Mark's Blog

Saw a couple of movies recently. I've been going to the theatre a lot more recently, not sure exactly why, but there seem to have been some more watchable ones around these days.

Saw Syriana, which I rate a 7. Overall it was okay, but when you have a movie with intertwining stories, you need a bit more of a payoff that you get with this movie. I'm not too sure what the message of this movie was supposed to be, something along the lines of "the oil industry is very complex and important", and if that seems banal, well, that's what I got out of the movie. Also, I'm not sure I really figured out who I was supposed to be empathizing with in the movie. Some people seem to think the movie is apolitical, but I can't agree with that. It may not be exactly the usual tedious left/right politics, but it's got a fair amount to say about a significant political topic. There are a number of stereotypical American "fat cats", but it's not like anybody in the movie is really portrayed to be wholly good.

I learned one thing from playing Civilization III, which is that if your civilization doesn't have access to the Oil strategic resource, you do anything to get it. Maybe in a roundabout way, this is the message of the movie, that oil is so important that our actions are almost predestined because it's so crucial to our society. Who knows. Anyway, if you don't mind slower movies, and if watching George Clooney have a couple of his fingernails extracted with pliers doesn't bother you too much, it's worth a rental. Think Traffic-lite, except about oil not drugs.

Saw King Kong a couple of nights ago. Since I only rate movies on how much I personally enjoyed them (since I don't believe in "art", "artistic integrity" or any such thing), I gave this movie an 8. Frankly speaking, this movie is a total disaster. It's too long, there are a lot of unresolved subplots, there is a massive overuse of CGI effects, there are multitudinous completely implausible action sequences and about a zillion other problems (including an absurd ice skating scene with King Kong and Ann Darrow in a park in New York City in which I was fully expecting Kong to bust a Triple Salchow). I understand that there were dinosaurs in the original King Kong, but unfortunately, the middle third of this movie was nearly indistinguishable from Jurassic Park. I was inappropriately laughing numerous times in the movie because of the complete stupidity of the scenes, although, hey, laughter is laughter.

That all said, I just found it to be a fun movie to watch due to the cool 1930s' setting, manic action sequences and, of course, King Kong. If you want to see this, definitely catch it at the theatre and get a huge bag of popcorn (adding a cheesy topping would be appropriate) for this popcorn movie.

Just got back from spending a little time at a local bar and grill with the badminton crew, which was fun. It's one of those immutable laws of nature that a few "tasty beverages" brings out a certain risqué sense of humor in people. Unfortunately I had read el nanO's post on poutine recently and had to order one for old times' sake. I should have bought some heart attack insurance with it, and to make matters worse it wasn't even that good. Oh well, can't win them all.

Saw the Narnia movie last weekend. I hadn't read the book, but I probably walked by it in the library a thousand times as a kid (probably not even an exaggeration). Not sure why I always dismissed it (I'm not much into fantasy, I guess that is probably the reason) but I very much enjoyed the movie regardless. I gave it an 8 on IMDB (-1 for talking beavers). From what I've heard it's fairly faithful to the book and overall the effects were terrific and the story moved along at a good pace even though it was longish at 2 hours 20 minutes. Tilda Swinton did a great job as the, uh, titular witch (that would be a good name for a punk band).

Have been working on the Sonic Normal and have pretty much gotten it down pat. I'm not at near-100% success rate yet but it is getting more consistent and I can probably do it 7 or 8 times out of 10. The trick still feels a bit forced, even when it's successful, but that will improve with time.

Well, I haven't posted since March, so I figured I would do some random rambling. A couple of my friends have launched blogs recently (Klopzi's Mediocre Poker and Evening Tipple) so I guess I have some catching up to do.

Installed Ubuntu a couple of days ago. The whole installation process was very easy. Installed GnuCash and some other software. I want to get back into the good habit of using a personal finance manager. I used a very old version of Microsoft Money for a few years, but due to a meltdown of my old computer that slipped. I think this will be a good New Year's resolution.

I need to find some new blogging software. I like b2evolution but I need a fresh start. There are thousands upon thousands of spam comments in the database and it's not practical to delete them all. I might give Wordpress a shot, we'll see.

Added a new page to my website on dexterity tricks. And I'm practising my poker chip shuffle with 10 chips in each stack as I type this...

Might as well do a quick movie review summary of the last three movies I've seen while I'm here:
* Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. 8. Enjoyable, but we've seen this movie three times before.
* Walk The Line. 9. Terrific performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. Highly recommended.
* A History of Violence. 8. A strange movie by a strange director. Close to being a classic but too implausible.

