I can’t believe Arroyo got re-elected president of the Philippines. What bullshit is that?

An effective movie. A bit disjointed in some parts, but overall… effective. Regardless of your political tendencies, it’s certainly worth watching. The television and frankly, the news media, will already be full of the party line from the current admnistration, so this is an effective counter to present you, the registered voter (you did register, didn’t you?) with the extremes of both sides. From there, you can make a decision, or perhaps do some research on the accusations presented by both sides to further increase your abilities to make a sound decision in November.

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A cute little film with Hanks playing a charismatic foreigner trapped in the international lounge of JFK Airport due to a civil war in his native country.

I enjoyed the movie as a lighthearted, fairly sappy bit of fluff. However, Spielberg has continued to show a complete lack of timing when it comes to ENDING THE MOVIE. The last twenty minutes play out rather badly, and for a lighthearted, fairly sappy bit of fluff 140 minutes is not just a tad on the long side. The movie would have been good at 100.

Should I blame the screenwriters? I mean, I would, but considering Spielberg’s recent filmography all share the same flaw (Catch Me If You Can has the flaw, but it sort of works), I really can’t avoid blaming Spielberg.

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A visually stunning movie.

It wasn’t better than Pitch Black as a story, and the detour it takes in the middle of the film for no good reason doesn’t help, but I enjoyed the visuals, so I came away liking it more than most.

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4 megapixels, 2/3″” CCD, CompactFlash and SmartMedia slots.. yeah, it’s an old camera from late 2000, but what can I say? I’m not made out of money, and this is as good as I can get for the value at this time. I figure another two, three years I’ll finally have an APS-C or 35mm CCD D-SLR.

But for now, I’ve simply upgraded to the next model up from my previous camera, the C-2500L.

This “”next model up”" is a big step, though. Olympus created a new category, the E series, starting with this camera, after the C-2500L.

Almost all the features are the same, with a slew of others.
The best parts:
1. Manual zoom ring!
2. Focus ring! It’s electronic, but it’s a focus ring!
3. Non-mirror prism system allows you to use the LCD as a viewfinder!
4. All the exposure, timing, and quality adjustments can be made using a combination of a button on the camera body and the command dial. No more menus!
5. Big honking optics!
6. Still able to use AA and the older flash cards from my C-2500L!

The sacrifices:
1. Big and heavy (5×6x4-inches, over 2 lb., almost 3 with the batteries.
2. Didn’t come included with a lens cap holder like the C-2500L.
3. Big.
4. Heavy.
5. See 1, 3, and 4.

Now I need to see if my small 46mm thread .45x converter will still play nice… and think about getting a non-vignetting .5x wide-angle converter designed for the camera (my old .45x being the cheapy I bought in Hong Kong for my long-gone Nikon FM-10 35mm SLR back when I was doing macro work in the lab, taking pictures of jade).

This thing rocks.

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For once, a movie adaptation versus a simply follow the pages adaptation. Where the first two films tried to keep to every bit of plot contained in their sources, this one streamlines it to the main bit, and adds the one thing that I found missing in the third book: character development.

The ending resolved itself a little too quickly, and some parts were perhaps too predictable, but it certainly did a better job of ending the story than Rowling’s books, which tend to contain a neverending resolution plot; the second book was the most atrocious, and it showed when the movie followed it through without any real adjustment.

So yeah, good ‘un.

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I fucking hate eBay snipers.

Antonio Banderas steals the show as Puss-in-Boots; that may be because I loved those stories about a sword-wielding cat… in boots.

The movie itself? Nothing much. Funny as hell, probably funnier than the first one… but not as cinematic. It felt like a sitcom on TV. A good one, sure, but not something I’d watch on the big screen. But yeah, funny.

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A promising first 30 minutes followed by a crappy god knows how much longer.

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