WHERE HAVE I BEEN? WHAT AM I DOING?

Time gets away from us all sometimes. Looking at the date of my last post, I noticed that it has been more than a month since I shared my thoughts with the world. ("The World...ha ha ha, so grandiose in my middle age.)

Here are some of the things I've been meaning to talk about over that time condensed down into bite-sized pieces for your perusal. After all, your Internet time is valuable.
----------------------------------

INCEPTION

I won't do a full review here, but I can tell you that I've seen this movie twice now and it is even more engrossing and impressive the second time around than it was on first viewing.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan reportedly spent over ten years working on this mind-bender of a story about a shadowy team of people who can invade people's dreams to steal secrets--or in the case of Inception, implant an idea. Leonardo DiCaprio is in peak, movie star form as "Cobb", the leader of the team which also includes the cautiously debonair "Arthur" (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, who just gets better and better), newbie Ellen Page and a silver-tongued forger played with impish glee by Tom Hardy. Ken Watanabe plays Saito, the billionaire businessman who masterminds the mission and who provides a very special motivation for Cobb to take this quintessential "one last job."

What the movie is best at is setting up a plausible dream reality with it's own rules and it's own unique stakes while combining that with an emotional backstory almost guaranteed to tug at anyone's heartstrings. Look for Marion Cotillard as Cobb's ex-wife--she's sexy, smart and creepy all at the same time. The idea the crew is trying to implant is almost a Hitchcockian MacGuffin--it seems there could be much easier ways to achieve the same result, but how much fun would that be, right?

So far, Inception is the best movie of 2010--by a wide margin.

THE OTHER GUYS

Another brief review...another winning movie. This is not a groundbreaking comedy by any means, nor does it have the cheeky, parodic lunacy of the first two Naked Gun movies which are clear antecedents for this buddy cop farce. But instead of me blathering on about what the movie isn't, let me tell you what it is: fucking funny.

Will Ferrell is back in form as the dweeby, paunchy, forenzic accountant whose main job with the NYPD seems to be doing the paperwork for the Alpha male, bad ass, supercops played hilariously (and not spoiling anything here, briefly) by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who essentially are doing amped-up, dumbed down versions of their stereotypical movie roles. Mark Wahlberg is Ferrell's unwilling partner, shackled to him after an unfortunate incident involving a New York Yankee just moments before a deciding World Series Game 7. Michael Keaton plays the precinct captain, channeling every precinct captain you've ever seen in a cop movie or TV show over the years and winking at the role just enough to let you know he's in on the joke.

The plot is mostly irrelevant, which is good because its unnecessarily convoluted. The point is the chemistry between Wahlberg and Ferrell, who seem to be having a blast; combined with more than a few good jokes about what it is to be macho and how to find happiness in a workplace full of buffoons. Oh, and Eva Mendes shows up playing Ferrell's "Perfect Wife" who, in a running gag that wisely stops just before it gets too old, Ferrell can't stand and Wahlberg naturally lusts after.

You're not going to believe this, but if you stick around through the final credits, you might actually learn something about Ponzi schemes and the ridiculous inequity in the distribution of wealth in present-day American society, so you can't say the movie isn't enlightening in it's own way. My grade for The Other Guys would definitely be a B+ and this year, that's pretty damn good.

BP Stops the Leak...Can't Congratulate Itself Fast Enough

Am I the only person still concerned that there are literally millions of gallons of crude oil still floating around in the Gulf of Mexico, leak or no leak? I think the mainstream media will revisit this story when the prices of shrimp and other fish or crustaceans normally harvested in the Gulf suddenly skyrockets.

Still, it is a relief that for now the leak seems to have been capped. I only wish that greedy BP had put enough money and manpower into preventing such a spill in the first place. With their history, they should never have been allowed to build a deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico in the first place.

Summer TV Worth Watching

Quickly, thumbs up--oh wait, that's trademarked. Thanks Roger Ebert! :-(

Let me try again...here are the shows worth watching or DVR'ing this summer:

Mad Men
Friday Night Lights (if you didn't catch it on DirectTV)
Top Chef
Royal Pains
Covert Affairs (will make you remember Alias fondly though it's not nearly as complex as that show was)
The "C" Word
Lie to Me

This category is "Shows Worth A Look or Two, But Don't Get Hooked":

Next Food Network Star
The Closer
Louie
The Good Guys

And finally, "Shows That If You Watch More Than Once, You Clearly Are Wasting Your Summer and You Should Consider Destroying Your TV As Punishment":

The Bachelorette
Bachelor Pad
Dating in the Dark
Rizzoli & Isles
Wipeout

It's getting late...but at least I have a three-day weekend! Hooray for me. Bad for you, if you don't. Come back and visit me soon, I promise I'll write more. Maybe I was away at summer camp?

