I’m sorry I haven’t been writing much lately. Yes, the holidays are upon us and that is partially keeping me plenty busy (especially this week), but I have to admit that that isn’t the only reason I haven’t been on here much. Frankly, I’m just not interested in writing lately.

For some time now, life has been full of “have to’s”. I have to get up and go to work. I have to go to class. I have to go to the Fire Department. I have to read 40 pages of Piers Plowman tonight. I have to write a paper before next Friday. I have to, I have to, I have to. It’s all I’ve been hearing. So lately I’ve been trying to eliminate as many “have to’s” from my life as possible. Of course that doesn’t always work, but those things that I can control, I’m trying. I’m still doing some things that I have to do (like Christmas shopping, for example), but if it’s not absolutely necessary and doesn’t sound like much fun at the moment, I’m shoving it off for another time.

I think this has actually been an on-going thing for quite a while now. Honestly, I think it’s been all of these required courses in school that have been bearing down on me – Spanish I, II & III, and this semester, math. These are not courses that I want to take. However, they’ve been forced upon me by the university to ensure my education is more well-rounded…even though I generally forget everything I’ve been taught in these required classes as soon as I’ve turned in my final exam.

So the last 4 semesters of required courses (mixed in with a few English courses I’m actually interested in, of course) have been sort of wearing down my will to go on. And I think that has bled over into some aspects of my personal life, too. My writing has suffered (here and my fictional work) because I can’t see sitting in front of the computer for a few more hours as an escape. My reading for enjoyment has suffered because I’m too busy memorizing the preterite form of “haber” or reading pages 214-300 of “Le Morte d’Arthur”. I haven’t been to the gym in months because I spent most of my evenings at the Fire Department in November.

I realize that all of these things are a choice. I could drop out of school, I could stop working at the Fire Department, and I know I could make time to do the things that I want to do. The thing is, I want to do some of these things. I enjoy working at the FD, so much so that I’d love it if that job could somehow go full-time. I like going to school to read and discuss literature. I really enjoyed my math class this semester. The problem has been finding a balance between what I have to do and what I want to do. Unfortunately, that equilibrium has not been easy for me to come by. If I say screw school for the night, I’m going to fall behind. If I say screw the Fire Department tonight, I’m potentially hurting my chances of this opportunity remaining in my life, plus I might fall behind on a project that is due. I have so many obligations in my life, that I can’t just forget about any of them. And that’s no fun. The problem is, even when the weekend comes, I still have obligations. Andrea and I need to clean up the house since we’re both working and going to school so much that we rarely have time during the week to do so. And we often need to work on some weekend repairs or remodeling project to boot. We have to go to dinner with these friends and then go hang out with those friends. Again, these are all things we want to do, but when it’s Saturday night and you still haven’t had time to watch last Sunday’s TiVo’d episode of “Family Guy”, you’re obviously not getting your way in life.

That’s where I am – doing whatever I want to do for a little while. And at the moment, writing just isn’t one of those things (despite this rather lengthly little rant). Instead, I want to watch movies. I want to work on designing the entertainment center we’re going to be building. I want to go thrift store shopping with Andrea like we did all day last Saturday. I want to do things that I don’t do for school (reading, writing, arithmetic) and do things that don’t leave a bad taste in my mouth of the things I’ll have to do again come mid-January.

So look for more entries in the near future, but I don’t know if they’ll be very frequent (not that they have been lately, anyway). Maybe once I get back into the semester – a semester where I’ll be taking nothing but English courses that I want to take – I’ll be more inspired to write monkey entries again. I sure hope so, because it is truly something I still want to do.

We recently purchased a fancy new TV so needless to say I’ve been watching a lot of movies whenever I can squeeze them in. Actually, this list hasn’t been updated in a few weeks, so really these have been pretty well spread out.

