The Dark Knight: The best PG-13 movie since Red Dawn (haha)

The Dark Knight>XMen 2>Batman Begins>Batman Returns>XMen>Sin City>Ironman>Batman>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles>Hellboy 2>Blade>Blade 2>Hellboy>Superman>Punisher (2004)>Superman Returns>Spiderman 2>Spiderman>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2>Superman 2>Superman 3>Punisher (80s)>Spawn>XMen:The Last Stand>Blade Trinity>Superman 4>Hulk>Spiderman 3>Fantastic 4>Daredevil>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3>Elektra>Captain America>Cat Woman>Fantastic 4: The Rise of the Silver Surfer>Ghost Rider

disagreements?

Here is my recent netflix activity and thoughts

"Punch Drunk Love" - Even better than I thought it would be. The chaotic, clanging music drove me near insanity. Really funny, and scary at the same time occasionally. Anderson taking Sandler's typical man-child and turning it into something completely different and real was fucking nuts.

"The Squid and the Whale" - hated it, didn't finish it. One of the most pretentious movies I have ever seen. Here's my attempt at Squid and the Whale dialogue -
Jeff Daniels - "People are dumb, yes, people are really dumb."
Daniels' son - "I like name dropping authors and famous works of prrrrrrose"
Daniels - "Me too. Kafka, Kafka Kafka, Well I guess it's time for me to go do something really emotional and kinda mean spirited."
Daniels' son - "Kafka, Kafka, Kafka"

Simply name-dropping famous writers doesn't make your writing great, it just makes it obnoxious. How about using some of Kafka's themes, etc as homage? Then again i dind't even finish it, so maybe they make good by the end.

At least the camera work and Wes Anderson style colors was really cool, but jeez.

"Ratatouille" - Pixar never disappoints (cept "Cars"). Its like old Hollywood, Well-told stories, with real emotions and complex themes for adults, and lots of fun for the kids. So much better than animated movies like "Shrek" that people say are "really funny" and "have humor for adults and kids." Ratatouille didn't have to throw in ham-handed sexual innuendo for adults to laugh at to keep them entertained between kid-aimed idiocy. (OK, there was one moment of innuendo, and it was great.)

"Michael Clayton" - The film never treats the audience like an idiot, never over-explains like other thrillers, and they managed to make a thriller void of any Luddite fear mongering ("Untraceable").
But I do think they tried to disguise a really simple plot by masterfully executing it in a gray and vague way that forced you to pay attention and figure it out yourself.

"Garden State" - I hate the word quirky, but it was quirky. It was funny and charming and clever. It was good. Zach Braff bothers me as a dramatic actor. He just seems to let his jaw hang loose and mouth breaths all over his serious lines. Anyone whose perspective on the world was changed by this film (most of the 20-year-olds in my Film Appreciation class) needs to get out more, and avoid being pandered to so easily.

"The Wire" Takes a while to get into, I'm on the third season now, but it is as good as everyone said it was. Legalize it.

"I'm Not There" Too non-linear for me to enjoy. I'm a huge Dylan fan, so I loved the music, loved the myth of Dylan represented through several fictitious characters, but it was just too abstract for me. I guess I'm square.

"Repo Man" "Lets go eat sushi and not pay for it." hahahaha, 'nuff said, it's a punk classic.

"Adaptation" Another one as good as everyone said it was. Kaufman is a fucking genius.

fandango now infecting Warped Coasters

Google's adsense toolbar scans my blog and creates advertisements relevant to my posts. So, naturally it read my rant about Fandango, assumed I really appreciate the site's services and added a Fandango ad to my blog.
Moments of perfect irony like this nearly make my head explode.
If I were to rant against the evils of lets say, the current White House administration, would Adsense create ads for youngrepublicans.com, or the Nationalreview.com?
I can't wait for future ads running totally against the content of this seldom read blog.
In a meta-irony situation soon to follow, this post will probably only continue to encourage adsense to put Fandango ads on my blog.
Shit, I'm going to need a code word for the previously named Web site. Perhaps I will now refer to it as Farfanoogan. It's final. Who knows what ads the code name will generate.

