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Archive for July 2004

Pfui

July 30, 2004, 11:20 pm

I broke down and bought the Nero Wolfe DVD box set (the first volume) online - actually, online, though A&E, is the only way to get one, and they’re expensive.

A person could buy them on ebay. Which is what I did - and the price was much, much lower.

I love Nero Wolfe and the A&E movies are perfect. Like Jeremy Brett to Sherlock Holmes or Bogart to Philip Marlowe, Maury Chaykin is awesome as Nero Wolfe. I’m so happy!

As a bonus, the movies were filmed in Toronto (standing in for New York), so it’s chock full of Canadian actors. The orchid room needs more orchids though. In Rex Stout’s books, the room is supposed to be packed with thousands of the flowers (besides selling to collectors, Wolfe also sells some for culinary reasons). Other than that, the show is bang on.

UPDATE: I didn’t realize it - the few times I caught the tail-end of the show on TV (I had a terrible time seeing a whole episode) - but there is an ensemble cast . Most are the same characters over and over, but everyone else, all the minor parts, are played by the same handful of actors over and over. James Tolkan (Principal Strickland from Back to the Future “You’re a slacker!”) seems to be in every episode. This show just gets better and better all the time.

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(posted in the General category)

The Village

July 30, 2004, 10:34 pm

Me and Ma (”What’s her last name? I only knew her as Ma. That’ll have to do.”) saw The Village tonight and it was ok, in the mildest sense of the word. The J-Lo wannabe next to me (some random chickadee, not Ma) proclaimed it “the stupidest movie ever”, but then she’s never seen Highlander 2. Also, it was obvious by the way she laughed through the whole thing, she wasn’t investing what little imagination she had into the film. Sadly, should she ever read a newspaper (unlikely) Roger Ebert will back her up. I didn’t know that’d I’d slam it as much badly as Roger did, I just found it lacking in all the stuff I liked in M. Night Shyamalan’s early movies - like chills and “holy crap!” twists. I didn’t get any of that. I did get to see Shyamalan try something different, so there’s hope in the future.

It’s kind of a renter, or a cheap night film (though I’ve heard they don’t exist anymore). Toren says he might go pull a see one movie, sneak into the theater for the other, and that’s not a bad idea. Here’s the ranking, best to worst;

Sixth Sense
Unbreakable
The Village
Signs

The Village and signs are, in terms of movie theory, neck and neck, but Signs has such a couple of amazingly stupid logical gaps, that it gets the red card and The Village moves ahead.

My apologies in advance if you go see the movie and walk about think it’s the stupidest movie ever, wonder why I even called it “ok”. You have to understand, I grade all movies on a wicked curve;

I’ve seen Highlander 2.

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(posted in the General category)

Spam. It comes with its own ASCII

July 27, 2004, 1:22 am

When I was a kid, the boobies didn’t appear all that often. Boob media (not to mention all the other secret stuff) was tucked away behind squeaky doors and behind the counters.

These days, the boobs show up, unannounced and unsolicited in my email inbox - digital citizenship automatically comes with daily nudie pics, watered down with special financial opportunities and herbal enhancements. I’m going to have kids one day, and this is going to drive me crazy. But’s that’s not what this post is about.
(more…)

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(posted in the General category)