The Rage that Is...Kevin Bieksa

Everyday he misses Byfuglien...

After last weekend's raucous display between the Calgary Flames and Vancouver Canucks off the opening face-off, there were really only two questions; how badly did John Tortorella need a vacation from his once-powerful now mediocre Canucks and 2, what is up with Kevin Bieksa?

First, let me state that I enjoy Kevin Bieksa. He seems to be a funny guy. He jokes with the assembled sports reporters like a high school quarterback that acknowledges the local nerd squad. He looks to be the type of guy that makes funny comments after the waitress walks away and is constantly daring you to do something stupid and because it's Kevin Bieksa, you kind of want to do it.

Retro Post 5 First Films of Innovative Filmmakers

So you’ve read a few film books, watched a LOT of movies, maybe even cut together a couple cute videos of cats and posted them on Youtube. Your ultimate goal is to remake Con-Air or perhaps to create a superhero movie based on your best friend’s underground comic book. When people hear you say you want to be in the movies, they think you want to an actor. But you know where the action’s at; you want to be in charge of it all, you want to DIRECT!

Yet, like everything else, directing requires a multitude of skills much like every other job; do you get along with people? Are you a leader? Are you organized? Can you visually tell a story that is entertaining and noteworthy? Do you know what a green screen does and where you can get one for cheap?

Directing fame can come one of two ways; you can go the long, slow easy route; attend film school, maybe start working at an ad agency, create a demo reel, shop it around the film industry, find work directing second unit stuff, avoid porn and cocaine, gradually gain a reputation of steady and dependable craftmanship which will one day get you considered to helm a Zooey DeJulia Roberts rom-com script that is so safe that terrorists rent it to waylay suspicion.

Or, you can go big and go hard; find people of like mind willing to work long hours for nothing. Beg, borrow and steal the money needed to shoot your film with decent cinematography and actors. Believe in yourself and your movie, shoot and edit it by yourself while eating crackers and cream cheese then find a distribution deal. Repeat the process until you are awarded the recognition, star power and director’s cut privileges you so richly deserve.

Here are 5 directors that went Balls In, taking risky subject matter and convincing other people to give them money so that they could live their dream. The got investors to believe that once they had enough money to shoot their amazing script, it would be so good they would make their money back plus more upon the massive distribution deal.

These 5 have been selected due to their somewhat humble non-Hollywood beginnings, their inane first projects and their continuing upward career trajectory due in some part to their ability to continually challenge themselves and their skill set by creating innovative and interesting films that move the industry forward.

The 2013 List of Reviewing The Best/Worst things From 2013

Ogie's 2013 Top 10 List of Things That Happened for Better or Worse in 2013

10 List-based Articles

My kids can't remember to flush the toilet, never mind 70 other things...

2013 seems to be the year that 'list-based' articles really went viral. Who am I to complain? I accomplished a giant step in my writing by having over 20 articles published by a webzine that specializes in the fan-based list format without the high bar of objective opinions or relative current subject matter.

Despite my success and their low standards, I have grown to hate List-Based Articles. It is a sneaky way to drive website traffic to make said website more attractive to the hated pop-up advertisers (which this website is becoming increasingly annoying for). Every time a reader clicks 'next' or 'continue' on a webpage that counts as another hit for that website. So although you are one person reading a list of 20, the web traffic control thingy reads it more as 20 people reading one list. 

Lists tend to be highly subjective and really pointless (says a guy with about a dozen published lists). Lists tend to dumb down a thought-provoking subject into a basic subjective opinion-orientated argument. Do I really care that #3 on Miley's worst fashion mistakes is not #1? According to the comments, some people actually care enough to argue why TDKR is a good movie, despite all the evidence to the contrary. 

Yet, list-based articles are here to stay. They are mind-entertainment for your eyeballs. Giving a set limit to your subject creates a count-down of such, where readers are more than likely to finish off a list of 10 if they are already on #7 than if it was just a long, well-researched article on why The Dark Knight Rises sucked donkey balls. Lists state automatically that there is a limited commitment involved, depending on how high you wish to count. 

12 Days of Christmas Not-Christmas Movie Marathon

12 Days of Christmas Not-Christmas Movie Marathon

Well, this one was a bit out there and in terms of Christmas, now a bit late. But maybe you want to do a movie marathon this weekend, this could be a list to get you through it...it was rejected for valid reasons of which I am not able to explain here. Perhaps it has something to do with Christmas and the #1 movie being Jewy...

