Red Carpet Saturday
by Scott Hardie on April 19, 2015

Some friends of ours recently made a short film (they're officially in IMDb) that got into the Sarasota Film Festival, so Kelly and I had to check it out. It screened with eight other short family-friendly films on a Saturday morning, and there was good turnout for the two locally-made titles in the set. I enjoyed our friends' comedy and laughed along with everyone else, and I was impressed by several of the other movies too. Short films don't get much respect, but there's often so much more originality and experimentation in them. We ran into some other old friends in the audience and shared a long lunch afterwards catching up about old times and mutual friends. What a great start to the weekend. I need to get out to this annual film festival more often.

Logical Operator

The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »

Flak Album

Lately I've been enjoying Aimee Mann's I'm with Stupid. Oh, how I wish she'd saved that title for a duets album. Go »

R.I.P. Katie

Go »

I Can Deflect Staples

Should you call your day a complete wash if your greatest creative achievement was paper fastener nunchucks? Go »

Retrospection

If I recall the dates correctly, yesterday would have been my grandmother's 100th birthday. She lived to just shy of her 89th, despite a lifetime of chain smoking. I remember her as a sweet, generous woman who liked to laugh and teach me life's simple pleasures; a typical afternoon for us was playing crazy eights and baking cinnamon rolls. Go »

The Time Has Come

My kingdom for an alarm clock that beeps once, gently, 60 seconds before it really begins going off. That way you're woken up comfortably and given a chance to turn it off, instead of being startled awake by loud shrieking and having to scramble for it. Go »

All King and No Kubrick Make Jack a Dull Boy

I recently got to talking with friends who liked The Shining, both Stephen King's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of it, but who were unaware that King has always loathed the movie, despite its reputation as one of the best horror films ever made. It's hard to imagine that a writer doesn't know his own work better than someone interpreting it, but I think this is one of those rare cases where the writer is just too close to the story to get it. Here are three reasons why I think Kubrick's film better understands the material, and is better overall, than King's novel: 1) In King's version, Jack Torrance is a fundamentally decent man who wouldn't hurt a fly, but who is down on his luck and desperate. Go »