Not too many people recognize the band name Dishwalla, but they were at one point in the 90s pretty popular. One of their songs, Counting Blue Cars, was actually the most requested song of I believe 1996. I’m listening to their latest album from 2003, called Opaline, and I’m working on Angels or Devils, Every Little Thing, and Somewhere in the Middle. I think Somewhere in the Middle is just as good as Counting Blue Cars.
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So my blood test came out about a week ago. Here are the results.
Blood count (Good)
Urinalysis – Good
Cholestral – Good (114)
Bilirubin (liver function, pancreas)
.2-1.3 is healthy, I’m at 1.5
Means I need to lower fat intake
Electrolites within normal
Blood Urea Nitrogen 5-25 healthy, I’m at 27. This measures your kidney functions.
Use of motrine, celebrex, and naproxen in the past year could have led to the increase of Urea Nitrogen in my blood. It should decrease in time as I am no longer taking medication.
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The other day Matt Lee and Sung and I went movie hopping. When’s the last time you ever did that? I haven’t since like Senior year in high school when Matt Mck and I used to do that every 3 or 4 weeks to watch all the new movies. SO, here is my review!
Collateral (Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx) 3.5 out of 4 stars
Great movie. The hitman Vincent (Cruise) is flown to LA and is met by Jason Statham (Transporter, Snatch, Italian Job) who gives him a briefcase filled with 5 names that he has to kill, with or without knowing the reason why. Jaime Foxx becomes his unfortunate killing spree driver. Without ruining the movie, the plot makes sense, the emotions make sense, and I was especially surprised and glad that they decided to kill off one of the good guys, which goes against a lot of the movies these days (The Professional of course being the most radical and also the one that aroused most emotions, possibly one of the best movies that effectively illustrated that not all happy endings have happy endings). The driver and the hitman engage in a philosophical debate over right and wrong, of life and death, and all along the ride you find yourself emersed into Cruise’s world and begin to understand his style of life. He is, after all, a human being, and capable of reason and he has completely persuaded himself of his own lifestyle. I saw some parallelism from Training Day, but only because I thought that Jaime Foxx’s character was involved in an evil that was beyond him, and only in the end does he realize that he could make a difference, that there is a choice for him, and he sees a glimpse of hope and takes it. But by then many people had already died. Instead of Training Day where it lasts all day, this lasted all night, and the movie fades into sunrise. But there were some parts when I thought the plot was a bit forced. If you look at the summary of the movie in general, it’s about a hitman on a mission to kill with involuntary assistance from the taxi driver. And you see a lot of scenes in the taxi, which causes some interesting conversations but it does shy away from the general plot and the mood of the movie.
The Village (directed by M. Night Shyamalan) 2 out of 4 stars
One of the more plot twisting movies in recent memory, this latest effort from Shyamalan does fall a bit short. Where his other three movies (Sixth Sense (great movie), Unbreakable (not so great), and Signs (a bit of a rebound) concentrated on a science fictional plot, the director seems so poised, almost too intent, and fixated on making the audience believe he is going in the same direction but in the end comes up empty handed. This is no Big Bang like “I see dead people” then cut to Bruce Willis type, this is more like “I thought I saw dead people (cut to Bruce Willis),” then to “I think I see dead people (cut to Bruce Willis),” to “I know I am seeing dead people (cut to Bruce Willis),” to “ah, forget about it, I do see dead people (cut to Bruce Willis).” By the end of this sequence, you would have figured Bruce Willis is the dead guy he’s referring to. Meaning, there are few twists in the movie rather than just one big one, but it’s so spaced out and comes so expectantly that it doesn’t create the big bang and the “Oh, that’s what they were referring to 20 minutes into the movie.” Joaquin Phoenix of course is a great addition to the movie, and I have no reason to doubt that Shyamalan wrote this movie and the character with Phoenix in mind. There is no other Hollywood actor that could have carried this particular character as well as Phoenix. Bryce Dallas Howard, a newcomer, is actually the daughter of director Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, the Alamo), and is not the greatest actress but does her job sufficiently in a believable fashion. There is some romantic plot to this thriller. Of course Phoenix and Howard are engaged in an almost forbidden love, but at one point when Howard is in danger Phoenix comes by, grabs her hand in slow motion and delivers her to safety. Then this same sequence plays again 10 minutes later in the movie, in a house filled with people, of all places, when there is no apparent danger. This was certainly the low point of the movie when I thought to myself, was that really necessary? It degraded the effect of the first, which I thought was well executed. This is a romantic seldom funny thriller, although if you are expecting another Sixth Sense, perhaps you should just stick to your other five instead.
The Manchurian Candidate (Denzel Washington, Merryl Streep ) 3 out of 4 stars
I enjoyed this movie. I really did. Of course it’s got a lot to do with the military background, but I’m glad I could be biased. At one point Denzel Washington says to Liev Schreiber (Scream 1-3, Sum of All Fears), “There’s something deeper within us that they cannot get to, no matter how hard they try.” This was the high point of the movie for me. But I didn’t like the fact that I knew the plot and who the bad guy was 45 minutes into the movie. Denzel Washington is effective, but not as he was in Training Day or Courage under Fire, in which he plays a similar yet different role. I would have to say Courage was a better movie. In fact, I cannot vision Washington as a Ranger, or a Special Forces operator. If he was acting as the operator in Kuwait, then why were there corporals in his rank? Why were they using traditional weapons like everyone else, and why were they patrolling Kuwait when that’s what regular infantrymen would have done? Of course the movie can’t answer these questions so they do not probe into his military background. I haven’t seen the original, but this movie was a good political drama movie, especially in this election year.
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There you have it. I can say more, but it’s already a long post. I really enjoy movies (although not as big as Matt McKinney is, but probably a bigger movie buff than most people), and really like to analyze it after having seen a lot of them. For example, I like Collateral but I especially loved the big ending that doesn’t come out as a big ending. It’s big 1)because Cruise does at the end exactly what he said happened to another guy (hint: why he hates LA and the story he told Foxx about it, 2) because Cruise ends up at LAX (the Metro station is the LAX metro, I know because I’ve taken it there and back several times) at the time he had designated earlier, and 3)because Foxx walks AWAY from the sirens, whereas the beginning-of-the-movie-Foxx would have probably stayed. Little things like that put together in the last minute of the movie just made me go, ooh, that was a nice touch.