Tickets are on sale NOW!
To celebrate our participation in FringeNYC and to... ahem... raise the funds required to transport a cast and crew of 13 to New York for the festival, Bootstraps will be presenting a one-night-only benefit performance of THE BOXER!
The evening includes show, snacks, drinks and an after party! You can't beat this deal and we can't do it without you!
August 22, 2009 at 8 p.m.
Rosewood Center for Family Arts
Early Bird tickets are only $20 through July 10th
Regular Price: $30
Tickets may be purchased by clicking the link above
or by calling (214) 334-1659.
Possibly it's missing the point slightly, but the most striking fact gleaned from last night's unavoidable dead-celebrity coverage was this: holy crap Jaclyn Smith is still hella-gorgeous. If she's had a face lift then her surgeon's a certified genius (it doesn't look like it to me, but I'm hardly an expert), but I suspect this is more down to (a) extremely good genes and a healthy skin routine, or (b) that old painting up in the attic that ages instead of her. JS was always my favorite Angel (not that I ever watched that show, no really), so her extremely graceful aging isn't much of a surprise, really.
(2009 photo)
So of course the car picks the first week of near-100 degree weather to chug the last of its freon, making the AC more or less useless... I guess it would be worse if it packed up in mid-August, but don't get me started... anyway, that means I get to spend Saturday morning at the Saturn dealership, and not the old five-minutes-from-my-house Saturn dealership -- no, that one closed down because of the bad economy, so I getta driving 20 miles or so to Lewisville, which is where they apparently beamed all my service records. All appendages crossed that it only needs freon, and they don't find another half-grand worth of crap wrong with it, which is the usual procedure ever since it's been paid off.
B keeps making noises like we need to just get a new car now, what with the dealerships being on their knees and all, but that would basically put us in a financial position I'd rather not experience just at the moment, if we can possibly avoid it... the light at the end of the tunnel grows larger, but I just need to make sure it's not a locomotive that flattens us.....
Other than that, I'm having a great week. You?
Getting back to my roots, I’ve been on a real horror movie jag lately. Here are some recommendations/warnings:
The Burrowers (2008) – Horror western, set in the 1890s. The period feel is very finely evoked, and the story isn’t as clichéd as most of this type, though it does take quite a while to get going. Pretty good monsters too. Only a fairly ridiculous climax turns things a bit sour. 4/5
Midnight Movie (2008) – This feels like a real throwback to the ‘80s, when scare flicks were slightly more conceptual – a pack of twentysomethings (plus a cop and a doctor) find themselves trapped in a movie theater while the stalk-and-kill film playing on the screen begins to manifest itself in their reality. The idea would work better if the “movie in a movie” were more interesting – and less anachronistically prescient, being a Jason-type killer in a weird skull-mask, even though it’s supposed to be from the late ‘60s – but the gore is plentiful, the concept reasonably intriguing, and the movie keeps moving. Pretty entertaining overall. 4/5
Okay, I'll try to keep this succinct... in a few days time, my dear ol' Dad turns 80 years young, and my mother has long made it known that we all (meaning all pertinent offshoots) WILL be there for a modest celebration... The fambly is pretty spread out these days with me and my sister Chris in Texas, and other sis Judy in mid-northern Illinois. Mum/Dad are still in Sparta IL, 70 miles or so southeast of St. Louis, with all the grandkids and great-grandkids in various states. But most agreed that, despite the tough economic clime, we'd make it there. About two months ago, I dutifully dug up some decent-priced plane tickets (abt. $150 round trip to St. Louis, I've had much worse) as neither B nor I can face the drive anymore, and the ol' Saturn wouldn't be up for it anyway.
So: the date for this shindig was May 30th, next Saturday, two days after Dad's actual birthday.
Except.
My Mom has apparently all-too-casually been saying "Memorial Day" to people -- because she still remembers Memorial Day being the 30th, from way back when, and since she and Dad have long-since retired, "holidays" don't really register with them like they do with us working stiffs. So even though she knows Memorial Day is the 25th, she's still said it to various other family members too many times. The practical upshot: everybody else is coming this weekend, the 25th. Even though that's not what Mum was planning. Apparently she's been saying something like "May 30th, you know the old Memorial Day." But all anybody heard was "Memorial Day." And none of them are able/willing to change their plans at such short notice, which is at least somewhat understandable.
(Note: about two weeks ago I got paranoid about this very thing, and I called her to double-check the date, and was assured the party was on the 30th. Apparently I should have been more alert to the implications.)
But it's too late to change our tickets, without a $400 additional cost which, sorry, is not even remotely possible. So the party goes on without us, and we'll get our own private weekend with the parental units next week. Which will be kind of nice, actually, but I don't get to see the IL branch all that often, and I hate to miss 'em.
But that's the way it goes. Weird, huh?
Bleech. Dry, trite, overlong, and worst of all, crashingly unfunny. I think I may have chuckled twice in 90 minutes (and one of those times was at Starbug, an easy laugh). The meta stuff was insanely hackneyed and tiresome (and, as my friend Rusty said, made it all seem like really bad fanfic) and the whole tone of the thing seemed wrong -- maybe it was just the lack of a laugh track. It did look good though -- mostly green-screen FX, but very well integrated, with some really good design work. And you have to admire that Danny John-Jules has kept his figure enough to still fit into those crazy suits (the skin-tight fuschia Lycra wetsuit with the giant bell bottoms made my wife laugh). And where can I get one of those 12" Kryten dolls? But still -- a really shiny turd is still a turd.
