We Have Been Blogging for 11 Years.........Wowza..........

We have a slew of new or semi-new material to put forth in recognition of our 11th anniversary of blogging which occurred yesterday as we posted out very first blog entry on Sept. 21, 2005. To our recollection, we simply posted a grocery list for the Food Lion in Mount Jackson, Va., some two hours south of Washington, DC. Or, maybe, it wasn't.

At any rate to mark the occasion, we are featuring images of Megyn Kelly (pict. top), the gorgeous Fox News anchor born in November of 1970 who is the subjective right-wing news network's hopes of maintaining viewers who include 79-year-old men at nursing homes in Amherst, Ohio, in the hopes that viewers from liberal places like Seattle will actually watch for nine minutes or so....

The middle image is of Erin Andrews (center) the sportscaster who now hosts "Dancing with the Stars" which competes with Fox News for those same nursing home residents in not only Ohio, but the whole entire midwest and the state of Florida. 

Finally, we hope to maintain an international audience with Turkish-German actress Sibel Kekilli, who first became known for her acting in the critically-acclaimed German film "Head-On" by Fatih Akin. Kekilli became a yuge star when she appeared in "Game of Thrones." 

Other actresses we considered posting images of include Parker Posey, who has been in a film with Kekilli, and is now starring in Woody Allen's "Cafe Society," which also features Kristen Stewart. Posey is actually two years older than Kelly, and to our knowledge, those nursing home men residents in Amherst, Ohio, probably don't know much about the indie films that made Posey a distinct actress.

Katie Holmes was also on her radar but it seems she is getting enough attention both from Instagram and tabloids suggesting she is in a secret burning romance with Jamie Foxx, who is supposedly a pal of her ex-husband Tom Cruise. And, we thought about posting an image of Nina Totenberg, the legal affairs reporter for NPR for our intellectual readers. But, yea, they probably are in the minority.

Here's to the next 11 years......!!!

http://www.foxnews.com/

http://www.npr.org/

http://www.amherstohio.org/

http://www.mountjackson.com/

The Last Ten Movies We've Seen (as of Wednesday)........Are We the Doom Generation?

Greetings to our blog readers in South Korea, Romania, and Egypt......

Happy Ramadan to our Muslims friends.....

Today, we look at the last ten films we've seen; this is an idea we originally got from "Film Comment" magazine, where Gavin Smith is the editor-in-chief.

The last ten films we've seen, include two that are in theatres ("Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl;" "The Overnight"). The earliest Hollywood film on the list is "The Brothers Karamazov" (bottom image) which is a 1958 film which marked the film debut of William Shatner (Captain Kirk on "Star Trek") and the earliest film overall is "Torment" from 1944, a Swedish film with a screeenplay from a young Ingmar Bergman.

The other two foreign-language films on the list are "Inside" (Yeralti) by Turkish director Zeki Demirkbuz and "Stray Dogs" (center image) from Taiwanese filmmaker Ming-ling Tsai.

It is not very often that we have a film from the 1990s, or the "Seinfeld" decade as we like to call it, on the list, but the very last film we saw on this survey is a strange spree killers road movie called "The Doom Generation" (top image: Courtney Love, we are using her symbolically as she is not in the film) which features a supporting character played by Parker Posey, who is one of the film's few highlights! (We agree with the late Roger Ebert who called it an awful film!).....

Here is the last ten:

1. "The Doom Generation." director: Gregg Araki. 1995.

2. Stray Dogs. Taiwan. dir: Ming-ling Tsai. 2013

3. The Dark Crystal. Jim Henson and Frank Oz. 1982.

4. Next Stop, Grenwich Village. Paul Mazursky. 1976.

5. Death Hunt. Peter R. Hunt. 1981 w/ Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin

6. The Brothers Karamazov. Richard Brooks. 1958.

7. The Overnight. Patrick Brice. 2015 w/Jason Schwatzman

8. Torment. Sweden. Alf Sjoberg. 1944

9. Me, Earl and the Dying Girl. Alfonso Gomez-Rejan. 2015

10. Inside. Turkey. Zeki Demirkubuz. 2012

http://www.filmcomment.com

http://www.tcm.com

Last Ten Films We've Seen: Trying to Catch up on Netflix....

What do Captain America, indie film queen Parker Posey (pict. center) and a silly Dudley Moore/Kirk Cameron movie from 1987 have in common? They all relate in one form or another to the last ten films we've seen.

"Like Father, Like Son," is also the English-language title of a Japanese art film which is more like Dustin Hoffman's "Kramer vs. Kramer" in nature as it deals with a family who learns that their son was switched at birth with another boy. Adding to the tensions is the fact that the families are in two vastly different economic classes.

We got this idea from "Film Comment" magazine.

Here are the last ten:

1. Like Father, Like Son. 2014. Japan. director: Hirokazu Koreeda

2. Goodbye to Language. 2014. France. dir: Jean-Luc Godard

3. The Babdook. 2014. Australia (in English). dir: Jennifer Kent

4. Wild Tales. 2014. Argentina. dir: Damian Szifron

5. Lovers and Other Strangers. 1970. dir: Cy Howard w/Diane Keaton

6. Price Check. 2012. dir: Michael Walker w/Parker Posey

7. Inside Out. 2011. dir: Artie Mandelberg w/Posey

8. Nothing Lasts Forever. 1984. dir: Tom Schiller w/Bill Murray

9. Avengers: Age of Ultron. 2015. dir: Joss Whedon

10. Far from the Madding Crowd. 2015. dir: Thomas Vinterberg w/Carey Mulligan

Last Ten Movies We'Ve Seen: Catching Up with 2014

Greetings to our faithful blog readers in Afghanistan (well, maybe), The Bahamas and Poland.

