i m N s h o

All right, to be honest, it’s the 36” TV, surround-sound stereo and THEN Netflix that’s ruined me. But Netflix is the enabler that feeds the addiction. I’ve always been the “I want to see movies in the theatre” guy. Watching them on TV just dilutes the experience too much… screen’s too small, sound’s no good, picture’s muddy, I hate the way they crop the screen, etc. etc. etc. And I worked for years to get Dani to understand, agree and finally embrace this idea. (Resistance is futile, baby!) So along come DVDs with their widescreen presentation, Dolby 5.1 surround, a great picture… suddenly, watching movies at home doesn’t seem like such a bad thing after all. And what’s worse is that this means that the films we DO see in the theatre are all the bad ones! Let’s face it, the smaller art-house type films may look great in a theatre, but with all the aforementioned goodies on the DVD, they’re not looking (or sounding) bad at home either. On the other hand, the bi...

But really, I should probably mention that I was promoted on Friday to Asst. Producer on BarbieCollectibles.com . Just because you should make note of these things, you know?

(Yes, I can sense some of you dashing for the mouse to get off this page already… “Oh no, a Lou theory… that can’t be good.” Well, you’re just gonna have to bear with me.) I’ve noticed that, whenever I’m driving the lovely streets & freeways of Los Angeles, I have this amazing tendency to end up behind the slowest person in whatever lane I happen to be driving in. I know, your first reaction is “it’s all in your mind”, kind of like the feeling that, when stuck in traffic, the lane you’re in is the slowest one on the freeway (in fact, it sounds almost exactly like that, doesn’t it?). But in THIS case, I’m not imaging things! Here’s how it works… Invariably, as I’m driving along, I will find myself behind the one person on the road going significantly slower than the posted speed limit. (I’ve mentioned this clown before—he’s the one that will run through that yellow light that I’m going to get stuck at. Yeah, that clown.) I’ll sit behind him (or her...

Just came across this guy's blog the other day. Figured it was probably some Matrix-type page (and who knows, if you dig far enough, it probably started that way) but he's got some pretty funny comments here—his love/hate take on Underworld is great stuff, for starters.

I get this word-a-day email that always ends with a quote… today's quote: "A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood. -Chinese Proverb" Then there's this other email that I get less frequently, that also showed up today: "Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open." (Thomas Dewar) Is someone trying to tell me something?

According to a Zagat restaurant survey: "Angelenos eat out more often than residents of any other U.S. city -- an average of 3.7 times per week -- but are also the cheapest tippers… the survey ranked Los Angeles last of the 40 cities surveyed in terms of tipping, leaving an average tip of 18.0% , as compared to the national average of 18.3%." Now, the news story that carried this bit of fluff was titled " Zagat: LA Residents Eat Out Most, Leave Lousiest Tips ". So, for a difference of 0.3% in the average tip, Channel 2 News is whipping people into a needless frenzy over a restaurant survey? William Randolph Hearst would be proud indeed. (I'm not even going to comment on the fact that, from my past restaurant experience, an 18% average would be pretty damn good tipping. Really. See, I barely mentioned it.)

I mean, I was never voting for the recall anyway—I'm annoyed by the whole thing in the first place (and now Issa's out there telling Schwarzenegger and McClintock that one of them needs to drop out of the race or HE'S against the recall. Have I mentioned that he's an asshole recently?) I skipped the debate last night. I had class, so I've got a reason, but I probably wouldn't have watched it anyway. They all had the questions in advance (presumably the reason Arnold was willing to participate in this one—his "super bowl of debates" notwithstanding) so it was unlikely there'd be any grand revelations… they'd all be firmly "on topic" all the way, so you're not getting any "new" info. From what I saw on the news last night and have heard on the radio this morning, looks like I dodged a bullet. Bustamante was a patronizing asshole, Arnold's simply an asshole (apparently, this is my word for the day), Huffington...

