WHO THE FUCK CAN RESIST A MOVIE STARRING BOTH DEBBIE GIBSON *AND* TIFFANY? (Also, Micky Dolenz of The Monkees is in this briefly.)
Carolyn was feeling kind of sick, so we didn’t want to waste a good movie on sickness. Thus, we finally had a chance to watch another movie by The Asylum — a company that makes deliberately bad movies. Often mockbusters, but sometimes “original” ideas like this one. Now add the fact that it’s a SyFy original movie just to make the endeavor that much more awful.
But with the cast of these two has-been (but well-respected by me) pop stars at the helm, how could I fucking resist? HOW COULD I? I’d be doing a grave disservice to 16-year-old me. Y’know, I STILL have two copies of the Tiffany cassette because I couldn’t figure out which print had the shade of red that I liked better as her hair color. And I still have the 7″ single to Only In My Dreams by Debbie Gibson.
I have no shame.
Carolyn: “That movie was terrible. I don’t think it had any redeeming qualities. Except for the boobs. Those boobs were really good, but not enough to save that trainwreck of a movie.”
Man. This movie had such potential. The main cast is Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, Jim Carrey, Olivia Wilde, and (less so) James Gandolfini (Sopranos!) and Alan Arkin (The Change-Up, Argo, Gattaca, Grosse Pointe Blank, The Last Unicorn, Edward Scissorhands).
These are all great actors.
The premise was suspicious — rival magicians? Well, it’s just ridiculous enough that it could work! They make fun of Criss Angel, and do make a valid point that these new “magicians” aren’t doing tricks… They are doing stunts, and that’s not “magic”.
It’s directed by the 30 Rock director. People say that’s funny, right? Well at this point, I’m less likely to watch 30 Rock than ever… Because this movie FELL FLAT. Let’s look at who wrote it… A guy involved in Shit My Dad Says (the show). If I’d known that… I’d probably have steered clear of this movie. The other writer was Mitch from the movie Waiting, but yea… These guys don’t write funny things I’ve heard of.
So yes. Magic-partner buddy bromance with a side of romance, and a side of friendship. Many ingredients that could have worked together well, but ultimately did not.
Basics of reduced functionality:
Infinite zooming windows fill all available bandwidth. I used to browse 5 peoples’ favorites all at once - i always open the favorites of anyone who favorites any of my photos. If you do that now, each window takes up 10X more bandwidth, because they are a bunch of hi-res pics instead of thumbnails.
Previously i could click the next 2 pages of someone’s favorites (next 6 if it’s page 1), and have it preloaded in another tab. Basically, I had an unending, uninterrupted stream of images to my eyes. Which is THE POINT of a photo site.
If something was interesting, I would click on it.
Now? Nope, no preview. You have to load the full size of everything. And if you want to preload the next page, you have to go to the bottom of the page to click that. Except you can’t, because ajax requests will fill the page up with new full-size-bandwidth-sucking images.
Nevermind that when you finally get to the bottom of page 1, it always says you are on page 2.
The net result is - by the time i cycle through to a tab, maybe 5 or 10 more images have loaded.
More intensive means harder. Doesn’t matter if someone is 56kbps or 100Mbps. Using more bandwidth than you want to use is always a bad thing. My bandwidth is often tight due to use patterns here.
-*-
That’s just one of many examples.
How about the crowded page? If I’m in another application, and click back to chrome (because I left a favorites page in mid-load, becuase it takes forever), I need to scroll. Previously I could click on the whitespace to change my focus. Now I need to be extra careful and only click on the scrollbar, or on the TINY TINy whitespace between pictures. Smaller click targets are harder by definition.
And the penalty for missing? You have to re-load the HUGE UNENDING PAGE again. And if you were near the bottom? It might take 5 minutes to load the pictures to get back to where you were. Back button is no longer sufficient like in the past.
Same thing if you accidentally close a tab. You can re-open it (“undo tab close”) … But your connection will be servered, and you generally won’t be able to scroll down any further. So if you want to pick up where you’ve left off, you have to reload all the huge, full-size, neverending pictures up to the point where you were. Which will always, always take more time and bandwidth than with the old flickr.
-*-
I have meaningful titles and captions written for all my photos. When you went to my page, you would see them. That was part of what I was building every day for 8 years.
