Best Podcast Ep of 2016 – Doug Loves Movies January 4, 2016

Maybe it is a little early to declare the top episode of the year 4 days in, but I haven’t laughed so hard for a solid 90 minutes in I don’t know how long. 

DLM
Episode description:

Live from the NerdMelt Showroom in Los Angeles, Doug welcomes Andree Vermuelen, Patton Oswalt, Bert Kreischer and Geoff Tate to the show.

The abuse that Bert takes is just the start as the jokes come rapid fire from all 4 guests. 

Awesome start to the year.  

Halloween Movie List

In 2015 I embarked on a short term movie expedition.  As a build up to Halloween I attempted to watch as many horror or Halloween themed movies between Canadian Thanksgiving and Canadian Halloween.  Here is my list, roughly in the order watched.  19 movies in 19 days, only 2 that I had seen before. (everything links to IMDB, so I hope they don’t break it).

Sinister

• Always nice to see Ethan Hawke in a movie and he turns in a great performance.  Story unfolds nicely, ratcheting up to some very tense and scary moments.  Not sure I 100% loved the ending, but it was interesting and unpredictable enough overall.  Worth the watch.

May

• An odd little movie.  Not sure I would exactly categorize it as horror, though it does go there.  Worth the watch.

The Monster Squad

• Loved this when I was a kid.  Wouldn’t say it exactly held up, but it was nostalgically fun.  Watching it with my 9-year-old I cringed at the typical 80’s language – it was fun back then to have kids talk like homophobic truck drivers.  Worth the watch.

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane

• I’m not big on movies where I just hate everybody.  Hard to care about them dying.  ATBLML is a bit uncomfortable as a rallying cry to strike out at your bullies in this day and age of public shootings.  Not highly recommended.

Detention

• This one caught me off guard.  Frenetic, chaotic and totally unique.  This movie moves in such weird ways the horror theme barely registers.  Loved it!

Haunter

• I liked the flip-floppy ghost story premise, but in the end it was not all that unique.  I think they spent too much time explaining the premise.  Abigail Breslin gives a great performance.

Beetlejuice

• What can I say that hasn’t already been said three times.  A classic.  The story is a little choppy at times, like why does he suddenly only care so much about getting married (I mean, other than the fact that it’s Winona Ryder).  Never the less, I love it.

Creep

• Another non-traditional horror-ish movie.  The events are truly creepy and scary.  Mark Duplass is great as always.  Totally worth the watch.

The Conjuring

• I didn’t think a haunted house movie could scare me this much.  I jumped and cringed and felt my heart thump throughout.  I think that now I’m a parent movie where kids are in peril hit me so much harder.  Great performances, too.  Worth the watch.

The Midnight Meat Train

• Weird.  Mostly in a good way.  Vinnie Jones and Bradley Cooper are great.  I definitely didn’t predict where this was going.  Worth the watch.

In Fear

• So stressful.  I was not always on board with the choices the characters made, but you can totally put yourself in their situation and accept irrational thought processes.  Worth the watch.

Corpse Bride

• Our only family Halloween movie this year.  I love The Nightmare Before Christmas and had not watched this before.  I liked it, but didn’t love it.  Good for a family with younger kids.

The Final Girls

• The only one I paid for (all the others streamed or disc’d) and totally worth it.  Great horror comedy with heart.  Amazing performances.

We Are What We Are

• I kept circling around this one and finally landed on it mainly because I hadn’t watched any cannibalism yet.  It was decent.  You want these girls to rise above and cringe at what they endure.

Silent House

• Elizabeth Olsen is great, but there is something that doesn’t quite feel right from early on in this movie.  Some great, tense moments, but I felt like I saw this one coming from way across that field she should have kept running across.

Bad Milo!

• Funny, weird and unpredictable.  Much better than I expected.  Ken Marino delivers.  Worth the watch.

The Den

• Creepy sort of modern day cyber-slasher movie. I liked it.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

• I love the original, have never been impressed with the sequels.  I only chose this one for Paul Rudd and enjoyed his creepy loser character.  This one tries to be witty and self-aware, but does not achieve it in the way that Scream would knock it out of the park the next year.

Oculus

• Great performances, including the kids.  I liked the idea of purposely going to battle against the known evil, but the way it unraveled didn’t really pull me in.

Back

I have built and ignored many sites while this one layer around. Nothing I did was worth the self hosting costs. So back to where I started. My dumping ground for thoughts and crap. 

I just wanted to create a bookmark for the new feed. Everything before this is old… but still me. 

  
This is a plan for putting shelves up in my garage. I’m a pro!

Album Obsessions: Fear of a Black Planet

If He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper was the gateway drug, Fear of a Black Planet was my graduation to the hard stuff.  The combination of Chuck D’s intensity and Flavor Flav’s insanity really appealed to me and I still maintain that this is the best rap album ever produced.  I bought the cassette tape while on vacation in Kingston, Ontario (which has no relevance to the piece but helps me meet my minimum word count quota) and I’m sure I have listened to the tape front to back hundreds of times.

