Movies Watched -- 20,000 Days On Earth

Added on by C. Maoxian.

All future movies watched posts will just be my stream of consciousness notes taken as I watched the movie, which might not be very coherent.

93 minutes ... 20,000 days is just short of 55 years ... funny looking chinless guy ... he's a songwriter ... going to see his shrink ... his name is Nick, Nick Somebody, no idea ... he's articulate ... bunch of ageing rockers, I have no idea who they are, they're probably famous ... "memory is what we are" ... former junkie ... bald shrink with index finger pressed into cheek so you know he's top drawer ... shrink with round wirerim glasses and sensuous mouth ... rockstar sunglasses and gold rings including the pinkie ... hippie rocker buddy's house has great view of Dover cliffs ... importance of collaborators ... ageing rockers in paisley shirts (proving that they don't work for the man) ... his group's name is The Birthday Party? no idea ... Cave, he does have a name: Nick Cave (never heard of him of course) ... he's Australian not English ... "Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds" (I like the band's name) ... beautiful wife ... that pretty girl in his back seat is probably Kylie Minogue but I don't know for sure since I wouldn't know her if we shared an elevator ... hipster audience at his live show ...  white hipsters ... beautiful young women love this chinless old guy ... early teenage twin boys who look like their mother, fortunately. Kind of interesting, didn’t fast forward it … Yellow rating.

Movies Watched -- A Most Wanted Man

Added on by C. Maoxian.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a German intelligence agent ... everyone in his unit speaks English, oddly ... he smokes and drinks enough in this one to down a rhino, which he oddly resembles, a blonde rhino.  Robin Wright shows up as a CIA agent with a horrible dye job, black, maybe trying to pass as KD Lang ... beautiful fake blonde "human rights" lawyer ... Willem Dafoe doesn't play a Batman villain, but a German banker villain (more evil) with a soft spot, a bitchy bored wife, and an AMG Mercedes ... they got that guy from Nazi central casting (Hitler mustache, wire-rim glasses) to play the bad German intelligence guy ... was sort of interesting but not really ... spoiler: the Americans swoop in at the end with their black glass Suburbans and scoop up all the bad guys to send off to god knows where.  Hoffman goes home to drink more, smoke more, and play Brahms using two fingers.  Not 90% fresh but already in the queue before I made the new cutoff, so I watched it. Yellow rating.

Movies Watched -- A Most Violent Year

Added on by C. Maoxian.

Two hours long and felt about twenty hours long ... slow slow slow.  Starred the folk singer from the recent Coen brothers movie, Oscar somebody. Also had a blonde Jessica Chastain and her boobs. This was a W.D. By movie, maybe the same guy who made Life of Pi or something. God it was slow. The only thing that interested me was how many late 70s and early 80s cars they had to get in one spot for a highway scene. Again, this was on the RT Top 100 list but would have been cut if I had instituted the 90% fresh rule. From here on in I'll only watch the 65 movies from 2014 that were at least 90% fresh.  Yellow rating.

Movies Watched -- 22 Jump Street

Added on by C. Maoxian.

Sequel to dumb comedy 21 Jump Street ... funny in parts, but aimed so squarely at white suburban teens and early 20s frat boys that it gets old fast if you're outside the target demographic.  10 minutes of end credits so really only 10 to 20 minutes too long. Inexplicably on the Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 movie list so I had to go back and rework the list to include only things rated 90% fresh, which cut it down from 100 to 65 movies, which I will now watch so you don't have to. Yellow rating.

QQQ to $110

Added on by C. Maoxian.

The set-up across volatility I pointed out before still stands, even though the Swiss revaluation threw markets for a loop, and the Q's look like they should rally from here.  That's my take on things. 

Cheap Chinese Cigarettes -- Taishan

Added on by C. Maoxian.

Under US$1 and a hard pack ... Taishan ("Mount Tai") is one of the famous mountains in China, can't remember how many there are in total, oh right, five, five sacred mountains 五嶽 ... it's in Shandong province, so these cigs are manufactured in Shandong. Predictably the website listed on the package doesn't work: taiclub dot com dot cn ... probably because I have a US IP address?

UPDATE -- Taishan has a number of brands under their label, this is the "General" brand.

The characters in the center of the package say 將軍 or "General" It also says "General" in English script on the bottom of the box.

Taishan written in pinyin on back of box.

Plain pull foil, though gold

Butt design ... "General" in fancy English script