Archive for December, 2005
King Kong: Good Flick Won’t Save Hollywood
Friday, December 23rd, 2005Hollywood suffers. It’s hard to get weepy when they put out such mindless, violent, negative ney-bob stuff. What do they expect?
Will King Kong save this sad sack bunch? The short answer: no. That’s not to say the movie isn’t worth going to, because it’s great.
King Kong soars in a majestic, 40s-era Humphry Bogart kinda-way. In fact, when Director Peter Jackson closes in on Anne Darrow’s (Naomi Watts) tear-filled eyes my mind wandered back to Casablanca and Ingrid Bergman staring up into her soulmate’s eyes, except this time it is a monster gorilla instead of a barkeep.
The camera work, with mega-tight close-ups, are all the more breathtaking when the viewer stops to think about the fact that most of what she is watching on the film is computer generated. Not only do the eyes of man and beast reveal character, they reveal unbelievable advances in the special effects field. George Lucas needs to move over, Peter Jackson is King of CG.
But here is where I have a bone to pick with my dear Mr. Jackson. Sometimes the extravagent effects sequences slowed down the action. This sounds counter-intuitive, I know. The thought actually passed through my mind (and this could only happen in Mr. Jackson’s films so this might be pickier than the film deserves), “Okay, okay, the bugs are bad. Where is King Kong?”
This Kong is set in both New York City during the depression and on King Kong’s home, Skull Island–which is somewhere out there in the fog. Ms. Darrow, a vaudvillian actor needing a job and without a single soul in the world to rely on during tough times, finds herself employed by director Carl Denhim (Jack Black) and on the ship to shoot the movie with her favorite playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrian Brody).
Adrian Brody, Naomi Watts and Andy Serkis who plays King Kong brought depth to what could have turned into a fluffy effects film. Mr. Brody conveyed humor, strength, courage and compassion while swinging from tree-tops and writing in the bowels of the boat where he found himself stuck. Andy Serkis needs an Academy Award category all to himself. Naomi Watts needs mood enhancers, her Anne Darrow reads so believably alone yet hopeful. When Carl says to her, “You have to play the part, you’re the saddest girl I ever met”, I wondered if Ms. Watts truly felt that sad in her life. She has me believing.
Fortunately for me and the reset of the audience, my sister joined us to watch. She screams and oohs and ahhs in all the right places and caused more than a few people close to us to leave their seats by going airborn in fright. She wasn’t alone in her screeches of horror, however. The movie boast plenty of heart-stopping moments. Huge T-Rexes, every kind of creeping critter and ground shaking approaches designed to scare you into eye coverage. It works.
One scene, that felt long in a good way comes near the end of the flick. King Kong discovers an iced pond. His shared delight with Anne lights up the screen in childish wonder. Harkening back to earlier in the film where Anne must literally dance for her life, Jackson captures the enigmatic nature of friendship and the kizmet when two people truly share their hearts.
King Kong references so many movies they literally leapt at me from the screen: Casablanca, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Master and Commander, and just about all the WWII movies you’ve ever seen. I get the feeling Peter Jackson thinks, “Man, I liked that film but it should have been done this way.” Most of the time, his way is definitely better.
You’ll like this movie. It’s intense though. Kids under 12-13 might truly be freaked out. Big kids might be, too. Just leave your phobias at home. Mr. Jackson exploits nearly every one.
NYC Transit Workers Strike
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005A friend believes that union bosses, and it doesn’t matter the union, are notoriously short-sighted. Their aims are measured in the years and not in the much bigger long-term picture.
Remember the conversation the Caddy Manager had with the caddies in the movie Caddie Shack?
“If you guys want to be replaced by golf carts, people, keep it up!” And his rant continued, “What this is, is poor caddying! Poor caddying!”
The union guys and those people, whose interests they purport to represent, don’t seem aware of these two little recent developments: outsourcing and technology.
In the big picture, haggling over when retirement kicks in becomes irrelevent when there is no job to retire from. No job. No retirement. Hello?
If the good people of New York get angry enough, a proposal pointing to the success France (and the people love citing a French success) has had automating their train service will make its way to the Governor’s desk if he doesn’t come up with it himself.
Growing up in a union state, I could never understand why unions were so determined to shoot themselves in the foot. They had good jobs, but never seemed to understand the greater global market. Overreaching got their hands or whole arms lopped off more often than not. They ignored the bleeders and blundered on until all that was left was a very verbal, protesting bloody mass of flesh.
Underneath all this dispute is a concept I’ll blog about soon: energy exchange.
Radical Islam in U.S.: This is Sobering
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005The War on Terror begins at home and should start here.
Emotional Impact
Wednesday, December 21st, 2005Is it memorable? Do you pour valuable time and sweat into a venture that no one notices? Is your advertising p.u. stinky? Is your image ho ho hum?
This might be why.
Time Magazine: Pictures of the Year
Monday, December 19th, 2005Here is a link to Time’s pictures of the year picked by YOU the reader.
Here is a link to Time’s pictures of the year picked by the Editors.
Do you notice a difference? One of my favorite quotes is “The eyes bring to seeing what they want to see” by Shelley.
