I Have Said Fluffernutters And Movies Are Life.

I seem to have completely shifted this review of what I've actually accomplished in a week down to what movies we've watched. In the end, I have the feeling that will be more conversation-worthy.

For instance, if someone asks me what's new with me, and I say I almost drove into another car because the sunlight flickering off my windshield caused me to become what they call in medical terms, "weird," that's not going to end as well as me saying I saw a movie I thought was great. Unless of course I'm dealing with some of the people I know who don't watch movies, and then I'm left with mentioning that I bought Round-Up to burn the grass out of the driveway. Also not worth blogging about unless I was telling a story from the viewpoint of one of those blades of grass, who did nothing to deserve such a hideous fate except come into being in the wrong place and time. Much like me. Except I don't even need chemicals to wilt in the sun.

On that cheery note, 27 Dresses was actually way better than I expected it to be. I liked the cast, though, so that could have helped. Nan has loved Katherine Heigl from the time she saw her in Love Comes Softly, so that was a main reason we even sat down to watch this one. Luckily in this movie no one gets a horse dropped on them, and it either wasn't too sappy for me or I'm getting old. If you liked While You Were Sleeping, you will like this.

The next night we watched The Mist. We're Stephen King fiends, so of course we watched it, come on. Don't watch it right before you go to bed because it will shake you up. The final horror of it is not the scary monsters, either. Also, Lisa Gerrard, please stop cutting my heart out, you siren, you.

One of Nan's late night finds was Angel's Dance, it's one of those wacky dark comedies that I grew up on. Jim Belushi is teaching a guy to be a hitman, and Sheryl Lee from Twin Peaks starts out as the kookiest mortician and I won't say what she turns into, but just watching her set up the wall of photos of bodies she'd made up cracked me up. I need to watch Twin Peaks again.

Due to the asinine removal of our local grocery store, we have to get bread from a bodega that Mum swears doesn't carry rye bread because, "It's Jewish and the owners are Middle Eastern." I'm not sure about that, but while we wait for the replacement store across the street to open its doors, I switched from rye bread to Wonder Whole Wheat. It's a momentous occasion, you know. I've been eating rye bread and peanut butter first thing in the morning nearly every day for 12 years. Now I'm eating some sort of whole-wheat-made-out-of-white-bread, and I like it. What is wrong with me? I caved, I rolled over, I shifted loyalties. Meh, never was crazy about caraway seeds anyway. (I'm aware rye bread comes without seeds, but my aunt and I are the only ones who like it that way...so...we don't get that.)

This week I also shredded three bagloads of old invoices and statements, thereby falling behind in my goal to complete 24 comic strips in one month by a day, and I think I cut my hair. That might have been last week, however.

Tags: July 2008, movies, week in review, food, confessions, family

Things I Can't Believe Exist.

What a time to be alive. There is a grill--a small one, mind you--that has the ability to play MP3s.

MEAT AND MUSIC. Not entirely my thing, but wow. Gone are the days of having a radio sitting on the table taking up all that space that could be used for the potato salad, no, now there are 10-watt speakers inside of a George Foreman grill.

As a child, before my first boombox, Nan would pile her Barbra Streisand albums into the 6-foot long, 4-foot-high, 8-Track capable stereo upstairs in the living room and crank that baby up loud enough that we could hear it in not only the backyard, but Connecticut. To this day every time I smell a barbecue I can hear Guilty. (This was back before my intestines rebelled against 80% of the things I ate so that's one of my good memories. I know it may be hard to tell for some of you kids who don't get how fantastic an album Guilty really is. I'm not even playing with the title and saying I had nothing to be guilty of, eating a cheeseburger, really.)

As good an idea as this may seem, I don't understand how the wiring of the 10-watt speaker inside the MP3 grill doesn't get damaged by the searing heat of grillin'. Not only that, I mean, there's a plug for an MP3 player. Like, you have to plug your player into the barbecue. Think about this. Think about the ways this could go wrong. iPods aren't cheap, and I've heard rebuilding a library in one is like trying to reconstruct your ex out of Lego. To each their own.

The Tupperware boombox seems safer to me, somehow. Not that I'll be trying that any time soon as I wear my music on my head and since the time that I played my tape of Frank's Wild Years I tend not to try exposing my family to new music at dinner.

Here is some dinner music for your weekend by Barbra and Barry and Tom Waits, your results may vary.

Tags: July 2008, summer, music, MP3 grill, Guilty, barbecue

Comics That Inspired Me: Cat And Girl

Yes, Peanuts and Mutts are two comic strips that started me down the path that is the hobby I enjoy the most, but it wasn't until I started reading webcomics did I realize I had "people."

