CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

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POLARITY 223

Monday, December 18, 2006

this entry brought to you by the living things, "bombs below"


THE GOOD

A History of Violence David Cronenberg is famous for making weird, heady movies, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise when the first thing out of my mouth after seeing Cronenberg's latest was "well, that was weird." It's not weird in a David Lynch-ian "What the hell is going on?" way, but it has a second half almost completely different in tone than the first half. We begin with a horrific murder of three innocent people out in the middle of nowhere by two cross-country traveling serial killers, are then introduced to a small-town family man Tom Stall (played by Viggo Mortenson with boyish, aw-shucks innocence) who becomes a local hero when he saves the day from an attack by the two killers. The movie then becomes a curious study on how violence begets violence as Stall's life unravels due to his heroic act, and ends, oddly enough, as a gritty, body-filled gangster movie. A History of Violence leaves you bewildered as to why it chose to go from point A to point B, but all the while it is impossible to take your eyes off of, and is helped along by its brisk, to-the-point pacing, that still manages lots of character. I get the point of the movie, the statement. I just don't know exactly what to make of it, other than that I liked it.

Buying Rolling Stone on a regular basis again I pulled out my latest issue of RS the other week at work, and a guy I know popped his head up and said "I fucking hate Rolling Stone." I flipped to the cover and looked at it for a moment and said that yes, as a music magazine it barely qualifies, and sometimes seems to have to be reminded, oh yeah, we're supposed to be about music, when he continued, "It's way too liberal." Funny, I was about to say "...But I like how liberal it is." I'm very happy that I've decided to pick up RS on a monthly basis, because while the music news is nice-- I can't get enough information on music, and I honestly wish I could read even more-- the real reason I look forward to buying it again is how liberal the magazine is, and how in-depth its journalism is. Frankly, I'm sorry I ever stopped reading it, or that I didn't pick it back up earlier.

Sexy album cover alert!: Deftones, Saturday Night Wrist I used to work right next to an independent music store, so when I went to lunch every day I walked by it. They had a poster of the album cover to the new Deftones up in the window, so I noticed as soon as it went up how wonderfully sexy it was. Still, they already have an album, Around the Fur that has a sexy cover, so when I saw it I didn't exactly give it too much of a second thought. It was just an awesomely sexy album cover. Weeks later I was on the Internet and found out that the title of the album was Saturday Night Wrist, and suddenly, the woman's anticipating, upturned face took on a whole new meeting. Suddenly I felt very dirty for looking at it, and suddenly much more turned on than I was when I first saw it.

Jenny Lewis I'm probably about the 8 billionth indie kid to say this, but holy shit Jenny Lewis is fucking cute.

How to Dance Like a White Guy The first time I saw this I couldn't stop laughing. Although it's put together like an instructional video, it could have very well been made like a nature video, going into the natural environment where honkies go through bizarre and frightening mating rituals. Classic.


THE BAD

Anger Management When I first heard about Anger Management, a movie that combined Adam Sandler, an everyman known for his manic shouting and bursts of rage, with Jack Nicholson, an icon for coolness also known for his manic shouting and bursts of rage, it didn't seem like it could possibly go wrong. And for the record, Jack is great, freed from the restraints of drama, able to fly off the handle at a hilarious moment's notice. For Sandler this is business as usual (though much more restrained business than normal; more Spanglish than Happy Gilmore), but Nicholson seems to revel in the fact that he can curl his eyebrows and give his devilish smile as much as he wants and the movie will be better for it. So why did the moviemakers take such a stupid vehicle to put these two geniuses through? Honestly, did they even need a script? They could've just let Sandler and Nicholson loose with a camera and that would've been a better movie. Nobody expects a realistic, believable plot in a Sandler movie, but the plot here is so ridiculously unbelievable it's difficult to attach oneself to it. There are some good laughs to be found here (the best non-Nicholson moments come from John Turturro, who plays Chuck, a certifiable lunatic who is partnered with Sandler's character in anger management class), but it doesn't stop Anger Management from being an exercise in wasted potential.

Classmates.com The first time I heard about Classmates.com, I was really annoyed that you had to pay to sign up for it. Sure, it made sense-- years ago, when Classmates first started, the Internet had this idea of making people pay subscription fees for everything, even things people wouldn't actually ordinarily pay subscription fees for, as opposed to finding alternate ways of making a profit. I really, really wanted to hook up with high school classmates, but paying for it? And if I did pay for it, I would only be able to access other alumni who also signed up to pay for it. The people who pay money to hook up with other high school friends are the socialite people you could probably find doing a normal Google search. But the bigger point is, in the days of Myspace, where I can just click a button-- for free, mind you-- and find hundreds of people from my high school graduating year, or for that matter, my friends that didn't graduate from my school, why would I pay for Classmates? Ironically, Classmates is a huge advertiser on Myspace. Do they make any revenue nowadays? How exactly do they still exist?

Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2006 You are Time's person of the year. That's right, you. It's got something to do with the average consumer driving the Internet world with user created content like Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, or some such crap, which is awesome I guess, except that it seems like a huge cop-out. I don't need to be told how fucking awesome I am for following the pack.

Downloading files that never finish I don't know if you use BitTorrent like I do, but this is where we primarily get our television shows that we see, and lately, music (this year I haven't had much income to spend on music, though last year I bought 44 CDs). What happens is I'll be downloading some file and it says that I’m sharing with 400 people, and I'll be downloading at a blazing 350k/second. The file gets all the way to 98.7%, and suddenly screeches to a halt-- turns out none of the 400 people on-line have the completed file, and it just sits there for days at 98.7%, occasionally downloading at 1k/second for a few moments, then goes back to sitting there, dead. This isn't always a big deal; usually with .avi files we can go ahead and just play it and it'll only be missing a few seconds. Or if it's a record I'm downloading, often it's just one song that didn't get completed, and I'll just have to live with it, hoping against hope that it just happens to not be the best song on the album. It's a real nuisance when this happens with zip files, though-- unless the zip is 100% completed, it won't unzip. And I pray to the Internet gods that someone, somewhere, has the complete file and logs on. I usually run out of patience, though.

Vida Guerra I'm not completely opposed to the idea of a model famous for her generous posterior, but maybe I'd care a little bit more if she wasn't dressed like she was modeling for a hot rod magazine every time I saw her.
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with love from CRS @ 11:14 PM 

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