Spring has sprung in Boston!  It’s a gorgeous day today and the buds are bursting from the trees.

Colors just seem brighter on a beautiful spring day.

Entertainment Weekly posted a neat new pic of Optimus Prime from the Transformers movie.

The pic really helps illustrate how the truck unfolds into the robot:

Here’s the new truck that’ll appear in the movie:

Check out the ego on Quentin Tarantino (emphasis mine):

Our original idea was to do a horror double feature. The genre I wanted to tackle was slasher films, because I’m a big fan of late-’70s, early-’80s slasher films. The only thing was, what makes them so good is the genre is so rigid. And I had an idea about a guy who kills girls with his car as opposed to a machete, and I put it in a slasher-film structure. Other than the big car moments, though, my thing could be a Eugene O’Neill play. These girls just talk and talk and talk. If it wasn’t for the car stuff, I could do my thing on stage. more>>

Apparently, Eugene O’Neill’s work is just “talk and talk and talk” - as long as you have a lot of talking, your work is as good as a Eugene O’Neill.

It’s interesting how Tarantino is aware of the biggest fault I have with Death Proof, but sees it as a good thing.  I think at this point he’s so surrounded by sycophants willing to praise his screenwriting abilities and “ear for dialogue” that they’re unwilling to tell him when it goes on for WAY too long and stalls the movie in its tracks.  Yes, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs had lots of dialogue, but that doesn’t mean that Tarantino’s dialogue is always appropriate for the scene or the plot.

Also - playwrights may be able to take any given subject matter and turn it into great theater (as Arthur Miller did to an average salesman), but I doubt a Pulitzer will ever be awarded to a story about “a guy who kills girls with his car as opposed to a machete.”

Grindhouse has failed at the box office. Here are three causes I can think of:

1. It’s just not fun. There are 4 truly enjoyable moments in the movie: the missing reel in Planet Terror, “don’t”, “Thanksgiving,” and the car crash in Death Proof. I was expecting Sin City and Kill Bill vol. 1 double feature, but found a LOT of dialogue and not a lot of scenes that made me laugh out loud or even smile. It’s not that the violence or gore turns me off (I enjoyed the Dawn of the Dead remake and thought Hostel interesting) but I kept looking at my watch to see how close we were to the grand finale of each movie.
2. It needs serious editing. Forget the 3.5 hour running time - a well told, interesting tale (rare as they are) can hold an audience’s interest for that long. Tarantino needs people around him that are willing to tell him when his dialogue is running on - otherwise you get a 15 minute scene of four women talking in a coffee shop. Apparently the movie will be split into two different films for the UK release, but I think they need to cut scenes, not add them. A poorly structured story is going to be dull, no matter how you edit it.
3. It has no audience. I suppose there’s something admirable about making a movie for your own enjoyment, and Tarantino and Rodriguez have said that they made the movie almost as a goof. However, the movie seems designed for a specific subset of movie fans who 1) remember Grindhouse films and 2) actually enjoy watching them. It was sort of interesting to see the Tiger cartoons that assumedly marked a Grindhouse movie as “restricted,” but nobody in the theater I was in showed any recognition when they came onscreen.

As a result - I’m glad I saw the movie, but I wouldn’t recommend it to others. The movie may still turn a profit (or at least break even) on DVD, but without good “word of mouth” it’s destined to fail at the box office.

I recently redid my kitchen, and noticed that my new dishwasher had an inch of standing brown water in the bottom. A quick consult with Google revealed that this can sometime happen when the food processing unit hasn’t been opened. Sounded like a simple fix.

I unscrewed the plastic on either side of the dishwasher and pulled it out. It felt stuck; I pulled and shimmied with it but it felt like I couldn’t pull it out more than 3 inches. After poking around with a flashlight and screwdriver, I found that the installer had connected the electric cord through a hole in the floor that was drilled before the cabinet was installed. When I pulled out the dishwasher, the cord was pulled taut, and there didn’t seem to be a way to pull it out without widening the hole in the floor.

My first impulse was to drill a hole in the cabinets, disassemble the electric connection between the dishwasher and the floor, and/or widen the hole to get at the electric cord. I went with my second, lazier, wiser choice and called a professional.

The guy from A-Z Repairs came at 2pm today. He looked at the dishwasher and asked if I had a garbage disposal. I said yes, and he asked who had installed it. I said I did.

He bent down and felt under the sink. About two minutes later he showed me a piece of penny-sized plastic he had removed:

(Apparently new garbage disposals have this piece of plastic covering a hole, and there’s a tube that can connect the dishwasher runoff to the garbage disposal. You need to remove the plastic BEFORE connecting the tube, otherwise the dirty water hits the plastic and runs back into the dishwasher.)

He asked for a copy ofthe dishwasher receipt (still under warranty) and I gave it to him. He was also nice enough to say that “they should make this easier to understand in the kit,” making me feel somewhat better at seeming like a complete idiot.

At 2:05, he left, having noticeably NOT drilled a hole in the cabinets, disassembled the electric connection between the dishwasher and the floor, and/or widened the hole to get at the electric cord.

This struck me as an illustration of the difference between intelligence and experience - I might have been able to figure this out after 48 hours of dedicated work, but he was able to solve the problem in 5 minutes based on massive experience.

Next time, I’m calling the experts first.