The Rambling Den Of Iniquity

Mo' Movies, Mo' Movies

2006-03-29T20:28:00.000-08:00

If you haven't already seen it, get thee to the video store and *buy* Millions. Danny Boyle manages to make pot-smoking saints and Mormons co-exist with the dawn of the Euro in the UK, all underlined by the innocence of a little boy named Damian who happens to get hit in the head with a sack of pounds Sterling. Sounds a bit left-of-center, and it is. However, it's also one of the best family movies you'll see this year. Go get it.

2006 Already

2006-01-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

Sheeyit. This year got here too damn fast. Rolled through another birthday, did Christmas, slept through the New Year. All the things your mother tells you do come true.

The year so far in books - finally started working on the ongoing classic series The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Had this recommended to me by several people, looked at it a few times, but never got around to starting. I am impressed. Rich text, possibly hundreds of plot threads, with a fully developed world and mythology that serves as a backdrop against which fascinating characters full of potential and power move in world-changing paths. I am seriously excited about getting further into this series - we'll see how things develop over the course of the next 10 or 11 books (!), with additional threads being explored in a soon-to-be published prequel and companion books. So far, the books provide a satisfying density without the stilted tone that Tolkien's works (for all their incredible depth and breadth) sometimes found themselves mired in, or the brain-bending complexity of Herbert's Dune novels that occasionally left the reader gasping for breath under the sheer weight of the socio-political exploration going on. Recommended.

Flicks - heavy, light, and in-between. Let's start light:

More great stuff from those wacky Brits - Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Technically impressive stop-motion animation, great character design, all topped off with pitch perfect caricatures of all things British. Funny, touching, exciting, just an excellent family movie from start to finish. Nick Park and his animation team at Aardman have released consistently hilarious work. Their first theatrical release, Chicken Run, was not everything it could have been, but the misses of that movie have easily been converted to hits with this one. Great stuff, even if you don't have kids to take to it.
Say what you like about les Québécois, as long as they release movies like Les Invasiones Barbares, I say we hold off on the invasion. A frank, fascinating look at mortality and how it affects a group of old friends and their families. Veering from explicit discussions of exactly how much sex went on to how best to start off on using heroin, covering the decline of intellectualism and every other topic under the sun. A touching, beautiful movie about life and all the things that make it worth living.
For every good movie that I see, there's at least on piece of crap rolling around out there, waiting to stick to my brain like chewed Bubble-Yum in the grocery store parking lot. Taxi is the most recent of those. Queen Latifah does everything she can to get past it, but Jimmy Fallon just plain sucks. He can't pull off any of the things he tries, and winds up being a pathetic, sniveling loser that you just want to see thrown off a building. Not that I was expecting something classic here, but when comedy doesn't work, it can be agonizing to watch. Hope for some chuckles to burn some daylight - get lemon juice poured into the paper cuts on your eyes. Ahh well, maybe I'll learn some day.

Games - my bane. I have seen the eighth wonder that is Half-Life 2, and it is every bit as good as they say. Incredible graphics, level design, sound, music, story - a cinematic experience that rivals or exceeds pretty much anything that has come before. Every time I run across one of these games, I get more and more pumped about the future of interactive gaming. Games like this, The Chronicles of Riddick, Morrowind, the Halo series, and others continue to stretch the limits of what gaming is, and it's only going to get better. On a more visceral and less intellectually engaging level, the beauty of Quake 4 has held my attention for a bit - a well-done and worthy successor to the classic id games, moving the impressive Doom 3 engine into the light. With better voice-acting, a slightly deeper storyline, and some great level design, this one is an excellent run-and-gun shooter with enough variation to keep things interesting. Sliding over to the platform space, I've finally pushed my way further into the Tony Hawk Underground series. While never as graphically stunning as some of the monsters above, this series has been consistently entertaining, challenging, and just fun to play. I'm hearing ill winds about the choices made in the American Wasteland entry, but I'm still one title away from that one. We'll see.

Well, I'm off to get some fresh air and daylight before I return to the grind. Until later.

Lit-ray-chure!

2005-12-12T18:34:00.000-08:00

Finally got around to reading The Half-Blood Prince - about three-quarters of the way through, and I think it is the best in the series so far. Rowling has matured with her audience, and with the latest book, appears to have lost some of the rambling structure that frustrated me through the first five books. Having just seen The Goblet of Fire, I've been in the mood for Hogwart's. I listened to part of the book when my wife and children read it early this summer, so I already know how it's going to end, but I'm enjoying the story thoroughly. On the subject of the movie, another great entry in the series - as I've said before, the adoption of the darker style and more mature attitude in this and the last movie have really got my attention. Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell have both brought a welcome shift in the direction of the films from a design and directorial point of view. I sincerely hope that some of the rumours about the next movie being the last are wrong - I'd love to see another director have a cut at the Hogwart's mythology. We shall see.

Cinn-ay-mah!

2005-12-12T17:39:00.000-08:00

Three for the books - a small-scale tale of slightly stupid people and a lot of bad luck, and a large-scale tale of humanity's possible exit to stage left, followed by two people immersed in grief and caught up in a whirlwind from one of their pasts.

