Swedish?

Google Chrome's got some 'splainin' to do...

My iTunes Shuffle Baker's Dozen 4-12-13

Sadly, I continue to procrastinate at this blogging stuff. But somehow, someday, I'll do something more substantial than this...


Walk Away From Love - David Ruffin
All The Things She Said - Simple Minds
U Got The Look - Prince/Sheena Easton
Love Come Down - Evelyn "Champagne" King
Got To Give It Up (Pt. 1) - Marvin Gaye
Give It To Me - Timbaland feat. Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake
Only Happy When It Rains - Garbage
He's On My Team - Ari Gold feat. Kendra Ross
Smithereens - Annie Lennox
Gold - Spandau Ballet
It's My World - Ultra Nate
We Are Monkeys - Travis
Waste - Smash Mouth

Facebook Ad FAIL

I've noticed an increasing amount of advertising and pseudo-advertising on my Facebook news feed lately. There are obvious ads, of course, but there are also other posts -- "promoted" articles, "sponsored" posts, etc., all based on your "Likes" and those of your friends. For example, there could be a post saying "John Smith likes Wal-Mart" followed by a post from Wal-Mart's Facebook page. Here's another example, which just appeared at the top of my feed:

Just because I "Like" Jody Watley's page doesn't mean I want to like the page for her old group.

Sometimes, though, these auto-generated posts are wayyyyyyyyyyyy off-base. Here's a recent example: I "Like" the FB page for singer Will Young...

Based on this, here's what Facebook generated:

Ummmm...what?

I keep saying I hate Facebook more and more. I have too many friends (real-life friends as well as  Facebook "friends") who aren't on Twitter, though, so I'm stuck. 

Too Long For Twitter: Nashville Teens

Hi. Remember me? I hope so. I also hope to actually blog more often, but I've said that before. Anyway, I started to tweet this but I can't fit it into 140 characters, so...

Ever hear a song and think it's great, find out the artist and song title and put it on a list of songs you want to download, and then don't do so for quite some time and then, after a long time passes, you win 25 free downloads from a Coke Zero promotion and start downloading songs from that list, see the song and wonder what the hell this is, so you listen to it and you don't really care for it much and wonder why you put it on the list to begin with, and then you check Wikipedia and find that it was featured over the closing credits of a "Mad Men" episode in 2010?

Presenting "Tobacco Road" by Nashville Teens...

Bieber vs. Brown

I think we need to set up this cage match: Chris Brown and Justin Bieber: two "men" enter, one "man" leaves. Who's your money on? Check the videos at each of those TMZ links and decide for yourself. Bad language on both videos. Imagine little Justin Bieber dropping f-bombs. For shame!

My Best/Worst 2012 Films, Oscar Rankings

Sure, it's 55 days into 2013 but why not take a trip back in time with me? Since I've finally seen all of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, and I don't think there are any more 2012 releases that I'm going to see -- if any I haven't seen are even still in theaters -- it's time for my top ten of the sixty films (up by 6 from last year) I got to see. But first...

My Bottom 5 of 2012

5. Men in Black 3 -- An extremely tired sequel.
4. This Means War -- The worst rom-com and there's no Katherine Heigl or Gerard Butler in sight.
3. Silent House -- So bad I couldn't remember what it was about until I checked Wikipedia, and then it all came back to me.
2. Les Miserables -- I think I hated "Silent House" worse but I walked out of this one. But I did stay to the end of THE worst film of 2012...
1. Rock of Ages -- I will never understand why the film version, with the female lead's character named Sherrie, didn't bother to include the song "Oh Sherrie." Never. That song might have saved this from my only F of 2012...umm, probably not...

My Top 10 of 2012

Quick Reviews: Identity Amour Beasts

Finally got my last two Oscar Best Picture nominees in the books. So after this post you'll finally get my best/worst of 2012 (only two months late!) and my ranking of the Best Pictures.

I was very disappointed by Identity Thief. The trailer seemed promising but the film didn't live up to expectations. Jason Bateman's character (the identity theft victim) was just too stupid; that was established in the opening scene, which showed how the theft occurred -- basically, he gave it away. And I like Melissa McCarthy, but her character was just a series of weight/looks jokes with motives that were inconsistent. Is she really a bad person or a victim of her childhood? After her star-making turn in "Bridesmaids," she'd better look at her scripts more carefully. My grade: D-plus.

The story in Amour is meant to be heartbreaking. An elderly woman (Emmanuelle Riva) suffers a stroke that leaves her partially paralyzed, and her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant) takes care of her at their Paris apartment to honor her wish not to go into a hospital or nursing home. He struggles more and more as her condition deteriorates. It's well-acted but takes a jarring and then confusing turn near the end that kind of ruined it a little for me. My grade: B-minus.

