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Picture of filmstrip

For those of you who liked Will Farrell’s impersonation of the prez on SNL, you’ll like this satirical commercial.

We saw this last night, and I haven’t decided whether I liked it or not.

There were some pretty good “realism” scenes & dialog, and the main storyline was decent, but I don’t think it’s worth raving about as I have heard some people do. For those of you who have seen the movie and are totally confused (don’t read this link until you’ve seen it), here is a good link that goes into some additional information about the actual story, that may in turn help to figure out the meaning behind it.

A couple things I didn’t like:

• There were quite a few deleted scenes that were fairly significant to the story
• The text of the book that Donnie receives in the movie is posted online, and helps to explain some of the story, but a lot of viewers will just walk away confused. It’s one thing to make a movie that lets the audience think and figure things out; it’s another to create a piece of this puzzle and not make it accessible in the context of the movie. Maybe that was the idea, I don’t know
• I think I probably would have liked this movie more if I hadn’t heard several people go off on how amazing / deep / etc. it was first. Going along with the previous point, I enjoy a movie where you have to do some digging and reflection to grasp what the filmmaker was saying, but when the director himself specifically says that some pieces are just open to interpretation by each individual, it really nags me to hear people talk about it as if they’ve “figured it out” and have some kind of lofty appreciation that others cannot enjoy, since they don’t “get it” yet (meaning they don’t see it the same way).

All in all, I still liked it, I just don’t think it’s as profoundly deep as I was thinking it would be.

Picture of sign at TargetI was looking through the pictures I’ve taken on my cell phone and I came across this one, which I had forgotten about until now. The picture isn’t great since it was dark at the time and my cell phone camera isn’t the greatest, but I brightened it up a little in Photoshop, at least enough to read it (click on the image for the full-size pic). It shows a sign now posted at the local Target store which reads “Our shopping carts will lock if taken beyond the parking lot boundary. The boundary is marked by distinctive yellow lines.”

This subject came up while we were having dinner down the street at Macaroni Grill, since someone had noticed it earlier that day, and Martha suggested that a field trip was in order to study this and attempt to discover how it worked (or perhaps more interestingly, whether it could be circumvented).

I didn’t snap a photo of the wheel, but the way it worked was that one of the four standard wheels on each cart was replaced by a slightly more bulky gray wheel, with no other additional components that were visible. The first test was to determine whether the wheel locking was triggered by proximity to the store, or by crossing some sort of “border”. After trying to push one over the painted line and seeing it lock, we then went further down the lot, and tried to go up to the street farther away from the actual entrance/exit, but the wheel still locked. At this point I suspected that it was a proximity limit from the store and that it would lock any time you got far enough away from the store, but I was eventually able to wheel it to the far end of the parking lot and get around and out to the street, so the proximity theory is out. (BTW, I don’t have any pictures of me triumphantly riding it down the middle of the road either, so you’ll just have to take my word for it). Must be some sort of electro-magnetic trigger that will lock the wheel if the wheel passes close enough, but I either found a blind spot in the border or went over it fast enough that the lock was not able to engage.

After several experiments, we ended up with quite a collection of locked carts, which brought to mind the entertaining possibility of figuring out how the locks are triggered and then going around the store and locking all the carts.

One point that I was wondering about was who is stealing the Target carts? It would seem that the street population prefers the “classic” steel variety (my theory on this is that they can’t always be too picky with their wardrobe, so they need the more easily integrated neutral color instead of the bright red Target style), so that leaves me to wonder where they are all going?

I just got back from the Century 16 theater tonight, and am sad to report that the ticket checkers at the door were not allowing anyone who had bought a coffee across the street at Java Joe’s (including me) to bring it in with them. I argued with them for a while, and finally ended up just drinking the coffee while I was talking to them and missing the previews, but it was still very annoying.

Then I get inside and notice that they now sell coffee at the snack bar. I know they’ve always had that sign out there saying that they don’t allow outside food & drinks, but for years I’ve walked by openly carrying coffee and/or other things in plain view without ever having anyone say a word, including the guy who stopped me tonight. In light of their newly available coffee service, somehow I doubt that it’s a coincidence that they chose to start enforcing this now.

Two questions I have:

1. Is this happening in other local theaters as well?
2. I heard from someone a long time ago that an establishment cannot prevent you from bringing in your own stuff, possibly something to the effect of if they sell it, you can also bring it in. Has anyone else heard this?

I’m not too sure on the second one, since I know of one independent theater that a nearby Starbucks makes regular payments to in exchange for the theater allowing customers to bring in their coffee, and I doubt SB would go for this if there were any legal way around it.

Listening to the radio tonight and hearing yet another report of how more Americans every day are not supporting the war, and directly attributing it to the rising loss of what they refer to as “American lives”. Read More »