Emotional Bullshit and Kit Kat Bites for the Artist in You

As an artist slash writer, my worst downfall is me--yeah, I know, cliche, but listen--as soon as I come close to achieving some semblance of success, I shut it down.  I take comfort in the childhood conditioning that deemed me a worthless little scamp, carrying that torch of failure happily knowing I'll never get where I'm going.

Too bad, cause the past is long gone, and so there's just me left, with a big question mark of what to do with the years that remain.  Every now and then, I read a book about one or more of my dysfunctional habits, usually after watching fellow artists or writers outperform me by simply doing.

Emotional Bullshit, by Carl Alasko, is one of those works.  Anything to help, right?  I figured if anything, I could get a couple pointers concerning the worst relationship I have, that being the one with myself.

I got comfortable with the book and a bag of Kit Kat Bites.  Why eat a second-rate chocolate that contains bizarre ingredients like 'wheat flour' when real tantalizing chocolate awaits me?  Well, my head games are rooted in my past and so is Kit Kat.  I remember it as a girl, growing up on the outskirts of a small hick town.  We used to take the ten minute drive by pickup to go to the convenience store and honestly, it was one of my favourite snacks.  It made a nice change from fried bologna on white toast.

Yes, with sentimental value, I enjoyed eating the candy, especially the wafer crunch of it.  Those elements made it satisfying, much more so than the questionable chocolate taste.

Munching away, I dove into Emotional Bullshit.  It's about fear and delusional thinking, how our fat egos make problems instead working with the community.  We blame others for our disappointments and avoid reality as much as possible by avoiding or attacking others.

In my own case, I blamed myself as a worthless female for letting my future go down the drain.  A waste of space.  Why write the stories or paint the canvasses with my ideas when someone else out there already has or will anyway.  My delusion that I was a loser from the start allowed me to avoid the risks required to grow as a writer and artist.

A quick read, EB thoroughly explained this common messed up way of interacting with ourselves and others.  Alasko gave tonnes of examples that showed people screwing up all over the place, but he did it in a way that I felt sympathy and understanding for both sides.

What I took away from it involves seeing me and you or somebody else as partners, whether it be in a marriage or business capacity or on a parenting level.  In our individualistic society, where the ego reigns supreme, this is tough to do.

The book offers a solution called 'constructive conflict'.  At the core, a person's needs, like maintaining healthy communication with loved ones, come before the negative desire to avoid confrontation at all costs including losing loved ones.  We have to learn how to treat all involved with respect, listen, and work together on divisive issues.

I lent the premise to my relationship with creativity, which I deny regularly and then blame myself for via guilt of procrastination and distraction tactics.  Some of us must create things because that's who we are; we have to stop deluding ourselves that we have nothing to offer and get on with it, in whatever capacity our circumstances allows for.

Like the shovel on the cover indicates,  digging away at our own crap is hard work, but it's worth it if you break through the fear and denial of what you really need.  It's inspired me to change my approach!

Emotional Bullshit:  8.5 / 10 - An easy read and quite helpful, it could have been tightened up and summarized in a shorter space, but that might be my own personal taste.

Kit Kat Bites:  7.5 / 10 - For the wafer texture and childhood sentiment, I give it a high score.  It's a tasty cookie-candy which I didn't eat for the chocolate taste.

21 Jump Street and Chocolate Redemption

I thought 21 Jump Street was going to be a half-baked movie, full of drab jokes, but it turned out I had no idea what I was talking about.  This movie rocked the laughs so much that I went back and saw it again.

I'll just refer to the first experience, which includes a difficult chocolate episode.   We went in without remembering to snag some Jones Soda or decent chocolate beforehand.  Yikes.

We ended up grabbing a combo that included popcorn, fountain pop, and a candy I used enjoyed while growing up redneck in Hick Town Canada, called Rolo.  Well, the truth of the matter is, that chocolate is sub par compared to what I snack on now. It barely had any flavour and although it didn't burn my throat like a lot of other cheap mainstream chocolate, it was so bland that after the movie, I went to Laura Secord and bought a giant Easter egg to help my tongue recover from the how ordeal.

I've reviewed the same egg here before, but in a smaller size.  Of course, it tasted delicious compared to that other stuff.

Anyway, back to the movie.  It opened up with Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) as these two high school enemies that forge a friendship in the police academy in order to survive until graduation.  They go on to be bumbling cops stuck on chump assignments and eventually find their way into the old 21 Jump Street assignment of the 1980s TV show.

