Common Sense

I watched the first episode last night on my DVR and I must say that I like the ambitousness of the dark comedy. Having the dad from Malcolm in the Middle turn from high school chemistry teacher to meth cooker is just funny to me.

The way he goes about doing things and his own general resignment to a life of disappointment seem at odds with his potential. And the way he absorbs a terminal lund cancer diagnosis, by fixating on the mustard stained lab coat of his doctor, speaks volumes about a character who is ready to die.

You can watch Breaking Bad on AMC Sundays at 9 Central.

I’m reminded that Sailor Moon had never actually seen any of the Rambo movies until Space Monkey and I showed parts 1 and 2 to him. Of course, badass action and using a bow to blow shit up was very appealing to him. That’s what we call a “weekend” at Sailor Moon’s house.

But I wasn’t too enthused when I heard Stallone was making a fourth installment in the franchise. After all, the guy is 61. The only other old guy that is still trying to be an action star is Bruce Willis, and his fourth sequel in the Die Hard series was cartoonish at best and insulting at worst.

Stallone seems to have found a formula that works, though: First, add a little HGH, write a script where the only answer to the problem is unadulterated violence, then commence to blowing motherfuckers up.

I’ll be adding my five dollars to the opening weekend stats sometime soon because I’ve read enough to know that this is the kind of movie I expect when I see the title Rambo. I don’t want a whole lot story or plot. I want unambiguous bad guys. I want really big guns. I want to see people blown in half… literally. According to Devin, it’s gonna take a lot to top the carnage candy in this film. You hear that makers of the Saw movies?! You have some big combat boots to fill in the sequel that I haven’t heard announced but undoubtedly will be in my local theaters in October.

The pornstar that almost cost me my job, but who I would pick over answering the sports phone any day (I love you Eva Angelina, and I have the t-shirt to prove it), won an AVN award this weekend. To the uninitiated, that’s the porn equivalent of the Oscars.

She actually won best actress for Upload from Sexz Pictures and she’s going to be doing a signing in Dallas for said picture this weekend. I’ve got my fingers crossed that her publicist will let me do an interview. How cool would that be? And, I hope I was in some involved with her winning Hottest Girl In Porn.com’s Girl of the Year title. That would probably be wishful thinking.
And let’s not forget about Sasha Grey, who walked away with wins for best new performer and best oral starlet. I’m not ever going to be able to think of oral sex without thinking of Sasha, which I’m sure is going to make all of my future girlfriends extremely happy. Tequila’s probably going to be involved too, but not the ‘lying about her bisexuality’ kind.

I waited much too long to try and salvage some of my writing from Google cache. Thanks to someone for reminding me to try and do this so that I at least have clippings and it’s not like Cinema Toast never existed.

That’s probably the worst thing about this whole experience. Just the fact that, instead of talking to me, they took down the blog and deleted everything, not just the post they found offensive. In this day in age, a blog post is as important to a writer as a physical clipping with a byline if and when that writer decides to move on. If some other publication liked my writing or I found a place that was a better fit for my movie blog reviews and news, they were going to leave me high and dry with nothing, not one of the 86 posts that I wrote for free for them, to use to show that I can write for a real news outlet’s Web site.

That hurts.

I salvaged what I could with what links I could, but obviously the art is all gone and most of my comments are gone as well. I was rushing tonight so I just copied and pasted whatever I could into the text field here. If any of Cinema Toast’s regular readers happened to use Bloglines and and has the full cache of all my archives, I’d appreciate it if you could help me put together a complete archive that I might upload and keep. I’d like to be able use whatever hyperlinks I’ve already used instead of trying to figure out where I went before.

By nathan nance | Thursday, January 3, 2008, 08:23 PM

There is one kind of movie that we don’t really talk about at Cinema Toast. This is, after all, a niche blog and my niche is horror and sci-fi. I’m more likely to talk about Transformers than say, the Best Costume Oscar nominees.

And that’s how this was designed. We already have a great Entertainment editor with a great blog, this is just for guys like me, Space Monkey, Quentin Tarantino and you nice people, my readers.

