Yo, Rocky Balboa

I've officially seen three of the Rocky movies: Rocky, Rocky IV, and now Rocky Balboa. I think everyone probably rightfully thought the same thing when we heard of Stallone's plans for a sixth Rocky film. I know my eyes couldn't stop rolling for weeks. However, he seems to have acknowledged all of those notions that would have caused us to doubt.

The first and most obvious of those being the question of both the actor's, and the characters age. How was this addressed? Well, this isn't a story about the greatest fight of his career, but a story about the last fight of his career. It deals with being a has-been but still having a few tricks he can teach to the new kid on the block. The other big issue is Stallone's acting itself. Can the man act? No, not really, but he can play Rocky Balboa and be as convincing as he needs to be so that the audience doesn't realize that this is in-fact a washed-up actor. And I suppose that's why this ended up being a smart move for Stallone. Had he tried to do Cliffhanger 2, our eye rolling would have been justified (We may have to hold that thought for Rambo 4 though).

It's got some sappy moments, it's got some inspirational moments and even some exciting moments. Whats good about it is that it doesn't seem to try to copy verbatim the formula of the other Rocky films I've seen. Sure, it makes it's homages, but tastefully and not to the point where they carry the story.

The best aspect of the character development of the film is Rocky befriending a down-on-herself young woman and her son. Had there been no fighting in the movie what-so-ever, this story could have been expanded into it's own film by itself. The only awkward or confusing thing was the current heavy-weight champ Mason Dixon. We're never really sure if he's supposed to be a cocky asshole, or just a good guy surrounded by the wrong people. In one scene he talks about how he'd rather be respected as a fighter than be the champ, and in a later scene he's asshole trash-talking Rocky. In the end though, he finally learns a lesson and that's the real point of the character.

All in all, this is a film about doing whatever it is you do without bitching about the obstacles in your way. In fact, Rocky makes a speech to his son saying pretty much just that. The story is full of those and other speeches, but they always seem natural, unpreachy and warranted. The best perhaps comes from Rocky's trainer (forgive me die-hard Rocky fans for not knowing the character's name). He tells rocky that he's not fast on his feet, and his reflexes are shot, so he's going to have to win the fight with "blunt-force-trauma", and it's time to start building some "hurtin' bombs".

As tempting as it is to laugh at so-called has-beens, you've got to give respect to actors like Sylvester Stallone, Bill Murray and Jack Nicholson that have managed to stay in the game just as well as they ever were (the later two more so). I say just as much with Stallone, because as I said, the man can't act, never really could, but he's still doing it and I'm still paying to watch, so that's something. Like the movie poster says, "I ain't over till it's over".

*** (3 out 4 stars).

Updates and More

First of all, until I have time to get the new logo to appear up top without the site feed title being the location of the jpg file, It's just going to be text based.

In badass martial arts movie news, Yimou Zhang (writer/director of Hero and House of Flying Daggers) has a new movie coming out called The Curse of the Golden Flower. It stars Chow Yun-Fat and Li Gong.

Lastly, I finally was able to pick up 24 Season 5 on DVD. I was disappointed with the packaging this time. It just seems like they got lazy (using slim-cases instead of the usual gate-folding case with elaborate photo-art). However, they more than made up for it with the design and function of the menus. They look much cooler than in years past, and they finally added a "play-all" feature. Only took the 5 seasons to realize that people might want to watch several episodes in a row uninterrupted.

New Title

As you may have noticed I've changed the name of this blog from "Trevor's Lucid Dream" to "The Lucid". Title doesn't make sense to you? Don't look to hard into it. It's only meant to retain a reference to it's origin while being a more news-like title. I did this because I've decided I much more like writing about external things rather than dear-diary stuff about myself. I'll try to keep my focus on news, science, music, and movies, but who knows. I'm in the process of adding category labels to all my posts. Those categories are listed in the right column. I've also added a "Shoutbox". If you'd like to leave a message on the site not related to a post, there's the place to do it.

