Stop Censorship

http://americancensorship.org/

Movie Rev. The Ides of March

I just wanted to throw out my gut reaction to this movie tonight.

Fucking Terrible.

A weak political thriller with no thrills. Just because George Clooney directed it doesnt make it good.

Synopsis.
A press secretary for Clooney gets dicked over by the other campaign manager, and then he blackmails Clooney to get that guy fired.

I kid you not thats the movie, and its ending left you sitting there wondering why the hell you wasted 10 dollars and nothing happened.

There was some nice cinematography and the acting was fine. Paul Giomatti was good, and Philip S. Hoffman was decent. Ryan Gosling has more charm in the movie Drive than he does here, which was a much better movie btw. Clooney was fine, he acted like a politician. Smiled a lot, and then looked stern in some parts. All of acting overshadowed by the poor plot, lack of intrigue and crappy ending.

Rotten tomatoes gives it an 83% saying "While not exactly exposing revelatory truths, The Ides of March is supremely well-acted drama that moves at a calm, confident clip."

I read a review of this movie by the denver post and i really liked what he had to say. There are 2 other movies out there are show the down and dirty of different worlds, moneyball for baseball and the social network for computer stuff, and this movie here lacked what those movies had. Maybe cause those are movies about the underdog and making it from nothing that appeals to people. Nobody could care less about politions being corrupted, everybody already believes that. Show us something we havent seen.

Scary Movies

I did a bunch of google searches for the top 10 scariest movies of all time. I have collected a bunch of them. The one that I watched tonight was American Psycho. I dont know why its on the list. The movie isnt scary at all, and there arent any "gotcha" scenes for cheap thrills either. The movie plays out more like a drama, lots of Christian Bale having sex with hookers and showering and stuff. This movie came out in 2000, and I went looking around for other movies from that era. Final Destination came out in 2000 and pretty cool, and had some nice death scenes. I dunno what was trying to be done here but it seemed like a very toned down version of the Shining (which was much scarier, as i remember it). Other movies to round out my list are

Audition
Dead Girl
Funny Games
Martyrs
mulholland drive
and
rear window.

More later, oh also I saw Killer Elite with Chev Chellios and that other movie......MoneyBall.

<3 B

Nevery got around to talking about Killer Elite and Moneyball.
after a few weeks you really get know how good a movie is by what you can remember of it.
Clive Owen was pretty good and chev chellios did his thing, like he does in all of his movies. This movie could have been transporter 8 and the plot doesnt really change. Gotta kill some british sas blokes that were in a war with iran? If Chev doesnt go kill them then his partner Robert DeNiro dies. Deniro is like a father to him blah blah, so he does the job, but Clive Owen is former sas and "is on to him" and tries to beat him up. Brits die, Deniro gets saved, clive owen is mad. Ok action flick, rent it if you are bored, will end up in that $4 bin at best buy.

MoneyBall.
Brad Pitt was excellent in this movie. He plays the roll of Billy the manager of the Oakland Athletics, which was pretty much the crappiest team ever. He has a low budget and all his players leave for better paying teams when their contracts end. So billy goes another team and asks for some trades to replace his losses. Jonah that big guy from those comedies is crazy with stats and Billy snipes him from that other team. They devise a way to figure out who is good based on specific stats that nobody else uses. THey make a huge comeback and win like 18 games in a row, but lose the last game of the season. Theres drama with billys x wife and his kid, and it shows a man conflicted and dealing with what lifes given him. I dont like watching baseball, but thankfully with this movie there actually wasnt much watching, it was all the behind the scenes stuff. I enjoyed this movie very much. Go see it if you like baseball, and maybe even if you dont.

Remakes

Im not to happy with all the remakes at are surfacing around now. Footloose, Top Gun, and the Three Musketeers, are the few that I remember. Footloose has an all new cast and Top Gun is getting done in 3D of in your face homoerotica. Goose Dies.

