This may seem a bit strange to some, it did a bit to me as well, that in our day and age where we do everything we can to shelter kids from anything unpleasant, let alone anything morbid, someone would address such a book to kids. This is, after all, an era where Rapunzel didn’t let down her hair so charming prince could rescue her from a tower prison, put there by an evil witch. No, no, she merely was a girl told by her grumpy aunt that she couldn’t go out and play. So her friend climbed up inside, with the help of Rapunzel’s extraordinary hair and they had a play date together. This is pathetic, yes, but I seemed to have gotten side-tracked.

Ways to Live Forever is surprisingly frank, matter-of-factly dealing with death and all the questions and issues that our mortality brings: the afterlife, pain, fear, legacy. It is written in the first person by Sam, a boy deciding to write the story of his own death. As morbid as the whole thing seems, the story is decidedly not. Sam’s story lacks the expected self-pity as well as the expected “live life to the fullest” preachy message.

The ending, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here that you wouldn’t get from the inside flap of the book, is both creative and heart-rending. The author manages to portray Sam’s final moments well, avoiding triteness and allowing the weight of what is happening to fall squarely on the reader.

The writing is excellent and the characters are perfectly realistic. Only in the occasional footnote does the tone ever falter from a completely believable eleven-year-old’s voice. I am so glad to have read this book, and I would definitely recommend it to both adults and for children as well. I think this book does an excellent job addressing a topic most would prefer to avoid. It does it well and in a way I think kids could understand. I’ll be keeping this one on my shelf for a long time.

Set in the 1970’s, the movie manages to bring in Government conspiracies and cover-ups, dirty cops, and a brutal torture scene and still made it seem plausible. They even brought in a love triangle without making it feel tacked on to please a female audience. I am still amazed that the producers managed to fit in all the same components as every other heist movie (even the rag tag group of misfit thieves) and still made the movie feel original. It is a great throwback, and really feels as if it could have been made about thirty years ago.

Jason Statham did an excellent job bringing some depth to his character and not churning out another typical Statham film (though I do tend to enjoy those as well). The supporting cast worked well together; not a single character standing out as being out of place or miscast. Another huge praise I have, is the total lack of gimmicky gadgets and tools. The whole plot comes off without ever becoming cheesy or cliché.

I have only two complaints that I can think of: 1) a bit of a throwaway love-scene in the middle of the movie (though it does become important later on), and this is no fault of the movie itself 2) I was a bit lost for a few minutes at the beginning. This is mainly due to the fact that it was late at night and I had already turned my brain off expecting mindless action. Being confronted by an actual plot, I was pleasantly surprised.

I definitely recommend this one.

Not long ago, I came across this photo collections. Many of them are too overused to be of any great impact. How many times have you seen the picture of the sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square? When you last saw it, What did you think about? Did you think about the incredible excitement that everyone felt that day, knowing that the years of death and destruction were over? Sadly, even the picture of a Vietnamese monk burning himself to death doesn’t arouse much emotion. Through over-exposure and commercialization these have all but completely lost their meaning and their power. Still, there were two in that collection that really struck me.

First, the lone student defying the tanks in Tiananmen Square caught me. Maybe it did because two separate but very similar shots of the event were shown, giving me an immediate second look. I stared at the images for quite a while. It took a minute, but then the weight of what I was looking at fell on me all at once. This was one man standing up alone against an entire nation. I can’t help but think that he knew that what he was doing would most likely end up in his own death. What an amazing thing to have been there to witness one man do what thousands would not. How shameful would it feel to stand on the side and watch that man stand alone? It is incredible, literally unbelievable. It makes me think of Arnold von Winkelried and his famous self-sacrifice, screaming, “Make way for liberty!” as he dove into the enemies’ pikes. It’s rare the world actually gets to witness such amazing heroism. The picture leaves me speechless.

The second photograph, taken by Kevin Carter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. It is one of the saddest, most shocking things I have ever seen. It shows a starving child huddled on the ground. She is completely emaciated, seemingly moments from death. Only a few feet behind, a vulture waits. It is an incredibly disturbing picture. It is an image I will never forget.

After staring at the picture of the young girl, I sat feeling so sad and helpless to do anything. That is how I was supposed to feel. That picture was not taken so I could glance at it and scroll down the page to the next photo. It was meant to shock. It was meant to drive people to make a decision to act. I went back through all the images again. I tried seeing them. I didn’t want to just look at them anymore; I wanted to understand what was being shown. I wanted to be shaken. I tried to forget the merchandise, the advertising, the abuse of these images, and just take them in.

