jetSet and otherwise unbloggable

So, lots of new, new, new, which is why I've been MIA here on Pick-Up Flix. For starters I've been traveling like George Clooney in that one movie where he flies a lot for work and then lays people off while accumulating air miles ... uh, what's it called ... oh yeah, O Brother Where Art Thou? jetBlue offered their nifty All-You-Can-Jet Pass for a month so Sara and I — Sara is my new everything — jetted off to Florida, Boston and New York City four different times. Needless to say, I'm not seeing many movies, although that's going to change. I have been writing about some of our trips on our new JetSetters page if you're interested in a little change of pace of the movie reviews. As for the regular movie content, it will be back very soon.

Goodbye Phoenix. Hello Manhattan.

My summer plans now include the greatest city in the world: Tulsa.

And by Tulsa I actually mean New York City. This is my movie page, and I realize that my travel plans are unlikely to interest movie buffs, but I was so stoked when I found out I had to mark the event with something more than just my self-contained glee. Although, on second thought, I'm sure there's a movie element I can weave it around if I really tried.

On other travel — and truly legitimate movie — news, I am going to the world's lamest city next month for a set visit for Piranha 3D. The city: beautiful Lake Havasu City, Ariz. This trip is only tentative now, and at any point the producers of Piranha 3D might come to their senses and call it off. Then again, they are the producers of Piranha 3D.

Celebrities/Naked: The Search Destroyers

There are no naked celebrities on this page so feel free to click away if you reached this blog by mistake. No hard feelings.

Two weeks ago Roger Ebert wrote about the brilliant little SiteMeter he put on his blog — take a look at the bottom of this page if you haven't seen one yet. I had a SiteMeter before his post, so I was stoked to read his comments, which reinforced the little gadget's curious skills. The little green button links to its home base, where it tracks visitors to this page. It catalogs their visit: how long they stayed, where they came from and where they left to. It's completely anonymous except for a little blip that will appear on a world map indicating where the click originated, be it northeast Phoenix or Norway. One list on SiteMeter, called referrals, shows the page the visitor was on when they clicked onto this page. Sometimes the pre-PickupFlix page is a Yahoo or Google search. Incidentally, SiteMeter has a funny little trick to its cataloging: it preserves the original search criteria of the visitor. So not only can I see that they visited my site, but that they clicked into it after searching for "Humphrey Bogart movies" or "great cop flicks." Or maybe the occasional "Marisa Tomei nude."

Yes, there are lots of people looking for porn on the net. Apparently some get sent to my page which is 100 percent porn-free. I first noticed this lost-porn-surfer phenomenon after naming a non-nude photo of Vanessa Hudgens "tween," which sent droves of assistant principals to this page to see Miss Hudgens sans clothes. Creepy indeed. (I've since renamed the photo, by the way.) One variation on the "tween" search was "tweens nude," which my blog was able to keep up with since, three posts before the one with Hudgens, I had used the word "nude" to describe a plot element in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. Yahoo and Google have a hard time analyzing the distance between searched words apparently, so as long as "nude" and "(insert your favorite female celebrity's name here)" appear on the same page it counts them as if they appeared in the same sentence.

The phenomenon came up again after running a piece on rapper and pop superstar M.I.A., less commonly known as Mathangi Arulpragasam. She played the 2007 Vegoose music festival, where I was photographing her. Shortly after her set (like 2 seconds) I decided she was the hottest thing on the planet. I'm sidetracking, but I write that only to underscore her abilities to charm men out of their socks. Anyway, the piece ran last December, yet every week I get a lovely array of Mathangi Arulpragasam searches. Here's a small cross section of some of the searches: "MIA topless," "MIA nip slip," "MIA sex video," "MIA bra flash," "MIA crotch shot," and all kinds of variations of "MIA nude" and "MIA naked," because apparently there's a difference. Now, let me again clarify something: It would be delightful to see M.I.A. naked, but until M.I.A. actually comes to my door to remove her clothing for a visual inspection by me then I'm going to assume that she does not want me to see her in nothing but her skin. So I just kinda skip the internet treasure hunt for Mathangi Arulpragasam nip slips and sex videos.

