Hankblog: February 2005

Monday, February 28, 2005

Ok, one little thing...

This movie will kick so much ass!!!

Or maybe not...

So I got stuck at work late. Will take a break to write tomorrow, promise.

Oscar Wrap up

Hope to talk about the ceremony more later, but must say I'm dumbfounded the Million Dollar Baby won the big enchilada. Just don't make any sense to me...

Friday, February 25, 2005

Webcomics randomness

My girl introduced me to a webcomic a ways back called Something Positive. I immediately fell in love because the thing appealed to my sick sense of humor. I mean, come on...any comic that features a boneless hairless cat has to rank reasonably high on the twisted meter.

Little did I know what kind of addiction this would spawn, as I found myself spinning off of links from one webcomic to another and finding more stuff I had to read on a regular basis. Because one of my must read recently ended its run, I thought I would share some favorites in case you're looking for a few good laughs on the internet.

Queen of Wands - Aeire, the artist who created this strip, brought the whole thing to a close on Wednesday, and that made this kind of a glum week for me to a degree. It's a very well drawn strip focusing on a redhead named Kestrel, and her life with her friends. At times very funny, others poignant and sad, it's one of the most well developed story arcs I've seen in a comic strip, print or web. Aeire is rerunning the entire series (roughly three years of strips that were done three days a week) starting on Monday 2/28/05 with her commentary on what went into each strip. It's a good chance to hop on the bandwagon if you'd like to start something new.

Something Positive - Not be read if you are the least bit easily offended. Randy Milholland's opus to cynicism, bitterness, and chaos is darkly funny, and almost always edgy. Randy has no issues about throwing a few sacred cows on the barbie at the drop of a hat. When I went through the archive and saw the "Nailed" storyline (which starts here if you want to check it out...don't let the artwork from the early part of the run fool you), I seriously thought about going into his online store and ordering a "Nailed" T-shirt to send to Mel Gibson after viewing Passion of the Christ. It's about as reverent as Mel's work, and better scripted.

Sinfest - Tatsuya Ishida's daily strip pays homage to/rips off a number of different sources. Slick is definitely Calvin merged with Vince Vaughn's Double Down character from Swingers. There's some good social commentary hidden in here too when you're not expecting it. And he digs porn. How can you not like that ;-)

PvP - PvP stands for Player vs Player and centers on a crew working at a video game magazine. Probably the most mainstream in style of anything I have listed, Scott Kurtz still does a nice job of bringing the funny and making characters you can be interested in. I hope to go to a comic convention he's attending here in Austin to buy a Skull plushie for my cats to play with :-).

Lore Brand Comics - Updated sporadically (Lore's currently on a once a week kick, this week notwithstanding). Usually just some observational humor, both crude and not depending on his mood. Lore was a member of a group called The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which are now defunct. You can see their work in their archive at the above link. Also check out Lore's love song for Bjork. Lore also has some animation up at Bandwidth Theater.

Questionable Content - Jeph Jacques strip is entertaining in that it's helped me get a little bit of insight in the workings of the minds of the generation after me. Jeph was born in 1980 according to his FAQ. That would make me feel old were it not the same year my girl was born in :-). He also gives his readers a good line on what the best new indie bands are through his characters. Anything that turns me onto good new music is all right by me :-).

Websnark - Websnark is not a comic, but a blog kept by a good man by the name of Eric Burns. Eric writes about all sorts of comics, both web and print, as well as anything else that tickles his fancy. Eric's a good resource for finding other hidden gems on the web, and just a fun read in general.

All I got for tonight. Hope to see Ray tomorrow, and get the other two best picture noms in before Sunday's big show. Talk to you all later.

Friday Kitten Blogging

Well they're getting big for kittens...

"What are you looking at?"

"Jesus, man, what do you keep in these things?"

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Sorry no posts yesterday

Wednesday is my poker night, and I have another game tonight ostensibly. That plus the human waste byproduct has hit the oscillating ventilation system at the office in the last day or two with my product family. Hope to have a couple of notes up later tonight.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Review:

Million Dollar Baby (2004) Director - Clint Eastwood; Starring - Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman; Screenplay - Paul Haggis from stories by F.X. Toole; Rated PG13 for violence, language, and mature thematic elements; trailer here.

