musings

You are a God… The World is at your whim, and
there is nothing that anyone else can do about
it…


What level of divine power do you have?
brought to you by Quizilla

I finally got around to seeing Lost In Translation and I can’t possibly recommend it highly enough. It’s a beautiful film – one of the most beautifully shot films I’ve ever seen. Bill Murray was stellar – he gave, IMO, the performance of his career. It’s an absolute crime that he didn’t win the Oscar this year. Scarlett Johansson was positively radiant – she gave a star-making performance, and I see Great Things^TM in her future. Top off two magnificent performances with a soundtrack that so perfectly fits every scene (which just goes to further my belief that Kevin Shields is a genius) and you’ve got a movie that will stand the test of the ages. It’s a beautiful and moving work of art. If you haven’t seen it, you should. If you’ve ever felt isolated, even amidst the bustle of life, this movie will speak to you in a way few things can.

It works!

Test post ; trying to get BloGTK to write to WordPress.

LOVED it. Now, I saw Volume 1 on opening day a few months ago, so my memory of it isn’t exactly perfect, but Volume 2 really does feel like a different movie than Volume 1. Where Volume 1 felt like an homage to Japanese Samurai movies, Volume 2 feels like an homage to the spaghetti western. The pacing is much more deliberate, and the fights are fewer and further between. And even then, the fights are shorter, and less gory.

In the past, Quentin Tarantino films have revived flagging careers – John Travolta (and to a lesser extent, Bruce Willis) received a boost in Pulp Fiction, and Pam Grier and Robert Forster both catapulted back into public consciousness (deservedly so) through Jackie Brown. Furthermore, each of those stars gave career-highlight performances. Well, Kill Bill is no different. David Carradine is so perfect as Bill, I can’t imagine casting anyone else. In fact, I don’t think any role could have been cast better. (The only change I would have, maybe, made was with Vivica A. Fox as Copperhead – I’m a total Angela Basset mark, so she’d probably have been my first choice for that role.)

I want to gush and rant about how great this movie was, but I really think that you should just go see it for yourselves.

I can’t wait for a Kill Bill box set.

So, as you can see, my entire Blogger hosted blog is now here. This makes me very happy. Blogger’s been great, but was starting to show its limitations. I didn’t like having my posts on a “foreign” host, and I wanted people to be able to comment on my posts. WordPress gives me those features. Hooray!

Now, I really need to replace the default template….

I’ve been stewing over this entry for a while, getting my thoughts together.

One week ago today (April 6), my Great Uncle passed away. He’d been in the hospital for the last few months, and he was in a great deal of pain so I’m glad he’s not suffering any more, but that doesn’t make his loss any easier. He wasn’t a blood relative, but he and his family are proof that family transcends blood. They’ve been fixtures in my life since as far back as I can remember, and my Great Uncle held that same spot in my heart that a grandfather would. I always remember him as this tall, powerful figure who taught me about physics and helped my with my science projects (back when I was in public school). I feel sad that I hadn’t seen him more in the last several years – maybe a total of a half dozen times since I started university. I visited him a few weeks ago in the hospital and he was so tiny and frail and in so much pain that it broke my heart. It’s funny, but as sick as he was I never thought that our time with him would be so short. I was positive that he’d recover – I mean, he was only in his mid-seventies, and he’d always been there. It’s strange – I’d barely seen him at all in years, and now that he’s gone I miss him like mad. I suppose it’s that I knew he was there, and I could go see him any time, and now I know there’s never going to be another opportunity to see him.

So I went and saw Hellboy, and I really liked it. It’s not anywhere near as amazing as the comic, but it’s a good flick. The plot feels more like it was lifted from a Lovecraft book than it does a Mignola story, but Ron Perlman looks awesome as Hellboy. Some of the CG (okay, a lot of the CG) sucked, but overall I liked it. Out of the recent spate of comic book movies I’ve seen – X-Men, X-Men 2, Spiderman, The Hulk, and now Hellboy – I’d certainly say it was head and shoulders above the rest, save for X-Men 2.

Despite being written in (accursed) Flash, MusicPlasma is the coolest damn thing ever. It’s a visual music search engine. Simply enter the name of a band and you’re treating to a zooming relational diagram showing similar bands, and floating window with a list of all the band’s albums which you can click on to buy the albums.

Test!

Yee, this default template is awful. I need to change this.