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  ne of the things I'm enjoying about pulling loads for the 48-states general account is that there is much more variety in the places I go and, probably even more interesting, the types of places that I go. Before, I loaded at the same 4 or 5 plants and then took them to the same sorts of places: moving and storage warehouses, lumber yards, and a mixture of home improvement superstores and mom n' pop retailers. This was what I did for the first three years as a truck driver, which was comforting as a rookie driver to have a routine which varied little, but eventually it became monotonous. Just one of the plethora of reasons why trying something new was appealing to me.
I've been thinking that with all of these neat places I'm getting to see, it'd be fun to start documenting them photographically. These won't be large collections, just a few pictures when and where I'm allowed to be (or can get away with) taking them. Logistically speaking, I've created a miscellaneous album in my photo gallery which will have additional sub-albums of these various facilities rather than their own top-level albums. For the purposes of LiveJournal, I intend to share a photo or two in the text of my daily/weekly entries just for the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing something you might not see every day, with a minimum of fanfare and words. The picture will also serve as a link to the sub-album in question if you care to click-through and see the rest of the photos.
Today for instance, Joe and I made a delivery to a Freightliner Chassis manufacturing plant in Gaffney, South Carolina. The lot was filled with the skeletons of what would eventually become trucks. There were guys driving some of them around, which was really surreal.
Speaking of Joe, I managed to capture him in a photo, too.
 ovies
 Secret Agent (1936)
Featuring a cast which boasts John Geilgud, Robert Young and Peter Lorre, Hitchcock weaves a love story into a tale of international intrigue. Not as visually masterful as some of his other films but oodles more engaging than a similar Hitchcock film made just two years prior (The Man Who Knew Too Much, also featuring Lorre). Young and Geilgud's performances are on the spot, but it's Lorre who steals the show as he usually does. Presented only as The General, a spy of questionable loyalties and an even more dubious ethnicity, Lorre speaks hilariously broken English while traipsing about with a curly perm, moustache, and hoop earring. Secret Agent is not a great enough of a film that you'll remember a lot about it for very long after watching it, but you'll never forget Lorre's performance in it: outstanding.
Kid Dynamite (1943)
Set in Brooklyn during the war era, it is the story of Mugs, a street ruffian and leader of his gang of neighborhood friends. He spends his days trying to one-up his rivals and friends in pool halls, boxing rings, and while jitterbugging on the dance floor while commiting petty crimes to make a living. When his friend costs him the loss of a pool game, a boxing match, and a dance contest and then proposes to his sister, things get out of hand until his sister's fiance joins the ultimate gang, The United States Army. Now untouchable and garnering the sort of respect Mugs has always sought to obtain, he is forced to evaluate his moral choices in life. It's not a horrible film and is often very funny. The over-the-top Brooklyn accents are typical (think Bugs Bunny: girl=goil, turn=toin, etc) of the era as are the social values depicted. The preachy nature of the film about what it means to "be an American" and having a sense of "duty" is a little overbearing at times, but all in all it's an entertaining film from start to finish.
Africa Screams (1949)
Posing as seasoned expeditioners, Abbott and Costello con their way into a safari, which has a nefarious ulterior motive involving diamonds. The film is full of typical plot devices involving humans disguised as animals resulting in a comedic mistaken identity, alligator infested rivers, and of course, cannibals. This is probably the first Abbot and Costello movie I've ever seen in its entirety and I seldom stopped laughing. I look forward to seeing many more.
The Truman Show (1998)
By now everyone knows the premise of this film whether they've seen it or not. Jim Carrey is Truman, a man whose entire life has been televised without his knowledge or consent for the viewing pleasure of millions. His entire life (home, work, marriage, etc) is fabricated and he's the only one who doesn't know it. Slowly he begins to unravel the secret and put the pieces together to discover the truth. It is well written, well acted, cleverly shot, and has great production design making it very entertaining and fun to watch. Yet, I couldn't help feeling that the film tried to tackle too many transcendent themes rather than try to stick with one and go for it good and hard. There were themes about the nature of entertainment, the power of television, man's purpose, the nature of love, God complexes, and on and on and on. In doing so, the film loses an opportunity to impart a moral/caution, or at the very least, to leave the viewer with a powerful question in their minds about how they feel about any of these themes. They weakened the potency of any one of these by watering it down with mini-themes about all of them.
