Urban Congestion, Independent Film, and Comment Spamming

So it's Saturday. Yesterday I had a pretty good day, I saw two good movies (Cars, and A Prairie Home Companion), the latter of which I hope to post a review of tomorrow, and had some fun afterwards.

Today I thought I'd have a nice quiet day, maybe hang out in Golden Gate Park for awhile, or maybe catch up on some reading or stuff I have taped from Turner Classic movies.

However, this was not to be. I woke up to sounds of someone literally banging on my wall.

POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND!

This isn't exactly the most pleasant thing in the world to wake up to. I couldn't even tell where the noises were coming from. The apartment above me? Next to me? Nope! Construction was being done on the building next to mine, at 8:30 AM on a Saturday of all times, and if you know anything about San Francisco, you know that there isn't much space between the buildings so if there's construction going on next door you're probably going to hear it loud and clear.

So I get ready to go outside, and as is typical, it is a completely bleak and dreary day. Doing anything outside today seemed kind of pointless really, so I went back inside to see if I could actually deal with the pounding. I went back inside and started watching The Third Man which I had taped, volume practically full blast in order to drown out the noise.

POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND!

It was so ridiculously loud that I couldn't even hear my own TV, playing very loudly, inside my apartment when construction was being done next door, so I decided I had to get out of there and go do something. Being that I didn't have any existing plans, and it was early afternoon on a Saturday and it seemed like scrounging up some was pretty unlikely, I thought maybe (being the movie junkie that I am) I'd go catch some movies I hadn't bothered to see yet.

The thing here is that I had already seen the two new movies that I wanted to see this weekend, and I had already seen everything else I wanted to see that came out on previous weekends. So what am I to do? Lower my standards, I suppose.

Now I had a few options. I could see a few different independent films (The King, Keeping Up With The Steins, Peaceful Warrior, Art School Confidential, or The Lost City) which I had previously dismissed due to having negative reviews below my threshold. Now I am pretty much an independent film fanatic, most of my favorite films are small films, and they comprise probably 80% of the films I see. You've probably noticed this already from the review content on this site when you may have never even heard of a movie I'm talking about before. However I have this opinion: while I usually enjoy a really good independent movie more than a really good studio one, I usually hate a really bad independent film more than a bad studio film. If I'm going to take a risk on an independent movie with questionable RT and Metacritic scores, I usually wait until Netflix to do so. At least if I see a bad studio movie there's a good chance I'll be able to talk about it with someone I know later on and maybe get a laugh out of it. That's not the case if nobody else has even seen it.

So what do I do? I went and saw The Break-Up and The Omen, both of which were pretty much awful. Not a very enjoyable day for me I must say. Those are the breaks I suppose, I guess since this new construction will be going on for awhile I am guessing I will have to arrange my schedule to never be home Saturday morning and afternoon.

After I got home, I checked this page to check for the occasional rare comment that I get (note to readers: comment more, I tend to get more email, but comments are kind of more fun and interactive), and noticed that almost every page on the site had a new comment with a random message such as "Love your site!" What all of these posts had in common was that they had a link to a webpage with links to a bunch of gambling sites and the like, so I deleted all of them. It is a shame, I like to allow anonymous commenting on my page, but if this happens again I'm going to probably have to turn it off. I don't really feel like digging through my posts and deleting annoying spam. I have to do enough of that in email with the stuff that my filters don't catch.

Is this a new phenomenon, blog comment spamming? I haven't read about it yet but it has obviously happened to other people before.

Anyway, that's all for today.