City by the Sea

Two days ago, I watched a movie that I've been drooling over and wanting to watch for probably three days. It was fantastic and it was called City by the Sea.

The first reason I decided that I had to watch this movie ASAP was because James Franco is in it. And he's amazing.

Secondly, I watched a video on Youtube video of clips from the movie with James in them and it was awesome. Plus, there are drugs in this movie. So of course I want to watch it.

From the video I saw on Youtube (which you can view here), I thought the movie would have more to do with James Franco's character, Joey, and his addiction. Instead, it turned out to be more a cop-drama movie, which a tiny bit of Hollywood drug culture thrown in here and there. More of the shots with James had to do with him looking emo rather than strung out, even though, occording to how the plot was set up, he was basically involuntarily going cold turkey. I didn't think of this while watching the movie, but have, obviously, now that hindsight is 20/20 and I'm not sucked into the weavings of the plot.

I will say that some parts of the movie were very nicely editted. Such as when you know that Robert De Niro has sex with his neighbor, but, let's face it... he's kind of old and you don't want to see him doing such grotesque things on screen. Sorry, Robert.

But besides this, the film had other merits. It had plenty of antagonists, such as headstrong cops and an angry drug boss guy named Spider. (Probably spelled with a Y instead, to be a little more hardcore than something we smoosh whenever we see one crawling in our bathroom sink.)

The movie definitely deserves, at least, 3.5 stars out of 5. Some of the characters were thin and some parts of the plot seems a little off with the general vibe of the movie and were just a hassle for the viewing audience. But overall, the movie was really good. The acting was fantastic and the premise was enthralling. I would recommend this movie to my friends. Probably.

Trailer:

Sundays with Vlad (Paul Bibeau)

I just finished reading a fantastic book called Sundays with Vlad by Paul Bibeau. It is basically a (pop) cultural analysis of the development and spread of the Dracula legend.

The book was endlessly entertaining. Bibeau covers most aspects of the vampire legend. He goes over the historical Vlad the Impaler who was the VERY vague basis off the Dracula myth that was created almost single-handedly by Bram Stoker with the publication of Dracula, published in the late 1800s. Also covered in the book, are the movie adaptations of the novel and the extension of vampire propaganda. Also: Role-playing, vampire crime, people who believe they are either psychic vampires or sanguinarians (they actually drink blood) and even a politician in Minnesota who believed the state should impale criminals, such as rapists and child abusers.

If that doesn't sound gripping enough, there's something wrong with you.

Bibeau's humor was often understandable, even though he grew up in a much different generation that I did. He makes countless current pop culture references as well as personal anecdotes to bring the audience closer to his humor and his personality, which glows through the entire text.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed this book. I bought it on a whim during Spring Break with some generous Barnes and Noble gift cards and am very pleased with the purchase. The first chapter, in which he details his trecherous honeymoon in Romania with his wife, left me suspicious of the rest of the book but it pulled itself out of the gutter, so to speak, and was entertaining, so much that I was wishing I could be reading all throughout the school day and putting off homework in order to read it.

I'd give it, probably, 4 out of 5 stars, just because there were some parts that I wanted to be done with way faster than others, such as the visits to Romania and Hungary. But other than that, the book was humorous and fun to read.

Pictures: Help or Hinder?

For those of you that don't know me well, you may not know, but I am a huge fan of writing (as long as it's fiction and, for the most part, largely unrushed). I've been writing stories since I learned how to string words together on paper and have been telling stories for as long as I could coherently put together words.



This picture has been giving me fits for weeks. I saw it on a LiveJournal community one day and saved it to my computer because I thought it was really cool. I thought there was some kind of story lurking behind the facade. But for some reason, I have no idea where to start. And herein lies the problem. Whenever I get an idea, I have a middle - an elaborate middle if I dare to say it - but cannot seem to find out where to stop and where to prevent it from becoming an epic.



This is yet another picture of my many saved photos that has been giving me trouble. I know there is a story here. It's at the tip of my tongue, so to speak, or more accurately the tips of my fingers. It's frustrating that I can look at a picture, see the emotional undertones presented by the models' postures and expressions, the lighting of the environment and know what I want to write but have no idea where to start or how to write it. If only the ideas sulking around in my head like an emo kid listening to its iPod at full blast could manifest itself into words on a piece of paper or an MSWord document.

Of course, some pictures make my writing life easier. In the novel I began in October and have made approximately 2/3s of the way through (page 167! hoorah!) has been assisted and pulled along by a series of photos I saved that had pretty scenery and depictions of lighthouses such as this one:


Using pictures to get a better idea of where I want my characters to go, or where I want my characters to look like, is probably the only help I should try to get from pictures. But I can't resist the urge to keep making up the stories that go on behind the scenes of a picture, even if it is models on a set giving a series of looks in front of a flashing camera.