The West Wing

This is a short pseudo-review. I decided to give this show a shot because I thought that I might enjoy it - it's not a more recent show and was done in the early/mid 2000s, which I thought might make it more to my taste as opposed to shows from the last 5 years. In high school, in one of my classes we watched the second episode of this show, which I don't really remember what happened in, but I remember that we watched it. That particular teacher liked this show which wasn't too surprising because she taught a class about government. 

Netflix's new rating system said that this show was a 62% match for me, which I thought was possibly a little low before I watched it. After watching the episode, I wasn't too thrilled. So I guess in this case, the match % was more or less accurate. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't exactly riveting. It seemed very fast-paced which I thought was detrimental in a first episode because it was hard to understand how all the characters fit in the show and such. The guy who created this show, Aaron Sorkin, also created another show (The Newsroom) which might be interesting and if it's ever on Netflix, I might give it a shot. I think my biggest issue with this show is that Martin Sheen, who plays the fictional president in this show, does not look presidential (neither does Donald Trump, but that's beside the point). He looks like he belongs on a farm or something. Remember him from Apocalypse Now? So, I don't really think I'll be watching more of this show. I guess at least I gave it a chance. There are a couple of other political shows on Netflix that I could try, but I'm not really sure I'm in the mood for a more recently done political show. Real life politics is enough of a (grotesque) spectacle for me. 

So at the moment, I'm at a bit of a loss for what show I should watch now. It'd be nice to find something that's sufficiently riveting. I'm not sure if I'd like the seasons of American Horror Story that I haven't seen since they're all disparate. Naturally, some kind of murder show would probably be enjoyable, but I also think that maybe it would be a good idea to branch out a little bit and watch something that's about a different topic. There are a few shows not out yet that I think would be interesting, but obviously those aren't an option right now because they haven't been made yet. I read a rumor/speculation on reddit today about a remake of Columbo with Mark Ruffalo as the eponymous character, which could actually be interesting. In that Mark Ruffalo is like a second rate (in that I don't like him as much - nothing personal) Vincent D'Onofrio and Vincent's Law and Order character was somewhat similar to Columbo. Fun, right? I wonder if Vincent and Mark have ever been in anything together. I'm not aware of anything, but that could be interesting because they're somewhat similar looking. 

Peter Sarsgaard interviews

This is a list for my personal reference but I thought that I might as well put it out there on the internet as a blog post for anyone else who might happen to come across it and find it useful. It's a collection of links to Peter Sarsgaard interviews that I found to be interesting/insightful/amusing. I've arranged them by year with a note on subject matter and length (if an interview goes particularly in-depth) where applicable. 

2016 (lotta Magnificent 7 interviews from this year) 

• March, W Magazine, re: birthdays (video, 1 min)
• September, azcentral, re: Magnificent 7 (medium)
• September, Indiewire, re: Magnificent 7 (long - goes into some interesting non-M7 stuff)
• September, LRM, re: Magnificent 7 (very much so)
• September, Uproxx, re: Magnificent 7, Green Lantern (medium - a little mention of his similarity to John Malkovich)
• November, San Diego Reader, re: Jackie as well as some about his earlier life/career (medium/long)

2015

• August, Slate (not an interview, but amusing nonetheless: a [fairly pointless, if you want to be serious] quiz about the various -gaards of Hollywood. "Hollywood is overrun with -gårds, especially of the Sars- and Skars- varieties. But with so many -gårds, how do you remember which is which? To help you puzzle through it, we’ve made this quiz.") 
• September, GQ Australia, re: Black Mass "The 44-year-old has been described online thus; 'baby face; soft, strangely ominous voice; often bizarre, unstable characters'."
• October, Vulture, re: Experimenter (long) also see this interview of Winona Ryder about the same movie; she mentions Peter a little bit
• October, AOL, re: Experimenter 
• October, Metro, re: Experimenter (medium)
• November, Hollywood Reporter
• November, NPR, re: Experimenter (text transcript and audio - 12 mins)
• November, The Fix, re: Experimenter, the death penalty, drinking (medium/long)

2014

• July, Men's Journal (there's a link to this article about the physiques of action heroes in movies, which is interesting)

