Top 10 Movies Of 2013

Before Midnight

Frances Ha

Side Effects

American Hustle

Star Trek Into Darkness

Pacific Rim

Gravity

Captain Phillips

12 Years a Slave

This is the End

The worst movies were The Lone Ranger and The Hangover Part III

Our 2013 Christmas Letter

Hello, all. As you can tell from the crisp air, music on the radio, decorations in store windows and Cardinals' dwindling playoffs chances, it is nearly Christmas time once again. So now seems like as good a time as any to pretend that Facebook doesn't exist and send you a zany photo and an update about how we have been doing. 

2013 has been a year of alarming and disgusting change in our household. The change we are referring to, of course, is that of Zack's diapers. Even though he is our third child, we had forgotten just how revolting a toddler's diaper gets when he begins eating solid food. But our memories are refreshed one or two times daily, when the youngster's drooping undercarriage serves a reminder. 

Zack is the biggest mover and shaker among the household this year, having launched his own app on iTunes, launched his tech startup into an impressive initial public offering and launched an exploratory committee to gage his chances in the 2014 Congressional elections. Although he's only 1 year old, his accomplishments are remarkable. In addition to all that, he also learned how to crawl through the doggie door and spray fridge door water all over the floor, which he proceeds to lick up.

Luke, who is in first grade, is a thriving artist and musician. We see him becoming a one-man band who beat-boxes his own background music while also singing lead and backup vocals. If you think all this to be impossible, it's because you have never been serenaded by the 6-year-old.

Emma, who proudly boasts she is in 'Pre-K' and not just standard preschool, is also the artistic sort. She excels in the ancient, well-respected medium known through the ages as Grabbing Scissors Out Of The Craft Closet And Leaving Squiggly Pieces Of Construction Paper All Over The Kitchen Floor. Combined with her affinity for painting and drawing on several sheets of paper per minute, when trees see this girl, they cry.

Jessica continues to attend grad school, going for a master's degree because the master's she already earned has lost that 'new car' smell. She also continues to work part-time and rescue Zack from his minutely attempts at sending himself to the emergency room by BASE jumping off the dining room table.

As for Phil, he is still toiling away at the local newspaper -- poor guy, no one has stopped to tell him that newspapers ceased to exist in 2005 -- and passing his video game addiction on to his offspring. 

That should about catch you up. We'll check back in at the end of 2014 -- another anticipated year of disgusting, smelly change until we can get that kid potty trained.

Sincerely, 

The Villarreals

Book Report: The Witches

The Witches by Roald Dahl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun book from beginning to end. Dahl's sense of wonder and imagination carries throughout the fast-paced tale. I like its bittersweet, darker-than-expected ending.


View all my reviews

How Cable And Satellite Will Go Down

The whole cable/satellite cabal will probably go down at some point because people are getting sick of paying for billions of channels they care nothing about. 

Once the networks are able to break away from the cable/satellite money and start selling directly to consumers there will be a revolution. It sucks that you have to buy HGTV and a million reality show channels to get ESPN. 

Book Report: 1984

1984 by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An alarmist thinkpiece and word of warning to humanity. A dark and terrible read, but illuminating while terrifying. Some of its dreary projections seem farcicle, and some have come alarmingly true. The book bludgeons your mind and soul. I was glad when it was over.


View all my reviews

Review: Saving Mr. Banks

Ever since I first heard of it, I dreaded Saving Mr. Banks, pegging it as a dopey Disney self-congratulations job. A pomade-slicked Tom Hanks would be the hokey, do-no-wrong master of the universe Walt Disney, Emma Thompson would be unreasonably uptight Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers. Using his trademark Disney charm and whimsy, Walt would break through Travers' defenses, make her see the error of his ways and...

Consent to wild sex with him?

That impossible historical stretch, I figured, was the only hope the movie had of being entertaining in any way. The trailer even played up this possibility, intentionally or not, with a scene in which Disney looks suggestively at Travers and asks her what he'll have to do to get the rights to her book.

The movie doesn't go that way, but it does skew far darker than I ever could have hoped for, and in that way ends up becoming something halfway profound. Although Hanks' Walt is just as much a hagiography as you'd expect, but Thompson has found a spoon-sugared plum of a role in the furiously demented Travers.

