musings

You’re a dragon. You’re smart and cunning, and enjoy taking risks. Your need for independence is an advantage, but sometimes it alienates you from others. As far as good and evil, you’re pretty neutral–but you may have something of a wicked streak.

What mythical beast are you?
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Well, in 3-5 weeks my home office will be about 8 pounds away from complete freedom from PC-dom. I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Mac. The final straw was my primary Linux box. About six months ago the machine started crashing randomly. It always seemed to happen when doing large compiles (like gcc, glibc, or XFree86) so it was pretty apparent that the problem was memory-related. I ran Memtest86 and, sure enough, the machine wedged part way through the test. So I replaced the memory … and the machine wedged hard in the same place when I ran Memtest86. Well, that meant that the memory controller was the problem. Rather than return the memory, I figured I’d just get a new motherboard and use the new (and faster) memory instead of the old (and now revealed to be good) memory. So, I replaced the motherboard and the machine was more flaky than before. I ran Memtest86 again and it turned out that half of the new memory was just bad. Unfortunately, I ran out the warranty on the memory before I bought the new motherboard . Fine, my fault. I can live with it. What I can’t live with is that now, the machine I have at home and the machine on my desk at work are virtually identical, with identical installs of Gentoo Linux and the work machine is a joy to use – stable and fast – and the home machine crashes randomly, and often. I’m sick to death of PCs. I just want my computer to work. I started my computing life as an Apple user, and now that MacOS doesn’t suck, I’m going back to being an Apple user. Only my laptop (hence the 8 pound reference) remains part of the Wintel hegemony. If my Mac experience is positive, that might change in a year or two too.

Words cannot begin to describe just how magnificent a film HERO is. JP and I went to see it tonight, and at the end of the film we sat, in absolute silence, through the entire credits. I just didn’t know what to say ; I was completely floored by the film. The cinematography, the characters, the acting, everything about the movie was well done. Not since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have I walked out of a movie theatre wanting nothing more than to turn around and go right back in to watch the movie again. I don’t know what it says about me, that the movies I find most moving seem to be wuxia films, but I don’t care. I need to digest what I’ve seen tonight. And I need to see the movie again. And you need to see it too. If you’ve already seen it, you need to see it again.

AvP:
I went into this with pretty low expectations, and I wasn’t disappointed. The movie entirely invalidates the mythology of both the Predator and the Aliens in one fell swoop. The characters are boring, the dialogue stupid, and the plot inane. But when the Predators and Aliens went at it, I forgot all of that. Too bad that was only 25 minutes out of 101.

Collateral:
I’m not really a fan of either Tom Cruise or Jamie Foxx, but I’m a total mark for Michael Mann (Manhunter, Heat, The Insider), so I had mixed feelings going into this – I mostly expected to enjoy the style of the movie, the camera work, the soundtrack, and not really get into the film at all. I was so wrong. Collateral is, quite possibly, the best movie I’ve seen this year. Cruise and Foxx were both excellent – very believable in their roles, and both likeable in their own way. The direction was exactly what I’d come to expect from Mann – beautiful shots of LA, from above, lingering shots on faces where appropriate – none of the nausea inducing snap-cut garbage so prevalent in action movies today. Even the one real action scene in the movie was shot and edited in a way that you could actually see the action. Collateral was, quite possibly, the best movie I’ve seen this year. Better than Kill Bill vol. 2? I don’t know if I’d go quite that far, but they’re each different enough that I can put them side by side on the Great Movie pedestal. I know I’ll be buying this movie when it hits DVD.

So I went to see The Village on Monday night. It’s no Sixth Sense. It looks good, and is (largely) well acted, but behind the pretty facade is something that’s utterly hollow. The story was, plainly put, bad – it’s a five page short story stretched out to two hours. Shyamalan’s now-famous (or should that be infamous) plot twists (all three) were so obvious that they oughtn’t be called plot twists at all. And the dialog often rides the border between terrible, and “David and Goliath” terrible. Net gain in media karma. I’m betting my next CD will be amazing, ‘cuz the next movie we’re going to accrue karma on is AvP.