All things being equal, I consider myself a bit of a boxing fan. I don't actively look forward to matches or go out of my way to watch one. But if boxing is on TV, I'll watch it if it's a good fight. The violence contained within boxing for me has always danced on the edge between high drama and primal brutality, usually falling more towards the latter.

Coming from that perspective, for me there will always be two boxing movies that bear the standard for all boxing movies: Rocky and Raging Bull. Rocky captured the true spirit of rooting for the underdog along with the thematic ideals of the American Dream. A relative nobody has the chance of a lifetime to be the best in the world. Even in failure (or rather an absence of success since he fights to a draw) he is a true winner. The audience loves Rocky for it.

Raging Bull by contrast put an all too human face on the former middleweight champion Jake LaMotta. LaMotta is no hero. He is a seriously flawed human being. The movie is at times brutal, vicious, sordid. It is the seamy underbelly of the sport that Rocky never hints at but that even non-boxing fans are familiar with through the exploits of characters like Don King today.

Small wonder then that when director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Paul Haggis try to fuse the essence of those two movies into Million Dollar Baby, the offspring is about what one would expect from that kind of mating: a bit ugly, very awkward, but bluntly compelling at times.

Eastwood also stars in the movie as Frankie Dunn, a grizzled long time boxing trainer. He owns a decrepit gym where he has found the fighters he's trained over the years. No fighter stays long with Frankie, though. Every time a boxer of promise gets close to a chance at a title with Frankie, they leave him because he never seems to have the nerve to try and take the next step. He keeps writing it off to the boxer "not being ready yet". The only boxer who's stayed with him is Eddie (Morgan Freeman), long since retired and out of the game having lost sight in one eye. Eddie helps Frankie run the gym and looks out for more boxing talent when he can.

Enter Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank). Maggie is a waitress who's lived her whole life on the wrong side of the tracks. She freely admits she came from nothing and knows people expect her to amount to the same. The only thing she seems to find any joy in is boxing. She hopes that Frankie might take her under his wing and make her a championship caliber boxer.

Frankie is reluctant at first. Having just been dumped by another boxer on his way to the title, it might be that Frankie thinks he just doesn't have it in him. Women's boxing is also a relatively new field. Frankie as a boxing traditionalist doesn't seem to see the role for women in boxing. At 31, Maggie is more than a bit old to just be starting out as a boxer. However, Eddie convinces Frankie that Maggie had talent. So Frankie takes a chance that leads both he and Maggie to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

Swank really dominates this movie as Maggie. I recall reading in a column by Peter King of Sports Illustrated the observation that between this movie and Boys Don't Cry, Swank has pulled down two roles in five years that most actresses can only dream of in a lifetime. She makes the most of the opportunity to play Maggie. She looks like she could seriously kick someone's ass. Even though the boxing in the movie itself is a bit cartoonish and overdramatic, Swank takes the activity very seriously. Even given some tough competition I think she's got to be the leading contender to take down her second Best Actress Oscar.

The rest of the film is more problematic for me. Eastwood and Freeman are serviceable in their roles, but the characters are fairly stock in my opinion. Some attempt to give Frankie depth in the form of a couple of subplots falls pretty flat. There's a subplot involving a never seen daughter that Frankie is estranged from. The reasons for this estrangement are never revealed, but they're largely irrelevant since it's obvious from the get go that Maggie is going to fall into the surrogate daughter role.

Then there's a subplot involving his supposed questioning of his faith as a dyed in the wool Catholic. This particular aspect of script seemed really half baked to me. It's played for laughs in the only glimpses we get at it, which makes a true question of faith that Frankie has during the last third of the film seem more than a bit hollow to me.

Freeman's Eddie and the rest of the supporting cast are more than just stock, and this is one of the problems I have with this film getting the accolades that it is. Maggie's family is not just white trash. They're the kind of white trash that would make people on Jerry Springer seem almost moderate by comparison. The women's champion practically screams "EVIL!!! BAD!!!" at you to the point of absurdity. Freeman's Eddie has the wisdom of a grizzled vet that seems almost satirical when laid against the subtlety of his work in something like The Shawshank Redemption.

