Stage spillover- Hollywood kisses its own ass

Every year Hollywood blows itself with the self congratulatory Academy Awards show. They give statues to some pretty boy for being the “best actor.” The King’s Speech was the last big winner. A guy acted like a pampered royal whose big accomplishment was reading a prepared speech into a radio microphone without stammering. Whoa - what a stretch! I say if you want to honor someone playing a role, give it to a waiter on the fifteenth hour of his Waffle House shift. Acting like he gives a shit how your day was and if your eggs were cooked properly is a real performance. Give that tortured bastard a statue for the acceptance speech alone. “I’d like to thank everyone who made this possible. First thank you Fox News for convincing my fellow broke people that unions are a horrible anti-American plot pushing evil things like a living wage and a medical plan. I’d like to thank that condom for breaking in 1999 leaving me with teenagers needing braces. I’d like to thank my buddy Joe for convincing me to drop out of high school and work on the band full time. And finally thank you to that payday loan company on Van Buren. Without your support I would have blown it by throwing the coffee pot at that witch who finger snapped at me. 

Night Train - pretty good for a B movie

I grabbed this flick at Blockbuster the other night on a whim. I knew little of it. It's a decided B-movie without, as I later found out, even a single review at Rottentomatoes.com. My biggest concern was the cover, which suggested it might be a gruesome, mindless slasher film. It isn't. It turned out to be a pretty good choice.

Night Train is a story of three strangers that meet aboard a train on one snowy night -- one with ridiculously few passengers and not much of a business model. Danny Glover is the train's conductor, Leelee Sobieski is the hot, but unhinged med student, and Steve Zahn is the scheming, eccentric salesman. When a nameless passenger dies shortly after boarding their car, Zahn and Sobieski discover he was carrying a box containing a fortune in diamonds. Together they plot to dispose of the man's body and keep the box's contents for themselves. All manner of paranoia, double-crosses and murder follows. There also may be something more sinister and mysterious to this box than any of them suspect.

The movie is a homage to movies of yore -- dumbed down Hitchcock. The scenery and setting is very appealing. The characters are beguiling. The ending, however, is absurd, and ruins what could almost have been a fantastic movie. Overall, it is still worth a watch.

The Wrestler is a haunting film

I'm not a fan of professional wrestling, and other than a brief period in the early '80s, never was, but the movie "The Wrestler" blew my mind. A week after seeing it, the stark realism of this film, most notably in its highly relatable and sympathetic main character Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, still haunts me. Wrestling is the backdrop, but the movie is really about being lost as a person, clinging to the familiar, simple survival in a rapidly changing world and searching for human connections.

Randy pursues a stripper nearing the end of her run named Cassidy, played brilliantly by Marisa Tomei. Her embrace of change stands in contrast to Randy's more innocent and naive approach to life. Both use their bodies to make a living, and time is the enemy of both, but the difference is Randy genuinely loves what he does and can't think of what else to do. Cassidy doesn't like what she does, but can't think of what else to do, either.

The fact that the movie is set in New Jersey, and filmed in a particularly grim winter with a typically plain yet powerful Springsteen tune as its theme song, adds even more -- at least for me personally.

The film displays much insight into what the real world of professional wrestling is like -- especially on the "has been" circuit in local school gymnasiums, as well as the physical toll the sport takes on a body. Wrestlers often find an early grave, which is documented here. I remember attending a few of these bouts at my local high school when I was a kid. I recently watched the extensive Charlie Rose interview with Mickey Rourke and the actor really does come off as similarly chastened and longing to "get back" as the character he plays. This was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time.

Stuff for sale

I have some dvd box sets for sale. All original of course, all in excellent condition. Email me at turbittj@yahoo.com if interested:

The Wire Complete Season One $35
The Shield Complete Season One $20
24 Complete Seasons One and Two $20 each
NYPD Blue Complete Season One $15
Entourage Complete Seasons One, Two, Three Part 1 $40 for the three sets

Also I have Polanski's The Tenant and Rosemary's Baby, as well as the original Halloween from John Carpenter. Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Secret Agent and the Lady Vanishes, all on one disk. Each of the four are $5 a piece.

I have a Digitech BP 200 Bass Effects Processor for sale. While this is designed for bass and that is of course its ideal purpose, I'm sure a guitarist could get some cool sounds and use from it as well. $95

I have a small army of books to go. I think I played a small role in the revitilization of Amazon stock in the last five years. I'll call them $5 each. Check Amazon for the summaries.

