With every DVD having audio commentary ranging from the insightful to the inane, other forms of media have started latching on to this concept. I've watched a few movies on television with the director talking over the dialogue. Any clip show on VH-1 seems to be based on this as well (and the fact that D-list stars need money too). What's next? Audio commentary on music videos?

Yep. And it's actually a fairly interesting use of audio commentary. Here is one of my favorite bands, The Thermals, doing some commentating:

The Thermals - "Pillar of Salt" (with band commentary)

And here is just the straight video:

The Thermals - "Pillar of Salt" (normal)

Wendy and I are trying a new hotel this trip to San Francisco -- Hotel Des Arts. It's an arty remodel of a skinny old hotel near the entrance to Chinatown. Each room is hand-painted by a different artist. We got the Sam Flores room and I couldn't help but snap a few pictures with my phone.


The Pretty Butterflies
From the Echo-7 flickr collection.


Spike-y Shapes
From the Echo-7 flickr collection.


The Two-Tone City
From the Echo-7 flickr collection.

They say you learn something new every day. "They" say a lot of things (like too much TV rots your brain), but this one happens to be true.

The something that I learned a couple days ago was that in the 1985 rap movie, "Krush Groove," there's a white guy on the turntables wearing a Hüsker Dü shirt.

I just couldn't stop staring at the guy's shirt through the whole song. Why is a hip-hop DJ wearing a shirt for a Minnesota alt. rock group? It boggles the mind.

He may as well have been wearing a shirt that read, "Not from around here, but I can spin records."

Before there was "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," there was a British TV series called "Spaced." It's a quirky little comedy from the same writer/actor, co-star, and director that brought us those two great films.

We started watching the series on YouTube because it's really difficult to find otherwise. The first few episodes were amusing, but we weren't hooked until we saw this scene:



Brilliant.

Sometimes the potential of a movie is its own downfall. Take "Smokin' Aces" for example.

The plot: Multiple mercenaries all try to be the first to take out a high-profile snitch hiding out in a penthouse suite before the FBI can extract him.

It's no "Hamlet," but it's the perfect storyline for shots of people diving in slow-motion firing guns from both hands while things explode behind them. The movie trailer backed it up with a myriad of wacky mercenaries, guns, and explosions spackled together with jump cuts, rockin' music, and enough star names to choke a Robert Altman film. In fact, the trailer was wonderful.

The movie should have been a jump-cut hybrid of "Die Hard" and "Cannonball Run." Instead it spent the first half of the film introducing a lot of fun characters and the second half of the film by letting the story unravel to an uninspired, and boring, conclusion.

If I hadn't known anything about it, I'd say it was an okay movie, but knowing what it could have been makes it a terrible film. Maybe they should have just stuck with the movie trailer.