The script itself compounds the generic feel of the supporting cast by playing on cliche the whole way through. When Maggie first asks Frankie to train her, she mentions that some people have said she's pretty tough. Eastwood's signature gravely growl comes back, "Girly, tough ain't enough." It's got to be one of the cheesiest lines I've heard in a Best Picture contender since Leo DiCaprio was "King of the world" in Titanic. It only spirals downward from there.

When the movie moves from the underdog story to the seamy side of boxing, the careful orchestration falls apart. The last third of the movie plays like a bad made-for-TV "Disease of the Week" movie. I'll refrain from discussing it here further, as the ending has gotten some play in the news as a minor controversy has sprouted from the way the film ends (Click the link only if you don't mind knowing how the movie ends). The brouhaha over the ending made me realize what the biggest issue I have with the whole film is. I feel like the entire thing might well be the most blatantly manipulative movie I've seen in some time. I heard many sniffles and catching of breath in the auditorium behind me that tells me this movie strikes an emotional chord in a fair number of people. I think it failed to achieve that with me because I felt actively the whole way through like I was being pushed to that end. I don't particularly care for films to push me around that overtly.

In the end I thought that this was a good movie, but hardly great. The fact that I think it is trying too hard and ultimately overreaches towards the emotional ending cost it a lot of points in my eyes. Maybe I've become too cynical after seeing so many movies over the course of my life. But I personal feel that a movie that gets me to the same point without my being aware of how it gets me there deserves a lot more consideration than this one does.

Best Picture Odds: As much as it depresses me to write this, this is exactly the kind of movie that tends to draw the Oscar voters. I think were this any other year, or Eastwood competing with anyone other than Martin Scorsese that he'd have a real lock at taking home another Oscar to pair with the one he won for Unforgiven. As it stands, it wouldn't shock me too much to see this movie take it home, but even having not yet seen The Aviator, I have to guess that this is Martin's year. We'll lay the odds at 5-1 in favor of the Million Dollar Baby.

Review:

Sideways (2004) Starring - Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh; Director - Alexander Payne; Screenplay - Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor from the novel by Rex Pickett; Rated R for sexual content, language and brief nudity; trailer here.

I think that should I be fortunate enough to get married again, I will have a hard time figuring out what to do for a bachelor party. The first go, I did the traditional strip club thing. My brother Ernie made the trip down, and my good friend Chris (who got the shout out for his new son below) made sure I had a very good time :-). Now that I'm older though, I'm not sure that doing a strip club would hold the same allure. Maybe I've gotten jaded over time.

It's the trip that Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church) take in Alexander Payne's Sideways that got me wondering what I would do if I got a second chance with a bachelor party.

Miles is a teacher and heretofore unpublished author. A year removed from his divorce, Miles finds himself a place where he's questioning a lot of his choices and where he really is in his life. The only thing that really seems to make sense to him is wine, something which he holds a passion for that borders on unhealthy obsession. It's out of this obsession that Miles thinks to take Jack on a driving tour of wine country to celebrate Jack's impending marriage.

Jack is a formerly successful actor, now spending his days semi idle, doing voice work for commercials and enjoying the company of his lovely fiancee. Jack's the kind of person we've all known at some point in our lives. He's a middle age man who seems to absolutely refuse to grow up. He's probably had things handed to him his whole life and likely never had to make a real tough choice. In many respects, I assume that half the reason he's friends with Miles is because Miles acts a pretty reliable enabler.

Things get thrown up in the air when the two men meet two women on the trip. Jack connects with Stephanie (Sandra Oh) on a purely physical level, which satisfies the needs Jack was looking to fulfill on the trip. Miles' encounter with Maya (Virginia Madsen), a waitress at a restaurant he frequents in wine country, is more complicated because of the deeper connection they seem to share. How these two pairings play out amongst what is left unsaid about Jack's wedding makes up the heart of the movie.

What works for me in this movie really lies in the relationship between Maya and Miles. There's a scene at Stephanie's apartment where the two are talking about what really drives them in their respective love of wine. As the characters open up talking about the little details of what makes a wine special for them, I felt like it wasn't the grapes they were talking about but their own personal makeup. It's a beautiful scene, nicely shot and paced, that just made the biggest smile break out on my face when I came around to the realization.

