The Cooler.

Saw The Cooler tonight. A film about Vegas's sinister under-belly. Yeah, like we haven't heard that song and dance about a thousand times now. Not the most inventive plot, and a HORRIBLE cameo by Joey Fatone (the fat guy from N-sync) drag this film down a little bit...

BUT William H Macy, Alec Baldwin, and Maria Bello turn in great performances. I have to say, the greatest thing that happened to Alec Baldwin's career was him gaining a little weight. Once he lost his leading man status he had to really flex the acting muscle to keep himself working, and damn, has it paid off. William H Macy was brilliant as always, and Maria Bello has shown herself to be much better than she led us to believe in Coyote Ugly. Over all I give it three out of five. Worth seeing, mostly for Mr Baldwin's sweaty, cursing, pit-boss character.

Swimmingly well, just swimmingly!

Tonight I had a very fruitful discussion with my good friends on Biblical mish mash. Not to say that the discussion was fruitful in any intellectual, philospohical, or even theological way, no no. Quite the opposite. In those respects we kind of were all beating our heads against walls. With the exception of Brandon we were all beating our heads against the age-old arguments over the Bible's flaws and contradictions. Brandon was beating his head against the wall that was the rest of us.

The fruitful part came out of many funny situations that were relayed during this conversation. We're all very smart guys, and we're all very funny guys, so any intellectual discussion between us will tend to breakdown into silly situational humor. This time was no exception.

First we got onto to Jesus, and i mentioned he had a sibling named James who was important in the continuing of Christian teachings after Jesus's death. That lead to conversations of Jesus constantly out-shining him when they were kids, and making him feel inferior. Seriously, how do you compete with the son of god?

Then we moved on to the Druids and how the Romans might or might not have objected to human sacrifice seeing as how they had reveled in it themselves until only just before discovering the Druids in the lands known today as the U.K. This provoked jokes about rehearsal sacrifices, and what not.

Then somehow we got into vikings. I think that one was David, but damn if it wasn't comedy gold.

I have a veritable treasure trove of material for this animation website. I've always said that the best jokes are right under our noses in history books. Eddie Izzard's Dressed to Kill is proof of that. History based comedy. I mean, it's all public domain, isn't it? you can't copyright actual events. :) It's free material and virtually inexhaustable seeing as how the world keeps on turning in a mundanely predictable fashion.


Sweet.

To the tune of Mandy, by... some famous singer guy.

Oh Bloggy, you came and you something and something,

and now I feel so good, oh Bloggy...


Wow, this song practically writes itself!

So far my efforts on this animation website dealy are leading nowhere. I need a sounding board, a co-writer, but all the other dirty bastards are in school lately and have no free time. All I have thus far is a sketch of a cranky, Scottish midget. He's funny looking, and has potential, but one mean-ass mini-Scott is not going to carry a whole website.

Meow. Meow. Meow. Meow. Meow.

I'm apparently channeling Homer Simpson tonight. Very disconcerting.

Pity Party part 11,598: Moping strikes back.


I spent a lot of time with John over his winterbreak from school. One such occasion, about a week and half, maybe two weeks ago, the subject of camping came up. And as usual I got that distinct look of horror I always get when I announce that I have never had the pleasure of camping in my life. John commanded that we needed to rectify that soon. I said cool, because I've always wanted to. Then for the week that followed I tried to get him to go hiking with me on South Mountain on 3 consecutive days, but he couldn't manage to wake up early enough to fit it in. Cool, no big deal.

Thursday Brian tells me he and John had decided to go camping for the weekend, but he keeps discussing it in a particular way. Saying "me and John" and "we" but never opening it up to the rest of us sitting in the room. I feel a little hurt, but don't ask, because it seems like it's a Thing. You know, sometimes you have a Thing with a friend. Even though our small group has grown to a community, sometimes you just want to hang out with one person. I respect that, so I kept my mouth shut.

After they come back I find that the trip included not only John and Brian, but also David and Jess, AND they tried to convince Ben and Brandon to join them.

