I love The Wire, HBO’s show about the drug scene in Baltimore. I refrain from calling it a tv show, because it’s nothing like television. It has nothing in common with television except that it’s shown there first. What it really is, is a televised novel written for the screen with unimaginable depth. It’s hard to explain, but the depth of the show is so staggering that one can scarcely understand it on first pass. Maybe the best way to look at it is that each season is like a well produced 12 hour long movie from a creator who truly loves his subject matter.

That subject matter is the streets of Baltimore, and the cops, dealers, citizens, politicians, and drug users who impact and are impacted upon by the streets. The main focus is with the police but it’s so unlike any filmed cop show I’ve seen that I can’t really compare it to any movie or tv depictions. Eventually you realize that the theme of the show is systemic organizational failure in various organizations — within the hierarchy of drug gangs, within the police stations, within the political structure, within the educational system.

The characters in this show, from the dealers to the cops, are so well written and acted that they seem beyond realistic. They seem real. When I watch this show too much, I feel like these are real people and I care about them way too much, as if what happens to them is happening to my friends and family. I start to think in their lingo, mentally replacing the n-word with “dude” (that works surprisingly well).

The fifth and final season is now airing on HBO… I’m still working my way through the fourth season (for the first time). If you are looking for a show, not just to watch, but to fall in love with… I can’t recommend The Wire in strong enough terms. Rent the first DVD, and watch it twice.

In Rainbows is completely fantastic.  Buy it now for the low-low price of whatever you feel like.  It’s worth at least that much, I promise.

I saw Grindhouse over the weekend when my friend Joey JoJo Shabadu Jr was in town. The easiest word is of course spectacle, it doses you with incredible amounts of gore and schlock, dishing out cornball cliches and explosive violence at every turn.

But in the end, I think exhilarating wins the day as a way to describe Grindhouse. By the time I left the theatre I was so amped up that I felt as if I had just gone through a physical workout.

Of the two feature films in Grindhouse, I think I enjoyed Planet Terror more, if only because standing alone it would be one of the best zombie movies ever made. But Death Proof is certainly a fine accompanying piece, even though I wouldn’t have likely seen it were it issued by itself.

Sadly, this movie hasn’t shown well at the marketplace and thus we likely will never see Grindhouse 2 featuring Thanksgiving and Machete. But still, see this one in theatres while you still can.

A friend recommended I check out Mike Judge’s new movie Idiocracy, which as he suggested was a very funny movie which was somehow completely overlooked by most people.  The general plot is that the extremely average protagonist is cryogenically frozen for five centuries and emerges into a world where humans have been bred into incredible stupidity leaving him by far the most brilliant person on the planet.

Of course, you have to get past the outstanding hypocrisy of the man who created “Beavis and Butthead” lecturing us on the dumbing down of our culture.  With all of the references in the film I’m rather surprised he didn’t poke fun at his own creation in this way.

Meh.  I don’t find hallucinogenics very appealing, and apparently I don’t find them very interesting either.  The rotoscoping technique used was exceptionally pretty and I think added to the effect that the director was driving at, but I couldn’t find myself to care about the plot much.  Maybe I’m getting jaded but the plot twists were all very obvious and the pacing seemed erratic.. sometimes too slow other times much too fast.

Maybe the book was better, but the film is a miss.  Unless you think that a bunch of hallucinating idiots babbling is interesting or funny or whatever.

Frigging awesome!

Short for zombie comics: zombics!

Based on a glowing recommendation from Cory Doctorow of boingboing I picked up the first volume of The Walking Dead today from Amazon.  I figured what the heck, it’s only $10 thanks to the free shipping I get with Amazon Prime.  It was kind of uncharacteristic of me since I’m not a big comic fan and I don’t really trust Doctorow’s judgement all that much, but c’mon… zombie comics are a golden concept.
Right from the introduction I knew this was pretty much as perfect as they come:

Give me “Dawn of the Dead” over “Return of the Living Dead” any day.  To me zombie movies are thought provoking, dramatic fiction, on par with any Oscar worthy garbage that’s rolled out year after year.  Movies that make you question the fabric of society are what I like.  And in GOOD zombie movies… you get that by the truckload.