2013

• January, Interview Magazine, re: Lovelace "I was just skulking around the house, going from room to room, sulking, thinking about it, going, ‘Why do people offer me these parts? I'm not like this. I'm such a good person!'"
• June, Rolling Stone, re: The Killing
• July, Entertainment Weekly, re: The Killing (medium length)
• July, Buzzfeed, re; The Killing (long, spoilery but really interesting, with the showrunner Veena Sud)
• July, Vanity Fair, re: Blue Jasmine, The Killing (medium)
• August, Independent, re: Lovelac (long and I like the writing style of the interviewer) "Sarsgaard's voice – one so mellifluous it wraps you in cotton wool then rocks you to sleep"
• August, Guardian, re: Lovelace (medium - "It doesn't sound like a normal person's voice, whatever that is. I wouldn't be chosen to sell cereal on TV.")
• August, GQ, re: Lovelace (medium, with Amanda Seyfried - amusing interview)
• August, Slant, re: Lovelace (long: "I might look like a rag doll in the film, but I permed my hair, teasing it after I permed it. We were putting crazy stuff in it. I wanted it big, my sideburns long." and "I probably feel most comfortable when I’m running. I’m a long-distance runner. In terms of style, I feel the most comfortable wearing a really short pair of running shorts and a pair of shoes and no shirt." [❕ oh boy]) 

2011
May, Mr. Porter, medium ("With his low-lidded, almond-shaped eyes, and sly, insolent manner, he often plays men honeycombed with secrets - a killer in Boys Don't Cry, an editor in Shattered Glass, a sharpshooter in Jarhead, the seducer of Ms Carey Mulligan in An Education - parts which instil in the audience a similar paranoia: what is that guy thinking? Is he thinking about us? If so, is it nice or nasty?") 
Undated, but mentions he is 37, so I'm assuming 2008. Timout, re: a play Interviewer: "You hooked up with Maggie just because she also has a double a in her last name, didn't you?"
2008
June, NYT video (5:30; very nice interview of him saying things) 
2006
video titled 'Prize Roast Beef', at an awards ceremony (2 min, the title makes sense after you watch it. "Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard joke about what Peter will say when he presents Jake with an award at the 2006 Palm Springs International Film Festival. They also joke about whom Jake should thank and what his greatest achievement is.") 
2005
video, re: Jarhead (5 min, with Jake Gyllenhaal; there's a tone reminiscent of the Cloud Atlas interviews with Ben Whishaw and James D'Arcy)

This is totally unrelated except for that it has to do with the Google doodle of the day that came up when I was googling the interviews for this post. Here's a little melody that I created. It's surprisingly nice sounding. 
It was hard to find much online by way of interviews pre-2013. I'm not sure what to attribute that to - maybe he hadn't done many interviews before then or maybe the ones that he did do were in print (magazines) and have not been put online. I'll update this post if I come across any that I think should be added. 

Postsecret review 4

This week there are a good amount of interesting secrets, so here is my review of them.

"Why oh why do we have to be cousins? What do we do now?" over a picture of two people holding hands. From Arrested Development: this

"I'm afraid I'm smoking away my future." with a drawing of a marijuana leaf. If you're worried about it, you probably are indeed smoking away your future. 

"In attempts of getting her youth back, my mom wears thongs. It grosses me out!" Well, I assume you aren't actually looking at your mother when she's just wearing thongs and no pants? So it's more the idea that grosses this person out. But you can't control other people's underwear choices, so it's probably best to just let this go. 

"I feel like a failure as a parent because I can't afford to bring my daughter to Disney. (other side) Forever stuck in Pennsylvania" I think more context is needed to accurately judge this - if the daughter has strongly expressed interest in going to Disney then it makes more sense, but if this parent just feels like taking their kid to Disney is some kind of goal they think would make them a better parent, then it's sort of silly. There are plenty of ways to be a good parent that don't involve Disney. I'm not so sure about there being particularly interesting things in Pennsylvania (Hershey Park, maybe??), but I do know that there are interesting things in Maryland and DC, which is not as far away as Disney.

"I've always wanted to find a dead body" Now this one I can get behind. I also somewhat have the desire to find a dead body. I think it could be interesting if that happened to me. Although depending on the state of the dead body it could also be some degreee of  disturbing.

"People always talk about how college was the best time of their lives but it kind of sucks." Fair enough. Especially when being 

"I've been losing things recently...... in my tiny apartment..." Maybe someone is breaking in and taking the things, or maybe it's dementia or something.

"Almost everyone in my office reminds me of someone famous. It makes me wonder who I remind them of." This one is a nice secret (although it doesn't exactly scream "secret" material - as in, this doesn't seem like something you'd necessarily need to keep secret. Maybe from the coworkers in this scenario so as not to seem possibly weird, but certainly you could tell your friends and stuff) because I also look at people sometimes and think they look like other people, which sometimes only I can see the resemblance to. 

