I know there are a lot of you who read my blog on a regular basis (Val) and never leave comments. You read, you have thoughts, so leave them, comment?!?!? on them. If anything else I will know who you are. And thank you to those of you who do.
I’ve been really interested in this movie called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. See the Apple site for more trailers.
At first I saw the trailer in a theatre and I wasn’t really impressed, I thought the images looked wired and the story looked pretty lame. But over time I have developed a real interest in this movie. The images really look groundbreaking while holding a nostalgic sense. I finally found a good explanation of the overall look of the movie from JoBlo.com which described it as “washed out“. Which I think really hits the nail on the head about the look.
I am still having trouble figuring out how most of the visuals were accomplished. My guess is that most of the movie is CGI (computer generated images) with live actors pasted in, with their images modified to have that “washed” look. I think there may even been a few CGI shots of the principal actors. If you watch any of the trailers then you will see what I am talking about.
I’m not sure how this movie is going to do financially. Since it really hasn’t been heavily promoted, and it’s coming out at the end of the summer season. I figure that it didn’t want to compete with some of the big movies of the summer, which in fact most of the “big” movies really bombed. I figure this movie may receive some critical acclaim, with low attendance, but possibly many awards come next year, for visuals and/or cinematography.
On another note I’m really excited to see Garden State. I’ll probably go this week so expect a post about that too.
This past weekend I went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11 again. But this time I saw it with a Republican and an Undecided. Quite interesting. I thought with all the hoopla around the Republican National Convention (you don’t have to go to the site, I just included it just to) this week I’d thought I’d say something as well about all things political. For a different (yet similar) view see Kathryn’s page.
But one of my friends said something thought provoking about Mr. Moore’s movie. They said that they felt sorry for Bush. More for the reason that they felt that Bush was being so harshly attacked. They felt bad that people were so adamantly being just downright disrespectful towards him as a person.
This got me thinking. As much as I dislike Bush as a President and leader, how should I as a Christian see him. I guess I can ultimately disagree with him and not like much of what he does, but I guess I’m pretty much required to love him as a person. But I think I’m having a hard time finding my compassion for him.
We’ll see what happens in Nov.
Rock the Vote
Wed was spent trying to prepare for Matt’s and Jeni’s wedding. I gracefully volunteered to pretty much cater the rehearsal dinner which was tonight. Since I love to cook I thought this would be a good idea, yet I forgot to factor in the time it would take to prepare everything. So Wed was spent at Costco doing most of the shopping before heading with the Jr Highers to Medieval Times. Which was a total blast, especially since I had yet to go there in all my years living in So Cal.
We have this little girl named Kelsey who is going to be in 6th grade next year, she stands 4 foot naught and looks as sweet as can be. I had the pleasure of sitting next to her during the festivities at the tournament. We enjoyed talking about the food we were enjoying and the Pepsi that I guess was served in the 4th century. Along with other things such as who we thought was the cutest knight. But my favorite part was during the fighting, when our knight the white and black knight was fighting the other side’s Green knight and little Kelsey yelled at the top of her lungs, “Die!!!!!!!!!!!! Kill Him!!!!!! Die Green Knight, Die!!!!!!!” What precious moments. A great night which was capped off with some Krispy Kremes on the way home.
Today was the rehearsal dinner for the wedding and so that meant that I spent my first 2 hours of the day, starting at 8 am, when Matt and I had finished shopping for stuff we couldn’t get at Costco at the great hour of 1 am. After 2 hours of preparing burgers (which included onions, eggs, bread crumbs and the infamous Worcestershire Sauce), and little salmon packets, which were little pieces of foil that we put a piece of salmon with potatoes, yellow and green squash, onions, garlic, and carrots, so that we could slap these things on the BBQ along with the burgers and dogs. We were finally done. I then headed over to CSUN to sit with Danni so that we could spread the word about our church and college group. If anything we handed out a lot of flyers to people, so helpfully we will see some fruit come the next few weeks. After that I returned home for a nap before the actual rehearsal and then the rehearsal dinner. There were about 40 people at the rehearsal dinner and I got a lot of props, from the older g-parents down to Jeni’s sister’s husband who was a chef. All which made the evening even more fun.
I do have to say I was a bit jealous of the bridesmaid’s gifts, not to say that ours weren’t good, but they got embroidered robes from the GAP. Totally stylin.
Tomorrow I finally get to spend some time with Jacob and Krista who got in Wed night but things have been so hectic that I haven’t really spent time with them aside from Wed night when we had a latenight meal at Denny’s. We are scheduled to head up to the Getty and possibly the beach sometime tomorrow which should be a lot of fun. Then dinner with the rest of the out-of-towners and whatever antics ensue. Then pretty much it’s Sat which means the Big day, which will be great as well.
