Archive for June, 2004
I have had my in-laws copy of Seabiscuit on my dvd player for months and haven’t watched it yet because I hadn’t found 2 and a half hours to watch it without the fear of falling asleep. I am NOTORIOUS for falling asleep even during the best of movies if I’m watching them at night. So, yesterday was a slow day and I decided to watch it early - around 7:30PM. Boy, was I ever glad I did!
Before writing this up, I checked Rotten Tomatoes for the reviews and to get an image link. I was quite surprised that the movie didn’t get better reviews than it did. Most of the bad reviews were in regards to it not living up to the hype and bad adaptations of the book (which I didn’t know there was one). I think critics and movie buffs sometimes take films too seriously. This movie had an excellent story, in my opinion, and had some great acting - particularly by Tobey Maguire and Chris Cooper. But one of the things that really struck me were the absolutely stunning cinematography and landscapes that were shot. The look of the film just really took me for a loop.
So, the only 2003 Best Picture nominee I have left to see is Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and I plan to see it ASAP. As far as my personal ranking of the nominees, I will leave that until I watch the last movie. But, I will say that Seabiscuit and Last Samurai are in a dead heat for 2nd place behind LotR: RotK.
June 28th, 2004
I actually watched this about a week ago, so I my mind isn’t too fresh about this movie. I do remember this though: Sean Penn did NOT deserve the best actor Oscar. I’ve seen all of the movies for best actor - except for Jude Law in Cold Mountain because it’s not on DVD yet - and Ben Kingsley takes the cake - BY FAR! I actually think Tom Cruise deserved a nomination for Last Samurai, but so did a lot of other actors in other movies. The only really good scenes Penn has in this movie are the scene where he finds out his daughter has been murdered and another scene where he’s grieving about his loss to Tim Robbins’ character.
Now, speaking of Tim Robbins: he was awesome in this movie and deservedly won the best supporting actor Oscar. The only movie I haven’t seen for that category is In America. Robbins plays a very disturbed man who, as a boy, was tricked into getting into a car and was hence molested for 4 days.
The movie is very good, but not as good as Last Samura, IMHO. I still haven’t seen Seabiscuit or Mast and Commander yet, so the verdict is still out as to what movie I think deserved 2nd place. I have a feeling Seabiscuit will be better than Mystic River, though. Anyway, the movie is very well written and directed, and there is some very good acting by all - even Kevin Bacon. My favorite part about this film is the plot twist - and I’m a sucker for those. All in all, I highly recommend watching this movie.
June 24th, 2004
I usually bring frozen lunches to eat at work, but today I didn’t have one, so I went to my favorite cheapo fast-food restaurant: Taco Bell. I only had $5 and I decided to drive through and eat on the way back to work. They had a $4 special on their new Chicken Ranchero taco combo, so I went for it. Little did I know that the sauce they put on those things drip like a faucet. I’m driving down San Felipe and getting my pants drenched in that sauce - which was really good, by the way. So, now I look like a total slob - hooray for me.
Could they have eased off on the sauce a little? Or maybe I just shouldn’t eat and drive…
June 17th, 2004
The Mozilla foundation released the latest version of their Firefox web browser last night. Since I’ve been using 0.8 for quite some time now, I immediately downloaded it last night. Aside from changing the default theme it comes with, most of the changes are slight. They seperated the extension manager from the Options menu, gave the option to close the download manager when all downloads are complete, and changed the theme/extensions installer. Overall, it seems like an improvement. The only problems I had were with getting my mouse guestures and googlebar extensions working properly.
There was a big hubub about the new default theme, and I see what they were talking about. The new theme - dubbed “Winstripe” - doesn’t even compare to the Qute theme. I don’t know exactly what they were looking to gain from the new theme, but I hope they either improve the look or go back to Qute.
