Slowly Going Bald

The Rocky Mountain News, which has been publishing since 1859, printed its final issue Friday. The industry continues to bleed to death:

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

• Sleeping until 1 p.m. when 12:30 p.m. is perfectly acceptable. Be more proactive!
• Drinking three nights a week. Come on, you never want to be hungover for work. Two nights a week won't kill me. (Be strong on this one!)
• Using my turn signal when there's no one there. It wastes electricity, and I think we should be good stewards of our environmental resources.
• Washing underwear more than once a month. Again, this goes back to wastefulness, which is something I think we can all do our part to help reduce. Together we can do it guys!
• Paying attention when people talk to me. I need to do more for myself or I'll never feel like I'm centered, you know?
• Reading the news. It changes every day, and people tend to tell me when something happens that affects my life. Plus this will give me more time for reading for pleasure (currently on the nightstand: Shopaholic Takes Manhattan NO SPOILERS PLZ!!).
• Dogmatic Catholicism.

Bad cake, Jack. Bad, bipolar cake that just wants to screw you to forget about her missing son. You need to be okay with that, because she's not worth the orange juice, man.

Click here for the recap.

Halbey: if leoben and bin linus are in a room playing poker
what happens
Me: zero sum game. constant bluffing assures that no one will ever take the entire pot
Halbey: i'd watch that one-act play
Me: kate and starbuck in a crazy-off. who wins?
Halbey: starbuck
we don't even know if she's a human being
that's how crazy she is
kate can fight to survive or whatever but kara doesn't give a frak
plus she is the only possibly nonhuman alcoholic i've heard of
besides tigh i guess
plus kate is stringing along two already-messed up guys in jack and sawyer. i guess she did get that one guy killed. but starbuck is leading along the son of adama and also the caprican equivalent of lebron james
i think your crazy quota has to be higher to pull that off
jack v lee in a "grim face bc i have the weight of the world on my shoulders" stareoff
Me: hmm
jack, but barely. he's had to be the leader, whereas lee keeps finding ways to be no. 2
Halbey: who felt worse about their infidelity
Me: jack
lee was always starbuck's bitch
Halbey: boy that's the truth. i think jack also regrets his prostitution experiment more too. wasn't bai ling a hooker?

Over at Pajiba, we're taking a look at movies for the dumped. You know you want to check it out.

I mean seriously, when that dude's arm got ripped off, I kinda yelled.

Click here for the recap.

Also:

My apartment manager is asking the tenants in my complex to call him with the number of their parking spot; he's in the process of compiling an updated list of who parks where, and he doesn't want to accidentally double-book a parking spot for someone new. So, for maybe the first time since coming here, I noted mine and my roommate's spot numbers.

Mine: 4.
My roommate's: 23.

I guess what I'm saying is, if I come unstuck in time, don't say I didn't warn you.

As completely stupid and utterly pointless as you would expect.

Click here for the review.

UPDATE: As always, Pajiba commenters rise to the self-imposed challenge of missing the point. One writes:

"Were you expecting a f*cking reinvention of the genre? It's Friday the 13th, and you're seeing it on Friday the 13th. Yeah, you spent $10. Less than a night at the local watering hole (if you're worth a damn). I can only hope you had the common sense to bring some Vodka with you. Come on man, yeah, it kind sucked. It sucked hard. But it tasted better than sitting at home watching Dollhouse, knowing it's going to fall, hard. Didn't it?"

Another:

"So just to be clear:
1. Immoral, half naked teens/20-somethings meet their merry end.
2. Graphic, over the top slasher sequences with a variety of weaponry.
3. Poor acting/script/direction.
People don't go see these films despite these things, but BECAUSE of them. I don't know why you seem so surprised.
Methinks you were determined to write a bad review, no matter what you saw."

A third:

"This movie is filled with titties, weed, gratuitous violence, Dean Forester, and Dick Casablancas. What the eff is there NOT to like?"

I barely know where to begin. It's not like I'm incapable of ironically appreciating bad movies: I'm a white twentysomething who will drink and watch Troll 2 with friends, so I'm hardly a stranger to sitting down and laughing through an awful movie. But the remake of Friday the 13th isn't so bad it's funny; it's so bad it's bad. Every genre has its own rules, but I always go into a movie hoping that the feature I'm about to see will do good by those rules, or at least break them in interesting ways. And to say that I went in planning a bad review is insulting. I want every movie I see to be good. Every one. This one wasn't. The jokes sucked; the story sucked; it was boring and tedious and completely pointless. Some of the stupider commenters — which I know some days feels like most of them, but hey, them's the breaks — seem to consider my review a failure because I didn't take into account that all director Marcus Nispel had to do to uphold his end of the bargain was parade some topless girls in front of the camera and then have them brutally massacred. But I'm not 14, and even in a slasher flick, I'm looking for more. If that's a problem for anyone, well, I appreciate your patronage to the site and hope you continue reading and commenting, but frankly, shove it up your ass.

