New Movie Alert: Rules Don't Apply

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Small town beauty queen and devout Baptist Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), under contract to the infamous Howard Hughes, arrives in Los Angeles. At the airport, she meets her driver, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), only two weeks on the job and also from a religiously conservative background. Their instant attraction not only puts their religious convictions to the test but also defies Hughes' number one rule: no employee is allowed to have an intimate relationship with a contract actress.

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Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down: Movies 2016: "Keeping Up with the Joneses"

There's an old saying that goes something like "Stop keeping up with the Jones's before you fall flat on your butt!" For the most part, people tend to allow that saying to go in one ear and out the other, especially when their next door neighbors Uncle Bob and Auntie Susie gets a new vehicle and smiles every time they passes by. 

I mean you can't let old Bobby Boy out do you, or can you? So the very next week you go out and buy a brand new special edition Ram Truck with butterfly doors! 

 First mistake...

Now here comes the rumors. Whelp! The rumor on the street is that Keeping Up With The Joneses cost approximately $40 million to make, but only brought in $24.6 million according to the box office. Hmmm... word on the street is that the movie gets a "Thumbs Down" 

New Movie Alert: La La Land

In Theaters December 9, 2016

Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) are drawn together by their common desire to do what they love. But as success mounts they are faced with decisions that begin to fray the fragile fabric of their love affair, and the dreams they worked so hard to maintain in each other threaten to rip them apart.

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Short Stories Saturdays: The Man on the Stairs

By Lord Pepem

It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound. I held my breath and it happened again, then again; it was footsteps on the stairs. I tried to whisper,

There's someone coming up the stairs,

but my breath was cowering, I couldn't shape it. I squeezed Kevin's wrist in pulsing units, three pulses, then two pulses, then three pulses. I was trying to invent a physical language that could enter his sleep. "but after a while I realized I wasn't even squeezing his wrist, 

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New Movie Alert: Moon Light

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A timeless story of human connection and self-discovery, MOONLIGHT chronicles the life of a young black man from childhood to adulthood as he struggles to find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami. This groundbreaking film is both a vital portrait of contemporary African American life and a deeply personal and poetic meditation on identity, family, friendship, and love.

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New Movie Alert: Almost Christmas

In Theaters Now!

Walter Meyer (Danny Glover) is a retired mechanic who lost the love of his life one year earlier. Now that the holiday season is here, he invites daughters Rachel (Gabrielle Union) and Cheryl (Kimberly Elise) and sons Christian (Romany Malco) and Evan (Jessie T. Usher) to his house for a traditional celebration. Poor Walter soon realizes that if his bickering children and the rest of the family can spend five days together under the same roof, it will truly be a Christmas miracle.

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New Movie Alert: Shut In

In Theaters Now!

Mary (Naomi Watts) is a child psychologist who lives in isolation in rural New England after her husband dies in a horrific car accident. The tragedy also leaves her 18-year-old stepson Stephen (Charlie Heaton) in a bedridden, catatonic state, making him completely dependent on her. When one of Mary's young patients goes missing and is presumed dead, she becomes convinced that the boy's (Jacob Tremblay) ghost is now haunting both her and Stephen

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New Movie: Fantastic Beast

In Theaters November 18, 2016

The year is 1926, and Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) has just completed a global excursion to find and document an extraordinary array of magical creatures. Arriving in New York for a brief stopover, he might have come and gone without incident, were it not for a No-Maj (American for Muggle) named Jacob, a misplaced magical case, and the escape of some of Newt's fantastic beasts, which could spell trouble for both the wizarding and No-Maj worlds.

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New Movie: Arrival

In Theaters Now!

Linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) leads an elite team of investigators when gigantic spaceships touch down in 12 locations around the world. As nations teeter on the verge of global war, Banks and her crew must race against time to find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Hoping to unravel the mystery, she takes a chance that could threaten her life and quite possibly all of mankind.

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Short Story Saturdays: "You don't miss your water (Til the well runs dry)" By T. Coraghessan Boyle

A LIGHT RAIN FELL at the end of the second year of the drought, a female rain, soft and indecisive, a kind of whisper in the trees that barely settled the dust around the clumps of dead grass. We took it for what it was, and if we were disappointed, if we yearned for a hard soaking rain, a macho rain crashing down in all its drain-rattling potency, we just shrugged and went about our business. What were we going to do, hire a rainmaker? Sacrifice goats? 

