Recently in Talking Pictures Category

My dear friend Patty sent me this article on my Facebook wall this morning:

By George, Give Up!
One critic begs and pleads George Lucas to PLEASE STOP already!

...After 22 years of product management, Lucas returned to directing with the unfortunate "Phantom Menace," and completed the prequel trilogy with "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith" between 1999 and 2005. Were these the "small, personal" films he'd been waiting all this time to create? Apparently not. He's still talking about an urge to get small, get personal, with his movies.

One word of advice for Mr. Lucas: Don't.

Two words: Please don't.

We are such intellectuals in the Upstate Moss household, you would be impressed. Our latest debate is the one that resurfaces every time George Lucas feels the need to make another stupid prequel: my husband is the true Star Wars fan because everything GL puts out is awesome and that's what it means to love SW. I on the other hand am no fan (according to my beloved) because I think the prequels were crap, and just money making, not adding anything to the story. Now I can't blame Lucas for making mo' money, mo' money, mo' money! That's what he's good at. However I have no desire to see any more of these annoying films.

The Darth Vader storyline was cool because he was evil and mysterious, and we knew little about him...and with that there was motivation to get rid of the guy. Now he is a cool whiney, Emo teenager with more apprentices than we can count (when he supposedly had none because he was too much of a Bad Ass for that). We are supposed to feel sorry for him and like him and "understand" why he is evil, when his reasons are so dumb. he is no longer cool and mysterious force to be reckoned with, just an idiot. I'm so friggin' done.

And remember that whole Sith rule, as Yoda described in Episode 1: Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice. Well besides the fact they wanted Anakin, and Sidious and the Emperor, and that ugly bald headed black and white chick (see the Clone Wars micro-episodes from Cartoon Network). Every time they make a new "prequel" they break all their former rules which made the story intriguing. No one could be trained as a Jedi unless you were "Force strong", except for "General Greivous" (which must have taken Lucas all of 3 seconds to come up with that moniker) and his band of light saber wielding droids (Light saber's being a "Jedi only" weapon). Now we have Sith here there and everywhere: Darth Vader, Darth Maul, Darth Plagueis, Darth Sidious, Exar Kun, Darth Malik, Darth Revan, Darth Tyrannus and Lumiya (Vader's apprentice who we never heard of until 25 years after the Star wars movies). Who cares about Darth Vader anymore?Yes, I know, these weren't all the same storyline, but it's so redundant, it makes what was once a fun sci fi movie a cliche.

If someone sees the movie and has positive reviews, please let me know. My husband, no doubt, will say it's great.

On Sunday I had the privilege of watching my first and last episode of Rock of Love 2 with Bret Michaels. The only reason why I watched it was because I love Celebrity Fit Club. With the exception of Dustin and Erin, I like the people,. They seem good people I wouldn't mind knowing. Most people on TV-well let's just say I am glad they are on TV and not next door to me. I like Dr. Ian's smile and I just love Harvey. I want Harvey to come get my kids motivated to clean their rooms and do their school work. Back to Rock of Love, the only reason I watched it is I was captive under a just falling asleep toddler without a remote to change the channel. It was a pathetic site as I kept doing that whisper-yelling thing hoping I was loud enough for someone outside my door to hear me, yet not loud enough for the kid next to my face to wake up. No luck, I was hostage to VH-1. So I kept the show on. Although I never saw the first show or one episode of the second, you practically have to live under a rock to not know that one of the contestants is Oscar De La Hoya's neice, Daisy De La Hoya. And lo and behold, there she was, one of the two finalists. So my interest was piqued.

I watched in horror for one and a half hours as an obviously plastic-surgery-enhanced-too-old-to-not-get-a-haircut "gentleman" pitted these two women, Daisy and Ambre (every time I see that spelling I think it''s pretentious and should be pronounced AHM-bray), against each other. Daisy, the supposed "Looker" between the two of them (who also looks quite surgically enhanced) did not have one intelligent word come out of her mouth. There was no way he was going to pick her. Ambre who seemed more intelligent, and was more appropriate choice age wise in comparison to Daisy seemed more "together", but she was also someone who is not ashamed to show the world she goes to dinner without underpants on for a man who has not committed to her. In truth, as much as the feminist in me wanted to hate him, I didn't. Truth be told, I'm not sure exactly what my opinion of him is exactly.

