The drive up went well, and there's supposed to be a storm tomorrow. Looks like we're in for another winter wonderland time in the mountains. Got here in the dark, but regardless, the snow and the trees and the little cute mountain villages, and the super nice people... it's a great place to visit.
More soon, we'll take pictures too...
j-
Merry Christmas everyone! May the season bring you all you wanted and more. Best wishes to all of those that are away from their families for the holidays and may they return home soon to the ones that love them.
j-
There are a few movies that are worth some comment. Here's the quick list and what I thought of them:
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
I have to confess, I wanted to not like this movie. I thought it was going to be another insipid little waste of time like movies that are based on video games or anything that ever had Pauly Shore in it. Instead, it was a fun movie that had a lot of visual appeal, and the action sequences weren't bad either. The performances were unusually strong given that Mr. Depp was hired to play the role of the insulant bad boy who everyone loves (a role he's perfectly cast for.) And Orlando Bloom can actually play something other than an elf! Overall, it was a film that was a 4 out of five on the Dancing Monkey scale, but I'll give it a 7 of ten for enjoyment factor. It's not great, but it's a good ride.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
I can't look objectively at this film. It's plays on everything that I loved as I was growing up, namely the fantasy and adventure of the Tolkein classics. It's the third and final installment in what has become a two year, ten hour investment on the part of the viewers, and I think it was worth every single penny that I've given and will continue to feed into this marketing cash cow. Mr. jackson deserves my money for bringing this story to vision in a way that only a twelve year old boy's imagination could do. I've said at times that I thought Peter Jackson had a psychic link directly into my head as he made this movie because it was so completely what I saw when reading the books. Either that or Mr. Tolkein was very descriptive. I tend to believe the latter. Regardless, it's a testiment to his skill and vision as a film maker that I even had that thought. So, glowing reviews and bias aside, there were a couple of easily forgivable weaknesses, mostly in the graphic imaging department. There was at least one shot that was unmistakabley green screened. This is unusual for this day and age, but in defense the shot was large and difficult. There were perhaps two other spots (out of three and a half hours) where I could poke holes in the visuals, but I'll leave them alone. After all, if you notice the mistakes, then the movie isn't sucking you in the way it should. I don't want to be the one to plant the seeds of looking for the mistakes. You should go into this film with plenty of enthusiams, some snack food, a drink, and a totally empty bladder. You won't want to get up and leave once this film gets going. I give it a 9 out of 10 and 3 dancing monkeys.
There was another one that I wanted to write something about but I'm coming down with the Flu and can't remember right now. So... more later.
This article over at Slashdot got me thinking. A way to quickly and easily develop a distributed web publishing mechanism would be to publish your content in an RSS feed (as many blogs do today) and transmit that RSS feed through a Jabber server to whatever client chose to subscribe to it. If you're running a client, it would grab that XML feed, and pull the resources. This is great for the text portion but where does BitTorrent fit in? When you publish the XML through Jabber, you seed bittorent with the images, multimedia, etc that make up the rest of the information and deliver the link to the P2P resource. From there (with some BitTorrent support from the client side) everything is transmitted quickly and efficiently to the remote location almost immediately without exacting a huge toll on the publishers hardware. There are plent of issues to consider, but I think this framework has some promise as a distributed publishing platform. Let me know what you think.
The Quote's from Jane's Addiction. The article that made it pop into my head is located here (UPI.com).
Just goes to show that in war no one is absolutely right, but some people are just plain wrong.
j-
Finally caught this flick after much waiting.
Here's the breakdown. This is one of the best films if not *the* best film of the year. I've searched pretty hard in this one viewing, and I can find only a couple of minor flaws. More on those in a bit.
I love the cinematography. The rough 16mm look and the handheld camera in every scene. It gives a weight and rawness to the look that carries the strength and potency of the plot through to a transcendant level.
The plot, it's both sad and beautiful. The plotline of the remorseful martyr for some reason never grows old to me, and this story (although it rings painfully close to the real life of my wife) at times is shocking, comfortable, irritating, and whimsical in just the right balance. Truly an original in the field of european remakes and boring stories that normally fall out of hollywood.
The performances were strong across the board. I have no idea what Iñárritu does to inspire or motivate his actors, but he finds depth in the characters like you find seldomly in directors today. I thought of the powerhouse performances that Mike Nichols pulled from Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf" while watching this film, not that I think that 21 grams tops it, but that there is nothing else even close to rivaling it in this day and age other than 21 grams. Penns performace in Mystic River (that's a whole other conversation) fell weak and silent compared to his role here. Benicio Del Toro played the role of his lifetime in this character that was complicated in both his rage and his redemption. Naomi Watts had a more difficult time, and this is probably due to one of the only flaws in the script that I could pick on, there wasn't enough time to develop the complexity and anguish of Watts' character. But it can be forgiven, you could see that she gives her all in every scene. The weakest performance in my opinion was Charlotte Gainsbourg as the girlfriend. I think she could have played up the despiration of
her situation in a little more frantic manner and sold the character a little more convinsingly, but that's an aesthetic choice. Perhaps by leaving her character a little more subdued, Iñárritu left room for the three main character to pull off truely stellar performances. It's a shame though given the quality of her european work. Perhaps she'll be given a chance to cut loose in a deeper role soon.
Last, but not least, the editing... I find that the Terrintino timeline is working it's way into more and more feature film directors psyche. Some pull it off rather badly, and I think Terrentino himself has a hard time putting it into words exactly why his disjointed style works. There is style, poise, and balance to Iñárritu use of this technique however. There is a balance from the beginning of the film to the end, and you notice that somewhere in the middle time starts to look more linear. Until the end when the events of the end and beginning are perfectly tied together.
Beautifully executed from beginning to end, I give this film a 10/10 but a zero on the dancing monkey scale (which is always a good thing).
This time I'm using Movable Type after seeing it in use all over the place and considering it's power and flexability in templates and other things. Plus I did the netflix plugin, yes, I know it's candy, but I like it. Okay, more to come...
j-