The entire time, the movie laughed at itself and the unbelievable premise that these guys were passable as high school students.  Something to note here, even Schmidt's crush, Molly, played by Brie Larson, didn't come across as a teen, at least, for me.  The only main character who did was James Franco's little brother, Dave, who did an excellent job as high school year book editor slash drug dealer.

Unlike the original TV show, these guys look and appear too old and out of the loop for the high school scene.  I remember Johnny Depp, Peter DeLuise, and Holly Robinson, who have cameos here, as baby-faced cops that fit in.  Course, that was many many moons ago, so maybe I'm off with my assessment.

But that's part of the point, since it's a humorous send up of the whole concept.  Even the fictional drug, HFS, that looks like a church wafer with a pic of a pile of shit and a halo over it, lampoons the drug culture.

The attention to minute details in the film, such as the wafers, add to the high quality presentation.  A shiny Z28 Camaro, almost like the one I used to drive, Johnny Depp's long haired biker disguise, and even the villain's um, appendage, all got the right reaction from me.

One of the best elements of the movie, for somebody like me, who grew up in the late 80s and 90s, had to be Ice Cube, who rocked it as the stereotypical angry police chief, Capt. Dickson.  What a d*ck.  Yeah.

Ice Cube was part of N.W.A. which was big during the airing of the original 21 Jump Street.  Back then, a lot of us kids listened to the group.  And if you came from anti-establishment, like I did, you took on several of their anthems, like F*ck tha Police.  Jump Street's soundtrack includes songs like their Straight Outta Compton.  As backdrop to Schmidt's Slip Shady wannabe getup in his high school days, Eminem's The Real Slim Shady is also included.

So we've got lots of humor, fast paced gut-busting action, cameos from the original crew, kick-a** music, and oh yeah, several silly subplots like a play that Schmidt wants to star in and the stages of an HFS trip.

It's all good.

21 Jump Street:  10 / 10  - Nothing but praise here.  Try it, you might be surprised at how much you laugh.  And you definitely don't need prior Jump Street experience to enjoy it!

Rolo:  3 / 10 - You know I'm being too generous here.

Laura Secord egg:   8.9 / 10  -  This chocolate came through for me when I really needed it.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Goodbyes, & Sad Chocolate

A few days ago, we headed out to our local downtown movie theater, the Palace for the last time.  Choosing Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows for the last movie to see in a theater that has been rebuilt since its creation 91 years ago, we settled in for the show.

Of course, we came prepared, with Jones Soda for me and Turin's Baileys Irish Cream chocolate for everybody, which we bought at the local drugstore.  Popcorn with fountain pop rounded out the gorge-fest.

I looked forward to seeing Robert Downey Jr's Holmes and Rachel McAdam's Irene Adler interact on the big screen again.  They didn't disappoint, but Adler's time on screen turned out to be minimal, as Noomi Rapace's character, Madam Simza Heron, took over for most of the movie.

I think I felt more grief at the lack of Adler's presence than Holmes.  Don't get me wrong, Rapace did great in her portrayal of Heron, but I missed the Holmes-Adler connection.  I haven't read the actual stories since childhood --and I'm very old, so ... maybe that's the way it goes in the story, but ...

Okay, even with that reality, Holmes could have been given more than a few looks and a handkerchief to show his own sadness.  Okay, the hanky blew out to see, time to move on ...

While Jared Harris did solid work of portraying Prof. James Moriarty, I didn't feel the same suspense between his character and Holmes as there was in the first Sherlock Holmes.  Mark Strong's Lord Blackwood actually scared Holmes, who needed to figure out the villain's plan.  With Moriarty, it's simply a chess battle of moves, not a puzzle.  Sure, there is investigative work to be done, but there are no question marks.

The movie, despite those disappointments, is a fun ride, full of visual candy and more of the same style of the first.  The story takes us beyond the streets of London onto a train, out into the woods, and to places such as Sweden's Reichenbach Falls, but, complete with a fictional castle, is computer generated. The CGI is done in good taste.

Along with action, we got humorous bits.  All I have to say is, the poor pony.  Hopefully he or she had a stunt double for the scenes with Holmes. The segment where Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes showed us his all--and I do mean his all--proved to be less dangerous but no less funny.

Of course, the last scene --or what I think should have been the last--must be discussed.  The final chess/physical battle between Holmes and Moriarty.  Yes, Richie did an artful job of it, but he didn't end it there; he let Jude Law's Watson take over, leaving of course, a question mark on whether there will be a 3rd movie.

I say sure, but only if Adler is brought back. Hey, it's Hollywood, why not!  In the end, the movie did provide decent entertainment; we ended up going downtown one last time to see it again and say a final goodbye to the theater.