Saw National Treasure last night at the Coliseum. It was the usual Bruckheimer fluff, but mostly entertaining. I hadn't been to the theatre in ages (I believe the last movie I saw in was Team America: World Police so I figured a light action movie would be worth checking out. It was good mindless entertainment, the type of summer "popcorn" movie that all the critics hate but still does well at the box office.

I spent a few minutes in the movie trying to figure out where I had seen the lead actress, Diane Kruger but could not, until I got home and learned she was Helen of Troy. Oh, I almost forgot, I was in a generous mood and rated National Treasure an 8.

Back on the topic of blog spammers, I had forgotten that one remaining way of spamming my blog, through the comments. Fortunately I have an automatic email sent to me when any comment gets posted, so I can easily delete those vague one-line posts containing a link to a pr0n site. I've only had maybe five so far, so I'm not going to worry about that unless it gets out of hand. I was also looking through my traffic logs today and noticed that the pr0n spam had actually been getting me a fair bit of traffic -- several hundreds of hits due to people searching the names of pr0n sites and stumbling here because of faked referer hits. Sigh.

Went to see Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban tonight. I rated it a 7, after giving the first one an 8 and the second a 7.

I haven't read any of the books, so I can't really judge its faithfulness to the series, but from reading some of the comments online it appears that this one deviated a lot more from the books than the first two. It's not necessarily a bad thing, since one of my complaints about the first one is that I felt there were too many little artifacts that they had to show for the sake of completeness.

As for the movie, there were definitely a number of cheesy parts, such as the werewolf, which was not very wolf-like. They did handle a time-travel sequence rather cleverly though (minor spoiler ahead). It was revealed, in the time travel, that previously unexplained actions were actually the result of a time-travelling Harry and Hermione.

Anyway, I put this movie firmly the category of see-it-if-you-were-going-to-see-it, don't-bother-if-you-weren't-going-to-see-it-anyway (I really need an acronym for that).

A couple of unrelated things: first I'm going to shill for Bloglines.com, a web-based news aggregator that is amazing and a regular part of my web surfing. It lets you easily view new stories in RSS-enabled web sites and they just did a very slick re-design. Highly, highly recommended. It also has a feature to manage your blogroll, so I just hooked that up to the side menu, so you can see the feeds I'm currently watching.

I joined a lob-ball team with work and have been playing that once a week. It's been fun, but it seems like whenever I hit the ball hard, it gets caught, and when I hit the ball weakly, it falls in. I assume that will turn around with time though. We lost 15-13 tonight, but it could have been a lot worse since we started off with only 7 players. I think we're 2-6, but it's still a lot of fun.

A few movies seen recently (and my IMDB rating for them)
* Cidade de Deus (City of God) (10: amazing cinematography, moving story of a boy who escapes the violence of the Rio de Janeiro favellas)
* Paycheck (7: interesting concept but mundane execution)
* Shrek 2 (8: fun summer movie, similar to the first one)
* Spider-Man 2 (8: very good, maybe a bit better than the first but I enjoyed the first more since it was new)
* Super Size Me (8: moronic experiment and dubious science but punctuated with a number of good points about our fast food culture and obesity in general)

Time to delete the porn referrer spam...

I watched The Hours this week, the only 2002 Best Picture nominee that I didn't see in the theatre. I didn't have super-high expectations but ended up really enjoying the movie. I usually like films with interlocking stories and those that play around with time, with different personalities or events that may or may not come together at some point. There were a number of interesting philosophical points in the movie. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, since it wasn't exactly action-packed, but if you like slower, more thoughtful movies you should give this one a shot. I gave it a 9 on IMDB.

I've been addicted to Civ 3 Conquests lately. I'm in a multiplayer game right now, against a friend and (right now) four computer civilizations. I have the lead in score and tech, but we are on different continents, and just like in real life, inter-continental wars are extremely costly, so the end is not in sight yet. I'm playing as the Romans, which is not one of my favorite civs to play, but it has worked out well. The Legionary was useful in the Ancient age and the Militaristic trait has helped to produce a couple of Military Leaders, which are always useful. I'm not a huge fan of the Commercial trait but I'm doing well in gold pieces in this game so I shouldn't be complaining. I usually play (and win, most of the time) on Regent level, and tried a game on Monarch recently, but got crushed quite quickly. I suppose I'll have to refine my strategies in order to make progress. I still have no idea how people can win on the Emperor and Deity levels.

The Super Bowl is tomorrow. I'm predicting a closer game than the bookmakers, but what do I know. Seven points seems to be an awful lot, given that the Patriots' offense isn't exactly tops in the league and Carolina has a very good defense. Plus, New England doesn't have home field advantage. I'll take the under of 38 points, and Carolina +7. I might as well do a final score prediction -- I'll go out on a limb and say Carolina 16, New England 13.

