David "The Rock" Nelson--"The Ed Wood of the '90s--and beyond"

I'm torn between the need to acknowledge my sources and this feeling that Brent would not want me to publicize that he directed me to this site David "The Rock" Nelson BASEMENT OF BLOODY HORROR!!. He aspires to be the next Ed Wood. Apparently Hillary Clinton appears and even gets a close-up in his film Devil Ant. She was unknowingly filmed by Nelson, and then he fashioned the script in part around the footage.

Conrad Brooks foregoes his usual character roles in films like Attack of the Giant Gull or El Cerebro de Hitler!, and gets the title role in Conrad Brooks Vs. the Werewolf. I can definitely wait to see it.

Be sure to impose the correct meaning

I tried to watch Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966) on Thursday night, but I wasn't impressed and kept falling asleep during it, giving up after an hour and going to bed. However, I listened to the scholarly commentary track anyway the next day at school. All I knew about Blowup when I got it from the library was that it was famous and important (but not why), it was by Antonioni, and it was about a photographer who may have inadvertently photographed a murder. I also knew that there was a film by an Italian director with a photographer whose name is the origin of the word "paparazzi." (It wasn't until friday morning that I found out I was thinking of Fellini's La Dolce Vita.) The commentator kept going on about how it was abstract filmmaking and had no meaning until the viewer imposes a meaning on it. But, I was doing just that--the meaning I imposed on it was that this photographer (who isn't named) was photographing someone famous in the park--and found the film to be quit lacking. However, when the commentator told me how to think about it--the need for opinions to be validated by another is important to the film, too--I understood it, and especially after seeing the absurd ending, I did kinda like it.

You've got (junk) mail

I got yet another AOL CD today. I've been keeping them, thinking one day I'll send them to the guys at www.nomoreaolcds.com. At the moment I have accumulated 34 (12 for version 9.0; 13 for 8.0; 5 for 7.0; 1 for 6.0; 2 for 4.0; 1 undertermined version). I'm not sure how far back that stretches, and I know this is not all that I have recieved. (That they sometimes send them in DVD cases is pretty nice of them.)

I'm not totally sure how the PRSRT STD postage that AOL uses works, but according to the USPS website, the presorted parcel rate for a 3-ounce package (roughly the weight of one AOL CD) is $0.761. Thus, for postage alone, AOL has spent $25.87 to try to get me to use their service, which now costs $23.90 per month. This does not include any costs of actually producing the CD with the software on it or its packaging. This new one offers me three free months, and so when will they start making a profit from me signing up for their service? Is this a good business model?

In order to help balance the scales, AOL has apparently started selling advertising space on their mailers. Today's CD includes a "Free Spider-Man 2 Game Movie Preview." This does not strike me as a financially effective way to get more people who would not see it already to see Spider-Man 2.

Я могу писать блог по-русски?

Печально, нет. Многие слова и грамматики ушли с ума.

I'm bloggin' now.

i'm a blogger now. woo-hoo.

i decided five or six days ago to start blogging and wrote my first post but it took me few days to get around to finding a place to post it. read on:

Title: Yeah, I have a forum review the movies I watch now.

Vanilla Sky (2001), written for the screen and directed by Cameron Crowe, based on Abre los Ojos, directed by Alejandro Amenábar, written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil. I saw Abre los Ojos about a year before I finally saw Vanilla Sky, and I think I would have liked it more if I hadn’t. Many films with a twist ending play better upon the second viewing; however, I don’t think this is one. There are way too many pop culture references, well-know songs, and allusions to other films in Vanilla Sky. Since a lot of this film is a dream, it would stand to reason that there would be these references (I had a dream I was flatmates with John Cheever a few weeks ago.) but as good as Radiohead, U2, and R.E.M. are, in this film they are distractions. Perhaps it’s that many of the references are fully explained, like the cover of reenactment of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan's cover photo. Would I have gotten that the two of them walking down the street was a reference to that album cover if they had not later returned to the shot and morphed into the cover? No. What did I learn from this shot? Cameron Crowe likes The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which just distracts me from the couple he’s trying to tell me about. As if the distracting music in the film weren’t enough, on Crowe’s commentary track he is accompanied by his wife Nancy Wilson (of Heart) on guitar. There is also a phone call to Tom Cruise.