Thought for the Day (from Hank Moody)

Replaying Season 1 of Californication, gearing up to screen Season 2…..

Hank Moody: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber, you know? I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically 4 figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratise us but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. You know, people …. they don’t write anymore, they blog; instead of talking they text, no punctuation, no grammar, LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me that it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo- communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a protolanguage that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.”

Rollins: Yet you’re part of the problem. I mean, you’re out there blogging with the best of them

Hank: Hence my self-loathing.

BP Quick Hitter: Taken

 

She said she was just going to the mall and would be back by 1o.

Taken is the first film I’ve rented using Redbox. There’s one around the corner at the Harris Teeter.

Redbox is the service that lets you pick a DVD from a kiosk and rent it the next day. And it lives up to its initial impression as a vending machine, where you’ll always find a Reese’s Cup but rarely a Zagnut. So, don’t expect to be taking home The Bicycle Thief for your evening’s entertainment. In fact, I think going forward the terms “Redbox” should be synonymous with mainstream, multiplex offerings, offering cheap thrills with a minimum of thought. (As in “I saw the new Redbox with Anne Hathaway.”)

On that score, Taken delivers. It’s actually a strange little action film, made in France a while back and starring, of all people, Liam Neeson, taking a break from his mopey, hang-dog dramatic personage to play a mopey, hang-dog former CIA agent.

In doing so, Neeson may have established a new subgenre: The Divorced Dad’s Action Fantasy Movie. In more traditional settings, these kinds of movies had their day as families split in the 1980s and 90s. Then, Dads would do crazy things to get their kids to like them again, such as dress up as a woman, or be reincarnated as a talking snowman.

That won’t work in these more ruthless, desperate times. In Taken, Neeson, in order to just spend some time with his teenage daughter, has to travel to Paris and rescue her from Albanian sex traffickers. You can’t do brunch at Ruby Tuesday like the rest of the divorced dads?