wildyams

I have a crappy parking space in my building. I have a spot between two cars (naturally), and if I park head in the car on my left always backs in, while the car on the right always parks head in. This ensures that both cars always have their drivers' side doors open towards my car, so if they leave me a narrow space to park in, I can't just park close to one car or the other so I can get out, because then I'll end up blocking one of them from getting into their car. In addition to this problem, I park perpendicular to an area in the garage that is supposed to be a no-parking zone. This would be fine, except that people always ignore that it is a no-parking zone, and there are always cars there, making it much harder for me to get into and out of my spot because it cuts the space I have to turn into my spot (or turn out of it) about in half, so I often have to do a multi-point turn to get in and out of my spot. The building management repeatedly tells people not to park in these spots, but it's always ignored because the parking on my street is basically non-existant (parking on the streets in Hollywood is ridiculous).

On Sunday night at around midnight or so I wanted to go out and grab something to eat, and naturally all the no-parking parking spaces were filled, so I had to manuver my car out of it's spot. Having done that I went to exit the building only to find that one of the cars that is usually parked in a no-parking zone had decided to just parkin the driveway because all the no-parking zones were filled. Now the driveway to my building is on an angle because the parking is sub-terranean, and it curves out to the street, and there are probably roughly 50 cars that park in the underground lot; but this guy must have decided that if he parked as far to the side in the driveway, that maybe people could squeeze around him to leave. I almost attempted it, but going slowly uphill around a corner where you can't see exactly where the wall and his bumper were was too much, and I decided that there was no reason why I should have to risk scratching my car up just to leave my apartment building, so I went back to my space and called the manager, who then woke the guy up and got him to move his car (he moved it down into the garage, this time into a fire lane before going back to bed).

Needless to say this whole thing really bugged me, and I was contemplating asking the maangement for a new parking space when I got home today and saw a letter on my door basically saying that while they have been patient with everyone who has been parking in those spaces so far, their patience is over, and they will now immediately tow any cars who park there. I have my doubts about whether they'll actually follow through on this or not, because I have seen letters telling people not to park there before, and all that's happened is that it stopped people from parking there for a couple days before coming back, but we'll see. I'm really hoping and praying that they do tow away a bunch of those cars, cause these cars are so long overdue for that. Happy New Year everyone :lol

It probably wasn't a good idea for me to watch a movie about an airplane crash the day before flying halfway across the country, but that's what I did yesterday. I'm off to Texas for the weekend for my grandmother's 90th birthday. Rebecca and I leave this morning and get back Sunday night, and in the meantime we'll be hanging out in Austin. I hope I get to have at least one day that's pretty relaxing, cause work has been pretty stressful lately and I really don't need a stressful weekend on top of that. My Mom's whole side of the family will be there this weekend, so it's gonna probably be something of a madhouse (probably 40 or so people), and while it will be great to see everyone, I do hope it's not too crazy. Texans have a lot of energy after all, and I'm a pretty laid-back (read: lazy) guy.

In keeping with my list from last year, I wanted to once again write down all the movies I saw that were released this past year and ascribe them a numerical value from 1 to 10 based on how much I liked them. Once again to do this I consulted a list of all the movies released this past year (according to them, anyway), and went through and chose the movies that I saw, and then gave them all ratings. It's not perfect, but it's not bad either. Here again is my rating scale so you can see what the numbers mean:

10 - Arguably my favorite movie of the year
9 - I really really liked it and am anxious to see it again
8 - I thought this was a great movie, although I'm not dying to see it again right away
7 - I thought this was very enjoyable, even though I wouldn't say it was a great movie. Most likely it was either a very solid film or a guilty pleasure
6 - I thought this was better than average, but nothing really stood out too much
5 - I wasn't really sure if I liked it or not
4 - Mediocre at best, but not so bad it infuriated me
3 - Really dull, bordering on annoying me
2 - I hated this movie. Offensively bad
1 - Beyond bad to the point where it is so bad it's fun

