I’m posting my thoughts on Ray right now, before it leaves my memory. I will be honest; Taylor Hackford is a cool guy. He knows what he’s doing and he’s a good director. But I just saw Ray at the Beverly Center (avoid this theater—more on that later) and it blew, big time.

Joined by intrepid if slightly lackadaisical cinematography duo Cindy F. and Chuck D., we proceeded into the theater at the very top of the Beverly Center complex. It is large and seems underutilized, but it was a Wednesday night, so I’ll give them some slack. And slack it was, the sound system rates a D- on Phil’s Phonic Quality Rating System (PQRS) and the projector had some major registration issues. The film jumped and jittered vertically (no, that’s not a dance move) which made me feel as if I were starting to go blind. Perhaps the creators intended it this way, to make it a more visceral experience and help us identify with Jamie Foxx? (Who, by the way, was brilliant in this film and its saving grace.) I’m afraid not. All it did was give me a headache and made me want to run out of the theater and complain to management. As a matter of fact, a half hour after the movie should have ended, Cindy did just that, but alas, alack, to no avail.

You can’t be anyone other than who you are, so don’t even try. Actors exempted.

From Chris Jenkins: “Technology should be your mistress.”

(then I think: “Oh, but she is….”)

Found Kevin Thompson’s blogsite (well, okay, I asked him today in class), and from there that took me to Cindy Fang’s blog. Yeah, they’re cool, I guess. But they don’t run their own webserver like me and I’ll bet dollars to donuts they didn’t install their blog software themselves. :) Okay, geekiness rant over.

This cracked me up. If you don’t know Whose Line…?, watch it.

(order: Wayne, Chip, Colin, Ryan; subject: something that could go bad on a date—falling out of the car) Now, you have to sing this as you read it, or it won’t be as much fun.

Oh, Heidi-didi-didi-didi, didi-didi-di

My date and I were drivin’
I’m lucky to be alive
We were goin over 60
It wasn’t my kind of jive
Then my door opened
It could not be beat
I fell right out
…Boy, that was neat

I found the website of fellow film student Kevin and his wife Alice. It’s a little out-of-date but stays current with new posts, almost exclusively from Alice. I have playfully chastised Kevin for neglecting to post an update in a year and a half. Then if everyone gets a blog we can just all read each other’s websites and stay up to date without ever actually having to talk to one another. Kinda like what I’m doing right now. Sheesh.

Ever since I got Elgato’s EyeTV 200 thingie, my life has become more fragmented. I start to watch a TV show but I pause it at the first commercial break because I want to make chocolate milk and write a weblog entry about how my life is fragmented. Then I get back to the TV program program and skip the commercial breaks for the rest of the show because I’ve built enough of a buffer to skip them. So in a “real” hour I get stuff done in one big block of time (say 20 min. or so) and leave the rest of it to the “network” hour (the remaining 40 min. or so). Ideally. Sometimes it doesn’t work that way but thank G-d for the gizmos that let the attention deficit generation live attention deficit lives. I’m not saying that I’m ADD. I’m just saying that the ADD consumers drive the marketplace and I reap the benefits. Anyway, enough chatterwauling (yes, that was intentional). Time to get back to Law & Order: Criminal Intent. 🙂

http://interactive.usc.edu/

Check out this TellBush.org thing. Eeeeenteresting…. Hey, I never said USC Cinema-Television was a Republican school—our admissions standards usually don’t allow it. 🙂