Movies.com eaten alive by Fandango

While much of the Web progresses into version 2.0 with user-generated sites over taking the stodgy, old paradigm of central control, some mergers and acquisitions still resemble the good ole days of brick and mortar business. One of my favorite sources for movie information and pre-release buzz has been chewed and spit out into an unrecognizably ugly ticket-selling monstrosity.
Movies.com, formerly owned by Disney, was recently bought by Fandango. In an attempt to crowd out movietickets.com Fandango bought movies.com hoping to incorporate its 1.9 million users, and it's generic, easy-to-search url. But even that goal has been poorly handled.
Fandango deleted all of movies.com's users' accounts and posted a message that they all have to come over to the (dark) side and create Fandango accounts.

Even worse, like a classic Gordon Gecko dismantling, Fandango removed all the writers, features, well-written content and industry buzz from the Web site and turned it into a fandango.com clone with a look barely better than an amature Dreamweaver skeleton.
What happened to Mike's buzz Bin? I read that weekly feature every Wednesday since 2003. What about the "8 Great _____" series that provided sharp lists and rankings of different film genres? In fact, the site no longer employs any film reviewers (all film comments are blurbs by Joe Schmo users) nor provides any function besides listing movie times (I can get that on google), posting some trailers (everywhere else on the internet) and selling tickets (that's why Fandango already existed, so I could avoid it completely).

If Fandango had any brains at all it would have left the site intact and just put links to its ticket selling services all over the damn place.

Until then, I'm never visiting one of my old, favorite Web sites again.
If anyone else's nerd rage is firing like mine you can shoot off a disgruntled email here: moviesfeedback@fandango.com

UPDATE
Apparently fandango has computers answering its hate mail about Movies.com.
Here is the response i received:

From: Jennifer Baker

We appreciate your feedback. We’re taking your opinion into consideration as Movies.com continues to evolve. We’re still working to make updates to the site and work through technical difficulties so please check back soon.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for an archive of Dave White’s past reviews, you can find it here: http://www.movies.com/ReviewsArchiveIndex.aspx. New DVD Releases and a list of this week’s Best Sellers can be found here: http://www.movies.com/DVDLanding.aspx. If you would like to add the RSS feed, you can find it here: http://www.movies.com/rss/. For weekly Box Office totals, you can go here: http://www.fandango.com/default.aspx.

Thanks for letting us know your thoughts. Your input is valuable as we move forward.

-- The Fandango Team

________________________________________

Wait, so is this from "Jennifer Baker" or the "Fandango team"? Is Jennifer Baker a real person, or a computer named Jennifer? Anyway, I love automated responses. I'm turning into that guy who writes more and more angry letters to the editor of the local newspaper as he becomes more and more senile.

Feed the Animals

Following in the path of Radiohead's pay-what-you-want album release scheme, DJ/mashup artist extraordinaire Girl Talk is releasing his latest, "Feed the Animals," right now at http://www.myspace.com/girltalk.

Girl Talk is great for two kinds of people and everyone else in between: The first being those with a paltry music collection and nothing to play when they have a party or gathering of friends, and/or are terrible at making play lists. The other end of the spectrum are music nerds who love spotting out every sample and slice of source material spliced in throughout the disc's insane brain melting.

Thanks to the joy of America's fair use copyright law, unlicensed samples of The Band, the Beastie Boys, Paula Cole, Jay Z, Little Wayne, Kanye West, Avril Lavigne, Steve Winwood, Outkast, Jackson 5, Queen, Huey Lewis and the News, Grand Master Flash, Beyonce, Dexy Midnight Runners, Missy Elliot, Len, Cheap Trick, countless rap artists I don't know by name - on and on, that was just the first 8 minutes - move seamlessly into, over and under each other without break.