As always, I don't think that this is how everyone should feel about these movies, it's just my opinion, so don't go crazy. If you disagree, well that's what the comments are for I guess. Anyway, here's the roughly 60 movies from 2004 that I saw:

Maybe you'll find it interesting to note that my average score for all the movies I saw this year was 5.64, as compared to 5.4 for 2003. It should be noted (or maybe it shouldn't, you decide) that this year I had five movies that I gave 10's to, as opposed to only 4 last year, although this could be because I saw more movies from 2004 than I did from 2003. Also of note is that even though I saw 19 more movies from 2004 than I did from 2003, I didn't see any movies from 2004 that I considered to be so bad they were fun (earning a 1 rating), which is a shame since movies like that are treasures in their own right.

So I got back from Texas last night to find that there were cars parked in all the no parking parking spaces. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

Anyway, my time in Texas was fun. I got to see my entire family on my Mom's side, and realized a few things about them: For one thing, they're all from Texas, all live in Texas, and with rare exception (like my Mom) have never lived outside of Texas for an extended period of time. This is quite a contrast to my immediate family and my Dad's side of the family, who are from all over and have lived in various places at different times. Also, I have 7 cousins on my Mom's side and all but one of them are married (or engaged), yet neither me nor my two sisters have at any point been anywhere near getting married. Additionally I was reminded that outside of California, there are still people who "dip" or use chewing tobacco or snuff or whatever that stuff is. I've yet to know anyone in California (and I've lived here most of my life) who does that, although I'm sure they're out there. But when I was in college (in Colorado) lots of people did it, and a few of my Texan family members apparently do it. There's a lot about Texas that's different from California, to be sure, but if I had any doubts about that they were immediately erased when we went into a BBQ place and one of the specials they offered was called "The Redneck Plate".

Hard as it may be to believe, people are lining up already for Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. Of course, the part about that fact that is hard to believe is not that someone is gonna wait in line for 5 months for a movie, but that someone who clearly saw Episodes 1 & 2 is gonna wait that long for the next one in the series. The guy who is first in line (who goes by the moniker "Superfan 1138") has a blog he's keeping to document his "effort". You'll be happy to know he'll be offering T-shirts related to what he's doing sometime soon.

After discussing my comprehensive list of the movies I saw last year with Cookie and Milkshake today, they thought I should rank the 10 worst (or "most terrible" as it were) movies from last year that I saw. So without further ado, here you go, the 10 most terrible movies of 2004 (that I saw, anyway):

#10 - The Perfect Score (15% on the Tomatometer): The big question here was what was Scarlett Johansson doing in a movie where she gets as much screen time as a guy coming off the bench for the Portland Trailblazers? It's basically just a really lame heist-type movie about a bunch of kids who steal the answers to the SAT so they can get into college. It's a dumb idea, with mostly bad acting, and it does a poor job of holding your interest. If you're into seeing movies that try really hard to emulate The Breakfast Club but do a horrible job of it, or you think Matthew Lillard can do no wrong, then this movie is for you. Otherwise you're better off watching almost anything else. It's better than #9 because it doesn't beat you over the head with how bad it is quite as much.

#9 - The Chronicles of Riddick (29% on the Tomatometer): J-Krue described this one as akin to being stabbed in the face for 2 hours, so keep that in mind if you go see it. A truly horrendous follow-up to the surprisingly good Pitch Black, in this one we have Vin Diesel trying as hard as he can to show everyone in the movie and in the audience what a badass he is. The lowpoint is probably when he challenged a girl who's in love with him to a game of "who's the best killer". The movie substituted coherence and substance for volume and effects, which is not all that original, and not very entertaining. It would be much more boring if it wasn't so loud and obnoxious. With a movie this bad they should at least make it easier for you to sleep through it. It's better than #8 because at least it had it's own story and didn't completely lift it's story from another movie.

