Archive for the ‘movies’ Category

The mid-Atlantic is getting a lot of snow, and we want it. They are not capable of handling snow like we are, they don’t want it, they can’t do anything with it, and it’s way more dangerous to people in the Washington DC-area who have no clue how to drive on snowy roads than it is to people here in WNY who have 8 months of the year to practice our snowy-road driving.

Who among us Western New Yorkers doesn’t recall with fondness when we got 6 feet of snow in only 3 days? And wasn’t the October Storm, for all its semi-benign destruction of power lines and cable TV wires, the most calm and relaxing week-long natural disaster in history?

So, it seems odd to those of us who lived through those snowstorms to have to sit back and watch the weather radar, with that distinct line of clouds that just sits right below our border with Pennsylvania. And the constant updates on facebook from our friends in Virginia, the Washington-DC area, and eastern PA–bragging to us about how much snow they’re getting, and how much more is forecast to fall before the storm is over.

And here we are, with some snow on the ground, but without full coverage. Because some of our snow has melted or blown off our lawns, we’re literally green with envy.

If you haven’t yet seen the new Star Trek movie, and you are planning to see it some time, you don’t want to read this post.

I think the thing I liked best about the movie was that, at the end, Romulus and Vulcan were not restored. Yes, it is an alternate reality, due to Captain Nero’s time travel, but still, the writer and director decided not to play a typical UNDO that science fiction movies seem to do whenever something catastrophic happens.

The boys and I rode our bikes down to the park to fly our kites today, so I shot this video with my camera phone.

The wind was strong enough to keep a kite aloft without any interaction or intervention by human touch… when one of the boys grew tired of hanging on to his kite string (mainly because that meant standing still), I hooked the kite string spool onto the water bottle cage of my bike, and the kite just hung there in the air the whole time.

Technical note: this video is made of two shorter clips. The max length my camera phone can shoot is 20 seconds, so I took two shots and faded them together with iMovie’s transition tool.

In addition to watching as many hours a day as I can of the presidential race, today I watched a movie that was delivered to my house by Blockbuster. I know everyone cool uses Netflix, but the deal with Blockbuster is that if you get a bad DVD, you don’t have to wait for the mail to take care of the problem, you can walk to your neighborhood Blockbuster store, and they take care of the problem.

Okay, so maybe Blockbuster isn’t walking distance from YOUR house, so maybe you should move.

Anyway, the point of this cold-medicine-addled blog post is that today I watched a movie that I’d already seen before: Rabbit Proof Fence. It’s the true story of a rabbit that wants to get to the other side of a fence and eat carrots planted by a silly farmer named Mr. Fudd.

So what are you watching? If you are a Blockbuster Online subscriber like me, we can share favorites lists, we can see what each other is watching, we can give each other movie suggestions, and we can set our own secure privacy settings… oh wait, that’s not necessarily fun, I just got carried away reading the advertisement that came with the DVD.

I benefited from the seemingly random selection available in the RedBox DVD vending machine today, which showed me a movie that broke my heart: Trade, starring Kevin Kline and Cesar Ramos. The story is sad and heartwarming at the same time.

The saddest part is the end, where this fact is displayed when the credits come up:

• 50,000 to 100,000 people are brought into the US every year to be forced into sex slavery.

Here is a link to the trailer for the movie.

For more info, go to the Wikipedia page on human trafficking, or read this page on a Pennsylvania government web site.