There were vagaries to the weather, seasonal variations spurred by the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Northern Hemisphere Hadley cell, and certainly the dry years would be followed by the wet in a cycle that had spun out over the centuries, the eons. Daily life was challenging enough—people had to go to the dentist, sit in traffic, pay taxes, cook dinner, work and eat and sleep. It would rain when it rained. No sense worrying over it. Nobody gave it much thought beyond the scaremongers in the newspaper and the talking heads on the television screen, until the third year went by in a succession of cloudless days and no rain came, not male, female, or androgynous.

It was that third year that broke our backs. We began to obsess over water, where it came from, where it was going, why there wasn’t enough of it. It got to the point where everything that wasn’t water related, whether it was the presidential election, the latest bombing, or the imminent extinction of the polar bear, receded into irrelevance. The third year was when it got personal.

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New Movie Alert: Shivaay

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story of an extraordinary man in an extra ordinary circumstance. Young, cool, contemporary, dext, swift, foolish, SHIVAAY is a Himalayan mountaineer who is an innocent everyman and yet is capable of transforming into a mean destroyer when he needs to protect his family. Shivaay sports a snake tatoo, a trishul tatoo, dresses cool grunge, his demeanor is calm before the storm, with abundant held energy, can pre-empt nature, his observation skills are as developed as his brawn. His anger is channelized for a larger common good. Shivaay lives by the leitmotif that destiny is pre-written. He is satisfied in his isolated world and is not very ambitious. He believes that 'Joh ek baar Shivaay ban jaaye use aur kuch banne ki kya zaroorat hai'. An avid risk savvy mountaineer, a hiking trainer, he is leading a simple peaceful life in the lap of the Himalayas until one fine day he is pushed to leave his comfort zone to protect his family. Challenged at every step, he must now use all his faculties to defeat evil. When faced with a large mass of faceless villains spread all over the world, and pushed against nihilism, Shivaay becomes a destroyer.

New Book Alert: Gon Til November "A Journal of Rikers Island" By Lil Wayne

A Must Read! 

MOVIE THIS JOURNAL: AVAILABLE NOW!

Rapper Lil Wayne drops it like it's HOT! Get up close and personal details of his time spent on an Island that one might not want to vacation on.

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Short Story Sundays - "What happened to the Baby" By Cynthia Ozick

When I was a child, I was often taken to meetings of my uncle Simon’s society, the League for a Unified Humanity. These meetings, my mother admitted, were not suitable for a ten-year-old, but what was she to do with me? I could not be left alone at night, and my father, who was a detail man for a pharmaceutical company, was often away from home. 

He had recently been assigned to the Southwest: we would not see him for weeks at a time. To our ears, places like Arizona and New Mexico might as well have been far-off planets. Yet Uncle Simon, my mother told me proudly, had been to even stranger regions. Sometimes a neighbor would be called in to look after me while my mother went off alone to one of Uncle Simon’s meetings. Going was important, she explained, if only to supply another body. The hall was likely to be half empty. Like all geniuses, Uncle Simon was—“so far,” she emphasized—unappreciated.

Uncle Simon was not really my uncle. He was my mother’s first cousin, but out of respect, and because he belonged to an older generation, I was made to call him uncle. My mother revered him. “Uncle Simon,” she said, “is the smartest man you’ll ever know.” He was an inventor, though not of mundane things like machines, and he had founded the League for a Unified Humanity. What Uncle Simon had invented—and was apparently still inventing, since it was by nature an infinite task—was a wholly new language, one that could be spoken and understood by everyone alive. He had named it GNU, after the African antelope that sports two curved horns, each one turned toward the other, as if striving to close a circle. 

He had traveled all over the world, picking up roots and discarding the less-common vowels. He had gone to Turkey and China and many countries in South America, where he interviewed Indians and wrote down, in his cryptic homemade notation, the sounds they spoke. In Africa, in a tiny Xhosa village nestled in the wild, he was inspired by observing an actual yellow-horned gnu. And still, with all this elevated foreign experience, he lived, just as we did, in a six-story walkup in the East Bronx, in a neighborhood of small stores, many of them vacant. In the autumn the windows of one of these stores would all at once be shrouded in dense curtains. Gypsies had come to settle in for the winter. My mother said it was the times that had emptied the stores. My father said it was the Depression. I understood it was the Depression that made him work for a firm cruel enough to send him away from my mother and me.

