This is my 500th post. Shazaam.

I went to see Public Enemies today. It was pretty good. Johnny Depp handed in a surprisingly restrained performance -- he was subtle and charming and vicious. Christian Bale had a pretty boring character. Not a lot to do but look determined, though in the scene between him and Dillinger's girlfriend, he was sweet. But still determined.


It was nice to see David Wenham in a big movie again. He didn't have as big a role as he did in Australia, but it was a fair-sized one. And Rory Cochrane had a nice role too -- I really only know him from the FBI mini-series The Company, and maybe they decided he looked good in a fedora in that and decided to put him in this, dunno.

Anyway, the storyline was pretty much your standard Movie About Bankrobbers. No huge surprises, good or bad. The dialog was good, sometimes really good, but never fabulous. The sets were great, the costumes rocked, and the music was okay.

But the cinematography? Ugh. Almost entirely handi-cam stuff, very rarely a moment where everything stayed still. And um... the last third or so was shot really oddly. When they got to the shoot-out at the little cabins in the WI woods, all of a sudden, it looked and felt like a teenage movie shot for YouTube. The cameras got extra-shuddery, the lighting went weird and sort of flat, and there was no music or any sort of non-diegetic-sound at all. The picture got grainier, and the whole thing felt very amatuer. It got a little more normal after that sequence, but not entirely. I'm assuming it was supposed to emphasize the way John Dillinger's world was slipping out of his control, but to me it was very off-putting.

So... if you love Johnny Depp, it's worth seeing just for him. But otherwise, I'm not so sure. And I'm afraid it gets three Warheads.

But one cool thing about this movie, for me: I visited a place where part of it was filmed before it came out! That's a first for me. I've been to filming sites for The Fugitive and The Patriot and lots of western stuff like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, but those visits were all long after the fact. But last summer, when I went to visit ED in Oshkosh, they'd just finished filming parts of Public Enemies there a few weeks earlier. She took me around to where some of the exteriors and interiors were done, and in one building, part of a bank interior set for a hold-up scene was still up. I snapped a couple pics:













I think they're from the first hold-up in the movie, but I'm not sure. Coulda been the last one. Not a lot of the set left, as you can see.

Farewell, Karl Malden :-(

From Where the Sidewalk Ends to On the Waterfront, from Pollyanna to The Birdman of Alcatraz, you have never failed to delight and entertain me. From General Omar Bradley in Patton to Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire, you played unlikeable characters likeably, and made merely likeable characters endearing.

I miss you.

Six policemen wearing kilts walked into a Dunkin' Donuts.

Nope, not a joke in need of a punch line (though it could be one). That actually happened while Dano and I were at DD yesterday. Six policemen, all wearing kilts. I didn't muster up the courage to ask them if that's how policemen around here normally dress (and since I usually see them sitting in their police cars, it's possible, I suppose), or if there was a special occasion. They were way too jolly to have just come from being an honor guard at a funeral or something, and I'm pretty sure there was no early 4th of July parade going on.

I have outsmarted a pair of mourning doves. Yay me.

Last summer, we had hanging pots of flowers on the porch that opens off our bedroom. I overestimated how much sun would hit them, and they didn't do very well. After they all died, I just left the pots there because I wanted to use them again this year, but had nowhere else to store them. This spring, a couple of mourning dove decided one of the pots would be a great place to build a nest and hatch a pair of offspring. We thought this was adorable, and Dano enjoyed looking at the birds out our window every morning, especially after the babies hatched. We didn't mind them being there, because it was too cold out for us to plant flowers in the pots anyway.

So the baby doves hatched and grew and flew away with their parents. Yay!

A few days later, the mommy and daddy birds were back. Before we managed to put any flowers in those pots, they laid another pair of eggs. We sighed. We rolled our eyes. We resigned ourselves to another month of not being able to use our porch, for fear of disturbing them. Eventually, I planted impatiens and begonias in the four pots they weren't nesting in, and reserved enough flowers for "their" pot so I could plant them as soon as they vacated.

(We actually don't know that this is the same pair, but they seemed very focused on using the same pot again, so we assume they are. But according to Wikipedia, mourning doves can hatch up to 6 clutches of eggs a year.)

All went well -- both babies hatched, ate a great deal of regurgitated whatever, and eventually flew away. After we saw no birds for 24 hours, we assumed they'd moved on, and I planted the reserved flowers in the hanging pot.

Yesterday morning, they were back. Trying to nest in that pot again. Smooshing down my flowers. Cowboy went out and shooed them away several times while he was getting dressed, and left me to defend the fort when he went to work. I spent two hours running out onto the porch every five minutes or so to clap my hands and yell and wave plastic bags to scare away the birds. They kept coming back. And they began to build another nest. I threw away the twigs they brought, and they just came back with more.

I thought about making a scarecrow. I considered wrapping all the plants in plastic wrap until they got bored and left. I thought about playing loud music on the porch.

And then I realized there was a very simple solution: no hanging flower pots, no nesting spot. I brought in the pots and put them in the pantry, which has lots of light, as well as a baby gate that keeps a certain little mister out.