Peace.

MY VOLUMINOUS READER MAIL & A Few Other Thoughts

I've got mail! This note came from "J" (many thanks J.) regarding my last post about the greed driven realignment in major college football (which has slowed, but may not yet be done as I will outline below):

"So now that Texas has decided to stay put, Nebraska bolts next year to the Big 11 (or are they the new Big 12?) and Colorado to the Pac-10 in 2012, what are your thoughts? It doesn't sound like there will be too much more movement for a while and college sports are saved!!"

Well, first of all let's get something straight--Texas didn't magnanimously decide to stay put. They knew they had the biggest dick in the conference and they decided to swing it around. And they will get paid--at least $20 million a year more for staying in the "Big 12" then they were already making plus a rumored 60-40 share of any revenues from a planned Big 12 television network package. The other schools in the Big 12 (with the exception of Oklahoma) didn't really have much choice since they had nowhere else to go if the Big 12 fell apart. (As much as I think the Mountain West conference is nationally undervalued, could you see Missouri, Kansas and Kansas State being happy there? I didn't think so.)

So while it seems like things have stabilized, I say Texas' decision only reinforces my original argument. I'd also like to add that we may not be done with realignment yet. We're not going to see four or five "superconferences" as some had feared, but Utah is being courted to join the "Pac-10/12", Rutgers and Notre Dame remain possible (although fading) options for the "Big 10/12" and both Arkansas and TCU may be replacement teams in the "Big 12"--they are natural long time rivals with Texas anyway, so at least that makes some sense.

Trust me, in five years, almost all of the top 50 BCS conference teams and a few others will have changed affiliations at least once, college football players will force some sort of further compensation beyond mere college scholarships to classes they don't attend anyway and every surviving power conference will have some sort of divisional championship game or playoff. In other words, it really will be the NFL Junior League. Get used to it! :-)

News & Notes

--I caught most of President Obama's Oval Office speech tonight. It was solid, forceful and well-crafted, but there wasn't very much there that was concrete I thought. He gave a nice shout out to Colorado's own embattled Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and pledged a lot of future action, but aside from promising that the government would commandeer control of BP's compensatory payments to local businesses and citizens affected by the spill, there wasn't anything in the President's speech that anyone could really hang their hat on. Maybe that's because the networks were only willing to give him 18 minutes of Prime Time. Time will tell.

--I thoroughly enjoyed the first season of FX's new drama Justified. I thought after the first couple of episodes that Timothy Olyphant's portrayal of U.S. Marshal Ralyen Givens was the strongest part of the show, but I feared that the writing and the basic premise might get stale pretty quickly. Um, no. The finale was a tour-de-force of nail biting intensity leavened with Elmore Leonard's trademark droll wit and full-bodied characterizations. The episodes leading up to it developed the supporting cast expertly and added novel-like plot twists to the year's story arc. I'm looking forward to Season 2 and if there was any merit to these types of things, Olyphant would be assured at least a Best Actor in a Drama Emmy nomination for his work this year.

--Beware rapid weight loss diets! My wife just had a bad experience with Medifast, a diet which limits you to no more than 1200 calories a day (preferably less) and charges you hundreds of dollars a month for their calorie controlled shake packets and one (or at most) two solid meals of your own making a day. Once you get on this diet, it's hard to maintain both your weight and good organ health once you stop. It's insidious...you have to keep buying the packets to keep your body's metabolism under control, but your body craves solid food making it difficult to stay on the diet. And once you're off, you're in a world of trouble.

Spread the word...warn your dieting friends. I can't emphasize this enough! Doctors do not recommend this diet for anyone but the most morbidly obese, for whom the diet was designed in the first place. The good people of Medifast however, saw profit in America's dieting obsession and have marketed it for everyone. This is just another example of how the profit motive supercedes all else in America today. Tracy probably won't be too happy that I wrote about this, but I feel strongly about it. Something has to be said.

Enough for now...good wishes to those who are working to save the Gulf Coast shoreline, the water and the wetlands.

Peace.