"a fear: what if my art never means anything to anyone but myself?" I think that if a person happens to see an artwork, they can ascribe their own meaning to it. I guess not necessarily every artwork will cause someone to see meaning in it, but if you display/share your art to other people, the chance is higher that someone who sees it will decide that it means something to them. Like Andy Warhol. Imagine all the different things that people think the soup can paintings mean! And they're just ordinary soup cans!

"None of the artwork made sense, but being there with you did." I would like to think that I can at least attempt to make sense of any artwork that I see, unlike this person. Try me. 

That's it for this week's secrets, and look at me, getting this post done in a timely manner in relation to when the secrets were posted!

Documentary aggragate

I've watched a couple of ducmentaries over the last few days so here are my thoughts on those. Tomorrow I'll hope to do a new installation of my postsecret review feature; I skipped last week's because they were all Father's day related secrets which was sort of boring - no variety. Anyways, onto the documentaries.

They were about subject matters that I find particularly interesting: drug addiction and nuclear weapons. The first documentary was about nuclear weapons and it was titled Command and Control. It was about something I hadn't known about previously, which was an accident about 35 years ago (approximately; I don't remember the exact date) with a nuclear weapon. The nuclear weapon was in a facility, an error occurred, and it nearly exploded. So the documentary was about the dangers of having nuclear weapons because things can go wrong and there is a risk of them accidentally exploding where they're stored instead of being dropped on an enemy. It made me ponder about the idea of nuclear war with [take your pick of hostile nations].

The second documentary was titled Dr. Feelgood and it was about a doctor who overprescribed painkillers and was convicted basically of being a drug dealer.  He doesn't really seem to think that what he had done was particularly wrong - he wasn't worried that there were people getting pills from him which they later sold instead of using them legitimately. I think that doctors do have some responsibility to NOT recklessly prescribe painkillers because it certainly can lead to problems - addiction and all that.

I liked both of these documentaries so it's nice that they were on Netflix even though Netflix doesn't necessarily have a particularly good selection of the things I want to watch.

Children

I was having some thoughts (did I mention this in the past?? I don't remember) about the idea of having children, which is something that I don't want to do. Not now or in the future. I'm proud that I have managed to not get knocked up unintentionally, something that not everyone can say. If theoretically I were to have children, I think they would be an absolute pain and a hassle. The most having children (not the physical act of having them - conceiving, being pregnant and giving birth: no way) I think I could manage would be a situation like the kind that happens when people get divorced and end up with shared custody of the child(ren). You have the kid(s) for awhile, maybe a few days a week or something, and then back off to the ex-hubby's house they go. I think maybe, just maybe, I could deal with a situation like that. But it's not exactly accepted to marry someone, acquire a child somehow along the way, then divorce them so that you only have to deal with the child for a fraction of the time. In order to avoid me actually having to physically have children, I guess the way to acquire a child would be that the person I theoretically (in this scenario) marry already has a kid from a previous relationship, or to adopt a kid. Both of which aren't completely simple and straightforward matters. Having a kid the normal way is more straightforward but that's absolutely not something I want to do. 

I think a cat, or possibly multiple cats, is the right level of maintenance for me. They provide some companionship but are not particularly needy and can take care of themselves for the most part. A cat is nowhere near as high maintenance as an actual human child. 

Ooh, I thought of another theoretical scenario where I wouldn't have to deal too much with having a kid. It would be that I am rich and have a surrogate mother carry the baby, and then hire a nanny to raise the child most of the time. And I guess my spouse could get involved with the kid if they wanted to. But I would only have to get involved with it on my terms, because everything else the nanny would take care of. I don't necessarily condone this as a good way to raise children, but it's a theoretical scenario that I'm sure has happened with other people. 

Or yet another theoretical scenario: if I were a man, it would be much easier to have a kid but not have to deal with it that much. Plenty of men abandon their children or just aren't that involved with taking care of them. And if you're a man you don't have to be pregnant for 9 months. Or I could be in a lesbian relationship where my wife is the one who carries the pregnancy. 

Realistically, I think the most children having I'll do is possibly being an aunt, or maybe a godmother or something. That's kind of odd to think about. It's probably not going to happen anytime soon, unless [redacted]. 