Clerks II – I was one of those guys who loved Clerks back in the day. It spoke to me as an early 20-something and seemed to depict people, places, and lives I knew and understood. With this in mind, I really wasn’t expecting to like Clerks II at all. Much to my surprise, I found it to be a decent follow-up to the original film. While it has a very different aesthetic and is generally more Hollywood than the original, which was famously shot for $30,000, it also has a little more meat to it as well. Not much more, mind you, but some. In Clerks, the jokes are the main focus. The minimum wage workers pontificate on pop culture icons like Star Wars and make fun of the customers that do little more than get in their way as they hang out and read magazines. The whole “Appreciate what you have” plot is sort of secondary. In the sequel the plot, as cliche as it is, takes the forefront, with the jokes being more of a backdrop this time. It shows a maturity in Smith, yet still lets him cling to his “dick and fart joke” roots. Speaking of, there is one aspect of the film – the infamous donkey sex scene – that, while funny, seemed really shoehorned in. I understand that this is a Clerks film so you have to have something shocking and offensive, but since they covered necrophilia in the last one, they had to take things in a different direction this time. Still, it was pretty funny, but felt forced. Which, really, kind of sums up the whole film. It was definitely funny, but it was also fairly forgettable. It’s obvious that Smith wanted to return to his beginnings, but, like the old saying goes, you can never go home again.

2.5 / 5 bananas

Singapore Sling – Oh. My. God. Around Halloween, one of the writers over at Chud.com recommended this as one of the most disturbing films he’d seen. Never one to back down from a film-watching challenge, I threw the film on my Netflix queue to see what all the hubbub was about. He’d mentioned that the film wasn’t so much a horror film, yet had some very bizarre and scary aspects to it that pushed it into some other genre entirely. After watching it, I’d have to agree. A private detective is searching for a woman, Laura, whom he fell in love with. She’s been missing for some time now and he’s taken it upon himself to find her. Her trail leads him to a lavish home where a deranged mother and daughter live. The two women have lived alone since the man of the house died, inhabiting a sprawling homestead which you imagine to be out in the countryside somewhere, where they are left in isolation to practice their bizarre hobbies. I can’t get into what their hobbies are without turning this post into something that will make search engines label this site as something entirely different than what it is. So I’ll just say that there’s a lot of (not explicit, but vividly depicted) sex (some involving mummies…seriously), some really nasty eating habits, and a few issues with sanity. I really can’t describe this film. It is simply something that must be experienced to believe. Which, oddly, is what makes it great in an utterly horrible way. It’s not something I’ll need to watch again anytime soon because, well, it’s not like I can forget anything that I saw. Just thinking about some of these scenes puts me into a sort of shell shock where I just can’t wrap my head around what happened. The problem is, I can’t decide if it was brilliant or not. If you’re interested at all, I highly suggest you do some searching on the internet to learn more about the events that take place in the film that I’m unwilling to talk about here, before adding this one to your queue. This is not a film for everyone. In fact, I’m not sure who it’s for. Still, if you think you’re up for the challenge, give it a shot.

I don’t even know how to score this one. I’m going to go with 4 / 5 bananas for a purely visceral film-watching experience that I will not soon forget.

United 93 – For whatever reason, this one never really interested me. I can’t explain it. Maybe because I see film as being such an escape from reality for me as of late, that seeing this depiction of real events just seemed like it would be too much emotionally. I wound up renting it because I kind of felt like it was a film I needed to see to call myself any kind of film geek today. And, as is usually the case whenever I have trepidations about a well-received film, I wound up loving this one, too. The thing I appreciated most about this film was the different viewpoints from which we get to see the events of 9/11 unfolding. We see the air traffic controllers, the FAA managers, the unsuspecting people getting on-board United flight 93, and even the terrorists as they prepare for their fateful day. However, as you might expect, it’s the events on the plane that are the most riveting and horrifying. There is some violence, but most of it is handled off-screen. Instead, the horror is the question we all thought that day, “What would I do?” I pray none of us ever has to find out.

