I’ve just been asked to moderate a debate between school board candidates at Cypress Academy on October 23. This is my first time doing something like this, as I can recall, so it’s a good thing the event sponsors, the Parent Coordinating Council, is providing the questions.
It should be interesting.
I just got back from the first Hesperia City Council meeting at the new city hall (after driving on autopilot to the old city hall, of course). I have to say, it’s pretty nice. It’s comparable to a nice (but not extravagant) Los Angeles office building inside, with an attractive amphitheater for council meetings.
This meeting was full of folks from the Oak Hills Property Owners Association lobbying against the city absorbing three Oak Hills islands otherwise within Hesperia city limits. Seeing the room filled up as it was, I’m not sure how many seats the new facility has compared to the old council chambers — not a lot more is my first guess, but it’s rare that there’s a big crowd at council meetings, anyway. Usually, other than city staff and me (and now Hillary Borrud from the Daily Press), there’s between three and a dozen people at any given meeting, unless there’s an issue in some neighborhood.
Back in 1995, “The Usual Suspects” blew my mind, like it did to a lot of people. It was clever, it used an unconventional (at the time) narrative structure and it played fair with all its twists and turns.
Soon after, it was totally overshadowed by all the filmmakers trying to do their versions of “Pulp Fiction,” but it was inevitable that someone, someday, would channel “The Usual Suspects.” And that’s just what “Lucky Number Slevin
” does.
That’s not a bad thing: I love “The Usual Suspects,” but just like the films created by all the would-be Tarantinos, “Lucky Number Slevin” is a lesser film than the one it apes. It’s a bit too clever with the dialogue — which, despite deleted scenes showing how much many of the scenes were cut down, could still use still more cutting — and the character bits are more clever than plausible much of the time. What mobsters would really be called the Rabbi and the Boss? The stylized nature of the film is either too stylized for a realistic film or not stylized enough for a less realistic one.
That said, it’s an entertaining ride. The cast is uniformly strong, and it’s a treat to see Lucy Liu playing the girl next door (literally) instead of Yet Another Asian Dominatrix Type. The mob bosses are played with well-credentialed scenery chewing relish by a pair of Oscar-winners (Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley). And if Josh Hartnett and Bruce Willis don’t cover themselves in glory, they turn in solid performances.
It doesn’t escape from the long, long shadow of “The Usual Suspects,” but “Lucky Number Slevin” is a fun (if overly self-aware) film in the same vein.
For about a year now, I’ve been getting my NapraPAC (a combination of 1000 mg of generic Aleve and a Prevacid pill a day) for free. (Hey, prescription drug manufacturers: If you push your pills with giant stacks of coupons for the doctors you harass, they’ll turn around and give a big stack of them to patients.)
Today, at long last, I had to pay for the pills and I had been dreading the day, not knowing how much of a bite my insurance would take out of the three-figure bill for the 28 days of pills.
I had to pay $15. Score one for medical insurance.
|
|