[…]

For me the worst part of every zombie movie is the end.  I always want to know what happens next.  Even when all the characters die in the end… I just want it to keep going.

I hate to sound like the dude’s agent… but if that sounds good to you then you owe it to yourself to get The Walking Dead Vol 1: Days Gone Bye. Character driven zombie epic comics — good to the last drop!

I just watched a truly wonderful movie a few moments ago: Trailer Park Boys: The Big Dirty.  Being a longtime fan of the show I have to admit I was kind of skeptical going in about how it would be, but since I was in Vancouver I had to see it this weekend regardless of my concerns.

Totally blown away.  I think it’s the finest work they’ve done, better than any of the seasons thus far in my opinion.  They toned down their shtick slightly for the more mainstream audience I think, and while that could have been a recipe for disaster I think it actually helped
make the downs more down and the ups more up.

Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles:  keep on keeping on, dudes.

‘Top of the Food Chain‘, by writer/director John Paizs, is a little-known Canadian film produced in 1999 on the subject of science & technology, culture, and religion. On the surface the movie is a loose parody of 50’s horror movies, but the intensely witty dialog and the outstanding performances by Campbell Scott and Fiona Loewi and others make the film a pleasure to watch.

‘Top of the Food Chain’ is set in the fictional small town of Exceptional Vista, where most of the people left town after the local nut factory went out of business, leaving only a small handful of oddballs. When a famous atomic scientist (Campbell Scott) and two traveling salespeople visit the town, the town is plagued with problems. First the television reception suddenly fails all over town, and then residents start disappearing one by one, victims of hostile aliens.With the help of a sexy motel manager and her dimwitted brother, the people of town are forced to find and ultimately stop the invaders before they destroy the town and eventually the planet itself. The premise of the film might sound ludicrous, but that is an intentional part of the self-referential parody at the core of the movie.

This film comes as a great relief to those people who are tired of Hollywood’s tired routine towards science fiction. In fact, this film accomplishes the very task that ‘When Mars Attacks!’ failed at when attempting to cover a similar subject. It is unpredictable and funny in a way that high-budget Hollywood collaborative productions rarely accomplish, if ever.

The fast paced and well-written dialog is funny in a much different way than found in films like ‘Dude, Where’s My Car?’ or ‘Dumb and Dumber’ - but if you watch this film you should expect to have many of the quotes follow you around for a long time. In fact, even several months after watching the film many of my friends still refer to “the hilly, lumpy bumpy part of town outside of town”, or “aye, says Jesus, there’s the rub” - lines that do not sound funny when read in text but with the delivery by Campbell Scott and others they are unforgettable. In fact, you may want to go back and watch the film a second time, just to hear the parts of the dialog that you might have missed the first time.

However, this movie is most certainly not for everyone. It is quirky and odd, and very unlike the conventional straightforward plodding film that many moviegoers tend to expect. Some of the characters have odd sexual fetishes, while might make certain viewers squeamish, but there is no nudity or sex scenes. There is a little bit of gore and violence in the film, but it is done more in the low-budget tradition of implying violence and hinting at gore (a la ‘The Blair Witch Project’) - nothing that should bother most moviegoers.

Unfortunately, you will likely not be able to find this movie at your local Blockbuster. If you want to find ‘Top of the Food Chain’ for rental, you will probably have to find a specialty video store in order to find it. In the United States you may have to look for the film under the alternate title ‘Invasion!’, and in Europe look for ‘Welcome to Exceptional Vista’. If you enjoyed this movie, I have to suggest you look for other works by John Paizs, in particular ‘Crime Wave‘ (1985). ‘Crime Wave’ is a remarkably different film from ‘Top of the Food Chain’, but also quite enjoyable.

This was an old classic, Netflix has been trying to get me to see it forever but lately I’ve been put off older movies because of the lower production values and often weaker writing and acting.  North by Northwest though shattered my expectations, it was a very wonderful film that was well written and executed.  To summarize the plot briefly it’s about a “normal guy” who is mistaken for a spy and is drawn into a world of intrigue and suspense.  If you haven’t seen it yet (I think I was perhaps the last person on the planet to see it), check it out.

