Welcome back to Internet Meme Monday! What is a meme you say? Well, as I understand it, a meme is similar to a gene, except instead of passing on genetic information it passes on cultural ideas. A meme can take many forms, from a catch phrase to a hand gesture, but the type of memes I’ll be looking at every second Monday of the month are “internet memes”.
On the agenda this month? Kittens! Inspired by…Kittens! (more…)
Every now and then I’m reminded that I really don’t know as much about the bible as I thought I did. Well, tonight was one of those times: I just finished Nicholas Ray’s 1961 biblical epic King of Kings and boy did I learn a lot! I mean, I already knew some things, like Pontius Pilate was a meanie and Judas has a heel turn. Oh, and (spoiler alert) Jesus dies at the end. But just like in comics, it seems dead doesn’t always mean dead, so I assume, like comics, maybe they had him die to boost sales before they brought him back. Ok, ok, I’ll try not to make today a day where I say insulting things about the bible, instead, I’ll see if I can focus on all the stuff I learned from watching King of Kings! (more…)
Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again! On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions!
What’s that you say? Do I really get that much mail? Well, I’ll admit…the contact sectionof this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site. And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question. So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site. I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with!
So, without further ado, it is time to dig into the old Mailbag to see what kind of things have been on my reader’s minds in the last month! (more…)
Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in January.
The time you have all been waiting for is here! That’s right, the final www.isleyunruh.com Monday feature will be Middle Earth Monday: where I use my love of fictional cartography to take an in depth look at a different place in Middle Earth each month! Oh don’t all leave at once, it can’t be any worse than my film “essays” right? Besides, Middle Earth is a place of enchantment and wonder, so why not take a moment to fill you head full of knowledge that will have no bearing at all on the real world?
For today’s inaugural post, I’d like to take a look at my all time favorite lake in Middle Earth! No, not Lórien’s famous shaded lake Lórellin, nor the misnamed “Sea” of Núrnen, and, no, not even Lake Titicaca (that would be my all time favorite REAL lake); instead I’ll be talking about the lake of Nen Hithoel for this month’s Middle Earth Monday. (more…)
I always have to stop myself when I say I like “all kinds of music”. Because, honestly, that just isn’t true, there is really only one kind of music I like. No, not [just] Black Metal, I’m talking about music in a minor key. I mean, I’m a pretty happy guy, but there is something about sad, sad songs that just does it for me. I don’t dislike Vivaldi’s “Spring” and “Fall”, but I far prefer “Summer” and “Winter” (guess which seasons he writes in a minor key). “Satisfaction” is a fine song, but I’d rather listen to “Paint it Black” any day…you get the idea. Basically, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t go that sting [of soul crushing sorrow and sadness].
So I’ve decided to make the third Monday of every month “Minor Key Monday” and discuss some of my favorite songs in a minor key. I’m no music expert, but who wouldn’t want to create an outlet where they can inflict their favorite songs on the world at large? And to prove that Minor Key Monday will not be “all Black Metal, all the time”, I won’t start today with Darkthrone’s Hank Amarillo, but rather with Hank Williams Sr. and my all time favorite country song “Ramblin’ Man”: (more…)
There are many directors I admire greatly, but none as much as Eric Rohmer. With his death yesterday morning, cinema lost a true master whose unique voice has never been (and most likely will never be) matched.
It’s easy to think of Rohmer’s films as “all being the same”. After all, “young attractive french couples (often on holiday) endlessly dissecting their relationships” pretty much sums up the bulk of his work. Yet while his movies all inhabit the same realm of human interaction, upon any close inspection they are as unique as tomorrow will be from today. The fact that Rohmer has made so many films of such astounding freshness (even when compared to each other) despite their similar premises says volumes for the infinite variability and wonder of life as a member of the human species.
But I’ve discussed my love of Rohmer’s films before, so instead of focusing on his entire body of work in today’s memorial post, I thought I would discuss my personal favorite (as if one could really pick one from so many superlative movies) film of his: Chloe in the Afternoon. (more…)
Welcome to the very first ever Internet Meme Monday! What is a meme you say? Well, as I understand it, a meme is similar to a gene, except instead of passing on genetic information it passes on cultural ideas. A meme can take many forms, from a catch phrase to a hand gesture, but the type of memes I’ll be looking at every second Monday of the month are “internet memes”. Of course all that was a fancy way of saying I’ll be ripping off funny things I’ve seen on the internet. See, the internet has almost as much funny stuff as porn, and while it isn’t all comic gold, I catch myself thinking “I wish I’d thought of that!” on a fairly regular basis. Thus, Internet Meme Monday is my way of ripping off all your favorite internet memes guilt free (guilt free because I’ve set myself up a forum where I freely admit that’s what I intend to do).
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Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again! On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions!
What’s that you say? Do I really get that much mail? Well, I’ll admit…the contact section of this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site. And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question. So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site. I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with!
So, without further ado, it is time to dig into the old Mailbag to see what kind of things have been on my reader’s minds in the last month! (more…)
Top ten lists might be completely subjective affairs that are meaningless to anyone other than their creator, but they also happen to be a hell of a lot of fun to make. Obviously nobody can really say any one movie is exactly the 7th best movie of the year, the decade, or all time, but the process of deciding for yourself how you would rank your favorite films is a very legitimate method of thinking about cinema. Which films have the necessary level of mastery to even make your list, what about those films, specifically, appeals to you, specifically, and just what the best movie on your list will actually be are all very valuable questions. Sure, my 4th favorite movie of a particular decade might shift up, down or ever disappear from any of these lists based on the whims of my fancy at the time, but the fact remains that the act of creating such a list is very helpful in sorting through your thoughts and preferences in the world of cinema.
