Touch You Last

• On the red carpet this year, boobs are in! Whether you’re Hilary “I’m not a boy after all!” Swank, or you’re Natalie Portman—-the last of your friends still waiting for ‘Aunt Flo’. • All red carpet shows are crap and should only ever be broadcast with the song Popcorn in place of any live audio. Nobody seems to know how to use a microphone and the hosts are always introducing strangers to one another as if magic will suddenly happen. Someone on CNN introduced Catalina Sandino Moreno, star of Maria Full of Grace , to P. Diddy. And boy did hilarity ensue! • Sarah confirms that, while Beyonce can’t speak French, she can sing Giberish like nobody’s business. • No one told Orlando Bloom that if he just dug deep enough in the rental bag, he would have found a tie in there somewhere. • Pierce Brosnan and Edna Mole are no Rob Lowe and Snow White • Adam Duritz felt that a wacky blue outfit and gross obesity would preserve his artistic integrity in the face of Shrek 2 . Sadly wrong. • Just be...

Oscar, Oscar – who will win? I thought I’d hijack Dave’s blog in order to have an official record of my own Oscar picks. Sadly, this has the potential to bite me on the ass, giving Dave gloating rights for the next year. I’ll risk it. I am going to divide my picks up (absolutes are NOT my strong suit) into “What I think will happen” and “What I would like to happen”. What I think will happen Actor: Jamie Foxx. As much as I despised the second half of Ray , he was mesmerizing. Supporting Actor: Morgan Freeman. The man has never won, and was magnificent in Million Dollar Baby . Actress: Annette Benning. The voters may want to reverse the “every best actress since 1995 has been under 40” trend. Supporting Actress: Natalie Portman. This category is such a free for all, and she’s a pink-haired stripper (ostensibly with a heart of gold). Director: Clint Eastwood. He’s older than Marty, and he was overlooked last year for Mystic River . Plus, academy members love rewarding actors-turne...

Ray was beautifully shot, incredibly quick-paced for a near three hour biopic, and would have been in contention as my Best Picture choice had I not watched the second half of the movie. We broke the movie up into two nights after starting it too late on Wednesday, and I enjoyed the shit out of what I saw that first night. I loved the music, I loved the way the colours were cranked up in the flashback scenes, and I thought Jamie Foxx was brilliant. Then on night two, things went suddenly awful starting with the Gidget-like scene of white kids dancing in tandem to What’d I Say (which drove Sarah wild-eyed crazy—and I wasn’t overly fond of either). Things got back to normal after this and I had no major complaints for the next hour. I was getting ready to forgive the Beach Blanket Bingo bit, but then Ray finished rehab and went into the worst flashback sequence I have ever seen . It was a terrible Hollywood ending where he imagines that he can see and his dead mother absolves him for...

While this doesn't provide any new content, it's a fresh way to look at the old content, courtesy of Gizoogle . Better than nothing. More to come soon. Click away.

Notice the flare, the fact that the subjects really aren't centered, that the shopping bag is placed as prominently as the kids. Were my parents just really bad photographers, or were they, in fact, making art?

Just came back from an Oscar nominee double-feature and I feel as though I did my bit for God and country (though I suppose only Genie noms should make me feel that way). Now all that’s left is Ray, which is on video, so I’m a sorry sack of crap if I can’t pull that off between now and next Sunday. I’m glad to have both movies out of the way, each for a different reason. Million Dollar Baby has a twist that I’d heard critics allude to, and I was sure it would be completely spoiled for me before I got to see it. It’s not a crazy twist; she doesn’t turn out to be a ghost, and she doesn’t reveal her package to Stephen Rea, and she’s neither Keyser Soze nor Tyler Durden, but the story takes a big turn, and sometimes just the knowledge that there is a twist is spoiler enough for me. Having seen it, I like it a lot. From a Best Picture standpoint, if I can boil the script, the cinematography, the acting, the directing, the artistic merit, and the potential longevity of this movie down to a ...