What the movie truly turns out to be is a dark flashback-laden biopic on Travers, describing in painful detail how exactly she turned out to be as coarse and brutal a caricature as she turned out to be. Her past was filled with shame, abandonment and disappointment, much of it at the hands of her well-meaning grease fire of a dad, played by Colin Farrell.

Director John Lee Hancock spins the tale with equal doses of Disney charm and indie-flick grit. The movie amuses, terrifies, intrigues and fascinates at nearly every moment, infusing suspense into a story that everyone already knows the happy ending to. After seeing the ugly, painful way the sausage was made, I'll never watch Mary Poppins the same way again.

Starring Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, Colin Farrell and Ruth Wilson. Written by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith. Directed by John Lee Hancock. 125 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Book Review: The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The pacing is incredible, and the writing is forward-driven, unpretentious and dripping with suspense. The detail is necessary and sticky rather than superfluous, flower and forced. Fitzgerald makes Gatsby loom as a dynamic phantom, as full of enthusiasm and purpose as the pages themselves. This is an amazing book. One of my very favorites. A true inspiration, both emotionally and technically.


View all my reviews

Review: 12 Years a Slave

Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave is one of those movies you have to see, almost as though a penance or homework assignment. It's a work of magnificence that you need to have experienced if you want to expose yourself to the best that moviedom has to offer. You know that you are in for an uncomfortable experience from the get-go, and just have to deal with that reality, wince and deal.

Based on the 1853 Solomon Northup memoir about a free man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, the film is out to reveal the grotesque realities of human subjugation. The grime, crushing workloads, barnyard-like living conditions and cruel mental and physical tortures. It's one thing to see an innocent man whipped to a bloody pulp by a sadistic master, but quite another to see the master force another slave to elicit the whipping. Forced participation in cruelty is an ongoing theme in the movie, which explores the social strata of the slave and the interwoven levels of injustice and abuse of power all the way down through the chain of misery.

Chiwetel Ejiofor thoroughly owns the film in the lead. I hate to be one of those guys who is so stunned by a performance then runs out and declares that he absolutely needs to win the Oscar, but I have to do it here. Sure, there are about 20 or 30 movies yet to come out that I need to see before I can say such a thing with any kind of authority, but Ejiofor is so amazing here that it's almost impossible to imagine anyone out-doing him. So either he will win the Oscar or he will be robbed.

Brad Pitt pops up in a minor but crucial role late in the film, and Paul Giamatti makes a mark as a slimy slave wholesaler, but the real work comes from Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender as a disgustingly vindictive master and Lupita Nyong'o as his unwilling mistress. All three performances are enthrallingly awards-caliber, and while it's trite to boil down artistic work to that level, I want them to be recognized so badly that I can't help myself.

The movie is well paced, devastating and eventually uplifting in its strange, harried ways, but it's not quite worthy of its performances. Like The Passion of the Christ, there's a disturbing obsession with flesh being ripped from the bone. The graphic cinematography leaves no detail to the imagination. Reaction shots accompanied by sounds, which McQueen uses sparingly, are more effective at showing the devastation of lashings and lynchings, but he sticks to the gory, incredibly realized details.

The film wants to hurt you, knows you are terrified of what it will show you, then shows you way more than you bargained for. Two critics I watched the film with stormed out in disgust, and I suspect many audiences will do just the same. It normally bothers me when people do that, but I can't really blame them. I just happen to be one of the people who was stuck to his chair, unable to move even if I wanted to.

Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti and Sarah Paulson. Written by John Ridley, based on the Solomon Northup book. Directed by Steve McQueen. 113 minutes. Rated R.

Ruminations On The Direction Of New Girl

I think I'm ready for Nick and Jessica to end their relationship. We'll see if the writers can continue to explore the relationship for humor. They are doing a good job but it's getting strained.

I am at the point where I think they have accomplished brilliance and doubt it can stay this good, unless there is another dynamic shift. And there have been quite a few of those over the two-plus seasons. The writers have proven that they are not afraid to shake things up and change paradigms.

Usually, a sitcom will wear out the platonic romance thing for the whole run of the show, Who's the Boss style, or the four or whatever seasons of Pam-Jim in The Office.