Ugh, what a hectic mess of a week. Turns out, I've been busy! So here, in no particular order are some of the things that I've been meaning to post all week… Joan of Arcadia In this CBS series, God appears to Joan and ''He asks her to take a chemistry class, He asks her to join the chess club, He asks her to have a garage sale, He asks her to build a boat.'' Now, I know this is getting some really great buzz from the TV critics, but really… if you're going to saddle the main character with a Joan of Arc reference and have her talking to God, don't you expect something, I don't know… more? (Maybe that's why the preview I read said they wished they'd give Joe Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen, Joan's parents, more to do. Nope, sorry guys, God's handling that!) 8 Simple Rules… will go on Winning the crass award for the week is ABC TV: "Everybody recognizes that John loved that show. …He'd have wanted the show to con...

All right, so Quentin called me on my movie choices for the week and I’ve got to acknowledge he might have a point. Not Matchstick Men—we both agreed it would be worth seeing and, while I didn’t make it this weekend, it’s still on my “to see” list. No, it’s my choice of Once Upon a Time in America over Cabin Fever. His take is that OUATIM was an empty nothing of a movie and, if any movie was going to prove that we deserve crap films, this one would be the one. Meanwhile, he described Cabin Fever as “a hoot… ridiculously funny, gory and over the top. A modern Evil Dead.” Well, I’m going to defer to him on Cabin Fever for now (although he did follow up his glowing praise with a caveat about the first hour being weak and amateurish)… I may catch this one later on, but chances are, it’ll end up being a rental down the road. And Matchstick Men didn’t make it into our plans this weekend either. Nope, it was Once Upon a Time in America for us! Looks like Johnny & Antonio...

After a month load of crap films like Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star , The Medallion and My Boss's Daughter (not to mention "successful" crap like Jeepers Creepers 2 & Freddy vs. Jason ) it's refreshing to see a couple of movies opening that I would actually want to leave the house to see! (And no, I'm not going to link these… you want to torture yourself, Google them on your own time.) But this week we've got some good stuff (potentially, of course. One could argue that Charlie's Angels looked good from the trailers and we all know what a pointless mess that turned out to be). Between Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Matchstick Men there might actually be a reason to go to the movies! Hey, who knows, maybe the top film this week will make more than $7 million! Whoo hoo! (Of course, Cabin Fever will probably end up taking the weekend, thereby proving that we deserve every crap movie the studio releases, since that's what makes the money f...

So who knew I was trendy!?! Last month I had a little rant about LA drivers and their amazing talent for stupidity and arrogance (usually wrapped up in the same package) and in my post I mentioned COTU—Center of the Universe syndrome. Going through my email after I got back from vacation, I find this from BuzzWhack's "Buzzword of the Day" email: " COTU: Center Of The Universe. Often used to describe people who are unable to see another point of view and [the belief that] wherever they're standing is the center of the universe." Nominated by Michelle Hornsby So here I've been all trendy and buzz-wordy without even knowing it! How about that! (I would, of course, take credit for coining this one, since I wrote my post on the 7th and the email's from the 26th… plenty of time for it to percolate through the web. But I can't say for sure that Michelle saw my post, so I'll be humble. Just this once.) (ah, for a more elegant so...

White Nights…   Watching Insomnia (Al Pacino & Robin Williams—murder and insomnia in Alaska) and one of the characters asks Pacino if he's enjoying their "white nights". And I thought "there was a movie called White Nights a few years ago."   Channel surfing a little while later and, showing on one of the many Starz variants on our cable system… "White Nights" (Mykhail Baryshnykov & Gregory Hines dance their way out from behind the Iron Curtain).   No comment.

More Synchronicity?   I mentioned that I’d watched “Once Upon a Time in America” last week. One of the things I wondered while I watched was “what ever happened to Elizabeth McGovern ?” I remembered her in Ragtime, and she’s DeNiro’s love interest in “Once, etc”. But aside from that, I couldn’t remember anything else. (Of course, checking that IMDB listing shows she's done A LOT of work… I just haven't been paying attention, apparently.) Saturday, we’re running errands and pass a billboard advertising a new David E. Kelly/CBS series ( The Brotherhood of Poland, N.H. ,) starring, among others, Elizabeth McGovern.   But, even more interesting, in that whole synchronicity vein (since I can easily accept the McGovern one as coincidence) was as I was browsing Amazon.com last night. Dani’s reading group is doing The DaVinci Code this month and, since this is the first book they’re reading that interests me, I’m tagging along. It’s another of those literary detective ...