The people’s choice? Humor, Love even to death, courage in the worst conditions, honoring triumph, the symbolism of soaring, remembering victory, more animal fun, God’s light show,
and star bursts.
The editor’s choice? Pakistan earthquake heartache, NOLA flood heartache, weird confession picture, big justice with little Justice Roberts, legless Army dude looking at his crotch, exploit the loss and grief of parents losing a child (to an unjust war), backwards burka ladies voting, ethereal picture of people wading in water in India (good pic actually), cool Saturn moon shot, goodly looking Muslim, the religion of peace, man (btw, aren’t dove’s a Christian religious symbol?) with flocks of doves.
A picture is worth a thousand words–almost every single one political.
What’s your choice? It seems to be between hope and futility.
Torture
Monday, December 19th, 2005Does anyone need proof that John McCain is an opportunistic boob? Here’s some.
It reminds me of the conversation a lawyer friend always had with his far more intelligent wife. She would criticize him. He would protest. She would say, “Don’t be so defensive!”
Falling into the trap, he would say, “I’M NOT being defensive.” (Which is in itself defensive. Get it?)
That’s like his Mr. Morality proclaiming, “Torture is BAD, bad, bad. Our troops should never do it!!” You can almost see his jowels shake all righteously indignant.
- Who is saying torture is good, stupid head?
- Who is saying our troops are torturing people? Provide proof and it better be better than some doofus on a dog chain or false-claims of Koran flushing (who, by the way, gives a crap about that? Use it for toilet paper if it gets one of those scum-bags to cough up a murderous plot.)
NO ONE (with a fully functioning frontal lobe) IS SAYING THIS YOU CRAZY, SELF-SERVING LOON!
But regular idiots listen to the congressman and his weasily followers pontificate about torture being horrible and awful and wrong, OH MY! (Beheading innocent people is jim-dandy-o, though, ’cause they’re just uncivilized bruts who have been driven to murdering with butter knives by Western oppression, see?) and they believe all wide-eyed and head-nodding.
And now, BIG NEWS! Eminem and Dr. Dre’s music is being used to TORTURE terrorists. Broad use for the term Torture don’t you think? But that’s just the problem with stupid legislation like banning “torture”–whatever that is. Listening to Daniel Shore drone on during his NPR essays is torture to me but music in the ears of many of my dear readers, no doubt.
It is times like this when representative democracies are worse than dictatorships. At least with a dictator you can focus your irritation. But when a Senator with the I.Q. of a lamp-post cynically uses his hard time in a Viet-Cong TORTURE camp, comes up with a law that makes half the teenagers in America torturers (their parents must suffer this, remember) and have the weenie Senate atta-boys him ’cause “he might be the next president” or “John McCain is the Maverick Moderate and I might need his vote on my pork-barrel legislation and he scares me when he’s mad–that weird-looking grimace and lurchy shoulder and all” (big breath, that was quite a run-on), I want to scream. Primally.
Get a backbone you ninny-headed nincompoops! John McCain looks mean, but his day in the sun is passed. He only has power because you give it to him. He will never win the presidency EVER, ever, ever! Humor him and then vote against his self-aggrandizing, reckless law. Please.
Right now, reading the news is torture. And it’s all John McCain’s fault. Let’s string him up.
Bin Laden: Who Is He?
Monday, December 19th, 2005Bin Laden sounds like a spoilt middle-class brat sticking two fingers up at his family and former friends (he was once close to various Saudi rulers) for getting all money-obsessed, dude. In fact, that’s exactly what he is: the son of a Saudi billionaire who in the 1970s made a fortune from running one of daddy’s construction firms and drove a white Chrysler, but then went all religious and decided that capitalism is not very nice. If he’d been born in the Home Counties instead of Riyadh, he would probably have been one of those Eton-educated types who turn their backs on privilege and piss off their parents by becoming smelly hippies who smash up McDonald’s.
Sounds right to me.
Internet WWW Founder Blogs
Sunday, December 18th, 2005Look at this. Tim Berners-Lee is his name, btw. His creation is up there with the Gutenburg press.
Kroger: Bad News
Sunday, December 18th, 2005Kroger (or K Rodger as one friend called it for a year before I figured it out) is not doing well. Oh yes, the stock has been up some since July (when all grocery stocks went up because of timely hurricanes–untimely for those who experienced them, but good for business nonetheless), but it is still going down.
Why will Kroger join Albertsons and Randalls flopping around on the deck of the grocery shopping vessel hoping by some grace of God that it will flop into the money ocean, but instead die a slow, painful oxygen-deprived death? Bad products? Maybe, the produce at Randalls sucketh. High prices? Yes. Albertsons and Randalls especially seem to take perverse pleasure in picking needful products and adding a dollar just for fun. How about those stupid shopping tags you have to scan in order to get the “member” price which is just what the product should be priced at anyway? Yes, yes and more yeses. Those things irritate the daylights out of me. They are coercive and invasive. How about union workers verses market-driven wage earners? Very possibly maybe, but not for reasons that you might think. What about the shopping experience itself? Alberston’s: ho hum. Randalls: patrician and byzantine. Kroger’s: good, but flat.