That said, any list such as this must have criteria and guidelines for its creation. Here are the ones I have decided to use (the choice of guidelines being equally subjective as the ordering of my list):
With those simple rules for me to try to break, let’s move on to my list of the top ten best films of the 2000s!
Because today marks the one year anniversary of my Monthly Movie Review segment, I thought I’d spend a bit of time looking back over my year in movies. And when I say in movies, I mean a lot of movies…like an embarrassing amount. It’s almost as if I have a bit of free time on my hands.
How many movies did I watch in the last year? According to my calculations: (more…)
Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in December.
There has been a vicious rumor going around that I don’t like Christian music, a rumor that is simply not true. So today (in addition to capitalizing all non-secular words) I’ve decided to finally set the record straight! Why today? Well, first, it is Monday, and this is a little sneak peak at one of the new Isleyunruh.com Monday features that I will break out next month: “Minor Key Monday” where (every third Monday of the month) I celebrate my unHoly love of anything in a minor key! But, more importantly, it is almost Christmas, and what better way to not only talk about some of my favorite sad songs, but also some of my favorite Jesus songs too! That’s right, Santa Claus is for lame-o’s, if you want a truly melancholicly mournful Christmas then only the Jesus-centric carols will do, and today I’ve hooked you up with ten of my favorites! (more…)
Everyone has probably heard at one point or another that they resemble some celebrity. Well, the question of which celebrity I most resemble has become a bit more important lately when I learned of the upcoming film that I assume is based on my life story: The Undeniable Charm of Sloppy Unruh. You can imagine my crushing disappointment as I learned that even though my dream casting choice Sean “Stiffler” William Scott was in the film, he would for some reason NOT be playing the title role of “Sloppy Unruh”.
Though I’m still working through a lot of hurt and betrayal over that disappointment, I thought I’d take today to sort through various celebrities that I have been told I resemble in order to find my ideal second choice (after Stiffler) to play myself in all future biopics based on my life. (more…)
Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again! On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions!
What’s that you say? Do I really get that much mail? Well, I’ll admit…the contact sectionof this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site. And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question. So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site. I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with!
So, without further ado, it is time to dig into the old Mailbag to see what kind of things have been on my reader’s minds in the last month! (more…)
Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in November.
I’ve talked about board games before, and in that post I discussed how there are a ton of games out there with simple rules, short playing times and fun strategic choices that are all far better than the ”roll the dice and move” games you find at Walmart. Well, this post will not be about those games, today we’ll be talking about war games, and if you want an example of how much fun your typical war game has sucked out of your innocent “board game”, look no further than the fact that most war game adherents prefer to call them “consims” (conflict simulations) rather than anything with the word “game” in it.
So, today we’ll be leaving the land of having a good time hanging with some friends around a table and entering the land of bearded middle aged history buffs squinting at enormous maps covered in tiny counters in their basements. Abandon hope all ye who click “more”. (more…)
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not entirely fair in my reviews of movies with a strong message. It doesn’t matter how delicately the filmmaker has incorporated their “message” into their film, as soon as I get a whiff of proselytizing I immediately find my opinion of the film is lowered. It is important to keep in mind that I am making the distinction here between the filmmaker showing their view of the world (something every filmmaker should do) as opposed to attempting to change the audience’s view of the world (something I feel should not be overtly attempted).
While discussing this with a friend, the point was made that while the purpose of art should not necessarily be to inform, “the role of art for the artist is self-expression, so objection to their doing so in a political or otherwise partisan way is disingenuous”. Which is a good point, one that I will look into in greater depth here today to find out just what it is about everything from I was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang to The Lost Weekend that immediately turns me off. (more…)
When I wrote my last flash games post I was still of the mindset that “Tower Defense” games were lame. For those who have never heard of them, playing a Tower Defense game is similar to playing a real time strategy game (like Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, etc) where you only build towers to defend your home base against an ever growing horde of enemy attacks. The typical Tower Defense game will have an overhead perspective and confine “attacks” to a road (usually leading to the heart of your “base” or off screen) along which you will place various towers to shoot at the “wave” of enemies (”creeps” in Tower Defense lingo). As you kill enemies you are rewarded with money to buy more towers to help combat the next wave of tougher enemies.
Now, I initially had no interest in playing these kind of games. It seemed like the only decision you made was where to put a tower and then you sat back and watched the game play itself as the towers automatically shot the enemies for you. And to be fair, there are tons of these kind of games out there, and the vast majority do just that. But I have also found the rare few that not only managed to get the difficulty curve mostly balanced (Tower Defense games are all about building enough towers to stay ahead of the toughness of the creeps–and this game balance is surprisingly hard to maintain), included interesting towers that upgraded in fun ways (the Tower Defense genre is all about slowly improving your defenses–this is a lot more fun when your defenses do progressively cooler things than just “shoot more”), and best of all, required a bit of strategy in your tower choices and placement (ie, something more than “close to the road”).
So here is my list of my favorite Tower Defense Games. The top 3 are highly recommended, 4-8 are pretty good and the last 2 are at least worth checking out if you really need more Tower Defense games. Anyway, for those that would like to waste dozens of hours of their life, read on! (more…)
Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again! On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions!
What’s that you say? Do I really get that much mail? Well, I’ll admit…the contact section of this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site. And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question. So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site. I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with!
So, without further ado, it is time to dig into the old Mailbag to see what kind of things have been on my reader’s minds in the last month! (more…)
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