Great thread. I've got a question that has been on my mind since I just now came up with it.

steve(thelil), do you have any strange cheese anecdotes?

Very sorry to hear of this loss for you and for this weird extended family of ours, JC. I always enjoyed hearing about your and Glenda's shared adventures. My sympathy, Doug.

INHERENT VICE is a crazy good film. Hilarious. Imagine WC Fields as a hippy detective.

12 in Paris. 2000 (!) in Nigeria. How many in a coffee shop in Australia a few weeks ago? How many in Ottawa a week before that? How about the children at school killed in Pakistan? The Coptics in Egypt. The minorities in Syria. WTF.

jmj was a great poster.

Nope. Don't know if I'll see it before it goes to cable. I usually pass on the "smart" space epics, having been burned in the 70s by a misguided elementary school teacher who told me that if I liked STAR WARS, I would love CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. Au contraire.

Check out the improvised drum score in the kooky BIRDMAN. Good picture, in my estimation.

You know my wife is an anesthetist. She'll tell you that when anything goes wrong in the OR, say an 81 year old lady with a life expectancy of around 81 dies, everyone will blame the anesthesia, because the operation of anesthetics is largely a mystery to most people, even most doctors, and all juri...

How many anesthetized surgical procedures did this 81 year old voluntarily undergo in her life time? Attacking the appearance of others as TV's celebrity court jester, she was a plastic surgery addict and attached herself to one of the grossest aspects of modern culture. She was herself a gross aspe...

She stinks. I wish her well.

Fantastic record.

I saw Godzilla. While I was pleased with its general suckiness, I found myself wondering why in all the Godzilla movies thru the years, Toho Studios or not, we've never seen a sensitive, realistic monster-on-monster sex scene. I mean really getting it on, like I'm sure giant monsters do in real life...

Missed you, Rita. The set was great. Carter, Donald Vega on piano, Russell Malone on guitar. "Autumn Leaves" "Laverne Walk" (Pettiford) "Candlelight" (Jim Hall) "My Funny Valentine" "Soft Winds" (F. Henderson) It was a short set, about an hour, which...

Game of Thrones sucks.

I'll be at the Ron Carter date at the Caverns on 5/24 if anyone else is going. Actually I'll be there regardless.

steve(thelil) wrote:Agree about Philomena, except for the part about seeing it "the other day."

Yuk yuk yuk.



Title says it all, really.

No prob, walto. I'm reading Lodge's GINGER, YOU'RE BARMY right now. It's not quite a university novel, but it sort of is, too. A middle class Angry Young Man-type describes the post-graduate interlude of compulsory national service in 1950s Britain. I like the period and its authors; Amis, Bradbury,...

Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim. Lots of fun! Interesting to compare this with the other university life novel I read recently, Edward Williams' 'Stoner'. Completely different in almost every way. I found 'Stoner' to be the superior work, but I really dug 'Lucky Jim' regardless. The more natural comparis...

I binged on The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, an Anglo-American comedy for IFC starring David Cross. Initially I wasn't impressed, but eventually the unremitting bad taste won me over.

Every so often I like to pick up a James Bond novel. I read the Fleming books in a binge when I was in high school and I loved them, so I guess I'm always trying to rekindle the old flame. It's usually a mistake. Last year I read one by Kingsley Amis, Colonel Sun, and that was alright. Better than m...

Jazzooo wrote:Excellent performance by Ms. Streep.

There's probably not a more boring sentence in the world of film than that.

Jazzooo wrote:
August: Osage County. A decent drama, with a few too many "made-for-TV" touches.

Ha! I wonder if that's because it was a successful play? Stage values can come off as inferior on the screen. Or was it just too syrupy?

We went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel yesterday. For some reason I want to call it The Exotic Marigold Hotel. Same principal, I suppose. Gather a lot of character actors at a romantic pile to celebrate life. I enjoyed how Wes Anderson accomplished this in GB Hotel. It was warm and full of comedy, ...

You New Englanders have it rough in that regard, with heating bills. This has been the coldest winter in five or six years here near the Potomac and I expected astronomical heating bills, but I have to say they haven't been unusually large. Maybe it is because of our fuel, natural gas, which is comm...

The first season of Orange is the New Black isn't yet available on DVD from Netflix, even though it's a Netflix program. So read the book! Guh, kids today. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Have to echo the plaudits above for Deadwood. Best thing on television ever, even if it did piss out with an inconclusive end...