It’s funny how images so compelling can lose their meaning. Look at Che Guevara’s famous portrait. Everything the man stood for is mocked on a daily basis as the industrial world daily churns out t-shirts, jackets, hats, key chains, posters, backpacks, ashtrays, purses, belt buckles, and, my personal favorite, wallets. If you can’t appreciate the fact that Guevara’s face is stamped on wallets, I’m not sure what to do with you. It’s not that I agree with all of Che’s ideas or practices, it’s that the revered has become the commonplace; the powerful has become the merchandised.

What have I missed, and what can I not see? This is the question I’m left with. There is so much to be awed by. But it’s easy for the incredible, the inspiring, the horrible to be glanced at and passed over. I’m glad I finally looked again and saw at least one thing I had missed.

The movie is all about a guy named Ray (Dylan Walsh) who lives in the desolate and, incidentally, real town of Trona, California.  He is a parking garage attendant who spends his nights talking to his white trash neighbors and dealing with his reclusive and unloving wife.  The town is run by the local meth-dealer who happens to be about 17 years-old and acts like a dictator.    Ray is completely meek and unassuming, taking abuse from just about everyone in his life.  His only joy is the daily trip to the local grocery store where his beautiful and single high school sweetheart Nora (Tracy Middendorf) works.  If you can’t figure out what is going to happen based on that information, I pity you.

Like I said though, the first three quarters of the movie were not bad, even decently good.  Then suddenly the writers forgot that this wasn’t a movie for eight-year-olds.  I’m not against predictability; sometimes there’s just a place for it.  Other times, here, for instance, it just seems lazy and hackneyed.

In short: don’t bother with this one.

Everything about the movie showed promise: a great cast, great filmmakers, even a great poster. We saw it on Friday night, and we were not disappointed. I had been looking forward to it for quite a while, and was a bit worried that I would get a bit too hyped about it and end up disappointed. Not so.

The movie is a ensemble set up, but mainly follows two gym workers (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) as they attempt to blackmail the CIA into giving them money for what they think is classified information they have stumbled upon. The two bumble around, eventually going to Russians to try selling the information there. Everything falls apart as all the characters paths cross again and again. Throughout, plot lines of lost love, divorce, broken dreams, self-obsession and alcoholism are woven together, all treated with the typical Coen style of holding nothing sacred and willingness to send anything up for a gag, laugh or plot point.

It had a bit of a slow start, but that didn’t last long. The cast worked very well together, especially Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand. Their dialogue came off perfectly, and with Pitt as a puffy haired, overly peppy personal trainer, it was easy to forget that he is actually 45 years old.

John Malkovich is his usual angry, yelling self, and pulls of his out of work, alcoholic, ex-spook of a character to perfection. George Clooney is a neurotic, self-obsessed, and chronically unfaithful government man. In short, everyone in the cast gave excellent performances.

One of the things I love about the Coen Brothers, is that (and you might consider this a spoiler) they have no problem killing anyone in their movies. They have this perfect ability to build up completely likable characters that the audience gets attached to, then killing them off without so much as wincing. What’s crazy about it is that when they do kill someone off, they manage to do so without slowing the story or even making the audience sad.

As with all Coen movies, the bit part characters make the movie. The man who pulled it all together in this one is J.K. Simmons. Playing an unnamed CIA supervisor, his few brief scenes were some of the funniest in the whole movie.

It won’t ever be the cult hit that The Big Lebowski is. It lacks a strong central character for that sort of fandom. However it was, in my opinion, the funniest thing that Joel and Ethan have made since creating The Dude.

Anyone who has seen The Ladykillers will not be surprised at how everything wraps up. Even so, nothing is boring, and the ride is as fun as ever.

I definitely recommend this one.

Check it out.

I distinctly remember one of the times that I quit (don’t judge, most quit at least twice).  I had over half a pack left, but I had decided to drop it, at least for the time being.  I walked out of a grocery store and lit up my “last” one.  I looked down in the pack and saw all those lovely white sticks, those eleven or twelve perfectly recessed filters and wonderfully scripted blue type elegantly letting the reader know that the bit of heaven they are about to enjoy is a Parliament.

Now being the cheap person that I am, I couldn’t throw them away.  That had been my intention, but now that the moment of truth was upon me, the trashcan at my right hand, I couldn’t do it.  I know you’re probably thinking that I was just having second thoughts about quitting, but that really wasn’t it.  I couldn’t just throw them away.  I spent four bucks on that pack, and I wasn’t about to chuck it in the trash.

Then came the moment of redemption.  I saw a homeless guy sitting on a bench just down the way a bit.  He was next to an ashtray and was digging around in it a bit.  Perfect!  I give him the pack, he’s happy, I’m happy, and I get to hear his story for a bit.  I’ve always enjoyed talking to homeless people.  I got some of the best advice I’ve ever received from a man who lived in a park.  Best of all, I don’t have to throw the cigarettes away.

