What is Best in Life

While talking with my dad about “10 best” lists we realized that for film we were having a lot of trouble coming up with an obvious list for the 1980s.  Now, every decade is full of great films (and despite having said in the past that I give short shrift to any film made post Star Wars, I was mostly joking), but the 1980′s did not seem to contain the wealth of choices that decades like the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1970s did.

Thus, I decided to go back and scour lists of films made in the 1980s to see if the pickings were actually that slim, or if I was just showing my bias against “post Star Wars/post global new wave” cinema.  Though it still proved tricky to find a list of unqualified masterpieces (and a few qualified ones still snuck onto my list), it turned out that the 1980s nevertheless was a decade full of enough great cinema to keep any movie lover busy for quite a while. (more…)

Westerns, at their hearts, are stories about heroes.  The hero defeats the villains and saves the honest townsfolk using, not just his wits, but also his fists and gun.  While the town doctor might be a brave, kind, smart man, in the mythical land of the West that is not enough to free him from oppression at the hands of gunmen stronger than he is.  Violence and the barrel of a gun are the only language the men in black hats will understand, and even the fragile arm of the law can not touch them without a hero to back it up.

The situation presented in these classic Westerns is not reality of course, merely the byproduct of  the rules that American mythology has set for itself.  Just like the Arthurian hero must fight the black knight at the bridge crossing, the hero of a western must eventually shoot it out with the bad guy.  Thus the notion of a “pacifist Western” has always seemed a bit conflicted to me since brute force wielded by a righteous hand is really the only possible solution when you are working within the mythological confines of the American Western and to say otherwise you are either setting yourself up for failure, or no longer making a “Western”.  However, upon further reflection, I have come to realize that the pacifist Western is a far more worthwhile member of the “Western” genre than I had once thought. (more…)

I shall dispense with the pleasantries today except for a quick introduction.  So, hello Wizards of the Coast, I’m your worst nightmare–you might remember me from such rants as “An open letter to Wizards of the Coast RE: Magic 2010 rules changes” and the unpublished “An open letter to Wizards of the Coast RE: My final request for an RMA# with regards to the broken port side laser cannon on my AT-AT Imperial Walker Colossal Pack” .  Even though (as of this writing) you have failed to redress the wrongs you have inflicted upon the Magic the Gathering rule set (though I did at least finally get my RMA#, thus saving you from the publication of the latter open letter), I am forced to once again take keyboard to sausage fingers in an attempt to get you to redress the even greater tentacle violation you have inflicted upon the Dungeons & Dragons rule set. (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!

This time I answer the questions:

• What’s special this month?
• Top ten most upsetting items?
• What goes on behind bathroom doors blogs? 
• How to make metal song titles?
• Ballad about four wheelers?

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 September.

Stats

• Movies watched - 24
• Movies that were new to me - 19
• Movies about dudes falling in love with their daughters - 2
• Monthly Masterpieces - Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A Touch of Evil, The Aviator’s Wife,  Louisiana Story, The Fireman’s Ball, La Roue

(more…)