I'm actually pretty pissed off about The Musketeers remake. I love the 1993 version and i think it was one of the few Disney movies that was actually done right. With its allstar cast
Keefer Sutherland, Chris O'Donnell, Oliver Platt, Tim Curry, Charlie Sheen, and Michael Wincott.
The movie itself is outstanding, its funny, great action, comraderie, a chase scene, betrayal, and just an amazingly fun action movie. This remake with Orlando Bloom(default renaissance guy, since Pirates of the Caribbean) and Milla Jovovich(who i love) looks like they took the game Assassins Creed and put it to film. Theres the Flying dutchman, which is a flying ship/blimp/thing which has an airbattle straight from Pirates but in the air. And they made the Countess D'Winter out to be some crazy Electra assassin in a corsett and bloomers. None of it looks fit for the period except the clothing. Its pretty much an affront to the novel by Alexandre Dumas which from last i check included no mention of flying blimps and other such redikulousness.

In essence i guess im just not a fan of remakes unless they are true to form. Along the same vein, the Count of Monte Cristo (also by Alexandre Dumas) was remade with Guy Pierce, but it kept pretty much the same storyline just updated from the 1975 version and it was good.

While i am putting up a fuss about this remake because of the over the top of it all, which isnt really needed for good storytelling, i am very much looking forward to the Sherlock Holmes sequel the Game of Shadows. I loved the first movie they did, and Robert Downedy Jr, and Jude Law are marvelous together, and I hope the sequel builds on the foundation that first one built. Guy Ritchie has a habit or directing good movies, so i doubt that i have much to worry about it.

Any remakes that you guys have seen and are looking forward to, hated very much so, or want to talk about?

Next they will remake Goonies, and Terminator 1.

Movie Review - Drive 8.2/10

This movie is pretty timeless. One where the main character has no name, has a role and fills it. Hes a driver, its what he does, and he does it well.

The only things that date this movie are the vehicles. If it wasnt for the vehicles this movie could have come out in 2000,1990,1980,1970,1960,.... The story is pretty decent but at times the pacing is slow, which would be okay if it were filmed in 1970 or so. At times the music is super loud and doesnt really seem to fit the scenes that well. It wasn't just music, but they were songs with loudly sung words about being a real human being.

Ryan Gosling, and Ron Perlman are the only names i recognized in the movie.

Synopsis

Theres a guy thats a part time movie stunt driver, part time mechanic. On the side hes a wheel man for random criminals. He starts hanging out with his neighbor and her son. He likes them but her husband gets out of prison. He owes money to people for protection in prison. He gets beat up, and the bad guys threaten the girl and her kid. Driver doesnt like it, so him and convict dad go do a heist on a pawn shop. It goes bad, convict dad dies, and girl criminal and him drive away. Later she gets shot and he has a million bucks in a bag. He tries to give it back, but the bad guys want to kill him, so he kills all of them. During all this at one point the little kids mom sees him stomp a guys head in to protect her and himself and shes very shocked and leaves. He calls her and she wont talk to him.

He drives away.

The chase scenes were pretty cool, and ryan gosling was really good with the hyper violent scenes. He played them to a T. He seemed very akward in social situations, which was part of his character, and he played that well too. The girl didnt seem worth fighting for, and at the end he left the million dollars lying on the floor as he drove away.

I feel that they could have done a bit more with the movie. Paced it a bit better, changed the music or toned it down some, maybe the girl could have died and he leaves with the boy. It has some very scenes that reminded me of Casino, but the ending felt blah.

It was a good film, very stylistic, and timeless.
Its a solid rent, and a maybe watch in theater this weekend, but next weekend Killer Elite comes out and that looks a bit more action packed if thats your thing.

Movie Review - Contagion 4/10

I watched this movie last night. I wasn't impressed. It didn't have any of the elements of a story that grip you, have that wow factor, or impressive storytelling. It was basically a two hour commercial telling you to wash your hands.

They loaded the cast with Gwen Paltrow, matt damon, morphious, and jude law. But they jumped back and forth between all of them, each telling a mini story of what they are doing while this crisis is happening. And the crisis is, bird flu.

1. People start getting sick.
2. It spreads across the world.
3. Millions die.
4. Scientists find a cure.
5. Cure is distributed.
6. End Movie.

