musings

Yeah, I know. It’s a horrendous pun. Anyway, last Friday I went and saw The Bourne Supremacy, the sequel to 2002’s The Bourne Identity. I know that nobody’s expecting this, but I mostly liked it. I have one major complaint, though. See, I’m not sure I actually saw what was filmed. The entire movie was shot with that Blair Witch style handycam look, and all the action scenes were made even less cohesive by being shot from only 30cm away. And then, to top off that nausea-fest, the movie was edited to have thousands of quick cuts. I’m pretty sure that the movie had a couple of decent fight scenes in it, but I didn’t get to see them. And the car chase sequence focused almost as much on the Jason Bourne’s clutch-accelerator-brake pedal manipulations as it did on the car chase.

I thought the story was better than the first movie (I’ve not read the books since I was but a wee bairn), but the movie was much harder to watch. I hope that, should there be a sequel, they get Doug Liman back from Bourne Identity, because Paul Greengrass made a mess of this one.

It’s a shame – it could have been a really good movie, but shoddy direction and editing made it merely a decent diversion for an evening.

Adrian Holovaty has put together a wonderful Firefox extension – All Music Guide Corrector 0.1 – that fixes three of the most aggravating problems with AllMusic: the Javascript-only links, the flash spinner thingy, and the way “read more…” links work. I’m using it under Firefox 0.9.1 and it’s awesome. Another point is that the newly relaunched mp3.com licenses the AllMusic content and provides it through a much much cleaner and cooler interface.

This sucks. I’m referring to the newly redesigned All Music Guide. I was eagerly awaiting their site redesign, as the old site really needed a facelift. I was hoping that some of my complaints, like the fact that all the links were javascript and thus couldn’t be used to spawn new windows or tabs, would be addressed.

Well, the new site launched on Monday. I’m not happy. My once favourite source for music info is now horribly crippled. The content, which once all appeared in one page, is now split within the page along tabs. You can no longer look up a band and see their discography without having to click on a tab and wait. And wait. And wait. Yeah, the site’s damnably slow. There’s a flash navigation widget floating in the top third of the page, but it’s mostly just a waste of space.

None of these problems would be too much to bear, but the page doesn’t render correctly in any browser that doesn’t suck. Check out the notice I got when I visited the site with Firefox in Linux:

Notice: You are accessing allmusic.com with a browser that is not currently supported. The appearance and functionality of the site could be impacted. allmusic.com is optimized for Internet Explorer 5.5 and above for Windows.

And you know, they’re not kidding. In Firefox the links don’t look like links, and the search engine keeps switching from band to album. In Opera the search seems to work for me, but the search results page is b0rked beyond belief. The table renderer goes insane when the cursor passes over it, rendering it (pun intended) useless.

I’m not going to stop using allmusic – it’s just too useful to abandon – but I’m really disappointed.

I just got back today from a brief trip to visit my dear friend Kourosh in Ottawa. (I don’t know if he’ll be happy about me posting that link, but I’m trying to get him to start his own blog and, until he does, that’s the extent of his web presence.) I went up on Thursday, and came back this afternoon, and I have to say it was a great weekend. The whole trip was prompted by the Manitoba concert at the Ottawa Blues Festival. (The show, by the way, was fantastic. Visit the link, check out the mp3s and definitely download and watch the videos for “Jacknuggeted” and “Skunks”.) We did a lot more than just go see the Manitoba show, though. Kourosh showed me around the city (which is beautiful and very clean … mind you, I think the police arrested all the homeless so that we wouldn’t see any during the tourist season…) and I got some great photos. A couple of my favourites:
The bridge between Ottawa and Hull.
Gargoyles on the Parliament building.
A view of the locks between the Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal.

We also saw a couple of movies while I was there (unlike me, Kourosh has excellent movie karma, and we used some of his this weekend) – Super Size Me and Talaye Sorkh (Crimson Gold), both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. We had some good food, saw the Ottawa Gay Pride parade, wandered about Ottawa checking out the municipal parks … it was a really fantastic weekend.

I’m reading this back and it seems like rambling, but the trip just kinda pours out of me when I think about it, so I’m not going to try to polish this post up. I’ll just leave it as it is.

I’ve come to realize that I’ve been looking at this movie karma thing all wrong. See, it’s not movie karma that I’m accruing here. It’s media karma. See, while my movie karma has been almost uniformly horrible, my book and music karma has been singularly excellent. Take, for example, my most recent book purchase. Two piece of SF bubblegum from Tanya Huff, Valor’s Choice and The Better Part of Valor, David Rees’ masterful, biting and timely Get Your War On (also available as a netcomic), Sharon Shinn’s wonderful Angelica and the utterly spellbinding King Rat. Each of them a great read in their own right. Obviously this is where I get back the karma I burn by seeing tripe like The Day After Tomorrow.

The funny thing is the way I go about buying this stuff. Each purchase is carefully considered. I spend time mulling over how much I want each book, and what my book (or music) priority is, and where in the purchase order this stuff should go. Sure, sometimes I’ll see something that I haven’t been able to find for ages (like King Rat) and just buy it on the spur of the mo’, but generally it’s a complicated and mysterious bit of voodoo I go through before buying books or music.

And then I’ll just pull $13.50 out of my wallet and set it on fire by walking into a theater to see Van Helsing.

I’ve figured out why this is. Books and music are, by and large, pretty solitary things to enjoy. Movies are social. I never go see a movie alone, but gather a bunch of friends (or even just one) and I’ll even go see The House of the Dead.

Stupidity grows in packs.

(By the way, I’m only linking to Amazon.ca because that’s where I found info for each book – I don’t get anything from them for these links.)

Right. So I saw Spiderman 2 on Wednesday night. You know, I didn’t like the first one, so I wasn’t expecting to like the second one either. And, I’m sure to no-one’s surprise, the movie lived up to my expectations. (No, I didn’t much care for it.) The pacing was much poorer than in the first Spiderman movie. There was about an hour of the film where there wasn’t much happening besides Peter Parker being all angsty. There were no less than four points in the movie where they revisited the Uncle Ben guilt-trip, and each time wound up with somebody in tears. Now, it wasn’t all bad. One of the biggest complaints I had about the first film was the absolutely horrible animation of Spiderman when he went swinging around the city. The animation is much better this time around. That’s not to say its good, though, just better than in the first Spiderman. The lighting, however, sucked. Spidey never looked like he was being lit by the same lights as the rest of the scene. (Really, I should stop going to see CG movies, because I see all the problems.) Alfred Molina was quite good as Doctor Otto Octavius/Doc Ock – he didn’t play Ock way over the top (like Willem Dafoe did the Green Goblin), but he was largely wasted. He didn’t have anywhere near the screen time he should have, especially given that he was supposed to be the Big Bad. As with the previous Spiderman, J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson was the true highlight of the movie. He so perfectly captured the JJJ from the crappy Spiderman cartoon I grew up with that I couldn’t help but laugh every time he was on camera. Sadly, none of the other performances really lit up the screen. I loved seeing Ted Raimi and Bruce Campbell’s cameos, but, then again, I love seeing those guys on screen no matter where they show up.

Ah well, more movie karma for me.