I heard from several sources that this movie was hillarious so I took the unprecedented step of even watching it in the movie theatre a while back.  Except, it wasn’t all that great at all.  I’m really wondering what all the hype was about because while it had some really funny moments it wasn’t even a great performer in its own genre.  Sacsha Baron Cohen did a really good job with his stereotyped character as did the rest of the performers but it just wasn’t as great as everyone said it would be.  It was a decently funny movie, that’s all.

Summary review: decently awesome.

This movie has received more hype than a B movie ever really has before, which in itself is a pretty awesome development. I’m a big fan of the genre, I even saw The Man With a Screaming Brain in the theatre last year when it came out.  As this guy in Seattle said to me the other day: if you’re going to see this movie you may as well see it the opening weekend.  So I did, because I agreed.

The directors made a very major flaw though, one that is unforgivable. Somehow they managed to forge that what people came to see this movie for was to see Snakes, on a Plane, killing people. The first 15 minutes or so of this movie involved setting up the plot and I shouldn’t speak for everyone else but I think it’s safe to say that no one really cared. I know in the theatre I saw it in it actually caused a minor commotion as the hyped up fans were yelling at the screen for no reason in absence of the promised snakes on a plane. When then got the manager involved when some old dude called out “hey keep it down, some of us are trying to watch the film“.

I wonder what inspires a person to think they can go see a movie called “Snakes on a Plane” on opening night and not expect a rambunctious audience? But I digress.

Once the snakes came out to play and the stupid plot bits were over, the movie really shined. People got bit in places you really hope to not get bitten in, Samuel L Jackson said memorable quotes regarding being dumbfounded about the existence of these snakes on the plane. The passengers on the plane did a great job of playing up several obvious stereotypes, and the movie came together in a very satisfactory conclusion.

I hope this sparks a trend of things to come in Hollywood, this movie is obviously making a pile of money with relatively little cost while many of the other films are sucking it up big time. I for one would pay $10 to go see “Snakes on Another Plane” starring a very pissed off Samuel L Jackson next summer.

I had this one on my netflix “saved” list for quite some time. A parody of several varieties of detective mystery films, starring Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness, and Peter Falk — how could it go wrong?

The first clue to answering that question was in the opening scene, where Alec Guinness was playing a blind butler. In the opening scene he was stamping some envelopes. Lick, stamp, lick, stamp, lick stamp. Then fade out and HA HA THE BLIND GUY MISSED THE ENVELOPES AND STAMPED THE TABLE. HA HA. This was a sign of bad things to come.

I kept wondering while I was watching it, when was Peter Sellers going to show up? Then it dawned on me that he was the dude playing the “Chinese” detective with taped up eyes spouting ridiculous fortune cookie sayings. Peter Falk’s role was to be homophobic, misogynistic, and racist in a “charming” way. Though I must say in the few places where he wasn’t doing on of those things he did a really good job.

The sad part is that this movie had real potential — and in a few parts it really shined through despite the failings listed above. The conclusion of it was a wonderful parody of the ridiculous twists that are often given to films of this genre to solve a case. This movie could really stand to be remade, especially given how the detective genre has been really prominent lately with all of the crime dramas on tv.

I’m a big Coen Bros fan so I wanted to round out their catalog  by renting these two older films.  Sadly I wasn’t really impressed with either, though they both had their charm.

Blood Simple had a few really good scenes, the best one being where the PI reaches around the building and then… well I won’t spoil it.  The acting was solid but nothing really stood out.  It was more mediocre than it was awful, it just didn’t capture my attention and I didn’t care about any of the characters all that much.  The only really interesting character was M. Emmet Walsh’s and didn’t get enough focus in the film.

Miller’s Crossing was better, though it suffered from two flaws: the protagonist was unsympathetic and not really that interesting either, and also that it had no real standout scenes or characters that would make it memorable.  If Gabriel Byrne was supposed to just act aimless and confusing all the time, he did a good job in that.  Thing is though, everyone around him did a pretty good job.  John Turturro at his very finest, but yet again his role is extremely minor.