That, of course, doesn't stop hundreds of others who cozy up in front of their computers to begin their nightly searches of "Megan Fox lesbian video" or "Zooey Deschanel no panties." Curiously, I've yet to have anyone land on Pick-Up Flix after they've searched for "Laura Dern nip slips," "Kathy Bates hot tub video" or "Christina Aguilera breastfeeding in clown makeup." And, yes, I realize that by including these searchable phrases in this text that I'm increasing the chances of random porn seekers landing on this page instead of their beloved nude sites. It doesn't matter because they stopped reading a long time ago; in fact, they stopped reading as soon as they didn't see any "Jenna Fischer see-through dress" photos, which would be rad but, alas, they don't exist. Yet.

But going back to M.I.A., if I had to talk about a winner this summer it would be her. She didn't release a movie, or even a new album, but her "Paper Planes" in the Pineapple Express trailer was brilliant on a level that I have yet to define in any sort of articulate way. I loved the video and its catchy song so much that I sorta regretted watching the movie when I could have just watched the trailer again.

Another critic bites the dust

Hooray free time!

Really, though, what else is there to say? I've been canned. At least from movie reviews. In this crap market, in this shit newspaper era, in this colon-reaming bout of dysentery we call an economy, what room do newspapers have for movie critics? The answer: none. And that's why critics across the country are getting pink slips, buyouts or, like me, restructured beat lists. Even Roger Ebert's long-running show was given the boot for something a third as intelligent, thus five times more sellable to a TV-watching America. If Ebert's not safe, and big-name critics at big-name papers in big-name cities aren't safe, then what hope does little Michael Clawson of the community weekly the West Valley View have? Apparently some, although that's now fading … for now. Frankly, I'm surprised I was allowed to write movie reviews through the summer.

So here's the skinny: I was told that my movie reviews would no longer be needed until ad revenue increases and page counts go up. It sucks, but I'm just grateful I still have a job (I'm also a photog and I write Volume). The movies aren't gone completely, though: reviews of "big movies" are allowed. The logic of that single instruction should make most movie critics chuckle. Hmmm, big movies … Transformers is a big movie, but it's also one of the most mindless movies ever created, too. And No Country For Old Men is a classic, but clearly not a big movie, even if it did win the Best Picture Oscar. But I get what the bosses are saying: review the movies that most of America is going to show up to see. Why give space to a movie that, yes, will win Academy Awards and be on year-end Top 10 lists, but won't be seen by 97 percent of the movie-going public?

I'm taking this news remarkably well: No anger. No hatred. No frustration. This time of year helps. The first review I didn't have to write was Death Race ... hallelujah! Had it been Wall•E or The Dark Knight I would have sobbed at my desk. How can I be mad, though? Yeah, it's miserable that the movie section I built up over eight years has been shelved, but if no movies is my sacrifice to my paper then so be it. I've read that when a person is submerged in freezing water their body senses the temperature change and, in a defensive move, begins shutting off circulation to expendable parts of the body. Heart rate slows, fingers and toes go numb, breathing slows, but the body is trying to right itself, or at least weather through the storm. I love movies to death, but I'm not afraid to admit that movie reviews are fingers and toes — expendable.

America has too little film analysis and genuine critique, two things I've always strived for in my writing; reviews are too often random commentary about the stars' nip-slips and what they wore on the red carpet at the premier. There will be a time when I can once again offer film analysis in the West Valley View. My days aren't over. To quote Ahhnold: "I'll be back." In the meantime, as many reviews as I can do will be posted here. And look for other features as well. I'll weather this storm and when I'm back in print I'll be better than ever.

