Reel Reviews

Bad Words -- Here's a mean one, and delightfully so. Jason Bateman's character is exactly what I wish I could be; alas, some touch of diplomacy is necessary in this world. In a movie, though, a guy that dickish can be hilarious, and Bateman's Guy is just that. I'm wavering only slightly in this review, because one can argue that the movie does pull its punches a bit--but not in any significant way that pulls any of the principals out of character. Also, there's a minor fallacy in the movie's premise: there's no particular need to have rules keeping adults out of spelling bees, as most adults are atrocious spellers. Regardless, this film is a ton of fun, as long as you're not a wilting flower about the language. Check it out.

Reel Reviews

Mr. Peabody and Sherman -- Here's a cautionary tale about all these nostalgia based remakes we've seen these past several years: if you don't get everything just right when you're competing with someone's memories, the memories win. So it goes with this film. A lot of what's here is good, but when the movie misses the mark--for example: the voice for Sherman is nowhere close to the original--the discrepancy takes the viewer right out of the moment. That's a tough tightrope to walk, and why most nostalgia movies don't succeed. On its own merits, this flick tends to be very clever--they seem to get all the historical facts right--but there's a lot of dumb sprinkled in, too. If not for its attachment to an already known property, I'm not sure this script would have been produced. Put it all together and the ultimate product merits the so-so mark--as much for unfulfilled potential as anything else.

Reel Reviews

Godzilla -- (2014) Mild spoiler alert: some of the stuff in this movie doesn't make much sense. In other words, it's a monster movie. Go figure. It may be nonsense, but it's entertaining nonsense. There is perhaps a little too much teasing going on before the big guy starts fucking shit up old school, but I think this flick ultimately delivers on its promises. (The ending of the climactic battle, for sure, delivers quite a jolt.) It's somewhat ridiculous to judge these movies on any criterion other than, do you have a good time watching it? I certainly had a good time watching this one, so it's a go from this end. Enjoy.

Sour Notes

I don't remember things very well these days, for various reasons. That's why I like having the ability to jot down notes when they pop into my mind. Keeping the ideas that come to me by recording them on the fly, or using a simple note pad to keep handy information handy, is really useful to me.

Thus, I've found the iOS app Notes very useful these last few years, first on my iPod touch, and recently on my iPhone. What I really liked was the fact that every time I synced my device, my latest notes would automatically update into Apple's Mail application. Changes to old notes would similarly update onto the computer, so that new info or ideas that I had had while on the go would then be live and available when I sat down to work at the laptop.

Well, screw all that, said the increasingly clueless Apple. A few weeks ago I made the grotesque mistake of "upgrading" my macbook's operating system to OS X Yosemite, which is turning out to be perhaps the most hideously awful iteration of the Mac environment ever. And among its many abortions is the truly bizarre revision that makes Notes (now in its own separate desktop app) virtually impossible to sync. I've tried everything indicated by Apple's help documentation, short of enabling iCloud--no, I don't want you to have complete access to my devices; screw you and your shitty iCloud--and nothing will get my damn notes to update.

I don't usually agree with the plain, on the face of it, overly simplistic analysis that most folks tend to wallow in. But with Apple, all those people who say that things have really gone downhill since Steve Jobs died may be on to something. Notes was fine as it was; I would enter a note on my phone, and--bam--it would just appear there on my laptop after a sync, and I'd never have to think about it. This seems like a really simple thing to accomplish; hell, it didn't even need to be accomplished--it was already done. All they had to do was not screw it up...and sure enough, they screwed it up. Yosemite's other flaws--slow performance and memory hogging, poor visual design, program updating issues--are bad enough; screwing up a minor program like Notes, which was already perfect the way it was...well, there are reasons why I've long been off the Apple bandwagon, far enough off that I have had no inclination for a long time to buy any Mac hardware other than after market. But now I'm starting to consider the possibility of just saying screw the whole thing and finding a new computing paradigm. Windows remains dreadful, but...Linux, perhaps? Has it come to that? Maybe.

Apple used to be the greatest thing ever in computing and its associated implementations. I stayed with them through the dark days and never really wavered in my belief that their stuff was the best that was out there. But Yosemite is just plain shit, and these days Apple is looking moldy and full of worms. It may be just a matter of time before everyone concludes the thing is simply rotten to the core.

As If You Need More Things To Read...

For a long time now, I've had this idea about starting a blog. Not this blog, not blowing it up and starting all over again; I mean starting a different blog, something that had a different focus from my random musings about life, or what movie I just saw, etc. What I've been thinking about was a blog about sports, one where I dish out some brutal truth about the world of sports as I see it.

Well, I finally got around to getting that ball rolling. This past week I launched The Disgruntled Fan Report and posted the first essay, about the new college football playoff system. (For the record, I'm agin it!) Right now the site is in a most primitive state. I'm working on some banner art for the top of the page, to at least make things look distinctive. Right now it's a free site on WordPress's servers, but I'm expecting to eventually take it live on its own domain on its own hosting, which will help me gussy up the thing. For the moment, the chief focus is on grinding out copy.

I'm going to try to make this a weekly thing, a site where I issue at least one column per week on whatever seems to be the best topic out there at the moment. This will require a certain amount of discipline on my part--always a dicey prospect--and an ability to consistently come up with good ideas. I believe one idea a week is not too big a challenge; I've already written this coming week's piece, and the next week's work is now on the drawing board. I wrote commentaries on a similar schedule on my very first website back in the day, and that didn't run out of steam until well after a year, so I'm hopeful that the new project, with it's narrower focus (easier to stay current and relevant that way), will last at least that long. Hopefully, it will be a long-term thing--and maybe, just maybe, it will somehow grow into another career.

So if you've got a taste for some quality sports commentary, click on over to The Disgruntled Fan Report. I will greatly appreciate your patronage.