I also love the way the characters are drawn in a larger sense. Miles would be a garden variety nebbish in any other movie (sort of a poor man's Woody Allen...wait, isn't that Albert Brooks?). It's the little touches that flesh out his character that really made him a lot more accessible for me. In a scene that's featured in the trailer when he adamantly declares to Jack "I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!", I heard an argument that I might have had with the ex about country music, when my limited musical canon refused to allow for the possibility there might be some country music out there I'd like. It just resonated deeply within me.

Madsen also sells the movie to me in a big way. Her portrayal of Maya is simple, straightforward, very few frills. Like a good simple wine, her performance doesn't overwhelm you right out of the gate, but rather builds slowly until you think to yourself "This is pretty damn good, I need more of this." And I don't know if this quite the way to express what I saw in Maya, but all I can say is simple has never seemed sexier for me than it has with her.

The movie has its flaws too. Jack's character is pretty standard aging playboy fare. I think it would be really easy for me to just despise Jack completely were Church not lending the character his goofy charm. For me, as much as I dislike the way Jack approaches things, Church's portrayal makes it hard for me not to like the dumb SOB. Sandra Oh's Stephanie could be played by just about anyone and I don't think it would have added or taken away from the movie. Stephanie just seems to be there to be the object of Jack's desire, and on that basic level it plays ok. I wonder if it was Pickett's intent in the original novel to distinguish the more complicated characters with the more unusual names of Maya and Miles, or if the fact that the commonly named characters of Jack and Stephanie are the more common personalities was just coincidence. Something to wait for with the DVD release I guess.

One of the most interesting things I've noticed about the film is that I don't think there's been two people I've spoken to who have seen it and had the same reaction. I might very well be the only person who found anything redeeming in Jack however slight that redemption might be. Reactions seem to run the gamut from "great movie" to "overhyped". Curious that such complex reactions come from such a simple story.

Best Picture odds: I'd say the odds on this one taking home the big prize are about 1000-1, and that's only cause I don't feel like setting them higher. Oscar never seems to recognize comedy for the big prizes, and at its heart, that's what this movie is, though it gets there in a very strange way. I'd like it a lot for the adapted screenplay award, but the competition there is pretty thick too. Probably going to be a good night for this crew to curl up with a nice bottle of wine to forget about. But I definitely have it among my top 10 for the year. For whatever that's worth ;-)

Clear the Queue

A group of friends and former coworkers are doing a fundraiser for an internet TV show they're doing called Clear the Queue. The fundraiser is tonight at the Back Room here in Austin starting about 8:30pm. A $5 suggested donation/cover charge is appreciated by all associated. Please come out and show your support. Info on the fundraiser can be found at the news page on the link above.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Technical difficulties...

Will get Sideways tomorrow, and Million Dollar Baby to boot.

And I thought Network was prescient...

In forcasting the coming of the Fox Network. Turns out (via Sisyphus Shrugged), Chayefsky was 28 years behind Groucho Marx.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

For a good cause

Brea, as most all y'all know, is my former wife, and current good friend. She's doing this thing called the CROP Walk March 5 and 6th for the Micah 6 Food Pantry as well as other organizations dedicated to fighting hunger. She needs sponsors who are willing to donate money to sponsor her walk. Please give a little if you can at this link. There but for the grace of God go we all. Help Brea to make a difference if you can.

Musical timewaster du jour

I'm a little behind on this with the delay in posting, but following the steps of Ezra (formerly of Pandagon) and TBogg, opening up my iPod and hitting shuffle gets the following first 10 songs:

Take First - Ornette Coleman
Agua Que Va Caer - Santana
Zoe (Timo Maas Mix) - Paganini Traxx
One - Bluefish
E=MC² - Big Audio Dynamite
Missing - Everything but the Girl
Too Young - Phoenix
What's Next - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Passion - Purple Penguin
Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen - Santana

Note: I'm not a big Santana person, don't know why these two should both happen to come up.

What does your music say about you?

Thought I was done for the night....

But I had to assert two things (off color humor alert):

1) Randy Milholland is one sick sick bastich. But dammit I think he's funny.

2) If there's any doubt about how pervasive the iPod is, just look here and here.

