Prince of Persia (2010 movie)

A lot of people will complain about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but I wont (too much); I actually sorta liked the film.

However, keep in mind: this is not a brilliantly intelligent film, this film isn't really philosophical, nor is it expertly composed and choreographed or even highly funny. It is "Simply Fun". If you are looking for more in your movies, don't look here; if you don't like action movies and hero movies, don't look here. This is a genre film: it fills its roll it it's genre. It gives english accents to persians because they aren't americans (and they are from europe, what other accent ya gonna use?), nobody really looks like a Persian, it has a lot of sword fight scenes, it has a lot of acrobatics. In its genre, though, it stands apart as pretty good. Its fight scenes are almost mediocre; there's a lot less attention given to them than to the arial acrobatics, which suits me fine. I am getting a little tired of fight scenes. They are there, too be sure, and they aren't horrible, and they aren't so long as to get too stale.

There are those who would disagree with me on both ends, I am sure. People who are annoyed they are there at all and those who lament that they are too short. For me, they are easy to pass by and get to what the film does well. The plot is pretty good. The ending might be obnoxious for many, it certainly wasn't my favorite part, but I had predicted it by the time the movie was a quarter though. It was cemented in my mind by three-quarters.

There really isn't much of a reason to like this movie, but I still do. Perhaps I am biased because it casted my ol' creepy roommate "David the Vampire" as a creepy snake-wielding Voldemort like character. Other characters are fun as well (especially the entrepreneur - he is as close as this movie gets to political). See if if you liked the Zorro movies.

The First Millimeter (2009 documentary movie)

The First Millimeter is a great documentary especially when paired with Dirt!. It has a few problems with its composition, there are a lot of visual glitches, ineffective cuts and cuts which are too quick (especially during some interviews). It seems like there are always sub-titles in the sections from Africa, whither the speaker was dubbed or not, yet there are few sub-titles from anywhere else.

There is still some invaluable information in there.

"Everyone Should See" The First Millimeter, especially decision makers. We are currently making our national parks and wild-life reserves less and less wild because we have forgotten two parts to their ecosystem: large herd animals and predators. It's hard to get predators because they need absolutely huge tracks of land, but perhaps something can be done which will improve our land quality more than what we are doing now. And in this age of too much carbon in the atmosphere (and too little in the soil) we must figure this out.

My major contention with the film is how much credit it gives to human beings. Casting us as the manages, that we have been "endowed" with this capability and if we are to make anything better, we must be better managers.

We must copy the management of the gods: grassroots. We make rather shitty managers, see what has happened to the earth under our rule. When the world was "animal maintained" it was in much better shape. Still, there is wisdom in framing it this way because the homo sapiens is unlikely to relinquish his control, even if he is spiraling toward disaster.

Seeing as these two movies, Dirt! and The First Millimeter, came out recently and almost concurrently, I am tempted to have hope that these ideas will spread. If more of our ranchers and agriculturalists see this movie, we could begin to rewild the world.

Meet the Spartans (2008 movie)

Way back when, when Meet the Spartans first came out, I thought the advertisements were hilarious, but also that they were probably the best part of the movie.

I was right. This movie is "Very Stupid", it's just a series of jokes, and it works better in the 30-second add format far better than it works in the 86 minute movie format.

It is still a million times better than 300, which it is parodizing, and not even half so stupid. It objectifies women horridly, and makes a lot of gay jokes, but it still manages to be funny in a few places, Not worth the 86 minutes you'll spend on it, but there's still some things in there.

Especially if you suffered through 300. It does a good job of making fun of that worthless militant war-glorifying thing which made it obvious we in America forgot the lesson of 'That Old Lie'.

The CR-48 and Chrome OS (Chromeos)

I applied to get a CR-48 from Google the other day and I really hope I get one.

Besides the obvious benefits of a free computers (especially when the one you own is 10 years old and so slow on the internet it can't run Firefox or Chrome browsers - it does well off line, but for any online work, I have to use a school computer) I really like the idea of having a computer that is at once unbranded and also named after a chemical element.

There's still a little Chem-Geek in me yet.

I've been using Linux for a little while, partially because it is the only operating system in the world which can still run on my little box. It can't handle Gnome, really, I am running LXDE on the thing (which wont mean anything to most people - suffice: it is a really thin operating system so that I can still run AbiWord, OpenOffice is even too big for my computer to handle comfortably!)

