musings

I rented Big Fish tonight (I haven’t gone to bed yet, so despite it being quarter past four in the morning, it’s still Saturday – my rules, I make ‘em up) and really enjoyed it. It’s essentially a collection of tall tales that a father has told his son over the years. Beautifully filmed and well acted, it’s a real winner. Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney and Jessica Lange (who, at 54, is as beautiful a woman as I’ve ever seen) all give standout performances. It starts off a bit slow, and has a tendency to drag in places, but it’s such a charming movie that I’d call it a winner. Despite “Mars Attacks!” and “Batman Returns” I’m a huge Tim Burton fan, and this movie helped remind me why.

Okay, you all need to go see Shaun of the Dead. It’s utterly hysterical – a great film. Once again, my movie karma balance is zero. All my RE:2 karma is now spent, and I’m a happy guy. It’s not so much a parody of zombie movies as it is a comedy within a zombie movie. I can’t rightly do a real review of the movie when Stephen Notley of Bob the Angry Flower fame does such a bang-up job.

So I took the OkCupid! Politics Test and here’s where I sit on their scale:
Seems accurate enough to me.

I just received an email from Apple notifying me that my dual-2.5GHz PowerMac has shipped

Added a new link to my list of friends on the left there. Stephen Hill and I are great friend from way back – we met in 1989 during first-year physics (yeah, I’m that old – he’s older ). He’s just starting the whole blog-thing, so give him a read.

So I went to see Resident Evil: Apocalypse, knowing full well that it would net me some serious movie karma. (For those that aren’t clear on the way this works, suffering earns you karma. When you enjoy a movie, it costs you karma. Ideally, you’d like to be in movie-karmic-debt. This is a corruption of the Hindu concept of karma, but I don’t care.)

I was right. RE:A is a seriously stupid movie. The director, one Alexander Witt, needs to be slapped because, just like every other two-bit hack, he films all his fight scenes with a handy cam in half-second bursts. That said, the Cole Factor (named for a friend, Dave Cole, where the magnitude of the Cole Factor is directly proportional to the amount of “hotness” in a film – for reference, Underworld was off the scale based on Kate Beckinsale alone) was very high, and the explosions were plentiful.

The previous RE movie captured the feel of the game much better than this film, and was paced and directed better. (Yeah, Paul W. S. Anderson (Aliens vs. Predator) is a BETTER director than Alexander Witt, at least when it comes to RE). Neither are good movies, but the first sucks less than the second.

I’ll spend the karma at Shaun of the Dead on Friday.

So I was in California this past weekend, attending a developer’s conference. I was only there for two days, but while I was there I was able to visit with my very dear friends, Jed and Wendie and their bundle of joy, Holly. Jed and Holly are right there on the left. Holly has to be the single happiest baby I’ve ever met – Jed and Wendie positively dote on her and, truth be told, if she were mine I would too.

The conference was really good too. I ran into a bunch of friends I’d not seen in a few years, and learned a lot about …. the Nintendo DS. I can’t say anything about it, ‘cuz I’m under NDA, but I think it’s going to be huge. It’s awesome.

And now for some movie karma. I saw Man On Fire at the hotel. It’s a decent action thriller – goes a bit over the top, but Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning both turn in fantastic performances. In particular, Washington’s performance as a dead man who keeps going through sheer force of will and anger is impressive. And the soundtrack, the soundtrack! Filled with Nine Inch Nails, and capped off with a song by Lisa Gerrard that punches all the emotional buttons. The plot gets goofier as the movie progresses, and the direction gets a bit hectic, but overall it was a decent film. If I can score the DVD used, I’ll probably pick it up. Net shift in movie karma: zero.

I went to see Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence at the Toronto Film Festival last night. I’d been eagerly awaiting this film since the moment it was announced. I really enjoyed it, but I knew what I was getting into. The movie was written and directed by Mamoru Oshii, and he really just makes the same movie over and over again, with slightly different settings and characters. You have to expect an Oshii film to have monochromatic faces, long still shots, fisheye views (which must make animators go mental) and a whole lot of philosophy. The film itself is visually stunning, and I’m glad I saw it on the big screen, but a lot of it feels like siggraph demo videos glued together. Really, it whet my appetite for Appleseed.

Check my new toy! The first part of my Apple order has arrived. I’ve already stuffed about 14G of music onto it. I’m being a bit selective ; I’ve got well over 200G of music ripped from my CD collection. Trying to predict what I’ll want to listen to in a week, or a month, or even tomorrow morning, is really hard. It’s a sweet dilemma.