CNN

Here is a case and point of why I hate the mainstream media. CNN yesterday was talking about a cruise ship that had 2 "outbreaks" of a virus on board within the last year. They said that they had hired more cleaning staff and doctors for it's next voyage. The "reporter" at the desk was giving tips on "How to Keep Yourself Healthy on Your Next cruise". This same person asked the guy in field how common this virus was. He then responded that this was a very common virus and not at all exclusive to cruise ships. He then went on to say that 1 in every 12 people in the United States contract this virus every year and the symptoms are much like the flu. He was then asked what the ratio of people getting sick on cruises was, to which he responded about 1 in 100. They both then chuckle about how they suppose the media was just blowing this out of proportion because it happened on boat.

So, did you catch that? You're LESS LIKELY to contract this virus if you're on these cruise ships. You're LESS LIKELY to contract this virus if you're on these cruise ships. You're LESS LIKELY to contract this virus if you're on these cruise ships.

CNN having this info before hand, decides to put this shit on the air anyway. Then, the reporters admit that it isn't newsworthy. And yet, it fucking made it on the air. This isn't the first time I've heard of illness on ships cause by virus contraction, and I'm going to go ahead and guess that over the past 18 months that this has been a "story", news organizations have had these same statistics.

So what we have now are people thinking that these ships are just disease vessels when their own kitchen is probably far more unhealthy. I'm gonna bet that the people running the cruises are swept up in the same paranoia hence the added cleaning and doctor staff. Or maybe they are aware of the reality but are just appeasing public idiocy induced by irresponsible "reporting".

The Sudoku Conquest

I did a few in the past and thought they were too easy. Then I came to realize I was doing them wrong. The two puzzles above represent my triumph in doing them correctly (And, of course they were much harder than I thought). I feel smart. Isn't that the ultimate reward of anything in life? Doing something that doesn't make you feel like quite such an idiot. If I could do a bunch of shit myself on my car, that too would make me feel smart; maybe someday.

I've found that doing these mundane puzzles calms me down when I'm depressed, pissed off, or freaking out. Having something else to focus on helps take my mind off of my troubles. Perhaps if I do enough of these I won't need Zoloft anymore.

Titanic, yes I said "Titanic"

Ashley and I watched the entirety of Titanic the other day and when it was over I realized something; I had sat there for over 3 hours and 15 minutes and watched what I still believe is a pretty corny movie. More specifically what finally came to me about the movie was why it was so insanely popular. While I don't care for the plot nor really would I ever go out of my way to see it again I realized that the film is almost perfectly paced. Most other 3+ hour movies will lag in the middle somewhere, have an awkward, drawn-out ending, or have 3 false endings. Titanic, it seems, doesn't fall into any of those trappings. It begins, it middles, and it ends. It tells a big, long story, and yet I sat there and watched the whole thing without being bored. That, along with it's sappy love story and suspenseful finish is why so many people like a movie that before I would have snickered at. So there you have it, I found something positive about a movie I never really liked.

The Cut-throat world of Chuck E Cheese's

Ashley and I took Samantha to Chuck-E-Cheese's the other day. Normally I don't mind the place. Sure it's obnoxious, but it's skeeball and pizza, two things that I happen to like. It was on this occasion that something occured to me. It's something I had realized as a child but didn't really put togeather what exactly what was going on. You see, we went on friday night and as such it was very busy. We've gone with Samantha a few times over the past couple of years but it was usually during the week and not busy at all. What I realized (stay with me...hear me out...) was that Chuck-E-Cheese was a microcosm of the adult world. At first I thought it was just the corporate world that it resembled, but the analogy can apply to all of it really, and I'll explain how. It hit me when I was waiting in line behind some kids to play skeeball. I was polite and patient and I gracefully waited my turn. I should have known that the kids wouldn't behave as such as they kept just walking up and cutting in front of me. At first it pissed me off, but they're kids; I can't exactly scold them for cutting in front of an adult to play a game at what is cleary an establishment for children. But then I saw these kids cutting in front of other kids that, like me, were waiting patiently to play the games (which brought back wonderful memories of my own experiences at the exact same place). The first thing I did in my mind was jump up on my high-horse and think to myself that us adults know how to behave properly and these kids need to be tought a lesson. Then something else happened in my mind...it almost sounded like the laugh track from Three's Company slowly creeping from my sub-counscious into my counscious mind. Us adults don't do that? I can't remember the last time I was at the grociery store or the pharmacy and some jackbag didn't try to muscle his way in front of me in line (it's usually meatheaded men or really old women). Then I noticed other things going on, kids were stealing tokens from other kids cups, they were stealing tickets that other kids had won. One kid even stole some of my french fries (but in his defence he was like 3 and I think he thought his mom had ordered them). All this behavior was rampant, but what was most rampant of all was the blatent cheating. Mostly with skeeball, but with the soccer ball kicking game and others as well. And were the parents there teaching their kids to play fair? I didn't see a sinlge parent correct their children. So, what was all of this lying, cheating and stealing for? Prizes of course. Peaces of crap that they didn't need. How much of this sounds familiar? All of it I'm guessing. This kind of behavior is commonplace in both the working-class and corporate world. Taking short-cuts, lying to employees, customers, and the public . I'm sick of this attitude that something isn't cheating if you don't get caught. I'm sick of it from kids, people, and corporations. I'm sick of children being tought that it's just the way the world works and you better learn to do it better than the next guy or he'll get a bigger house than you. The world is what you make of it, and I don't think the entire world is like this. We've gotten it burned into our culture's psyche that this is the way it is, and that you have to play the game before the game plays you. This isn't ok. This isn't life. I fully submit that it may be in our nature to be this way, but that we are smarter than this. We can be above this. We can take a stand and say no matter what the outcome, no matter what the other guy is doing, that we're not going to be cheater, the theif, or the liar. We can do better.