Rating:

A Game of Shadows:  8 / 10 - We got our money's worth in eye candy and action.  Plus, we saw it twice, so that says something too!

Turin Baileys Irish Cream chocolates:  4 / 10  These chocolates get a fail, even though we bought them on sale.  They did not taste like other liqueurs, being way too mild, and the chocolate itself was bland.  Never again.  Ah well... at least we had Jones Soda and popcorn!

Harry Potter's Last Stand and Dark Chocolate Pomegranate

Here we are, about four weeks after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 has come out and I'm finally getting around to posting about it.  Well, it can't have been that great then, eh?  Nope.  Plus, well, other things distracted me, like the visual art scene.

Three of us went downtown to catch it on the first Saturday night.  Coming into the theater, we brought our own goods, of course:  Brookside Dark Chocolate Pomegranate and yes, Jones Soda -- Green Apple and Blue Bubblegum flavours.

The state of the seats directly in front of us foreshadowed our overall view of the movie.   Busted and out of order, management taped them up in black garbage bags.  Sure, HP installments have always been filmed in rather dark tones to match the whole black and white fight between good and evil, but never before did we find the magic within broken.

It came across as if the actors, especially the younger ones, phoned in their roles.  Tired, weary, and emotionless.  Honestly, I felt more sentimental before I entered the theater and bought my ticket.  After ten years of Bertie Bott's Jelly Beans and the Weasley twins' antics and the crazed killer actions of Bellatrix Lestrange, a sadness in saying goodbye surrounded me like an Invisibility Cloak.

Good thing I bought a giant bag of popcorn and my friend supplied the Brookside chocolates.  I couldn't get enough of those.  Yummy, I thought about them as I bit and chewed them instead of focusing on the dull rapport between even Hermione and Ron.  So much for screen chemistry.

Now, the electricity and passion that Alan Rickman infused Snape with, well, that became the best part of the whole experience.  More please.  Oh, it's too late.  And when Molly Weasley took down Bellatrix, I actually thought, Why, Voldemort, why?  Boring as bloody hell.  Characters like Bellatrix needed more screen time--and so did Malfoy.

Oh, they could have done so much more with this movie.  Instead, they turned it into a sleep-walker of blandness.  When favourite characters like Fred died, they didn't show it and only briefly did the camera pause on them.  So much wasted potential.

Aside from Snape's love for Lily, the presentation fell flat.  I can't say it enough.  Even the epic final battle landed on its head.  Devoid of emotion, poorly choreographed, and far from memorable, it came across like bits of World War II reenactments, the Luke/Darth Vader sword battle of the Star Wars series, and, well, a knock-off of Lord of the Rings.

Sure, you can try and guilt me: it's the last movie, don't you feel the sadness, the tears rolling down your cheeks?  No, but I did and do long for the magic of earlier HP movies.

And then to add insult to injury, the production offered us some cheap makeup and clothes in the so-called aging of the main characters, Ron, Harry, Hermione, and Draco.  Seriously?  The HP machine has brought in buckets of money over the past decade; you'd think that they could spare a couple bucks to make them credible grown ups.  Hell, even bad wigs and properly angled stage lights would have worked better.

Walking out of the theater, we felt so empty.  Just as the author, J. K. Rowling, squashed further sequels by throwing a bland coda on the end, the series finale killed it by erasing the spirit that soared in earlier parts.

Ratings:

HPATDHP2:  6.5 / 10 - Somewhat lackluster and anticlimactic, but Snape and Voldemort saved it.

Brookside Dark Chocolate Pomegranate:  8 / 10 - A tasty mix of cocoa and pomegranate juice.

Cookie Cutter Hollywood Movies and Cookie Dough Ice Cream

We celebrated Canada Day (July 1) by eating ice cream and watched some older movies, A Knight's Tale (2001) and The Karate Kid (2010), with a friend.  When these movies came out, I had absolutely no interest in seeing them, however, we were hanging out and decided to sit down and see what they had to offer.  Since it was a holiday, we walked to the nearest grocery store and picked up the closest thing to chocolate that we could find without a trillion chemicals in it:   Irresistibles Cookie Dough and Brownies Ice Cream.

Irony overshadowed the whole experience. The day before, unbeknownst to us, the Canadian government issued an allergy warning for the ice cream we bought. No kidding. Course, we didn't hear about it until a few days later. Ooops. Fortunately, nobody who ate it suffered from any issue relating to eggs.