The birds were extremely confused. They spent several hours perching on the porch railing, craning their necks around to look for the missing flower pots. Periodically, one or the other would fly up a couple feet, to where the pots formerly had been, and flutter around. Maybe they thought the pots had just turned invisible or something. At any rate, by noon, they gave up. We haven't seen them since.

So yes, yours truly has outwitted a couple of bird brains. Aren't you proud of me?

I watched The Crimson Pirate (1952) last week, and all I have to say is, I haven't had that much fun watching a pirate movie since the first Pirates of the Caribbean film! I'm not saying I loved this the way I love Curse of the Black Pearl or anything, but it was a resoundingly enjoyable film.

Okay, okay, a lot of that is due to the fact that Burt Lancaster spent most of his time looking like this. Though this picture doesn't do his manly biceps and triceps justice, I'm afraid. He also spent a remarkable amount of time swinging through the air while brandishing a cutlass. They definitely put his circus acrobat training to good use, that's for sure. I've never seen someone climb up and slide down so many ropes in one movie. Also, he got to dress in drag, and he makes a remarkably attractive woman. No, I'm kidding -- he makes an extremely ugly woman and no one in their right mind would ever be fooled by him in a skirt and blonde curls for a second. Which made it even funnier.

I can't actually tell you what the plot was about, as I'm a bit fuzzy on it myself. Something about stealing guns and pretending to sell them to some rebels, and then double-crossing the rebels by telling the British officials where to find the rebels, except then they decided not to do the double-cross part, except then they decided to do it after all, except... somewhere in there, I got lost. And I didn't care. The plot was entirely beside The Point, which was that Pirates Have Fun! Lots and lots of fun. They sail around and swing on ropes and taunt soldiers and walk around on the bottom of the ocean with a boat over their heads and kiss women and never, ever, ever stop smiling. Especially not Mr. Muscles And Teeth, who was having the most fun of all.

So much to blog about, so little time! But Cowboy and Dano are "reading" a National Geographic together (Cowboy explains the pictures to Dano, who points to things and asks, "What's that?"), so I'll take these few minutes to get caught up.

A guy we knew in college, Steve Corona, has a small part in an episode of In Plain Sight on USA tonight at 10 EST. We don't get any TV channels, but I'm going to watch it on imdb.com tomorrow. Check it out if you can! I'm very excited to know someone in the movie biz.

I went to see Wolverine again today. Mmmmm. Definitely loved it again. So much, that I drove to Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target looking for the soundtrack. I remember when you could buy movie soundtracks at such stores, not so many years ago. Now they just have Hannah Montana and movies I've never heard of. So I ordered it online at deepdiscount.com. I think it will be good writing music. Of course, I'm gearing up to finish my 4th novel, Salem, and this would be better music for writing actiony stuff like Combat! fanfic, but I'll be writing more of that eventually. And I haven't gotten a CD in a long time.

My Huggermugger store is starting to take off -- I've had a whole bunch of sales in the past month, as well as some trades. I've got some cool new items, so stop by and check those out!

Let's see, what else? I got a Burt Lancaster movie out of the library again this week, so I'll no doubt be discussing that later this week. I also got a couple new books out, including Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs -- it's the first of the books that spawned the TV show Bones :-D I'll probably blog about that either here or on my writing blog once I've read it. Speaking of which, I need to go review a book over there, and I think I'll get a start on that now. Have a good week!

I'm starting to like Burt Lancaster. A lot.

That makes sense, you say. He's got massive shoulders. He's an Old Hollywood movie star, and Hamlette loves old movies. He made westerns and war movies, and Hamlette loves those kinds of movies. He's got a boyish charm, a quick grin, and a smooooth voice. Of course Hamlette likes him.

But for most of my 29 years, I haven't liked him. I haven't hated him -- I haven't avoided his movies, or at least not often. I just thought he was boring. Vanilla. White bread. Bland and uninteresting. Granted, I'd only seen him in a couple movies, like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and From Here to Eternity, but he was pretty dull in them, so I didn't bother looking for more.

Then DKoren told me last year that one of her all-time favorite movies is The Professionals, which stars Lancaster and Lee Marvin and is a fun western romp. A few months later, I was at my parents' house and discovered that my dad had two copies of The Professionals. Sometimes that happens to him, because he can't always remember if he has a movie or not. When Johnnycake and I were home, he'd always ask us before buying a new movie, and we could tell him if he had it or not. But now we're gone, so sometimes he finds a movie he thinks looks good, buys it, and then I come to visit and discover he's got two copies of it. Anyway, Dad gave me one of his copies, and I watched it sometime during the winter.

And Burt Lancaster wasn't boring in it! He was sarcastic and sly and sexy, with a twinkle in his eye and a trick up his sleeve.

So I decided maybe I'd have to give him a second chance. But, my life being what it is, I didn't get around to watching one of his movies until this week. I saw Birdman of Alcatraz. And I loved it. And I loved Burt Lancaster. He was subtle, he was angry, he was loud, he was quiet, he was just plain cool. And did I mention he has the broadest pair of shoulders I've seen on a man since, oh, David Boreanaz?