The Manrilla Blog | Life. Art. Religion. Culture.

A lot has gone on in the last few days. I’ve been meaning to write about a lot more stuff but it just keeps getting ahead of me. We (Julia, her brother, Clayton and myself) went ot see the first showing of Batman Begins at 12midnight. I was really anxious to see what they had done. It looked like it was going to be good; darker, more serious. And it was. I have to say I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t the best movie I’d ever seen but it was good, fairly well acted and was most certainly a much improved version over all other Batmans including Tim Burton’s. Liam Neeson lent some heavy weight to the flick and Morgan Freeman was good as Lucious Fox. Rutger Hauer made an appearance (someone’s been resurrecting his career) and Gary Oldman’s there as Gordon. Christian Bale does a good job of both portraying Batman as well as Bruce Wayne. Nolan’s Gotham is quite good, too. We all had a good time seeing it last night and I’m sure I’ll see it again.

I have to give it up. Madison can be, at times, a really fascinating place. I suppose this could be said about any place, really. But I’m not in any of those other places right now. I just got back from the Weary Traveler, having had a very rousing conversation with Omar. Omar is an ethnic Somali who grew up in Egypt. He’s from Aswan. I just happened to sit across from him tonight and we struck up a conversation. Now, I haven’t really had a chance to speak Arabic very much since I left Michigan. Most of my Arabic-speaking friends still live there. Arabic is a beautiful language and it’s something that I pride myself on for being able to speak, read and write very well. I even taught Arabic for a period of time. So here we are, two Muslims, one a foreigner, one an American, sitting in a restaurant in Madison Wisconsin, Talking about all kinds of things! We talked about Islam, the state of Muslims today. About Qur’an, hadiyth, the Prophet and many, many other topics. Omar was shocked to find an American who not only spoke his language but who might have even had a better grasp of the grammar than himself! I think the most shocking part for him was to find an American Muslim who is informed on the religion as well. I have not done a lot of deep thinking about religion in the past several years. Photography and art have been my passions. But I can feel a change coming about again. A desire to assert myself in the religious dialog. I had a great time tonight bringing up topics out of my past that I was very passionate about; I came to find I am still passionate about those things. We made a tentative agreement to get together next week and continue our conversations in Arabic. In sha’ Allah, I hope it to be true.

I had a fairly good weekend. It was really hot and humid, though. The weather’s been in the 90’s some days with the humidity near 100%. Luckily it’s rained really hard a couple of times and it’s cooled off a lot now. I hope to be able to get some sleep. Haven’t really had any for the past couple of days.

I will add some more tomorrow if I get the chance but I will mention briefly that I had the chance to watch a couple of movies this weekend, most notable The Corporation, Hotel Rwanda, Alone in the Dark and a Howard Zinn documentary. I’ll elaborate on this more tomorrow but I will say that if you haven’t seen The Corporation you really should do so. But, for now, I’m going to watch The Big Lebowski. Cheers.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day concerning movies and American culture (or lack there of if you will). We were talking about how American mainstream movie makers, i.e.: Hollywood, don’t take chances anymore in their film making. They don’t develope characters that one cares about. For most movies you are apathetic as to whether the characters live or die. If they’re successful or not. It’s become such that it’s more like you’re watching someone else play a video game - be it Doom or the SIMS. I watched this flick tonight, Alone In the Dark, starring Christian Slater. Now say what you want, I know, I know, it has Christian Slater in it. But, moving past that, this was a movie that really could be interpreted in no other way than it was made for a video game playing audience. Many movies are made this way today, especially action movies. It starts off by giving you all this back history and shit that doesn’t really matter because ten minutes into the movie you’re watching some wack-o leap off the roof of a building and karate-chop someone in the back. They go through some cheesy Matrix-type moves (why does everyone know karate/martial arts in movies now-a-days?) and bam!, you’re off to the races. Granted it’s a race that you’re not sure who’s who, why their racing and who’s even winning. Give it another 30 minutes and you won’t care who’s winning. There’s really horrible montages with heavy metal music, a thrown in sex scene and lots of bad acting. I can tolerate bad acting if the movie’s story is good or if the concept was good but just not really carried through. But it’s the movie audience as well that has to be examined. Why do people want to see movies like this? Have we become so detatched in our messed-up, sterile, lonely lives that we don’t want to have to care? Don’t want to have in invest in someone else? What ever the case may be, it’s a pretty sad place to be in. This topic came up after I told my friend that I had gone to see Cindarella Man. He asked me what I thought of it since he was holding off seeing it since Ron Howard had directed it. I said that it was formulaic and boring but I was entertained by the fight scenes. I was thinking on how boring and formulaic it was when I was at the grocery store today and saw some magazine (People, GQ, Esquire, some shit…) and there was Russell Crowe and Renée Zellweger. The cover said, “Could be the feel-good hit of the summer.”. Was that it? Man, I felt really duped somehow. Knowing that that’s what the studio execs were after I really do regret seeing that movie now. I’ll make up for this by watching Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai again.

Here’s an interesting article I had seen before. It’s a commentary of Pat Metheny on Kenny G. I first came across it when I used to DJ at WEMU 89.1. It seems that Pat doesn’t really care too much for old Kenny G. But, hey, don’t take my word for it. Read on.

Really, Pat. Why don’t you tell us what you really think about Kenny G. Read more this entry »

I have just been livin’ lately. Not up to a whole lot. Met Leah and had lunch with her today. Talked to Ginger today. I think I’m going to shoot her; put her in the new book. She’s great. She’s got two different colored eyes! Pretty wild. She reminds me of my cousin Karen for some reason. So yeah, I walked over to the Weary today. Before that, I met with the Tech College to discuss implementation of Dreamweaver as their standard WYSIWYG HTML editor. It kinda sucks, really, since Dreamweaver MX has very poor support for CSS. This poor support results in the user not seeing the site in the preview mode correctly. Instead, the page is broken and it’s difficult to see where one can add new content. I don’t know what we’re going to do to fix this issue but an issue it’ll be.

I got all hot and bothered walking from the Weary to the movie theatre thinking I was going to be able to see Batman Begins only to find out that the movie doesn’t start for another week. They posted the wrong times in the newspaper. That’s a long way to walk in this humid weather.

I think I’m just gonna be on chill mode tonight unless Leah calls and we hang. Maybe do some reading and what not. Oh, by the way, yes, I have added a comment feature to the blog now. So feel free to leave your comments and stuff. Ciao.

As you can read in an article in The Guardian it appears that there were two Japanese soldiers found in an island in the Pacific, hiding out in the jungle, thinking they were still at war. These men are in their 80’s. Check out the article in The Guardian.

Okay, so this is like the most amazing thing ever. Appearantly, I am the most famous person in the world. No, really. No, really. Fine, see for you self.