This wasn’t a new release by any means, but it had been on my list for a while now.  Surprisingly it was pretty good, though the plot was laughable at some points it didn’t fall into any obvious traps aside from coming close to stretching the bounds of our ability to suspend belief.  The actors here did a very fine job, Carrie-Anne Moss in particular was very good which surprised me after those horrible Matrix movies.  One exception is Val Kilmer who was too damn smug the whole way through, perhaps that was the intent of his character but it seemed like his own smug personality shining through for some reason.

Colour me unimpressed.  It was slow moving and I just didn’t buy the acting of Jake Gyllenhaal* (though Heath Ledger did a fine job).  The cinematography was great, but in the end it was just a story that trudged towards an inevitable conclusion with very few surprises from what you would predict would happen.

Not to slight the guy, he did a superb job in Jarhead where he carried the whole film.

I just can’t bring myself to care about Ray, the movie about Ray Charles.  Musician struggles with drug and womanizing problems.  Oh, also he’s black and blind too.

Meh.

I have to admit: I had low hopes for Syriana after a string of bad movies that I’d seen.  I’m happy to report however that I was positively surprised by this movie.  I was expecting lame moralizing of the kind that disappointed me about Lord of War, however this movie managed to make it’s way through without introducing cartoonish villains.  What it did have instead were complicated people with realistic motivations, spun together in a series of interconnecting narratives that made the film a pleasure to watch.

What really impressed me was that despite the well-known political leanings of show star George Clooney, the US government was portrayed not as a faceless villain who wants to destroy the world, but instead as a collection of individuals with different goals, who make actions in their own self-interest with non-evil motivations — even if the end result ends up being suboptimal.  It’s too easy to just fall back to the activist position and just make use of they as was done in Lord of War, but Syriana was happily not guilty of this offense.

With a complex plot like this that weaves multiple stories together, it’s pretty easy to be confused by what is going on where.  I credit excellent casting for making it pretty obvious which characters belonged where so even a dumb guy like me could easily remember which person belonged in each storyline.  Clooney and Damon, the show’s big name stars, both did good in their very different roles.  Neither of them was really stellar or standout, perhaps because this was really not the kind of movie that could provide the proper stage for that kind of thing.  While each of them could have been described as being the lead actor in the film, really they just played a part in their own narratives, two among many.

Definitely one to rent.

I rather liked the original underworld movie, it took me by surprise when I saw it because I was really expecting not to. So with the sequel I was expecting to like it, yet of course I did not.

I AM A MAN WHO DEFIES HIS OWN EXPECTATIONS!

Anyhow. The problem with this movie is that like so many sequels it relies too heavily on the previous ones. Perhaps it’s just me, but even though I saw the original it didn’t change my life, and so I didn’t really care enough to memorize exactly what happened to all the characters. Flashbacks here and there are nice, but if you’re going to have this plot rely on something outside of the film a tacky “previously on…” intro would really be nice. For most of the film I was either confused or just didn’t care enough to stop being confused.

It was pretty, but that’s just not enough to carry a feature length film. Also, the ending totally sucked.

Wow, that was a bucket load of awful. Thankfully, I was expecting it to be awful so this wasn’t a really big surprise. This high-budget flop has been on my “should see but don’t really want to” list for a while, and the fine folks at netflix resolved that dilemna for me this week.

The one thing this movie did right was some really cool special effects. Everything else they did wrong, though. Oh, and seeing Gary Sinese play something other than brooding man in a show set entirely in blue hue was nice, even if it is just him playing a brooding man in a show set entirely in a red hue. Good to see the man’s got depth as an actor. Resume bullet: can brood in both red and blue.

You know what really sucked? The ending.

It sucks.

After watching Nausicaa and being totally impressed by the great story, I figured I’d give the anime genre another chance. So I moved on to some other movies by Hayao Miyazaki, and rented Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. I have to say that I was unimpressed with either, in particular I really didn’t like Spirited Away in the slightest.