It was still better than all of Series 7, though. But I've no need to ever watch it again.
Looks like I get to do the Star Trek screening/review for Pop Syndicate, meaning I get to see it a few days early. Stefan, I'm going to take back some of the things I've said about you. ;-p
Bleah. I've just come off a six-day sinus infection (with raging sore throat) that really knocked me down and had its way with me. Long story short, I delayed going to the doctor at least a day too long because I was convinced I could lick it with the drugs at my immediate disposal, but eventually had to admit defeat, and ended up missing three days of work in the process -- not a great situation when you work freelance and have no sick pay. But I'm finally hopped up on antibiotics, and it no longer feels like I'm eating razor blades with every bite. So finally feeling almost human again. Well, as human as I ever feel.
Only a couple weeks to Star Trek. I'm actually looking forward to it, somehow.
I haven't set foot in Titan Comics in months. A couple years ago I made the decision that I just wasn't getting anything out of most new comics, and so I just stopped buying them, pretty much cold turkey. The only exceptions were Hellboy comics actually drawn by Mignola, Astro City, and... er, that might be it. Even though I wasn't regularly buying comics, I still would hit Titan about every six weeks or so, just to see what was going on, but as the years drug on, it seemed... depressing somehow. I'm so "out" of this hobby that I have no clue what's going on in the industry, or in the books themselves. On some base level, I'll always love comics, but I'm just not "into" them at this moment in my life, and that feels........... weird. And with this whole recession thing, I can't really see myself getting back into buying much of anything.
On a related topic, I've recently been trying to liquidate my existing collection on eBay by cramming a Flat Rate Priority box with as many comics as it will hold (usually around 40) and starting the bidding at ten bucks... and I'm still not getting many takers. I'm pretty much giving these things away, but at least I'm getting most of them out of the house. I culled my "must keep forever" books down to four long boxes (really, I wanted to get down to three, but some of 'em were too dear to part with), but beyond that: I don't need 'em.
Not sure how to feel about all that.
I still don't like the decor of the place, though, which has a very fru-fru and upscale "don't you dare set foot in here unless you make at least $60K per year" atmosphere. The old Houlihans that was here in the '80s (formerly "our" place) had a much more friendly Chili's/Irish pub-style vibe to it.
Still, the fuud was guuuuuuud. We both had afterglow for the rest of the day.
Okay, in this interview, Grant Morrison makes a great point about Watchmen (the comic) that I'd never considered before: the story is completely circular. One of the last images we see in the book is the fat dude at the radical newspaper reaching for Rorschach's journal, and then if you go back to page one, the very first thing you read is: "Rorschach's Journal, October 12th, 1985." In other words, the entire story can now be seen as the fat dude reading through the journal. Of course, this doesn't totally work, as all the stuff at Karnak, the squid attack, and the fat guy himself (basically anything past when Rorschach dropped off the journal) won't be visualized within its pages, but it's still an intriguing notion.
Is this like "common knowledge" and I'm the last one to consider it?
I promise this is not going to turn into one of those blogs where I just re-post stuff I've found on the web... bor-ring. However, here are a couple of funny things you may have missed on the gigantic bilge barge that is YouTube...
The boys at Balloonshop have a unique brand of humor that really cracks me up. However, it may be a "guy" thing. Here's one of my favorites, but also check out their main page for many more humorous shorts.
Molly Erdman is the beautiful redhead from the Sonic commercials (she's usually with her TV "husband" Brian, not her real husband), a Second City vet who has started making some short films and posting them on YT. This one's pretty funny. Also, check out her charming blog.
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colonel_barker THE BEGINNING...
1. Real name - Jeffrey Eugene Smith
2. Nickname(s) - No nicknames, but I use "JE Smith" as a "professional" and on-line name, for various boring reasons.
( Cut for FList Sanity... )
The How it Should Have Ended website is filled with awesomeness. My favorite has to be this one for Superman, but there are lots more great ones.
It was... pretty darn awesome. Not perfect, and Snyder really went overboard on the gore, but frankly, I'd like to see somebody make a better movie out of this material. Probably the most surprising thing is that the alterations to the ending really work, and probably make a lot more sense than the book's ending.
More when I've had time to process it, and possibly see it again.
You know, I hardly ever get seriously sick, but the older I get the more often I seem to get these wicked head colds... I don't barf, I don't get nauseous, I don't lose my appetite, but I get stuffed-up, lightheaded and totally drained of energy, to where I feel like just laying on the couch for a week. Got hit with one of those last week; I managed not to miss any work (no Sick Days for the eternal Freelancer), but have felt like hammered ka-ka since about last Thursday; it didn't help that I had to sit at the car dealership for about four hours Saturday morning, but my brand new MP3 player helped pass the time. My head is finally clearing today, and am feeling almost back up to snuff.
So, good thing Watchmen is this weekend instead of last, as I probably would have gone anyway, and gotten the whole theater sick. I'm thinking I'm going to try to cut out of work early on Friday and hit a 3 or 4 o'clock show. The reviews so far seem a bit mixed, but I don't care... I'm all over this one.
