Just the Ticket

Step on a crack, break a mirror, spill the salt, and wear white to a Japanese wedding, Ticketholders! Welcome to the Thirteenth Dead Parade , held this Friday at 1101 D Street, Apt. #15. But not really. I was just goofing around with the number thirteen in various base representations this morning, and needed an excuse to stop thinking about them. Being an obsessive, compulsive nerd sucks sometimes. Anyway, whether you care or not (because that's just the kind of sucky, obsessive, compulsive nerd I am) here are the above numeric representations of the the number 13 explained for the non-mathy among you: 13 (base 10, a.k.a. decimal) = 1*10 + 3*1 1101 (base 2, a.k.a. binary) = 1*8 + 1*4 + 0*2 + 1*1 D (base 16, a.k.a. hexadecimal, or just hex) = 13*1 15 (base 8, a.k.a. octal) = 1*8 + 5*1 I can hear the dead silence in the air as you faithful Ticketholders neglect to give a crap, which is a welcome coincidence because silence is what today's issue is all about. The first...

Once again back for the epically reformed Amish among you (and those who weren't around for my GodsOfMelee days), I bring an old review to introduce you to a pair of films that took so long to get rental copies of because they were completely out of stock for two weeks! First, let me give you an update on my Serious Technical Difficulties: I got my new external drive back this week, but Staples ' technicians were only able to recover half of the data. My high school and college essays were not among them, sorry to say. I was hoping to share them with you all one day so that my years of essentially effortless hard work would not be in vain. I still have the old drive, mind you, so there is always a chance of full recovery in the future. But who wants to spend 1500 dollars to retrieve their childhood, anyway (he asked with a choked snivel of loss in his voice)? Let's move on to a post from January 17, 2005 (SWAT Ticket #29: License to Ilium)   before I start to cry for re...

All is lost for me, and has been for a few weeks now. My external hard drive recently crapped out on me, taking with it all the TV I watch, the music I have downloaded, game design projects, remixes I've done, comic book characters I have designed, every essay I've written going back to grade school, and the novel I have been working on most recently, which has crept slowly up to 38 pages. The folks at Staples are working to recover whatever data may be left on the drive and hook me up with a new device, but progress is slow because they effectively have to digitally torture the damned thing to death to get it all. And it cost me $280 to boot (so to speak). But I am not the only one for whom All Is Lost . Robert Redford plays "Our Man," the essentially unnamed, and only, character in a grueling survival story about a sailor who must rely on his wits and will (and blind faith in the relentless forces of nature) to endure until he can be rescued by a passing ship a...

I just finished watching Get the Gringo for the second time, and it reminded me why I didn't much care for it originally. Chief among the film's less desirable qualities was the fact that the bulk of the dialogue was in Spanish, and although I understand enough to speak it like an ignorant Gringo myself, I was disappointed that there were no subtitles for most of it, like they were forgotten  in post-production. Mel Gibson made up for this shortcoming by going back to his roots—by which I mean the natural comedian he was in Lethal Weapon , not his actual roots as the son of an anti-Semitic alcoholic, which inspired such pieces of crap as Passion of the Christ  and Apocalypto —and reminding us why he was such an appealing actor in the first place. Gibson continues this display of charisma and larger-than-life ego as a villain in the latest installment of Robert Rodriguez ' Grindhouse  franchise: Machete Kills  (and, if no one else has anything to say about it, Ma...

Goot do be bach, Dicketkholduhs! If you're wondering why I'm talking like the ex-Governator of Kullyfwornyia , it's because I've been sick for quite awhile. Not to worry, I am not on my way to becoming one of the Dead Parade I so love to invest my cinematic and blogitorial time upon. I have just recently returned from a three-sick-day stay-cation—feel free to start pouring yourself a shot every time you see a hyphen—or minus sign—or a two-for-one dash like this one—. By the time you get done reading this, you will probably be so wasted you may have actually enjoyed it—or forgotten you hated it. Anyway, that time off included my first doctor's visit in over five years—thank you, ObamaCare—and just in time, too, because I learned that the cough I had been fighting for two months straight turned out to be bronchitis on its way to becoming pneumonia. I just completed my antibiotic treatment—a six-pill plan that they lovingly call a Z-Pack, as though the medical commun...

I don't particularly enjoy movies about the hoplessness of being endangered at sea. Films like Open Water  and Dark Tide  turn the treacherous majesty of the ocean into a coma-inducing exercise in boredom ad nauseum . True stories like The Perfect Storm  and Titanic   toy with our emotions by constantly leading us to believe that everything will turn out alright, even though history tells us otherwise, and we wind up pissed off that Leonardo Di Caprio freezes to death on a wooden plank and Kevin Costner gets drowned by a monster wave. Although the events behind  Captain Phillips  were unknown to me, it is in many ways no different than the films mentioned above. It may not spend as much time covering the blue abyss as Open Water  or Dark Tide , and it may not string us along for four hours like Titanic  ( Captain Phillips  is only two hours and fourteen minutes long) or manipulate us like The Perfect Storm , but it is full of repetitive d...

Welcome back, Ticketholders, to the world of intriguing-yet-low-budget cinema. From the preview reel preceding Sweetwater , Just the Ticket  brings you a review of Bounty Killer , the film adaptation of the successful Kickstart Comics series featuring cameos by Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines  star Kristanna Loken and the always captivating Gary Busey . Enter a dystopian world full of sex, blood, and corruption where the most deadly get rich and famous and the rich and infamous wind up dead. Not much can be said of the acting on anyone's part, nor of the special effects that turn a storm-torn radioactive wasteland into a scene from Sharknado . But between the numerous creatively choreographed exhibitions of exsanguinous expiration, there oozes a measure of charisma that keeps you watching, even when you're still wondering what you're watching and why. It's the same quality of cult-classic strangeness that made Bubba Ho-tep  so strangely great. While the titular h...