What did you watch today? v 14.0

Tell everyone what you watched, what you thought, and what's up next.

The first post in this thread is # 3366

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Permalink Reply by Debra on September 14, 2008 at 4:52am: It's 7:30 AM so I'll put what I watched yesterday:

"Gypsy" (the Bette Midler version) was just okay. I like the Rosalind Russell version more but I was curious to see this one so I rented it.

Later I was channel surfing and came upon a movie called "Stuck on You". It was a ridiculous yet funny comedy starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins attached at the hip. Silly yet entertaining. It's a riot when they get into a fist fight with each other. I'd never heard of it before & I thought I knew all of Damon's work. It also had Meryl Streep, Cher, Eva Mendez & other cameo appearances.

Permalink Reply by wowwee123 on September 14, 2008 at 5:13am: Re: Stuck on you - I saw the trailer. Looks interesting, but doesn't look real. Or am I wrong?

Permalink Reply by Debra on September 14, 2008 at 5:17am: It's not real. It's an absurd comedy. I thought it was hilarious but it's probably not for everyone.

Permalink Reply by macroman on September 14, 2008 at 7:19am: (1) Jerry Lee Lewis: Last Man Standing Live(2006)=The Killer is still in fine form at age 71 in this concert and biography lovingly produced by his daughter Phoebe Lewis. He sings his signature hits like "Whole Lotta Shaking Going On," "Great Balls of Fire" plus other hits either solo or in duet with other guest musicians. John Fogerty, Tom Jones, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Buddy Guy are some of the other musicians to appear on stage.
A good, entertaining and fun music DVD. If you like Jerry Lee Lewis, you will probably enjoy this. 4 stars. 2 hours long.

(2) Visible Vote '08=taped about one year ago, this was the first Presidential forum focusing on gay and lesbian issues. All the candidates at the time were invited--6 Democratic candidates attended and none of the Republicans.
This was a forum not a debate. Each of the candidates were brought on stage one by one and were asked questions by a panel of three members, one of whom was singer Melissa Etheridge, who asked some of the best and most pointed questions. The good thing about a forum is that each candidate received more or less equal time, which is not true of most debates.
This DVD was good but not great. 31/2 stars. It is interesting to note that even in the gay and lesbian community, most chose to support not the two candidates who were most in line with their views, but candidates who were only halfway there because they felt they were the most "electable."
This DVD is 2 hours and 18 minutes, but the post-forum wrap up is poor and should be skipped(about 25-30 minutes). Bill Richardson had the worst performance, by most accounts, and this forum probably ended any chances he had.

Next up is Spike Lee's Love and Basketball. Coming next week are In July, a German romantic comedy, and The Band's Visit, and Israeli-Egyptian comedy-drama.

Permalink Reply by Aces on September 14, 2008 at 12:33pm: Clean, Shaven - 4 stars - Good one for the mental illness list. Also has a director commentary.
Felon - 4 stars - Good citizen makes a mistake and ends up in prison. Interesting bonus feature about the filming.
Pusher - 5 stars - Great! Drug deal gone wrong - pusher owes a lot to his supplier and tries to get the money. I liked all the characters, the story and the way this is filmed. I watched it on cable but it is available on Watch Instantly along with Pusher 2 and Pusher 3. FYI - A review on Pusher says there are no subtitles but I just tried it and it has em.

Permalink Reply by YnEoS on September 14, 2008 at 2:59pm: Finally got around to the Lone Wolf and Cub series along with the Hanzo The Razor series. Why the fuck didn't I watch these earlier?

Permalink Reply by runnr1 on September 14, 2008 at 7:30pm: tonight it was funny games (2008). clever and suspenseful.

last night it was jonestown: the life and death of people's temple. i had heard about this tragedy, but didn't know the details so i got this documentary. jones' voice on the tapes was chilling. makes me glad i don't use the 'drink the kool-aid' phrase (so popular on political debate boards nowadays).

