Nice collection of beautiful photographs featuring wrecked ships; reminded me of the D.T. Sheridan, the iron tug that sits to this day on the southern coast of Monhegan Island, Maine. I lived on Monhegan for about five months after graduating from Wesleyan, and visited the wreck several times. I have some Flickr pictures here, for those interested.
The summer movie season begins today, with Iron Man.
It's every bit as fun as it looks, has excellent pacing, and feels exactly like what a summer popcorn flick should. Great action, well-told story, perfect performances, excellent effects, only the merest bit of shoe-horned romance, and an above-par post-credits stinger for a sequel (so wait until the roll is through!).
A few of us went to a midnight screening at the Arclight Cinerama Dome; director Jon Favereau and star Robert Downey, Jr. were both in attendance, and primed the audience with some (brief) words. New trailers for The Incredible Hulk (so-so), The Dark Knight (awesome!), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (closed my eyes and plugged my ears and only heard the muffled refrains of the "Indiana Jones March," so good for me) screened before the film, and set a pretty excellent mood.
Iron Man rocked. Hard.
Add in a solid episode of Lost, some rousing Mario Kart Wii, and delicious pizza from a new local place beforehand, and I had a pretty excellent night – and it's only Thursday, a school night at that!
If only Tracy was in town... but I'll meet up with her in Davis tomorrow, and then off to San Francisco with Dan and Sahra.
This is the start of an excellent few days...
Short post tonight.
3:10 To Yuma was, in my humble opinion, one fantastic flick. Excellent performances— Christian Bale continues to be one of the best working actors out there, Russell Crowe used his charaisma in a way completely appropriate to his character, and Ben Fostor stole all of his scenes as the psychopathic Charlie.
Yuma is not seeking to reinvent, subvert, or lampoon the Western genre. It is simply a very good classic Western, made with modern sensibilities. If it seemed a little... cartoony at times, that's because the Western story is the American creation myth; archetypes play their dramas out on the frontier landscape. Ben Wade can redeem himself so fully because he already is a legend, or a version of a legend; Christian Bale is the same struggling frontiersman, too weak to support his family, who can learn to be enough of a man to take a last stand. I've heard complaints about a certain horse hearing a quiet whistle from a few hundred yards away, while a train roars by. Folks, that's not literal, that's symbolic. This is a Story about who we are.
Marco Beltrami's score seemed to really sum up my feelings on this. It's got the classic sounds we all expect a Western score to have— brassy horns, twangy guitars, the same chord progressions Morricone uses. But it's still it's own beats, and serves the story being told here, with strong percussion and a clear action rhythm. It sounds modern, to be sure, but is no doubt classical, and instantly recognized for what it is. And so the film is an exemplary Western, modern not in its structure, but simply in its timing and style.
Hello All-
Here's a little experiment. We're here in the Month of September. I've had this blog rolling for, technically, 8 full months now, and I have something like 10 posts.
WEAK.
So here, in the (formerly 7th) 9th month of the year, I make a firm attempt.
I will post every day of September, from this point forward.
Aiding me, I have a new tool: MarsEdit.
Basically, it's a blogging application I can do all of my composing, tagging, and posting through. I'm fairly optimistic that, with this app, I'll be posting more frequently, and with a higher level of quality.
Was the Blogger Dashboard that complex or annoying? No, but the step of going through a web interface slowed me down. On the one hand, going through a browser portal isn't a dedicated act: I can quit Safari and lose work, or get distracted into other webpages. It doesn't feel as "official." On the other hand, the act of logging in and navigating to the "Compose" page takes several clicks and entries; with MarsEdit, I launch an app and go.
So, we'll see if the psychological game pays off. As I've stated before (in person, if not on this blog per se), I want this to be a true window into my life, a real tool for friends and family, as well as myself, to be able to use for communication/getting informed.
Stay on my ass. E-mail me. Post comments.
I need your help to do this.
;-)
On August 9th, 1974, my mother got a surprise birthday present: Richard Nixon resigned.
This morning, I got a similar bithday present, albeit a day late:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/washington/13cnd-rove.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
All I have to say is, this is seven years too late as far as I'm concerned, and that the lack of any criminal repercussions is disheartening yet wholly expected.
Favorite quote from the article: "Mr. Rove was not only the chief architect of Mr. Bush’s political campaigns but also the midwife of the president’s political persona itself."
Why is it that as soon as a block of time is planned out, it feels as if you've already moved past it? I say this specifically in relationship to summer... you start getting close to the end, you figure out what you're going to do, and then, as far as you're concerned, it's over. I started thinking about this because today, we planned out the rest of the summer's schedule here at work, as it's going to be busy.
So it's officially fall over here as a result of that.
Sigh.
I haven't posted as much as I intended to recently... sorry about that. Laziness mixed with some work on a project soon-to-be-revealed have stopped my efforts to keep this regular.
Any of you linking here from my MySpace page, welcome! I certainly post here more often that I do myspace; last night's updates notwithstanding, I pretty much never go there. But please, comment here anytime you want, I pay much more attention.
Hope all is well with you, my dear readers. Until next time, enjoy the summer.
While it lasts...
