Movie-Reviews

Today on the Netflix bandwagon: Chicago Full disclosure: Whitney hates this movie, and has been very vocal about it, so that’s probably colored my view here. What we have here is an opera/musical that centers around Roxie Hart, philandering wife of a lowly mechanic who figures to sleep her way to a shot at Vaudeville fame. When her lover comes clean about being a furniture salesman who fed her a line to bed her, she shoots him in a jealous rage. The plot describes her time in prison, the environment of 1920’s Chicago, and the role of media in justice (or, in this case, injustice). ...

Thanks to NetFlix I’ve seen one of the best films ever made: The Godfather Words really don’t do justice to the mastery of this film. From the first moment at the Corleone wedding, Coppola presents us with dozens of interesting, round characters. He captures not only the story, but also several picturesque locations: 1946 New York, Sicily. Color, texture, and smell flow from the screen to your cortex. The main thread of the story involves the Corleone family, most prominent of organized crime’s “5 Families”. As the story opens we see Brando as Don Corleone, aged patriarch, founder of the family. His three sons, hot-head Sonny (James Caan), simpleton Fredo, and college-kid-cum-war-hero Michael (Al Pachino) lead the magnificent cast of surrounding characters. Mainly, we see the story through Michael’s eye, his feelings of duty, honor, loss, rage. As he becomes first a pawn, then a killer, then a victim, then a calculating leader, we go through the changes with him. By then end, I was scheming with him. ...

I know, I know…long time no blog. This is amazing, considering the amount of time I’ve spent on my new powerbook in the past week. Today is my powerbook’s first (and, likely, only!) trip to work with me to show off to the guys Saw Matrix: Revolutions for the second time last night at Whitney’s place, and I must say it’s better on the second viewing. After the overblown, quasi-Zen philosphy of Matrix: Reloaded, Revolutions was a let-down when I saw it in the theatre. Mainly, I was pissed-off that Revolutions had wasted 2 hrs of my life, b/c the 3rd picture basically discarded all the stuff from the second. ...

Cue the Hallelujah Chorus, people! Dave’s out sick so BOTH of my rather pointless meetings are cancelled today! I’m feeling random & sleepy, so this might be a *bit* diffuse… There is something just so pastoral and pleasing about making coffee. Granted, here at work, the machine does it all for you, but seeing it created is just…nice :-) So anyway, my weekend: Friday was a totally wasted day at work; Dave’s been out since Tuesday and I’m nursing our server along, looking for bugs popping-up in our log file and logging them as Problem Tracking Reports (PTRs). It’s about as fun as watching paint dry, but if this release is to have any hope of success, we’d better trace-down every bug we can find BEFORE our users get to do that for us. ...

Well, saw my lovely last night and we went to see Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Thoughts: Why in the world does everyone expect thoughts to be in a bulletted-list? Is this the “POWERPOINT EFFECT”? :D Anyway, I thought it was a decent film, if utterly pointless. I had quite a bit of fun, and there’s more there than the PG rating would imply: Fart jokes, skimpy outfits from the two female leads. Lots of guilty pleasures here, mostly revolving around SMG doing a Buffy-esque fight with the Black Knight Ghost, and Linda Cardellini….well, all of Linda Cardellini. ...

Can I just say Seabiscuit got robbed? Come ON people…I know LOTR is the uber-movie, but for Cinematography at least, Seabiscuit deserved the oscar. LOTR was done mostly CGI, for goodness’ sake! I think 2003 will go down as a year of embarrassing riches. Four movies (At least!) that were worthy contenders in any category. * * * On a personal note, Squeeze and I have made plans to head for Rocky Mountain National Park September 1st through 5th. Really, really excited. Plane Tickets, car reservation, and hotel reservation (Holiday Inn). My compliments to my little love: She’s a great planner–meticulous, single-minded, thorough. ...