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No Sweet Month and the Mystery of the Missing Director...

This is not working out.

I feel terrible... and this morning I woke up with a knee the size of a grape fruit! I'm hoping whatever I'm going through right now is temporary, because I have no appetite what so ever. I'm forcing myself to eat! I don't crave anything, good or bad, and I seriously have not been eating much for the past few days. I'm pretty sure I've been pulling about 1 meal a day, with very few snacks in between. :/

However, I'm taking steps to correct this. I am going to purchase a couple books that have been recommended to me by a physical trainer and friend. I'm going to start cooking my meals, prepping them the night before if necessary. I'm going to start forcing myself to have regular meals, even if it means setting a timer to remind me to eat. I have no idea why my body has started pushing back so violently, but I'm getting to the point where it's no longer tiring, it's just annoying, and I'm going to start pushing back.

Also, as August ends and September threatens to spring out without warning, I'm forced to look back on the month and view my progress.

August was no fast food month. Did I consume no fast food whatsoever? no. BUT - I feel it was an accomplishment. I crave it less, and when I did get fast food, I tried to make it the healthy version: Grilled chicken sandwiches on a whole wheat bun, salads, panda bowls with veggies instead of rice of chow mein... stuff like that. Still, I think - in that aspect - that the month was successful. I am off the fast foods. Starting tomorrow, I stop with sweets.

I am classifying sweets as:

  • Candy
  • Cakes
  • Pies
  • Ice Cream
  • Extravagant drinks
  • other dessert things


No more frozen bananas covered in chocolate, or fudge pops after dinner. :/ But I did it with fast food, I can do it with sweets!

Bring it on, September! I mean... why not? September is bringing on a lot of other things... like Heroes, Halo, and Steven's birthday... why not bring on a little trial? lol.

I find it amazing that it's September already, that the year is coming to an end, and that Limitless Ramblings is rapidly approaching its one year anniversary. Things are coming around full circle, and the biggest sign has been my rediscovery of movies that I absolutely love.

I think it started with Star Trek. As the movie inched closer, I became more and more excited with it, and began to relive the love I had for it as a child. Once the movie came out, I was so impressed that I began to watch what I call "Threeare" movies: Star Trek 2-4, Star Trek 6, The Irrefutable Truth About Demons, Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, The Chronicles of Riddick, Stand By Me, etc. I hit all of them hard and fast, and remembered quickly why I called them Threeare movies - they were movies I could Rewatch, Relive, and Relove.

Then District 9 came out. I had shied away from the movie at first, but once I watched it, I once again fell headfirst into a bunch of threeare movies: The Two Towers, the Price of Milk, Alive in Joburg, Return of the King, Ghost Ship, and Thirteen Ghosts.

The last two really got my attention. I'm fairly peculiar about the directors I rave about... especially now. The movies that have come out and really blown people away seem to echo the same names when the director credit rolls, and the reason is simply this: majority of new directors just don't have it, and thus, movies now are lame. Too many newer directors rely too much on special effects to sell a movie, too many directors now a days think that a hip rock soundtrack, bright colors, good graphics, buckets of blood, and scantily clad men or women will distract people from the fact that the plot sucks, plot twists are predictable from scene one, and character development is non-existant. And so often now, I see a movie sell out simply because of the billion dollar name attached to it (Judd Apatow, Michael Bay).

Steve Beck, however, is one of those directors I will rave about. Like JJ Abrams, Sam Raimi, and Tim Burton, Steve Beck directs movies that pull you in. You may walk away wondering what you just watched, you may be unsure whether to laugh or cry or scream, you may end up doing all three at once, and you may have to watch the movie multiple times before you're fully able to process what you've seen, but you cannot deny that you were taken along for a ride after watching a flick directed by these men.

More so than that, Steve Beck had a special touch when it came to scary movies. Ghost Ship and Thirteen Ghosts are two of my favorite scary movies ever, simply because they aren't just silly scary movies, they aren't just horrifying scary movies, they aren't just puzzling scary movies, and they aren't just gory scary movies. They are all 4 in one, and it makes for quite a fun film to watch. Critics claim that neither of these two movies deliver the scares, and claim the plot is weak... but really, IMO, the scares were there and it was only the synopsis that was weak, not the plot. As I threeare'd these two, I couldn't help but smile as scenes I absolutely loved were coming up, couldn't help laughing out loud every time I screamed (even though I knew it was coming!), and couldn't help immediately wanting to watch the movie again simply because it was so good.

It got me thinking... I really want Steve Beck to make more movies. When I was a kid, scare movies consisted of Halloween, Halloween 2, Child's Play, Friday the Thirteenth, Pet Semetary, The Thing, IT, Ghost Story, The Haunting, The Exorcist, etc.

Now, scary movies consist of Saw 34, Halloween 14 (on the moon), Friday the 18th, *your monster of choice* VS. *your monster of choice*, SCREAM...still?, I still know what you did last LAST summer, and bloodfests IN 3D! Why aren't there more movies like The Strangers, Ghost Ship, Thirteen Ghosts, The Orphan, etc... When did we make the transition from having multiple scary movies, to just having a bunch of scary movie sequels?

Frustrated, I looked up Steve Beck to see if he at least had something in talks and found... nothing. And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. I can't find any information about Steve Beck anywhere. Even IMDB and Wikipedia, 2 sources that usually ooze with information - no matter how inaccurate - only list his 3 visual art director credits, and his 2 director credits. That's it. No trivia, no date of birth, no date of death, nothing. It's like this guy fell off the face of the planet in 2002.

It makes me sad, because he had a lot of talent. Thirteen Ghosts was a pretty groundbreaking film, because it was the second attempt to remake a horror movie by 60's horror director William Castle and, seeing how badly the House on Haunted Hill remake sucked, it was the first with any real promise. And then to go on and make Ghost Ship which was pretty intense (people start dying within the first 5 minutes of the movie) and in it's own right a pretty scary movie (For me, Ghost Ship was more of an everyday scary movie. In one scene, the crew is eating food that was sealed in cans, and things go wrong. Watching Karl Urban place a handful of maggoty food in his mouth turned my stomach and freaked me out, seeing as I have a deep rooted fear of the eyeless, wriggling creatures).

Not to mention, he had his hand in movies like Indiana Jones and The Hunt for Red October... and anyone that works that closely with Sean Connery is pretty BAMF. I just wish there was more out there about him, or that he'd make a new movie. If anyone knows anything about Steve Beck - if he's alive, dead, or just switched professions, it'd be greatly appreciated if you could let me know! :) Thanks!

And that's it! I'll keep you updated on the book&cook book once I get all of that together. Until then, stand tall and stand strong.

Rohirrim! TO THE KING!

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