Yay Chris & Tara!

Give a big shout out to my friends Chris and Tara as they welcome their newest family member Mikhael Clark Ford. Feel free to wish them well in the comments!

Down amongst the dregs

Since I'll be talking about this year's Best Picture noms this week, I figured I would take time out before that with a look at the other end of the spectrum first. Norbizness took a look at IMDB.com's bottom 100 rated movies and offered his own comments on the ones on the list he had seen. Note that because of additional ratings contributed to IMDB since Norbizness' post, my numbers and his won't exactly match up. Of the worst of the worst out there, the ones I've wasted time with include:

#95 Bats - What does it say about a movie that the only thing I remember about the experience prominently is that when the ex and I went and saw it, we referred to it as "Stab" because of the poster's clever trick of inverting the title to mimic bats hanging upside down, and the theater where we saw it doing the same with the letters on the marquee over the auditorium door. Was the most clever thing this movie had going for it.

#94 Superman IV: The Quest for Peace - Utterly disjointed forgettable story, but the movie did provide one good laugh. When I saw it in a theater, it was with my mother and her mom. My grandmother did not speak a word of English, so my mother would tell her what the actors were saying or what was going on quietly during the show. When Nuclear Man (the super villain) made his debut, my grandmother got very agitated before my mother could tell her what was going on. Found out after the fact that my very Catholic grandmother thought Nuclear Man was Satan himself. So apparently, Jor-El doubles as an exorcist ;-).

#82 Jaws 3-D - Worst 3D ever that I've seen. Hard to make a shark swimming toward you scary even if its in 3D.

#72 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie - A moment of pure shame for me. To my credit, I did not pay to see it as I was working in a theater at the time. I mainly wanted to see what the big deal was, as the show was at its height of popularity when this came out. 95 minutes later, I still don't know, though I remember being cheesily entertained at the time. Now, writing this in reflection, I feel the need for a clensing shower.

#64 Mortal Kombat: Annihilation - I actually found the first Mortal Kombat movie to be entertaining for some strange reason. Low expectations I guess. Which meant that this movie was doomed before it began since the first raised the bar slightly for the second in my mind. When Christopher Lambert won't come back to do your sequel, that tells you how bad a movie you have to be.

#52 Teen Wolf Too and #51 Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 - At least with Smokey I can foist it off on being 11 years old and too stupid to know better. Teen Wolf Too is much more difficult to explain. Was actually on cable while I was laid up sick right after New Year's and I sat and watched about 10 minutes of it. Probably contributed to my being out of the office for a week ill moreso than cedar fever.

#32 Battlefield Earth - Brea and I rented it to see just how awful it was, having only heard the stories and read the reviews. And I thought the Dianetics crew were nutbars before this thing.

#24 Gigli - I watched this last year for the blog when I did a week of bad movies. The fact this thing has not dropped lower in the rankings stuns me. A stink bomb for the ages.

#9 You Got Served (provisional) - The week I was out sick and I saw part of again, I saw this was on Cinemax, and figured I'd tune in for a bit. At the time, this was in the bottom 3 on imdb and I remember my friend Alisa telling me she didn't think it warranted that much derision. She had seen it with her husband and she thought the dancing was neat. I saw the first 10-15 minutes of this thing just to see if she had any standing at all on this one. Alisa, honey, putting the extras of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo on the leftover set from Bloodsport does not hold an auspicious movie. Unless the dancing at the end provides a cure for cancer, AIDS, and bad breath all in one viewing, it can't be good enough to salvage the 15 minutes I saw.

Add any comments you have on the worst of the worst that you might have witnessed.

Fare the well, Ossie. We'll miss you.

One of the great actors who passed during my hiatus from blogging was Ossie Davis. Ossie passed on February 4th, filming a movie in Tampa.

Ossie had been in film for well over 50 years, and was doing stage work before that as well as during. Along with his wife of 57 years Ruby Dee, the two of them made a name for themselves not only as actors, but as activists as well. They were both very active in the Civil Rights movements of the 60's. Ossie gave the eulogy at Malcolm X's funeral. I remember when I saw the film Malcolm X last year, hearing Davis' voice reading the eulogy gave the film added poignancy as he summed up all the ways in which Malcolm's life defied easy categorization.