5 /5 bananas

Accepted – Andrea wanted to rent this one. I had no desire to see it, frankly, because I figured it was going to be a dumb, teen comedy that I wouldn’t care about. Still, I watched it with her one night. And while, yes, it is kind of a dumb, teen comedy, I really enjoyed it. It’s essentially a rehash of the 80′s classic “Summer School”, but instead of a teacher being the messianic slacker that leads his people to greatness, it’s another just-graduated kid. In the film, the slacker in question can’t get into a college, so he creates one to get his parents off his back (and to blindly pay the $10,000 tuition fee). He goes so far as to lease an abandoned building, make it over with a fresh coat of paint, and get the insane uncle of one of his friends to play the dean. All goes according to plan until his website-making friend makes the fake website too user-friendly by accepting everyone who applies at the school. Then the shenanigans begin. Again, it’s a rehash/mash-up of just about every college movie you can think of, but there are some great aspects to the film that set it apart. One is the lead actor, the smarmy, nerdy-hip kid from the “I’m a Mac” computer commercials and another is his chubby, geek sidekick who pretty much steals the show. Really, Accepted is nothing that you haven’t already seen before, but sometimes it’s nice to see a new finish on an old favorite.

3 / 5 bananas

The DaVinci Code – If you’ve ever read the book and know anything about screenplays, you’ll know that DaVinci was written as the outline for a movie. Those short chapters that everyone complained about? Those are scene breaks, just like in a screenplay. I swear that was no accident. But the rest of the book was a perfect setup for a thrilling adventure through Europe, searching for the truth about Jesus and his supposed lineage. Unfortunately the film does not deliver on that setup. The story is there, but the thrills are not. I’d complain about the characters being threadbare, but they’re that way in the book, too. There are some fun puzzles to figure out (if you haven’t read the book), but all of that gets lost. The thing is, I can’t really say what went wrong with this movie. I suppose one problem is that none of the action scenes stand out at all. I know that our two heroes are running from evil Catholics, but I don’t really remember them doing a lot of running or being chased per se. It just seems like they appeared in the next place they needed to be without any real menace or motivation to get them there. There’s no overwhelming presence going after them a la The Terminator or The Matrix. They seem to be running from no one. And maybe that’s the main problem, is just that the tension is non-existent. I suppose it’s worth a rental, but I might even say wait until HBO.

2 / 5 bananas

Lucky Number Slevin – This was a morbid curiosity pick for me, which turned out to at least be worth the rental. The plot is reminiscent of Yojimbo (or for you strictly American film folks, it was remade as Clint Eastwood’s A Fistful of Dollars) with a single character stuck between two crime families who have hired him to kill some member of the other family. There are a lot of twists and turns and some nice directorial choices, though sometimes the direction can feel a little forced. Still, it’s a fun little popcorn romp which you’ll probably only have vague memories of a month later.

2.5 / 5 bananas

Stay – JK recommended this one to me after he rented it out of the blue. I’d never heard of it, but I’m always willing to give something a shot. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of it since it stars Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, and a kid I like a lot who doesn’t get much respect outside of the film geek community, Ryan Gosling. I was also surprised I hadn’t heard of it because it was such a cool little movie. Ewan plays a psychologist who takes over the case of a young man (Gosling) when the kid’s normal psychologist gets sick. The kid threatens suicide and has even stated the day and time he’s going to do it. The rest of the film deals with Ewan trying to track this kid down and keep him from killing himself. Sounds kinda boring until you watch it unfold in a really trippy, mind-bending way. There is definitely a blurring of the line between reality, dream, and some other level of existence here. Sometimes you wonder if Ewan and Gosling are the same person. Sometimes you wonder if any of it is real. Then you begin to question the dream. It’s a fun film with some really great direction that gives you plenty of hints at what’s really going on, but yet twists reality enough to keep you on your toes and wondering. The ending was a little bit of a let down, but that doesn’t negate the rest of the film by any means. Definitely worth checking out.