I walk up to him, feeling very cool and with it, and I pull out this smooth line: Hey man, do me a favor.  Can you take this pack off me?  I really gotta quit, you know?  He looks up at me, then down at the pack.  He looks back up at me with a pained expression as if I had just asked him to swallow a medium-sized cactus. “Yeah, I don’t smoke that brand.”

Seriously?

“Seriously.”

All this while he’s digging in the ashtray.  Talk about brand loyalty.  I walked back to my car, more than a little confused.  Did that just happen?  My cigarettes just got snubbed by a guy digging around for butts in an ashtray.

Then I started to wonder: what brand does this guy smoke?  I’ve got to try them.  They’ve got to be incredible.  I went back to find him, but he was already gone.

I don’t know what happened to that half pack.  It doesn’t really matter, I guess.

It is the story of a man named Eric Sanderson who wakes up with complete amnesia. He has no idea who or where he is, only that he has just woken up in extreme panic. (I might skip the rest of this paragraph if I were you. At least not if I didn’t like spoilers.) Finding a note giving him instructions, he calls up a psychiatrist, Dr. Randle, who has been handling his case. This was the eleventh recurrence of his memory loss. Sanderson begins to receive letters and packages from his past self, set on delay to arrive periodically. By following the instructions and crawling further and further into a strange world, Sanderson tries to escape from his recurring and ever increasingly real dreams of being hunted by a giant shark. Not only is he haunted by the shark, but also by his past which always sits just out of reach. The text continues to follow Sanderson deeper and deeper into either insanity or enlightenment; it’s never clear which. The shark, it turns out, is a conceptual fish, hunting Sanderson, wanting to consume his self. Eric must find a way to kill the shark, there is no other escape. The further Eric goes in his search, the more he enters a world where text and concepts are alive, not just on paper, but in three dimensional reality. In the end, he ends up on a small conceptual fishing boat, on a conceptual ocean, hunting the great conceptual shark. This may not sound like much of a story, but that’s the beauty of the book. The world only makes sense if you walk in Eric’s shoes step by step. If you do, it all comes together, just as it did for him.

The universe set up by Hall grows more and more Kafka-like as the story unfolds. The main character simultaneously existing in two worlds: the normal and the impossible. It doesn’t come off as a copy of or homage to Kafka, more like the author was reincarnated to write a psychological mystery/thriller. The first few paragraphs hit with a perfect and steady stream of completely original and incredibly convincing descriptions. It immediately grabbed me and jerked me into the story.

The story is told by Eric Sanderson himself, and it’s never completely clear whether we can believe any of what he says, or if he really is completely delusional. The first 60 pages or so definitely owe a debt to Memento, and the last 60 to Jaws. Some have claimed that the story is, in the final section, simply a regurgitation, and, to a point, it is. But that was the idea. In the world that Hall created, this is how it must be.

While some of the dialogue seems a bit stiff or typical, somehow the characters come across as being so real. Even the cat was written perfectly. I believed every second of the book. At one point Eric lashes out at another character, and it definitely rubbed me the wrong way. Then I realized why: Eric wasn’t acting like a character in a book, he was acting like a real person. I re-read the section, and am still amazed at what Hall did. Still, he has room to grow as an author, and I hope he does.

There are so many ideas and clues scattered throughout the text that I’m sure only a second reading will fully bring out. This might not be the best book every written, but there is definitely something there to talk about. This book has something to say, and I think it enormously clever of Hall to say it in a suspense novel. Though I’m still not one hundred percent on what Hall wants me to see, the knowledge is somewhere there beneath the surface, waiting for a chance.

It was the first concert I’ve been to in some time and there were so many things that I had forgotten about, so many things I didn’t even remember I had missed: the crowds, the carpet of fliers and empty water bottles, the smell of sweat, cheap beer and pot all mixing together in the pits. Ah, the pits.

The great thing about a show like this one was there really is something for everyone. Punks, metal-heads, chick-rockers, skas, hip-hop fans, and straight-up rockers, everyone had at least one band to really get excited about.  I’m into a lot of different types of music, and the smorgasbord offered up made for a musically fulfilling day.

There were the mainstream bands and the guys just starting out.  I like going back and forth between the main stages and the smaller venues.  You can really feel the difference, and it’s almost perfectly clear who’s going to make it and who is going to remember this one show as the peak of their musical career.

Things I Loved:

- Fighting all the way to the front dead center for Rise Against, barely being able to breathe because of the crush, but still thinking how cool it is that I can lift my feet and be held in place by the wall of people.

- Catching the pick tossed out by Tom DeLonge from Angels and Airwaves at the end of the night.

- Surfing, and getting dropped.  Twice.  Apparently my 210-pound self doesn’t surf as easily as my former 170 pounds did.  Still fun getting up for as long as I did.