Now? You don’t see them. The curative info I worked hard to create is now buried past a click.
Same thing with privacy settings. Previously you could see which pictures were public/private by the color next to it. But they removed those summaries. If I want to go change the status, I first have to get to the picture on the neverending hi-res large-bandwidth page (which itself can be a problem if it’s 300 down), and click into it… Just to find out something I could find out before.
-*-
Same thing with views. I would look at my first few pages and see the view counts. Now I can’t do that. Unless I click into every damn image.
Do I need to explain the concept that having more user interactions to get to user information is a bad thing? I’m a web developer myself, and even with my 10 years experience, I know better.
-*-
Same thing with when a photo was uploaded. When going through someone’s photostream, I often only want to go back to see their most recent (say, 2 months) images. So I would browse back until I saw a date of 2 months ago. Except now that date is buried. There’s no way to know. Yay for hiding photo information from a photo view on a photo viewing website!
-*-
They took away browser zoom when viewing individual photos. Previously I would use browser zoom to zoom into the picture. Sometimes I want it 50% larger than my screen to look at a detail. This applies to preview resolution AND full resolution.
Now they override that, removing a basic browser functionality, and making it harder to control the size of the image I’m viewing. On an image viewing website. Genius.
Ironically, they still allow browser zoom during the neverending-highres vomit view… And that’s the one place you DON’T want it, because you’re suddenly resizing 400 images at once, throwing yourself onto a totally different part of the page. THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF HOW IT SHOULD BE ON BOTH COUNTS!
-*-
Now I’m going to grab some popcorn a wait for the inevitable No True Scotsman and Ad Hominem responses.
Got up around 7:25AM, made it out driving by 7:54AM, and went out until 12:57pm for a total of 5h3m hours (AGAIN?!) (3h24m spent driving, 1h39m spent at sales).
Spent $26.25 plus ~$15.52 gas for 56.6 miles of driving (14 mpg @ $3.84/G), for a total cost of $41.77.
We drove to 40 yard sales, stopping at 25 (62%) of them.
We made 17 purchases (31 items) for a total estimated value of $320.02, leading to a profit/savings of $278.25.
So in essence, we multiplied our initial investment by 7.6X. (Also, if you think about it, the profit counts for even more when you consider that we have to earn $317 on the job, pre-tax, in order to take home the $278 in cash that we saved here. How long does $278 of disposable income take to earn, vs the 5 hrs we spent here?) Anyway, this works out to a *post-tax* “wage” of $55.10/hr as a couple or $27.55/hr per person.
COMMENTARY/ANECDOTES:
Clint’s back hurt, so Carolyn drove this time. Clint did the navigating, gathering of stats, and counting how many yardsales we hit and drove by. Usually the situation is the opposite.
Twice, Carolyn took 4 seconds to notice the light turning green (left turn green arrow, the rarest of all greens!). She needs to pay more attention. I’d have beeped if I were behind her :)
We saw the solar system floor puzzle we bought last year.
“Yardfishing” looked like an interesting game, but we didn’t buy it.
We passed on some items, too: Simon & Garfunkel vinyl, a banjo that was also a tambourine for $3, smallest cello ever (it seemed way smaller than a normal cello). We also almost got a gavel after talking about how we didn’t have a gavel during a recent hangout, but decided against it in the end.
Carolyn missed $20 “cat walk” thing because she wouldn’t get out of the car, sitting in it, for like TEN minutes. Carolyn… If I’m at a sale that long, that means its good… So get out and join me! (She does this sometimes.)
“He puts the kid in skid.” – Clint’s comment about a kid who was running towards the street, who skidded and fell over. Carolyn was laughing for awhile about that comment.
Every year, we are reminded that “If the signage sux, so does the sale!” Particularly true today. If there is a mis-spelling, or a lack of arrows creating an ambiguity — it’s a virtual guarantee that the actual stuff at the sale will be shitty as well. Stupid people don’t have good stuff. Smart people do.
Awesome kitty cat pet session interupted by rustling in the bamboo. (It was a seal-point himalayan.) That cat was so friendly. The old lady told us how the cat was missing for 3 years and then she got it back because of its microchip. Her house was built in the 1700s, before Mount Vernon. Some of the windows did indeed look old.