#8 - The Girl Next Door (57% on the Tomatometer): This one may be more enjoyable to many people than I am giving it credit for. The reason I hated it so much was because it was a really poorly done rip-off of Risky Business. The only difference was that in Risky Business (aside from that movie being great while this one was shit) there were consequences for what happened to Joel, while in this movie the main character ends up becoming a super-rich national hero for bringing porn stars to the prom. Considering how ludicrous it got when they veered from the plot of Risky Business, in retrospect maybe they should have gone all the way and had it end the same as well. It's better than #7 because it didn't try so hard to make itself out to be more than it was.

#7 - The Village (44% on the Tomatometer): Maybe the most irritating thing about this movie is that you can't really talk about it without spoiling it, so if you haven't seen this movie, skip ahead to #6. Here we have a boring movie that has one somewhat interesting thing going for it. The only problem is that halfway through we find out that one twist is that the interesting thing is not true, which kills all your interest. If that's not enough, at the end we're hit with another twist which simultaneously makes you realize how unrealistic it all is, how stupid the movie is, and how insane the message that M. Night Shyamalan is trying to convey (that the solution to the problems the world presents is to isolate yourself from them and live in ignorance). It's better than #6 because there's at least some story to it, even if it's a bad one.

#6 - The Passion of the Christ (51% on the Tomatometer): What got lost in all the hype and controversy of this movie was that if you strip away the religious implications (or whatever), it's a movie that's over two hours long about a guy who walks up a hill. You can sum the whole movie up like this: he's in a garden, he gets arrested, he goes before the Jews, he goes before the Romans, he goes before Herrod, he goes back before the Romans, he goes up a hill and then he dies. The end. Mel Gibson compensates for the lack of story by seemingly showing the entire film in slow motion and spending extra time focusing on how bloody being whipped with metal hooks is to distract you from the fact that nothing is really going on in the movie. Having to watch it a second time I felt like I was carrying that damn cross up the hill. It's better than #5 because at least it made sense as to what was happening.

#5 - Darkness (4% on the Tomatometer): The most convoluted horror movie I've seen since Event Horizon, this movie evoked an audience reaction not unlike the one I heard at the end of The Matrix Revolutions, namely the audience yelling out "huh?" It's one of those movies where they obviously felt that "vague" equals "creepy", and if they shoot most of the movie with as little lighting as possible it will be enough to keep everyone scared. Instead the result is that you're spending most of the movie trying to make any sense of what is going on, and having no luck doing it. It's better than #4 because at least the characters were somewhat consistent.

#4 - Surviving Christmas (8% on the Tomatometer): In this movie you have to suspend disbelief enough to accept that Ben Affleck's character goes from being a hugely successful advertising or marketing executive who has the corporate world eating out of the palm of his hand, to a raving lunatic, and then back again, and you have to accept that nobody else in the movie seems to notice. That's right, the guy is all over the place, insisting that Christina Applegate call herself the maid because his full-scale delusion in which he pretends he's a child again doesn't have a place in the family for her, and then a couple scenes later they're falling in love with each other because suddenly he's normal and she's forgotten he's a psycho most of the time. It's better than #3 because at least some of the people onscreen weren't totally irritating.

#3 - Taxi (9% on the Tomatometer): This is what you get when you combine Queen Latifah playing a tough black girl (gee, where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, in every one of her movies) with Jimmy Fallon, a funny man who's not even remotely funny. Jimmy Fallon is less funny than Chevy Chase, and I mean how funny Chevy Chase is now, not 20 years ago. In addition to having probably worst and most unwatchable onscreen duo in a decade or so, this movie has the most thrown together, absurd plot imaginable. This movie will have you gnashing your teeth throughout it and will make you never want to see Queen Latifah or Jimmy Fallon ever again, even if they were showing up on your doorstep to give you money. It's better than #2 because at least it has something of an edge, dull through it may be.

#2 - Welcome to Mooseport (14% on the Tomatometer): You're pretty much guaranteed to want to walk out of this movie by about the time the opening credits are finished, that is if it hasn't sapped all your energy, in which case you'll pray that you can just sleep through it. It vacillates between being extremely dull and being extremely irritating. It's the low point in Marcia Gay Harden's career, and is only saved from being the low points in both Gene Hackman's and Rip Torn's careers because of Superman IV and Freddy Got Fingered, respectively. Avoid this movie. It's better than #1 because it's more boring than annoying.