Most recently, I saw Davis in Bubba Ho-Tep, a movie that should have been too absurd for words seven different ways if you know the basic premise. Davis plays a black man in a nursing home who's convinced he's really JFK. There's a point where he's having a conversation with another of the home's residents (Bruce Campbell, playing a man who may be Elvis, or just thinks he is), and they have the following exchange:

Elvis: No offense, Jack, but President Kennedy was a white man.
JFK: They dyed me this color! That's how clever they are!

I remember seeing that scene in the trailer and later in the actual movie, and thinking to myself that only Ossie Davis would have the strength and dignity to pull that line off and make you think he's 100% convinced he's telling the truth. After the movie, I recall telling Brea "When I grow up, I want to be Ossie Davis." The man was that cool, that dignified, that charismatic to me.

I still hope I get there some day. Fare thee well Ossie. We miss you already. Keep watching over Ruby. You know she'll miss you every day.

Ong-Bak (2003) Starring - Tony Jaa, Perttary Wongkamlao, Wannakit Sirioput; Director - Prachya Pinkaew; Rated R for violence, language, and some sexuality and nudity; trailer here.

As a sports fan, I'm always amused whenever a new young phenom is pronounced the second coming of whatever superstar was the latest uberlegend to grace a particular field. Kobe Bryant was the next Michael Jordan, at least until LeBron James came along. Tom Brady is the next coming of Joe Montana. Ken Griffey Jr. in his prime was Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays all rolled into one until attitude and injuries did him in.

With movies there's a similar sort of pattern, though the comparisons tend to run more strongly with action heroes. Jackie Chan suffered from the label of being the next Bruce Lee until he carved out enough of a niche to stand out in his own right, and in some ways become bigger than Lee through longevity, skill, and charm. Jet Li was set up to be the next big martial arts star here after Chan, until a series of bad films really curtailed his ability to grow in the US market.

Now with Ong-Bak, a Thai film made in 2003, and just now getting some theatrical play in the US, Tony Jaa (real Panom Yeerum) may be the next action star to start getting the comparisons to Chan and Lee. Based on the skills he exhibits in the movie, he may be able to live up to the hype.

Jaa plays Ting, a young man from a small isolated village in Thailand. He is sent by the people of his village to attempt to retrieve the head of the Buddha statue (called the Ong-bak) that has been stolen by a street hood from Bangkok. Once in the city, Ting attempts to enlist the aid of Hum Lae (Wongkamlao), an expatriate of the village who has fallen away from small town life in more ways than one. Ting's quest and Hum Lae's debts send them spiraling into a criminal underworld of street fighting and artifact smuggling. Their combined goals put them across the path of a criminal overlord (Sirioput).

As far as story goes, there's nothing here that hasn't been done a hundred times over in other movies. Ting is the reluctant warrior, only willing to fight if it means returning the Ong-bak to his village. Hum Lae is the fallen away wandered who must be shown the error of his ways in order to gain redemption in his own eyes, if not in the eyes of those of his former village. The fights Ting gets into to find Ong-bak become more convoluted and more intricately choreographed as they build to a show stopping climax.

So why give this movie a view if you've seen it all before? Because you've not seen anyone fight quite like Jaa in anything prior to this.

Jaa is a practioner of the style of Thai boxing called Muay Thai. Frequently in American martial arts films you see at least one of the bad guys fighting in that style as a change up to the more conventional karate/kung fu style of the hero (the first incidence of this that comes to my mind is the film Bloodsport, when Jean-Claude Van Damme fights a Muay Thai boxer about halfway into the film). Muay Thai in my experience has never really been given a showcase to show what it's really all about in an action film.

All of that changed for me with Ong-Bak. Jaa, to put it rather bluntly, is a serious ass kicker of the first order. He gets ample opportunity to show off the more graceful aspects of Muay Thai, as well as its pure raw power. There's not just a lot of flying chops and kicks. There is a very healthy dose of blunt power in Jaa's elbows and knees that he shows off in a stunning variety of moves. Come to think of it, Jaa really really likes using the elbows. A lot.