THE BOOTY:
$5.00: throw, electric, red plaid, Sunbeam, M85AP E23623SP (EV:$29.96) – We already have one of these, but sometimes we had fought over who gets to use it, so it doesn’t hurt to have another.
$5.00: razor, electric, Philips/Norelco, 7145XL. (EV:$50.00) – We had recently spent $26.76 on replacement blades for Clint’s very similar razor
$4.00: action figure, Iron Man, walking, talking, shooting rockets, remote control for your wrist, large, 12.75″ tall, 9 joints, 2009, MVLFFLLC, ours is missing the two shoulder guns and 1 of the missiles (EV:$13.00, but ours has the remote and 3 missiles) - Here’s a review that is pretty accurate: “He falls and he falls a lot.” They even have a video. Theirs walks more than ours did. This thing is pretty funny, though.
$3.00: sheets, queen-sized, blue, 1 fitted, 1 regular (EV:$20.98) We needed a queen-sized fitted sheet because one of ours had ripped, and another is slightly too small for our bed.
$2.00: game, top bowling game, Mespi Kegelspiel Birilli Skittles Jeu de quilles, art. 14500, http://www.mespi.com/ (EV:$98.90 euros = $130.94) – really hard to believe this is worth that much, but apparently this game originally came out in 1920, and that may be the price for an original. Still, I couldn’t find this, and some niche person who really holds this in nostalgic value might actually pony up that money. I’ll call this $50 to be a bit conservative.
$2.00: vent/register covers (2), wood, 13.5×5.5″ (2@$1.00/ea) (EV:$19.99*2=$39.98) – Unfortunately, these were too big to fit in our vents. Who can use these?
$1.25: VHS tapes (5@$0.25/ea), Pink Floyd’s The Wall (EV:$2.95), Terminator 2 (EV:$5.98), Better Off Dead (EV:$6.97), What Dreams May Come (EV:$4.13), 12 Monkeys (EV:$6.95) – Extra VHS tapes to play on our kitchen TV during parties.
$1.00: game, mystery game, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, still in wrapping, Sleuth Productions LTD, SL-100 (EV:$24.99, but ours is shrink-wrapped) – Could be interesting to host a murder party.
$1.00: game, Game Of Life: Indiana Jones version (EV:$19.99) – We got this with Steve in mind, but y’know what? This is a totally different game from the normal game. We’re gonna have to play this, actually!
$1.00: lightbulbs, (8@$0.12 each) (4 75watt, 4 100 watt) (EV:$4.37 for 6, so $0.73/each, so $5.83) – Not as good as the deal from Home Depot where the lightbulbs were $0.10 each, but still a good deal
$1.00: bobblehead, Star Wars, Boba Fette, Funco 2008 (6.25″ tall) (EV:$8.19) – Well, my name is Boba Fett, you know my shit is tight.
$FREE: toy, Pengiun, car, 1991, 3.125×2.375″ (EV:$0.99) – We already had this. Oops.
$FREE: toy, Batgirl, car, 1991, 3.625×2.25″ (EV:$0.99, but ours isn’t inbox) – We already had this. Oops.
$FREE: cup, Batman Returns, Batman & Catgirl, McDonald’s 1992, 5.625″ (EV:$8.99) This guy was getting rid of all his plastic cups from back in the day.
* EV stands for “Estimated Value”, which I estimate by looking things up in Google Shopping/Google/Amazon/Ebay. I don’t always deduct for an item being used, unless it’s actually in worse condition in a way that matters. For example, I estimate books at the cover value. I also try to only count shipping if it’s the type of thing that would need to be shipped, and only if the price isn’t “fixed” (i.e. 1 cent items that cost $10 to ship would not be $10 in person).
Basics of reduced functionality:
Infinite zooming windows fill all available bandwidth. I used to browse 5 peoples’ favorites all at once - i always open the favorites of anyone who favorites any of my photos. If you do that now, each window takes up 10X more bandwidth, because they are a bunch of hi-res pics instead of thumbnails.
Previously i could click the next 2 pages of someone’s favorites (next 6 if it’s page 1), and have it preloaded in another tab. Basically, I had an unending, uninterrupted stream of images to my eyes. Which is THE POINT of a photo site.
If something was interesting, I would click on it.
Now? Nope, no preview. You have to load the full size of everything. And if you want to preload the next page, you have to go to the bottom of the page to click that. Except you can’t, because ajax requests will fill the page up with new full-size-bandwidth-sucking images.