#1 - The Prince & Me (29% on the Tomatometer): There's so much wrong with this movie it's hard to know where to start. First of all, it's Coming to America done as a serious romance movie starring white teens. It features the same problems that Surviving Christmas had, with the characters switching from being normal to being totally insane, but it has the plot suffering from the same problems. A Danish prince comes to America because he wants to get laid (as if he'd have problems with that to begin with), and because he saw a Girls Gone Wild in Wisconsin video, he decides that the babes are in Wisconsin. When he gets there, rather than use the fact that he's rich and famous to get girls, he pretends to be poor, gets a job mopping floors and asks a female co-worker to flash him upon just meeting her. She refuses and he switches to being the perfect guy, but still doesn't tell her he's a prince, and she falls in love with him immediately. She then finds out he's rich, famous and powerful, and gets pissed at him (??), so he goes home. After thinking about it for a day or so, she follows him home, where he proposes and she accepts. The queen shows her all the jewelry she'll get in a scene which can only be described as "jewelry porn", then she freaks out thinking about how a farm girl from Wisconsin doesn't really fit as a European queen, so she goes back to college. Her ex-fiancee waits a couple months, then goes to her graduation and she changes her mind and decides she'll be a queen after all. The end. If I could have taken the script and changed it in any way, it would have improved it. Even if it turned out in the end that Julia Stiles was really an alien like Natasha Henstridge in Species and was going to try to conquer the world, or if she'd woken up at the end and said "it was all a dream", those ideas would have improved this movie. I can't imagine anyone enjoying this movie in any way. Plain terrible.

Sounds kinky, huh? At work a fan somewhere broke, so we no longer have any kind of air circulating and no air conditioning. Considering it's been between 50 and 65 degrees out, you would figure that's not a big deal, right? Wrong. We're on the 3rd floor of a building with windows that you can't open and a ton of mechanical equipment which heats up rooms like you wouldn't believe. So for the past couple days at work it's been quite warm as they're working to fix the problem. It was so hot on Monday that when I got home I had a mean headache that didn't go away till I woke up the next day. I'm sure it's helping extend the life of our computer equipment though.

If you weren't aware, we've been having El Nino-like rains here in SoCal (by the way, according to Chris Farley, El Nino is Spanish for "The Nino"). The rains have stopped for the time being, but it's unknown how long that's gonna hold up. The rains got so bad for a couple days there that it created massive flooding and mudslides and have various roads closed here and there. I don't know if that's what is causing the extra traffic I'm experiencing on my way home from work or not, but it's all I can come up with. It has been positively gridlocked out on the surface streets around here the last two days after work. It is so bad that numerous people are turning down my street thinking (hoping) that they can cut through to another parallel street and avoid the traffic, but it's jammed everywhere. It's gotta be cause a lot of the routes over the hills here are close from the rain. I hope it gets better, cause it's downright miserable trying to get home lately :sad

I finally got my new car stereo installed this weekend! I had bought most of it back in September or so, but last week got my final pieces (a stiffening capacitor and new wiring) and so I had it installed. I dropped my car off on Saturday and picked it up yesterday afternoon, and so far I am very pleased with it. I had everything except the amp replaced, which means I have a new head unit (CD player), new front and rear speakers, and the aforementioned capacitor and wiring. I replaced all of that because I still had the stock speakers in the car, and my right front one was blown; my CD player was in good working condition, but needs to have the lens re-aligned and cleaned (regular maintenance on a car CD player), so as a result it was having problems reading burned CDs (which is about all I listen to); and my wiring that I had in there was stuff meant for home theater, not for a car, so it was insufficiently shielded and as a result picked up engine noise in the form of a high-pitched whine that grew louder when I hit the accelerator. My new wiring is very high quality, and it has eliminated the engine noise; my new CD player plays burned CDs great, and even better plays MP3s off of CDs (always preferable to have 10 hours of music on a CD as opposed to one); and my new speakers take much better advantage of my amp and sound much cleaner and louder than the cheapies that were in the car before. So needless to say I'm rather pleased with my car's audio system right now :grin

