Daily Archives: 15 Jan 2012

My favorite (and not) movies of 2011

Here are my favorite movies of 2011, in no particular order:

– My favorites –

Crazy, Stupid, Love.

For me, this was this year’s (500) Days of Summer, but not quite as awesome.  I originally became interested in it when one night I was flipping through channels on the TV (which I rarely do), and I saw Steve Carell being interviewed about it.  (It was one of those half-hour dedicated-to-one-person shows, not a late night talk show.)  His description and the way he talked about the movie sold me on it (but not enough to go to the theater, of course).  So during Black Friday week I blind bought it from Amazon and both my wife and I really enjoyed it.  As a bonus, it has Emma Stone, who I love to watch (though, sadly, even she could not save Zombieland for me).  Also, as events in the film unfolded, I kept thinking to myself, “I can’t believe I didn’t see that coming!” even though all the clues were there for me. That’s a good thing in this case.  As a bonus, this plus Steve Carell’s other film roles that I’ve really liked, e.g. Dan in Real Life, Date Night, Get Smart, Anchorman, finally got me to start watching The Office last month.  How did I never watch that show before?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

This and Deathly Hallows Part 1 are my favorites in the Harry Potter series of films (and I think Deathly Hallows is probably my favorite of the books, too).  As I mentioned before, the first and last films are the only ones I saw theatrically.  For this one we took our 9-month-old baby with us and stood in the aisle for most of the show.  It was good enough that we didn’t mind.

Phineas and Ferb: Across the Second Dimension

While this was really a made-for-TV movie, it is still awesome.  My friend Ben got us watching Phineas and Ferb sometime in the summer and our whole family loves it (and it’s something that I can feel good about my whole family watching without worrying about what we’re watching).

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Robert Downey, Jr. never ceases to amaze me.  Also, people kept telling me the villain wasn’t as good in this installment as the first.  I think it’s the quiet ones you always have to watch out for.

Winnie the Pooh

This is one we took our kids to see and it was just the right length for them to sit in a theater–about an hour.  Plus it was the best Pooh movie, I think, since the original The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

X-Men: First Class

I was really surprised by how good this movie was, and I really don’t have that high of an expectation for X-Men movies (I even liked The Last Stand and Wolverine just fine).  I can’t really think of anything I didn’t enjoy about his movie.  Kevin Bacon played a great villain, and the good guys were fun, too.  I was also delighted by the fact that Beast was played by a grown-up Nicholas Hoult, the kid from About a Boy, which I just watched again a couple of weeks ago and loved again just as the other times I’ve seen it.

– Other movies I enjoyed –

Batman: Year One

This was one of DC’s direct-to-video releases for the year.  I find it hard not to enjoy Batman (except you, Batman and Robin, you crime against humanity).

Captain America: The First Avenger

I didn’t know what to expect from this movie, or Chris Evans, but I wound up really enjoying it.  As a bonus, my 3-year-old and I have recently been watching The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes cartoon and for some reason he has really taken a liking to Captain America.

Cars 2

This is the other movie we took the kids to see in the theater in 2010.  I am apparently in the minority in that I liked it more than the first one (but then, the first one is my least favorite Pixar film).

Everything Must Go

This was a “dramedy” starring Will Ferrell as a man living on his lawn because his wife kicked him out.  While not in the same league as his “serious” role in Stranger Than Fiction, I still liked this movie a lot.

Thor

I really had no idea what to expect from this movie.  My only previous exposure to Thor was in the animated movie Hulk Vs., of which I watched the Hulk Vs. Wolverine segment but only part of Hulk Vs. Thor.  I was pleasantly surprised, and the cast was great.  I liked Chris Hemsworth in his brief role in Star Trek (which I watched again recently) and I was impressed by his ability to play the two very different characters so well.

– Movies that made me say “meh” –

Green Lantern

I went into this movie with no hope of liking it, really, except that I like Ryan Reynolds.  I don’t really like Green Lantern at all, but my wife does, so we watched it.  I didn’t hate the movie, but I didn’t really like it either.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

This was a blind buy because we have the other three Pirates movies, and it wasn’t really bad, but it didn’t really grab me.

– 2011 movies I haven’t seen yet that I hope are good, because I already bought at least one of them, and I want to like the others –

Kung Fu Panda 2

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

The Muppets

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Puss in Boots

– Movies that made me say “Why on earth did I watch this?” –

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

I should have known.  I really should have.  It wasn’t anywhere near as stab-your-eyes-out bad as the second movie, but it was so boring.  The building the cast was trapped in was collapsing for, what, 45 minutes?  I fell asleep for a while, and when I woke up it was still collapsing.  Also, Shia LeBeouf’s character was a complete a-hole.  And boring.

Tron: Legacy

Holy cow, was this movie boring.  Visually interesting, sure, but so boring.

