13 Mar 10 Whenever I watch a movie…this is all I see.
A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever — powered by Cracked.com
Tags: dumb movies, movies, movies fail, stupid movies
13 Nov 09 Life off Lake Street
Living here with my roomies has definitely introduced me to some new food culture. After moving here, I found that my taste for food had dramatically (and sometimes, subtly) changed. The novelty of these changes have worn off, and we’re now in a typical weekly pattern:
Monday
Occasionally, Mondays hit with all the strength that Ali could muster in his early days. To relieve this pain, Cody, Mike and myself will typically throw a Mexican fiesta. Mexican food is very easy to cook for multiple people, and typically we’ll have nice sides like fresh guacamole or cotija cheese. For main dishes, we’ve had quesadillas, tacos, burritos and fajitas.
Any night Cody is closing
Mike and I, not wishing to burn the house down, will order a pizza. Originally, I was only a Pizza Hut guy, but since moving here, have become a major Pizza Luce adherent. While Pizza Hut is OK, and when warmed up again is OK, Pizza Luce is delicious and fresh (though have little to no reheat value, it tastes great cold).
Thursday
The famous Asian Thursdays. This has been tradition since the week I moved in: ordering some delivery Asian food from Star Dragon on Lake Street. Mike will typically get C19 (General Tso’s), I will get C15 (Sesame Chicken), and Cody will alternate between a few dishes. They’re got excellent, hot food–and a couple of amusing idiosyncrasies, like adding a clear 3 handfuls of those little sauce packets, or random dried egg rolls, and always saying that the food will be delivered in 30 minutes, regardless of the size of the order (I once fed a table of 10 people by ordering from them–and it came within 30 minutes).
Desserts
Lately, I’ve been big on having more filling snacks around than just Nutty Bars and chips. So, to that end, I’ve been making some cakes (made my first two-layer cake a month ago or so), brownies, and carrot cake occasionally. While these are still sweets, I feel like they’re a bit healthier than preservative-laden nutty bars.
Upcoming updates: I got a new job–details soon! The aforementioned and much promished short story, VIP, will be available by Thanksgiving at the latest. I’ll also be going to see the latest disaster porn movie, 2012, tonight–expect a review!
Tags: food, movies, roommates, weekly routine
12 May 09 Top 10 Movies List of Thomas Billo II
I didn’t post anything last week because I was focused on finishing and writing my Top 10 Movies List–behold!
- Lord of the Rings Trilogy
- The Fountain
- City of Angels
- The Hours
- Titus
- No Country For Old Men
- Der Untergang
- Hard Candy
- Primer
- Watchmen
When I first sat down to watch Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring with a few friends from high school, I was shaking in my seat. Some scenes still have a huge emotional impact on me–Sam carrying Frodo, the horns of Rohan, the flight from the Black Riders, Gandalf’s timely arrival at Helm’s Deep–to name a few. Easily my favorite movies.
Darren Aronofsky’s venture into the realm of science fiction is a visual feast, with an incoherent and unclear message and story you need to figure out for yourself. If you could live forever–would you? Three interweaving stories tell a love story between Thomas and Isabelle, and their thousand-year journey from Spain to America to the Orion Nebula.
Movies with poignant, deep messages trike home with me. For a long time, I despised romance movies and couldn’t bring myself to watch them. Despite starring Meg Ryan, this is not your typical Meg Ryan ’90’s romance flick: Nichola Cage plays her angelic, celestical lover and his transformation to a human. The question the movie asks is: Would you love someone enough to give them up?
Michael Cunningham’s excellent novel of the same name is turned into this striking, impacting film. Three women–Virginia Woolf, a 50’s homemake, and a modern-day executive–all are tied to each other through Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. It’s a meditation on the lives of women in three very different eras, all tied together in seemingly mystical, unspoken ways.
Another visually striking, anachronistic exploration movie, Titus is a modernization of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, his most bloody and vengeful play. Titus is an old general of Rome, having sacrificed the majority of his life and his family to the glory of the Empire. But returning home, he finds that Rome is still ‘but a wilderness of tigers’ as his family is persecuted by his old enemies. Starring Anthony Hopkins, the ending is a glorious revenge scene, with a final meditation on evil, good, revenge and power.
In a word: bleak. The Cohen brothers hit a home run with this realistic, character-focused piece on power, death, and chance. Too many favorite scenes to name–when I first saw this movie last year I was immediately depressed but struck by, again, the bleakness and reality of the film. Excellent acting and cinematography.
A film about the last 12 hours of Adolf Hitler’s life in his fortified Berlin bunker, the film shows how his entire command structure and his life fell apart in the final moments of the Third Reich. Bruno Ganz plays a diminutive but terrifying, overpowering Hitler–his presence seems to fill the small rooms and hallways of the bunker. Absolutely terrifying movie about one of the most dark men of the 20th century.
You get some serious preconceived notions about this movie when you learn that ‘hard candy’ is internet slang for an underage girl. But this movie turns all of this on its head when Ellen Page, in an uncharacteristically savage role, performs psychological and physical torture on pedophile Patrick Wilson. A complex and difficult movie to watch. The question this movie asks is: What could you and would you do if you had to take the law into your own hands?
A very complex, engineering-focused movie, Primer is a movie that focuses on the complications and paradoxes that arise from garage-built time machines. The implications are terrifying, as two best friends become mortal enemies, crossing each other paths in time over and over again to get rich, to get power, and to get even.
An epic film on the American psyche: what better way to psychoanalyze America than through the superhero, a lasting personification of American culture? The graphic novel was a many-layered, complex story of masked heroes, most of whom have no powers (with one notable exception); the movie holds true to this, with many scenes pulled directly from the graphic novel and with only minor changes to story elements and plot. The question this movie asks: What would you do to save the world?
Tags: 10 top movies, favorite movies, movies, top movies
