Hollywood’s most talented.. in my eyes ;)

Whenever I watch a good actor/actress doing what they do best in a movie my mind can’t help but try to put them in a list. My list is a bit short and not in any particular order:

1.      Sean Penn (His character in “I am Sam” is just unbelievably believable).

2.      Anthony Hopkins (reads each script 250 times before filming) can you believe that?

3.      Colin Farrell (something about him makes me forget how good he is until I watch his next movie).

4.      Johnny  Depp (No I am not only talking about Jack Sparrow in pirates of the Caribbean but all of his other movies).

5.      Mel Gibson (He can make any movie watchable).

6.      Angelina Jolie (Although I feel her image of being a beautiful Hollywood woman tends to cover the fact that she is a very good actor. I also admire her endless charity work).

7.      Kevin Spacey (Have you seen “The Usual Suspects”?).

8.      Leonardo DiCaprio ( He was born an actor, if you don’t agree, check out “The Basketball Diaries”).

9.      Edward Norton

10.  Giovanni Ribisi

11.  All Malcolm in the Middle cast. (I don’t think it has to do with the directing because the series was directed by 15 different directors so it has to be the cast).

12.  Christian Bale (according to IMDb ‘dropped an amazing 63 pounds for his role as the emaciated insomniac Trevor Reznik in the film “The Machinist” (2004) with only a single vitamin consultation with a nutritionist to guide him. For the most part, he only ate salads and apples, chewed gum, smoked cigarettes, and drank nonfat lattes.’) What do you want more from an actor?

So who’s your favorite actor?

CarFax report my A$$ !!

So my wife and I decided to buy another car and add it to the fleet.  Since I am a smart ass and I always preach the phrase “the most expensive period in a car’s lifetime is the first 10,000 miles” and “I will never buy a new car in my life, that’s for the stupid” so of course I convinced my wife that we need to buy another used car. I did my research and went through all of the area’s online car dealership lots which took weeks. Finally we decided on a loaded very beautiful coupe with a very low mileage, the price was also great and the dealer is very reputable my friends.

 We got so excited that we left early from work to buy the car before anybody else gets to it.  The car was beautiful and what made it even better is the very assuring well-advertised CARFAX report that the sales person presented to us. It was as clean as a whistle. We anxiously started doing the paper work before even test driving it.  Why would you want to test it? You saw the CARFAX report. When we headed outside we saw a pretty decent dent in the door. The salesmen told us it must have happened while we were inside and because we already shook his hand before the damage happened we honored our word and continued with the deal and they said they will fix it by the next day. Tomorrow became a week and the salesman who was a friendly angel stopped answering his phones. When we paid him a visit he swore he never said it was going to take a day only, As a matter of fact, he never heard of a one day paint job. Ok, after all the headache we happily took the car home.

After a couple of days I noticed something wrong with the door and I contacted a friend of mine who happens to be an ex-car salesman/ car fanatic, he inspected it and discovered that the car went through a major body and paint work.  We went back the next day to the dealership or I should say dealershit and fought with them for hours. At first they didn’t want to return the piece of shit saying that CARFAX is not a reliable source and most of the accidents people don’t report and when they do it could take up to a year for an accident to reach CARFAX.    So all the talk about the almighty CARFAX had gone with the wind and while they were trashing CARFAX’s credibility the commercial kept playing in my mind (Show me the CARFAX) giving me mixed feelings of old trust and new betrayal. At the end they accepted to take it back if we get a new car from them. And so we did. The process took us almost 8 hours and it was one of the longest shittiest days of our lives.  

What I learned from this experience is:

1.       Do not trust any product even if it was initially created to make you feel secure like CAR-FREAKIN-FAX and remember, whenever you hear the commercial “show me the carfax” don’t hesitate to show them the finger because that’s what they’re talking about. Did I say I named my middle finger CarFax

2.       The reason behind fine print being so fine is not the lack of space

3.        Never ever trust any car salesman; their first sale is selling their soul to the devil.

4.       When life wants you to have a new car.. you will.

And now let me go and enjoy my new ride, will ya??

From Paris with love !!

Just when I started believing that Hollywood is over with the Rambo -like non stoppable heroes who kill thousands of presumably bad people without getting a scratch, Hollywood comes up with” From Paris with Love”.

