Thursday 8/1

Ugh... not a great day to wake up with a migraine...

SO here we are, one day closer to the weekend! About damn time right? Was it just me or did this week take forever? Granted my wife and I did have to change our travel plans entirely -  which sucked a lot - but you'd have thought we'd have kept to at least some of our usual routines. I mean honestly - did we really want to see family that badly? Considering how hard it's been able to wake up each morning, i guess we did! Who'd have thought it?







Something Awesome to Start Your Day

Believe it or not, I actually love to swim. Why then did I move into the heart of a landlocked state with few natural lakes and water sources to swim in? - I couldn't tell you but really, I love the ocean. Since I don't have cable, any time we visit home I always slide the channel over to Discovery to get as much of that stuff that I can - when they're not trying to capture Big Foot that is. With my love of swimming and snorkeling in the ocean watching this video last night was pretty damn amazing so I'm sharing it with you.

Now, the couple times I got to go snorkeling in some reefs were some of the most amazing vacations I ever went on - including getting stung by a jelly fish on my knee so badly the welt didn't go away for months. But on these trips I got to see my fair share of reef fish and eels and I gotta tell you, it takes a LOT of will power to not reach out and touch them. So now I want to take scuba lessons! Chalk that up on the dream board!

Way to go China!

As if the perfect score I gave wasn't indication enough, I loved Pacific Rim - so news that the movie had a record breaking opening in China is welcome indeed! While a $10million opening on a Wednesday might not seem that huge, keep in mind that China was responsible for nearly 10% of Avatar's $2Billion worldwide haul. Now you understand why the foreign market is so important for movies these days? Equally important to consider is Japan, who was also responsible for 10% of Avatar's total and a movie like Pacific Rim is designed to perform well in those two countries. What does all this China and Japan box office mean? Well, considering the international performance to date, it pretty much secures a sequel. While that isn't a 100% sure thing, it gets the conversation started between studio heads and producers. Does this movie need a sequel? Probably not, it wrapped things up pretty tightly, but would I mind seeing one in the near future? Not at all! Do your part folks and pay for a ticket! There is still time to enjoy this one on the big screen!

Speaking of Avatar

As production on Avatar 2: Avatar Harder progresses(that's not the real title) word has come down the pipe that Josh Friedman has been tapped to assist James Cameron with the screenplay. What this means exactly isn't entirely clear -  he could be doing dialog touching up, he could be doing a draft to get some fresh eyes on the project - the one assured thing is that Cameron has brought in a solid writer to give a fresh approach to the project. I doubt that this is a page one rewrite, Cameron is said to be eying a January or early February start date - this could be more of an effort to shore up the third film Avatar With A Vengeance since both films are supposedly to shoot concurrently. Where I like this news is that Friedman was the lead writer on Spielberg's War of the Worlds and he was the lead writer and creator behind the awesome, under rated, and sadly canceled too soon Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Maybe Cameron is reaching out to Friedman because he is the one guy to love Terminators as much as he does? 

Also arriving today for you should be my review for The Wolverine. I plan to hit an early show if my brain holds out for me to be able to enjoy it, if I don't go today I'll go tomorrow. I don't know why but I am just not at all excited for this movie. Perhaps it's the lackluster middling reviews? Maybe it's the fact that I don't know of anyone that went to see it? Or it could be the fact that I am totally burned out from the slew of summer movies this year. I'm preparing a rant on that issue so look out! With that I shall leave you, so remember Dear Readers, climbing into a dishwasher isn't the same thing as taking a shower - while you can wash dishes in a shower, you can't wash yourself with your dishes, sadly, the two methods are not simpatico.

Wednesday 7/31

August is almost here! That means summer will end soon and we'll be done with the heat!

Ahoy there Dear Readers, sorry for the lack of any post yesterday- got busy writing my own stuff cleared out about 3-4 pages!, and by the time I realized I didn't drop a line to you all, well, yeah my wife and I started watching Always Sunny in Philadelphia and before we knew it we were watching another episode of Orange is the New Black and by that time it was like 8:00 at night so we figured "why not?" and watched another episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia. So yeah - pretty clear at this point, I wasn't going to get much of any blogging done yesterday - still not sure about today but I'm willing to give it a go if you are!