These poor women went to Mexico and for 24 hours waited in a hotel room with nothing to do but pine over this guy while he wine, dined and slept with their opponent in the hopes that the next day he will pick them. The only thing that made total sense to me was when Daisy left Bret's room the next morning, she went to her room and broke down in tears.

Can someone please explain the Feminist Movement to me? Where are they? Why has being used as game show prizes the mark of modern woman?

That night I had nightmares about Daisy and Ambre and when I woke up the next morning, I still had a sort of emotional bitter taste in my mouth about the show. I remembered why I never watch these shows, they make me feel angry and depressed. There are certain horror movies I cannot watch because I feel the graphic imagery does some kind of damage to my soul. I felt the same way about what I witnessed on VH-1 last Sunday.It chips away little by little the sense of right and wrong God instilled in me, and takes us a step away from viewing people as people, but seeing them merely as commodities.

I guess it was the unpleasant memories of having been there, done that made me feel terrible. Nothing fulfilling about it.

I spent part of the day cooking and freezing meals. This is a venture I have attempted somewhat both successfully and unsuccessfully in anticipation of the arrival of a new baby. Even though I would have a meal in the freezer, I would never plan out in time to have it thawed if necessary and have the side dishes available, hence the "OK"-ness of the method.

This week I bought the book The Freeze Cooking Manual from The 30 Day Gourmet. I did not think to buy the book before because I figured it was simply like the site in print. While the site has some good advice, it is mostly recipes, some that are not quite my style. The book however is more of a "how-to" with these incredible worksheets that help out with organized shopping, meal planning and menus. So I substituted many of my own recipes and used the method.

Today I shopped for a number of meals at 6 AM, and started preparing some. I intended for tomorrow or Friday to be my "cooking day", but with a nursling who hates everyone but me, I am not sure how feasible that is.

So as of today, I have in the freezer:

-4 nights worth of pork chops in marinade (they were buy one/get one)
-2 pans of baked rigatoni (rigatoni in bechamel sauce with mozarella or fontina cheese and proscuitto)
-2 nights worth of homeade chicken nuggets (I suppose I could save myself the effort and buy ready made/frozen nuggets, but I hate how salty ready-made food is-it gives me a stomach ache)
-3 quiche broccoli, cheese and bacon quiche fillings

I also bought some Italian bread and to accompany the meals and wrapped it up tight in foil and freezer bags.

I plan to make a couple of lasagnas, meatballs for three nights, a couple of Chicago pizzas, some chimichanga-ey things for a couple of nights, some type of chicken-alfredo stuff, and 16 pie crusts for quiches, or pies or whatever.

So what is the benefit? A planned menu. A full freezer. Better budget-ing. I spend a lot of time lately heading out to the supermarket at 2 PM trying to figure out what to make for dinner that night. I end up spending more money shopping like this and I am not sure how I got into this habit lately, but I need to get out.

Also, thank you for filling up the comments box below with some favorite recipes. I love the pretzel idea. Keep 'em coming!

How do you get out of dinnertime idea ruts? One of the latest problems I am faced with is whatever I cook has to be enough food. Many recipes I find that can feed a family my size are a little too "la femme cuisine" than I would like. Lots of what Dinka would call "with goo recipes" (canned soup and Velveeta). So my old cooking strageties nned to be revamped.

Oh, I forgot! My grandmother corrected me a few weeks ago-dinner is early in the day and supper is at night.

Whenever I make lemon meringue pie, it never sets. (I suppose baking on 90 degree days does not help either). The flavor is always fantastic and a homeade lemon meringue beats a store bought in flavor hands down. Still, it always turns into more a mess. We still enjoy it-we just put in bowls and use a spoon. However, I would not mind having a nice, stiff pie for once. Any suggestions?

