Shoup Airlines

You know I’ll be wearing shorts!

So I’m going on a little trip. Way back in the planning stages, this trip was destined for the sunny skies and aqua blue beaches of the Caribbean. On a very large boat. With lots of adult beverages. And even more scantily clad women running around.

Alas, life doesn’t always work out the way you want it to. Sometimes life walks right up to your door, invites itself in and then proceeds to pants you in front of all your friends and family. If life is in a real saucy mood, it will point and laugh too. Point in case, somehow St. Thomas has gloriously metamorphized into Minneapolis.

No, not the Minneapolis in North Carolina. The true Minneapolis. The Minneapolis that houses the Twinkies, the Saints and that college with school colors that look an awful lot like USC. The Minneapolis where Northworst is based and rules the Midwest skies with an iron fist. The Minneapolis that is affectionately known as MSP, Minnie, the Twin Cities or if you’ve done a real tour of duty in the area, The Cities. Yes, the city that will freeze a little bit of your heart, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Connelly has informed me that the area is rolling out the red carpet treatment and dropping the temperatures to a “maybe I should bring pants just in case” level. I can’t wait to take that first breath of sub zero air and feel my nose hairs instantaneously freeze. It’s been too long!

Crank‘n to A Sound of Thunder

Not only is Ray Bradbury rolling in his grave but so are Einstein, Wells, Twain, Roddenberry and just about every other author of time travel who is dead. Even Dickens! That’s just how totally awesome A Sound of Thunder is!

Based on an excellent short story (one of my favorites) written by Bradbury in the 50s, you mix one money hungry capitalist with a budding time travel technology and get extreme safaris hunting dinosaurs. But don’t do anything to change the past! What could possibly go wrong? With the movie? Everything!

I’m not even sure where to begin. Special effects are almost always a main character in sci-fi movies and this one is no exception. Unfortunately, the special effects department was apparently funded by the local neighborhood 12 year old’s paper route money and created on his older brother’s hand-me-down Commodore 64. However, I’ll give them credit for creating the baboon-osaur, it’s right up there with Napolean’s Liger!

The acting is solely hung upon the shoulders of Ed Burns, the protagonist, who pretty much sleeps through his role. Ben Kingsley plays the greedy capitalist to the hilt but in this two bit movie it sadly comes off as over the top. Luckily, there isn’t much of him. And of course there is the requisite group trying to save the world and once they realize they can go back in time and return everything to normal no one seems to care when one of the team gets killed off. This movie screams MST 3000 if Tom and Crow ever return.

The largest loophole, however, is that the future doesn’t change until after the team arrives back in the future coming in waves. How can the present (or future) change as a result of an altered past but not until after returning from the past? Wouldn’t the resultant change occur while traveling back to their time? I know they were trying to use the ripple effect and ramp the excitement, but still that’s just an un-jumpable gap!

This movie is just pure fodder, plain and simple. Read the short story instead.

And now for my digression: Bradbury’s story introduces us with “the butterfly effect,” the concept that if even the smallest of things (he uses a butterfly) is disturbed in the past it can have a rather disturbing ripple effect on the future. It’s a great story, one of my all time favorites! What I want to know is if his work inspired the chaos theory that asks the question of whether the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in California create a monsoon in Japan.

Crank, on the other hand, knows it is your basic summer matinee and embraces that fact with a big, wet, sloppy french kiss. Jason Statham plays a contract killer that pisses a gangster off. Really? A hitman pissing someone off? Anyway, pissed off dude injects hitman dude with a drug that will kill him unless he keeps the adrenaline flowing at an extreme rate.

Yep, it’s exactly what you think it is…Speed. Except Keanu Reeves is nowhere to be found and you can do so much more with a rampaging hitman in L.A. than with a Metro bus in L.A. I wouldn’t say the action is non-stop but there is enough to keep you entertained and it’s filmed in that erratic “MTV” style. The best part is the large amount of tongue in cheek-ness of it all. Even Statham’s character’s name “Chev Chelios” is comical. Efren Ramirez rounds out the characters with a performance a million times more hilarious than Pedro.

This is definitely a nothing on tv, nothing else to really do, just want to disconnect for a few hours and be razzle-dazzled with crazy stunts and the occasional laugh type of movie. But it’s a really good one of those.

Bored?

As if you don’t already have enough to help you procrastinate at work…

But then you wouldn’t be here would you?

Remember way back in the late 90s when everyone was going mad with “Best of” lists and the top five of whatever they were trying to ram down your throat ended up being things that were still pretty new or hadn’t burned out their 15 minutes of fame?

Apparently back in ‘94, even before it was trendy to have a “best of” list, a bunch of animators got together and decided on the 50 best cartoons of all time. And when I say cartoon I don’t mean character but specific episode. The list is actually pretty extensive, spanning a Wagner belting Bugs to a scantily clad Ms. Boop.

The list is pretty heavy on Looney Tunes but then they are the quintessential cartoon. I am a bit disappointed not to find Tom and Jerry or Mighty Mouse on here. However, getting to see some cartoons you haven’t thought about since you wore your Spidey under-roos while eating a bowl of milk logged fruit loops and just beginning to feel that wave of sugary goodness hit you like some pure Colombian lleyo is well worth the omission of some personal favorites.

“But Mike, there aren’t any links to see each episode!”

Oh, come on now, you don’t really think I’d leave you hanging like that do you? This guy already did the leg work for you. Enjoy!