One of my many guilty plea­sures is movies. I love ‘em in just about every vari­ety from art house fare to good bad movies (Armies of Dark­ness for exam­ple). Thank­fully where I live makes it very easy to feed that urge. Rochester has two great the­atre for lovers of non-​mainstream movies (and a bunch of great main­stream the­atres too): The Little The­atre and The Dryden The­atre at the East­man House. The Little is our local art house the­atre. If you’re inter­ested in seeing indy films here in town, it’s the place to go. And that’s cool…

But for the best selec­tion of films, good and bad, new and old, you’ve got to go to the Dryden. The George East­man House is both a museum and film preser­va­tion insti­tute. They are respon­si­ble for sal­vaging, restor­ing and stor­ing mas­sive amounts of film. When the Wizard of Oz was re-​released into the­atres a few years back, they were show­ing a print that was restored at the East­man House. Almost every night of the week you can go to the Dryden and catch a dif­fer­ent film, with an intro­duc­tory lec­ture, for about 7 bucks.

So where is this blog going you ask? Well August is a kick bootie month at the Dryden for Fan Boy’s like me. You can check the cal­en­dar your­self, but here are a couple highlights:

• 8/2 Godzilla (1954) – the orig­i­nal Japan­ese print, sub­ti­tles, no Ray­mond Burr
• 8/3 Oceans 11 (1960) – see the brat pack movie before the star stud­ded remake is release this December
• 8/7 The Valiant Ones (1975) – Old School good Kung Fu cinema
• 8/8 Annie Hall (1977) – Arguably Woody Allen’s most main­stream film and one of his best
• 8/9 Destroy All Mon­sters (1968) – More rubber suit good­ness than you can handle. 11 Mon­sters and Godzilla throw­ing a drop kick. What more could you want in a film
• 8/10 La Femme Nikita (1991) – forget the crappy Amer­i­can Remake or the bad TV series, this is the good stuff
• 8/12 Touch of Evil (1958) – Only Orson Wells could figure out a way for Charl­ton Heston to play a con­vinc­ing Mexican
• 8/14 Zu: War­riors from the Magic Moun­tain (1983) – Before Crouch­ing Tiger Hidden Dragon there was The Bride with White Hair. And before the Bride there was Zu. This was one of Hong Kong first big Kung Fu/Fantasy/Wire Work/Sword Play films and still one of the best (thanks to the pres­ence of talent like Yuen Bao and Summo Hung). Also a lot fun­nier too
• fin­gers are get­ting tired… to many good movies… one last
• 8/21 Swords­man II (1991) – Before Jet Li came to the US he made his name in period Kung Fu films. This is regarded as one of his best.

Fact is, just about every movie in August is a good one. Check the cal­en­dar for your­self And if you’re in the area and want to take in a flick, drop me a note.

sigh. I was so close. Unfor­tu­nately before I could update my other pages to the new look, trou­ble struck and blog­ger is having prob­lems accept­ing tem­plate changes. I’ll try to fix ‘em up tomor­row. For now it’s off to Toronto….

Ok, finally got this design to a point I’m happy with. Dig it, this is the fin­ished look for my blog. At least for right now….

Wow. It’s been three days since I returned from the Mar­tial Arts con­fer­ence and I’m still grap­pling with the lessons learned there. Within the course of two days my world sud­denly became a much bigger place. More about that on the Mar­tial Arts Page.

One of the other projects I’m involved in when I’m not at work is set­ting up a The­atre Com­pany. I’ve been involved in the­atre for a number of years on a col­lege basis. Basi­cally, the the­atre scene here is Rochester, well… kinda sucks. We have one major pro­fes­sional the­atre here in town that stages good stuff from time to time. But the major­ity of their stuff is way too safe. The rest of the pro­fes­sional and semi pro groups in town are a pretty mixed bag at best. Any hoo, I’m doc­u­ment­ing our progress in the cre­ation of the com­pany on my The­atre Page. I’ll have a report up later today on our meet­ing with the asso­ciate direc­tor of Uni­ver­sity of Rochester’s Inter­na­tional The­atre Program.

Other than that I’ve been fight­ing exhaus­tion and a bit of depres­sion. My body is trying to recover from the week­end. I’m feel­ing a lot better as I got more sleep last night. Night’s here have been very hot and I’m too cheap to get AC. Oh, check out the new look of Julia’s Blog! I need to get on the ball and add links to my friends blogs from this page. *Sigh* So much to do and such little time….

We had the work group picnic yes­ter­day and every­thing went off with­out a hitch! Jenny, Abby, Tina, Jo, Sarah, and I were in charge. We had it at a Rochester Red­wings game. Check out thier site and the cheezy flash ani­ma­tion that kicks it off. Every­one seemed to enjoy them­selves. I didn’t see very much of the game cause I was to busy play­ing with some of the kids there.

And with this I’m off to Super Sum­mers. I man­aged to throw together a quick web­site for the school. Check it out here. It’s just brochure-​ware now, but pretty soon I’ll get some pic­tures and more up there. Blog to you on Monday….

I’ve been work­ing very hard to get in the habit of post­ing once a day. Unfor­tu­nately there is still a lot about blog­ger I don’t under­stand. For exam­ple can posts only be a cer­tain length? I keep having issues post­ing my updates in the Mar­tial Arts page. Thank­fully, I can bring out the big guns on this prob­lem and talk with Jenny. Check out her page for the grip­ping account of the rescue of Spi­der­man who had been lost between the walls of our partitions.

I’ve been prac­tic­ing to get ready for this mar­tial arts sem­i­nar coming up this week­end. As part of that I’ve been trying to spend a lot of time brush­ing up on my Monkey skills. Rolling is a big aspect of that. It’s an area where I’ve approved greatly. Watch­ing me fall and roll in the past was not unlike seeing a sack o’ flour hit the floor. But even today I still some­times hit the ground a little too hard. So I have a small silver dollar sized black and blue mark on my right shoul­der blade. Which, along with a sore right shoul­der, makes sleep­ing a little dif­fi­cult. So the past few nights my trips to the mag­i­cal land of dreams have been trou­bled at best. Need­less to say I’m feelin’ a little sleepy.