti-hero with nothing to lose! No, wait…”
A complex movie like Heat is able to pull off all these elements into one cohesive whole because it knows that, at its core, its just a cops and robbers story. Being helmed by Michael Mann doesn’t hurt, either. The movie NARC nearly suffered from the same schizophrenia that Night does, except it’s director, Joe Carnahan, was able to control what it was under the surface until it slowly revealed it’s true genre: mystery. What NARC did suffer from was too much imagination and not enough self control, so it tended to try to be bigger than it really needed to be, but that fallacy didn’t show half as much as it did in We Own The Night. (NARC, incidentally, was Carnahan’s second feature movie. Night is director James Gray’s third.)
Where NARC pretended to be The French Connection when it was actually an episode of Columbo (but more badass and with Ray Fuckin’ Liotta), Night thinks that it’s Heat but it’s actually just a big dumb action movie without any action in it. Night devolves into brainless, unbelievable action B-movie so gradually after the first 20 minutes it’s hard to notice it until after the credits roll, when you’re sitting there with your mouth open and a big electric question mark floating over your head as you wonder where it all went wrong.
Sure, the short car chase in the rain was cool in a video game kind of way, and yeah the drug bust scene had a few moments of authenticity to it, but c’mon, man. The dialogue is so flat and ho-hum that I was AMAZED that the actors were able to make the movie at least half-way watchable. I got so bored after the first half I just hit fast forward on the DVD because I already knew what was going to happen. [spoiler]“Guy gets disillusioned with his life while his girlfriend gets disillusioned with him and she leaves him and then he joins the good guys and becomes a super cop and saves the day all by himself.” Cue slow-mo of hero exiting flaming remains of the final showdown’s blasted exterior as the circle of fellow police officers revel in his badassery and display of machismo as the at-one-point fatherly villain hangs his head in proverbial shame. Crescendo with the music…and fade to black.[/spoiler]
The only other high point I can think of is the opening scene where Joaquin Phoenix joins girlfriend Eva Mendes in rubbing herself off when they are interrupted by some topless shit going down in the crooked bar he manages. It’s all down hill from there. Neither Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg nor the incomparable Robert Duvall could save this movie. Looking at his past work, I imagine this is director James Gray’s solution to save his crappy writing and lack of direction: hire great actors to make his lack of talent not show so much. But, Gray, even if your movie looks good (especially in the trailers) with the stellar cast and all that, when your movie is THIS boring, a special guest appearance by Jesus himself couldn’t make it watchable after the first hour. And that’s because a charismatic cat like Jesus could read the phone book and make it interesting. Seen ‘im do it.
So, We Own The Night just isn’t very good. And comparing it to the likes of The Departed (which was merely okay now that I looked at it again) just seems foolish and insulting to the likes of Scorsese. Not that he cares. Scorsese’s good and he knows it. And just because Marky Mark is in both movies doesn’t make your movie a successor, not even a spiritual one. So stay away from this flick, Night, but rent it at least for the few seconds of Eva Mendes’ opening scene. That part’s barely worth a rental, I suppose. But as far as a comparable movie to compare this one to, I’d have to scratch out any of the great cop movies I mentioned above and go with Eye See You, the dreadful Stallone movie from a few years back. Don’t remember it either? That’s okay, the same will be said of We Own The Night in a few more weeks.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
As we near the start of the “Countdown to Battlestar Galactica Season Four”, a four day countdown beginning on the first of April, I found this little article shedding light upon the dubious future of the best show on television.
When I got Season 3 on DVD I immediately watched the original cut of “Unfinished Business”, my favorite episode from the season. I can see why and where the cuts were made and it was interesting to see what was cut out and what those bits of information continued to work as mostly subtle character development. In fact, watching any of the deleted scenes from BSG, you are given the impression that the stuff that makes the cutting room floor are still little gems in their own right and it must be very hard (as confirmed by showrunner Ronald D. Moore) to have to pull interesting little character scenes so the episode will run in the time allotted by the network.
As Moore has mentioned several times, BSG is a character-driven show; it’s a show about people who are thrust into a situation where they must survive in whatever way possible, or perish. And these little scenes that are cut out from the episodes proper, that they gracefully let us see in deleted scenes and alternate versions of the episodes, only maintains that notion. BSG is probably best seen on DVD. Like Season 2.5 and the alternate version of the episode “Pegasus”, BSG Season 3 gives us a lot of relevant character information apart from what we’ve seen in the episodes as-aired. Check it out.
I picked up the two-disc version of “I Am Legend” and sat back and sincerely enjoyed the original ending. I feel the original ending gives better closure to the events of the movie and best shows Neville as the true anti-hero that he really is.
In fact, the movie now better conveys the latter day translation of the book that the filmmakers were going for, keeping the story bleak, and closing the gaps we all had in our brains in the theatre (”the butterflies didn’t do shit for Neville!” and “how are there survivors?!”). This was a movie that didn’t need the kind of happy ending closure the theatrical version gave us. The original ending is superior in every way.
I think even the CGI naysayers will finally have to wipe the proverbial egg from their faces when they see it. I hope that if they were to make a sequel (and they probably will) that they don’t use the theatrical ending as a jumping off point.
Quick Review
Synopsis: An honest cop investigates an honest crook on the streets of 1970s New Jersey.
Pros: Sharp, detailed direction by Ridley Scott, stand-out performances by Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.
Cons: Not as violent as I would have liked, maybe a tad long for some people.
Overall: This may be one of the finest films about organized crime since The Godfather. Scott is a master of detail and the movie absolutely transports you to the era of the film’s setting. And I love Denzel when he gets a chance to act…and act he does. The extended cut is great (I hadn’t seen the theatrical version) and the supplemental material is very well done, if a bit fluffy here and there. Buy it.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Quick Review
Synopsis: Vampires besiege a modern Alaskan town during an annual month of darkness
Pros: Dark, fun, and thrilling with some genuine scares. Ben Foster. Danny Huston.
Cons: Not that romantic…might be a bad thing if you’re expecting “Dracula”.
Overall: Solid direction. Strong writing and performances with a love story that doesn’t get in the way. Effects are great. A few genuinely frightening scenes. The shark-like vampires really feel like hunters. Solid rental.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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