Unlike Nausicaa, Spirited Away is a kids movie through and through, the story is simple and the characters are not really all that interesting. I didn’t care about the plot at any point, and hardly had any attachment to either the protagonists or the villains. It just didn’t make me care at any point during the film, I nearly turned it off partway through because it was just boring. Maybe it would be good for kids, I dunno, but for adults there just isn’t much there.

Mononoke was not as dull as Spirited Away, but it didn’t capture me all that much either. The character of Ashitaka was uninteresting to me and the plotline in the beginning didn’t interest me much. But I must say that once the Mononoke character was fully introduced into the plot the story picked up a lot.. by the end of the movie it was actually pretty good. Overall I just can’t give the film a really positive review. It was quite preachy and the reliance of the plot on magics was kind of annoying for my personal tastes. I will say that if you don’t have the same anti-fantasy bent that I do you might like that one. But skip Spirited Away, I suggest.

This forgettable Nicholas Cage movie is about the adventures of a global arms dealer over a 20 year period. It shows his rise from an independent small time crook to an operator of a large operation assisting evil dictators. The first 75% of the movie is okay, mediocre or maybe slightly above that. But the very end, the plot twist, it’s really annoying and preachy to the point where it completely ruins the film.

The one good aspect of the film is the portrayal of Andre Baptiste Sr, he steals all the scenes he is in from the lacklustre (as usual) Cage. But it’s not nearly enough to redeem this waste of a movie.

I’m pretty sure that yesterday was the first time that I’d seen a movie in the theatres all frigging year so far, and I think I made a good choice when I decided to go see the third X-Men movie. If you’ve seen the first two, you’re already familiar with the weak plots offset by excellent special effects… well if you were okay with that, definitely put X-Men 3 on your list as well. If anything, the effects were significantly better than the past two movies, but the plot was at the same time weaker. No spoilers, but the use of mutant powers to do very clever things with the camera was most excellent, and at least for me this redeemed any of the badness caused by the crummy and often slow-moving plot.

No spoilers, but I just want to reiterate that Season 5 of the show 24 was probably the best of its run thus far.  Not only was the finale last night dramatic and awesome, but they set up a great scenario to start up season 6 with too!

Most excellent.  Those of you waiting to see the show on DVD, I suggest you pre-order today.

I use gmail as my primary email client because it’s quick and also I can access it from anywhere.  But there are some really annoying things about it, and I will gripe about them now.

• It is impossible to write filters that would help reduce spam levels.  For example, any mail that arrives with asian or cyrillic characters in the “from” column is going to be spam, and I’d like to delete that straight off.
• Deleting large volumes of stored mail at once is near impossible.  I have mailing lists with over ten thousand messages in them, but I can’t bulk delete them and if I want to I’d have to page through them 100 entries at a time.
• Lots of my friends have multiple email addresses, but they all count as different entires in the address book.  It would be super if I could select four email addresses and hit “merge” so that they would all be joined in some super-contact so I don’t get 200 duplicate suggest every time I start writing an email address starting with “joh..”
• If you have a contact with multiple email addresses (which you manually entered), it will still suggest their @gmail address even if you set their primary address to a different one.
• The calendar is poorly intergrated, and the reminder email doesn’t always work as I discovered yesterday.
• The conversation threading feature is very cool. but when its not it can be very annoying.  Especially in a >2 person email conversation, it always lists the first person to send the message at the front of the message even if someone else replied last.  Example: wordpress comments notifications.
• When I click on a “mailto” link on my desktop, that doesn’t bring up gmail.  I could probably hack a workaround for this though.
• Probably more. It’s still a great system, and I’m going to keep using it — but I wish it were better.

Another movie I watched recently that I enjoyed was “A History of Violence“, the story of a mild mannered family man in a small Indiana town who stops an armed robbery in a high-profile way.  Part of the attention he gets though is from a group of out-of-town mobsters who think that he is someone they’ve been after for a long time.  I don’t normally like films directed by David Cronenberg (exception: the fly) but this was quite well done both in direction and in the stellar acting performances by Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello.