Goddamnit. I'm torn between kicking myself for the above assumption, and the hurt that John never thought to tell me about it himself. Just because of that recent conversation, I would think he would've been excited to tell me about the idea, but I never heard from him at all. I know full well that it's mostly my OWN DAMN fault, but that makes me feel SO much better, right? Whatever.

To make my mood worse I saw Shannon tonight at Brian's, and received not so much as a glance from her once. Meg and I both want nothing more than to put the past aside, and have both attempted to talk to her on a couple of awkward occasions. She seems adamant on disregarding us as non-entities. I suppose that's her choice, but every time I see Nick I feel further and further away from him because of it.

Thus concludes todays episode of Crap-Ter-Piece Theatre, join us next week when our plucky hero mistakes David's friendly hug as a sexual advance, and chaos ensues...

with sexy results. **cheesey tiger-growl here**

The whole world breathes a sigh of relief. Ahhhhhhhhh.....

By the whole world, I mean me. Hobbit is open and all is well. That mind-numbingly stressful beast of a production is now but a memory and a portfolio piece. And a fat check in the mail. :)

I've made it my mission to buy as many of the Dogme 95 films as I can get my hands on. For those of you who don't know what Dogme 95 is; it's a group of directors who got together in 1995 to form a sort of filming rule doctrine to govern the way they would make films. The rules are essentially limitations put on the director so that he must rely on creativity, well written characters and talented actors to tell his/her stories. The rules include no set building, you must use found locations. No adding of lights, only found lighting on the locations or sunlight. No special effects, no handsome typed out credits, only title-cards. The list goes on. It makes for solid stories that are acted beautifully.

Anyway, I learned about this years ago in my first film class, and I always enjoyed these films, but never made any effort to acquire any of them. Finding them in america tends to be diffcult because of the lack of technical effects most americans won't bother with them. To my surprise I discovered last night I already owned a Dogme film that I had never even watched. It was one of many videos I rescued from a "field destroy" at Blockbuster. It's called "Italian For Beginners" and it's not the best Dogme film, but it's still pretty damn good. I looked into finding more and discovered that my favorite one, and the best one by many film scholars lists (The Celebration), has a release date set for the future. SIX YEARS IN THE FUTURE. It's set for 01/10/2010 Damn it. I'm hoping that's a typo, I need to do a bit more research.

Wizards and halflings and dwarves, oh my!

OYE! Don't get me wrong, I'm having a blast on this show, and Matthew (the director) is a good friend of mine, and I love working with him... BUT (oh yes, you knew there was a but coming) this has also been one of the more frustrating experiences I've ever had as a designer. First off the stage manager, Mary, thinks she has a right to direct and give me input on what she thinks i should be doing with the sound, and she's even gone so far as to set levels and patch speakers without me. She brought in her husband, who is a brilliant sound engineer and a nice guy, and started making all kinds of changes. Grrrrr. I put my foot down and got it all changed back, but I hate having to be that guy. I'm pretty laid back, especially when working on a sound gig, and she made me get confrontational on her. GRRR.

Then there's Bobb (that's right, two b's on the end). Bobb is the artistic director, and a very nice guy. But Bobb likes to step all over Matt's toes by directing the show himself. See, from my personal experience the relationship between Bobb and Matt is supposed to be kind of like the President and the military. A chain of command if you will. Meaning you wouldn't see the president giving direct orders to a unit of foot soldiers. No, he'd give it to the highest ranking officers, and the orders would trickle down. Bobb is that President who likes to get in the trenches. He get s on stage and redirects scenes, he gives me and the lighting designer direct notes. The reason this part pisses me off is because

A) It hurts Matt's feelings A LOT that Bobb won't let him run his own show. It makes him feel like an idiot, or that Bobb thinks he's an idiot.

B) All the actors are kids and now they don't have a clearly defined authority on the show. They have two people sometimes telling them two different things and they get confused on who to listen to. Bad way to run a show.

Whew. I just keep reminding myself I'm getting paid a lot of money for this, and then I feel like they can do whatever they want.

A bit of advice for would-be pushers and pimps out there.

