Road trip

First off, the blog for the trip is: matt-moore.blogspot.com. I sent out an email this morning to people only to discover that apparently I have not updated my email for a while since there were about five or six people that I had old addresses for. So if you are reading this here and didn't get a message I probably need your email address.

I'm leaving tomorrow for the trip. I was thinking about leaving today but I still have too many things to do to get out of here before this afternoon and I'd rather start off earlier than that.

I totally kicked ass at Risk last night. Only I didn't really, but we stopped playing, and I had the most places. Even though I had already executed game plan Alpha 14 - Wandering Hordes. It's damn near unbeatable. Sort of.

I'm not really sure what else I have to say right now. I've been in a strange mood all week. I think it's the anticipation of leaving, mixed with the anticipation of graduation, mixed with a general feeling of anticipation. Also I'm a bit anxious, and I'm a little anticipatory about that.

The movie "Next" with Nic Cage is actually, and completely surprisingly, a pretty decent movie. There are some bad scenes in it, and some of the acting is a little flat. And Jullian Moore's character gets a lot of build up for not much pay out, but I actually really enjoyed it. The special effects worked for the most part, and in the important parts. The bad hair was a bit annoying but it worked with the character. The ending was a bit of a cop out. I'm not saying this movie is a masterpiece, but it's not nearly as bad as people would have you believe.

I watched the movie "Jawbreaker" on demand last week and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's an older movie now. It has Rose McGowen and the chick who played Kitty on Arrested Development. And some other less important people. The thing about this movie is that it is total camp. Snakes on a Plane camp. The critics fucking hated it, I looked it up later, but I think that if they went back round to it today after camp has started making its way back mainstream they'd have something better to say about it. The movie is full of all these cliches and stereotype characters and just really dumb characters, but if you believe, as I do, that the movie makers knew what they were doing, then the movie takes on a level of satire of all high school movies. In that way its like "Not Another Teen Movie" only its more subtle. You kind of have to accept that the movie is self-mocking in order to see it, I think, as JJ watched most of it with me and didn't think it was being self-mocking at all. But it was, I tell you! It was. It's really funny if you let it be funny, but you have to look deeper than the surface.

Also, while I'm on the subject, 12 Angry Men and Hollywoodland are both very good movies that I would suggest. 12 Angry Men seems almost trite in its subject matter and how the facts are presented in our modern 4 CSI, 3 Law and Order, 10 to the 10th power other criminal procedure shows. But as a film this is great. It keeps you in the jury room the entire time of the movie and really pushes you into the situation and into the spot. The reason I say it might be appear trite is because some of the things they discover about the case seem like they'd be pretty obvious. But I suppose it could be speaking to a lot of things why such obvious things as they discover aren't figured out by the lawyer. I won't go much more into it than that, but its a good movie. Hollywoodland isn't fantastic. It's good. And its fun, and its leaves you with a strange sense of wonder at the way of the world. But it doesn't work on a lot of levels. One level of which is Ben Affleck, who I am usually a fan of, but not so much here. I think the real problem, though, is that they treat the suicide/murder with more weight then they are actually able to get it to carry. Its just that the whole movie is starting at that point at leading back up to that point and figuring it out, but I guess I just never really got to a point were I cared how it happened or who was responsible. The weight of it is really only seen in the way the children react, and they fall short in that department because they don't seem to really want to deal with kids in the movie at all. This movie would have been great if they had said fuck the flashbacks and just started at the death and moved forward in a straight line instead of giving us all the Affleck scenes. They felt so forced, and they didn't always lead anywhere, which kind of makes the person watching the movie feel like maybe they are being tricked but in the end the only trick revealed is that the film makers are kind of jerks. And I don't even know if thats a trick, per se. But I do recommend seeing it, especially if you like detective fiction and noir film. It isn't noir, and it isn't detective fiction in the standard sense, but that makes for an interesting compination in the film. A sort of new American noir, maybe. I don't know. If you go in expecting to see a lot of intregue but know you aren't going to walk away with any clear answers it would be a fine movie for you to see.

Okay, I don't really know why I spent so much time doing film reviews right now, but whatever, there they are.

And I'm off.