This is no action movie by any means, but this fact makes the few violent scenes in the film even more jarring, which is important to the point of the film.  It’s mostly about the interactions within the protagonist’s family as they deal with the crisis around them, and I found it all very interesting.  Definately one to put on your to watch list.

The movie “24 Hours on Craigslist” is a fascinating documentary that looks at the people who are behind those wacky posts on the internet service Craigslist. The filmmakers dispatched several crews on a single day, meeting with dozens of people who posted and replied to some of the colourful listings on the service. After seeing it, it surprised me to find that the reviews of the film were so terrible.

“The disorganized documentary 24 Hours on Craigslist is primarily a stroll through human desire as manifested on the popular Internet site Craigslist.org.” — nytimes

That sounds like a pretty solid endorsement to me, but they ended up giving it 2 stars — and they were not alone, most of the reviews I could find described it as aimless, dull, pointless, etc. I’m wondering if they watched the same movie as me, because I really enjoyed it.

This may sound odd, but something that struck me while watching this film is that it would be the perfect thing for a Time Capsule, because it so accurately portrays a segment of society that never existed before in the same fashion as it does today. Before the advent of the Internet, classified ads were expensive and only high-ticket items were generally available — plus there was strict control on what could be posted by the newspapers. But things just sort of exploded thanks to the freedom that the free service CraigsList allowed for and produced a neat little ecosystem where people can interact no matter how strange and unique they really are.

24 Hours on Craigslist is not going to change the world, or make a billion dollars at the box office. It was low-budget filmmaking and you can tell. But it was still a good time, especially if you have ever wanted to see who those crazy people behind the scenes were, but didn’t want to actually have to meet them!

At the advice of aphrael I recently rented Nausicaä, a Japanese animated film from 1984.   I was hesitant to do so as I’ve never been a fan of the anime genre since I had a few bad experiences when I was in University.  I had seen a couple of popular titles with friends who were fans of the genre, but I was immediately put off by the nature of the violence, specifically the portrayal of rape scenes.  I mostly gave up on that for years, and then watched part of Cowboy Beebop but found myself bored to tears by it and didn’t bother finishing.  So it was with a lot of hesitation that I even bothered to rent Nausicaä, but I trust aphrael so I did anyhow.

And I was not disappointed.  Nausicaä is the story of small bands of humans struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where a toxic jungle is rapidly spreading, forcing humans to retreat into small enclaves in order to avoid breathing in the poisons produced by the jungle and from being attacked by the aggressive oversized insect inhabitants of that jungle.  The protagonist of the film is Princess Nausicaä of an enclave known as the “Valley of the Winds”, one of the few remaining areas on the planet with a forest and clean water.

The Princess has an unusual attitude towards the jungle compared to the other humans though, where they see an enemy she sees something more.  But a war between the factions of surviving factions leads to the status quo being shattered and presents some difficult choices for the pacifist Princess Nausicaä.

That’s all well and good, but how enjoyable was the film?  Quite a bit, by my estimation.  The animation is dated, but this hardly subtracts from the quality of the experience.  The netflix disc I rented defaulted to English dubbing, but instead I watched it in the original Japanese with subtitles and this was a good choice.  Despite the famous voice actors (Uma Thurmon, Patrick Stewart) it just isn’t the same in English as it is in Japanese, if you do watch this I recommend you do the same unless you really hate subtitles.

Nausicaä was good enough for me to fill up my Netflix queue with other titles from director/creator Hayao Miyazaki, which I’ve heard are also entertaining.

I’d heard from multiple sources that King Kong was a lousy movie, but still I wanted to see for myself.  After being on my Netflix queue for months, it finally came the other day and I must say I was quite pleasantly surprised by it.  Perhaps this is partly because of the low expectations I had for it after the long negative buildup, but I think it’s also because the film was just plain entertaining.

