Green Chicken, No Ham

[howeird]

I was all set to dump three packages of chicken gizzards and two tubs of chicken hearts into the crock pot for overnight cooking, but I forgot the first rule of Oriental supermarket shopping: Cook it or freeze it right away. They had only been in the fridge since Sunday, but when I opened the packages, the smell was overpowering, and when I dumped them upside-down into the pot, the bottom ones had started turning green. Yikes!

Silly me tried to flush them down the garbage disposal, but they clogged it and popped the circuit breaker, so I slopped them all into a garbage bag (there was some serious excavation work required in the bowels of the disposal unit) and will haul that out to the dumpster in the morning.

---

Tonight's DVD was Junebug, a  film which starred Amy Adams (of Enchanted fame). I wanted to see her in a non-Disney setting, and this performance won her a supporting actress Oscar nomination and a ton of wins from other award givers.

So, take the Princess, make her 9 months pregnant, slap her into a seriously dysfunctional Bible Belt family living with her in-laws, and make her a redhead and even more ADD, and you have Ashley, the character she plays in this gem. She deserved the awards.

It's a strange film from a production standpoint. Pretty good photography, considering it was shot in 16mm, and some fine acting, though that's uneven. The editing, storyboarding and shot selection was miserable. Amateur. Killed the flow of the story over and over again. The director seems to think we need to see the entire room before anyone occupies it. And the way to show that the house is empty is to show a shot of each room in the house, empty. Even rooms we have not seen before, nor will we see later. For the first half hour it's hard to tell where we are, or why. It gets easier to tell where we are about halfway through, but "why" is still a mystery a lot of the time.

It's a "you can't go home again" movie which makes you want the protagonist to dump his new cosmopolitan wife, kill his younger brother and elope with his widow-in-law. 

I liked the opening/closing credits song -- Stevie Wonder's Harmour Love  Performed by Syreeta.

All the characters had their moments, except for Ashley's husband Johnny, whose part is a cross between stupid trailer trash redneck and borderline autistic manic-depressive. Benjamin McKenzie was not up to the challenge. Alessandro Nivola does well as George, the older, smarter brother who went to the Big City (DC) and Made Good. Embeth Davidtz is the gallery owner who practically rapes him and magically is his wife in the following scene. Scott Wilson plays the enigmatic father, and thanks to lousy directing, writing and editing we have no ideas if he's Simple™ or just quiet. By the end of the film he has almost developed into a character. Celia Weston as the mom has the same problem with a character who is poorly defined, and the lines about her don't match the person we see. And I feel sorry for Frank Hoyt Taylor, who plays off-the-wall artist David Wark, a character who has no artistic talent whatsoever, but his childish works are Inspired By God. He pendulums between being just another bewildered crackpot and a wildly flailing top-of-his-voice maniac in the style of a Southern Baptist style preacher.

Sound editing sucked - usually the dialog was too soft to hear, but every now and then they cranked it way up to let us know that people were shouting.

Lots of loose ends, but let us pray nobody makes a sequel.

Comments

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

Off topic, but I didn't feel like looking for the older post. You may find this interesting...

http://www.fec.gov/DisclosureSearch/mapApp.do?cand_id=P80003338&searchType=&searchSQLType=&searchKeyword= (http://www.fec.gov/DisclosureSearch/mapApp.do?cand_id=P80003338&searchType=&searchSQLType=&searchKeyword=)

[howeird]

Thanks! That's excellent. Notice Hilary and Barak had about the same distribution of donations, the only major diff is the predictable NY for Clinton and IL for Obama.

Doing the math on the $122 million in <$200 donations, the most conservative estimate is they received 610,000 donations at that level ($122 mil at $200 per). I'll go for the moment with the theory that the number of people who donated more than once is outweighed by the number of people who gave $100 or less. Roughly 18 million people voted for Barak in the primaries, so about 3% gave some bucks. That sounds reasonable.

However, approximately $98.5 million came from $1k and over donations, which kind of puts a crimp in the "no strings" image. And how curious is it that he was the Wonder Boy keynote speaker at the last Demo convention? Things that make me go "Hmmmm"

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

The part that I find interesting is none of them are organizational donations. His campaign just didn't accept them, which in turn means that the names of the donors (over $200 in total) are a part of public record.

[howeird]

That doesn't mean a thing. It's SOP for organizations to make donations in the names of their members. Unions do it all the time, so do some corporations. They just ask each member to sign an authorization, and they take care of all the rest, sometimes including the actual funds.