Nevermind that when you finally get to the bottom of page 1, it always says you are on page 2.
The net result is - by the time i cycle through to a tab, maybe 5 or 10 more images have loaded.
More intensive means harder. Doesn’t matter if someone is 56kbps or 100Mbps. Using more bandwidth than you want to use is always a bad thing. My bandwidth is often tight due to use patterns here.
-*-
That’s just one of many examples.
How about the crowded page? If I’m in another application, and click back to chrome (because I left a favorites page in mid-load, becuase it takes forever), I need to scroll. Previously I could click on the whitespace to change my focus. Now I need to be extra careful and only click on the scrollbar, or on the TINY TINy whitespace between pictures. Smaller click targets are harder by definition.
And the penalty for missing? You have to re-load the HUGE UNENDING PAGE again. And if you were near the bottom? It might take 5 minutes to load the pictures to get back to where you were. Back button is no longer sufficient like in the past.
Same thing if you accidentally close a tab. You can re-open it (“undo tab close”) … But your connection will be servered, and you generally won’t be able to scroll down any further. So if you want to pick up where you’ve left off, you have to reload all the huge, full-size, neverending pictures up to the point where you were. Which will always, always take more time and bandwidth than with the old flickr.
-*-
I have meaningful titles and captions written for all my photos. When you went to my page, you would see them. That was part of what I was building every day for 8 years.
Now? You don’t see them. The curative info I worked hard to create is now buried past a click.
Same thing with privacy settings. Previously you could see which pictures were public/private by the color next to it. But they removed those summaries. If I want to go change the status, I first have to get to the picture on the neverending hi-res large-bandwidth page (which itself can be a problem if it’s 300 down), and click into it… Just to find out something I could find out before.
-*-
Same thing with views. I would look at my first few pages and see the view counts. Now I can’t do that. Unless I click into every damn image.
Do I need to explain the concept that having more user interactions to get to user information is a bad thing? I’m a web developer myself, and even with my 10 years experience, I know better.
-*-
Same thing with when a photo was uploaded. When going through someone’s photostream, I often only want to go back to see their most recent (say, 2 months) images. So I would browse back until I saw a date of 2 months ago. Except now that date is buried. There’s no way to know. Yay for hiding photo information from a photo view on a photo viewing website!
-*-
They took away browser zoom when viewing individual photos. Previously I would use browser zoom to zoom into the picture. Sometimes I want it 50% larger than my screen to look at a detail. This applies to preview resolution AND full resolution.
Now they override that, removing a basic browser functionality, and making it harder to control the size of the image I’m viewing. On an image viewing website. Genius.
Ironically, they still allow browser zoom during the neverending-highres vomit view… And that’s the one place you DON’T want it, because you’re suddenly resizing 400 images at once, throwing yourself onto a totally different part of the page. THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF HOW IT SHOULD BE ON BOTH COUNTS!
-*-
Now I’m going to grab some popcorn a wait for the inevitable No True Scotsman and Ad Hominem responses.
Clint: 4.6/5 stars, 9/10.
Carolyn: 5/5 stars, 9/10.
Jesse: 5/5 stars, 10/10. (I made this rating up for Jesse, based on him saying it might be his favorite movie of all time.)
Native ratings: 4.2/5 stars Netflix, 7.8/10 IMDB.
Cloud Atlas, The Fountain, Click, Benjamin Button, Ink (2009), Inception (a bit). Smush them all together and you get this movie. I was hooked in the first 20 seconds. This was awesome.
Basically, this movie is about making choices, and the parallel universes that arise with each choice that is made. Hell, they even touch on string theory, chaos theory, and the butterfly effect at points… It is also about how it’s better to make a decision than it is to stand there scared of the various consequences that may arise.
The structure of the movie is pretty amazing, and the cinematography is 10/10 for sure. Over 500 visual effects.
It also had a better than average soundtrack. Mr. Sandman … used even more than in 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag!
Clint: 4.6/5 stars, 9/10.
Carolyn: 5/5 stars, 9/10.
Jesse: 5/5 stars, 10/10. (I made this rating up for Jesse, based on him saying it might be his favorite movie of all time.)
Native ratings: 4.2/5 stars Netflix, 7.8/10 IMDB.