I think they ended the Schmidt-Cece fling too early. He did not deserve her, so it's only fair. And in a way she did not deserve him, for nearly going through with the whole wedding charade just to please her family. But still, it hurts that he screwed up his second shot with her.

But he kind of has to be a doofus who messes everything up. A Schmidt who acts rationally and makes good choices is not a funny Schmidt.He has to be an overzealous wannabe bro, who never quite knows how to bro it up properly.

Nick, in the long run, has to be an untame-able manchild, and Jess has to be someone amazing for whom love never quite works out. Eternally nearly missing out on the romance she so badly desires.

One of the things I like about Nick-Jess is how screwed up and awkward their relationship is. If they can keep that going, and keep them always hanging by a thread and never blissfully at peace with their love, then the relationship can continue to be funny.

Just Posting This

So I don't go the entire month of September neglecting my poor little blog. I want to post more on here. I've got a ton of drafts that would take me a few seconds to massage into post form. Maybe next month. Or perhaps October 2014 at the latest.

Book Review: The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A dull and laborious haul, even for a piece of classic literature based on a candy bar. I did appreciate the use of the terms "lackey," "antechamber" and "What the deuce?" but other than that I had a tough time staying interested. It was almost as tough to truck through as Moby-Dick or War and Peace. I can't fathom why the franchise is so popular.


View all my reviews

Review: Getaway

Get. Away.

That's what I kept saying to the movie, but it wouldn't budge. It just squatted there all stupidly on its big dumb screen, mocking me by refusing to obey.

How dare this silly action flick spoil the good name of the beloved 1994 Alec Baldwin-Kim Basinger sexcapade, which itself was a remake of the 1974 Steve McQueen film. The title, much like everything in the movie, makes no sense, has no bearing on reality, and simply expressed the urge you feel as you longingly eye the portal below the exit sign.

Ethan Hawke stars as a racecar driver whose wife, like so many women, has been up and stolen by Jon Voight. Voight calls Ethan up, tells him that he totally dug Before Midnight and Snow Falling on Cedars, then commands him to steal an armored, camera'd-up car and race it around town at his whims. Do it or his wife dies.

Voight is rather firm about his demands most of the time, but occasionally allows a little freelancing, such as when Selena Gomez tries to carjack Ethan and ends up an unintended passenger on the miseryride. At first, Voight is all KILL HER ETHAN YOU CAN'T LEAVE NO WITNESSES!. But soon he realizes that a female lead for Hawke to vibe off of will help pass the time so he lets her stay.

Gomez tries her best, but she has a little problem in that she was bitten by a vampire at age 11, and thus, despite her biological age of 452, cannot be taken seriously as an adult actress. When Ethan locks Selena in his car, there's a distinct stranger danger vibe going on that's quite off-putting.

More video game than movie, the idiocy has Ethan, in the name of saving the woman he loves, murder dozens upon dozens of people via vehicular manslaughter. You shake your head as his tonka toy of a vehicle survives fiery wreck after fiery wreck, avoiding the cops and ramming through buildings and doing whatever because it's touched a Super Mario Bros. star and cannot be killed.

It's too bad, because this mess could have been sort of fun like Crank, The Transporter 1 through 17 or pretty much any Jason Statham movie that all happen to be exactly the same. All Getaway needed to be mediocre instead of awful was Jason Statham, half a script and one fewer 452-year-old creepy Disney demon spawn.

The real getaway here was the one the filmmakers pulled on the studio, having heisted giant paychecks for minimal work or thought. While I respect the earnest con, I am sad to have suffered 90 minutes of punishment at the hands of the execrable results. Gag away, I did.

Starring Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight and Rebecca Budig. Written by Gregg Maxwell Parker and Sean Finegan. Directed by Courtney Solomon. 90 minutes. Rated PG-13.

5 Stupid Things People Can Go Ahead And Stop Saying

1. "Breakfast of champions." When the expression is known better than the source is, it leads morons to utter it about eating Doritos or pizza in the morning without knowing or caring where it comes from.

2. "Your tax dollars at work." Your brain cells are not at work though.

3. "If I had a nickel." If I had a hammer every time I heard someone say that, I would likely be in jail by now.

