beever street art

Did I get you with the title? huh huh? Anyway. Beatty at UCLA led me to this artist, Julian Beever, doing street art. It’s amazing what illusions he can create.

manhattan

A fun netflix night at our place. Woody Allen’s 1979 movie Manhattan was a hoot. I died during the conversation he was having with his buddy while standing next to the gorilla (monkey?) skeleton. (wishing I had an image to link) There’s good woody allen, and there’s bad woody allen. It was good to go back and find good woody allen.

the notebook

This is a Nicholas “sappy romance” Sparks story. I will quietly admit that I read and liked his book Message in a Bottle. I hate the movie version. I stopped that dvd and gagged. After seeing Rachel McAdams in Wedding Crashers, I remembered Ebert saying how good her actiing was in The Notebook. Boom. Netflix. This movie never made me gag. It’s a sweet and sorrowful story, with great acting and good directing.

wedding crashers

The girl-falling-on-bed montage was a breath of naughty air. Rachel McAdams was cute. Seeing her in this led me to netflix The Notebook. In the Vegas(baby!) era, the iPaulo movie rating was the number of times I’d go see a movie. I don’t do that much anymore, with ticket prices what they are, but if I did, this movie would be a 2 for sure.

Relic by OSWD

Tada! A new look for iPaulo. The layout is from a site called open source web design. This layout is called relic, and it’s one of the more popular themes at the moment. I still have some work to do. With blog posts, links all over the place in the blog roll and movie posts, etc. the page has way too much green text for my taste. Fortunately, that’s easily changed thanks to css. 🙂 I also want to find my own iPaulo banner image(s).

Cure

Righto. I can’t think the last time a movie has scared the beejezzus out of me, but Kyua (aka Cure) did. Kyua is a japanese thriller I rented from netflix. It stars the guy from Shall We Dance (the good japanese movie, not he junky hollywood version). It was able to watch about an hour of the movie, and then it just got too scary for me. If you want a murder mystery with a big dose of creepy, ritualistic killing, then this movie is for you. Enough of this. I’ve got to go reorder my netflix queue so something really cheery is #1.

Scenes from A Marriage

Scener ur ett äktenskap was made 30 years before Saraband, and follows the same two characters (and actors). Both movies are powerful and gut-wrenching while they tell the story about a husband and wife bound by love. Yet for two people who are tied together so tightly, they sure say I hate you a lot. We saw Saraband first, and then this 1973 movie on netflix. It’s a pretty much a coin toss, but I think I’m glad we saw them in that order.

Saraband

Ingmar Bergman is one of those movie names which I’m embarrassed about every-time the name comes up. Who is this guy? I’m a movie fan and I have no idea. Makes me feel very closeted and weird. So when I heard Ebert and Roeper raving about Saraband I had to go. Challenging describes it well. The acting, directing, and story are amazing. Those Swedes…

March of the Penguins

I had heard amazing things about March of the Penguins before I went. Consequently, I think I was disappointed by what was otherwise a very good movie. Thom and I were talking about how some of the film, including what should have been a dramatic, breathtaking opening, looked too grainy. After see the end credits, where they showed uber-parka glad camera people carrying gear through freezing Antarctica, I think think we should cut them some slack.