 Although well directed in terms of effects, acting and picture, the movie in my opinion is addressing 80’s to early 90’s audiences. In terms of acting, John Travolta whom as far as I can remember always played the nice guy character was able to convince us that he is a tough mentally disturbed funny bad ass guy just like he did in (The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3) so I have to give it to him here.

But again, in the movie you can clearly see how intelligent we are and how stupid the rest of the world is. According to the movie, in France, you can kill a couple of hundreds of people, demo some cars, burn a few apartments, and shoot as many bullets as your trigger finger can handle and never see a single policeman. The movie also shows that the French are stupid, Asians are cowards, and Pakistanis are ignorant, cowards and stupid.

Is this an indication of how low the average audience’s IQ is? or is Hollywood underestimating it? Is this movie a beginning of another Schwarzenegger era where when he said (I’LL BE BACK) he really meant it? Or is it a mistake going to be realized shortly? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.  

Pat down...Hands down!

I am not a big fan of flying to begin with but If I fly anytime soon and I had to choose between the pat-down or the body scanner, I will with no doubt choose the pat-down. In the scanners’ case it is not the privacy issue that is going to hold me back, that is the least of my worries, I don’t care if you have a picture of me naked. I mean who cares if you have a naked souvenir picture of an old wrinkled man in his 70s like me. But what I don’t like in this process is the exposure to X-rays. I have tried for years and years as much as I can to avoid X-rays and Buffalo chicken wings because they cause cancer, especially if there is not enough ranch to go with the wings.

The other day I went to get my teeth cleaned and the dentist almost cried while he was begging me to accept taking a couple of X-rays for my teeth.  In the first 30 minutes of his begging I was telling myself this bastard wants me to get exposed to radiation just so he could make a couple of bucks more.  But then he started explaining how he wants to determine if there is bone loss or not to decide on the cleaning method to be used and the poor guy went into a deep medical lecture explaining most of what he learnt in dentistry before I hesitantly said yes.  I don’t know how I was able to make him feel so guilty that he was apologizing for everything he did after the X-rays.  To make a long story short, X-ray in my eyes is not a joke and that is why I tell you if you want to touch my junk go ahead and do it but if you  haven’t had bought me lunch the night before I just ask for no eye contact afterwards.

P.S. I am not that old, wrinkled and ugly. As a matter of fact I am freakishly handsome; a copy cat of Fabio. Even if you don’t know Fabio the name itself is going to get your imagination going.. PERVERT!

Is it March yet?

I don’t know what is wrong with me (or maybe what is right?), but whenever fall closes in I start feeling down and immediately start counting the months and days to the next summer; the thought of migrating south haunts me constantly. I get excited in the winter when I hear words like "March Madness", "April fools' " or "Cinco de Mayo". Does everybody feel the same?

I always feel like I live in the summer and hibernate in the winter. I am not a wave surfer nor an ice cream man; that's not why I crave the summer. My bitching starts with the first falling leaf and ends with the beautiful DC cherry blossom. It could be part of the endless search for serotonin which I assume has hit an all-time low all around the world with the exhaustingly, increasingly demanding life style that we all live in nowadays.

I've met a lot of people who like winter in this area and, in my mind, it's due to body fat! The bigger the person the more they like winter according to the poll conducted by my brain. You are saying now  “Na-Ah that was not nice”  Well, I don’t care.. THAT'S WHAT THE POLL SAID!!

HARRY POTTER ?!? I just don't get it

A couple of days ago two colleagues of mine one is in his late fifties and one is in his late twenties were so excited while checking Harry Potter's last movie preview and they both talked about how they can't wait to watch it and I know they are not the only ones. Millions of people are waiting to see this movie just like they did with its previous parts. I have seen a few minutes of Harry Potter here and there on TV and the only thing I see is that this movie/story is for kids and kids only. I think adults who enjoy watching it are either shallow or didn't have a good childhood. Same goes for the very famous Lord of the Rings which my wife and I left the theater after watching half of it feeling very silly and in an effort to stop time wasting.

While riding the metro I see adults wearing very professional clothes going to/ coming from work holding their precious Harry Potter book. From a distance you think from their serious look that they are reading a book about the freakin recession that we are in,  and all I can think about is going towards them shaking the hell out of them screaming WAKE UP YOU ARE NOT A KID ANY MORE!!!
But after all who am I to judge?