Cloud Atlas, The Fountain, Click, Benjamin Button, Ink (2009), Inception (a bit). Smush them all together and you get this movie. I was hooked in the first 20 seconds. This was awesome.
Basically, this movie is about making choices, and the parallel universes that arise with each choice that is made. Hell, they even touch on string theory, chaos theory, and the butterfly effect at points… It is also about how it’s better to make a decision than it is to stand there scared of the various consequences that may arise.
The structure of the movie is pretty amazing, and the cinematography is 10/10 for sure. Over 500 visual effects.
It also had a better than average soundtrack. Mr. Sandman … used even more than in 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag!
A pretty long article talking about various science studies, and the cell phone corporations’ war against science – including a copy of one of their own memos where they talk about thwarting science.
Slightly creepy movie with a message about how broken our mental health & pharmaceutical systems are. But just when you think it’s a political drama…. It turns out to be more of a mystery/thriller than you expect. The twists in tone made the “fucked up”-edness feel that much more sinister. Briefly confusing, with everything making sense in the end. Things do not go where you’d expect; I was actually reminded of the feeling of watching the end of Wild Things when this movie ended — everything not quite being what it seemed.
Watched this with Jesse, who seemed to enjoy it a lot, though he had some problems finding Catherine Zeta-Jones’s character/acting believable.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh (The Informant!, Contagion, Erin Brockovitch, Sex, Lies, & Videotape, Ocean’s 11, Solaris, Full Frontal). Soderberg is a major hit-or-miss director with us — I flat out hated several of his films, and only really liked 50% of them. But I keep coming back for more because of the better half of Soderberg films — and this was in that half.
PLOT SUMMARY: The true story of a man who successfully impersonated a pilot (piloting over 2M miles) and a doctor — one of the best career impersonators in history. He developed a strange kind of friendship with the very agent who was pursuing him. In real life, they are still friends to this day. At least, according to the movie.
UNCOMFORTABLE PLOT SUMMARY (inspired by this): [highlight for spoilers]→Impersonating liar lies his way into jail, lucrative career.
QUIRKS: Based on the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr.’s life. Lies, subterfuge, impersonation, fraud, having “the man” chase after you.
This is the concluding part of Steven Spielberg’s unofficial “running man trilogy”: A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can.
MORALS: If you don’t mind going to jail for awhile, lying ultimately pays off.
POLITICS: Putting criminals in jail is good, but using them to stop even more criminals is probably better — even if it means letting a bad guy “get away with it”. Less overall crime is good.
GOOD STUFF: The lies! Such incredible lies!
CONCLUSION: Worth seeing. Good actors, interesting story.
RATINGS:
Clint: Netflix: 4/5 stars. IMDB: 8/10. I dunno what I really think, I’m deferring my rating to Carolyn.
Carolyn: Netflix: 4/5 stars. IMDB: 8/10.
The native public rating for this movie is: IMDB: 7.8/10, Netflix: 3.8/5 stars (Netflix‘s predicted rating for us was 3.7/5 stars).
RECOMMENDATION: Worth seeing. Good actors, interesting story.
SIMILAR MOVIES:The Informant – another movie that takes place over 10 yrs ago and is full of lies and paranoia.
MOVIE QUOTES:
Principal Evans: Mr. and Mrs. Abagnale, this is not a question of your son’s attendance. I regret to inform you that, for the past week, Frank has been teaching Mrs. Glasser’s French class.
Paula Abagnale: He what?
Principal Evans: Your son has been pretending to be a substitute teacher, lecturing the students, uh, giving out homework, uh. Mrs. Glasser has been ill, there was some confusion with the real sub. Your son held a teacher-parent conference yesterday and was planning a class field trip to a French bread factory in Trenton.
Carl Hanratty: Well, would you like to hear me tell a joke?
Earl Amdursky: Yeah. Yeah, we’d love to hear a joke from you.
Carl Hanratty: Knock knock.
Earl Amdursky: Who’s there?
Carl Hanratty: Go fuck yourselves.
Mood: sick of yardwork Music:Anthrax – Metal Thrashing Mad (live)
Spazzing out on the cat tree. Oranjello the cat, cat tree, scratching tree cat toy. upstairs, Clint and Carolyn’s house, Alexandria, Virginia. September 24, 2012 Originally posted at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzM6henrRc8
Mood: eh
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