4. "Which begs the question." This has been misused so much that its misuse has become accepted usage. Even if the saying has backed its way into the realm of grammatical correctness, it still sounds moronically pretentious.

5. "___ o'clock." Beer o'clock, sex o'clock, nap o'clock, snack o'clock. How about shut the eff up o'clock?

Review: Planes

Looking like a lifeless, creativity-free cash-in on a tired franchise, Planes acts the part as well for the first hour or so. A barely-tweaked, character-for-character carbon copy of Cars, the narrative hurls itself into a bonheaded plot mechanic, then lazily skywrites its way to oblivion.

And then things get interesting.

The movie no longer sucks as it teeters into the third act. Much like Happy Feet, it ventures gleefully off to crazy town, taking on a severely dark tone. Refusing to play it safe any longer, it becomes genuinely dangerous and exciting. For the first time, it's not quite clear where things are going, and characters that seemed poorly written suddenly have some definition and edge.

There is much to hate about this movie. Far more than there is to love, in fact. But I appreciate the dangerous turn so much that the glee overtook the Dane Cook-baked misery that led up to that point. The movie works, almost in spite of itself, and though it predictably coasts toward a predictable ending, at least it manages to accomplish the task with flourish.

Still, though, I have to voice my hatred of some of the crap that came before. Ahem.

* The movie shows a televised plane race. These do not exist. How stupid.

* Just like the bizarre world of Cars, humans do not exist. They must have been all killed somehow. Cars do exist, but their only purpose is to serve as forklifts or as crowd filler in the stands.

* Dane Cook does an Owen Wilson impersonation as the main character, a crop duster who decides to compete against jet fighters and such to prove to be the fastest plane on earth. I hated everything about this character until he suddenly starts calling another pompous plane out on his BS. Then I only disliked him.

Starring the voices of Dane Cook, Stacy Keach, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Brad Garrett. Written by Jefrey M. Howard. Directed by Klay Hall. 92 minutes. Rated G.

My Lifelong Goal Achieved

I accomplished a lifelong goal Tuesday when I discovered the name of the song at the beginning of this video, the intro to DTV, Disney Channel's 1980s response to MTV, back when MTV played music. Disney Channel was big into responding to stuff in those days, for instance creating Mousercise as a response to Jazzercise.

Anyway, that intro song was always one of my favorites, and my adoration of the tune only increased when my beloved Phoenix Suns adopted it as their pre-tip-off jingle. Nothing gets me as pumped up as that song. Not "Eye of the Tiger," not "You're the Best Around," not "We Will Rock You."

The song was an instrumental, and had no words, so I would create my own:

Get ready

Get ready

So excited that I can't hide it, 

I'm coming into,

I'm sliding into,

The danger zone.

Didn't ever think that I'd find you 

And now that I have we are walking on air.

Didn't even think that I'd find you

And now we are walking on air

Yes the air

Way up there

In the air

Oh the air

Yes the air

Oh the air

Oh the air

Woo!

Ahem.

I needed this song. And to get the song I needed to know what it was called. The closest I could get to owning it was to dig up YouTube videos like that one and listen to snippets of it. I scanned the comments, hoping someone entranced under a similar spell would have already have done the work for me and have been willing to share the results.

No luck.

I embedded the video on Facebook, begging anyone to give it a listen and see if they could deduce the song's title.

Crickets.

Google, as powerful as it is, failed me in my decades-long search for salvation. No matter how I searched, no one seemed to know the title of the song.

And then, by some miracle, I found my answer through Shazam, a smartphone app that listens to bits of music and identifies the songs from which they came. I'm pretty sure I'd tried to Shazam the song before, but had no luck. I indulged a fleeting hope that maybe somehow, some way, Shazam had updated its database enough to include my Moby-Dick of instrumental magic.

The first time I used Shazam, it came up empty. But I would not take no for an answer. I gave it another try. And my perseverence was rewarded. The sweet result the app yielded was that the song was "RPM" by Network Music Ensemble, and was part of the "After School Rock" album.

I was afraid that Shazam was toying with me, but sure enough, a click of the sample listen button confirmed the answer to be the truth. I joyfully handed Amazon 99 cents in exchange for my childhood appreciation that had festered into a lifelong obsession.