I also look forward to comparing Chromeos (I like the name without the space - it makes it seem more like a name; and one for a Greek God of some sort to boot. Using OS as a name is the most disappointing thing about this OS (and the iPhone OS. I would have called it "Crabapple" he he) It also distances it just enough from the name of the browser for me) to Linux, Mac X (another OS name...) and Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

I like comparing.

My initial hypothesis is that it will be at least as good as Gnome (which also has some tentacles into Cloud Computing) and will act as a better desk-top operating system than anything Microsoft has ever done with its life even though it doesn't have a desk top.

The question to me will be its comparison to Mac.

I have often said that I don't like Mac. Very much. It's just about 152156535x better than Windows. But it's also a little ahead of Linux for me. Out of the box, Mac usually works. It is clean and even fun to use sometimes. They don't stop working, they rarely get in your way, it's pretty nice really. The problem with Mac is that there is a little more in your way to learning the ins and outs of the computer. This is where Linux shines. If you like pulling apart your computer and changing how it works, customizing the look in every way and even the way it functions, Linux is for you. If you like a computer that simply works, use Mac. If you like crying and cutting yourself, by all means, get a Microsoft operated machine.

I  may be a masochist, but I am not a cutter. I like Mac because it works, I like Linux because I can change it every day (which can get distracting from doing any actual work) and I expect to like Chromeos because it'll be new and I already like the idea of cloud computing.

I had thought of it a few years ago and was telling people, "if I were a millionaire computer genius, I would make a computer was almost all sending and receiving signals. What you see on your screen is just a picture sent back from a super computer which is where all the actual processing is going on. Your computer would just send and receive. You could still have desktops and whatnot if you wanted, programs installed; hell, you could probably have every operating system and chose from them, all the computing is elsewhere on super-computers or networks of computers. It would be cheaper for you and probably more environmental because it would be more energy efficient."

Then someone told me, "They are already doing that. It's called Cloud Computing."

"Oh, ...Well, alright then. That's cool. It's a good idea, I think."

And now its really close. I've already been on the web for a while; used to use Buzzword as my word-processor (it's still better than Word, though it has been in decline recently) because I haven't had a computer of my own. And because my external storage devices keep kickin' the bucket. I am lookin' forward to Cloud Computing.

Tangent: I've been taking a class about Systems Thinking and we have gone over Biomimicry, which is the idea of copying ideas nature has been using for a billion years. One common thing this leads people to do is to work with a hive of things at once rather than centralize control. For example, hair is a very poor insulator until you combine that one strand with a few hundred thousand, then you've got one of the best insulators imaginable. Instead of building solar and wind farms, I think we should integrate them into the existing cities: even climate change isn't a good enough reason for me to rake up more habitat, especially when it wouldn't be that hard to put the power-plant on top of the existing city. Centralizing our computing is going the opposite way that Biomimicry would advise.

Is it justified in this case? To centralize our computing would reduce the manufacture of computer components which are atrocious to the environment. Battery use on a million spinning disk hard drives may be more than centralizing the storage on super-computers far away. But also a main pull of environmental movements is to become more locally supported.

This is not local for anyone. If Google's computer gets hit, what happens then?

But, in the short run, I am much more likely to break my computer than Google is. I will have to deliberate this further, but for now, I am still enthralled with Cloud Computing; it has been working better for me these last 3 years.

Anyone else have some thoughts?

The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009 movie, missed the beginning, never read)

"Cussin' Funny". I like the sense of humor in The Fantastic Mr. Fox. George Clooney's Mr. Fox reminds me  reminds me of Ulysses Everett McGill from Oh Brother Where Art Thou, which I think is the best role I have seen him in. Now, there are two roles which are hard to choose between.

Too bad they are so similar; That might say a something about the mans acting ability, but he was pretty good in Men Who Stare at Goats as well, so I wont be the one to say it.

The first thing that most anyone will notice is that the animation style is very unique. I thought that it would be horrendously distracting throughout the movie, and that it would never have been accepted when Sleeping Beauty was new, but it fits the story and fits itself so well that it does nothing of the kind. It may not have been accepted in 1959, but it is very impressive now.

Still, there aren't veyr many movies this style will work well with. This movie is unique.

Wes Anderson, the writer and director, is far more of an impressive writer/director than the block-busting James Cameron. He's only made 8 movies, but all of them that I have seen I have found impressive at the least. They don't have the same mass appeal as Cameron, but have more of a controversial nature. That cannot be liked by everyone. And is therefore better.

