Ok, I am complete now. Christmas can come and go. I’m ready. I have been prepared and all prerequisites fulfilled. I got to hear the Hippo song! You see, I was going to write a rant on my blog about the Hippopotamus song, and the lack of airtime it gets on the radio. The Hippopotamus song is the far and away the best Christmas song ever made. It seems that I am usually lucky to hear the Hippo song once or twice a year on radio stations that play Christmas songs. This year my morning radio station started to play Christmas music before Thanksgiving (a little soon guys?) when it was still 90 degrees outside. I was sure that I would at least hear the song a few times in that 20-30 (ok.ok.ok 45) min period I keep my lazy butt in bed listening to the radio before I get up. No luck. Christmas is less than a week away and STILLL NOOOOO HIPPO song on the radio! I can’t have Christmas without hearing the Hippo song!!!! So I was going to write a rant about how radio stations need to play the Hippo song just to keep me happy. However, my plans were foiled. In doing a little quick research to find out who sings the song, I found the MP3 free for download! So I’m listening to it on a never ending loop right now as I write this. “I can see me now on Christmas morning, creeping down the stairs….lalalala.”. So now I can’t write a rant about not hearing the Hippo song, but I can put it on here for you to listen to. Hark (the herald, angels sing?), behold the best Christmas song of all time. I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas, by Gayla Peevey. The Hippo Song
For info on the song: Hippo song site
Now I just need to see the “You’ll shoot your eye out” Christmas Story movie, and I”ll be set.
Published on
December 18, 2005 in
Reviews.
When I went to see King Kong with Blake and John last night I didn’t know what to expect. The actual movie reviews for this film that I had heard on the radio were all very favorable. However I had heard from a few people that it was terrible movie. On top of that, the movie was 3hrs and 8mins long, so if it sucked, it was going to suck for a really long time!!!
To enjoy this film you have to be a movie person. If you only like 90 min, fast paced movies where the entire plot develops and concludes in less than two hours, then you will not enjoy Kong. This movie is really two full movies put together in a 3 hour film. The first hour or so of the movie is the prequel that develops the human characters and the human story. You don’t even see King Kong until about 80 mins into the movie! If you go into the movie understanding that you are really seeing a double feature I think you will be able to enjoy what you see.
The acting was well above average (Jack Black actually did pretty well), and the screenplay/story was very well developed. The visual effects and graphics were exceptional. Much like my review of The Chronicles of Narnia, this movie has a huge amount of footage that is digital or partly digitally done, and it its not often that you find yourself thinking that you are watching animation or computer graphics. The interaction between the real people and the animated characters was better than I’ve seen in a long time. What makes this movie worth watching for 3 hours: Great visual and graphics effects, coupled with a well developed and thought out storyline than makes the movie more than just the effects/graphics!
Over all I enjoyed the movie and would recommended it. It’s not going to be the best thing you have ever seen, or earthmoving, but it is a good solid film. If you want to pay a few bucks to be entertained for 3 hours, this will acommplish that goal. There where a few points where they could have easily cut some time down, but it never really felt slow. One thing I will note: The theater I was in was FULL of parents and their young kinds (many who were 4 or 5 years old). This movie is PG-13, and I think it deserves it. There is quite a bit of pretty freaky/scary footage in the film. This movie isn’t just King Kong running around New York batting down airplanes and getting shot by the National Guard. In fact that is only about 15 mins of the whole film. Before they get to Kong there is some very violent, scary, ritualistic zombies, freakydikey kinda stuff that happens on Skull Island. For older kids I don’t’ think it would be that big of a deal, but this is not a film to take your 3rd grader to. I doubt many of the 4 year olds in our movie slept well that night.
This one was sent to me by Miss Militza. See, even nerds have dirty minds. This was Ken Jennings when he was Super Hero man on Jeopardy.
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Thanks Militza!
Holly crap! I’m so proud of myself.
Mission accomplished.
I have FINISHED my Christmas shopping, and I have a week to spare. I think that is a record for me. So now I’m totally broke a week before Christmas, instead of waiting until Christmas Eve to be Ramen Noodle broke. I have $9.25 to live on for the next 8 days. Whoohooo. Being done early isn’t the real reason I’m proud of my self. The real reason can be found in the picture below.
That’s right, Bath and Body Works. My rock. My Old Faithful. My stand-by shopping for all things female. I walk by this store almost every day when I go to lunch. I’ve used Bath and Body Works for the past decade or so to help me pick out gifts for girls at Christmas and birthdays. I’m TERRABLE at coming up with things to get for girls, and my father was nice enough to share this wisdom with me when I was just a lad, knee high to a grasshopper: “Son, girls like smelly crap like soap, lotion and such”. With this wisdom I learned how to take care of my gift giving dilemma. I used to pick out the products from Bath and Body Works individually, until a nice lady that worked there made fun of me for picking out soaps that didn’t “match”. “You are noooot getting this for the saaaame person are you? You know “black melon paradise” doesn’t really go with “lavender autumn spring”….. here let me help you….”. I was scarred by that encounter and for every Christmas since have since purchased cart loads of the gift baskets they sell since they have someone who knows what “matches” put them together. It’s fool proof; one might even say that it’s Zach proof.
I made it my goal this year to NOT step foot in Bath and Body Works. There is nothing wrong with the store (other than how my head wants to blow up with all of the flowery smells in there), but I wanted to prove that I could pick out gifts for all of the girls on my own! That means finding gifts for 78 year old grandmothers, 14 year old cousins, and everything in-between. I overcame the challenge and persevered. No BATH AND BODY WORKS GIFT BASKETS ARE UNDER MY TREE!!!
Published on
December 15, 2005 in
Reviews.
Dukes of Hazard
I rented The Dukes of Hazard last night, and was excited to see the film. I was a big fan of the show when I was a kid, and Rob and I used to watch re-runs in the dorm when we should have been studying. The movie seemed to have a lot going for it: Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar (also directed Super Troopers and played Ramathorn), big budget remake an old series, and Jessica Simpson rumored to be half naked for most of the show so it can’t be too bad right? Wrong. This movie was terrible. The characters were so far off from the originals (not just how they looked, but their personalities and how they acted) it wasn’t even a shadow of what it used to be. The acting was terrible. Everybody (including Simpson, who is from Texas and has a real accent!!!) had BADLY faked accents, that they used in random parts of the movies, and then spoke with no accent in for other parts. They might as well be like Kevin Costner in Robin Hood just not speak with an accent at all (the only guy with an American accent in the whole film was him 
). Some of the Broken Lizard (Super Trooper) guys had small roles in the movie and even did Super Trooper lines/parodies. If the movie wasn’t so lame, that might have been a funny addition to the film, but this just added to the disappointment. Hollywood decided to make the film racy/raunchy. A little bit would have been fine, but they went way overboard. Hearing all of the cussing, Uncle Jessie dropping the F-Bomb, and Cooter asking the Duke boys if he could get a BJ from Daisy….really didn’t sit well with me. Maybe it was Uncle Jessie smoking pot out of an apple bong that did it. I’m no prude, but the way they made the movie so dirty just really killed the experience. Some of the car footage was pretty good, but that really was about the only thing worth a damn in the movie. The best 2 mins of the whole movie was the credits when they showed all of the stunts that went wrong. I don’t think they could have saved the movie even if they had a Jessica Simpson topless sceen (we can dream right?). It was a terrible movie, save your money. Two hours of my life I can never get back!
![Jessica Simpson](http://www.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0377818/Ss/0377818/DHD-1377.jpg?path=gallery&path_key=0377818"target="_blank"){kind=link}