Now, you're getting tired of me.  I saw the preview for In Good Company today for the second time.  I'm really looking forward to this one.  A friend of Clinton's at Dreamworks is going to try to get the script to me, so I can read it before I see it.  I want to see if I can imagine the movie myself without the aid of the movie.  I figure that is a skill I'll need if I ever want to be an actual producer.

I realize that it's been years since I've really blogged last and nobody reads this anymore, but in case someone does, I'm trying to come up with a good word that I can use as a trademark for an idea I've had lately.  Something short that's probably not a real word that I can use as a domain name.  For instance, I really like TiVo, but sadly it's already taken.  Any ideas?  No, I can't post the idea here.

In the course of the last week, I saw National Treasure and Finding Neverland.  I expected very little from National Treasure, and apart from the in-your-face, surprise-attack-style product placement, I thought it was quite entertaining, actually even good.  Cage's sidekick is really good, and the characters' self-deprecation keeps the movie from taking itself too seriously.  Finding Neverland was really quite sad, but if you don't mind that so much, the story is moving, especially when you already know the story of Peter Pan and can see it forming before the Depp's character's eyes.  If you prefer to escape sadness in movies, be warned.

Oh yeah, we have to pay $1 for parking at the ArcLight now.  Boo.

You should...http://www.pinback.com/.

Wow, long vacation.  By the time we got back from vacation, I was pretty sick with a cold and tired from all the traveling.  Plus, I had loads of work stacked up waiting for my upon my return.  So, I didn't really feel like blogging.  It's a shame, because I had a lot of stuff that I wanted to say about the election that is now all moot.

Tonight, we went over to Tony & Martel's for the season premiere of Arrested Development.  It has been blessed with a solid time slot finally, following the Simpsons on Sunday nights.  Hopefully, it will play there consistently and not get pre-empted too often.  Is pre-empted hypenated?  Anyway, it was a great episode; I hope you all got to see it.  Mike and Alia, the actors who play George Michael and Maeby were also there, and it was fun to watch them watch their show.  Terence and Clinton were there as was a new girl from New York named Tanya.  It was a fun group to hang out with, and Clinton brought some sweet root beer.

Speaking of Clinton, he just purchased a Windows Media Center PC from Sony this week.  It's pretty awesome.  It's basically a powerful video editing workstation and a Tivo all rolled into one, plus a lot of other cool stuff.

This weekend, we're heading to San Diego to shoot Jamie and Clinton in a pilot/audition video for the Food Network.  Should be interesting.  Perhaps it will get posted.

And before I go, how about a pic from the va-cay.

I ventured out in the rain tonight to meet with Scott Coones (and supposedly Cameron Coen) about a short Scott wrote and I'm going to help produce.  If there had been thunder and lightning, it could have been a Texas thunderstorm.  We're off to Texas in the morning, and I'm not likely to blog while we're there.  Oh, we did get a portable dvd player for ourselves for an early Christmas present so we'll have something to do on the plane.

Many of you, especially Jeff, will love this.

Here's a cool article about ten cool new inventions.  My favorites are the drive-by-wire, plastic chips, and super-light cars.

By happy accident we had the largest group of our friends at church tonight all at one time.  Me, Jamie, Doug, Clinton, Summer, Clinton's friend from Groundlings, Nick, his girlfriend, and Terence.  The service, unfortunately, was not a standout.  It really went on forever and the fill-in pastor used poor analogies and repetition to drive home a point, maybe.  But I don't know what that point was.  Oh well, just one service.  Afterwards, Terence and Summer joined us four regulars at Chipotle.  Halfway through my burrito, I got this weird vision of me eating a second burrito, something I've never dreamed of doing because of fullness.  I mentioned this vision, and Doug admitted that he was thinking the same thing.  He went and got a second burrito and proceeded to play with it as much as eat it.  By the time I finished my first, I knew I couldn't handle a whole other burrito, so I just went to get chips and guac.  While I was gone, Doug had smeared his messy, messy hands all over his shirt and parts of his burrito had fallen down all over his pants and shoes.  What a character.  Then, we all did some seat-swapping, and I got to chat with Terence for a little while.  We're talking about setting up a trip to the Sundance film festival in January for the group.

The next two days, Jamie works for another Maxim shoot, and then we head to Texas on Wednesday.  Yeehaw! 

The rain is coming down again!

It's raining in California!  I can actually hear it coming down!

UPDATE: Our kitchen ceiling leaked!