Starship Troopers (1997 movie)

I am "Undecided" on how I feel about Starship Troopers. That may seem like a shitty cop-out of a rating, but I'm stickin' to it. I think it'll end up encapsulating my decision once it is made. I like most of what I have read of Heinlein's: Job, Stranger in a Strange Land. But this movie is not very similar. It is campy, that is where the humor lies, but it supports military aggrandizement a little more than I think is healthy. It seems to make the metaphor that war is sometimes necessary if we are fighting an alien without a sense of empathy. But since that will never happen (I seriously doubt that if we meet with bug aliens they will actually lack empathy), the point is moot.

But that might not really be the point. That is just the surface, that is just the opinion of the characters. In reality, the film seems to be almost entirely satirical. And like any satire,

At least, that is the controversy about Heinlein's opinion. But in this movie, that seems to only be the opinion of the characters. The situation and the attitudes are almost entirely satirical. And like any satire, the point where satire ends is rather hard to distinguish.

This film is violent and acted with not the greatest degree of skill. If you are in the mood for a simple movie   and in the mood for satire, this is a good one to pick up.

I feel the need to eventually read the book. There is some controversy on Heinlein's own opinion. It seems that he hates communism (no surprise, I suppose, considering Stranger in a Strange Land) and believes that only those who earn suffrage should be citizens, an idea I could probably get behind.

A Town Called Panic (2009 movie)

A Town Called Panic is "NOT for Everyone"; it is in french and it has subtitles.

And it is animated like vomit.

But I loved the movie. It is strange in the finest and makes about as much sense as a platypus-taur, but it was erroneously entertaining for me. The surreality engenders a sense of adventure which is surprising.

Mostly, it is just funny, though. That's the whole point. It's bleeding funny. If, of course you can get past the choppy stop-motion animation which makes Wallace and Gromit look like a Pixar masterpiece (which is something of a misnomer - I think Wallace and Gromit looks better. Makes it look like Final Fantasy in plot coherency and graphics.)

It was recommended to me because I like Monty Python; if you like almost everything in the Flying Circus, then look up this movie. 

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2009 movie)

It is amazing how name-brand can affect how much people like something. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, for example. It carries the weighty name of the HP and people have collectively given it 7.3/10 on the ever-popular Internet Movie Database. There are several lengthy reviews on the value and brilliance of this composition, but I find it more than dull and not at all worthy of the source work.

7.3 might not really sound all that bad, but if I were into giving numbers it wouldn't be half so high. It is like the makers of these movies realized that they left out so much in the previous movies that they would have to split #7 into two and to correct this they made sure everything was in there somehow. Let alone how choppily it fit in.

This movie is just "Bland". It didn't induce very much emotion in me, even in the horrifying final scene which caused everyone who read the book to simultaneously break out into sobs. I laughed a few times, but I feel I was laughing at the movie, not with it. I just didn't care about anything that was happening. Nothing was developed, nothing was explained. My cousin watching with me, who hadn't read the book in a few years, found herself lost. Even though she had read it once, it wasn't enough to help her along through the movie. That is when you know you didn't plot out your story very well.

But pretty much every plot is there: two romances, Aragog, death and destruction, Malfoy being a prick, searching for horcruxes, Slughorn and his collection of students, getting forgotten on the train. There's even a few new ones: HP being an idiot and running out into a hayfield (why? cuz he's dumb). It's all packed in there like forcing jigsaw puzzle pieces together whither that is where they go or not. I think there's some boarder pieces in the middle.

What makes Harry Potter such an enrapturing series? It has captured children's imaginations and even wrangled a few adult ones. I believe that one of the things that has done this is her character development. But the characters in the movies are largely boring.

Planet of the Apes (comparison of the 1968 and the 2001 films)

I should have posted this about 3 months ago.... I didn't even realize that I didn't.

The Acting Skillz Sarah de Palin

    The most amazing thing about Sarah Palin is that anybody listens to her. And not just because of the inane and senseless babble that pours unheeded from her mouth, but at how badly this babble is actually poured. I'm not going to talk about the subject of her babble, but just its delivery: she is a worse actor than she is a thinker. The fact that there is a person on our planet that takes her seriously is depressing and doesn't bode well for the survival of our species.

    Many people by now have seen this video. I don't watch a lot of Palin, so I don't know if this is typical of her, but her performance would be laughable if it weren't jaw-droppingly pathetic. I have a deep and broad sense of humor, most of the time, but I still find it hard to laugh at this level of sadness. I am tempted to predict that this is one of her worst rolls? I kind of hope that it is.
 
