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September 27, 2004
I saw Shawshank with Alma on Saturday. It was, of
course, fantastic. The best movie I've ever seen, as you know, and even better on
the big screen. Alma was actually seeing it for the first time, which I didn't
know. She hasn't told me what she thought of it, probably because she thinks
whatever she says will be a letdown since I love the movie so much. Or maybe it just
didn't really occur to her to do so.
We then made the mistake of rounding the day out with Dogville, which
is just a piece of crap. Capsule review here. Today I had
to go up to Evanston to buy books, so I also went and saw Silver City.
September 23, 2004
Shawshank is playing at the AMC River East 21 downtown, and
apparently that's it. That's good enough for me! I'll be seeing it this
weekend. I haven't decided yet whether I want to write a review or not (as I've
never written an actual review of Shawshank). It might be tough at this point, but
maybe I'll give it a shot and see if I like it enough to post it.
In other movie news, the "two movies every Thursday" plan is
1-for-1. The review of Sky
Captain and the World of Tomorrow is up. I'll work on getting a capsule of the
French film Beau Travail up later.
EDIT: And here is that capsule.
September 21, 2004
I know a lot of you out there are fantasy football nuts who talk about their teams in their blogs. Well, now I'm doing it too! I know you care! An early preview of Week Three will greet you on this page, plus go back and see what happened the first two weeks and in the draft.
September 20, 2004
Four days until Shawshank opens and I still can't get a single site to tell me where it's going to play. How can we not have this information at this point? Four days left? Really?
In other news, does anyone remember when Britney Spears was hot? I do. It really doesn't seem that long ago. I remember I first saw the video for "Baby One More Time" in a hotel room in Denver. Man, she was hot in that. (And yeah, she wasn't 18 yet when she hit - but neither was I, so who cares?) Was this really just five years ago? From schoolgirl outfits, midriffs, and sexy dance moves to THIS in just five years? She looks 40! She's only 22! Alma and I discussed it:
Alma: wow, Britney Spears is just starting to look more and more like "whoever" Honestly, I think her career is nearing its completion - at least
her career as anything other than a curiosity, a public figure known for her wacky hijinks
that keep her in the spotlight. Most people seem to be getting pretty tired of her
music career; In the Zone will limp to triple platinum, which sounds like a lot
until we realize that Britney is approaching 5 million albums, Oops I Did It
Again went 10 times platinum, and Baby One More Time 14 times.
I mean, we already knew Britney wasn't the best singer. But now
she's burying her voice in so much production that she might as well be Ashlee Simpson.
It may mask her flaws, but it also makes her interchangeable. And her act is
no longer very interesting. The public is losing interest fast.
So what do you do? Apparently get married. But if this was
a publicity stunt... well, didn't she learn her lesson from the Jason Alexander fiasco?
Count me among the people who thinks there isn't a chance of this lasting.
Remember the old adage: if he'll cheat with you, he'll cheat on you. (Just ask Shar
Jackson.) I give it less than a year. Seriously. And if she didn't have
a lot of money, I'd give her less than five years to be doing something with nudity
somewhere - Playboy, Cinemax, basement in Inglewood. Although frankly, I'm not so
sure she won't anyway - just for the attention.
September 18, 2004
It's nineteen months and one day after I first heard about
it, and The Shawshank Redemption, my favorite movie of all time, is now just six
days from beginning its two-week limited engagement. Thank God I live in a major
metropolitan area, as it's opening in just eight cities (New York, LA, Chicago, San Fran,
Philly, Boston, Seattle, and Austin). I don't know yet what theaters it's coming to
- I'm holding out hope for Century, but it may stay in the city proper - but I do
know that I'm seeing this movie no matter what.
Another thing I'm doing no matter what is buying the Deluxe Limited
Edition DVD set, with two discs, the CD of Thomas Newman's godlike score (I hope it's the
whole thing instead of just the tracks that appear on the soundtrack I already have) and a
book of some sort. It's such a great time to be alive.
September 16, 2004
Classes at Northwestern start Wednesday the 22nd, which means
my first day of class is Thursday the 23rd. My class schedule is 1-3 TTh, plus the
course - which is on contemporary European cinema - has a lab from 7-9 Thursday.
Yes, that's pm. Since it was the only session offered for the lab and is at such an
odd time, my sneaking suspicion is that it might just be an optional viewing period -
that's when the class will see the bulk of its films, but you can rent them at home and
you're not required to be there. I may be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if I
turned out to be right.
I seem to have managed to end up in something of a theatrical dead zone
here in Chicago, an obvious problem for someone like me. The closest theater is the
Brew and View at the Vic, which really doesn't count. Second closest is the Music
Box, which will be nice if there's ever something really obscure that I want to see, but
isn't all that helpful on a weekly basis. Nothing else is really that
close, and none of the closest five appears to show much in the way of mainstream movies,
period (well, except the Vic, where you can see second-run mainstream films with an
inebriated audience, but that doesn't count either).