4 / 5 bananas

Mission: Impossible III – I’ve always liked the first film in this trilogy for reasons I can’t fully explain. I saw part II once in the theater, mainly because it was directed by John Woo, and was so utterly disappointed that I’ve never even tried to give it another shot. However, with a combination of J.J. Abrams (creator of Lost and Alias) directing and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the main heavy, I had to give this one a shot. And I’m glad I did. It was entertaining, it had some cool gadgets, one really great scene involving some remote-control machine gun turrets, and plenty of explosions and bullets whizzing by. It delivered on everything I expect out of an M:I film and more. Really can’t complain. Still, that doesn’t mean I’ll be adding it to my collection anytime soon.

2.5 / 5 bananas

And that’s it for now! I might have another one or two before next week, but we’ll see how my weekend shapes up.

By the way, I am planning on finishing my entry about the sporting event we went to almost 2 months ago. I’ve started it, but it’s going to wind up being one of those longer entries, so it’s taking a while to develop. Hopefully it’ll be done by next week, too.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to let my geek show a little bit this morning. If you haven’t been watching NBC’s his series “Heroes”, you might as well skip this entry.

While I don’t feel like it lives up to Lost, I’ve enjoyed this series thus far. Maybe it’s just my comic book dork side showing through, which, for once, isn’t a bad thing in society. It’s a weird show for me, I have to admit. I like it. I watch it. But I’m not fully invested in it for whatever reason. Maybe it’s the sporadic storylines that are only now slowly starting to merge into one, but something about the show keeps me at arm’s length. Still, it’s a fun little diversion and I’ve enjoyed following some of the various stories as they’ve unfolded.

So with this in mind, here are some of my thoughts on what we might be able to expect when the show returns in January. I welcome any other Heroes folks to comment and offer up your own predictions/theories/musings/etc.

Peter Petrelli (AKA “Rogue” from the X-Men) is going to absorb the radiation powers (a la “The Human Torch” from the Fantastic Four) from that one guy whose wife died in the hospital and he’ll become “the bomb” that everyone is trying to stop. Either something is going to spark his emotions (maybe his [and Isaac's] girlfriend will be hurt/killed) and he’ll go Nova like The Human Torch when he gets upset; or he won’t know how to control the powers once he gets them, which has happened to Rogue more than once as I recall. Or, alternatively, his soon-to-be arch-nemesis, Skylar, will absorb the powers and become the human bomb too, meaning the two will battle mano y mano with their borrowed powers, which could be fun. Skylar will use the bomb effect in an effort to kill Peter and the rest of the heroes, but thanks to Claire’s Wolverine-like healing factor, he’ll be saved. Then he’ll go back in time with Hiro’s powers and bring everyone back to life and it’ll be like nothing ever happened. If they want to go with a Christ metaphor here, going back will somehow mean the end of his own life and he’ll sacrifice himself for everyone else.

As for DL Hughley or whatever the phasing black guy’s name is (who is like “Kitty Pryde” from X-Men), he’s going to go rescue the Dorito’s chick (whose dual personality is very Hulk-like) from prison with his ability. Or maybe Micah (whose technological abilities mimic those of “Forge” from the X-Men) will figure out a way to break his mom out of a high-tech prison, thus revealing his own powers and they all become a happy little mutant family.

My only question right now is a question I seem to be asking a lot with television lately: Where do we go from here? Once the Skylar thing is solved, will they bring in new villains for the team to take on like they do in the comics? Or will Skylar become the Magneto of the series – a guy who brings together his own band of evil mutants to take on Mohinder’s (AKA “Professor Xavier” from the X-Men) goody goodies? Personally, I’d go the Magneto route and then have his underlings be the new bad guys to fight Mohinder’s new heroes every season. Keep the cast rotating like Menudo (not a superhero group, though I suppose that could be argued) and it’ll last for at least 4-5 seasons.

Anyone else have any predictions/thoughts?

Ok, nuff geeking out for now. We’ll see if I’m right on any of this stuff, I guess. Here’s hoping I’m not and they take me completely by surprise.