Home of filmmaker, improviser, and decent dude Geoff Ross.

My NYC improv team, Casual Sex Offenders is up in Boston for the weekend. We are doing three (THREE!) shows at ImprovBoston. Yesterday was with the IB group Bastards, Inc.. Here’s the video evidence.

It’s Spring Break here at BU.  But, I’ve been shooting movies the whole time so, no, it’s not spring break.. Not for me.  Of course amongst those movies was my own film Happy Anniversary.  It’s a dark comedy about a man trying to divorce his wife on their first anniversary.  The shoot was one of the best directing experiences I’ve ever had.  I still have to send my film to the lab for processing so perhaps my tune will change, but I still feel pretty good about.

I could have used the vacation, though.

I loved Avatar.  Not like I love my girlfriend, but more like how I love nachos.  And I LOVE nachos!  For those who don’t know Avatar is about a parapalegic former marine who gets to go to the forest moon of Endor Pandora thanks to the untimely death of his twin brother and walk around the lush environment pretending to be a 10-foot-tall Blue Cat Person that the film insists on calling the Na’vi.  ”Isn’t this FernGully?” you ask.  Well, no, it’s more like Dances With Wolves, but that’s beside the point.  It’s entertaining.

Like pornography.

My Xbox 360 Avatar. Sadly not in the movie Avatar

In fact it was better than pornography, sort of, because not only was it nice to look at, but it had a story worth following.  Although there wasn’t a money shot (Not yet) Avatar did have the odd distinction of getting me and the rest of the audience to root AGAINST humans and FOR some Blue Cat People that were, in reality, made in a computer.  That’s impressive.  What James Cameron and his crew of, I’m guessing here, trillions accomplished was a spectacle.  For that he and the film should be commended.

It wasn’t a perfect movie.  As hinted above it treads on themes that have been walked on before even by James Cameron himself (corporate greed = bad, science = good.  See other Cameron films: The Abyss, Terminator 2, Aliens), the movie runs a half-hour longer than it needs to and, honestly, the 3D presentation was OK not mind-blowing.  But I was entertained, I left the movie theater smiling and, frankly, I can’t ask for anything more.

Except a sequel.

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Movie school stops for no man.  Or goose.

The Shake Shack in Madison Square Park has the best burger I’ve ever eaten in my life.  Hat tip to Shake Shack.

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On August 8th (aka yesterday) I had my last improv comedy show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.  The current hope is that I can come back next summer.

I have to say that I have been disappointed with my performance in improv 401 so far.  I need to step my game up if we are going to have a good show on the 6th.

I was in Boston last week to start the apartment search.  I didn’t find anything, but we got off to a good start.  Hopefully I find some place to sleep before school starts.  That would be nice.

Despite having my camera with me I didn’t take many photos while I was there.  Plus amongst the few photos I took even fewer were any good.  Here’s one:

A group of my fellow improv 201 students (Cecile, Dara, Jason, Austin, Shalyah, Brad, Esther, and Eric) got together to practice today.  This is only the second time we’ve had practice sessions outside of class (class itself ended nearly a month ago), but I already have a good feeling about these folks.  We’re going to get some interesting things done.

In other news: the infamous sketch video churns along slowly.  I hit a technical snag that has taken me a few days (on-going) to get sorted.  I really want to push this thing out the door, but I’m not going to do that until Greg and Anthony sign off on the whole thing.

Tomorrow is the next Society of Reasonable People™ meeting.  I decided to write my Zombies! script.  I have some of the first pages written and am quite interested in what people think.

I’m going to turn off some of the new plug-ins I installed because they just don’t fit the current look of this website.  As soon as I get around to redesigning the front page (no idea when that’ll be) I will bring some of those things back.