musings

I saw a couple of movies on Friday night – Million Dollar Baby and Constantine.

Million Dollar Baby, despite all appearances, is not a boxing movie. It’s dressed up like a boxing movie, it walks like a boxing movie, and it talks like a boxing movie. It’s not a boxing movie but rather a movie about a boxer. Like Mystic River before it, there are no special effects, no fancy camera work, no flash. Just a simple story, told in a straight-forward fashion. Long lingering conversations allow the characters’ personalities shine through, and sometimes there are just silent scenes that are more revealing than any dialogue could allow. Million Dollar Baby is mostly a quiet, contemplative movie, that plucks at heartstrings but still can make you laugh. It’s not a flashy movie, but like Hillary Swank’s character, Maggie, it’s got a lot of heart.

Constantine, on the other hand, is all flash. A lot of my friends told me that if I could get past the fact that it was based on Hellblazer it was a pretty decent movie. I wouldn’t go that far, but it wasn’t terrible. I’ll skip all the bits that have been changed from the comic and treat the movie as standalone. The high points: Tilda Swinton was marvellous as the archangel Gabriel, Rachel Weisz looked like she actually believed her role, and Djimon Hounsou, as Papa Midnite, was the king of cool. The low: Hell is Los Angeles, only on fire. Really. I suppose that’s better than the cheap Nine Inch Nails video vision of Hell that was Event Horizon, but really, it was pretty lame. The half-skull demons were also rather less than intimidating. Aside from those two, the special effects ranged from pretty okay to really impressive. Of course, the impressive effects were all hiding in the background, so you had to be paying attention to see them. Reeves was, unsurprisingly, pretty wooden. The story was convoluted, and the dialogue often utterly vapid. Despite that, however, I kinda liked the movie. How often do you see a Hollywood action movie where the hero doesn’t walk off into the sunset with the girl?

After I’d added the AudioScrobbler and flickr feeds, I realised that the right column of my blog was just too long, and decided to go out looking for a new theme. I found almost exactly what I wanted in Viewfinder Design‘s Three Column Darkess theme. The theme failed for me in a couple of ways, though, and I just had to fix them. First, the formatting didn’t agree with me – I didn’t like where different modules got placed on the page. That was easy enough to fix. Harder to fix was the more, IMO, compelling issue – the layout was jello. Now, my old theme was ice, but that was something that always irked me. I think web sites should look right no matter how you resize the browser window. I always found it irritating to find a web site with a 4cm wide column of text that ran 80 screens long, regardless of how wide I made my browser window. Thanks to this page by Craig Saila, I found out how to modify the Viewfinder Design page to make it liquid. I’ve got a fixed minimum width (I believe it’s 600 pixels ; if you’re trying to view this site with a narrower window then you’ll have to exercise that horizontal scrollbar) but aside from that, the site should always reflow to use as much of your browser as you give it. As always, comments are welcome.