The Long Road Out

You'll probably generally agree with my list, if you also agree that American Sniper  doesn't have a single original thought or line, and is a mediocre hackneyed love story...and a mediocre hackneyed war movie. My rankings (in descending order) of David Foster's Best Films of 2014 are: Force Majeure --fun acting around an important and critical topic that allowed for hours and hours of thoughtful conversations Mommy --Canadian entry to the Oscars, the best three-lead acting of any film of the year, taking Maggie Gyllenhaal one step further--or one kilometer further Ida --now THIS is a war film--two women jointly rediscover their past, and make morally defensible decisions once they understand  Boyhood-- talk about getting lucky on a long term project...could you select a better group to watch grow up together? Calvary --Dostoyevsky and Camus dealt with inescapable guilt when you're on the fringes of society.   This film, and Brendan Gleeson, looks straight i...

I've now got about 10 flights on United since their new 2020 Mileage Plus program. Eight of those have been purchased business class tickets. Here's the shock--under the new scoring system, I'm less than a tenth of the way toward 1K status (I've been 1K or Platinum for the last eight years. I'm might not make gold this year). There are about a million posts complaining about the new system which rewards nothing except dollars spent. Google to experience the anger. You'll also see a lot of "winners vs losers" analyses which try to game whether you should add a connection to a Singapore flight on a partner airline. United has now added an hour to your flight booking time...for each leg. For a 1K traveler, that's 54 hours of your life, every year, sucked away from you. Please be careful.  Mileage Plus may cost you a spouse or a friend or the ability to have conversations with other humans while you click away on your calculator. Here's the o...

As Super Bowl games go, the Chief's victory over the 49ers was fun to watch...Kelce when it mattered, and precise defensive play on both sides. So, when the dust from the artificial turf settled in the depths of our lungs, the result was exactly the same. We still have Fox promoting a vision of the United States as a glistening beacon. This vision is only possible if you put a deep screen on the lens of all the cameras, and the resulting soft light effect worked its magic for every second other than the 8 minutes of Mr Small Penis.  No screens can make Trump appear any different than he is. That must be what the advertisers mean when they talk about American integrity, since we left the remains of our integrity on the roadside miles ago, along with the used condoms. And, we still have all the women who count out of their clothes offering full crotch shots, while the men are fat, careless, wildly unattractive, and unable to finish sentences.  Sports which require 8 minute...