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004)
Stupid. Funny. Stupid Funny. If you like SpongeBob, you'll love this movie. If you're not a fan of SpongeBob, you won't be converted.
 Death Tunnel (2005)
This is probably one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and I've seen a lot of bad movies. I mean, we're talking top ten, maybe top five bad movies. It's SO BAD that I recommend seeing it just to see what a REALLY BAD MOVIE looks like. The star of this film is its set, shot entirely on location at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky (a place I'm hoping to visit this year incidentally). To be fair, the directors of this film didn't set-out to make a feature-length horror film, they were there initially to shoot a documentary called Spooked: The Ghosts of Waverly Hills Sanatorium which, to their credit, has been well received. Unfortunately Netflix doesn't carry the film so I guess I'll be reduced to buying it sometime in the near future. Aaaaaanyway, where did this movie go wrong? It has all the markings of what could be quite a fun genre film. First of all, great location. Secondly, it has a tried and true premise: buxom college coeds dared to spend the night in a haunted place for some boneheaded initiation prank... in their lingerie. Genius! Even the photography and editing is above par, in that hip, fast-motion style that is all the rage in modern horror. Considering it was made on a budget of only 2 million dollars, it's an impressive feat. Five girls, Five floors, Five hours. That's the dare. Oh yeah, and the girls are named Devon, Elizabeth, Ashley, Tori and Heather. DEATH! Get it? So what's wrong? The narrative is what's wrong. There is no character development, the story is confusing and dumb, and the ending makes absolutely no sense. In case you're wondering, the film's title refers to a feature of the hospital. Alternately, referred to as the scariest and most haunted place on earth, the Waverly Hills Sanatorium was the site of over 63,000 deaths from tuberculosis in the early 20th century. The tunnel is a 500 foot subterranean passageway which was used to remove the bodies from the premises clandestinely so it wouldn't be a constant source of depression for the hospital's patients. That said, yeah I recommend seeing it, just to see how awful a movie can be.
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  for one think that the Shirelles were asking "Can I believe the magic of your size?" in "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?".
I became a "Lost" dork a couple of weeks ago when I was inadvertently exposed to the first season pilot by a friend. This resulted in my renting the entire first season and becoming engrossed. I typically am not a huge fan of supernatural entertainment unless there is double-penetration involved. "Lost" is not so much episodic television as it is one REALLY long movie which obviously required a lot of fore-thought in the writing process to weave the various story lines together. Even the way it is shot is more reminiscent of cinema than television. Hopefully its creators will take the story where ever I'm sure they've already planned and end it. If they begin adding bullshit things to extend the life of the show, it'll jump the shark for sure.
After all the hype about "Arrested Development" on my f-list for the past couple of years, I decided to rent the first two seasons of it as well. Definitely a funny show and certainly one of the quirkier things to come down the pike in a while. For you fans hoping that Showtime will pick this show up, I think this is the worst thing that could happen. A good deal of what's great about AD is what they get away with on broadcast television. It's funny because they have to bleep the language, use double entendres, and blur the nudity. Most of the humor is generated from the creative writing necessary to circumvent the censors and at the same time allow you to complete the joke or visual image in your own head. I think being on a pay/subscription channel will kill that.
Robert and I are kicking ass and taking names with concern to miles. We've been driving virtually non-stop for the past 36 hours. I've got the night-shifts right now as he's still on curfew and cannot drive between midnight and 6am, which is fine with me. I kinda like the peacefulness of the road at night.
Shadow Of a Doubt - (1943)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Joseph Cotton, Teresa Wright
Script: Thornton Wilder
When I declared my intent a couple of months ago to eventually see all of Hitchcock's films, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dxgrrrl told me that this film was her favorite, so I moved it to the top of my list. By all accounts, it appears that this was Hitch's favorite film, too. Set and shot on-location in Santa Rosa, California it was Hitchcock's first American film, literally and figuratively. Hitchcock utilizes what was then idyllic, small-town America (decades before the likes of democritus and psycat90, dxgrrrl's brother in-law and sister respectively, would arrive and debase it) as much of a character as any of the human ones; innocence lost with the insertion of an evil element as a long lost and mysterious uncle returns home. By this time in his career, Hitchcock's use of lighting (particularly shadows in this film) and his amazing eye for framing shots within a set were at the point of mastery.  Every scene exhibits an enormous and meticulous attention to photographic detail. Consider in the sequence of photos from the film to the right, as the family goes to meet the uncle as he comes into town by train. You first see the train in the distance, its ominous black smoke filling the sky as it nears. The little boy lags behind the rest of the family to watch the train to pull in the station and is engulfed by the shadow it brings with it. In some of the more complicated and longer shots, it creates a conflict of interest with the movie's contract with the audience and the suspension of disbelief, but the effect is so striking that you don't mind it and the characters/story is so engaging that you're easily sucked back into it. While it didn't go so far as to change my mind about Rear Window being my favorite Hitchcock film, it is definitely an achievement that shouldn't be missed.
