Author: Adam (Page 117 of 224)

The Good Girl

Rarely has my opinion of a movie changed so drastically while I was watching it. In the first half, I just didn’t believe Jennifer Anniston as a downtrodden Retail Rodeo employee, and I thought the story was simplistic and the characters stereotypes. But as it went on, it sort of seeped into my bones and I began to enjoy it a lot. And did I mention it has John C. Reilly?

While “Trust” is a much, much better movie, “Good Girl” reminded me of Hal Hartley movies in how they use exaggerated plot and characters to illuminate truths behind them. That’s a really high-falutin’ film school way of looking at this movie, but it’s all I could come up with to explain how it affected me.

I do think that Jennifer Anniston has the best chance of all the “Friends” gang to make a decent movie career – even if she is more suited in the end to fluffy stuff like “Picture Perfect” and “Object of My Affection.”

Taking off for the yearly Labor Day family reunion festivities. Back sometime Monday. In the meantime, why not reload my page many, many times to get to see all the links on the right side? It’ll give you something to look at, and me some more hits.

It’s a win-win.

Took my yearly pilgrimage to St. Vincent’s today, to gather up items for the White Elephant gift exchange at the family reunion over the weekend. I always feel vaguely guilty somehow buying things there that are destined for gag gifts. But the place is rich with possibilities, let’s face it.

I purchased:
1. A wall hanging consisting of a sort of Kabuki/mime mask surrounded by beads, with a frilly fan spread out behind it.
2. The Better Homes & Gardens “Cooking with Cheese” cookbook from 1966.
3. An LP of “Barbara Mandrell’s Greatest Hits,” with a photo of Babs seductively posing in a mostly-unzipped fur parka.

Of course, I felt less guilty when the guy in front of me in the checkout line bought one item, a single golf ball for 11 cents, and used a penny from the “Take a Penny” jar to help pay for it.

Found out by watching The Screen Savers on TechTV today that Patrick Norton and I have just about the exact same computer: 600 MHz Athlon, 20 gig hard drive, TNT2 video card. We’re both too cool to bother with the latest and greatest stuff.

I guess I’ll have to file this under freaky celebrity synchronicities, like when I found out that Al Gore and I have the same favorite movie: “Local Hero.”

I wonder if Al has seen “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

Synonyms of the day

Bellicosity and truculence.

My friend Kevin had a great idea for a new product today. Make a recording of general office background noise, and sell it to lonely work-at-home freelancers. Charge a little extra to include a personalized page over the intercom:

‘Adam Blust, please come to the front desk. Adam Blust to the front desk.’

Have you ever had an e-mail ruin your day? I sent an e-mail today to a client I did a small job for a couple weeks ago, asking about the status of my check. Anyone who’s ever done any freelance work, especially when it’s your only support, knows how important those checks are. I was just asking nicely about it, and I received a really shockingly mean and snarky reply.

I debated whether to respond at all, and in the end I did send something back to him that made me feel somewhat better. Whether I should have sent any reply at all is debatable. I didn’t expect to get any more work from them anyway. But for a while it really disturbed me, and I felt like the only way to stop stewing about it was to reply somehow.

E-mail seems to have an immediacy and starkness that other forms of communication don’t have. And I know that people will often say something in an e-mail that they

1. may not even mean,
2. would never say to someone’s face, and
3. will regret later after the heat passes.

Do you ever write out e-mails in the heat of battle and then not send them? Do you send them and later regret it? This stuff fascinates me.

I got back from dinner tonight and there were 12 new e-mails in my inbox.

They were all spam.

The Wall Street Journal attempts to explain the appeal of Ann Coulter in a recent article. (I guess we’re on an Ann Coulter kick today at words mean things.) Along the way, they call her outrageous and hateful statements “flights of fancy” and “raillery.” Yeah, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would have a problem with her statement that she wished Timothy McVeigh would have stopped by the New York Times building.

As one MetaFilter commenter wrote, much more succinctly than I could have:

I can’t help but wonder if the WSJ would have been so accomodating if someone like Michael Moore had said something like, “My only regret is that W wasn’t breakfasting at Windows on the World that day.”

Words. mean. things.

I’m a proofreader – I can’t help it.

“Already this year, Ann Coulter’s ‘Slander’ and Michael Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men’ have been runaway No. 1 bestsellers, proving that ink on paper is one full-proof way to break out as a partisan pundit.”

-from a Salon article on conservative pundit Sean Hannity