Thats what happened. It might as well have been a pbs special or a scifi budget movie. There were so many parts of the movie that didnt help to drive the movie forward at all and were just there to add filler. Matt Damon's wife cheats on him while she has a layover in Chicago. You find out about it later, he gets upset cause he has to hear about it from the CDC because she is dead.....and...and...ok switch scene.

Lawrence Fishburn tells a friend of his to get out of the city, but a reporter gets wind of it and calls him out on national tv. Washington is going to investigate. No conclusion.

Jude Law makes a lot of money by blogging about different drugs and then investing in them. He gets arrested and then gets out on bail. No conclusion.

Some lady gets taken hostage by the Chinese and they trade her for vaccine. She lives there for a week and starts to like the kids there. Turns out the vaccine they trade her for is a placebo and when she finds out about it she gets upset and runs through an airport. End scene, no conclusion.

Once Matt Damons daughters boyfriend gets a vaccine, they have a mini prom in their living room because everyone at school is dead. I guess prom makes it all better.

A good 20 minutes of the movie, spruced throughout the film, is this electronica music showing scenes of empty streets full of garbage, empty hallways and airports.

At the end, the government lines everyone up at a football statium and distributes the drugs. Then it shows how it all started.

If i read this script as a teacher, i would give it a B, because an 8th grader wrote it. The are human elements in the movie but you could have just left them out and it would have been the same movie. The movie leaves you asking for more, not from the story but from the 4-5 different stories that they follow and never really conclude.

Lousy movie.
Skip it.

Bugsy.

The Weakness of America.

Listening to "Dirty Dubstep mix 09" on Youtube.

1. 23,378,792 Illegal aliens in the United States. Only 600,000 of them are not mexican.

2. The unemployment rate in the United States was last reported at 8.8 percent in March of 2011.

3. The 2010 Census showed the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2010, was 308,745,538.

So.....let me pull out my hand calculator.... the illegal immigrant percentage of our country is 7.5% The percentage would be higher if they were counted in the census. I am assuming that they were not counted in the census to help bolster the opposing side here.

Assumption.
-Every immigrant that is in the united states is looking for a job.
-Every person counted as "unemployed" is looking for a job, because the unemployment rate doesnt count underemployed or those that have been taken off unemployment aid.
-If there were no illegal immigrants holding jobs or looking for jobs, our unemployment rate would go down.
-The difference between the unemployment rate and the percentage of illegal immigrants in our population is 1.3%

Conclusions
-Remove the illegal immigrants that are in the country.
-Remove incentive to hire illegal immigrants with harsher penalties for employers.
-Remove the ease of illegal immigration from our southern border.

I stress "illegal" here, because I have no problem with immigration if it is done legally. Apply for a work visa, apply for citizen ship. If/when it is granted, welcome aboard.

Then we beg the question of how? How do we do the things that I have concluded. This is the part where I write what I think, and the part that will get thrown back in my face if I ever run for public office. Probably taken out of context.

Its a three step process. Border, employment, deportation.

Contain the border. We have 2 different forces that protect us at home, we have the border patrol that is supposed to secure the border, and we have the national gaurd. De-civilianize the national guard by absorbing them into the national guard, move their funding over and everything, and have the national guard patrol the border. In addition to this we need to erect posts, fence, and practically a DMZ for a 1/2 mile into mexico. Issue fair warning to the mexican president that those found crossing the border will be dealt with deadly force. Just like if an unauthorized civilian try to get into an American base in Iraq, they get shot. The border's total length is 3,169 km (1,969 miles), according to figures given by the International Boundary and Water Commission. The Army National Guard now has 403,616 service members. Currently, the U.S. Border Patrol employs over 20,200 agents (as of the end of fiscal year 2009)4. It wouldn't be that much to take on and it would just be another assigned duty of the National Guard. Once the border is taken seriously and we have extremely limited the flow of illegal immigration you are able to deal with the problems at home.
Create extremely harsh penalties for hiring illegal immigrants. It is easy to check citizenship of the person that you are hiring by using the E-Verify system. If you are found to have hired someone without using the system and they are illegal then your business will be seized by the government and sold, just like if you don't pay your car bill. The car is seized and sold to the highest bidder. The money made from the sale would go towards any debt you owed and the rest would go towards border protection. If you still owe money and cant pay then you are enlisted in the US military or you go to jail. You will be damn sure that the business will check and double check.
All that is left is then the removal of illegal immigrants. Take the ones already in our possession (jail, prison) and give them to the mexican government to deal with. Then continue to monitor the E-Verify for hits, do citizenship checks along state borders (Carry your ID cards!!) and eventually without adequate jobs the vine will wither. As long as deportation is higher than immigration we will be doing our jobs.

