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About This Author
I am SoCalScribe. This is my InkSpot.
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Blogocentric Formulations #810748 added March 20, 2014 at 8:01pm
Restrictions: None
Road Trips & Jack Black
PROMPT: Have you ever taken a road trip? Give us your opinion on the "must see" city/cities to road trip to/from/through.
I've taken many, many road trips over the years. One of the nice things about being separated from your hometown by about 500 miles is that it's just close enough to make driving worth it when airfare is a little (or a lot) on the expensive side. So I've done road trips from Southern California to Northern California dozens and dozens of times. Even when I was living in Northern California, my friends and I would do a mini-road trip to San Francisco or the mountains for a day or overnight every now and then. I've always wanted to go on a much longer road trip... cross-country would be an amazing experience, I think.
There aren't really a lot of "must-see" cities in the central valley of California, but one of my favorite drives has been going up Highway 1 along the coast of California. It's an agonizingly slow drive, but it's simply gorgeous. Highway 1 (also called Pacific Coast Highway) is named for the fact that you can essentially drive from San Diego to Seattle right along the coast of the county, oftentimes literally in the sense that you're on a little winding highway with a sheer five-hundred foot drop into the ocean on your western side.  It's a stunning trip though, and there are so many small beach communities that are really a treat to stop and explore. Going from south to north, I'd highly recommend the following California beach towns: Laguna Beach, Malibu, Santa Barbara, Pismo Beach, Morro Bay, San Simeon, Carmel, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay, and Mendocino.
The other road trip I used to take a lot as a kid was Northern California to western Montana. The crazy thing about that drive is that it's a two-day trip and it's such an indirect route that it's almost as many miles as driving two-thirds of the way across the country west-to-east.  I can't say that it's a particularly scenic route through Nevada... but the scenery in Montana is spectacular and it's always exciting to see the landscape start to change from desert to mountains to sprawling forests and lakes.
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PROMPT: Tell me about a popular actor/actress you simply cannot stand.
With the exception of animated movies (because, honestly, you can't really fault an actor's voice... and the KUNG FU PANDA movies are awesome), Jack Black has starred in exactly one movie that I thought was good (TROPIC THUNDER). Other than that, you have to go all the way back to his support roles in things like ENEMY OF THE STATE and THE JACKAL before you find a movie where I didn't find him completely intolerable. And honestly, I don't know what it is about him... I just don't think he's the slightest bit funny.
For me, Jack Black suffers from what I also like to call Will Ferrell Syndrome, which is when a comedic actor becomes really popular and then just resorts to doing his same schtick in a variety of different settings. With few exceptions a lot of Will Ferrell's movies are less about the movie itself and more about "Hey, it's Will Ferrell as a Nascar driver (TALLADEGA NIGHTS)!" or "Hey, it's Will Ferrell as a basketball player (SEMI-PRO)!" or "Hey, it's Will Ferrell as an ice skater (BLADES OF GLORY)!" And I think Jack Black is susceptible to the same phenomena where he's been cast as a certain type of comedian and for a long time they've just kept generating movie after movie to service his comedy, rather than having his comedy service a larger story. And hey, once that happened and they did start making his comedy play into a larger story, you get TROPIC THUNDER, and a movie I like again! 
A current example of this affliction would be Melissa McCarthy. I almost picked her today, but I'm still holding out some hope for her. She is a brilliant actress (she was great in THE GILMORE GIRLS and BRIDESMAIDS), but I thought THE HEAT and IDENTITY THIEF weren't great, and her new movie TAMMY looks like more of the same. It's just setting a camera up and recording her comedy routine in a variety of different settings. I think she's going to be great in story-driven and character-driven stuff like ST. VINCENT DE VAN NUYS, just like I think Jack Black is going to be good in a non-starring role like the one he has in the upcoming SEX TAPE... but for now, Melissa McCarthy (and more importantly, Jack Black) are on my list of actors I really can't stand right now.
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