Things I Didn’t Like:

- Lack of seating in the beer garden.  I don’t expect places to sit in the main stage areas, but really, did they not think this through?  People rock hard then drink, most people too much.  They really need a place to park for a bit.  While we’re on the beer garden, what’s with the 14-ounce beer?  If I’m paying $6 for a Bud (if you know me, that’s saying something), you should really go the full pint.

- I’m not hating here, just mentioning that just because I am six foot one and, as previously mentioned, a wee bit over the two hundred mark, it is not my responsibility to get every single person in the crowd up when they want to surf.  Hey I’m here to help, but when you start forming a line, I can’t get into the show.

Things I Hated:

- People moshing/crowd surfing who have no idea what it’s like.  Note for the girl in the yellow look-at-me-I’m-hot shirt: 1) no you’re not, and 2) when you’re being held in the by strangers in the crowd, someone will touch your butt.  It’s matter of keeping you in the air, not them wanting to grope you.  Furthermore, screaming “Seriously, what the fuck!” and kicking the guy holding up your legs in the throat is not good concert etiquette.  Even if someone did get a bit grabby, it wasn’t me; I was down by your feet.  I can still feel your footprint every time I swallow.

- No re-entry.  It’s an all day show. Really how hard would it be to let people leave and come back?  After my friend caught a drumhead from Against Me!, he had to drag it around the rest of the day, seriously hampering his ability to enjoy the show.

In the end, it was a good time.  I saw some bands I like, and found a few locals I didn’t know about.  I even managed to not lose my sunglasses.

You know how they say driving tired is the same as driving drunk? It’s the same with picking movies. When you’re tired your reasoning skills go out window. This is my excuse. We didn’t even get around to watching the movie that night; we just went to bed.

We watched it last night and I thought there were some really funny moments to the movie, the only problem being that those particular moments were not intended to be funny. (You may or may not consider some of the following comments to be spoilers. I don’t but you might so read at your own discretion.)

First a synopsis: The movie is about a genius MIT student named Ben Campbell. Ben needs money for medical school. He is recruited by one of his professors to join a card-counting blackjack team. They play in Las Vegas, and make lots of money. This of course changes their lives and things quickly get out of control.

The story was predictable: good kid gets sucked into dark world and can’t get out. The love story was completely disjointed and unbelievable. Then, of course, there were the geeky friends that were left behind and ignored only to have a heartfelt apologetic reunion at the end. Nothing about this movie felt at all original.

There was one scene where Lawrence Fishburne, playing a hardened casino security boss, was asked by his employer to put out a cigarette. He looks over with disgust and takes another drag. This I thought was cool of him; it fit the part. Then he puts it out. He not only puts it out, but there is a slow motion close up of the coffee cup he drops the cigarette into. It’s complete with the big sound build up and canon shot of an important moment. But that’s all there is. He puts out the cigarette and we move on, left to wonder why the cigarette was so important. It never comes up again. This is confusing. Also, when was the last time anyone in a Vegas casino was asked to put out a cigarette?

Fishburne’s character was completely over the top, spouting bad line after bad line. My personal favorite was in a scene where he is beating up a cheater he caught. “You think you can beat the system? This is the system… beating you back!”

Something I never thought I’d see was an intense training montage, like those seen in sports movies, that involved everyone sitting at a table the entire time. The music cranks and the tension level rises only to reveal people at a table dealing cards. Somehow that just doesn’t work for me.

There were too many hero shots of the whole team walking in slow motion through the casino as the crowds part for them. This makes even less sense when one of the main rules that are repeated over and over by Spacey’s character is that teammates never admit to knowing each other while in the casino.

Also, for someone so smart, why would the main character decide to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars in his dorm room? When I was in college I wouldn’t leave a five-dollar bill in my room, and this kid decides it’s a good idea to leave his life savings in an unlocked room? Hmm, I wonder what a major plot point might be? Maybe the kid getting ripped off?

The sad thing to me about this movie is that some serious talent was wasted on it. Kevin Spacey is a great actor (think Se7en), Lawrence Fishburne can definitely hold his own(Miss Evers’ Boys), and even Jim Sturgess did a decent job in the somewhat strange Across the Universe. This film did nothing to showcase their talents. The script was horrible, and even Spacey’s delivery could not make his lines believable.

The big twist reveal was completely anticlimactic as 1) the plot was incredibly obvious, and 2) the twist wasn’t that big. Everything happened as previously laid out, just with one little part added. Not exactly shocking.

Finally, taking thing in reverse I guess, but I wanted to save this for last, any movie that opens with the voice over “Winner, winner, chicken dinner” cannot expect to be taken seriously. Yes, somehow the producers actually thought that was the best way to set up the movie.

So there you go. I was tired. At least it was free.