Black & White, Dawn, Photoshop, Self-Portrait, Vest, WPC - Submissions

RWPE #47 – Discover

I don’t know if it was the theme or if it was the holiday, but once again submissions were somewhat anemic. Here are the submissions for DISCOVER.


WEEK 47 - DISCOVER - CHRISTOPHER D. BENNETT
Christopher D. Bennett

IMAGE LOST
Dawn Krause

WEEK 47 - DISCOVER - MIKE VEST
Mike Vest

There are only 5 themes left before this little experiment starts over. I went down and kicked the Random Theme Generator and told it to give me a theme that would light the fires of creativity under more people. It just sat there. Then it spit out the following theme:

ACTIVE

On the surface that seems like a good solid theme that could be interpreted in a bazillion different ways. Hopefully this will get RWPE back on track.

Movies, Nader, Sara

Movie Review: Conviction & Unstoppable

So I fell really far behind in my movie reviews, so I’m going to crank out a bunch of these in short order and without much detail.

Movie – Conviction

Director: Tony Goldwyn (The Last Kiss, A Walk on the Moon)

Screenwriter: Pamela Gray (A Walk on the Moon)

Starring: Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby, Insomnia, Boys Don’t Cry), Sam Rockwell (Moon, The Green Mile, Matchstick Men) and Melissa Leo (The Fighter, 21 Grams, Frozen River)

Theater – The Fleur Cinema – Des Moines, Iowa

Companion – Sara Junck

Food – Mezzodi’s

Intellectual Honesty

I didn’t bring much to this movie. I enjoy Hilary Swank’s acting, but I don’t think that I’m partial to her in a way that impairs my judgment.

Baggage

None. Don’t have a strong dislike for anybody in this film.

Synopsis from IMDB

A working mother puts herself through law school in an effort to represent her brother, who has been wrongfully convicted of murder and has exhausted his chances to appeal his conviction through public defenders.

Review

This is a fascinating true story, but it doesn’t really come off as that interesting in the movie. A woman without even a high school diploma goes back to school in the hopes of eventually getting a law degree and then getting her brother out of prison for a crime he didn’t commit. And she does it!

There is nothing wrong with this movie and the performances are solid, but this is the type of white trash that overcomes incredible adversity character that Hilary Swank plays in her sleep. Sam Rockwell is solid as the brother. Melissa Leo is impressive as the cop that frames Sam Rockwell, but she has an even more impressive performance that I’ll get to in a later movie review.

What isn’t covered in the movie is what happens after the brother gets out of prison. A year after he won his freedom he fell of a wall and died. How tragic is that? What I think is also fascinating about this woman that spent years and years trying to get her brother out of prison is that after she gets him out, she stopped being a lawyer. She went back to being a bartender. That is a fascinating person.

If this thing interests you, check out this link:

The Innocence Project

Rating: 3.5/5 Caramels

Buy on DVD

Not likely, but I would definitely watch it again.

2010 Ranking

I don’t think this really has a ranking. I guess it would sit just out of the Top Ten Movies I’ve seen this year.

Bonus Information

Before the movie I developed a love for boursin cheese. Thank you Mezzodi’s and Sara!

Movie – Unstoppable

Director: Tony Scott (Man on Fire, Top Gun, Domino)

Writer: Mark Bomback (Race to Witch Mountain, Live Free or Die Hard)

Starring: Denzel Washington (American Gangster, Glory, Malcolm X, Training Day) and Chris Pine (Star Trek, Just My Luck)

Companion – Nader Parsaei

Food – Probably but can’t remember.

Intellectual Honesty

I love Denzel Washington. I’ll watch him in just about anything and makes almost everything better. I like train movies. If I were to ever make films, one would definitely involve a train wreck. A real train wreck. No CGI!

Baggage

I think Tony Scott is a merciless hack and one of the worst filmmakers in the world.

Synopsis from IMDB

With an unmanned, half-mile-long freight train barreling toward a city, a veteran engineer and a young conductor race against the clock to prevent a catastrophe.

Review

Unstoppable? Unbearable is more like it.

You want to make a Tony Scott movie, here is his style in a nutshell:

Zoom camera. Cut to: Camera panning in a circle. Repeat until audience is nauseous.

For the most part, the acting in this movie was okay, but the action sequences were dreadful and the “ideas” these people had for stopping the train were laugh-out-loud ridiculous.

Plus here is free advice for Tony Scott. Next time you are trying to make a train look like it is going faster than it really is, even if you speed up the film rate, it is still obvious how slow the train is moving when you include so many other moving points of reference in the shot.

This film isn’t really worth any more discussion.

Rating: 1.5/5.0 Caramels

Buy on DVD

Not even for a buck.

2010 Ranking

Probably the worst action movie I saw in 2010.

Bonus Information

Nothing to report.

Art, Black & White, Dawn, Vest, WPC - Submissions, Writing

RWPE #46 – Spiritual

The theme of SPIRITUAL didn’t ring the bell of many people this week. It reminds me of one of my favorite Daniel Tosh jokes.

“When people tell me, ‘I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual’, I tell them ‘I’m not honest but you’re interesting.'”

Here are the submissions for SPIRITUAL:


WEEK 46 - SPIRITUAL - DAWN KRAUSE
Dawn Krause

WEEK 46 - MIKE VEST - SPIRITUAL
Mike Vest

WEEK 46 - SPIRITUAL - CHRISTOPHER D. BENNETT
Christopher D. Bennett

Dawn’s Poetry Submission

Spiritual

I thought of love in its glory
How each of us has a story
I thought of awe and thought of grace
Survival of the human race

And so it came I thought real hard
Of birds and trees in the yard
Of what it was that gave us life
And gave us strength in our strife

I pondered on many things
Of promises and wedding rings
Of how it is we know He’s there
The change we sense in the air

I felt a warmth begin to spread
It filled my soul from toe to head
I yearned to stay within that light
And so I prayed and said good night

We are definitely in the homestretch now. Just a handful of themes for the RTG to spit out. The theme for this week has been spat:

DISCOVER

That is a good broad theme. Hopefully it will light a fire of creativity under several people and the submission pool will gain a good depth again next week.