Pep Talk

This place has gone unloved for far too long. We have both dropped the proverbial ball, and QUITE FRANKLY I'm not happy about it. Yeah, I know... we have school and all that garbage. You know what I say? MAN UP. What is more important... this site, or your future career? That's what I thought. Let me quote a great philosopher:

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted-One moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?

Two things.

1. I have always wanted to use that quoting stuff in a post, but never had a reason to. Well, BAM. It happened. Live it up.

2. That's from an Eminem song. See, I called him a "great philosopher". That's the joke. Frickin' funny, right? RIGHT? That's what I thought.

Back in my day we had to walk 10 miles through the snow in 110 degree weather to update our blogs. Now you snot-nosed kids have intraweb access in your damn room. No excuses, never surrender, push the envelope, feel the burn, taste the rainbow, etc. If you get thrown off the horse and shatter your tibia into 9 pieces, what do you do? WALK IT OFF. YEAH! YES! THIS IS IT! THIS IS WHAT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR! Now. Right frickin' now. Listen up.

Filmless Reviews EVERY THURSDAY. No excuses. Sleepy? FILMLESS REVIEW. Midterm? FILMLESS REVIEW. Bird Flu? FILMLESS REVIEW. Alien invasion? FILMLESS REVIEW. If I fail to do this, you have permission to walk into my room and stab me in the gut. No questions asked. Oh, where do I live? Don't worry about it.

It's the least I can do. Quinn for Heisman, Hillary '08, Feliz Navidad, Boo-Yah.

Jarhead - Filmless Review

And #10 at that...


In reality, having the 10th Filmless Review be a review of a film that I actually watched isn't particularly true to the concept of the feature... but I have decided not to care.

Jarhead is a film adaptation of former US Marine Anthony Swofford's 2003 novel Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. It tells Swofford's story of being a 20 year old man thrust into the life of a Marine; from boot camp to the Gulf War. All you should need to know is that it was directed by the same guy that did American Beauty... but I will go on anyway.

Jake Gyllenhall, last seen luring an elderly man's daughter from her caretaking work in Proof, stars as Swofford. We are provided with a gritty look at the realities of his choice Swofford loses his girlfriend, his belief in the cause, and to some extent, his mind. One of the common complaints that I have in other reviews is that the story doesn't really go anywhere. This is true to an extent; the ending (The end of the war... duh) really has very little to do with the story being told throughout. This is an exploration of the characters and the toll that war takes on their psyches, not the events of the war themselves. At this point, I'm going to have to press the brakes on this review because it has gotten WAY too serious.

Today's tangential point that derails a review will be movie trailers. Along with that "nothing happens" complaint, I have also seen reviewers complaining about a lack of action in Jarhead. From a factual standpoint this is true; Jarhead has very little action... in fact, that is a point that is touched upon in the film itself (not going to ruin it... or maybe I did already). My question is this; how can you ever complain about a movie having "too little action"? Who decided that this was supposed to be an action movie at all? Oh... I know, the marketing team. The trailers of Jarhead definitely implied that there was some Rambo-lite stuff going down. Totally didn't happen. If marketing people weren't so stupid, Jarhead would be a bit higher than 56% on RottenTomatoes. Hey, what do I know? Maybe the false-marketing campaign pushed more tickets this week; I know I had a crappy seat because the theater I sat in was packed. Then again, I have reason to believe that those attendance numbers were inflated by the proximity to a college campus full of uber-liberals that salivate at the thought of the military being criticized*... so take that with a grain of salt. We'll see when the box-office charts come out in a couple of days. I suppose I should give some kind of assessment of the movie as a whole. I liked it a lot. Probably the best movie I've seen this year... unless I saw The Aviator in January and not December. Don't really remember.






* - Monticello is a registered Democrat

TheFacebook.com Sold Out

Normally I avoid the term "sold-out", because I feel that it is overused. For example, many would say that Gwen Stefani sold out because she went from some California punk rocker guy's girlfriend in like 1991 to doing crap like "Hollaback Girl" and making duets with Eve. I would just say that she "broadened her horizons" and conveniently raked in lots of cash along the way. See, TheFacebook.com has gone above and beyond anything Stefani pulled off. I remember when I first registered and there were something like 15 schools on the entire service. Facebook was fresh (although not really) and kind of quaint. It had been established by some college students to help their campus' socially inept student body get to know each other. A real feel-good story for the whole family. Well, ever since that day I have seen nothing but deterioration.