Armed Madhouse, Godzilla versus Bambi: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Into the Wild, Hey Joe, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, Don't Try This At Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs, Deep Descent: Adventure and Death Diving the Andrea Doria, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, Classic French Cooking, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World, Them: Adventures with Extremists, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, The Education of a Coach, Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, and the 2004 Red Sox, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Gasping for Airtime: Two Years in the Trenches of Saturday Night Live, The Mad Dog 100: The Greatest Sports Arguments of All Time, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Psychology for Dummies, Year 501: The Conquest Continues, The Schools We Need And Why We Don't Have Them, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics, Milk It!: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the '90s, Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies, So What: The Life of Miles Davis, Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef, The Best and the Brightest, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Practical Pentatonics: An Introduction to Pentatonic Patterns, Theory & Usage, The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation, Walden, Fatland: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, Ugly Americans: True Story of Two Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl, Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivilized, Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, Bush at War, State of Denial, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, The Scuba Diver's Travel Companion, Grammar the Easy Way.

Movies, sports, babies, delivery problems, gas prices, junkets and ESL

Lost returns next week. That should rule. Love that show. Bill Maher's show returned last week, but is a bit limited with the writer's strike still going on. The strike might effect the Lost season as well.

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I'm a pretty big NFL and MLB fan, and in particular I've long been a Yankee and Cowboys fan. I kind of like the NBA, but the referees seem to influence the game too much and defer to stars to an extreme. I'm not sure Michael Jordan ever didn't get a foul called in a big spot. Both the teams I really care about had seasons that ended with utter disappointment, and that's been the case for a long time for those teams. The joy of following these teams seems kind of fleeting with the really lousy ending, yet I've often wondered why the movie industry doesn't take something from the realm of sports -- the element of surprise. That's what gets people to keep coming back.

Who would have thought the Giants would be headed to the Superbowl with three games on the road? Who saw a broken down Chargers team beating the Colts? If the Giants do somehow beat the Patriots, and lord I hope they do, it would be the biggest upset since Joe Namath's Jets upset Don Shula's Colts with Unitas as the back up until late in the game. The overwhelming majority of movies are completely predictable, and I think we're in as big a movie Dark Ages as we are a musical Dark Ages. The movies that most stick with me had surprise to them: The Usual Suspects, The Player, The Sixth Sense and Pulp Fiction come to mind.
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Walking in a baby store, after 35 years on Earth without the need to do such a thing, or seeing a bassinet in your apartment, thanks Boni Gomez, to be filled soon is a really strange and nice feeling. In some ways, the fact that I'm about to be a father to a newborn still hasn't sunk in, despite my wife now being in her third trimester.
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Blockbuster all of a sudden started charging my credit card if the movie isn't back on time. They say they will refund it, but it's still annoying. On the subject of annoying, I ordered Cynthia an ipod for Christmas from Circuit City, who sent it Fed Ex Smart Post, which doesn't deliver here. Two months since I ordered it and it isn't here. When I complained a few weeks ago, they told me it would come in through the post office. Sure doesn't seem that way. Wal Mart did the same with part of my order. The stuff sent the simple way through the post office arrived long ago. Why they had to complicate matters is beyond me and extremely annoying.
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The price per barrel on oil dropped about 10 percent in a week as the U.S. economy continues to fall apart. If the reverse happened, Shell and Mobil would have raised their prices already. Let's see how long until they drop the gas price, or even if they do at all.
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Lots of people talked to me about my last column. One person noted seeing government vehicles in the rally. Did anyone else see that? Given the nonsense going on, with Bill Weiss pointing out the CPA junket, I'm not sure if that even rates on the outrage scale.
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PSS doesn't have ESL classes. I continue to have a large influx of Korean students with zero knowledge of English mixed into a class that is designed to get students ultimately ready for college level reading and writing. These students need ESL classes. I have no faith it will happen.

Taste of India working out the kinks

I made my first trip to the new Taste of India the other night. They are still working out the kinks. First, I seem to recall the old version being open pretty much always. We were hungry as hell at 5, so we showed up then, but no go. They open at 6. We got there at 6 and it took a full 45 minutes plus to bring our order. There was only one other small table with customers. They were very apologetic and nice about it, but hopefully the kitchen is operating smoother in the future. Forty five minutes with two kids is a nightmare in a restaurant, though Alex wasn't too nuts.