First up - Something AMAZING

Well to be honest I don't have a whole lot of interesting stuff to post so I'm putting up the best first. You need to meet Hal Lasko - if you haven't seen this video yet, you'll want to clear 10 minutes from your schedule NOW. I caught this last night and it's become one of the best things I've seen in a great long time. Not only is it a wonderful story about someone overcoming a disability to do what they love, but his pictures are truly beautiful works of art!

ALL of his works are created using Microsoft Paint! Because he is legally blind he can magnify specific areas of the picture and fill them in pixel by pixel. Some of his works take him YEARS to complete. EVEN more amazing is his WEBSITE. Seriously you need to check out his work. THey're also selling some prints of his work for a limited time! $98 bucks gets you a beautiful print and 10% of that goes to VFW charity work! Get some great art and help people at the same time, how can you go wrong with that? Hope this got your day on the right foot!

Need a Little Extra Laughter?

Well somehow I got my latest Epic Trailer out without actually telling anyone? I know I posted it to Facebook and I fired it off to the good folks at Screenrant, but somehow I never posted about it! Weird! SO without further delay, I bring you Kindergarten Cop Epic Trailer!

One day I hope this leads to a lucrative career cutting movie trailers - I'd love that responsibility if only to end the practice of giving away the entire movie before the movie is even close to hitting theater screens. I feel like that problem has gotten worse and worse over the last couple years. If I don't get that dream job, then I hope I actually get hired to create parody trailers for Conan or any of the other late shows - that would be the shit!

Should Have Seen This One Coming...

Since there is a new series of Tolken movies hitting the theaters, it should be no surprise to anyone that like The Lord of the Rings before them, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be getting the extended treatment as well! Coming in 2D and 3D editions you'll get to enjoy an extra 13 minutes of scenes not seen in the theatrical version along with about 9 hours of extra features. According to the good people at Comingsoon.net the longer version will be made available digitally on October 22nd  -why anyone would pay full price for a movie with compressed picture and sound without a physical copy is beyond me - and on November 5th the 2d and 3D blu-ray editions with HD digital copies will be available for your purchase. Where do I fall on this? Well... to be honest... meh. I really enjoyed An Unexpected Journey, I really did, but do I need to see a longer version of an already long movie? Not really. That isn't to say I'm not curious, but I think I'll wait for the trilogy to finish up in 2015 and get the big set of all 3 then.

Something Totally Random

Have you ever wanted to know what Stanley Kubrick's top 10 movies were? Well I stumbled onto this list. Apparently it was published in Cinema magazine sometime around 1963. It happens to be the only known list of it's kind made by the filmmaker. Given that he died around 40 years later, I'd imagine that he would have updated it at least a few times - so this is far from a definitive list, it's just cool knowing what movies the guy enjoyed most.Enjoy!
 

1. I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953)
2. Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948)
5. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
6. Henry V (Olivier, 1944)
7. La notte (Antonioni, 1961)
8. The Bank Dick (Fields, 1940—above)
9. Roxie Hart (Wellman, 1942)
10. Hell’s Angels (Hughes, 1930)


I myself have only seen 6 of the 10, while I thought they were all good, they wouldn't make the list of movies I'd take with me to a deserted island to watch for the rest of my life, I need RawHead Rex or Night of the Living Dead up there somewhere.

That's all I have for you, I could talk about the upcoming Superman VS Batman or Batman VS Superman or Batman Does Superman or whatever the hell they're calling it; but that would just be reporting rumors about rumors about a project that so far only has a director, writers, and like 2 cast members to speak of - so yeah, I'm not gonna do that. With that remember Dear Readers if you want to feel like a kid again, inject a solution of 2 parts sugar and 5 parts coffee directly into your blood. After that you're going to need the same medication your kids take to stay calm!