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t's become apparent to me that I will not be able to keep reviewing DVD's in such detail at the pace in which I watch them. So beginning with this installment, things may appear with a small write-up, or only a few words and thoughts. It's been a couple of weeks since I wrote one of these, so bear with me as I try to recall everything I've watched.
 Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003)
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe, Ruben Blades, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, Mickey Rourke, Enrique Iglesias
Of note: score composed by Robert Rodriguez
Rodriguez returns a decade later to update his tale of the gun toting mariachi and makes it a trilogy. In a big nod to Sergio Leone's trilogy-finish The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Blades, Depp, and Dafoe respectively), Rodriguez creates a sprawling and epic film with some abolutely gorgeous photography. The film suffers as a result. The various subplots don't entertwine as nicely as Rodriguez intended and the entire storyline becomes a victim of its own attempted complexity. Technically, it's a stunning achievement. It was one of the first feature films shot entirely on high-definition digital video, and while no one talks about the actual price-tag of this film as they did with his previous two efforts, his cost-cutting methodology is readily apparent in the DVD bonus featurettes and commentary. True to form, the entire movie was shot in a frenzied 7 weeks on location in Mexico and the star-studded supporting cast worked on a per diem basis. For instance Depp was only on-set for 8 days. If you like films with an eye for the actual photography, this film is the best of the bunch. Note to self: Rent Leone's Dollars trilogy, it's been far too long since you've seen Fistfull of Dollars and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and you're really not sure if you've seen A Few Dollars More.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)
Director: Doug Limon
Cast: Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Vince Vaughn
I love Vince Vaughn. Not that I had high hopes for this movie, but sadly he is the only redeeming thing in it. It's still not worth the monumental waste of two hours spent watching this turd.
The Fog (2005)
Director: Rupert Wainwright
Cast: mostly nobodies except for maybe Selma Blair
Of note: score composed by Graeme Revell, remake of John Carpenter's 1980 film of the same name
You know a movie is bad when you find yourself yelling at the screen, "Dumb!" at various points.
 The Cave (2005)
Director: Bruce Hunt
Cast: nobody worth mentioning except maybe the lovely Piper Perabo
Considerably more compelling than The Fog. I was surprised to learn in the bonus features that most of the underwater cave shots were filmed on-location and not a Hollywood studio. Interesting in that respect, otherwise, fairly run-of-the-mill. I became particularly interested when Piper Perabo changed into those shorts. There were lots of gratuitous shots from below while she scaled a rock wall. This movie was better when it was in outer space and called Alien.
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
Director: Roger Corman
Cast: no one of note except a bit part by Jack Nicholson
I had seen the musical remake from the 80's but never the original. I was surprised by how darkly funny and engaging this movie was. Definitely worth your time and effort to see. I found it packaged as a double feature with another Corman/Nicholson combination called Velocity which I've yet to watch.
Mr. Deeds (2002)
Director: Steven Brill
Cast: Adam Sandler, Winona Ryder, Peter Gallagher, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro
A remake of a 1936 Frank Capra film starring Gary Cooper. Typical Sandler plot-line about a nice, sensitive guy in way over his head but comes out smelling like a rose because he's such a "good guy". Lacks a lot of the passive-aggressive anger (Big Daddy, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, etc) which a lot of his roles usually display, which is refreshing. Not great and mildly funny, kinda like Sandler.
 The Farmer's Wife (1928)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
An early silent comedy by the man who would become synonymous with suspense. Hitchcock displayed his gifts as a director early. Unlike many films of the era, which largely had static shots, Hitchcock employs a variety of panned scenes. Not only from left to right, but vertically and diagonally. Most interesting is one scene where the camera very obviously moves, following someone around a room suggesting it was hand-held, which must've been quite a feat in those days. The story, while trite, is highly entertaining as a recent widower sets about looking for a new wife.