Permalink Reply by Sevorin on September 15, 2008 at 10:08pm: To the guy on the street it looked and felt and tasted like double murder. But the jurors weren't just a pack of gay-hating jackoffs. I wasn't in that courtroom and you probably weren't either, so neither of us has a handle on all the evidence those jurors saw. Dan White killed two fine men, and in San Francisco's old time rough-house days its citizens wouldn't have waited for the courts to handle his case. They'd've stretched him up on the nearest lamp-post. After the verdict the mob in the street would've loved to have tried. But I think that verdict was sound. He went to prison, did his time -- he made sure he did his time first -- and only then did he kill himself. He was no cretin who got away with murder, despite what the crowds said. He was a pathetic religious boy who fell apart. The whole thing was a catastrophe for everybody -- for Moscone, Milk, White, their families and friends and the entire city. If Gus van Sant sees it it only as a story of injustice, he'll reduce tragedy to politics, which would be a shame and an insult to the memory of Milk and Moscone. (Incidentally, the Jonestown documentary is dynamite.)

Permalink Reply by Sevorin on September 16, 2008 at 5:25pm: Falzon waited some thirteen years after this "confession" -- long after Dan White was as dead as any of the other principals involved -- before he disclosed this private interview.

The information that issued from this "report" is exactly the kind of material that the police would have obtained right after the killings themselves, when Dan White made no effort to conceal what he had done. One of the "significant" pieces of evidence that people brought up at the time was the extra bullets that White carried in his pocket. Does it make sense that he entered the building with the intent to murder not only Moscone and Milk but other persons as well, yet kept the "speed loaders" "hidden" where he could not have retrieved them for immediate use? When I've used speed loaders in a revolver, the bullets are already seated in them. That's why it's referred to as a speed loader.

So I assume that, if he had speed loaders, they were within ready reach and the police got hold of them when they found the extra bullets in his pocket. So that aspect of Falzon's report is no great revelation.

It's not my place to denounce Falzon as dishonest or unreliable. Nor do I doubt the genuineness of your faith in what he says. But I ask you to step back from your obviously powerful feelings about the matter and consider this additional possibility:

White supposedly made this "confession" about a year before he committed suicide. Cretins do not have the emotional ability to ponder questions of guilt, much less admit to it. On the other hand, a "pathetic religious boy", having spent time in prison for such horrible acts, who was already on a steady road toward killing himself, might consider himself "guilty" and "confess" to first-degree murder because that is the only way he could resolve those events in his own crippled mind. I'm sure that before he "took the gas pipe, " so to speak, he he was blaming himself for many other things as well, whether he was genuinely guilty of them or not.

That is how these events appear to me, even assuming Falzon's report is true (which I do not).

Of course, you can have it your own way. A cretin planned to murder several city magistrates by shooting them in public, but only knocked off two of them before he was apprehended. He concocted a lunatic defense about consuming too much processed sugar, which reduced his capacity to formulate the necessary specific intent required for first degree murder. The cretin then persuaded a dozen San Franciscans to believe this nonsense, which got him a much reduced sentence. Once he was out on the street he boasted of it to a homicide inspector, just to let the world know how clever he was. Then he committed the final, utterly brilliant, act of killing himself by asphyxiation. My God, what genius!

If he'd been found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, he'd have spent more time on death row, waiting through endless appeals and petitions for commutation, than he spent after he completed his prison time and chose to execute himself in his own makeshift version of the gas chamber.

So ask yourself honestly, what do you hope to gain by denouncing a man who clearly passed a quicker, and heavier, judgment on himself than society could have done?

If Gus van Sant treats Dan White as the "cretin" you claim him to have been, if he is depicted in a way to rile up the hostility of those who rioted in the streets after the verdict, it will be a shame on the memory of Milk and Moscone, and it will degrade the meaning of their lives.

After all these years your anger and outrage still burn. But you are unquestionably an intelligent person. Call White a cretin, if it provides a balm to your bitterness. But you know as well as I do that, whatever else he was, White was indeed a pathetic religious boy.

Permalink Reply by Sevorin on September 16, 2008 at 9:37pm: Exceeding the boundaries of the thread it certainly does. For this I apologize to others.

But I wasn't the one who first chose this thread to voice my opinions about the Milk-Moscone killings, was I?

And weren't you the one who answered my remarks with a still controversial "report"?

I just replied to what I read. Like you say, toodles, dude.

Permalink Reply by Anita_Blake on September 15, 2008 at 4:27am: I will agree that the Jonestown documentary was great. If you want even a more in depth look go ahead and read People's Temple People's Tomb, it is unreal.