I don't see where any budgetary problems would come in. We already pay for the half million or so National Guard, we pay their salary every month, we need to put them to good use. If there are sections of the border that are becoming problematic, say due to drug Cartels, then deploy the Marines. There is a very handy Camp Pendleton in San Diego California. There is even a few Naval bases in the area in case we need boat support. Perhaps we could save some money by leaving Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan alone.

One of the many things i would do if i were King of America.

-Bugsy.







1. http://immigrationcounters.com/
2. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
3. http://2010.census.gov/news/releases/operations/cb10-cn93.html
4. http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/border_security/border_patrol/border_patrol_ohs/overview.xml

$$ or lack there off

So i hear that the government ie congress cannot agree on a budget. Due to their lack of ability to come to an agreement they are halting all nonessential goverment. This so happens to include the military. Soo i will not be receiving pay until they can pull their heads out of their asses and come to an agreement.

But did you know that congressmembers and their aides will recieve pay. Lets look at the payscale here.

The current salary for rank-and-file members of the House and Senate is $168,000 per year. The Leaders get $186,600, the Speaker of the House gets $215,700.
http://www.congresslink.org/print_basics_pay.htm

Here is the paychart for the military for every rank in every branch.
http://www.navycs.com/2011-military-pay-chart.html

From this chart you would need to be an O9, thats a 3 star general with over 20 years of service obviously to make the equivalent of someone in congress. At the federal level there are 100 senators and 435 representatives. An O10, a 4 star General with over THIRTY years in the military makes $206112 a year, That is still less the Speaker of the House. These are men like Gen McChrystal, one of the joint cheifs of staff to the president and Commanded the war effort in Afghanistan.

A member of congress in his first year of his first term makes 168 thousand dollars a year.
A member of the military in his first year of his first enlistment makes 17k a year.
An officer of the military in his first year of his first commission makes 33k a year.

You see the problem here? What these men and women do to the country by letting it shut down, doesn't affect them. They dont have to worry about their paychecks or feeding their wives or children.

This is appauling and I am ashamed to be apart of our military that fights for their freedom to screw us over.

Bugsy

True Grit

The movie was good. I never saw the original but i liked this one. Jeff Bridges was excellent. The dialog was witty, caustic, and abrupt. I didnt care for the ending, but i guess that for the time period it is true to what prolly would have happened to her and him. Good stuff. Im looking forward to watching The Social Network. I also enjoyed Inception, but i saw it many months ago and cant really give it a more thorough breakdown than saying go see it. Thriller, mind fuck ending that you expect, but a good story none the less. Love the Decaprio Memes.

Typical USMC #1

Today we showed up at 530am, for a class that started at 8am. The class is 8 miles in the direction that I had to drive past to get to the place to meet up to ride the bus to. The classes were 3 hours long. At the end of which, no busses showed up for my group. A few people had to ride back to the initial meeting spot, to get vehicles to come back to pick us up to take us back to the intial meeting spot, so that i could then drive past the area which we had the classes in to go home.

Computer Pains

I got home a bit early today, and i had the idea in mind to work on my computer a bit. Small backstory, i built this computer about 3 weeks ago, everything worked fine at first, but the 60g SSD hard drive that i bought crashed a week later. I take it back to fryes and get a new one, same exact one.