This thing has eaten up a good serving of my spare time, as well as a nice slice of time that should belong to work. I’ve been thinking over the past few days about why I keep at it, and have concluded that there are four reasons: There is instant writerly gratification I went to University for Creative Writing. (Shut up. Just because it’s a subject you took when you were seven doesn’t invalidate it as a legitimate stream of academic study. Okay, so it does—but shut up anyway.) Four years later, I was neither a Hemmingway nor a Koontz, and I didn’t give up writing entirely but it wasn’t about to pay the bills or even a Tic-Tac habit. Luckily, I fell ass-backwards into a decent job and writing became an oft-neglected hobby. At present, I’ve got about three stories of which I’m not completely ashamed off, and that I’ve shopped around to maybe five lit mags. Submitting a story is arduous stuff; it takes an age to get a reply—likely a no—then you play around with your story for a b...

There’s enough time left that I might actually see all the Best Picture nominees before Oscar night rolls around. To date, my personal best is four of five. I love the Oscars and can’t really explain why. I’m likely the only straight man you know that sits through the whole thing year after year. (For what it’s worth, I skip most of the red carpet coverage. Does that make me at all more masculine? No, I didn’t think so either.) We’ve caught only The Aviator and Sideways so far. Some folks who read my thoughts on The Aviator came away thinking I hated it. Not true; I thought it was brilliant. It’s just that I saw it long after it had been released, and what more could I have said about it that others more intelligent, more qualified, or more masculine hadn’t said already. It was a great movie, but at the same time I don’t want to see it again for about fifteen years. It doesn’t match T2 or Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back for rewatchability, if you know what I’m saying. Sideways wa...

Today is a good day because this site has finally been indexed by google. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m officially too legit to quit. This will be a short one, but I did want to share something with you. I spy on you all on a regular basis. In the shower? No, but don’t I wish! I just spy on your internet tendencies. That friendly little counter on the bottom right of the screen is provided by statcounter , and on top of tracking how many visitors I’ve had (or at least how many times I’ve obsessively visited my own site), it also provides fun stats. I get to learn about visit lengths, visitor countries and cities, entry pages, exit pages, even what browser you’re using. Best of all, I get keyword analysis. See my title? That’s how some dude from Iowa found me. That just plain rules. I don’t know if you folks are having fun here, but I’m having a fucking ball.

I’ve done movies and books, but I haven’t touched on music yet so we’re going to go there next. I have no mandate going in, so this may be a go-nowhere entry. Take my apologies in advance. Right now, I find myself in a musical lull. (To be completely honest, right now I find myself on the computer, in the bleary-eyed morning, without any pants on, but let’s stay on topic.) I feel like my internal playlist of favourite songs and artists is getting smaller each day, and even bands I used to love are dropping off that list (Stereophonics, I’m looking at you.) There’s no doubt that, to a large degree, this is my own fault. You can’t, in good conscience, rail against the state of music when you haven’t bought a new CD in almost a year. I haven’t been grabbed by anything new in a while, and while I’d like to blame it on the state of music, it probably has more to do with me getting old than anything else. I don’t put the time or the money into music that I used to—not that when I did I was p...

It was October and my last year of University. Four or five of us were hanging out on the front steps of our apartment, probably drinking and probably waiting for our hot neighbours to walk by. For whatever reason, we got on the topic of martial arts. We’d all, to some degree, taken karate, or tai-kwon-do, or judo, or knife fighting, or some frigging thing over the course of our childhood, and so we started sharing stories about the cruelties visited upon us by our respective senseis. I told the story of how, for the week I’d taken karate, I always had to be wary of surprise crotch-kickings. Whenever we did our kata (standing in a line, punching the air, and screaming) our sensei demanded that we keep our thighs rock-solid to prevent an attack from behind (because when you’re walking down a dark alley doing your kata, that’s something you have to worry about.) To keep us wary at all times, he would walk up and down the rows of students and occasionally hoof people without warning....