Then I listened to the song about 20 billion times in a row. sometimes just appreciating the song, other times humming along, and occasionally belting out my made-up lyrics along with the music. I was content.

And then Caesar wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.

My Facebook Friending Policy

If you ask me to be Facebook friends and I add you, don't think you've accomplished anything. I am cool with accepting pretty much any person, place or thing as my "friend," because I am a shameless self-promoter who is happy to spam out links to anyone willing to be bombarded by them.

Bear in mind that although I will accept you as a friend, I will most likely not like or even read your posts. Odds are I'll hide you from my news feed because I will care little to nothing about what happens in your life. Such will be our friendship.

Although I do accept all friendships, I cheerfully destroy the relationships just as easily. Those who invite me to events and to play games usually end up not only defriended, but blocked entirely. Also, people who do things in real life to annoy me also get defriended and blocked. Because what's the good of social media if not to exact passive-aggressive revenge?

One last thing. If I can tell you are a spam porn girl, I will definitely not add you. Sorry to disappoint all of you.

Book Review: Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Starts off with silly whimsy but builds toward profound, relentlessly snarky truths about the human condition. This man loves him some horses. Fascinating Divine Comedy-style social criticism.



View all my reviews

Top 5 Zombie Stories That Have Not Yet Been Told

1. The Zom Bee -- In an attempt to win the Spelling Bee, a 10-year-old boy becomes a zombie who hungers for correct spelling rather than human brains in order to achieve the single-minded dedication it takes to become a champion.

2. ZomBaby -- An undead baby wreaks adorable havoc and hijinks as he gets the zombie apocalypse off to a gurgling start and manages to hit his clueless grandpa, played by Tim Allen, in the balls every 10 minutes.

3. Downton Zombie -- A struggling but proud Victorian-era family seeks to cut costs and keep up appearances by soliciting a staff of animated corpses to serve and passive-aggressively resent them.

4. Hannah and Her Dead, Rotting Sisters -- A ripe 105 years old and still intent on playing the romantic lead in his neurotically philosophical comedies, Woody Allen discovers that the only romantic foils age-appropriate for him are those who died long ago but have come back to life.

5. OK, so I give up. There have been so many damned zombie movies, TV series, comics and books that there are only four zombie stories remaining that have yet to be told, and I have listed them all already.

Top 5 Covers That Would Have Sold Even More Rolling Stones Than The Terrorist One

1. Hello Kitty. Little girls, Japanophiles and ironic hipsters would have all begged their mommies to pick up copies for them at the supermarket.

2. Your Mom. Remember back when Time Magazine named everybody on the planet its co-person of the year? Just like that, only with your mom, because everybody knows about your mom. And I mean everybody.

3. Kate Upton. It's worked for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue the last two years, so it's only a matter of time until every other magazine jumps on the trend. Scientists estimate that by 2015, all magazines will feature Kate Upton exclusively on their covers.

4. KABOOM! Just the word in bubble letters and jagged, neon bordering, 1960s Batman TV show style. That way Rolling Stone could have notified readers of its cover story, only with more class and style than a One Direction-style glamour shot of a mass killer.

5. A MAD fold-in. Because they're like two covers in one!

J.K. Rowling Ain't Nothin' But A Copycat

Watching the 1985 movie Young Sherlock Holmes, it's obvious how much J.K. Rowling swiped to create Harry Potter and the Hogwarts universe. Watson is a bespectacled doofus who looks like Harry Potter. She swapped his role for the lanky redhead, Sherlock Holmes. And she kept the girl in the movie who looks like Hermione as Hermione.

Want more? There's a punk kid with platinum blonde hair, and there's a guy named Dudley in the British boarding school Sherlock, Watson and the Hermione girl romp around solving mysteries in.

This explains why the Young Sherlock Holmes screenwriter, Chris Columbus, took out his vengeance on Rowling by ruining her books in movie form, with those two terrible adaptations he made. It's not, after all, that Columbus lost his drive after he made it big so he ended up turning into a tepid hack of a filmmaker by the point it came time to make the Potter films. He was just pissed that Rowling stole all his ideas so he thought he'd serve revenge just the way the Klingons like it -- cold.