Now this is cool! They’re engineered like an iceberg so that the fin part always stays upright in your glass, just visible above the beverage line, while the rest of the ice cube remains submerged. They cost just over $8 at Play.com.
Almost as cool as this! Han Solo frozen in carbonite ice trays and an R2D2 ice bucket!
Check it out!
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Cool Ice Trays!
Monday, February 2, 2009
Sundance Summary, part 2
By Saturday morning, I was wondering where the celebrities were at Sundance. It had been a much lower wattage festival compared to the previous year, and we had heard of sponsors canceling or scaling back.
My husband and I saw three movies on Saturday, starting with Brooklyn's Finest, which I'll tell you right out was not the finest movie I saw at the festival. What a big disappointment. The film is directed by Antoine Fuqua who directed the excellent Training Day, and the not so excellent King Arthur. Brooklyn's Finest has three different barely intersecting stories of three cops: Richard Gere is a suicidal beat cop about to retire, Ethan Hawke is a cop desperate to move out of his mold ridden house to save his sick pregnant wife, and Don Cheadle plays an undercover cop conflicted about his gangster friend played by Wesley Snipes. The script was written by a first time screenwriter, who entered a screenwriting contest to win a car. He didn't win, but somehow came 
I had lots of problems with this film. It is relentlessly dark, and I remember laughing at least a few times during Training Day. I didn't like Ethan Hawke's character, and thought he was stupid. His choices didn't make sense once his friend found out what he was planning to do. We're supposed to suspend disbelief and accept that Richard Gere's character can only get a Latina prostitute to have sex with him, even though he looks like Richard Gere with no paunch. (For the record, I respect Richard Gere for trying to stretch a bit beyond Nights at Rodanthe, but it was a stretch.) Don Cheadle's character I liked the most, and he and Ellen Barkin had a few explosive scenes. The ending of the movie was just awful, and I was left very disappointed.
Only Antoine Fuqua and the screenwriter attended our screening as it was in the morning. They got complaints from the audience over the violence and dark portrayal of the police, but they just replied that that would be a different film, and not the one they made. We heard that the film was picked up but, as a "work in progress." The first thing they can do is change the ending.
After walking around Main Street for a bit, we saw the awesome documentary It Might Get Loud, directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth). Before the screening, we heard rumblings from the back of the theater. Jack White of The White Stripes had come to the screening! Davis Guggenheim was greeted as somewhat of a rock star director himself.
Davis Guggenheim introduced the film saying that it is a documentary about the electric guitar with three of the best artists of the e
lectric guitar: Jimmy Page, The Edge of U2 and Jack White. Why these three? "Jimmy Hendrix wasn't available." Instead of the usual rock documentary about the rise of the band and the descent into drugs and so on, this film takes a different approach. He brought all three guitarists together in Nashville where they jammed and talked together for two days. He also interviewed each separately and they described how they got their first guitar, their start in music and how they write songs. It was fascinating, totally fun, and one of the best films we saw at the festival.
Jack White was convinced to come up for the Q&A, but unfortunately, he didn't bring his guitar. The film was just awesome, and I really learned a lot. I did not know Jimmy Page's history as a studio musician, and how he just couldn't take playing Muzak one more day! It Might Get Loud will be out in theaters probably in August of this year. Watch for it as it's not to be missed!
The last film we saw on Saturday, was Taking Chance starring Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon came for the Q&A at our screening, and I was able to tell the director Ross Katz how glad I was that I saw his excellent film. I didn't want to see another movie about Iraq, but I'm so glad I saw this one. Read my review here.
You can see all my pictures from Sundance 2009 here on Flickr.
Groundhog Day
"This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather." -- Phil Connors (Bill Murray) in Groundhog Day
Happy Groundhog Day!
Audi The Chase Super Bowl ad with Jason Statham 2009
This was one of my favorite ads from the Superbowl last night. I love that look of disgust and resignation Jason Statham gives the cars until he finds the Audi.
GI Joe Superbowl trailer spot
Most awesome thing about this teaser trailer? Christopher Eccleston is in it as a Scottish villain!!
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Sundance Summary, part 1
We saw 12 movies in 5 days at Sundance this year. My husband says he's done for the whole year. Now that I've posted all my photos on Flickr, I'll go through the whole list of movies and give you a few thoughts on each.
We flew in on Thursday, and saw the opening film of the festival, Mary and Max, an animated film by the same team that won an Oscar for their animated short Harvie Krumpet.
Mary and Max is the story of two improbable pen pals, or pen friends, a little girl in Australia (Toni Collette) and a slightly off older Jewish man in New York (voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Adam Elliot, the writer director introduced the film and told us he wrote the story about pen friends because of his own pen friend that he's had for many years, and never met. The movie is in the claymation animation technique used in Wallace and Gromit. It took them a whole day to do 5 seconds of film, and the whole film took 5 years. I really wish the director h
The film is quite odd, and I'm not really sure what audience it is aimed at. I'm not going to take my kids to a movie where the character Max says, after talking about his job in a condom factory, "By the way, I've never used a condom." I also have major issues with the ending. It was an interesting choice to open the festival and the first animated film to do so, but no contest to the excellent In Bruges that opened the festival last year. None of the voice talent were there at the premiere, and that was a contrast to all the stars we saw last year at In Bruges.
On Friday, we saw two films. The first was No Impact Man, a documentary about Colin Beavan and his wife Michelle Conlin and their experiment over the course of a year to have no impact on the environment while living in an apartment in New York City with a toddler. Colin Beavan's blog, No Impact Man chronicled each step and phase, from starting to only eat locally within 250 miles of their house all the way to turning off their electricity and powering his laptop with a solar panel! His goal was to write a book about the experience, and that book will come out sometime in 2009. Some friends of theirs offered to film a documentary about the whole year. The movie is really about Colin's relationship with his wife, and how they negotiate each phase of his plan and struggle with it. His wife is a Prada loving, Starbucks addicted writer for Business Week, and she really was the audience's entry into this film. Just watching her face as she says, "No electricity. Hmmmm." They said in the Q&A that a year of no TV made them better parents and a closer family.
Colin stated that he didn't expect everyone to be able to follow what their family did, but to think about how we are impacting the environment with our choices. My husband gave me a look when I said I'd been thinking about a worm compost box for our kitchen scraps. After watching the Beavan's fly infestation from theirs, I said, not in the house, maybe the garage.
Friday night we went in to Salt Lake City for the gala night showing of The September Issue. The documentary follows Anna Wintour and her editors at Vogue as they put together the most important issue of the year, the September issue. It was like the real life Devil Wears Prada. I was most interested in Vogue's creative director, Grace Coddington, who started at Vogue the same day as Anna Wintour, 30 years ago. The movie shows the tension between these old friends and rivals and the creative process and decisions that go into the magazine. It was really fascinating. Even my husband was more interested in the film than he thought he would be. You get some insight into the icy Anna Wintour and how her father was a famous newspaper publisher in England and her brother the political editor of The Guardian. She is the most powerful woman in fashion, and says of her family that they "are amused" by her career. I caught up with R J Culter, the director at the party after the screening, and was glad to be able to tell him in person how much I enjoyed his film. I think it's likely to come to theaters later this year.
Here's a cool little clip from the Sundance Channel about director R J Cutler and the making of the film:
Check out all my photos from Sundance 2009 on Flickr.
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