Twas an eventful Saturday.  I'm a little under the weather, so I slept way in.  Once up and showered, we picked up Clinton and headed to Quiznos for lunch.  Then, it was off to Urban Outfitters to exchange a shirt that was too small.  Next, we headed to the Grove and Farmer's Market for a little shopping.  While there, I saw an advertisement for a movie called The Machinist, which I had not heard anything about.  This really surprised me as it is scheduled for release on Friday, Oct. 22nd and it is starring Christian Bale.  I was immediately intrigued to go home and watch the trailer.  Discussing it with Clinton, the conversation turned to who would be a good actor to replace Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, as Brosnan is only doing one more Bond film.  Clinton suggested Bale, to which I questioned his Britishness.  Clinton and Jamie (and IMDB) confirmed that he is indeed British (if Wales counts).  Here were some other names that came up for Bond potentials:  Jude Law, Ewan McGregor, Heath Ledger.  Hmm, I thought that list was going to be longer.  Clinton?  Jamie?  Am I forgetting someone?  None of these seem to quite hit the nail on the head for me, certainly not as much as Brosnan did back before he had been tapped.  However, once it was confirmed that Bale hailed from across the pond, I started to think that he might be a good pick.  Then I started to wonder why I seemed to have this affinity for Bale as an actor.  I couldn't name a single movie of his that I had seen.  I have seen the trailer for the new Batman movie, which I fully expect to be awesome.  That could have been the answer.  So, I looked up his credits on IMDB to see what else I might have seen him in.  The most recent thing I'd seen him in was Newsies, and while Jamie loves that movie, I was sure that wasn't what had done it for me.  Then I saw it, Empire of the Sun.  I saw that movie maybe as early as junior high, and I loved it.  It's a war movie and a little bit depressing, typically negatives for me in selecting movies, but something about it just really hooked me.  So, all that to say, rent Empire of the Sun, I'll see The Machinist asap and get back to you, and start getting excited for Batman Begins.

So far, I've just watched the first 30 minutes of the debate, and now I've got to go to bed.  But first, I had to blog about something that Kerry said.  When asked about some Catholic archbishops' opinions that it would be a sin to vote for Kerry because he supports abortion and embryonic stem cell research, Kerry responded with the following.

I believe that I can't legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn't share that article of faith....  My faith affects everything that I do, in truth. There's a great passage of the Bible that says, "What does it mean, my brother, to say you have faith if there are no deeds? Faith without works is dead."  And I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people. That's why I fight against poverty. That's why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That's why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith.

I'm a little surprised by this.  I think Kerry is trying to impress his religious viewers by quoting the Bible, but it seems to me that he sets himself up here.  I was really surprised by his mention that his faith is the inspiration that leads him to fight against poverty and for the environment.  This statement completely destroys his excuse for being pro-abortion.  The scripture alone points out that faith without deeds is dead.  Since Kerry feels he is prevented by the Constitution to support his “faith“ that tells him that abortion is wrong, he lacks the works that give life to that faith.  As a result, that faith might as well be dead.  But, in the biggest contradiction of all, Kerry admits that he has no problem legislating his “faith“ as it relates to poverty and the environment.  Why then can he not legislate his “faith“ on the fundamental issue of human life?

If you like this sort of topic, David Mobley has a separate, but related blog entry about legislation and right and wrong.

I'd like to note that for awhile there, I really didn't feel like blogging, and so I didn't.  Lately, I've been wanting to blog, but I've been quite busy working.  Today I got a little breather.  I even got to play a little Tiger Woods today and shot my best round ever, 28 under par.  I got 10 eagles in one round.  Granted, it was an easy course, but I was chipping in shots from 100 yards out.

I also finally got to see The Forgotten tonight.  I'd really been looking forward to this, because I love those can-you-trust-your-own-memory-type movies, like Memento.  We've been so busy and out of town so much that we just now made it to the ArcLight to see it, the first time to the ArcLight in months in fact.  I tell you this story not because I like to rant and rave about bad experiences, but because I always rave about all the good the ArcLight does, and I suppose I should be fair.  There were two big problems.  First, buying tickets took forever.  We didn't have to wait in line, but the guy was new and the system was not working like it was supposed to.  Their card reader couldn't read my ArcLight membership card (which I was using points from for a free ticket), and it wouldn't read my credit card.  I then had to help the employee through some of the screens to type in the card number manually.  He made some mistake, and I had to sign some error log, even though I had nothing to do with it.  Meanwhile, Clinton goes to the counter next to us and buys his ticket in about 0.23 seconds.

Next, we head into our theater and hit our seats (reserved of course), right smack dab in the middle of the first row up from the floor.  Sweet.  Everything looks like it's going to be awesome as the trailers begin.  The theater is practically empty.  I'm psyched.  But then a crazy man comes and sits right next to me.  This is the down side of reserved seats.  Some people think that they have to remain in their reserved seat even if the place is practically empty.  The guy reeks of smoke, and before the trailers are over, I can tell he's going to be trouble.  He's talking to himself in a very conversational way.  At first, I thought he was on a cell phone, but no, he was pointing out to himself how funny or scary or interesting or sad something was.  Throughout the trailers and the movie he had to respond in some way out loud to everything that happened on the screen.  The only times he wasn't talking were when he was opening his very loud bag of snacks, which were apparently very hard to open and required opening many many times during the movie.  His comments were also interrupted by throat-clearing and coughing.  Early on in the movie, I actually even shushed him.  I do not like to do this, but at this point I hadn't realized that he wasn't crazy.  Apparently he was too busy responding to something on the screen, because he did not acknowledge my shush one way or the other.  By the end of the movie, I realized that he was crazy and wished that I had gotten an employee to come in and handle the situation.  Instead, I just sat there and took it and used my extraordinary powers of focus to block him out.  I leave you with the funniest of his interactions with the screen.  At the climax of the movie, there's a chance that Julianne Moore has forgotten about her son, and all she has to do to let us know that she remembers him is to say his name.  There's tense music and a dramatic delay which is filled by my neighbor pleading with her, “Say it.  Say Sam.  That's all you have to do.  Say it!”