Fanboys

Friday the 13th

From Thomas Wolfe, written when he was young enough to be shamelessly poetic but old enough to know that nothing lasts. Look Homeward, Angel is a spectacular coming-of-age story that constantly returns to Wolfe's theme of unstoppable loss in the face of a world that refuses to do anything but move on — the word "ghost" appears dozens of times in the text — and it's worth your time. The passage is wonderful for the way it captures how the protagonist felt in his youth and how the author knows things will really turn out:

They clung together in that bright moment of wonder, there on the magic island, where the world was quiet, believing all they said. And who shall say — whatever disenchantment follows — that we ever forget magic, or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold? Far out beyond that timeless valley, a train, on the rails for the East, wailed back its ghostly cry: life, like a fume of painted smoke, a broken wrack of cloud, drifted away. Their world was a singing voice again: they were young and they could never die. This would endure.

For my funeral, I'd like these songs to be played:

• "Please Tell My Brother," Golden Smog
• "No Depression," Uncle Tupelo
• "On Your Porch," The Format
• "Will I See You in Heaven," The Jayhawks
• "Into the Mystic," Van Morrison
• "Casimir Pulaski Day," Sufjan Stevens
• "Sin Wagon," Dixie Chicks
• "Green Pastures," Emmylou Harris
• "Return of the Grievous Angel," Gram Parsons
• "Long Black Veil," Johnny Cash
• "I'm Going to the Place," Lyle Lovett
• "Softly and Tenderly," whoever you can find
• "I"m Good Now," Bob Schneider

What do you want at yours?

Pretty weak. At least Dan Fogler didn't hump any produce.

Click here for the review.

"Lost" keeps throwing people around in time, in a good way.

Also, I finally get in a Live Links reference:

Click here for the recap.

(While The Sis was forced to monitor the Grammys at work:)
Sis: now katy perry is dancing
with quite an elaborate stage setup
me: yeesh
kevin IMd me and said he hopes the grammys blow up so we have an interesting story
and i think that would be AWESOME
Sis: haha
she was out of breath most of the time and looked confused. and she seem surprised when it ended
me: sounds like my last date CAN I GET A WITNESS
Sis: hahahaha
me: :-D
ok seriously thanks for the best setup i'll ever get
that one was right over the plate

"Battlestar Galactica"
Hera
Chief
Sam
Gaeta
Brother Cavil
Caprica Six
Col. Tigh
Natalie Six
The Final Cylon (also here by name)
Tory
Adm. Adama
Laura Roslin
Tom Zarek
Gaius Baltar
The Hybrid
Leoben
Starbuck
D'Anna
Apollo

"Firefly"
Mal Reynolds
Zoe
Kaylee
The man they call Jayne
Inara
River
Simon
Wash
Shepherd Book
Mr. Universe

"The West Wing"
Toby
Ainsley
Donna
Sam
CJ
Bartlet
Josh

"Friday Night Lights"
Saracen
Riggins

And I have only scratched the surface. (There are, for instance, accounts for a lot of "Mad Men" characters, which caused a bit of a scuffle last fall.) This kind of phenomenon needs to be talked about, or at least used as fodder for graduate research.

me: i watched Milk last night
Sis: ooh, how was it?
me: good
it's tough to watch a hyped movie in awards season, especially when peter travers' masturbatory blurbs are everywhere
e.g. "i would murder my firstborn if he didn't love this movie"
but it's good
Sis: haha
me: it's tough b/c it's stuck between biopic and character study. they try to cover so many years that some of the action is a little blurry and disconnected, but the final year is pretty grounded
and also, less gay than Brokeback
Sis: less gay?!
;)
me: you see dudes kissing, and resting in bed, and even kind of fooling around, but no one ever really takes anyone from behind
and dammit i want to see dudes getting it on
Sis: hahahaha
i just burst out laughing at that
me: "i didn't come here for this impressionistic shit! LET'S SEE SOME ACTION"
Sis: hehe

I mean, I get it. We all do. We understand the audience you're trying to capture. But man, you could at least try to be more cunning about it.

This week's song is a classic, and one of the many from its era I can remember hearing my father sing along with on the radio.

"Tracks of My Tears," Smokey Robinson and the Miracles:

And as a bonus, here's Billy Bragg's cover:

A dad filmed his son shortly after the boy's trip to the dentist, and the kid is just whacked out of his mind on painkillers. The way the dad seized the opportunity and filmed their conversation, and subsequently posted in YouTube, is the kind of deviant behavior that almost makes me want to be a father:

Great movie. They don't hand out the Palme d'Or for nothing.

Click here for the review.

You know, just to hang in the bathroom and freak out guests.

Anyway, click here for this week's recap.