Thursday, December 22, 2011

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I heard yesterday that they had released the first official trailer for Peter Jackson’s upcoming adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and wasn’t sure whether I wanted to watch it or not, since they always give away too much in trailers.

However, given that I had read the book a long time ago and want to read it again before the movie comes out next December, I watched it and was amazed.  So following the lead of my good friend Vittorio, here’s the first look of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Homeland

homelandHomeland, Showtime’s latest addition to its stable of shows, is a certified thoroughbred.  While I read a critique that complained about its penchant for running in circles without ever getting anywhere, I found the show intriguing and well made.

Yes, I do agree that Brody’s ultimate driving motivation was kind of a stretch (did he love Issa so much that he’s willing to sacrifice being with his family for him?  Really?  What about his own son and daughter?).  However, the show’s cerebral approach to fighting terrorism was a breath of fresh air after the years of overblown blunt force we were fed by 24.

Claire Danes and Damian Lewis are both superlative, and the whole cast does a great job, especially Mandy Patinkin.  The scripts are tight, full of surprises, and pack a load of physical and mental action.

If you haven’t checked Homeland out yet, catch up before season 2 premieres.  You won’t be disappointed.

Grade – Season 1: 8

Dexter

dexterDexter is a show that I started watching quite late, but rapidly became one of my favorites.  Yes, he’s a serial killer, and we’re not supposed to like serial killers, but that’s the reason why this show is so great.  Or at least, was so great.

Season 1 (the Ice Truck Killer) and season 2 (the Harbor Bay Butcher) were great.  Season 3 (Dexter strikes an unlikely friendship) was only good, but season 4 (the Trinity killer) was the zenith.  A season so good would have been hard to match, let alone best, so season 5 (Lumen now befriends Dexter) wasn’t as much of a letdown as a coming back to less rarified heights.

Season 6, however, made me wonder if Dexter’s best days are now firmly behind us.  Even worse, I’m now afraid that with Debra’s unorthodox interest in her brother, the show might have actually jumped the shark.

That would be really disappointing, because Dexter is one of those guilty pleasures that I long for and don’t want to give up.

Anyway, this last season wasn’t bad (just less good) and the featured killers, while at first seemed so shocking as to be unrealistic, turned out to be twisty and captivating.  However, I think promoting Debra put her into a corner and what I mentioned earlier about her newfound feelings felt weird and kind of messed up.

Here’s to hoping that season 7 brings Dexter back from the brink and to its former glory.

Grade – Season 6: 7

Monday, December 19, 2011

How to Make It in America

HowToMakeIt_768x1024.inddAlas, not all HBO shows remarkably improved this year.  How to Make It in America went from being just watchable in its freshman season to slightly interesting during its sophomore outing.

Full disclosure: the main reason I watch this show is the magnetically charming Bryan Greenberg (Ben), but I still hope the show will be good!

Seeing now how high it rates on IMDb (8.4/10 today), I’m starting to think that maybe I’m just not the demographic the producers are after.

The show centers around Ben’s friendship with Cam (Victor Rasuk) and their efforts to get rich and famous by launching a successful clothing line.  There are friends, relatives, and business partners, and the action takes place in the hippest and liveliest of locales: New York City.  It all sounds very exciting right?  And yet, the end result is less than the sum of its parts.

At this point I don’t know if I’ll be watching season 3.  It’s a possibility, mostly because how can one say no to Mr. Greenberg, but I might just drop it from my lineup.

Grade: 6

Hung

hung-season-3For a show that started out with the unlikeliest of premises (a gym teacher finds himself in economic hardship and decides to start prostituting himself to make ends meet) and not the strongest reviews, Hung sure found its footing in the recently ended season 3.

Aside from the obvious magnet of the gorgeous Thomas Jane (Ray Drecker) spending a third of the show without some article of clothing on, what really makes for a good time is the relationship that has been established between him and Jane Adams (Tanya Skagle), who acts as his pimp.

Adams this past season has really outdone herself in terms of comedic timing and acting chops.  She’s definitely established her character as a main part of the show.  Her interactions with either Jane or Rebecca Creskoff (Lenore Bernard), or anyone else for that matter, are really what make the show funny and interesting.