June 16th, 2004
Well, I had my first group hunt in Star Wars Galaxies last night, and that is going to make it so much harder to not buy the game. I was on Tatooine (a common starter planet) in Mos Eisley (a common starter city) and I was about to leave the city when I heard someone shouting for people to join their hunting group. I jumped on the chance because I just read earlier that day that group hunting is the best and easiest way to get lots of experience points (XP) and credits. I joined and found out they all had vehicles for long trips. So, I just used my vehicle rental ticket to rent a swoop bike - and boy, was that awesome. We got some high paying missions from a missions terminal and set out to the North of the city. It was like being in a Star Wars movie. We were all following each other on our vehicles (2 swoops and 2 speeders) over the Tatooine desert at sunset. Anyway, I learned a lot on how to attack in groups and at range with my rifle. I would set up a camp for everyone when we were all badly hurt and we would talk around the campfire - literally.
It is going to be very hard to stop focusing so much on this game.
June 15th, 2004
Now that the whole nation has gone Atkins and anti-carb, Coke is following suit by releasing a product called C2. It’s basically a Coke with less than half the sugar. I was skeptical before I tried it, but now I’m a believer. It really tastes great! So, if I’m in the mood for a Coke, but I want to keep my girlish figure, I just go for the C2.
June 14th, 2004
While Paycheck isn’t oscar-worthy for it’s acting, story, or anything else, it is a very entertaining action/sci-fi movie. My wife and I agree on this one and we both thought it was a cool movie but was extremely corny and hokey throughout. We also noticed that Ben Affleck seems to play the same character over and over in all his movies, and Uma Thurman looked…weird. We couldn’t quite place what it was, but Uma looked funny.
As far as the story goes, it’s this: Ben Affleck plays a guy that reproduces other company’s products. His best friend contracts him for a job that will set him up for life. The catch is that he has to agree to erasing the memory of doing the job. When he’s done, he figures out that his friend killed a guy for the plans to create a device to see into the future. Therefore, he sets out to destroy the device because it will cause the world to end by massive nuclear war.
I’m glad they didn’t pay a lot of attention to the story and how to support it, because it was a little unbelievable. Since this is a John Woo film, most of the movie was just really good action sequences. If anything, that’s what you should see the movie for.
June 14th, 2004
I haven’t been playing games lately, which is strange for me because I have always been a gaming freak. I think I backed off from gaming when my daughter was born and backed off even more when she stayed awake longer for me to play with her. So, I would mainly just play games at night when she went to bed. But for whatever reason, I just stopped playing (I was playing Beyond Good & Evil at the time) and didn’t seem to care to play anything again.
But…
I was surfing on the Net the other day and found out that Sony was giving out a free 14 day trial to Star Wars Galaxies - a game I have wanted to play for a while. It’s a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), where you create a character, chose a profession, and then play around on the planets of the Star Wars stories. It’s very detailed and takes many hours away from your life. I really like playing and I like seeing all the cool Star Wars culture, but I kinda can’t wait for my trial to be over. It’s very addictive and it is such a timesink. I would much rather not have been exposed to it, to be honest. But, it’s so fun to play! I have found myself thinking that the $30 every 60 days isn’t that much to spend on a game. It really sucks knowing that I’m probably just advancing my character for nothing since I’ll just quit after the trial is over.
Maybe something else will distract me…I doubt it.
June 14th, 2004
My friend, Trey, recently discovered a Content Management System called Mambo Open Source. We downloaded it and installed it on our linux dev server at work and it is probably one of the best open source CMSes I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of them. It is really easy to use and configure and I really like the layout as well. I’ve installed it on my server, so check it out.
June 11th, 2004
My wife and I watched House of Sand and Fog last night and we had differing opinions of it. I, for one, thought it was an excellent movie and Ben Kingsley was PHENOMENAL! I also got to see my cousin, Dan Brinkle, in the movie as well. He played the part of a home buyer when Kingsley’s character is trying to sell the house he bought for a huge profit.
Now, my wife thought the movie and Ben were both really good, but she just couldn’t get past how unbelievably stupid the antagonist characters were. She thought no police officer would risk getting caught doing something extremely illegal for a mere $45,000. I said that people in real life have taken far greater risks for far less money.
Anyway, the story was very original and intriguing. Basically, Jennifer Connelly’s character gets evicted from her house because of a mixup on the part of Pacific County. Ben Kingsley’s character buys the house the first day at auction and tries to turn around and sell it for 4 times what he bought it for, while Connelly’s character tries to legally/illegally get it back from him. It has a great ending and I highly recommend it to movie fans.
June 10th, 2004
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