Thus the best option is really this: go to class, then go to a 4pm-ish
show at good old Century Theaters. Even if there were a theater nearby me that had a
similar selection to Century, I wouldn't really know what I was getting in terms of the
theater experience. With Century, I do - afternoon shows during the week are empty,
just how I like it. Such a timekiller would also prove handy on Thursdays, what with
that whole "four hours to kill in Evanston" thing. And there are no doubt
going to be a number of movies I want to see this fall - having two handy spots a week may
turn out great.
September 14, 2004
Perhaps you have noticed the distinct lack of updates on this
page recently. That's because I haven't had the internet at home since I moved out
of my sublet and into the new apartment on August 29. But RCN came today, and now we
have internet and cable. Sadly, I had to go buy a new router because the one my
parents sent me wouldn't work, as it had previously been used for either ISDN or DSL,
making it incompatible with the cable system. Bah. Routers aren't very
expensive, though.
I haven't been completely neglecting the site despite my inability to
update it, though. See below for a big update that I wrote offline during the
internet-less period. I've also got a couple new movie reviews up: The Passion of the Christ, a DVD
viewing for which I wrote a full-length review for the first time ever, and a Netflix
review of Donnie Darko.
September 4, 2004
It's now the sixth consecutive day without internet. I've actually had similar outages before, but
there's nine more days like this to go before RCN finally sends someone out here on
the 14th. Comcast also finally got off their
duffs and cut off the residual cable feed from the previous tenants, which means that
we're stuck with the following sources of entertainment in the apartment itself: antenna
TV (it's freshman year all over again! Except
with no internet); DVDs, and Yahtzee. Drew has
been handling the problem by going out most nights; I've been seeing Alma, mooching
internet and cable off her when I can, and now writing this, which will only be posted
once I get internet back here in the apartment, which is to say long after it ceases to be
relevant.
Alma and I went to the Lincoln Park Zoo today. I don't think I'd ever been before. Let me say that for a free zoo (well, if you don't
drive - parking is twelve bucks, which presumably accounts for a large part of how it can
be a free zoo), it's really nice. A lot of
good exhibits and a fine variety of animals. Alma's
dad also had a major hand in designing the bird house, which is a cool bit of relationship
trivia. The best part of the bird house was
the free-flying room, where the Inca tern flew right over our heads when we were the only
ones left in the room. I took a lot of cool
pictures and videos, but you'll never see any of them because there's little enough space
on this website as it is. Besides, you don't
care. Either way, the best news of the day was
my apparent avoidance of a sunburn – it was overcast and we were in buildings a fair
amount, but I was still somewhat worried as I had rushed out the door without putting on
any sunblock and thus was left with just a hat as protection, and while that’s okay
for the nose it doesn’t really help the arms. As
we’ve learned before, I can burn in extremely short periods of time, but I lucked out
today.
Birthday shoutout for Drew, who is now 24... which
means there is really nothing different about him. Nothing
like your 20s to make birthdays start to feel totally irrelevant. He won't see this until long after the fact, of
course, but it's the thought that counts.
I'll use the Drew reference to segue into a brief
discussion of the new apartment, which I haven't discussed before - mostly because, as of
my last entry, I had yet to see it. That's
right, I took this apartment sight unseen! But
Drew had seen it, and I chose taking Drew's word over riding the El for more than an hour
round trip when I would have been happy with pretty much any place located in the
Chicagoland area that didn't cost an arm and a leg. However,
this apartment is significantly more bitchin' than those not-so-lofty standards. First of all, you can see Wrigley Field from the
porch. Okay, so really you can pretty much
just see the light banks, but it's awesome that we're that close (ten minute walk, tops). During home games you can hear the crowd roar when
the Cubs do something good (insert jokes about infrequency of said occurrence here). You can also see the Hancock Building from the
kitchen window that faces south, and apparently you can also see the Sears in the winter
when the leaves come off the tree that's currently in that sight line.
My room is not huge by any stretch of the imagination,
but it certainly serves its purpose - I've got all my clothes in the closet, a computer
desk I put together myself which so far has not fallen apart, a queen-size bed, and still
a reasonable amount of floor space. No
complaints. There's also a nice living room,
and a kitchen with a very important feature for those who know what things were like in
the Kemper suite my junior year - a dishwasher. That's
right, kids. I've also got a parking space out
back, though currently it is sadly unoccupied. Considering
its price, I'm hoping to get at least something to put there soon.
As for catching you up on the period before this,
there's not much to tell. We learned valuable
lessons about moving as relates to renting Uhaul trucks (try looking into it a little
earlier than three days before the year's busiest moving weekend) and getting cable
installation (take a guess). We still managed
to move everything down here using a rented Ford Taurus and the cars of two friends of
Drew's, plus a serious assist from Chris' Uhaul. We
also learned that Scout does not tolerate other cats on her turf.
That's about the story from here. Basically, I'm looking forward to kickstarting the
move towards independence. This has been step
one.
There's more! View last month's updates.
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This page last updated: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 08:23:19 AM