I've definitely been a delinquent blogger lately. I don't know why, I guess there's just not much to report.

I have been doing some editing on Chefmoz.org, a restaurant review site. I'm one of the volunteer editors for Ottawa. We maintain a list of restuarants and associated reviews. I used to log in fairly irregularly, like once every few months, but recently there has been a flurry of reviews, perhaps close to one a day, which is really nice to see. Some of the "reviews" are a bit too brief, but hopefully over time more people will use the site and contribute. According to Alexa, the site is around the 11,000th most popular site on the Internet, which is not bad.

I've been playing some Civ 3 Conquests recently. This is a good expansion pack, unlike "Play the World", which had precious little in the way of new features and extremely laggy multiplayer action. I've played through the three introductory scenarios and the first two real ones, "Mesopotamia" and "Rise of Rome". I usually play on Regent level and had ended up losing "Rise of Rome" the first time I tried it as the Romans, but winning the second time through as the Persians, who start out with significantly more land. It's definitely important to read through the rules for each scenario, since they are often changed from the base game. For instance, I was getting annoyed, while playing as the Persians, because I thought the best defender that was available was the spearman, who defends with strength 2. Then about 2/3 of the way through the game, I suddenly have the option to build Numidian Mercenaries, who have defense 3, which is obviously a significant improvement. In the regular game, the Numidian Mercenary is a Unique Unit, only available to the Carthaginians, however in this scenario the NM is available to anyone who has the Ivory resource (which I would have gotten a lot earlier if I had known that it would have been useful). Anyway, the scenarios are a great way to have a satisfying game in a night or so, unlike a regular game which can take a number of sessions on a larger map.

I've seen a few movies on DVD recently: Full Metal Jacket (endlessly quotable and reasonably entertaining but somewhat disjointed, I gave it an 8), The Recruit (slightly formulaic CIA thriller, I gave it a 7) and Out of Sight (overrated and somewhat implausible movie about a romance between a bank robber and FBI agent, I gave it a 7).

I saw Cold Mountain a few days ago, the 2.5 hour Civil War epic. Right about half way through the movie I thought that it seemed similar to The English Patient, so I wasn't too surprised when I got home to discover that the director was the same for both movies. I really liked The English Patient, but this movie was not as strong. The plot wasn't quite as interesting and mysterious, and I didn't like the characters as much. Cold Mountain seemed to drag at times, and I doubted the strength of the bond between Inman (a weary Confederate soldier played by Jude Law) and Ada Monroe (the ever-elegant Nicole Kidman), who had apparently shared less than 100 words (and a lengthy embrace, to be sure). Renée Zellweger turned in a great performance as Ruby Thewes, a rough-and-ready outdoorswoman who moves in with Ada to help her with the farm. I wouldn't be surprised to see her get an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

I saw a couple of other movies on DVD recently: High Fidelity, which I liked, although I didn't think it was all that funny. I liked the story and the "Top 5" motif that John Cusack uses throughout the film. The only parts I was really laughing about were Jack Black's back-and-forth with customers and the other employees in the record store. I had a similar problem with Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank. The movie was fine, but I just wasn't laughing. I guess it's not my style of humor.

The other DVD I saw was The Contender, a drama from three years ago in which Joan Allen plays a vice-presidential nominee who is involved in a messy scandal and power struggle. Gary Oldman plays Allen's nemesis, a Republican congressman bent on destroying her character, with his usual great skill. There wasn't anything in this movie that we haven't seen before, but the plot was solid and it was a good look at the political machinations that go on in Washington. I did have an issue with the hare-brained scheme that comes to light at the end of the movie, which I won't reveal. it seemed totally implausible that anyone would try that.

Anyway, I gave all these three movies an 8, which for me represents an above average, but not great movie.

Saw Elf on Saturday, which had been highly recommended to me by a number of people. It was surprisingly funny for a G-rated movie. There was one particularly hilarious part where Will Ferrell, dressed in his usual Elf costume, gets his picture taken in the same style as the classic Sasquatch pose. I think about 10% of the audience got the reference, but in any case it just cracked me up since it was so out of context. I rated this movie an 8. The movie had a lot of funny moments and director Jon Favreau didn't have to resort to the usual bathroom humor (although this is not to say I never find that funny).

Irrelevantly, I wondered whether I had seen a movie with a shorter title, but soon realized I had seen Go, Pi, X2, 54 and the optimally-short, assuming there is no untitled movie, O.

I played a number of rounds of MOHAA tonight, my current favorite first-person shooter, and reached a certain milestone of skill by getting accused of cheating for the first time. Despite the protestations of my poor-spelling all-capitals-writing accuser, his repeated allegations were erroneous.