My sleep "schedule" has been really problematic lately. I can't seem to fall asleep until about 6 to 8 am and then as a result I sleep until anywhere from noon to 3 pm. Imagine my great surprise when tonight I was tired at midnight and was fast asleep by about 12:30.

Ahhh. Sweet, strange, and funny dreams that involve me existing in the world of Harry Potter. My wand in hand, I battle Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters! Ha ha, take that you dirty-

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Several gunshots in rapid succession rip through the fabric of my dreams and yank me awake. It's 3 am, and I'm terrified for about thirty seconds, until I wake up enough to remember I'm a jaded ghetto-dweller. Then I'm very annoyed that some asshole had to wake me up for some illicit and most likely illegal reason.

So here's my advice to you idiots out there who feel the need to pack heat in urban America:

You're obviously doing something illegal to be out and around at 3am carrying a gun anyway. IF you are, indeed, doing something wrong, well then drawing attention to yourselves is probably not the greatest idea, right? So here's a novel idea: BUY A FUCKING SILENCER! I mean, you shelled out some dough in the first place for the piece, so why not spend a little extra to NOT get the cops called on you because your shots did NOT wake the neighbors?

In a way, I make a lot of sense. In another way, I'm very disturbed that I think this way. It just goes to show that smart people don't tend to end up criminals, I mean if they did, they probably wouldn't get caught. I know I wouldn't. But then again those smarts are the exact reason I don't need to resort to crime to begin with.

Bookman's rules.

So just before I leave I remember that Bookman's has an adult section. I've know about it for a long time, but I always forget to check it out. Those that know me know that I am a big porn fan, so naturally I took the opportunity to peruse it this time.

I notice on first inspection that they have a HUGE rack of Playboys ranging from last month to thirty years ago. As a joke I think to myself. " I wonder if they have May 1991." That perticular issue is the one with both Shannon and Tracy Tweed (sisters, oh yeah) doing a hot shoot together, and also was the first pornography of any kind that I owned. At about thirteen I smuggled it out of a friend's dad's closet. My dad found it a few months later and threw it out.

To my massive surprise, there it was. A little beat up, a little dog-eared, but most definately a copy of Playboy, May 1991. I rush over to David, practically jumping up and down. "David, do you know what this is?"

"Uh...a Playboy?" he says with a sarcastic grin.

"Not just any Playboy!" I quickly launch into the story of my first copy, and how I came across it. Just as I told the part about the smuggling it out an employee who happened to be nearby and overheard the story clapped and said "Good man." David told me I had to buy it on principle. And just I started to head back to the counter to pay for it, the employee said, "no man, take it. It's yours."

"Really?" I managed to say, a little surprised.

"Yeah man, that's a cool story, you gotta have it."

"Thanks. Thanks a lot."

Once again, I say: Bookman's rules.

Late Night Mexican Food Cujo Story

So John, David and myself were on our way back from Bookman's when John and I noticed that our stomachs were so empty they were devouring our internal organs, respectively. SO we decide it's time to stop for some late night burritos at Amado's. Mmmmm Amado's. The poor man's Philiberto's, and that is seriously saying something.

Anyway, as I pull into the parking lot I casually look out my driver's side window at the large SUV parked inches to my left and see the head of a massive dog peering out the open window right at me. Remember Marmaduke? This dog was fucking Marmaduke's bigger, meaner cousin.

I start to say "Woah, that's a big dog." My plan was to make this observation and calmly get out of the car anyway. All I got out was "Woah" in a slightly frightened tone, when the beast began barking in a very harrassed and frustrated way. Without missing a beat I calmly and silently put the car in reverse and slid two spots over. At this point I look over at John who has been pretty quiet for a few seconds, so naturally I figure something's wrong. I look over and he is shaking with laughter. So hard he makes hardly a sound. After we ordered, got our food, and got back in the car John finally stopped laughing. you haven't seen funny til you've seen John Roland, who's barely comprehensible at this point, trying to order a bean and guac burro from a guy who barely understands english. Once John can talk again he tells me that my reaction to the dog that got him rolling.

"What the hell would you have done?"

He says probably the same thing, but my calm and collected outward response to what was obviously terror was funny to him.