Takeshi Kitano’s take on the blind masseur/swordsman… and a bizarre take, it is. I enjoyed it, though it was disjointed, fairly pointless as a whole but with little tales, encapsulated nuggets, that are great by themselves. Good as a rental or matinee with friends.
How the fuck can you enjoy an Olympic opening ceremony when it keeps cutting to commercial and when it’s actually showing something fucking Bob Costas and Katie Couric keep butting in with some inane observation, cutting out the music and ruining the goddamn experience.
NBC, you fucking suck.
Grimy, dystopian futures make the cyberpunk fan in me grin. Code 46 delivers this quite well, and it treats what we would consider brilliant bits of technology as every day things, toys and tools that no one finds out of the ordinary.
The romance between Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton is decent, but not as compelling as you would like it to be — it also starts to lose its point in the back half, but it brings it back to full relevance in the last five minutes.
I liked it.
I’ll look for this movie next time i’m at the video store.
ps: It better be good!
Six days to Cancun and I am terribly excited.
Sun and I got a pair of Samsonite American Tourister wheeled duffels a couple of weeks ago at the Camarillo outlet, I picked up a Yucatan travel guide written by a historian, giving it a far meatier cultural and archaeological section than most, the tickets and my passport are on hand, and to be honest, I just want to get going.
Hopefully I can hit two Mayan sites within striking distance, and perhaps do a bit of snorkeling or whatever it is you do in the Caribbean.
And naturally, I can’t wait to gain all the weight I’ve lost this summer in a bout of crazy binge eating. 
A very stylish film about a hitman and the cab driver he forces to take him on his rounds one beautiful Los Angeles evening. I say beautiful though many would gag at the thought of Los Angeles’ skyline or night scene as such because Michael Mann shot the damn thing so nicely I frankly was surprised to see the city I’ve lived most of my life in look so sharp and vibrant. The story is simple, the plot often times far too coincidental to suspend disbelief, but what carries it along are the excellent performances of Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. Who would have thought I’d put either of those names next to the words “excellent performance”?
Because I needed a cheap, compact, snapshot camera to complement my big-ass, more-professional-than-I-am-worth Olympus E-10 Digital SLR.
This was pretty much an impulse buy, for which I paid a premium of about $30 by getting it at Bel-Air Camera in Westwood. Basically, it was $150, it used SD memory, which I already have 512MB of sitting in my PDA, and it uses AA/CR-V3 batteries, the same as my E-10. I essentially had a fully equipped camera as the memory I can hot swap with my PDA and the power source that I can swap with my E-10. Hence the impulse buy. Oh, that, and I’m going on vacation in ten days and I really wanted to test the sucker out first; figure out how best to use it, and therefore could not be bothered with waiting for shipping.
So far? For a 2 megapixel camera, it does a nice job. Does crappy indoors without flash, and the auto-ISO Nikon puts in these things means it just grains out instead of the Olympus cameras, which just get blurry, but I expect that of such a cheapy. The sweeping photo-ops will remain the domain of the E-10… but this? this is perfect as a basic snapshot companion camera, the kind I can give to some stranger to take a photo of me and the crazy Mayan temple behind me without wondering if he’s gonna bolt. What I really wanted was an Olympus Stylus, but you know? I just can’t justify spending $500 on that camera and new xD memory right now.
Made me laugh at loud at times. Drags a bit between set pieces, but overall an enjoyable film. I’ll be waiting for the sequel, when Harold & Kumar Go to Amsterdam.
Someday somebody?s gonna make you want to turn around and say goodbye
‘Til then, baby, are you gonna let them hold you down and make you cry?
Don?t you know (don?t you know)
Things can change, things?ll go your way
If you hold on for one more day
Can you hold on for one more day
Things?ll go your way
Hold on for one more day
Heh.
Well. It ain’t scary and the twist sucks. But, and there is indeed a but, Shyamalan’s got talent when it comes to framing and setting — if only he’d just do a regular movie and not constantly keep doing this whole twist at the end thing.
The Village is good for the first hour, the twist you’ll suspect and/or figure out within the first, oh, 30 seconds (for sure by 30 minutes), but that’s not what keeps you watching. What will keep you entertained will be the story of young people in love, a love that causes joy, sorrow, hurt, and inevitiably, violence. As a drama, it works really, really well. I could have done without the supernatural and without the twist, but all right, I could live with the supernatural element.. but without the twist.
August 18th, 2004 at 2:38 am
Did you really want to hear Bjork sing?
-ajb
August 22nd, 2004 at 10:24 pm
I would have liked the option to mute it… or perhaps would have preferred the pleasant surprise of seeing a dress unfold into a map of the world instead of Couric immediately telling me what’s going to happen before it happens — imagine a sportscast like that: “Now I saw this earlier and it’s the best touchdown ever; it looks hopeless but watch as….”
August 27th, 2004 at 11:54 am
Well, you are out of luck there, since NBC has horked up the Olympic coverage everytime they’ve had it.
-ajb