Lost mini hoax revealed

April Fool's Day is not celebrated enough. So to celebrate I thought I'd create a fake Lost script, throw it on a page and see what happened. It ran on this page April 1. Some people within my circulation area in West Phoenix, Ariz., totally believed it, and those that didn't found it amusing. Somehow the page made its way to several Lost blogs, all of which knew it was a hoax but admired its spirit. Lost Rumours picked it up, and so did Doc Arzt and Friends' Lost Blog. But the comments were harsh, more harsh than I was expecting. "This one wasn't even convincing." "The script was clunkier than most fan fiction." "Not even close." "The dialogue gave it away. Yeesh!" "Sounds like it's from a soap opera." "Boy, that was awful."

Ouch, everyone. Ouch.

IMDb links to Bad Libs

The beloved Internet Movie Database gave me a shout-out (holla!) on its home page and Hit List today for my variation of Mad Libs, which I lovingly called Bad Libs. The premise was simple: I was tired of writing crappy reviews for crappy movies that the studio didn't want me to see because they knew, from the bottom of their empty souls, that said movie was in fact oh so very crappy. So instead of writing the review of Resident Evil: Extinction, I let my readers do it by using my Bad Lib. I wrote the basic movie outline and then readers, or even you, wrote all the colorful language that made each review unique. I'm mighty proud of the way the page came out, and its overall design should be credited to my trusty Volume designer, Jonathan Barnes. You can find the page on IMDb today, or click here to find it in its original location. Also, don't forget to tune into Volume periodically. It's new every Tuesday.

Volume archive hits Web

My professional career has been spent doing a variety of things. When I started as a journalist I was doing obituaries and compiling religion events for a church calendar. It didn’t stop there: cop logs, hard news, fluffy features, military news, a city beat, several school beats, part-time photographer, full-time photographer … at one point, as a joke by an editor who knew I was single at the time, I was designated the “cheerleader reporter” after covering a local Arizona Cardinal dancer. By default I still retain that title.

Anyway, I have done a lot. But only after I started writing about movies, music and pop culture did I truly find a home. For a long time I only had my movie reviews, then slowly I began writing about music (in SPIN magazine even), and later still I would slip in some culture-type stories (in one of my first I proclaimed the iPod to be the best thing to happen to music since the electric guitar). Eventually I combined all three things into my own section in the newspaper — I called it Volume. The early forms of the full-page section were crude and boring; now they’re the best designed paper in the West Valley View. Until recently, they’ve only been available in print in the newspaper. Now, for the first time ever, they’re available on the Web. And not just the current issues, either; even some of the back issues are available going back to last summer. Production genius Jonathan Barnes, who has designed and built Volume from the very beginning, has built a spiffy new site where you can check out our different pages. Also on the site is an e-mail contact for myself and my editor. Please, please, please write in and comment on the pages or tell us what you’d like to see in Volume. Here are the links:

VOLUME

WEST VALLEY VIEW

And if you want to see some of my photography: SMUGMUG

Another IMDb mention

So, Pick-Up Flix landed another mention on IMDb's Hit List about a week ago. The first one generated about a dozen responses; the most recent one about double that. I'm going to keep trying to get on there and hopefully (cross my fingers, laces don't count) readership will go up and up and up. It's been about a week since I've posted last ... my apologies on taking so long. It's been a busy week. First there was Independence Day, then the Warped Tour (see my pictures here) and then just this week I was without a Internet because I was getting a high-speed connection on my computer (feel free to welcome me to the 21st Century). But fret not, new posts are coming. And I have a bunch too, including one on the life and times of actor Brad Renfro and another on the colorful language in True Grit, a terrific John Wayne movie always overshadowed by the much-overrated The Searchers. Until then, pilgrims.

Off to a good start -- thanks, IMDb

Three posts into this Web log (I won't say that other word; it rhymes with grog) and the Internet Movie DataBase, the end-all be-all of movie Web sites, plunked Pick-Up Flix on its home page. Gracias, IMDb. Since they've posted it, though, I've already added my review of Live Free or Die Hard. So, if you were diverted here from IMDb, please scroll down to read about two kinds of movie badness. And pretty please stick around for the review of Live Free or Die Hard. And in case you want to bookmark this page, I will be doing weekly reviews of movies, daily features on other cinema in general, as well as discussing old movies I might be viewing between current releases. Thanks for checking this page out.