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Short Story Saturday: By Ryu Murakami

Whenever I sit at a bar drinking like this, I always think what a sacred profession bartending is. The bartender, with the stained-glass shelves of many-colored bottles behind him, moves precisely about in a shining crystal vestibule, like a priest conducting a ritual. Pouring the holy liquid into a glass, he listens with a reverent, sympathetic smile as the customers recite their woes.

At the far end of the bar is a pair of unattractive Mesdames with coarse skin and too much makeup. They're disgustingly drunk-or maybe only pretending to be. Their dialogue alternates between whispers and squeals. Something? the bartender intones, beaming his smile in their direction.

Next to the Mesdames is an obviously newlywed couple. I suppose they've just held the wedding reception at this hotel, and now they'll spend a night here before leaving on their honeymoon. Neither of them is saying much. The groom takes tiny sips at a glass of house whiskey and water, and the bride is drinking in her surroundings as the ice in her mai tai melts, turning it a cloudy orange. Shall I bring you something to nibble on? the bartender inquires, sweeping his smile their way.

Next to the newlyweds is a lone American man in a dark suit drinking a Schlitz. Foreigners always order beer. The guidebooks tell them that the prices in Japanese hotels are outrageous, to stick to beer if they drink in the bar. Next to the American a young woman and a much older man are drinking champagne cocktails and virtually necking; next to them is a pair of the half-assed sort of rich men you find in any hotel bar; and next to them is me. There's an empty stool between me and them, however. She's late. I'm drinking by myself, not talking to anyone, and I can't really judge how drunk I am. I wonder how many I've had now. Shall I fix you another? the bartender asks with a smile, and I nod. Bourbon splashes into a glass. Busy? the bartender says as he pours. Well, at least the location work is over, I tell him. Now it's just a matter of editing the film.

I'm a director for a television production company, and our specialty is overseas documentaries. Until two years ago I was involved with musical variety shows.

The bartender never rests. He lines up the glasses, chills the champagne and white wine, chips rocks out of a block of ice, replaces ashtrays, serves up platters of sausages or raw oysters. No doubt all nine of the people sitting at this bar are looking for sin tonight. The circumstances are different for each, of course, but all have the same destination in mind. No one gets drunk in order to elevate their moral standards. The bartender, sure enough, is a priest of sorts.

Maybe I should tell a joke or two and laugh while I can. Tonight I have an unpleasant task ahead of me. Maybe I'll share a little joke with the kindly bartender. For the past six months or so I've been documenting slums. Calcutta, Manila, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Bogota . . . When you're in the slums you begin to wonder if the whole world isn't a slum, to feel as if slums are the normal state of affairs. I heard a lot of good jokes in those places. A dead baby was floating in the sewer in Calcutta, and an Indian fellow I knew said something really funny. What was it again? Ah, well, it's about a dead baby. I'd have to tell it just right or it wouldn't be much of a joke.

"Sorry!"

Here she is. I haven't seen this woman, this mistress of mine, for a long time. She looks wonderful. She isn't my mistress anymore, though. Why is it that when you stop having sex with a woman, the moment you've distanced yourself, she starts to look even more beautiful than before?

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New Movie: Trolls

In Theaters Now!

Poppy (Anna Kendrick), the optimistic leader of the trolls, and Branch (Justin Timberlake), her polar opposite, embark on an adventure that takes them far beyond the only world they've ever known.

New Movie: Hacksaw Ridge

Release Date: November 4, 2016

The true story of Pfc. Desmond T. Doss (Andrew Garfield), who won the Congressional Medal of Honor despite refusing to bear arms during WWII on religious grounds. Doss was drafted and ostracized by fellow soldiers for his pacifist stance but went on to earn respect and adoration for his bravery, selflessness and compassion after he risked his life -- without firing a shot -- to save 75 men in the Battle of Okinawa.

New Movie: Inferno

In Theaters Now!

Famous symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) follows a trail of clues tied to Dante, the great medieval poet. When Langdon wakes up in an Italian hospital with amnesia, he teams up with Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), a doctor he hopes will help him recover his memories. Together, they race across Europe and against the clock to stop a madman (Ben Foster) from unleashing a virus that could wipe out half of the world's population.