I was perusing IMDB.com and came upon this refreshing piece of news:

Click here for story

I dunno about you, but I for one am glad to know that the Ozzman has not gonneth :grin

By the way, speaking of IMDB, the fact that the XXX-rated Paris Hilton video actually has an IMDB page is just too funny for words.

I had an interesting weekend of spending time with my co-workers away from work. Yesterday I helped out Matt on his movie that he's filming by acting as an extra. It was a BBQ scene, and I got to pretend like I was in the background drinking a beer and chatting with other people at the BBQ. Matt kept coming over to my little group and telling us that our characters were supposed to act like we didn't give a shit about what was going on, to which we told him he had the right guys for the job :lol It was funny though, because as Matt would go around to tell everyone what they were supposed to be doing, he would always stop to say to us "and of course, you guys still don't give a shit." It lasted for about 4 hours, and the filmmakers were nice enough to feed us some pretty good catered food.

Then today Cookie came over to watch the AFC Championship game on the TV I'm borrowing from Jon, because it was in HDTV, the screen is large, and because we could fast forward through the commercials. I had a great time doing that, even though I'm not much of a football fan, but it was cool to watch the game with someone who is a big football guy and to get Cookie's takes on what was happening, and who he thought was gonna win and all that.

Other than that I spent most of my weekend just relaxing and taking a couple live music DVDs I have and grabbing the audio from them to make music albums out of them. As a result, I now have another live Peter Gabriel album from his last tour (to go with the one he released for his previous tour back in the mid-90s), and I have a live Cranberries album as well. In addition, since my sister got me the live Bjork box set for Xmas, I now have a whole slew of new live albums to listen to :grin

Just for fun to start off the week, rank the following Wesley Snipes movies from least forgettable to most forgettable:

- Boiling Point
- Sugar Hill
- The Art of War
- Drop Zone
- Money Train
- The Fan
- Murder at 1600
- Undisputed
- US Marshalls
- Rising Sun

Please note that Passenger 57 is absent from this list of Mr. Snipes' kung-fu/action movies because the "always bet on black" line makes it far more memorable than any of the ones listed above, so there's no need to include it since it would be universally agreed upon as the least forgettable of the group. Also, Demolition Man isn't on the list because there's nothing forgettable about that movie, except that Jesse Ventura and Jack Black were in it.

If you do participate in ranking these movies and find that you either haven't seen one or more of these, just rank them on whether you even remembered that they existed or not. Clearly if you can't remember if you saw one of these or not then it's gotta be near the "most forgettable" end of the scale.

Notice that I said "The Oscars & A Train Wreck" not "The Oscars Are A Train Wreck" :lol The Oscar nominations came out the other day, and at first I was really pissed because Jim Carrey and Paul Giamatti were both overlooked for nominations (again) for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Sideways, respectively. In my opinon, those guys turned in two of the best performances I've seen in the last couple years, and was really disappointed to not see either of them recognized. I understand that neither performance was the kind that the Oscars usually reward, because they were both very subtle, understated performances, but they were really fantastic and touching nonetheless. In any event, it's not really something to be upset over anyway, and I wasn't too surprised I guess, considering how often the Oscars seem to disappoint. But I did agree with most of the rest of the nominees, so I guess they did a decent job this year. At the very least I was glad to see The House of Flying Daggers not even get a nomination for Best Foreign Film, since that thing was way overhyped. Just because a film is shot well and the fight scenes were impressive doesn't excuse the lame-ass soap opera-esque plot and the laughable romance.