I got my usual Chicken Curry, which is the best I've ever had anywhere and it was as good as always. I ordered the Fish Tikka, and there was a sauce for it that I swear tasted exactly like mouthwash. It was the worst sauce I've ever tasted, but the fish itself was ok. The old guard of friendly folks is all gone. They have relocated to the Guam location. Good for them, but their now absent good natured presence takes away from the place.
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Cynthia won a free night at Fiesta Resort. The pool there is atrocious. Dirty and so heavily chlorinated as to be unpleasant. The kids' pool was always closed. The buffet was generous, lobster at a $20 buffet, but not especially good. I've been to their teppenyaki restaurant and have liked it.
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I ate out a lot on my trip to the states. One thing that has changed, at least in wealthy New Jersey, is that people eat out every night of the week now. It used to be just weekends. Places were packed on a Wednesday. In contrast, I went to Tijuanas here in Saipan on Saturday around 8. Not a soul in this place. That place isn't that good really, but our economy absolutely blows.
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Tomorrow is the last day of summer vacation. Yecch. I'm as uneager to return as the students right this second. The key to being a teacher is to survive the first three months with your sanity. There are hardly any holidays in that period. After that, there are a ridiculous number of days. I suppose I'll feel better once I get in the flow. Being switched from seniors to freshmen with no notice does not help.
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I met this guy Travis while diving in Palau. He was more interested in paddling and camping than diving, but he is a cool dude and I like hanging with him. He lived on one of the rock islands, often alone, for a month -- pretty much living off the land. He wrote about it here and it is pretty interesting. He had some other good posts, but blocked them for some unknown reason. I asked him why in an email just now. Definitely worth a read.
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For more serious, adult minded movie fare, I recommend a film on DVD, strangely enough, called Little Children. It has four main characters, an emasculated man, a woman in a loveless marriage, a child molester (Kelly from Bad News Bears many moons ago, and very weird looking) and an ex-cop obsessed with making the now free child molester's life hell. The coldness and bitchiness of suburbia is well represented. It is definitely not a dopey action movie. It is probably my favorite movie since The Illusionist.

Short takes on government, graduation, movies and travel

How could this governor give another State of the Commonwealth and not mention the schools -- especially given the talk about not even opening schools on time next year? Is this guy the leader of the island or Captain of the Titanic (the economy)? If his deal is investing in the future, how about actually doing that and investing in education. On that topic, how about a few words on law enforcement, public health, the environment, etc. His idea to violate every one's contract and not pay anyone on holidays is a stupid approach hatched from his half baked ten percent scheme. Keep eliminating the needless jobs, of which there are plenty, and stop the ten percent thing overall. What a lame speech.

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Why is it we are always waiting for foreign investors to ride in and save us? Are we that incapable as a people to not have our own quality businesses here on island. Do we know this place well enough not to want to invest in it. I can think of a few things this island could use, yet I'm not about to open these businesses for various reasons. The fly by night nature of the government's finances, the power situation and Article XII, whose time has very much passed, are key reasons for that.

A few things that come to mind: A decent French or Italian Bistro in the style of Cafe Urashima. That is a good restaurant with a pretty limited menu, but at least it isn't a noisy, gorge yourself buffet common in the hotels. What is served at Urashima is at least quality. It is quiet and dignified enough for actual conversation. I want a place with decent food, decent service, not as much as Giovianni's in price, but I'm not expecting cheap, and I think it would work. Now that Taste of India is no more, the decent restaurant options on island just reduced by about one third.