It's pretty obvious that I was drawn to Cat and Girl because hey, it's a cat, and a girl! There's a vampire in there, too. Also they're hilarious and brililant and drawn great, and I seriously considered cutting my strip to once a week if I could make it half as fantastic as these, but why I'm linking to this particular strip is because the punchline sums up my life.

Obligations from Cat and Girl by Dorothy Gambrell.

Tags: July 2008, comics, Cat and Girl, rss feeds

It's Like The Same Thing Just Keeps Happening

Hot weather means more movies! Yes, movies, because...moving around is dangerous.

After seeing the commericals for it quite a bit, we rented Vantage Point, which is not about tennis. No. I won't blow any of the plot because it has got suspense and mystery in it, but I will say Mum was glad 1159 didn't come out in the numbers the next day. Also, my joke about the story as seen by the ice cream cone ACTUALLY HAPPENS. Sorta.

Before we started the movie there was a Abraham Lincoln 77777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777biopic77777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 with Walter Huston in it on PBS, and I had no idea that Lincoln wore lipstick and got into bar fights. Wow. This entry brought to you in part by The Slinky One of my cats.

I'd taped the remake of The Andromeda Strain a while back, and we finally decided to watch it in one sitting. I rank it with Robin Cook's Invasion and Atomic Train. Did I ever do an entire post about Atomic Train? Probably not, so instead I'll stick to the movie we saw. Things that will stick with me from this new Andromeda Strain include: If a character is introduced and he starts flipping out over an ambulance almost giving him a migraine, he won't be the only one having a bad time by the end of the movie when the alert flashers are going off. The food chain of the Utah desert is so dangerous that somehow a bunny being eaten by a snake who is then nibbled on by a rat who gets picked up by an eagle takes out a group of soldiers.

I have to go back and try to stress how much I was laughing when the scientist with the migraines had a frikkin' seizure from the self-destruct warning lights. He somehow manages to pull himself together and throw a thumb to save the day. I'm...not going to say whose thumb because that would be a spoiler, but the entire stopping of the self-destruct sequence in the movie was worth the three hours of sitting there watching things (people, rats, monkeys, birds, fighter jets, the story) die horribly. If you ever get a chance, just watch the last twenty minutes. Priceless.

One night, while I was writing and Nan was writing, Nan found Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, and the discovery I made is that I'm so old and tired that smoke no longer musters the strength to come out of my ears when the presumably diseased rats hop off the ship and the cross goes up at La Navidad. Benicio Del Toro and Catherine Zeta-Jones are in this movie, as a crazy man and a hottie. WHAT A STRETCH!

We finally watched Shoot 'Em Up. I say finally because I'd been playing the "But it's got Clive Owen!" card every week since the movie came out and well, Nan and Mum loved it. So there. It's up there with the Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez movies I've seen, so if you don't mind fake blood in action scenes, and you like carrots, holy crap this is a fabulous movie.

Nan had found the end of Blades of Glory one night, and well...you know us for the figure skating, so I taped it and we watched it again from the beginning, which is always a good place to start a movie. I enjoyed it, it made me laugh and it also made me gag at one point but that's...it was a needed transformational plot point, I saw on the second viewing.

For some reason we'd also put off seeing The Kite Runner way too long. I think it was, "OMG, subtitles!" which I don't get because we turn the captions on for the all-English movies anyway. The story is amazing, though, and I keep thinking about how good the movie was. Look at the movies I saw this week. This was the best. I think it was one of the best of the year. One of the things that stuck with me from this was that the character of the father was one of the best movie fathers ever. Nice to see a break from the usual do what I say/you just don't understand me jive. Even though his kid didn't get that at first...but I don't want to give away the plot if you haven't read it already. See The Kite Runner. Read The Kite Runner, even.

Tags: July 2008, week in review, movies, books, family, cats, pets

Pardon Me, The Music Is Moving.

It's been a while since I did a post which pretty much can be summed up with, "OMG watch this thing I found on YouTube!" mainly because I haven't have 4 minutes straight of free time in which to check anything in my "ToWatch*" folder--and if you find that hard to believe, I was called away as I was writing that very line--but also because YouTube pulls things down faster than I can see them.

But here, from the channel of the director of the video (and one would hope not so soon to be taken down, but there was always that Sequential Pictures Dune Re-Dub incident), is Eric Wareheim's masterpiece for a song I've loved forever, Polite Dance Song by The Bird and The Bee. It makes me ten kinds of happy.



(*I have a ToWatch, Read, and Replies folder on my desktop. I...am afraid to do a count of how many items are in each folder. I've also got one merely titled "4," because there's a locked (damaged?) file in there and until I'm done with it I can't rename the folder...which has been sitting there since April. Of 2007.)

Tags: July 2008, music, videos, confessions