There is Some Justice in This World After All

"American Airlines, bowing to pressure yesterday from some of its lowest-paid workers, agreed to drop a $2-per-bag fee for curbside check-in service at airports throughout the country and to lift a ban on tips for skycaps at Logan International Airport."
American Airlines remains evil, of course, but at least they’ve decided to stop punishing the one part of their operation that still works smoothly and, more important, are courteous to the customers.

Ten Men and a Movie: 1 900 Drinking Buddy

Laughter is a very serious business. Production photo from the set. Director Ray Lai (center) speaks with his two lead actors Johnny Skourtis , left and Randall Park before shooting a key beer drinking scene .*

Last week was the official screening of 1 900 Drinking Buddy , a short film we wrote last fall. It’s a 12 min short directed by Ray Lai, and produced by Susan Havens and Andrew DeJohns. Drinking Buddy tells the story of Barry, a traveling salesman who, finding himself alone in a strange city, enlists the services of a rather unique service provider.



We were one of 4 shorts screened before a standing room only crowd of a few hundred people, and we are pleased to report the screening went great. People laughed in all the right places, and the 2 leads were outstanding.

It is strange but extremely gratifying thing to hear a room full of people respond to something you’ve written (We’re used to hearing a room break out in laughter at our words, as we were Gov’t speechwriters back in our homeland. But this time the laughter was intentional.)

We were very pleased with how the film came out, and we can say this w/out sounding like shameless self promoters because a lot of people were involved in bringing this from a 12 pp script to a 12 minute film.

The institution we are enrolled in (the exact institution shall go unnamed, as we wish to hide our location from our sworn enemies) prides itself on replicating the studio experience, and the screening was no exception. Of the 4 films that were screened, ours was the only one where the writer was invited to participate in the bows afterwards. One film left the writers name off the credits entirely.

All in all, it was a great experience, and we’ll be sure to send out the DVD as soon as it's available. We cannot post it to to the world wide web yet, because it is still eligible for submission to a number of film festivals.

Postscript
About a week after we wrapped, we came upon this guy. We’ve got the 14 pounds, now if we can just scrape together the airfare…


*Yes, this was shot in LA. It was 63 degrees when the above photo was taken, hence the wool hats and heavy winter jackets.

Remember When?

The year was 1985. The Pats were on their way to the SuperBowl, the Bruins had just traded All-Star goalie Pete Peeters to Washington for a bag of hockey pucks, and we were happily breaking in our first pair of Girbaud jeans.

1985 was also the year we purchased our first copy of Grand Theft Auto for our NES.


link via Kottke.

Ten Men and a Movie: Iron Man

We caught Iron Man this weekend. We liked it. one of the better superhero movies. It delivered exactly what we expected.

Which ultimately means it was a disappointment- no Wow moments. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the 1st 2/3rds of the movie. In sequential order. So we were never really amped up during the movie, because we knew what would happen next- we’d already seen it in the preview. So, predictably, the best parts are the parts we did not see coming. Like the comic bits about his helper robots. And there's lots of love shown to the fans of the comic

More observations:

• Robert Downey Jr, was born to play this role. And we're sure he does a better job than this guy would have done.
  
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• This is a huge plus - Tony Stark who was infinitely more interesting than the Iron Man character.
  

• The effects were outstanding, but then, if you’ve watched TV in the last four month’s you’ve already seen all the effects. The shots of Iron Man in action were believable, unlike the Spiderman movies, where every scene of him swinging thru Manhattan looks like it was animated by a dropout from ITT Tech’s School for Animation.

Overall, this guy sums it up better than we could.

Some absurdities (spoilers below, so cover your ears kids)

• Tony stark opens the movie with a team of bodyguards who then disappear. He needs an escort to drive to the airport, but nobody to stay at his house and watch the doors?

• Future generations may look back and laugh at the first scene of Iron Man in action. An American flies to the middle east to save villagers from…. Other Arabs? In the middle of a US occupation and ongoing war? Ugh.

• You'd think a brilliant inventor like Tony Stark would have an alarm system at his house.

• So the villain walks into Stark's house (like we said, he needs to get an alarm system) and goes to all the trouble of stealing the nuclear-thingy generator, yet he doesn’t bother to walk downstairs into the lab? He’s not the least bit curious to see what Stark’s been working on? Its not even a lab, its his freaking garage.

• We don’t buy the villain climbing into the suit. Especially after we sat thru a scene where it was explained to us that an unmanned vehicle will never be better than a manned vehicle. We were expecting a proof-of-concept here.

• We see problems for future installments – this is a movie where your main character has no discernable eyes or mouth. They handled this pretty well- great mix of believable “cockpit” shots of Downey inside the helmet, but when it came time for Iron Man to speak to someone on the outside, it did not work as well. Almost as if they hadn’t figured it out yet. Sometimes we hear his normal voice, other times it’s a synthesized robotic voice.

Amen, Brother.

We couldn't agree more.


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Cant' Wait to see what his Doh!-mar looks like

If the Wire was animated by the Simpsons animators.


Above, McNulty and the Bunk.

And, for you dorks out there, they also gave Galactica the Simpsons treatment.

via What's Alan Watching.