    Now I am conflicted. I am displaying the same sort of behaviour that so many liberal press-men exhibit. By sharing this video, I am supporting Palin: No publicity is bad publicity, right? If we all ignored her like we ought to, then she would disappear like she ought to. And the world would be a better place. But instead, we are all playing into her hands like puppets with half of her intelligence.
 
    Which makes me feel like a blob fish in a school of retarded liberals. Instead of putting up our own media gimmick, we are castrated by Bveck and Palin and their melodramatic acting which wouldn't even be respected in a Soap Opera as good enough. It is just not believable to an IQ over 80. It's unlikely a blob fish would be so stupid as Sarah Palin, let alone me and my friends who pay enough attention to her to write opposition to her.
 
    And yet, here I am.
 
    But the acting really impressed me that much. There is an impressive similarity between her delivery and that in a shitty infomercial. Her change in inflection isn't even on the right words. Like she realizes what she's saying and remembers: "oh, compassionate voice here, Oh, now concerned voice, now reprimanding a child voice..." But it is always a few syllables late. Despite the simplicity; those are the only emotions she goes though. I would think it'd be easy enough to keep three measly and simplistic emotions separate, but she doesn't quite get it together.
 
    If this caliber acting is all that is required to convince people of... well, anything. If all one has to do is say something to a camera and have a hoard of people believe you, then it shouldn't be so hard to convince people of things that really are happening and are really big deals: over-fishing, peak coal and peak oil, dehydrating aquifers, over-population... Global warming...
 
    Instead, there is a surprising number of people who put their effort into such mundane things as making sure people speak English in America! and trying (and failing miserably) to fight a war on drugs (and often the wrong ones). We have people in this country determined to undermine their own access to health-care for some really inconceivable reason. It's like we want to get sick or die of a broken elbow. Which, honestly, I wouldn't be that against, we hare deathly overpopulated, if it weren't for the heinous environmental degradation that comes from poverty. Without security, no one has time to realize that we are destroying the biosphere. Once it is gone, so are we, by the way.
 
    Meanwhile Palin, possibly in pursuit of assuaging her own guilt, has washed her hands of the murder of a few politicians. And there are a few people who buy it, even though it was sold with a cardboard mask on.

Inception (2010 movie)

Inception is the second movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio that I have been pretty impressed with. The first (which I didn't see all of, hence there is no review) was Shutter Island.

The similarities of these movies are substantial. There's even a common being-washed-up-prone-on-a-beach scene. The central character played by Leo DiCaprio is very similar as well, "conflicted, tortured by their own demons, needs to deal with their past" et cetera. I almost wonder if there is some event in Leo's history, like he killed his wife or something which leads him to play in these movies.

But the choices are good. Inception is one of the better movies I have seen recently and I feel like I've been fortunate enough to have seen some good ones recently. Mostly because there is a good ending, which is so important to me. It is hilarious, those last few seconds, and make this rather long movie as brilliant as it is. Without such a quietly genius scene, the movie suffers a little too much from what I'll call "Star Trek Syndrome"

In Star Trek, there was often a great idea that was explored for a little while. It was intriguing, an idea that really made a person say, "wow! What if! Hmm!" and then, after the conflict was established, the only solution offered was Captain Kirk punching an alien in the face. Curtain.

Inception is the same way. A wonderful idea, but none of the characters can think of a wiser way to deal with anything in a whole fictional dream world than shooting it. Woo. Lack of imagination in a world of imagination. I don't know why they needed to use certain devices so much when nothing was real; they really could have used Neo.

It is still a "Good Movie". I liked it, at least.

Black Beauty (movie, 1994)

Black Beauty; a classic of a movie. But for the life of me, I cannot understand why: "I Was Bored".

There is some rather phenominal cinematography in places which reminded me of the shots that Milo and Otis achieved. And the story line is alright, I think, but it is hard to tell under the surface veneer which is so sooty and tarnished. The central problem with this film was the way it was told. With unabashed narration. There's hardly any dialog and really no other characters than the central one who is just telling you why his life is so hard. The moving pictures are supposed to "show" you, but what the film-makers should  have been told before they began is that having video is not the same thing as "showing". There was, for me, not emotional connection to the characters. There was nothing personal in its creation.

Instead, I spent most of the movie trying to decide how much abuse their equine actors sustained in the making of the movie. I don't think it was as much as one would expect, the horses rarely have their ears laid back, so at least the movie avoids that cruel irony.