The problem comes into light as i was using that drive to run Windows 7, so that it would run quickly, and it would have a 20 sec boot time, from on button to usability. Once the SSD drive crashed, i had to load windows onto the other hard drive in there to make it usable while i procrastinated taking the other one back. So i finally get the new one and put in the computer, but now im wary of it. I dont want to reinstall windows on it just yet and then it crashes and i have a huge headache or reinstalling OS's on diff hard drives. So i put warcraft on it, and play on it for a week, kinda like a stress test. Well it works fine.

So i get home a bit early today, and i wanted to move windows over to the ssd drive from the other one. So i look up how to image a drive, and realize that its confusing after i download the image software that the tech guys like the most clonezilla. I download it, and it doesnt work for me, or i dont work for it. Either or. So i format the SSD that had WOW on it, and install windows 7. If you have ever done a fresh install, you know that you have about 60 new updates for windows that all need to get downloaded. If you have never done a fresh install, imagine those weekly downloads you do for windows (or should be doing) and then you have to do them all at once. Well i didnt want to do that, so i thought it would be prudent to just copy over the files i had from the old hard drive that already had all the updated windows software on it. Most of it went over smoothly, but somethings you just cant move cause you dont have permission. So 80% of it moved but i didnt know what didnt! So whatever, ill just update the stuff im missing and it wont take so long. I formate the other hard drive to get rid of windows on there so i can use it for backups. I run the updater.....unknown error has occured in your update, cannot update any of your essential 45 updates.

FUCK!

Put the windows disk back in, RE-Install windows. It freezes out halfway thru, im busy watching how people will never age on NOVA and i come back an hour later and its bar still hasnt moved. Reset button, bam. Take 2 or 3. This one goes well. All the stuff is going everything is done. But sitting next to my new Windows folder in /computer is this windows.old - This is 13 gigs of crap just sitting there. So, i toss that shit in the Recycling bin. {You need permission from TrustedInstaller} But thats me! Back to google, some guy has the same problem and hes told to go into properties and security and advanced and change the owner of the file to me. I do that. Delete!

{You need your permission to do that}

/facepalm.

P.S. Diskcleaner too care of it, ty forum gurus. Now im reinstalling all my drivers and shit.

TIPS.
1. www.Ninite.com for all your initial startup shit you always download.
2. Save your bookmarks for your browser in gmail, cause your browser gets tanked.
3. Dont lose your software disks.

Bugsy.

That book was crappy

I was looking back at the hundreds of posts that i have done (3) over the past year, and i saw that i was reading the book Law of Nines by Terry Goodkind. For the record, dont read that shitty book. Terry Goodkind did a fantastic job on his initial series called "the sword of thruth" series, the first book being "Wizards First Rule." That series consisting of about 12 books was phenomenal, with a great opening book and a great story throughout. Law of Nines was a desperate attempt to make some quick cash off the backs of loyal readers. They even made a sad sad tv adaptation called "Legend of the Seeker." Fans of the series everywhere slit their wrists. Reminded me of the Dresden Files series that SCIFI tried to put on. Another great great fantasy series by Jim Butcher, completely cut up....by the apparent need to make money and not a good show. I read 40 books on deployment, I have a list of them around here somewhere, ill go thru them and maybe hit somehighlights for a few decent series.

1 Year Anniversary Blog of Blogging

I dunno if this is a habitual lack of commitment to writing but ive been thinking that i should pick up my blog, So i sign in and look around. Its been 5 days past 1 year since ive posted. Its like i didn't even give it a good try. As if my blog had bad breath on our first date, i just look at the caller ID and click Ignore. But a lot of shit has happened in the year that i've been gone. I deployed with the 15th MEU to a whole slue of countries and had a decent time. I've melted my brain with hours upon hours of primetime television programming that was passed around like cheap wine on my ship. I've seen seasons of Dexter, Weeds, 24, Sarah Connor Chronicles, House, True BLood, Greys Anatomy and House. As well as a dozen or so anime series. On a boat when you are in the infantry there really isnt much for you to do besides the generic heaping of bullshit that comes with the usmc. Ill get into more of that shit later, i just wanted to dust off the ole blog. Caio