But there is a form of film that stretches across all socieconomic lines, racial barriers, even whether you<’re Republican or Democrat: Porn.

Lately there have been a lot of good movies about porn, which is quickly becoming mainstream in its own weird way. The Independent Film Channel did a four-part series on porn of different kinds (it had John Waters!), a documentary on Deep Throat was released in theaters last year. In my Netflix queue, I have a movie about a photographer that interested the children of prostitutes in the slums of Calcutta getting interested in taking pictures and movies about their daily lives called Born in a Brothel.

But there is just old-fashioned regular porn and that’s where the favor comes in. One of my Myspace friends (in the top 4, actually) recently won a weekly contest called The Hottest Girl In Porn and broke all kinds of records with the votes. Something like 30,000 people went to the site and voted for her.

So naturally, she’s up for Hottest Girl In Porn of the Year. All I’m asking is, ifyou’re not at work like I am at the moment, you just have to go to this site, scroll down close to the bottom of the list and vote for Eva Angelina. Yeah, I’ve mentioned her before; I’ve got a little crush on her.

Just go vote for Eva Angelina and I won’t write reviews for all of the movies I’ve watched in the last week (including Resident Evil: Extinction). You don’t want that, do you? So go vote for Eva Angelina. I have to warn you, none of those pictures are so for work in even the remotest way, so if you have to wait until you get home, that’s fine. This isn’t the Iowa Caucuses. You get to do it by secret ballot and you don’t have a time limit (except for when the contest is over at the end of the week, I think).

Go. Scroll down. Vote for Eva Angelina. When you look at her pics, you’ll understand why.

I’m guessing (and this is just speculation since I’m not a lawyer) that holding your toddler hostage, having the police kick the door in and having Britney Spears strapped to a gurney with police riding in the ambulance and then being put under 72-hour “crazy watch” (my non-legal term) may mean that Britney Spears is screwed in her custody battle with Kevin Federline.

But you probably already knew that.

Oh. My. God. This is the kind of thing that actually interrupts 24-hour news coverage of the presidential elections. Sorry Huckabee, MSNBC needs to have someone explain what has been painfully obvious for over a year to its audience so don’t count on much of a boost.

I’m not a doctor either, but my diagnosis is that she is batshit insane and she should probably be loaded up with thorazine while K-Fed tells the boys that ‘Mommy has to go away for a while… maybe forever.’

My penchant for self-destructive behaviour has led to the demise of Cinema Toast with Nate. Oh, don’t be sad. I brought it on my self.

It all started last night (wavy dream sequence with thematic music) I got a bulletin from on of my Top 4 Myspace friends, Eva Angelina, that she was a finalist for HottestGirlInPorn.com’s Hottest Girl of the Year.

So I pushed the envelope a little too far. Ok, I went way out there without a safety line. I thought it was one of the better posts I had ever written. I started off talking about how my blog was designed to be a niche blog about horror and sci-fi.

I went on to describe how porn crosses all social boundaries and is becoming more mainstream. I mentioned IFC’s 4-part series on porn and last year’s Deep Throat documentary.

Then I kind of crassly had multiple links to the site (http://www.hottestgirlinporn.com/finalist.php) asking people to vote for Eva Angelina. I said that the site was in no way, shape or form suitable for viewing at work. But The Man decided that was much too flagrantly, well flagrant. So when I got in tonight, there was an email from the Web manager saying that an editor had demanded that the site be taken down because of the post and the linking to a porn site.

So Cinema Toast is gone. Kaput. No more.

I’m falling back on the fact that I kept this blog up and running the whole time. It’s just a shame that I can’t even login to the Trib site and scavenge the archives for some of those reviews and interesting posts. They probably just deleted everything. And mine was one of the more well-trafficked blogs on the site, too. Oh well.

First and foremost, I’m still not going to write about politics. It’s just too excruciating on my nerves. This will be the new home of ‘To be determined new movie blog’ until I convince somebody else to give me a blog for movie news and reviews. Hey LYT, is the OC Weekly hiring?