I'm still puzzling a little over Beasts of the Southern Wild, to be honest. When I first finished watching it (note: for time-saving purposes I bought it on pay-per-view instead of seeing it in the theater) I was glad it was over, but upon some reflection I find my initial reaction was wrong. At first it reminded me of "Winter's Bone" in that it takes place in a very poor community -- this one's set in a part of the Louisiana bayou called "The Bathtub" that's cut off from everyone else by a levee. However, the fantasy element (the "aurochs," behemoths frozen in the ice caps long ago but freed by global warming) distracted from the story of the little girl (Quvenzhane Wallis), her ailing father, their impoverished but happy and self-sufficient community and the threat of destruction from a coming storm. Perhaps I'm missing the symbolism or something. My grade: B.

My iTunes Shuffle Baker's Dozen 2-22-13

Haven't made one of these posts in a while, so here it is. I have a complaint, though: the new iTunes is not great. Specific to this post, I can't find an icon to begin a shuffle right away when I open iTunes. If I click the Play button it begins with the first song in my library. In order to begin with a random song, I have to go to the Menu bar and click Control - Shuffle - Turn On Shuffle. Three steps instead of one. Really stupid.

Payphone - Maroon 5
Vibes - Inner City
Exhale (Shoop Shoop) - Whitney Houston
Season of the Witch - Lou Rawls
System - Seal
Don't Release Me (Wyclef Jean Remix) - Gloria Estefan
Somebody Told Me - The Killers
Why Can't We Live Together - Sade
Another Night - Aretha Franklin
Nothing Fails (Nevins Mix) - Madonna
50 Candles - Boyz II Men
Jupiter (Edit) (From The Planets) - Andre Previn; London Symphony Orchestra
The Captain - Kasey Chambers

Quick Reviews: 43 Gangster Bodies

And we move into 2013 releases (although there are still a few 2012 films I'll try to see, a couple of Oscar Best Picture nominees in particular). I'll discuss these in reverse order of the names in the title.

With the "Twilight" films finished, Hollywood brings us another version of the strange-love-between-human-and-other genre, Warm Bodies. Instead of human girl-vampire (or werewolf) romance, we have human girl-zombie romance. After some sort of apocalyptic events (cue the USA Today with the front page headline "The End?" that I swear I've seen in multiple films), zombies wander around in search of human flesh and brains to eat. One such zombie, R (Nicholas Hoult), narrates, explaining that he can't remember his full name or anything of his life. The zombies can barely grunt and moan, let alone communicate. Meanwhile, the survivors have fortressed (is that a word?) themselves and occasionally send out scout parties of young people to find medicine and other items in short supply behind the giant walls. On such a run, Julie (Teresa Palmer) is nearly caught by a zombie pack until being rescued by R, who became smitten with her instantly. R begins to regain some humanity as he falls for her, but her father (John Malkovich) is convinced there's no way a zombie can recover, so...see what we have here? R and Julie...Romeo and Juliet. Spoiler alert? (I didn't come up with that on my own, to be honest.) At any rate, there's some humor and cleverness to it. Certainly more than in the "Twilight" films. My grade: B.

Gangster Squad is almost like a cartoon. That's not really meant as a compliment. The story of a war between a mob boss and a police unit (loosely based on an actual squad) that's kept "off the books" so they can do things regular cops can't do, such as shoot and kill an unarmed mobster, in 1949 Los Angeles is a violent but simple story, with characters that are pretty much walking cliches. Ryan Gosling (as a cop) seems to be having a ball, but Sean Penn (as the mob boss, Mickey Cohen) brings nothing but histrionics. As good as Penn was in "Milk," that's how awful he is here. And Emma Stone as Cohen's girlfriend, who falls for Gosling's character, isn't at all believable in the role. This grade would be lower without Gosling. My grade: C.

As for Movie 43, after sitting through over a dozen gruesomely awful, disgusting, not remotely funny tales tied together by a movie pitch, featuring all kinds of big names (Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Halle Berry, Terrence Howard, just to name a few), just after the credits began to roll, there was one final story, in which an animated cat is jealous of the girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks) of his owner (Josh Duhamel). You might be happy that it includes pictures of Duhamel in a swimsuit, until you see said animated cat masturbating while looking at the photos. Every one of these stars should apologize for this garbage. The only person who didn't leave a negative impression on me was, believe it or not, Snooki. Of course, that's because, in the barrage of excrement that was this waste of celluloid, I didn't even notice Snooki until her name showed up in the credits. My grade: F.

ALL Of My Movie Grades

I had an idea the other day. I've decided to consolidate my movie grades from the past few years into one post. Instead of creating a new post every year, I'm going to use this one post for every year.

(Oooh, just had another idea: with grades going back to 2009, perhaps in early 2014 I can compile a list of the best and worst films I've seen over the previous five years.)

So I suppose you could bookmark this page if you're really interested. At any rate, the grades follow the jump...