The movie business is abysmal right now. Sales have been down. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal "weekend box-office receipts have been down for 18 straight weekends, the longest stretch recorded in at least two decades". Also according to WSJ movie chains are at the mercy of Hollywood, which is a content-driven industry. In other words we all knew the principles we learned in grade school—I'll call it "show-n-tell", for lack of a better word—that is "content is king."
If content is king, and by content we're talking about original, entertaining, and _______ storyline, then Hollywood has lost this focus. Instead of gambling and taking chances with great stories (see Batman Begins, and the stalled Darren Aronofsky's "Batman: Year One" project) studios have resorted to formulaic and dull reworking of old materials. Let me prove this point with the Gross Box Office for the weekend of 6/24-6/26
The big players that were expected to draft highly on Draft Day NBA did go in that order. If you have been following the NCAA Tournament and Utah's Andrew Bogut and UNC's Marvin Williams it made sense for these great players to go so high in the draft.
When the Warriors 9th lottery pick approached, they picked Ike Diogu. Ike-who? Is this something that the Warriors management have been planning on for a long time? Who saw this coming?
Not me!
I have been quite busy lately both at work and at thinking about redesigning the backstage blogging site (see below). After several attempts at originality both in design and CSS code I have decided to put the re-design idea on the backburner. Work, church, and community service as well as interest in doing all things outdoor has taken up most of my time.
A (Very) Brief History of (My) Time
What do you think shoes would say about their owners if they could talk? Someone at GrX proposed this question and made a short video to introduce a new seven week series on Authenticity, the Journey of Recovery.
Awhile back I had a discussion with my brother about Hotel Rwanda. He mentioned what a privilege we have living in the US. He qualified this statement by saying how his friends were shocked that he doesn't lock his door sometimes when he's running his errands. Contrasted that with the poverty and tension in some of these third world countries and my brother and I are both glad for our middle class existence here.
We complained about our state of affairs here, yet there are people who live in shanties and walk up and down dirt roads. These are the conditions that some of the people at GrX will have to deal with as they're heading to various places to serve God on their short term missions. Some of the missions are in Mongolia, China, Thailand, and Mexico. I know some of the missionaries that are going, too.
So the long weekend is over and it left me thinking about friendships and community. Friendships since a recent conversation was about my lasting frienships with a couple of high school buds. Our friendships go back to 20 years. There is something nice about that, like we have endured the silliness and now we can just sit down to serenely catch up on things without a need to compare status quo. Gone are the days when we tried to one-upped each others.
Instead we have gotten to a point where we can just listen about what's going on in our lives — renovating the house, our fallen idealism of our so-called educareer, gardening, pets, hobbies that keep our life interesting AND sane, relationships, home (home is where the heart is), and our ongoing friendships. Call me a sentimentalist but I would love to be stuck on an island with these group of buds, something to bbq, and some interesting conversations.
