Stop Frame

Ingredients: 3 oz. sweet and sour (I prefer Finest Call) 1.5 oz. Sauza Anejo Commemorative tequila 0.5 oz. Cointreau 0.5 oz. Presidente brandy A splash of lime A splash of orange juice Shake all ingredients with ice, serve over ice. Salt the rim if you desire, I generally do not. Now, that's the original recipe except I like adding a bit more citrus (hence the lime and OJ), but I am becoming disgruntled with the Commemorative tequila. First, it almost seems like Sauza is disowning it. If you Google " Sauza tequila " you'll be hard-pressed to see them confessing, let alone bragging, about distilling Commemorative. Second, and I admit I was delinquent in not catching this, despite being labeled "Anejo", this is not a 100% agave tequila. This is akin to making a fine margarita with Jose Cuervo Gold. You. Just. Can't. Do. It. Strange, though, all the above still makes for a fine drink. I would encourage you to follow my lead...

The Dark Knight is the best film I’ve seen in years. Not just the best “superhero” film, but the best film of any type. It’s not perfect, not quite a masterpiece, but it’s flaws are, to me, tiny and overwhelmed by the time the film ends. While relatively bloodless, it is consistently brutal, not just in what it depicts but in the themes that drive it. TDK is a film for adults, please leave the kids at home. Let’s deal with those “flaws” first, the largest being the character Rachel Dawes . In Batman Begins , I blamed Katie Holmes . Her acting was weak, to say the least, which is regrettable in that who she is and what she says and does are important to the film. Critics agreed and either for that or other reasons, Katie was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal , who is a better actress. Yet here she’s weak, real weak. Maybe it’s the character, not the actress, which is frustrating because Rachel is a pivotal character. The film,...

Hancock is, in a way, the polar opposite of WALL-E . The critics loved WALL-E , hated Hancock . Both Dirty Harry and Kyle Smith were mediocre on WALL-E and liked Hancock . I was frustrated by much of WALL-E and bought into Hancock completely. That’s partly because I like a good superhero film. (I am so on the edge of my seat in anticipation of The Dark Knight .) Hancock is a superhero film with a few twists, most of which I can't discuss because that would be major spoilerage. (Yeah, yeah, I spoiled away with WALL-E , but really, did it matter?) The twist to the superhero genre I can discuss is the one on display in the previews: Hancock is an alcoholic disaster of a superhero. That concept alone would probably have been enough to get me into the theatre, but it has the added bonus of being portrayed by the mighty Will Smith . On the Fourth of July I naturally watched Independence Day . It’s amazing how far he’s come since then, and back then he was damn g...

WALL-E was pretty firmly on my “wait until DVD” list until I saw the reactions to reviews by Dirty Harry and Kyle Smith . The MSM and elsewhere declared WALL-E the best thing since anything, while Harry and Kyle were less than impressed. Moonbats swept in. It seemed that anyone with a conservative bent who spoke ill of the little robot that could was in for a pounding. I needed to see what all the hub-bub was about. In WALL-E , humans have trashed the planet. In response, the vast corporation that runs the entire planet (hey, capitalism wins it all!) evacuates everyone from Earth, leaving behind an army of Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-class robots (WALL-E) to clean up. It’s supposed to be a five-year mission. Things go awry and our story begins 700 years after the planetary evacuation, with one robot still at work. His lonely world is disrupted by the arrival of EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), sent to Earth in search of life. In terms of compu...

Wikipedia , that unauthoritative authority on all things, says that misanthropy is... ...a general dislike, distrust, or hatred of the human species, or a disposition to dislike and/or distrust other people. This has clearly been the environmental movements' opinion for some time. You can tell this simply by listening. When they warn of environmental dangers it is always coached in terms of threat to the planet, not to humans. Extreme examples of this can be found in most any flyer from ELF , ALF , and Greenpeace . It's also the subtle undertone to any intonations from the Goreacle. This now seems to be a trend in Hollywood, at least for this year. First there was The Happening , which pretty much says that humans don't deserve to live. Depending on how you spin it, some have commented that WALL-E is another, but I've heard contrary arguments and will wait 24 hours before commitment (which is when I plan on actually seeing WALL-E ). And coming soon, the s...

The United States is often described as an imperial power commanding an empire unlike any in history. Like a lot of Americans, I often bristle at that description but there’s some kernel of truth. We have exceeded the common bounds of a “superpower” and are often described as a “hyperpower” because there is no one on Earth who can match us in terms of military might. As Thomas Madden writes : As you read this, American military might is deployed across the planet. The U.S. Navy is literally larger than all of the other navies in the world combined. The United States military accounts for almost one-half of total global military expenditures. Never before in human history has there been such a disparity in power among sovereign states. And yet if we are an empire we are singular in lacking imperial desires. Former secretary of state Colin Powell said it best when he rebuked the archbishop of Canterbury on the claim that our only reason for invading Iraq was to build “a new American empi...