We hunkered down with the Heath Ledger movie. After eating takeout pizza we dove into the ice cream. Yeah, pizza, for the holiday. Special days aren't meant to be chalked full of nutritional foods. I suppose that goes for movie quality as well, since Knight came across as typical Hollywood cookie cutter feel-good fair. Yeah.

Just like in Smith's Karate Kid, everything is black and white; there's the good guy who must be the underdog and the bad guy who always has the upper hand, whether it be through class or money or both. Then, of course, we need a pretty girl who immediately falls for our hero.

Good thing I got busy stuffing my face, it distracted me from the feel-good crap on the TV screen.  Sure, Ledger provided some eye-candy and Karate Kid came across as a tourist brochure for the shiny bits of China, but the fact that these two movies had the exact same formula kind of ruined it.  I mean, hey, if at least one of them could have had even the tiniest bit of creativity to it, that would have made everything okay.

The only area they did get creative with was in the whole Suspension of Disbelief department, as expected.  Smith's character, a complete newbie to martial arts, miraculously spars a seasoned Kung Fu champ and avoids ultimate defeat.  Never mind that they got the style of martial arts wrong, but I guess if they named it something other than what they did, people wouldn't get that it was a remake with a few superficial changes.

And poor Ledger, fighting with a knight who's obviously using an improper jousting lance.  Even the crowd could easily see that it wasn't regulation.  Such oversights must occur for flimsy and drab plots to crawl towards the required ending of white defeating black.  Ho hum.

From yawn-inducing stories to bland ice cream that didn't have the texture of any of the goodies it boasted:  chunks of chocolate chip cookie dough, chocolate brownies, or real cream.  And the chocolate taste was muted at best.  Disappointed, I double checked the ingredients to make sure it even had any in it and found traces of 'cocoa butter' and 'cocoa powder.'   Yay.

Ratings:

A Knight's Tale / The Karate Kid / Irresistibles Cookie Dough:  6 / 10 -  It's best to simply list them altogether, since they deserve about the same score.  Knight gets a high number for the shots of Ledger and the jousting scenes and, last but not least, Paul Bettany's naked butt shots.  Karate gets a decent ranking because of the pretty scenery and Jackie Chan--I'm a big fan.  Cookie did better than expected because well, we already had low expectations.

X-Men: First Class & Last Class Chocolate

I did not prepare properly for this particular movie outing.  We had to purchase chocolate at the movie kiosk.  And, as noted previously, we've been showing up on cheap night Tuesdays, since there are so many on the list to see this summer.

Despite the glitches, we enjoyed X-Men:  First Class.  Although I'd seen the previews, I had no idea how it would go over.  Well, it didn't center around Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), so ... But I have to say that the movie pulled off presenting the backgrounds of Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender).  Both characters came across as believable and their emotions reached through the screen to the audience, especially during their touching scene on the beach near the end.

Of course, I ended up on Team Magneto.  Xavier, even in college, when pursuing women, seemed such a pansy.  That's not a bad thing, but compared to the complex layers of Magneto, X was a lightweight.

Yeah, I know, it's a comic, but take the relationship between Magneto and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), for example.  She offers herself up to him and he reacts by agreeing, if she stays in her true form during the encounter.  That spoke much stronger than Xavier's lame pickup lines involving women's genetic quirks.

Now, that's not to say that others will be Team Magneto; somebody I went with totally disagreed.  She immediately took to the genuinely caring Xavier and stuck with him.  So either side is justified in the movie.

And onto the villains, featuring Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) and his sidekick, Emma Frost (January Jones).  Bacon did a great job playing a sadistic Nazi and transitioned nicely into a 1960s Bond-type bad guy.  Frost played the villainous vixen convincingly, and yes, she fit the 60s style Bond bad-girl wardrobe.

Of course, with such a movie, in contemporary times, there has to be CGI, especially for scenes where Magneto lifts whole submarines into the air.  Believable?  Not so much, but hey, it's presented much the same as in the other X-Men installments.  The human reflection and interactions balance it without smothering the audience.

And then there's the cameo with Wolverine.  Wow.  His time onscreen didn't last longer than say, twenty seconds, but the audience went nuts when they--er, we--saw him.  He had one line and that's all he needed.  Perfection.

Overall, the movie exceeded expectations (since I really didn't know what I was in for).  The Wolverine spot brought it over the edge.  From Bacon to Mystique and minor characters like Beast (Nicholas Hoult), the actors worked it.  Costuming and props also did a great job of working the 1940s/1960s vibe.