It would be great to have a decent space for things like comedy, live theater, live music, alternative film, book readings, lectures and so on. The theater in the park museum would be a place to do these things. I'm sure a place that caters to these interests would be profitable and would help the vibe and atmosphere of this island.
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U.S. immigration fees relating to the I-130, I-485 and so on are scheduled to triple in June. Those of you with a foreign spouse blowing this off, as I was doing over the paperwork supernova it entails, are best advised to move quickly before it costs a lot more. We have one clinic to do the medical portion of the forms, and it costs more for the medical than everything else combined. This is typical with limited competition. I think my wife needed like three different shots at like $100 each. Health coverage means nothing with this. I filed my wife's green card papers yesterday, not to mention my application for a teacher's license in the states, in case this whole sh**house goes up in flames next year -- a distinct possibility.
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Comedians often talk about the crowd, or distinctly the lack of personality in a crowd, as something that impacts them onstage. I have all seniors in their last month of high school, and their senioritis is infecting me. The prom is Saturday. Graduation is in a few weeks. One of the hardest parts of teaching, especially in a high school, is getting them to care about learning. I always wanted to know things, so indifference is not something I relate to very well. I routinely feel like I'm more concerned with the futures of my students than they are themselves. The counselors can't even get them to fill out applications for free college money. The parents are no help. The military is here regularly. I have several former students in Iraq right now. There are very few young people here I feel are ready to be in a globally competitive economy, and worse, I don't feel any sense of urgency from them about fixing the situation.
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I saw the film Children of Men, which got a 90 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and I couldn't believe how atrocious this movie was. The plot revolves around the fact that women can't have babies anymore for reasons not explained, at least before I turned it off after a wasted hour, and the world just seems very unhappy. Everyone is killing each other, and the whole world in the movie looks like the Sunni Triangle. Two characters no one cares about, one is pregnant so I'm supposed to care, run around trying to get somewhere to have the baby as people get killed all around them for no particularly good reason. What an abysmal piece of garbage. You'd be better off watching Twelve Monkeys again instead of this nonsense.
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Northwest, at least so far, hasn't run any kind of deal to the mainland in the summer, which they've done every summer since I've been here. I find Summer in this place miserable, and I'm eager to get out for a month. I miss things like decent restaurants, comedy clubs, concerts, museums, large book stores, alternative cinema, major league baseball stadiums (even if the Yankees stink) and all the cultural things I like about the states. I'm not in a "We Love Saipan" kind of mood right now.

Couple of new movies on DVD I've seen of late

I love watching great movies, but I seldom have a satisfying film experience. I've taken to buying old Hitchcock and Polanski films of late -- many I've never seen or it has been a while. I rent a fair share of movies as well, and bail on a lot of them, but I seldom go to the theater, not out of cheapness so much, but just that they are so mediocre -- even worse in Saipan with only one theater catering to teenage tastes. Home theater and a family make the cinema far less attractive than it used to be.

In the older movies, directors had to rely on plot and characters more than spectacle and special effects, and I'll take plot and characters over dynamic explosions any day. Directors can now include so many fantastic things visually that it ceases to "Wow." The lack of imagination in most movies is staggering to me. Writers can make a fortune with a good script, yet so many movies seem to be remakes, celluloid versions of bad, antiquated television shows or sequels to originals that sucked.

Having said that, I saw one I liked a lot in "The Illusionist." This one required perhaps a bit too much suspension of disbelief in the actual illusions, but it was dramatic, romantic, visually compelling, different, well acted (Paul Giamatti and Edward Norton) and had a few nice twists.

I was very happy with "Borat" as well. It mixes high and lowbrow humor in a way seldom seen, and raises points about all kinds of boobs nationwide. I was afraid it would be overrated. Sacha Baron Cohen, a well scrubbed British comedian in real life, plays a zany character named Borat, who is off documenting the "real America," the one that makes me want to be European, and plays off many racial and ethnic stereotypes to great effect as he interviews politicians, USC frat boys (like the ones I knew all too well at the University of South Carolina), gun dealers, feminists, gangstas and others, and gets them to reveal their real thoughts about things. Overall, it was very funny and very different. It mixes adult and adolescent humor nicely. While at a Virginia rodeo, his character tells the crowd about how his country supports the U.S.'s "War of Terror," and proceeds to raise the stakes to hoping that George Bush drinks the blood of all the Iraqis, as the crowd cheers. The world's richest country contains quite a freakshow.

I saw another that was wildly overrated, but ok in "Babel." There are four separate stories here that are midly related ala "Crash." Most are fairly unique, but drag in certain parts, and the constant shift between stories makes the viewer lose track and interest. Cate Blachett's character is fairly unsympathetic, so I was half hoping she'd die after being shot kind of accidently by some kids as she was traveling Morocco for reasons not really explained other than the couple is getting over the death of a child. It certainly doesn't look like a place to relax --- more like Afghanistan. This isn't a garden variety movie, and I suppose the acclaim it got is related to this fact, but none of the four stories are that intriguing, though there are times they are interesting, the relationships between them largely tenuous, and the overall impact is somewhat limited. I'm not sure what the fuss is about this one.

"Flags of Our Fathers" deals with the Battle of Iwo Jima, and has footage redolent of "Saving Private Ryan" that is amazing too see. It shifts time periods so often as to lose, and sometimes bore, the viewer as it hones in on the story of that famous Iwo photo and the true story of the people in and around it and the propaganda aspects it served. This is highly watchable, but not stellar.

Compared to the last several months, these four were an improvement on a lot of the other crap that was offered.