Today I left for work at my normal time and was rather shocked to see what can only be described as pure gridlock traffic going over Los Feliz to the 5 fwy North that I usually take to work. Because I know the side-street ways to get over that way, I took some of them, but found it gridlocked pretty much everywhere; and I approached the onramp to the 5 North from a different angle, only to find that they had blocked off the entire street going to the onramp. I didn't know why they had done that, especially at 9 am when everyone was trying to get to work, but what it meant was that everyone was diverted into Griffith's Park and we all had to take the winding road through that and into Burbank to get to the freeway. By that point, I just said forget it and took surface streets the rest of the way to work, but the whole ordeal went from being my usual 20 minutes or so to just under an hour. It wasn't till the end of the day that I realized a major train wreck had caused the mess.

Today in the mail I got 100 blank DVDs that I ordered this past weekend, and I'm very excited. I've had a DVD burner for about 6 months now, but hadn't tried burning anything to a DVD yet because I didn't have any blanks to try it on. From all my reading online, there's a lot to finding the proper blank DVDs to burn to and how compatible they are with the burner you own, etc... So I did the research, and got what are supposed to be great blanks for what I think is a good price (40 cents a DVD sounds pretty good to me). The first thing I'm burning is backups of all of my music. I've got over 60 gigs of music, so it should take me somewhere around 15 DVDs to back it all up (I'm on #10 right now), but this way if my computer or hard drive ever takes a shit I'll know that I've got everything backed up.

I got another mention on Boing Boing today, this time for our good buddy Superfan 1138. As you may recall when I posted about him recently, I noted that he said T-shirts were going to be available soon. Well even though the wait for Episode 3 isn't over, I'm happy to announce that the wait for the T-shirts about the wait for Episode 3 is over. Be the first kid on your block to sport one of these bad boys:

Click to Buy

Hell with the Oscar nominations, the Razzies and the Stinkers have announced their nominees. It appears that Alexander, Catwoman, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 and White Chicks lead most other movies for nominations, and fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it :lol) I didn't see any of those movies, so I can't really comment on how bad those movies are. Here's something that caught my interest: Meg Ryan and Kate Beckinsale are up for Stinkers for worst fake accent in Against the Ropes and Van Helsing, respectively, and I have to say that I would be hard pressed to pick a winner there cause those are some damn fine nominations. Also of note, Koga's favorite actress of all time has been nominated for "Worst Razzie Loser" of the Razzies' first 25 years. Congratulations, Ms. Jolie!

I know Arnold's the governor of California and all, but if I was marketing the new Keanu Reeves movie, I might try to come up with a different movie to mimick for the poster:

Click to Enlarge

Just a suggestion.

I went over to my sister's place yesterday to pick her up and then she, my Dad, my stepmom and myself all went to the movies to see The Aviator (for me my second time), and then went to dinner. I really liked The Aviator the first time, and I would have to say I even liked it more the second time. I am rooting for Scorcese to get the Oscar for Best Director, since he's so long overdue for that it's pretty embarrasing.

After the movie and then dinner I went back to Rebecca's place to try to help her get her computer up and running since she recently signed up for DSL. As is my luck with any type of computer tech support-type endeavors, it turned out to be a much more complicated issue than it should have been, although it was not my fault. I got Rebecca's internet up and running pretty quick, only to find out that her computer is a "zombie box" and has been infected with some type of trojan or malware which immediately began sending out large amounts of internet traffic the moment it went online (most likely automated to begin spamming as soon as it went online). The major issue with this was that it was sending so much traffic that her connection was rendered basically useless otherwise, so I could not download anything to try to combat whatever was on the computer. As a result I'm gonna have to go grab her computer and will probably take it to Dave's place so we can wipe it clean and re-install the OS. I woulda tried that last night, but at some point long ago Rebecca threw away her XP disc, so we were kinda SOL there. You might wonder how her computer could already be infected like that if she just got DSL, and the reason is because she's had the computer for a few years and used to have DSL, but cancelled it over a year ago, so she evidently picked something up back then. Oh well, Dave and I will help her get it all straightened out and I'll get her using Firefox so she (hopefully) won't have to worry about stuff like that in the future.