I'll leave the robots to Pansy and just blog all-Ratatouille all the time. I'd love to write a long, leisurely review but Happy Catholic Julie wrote a good one, so I'll just link to it and say, "what she said":

When "Fin" came up on the screen, I suppressed an impulse to applaud. No need. The audience around me, without my reservations, burst into applause anyway.

There was applause when I saw it, too.

Two themes I want to tie together at some point. Julie quotes Juila Child:

Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet.

I want to pull out Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture

and consider that idea in the light of Pieper's comments on sacrifice.

We saw The Transfomers last night and it sucked. OK, it was slightly better that I expected so let's get the good part out.

Optimus, who was voiced by the original Optimus, Peter Cullen, recited the above line and Rosey Posey said she thought she saw my eyes tear up. That was cool albeit totally pointless and a bone thrown at us nostaligic Transformer fans. The sell-out I am, I happily took the bone.

The other plus was the action scenes were really, really good.

So the negatives? It was mostly Shia LeBeaouf and his antics with his car, and getting the attention of a girl for like an hour before any action set in. There were lots of stupid little sex jokes that could have been dropped to make the movie more kid-friendly. On that same line of thinking, the violence could have been toned down a bit without any loss to the movie to give it a PG rating. I hated the sex humor although The audience laughed hysterically at it while I just rolled my eyes. So what do I know?

There also tghe usual mini-public service announcements strung throughout taking pokes at our government and Bush and what-not. Yawn.

The story was terrible, boring and incoherent. Many of the situations could have been resolved with common sense. For example, there is one action scene that ensues because instead of putting Sam and his Lady Friend inside his cab and driving away with the rest of the Autobots, Optimus decides to put them on his shoulder and climb under a bridge...and drops them. Why? What for? No one knows.

The robots looked kind of icky. Michael Bay's attempt to recreate this alien-robotic-life form and thought the boxy Transformers looked "unrealistic". OK I got that. But um, there is nothing realistic about Transformers to begin with (why must we take everything so seriously lately?) He should have established some middle grown and made them look slightly more like the guys we remember. They were literally confusing to look at-just jumbles of metallic spikes. Rosey Posey was kavetching for two hours afterwards about why did they feel the need to give Megatron pointy teeth: "To show how evil he is while he eats small bunnies?"

Mostly, something was seriously missing with the Optimus character. I am still not sure what it was. He seemed slightly ditzy and silly or something.

The movie is obviously a set-up for a sequel.

I give it a C-.

drop what you're doing and go see this movie RIGHT NOW.

The Soprano's ending sucked!

This weekend we went to the movies to see Happy Feet. I was looking forward to it. Penguins, dance numbers, music, PG rating, what more could a movie have to entertain the senses? Well for one, more dancing and singing penguins. I was disappointed. Instead, what I got was mostly long-ass public service announcements about living a politically correct, ecology friendly lifestyles blah, blah, blah.

My family of course thinks I am a wet blanket and I always just have to get annoyed at the political messages, but I asked them "were the messages there or not?" They were. So I can be insulted if I want to. Still, I suppose if you are not fed up and cynical with that sort of thing, you might truly enjoy the film.

If you do not want to hear me whine, I think the Kansas City Star's review is quite accurate:

But despite a great look and some nifty action sequences, this computer-animated effort doesn’t click. It piles lots of contemporary issues on what should be a simple children’s fable and becomes an overlong, emotionally muted and tiresome epic.

It wasn't just "ecology" lessons involved. There were other undertones, such as the elders who wouldn't stray from their old ways, and kept referring to foreigners as "pagans". Yawn

I think what bothers me most is not the message itself that they are trying to get across (well yeah, a little), but the fact that every childfren's movie, or TV show or whatever cannot just be entertaining anymore. That someone out there truly feels we have to be politically educated every single minute of everyday or else something horrible happen. I wouldn't mind as much if they inundated our children with times tables as they political correctness.

You know though. I mean is everyone in the general IQ all so stupid all the time that we need one more message about the environment or how terrible calling people bad names is?

I thought not, but you know what? I was wrong! Especially for a Catholic! Bishop Katharine Schori says so! (I had to throw that in).

Update:Michael Medved's review

anyone see Ghost Hunters live last night/this morning?