Month: July 2011

My new favorite song and video. This is just magical.

I’ve been a little busy lately moving from North Hollywood to Studio City. My friend Colinski and I found a really awesome apartment; it’s a great building and a great neighborhood. And I’ll be saving money. As I joked with Colin last night, if I keep raving about how awesome this place is, it’s bound to end up being haunted or something.

Anyway, aside from the move, I’ve just been getting the full summer in LA thing on by going out for various events like Design Week in Little Tokyo and the Kalbi Burger Challenge in Koreatown. Oh, right—I won that!

I’m really excited about the new place. And I’m also quite excited for the Donut Summit this weekend.

Stay tuned!

Originally published at PopBunker.net.

Director: Robert Benton / Writers: Avery Corman (novel), Robert Benton (screenplay) / Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, and Jane Alexander

In keeping with the serious tone of the previous installment of OM/YE, this week I decided to have a look at an old academy fave Kramer vs. Kramer. I’m as big a fan of Dustin Hoffman as anyone, having thoroughly enjoyed his performances in a wide range of titles including I Heart Huckabees, The Graduate, Dick Tracy, Hero, and Death of a Salesman (among countless other roles). And yet, somehow or another I could just never really get myself worked up about seeing him play a dad in a movie about a custody dispute. I guess I just didn’t know what the big deal was. Continue reading “Kramer Vs Kramer”

The trip to Okinawa was really quite wonderful. I did happen to break my glasses while waiting for my connecting flight at Narita, and in the middle of trying to fix the one side that lost a screw, I knocked the screw loose from the other side and lost it. I’m still walking around with a (barely noticeable) staple holding my glasses together until I make it to the eye doctor tomorrow.

Aside from the broken glasses, and forgetting to pack deodorant when traveling to a nearly tropical island, things were simply amazing. Being immersed in Japanese once again forced me into trying to think in Japanese as much as possible, so that even when I was landing in LA after the trip was over I still caught myself trying to figure out how I would say this or that in Japanese.

The convention was a real blast, and I got to see lots of the people I met when I traveled to Nagoya back in 2009. All around, a worthwhile investment. And it has certainly inspired me to redouble my efforts to work on improving my Japanese.

Now that I’m back in LA, I’m working on an apartment search, and hoping for some time to get to work on my novel. I’ve got thirteen days to the next meeting of our writing group, so I better get cracking.

Originally posted at PopBunker.net.

For this week I chose another one of those old movies that I actually did see when I had much younger eyes. I know I must’ve watched this movie when I was somewhere between the ages of, say, nine and thirteen, but I really don’t remember. The only recollections I really had of this movie were that Paul Newman seemed awesome (I don’t think I’d seen him in anything else by that point) and that the Hanson brothers were outrageously amusing. I’m not sure, but now that I think about it, it’s also possible that I saw this movie as a nice antidote to The Mighty Ducks, which would’ve come out right around that time (and which I found loathsome).

Watching Slap Shot again recently, after having seen countless sports movies in the interim that all seem to chronicle the rise or return of an underdog team to its deserved or former glory, I must say that the plot no longer felt nearly as compelling as it might have the first time I watched this one. Still, a familiar or formulaic plot need not be an excuse not to enjoy a movie, in my opinion, especially when the movie provides some laughs, which Slap Shot does. Continue reading “Slap Shot”

This morning I woke up at 6:30, did yoga on the beach, and then swam in the ocean.

Don’t hate.