Here are the last ten films we've seen (well, actually as of last week). We are still trying to catch up on the best films of 2014, some of which are listed in the IMDB as 2013 films.....yes, we are confused as well!

1) Night Moves (top image, film is about eco-terrorism.) 2013. Dir: Kelly Reichhardt

2) Palo Alto (center image, Palo Alto is where Stanford U is located). 2013. Gia Coppola.

3) Inherent Vice. 2014. Paul Thomas Anderson.

4) Post Mortem. Chile. 2010. Pablo Lorrain

5) Tabu. Portugal. 2012. Miguel Gomes

6) Drug War. Hong Kong. Johnnie To.

7) And, Now a Word from Our Sponsor. (bottom image, Ipana, originally an American toothpaste now only found in Turkey!)* 2013. Zack Bernbaum. (w/Parker Posey)

8) Museum Hours. 2012. Austria. Jem Cohen.

9) Lfe of Pi. 2012. Ang Lee.

10) Under the Skin. 2013. Jonathan Glazer (w/ Scarlett Johansson)

#- We learned that from Bill Griffith's comic strip "Zippy the Pinhead"


http://www.imdb.com

http://www.netflix.com

Quotes from Off the Beat and Path (3 of 6): Parker Posey

Today for our second quote off the beat and path, we go to independent movie queen Parker Posey, who has also been in Hollywood films like "Josie and the Pussycats" and "You've Got Mail," a romcom with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, but we lover her more for "Best in Show," "Personal Velocity" and "The House of Yes."

Here is the quote from Posey who will turn 46 in November:

"I'm the character actor in Hollywood movies, the girl who has to be so annoying so the guy can go to the other girl."

Casualties of Modern Technology- The VHS Tape (Entry 2 of 12)

Sorry for the six day layover at the airport in Atlanta (well, it would take too long to explain why I was really gone for this long), but let's get back to bizness (deliberately spelled wrong for all you English teachers out there; in-joke) here with an entry dedicated to the VHS cassette tape or videotape, which have all but vanished from the face of the earth.

My friend Jason Garnett actually held a VHS Night at the Shadowbox Microcinema in Roanoke, Va., where the film "Rad" (1986) with former Olympic gymnast Bart Conner- of all people- was screened. The film actually revolves around the world of BMX racing.

"Rad" was one of three feature films in the mid-80s to star men's gymnastics stars. The other two included "Gymkata" (1985) with Kurt Thomas and "American Anthem"
(1986) with Mitch Gaylord, a film that also featured a very gorgeous Janet Jones who later married hockey icon Wayne Gretzky.

Amazingly enough, no one in Hollywood thought of making such a film starring women's gymnastics darling Mary Lou Retton, but perhaps that was a good thing.

The videotape was first sampled in 1951 by Bing Crosby Productions, according to Wikipedia. Videotapes became widely available in the 1970s. Since VCRs were very expensive until the 1980s, there was little consumer demand for them. That all changed very quickly and cult films, like the South African wonder-hit "The Gods Must be Crazy" (1984), were more widely seen than the films were during their theatrical runs.

But, by the 1990s, dvds came and well the proverbial credits started to roll for the VHS tape.

SIDEBAR: We want to wish Parker Posey a happy 43rd birthday. No, we do not know her personally.

Things We Learned on Twitter This PM-Parker Posey is on Twitter!

I must profess that it was a bit of a slow news day on Twitter though I did officially find out that right-wing nut Tea Party candidate Rand Paul won the Kentucky Republican gubernatorial primary.

We also learned that a fifth-grader brought a gun to his school at Sumner Elementary in Greensboro, NC, near where I live. Fortunately, it wasn't loaded.

But, when I found out that the Grub Steak Restaurant in Park City, Utah, is offering complimentary Angus meat loaf sliders (yes, I have no idea what those are either!) with a soup and salad combo, I immediately thought of indie film queen Park Posey.

Posey, pictured here, who is literally just slightly older than me (she's 41; I'm 40), is known for coming to Park City quite frequently to promote her latest indie film at the Sundance Film Festival. So, out of curiosity, I checked and she is (well, sort of on Twitter).

There is apparently a web site called parkerposey.org which reports on her latest ventures. And, apparently Posey, who I have had a crush on since at least 1995, will be making a guest appearance on the new HBO series "Bored to Death." That's almost enough to make me call Time Warner and ask for HBO!

We also learned on Twitter than Sen. John McCain is having lunch with President Ivan Calderon of Mexico. No doubt, they will talk about Arizona's new highly controversial anti-immigration bill. But, somehow, we don't expect they will be traveling to Park City for lunch at Grub Steak. Maybe, they will just head out to an Ethiopian place in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC.

THE WHOOPS DEPARTMENT- We learned through NPR that the president of Mexico is Felipe Calderon, not Ivan Calderon--there are two guys with that name. One is a boxer. The other is a baseball player.