Ratings:

X-Men:  First Class - 8.5 / 10 - It's a good score, considering the movie doesn't focus on Wolverine (my favourite character).  My views of Magneto and Xavier really turned around.  I'm also looking forward to seeing more movies with Fassbender and Lawrence.  And nice to see Bacon back in form.

Junior Mints - 4.5 / 10 - I couldn't be bothered to them until now, when I have to rate them.  It's really been a long time since I've had to eat such sugar mints.  I've been spoiled on real cocoa chocolate and candies, that's for sure.  These bloody things (I can't really call them mints) burnt my mouth with the low-grade sugar assault.  Never again.  I must stick to smuggling real chocolate into the movies.

The Solitude of Numbers and Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream

I'm currently writing a memoir about childhood and as each draft winds its way through the eagle eyes of beta and refining critters, I often receive fantastic feedback that leads me to other writers.  That's how I stumbled upon Paolo Giordano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers.  A reader said that my writing, which portrays a dysfunctional family and includes the use of bodily excretions, reminded her of this book.

She found both stories difficult to read, particularly because of the grittier details.  At first I thought, oh man, time to toss the whole thing into the garbage, but after I absorbed the rejection, I went looking for it at the local library.

I'd never heard of Giordano or The Solitude before.  It's a translation of La solitudine dei numeri primi, his Italian story of two traumatized individuals, Mattia and Alice.  I decided to read it, thinking, hey, why not, maybe I'll get some insights.

What a surprise it turned out to be.   I enjoyed the fast read.  Yes, it included a scene that dealt with excrement, but so what.  I'm not just saying that to bolster my own childhood poop.  It maintains the story's integrity.

Since I'm talking about the body, I'll move straight into the chocolate connection.   Well, yeah, childhood humour is appropriate, given that the story deals with the progression from early childhood to the prime of adult life.

What better way to experience a novel then by purchasing some ice cream that you can eat in small bowls as it unfolds?  I chose Turtle Mountain's soy based chocolate peanut butter flavor.  The first taste my tongue found was the peanut butter.  Yes, real peanuts and, real cocoa.  The texture wasn't as smooth as traditional corn syrup, chemical-laced ice creams, but it sure tastes better.

Like the ice cream, Solitude has a bite to it.  It's refreshing.  Not like a cool glass of water, but as a potent dance between the main characters, who suffer early traumas that leave them emotionally disabled.

It reads as the band Radiohead sounds with Thom Yorke's eerily haunting vocals, only it's fluid words on paper.  I doubted the similarity was a coincidence, so I read up on the author to find out who influenced him.

Sure enough,in an interview, he notes that Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails (NIN) inspire him as an artist.  Although trained as a physicist, he is clearly also an accomplished story teller.

In the end, as the isolated and lonely Alice and Mattia tried to come together, I really wanted them too succeed.  When such reunions rely on the logical resolution that a mathematician or physicist provides, it does not bode well.  Can one emotionally stunted woman plus one man of similar suffering equal  happily ever after?   Read it and find out.

There is also a movie adaptation of the novel.  I haven't seen it yet.  From the trailer, it looks like it has captured the essence and atmosphere of the story, so I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully it comes with English subtitles.

Ratings:

The Solitude of Prime Numbers:  9 / 10 -if only I could defy logic and force my own ending on it.  Otherwise, it makes for fantastic word music.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream:  8 / 10 - great peanut butter taste, I'd like to see a bit more chocolate punch to it.  While it is far more healthier than the average junk-filled ice creams out there, it wasn't as smooth.  Yes, I'd devour it again.

No Chocolate No Go

Well, folks, I ran out of chocolate a few days ago.  That means no reviews or experiences.  It's a pretty bland world without chocolate.  It's no joke, I can't even brush my teeth without it.  No, seriously, what's the point of brushing if there's no chocolate?

Okay, dental hygiene jokes aside, I've got a few book reviews in the works. That includes the first ebook I've read (I got it as a gift last week).  Those posts will alternate with my thoughts on movies that I haven't seen yet, Like Kung Fu Panda 2, X-Men: First Class, and Bridesmaids ...

Oh, I know what you're thinking; people do entertainment reviews all the time without the aid of chocolate.  Sure.  Point taken, but this blog is supposed to be chocolate fueled and to do it without would cocoa-less.  Without the chocolate vibe, you might as well get Melba toast or unsalted crackers to fill in.  Honestly.

Look for chocolate peanut butter ice cream among the treats that I'll be talking about.  No, I haven't tried it yet, but once it's in my dessert bowl, I'm sure it'll last about three seconds--at least, I hope that's how good it's gonna taste.