Jaa also has a strong amount of charisma as a serious actor. Though he demonstrates some of the cat like quickness and reflexes of Jackie Chan, he does it with a serious demeanor that's much more suited to my experience with Jet Li, and Bruce Lee before him. Jaa is a serious man who's all about the job at hand, but he is not as wooden as some of the American action stars who have come before him (Steven Segal or Van Damme being prime examples). I wouldn't expect Jaa to put on the Thai equivalent of Hamlet's soliloquy, but he does strike me as someone who can more than act his way out of a paper bag. The same couldn't be said for Segal or Van Damme.

Director Prachya Pinkaew relies a little too much on double and triple takes from different camera angles to show off Jaa's skills for my taste. Beyond the repetitiveness of seeing a triple take over and over, the movie does flow decently once it gets past the initial exposition to set up the story. I think there's a fair amount of ground that could have been explored more with a subplot about the theft of Thai artifacts related to the theft of Ong-bak that could have been explored more. Normally the domain of a more serious non-action film, I think that Pinkaew could have still made a statement or two on this particular area with the way he portrays the crime boss running the theft ring beyond the black-and-white bad guy he's painted as.

But no one is going to see this movie for political subtext. They're going to see this movie to see some asses get kicked in a big way. They won't be disappointed with this film.

Out of the coma and back among the living
Or "Of Cats, Cars, women and Chicago"

No, not a literal coma, although I suppose you couldn't tell based on the inactivity of this bloody thing. I thought I had put some sort of BS up here more recently than over two months ago. But better late than never, I suppose. Remind me to keep that philosophy when it comes time for my funeral.

So why, you may ask, have I been AWOL for so long? Am I contemplating running for President in the future?

No the simple fact is that once I start getting involved with some of the things going on in my life, I find that I get lost in the things that need the most immediate attention, and everything else winds up getting tossed to the back burner.

For starters, as those of you who know me know, I work for Apple Computer. In case you've been living in a hole for the last year, Apple's been doing pretty well with this thing called the iPod (along with its variations that have been rolled out). My job is to make sure mini iPods roll out the door appropriately, and that eats up a good portion of my day to be sure.

I've also been very fortunate to welcome a couple of new guests to my household. Please welcome:

Jackie (named for Jackie Robinson)

and...

Doby, named for Larry Doby (I'm a bit of a baseball nut, can you tell?)

Living out in the boonies as I do, and with a big house to myself, I thought having a pet would help me feel less isolated at home. And the kitties have been a joy to have around, albeit frustrating at times (like children, they will not let me sleep through the night, which might be a new form of birth control, if I can bottle the frustration, and market it). In any case, these two will hopefully be lending themselves to my camera lens that I might be able to make catblogging a regular feature if I can get back into the habit of posting. If not my kitties, the good Ms. Brea has also procured herself feline companionship in the form of

Deja, a purebred Abyssinian. Please give her kitty some mad props as well.

There was also a side trip to Chicago right after Christmas. A breathtaking city I must go back to in the future. I could spend a week in the Art Institute alone. I met friends there so we could go see Spamalot, the stage musical "lovingly ripped off" as they put it from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A fun show all around

I've also found myself a new car, as my old one finally gave up the ghost. Since cars cost money, and so does going out to the movies and such, I may find myself at home to post a good deal more in the coming months :-). I settled on a new Toyota Corolla CE (pictures forthcoming once it stops raining). I named her Clem (after Clementine, Kate Winslet's character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). She's running like a dream. If you're in the market for a new car, you could do much worse.

There's also been the added factor of a new woman in my life. I shan't be getting into details here just yet. I want to know direct from her how much she wants me talking about her here ;-). Needless to say that Elizabeth has been a very full and enriching part of my life for a little more than three months now in a dating capacity. I'm as happy as I've been in quite a while, and from the comments I've gotten from some of my friends, it shows in a lot of ways. So we'll keep our fingers crossed that things keep on keeping on in a positive way!

Anyway, going to have a review up for a film I saw yesterday, and then tomorrow hope to start talking about some of the Oscar nominated films for this year. Once more unto the breach!

Updated: I realized after the fact that I mentioned Chicago in the title, but didn't say anything about it in the actual post. Doh! Added that paragraph in after the fact ;-).

Hankblog

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