The movie is separated into four quite distinct sections, it could easily have been a four part movie had any of the sections stood very well on their own.  The first section is the stories of the various characters struggling with life in recession-plagued NYC, the second is the the romantic journey to Skull Island, the third is the horrific adventure on Skull Island, and the final chapter is the sorrowful scene when they return to NYC.  The uniqueness of each segment makes this an oddity among Hollywood films, it comes off as a sweeping epic tale instead of the simple monster story that people often associate with King Kong.
As a conquence of the complexity of the story they are showing the movie is very long (3 hours) and is slow moving, especially in the first two segments which have few action scenes.  Since the audience is probably expecting an action/horror movie instead of the economic struggling and romance of these segments, it is no wonder that so many people disliked it — they just wanted to get to Kong and the fighting already!
My only complaint is in fact the opposite: when they did get to the action scenes they dragged on for too long.  Specifically the vines/falling scene on Skull Island and the famous Empire State Building scene went on for too long and had too much repetitive action.  Just because you can do all these nifty special effects doesn’t mean that you have to overuse them.  But this is a minor quibble, and hardly distracted from the enjoyment of the film.
The acting is mediocre but acceptable since this isn’t a character piece by any means.  What is important is that King Kong tells a range of stories about the human experience, and is a very fun movie to watch.

Firaxis designer Jon ‘Trip’ Shafer has released two new Civ4 scenarios, both of which are pretty darn good.  My favourite so far though has got to be “World War 1” where you can try the war from a variety of sides.  Most fun so far were playing as France and as Germany, though I’ve not tried Ottomans, Russians, or Italy yet.

The other new scenario is a futuristic WWIII scenario in East Asia, but unfortunately this was not quite as well designed.  If you do try it, play as China or Japan as the game doesn’t work really well if you play as the USA.

A popular phrase heard on the internets is that a particular tv show has “jumped the shark”.  This is of course in reference to a Happy Days episode where Fonzi literally jumps over a shark on waterskis, and the reference means that the show has gone so far overboard in a desparate attempt to regain interest in the show.

The show 24 in season 5 has so many elements of “jumping the shark”, it’s nearly fair to say that each episode has a “jumping the shark” aspect to it.  I imagine Jack Bauer jumping the shark, except that unlike Fonzi he goes back and does it again, and again, and then again.  So much so that I think it’s time to coin a new phrase: dancing on the shark.  24 is an excersize in shark dancing, and they do it so well.  No spoilers of course, but this season has been incredibly entertaining in the way it constantly on-ups itselfs with ridiculous situations.

Dancing on the shark, truly wonderful.

You know that liquid that gathers in the bottom of a garbage can after a while?  That stuff that leaks all over the place if you’ve got a ripped garbage bag?  It’s frigging gross, and certainly not delicious.

I’m betting that you’ve never heard of the film Alien Apocalypse.  I mean, why should you have?  Because it stars the phenomenal actor Bruce Campbell, is why!  It’s true, this movie was made for the Sci Fi television network and doesn’t exactly have a large budget, but it’s still available on DVD and is even at your local Netflix distributor just waiting for you to request it!

Apocalypse stars Bruce Campbell and Renee O’Connor (of Xena fame) as astronauts who return to Earth after a 40 year mission in space, only to find that in their absense humanity had been enslaved by evil aliens using them as disposable labour.  It’s up to Bruce and his cohorts to save the world and… uh… well… of course they (eventually) do.  It’s a campy, cheesy B-movie, but you already knew that part when I mentioned it stars The Bruce didn’t you?  If you like his earlier work, this is worth giving a shot if you like that sort of thing.

Free-dom! Free-dom! Free-dom!

I was absolutely delighted when one of my all-time favourite movies, Delicatessen, was released on DVD. I’d been waiting for it for months, put it on the top of my netflix queue a long time ago and I was lucky enough to have it arrive on the same day it was released to the general public.

Delicatessen is a film by the most famous directors Jeunet & Caro, and is about life in a post-apocalyptic world where food is extremely scarce because of an undefined catastrophe. The plot involves a circus clown, Dominique Pinon, who takes on a job as a labourer at a delicatessen after his trained monkey assistant is eaten by people after a show. But there is something really strange going on at the shop and the
apartment building where he works…

It’s in French so you need subtitles, but you don’t lose much in the enjoyment because of that. Caro and Jeunet went on to make the more famous La Cité des enfants perdus (City of lost children) and then after they separated Jeunet went on to bigger things such as Amélie and Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A very long engagement).

Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro, a $30 USB sound card with a normal headphone jack which doubles as an optical audio out if need be. Some time ago my laptop’s headphone jack stopped working and so I bought a cheap USB headset which was both uncomfortable and so poorly constructed that it stopped working less than two months after I got it. For the same price as a replacement USB headset I got this excellent portable sound card the size of a USB key drive which I can use our very good headphones with. And since it conforms to USB audio standards it just works on any operating system with no drivers, you just plug it in and it works.

Nifty.

I just watched a great film today, The Cooler starring William H Macy, Alec Baldwin, and Maria Bello. It’s about a loser (Macy) who has such extremely bad luck in life that he is employed by a casino manager (Baldwin) to stroll around the tables spreading his bad luck to the patrons to win the casino more money. When he meets his lady luck (Bello) though, all bets are off.

Macy is of course a brilliant actor, and he really shines when he plays a loser character — and this role is no exception to that rule. I’m kind of confused as to why Baldwin got the Oscar nomination for this movie and not Bello or Macy, but I guess that is how things work sometimes eh? In any case, put this one in your queue, the acting is superb and the story is solid and entertaining.

My wife and I watch television from time to time together, it’s a nice way to relax a bit together.  We don’t actually have a tv of course, we get DVDs via Netflix and watch various shows in sequential order as is all the rage.  Usually we watch science fiction type show or CSI type shows, and right now we’re working our way through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  It’s kind of shameful to admit that, but she enjoys it as a guilty pleasure so I’m happy to watch it with her despite the fact that I’m really not a big fan of the show at all.

Anyhow, the point of this is that Julia has an amazing ability to predict the corny lines that the characters will say, very often getting word-for-word
accuracy.  I’m not so hot with the dialogue compared with Julia, but I can spot the plot movement And this isn’t recollection — we’ve never seen it before — it’s pure guesswork based on our predictive skills.  And despite how much I’d love to pat myself on the back for this, I give most of the credit to the terrible writing that makes both the plot and the dialogue extraordinarily easy to guess.   Anyhow, enough complaining — onto the next episode.

Short summary: don’t buy it. Hell, don’t even borrow it.
As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve quite enjoyed the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster phenomenon since pretty much when it started. Mocking Intelligent Design and the people who promote it is pretty much my bread and butter*. In any case, the venganza.org letter was hillarious, and the reaction it sparked was no less than amazing and wonderful. For me at least, the best part was the graph showing the correlation of pirates and global temperature.

When I heard there was going to be a FSM gospel published by the venganza author, I jumped on the idea and preordered the book. I mean why not… it was only like $10 or so. It arrived the other day and I gave it all a good lookie-poo.

I am sad to have to tell you all what an incredible disspointment the book has been for me. There was a grand total of one (1) original thing in the entire book that made me laugh, and that was on the damn cover. The problems with the book are many, but I’ll list a few:

• the form factor for the book is all wrong. The cover actually has a picture of what a proper gospel looks like, but is actually a paperbook in an annoying wide format that wastes a lot of space. So instead of footnotes, the side notes appear off to the side and are very distracting.
• the book has a severe lack of focus. It doesn’t seem to know what it’s function is supposed to be… is it a satire of ID, is it just mocking ID, is it faux-serious, or is it a random collection of things found on the internet?
• the lack of focus would be alright if it were structured properly, but it is sadly not. It’s difficult for the reader to shift in the change of tone from satire to serious, from promoting it’s own “agenda” to making fun of another.
• most importantly, it’s not funny. It’s repetitive, and kind of lame.

The only reason to buy this book is to donate some money to the guy who created the FSM. And if you want to do that, I’d suggest a better way would be direct donation instead of purchasing this ill focused and unfunny book.Notes:
* This is only true because I have no actual bread and butter**
** except in the literal sense, because I have bread and I have butter but not “bread and butter”. Fuck, I’m even confusing myself here.