DVD Update - August thru October

 AUGUST - OCTOBER 2011

It has been many many moons since I've updated any of this blog, ACK the last few minutes of October are passing me by. This update has just August and September DVD purchases since I didn't get any in October, although I do have a couple of discs in transit from Columbia House.

NOTE: At the time I started working on this post my Amazon Associates link thing wasn't working properly so I couldn't add the links I wanted to, perhaps I'll have to edit later to improve this entry.

 

Source Code

First up in August I went to Target and got a DVD that I had forgotten I also had on order from Columbia House. It was the Sci-Fi Action Time-Loop movie Source Code. It is a blind buy. The first thing about the film from the trailers I've seen is the main plot of having to go back into the past just before some tragic event and try to make it right, re-doing it if you fail. Sort of along the lines of the 90s TV Show Seven Days.

 

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Moving back a little further through time we have the Third installment of The Mummy Franchise The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I haven't watched my DVD of it yet but I have seen the flick. Got this from Columbia House.

The Jerk: 26th Anniversary Edition

This Classic Steve Martin comedy I got for real cheap at one of my local Safeway stores. Excellent comedy with the classy Bernadette Peters. They worked well together, too bad it was only because they were dating at the time.

Termination Point

A sight unseen very B-grade Sci-fi Time Travel movie. Perhaps straight to DVD starring Lou Diamond Phillips and Jason Priestley. Again a very cheap purchase from Safeway.

National Lampoon's Pucked

Yet again a Safeway sight unseen B-Grader this time a Sophomore or perhaps Freshman comedy from National Lampoon called Pucked looks like a parody of high-school Hockey flicks with a girls team. These movies can be very Hit or Miss.

That was the August fair next the two September Flicks I got.

Thor

First up from Columbia House as the Director's Choice of the Month pick one of the latest Superhero flicks from Marvel Comics Thor. Looks to be 10 times better than that Hulk vs. Thor Made for TV movie from the late 1980s.

Zulu

The last entry was a DVD I got from one of my friends so it was a Freebie. He upgraded to Blu-Ray so he gave me this copy. This historical action Classic starring Micheal Caine might make one want to chant weird things.

A Recent Read Number 9

"When I woke up that morning, it didn't take me long to realize there were dogs in my nose."

Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin. Before becoming a big box office movie star Steve Martin rose to the top of the stand-up comic ranks. He was a frequent guest host for the original cast Saturday Night Live, often he would be the first host of a new season, which is why some people mistakenly think he was the first to ever host SNL. That honor my friends goes to George Carlin. Anyway it was during this time (late 1970s) that Steve wrote this book, which is just a hodge podge collection of strange, weird and often funny stories and ideas. Some of them are quick one-liners while others run a page or two very few are more than two pages long. Some of the bits, all of which have titles and are listed under the table of contents, get to the point of the joke right away, while some take sometime and make you scratch your head and wonder what the point is. Then there are the totally absurd bits like "How To Fold Soup".

It is a quick and easy read as there are only 120 some pages with many of those having black and white photos from Steve on stage doing his stand up. The humor ranges from slightly humorous and only worth a slight smile to outrageously hilarious. I took about a week to read this as I would read one or two bits and then put it down, but it can be read in a very short period of time depending on your reading speed and length of laugh breaks. Fun and very silly book.

Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin 1977 G.P. Putnam's Sons 128 pages - ****.5

April Showers Bringing May Flowers

ACK! April is almost over, it feels like it just barely began. Baseball is in the air and the Washington Nationals are once again losing but are losing while going down swinging. They have got to pick up the pace, but then again the season is only what 3 weeks old. So there is going to be lots of flip-floping all around. OK Next!

I am in rehearsals for a show I am directing with the Sandy Spring Theatre Group (SSTG) to be performed at the Gaithersburg Arts Barn (GAB) in June. The show is Steve Martin's first play Picasso at The Lapin Agile. It is filled with laughs and is great fun. The basic premise is a fictional meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein at the French Cabaret named Lapin Agile (The Nimble Rabbit - specifically a male rabbit) in 1904 Paris, France. They discuss how their respective works may effect the history of the 20th Century. So as a result my May entries will be somewhat limited, and I might only get the one post quota I try to keep as my standard minimum. Hopefully I'll be able to do more, but we shall see.

April Showers Or Something

Hmm OK so this seems to be my first April Entry. Yay! I've got several things I need to do and should be doing and as usual no time to do it.

In the next few days/weeks I will be in rehearsals for a show I am directing for The Sandy Spring Theatre Group (www.sstg-home.org). The show is Steve Martin's Picasso At The Lapin Agile the preformances will be in the first three weekends of June in Gaithersburg. Right now I have most of the cast, there are two more male characters that I need to cast. The turn out for auditions a couple of weeks ago was dismal. I had to go searching for most of the actors I did get and have additional auditions a couple of times. Needless to say I will be pretty busy and might not have very many entries here in April and May, so what else is new.

A few days ago I discovered at work that another website I like to visit and use has been blocked by their silly security programs because the site promotes mp3 file posting, ugh. So now I can't update any of my stuff at CDcomplete.com while at work. I used to be able to at least look at my collection there, then I started noticing errors whenever I would try to look at a specific title (while at work). Then work blocked the site all together. Oh Well I still can get to rateyourmusic.com. I noticed they have updated that site since I had last used it. Now there are more cover images and they seem to have more titles. I was using that site only for my cassette and vinyl collections (with some of the special CD box sets) since the CDs were covered by the CDcomplete site. I only have a couple of tapes listed there and about 20 vinyl albums in my collection list, so I have to buckle down and get more entries there. For about a year and a half I only had about 24 titles listed there. I listed more of my CDs there on Thursday and Friday so there are about 100 of my CDs listed there now. I have a big task ahead of me there. I had the same sort of task when I had first set up my account over at DVDSpot.com it took me awhile (Like over a week) to enter my 200+ DVDs I had, now since I'm updated there whenever I get new DVDs I can add it to the list easily. I hope to be able to do that with CDs shortly, but it will probably not be completed until sometime in the summer. Also rateyourmusic has always been a little simpler to add to your list than over at cdcomplete. At cdcomplete you needed to know the UPC number to identify which version of a title you had. It isn't too user friendly when it comes to comparing different versions. Rateyourmusic is more user friendly and more community oriented sort of like over at DVDspot. All this reminds me that I am still only about a fifth or sixth of the way through with catalogueing my books over at bibliophil.org which I have a few issues with, but that is for another blog entry now isn't it?