And the addition of a new “stallion” only made for more interesting storylines too!

Grade: 8

Boardwalk Empire

Boardwalk_Empire-Season_2Well, I’m glad I stuck around for the second season of this show even though I wasn’t particularly thrilled about the first one.  This HBO show now certainly deserves all the accolades it prematurely (in my opinion) got showered with.

What I mean to say is that I was a little surprised when it won, among other awards, 1 DGA, 1 WGA, 4 Emmys, 2 Golden Globes, and 2 SAGs after it’s first season, which I honestly found interesting but still budding.  I can’t imagine what it will win after its second go round!!

The drama intensified, the writing sharpened and deepened, the acting was better than ever, and the costumes, cinematography, and art design retained the highest quality that Martin Scorsese infused the pilot with.

If you haven’t checked this show out yet, rent both seasons and watch them back to back.  It’s like a good wine that improves with age.  And the finale’s cliffhanger left me aghast and shocked at the thought of having to wait a whole year before being able to find out what happens next.

Grade – Season 2: 9

The Spielberg Face

A fan’s tribute to the mastery of Steven Spielberg:

Laugh along

When laughter is contagious:

Good riddance

Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s crazy ruling tyrant, is finally dead.

Here’s The New York Times breaking news alert from last night:

Kim Jong-il, the reclusive dictator who kept North Korea at the edge of starvation and collapse, banished to gulags citizens deemed disloyal and turned the country into a nuclear weapons state, died Saturday, according to North Korean state news media.

Called the “Dear Leader” by his people, Mr. Kim, the son of North Korea’s founder, remained an unknowable figure. Everything about him was guesswork, from the exact date and place of his birth to the cause of his death to the mythologized events of his rise in a country formed by the hasty division of the Korean Peninsula at the end of World War II.

North Koreans heard about him only as their “peerless leader” and “the great successor to the revolutionary cause.” Yet he fostered what was perhaps the last personality cult in the Communist world. His portrait hangs beside that of his father, Kim Il-sung, in every North Korean household and building. Towers, banners and even rock faces across the country bear slogans praising him.

Now we’ll see if his son is crazier than he was…

Friday, December 16, 2011

Daytime fireworks

Towleroad pointed me to this incredible display by artist Cai Guo-Qiang:

More here.

The War Is Over

Or at the very least the presence of the US military in Iraq is.  This is the Breaking News alert I received from CNN yesterday:

The United States officially ended its mission in Iraq on Thursday, nearly nine years after it led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Baghdad for the ceremony to personally thank the U.S. troops who have served there, as well as Iraqi security forces.

All U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by the end of the month after Washington and Baghdad failed to agree on terms under which they could remain.

There were about 5,500 American troops in Iraq as of Tuesday, the most recent day American officials in Iraq gave CNN figures.

More from the CNN article:

Hussein's regime proved easy to topple, but no weapons of mass destruction were found, and the United States and its allies were left occupying a country where they were not greeted as liberators -- despite the prediction of Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney.

Iraq erupted into sectarian violence, leaving U.S. troops to try to contain what threatened to become a civil war. Improvised explosive device or IED became a household term; traumatic brain injuries, a signature wound of the war.

[…] In all, the United States spent more than $800 billion in Iraq.

But Panetta reflected on a greater cost.

He said the United States was "deeply indebted" to all Americans in uniform. Nearly 4,500 of them were killed in this war. More than 30,000, wounded.

[…] No one knows for sure how many Iraqis who have been killed since March 2003, but the independent public database Iraq Body Count has compiled reports of more than 150,000 between the invasion and October 2010, with four out of five dead being civilians.

Thousands of other Iraqis struggle to cope with lives marred by war. For them, the battle goes on as the Americans leave behind a fragile nation struggling to establish democracy, struggling to establish stability.

Violence still claims innocent lives in Iraq. People are frustrated with the lack of electricity. Baghdad is awash in trash. No one can predict Iraq's future without the presence of Americans.

I wonder how different the situation would be in the Middle East and for the US in the world had Bush not invaded Iraq after 9/11.  Given what we’ve witnessed with the Arab Spring revolts, Saddam Hussein would have likely been toppled by his own people, supported by the UN/Clinton embargos and no-fly zones that very effectively undermined his rule.