Let’s try to make finding a wife even harder.
I’ve decided (for now at least) that I don’t want to marry someone who is going to be in full-time ministry. She should be ministry minded, willing to think critically about ministry and even participate in ministry, but not do ministry professionally. Lately I’ve been thinking that I will want that seperation in my life.
Well I guess this pretty much commits me to a chaste life. Bummer.
The other night, well actually it was really early Tuesday morning, between 2 and 5am, I ended up watching Turner Classic Movie Channel. I found myself engrossed with the infamous Charlie Chaplin. TMC had rebroadcast a series from 1983 called Unknown Chaplin. Which was more than fascinating. It really brought to life the mysteries of this great man, and many of his techniques and thought structure which helped me understand this genius.
I think my fascination with Charlie and other greats such as Fatty Arbuckle, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and other slapstick comedians started in the sixth grade when I happen to take a media class that studied such great achievements in modern cinema.
If you haven’t examined the greatness that these men (and the occasional women) who developed such a patriarchal style of movie making, you really should run out to your local video establishment or mail order video service and spend some quality time learning and admiring a craft almost long forgotten.
A few weeks ago I was on a outing with the Jr Highers to the beach and on the way home we were rocking out to some MxPx and I got really into a few of the songs and was playing air drums as I drove. Then this one song came on and I REALLY got into it and accidentally slammed my hand into the rearview mirror, knocking it clean off the inside of my windshield. All to the amusement of 4 Jr Highers.
I snapped the thing right off its hinges. I was really bummed because there didn’t look like an easy way to repair the thing. The “screw” that held the thing on didn’t look to accessible and even Crazy Glue didn’t seem to be working. Even the mighty Duct Tape didn’t work. (Most likely cause I tried it in the middle of the day when the inside of my car was like 145 degrees fahrenheit, and it kinda melted the sticky part of the tape, rendering it useless.)
I finally realized that the screw was hex screw and I happened to have a set of hex wrenches that took the mirror off the windshield and I proceeded to jimmy rig a situation where I could glue the two components back together. I made sure I did it at night when the CA air temp dropped to the negative degrees of 65.
It was really kinda weird driving using only the side mirrors. And once I got the regular one put back, I kept finding myself looking in the sides instead of the rearview.
Well this weekend we had a little bachelor party for Matt. AJ and I spent the last few months trying to come up with some good ideas for things to do for Matt.
Since neither one of us have had any experience in the realm of bachelor party planning, we turned to the master of all things knowledgeable and right in the world, Mr. Bill Sperry.
First of all we had to figure out the main problem of where to eat for the evening. We knew it had to be memorable and we also had the problem of Matt’s favorite place to eat. A number of places ran through our head, from Chili My Soul, Todai, Tommy’s, BJ’s and even the good ‘ol BBQ. In the end we thought that the place to eat would be Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles(sorry no official site). Especially since Jeni has told Matt that he has to eat less fried food when they get married, it was one last good BANG.
If you haven’t been yet it is a must. Just order some chicken and waffles, but the way to eat this is to: rip a piece of chicken off, then rip some waffle wrap chicken in waffle, then dip it into syrup and then take the hot sauce and splash some of that on as well then enjoy. Yes it sounds a little odd but it’s quite amazing.
At one point we wanted to hire a Marachi Band to play while we ate, but we soon nixed the idea due to funds.
After dinner we retreated back to the valley to spend some quality hang out time. One of the members of our church was gracious enough to lend us his house. Let me just say THANK YOU Brian Holland. This place is just WOW!!!! It has a 6 car garage.
AJ and I had stocked up on the booze for the evening and were ready to make plenty of Manhattans, Martini’s and a few other assorted drinks. But in my opinion the creme de la creme for the evening was the bottle of Hennessy XO Conagc that I bought.
The night proceeded with some luke warm tubbing (we had a hard time getting the hot tub to heat up) and lots of munchies including chili cheese corn dogs.
We finally settled down to watch Matt’s favorite movie the Big Lebowski. We all fell asleep before the movie was over with the exception of Joseph or J-Liu as I like to call him. The combo of Roscoe’s and alcohol took us all out quick. We woke up the next morning to clean up a bit and we ended up watching the Jackie Chan movie that we had got for the night before. This movie called The Prisoner was basically an old Jackie move that was made in 1990 but re-released in the US in 2000 after Jackie had become big. The only problem aside from the movie being bad and not making not too much sense was that it is billed as a Jackie Chan movie but Jackie only really stars in about 7 min of the whole entire film. Quite disappointing in my opinion.
All in all a good time for all, the strippers ended up coming the next night when the family was home so I had to clear that up today, kinda embarrassing.
I guess you can buy shares for my blog.
I’m not really sure what this is, but take a look if you want to. Too bad I don’t see any of this money.
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