Assorted topics

One thing that came to mind the other evening while I was watching a movie was the similarity between a scene in Requiem for a Dream and the poster for the movie An Education: 

Note the posing. Interesting, right? If I were to make a movie or something, it would be interesting to incorporate a pose like this as an allusion/homage to these movies/scenes. 

Also, I read a news today about a new record set by a Canadian sniper in Iraq, who shot and killed a terrorist from a distance of over 2 miles. Something else, eh? It made me think of some movies that I've seen recently that involved snipers. One was a Jason Bourne movie with Matt Damon in which a sniper is attempting to kill Bourne. Every so often there would be a scene of the sniper training his rifle on Jason Bourne. The other one was that war movie with Peter Sarsgaard, which was interesting. So, my thoughts began to go to the thought of what if I got killed by a sniper? I have no idea why that would happen, but I thought about that prospect. It made me want to close my blinds and get away from the windows so that theoretically a sniper would not be able to see me and kill me. I imagined a bullet ripping through my bedroom window and killing me as I sat/laid in bed. Eek! As of now, there is no plausible reason for a sniper to kill me, but here are some possible theoretical reasons: a) a sniper serial killer b) the democratic government of the US has been overthrown and is now a totalitarian regime, and I am a wanted political criminal. Thus, the regime decides to send a sniper to kill me. I do wonder how I come up with these ideas sometimes. Let's hope that neither of those theoretical scenarios come to pass and my experience with snipers stays relegated to watching them in movies or reading news about them. 

While we're on this topic, I guess I should mention again how it theoretically could be interesting to be a sniper. If I had to be in a war, I think I would want to be a sniper because I like the precision of it, I guess. I would not want to be a translator like the poor guy in Saving Private Ryan, even though in other situations I might not mind being a translator. Regardless, I'd rather not be in a war at all, or if I weren't a sniper, it would be interesting to be a journalist covering a war although I could still get killed doing that. Anderson has done a bit of covering wars. It's too bad he hasn't done more of that recently, I think. They've got him covering politics all the time. That's pretty much all anyone's covering these days. 

Movie review: The Shining

(alternatively titled: No More Stanley Kubrick)

Yet another movie watched to add to the list. This one was mediocre. It wasn't horribly bad, but it also wasn't particularly good or spectacular or anything. I officially don't understand what the deal with Stanley Kubrick is; this is the second movie of his that I've seen. Good movies make you think "My life is better/more enriched/etc for having seen that movie" and mediocre ones make you think "I could've spent those [length of movie] minutes doing something else" and not regretted it. This one was certainly in the mediocre category to me.

Apparently it was based off of a Stephen King novel, and he's a famous author. Maybe the book was better but the movie doesn't really inspire me to go read it. This movie reminded me of the book In Cold Blood in some ways: in that book, when I read it, I was so impatient for the murders to actually happen since you know they're going to happen, but it takes awhile for the book to get to that part. I think I enjoyed In Cold Blood somewhat more than I enjoyed this movie though.

The movie is about a man, who is a writer, and who goes off with his wife and young son to an isolated hotel to take care of it for the winter. One of my questions is why wasn't the son in school? He seemed like he was maybe school aged. Naturally, unfortunate events come to pass. Apparently, this movie is considered to be a horror movie which I was not aware of prior to watching it. I don't really want to say it was a complete waste of time, but it kind of was. I was not particularly horrified/scared by this movie, for the record. It takes place when they still used typewriters, so there are some scenes of the writer man working on his book or whatever and the typewriter clacking along. It reminded me of All The President's Men, which also had a good deal of typewriting noises in it.

In the course of staying at the hotel, the man's nastier side begins to come out and it culminates in him trying to murder his family with an ax. Fun (not). This is all mentioned in the summary of the movie on Netflix/in the little thing that Google shows when you look up a movie. So really you don't exactly even need to watch the movie because there's not really much more to it than that. The actress who played the wife was kind of funky looking; she had really large eyelids and long teeth. It wasn't exactly conventionally attractive.

All in all, I don't really have a ton to say about this movie because it was quite mediocre and not particularly good/impressive. I wouldn't really recommend it. From what I've seen, I think I can safely conclude that Stanley Kubrick is overrated. And I'm not going to be watching any more movies by him, probably. I think I ought to get back to watching movies with actors that I like in them since I think I'd probably enjoy that more. On that note, theoretically, if a remake of this movie were to be done, I think Peter Sarsgaard and Chloe Sevigny would be interesting in the main roles. Theoretically.