I guess we’ll never know, but the thought of all those lives lost and money wasted compels me to wonder…

The Protester

Time has picked it’s annual “Person of the Year”

the protester

No one could have known that when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in a public square, it would incite protests that would topple dictators and start a global wave of dissent. In 2011, protesters didn’t just voice their complaints; they changed the world.

Sweet video of the day

From Towleroad:

Don’t you just want to adopt one?!

A Quote By

George Clooney, who just signed up to the West Coast production of “8,” Dustin Lance Black’s play about the Proposition 8 trial, about gay civil rights:

“It is astonishing that gay and lesbian Americans are still treated as second-class citizens.  I am confident that, very soon, the laws of this nation will reflect the basic truth that gay and lesbian people -- like all human beings -- are born equal in dignity and rights.”

In Memoriam

Christopher Hitchens (1949 – 2011)

chris hitchens

We have lost a great mind.  The New York Times wrote:

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62.

I liked his thinking and was particularly a fan of his positions on religion.  From Wikipedia:

Identified as a champion of the "New Atheism" movement, Hitchens described himself as an antitheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct," but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion."[12] He argued that the concept of god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization.

R.I.P.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Beware of Facebook’s data collection and retention

Even though I reconnected with some people from my teenage years, I regret ever getting a Facebook account.  I didn’t put that much information in it, but enough to bother me.

And removing it now is useless, something I already knew and that this video simply confirmed:

Use at your own peril.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Breakthrough scientific study

Another one for the ages from the brilliant minds at The Onion:

According to a study published Monday in The New England Journal Of Medicine, getting smacked right across the mouth with a goddamn tree branch really fucking sucks, but after a minute or so, you're pretty much fine.

The study, in which researchers at Boston University documented the reactions of more than 400 unsuspecting volunteers getting smacked right in the mouth with tree branches, found that regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, or socioeconomic background, a full-on, unexpected smack to the mouth with a stupid goddamn tree branch initially really blows, though the subject is more or less okay once a few minutes have passed.

Laugh out loud funny.  Full article here.

Friday, December 09, 2011

Rolling Stones falls for 21

Pink Is the New Blog reports that famed music zine Rolling Stone selected Adele’s 21 as their best of the best, the #1 of their 50 best albums of 2011:

Adele21“Turn my sorrow into treasured gold,” cried Adele Adkins on “Rolling in the Deep.” It was a confession and a prophecy. 21 was this year’s most stunning pop success, transmuting the young Brit’s personal sorrow – the collapse of an 18-month relationship – into a 13-million-selling smash that leapt across borders and oceans and united everyone from teeny-boppers to baby boomers to hip-hop-heads. The sound is state-of-theart retro soul, with touches of Motown, bossa nova and 1970s piano pop. But at its heart was that voice: giant, classic-sounding, promising emotional depth way beyond its years. More than any other album this year, 21 made you feel its pain – from the triple-hankie tear-jerker “Someone Like You” to ripsnorting revenge songs like “Rumour Has It,” where Adele rides a roiling groove and flattens everything in her path.

Couldn’t agree more!!

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Must watch of the day

Towleroad posted about this great video set to Adele’s Set Fire To the Rain:

Andrew Vallentine, the director, writes:

"The music video portrays a man struggling with his sexuality, while the girl in love with him fights to hold on as everything she thought she knew comes crashing down before her. The song speaks of a foolish love that's so hard to let go. This theme is not uncommon, most of us have been subjected to this type of unrequited love in some way, shape, or form. Whether gay or straight, single or taken, if you have not experienced this kind of pain, consider yourself one of the lucky ones."

The choreography is fantastic, but the most striking thing is probably the likeness of Michelle Meredith to Adele herself!

All in all, a great music video.  I bet Adele’s production team wishes they made it themselves…

Monday, December 05, 2011

Animal cruelty

Reading this article made me sick to my stomach:

A controversial procedure performed on dogs and cats known as devocalization or debarking has upset animal lovers, who are now pushing to have the surgery outlawed.

Debarking involves surgically removing an animal’s vocal cords to reduce the sound of the animal’s vocalizations.

