Derelict's blog

It's always nice when we see people put trust in someone they don't know. It's friendly, and suggests that everyone in the world is not an evil criminal, as it appears the news would like us to believe from time to time. That said, I do think there is such a thing as putting too much faith in the kindness of strangers.

Wonderful movie. It has everything!

But I'll keep it short so I don't spoil it.

Ridley Scott still has it.

Passchendaele - If you haven't heard of this war movie that came out last year, I'm not surprised. I'm guessing Canadian WW1 films don't get a whole lot of notice. Now let me say before I get into this review that I am biased for 2 main reasons.

1. It's a war movie about Canadian soldiers. There's not many of these around, so I automatically had an interest.
2. It was directed by and starring Paul Gross. A great Canadian actor that has done his best to keep his talent and love of film local. That in itself makes me want to support his work. Men With Brooms anyone?

Anyway, the movie. Very good acting, and a nice balance in the story of war and romance. I haven't really seen a lot of war movies (it's not a genre I tend to lean towards), but I felt the battle scenes in this one were all well done. Gross also added a fair mix of emotion and attitude among the soldiers that I felt was used as a reminder that these soldiers were just guys, that somehow fell into the fight. It also reminded me of some real war stories I remember hearing.

Although I won't be holding my breath to watch it again, I think it was a good experience to see it at least once.

It was good. I had never read the book to compare it to, but it definitely doesn't feel like a superhero movie. Going in, I wasn't expecting a typical superhero movie, but this didn't feel like one at all. Yes, they are in there, but it was more of a crime drama to me then anything. That's not a bad thing, but at the same time I wasn't feeling pumped up by the whole event. By the end, I was happy to have seen it, but not excited that I had seen it. Rorschach was a great character though. He was the most interesting to see and hear in the movie. I know he's probably a favourite pick of many, but it wasn't for his violent nature, or his ability to kick ass that I gravitated to. His actions weren't the best part for me, but his character was.

The rest of the cast was just alright. No one else really jumped off the screen for me.

I'm going to try not to unveil any plot points here, but I am going to talk about the purpose I percieved from the ending.

You know what I find interesting? How some people will take 1 word they use everyday, and instead of saying that word in their native tongue, they'll say it in a different language.

YES! This is my 3rd movie summary this month. NO! I don't know what's going on. Pride & Glory starring Colin Farrel, Noah Emmerick, Jon Voight, and of course, Ed Norton. It's a movie about a family of cops that get caught up in a drug bust cover up and the situation escalates from there. Sound pretty typical, and I guess the story really isn't all that creative.

There's a few big name actors in it, and although they did a good job at spreading out the screen time to show them all off, the one that really stood out was Ed Norton. I think Ed Norton is awesome in everything, so it's no surprise that I liked him in this movie. He bumped the whole experience up for me a notch.

Everyone else did pretty good too, and there were nice performances from even the lesser characters in the movie. But their roles, and the story in general isn't one that begs to be seen over and over again.

So overall, it was a good movie, and worth watching if you're into police dramas.

So we watched the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was better than 7 Pounds, but still not as good as I was hoping it to be. It was also a little depressing.

The acting was good, and if you can take for granted that someone was born aging backwards, the way the events unfolded felt pretty realistic. It was also hard to tell for sure how it was going end, until you got close to it, and that was good.

I would recommend watching it if you wanted a slow night in with a quiet movie, with a date. And although I won't be rushing to see it again, it's not because it was bad. It's just for a movie this long, it wasn't so great that I'll pop it in for the heck of it.

It was good enough to watch once, but I could live without seeing it twice.

I was a little disappointed actually.

On a scale from "Never Again" to "I'm buying the DVD", this movie rates a "I'll live without seeing it twice."

Here's what I recently noticed:
facebook, myspace, twitter, flickr, and yes even ipernity, all do not capitalize their names in their logos.

