My Blog In the Middle of Your Net

Animated movies have been a large fixture throughout cinematic history.   There is currently an Academy Award category devoted entirely to animated features.   They are an important part of the cinematic landscape.   Movies would be completely different if not for the animated films that have been popular throughout the past century. Children have always been a large part of the popularity of cartoons.   This has not been solely a movie based genre.   Television also thrives on animated shows.   As a child, I can remember watching cartoons on Saturday mornings.   In the children’s cartoons, characters could be forced into dangerous predicaments, get injured or nearly killed, and continue on with their lives as if nothing ever happened to them.   This was the way of cartoons such as Looney Toons , where Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote, Daffy Duck, and Yosemite Sam would always suffer great physical trauma, then return to their normal selves...

Previously on Work Stories, I told a tale about the time my boss gave me some extra money to go see a movie.   I’ve never understood why she specifically told me to go see Journey to the Center of the Earth.   I likely never will.   Dwelling on it any longer will not get me anywhere, so I might as well move on. This week, I present you with a shitty story.   Pardon the pun.   It’s a good tale of things that go on that people only sometimes talk about.   This is the dirty underbelly of the work force.   This is the area that people all know about but nobody wants to openly discuss because it’s not seen as a public thing to talk about.   If you couldn’t figure it out yet, this is a bathroom story.    Dun dun dunnnnn! I was working a five hour shift at the museum on Christmas Day.   This started out as a day like any other.   I went into work.   I let people in for a price.   They went into the museum. ...

Jimmy Stewart is an actor that I tend to like in whatever he does.   Whatever I’ve seen him in, which honestly is only a handful of films, I’ve enjoyed seeing him on screen.   There’s something about him that makes watching a movie with him in it that much better.   As part of the Marathon of Shops, James Stewart starred in a movie called The Shop Around the Corner . The Shop Around the Corner was a romantic comedy drama movie directed by Ernst Lubitsch.   It starred James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan as two romantically entwined pen pals that happen to unknowingly work together and despise each other in reality.   It was remade in the 90s as You’ve Got Mail , but I’ll get to that later, since it’s the next, and final, movie in the Marathon of Shops.   This movie was released in 1940. That's a pretty nice hat, I must say. The strangest thing, and the only weak spot I find in The Shop Around the Corner , is that the shop is located in Bu...

Prior to the creation of the Marathon of Shops, I had never heard of the movie Scenes from a Mall .   I did not know what it was, who was in it, who directed it, or what it was about.   I had never heard the name before.   Now I know all of these things because I watched it as part of the Marathon of Shops.   Did I like it, or not? Scenes from a Mall was released in 1991.   It starred Bette Midler and Woody Allen.   The director was Paul Mazursky.   The plot of Scenes from a Mall was that a married couple goes to the mall, where they begin to confess their extramarital affairs to each other, and they deal with the fallout of these confessions.   Does it sound exciting? A man, a woman, a mime. It’s not.   I was bored almost the entire way through this movie.   The strife between the two leads meant nothing to me, especially with the reveal that they were both guilty.   If the writer wanted me to feel any sympathy ...