So, I have another great recipe for you which comes from Portland-based blogger and awesome daughter, Ashley MacQuarrie. When my children were small, they frequently were told that “chocolate is not a breakfast food” in response to their requests for chocolatey cereals from the grocery store. I’m so glad Ashley found a way to make chocolate a reasonable choice for breakfast, or any meal, and this series would be incomplete without it.
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Last week we took a look at eight forgotten movies that we like and wanted to share with you. This week we have eight more.
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I’ve always had a taste for obscure and idiosyncratic movies. A long time ago there was a video store in Pasadena that was unlike any I’d ever seen before. Videodeon specialized in films for movie lovers. They had a large art film section, an even larger foreign film section, a healthy collection of little indie films, and a bunch of “drive-in classics.” As might be expected, the store only lasted a few years, but while it was there, we found ourselves exposed to a lot of interesting films, many of which don’t involve CGI monsters blowing things up. Here are a few of our favorite films you may not have seen or may have forgotten about.
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Afternoon Tea at the The Langham Hotel, Pasadena is like stepping through a glorious doorway to another time and continent. Relax in the beautiful surroundings overlooking the gardens while you savor a wonderful array of tea sandwiches, scones with Devonshire cream, tarts, luscious fruit, and delicate French macarons as you sip from the elegant Wedgwood …
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I should make it clear from the beginning that the way we do this isn’t the way real bookscouts do it.
The real ones—the ones who do it for a living—play hardball. For them it’s business. They have a set route of places they go to check for books, they’ve got client lists and handheld barcode scanners and a budget. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Professional bookscouts still love books—no one goes into the book business that doesn’t love books, the margins are too low. But it’s a business for the working bookscouts, they have bills to pay. For me and my wife, it’s just a hobby.
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I recently saw the new Disney film Tomorrowland (my review will be at GeekDad.com on Friday morning), and it got me to thinking about some of the themes that underlie the film. (Don’t worry, no spoilers here; I’m just talking about philosophy and the zeitgeist, not the movie.)
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Avengers: Age of Ultron is a solid and well-crafted film in which writer/director Joss Whedon displays a deft hand at juggling a huge cast of characters and alternating between quiet character moments and big loud explodey action sequences. Lots of big loud explodey action sequences across three continents.
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Since I’m going to visit Skywalker Ranch next week, the fine folks at Lucasfilm are giving me and the others on the trip some special previews and features before the general public sees them; in fact, the general public won’t see them until we bloggers do our part and share them. So here we go, a little snippet from Strange Magic.
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Once again I’m jetting off to the San Francisco Bay area for another sneak preview of some upcoming films, courtesy of the fine folks at Disney. On Monday, January 12, I and another couple dozen bloggers will pay a visit to the legendary Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas’ magic factory where Han Solo and Howard the …
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Last Saturday, to celebrate my birthday, Terri got us tickets to see Wayne Brady in Kiss Me, Kate at the Pasadena Playhouse. I expected Brady to be very good in the role of egotistical actor-director-producer Fred Graham, but what I didn’t expect was how good everyone else in the cast would be, nor how effectively Director Sheldon Epps would reinvent Cole Porter’s classic backstage musical about a theater company staging a production of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.
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