BilmBlog500

August has been a very busy month for me with very little blogging, and on the late August night that I'm composing this to publish a day or two later I've ended up making a choice to stay at home and watch some tennis and do some blogging instead of going to see a movie or two (Frozen River, Traitor) that I do want to see and hope I'll see sometime but at the same time am not thinking I'll have mental issues if I don't get around to it. So a quick round-up of the other movies I did go to see during the month of August, along with the heroin double-bill that I saw on the 23rd. And when I say August was a busy month... I went three weeks between seeing a movie, from Tell No One on July 27 to the three movies I talk about below on August 17. That is a very very long time for me to go without seeing a movie, and I can promise you it's not at all by happy choice. Man on Wire, Seen Sunday August 17, 2008 at Clearview's First & 62nd St. Cinema, auditorium ...

Tropic Thunder. Seen Saturday Night August 23, 2008 at Clearview's Ziegfeld. 4 Slithy Toads. Transsiberan. Seen Saturday Night August 23, 2008 at the Paris Theatre. 1.5 Slithy Toads. These 2 films offer an important message about the international trafficking in heroin, and it is particularly apt that I saw them both on the same night. Tropic Thunder, the first of these films, is hilarious. I was laughing loud and hard for good chunks of the movie, I can't honestly remember when I've laughed as loud or as long or as heartily in a movie, and I am giving it my highest rating. You're probably read a lot about this movie in lots of other places, so I don't need to say too much about it synopsis wise, I don't think. Starts out with 3 wonderful fake film trailers. If you're interested in Satan's Alley, then you might want to read some real novels, the Vampire Victor books VAMPIRE VOW, VAMPIRE THRALL and VAMPIRE TRANSGRESSION by Michael Schiefelbein. B...

Seen Tuesday evening August 26, 2008, 7:30 PM at the Music Box Theatre. 1.5 slithy toads. This play won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Variety loved it The NY Times loved it with the current cast . And with the old cast . Why? How? Do they have a category for Best Dysfunctional Family Drama? I think the best thing about the play might be the set. It's a three-story house, living room and dining room and den at the front of the bottom floor, marked off by pieces of furniture, with a kitchen lurking in the background and the driveway and front door and porch hinted at off to one side. A flight of stairs leads up to a 2nd floor with a couple of bedrooms, and then another staircase to a third floor with another bedroom tucked under the gables. It's a very very big house, and a very very tall house. Most of the time a play might have a really big living room and not much else going on, and maybe there's a turntable or some other scenery trick to give other rooms, b...

The final day of qualifying at the US Open tennis was Friday, August 21, and my assistant Eddie joined me for the day. After getting a mint ice from the Lemon Ice King of Corona, I headed over to Court 8. I did do some quick research to try and select my first match of the day because there wasn't a player going from the day before on my wannasee list for that one, and Court 8 had an 18-year old Lithuanian, Ricardas Berankis, going against the German journeyman Bjorn Phau. Phau was of little interest to me, but maybe the 18-year old was a rising star worth catching. No such luck. The match was so boring that I suggested midway thru the first set that we move from the bleachers at one side of Court 8 to the lower seating on the other side between Court 8 and 9 so we could watch Gianluca Naso and Robert Smeets at the same time. Why was Phau/Berankis boring? Well, neither player hit with a lot of pace. Neither was playing very well, with more of the points being won by errors t...

After some surprisingly good matches in the latter half of the first round on Wednesday, the second round matches I saw on Thursday August 21 proved to be something of a disappointment. After getting "dessert ices" the days prior, I fortified myself with a tangerine ice from the Lemon Ice King of Corona. Since it is fruit-flavored, much more healthy I am sure. I decided to choose the 2nd round match of Tobias Kamke to start the day, and my German rooting interest beat Samuel Groth of Australia rather routinely, 6-4 7-5 on Court #10. Much as I like the endzone seating on Courts #10, 11 and 13, I am beginning to wish the seats weren't a darker blue. For a science experiment, sit in those seats on a sunny summer day. Put your hand on the lighter colored metal that is used for the flooring and everything else except for the top of the seats. Feel the extreme heat difference. No matter what the metal will bake a bit on a hot summer day, and maybe it won't make a dif...

So it's always nice to head off to watch the qualies with a 0% chance of precipitation and the high forecasted for not much more than 80 degrees! Wednesday was tennis weather, and some of the tennis was pretty darned good, too! Match #1, Court #13, Sergiy Stackhovsky (Ukraine) vs. Stefano Galvani (Italy) Why? Sergiy is the #1 seed in the qualies, and thus almost certain to be in the main draw. Even if he loses in the qualifying, at least 1 of the players above him will withdraw, and his ranking will entitle him to take that spot. In fact, since Lleyton Hewitt is out on account of shoulder surgery, it's a lock just about. Why Not? Galvani I do know, as being a journeyman who has been around for years and years, and not the kind of player I usually want to spend time with during the qualifying. & in fact it looks like the 22-year old from the Ukraine will win in a runaway after 2 games. He holds served and breaks Galvani in a heartbeat to go up 2 games to 0. But then Ga...

Yeah, it's been way too long between posts, and I probably shouldn't post now, but it is usually my custom to bore people with reports on the qualifying for the US Open tennis, and now that I have a blog I no longer need to limit the boredom to my immediate family. As a quick explanation for those who follow tennis more casually than I... at each tennis tournament most of the spots in the draw are given to people based on their standings in the tennis rankings. For the US Open, there are 128 spots in the singles tournament for both men and women, and 96 of those spots go to the top 96 people wishing to enter on whatever the cutoff day is, usuallly in mid-July a week or two after Wimbledon is over. 8 slots are given to what are called "wild cards," which are slots that the tournament directors can fill however they wish. Maybe a good local player, or some star whose ranking has fallen due to injury but who may stilll have crowd appeal. And then for the US open, 16 ...

It's another of those busy months, but let's try and comment on a variety of sundry matters. First, a movie: Tell No One: seen Sunday July 27 at Landmark's Bethesda Row Cinema, auditorium #6 3.5 slithy toads. This is such a really nifty movie that it's almost hard to believe it's French! (See my movie post from a few weeks ago.) Based on a Harlan Coben novel. Starts out with a man and his wife going for a romantic night at a country lake. She goes to get something, we hear noises, he goes to hunt the noises down, we seem him bashed with a shovel, black out, cut to eight years later. Two bodies have been found at the lake, which rouses old suspicions the police have that he may have murdered his wife. He starts to get e-mail which links to a surveillance camera picture that suggests his wife is still alive. He has to go on the run when police suspect him in the new murder of one of his wife's friends, and secrets slowly start to cascade out. It's bee...