Month: August 2011

Three sentence movie reviews: Where History Lives: A Tour of the White House

I’ve been a fan of Aaron Sorkin’s TV series the West Wing for some time and I must confess that until I watched this DVD I didn’t really understand what the actual West Wing was.* Luckily, I was hard up for movies and brought home this 30 minute DVD, hosted by Laura Bush, and it explained it to me. Thank goodness the library stocks such informative information.

No picture. Apparently informative DVDs don’t have posters.
*This is much like me not really understanding that the US Capitol Building and the White House were not the same building. It was only when I visited Washington DC with my family as a 13 year old and saw they were two separate buildings that I realized that the White House was where the US President lived and the Capitol Building was where Congress did there work. Before the visit I could have drawn you pictures of both buildings, but they had joined in my mind as some hybrid where the president lived and the congress worked.

Three sentence movie reviews: Word Play


I myself am not a crossword puzzle person, though I would like to be. I found the opening–where Will Shortz reads his mail–to be hilarious and the story surprisingly moving. There are “famous” people throughout this documentary, but I found the most interesting people to be the “only famous in the puzzle world” puzzle people.

Three sentence movie reviews: Dark Fury



We currently have at our house a borrowed copy of the DVD set of the Chronicles of Riddick Trilogy including this movie, Dark Fury. It’s all packaged together and so I wasn’t aware that this is a 30 minute animated “bridge” between two films. It was clearly drawn by people who think that Vin Diesel is one of the ugliest people on the planet, and thus was not really very fun to watch.

Three sentence movie reviews: The Chronicles of Riddick


This seemed to have higher production values than Pitch Black, though I found the story less compelling. The sets were awesome and I enjoyed seeing the arc of Riddick. In fact, I wouldn’t mind some more Riddick movies, though I think this one makes it a little impossible.

At this point, I’ve seen all the Vin Diesel movies the library owns, though IMDB tells me that the library doesn’t own all Vin Diesel movies. I guess I’ll eventually have to search out the rest and actually (gasp) PAY to watch them.

Three sentence movie reviews: The Thing Called Love



I knew going into this that it was a really awful movie, but had hope that the scuttlebutt was wrong, as Peter Bogdanovitch was the director, plus Sandra Bullock and Durmot Mulroney starred along side River Phoenix (his last movie) and Samantha Mathis (who?*). But yes, it was that bad. There were a few lovely moments, and the commentary features make me like it a bit better, but mostly this is a “only if you have the flu” movie.

*the commentary alerted me to the fact that the studio was pushing her as a new big thing. I didn’t recognize her at all, but IMDB helpfully informed me she stared as the “older Amy” in Little Women. Oh yeah, her.

Three sentence movie reviews: Babies

Note: this great swath of eight movies watched in four days was because I was working on the Roman shades for the front room and there was a lot of hand stitching, which called for a lot of movie watching.




Documentaries for me are like my sometimes feelings about exercise, namely they tend to be something I have to force myself to partake in and then I usually quite enjoy them. This was no different. With hardly a word, we get to experience the first years of four children in widely different settings, which was informative (so that’s what they do when there are no diapers!) funny and moving.

Three sentence movie reviews: Pitch Black



I was quite surprised at how much I enjoyed this film, which I was only watching due to the Vin Diesel Film Fest. My liking had to do with two main things aside from the presence of Mr. Diesel: 1) there’s actually a strong woman character in this movie, much to my surprise and enjoyment 2) when the monster part comes, it’s pitch black and so we never really see the monsters eat the people. This is apparently an overlooked movie, so perhaps my recommendation will spur you to seek it out.

Building Gone

When we last checked in with the site of the former club Satyricon, it was in the process of being torn down. I’m midway through a three week vacation, so I haven’t followed the daily progress, but I happened to be in the neighborhood today and so stopped by to update.

The building is completely gone, debris moved away and there begins to be a hole dug.

If you squint at the above picture you can barely see the little graffito in the middle of nowhere. Below is a closeup. My theory as to how it got painted in the middle of the wall? I think there was a window that was still operable when the building went up and someone opened it and muralized.

I have 8 pounds per year.

Matt and I have been reading Pride and Prejudice where one of the general items of gossip is how many pounds various gentlemen have per year. Mr. Bingley is a good catch with four of five thousand pounds per year. Then Mr. Darcy enters the scene and is said to have ten thousand pounds per year. This circa 1800, so four or five thousand pounds will take you pretty far, but ten thousand? Wow.

I’m assuming that “having X number of pounds per year” means that the interest payments on your total fortune give you that amount to live on, though I’m not one hundred percent sure of this. However, my bank statement arrived the other day and I noticed that the quarterly interest on my savings account was $3.26. I multiplied that by four to get the yearly total ($13.04) and used google to convert the currency to pounds sterling. It turns out I have a fortune of $8.01 pounds per year. This in 2011, not 1800.
I see that there’s no doubt about it. Of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, I would have been one of the maids. Or maybe in a few years I could be Hill, the housekeeper.