“I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” Susan Rawson told WVIT. Her adopted 11-year-old Collie, a former show dog, was devocalized by his previous owner.

“It’s like declawing cats, or taking the voice box out of a baby,” she added. “That’s how they communicate, that’s how they talk. So I think it’s very cruel.”

Massachusetts and New Jersey are the only states to have banned the surgery, which critics decry as mutilation for the convenience for pet owners.

[…] The procedure is banned under the European Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals. The United Kingdom has also outlawed the surgery.

I cannot imagine somebody doing this to a dog simply because they can’t stand the loudness of their barking.  We have two dogs and one of them tends to “over bark,” but that’s her voice, that’s who she is, and there’s always a reason for it, whether we might find it agreeable or not!!

Even comparing this to declawing a cat is way off, because a dog’s vocal cords are used by him to communicate, like a cat’s meow.

It’s just disgusts me to think of the things people will lower themselves to do to the poor creatures they portend to love and protect.

Here’s a video report in which you can see the end result of this inhumane surgery:

Racism in America

When I read this article I couldn’t believe that this was happening in 2011 in America:

A small church in Pike County, Kentucky has voted to ban interracial couples from most church activities “to promote greater unity among the church body.”

Melvin Thompson, former pastor of Gulnare Freewill Baptist church, proposed the ban after Stella Harville brought her fiance, Ticha Chikuni, to services in June. Harville, who goes by the name Suzie, played the piano while Chikuni sang.

Before stepping down as pastor in August, Thompson told Harville that her fiance could not sing at the church again. Harville is white and Chikuni, a native of Zimbabwe, is black.

Last Sunday, church members voted 9-6 in favor of Thompson’s proposed ban. Others attending the church business meeting declined to take a stand on the issue.

“That the Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church does not condone interracial marriage,” the resolution states, according to WKYT.

“Parties of such marriages will not be received as members, nor will they be used in worship services and other church functions, with the exception being funerals. All are welcome to our public worship services. This recommendation is not intended to judge the salvation of anyone, but is intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve.”

Absolutely sickening.

I particularly like these two nuggets:

  1. All are welcome to our public worship services.
  2. This recommendation is not intended to judge the salvation of anyone

Link here.

Thursday, December 01, 2011

2012 Grammys

2012 Grammy NomineesThe nominations for the 2012 Grammy Awards were announced today and my beloved Adele picked up six nods, including the top 3 (Album, Record and Song of the Year).  Lady Gaga will also compete for Album of the Year with Born This Way.

The main categories, from MTV.com:

Album of the Year
» Adele - 21
» Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
» Lady Gaga - Born This Way
» Bruno Mars - Doo-Wops & Hooligans
» Rihanna - Loud

Record of the Year
» Adele - "Rolling In The Deep"
» Bon Iver - "Holocene"
» Bruno Mars - "Grenade"
» Mumford & Sons - "The Cave"
» Katy Perry - "Firework"

Best New Artist
» The Band Perry
» Bon Iver
» J. Cole
» Nicki Minaj
» Skrillex

Song of the Year
» Kanye West, Rihanna, Kid Cudi and Fergie - "All of the Lights" » Mumford & Sons - "The Cave"
» Bruno Mars - "Grenade"
» Bon Iver - "Holocene"
» Adele - "Rolling In The Deep"

Best Pop Solo Performance
» Adele - "Someone Like You"
» Lady Gaga - "Yoü and I"
» Bruno Mars - "Grenade"
» Katy Perry - "Firework"
» Pink - "F***in' Perfect"

Best Pop Duo/Group Performance
» Tony Bennett & Amy Winehouse - "Body and Soul"
» The Black Keys - "Dearest"
» Coldplay - "Paradise"
» Foster The People - "Pumped Up Kicks"
» Maroon 5 and Christina Aguilera - "Moves Like Jagger"

As much as I like Lady Gaga, I’ll be rooting for Adele in each category.  Adele’s 21 is an instant classic, while Born This Way didn’t live up to the very high expectations that Lady Gaga herself had set for it.  Adele’s style is also more what I’m drawn to anyway.

For a full list of nominees, or just to take a look at some of the weirder or more obscure categories listed, click here (it’s a 50 page PDF!!).