August 2018

It was not a great month for movies. MoviePass has changed its rules to the point where I can’t even see the movies I want anymore. What a disappointment.
In August, I traveled to Michigan City, IN, for the boat races. It was hotter than hell there. I enjoyed staying at the local Blue Chip casino and had some fun meals there. I was able to report on the story and get the September issue of Speedboat Magazine out before the end of the month—we really hauled ass on that issue.
This was the month where I did a load of laundry and was shocked by the thick layer of lint-like paper shavings that covered all of my shirts. I never did figure out how that happened, but getting those particles off about 50 shirts turned out to be quite an ordeal. Wow, this blog is incredibly interesting, isn’t it?
TV: I watched relatively little outside of Better Call Saul, Penn & Teller: Fool Us, the late-night talk shows and old episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. BOOKS: I listened to the audiobook of J.P. Delaney’s Believe Me and read “Uncle Jimbo’s Marbles,” a cool short story by Evan Hunter. MUSIC: Listened to a bunch of Moody Blues music, Norah Jones’ first album and some miscellaneous Chinese pop.
Here are the movies I saw in August:

BLACKKKLANSMAN (2018)—Spike Lee botches the interesting story of a how a black police officer infiltrates a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Overlong, full of weird musical-score choices and fairly ponderous, Lee should stop making movies. The best thing about this amateurish movie was watching beautiful Laura Harrier playing the president of the local university's Black Student Union. (5)

PUZZLE (2018)—As a big fan of actress Kelly Macdonald (Black Mirror, Swallows & Amazons), I was drawn to Puzzle because of her participation in this film about Agnes, a married woman who teams up with an Indian man to participate in a jigsaw puzzle-solving competition. Macdonald is excellent, although I miss her natural Scottish accent, and the movie is only OK—much of the movie is about Agnes’s stale marriage to David Denman, which I didn’t find all that compelling. (7)

CRAZY RICH ASIANS (2018)—For the first time ever, an all-Asian cast stars in an American hit movie. Based on Kevin Kwan’s comic novel (the first of a trilogy), the movie tells the story of Rachel Chu (Constance Wu of TV’s Fresh Off the Boat), an Chinese-American who doesn’t realize her boyfriend Nick (Henry Golding) is “crazy rich” until she flies with him to attend a wedding in Singapore. It’s there that we meet the highly pedigreed Chinese families experience all of the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding. It’s funny, engaging and features a cast full of lovely Chinese women. Between this movie and Ocean’s 8, Awkwafina is having a massively successful year. (9)

THE LAST STARFIGHTER (1984)—Caught this revival at the Arclight Hollywood theater with star Lance Guest in the audience. I’m sure he doesn’t get to experience fan accolades like this every day. Starfighter is a mostly lame fantasy for small children; it’s not very well acted, loaded with cheesy (by today’s standards) special effects, and the story is beyond preposterous. But it was fun to see Robert “The Music Man” Preston in one of his very last roles (he died three years following the release of this movie).