Kasey Mohammad lists top movies as well as other movie lists, starting here and moving on. movies are a funny artform. much more deconstructed than poetry. that is, you don't often get people pushing the metaphysical virtues of Ogden Nash's work, but it's different for movies. are Plan 9 from Outer Space or Wizard of Oz hokum or what? the answer is that the borders aren't clear at all. there are far fewer guilty pleasures in poetry. I like Whitman seriously, yet some of his expansiveness is just ludicrous. yet I 'buy' it: that would be an example of a poetic guilty pleasure. I suppose you can count limericks and clerihus or whatever as potential guilty pleasures, but that's more quirky than anything. whereas everyone has choices for guilty pleasure movies. I call Monty Python and the Holy Grail my favourite because it doesn't seem to wear out. the coconut carrying swallow debate, the sight of the knights a-horse, etc: these have yet to get old for me. I don't keep up with movies at all now, tho I try to think about what few I see. I like reading Kasey's takes because there seems to be a virtue to all movies. I suppose because movies are so culturally motivated that they cannot help reflecting something essential about 'us'. whereas poetry most times is pretty insular and personal, so that the cultural mirror is less intense.

funny that we go to the mall for Indian food. it is cheap and potentially quicker than the nearby restaurants. unless you wander... green is the new green this spring. entering the mall via Sears, and their Lands End display shoots green to the eye. Mall was pretty quiet e'en tho there were collections of networking teens that had likely been there all day. brilliant marketing minds aced out a way to quiet the foodcourt. the area under the central dome of the place, which used to be wide open and perfect for small children to run around in, now had a "snack center". this was a gathering of whatchacall gumball machines. coin in the slot, turn the handle, and receive a handful of savoury candy or refreshing gum. or just some shit. it's a glitzy set up yet seems like why bother. television screens appeared in the Food Court and thru out the mall around Christmas time. you cannot hear them, as Erin pointed out, so what do you get? flashing images of product and apparent promo for movies and CBS shows. yes, I did catch that CBS had somehow tied up this marketing advantage. at one of the Food Court choice there's a tv screen on which is shown demonstration of their baked goods being made. I could watch for hours. we stopped, again, at the Coach store. I saw a young teenage girl purchasing something. later I heard her father asking, are you happy with your purchase? and she obviously was. nothing comes cheap there, and as I continue to feel, the goods seem for older patrons. that is, according to my peccable sense of fashion flux. which is to say, Coach is doing something right: that got willing customers. their stock is bubbling, if you want to know. we learned that Coach changes its array of merchandise every 4-6 weeks. visit often. Macy's can hold onto items longer than the Coach store itself. I brought home a catalogue, which brims with crisp pictures of handbags and a grimly sultry model. Coach makes collars for your dog, not mine, if you're interested. they also make shoes, for which I have zero aesthetic. I just want to wear running shoes, and not even the fancy hi-tech ones. I will say I'm not keen on wedgies, if that's what they're called. walking on a wedge of wood... nah... Williams Sonoma, a foodie heaven, loads up on all the special cookware that you need. I liked the set of small square plates with green chopsticks and these ceramic snow peas to rest your chopsticks on. also a stainless steel fortune cookie that opens up so that you can put a cookie, or maybe just a fortune, inside. or how about serving bowls in the shape of those white cartons for takeout Chinese food. especially nifty was the air fresheners, hand cremes and dish soaps made from exotic essential oils. wasabi and green tea, ginger, meyers lemon, French (none of your English) lavender, ginger almond, pink grapefruit. neato. we used to visit a candle store, not Yankee Candle with its awful artificial smell, but ones made from much purer ingredients. I could sniff those for hours. the olfactory sense evokes images and feelings so readily. I should tell Marcel Proust about that. Crate and Barrel had lots of fresh looking geegaws. lots of green, as I noted earlier in Sears. while we were there, Erin came in to borrow Beth's phone because he was mid-conversation with a friend when his phone's battery hit E. large, oddly grim photographic portraits of Jack Nicholson, Angelina Jolie and Christopher Walken were displayed in the mall, adverting something or other. Nicholson's looked like a mug shot, Walken looked crazy and Jolie looked stressed. and so forth. we bought nothing, but we sure wish the economy well.

this is a perfectly silly picture, and it starts with how cats cannot, in all their wisdom, BE silly. this cat rules the entire cat structure thing, all of it, the full universe of that cat structure thing. okay, I admit I am infinitely amused by cats and dogs being cats and dogs, and how we don't differ so super much.

DSCN5889, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.

we watched Little Miss Sunshine yestreen. I had it in my head that it was an Oscar nominee, which I find that it is, yet couldn't/can't grasp how that could be. it was a cute picture, but not noteworthy. not that I harbour any respect for the Oscars as a sign of quality, but still. a tried and true collection of quirky characters that eventually get along by movie's end. let's see, heroin addict grandpa, suicidal Proust scholar, vow of silence son. mom and dad are just a bit tense and dysfunctional. patented road trip, to get the daughter to a Little Miss Sunshine contest. grandpa dies en route and rather than stay and fill out paperwork, thereby missing the contest, they steal the body. it worked comedically but jinkies, I expect that sort of plot development from the 3 Stooges. a leedle unbelieveable. the contest itself is one of those beauty contests for pedophiles, which is disturbing. our heroine is not cut from the same cloth, being a little chubby, and not glitzed up like her competition. her routine is an antic dance rendering of Super Freak, which outrages the judges, tho I don't know why. to support her, her family jump on stage and join her. sort of funny but too much a script writer's idea, and not the present scriptwriter but whoever millennia ago who 1st came up with it. the movie didn't resolve all issues, which is a good thing. I think putting these characters together in a less crucial plot would be more endearing. the movie wants them all to stand up as moral tropes or what not. which just sputters.