We were thinking of buying a new desktop, as my old one is... well... pretty old, and is doing weird things, and getting very slow. Then the wires in the joint between the top and bottom halves of our laptop started acting up, causing our display to keep going out if we moved it. Since the internal network card has also been going a little crazy, we decided to go with a new laptop instead and I'm going to format the ol' desktop to start fresh and keep it going for another little while. We use our laptop more anyway.

As for the old one, our upstairs TV has a connection for a PC display, so we're just going to hook it up to that, and leave it there.

New Laptop

I saw a stand of 5 Hour Energy drinks. It also had 5 Hour Energy Extra strength in the same stand. Now, I'm not a chemist or anything, and this is why I'm asking, but why is the Extra Strength version still only 5 hours?

I've been given the opportunity to test out a new 3.5G Wireless device running on the Linux based Android O/S. That's all I can really say about it at the moment.

Be Kind Rewind stars Jack Black and Mos Def. I'm not a big fan of Jack Black. I actually preferred Mos Def.

Mr. Def takes care of a VHS rental shop while the owner (Danny Glover) is away, and the silly friend, Mr. Black, gets magnetized during one of his crazy shenanigans and erases all the tapes by accident (sigh).

Anyway, the movie wasn't great. I suppose it was a good movie but just not my style. I felt like it didn't know what it wanted to be. I suppose it attempted to be a dramatic-comedy, and has parts of each genre, but doesn't pull of either very well in the long run.

I did laugh a lot for their filming of Ghostbusters, and a little bit for Rush Hour 2, but that was about it. Jack Black was suppose to provide more comic relieve, but I really don't find him that funny.

Back to the movie. They had sub plots throughout the movie, but I find that they didn't fit well. For example, they showed almost no sexual tension between 2 of the characters until an unexpected moment in one scene, which felt awkward and misplaced.

The rest was just kind of.... blah. It didn't hold my interest. It was a good story I suppose (or at least the premise), but not one I cared about.

I saw an list online entitled "101 Most Essential iPhone Apps of 2008". First of all the fact that there's 101 suggests to me that someone doesn't know the definition of essential. Upon seeing that one of the apps is a picture of a cowbell that makes a sound when you tap it appears to confirm my suspicions.

Cloverfield: Didn't like it. I think I could sum the reason why by saying the movie's style simply didn't appeal to me.

Here's some more detail:

So, if you didn't know, the whole gimmick of the movie is that it's being filmed from the point of view of one of the movie characters with a camcorder. NYC is being destroyed by a monster, while the guy keeps the camera rolling. It's Godzilla meets the Blair Witch film students.

There's things that I can appreciate about the movie. The whole idea of recording the event over previously recorded material that would pop in every now and then to help film in parts of the back story was a good idea. The concept itself was interesting but flawed. I can appreciate what they were going for with the movie, but I don't think it was pulled off very well. I found the movie boring. I found the relationships boring. The acting boring. The story boring. The whole idea of it supposedly being shot by an amateur is a catch 22 as well. You could tell that it wasn't shot by an amateur. But if you've ever watched an amateur home movie, you probably remember not wanting to sit through 85 minutes of it anyway. What I'm trying to say is that it didn't look like an amateur was doing the filming which took away from the concept, but if it did then it would have been horrible to watch.

I was also disappointed with how often you see the actual monster. I get that it wasn't really suppose to be seen, and why would average citizens go around chasing it, but I wanted to see more of it (probably because I found the rest of movie boring). What I did see reminded me of those crazy rabbit-horse creatures from the Dark Crystal (if anyone remembers those).

I think Jodie Foster is a good actress, and I thought this was a good movie. Not amazing, but good. It took a different direction that I at first anticipated, but it was a welcomed direction. I thought the whole situation played out quite realistically, but I was disappointed in the ending. To me it seemed like it was put in to be a crowd-pleaser, and took away from the feeling of "it could happen".

At any rate, it's definitely a story movie; no big special effects, no over-the-top action, but still paced very well to keep it moving forward. If you're into movies based on story and character development, I would recommend it.