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 fter working my way through the last round of DVD's, I found myself needing some more entertainment. I haven't been able to get home and get my newly increased Netflix movies, yet I can't very well be spending $50+ per week on movies. But I needed something. Then I discovered Vina Distributor. They make region free, super-budget DVD's of old films and TV shows. They have no special features, no subtitles, no language dubs, and questionable practices with concern to the printing of the case jacket.
But they're cheap. We're talking $3.33 cheap.
I figure, if nothing else, I can probably turn them in a pawn shop for a buck if I decide not keep them. I sat in the floor of the Flying J truckstop and rifled through the cases, looking for the gems among the utter crap. Here's what I got, along with some notes and mini-reviews.
 College (1927)
Buster Keaton plays Ronald, a brainy momma's boy who pursues collegiate athletics to impress a girl. Hilarity and hijinks insue. Made the same year as The General, but nowhere near as ambitious or engaging as that film. Still very entertaining and funny. Keaton's black-face scene, posing as a "colored" waiter might be offensive to some. Recommendation: only for fans of Keaton and silent comedies.
 The Lady Vanishes (1938)
I'm certainly no authority on Hitchcock, in fact my experience with his films is limited to Psycho, Rear Window, The Birds and Vertigo. I am interested in becoming one, however: I have all of his films lined up in my Netflix queue for me to devour at some point in time. So, I wasn't sure what to expect from this, one of his earlier films. I have to admit, I was mildly surprised. It's a good old-fashioned train mystery with some Hitchcock twists, turns, and humor along the way. Recommendation: far from a must-see, but highly entertaining.
 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
The case claims "Alfred Hitchcock at his very best." It lies. Not that I was expecting anything along the lines of Rear Window or Psycho, but after having been impressed with The Lady Vanishes I had some hopes. It's not suspenseful at all and rather boring. It's only redeeming value are the scenes with Peter Lorre who is just too deliciously creepy for words. This is not to be confused with Hithcock's remake of this movie in 1956, with Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart. Recommendation: only for Hitchcock completists and Peter Lorre fans.
 The Terror (1963)
Roger Corman is one of the film industry's most prolific producer-slash-directors, having made over 200 "B" genre films spanning a 50 year career. On the case of this title, it states that this film was directed by "Roger Corman and Francis Ford Coppola" which is blatantly wrong; Coppola was an associate producer according to the film credits, which basically means he had some money in it and nothing else. Among Corman's many achievements and gifts, he is often credited with having introduced the film world to a young actor named Jack Nicholson, who he utilized as a patient of the sadistic dentist in his production of Little Shop of Horrors. Corman gives Nicholson considerably more screen time with a lead role in this film, as a lieutenant in Napoleon's army who has been seperated from his company and stumbles upon a mysterious castle inhabited by Baron Von Leppe, portrayed by an aging Boris Karloff. The editing is rough, the acting is over-the-top melodrama, the dialogue is dodgy, the score is overbearing, and there are ample historical blunders (Nicholson is packing a revolver for most of the film). And yet, overall, the movie is 100% compelling and entertaining with a surprise plot twist that you don't see coming. Recommendation: a must for B-movie buffs.
 The Outlaw (1943)
After seeing The Aviator a few weeks ago, it was only fitting to find this sitting on the shelf for me to uncover. This controversial film was shelved for six years because director Howard Hughes refused to backdown from Hollywood censors who insisted that he cut certain scenes which showed just a little too much of Jane Russell's ample cleavage. Of course, by today's standards these depictions are extremely tame and this film wouldn't receive anything more than a PG rating, but at the time it caused quite a stir. Prurient boob gawking aside, the film doesn't offer much else. Everything about it is cliche, from the one-dimensional American cinema western characters who treat women like horses and vice-versa to a score which literally employs the "wah wah wah waaaah" sound when someone tells a bad joke on screen. Recomendation: of interest only to film buffs for its historical importance pushing the envelope of "decency" in film and for being Jane Russell's cinematic debut.
There's only one more film I haven't gotten to yet, Corrupt Lieutenant starring Harvey Keitel and John Lydon (of Sex Pistols/Public Image Ltd. fame). There are also two discs which aren't films: one is a collection of episodes from The Jack Benny Show and the other is a collection of scenes and sketches from Stuart Shapiro, known for his work on the television show "Night Flight" back inthe 80's and the cult-film Mondo New York.
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