The traditional grocers have been troubled for some time now thanks to price, efficiency and supply chain pressure by Wal-Mart. But that’s not why these other stores will go out of business. For ten bucks, I’d rather not shop in a store that barely contains chaos, sports dead-head checkers or worse, a computer scanner that is never right. Nope, sad to say, Kroger’s, my personal grocer for the last eight years just lost a customer to H.E.B.–not Wal-Mart. I finally gave in…
Kroger’s has something, one thing, that kept me coming back especially for the last three years: Hugslie Land. A woman there, Sharie we’ll call her, is fantastic. A former Montessori teacher, she runs the child-care area awesome. Activities for the season, decorations, cleanliness and child-centeredness while I mosey around the store to shop and linger just a little too long in the magazine isle. At any moment, I can look up to the monitor and wonder of wonders monitor my kids.
That whole wonderful experience (shopping kids-free) kept me loyal and outweighed the slow, miserable checkers, the apathetic baggers and the unresponsive responses to food item requests. Let’s see, I ask for a high-end organic cheese where their margin has to be at least 35% and they can’t seem to find a way to get the product on the shelves because the department manager has no control–it has to go through the buyer, don’t you know. And then, and then, after years, I have to scan my Kroger Card in order to get prices I should get anyway!
So, last week, because it was on the way home, of course, and because only one mini-Clouthier accompanied me, I slunk into the HEB Central Market. It was busy. The entry into the store is an annoying snaking curve through the produce department–certainly not customer centered but no question bottom-line centered. When I get pooped out of the end, hello! A charismatic chef sits four feet up on a pedastal wielding knives like a Ginsu salesman, chopping away at what will be dinner tonight for all of us if we buy the conveniently placed ingredients within reach. Take a hard right and you see the deli stacked ten deep of people willing to pay the $8.50 a pound for lunch meat. I pass the chatty chef and go straight (around the back of the store for health, remember people).
I need chicken. Ho, what is this? The chicken is exactly half price for the free-range stuff that the fam must eat. The organic chicken costs about what the free-range stuff costs at Kroger’s. Uh oh. This might be worth enduring the snake for. Then more organic product: every thing I usually buy in huge quantities and better prices. Organic yogurt exactly 50% less than at Kroger’s. Uh oh, again.
The lanes, alas, are narrow. The store is lit weird–softer, more home-like lighting that’s nice but casts shadows on everything making it difficult to see. But then, eggs! Cheap, organic eggs.
A bottleneck near the wine and flowers appropriately enough, is the last obstacle one must maneuver his cart through to struggle to the myriad check out lanes slumped, fatigued from consumer battle. And then a thing happens that hasn’t happened at Kroger in years, the checker smiles! An open lane too!
“Come on down, ma’am”, she encourages as she scrub, scrub, scrubs her assembly-line. She walks around the lane, grabs my basket, and puts my stuff on the lane herself!
Magically, a cheerful young man efficiently and logically loads my bags. My socially-conscious side appreciates Kroger’s for hiring mentally challenged baggers. It’s great that they have jobs, but that self-satisfaction evaporates 549 bags later at home. A whole acres of plastic trees were killed to bag each item in my over-stuffed basket individually. That’s just wrong and almost cancels out the goodness.
While HEB buzzed energetically, Kroger goes through the motions. It’s got to be, in part, unionization. At my bi-weekly jaunts to Krogers, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard the checkers yelling to each other about their breaks, their hours and “when they get off”. In fact, more than a couple times I’ve found myself encouraging them to buck up, quittin’ time is coming soon.
THEY ARE CHECKERS, for heavens sake! What is so all-fired difficult with moving your arm back and forth and scanning? They don’t even have to engage their frontal lobes to calculate change anymore.
The week before Thanksgiving, the checker was gloating about her 40 hour week. “I’m working Thanksgiving.. all day untl four,” said she.
“Do you get overtime?” I ask.
“Holiday pay AND overtime,” she grins.
“What’s that,” I say, “like $30 an hour?”
“Yup!” She enthusiastically says, “Maybe more!”
Thirty bucks an hour to wear a surly look, move slow and act put upon. Quite the gig.
Kroger feels more like walking into the DMV or Post Office. Entitlement hangs rank in the air.
Push my break back five minutes to help with the heavy load of customers? I should think not! My break is at 4:05 by-gum and at 4:05 I take my break even if the Archangel Gabriel needs fabric softener for a laundry emergency.
It isn’t any one thing, but put together, Kroger has lost its appeal. That’s too bad too. It’s store design and produce seem great. I like the butcher there. And then there’s Shari.
But it’s over. The lack of a genuine smile just might have been the proverbial straw. Can management change that?
Texas Hold ‘Em II: Yanks Over Pinknecks
Sunday, December 18th, 2005A classic Cinderalla story, Mr. Dr. and I have been the persecuted step-children at the Hold “Em table. Milk money taken from us by bullies weilding face cards, leaving us to shrink back home heads hung low in shame and degradation.
No more!
We actually just broke even if you average last week’s trouncing with this week’s triumph. It’s a start.
Can the Clouthier contingent capitalize on new momentum? Stay tuned.
