Saw two movies this weekend, both excellent.
Firs, The Page Turner (La tourneuse de pages). Little pianist girl Mélanie fails her entrance exam to a music school after she is interrupted by one of the judges signing an autograph in the middle of her performance. Mélanie abandons her music career, graduates from high school, applies for […]
I finally watched 300 yesterday. An odd movie. On the one hand — very competent acting, beautiful scenery, beautiful CGI, excellent battle scenes, people you are supposed to care about getting emotional, people you are supposed to care about fighting for justice, people you are supposed to care about dying… Yet somehow, I didn’t care. […]
Watched two Mexican-directed movies recently.
First, del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (Laberinto del Fauno). Most reviewers seem to be in love the film; it got 96% on rottentomatoes — an incredibly high score. However, I must disagree with the film critics. In my opinion, the movie is definitely overrated. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not […]
Saw two movies in December that I forgot to write about.
First, Apocalypto. The first third of the movie — showing ancient Mayan society, wars fought with stone and wooden weapons, the famous pyramids being built — is pretty interesting. I have heard that it’s full of historical inaccuracies, but one hardly expects anything different from […]
Saw the new Bond flick this weekend. Considering the ridiculous amount of hype about the movie, and, well, because it’s Bond, I fully expected that I would be seeing garbage. However, I was greatly mistaken. To my surprise, Casino Royale really is an excellent movie. Other Bond films may be pretty, or entertaining, but this […]
When I wrote about my initial impressions of Borat, I was under the impression that most of the scenes were staged. Apparently I was wrong. It seems that Bobby Rowe the Tennessee rodeo manager, Cindy Streit the Southern dining etiquette coach, and even the drunk, sexist and racist frat brothers were all real people, […]
Saw the Borat movie last night. It was, quite frankly, the worst movie I’ve seen in my life. Now, the problem is not that that the movie was offensive (it was, but I don’t care about political correctness). The problem is that it was stupid, lowbrow, and generally unfunny. Granted, there was one interesting scene: […]
Therefore, stop whatever you are doing right now and watch this beautifully abstract zombie invasion video. It will do your mind good.
(found via Federico Mena-Quintero)
Watched The Proposition this weekend. Flawless movie; so flawless in its portrayal of violence that it can be hard to watch.
The basic idea is, in the late 19th century, the Burns brothers gang is robbing, murdering, and raping its way through the Australian outback. Captain Stanley manages to capture Charlie and Mikey Burns. But the […]
I recently watched Thank You For Smoking. To my surprise, it was an excellent movie. It was a well-acted, witty satire of American politics, with none of the boring proselitizing that one might have expected from the title. Then someone mentioned that Christopher Buckley’s book of the same title was better. Having now read the […]
An Australian artist called Paul Robertson has created a black-and-white animation in the style of classic arcade beat-em-up games. It is called Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Streetfight 2006. It is as utterly brilliant as its title suggests it would be. The heroes are great. The enemies are great. The super attacks are downright amazing. It […]
Saw Silent Hill. Seems that critics didn’t like it. Seems that critics are wrong.
I’ll admit right up front: I have never played the Silent Hill games. Matter of fact, I haven’t played any survival horror games. Perhaps, fans of the franchise will find the movie to be the same sort of abomination that Doom was […]
Saw V for Vendetta this weekend. Nice movie, but the graphic novel was better. Which is to be expected — film adaptations of great literature are almost always worse than the original. The movie is substantially different from the book; some of the changes the Wachowski brothers made included:
The historical background for the book was […]
Studio Ghibli is making a film based on Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series. The English title is Tales from Earthsea (the Japanese Gedo Senki means something like Ged’s War Chronicle). Apparently, it will be based mostly on the third book of Earthsea (The Farthest Shore). And, if you read the director’s blog (well, its English […]
Generally, I dislike Woody Allen’s films. However, I heard that Match Point was a completely un-Woody-Allen-ish Woody Allen move, and so I went to see it last weekend. Basic idea: guy fails as a professional tennis player, lands a job in London as a tennis instructor, no money, no prospects, crummy apartment. Meets a rich […]
To celebrate Halloween, saw Three … Extremes this weekend. It consists of three short horror films by three Asian directors (Fruit Chan, Chanwook Park, and Takashi Miike) in one package.
The first of the three is Fruit Chan’s Dumplings. An aging HK actress finds that her husband is losing interest in her. To restore her former […]
Saw Good Night, and Good Luck last weekend. For those who have been living under a rock — the movie is about a TV news host, Edward Murrow, who gets drawn into a conflict with Sen. McCarthy in 1954. McCarthy gets ridiculed on prime-time TV — more by his own words than by Murrow’s […]
Saw two movies this weekend.
First, Everything is Illuminated. My first impression — the characters who are supposed to be speaking Russian, are, in fact speaking Russian! And without an accent! And the subtitles translate their speech correctly into English! It is a rare treat for an American movie to do Russian properly. The basic idea […]
To my surprise, Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle is still showing in my area; saw it on Saturday. Impressions: very pretty (and there is no CGI). The overall genre is a steampunk fairytale. In general, I find steampunk to be the last refuge of the least competent of writers and artists (see Steam Boy for […]
More Gentoo bugzilla humor: xmms-1.2.9 goes down more often than a drunken whore. An apt description…
In the spirit of exam season in universities worldwide, here is a quiz for aspiring gentoo devs and ebuild contributors.
Here is complete, non-emotional, well-stated summary of the KHTML vs. WebCore debacle. Conclusion: WebCore is a defacto fork, and /. posters […]