movies

Giveaway: “Sudsy Slim Rides Again.”

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Hello again, and sorry to have maintained radio silence for so long. Some day I’ll let you know what kept me elsewhere.

Today is not that day, though. Today is the day for promoting Chad and Darin Carpenter’s second film, “Sudsy Slim Rides Again.” Specifically, it’s a day for giving away a copy of the DVD.

Their first film, “Moose: The Movie,” was shot entirely in Alaska, with a tight budget and a loose grip on reality. That one made me laugh like a loon, filled as it was with the type of goofy humor familiar to fans of Chad Carpenter’s “Tundra” comics.

Their sophomore effort is, frankly, less sophomoric than the first. Don’t get me wrong: It’s rife with humor, but is definitely more of a semi-serious attempt at movie-making.

Want to win a copy of this “spaghetti Northwestern”? Of course you do.

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7 money lessons from “A Quiet Place.

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Linda B. and I went to see “A Quiet Place” recently and it was as frightening as I’d expected it would be – even though I already knew a couple of major plot points, due to having read a couple of spoiler-filled articles. (Will I ever learn?)

Even when I knew what was going to happen, “A Quiet Place” genuinely scared me. That’s because these weren’t jump-scare moments or, worse, the torture porn that passes for suspense/horror these days. The underlying emotion was fear.

Fear that we can’t protect our children, or teach them enough to survive in the world. Fear that we won’t have enough to eat. Fear that we’ll lose the ones we love.

Those are some grade-A terrors, all right – and given all the recent bluster about nuclear weapons, they’re not exactly unfounded.

I, of course, also found personal finance lessons in the movie. That’s how I roll.

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5 money lessons from ‘Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle.’

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They say the badness of a movie is proportional to the number of helicopters in it. Happy to report that “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” has just one whirlybird, and is as much fun as the previews indicated.

The film owes a huge debt to “The Breakfast Club,” with its “detention for disparate high-schoolers” theme. This time around the teens are a nerdy hypochondriac, a gorgeous and shallow blonde, a football jock who scorns academics and a loner who’s hyper-focused on getting into Princeton.

“Detention” involves cleanup duty in a cluttered basement room. Guess what they find? An old-school video game setup. Before you can say “exposition,” they’ve been sucked into a potentially deadly game in a world that looks a lot like Oahu.

And of course I found personal finance lessons there. You would have, too.

 

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Your governor earns HOW much?!?

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Had I been asked which state hands the biggest salary to its head honcho, I’d have assumed California or New York.

In which case I’d have been wrong, as I learned while researching “What the governor gets paid in every state,” my latest piece on Money Talks News.

Learned some other interesting stuff, too, such as the fact that one governor’s wife worked as a summertime waitress to save up for a car and that another governor credits his mad budget-balancing abilities to his super-frugal mother, a widow who washed and re-used not just aluminum foil but also wax paper and plastic wrap.

And nope, I’m not going to say which governor earns top dollar. You’ll have to go read the article to find out.

 

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5 personal finance lessons from ‘Alien: Covenant.’

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I saw “Alien: Covenant” and it succeeded in what I think were its twin purposes: to creep me out and to make me think.

And, maybe, to get me out of my own head. Nothing like a chest-burster to make you feel better about your reasonably good health.

But seriously, the film is restrained (albeit super-gory at times) and full not just of dread, but of a surprising undercurrent of mournfulness.

What’s the meaning of life? What makes us human? Why do the people we love leave us? Can a synthetic human ever become a real boy?

And, of course: How can I make the viewing of this film into a work expense?

 

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Baby Groot, a tweetchat and my book.

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My friend Linda B. and I went to see “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” on its opening day, and we were not disappointed.

A trash-talking and genetically modified raccoon, a musclebound alien with no social filters, a female assassin with green skin, the assassin’s mostly robotic sister, a (sorta) reformed space pirate and a super-adorable sapling version of the treelike giant alien Groot – what’s not to like?

Given my propensity for finding personal finance lessons everywhere, I went in with pen and paper. Although it was a pretty dark movie (outer space!) I could mostly read what I’d scribbled, and I skipped lunch with Linda in order to go home and write.

 

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6 money lessons from ‘Florence Foster Jenkins.’

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thFor years I’ve been promoting the idea that personal finance tips can be found in all kinds of places:

Opera (“8 personal finance lessons from ‘Gotterdammerung’”)

Monster romps (“6 financial lessons from ‘Godzilla’”)

Westerns (“10 financial lessons from ‘True Grit’”)

Superhero flicks (“10 money lessons from ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’”)

And even sled-dog races (“10 personal finance lessons from the Iditarod”).

See? You just have to know where to look.

My latest example is the Meryl Streep/Hugh Grant film “Florence Foster Jenkins.” The chameleonic Streep is by turns jaw-droppingly self-absorbed and touchingly vulnerable, and Hugh Grant is her complex, conflicted companion.

The real-life Jenkins, a New York socialite, was a patron of the arts. Also sometimes their torturer: She had the idea that she could sing. But she couldn’t. She really, really couldn’t.

 

 

Not to give away too much of the plot, Jenkins suffered from a physical malady that may have affected her ability truly to hear her own voice. Or maybe she was just gloriously deluded. Either way, she played to sold-out houses.

 

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7 personal finance tips from ‘Ghostbusters.’

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th-1Saw the “Ghostbusters” reboot on Friday and laughed quite a bit, especially at the antics of Kate McKinnon. While she didn’t actually steal every scene in which she appeared, McKinnon certainly borrowed some of them without permission.

The woman is damned funny. Since we don’t have a television, I’ve never seen her work on “Saturday Night Live” or “The Big Gay Sketch Show.” I might go see the movie again just to watch her. (The others were great, too.)

As for the fanboy bro-haha about the reboot being a heretical sacrilege against all that’s good and holy about dude films, all I can say is “Grow up.” Movies get rebooted all the time. You either go see them or you refuse to go see them. What you don’t do is wail about how this has ruined your childhood.

Seriously. Some guys, and maybe some gals, actually say this. If the first 18 years of your life are rendered meaningless by a movie remake, I suggest you seek help. Or maybe some anti-hyperbole tablets.

In keeping with my theory that personal finance lessons are where you find them, I went to “Ghostbusters” in full money-geek mode and with a notebook. Here’s what I found.

 

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Giveaway: ‘Moose, the Movie.’

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POSTERRegular readers know how I feel about the “Tundra” comic strip, created by Alaska cartoonist Chad Carpenter. Not content with being syndicated all over the world, Carpenter recently branched out into filmmaking with “Moose: The Movie.”

At one of the screenings Carpenter handed out autographed calendars. I promptly re-gifted mine for the May 3 giveaway (whose write-up included my impressions of the film).

Now that “Moose: The Movie” is available for home viewing, I’m reinstating the weekly giveaways with a copy of the DVD.

Is it great cinema? Of course not. But it’s good, goofy fun and very Carpenterian; witness the wildlife protection poster glimpsed in the Gangrene Gulch ranger station. Anyone who’s visited (or wants to visit) the Last Frontier will fall in love with the cinematography.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. A review from The Alaska Dispatch News calls it “bright, fast-paced, well-produced, utterly entertaining and very amusing,” among other things.

 

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