First - 11:14 - five inter-woven tales that follow a group of coincidental events that cause the paths of a bunch of small town working class people to intersect with some gruesome, funny, and sometimes gruesomely funny consequences. Possibly the most graphic head-smashing and pedestrian-versus-mini-van bowling that I've seen lately, and some awe-inspiringly stupid decisions, made believable by the fact that you've read about somebody doing these things in real life. A good one for a Friday night at home, and hopefully you won't remember doing any of this stuff somewhere in your dimly lit past.

Second - Spielberg takes on history and wins with War of the Worlds - Tom Cruise firmly succeeds in playing an asshole of an absentee dad who has to struggle with becoming a parent while trying to avoid be blown into an ash-filled pair of 501's by a marauding alien race. Spielberg and his team of magicians manage to pull off some impressive sci-fi horror, convincingly portraying mankind getting its collective ass vaporized, stomped on, drowned, bled dry, and used as fertilizer for alien weeds. I have to admit I choked for a second on the whole "they buried the machines a million-years ago" plot device, and the more I think about it, the more it pisses me off. Being different for the sake of being different, especially when you are re-making a movie, is not necessary or advisable. You can't tell me that thousands of alien spacecraft buried close enough to the surface to erupt out of the earth like sunflowers wouldn't have been hit by somebody's subway tunnel or water well, especially in urban New Jersey and downtown Boston, fer Chrissakes. That stumble aside, the rest of the movie cooks along with a full-bore intensity that doesn't really let up until the closing credits. Spielberg does plenty of large scale scenes of destruction, but a lot of the time, they are a backdrop for a tight focus on Cruise's character and his children - you see a lot of it from their perspective, with the scale of the destruction implied through their faces and reactions. Spielberg loves to show people going "OHHH" just before the shit hits the fan - he's been doing that since his first TV gig - and he has plenty of opportunities here. Very nice cinematography with some subtle use of tone to convey everything from the ominous pre-assault storms to the horror of the blood-fed fungal overgrowth, and of course a powerful soundtrack and score that will give your 5.1 system a thorough workout. Well worth a rental if you didn't see it in the theater.

Lastly - The Interpreter - not the best movie Syndey Pollack has every pulled off, but a well-paced thriller centered on another well-drawn Sean Penn performance as a weary Secret Service agent saddled with the task with protecting a murderous dictator and a boatload of grief. Nicole Kidman doesn't quite pull off being shoehorned into the role of an expatriate former revolutionary from a small African nation - you keep waiting for her to burst into "Come What May". Pollack would have done well to find someone like Emily Watson for his anti-heroine, but Kidman and Penn work together well, playing out a subdued cat and mouse game. The movie is at its best when the leads are sitting together quietly sharing their pasts, and wisely avoids the stereotypical Hollywood overkill during the denouement. Joe Bob sez check it out.

I Care A Lot

2005-12-07T19:24:00.000-08:00

Why the hell am I writing this? For the same reason I've published untold pages of mental lint over the past *omigod* 7 years -- for my own amusement. My website and this blog are my escape hatches where I can vent, share interesting weirdness that I run across, and generally bleed off the pressure of being over-employed, under-paid, and well-endowed ... with debt, living expenses, and all the other good shit that comes with being free, white, and over the age of 21 in Dubya's version of the NWO. Hopefully some of the noise I generate is entertaining, thought-provoking, or annoying, but if it's just noise, feel free to go read something more relevant.

Things That Piss Me Off

2005-12-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

A list of things that really raise my hackles on a daily basis:

Finding someone else's chewed gum in a public walkway ... with my shoe, and then my pants leg, and then my other shoe, and then ...
Seeing yet another asshole park their shopping cart up against my car door, or better yet, just turning it loose to see where it wants to go ... usually up against my car door
Stepping in somebody's kid's used diaper while going in to buy a gallon of milk
Finding that empty beer bottle with my car tire in the mall parking lot

I'm occasionally inclined to think that my negative attitude towards people in general colors my perceptions, making me see the worst behaviors and ignoring the good ones. I look around for some of those good behaviors ... and some wanker blasts past me on the right, giving me the finger for driving *gasp* 75 in a 55. Sigh ...

All Your Applications Are Belong To Us ..

2005-11-30T07:02:00.000-08:00

Spent this week in class digging into the depths of Microsoft's utterly invasive resource hog of a systems management tool. Hell, they've even branched out to infecting Mac OSX and HP-UX boxes - my *NIX admin friends will love it when I tell 'em they get to deploy an agent to monitor their systems. If your company has the cash and you've got the time, this is a pretty damn nice set of tools for managing you Microshaft network. I find new things to do with it just about every day, and there's nothing better than perusing the canned report on programs listed in the Add/Remove applet. Gimme some more of that "Biker Babes in Bermuda Screen Saver", oh mighty executives ...

A Day For New Shiznit

2005-11-29T21:27:00.000-08:00

Well, today has been rather interesting. Test drove about ten new software packages to blow up Windows with, some of which are cool, some of which are annoying, some of which are never going to be used. Currently dreaming of Vista and trying to decide if Internet Explorer crashing on every exit is worth it. Dunno.

Of course, I also wandered out of Google-dom and into this whole arena. Judging by the age of some of the blogs out here, it looks like I'm a bit late to the party. We'll see if I have anything useful to add - suspect I'll simply be increasing the noise-to-signal ratio.

Intro

2005-11-29T20:33:00.000-08:00

A first salvo into the blog-o-sphere. Just wanking here to see how things go.