For any download between free and $9.99, users can download the entire album free on MP3. Any payment over $10 gets the CD shipped to the persons house when it comes out (and the free download today.) I still feel guilty for downloading Radiohead's "In Rainbows" for free, so I actually paid the $10, whatever.

Springfield Sliders

There are 29 (or 30) days a month when the Funny Bone isn't having amateur night. So with a little hesitation and a lot of boredom we occasionally attempt the daunting task of finding things to do in Springfield that don't include a bar or someone's basement. What we found was the new college summer league baseball team, the Springfield Sliders.

A little background: back in the day Springfield had one of the St. Louis Cardinals minor league affiliate squads. They played at Landphier park, capacity about 5,000, until the Stl ball club apparently thought they could find a better city. So, Springfield received frontier and independent league teams like the Sultans (in effete, blinding purple jerseys) and the creatively named Capitals. All those ventures failed abysmally. The Sultans had some of the worst attandance numbers in league history. Think "Major League: Back to Minors" without all the athletes.

So, now the Sliders fill a park during the summer where future major leaguers used to smash baseballs. I don't know what body governs the league, or how someone gets on the Sliders. Was anyone actually keeping score, or was the billboard for show? But, if you charge an admission to see the game, I guess people assume they will recieve some kind of quasi quality entertainment.

And I was, actually entertained. Most of the enjoyment came from the atmosphere and people around me, swissers everywhere, gawky 14-year-olds hawking soda that need to shave the peach stach, the teenager who told us the bottled beer was a rip off. Also, the design of the tiny park is that any ball fouled behind home plate and clearing the short stands has about a 97 percent chance of landing through a windshield. Waj wiped out running up the bleachers to see if the ball killed his Cadilac and dumped his beer all over the place.

It was fun. People brought their kids, we brought our wallets to buy draft beer. Waj and Royal got picked from the crowd to get into sumo suits and wrestle for Cardinals tickets on the infield. Waj won the match, and will recieve two tickets in the mail.

More careful planning would have led us to wait until Thursday to go for the $1 beers, but at least we got half off admission on Monday for Cardinals apparel night. Waj, Royal and Dylan all wore their stupid Cardinals hats, etc and entered at the discounted price of $2 (!) dollars. I just approached the ticket booth and said "same" after they declared they wanted the discount for wearing the correct uniform. I was wearing a red shirt, so i guess that was enough, the ticket salesman didn't even look up from the counter to see the shirt read "Bradley."









The turtle eating a baseball bat is a slight improvement over the last couple logos, and the Sliders don't even have to pay their players. Does anyone else want to punch that fucking baseball in the face?

Of course, we ended up at the bar afterward anyway, open mic night at Marleys and 1$wells. More later on what the possibly homeless, possible just poor guy asked me for money for.

http://mysite.verizon.net/charliesballparks/stadiums/lanphier.htm

Whammy wanking

As soon as I get a (real) job I'm buying two things - a tremelo pedal for my guitar and a Digitech Whammy pedal.

The tremolo pedal, for those of you that don't play guitar, gives the tone a repeatingly wavy, sharp, shaky tone, think surf guitar. Cost:$80.

The Whammy pedal, $200, not to be confused with a wah-wah pedal (Hendrix - "Voodoo Child") might produce the craziest sounds I have ever heard. It cheats for you. Jack White's solos that seem to go higher in pitch than our ears were meant to hear ("Ball and biscuit")? Whammy pedal. Weird heavy metal shit that alternates between a train screeching on the tracks and all over the map sonic shifting? Whammy pedal. I'll never, ever be able to play like this guy in the video, or even describe what I do as playing the same instrument as this righteous ass hole, but I still want the pedal.



Side note: it doesn't just shift the tone sky high, you can use it to make your guitar as deep as a bass, ala the first low notes in "The Hardest Button to Button." Also, I've basically just written an Ad for Digitech, I need to trick some people into reading this blogg and convince Digitech to give me a free Whammy.