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.

Reel Reviews

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 -- Everybody else seems to be on board with this go-around as better than the first set. I'm not so sure. I can fairly vividly remember certain scenes from those earlier movies; I can't say much the same about the first in this series. And while this and its predecessor are certainly entertaining in the moment, it is the long term impact that makes for a great movie, or even a very good one. I liked this flick, but I'm just not sure how much. I guess you're on your own here.

Reel Reviews

Noah -- If it had been all theology, this movie would have been a dud. With the human dimensions added to the story--which is already at its core a pretty good story--the equation changes in this flick's favor. It still suffers somewhat from its bible story origins--pieces of the narrative feel like those children's books based on the scriptures that your weird aunt or uncle gives you for a birthday present--but the overall effect of good performances, interesting direction, and universal themes make the movie worth the effort.

Structural Change

If you've stumbled across this site in the past, and are coming back now for some benighted reason, you may be noticing a change in the way the Reel Reviews are being posted. No longer will individual movie reviews be organized according to the old habit of lumping everything together by alphabetical title. Now, each individual review will be its own post.

This make sense on a number of levels, and the change should have been implemented much sooner. For one thing, individual posts makes each of the reviews substantially more search friendly. While organizing all of the reviews alphabetically allowed for easier browsing of reviews that were not the object of the original search--just scroll through the list and find something interesting--the plain fact is that anyone reading this site probably is not really that interested in scrolling through that long list (especially under popular alphabetical titles, as with the 'S' or 'M' titles). Also, individual posts make creating the links in the sidebar substantially easier. They also make manually date-stamping each post's content unnecessary, since every post is automatically date and time stamped. Overall, I think it will be a cleaner, more efficient way of recording these reviews.

It will still be possible to browse reviews alphabetically, since all review posts will still get the individual letter-appropriate 'Reel Reviews -- ?' tag (where the ? represents a given alphabetical). Just click on the tag from the list in the sidebar and up will pop all the titles under that letter--except in 'most recent' rather than alphabetical order. Plus, individual posts will allow for other tags to be applied to a review, such as 'Comedy' or 'Drama' for an appropriate film, so that a complete list of any genre can be called up just with a click.

As time and gumption permits, I will be converting old, lumped together review posts to individual postings. The 'new-old' posts will get a new date and time stamp, but I'll keep the original 'Posted 00/00/00' date in the copy to distinguish those reviews from more recent stuff. Let's hope this all works out well and makes this database of movie reviews even more useful than ever before.

UPDATE: I've realized after the fact that I can back date posts if I so choose, and I'll do so on the older Reel Reviews posts. But I'll still keep the original 'posted on' dates in the text to easily distinguish old posts from the newer reviews.

Reel Reviews

The Grand Budapest Hotel -- As with every Wes Anderson film, you get quite the avalanche of quirky here. The effect is almost overwhelming at first, but eventually the film settles into its own little groove and winds up telling a story that’s clever, engaging, and ultimately both satisfying and a little bit heartbreaking. I don’t know if this movie would actually pull in anyone who isn’t already an Anderson fan, but for those who appreciate his oeuvre, this one is certainly worth a look.

Reel Reviews

Saving Mr. Banks -- I’m uncertain here. The positive sign could just as easily be a so-so mark. It’s hard to get a handle on whether this is a really good movie or not. This film features fine performances from a lot of really good actors; then again, in at least one case (Emma Thompson in the P.L. Travers role), that good performance makes for a rather unlikeable character. Some of the backstory scenes take way too long to tell their tale--we get the drift long before that curtain closes--and the film drags in those sequences. But those are forgivable lapses, given the overall quality of the thing. I’ll stick with the positive, but I won’t argue very hard against anyone who says otherwise.

Graphic Enhancement

Faithful readers of this blog--as if--have by now gotten used to my long-standing ratings system for movies and books: the + for a positive review, a ~ for a "so-so" review, and a -- for a negative review.

Using those characters for symbols never quite worked. They disappear into the text, and the tilde for a "so-so" character--it's supposed to represent that hand wiggle you do when you somatically describe something as "so-so"--is almost non-existent in some fonts, and is particularly so in MM's preferred font, Raleway.

Thankfully, I've been learning a thing or two about this web stuff, and that includes the wonderful thing called FontAwesome. It's a web-based symbol font that anyone--which includes me--can use to add some easy graphic elements to his website. And now I've done so: you will notice in new reviews that the ratings will feature new icons, as indicated in the reviews summary at the right. The positive and negative reviews still feature plus and minus signs, they're just now more visible icons in a square background. The problem was the "so-so" tilde; no such character exists in FontAwesome at this time. So I had to compromise and choose a new character; from now on, "so-so" reviews will feature a question mark symbol in a circle (oddly, FA features no squared question mark icon). I think this is a good choice, as the question mark represents just as well as the squiggle the indeterminate nature of the "so-so" review.

Old reviews will eventually be updated with the new icons look, as I get time and gumption to do so. (It can be a tedious process going through all those reviews--particularly in really long posts, like the 'S' Reel Reviews.)

That goes for movies. For Recently Read (book) reviews, I'm still trying to figure out whether or not I want to keep the symbol system or not. Most recently book reviews have not included any symbol, as I thought it was better to let the narraitive review speak for itself. But I'm still undecided on that. And of course, it may not matter anyway, as I almost never read any books anymore (the curse of being too busy).

So that's the scoop on what's the latest with Malchats Matters. Now maybe I can get moving and actually post something meaningful soon. There's always hope, I guess.

Accomplishment

Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Cat Did What?