Posted by grassmonk on 15 Jan 2012 in Media | No Comments →

Las Vegas Trip

On Monday, October 24, 2011, I took my first ever trip to Las Vegas, for a reason no less noble than to see Paul Simon in concert again.  (I have actually been to Vegas once before that I can remember–on our honeymoon we were passing through and stopped to go to church.  I’ve probably passed through on family car trips when I was younger also, but this seems to be the first time that counts, as it were.)

My dad helped us out a ton with various projects in our house over the year (mostly the bathroom), and we felt like we should do something nice for him, so for his birthday we bought him a ticket to the Simon concert in Las Vegas.  Of course, I couldn’t let him go alone, so I bought a ticket for myself also, for purely unselfish reasons.

Monday, October 24

We got in the car and left around noon, driving south.  We stopped at Quizno’s in Nephi for some food, a few times for gas, and eventually reached LV without incident.  We checked in to our hotel (the Paris) and then walked over to Caesar’s Palace for the concert.  Our seats were next to an older couple.  It turns out that the man’s brother was a teacher at the school in the small Alaskan village where my dad lived and went to school, and they had a grand old time talking about that before the show.  The woman assumed that due to my relatively young age I would probably being hearing some older songs that I didn’t know.  Har har.

The setlist was similar to the previous concert I attended in April; this time he added Graceland, Mother and Child Reunion, Cecilia, Still Crazy After All These Years, and Pretty Thing, while omitting The Afterlife and Father and Daughter.  The setlist was as follows:

  1. The Boy in the Bubble
  2. Dazzling Blue
  3. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
  4. So Beautiful or So What
  5. Mother and Child Reunion
  6. That Was Your Mother
  7. Hearts and Bones
  8. Mystery Train
  9. Wheels
  10. Slip Sliding Away
  11. Rewrite
  12. Peace Like a River
  13. The Obvious Child
  14. The Only Living Boy in New York
  15. Cecilia
  16. Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
  17. Gumboots
  18. The Sound of Silence
  19. Kodachrome
  20. Gone at Last
  21. Here Comes the Sun
  22. Crazy Love, Vol. II
  23. Late in the Evening
  24. Graceland
  25. Pretty Thing
  26. Still Crazy After All These Years

Cecilia was an audience request, and the performance was nice, but apparently it was substituted for My Little Town, which I think I would have liked to hear more.  I loved hearing Dazzling Blue again, as it has become one of my favorite songs from his new album.  So Beautiful or So What has also grown on me quite a bit.  Hearts and Bones and The Only Living Boy in New York are, as always, some of my absolute favorite songs.  I paid more attention during Here Comes the Sun this time, and I was struck by how beautiful the accordion part was.  One other interesting thing I noticed is that during one of the choruses of The Boy in the Bubble the words “arrogance and ignorance” were substituted for “miracle and wonder.”

Really, I can’t think of a bad moment from the concert at all, except that it was too short.  I would have liked to hear a few classics such as The Boxer and America, and (one can dream) Kathy’s Song.  I hope that Paul has another tour or two in him because I would love to go again.

After the concert we walked around the strip for a couple of hours, since I had never seen all the lights and hotels.  It was cool to see one time, and maybe go back and see again someday.  I was wearing one of my Superman shirts and there were some girls dressed as Supergirl and Wonder Woman who asked me for a picture with them.  I had to decline, because really?  Another guy asked me why I wasn’t using my super powers to rid the streets of smut, to which I could only reply it was my night off.  We found an open restaurant and had some (crappy) food, then headed back to our hotel for bed.

Tuesday, October 25

The next day we checked out of the hotel and stopped in one of the shops for some French pastries, which were pretty tasty, but not quite like I remember from France.  Then we headed over to Fry’s Electronics, which we don’t have in Utah and which I wish we did.

We then headed to visit a potential client (call it a business trip FTW) and on the way the clutch in my car stopped working.  I was sad because I had just had it worked on a couple of weeks before.  Luckily it turned out that the fluid was just drained, which means I have a slow leak somewhere, but at least we were able to put in some new fluid and keep driving.

After the client visit, we headed back to the strip to go on the roller coaster at the New York New York hotel.  It was great the first time (in the front car) and not so great the second time (in the second car).  You wouldn’t think there would be that much of a different between two adjacent rows, but man alive were we thrown around in that second row.  I also got a picture with someone dressed as Mario, which delighted my children.

For dinner we decided on the French restaurant attached to the Paris hotel, and boy was it the best food I have had in a long, long time.  I had some yummy escargot as an appetizer, and got my dad to try one.  The steak was one of the best I have ever had, and the french fries and green beans were the best, bar none.  So, so, good.

After dinner we drove back home, where we arrived sometime after midnight.  All in all, it was a great trip.

 

Posted by grassmonk on 15 Jan 2012 in Uncategorized | No Comments →