All Entries in the "Film" Category

We’re In The Club Now

I took the idea of the grape soda Ellie Badge (if you’ve seen Up, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen Up, go see it…take tissue) and changed it to better suit me and Cindy. I think Moxie is more fitting for us. Not only is it one of our favorite drinks of all-time, but it’s a quality we strive to bolster within ourselves.

And we’re going to need a lot of it to get us through the next couple of years

Five Fotos Friday: Growing Up Star Wars Edition

I’ve been meaning to post some pictures to the Growing Up Star Wars Flickr Group for a while now, so this as good a time as any to start going through the boxes and boxes of completely disorganized photos and see what else I can find to embarrass myself with each week.

Washington Irving Elementary – Durant, Oklahoma – October 1978

I think I had maybe a dozen Star Wars. I would wear them until the plastic iron-on picture would start cracking.

Halloween in Durant, Oklahoma 1978

Note that I was clever enough to use sunglasses with the Darth Vader mask, but not clever enough to wear a black long-sleeved shirt. Man, these costumes were just awful back then, but we loved them! I’m pretty sure the one-fist-on-the-hip thing was probably my grandma’s idea. Sassy.

My Birthday – Germany – 1980

I remember that this was the puzzle I wanted because basically I liked anything that had Han Solo. Chewbacca, or the Millennium Falcon on it. I don’t think I ever put it together.

Halloween in Germany 1980

I love that I’ve been demoted to a storm trooper, but I’m still taller than Darth Vader.

Christmas – Altus, Oklahoma – 1976

Of course, with a haircut like mine at that age, not everything was Star Wars. I wish I could find a better picture with the insignia showing. If I do, I’ll post it. It would be the logical thing to do.

I’m Still Here

We’ve been in the process of moving, and things are just piled and stacked everywhere. I haven’t had a chance to get much of anything sorted yet. I thought I would be able to get something done last night, but I was on-call for Traci and had to go watch the beast for a few hours. Most likely, I’ll be doing that again tonight.

On the upside, I now have every fight scene from Spider-Man 2 and 3 committed to memory. Quinn, who will be three in a few months, loooves Spider-Man. He’ll watch it, and just pick some random line to repeat. The other day, he climbed into the chair with me and said, “Avenge me. Avenge me, Uncle Chris. Uncle Chris, avenge me, okay?”

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I Heart Redbox

I just used a Redbox DVD rental kiosk at the Albertson’s down the street from us. We have Netflix, which we love, but sometimes I don’t get the movie back in the mail soon enough for the weekend (and the mail doesn’t run on Sundays anyway), so when I see an opportunity to get watch a new movie for $1 a night without having to talk anybody, I’m all for it.

If you want to try it, Redbox will email you a promo code for a free rental to use at one of the kiosks (I don’t think you can use it to rent online). So, the price is definitely right. I haven’t used my promo code yet, but I suspect you’ll still need to swipe a card at the kiosk in case you decide to keep the movie more than one day.

You can check for Redbox locations on their website.

Just so you know, I’m not getting paid anything for pushing Redbox. I just think it’s neat, and makes a good DVD rental back-up to whatever service you’re using now : )

BTW, The Departed was pretty damn good.

FICTION: Fact or Fiction?

A couple of weeks ago, Cindy and I saw The Da Vinci Code. Like the book, the movie is making oodles of money, and upsetting a lot of people of faith, including religiosity salesman Ted Baehr who calls it “Dan Brown’s hate-filled, fictitious attack on Jesus Christ, Christianity, the Bible, Christians and history” (because, you know, it’s not like the Church has ever meddled with history for its own ends or anything). Just do a Google search and you’ll see that a lot of people are protesting The Da Vinci Code. If people really, truly wanted to do some good in the world, they should have been out there protesting Big Mamma’s House 2.

On a side note, the phrase “fictitious attack on Jesus Christ” seems a little odd to me. Isn’t a “fictitious attack” an attack that never happened? Then again, it’s the right phrase in the sense that Crispies are imagining that Dan Brown is attacking them.

I’m with Bob Higgins, who has a nice little piece about Baehr and The Da Vinci Code over at Political Cortex. He says, “What is so frightening to these folks about a work of fiction is a mystery to me unless they fear fiction because they have always been afraid that they have based their entire lives on a work of fiction. I just don’t know.”

Well, neither do I, Bob. Neither do I.

Or so I thought.

Then I realized that The Da Vinci Code is not just a bunch of made up stuff, but filled with many factual details. For example, did you know there really was a Council of Nicea? Okay, maybe you did. But what about Templar Knights? Yeah, I know, too easy. But did you know there really is a place called Paris, France? Or that there is an actual painting called the Mona Lisa by a guy named Leonardo da Vinci?

I began looking through some other books I have on the shelf, trying to find other instances where writers have used real places and events in a not-real way. Using the Internets, I finally found something. Through extensive research, I discovered that dinosaurs did, at one point in time, rule the earth. I also learned that both DNA and Costa Rica do exist. However, I was very disappointed (and disillusioned) when I found out that Jurassic Park was just a made-up place, even though Costa Rica is real.

Dammit! How can it be legal for writers — especially fiction writers — to fuck with our minds like that? Mixing fact and fiction? What the hell’s up with that?