Well, the day has finally arrived. August 19 marked the publication of the new book, Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Cat Did What? Normally, that would not particularly pique my interest, but this ain't normal. This new book includes my story, "The Marks of a Lasting Love" (pg. 172), and it represents my first paid writing effort. Hopefully the first of many to come. The check should arrive sometime in the next month or so; $200 big ones. I could get used to this whole writing thing.

The story tells the tale of the one and only time we tried to give our first cat, WT, a bath, and how that led to me winding up in the emergency room at the local hospital. A good story, if I may say so myself, and it is a sincere tribute to my dearly departed kitty and the legacy that she left in my life.

I had to wait a whole year from submission to today, when the book finally hit the stores. I did get 10 author's copies (all gone now, save one I kept for myself) for free, so that's another good thing about it. I haven't read any of the stories other than my own (so far I've been too busy) but I'm guessing that they're probably all quite entertaining and worth a read.

Better yet, this won't be the only thing I get published this year. Another story, "Giving Thanks for the Big Birds," is scheduled to appear in the November issue of the magazine Watching Backyard Birds. I get a year's subscription to that periodical, no money for publication, but it is another credit, and hopefully will help grease the skids towards more writings of mine gaining acceptance with paying publications. (I currently have drafts of two pieces written right now, with the concepts for two others worked out in my head and partially written up in notes.)

So things be movin'. Let's hope I can sustain the momentum for a while longer. Like, say, the rest of my life. Excelsior.

For The Record, Scale Check

This photo is already a week old. This new low was achieved in the aftermath of my camping trip to Juniper Lake up at Lassen Volcanic National Park. I didn't get a lot of exercise those five days, but apparently I got enough to drop down to a new low mark on the scale. My weight as of this picture was as low as it has been since at least 2003, and almost certainly since 2002. I'm anticipating a bounce back the next time I get a chance to step on the scale, but with a whole month of housecatsitting (2 concurrent gigs) coming up in September, I think I have a chance to power through and really push down to another new low before the fall and winter and the inevitable slippage at the end of the year shows up. Maybe I'll even get down past 270, start seeing some two sixty something numbers at last. We'll see.

For the Record, Scale Check

So the progress continues, at a very mild pace I must say, but still it remains a downward trend. This was actually a shot from this past Tuesday, the 29th, so a couple of days out of date here. The significance of this very minor movement--just one pound below the last "official" low mark (I hit 276.5 back on the 14th, in an "unofficial" measurement)--is that this reading shows progress even after my Disneyland trip of the 17th thur the 21st. It's nice when you can go on a vacation and NOT gain a bunch of weight either then or thereafter. This bodes well for my upcoming trip to Lassen Volcano NP, which starts this Sunday and runs through Thursday, at least (still a little undecided about when I'll get back). I expect more movement downward in the next month or so, then interesting times while I'm housecatsitting in two separate places for the whole month of September. Things might get very interesting.

And it should go without saying at this point, but this does represent my lowest weight...well, probably since I've owned this scale. It's at least the lowest my weight has been since sometime in 2003, maybe even 2002. The only data point I have from that time is a 260 reading the beginning of 2002, and of course I'm still a long way away from that. But it's getting closer.

For the Record, Scale Check

I'm on a roll.

Once again, I've achieved a new low weight. This time it's a relatively large jump, dropping 2 pounds in about a week. This is especially encouraging, since my bike has been in the shop all week, and I won't get it back till Monday--which means I've lost more weight even though I haven't actually exercised since last Saturday. I take this to mean that my steadiness at maintaining the exercise regimen lately has paid off; that is, that my body has gotten used to being in "metabolize mode" and remains there, for the present at least, even without the bolstering benefit of my regular exercise. I'm eager to get the bike back, and get back in the swing of things, to see how far this thing can go before I plateau again.

If I can drop even three more pounds before the end of the month, I'll be deliriously happy with these results.

For the Record, Scale Check

More progress. Incremental progress, to be sure; this is a bare 1.5 pounds below my last lowest weigh in a couple of weeks ago, but this one shows enough movement down to count as a real move for the better.

My resolve to improve upon this number will be tested in the upcoming week; I will not have my bike for a whole week while it's in the shop getting some repairs/upgrades, and I have a giant blister on the bottom of each of my feet (related to the bike thing in a way, but a long story), so it's unlikely I'll be getting much exercise until next week. Of course, next week will see me embark upon a two week housecatsitting gig, at a place with a) a good location with abundant biking trail access and b) a backyard pool for getting some laps in after a ride and/or work. So plenty of exercise on the horizon. Check this space again for further progress before the month is over.

Recently Read

Holy Toledo
Lessons From Bill King, Renaissance Man of the Mic
by Ken Korach

There is a dilemma that lives somewhere behind this book, one that I have experienced many a time with regards to various things in my own life: when you find something great, do you want to share it with everyone else in the world, or do you prefer to keep this great joy all to yourself?

Holy Toledo by Ken Korach

The answer depends, of course, upon the nature of the great thing. If it’s the music of some hugely talented performer, you’re bound to want to share, since there’s no real way in which your own enjoyment of a song or a musician can be diminished by others enjoying the same work. The same applies, to an extent, with a restaurant that serves great food; certainly, you want others to patronize the place, lest it should otherwise go out of business; yet, you also don’t want the joint to be too crowded during those times when you want a meal for yourself.

And then again, there are those great things that you want to keep all to yourself--or, at least, you don’t particularly care if others get to experience their share of that greatness. You’ll be perfectly happy to keep that personal favorite truly personal, to let that secret joy be your own little oasis in an otherwise desert landscape.

For many sports fans in the Bay Area, that latter sentiment surely holds true for their appreciation of the late Bill King.