Category: Movies

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A month of potty-talk!

The Independent Film Channel web site had a celebration of the best dirty words in the movies last month– how could I have missed it originally? Here’s a link to the cleanest of the lot, the famous “frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” bit from Gone With the Wind, but from here, you can scroll down to get all of the rest. Many of them are, um, bad words.

Highlights for me include scenes from Bad Santa, Clerks, Pulp Fiction, and The Big Lebowski, which was actually featured in this blog just over a year ago here.

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Sophie the stupid dog on my Flip video camera

Annette was out of town most of last week, and because of that (and both of us are just swamped with school and work stuff, really), she overlooked an organized Father’s Day gift for me. So I bought my own: a Flip video camera.

Basically, it’s a small (like the size of a digital camera or a big cell phone) and cheap video camera that can store up to 30 minutes of digital video, which can then be watched on the camera itself, on a TV, or downloaded to a computer. It took some finagling with the format and converters and stuff, but I did ultimately get it to work on my iMac, so I can use it with things like iMovie, too.

Here’s a sample of Sophie the stupid dog chasing a ball. Actually, it’s not so much that Sophie is dumb; she just didn’t say no to me filming her for my blog(s):

No, it’s not professional quality. But basically, these people are looking for the YouTube et al crowd. As far as “family fun” and “movies” goes around here: I can easily see pairing this with my other digital camera for a cool vacation movie in the near future. I can also see this as a pretty handy teaching tool too– but that’s going to be on the official blog later.

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Pretty amazing etch-a-sketch drawing

I’d recommend turning the sound down a bit– the Cleveland Cavs rap song isn’t the best I’ve heard. But do check out this dude drawing LeBron James with an etch-a-sketch:

Dang, if I can barely make a smiley face with one of those things.

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Possible drive-in field trips?

Whatever happened to drive-ins? I recall them as a source of grand fun and “partying” as a high school young person in Iowa, and I’m pretty sure that my generation was among the last to experience this on a regular basis. They’re not around anymore, certainly not in my town where those big screens and lots were paved and/or built over a long time ago.

Or so I thought….

There was a blurb in the Ann Arbor paper today about a summer only drive-in theater thing at the Compuware Sports Arena, which is just down/up the road in Plymouth. Basically, this is a hockey rink, and they’re using the parking lot in the summer for drive-ins. No movies have been announced yet, but it could be a fun deal.

And then I did a google search and came across Drive-Ins.com, which has a database of drive-ins. And from there, I discovered that right in our own backyard (well, Dearborn), we’ve got the Ford-Wyoming Drive-In, which boasts itself as the largest in the world! Who knew?!

So, maybe a family-friendly movie show?

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As much as anything, this one goes out to Andre

I’ll change my list of links soon, I promise. Do check out Andre’s new blog, Visions of Ypsilanti in the meantime.

As penance for being late in changing that link, I present to you pictures from The Vader Project and this large group of Princess Leia as slavegirls with an Elvis storm trooper. These come via boing-boing and are on the flickr photo collection of bonniegirl. Check that out for even more Star Wars themed picts.

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The Landlord

Will Ferrell and a small child (I presume his?) in “The Landlord.”

Interestingly enough, this “viral video” that “everyone has already heard about” is something I read about this afternoon in that dinosaur blog technology, the newspaper.

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Rolling Stone and “The Dark Side of Oz”

I forgot the book I was planning on reading while at the gym, so I instead picked up a recent (current?) copy of Rolling Stone and thumbed through it while on the elliptical trainer.  Kinda fun to browse Rolling Stone about two or three times a year.

Anyway, there was a piece in there about Pink Floyd (I didn’t finish it, but it was a sort of “history of” kind of thing) and they mentioned a link on the web to infamous “Dark Side of Oz/Dark Side of the Rainbow” thing.   Basically, if you watch  The Wizard of Oz while listening to the Pink Floyd album “The Dark Side of the Moon,” you get this weird effect of things synching up.  I remember one time in Oregon, we tried this with some friends out there (sober, more less too), and I thought it was bullshit.

Well, I still do think it’s kinda stupid.  Still, these “mashups” on the Rolling Stone web site are kind of interesting.