In spite of the challenges brought on by the major paradigm shift, the music industry is obviously bored

A few weeks ago my father asked me whether or not downloading things via Bit Torrent was illegal.  I told him yes, but then launched into my standpoint on the “grey area” of the law.  In short:

• Music wise, it is essentially akin to my father’s extensive cassette tape collection when I was  a kid, all copies of other people’s vinyl (this sentence just lost any readers born after 1987).
• I personally found I purchased more music as a result of bit torrent (I do not use it any more) as it allowed me to find more new bands and to not have to take a chance at wasting money on something I don’t like.
• Downloading TV shows is akin to PRVing (or oldschool VCRing)them and then skipping the commercials.
• You exceed the speed limit even though you know it is illegal.
• And so on…

There are a lot of ways to try and justify such actions, but the answer to the question is still “yes, it is in most cases against copyright law and therefore illegal”.

Movie Review: The Losers Eek Out A Win

The Losers delivered exactly what I was expecting.  A fun action movie that was relatively faithful to the comic series.  I guess I could say that I was a little disappointed that it did not have the impact of the comic book, but that disappointment came when the movie was released and I could tell from the reviews that it was the case, not from watching it this weekend.  Did that just make any sense?

This image basically sums up the movie.  Flashy comic book style coolness.  I like that aspect of the movie.  The comic bookiness was actually more subtle in the movie than this poster suggests.  It felt like it might have been toned down to try to not alienate audiences, but I like the way they brought the original comic book artwork style into the flow of the film through various transitions.

Game Player Guy’s Corner – Magic: The Gathering

I cannot call myself a gamer because I am not very good.  At any video game.  It may be inherent skill or dedication to master any particular game, but either way I just play, I enjoy and I move on.  So anything I write about video games is from the perspective of a casual player.

I play games on my PS3 and iPhone 4.  And Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, but I don’t think that counts.

Movies I Am Excited To Watch in 2011

In the backwards world that I live in 2011 is my chance to watch all of the movies in 2010 that I was (and still am) excited about.  I typically only go to the movies twice a year and save those viewings for the big blockbusters I am excited about.  In 2010 I only got to see Iron Man 2.  Well, I also saw Tangled with my daughter, which was a great movie, but does not count as it was not on MY list.

Scouring the boxing week sales I was able to find my top 4 “2010 want to watch” movies on Blu-ray for a great deal.  Now I just have to find times when my wife and daughters are otherwise occupied so I can actually watch them.  They are:

I wish I could have stuck with Smallville (a.k.a. I wish it didn’t turn to such suck)

This older promo picture is pretty cool, like most promo pictures for Smallville, but it suffers from the same affliction as the show: all flash no substance.

The latest cool promo picture is at the end of the post, but first let us look at exactly what Smallville is (and try to figure out how it has lasted 10 seasons).

2010 Blog Winners – Kevin Smith, Superchunk, Jimmy Pardo, Beastie Boys and Rizzo the Rat

Thanks to WordPress.com for providing the following summary.  It was a fun first year (well, half year) for One Good Minute.  I still do not understand the Internet’s obsession with Rizzo the Rat.  Here’s to more great stuff in 2011.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 7,300 times in 2010. That’s about 18 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 202 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 61 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 12mb. That’s about a picture per week.

The busiest day of the year was November 2nd with 1,226 views. The most popular post that day was Kevin Smith’s “Red State” Poster is very Non-Kevin Smith … in a good way (Updated).

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, mergerecords.com, videogum.com, stumbleupon.com, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for rizzo the rat, rizzo, beastie boys short film, jon wurster, and rizzo rat.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Kevin Smith’s “Red State” Poster is very Non-Kevin Smith … in a good way (Updated) November 2010
2 comments

2

My Fake Jimmy Pardo T-Shirt Design November 2010
2 comments

3

Superchunk Singles – The Singles’ Singles Album (now with less singles!) August 2010
3 comments

4

Superchunk Album History – Part 2 [1993-1996] September 2010
2 comments

5

Beastie Boys Short Film Starring Seth Rogan, Elijah Wood and Danny McBride? December 2010
3 comments

My Personal Analysis

Looking at these results and some of the underlying data, I am a little surprised at the various ways in which people found the top posts.  There is not one clear winner in terms of referral type.

• First place comes from Twitter thanks to a Kevin Smith shout out.  Given the power of Twitter I am surprised that it did not dominate the rest of the spots.
• Traffic for number 2, 3 and 4 came primarily by way posting to message boards.  A good chunk (pun intended) of number 3 also came from a Twitter shout out by Superchunk.  This plus the first spot all make sense, given that people are monitoring these avenues for specific topics that I posted on.  This sort of targeted promotion beats out any of the more generic promotion blasts to places like StumbleUpon, Digg, etc.
• The biggest surprise for me has been search traffic.  The number 5 spot was almost fully driven by search results hitting my site.  This, plus the whole Rizzo the Rat phenomenon, is not something I expected given the lack of time spent on SEO.