1. Over-expansion: TheFacebook went from a Harvard thing, to an Ivy League thing, to an elite college thing, to a big-school thing, to a 4-year post-secondary education thing, to a "this institution can up your monthly hit numbers and bump ad revenue" thing. The addition of SouthNorthCentralEastern Polytechnic State A&M Community College was a bit much. It just ends up killing the magic.

2. Commercialization: Money makes the world go 'round. I even wrote a song saying something like that when I was in 4th grade (not that I can write music... it consisted of me humming a general tune and imagining some generic R&B floozy repeating one phrase repeatedly. Don't judge.) I understand that the creators of Facebook wanted to make some money off of the venture. Good for them. The thing is, I'm a little tired of getting group invites to things like the "Jimmy's Sports Bar Group" or the "Madden 2006 presented by EA Sports" group. Sell all of that ad space you want, but stop intruding into my "personal space". I have the same objection to this as I do with pop-up ads. You are free to make advertising visible and attempt to draw my attention to it... within reason. Getting friended by "Fox's New Sunday Lineup" is as far from within reason as it gets.

3. High Schools: This was the straw that broke the camel's back, and also what pushed me to eventually make this post. Yeah, I know this will push even MORE traffic to the site and thusly increase the amount that you can demand from advertisers; however there needs to be a line drawn somewhere. What separates Facebook from MySpace now? I remember bringing this up previously and being told that "Facebook is for college students and MySpace is for teenagers with low self-esteem and dirty old men". Well Facebook is clearly no longer college-exclusive, and some of these pictures that I see up just scream "daddy didn't pay enough attention". There really is no difference... besides those damn embedded videos that seem to have taken MySpace by storm... not that I use MySpace. They even recently added personal photo albums... because I need to be able to see 9 different pictures of you in a trucker hat with no shirt on. Just saying. I should also add that alumni and administrative staff at schools (all of whom may or may not be dirty old men) can easily get a Facebook account.


4. Schools from Mexico, the UK and Canada: 'Nuff said







I kid, I kid... I love Mexican food, Tony Blair is awesome, and Elisha Cuthbert is hot.

A Picture Saves A Thousand Birds

That is a TERRIBLE pun.

Did you guys see game 5 of the NLCS? Here's the setup: it's the top of the ninth, and the Houston Astros are up 4-2 on the St. Louis Cardinals and sitting three outs away from a 4-1 series victory and the first World Series appearance in the history of the franchise. Their all-star closer Brad Lidge comes in and mows down the first two batters. He gets 2 strikes on David Eckstein, and he dinks a single into left field. No biggie. Next up is Jim Edmonds, who works a walk. This is where the collars get tight.

Albert Pujols comes to bat as the go-ahead run. Lidge gets 2 strikes on "Phat Albert" and the crowd is going NUTS. These people are excited, the Astros are practically running out of the dugout already, the plastic is up in the locker room and the bottles of champaign are ready to be wasted. Then it happens... Pujols absolutely DESTROYS a ball to deep left field, and the Redbirds take the lead. The crowd shifts from party time to dead silence in an instant.

Later, Fox would run through endless replays of reactions around the park and we would see the disbelief on Lidge's face in full closeup, Andy Pettitte in the dugout mouthing "Oh... My... God...", and Pujols making the most defiant walk out of the batters box that I have ever seen. Not "pimping" as the increasingly unsportsmanlike trots down the first-base line have come to be known in some circles, but just focused and proud and excited and composed and ready to get back to St. Louis and finish business all at once. It was one of the greatest sporting moments that I have ever seen. I was speechless.

Now if only Alex Rodriguez could have done that...

Housekeeping

We have some issues to address:

1. The BIGBIGBIG 10th Filmless Review will be up next week, and to further complicate matters, I must decide between some fairly large releases. Will it be North Country with Charlize Theron or Doom starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson? While Doom would make writing a humorous post easier... I mean, so much about this film is utterly ridiculous... a review of North Country would call for a picture of Charlize Theron (she's a handsome woman). Feel free to comment on the matter.

2. Speaking of which, I got fed up with the spammers and enabled the verification phrase thing on comments. We ask that our core of 10 readers not be turned off by this development.

3. I was recently railroaded into attending a figure skating exhibition, and would post about it if it weren't so embarrassing. Having that kind of information in the public domain would just be ruinous. Whoops.

4. David the Gnome is the shiznit. The site is pretty cool too.