My new blog is set up and  I’ve already started posting. I finally settled on Cinema Toast with Nate. It just seemed right and I had to make a decision.

Things aren’t completely over here. I still have a lot of archives that I want to go through so I don’t have to repeat myself with movie reviews and I need to keep the comment spam down. But I won’t write very much here. All my energy is going to this new endeavor. For instance, I’m giving blood for the first time ever as a publicity stunt for the blog. We’re going to have a photog make a slideshow of it on the Trib Web site. Then I’m going to watch Saw IV right after and hope I don’t faint or something because that wouldn’t be very manly.

I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that after much lobbying, cajoling, pleading and selling… I’ve finally gotten a blog from the Trib. In the next week, I’ll be starting it up, moving my Movie Blog archives over to it and writing my own little niche film blog where I can review horror movies all I want, cover a few television shows throughout the season, interact with my new readers and just generally do what I do here, only get paid.

The bad news is, where does that leave Common Sense? I already neglect this blog because of work, now I’m going to be doing even more work blogging for a paycheck, so there is no reason to keep this site up. Except to treat it as a personal blog. As for politics, I’m more or less done covering that. It’s gotten kind of tedious since it doesn’t seem like anything really changes and I’ve been doing it for so long that I really need a break from it.

I’ll still be involved in Democratic politics and I’ll still vote, but blogging about fools can only last so long.

The real dilemma now is coming up with a name for this new blog. I had a great name — Nateflix — but that got vetoed in the selling process because an editor was worried that it skirted trademark infringement. Then we were going to go with Movie Blog, what I use here, but another editor thought that sounded too official, like my blog would be the official entertainment blog of wacotrib.com.

The working title at the moment is Nate at the Drive-In, kind of an homage to Joe Bob Briggs, but I want something a little more clever that keeps my name in it. The same way we have a Joe who write the Joe Weather blog.

The shame is that I already bought up the Nateflix.com domain, so that would have been perfect.

If you’ve got any ideas, please, don’t hesitate to shoot ‘em my way. We can’t formally request the blog until I have a name for it.

First up on the list of reviews, though, is the new Transformers movie, along with all of its bonus material. And the original Transformers animated movie to compare it to. Niche blogging can be fun.
Saw IV is being released in the next week and if I can swing it, I’ll try and go to a midnight showing Thursday night and have a review on the new blog up by Friday morning, thus showing my bosses why it is we’re doing this whole thing. And don’t forget about Horrorfest 2007. Last year we didn’t even mention it was going on, this year I plan on seeing and reviewing every single movie.

I’ll keep you posted as this gets going, but this isn’t really a goodbye. I’m hoping that many of you regular readers will enjoy this new blog even more than Common Sense. Sure, I’m kind of selling out to the whole infotainment thing that most of us bloggers have been railing against for years, but I’m doing it with a blog at a mainstream community paper. So I feel like what I could accomplish on my own, I have. Now I want to go further and see how far down the rabbit hole I can go.

That’s my favorite joke going around right now about a former Baylor assistant coach who “pissed on the bar” at Scruffy Murphy’s last Saturday night after the Bears’ devastating 58-10 loss to Kansas.

Those that know me know I used to spend every night at Scruffy Murphy’s with my co-workers and that I’ve actually gotten on stage on a Wednesday night and done some karaoke. I consider this a dark period in my life where I was constantly drinking and being forced to do things I didn’t want to do. I blame the fact that I was on Cymbalta and not on very many pain meds.

Since then, I’ve more less given up drinking (unless it is dollar beer night or Space Monkey is buying) and I spend all my time at Two Minnies instead of Scruffy’s. Not a major move up in cleanliness, but much better company. And no one judges me for drinking water and taking all my pills.

Anyway, Schnupp “resigned” because, well, he peed on a bar and the cops were there. Being the laughingstock of Waco, that has to hurt the ego a lot. I know I wouldn’t want to stick around.

Somehow I think ‘Schnupp’ will enter our lexicon as a way of describing a person who does something really stupid and embarassing… or as a polite way of saying you gotta take a piss.

Schtupping, Schnupping. It’s all good.