Christmas is here, yet again. Time for some of us who don't like to be force fed Christmas cheer to hunker down in our Xmas-proof bunkers and avoid all things festive society spews forth. It's a time when we wonder why that 'Festivus' idea from Seinfeld never took off. Instead of complaining about it, why not just sit back and cruise Netflix or internet website lists for movie recommendations to get you through the season? 

So here's my Christmas gift to you, ogieoglethorpe reader. After all, who better to give you classic movie recommendations than me, a perfect stranger? And I'm nearly as perfectly strange as they come. I once met Quentin Tarantino and given this once in a lifetime opportunity, asked him if he ever had a Nutella and banana sandwich (he hadn't). It was a highlight of mine before he launched into a stream of thought ramble of the movies he watched that weekend.

So if Tarantino can gorge on a random selection of movies why can't someone like you? These aren't even necessarily classic movies; they're just a sneaky way to tie in a random movie list with a Christmas/December type theme. Plus it gives you something to discuss with your mates if you are holed up at the Winchester arguing over which Simon Pegg movie was better.

So here are movies you may have seen, or not. They all have a number from the 12 days of Christmas in them and because I am a dad and watching a complete movie that doesn't have talking animals in them is a thing of the past, I only watched the trailers. Good enough. If you have kids you understand. If you are going to have kids one day, enjoy this time of uninterrupted movie bliss. 

Wayne Gretzky IS Luke Skywalker...

While this was already published by the UK webzine, Whatculture this is also part of my ongoing attempt to catalog/save/remember past articles. However, for this special blog post, I've added my own photos for the most part as I don't think the UK editors really knew who i was talking about. 

Enjoy the read... 

NHL 8 Reasons Hockey is Perfect for Star Wars Geeks

or

How I learned to stop worrying and just rip off other people...

Being given an opportunity to introduce the world of the great sport of ice hockey into the WhatCulture’s vast canon of subjects didn’t come without its own set of problems. Specifically, how do you start? With an explanation of the rules? Boring. Perhaps an overview of the top players and teams? Only if you already knew the game. The best fights in one of the only professional sports that condones fighting? Potentially next time… How about the way that Hollywood has portrayed the sport? Now, we are getting somewhere.

Now to associate it with Star Wars in some way…

Being a predominantly UK-based pop-culture website, it can be understandable that most of our sports coverage discusses football, what with its rabid fan base, history of passion, the occasional riot and world-wide acceptance. In North America there is a sport that has many of those characteristics and it’s not American football or professional baseball.

The one sport that parallels football, at least in countries in where it snows, is hockey.

First lesson; hockey is not referred to as ‘ice hockey’ by those that know the game, much as football is not referred to as ‘foot-soccer’. Just getting that out of the way.

Simply stated, the goal in hockey is to beat your opponent’s team by getting an object (the puck) into their net more times than they do in yours. To make the game move faster, the puck is propelled forward by a stick, the surface is covered in ice and players strap blades of steel to their feet called skates.

Basically, it’s football on meth, as designed by people with short tempers and limited attention spans. Due to the high rates of speed, players can either turn quickly in a circle (if they are European) or hit into each other and start again (if they are North American).

As a primer to the introduction of this great game and the dysfunctional league under which the top athletes of the world come to make vast (or little) amounts of money (depending on who you talk to) a comparison of hockey’s modern day history to the greatest movie franchise of all time seems as good as way as any to its introduction to WhatCulture’s readership.

Star Wars is a movie steeped in tradition, with heroic figures, interesting side characters, evil shadowy villains and run by a large unknown group of marketing executives who would do anything to make a buck, hiding behind the public face of the franchise, George Lucas. The National Hockey League (or NHL herewith) is a league steeped in tradition, heroic figures, interesting side characters, evil shadowy villains and run by a large group of team owners who would do anything to make a buck, hiding behind the public face of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman.

For example, just last year, after declaring record league-wide revenue hockey team owners unanimously decided to lock out their own players from training camp because they felt the players were making too much money, which would eventually destroy the league. This is like saying making too many Star Wars ‘collectibles’ would ultimately result in no more Star Wars movies. Yet Disney just bought the entire Star Wars franchise for all the money in the known world because anything with a Star Wars logo on it seems to make more money. The NHL team owners claimed to be on the cusp of bankruptcy, despite the same owners recently beginning to shell out decade-long contracts for decent players that have little collectible value, like a present day David Beckham jersey.

If you look at the history of hockey compared to the original Star Wars trilogy that’s not where the similarities end. Here are 8 more ways hockey is the perfect sport for Star Wars geeks, in particular because of a certain Wayne Gretzky…