LaurenandLloyd.com

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movie

Ten years later

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Ten years ago Lauren and I went with Samith & Stephannie to see the new the X-files movie (from here on out I’ll just say X-files, which is what FOX should have done all along anyway, thank you very much). Last night we went with them to see the new X-files movie. Under no circumstances should you see this movie in the theater. It’s not that it is a bad movie. It’s just that seeing it in the theater will ruin two vital parts of watching x-files:

  1. The ability to turn the lights on when it gets scary.
  2. The chance to talk about the episode with whoever you’re watching it with so as to figure out what’s going on.

Lets hope they make another one in ten years.

The movie itself was mostly good, except where it is really bad. And, keeping with tradition, they leave things a little ambiguous in the end. Skinner turns up at one point and there are a few little in jokes. This is a “monster of the week” episode, so don’t expect any mythology stuff. Oh, and did you know Mulder and Scully had a son?

Dr. Jones

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No spoilers were written in the making of this post.
I need a whip.
Lauren took me to see a movie last night. We had popcorn and Pepsi. It was just like a real movie. It was a sell-out at the Rivoli Theater. Lauren liked the movie, but she said it was because she had low expectations. I’d say it was better than the second movie, but it had a little bit of a National Treasure feel to it.

Lauren’s least favorite part was the jungle cave ninjas. These guy’s job is to hang out all day in a cave waiting to see if someone happens upon their thousand year old ruins. Then they let them go past and follow them. It’s a boring job, but they have a good union. Some jungle ninja families have been doing it for generations.

Fairly far along into the movie Lauren leaned over and whispered that “El Dorado” was maize (what my people call corn). I thought that was genius, but it didn’t occur to either of the Georges. Oh well, maybe I can work that into my next movie.

I’m not a Nicolas Cage fan.

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Tonight was the February Bad Movie Night. We had a new addition tonight. It was Curt Niermann’s first bad movie night (Jenny Niermann’s younger brother for those of you wno know Jenny). So there were 4 of us in total, and that’s a good number, because then we fit comfortably in a booth at our usual restaurant, which we didn’t go to.

I always hear Johhny Cash singing this

The movie was pretty bad. The acting was reasonable, but the writing wasn’t. I don’t know if it was true to it’s comic book origin. I was never a Ghost Rider fan. My impression was that people who read it were pretty hard core. The fight scenes were boring, but the flaming chain was neat. Yes, a bad movie, however, during the final credits there’s a cool cover of the song (Ghost) Riders in the Sky by Spiderbait, which we also covered at Lauren’s last Ukulele Night. I couldn’t find the song anywhere; it’s not on the soundtrack. If anyone digs it up, let me know.

After the movie we went to Lone Star and everyone had a steak. Even Samith. Then we threw back a couple of shots of whisky and shot up the joint. We barely made it out before the cops arrived.

By the way, I’m not a Nicolas Cage fan. I think the only movie of his that I like is Raising Arizona.

Gooda wark Danialsan

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We have three “Access periods” each week, because good middle schools have things like that. It’s in all the literature. Our access groups are students selected at random from 6th-8th grade. Once you have someone in your access group they stay with you until they enter high school. We don’t know what happens to them after that. So we’re pretty much stuck with the kids that we get unless you can convince another teacher to trade with you.

I have the best access group. It was a little experiment in self-fulfilling prophesy. When we first started doing these groups I told mine that they were the best access group. We fed off the fact that we happened to win the first inter-access group contest, and now they are the easiest group of middle students to work with ever. The 8th graders make the 7th graders tow the line and 6th graders are all terrified of me.

Wax on... Wax off...

This week we’re talking about bullying, and to introduce it we showed The Karate Kid to the rugrats*. It works well for an introduction, and when we first did this 2 years ago I made up a Karate Kid “talking points” cheat sheet for our teachers to use to lead the discussions. It’s an interesting movie to use, because it’s got the swears, drinking, smoking, fighting and racism in it, but it’s incorporated in a way that makes it easy to turn each one of those into a useful discussion. I think next time we show it I’ll include all of the swears in my introduction so the students aren’t shocked when they hear them in the movie.

We tried something new this time. We took a long sheet of paper from the art teacher and combined the two 12×12 screens into one huge 12×24 screen and showed it in letterbox. It worked surprisingly well.

*I said “rugrats” because I knew Annette would jump all over me in the comments if I said “kids”.

Bad Movie Night

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For the past few years, Samith and various other guys that we know have been going to see a movie once a month. Originally these were “Any Movie Our Wives Wouldn’t See With Us”, but as that almost universally means that it’s a bad movie, the vernacular became “Bad Movie Night”. Now we actively search out movies for which the theatre will be nearly empty. You and pretty much guarrantee that we’ll be at any movie that is (a) based on a comic book graphic novel, (b) based on a video game or (c) features lots of things blowing up.

Hot babes...check, cool cars...check, neat gadgets...mostly not.

This month’s movie was Casino Royale. It was actually a good movie, and so we had to fall back on the original Bad Movie Night charter to justify seeing it. It also happens to be one of maybe three James Bond books that I read when I was maybe 14 years old. As this isn’t actually a review of the movie as much as a review of Bad Movie Night, I won’t say more about it except that they new Bond didn’t look much like Bond at the start, but did at the end.

The theatre was pretty full this time, but usually we’re about half of the audience and thrice we’ve been the only people in the theatre. Once they held the movie for us because Samith (or maybe it was me) was running late. After the movie we go out to eat and talk about the movie and other manly things that our women folk wouldn’t understand –and by that I mean, “wouldn’t be remotely interested in”.