Everybody rock and roll the place

So, while I'm waiting for it to get marginally warmer outside so I can run a few errands, I figured I'd ramble a little bit here.

SuperWife and I saw CHANGELING on Sunday. I wasn't expecting much because I never expect much from J. Michael Straczynski (subtle he ain't) and THE BLACK DAHLIA had already pretty much poisoned the whole "period piece about Los Angeles police corruption in the early 20th Century" dealio for me... although it's worth noting that CHANGELING is set in 1928, BLACK DAHLIA in 1947, and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, the other film these two most remind me of, is set in 1951... so, really, I shouldn't have prejudged CHANGELING by either of the other two. That was historically myopic of me.

(For the record, while BLACK DAHLIA was yet another cumbersome, misshapen, lumbering celluloid crapapalooza of the sort that DePalma has uniformly burn-scarred his C.V. with since, oh, CASUALTIES OF WAR, maybe, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL remains a wonderful film and one of my favorites, although the final ten minutes or so are gratuitous, unnecessary, and stupid, and when I watch L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, I always stop the film at the moment where Ed Ecksley, having just shot the corrupt police chief Dudley in the back, 'holds up his badge to show he's a cop'. At that point, the film is over; every character has gotten their just desserts, every characterization arc is wrapped up, every storyline is fully played out. The ten minutes after that are not only unnecessary, but by tacking on a completely gratuitous and utterly unacceptable happy ending for the brutal and murderous Bud White and his hooker with a heart of gold, the entire movie ends up being dumbed down to a ludicrous extent. But up to that point, it's a brilliant film.)

Anyway, CHANGELING was much, much better than I expected it to be, and SuperWife and I had a good time watching it.

In other news, Mr. X was here for multiple visits yesterday, which is great. In addition, someone using the same webhost as him (Embarq) out of Carlisle, PA spent something like 24 hours over the course of two visits to this site yesterday, and somebody else used Qwest out of Colorado Springs to access this site 3 times for a total of just under 16 hours yesterday. Happy to see all of you in my statcounter, folks; I'd be even happier to see some of you in my comment threads.

Aside from them, there was someone else from New York who was here for about six seconds, and yet another person showed up here from Washington D.C. for just over a minute. Every other hit I got yesterday was for 0 seconds, which, to me, shouldn't count as a hit at all, but what do I know.

And my birthday is this coming Friday, so, you know, all you people should be out shopping for really expensive presents right now, shouldn't you?