Posted in art, entertainment, movies on January 5, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Last night CNN broadcast the movie Life, Itself about film critic Roger Ebert, focusing both on his career as well as the difficult final months of his life.
I greatly enjoyed the retrospective, and getting a stronger sense of his place within film criticism, particularly as a populist critic in counterpoint to cerebral critics such as Pauline Kael.
Posted in books, cooking, dogs, e-scrapbook, life, movies, pets, photography, thoughts, top of the world, travel, writing on November 16, 2014| 5 Comments »
It’s time. I’ve saved for years. I bought five extra years’ service with the state, bolstering my pension. I don’t have to work in the court system any more. The judicial process is painstaking, and as a citizen I appreciate the serious efforts of the courts to apply the law, to resolve conflicts, to get things right — at the same time, I don’t have to take those pains myself any more.
Posted in art, culture, entertainment, movies, music, television, TV on September 1, 2012| 4 Comments »
Sure, we all complain about commercials. I channel surf away and still can’t escape them — this evening while I fiddled around online a rum commercial came on in the background that made me turn the TV off.
But not because I disliked it. Rather, I heard it through for the background music, Iggy Pop’s The Passenger, which made me want to hear that song again.
Posted in culture, entertainment, movies, music on June 23, 2012| 2 Comments »
I just saw a wonderful documentary. It began with an item in the local weekly newspaper about a movie called The Wrecking Crew showing at the old theatre out on the former naval air station.
Posted in commute, movies, photography, Uncategorized, walking on April 25, 2010| 2 Comments »
A friend emailed this video to me. He knows I walk Market street to work frequently, and asked if I recognized any of these buildings–knowing most were destroyed. This is San Francisco four days before the earthquake and fire changed the City forever.
The music fits hauntingly well with this view back on a long-lost world. Twenty-first century as it may be, the music suits the mood for our glimpsing this basically Victorian, 19th century world.
Posted in art, culture, fiction, movies, novels on January 5, 2010| 4 Comments »
Posted in e-scrapbook, life, movies, predictions, technology, thoughts, writing on January 2, 2010| 10 Comments »
Posted in entertainment, fiction, movies, rants, technology on May 29, 2009| 9 Comments »
Mrs. Ombud enjoyed the new Star Trek movie, and I’m glad I saw it. (more…)
Posted in art, books, culture, movies, technology, TV on December 10, 2008| 7 Comments »
Superheroes were different when I was a kid. They mostly lived in comic books. Superman later became a TV show, but the special effects were so hokey you could practically see the strings propeling him in flight around the stage. We didn’t mind. We were kids. It was understood that childhood imagination, pretending, was part of the deal.
Posted in art, culture, entertainment, fiction, life, movies, politics, thoughts, travel on October 19, 2008| 11 Comments »
I’m pretty omni-movirous, meaning I like a variety of movies, so long as they’re moderately plausible and the stories are well told. There are not many genres I avoid, really — given that I want a good plot and don’t want to suspend disbelief like a hangman working overtime. So when we put Water in our Netflix queue, I’m sure the review looked good to me, but the reality, when I sat down to watch it, was different.
OmbudsBen 