(It's late, this is a rough-draft...I will spell check and proof-read tomorrow)

Damn straight, fucker.

Scientific Rationalism & Man With Mustache

The first thing I want to mention today is the most brilliant podcast out there right now, it's called Point of Inquiry. It's a science-centric show focusing on, as the host of the show puts it, "Asking the biggest questions of the day through the lens of the Scientific viewpoint". Other than issues directly relating to Science, it also desls with social and political issues, again from scientists' and rational thinkers' points of view. There is a guest each week, what initially brought my attention to the show was the recent interview with Richard Dawkins. So check it out, it's Point of Inquiry, subscribe to it with itunes or download the mp3s directly off of the site.


The other thing I wanted to mention was Entertainment Weekly. A few weeks ago they had a picture of the now familiar character Borat (played by sacha cohen) on the cover with the words "Has this man made the funniest movie ever?". Inside the pages were glowing reviews of movie, interviews with Cohen and so-on. They were kissing Borat's ass basically. Then, this week a rather large article appears in the magazine days before the movie is set to release, slamming the movie and telling everyone that it's going to flop because the studio over estimated the internet-buzz of the movie exactly the way they did with Snakes on a Plane. I'm not quoting exactly here, but it also said something to the effect of "When is hollywood going to admit to itself that internet marketing just doesn't work?". Now, lets review the reviews. Snakes on Plane: 69% on the tomatometer, while still considered "Fresh" 30% of those reviewing it still gave it a negative review with average overall rating being 6.2/10. Borat: 96% on the tomatometer with and average rating of 8.3/10. As many of you might know by now, Borat completely blew out all studio and media expectations and opened with 26m (it was expected to open in the 10-15m range and place 3 or 4th). The reason for the low expected take was that Borat was only opening in about 800 theaters this week, that's about 1/2 to 1/3 of what the other major releases that didn't fair nearly as well opened in. So EW, backpedaling and not wanting to look like asses they way they did when SoaP "Flopped" after they too had gotten caught up in the hype (I put 'flopped' in qoutations because it's a relative term, the movie still made a tidey profit), recanted their praise of the movie at the last second because they found out about the initial low theater count.

Did EW not look at or even care about the reviews of the 2 movies (SoaP and Borat) before shooting their mouth off? Does that not matter any more? Sure, plenty of great films go unnoticed by mainstream audiences all the time, but the usually have one thing in common: They were not made for mainstream audiences. So, did EW think that nobody was going to go see a movie that was obviously targeting the mainstream and had the best reviews of the year(96% has been the best tomatometer score for any film this year)? I don't know what it is about moive-market anaylsts and their gloom-and-doom predictions, but they don't seem to be based on anything like common-sense. Did I think SoaP was going to do a little better than it did? Yes, but not by much, because I saw the reviews ahead of time and they were luke-warm at best. Did I expect Borat to do better than SoaP...honestly, untill EW's article I wasn't really compairing the two, but I expect it to do well considering the reviews.