Category > Movies
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Flatline. Movies & Writings
Yesterday was fun. For fifteen minutes yesterday we didn’t have a flat because the landlord refused our rent offer. This was resolved over a series of phone calls by LoneCat, and we now have a flat again, albeit one without an ISDN line…
(It’s the downstairs flat, the one we had before was the nicer upstairs flat)
Yesterday I received a box. It was about DVD sized, and had a DVD in it. That DVD was Bridget Jones’ Diary, which Cathy sent me because she saw it was on my Wish List and didn’t want it anymore. Did I mention I love the Internet? I love the internet.
So we watched that, and it was funny and far better than we thought it was going to be, and I am currently resisting the urge to go all Cassie Claire on you, which isn’t fair because I really should have said “All Bridget Jones”, but that’s not who I associate the style with.
Still not employed yet.
Also went to see the (Oscar Winning) Chicago, which was very fun indeed. We ran into Nattie and Ben outside, who happened also to be going to see it.
The film is a direct translation of the musical, and rarely has one been done better. The songs were there without looking silly, the costumes were perfect without being out of place, and if they’d done all the songs (They missed out three that I counted) it would have been perfect. Whether the musical fitted into a film is debatable – though the Oscar panel obviously thought so – but as a faithful adaptation of the musical that I like, I’m happy.
Those of you who visited yesterday evening were greeted with the constantly shifting front page as I attempted to restock the writings page with all the content that used to be there. The Fanfic and Cevearn stuff is there (Including the unpublished bits for Worlds Apart, which will now never be finished), though the short stories (ie, the bits that have ever even been close to being published) arn’t yet, but will be.
Those who spoke on this:
Venn
I’ve been Spanish-Inquisitioning on this post all day. The draft of it started “I have three types of readers”, which quickly became “I have five” then “I have six”, then the heady heights of “I have seven”. Realising I have more than seven readers, however, I had to expand on this slightly.
Wandering though my stats for the purposes of a Usenet post, I was thinking about the people who are reading this tripe at the moment. If we were to draw a Venn diagram of my readership, it would have $foo circles, where $foo is the number of circles I get when I describe it this time.
- People who want to know how I’m doing.
- People who want to know /what/ I’m doing.
- People who want to be entertained
- Me
You don’t have to be in any single one of those groups, in fact you may be in up to three (I doubt anyone who is Google is also in the mood for entertainment and I am not Google). The balancing act appears to be keeping category 3, since categories 1 and 2 appear to be catered for. Category 4 something I’m actually going to have to filter somehow, and Category 5 is something of a captive audience.
Category 4 I have a couple of problems with. Of all the pages on the Geekstuff server where Aquarionics is hosted, Aquarionics is now the biggest. Before Aquarionics was the biggest, a site called “Wibble UK” was the biggest. When Wibble closed down, and we moved servers, the site went away and so now when you go to wibble.co.uk, you get the default site for the Geekstuff server.
The default site for Geekstuff is www.aquarionics.com.
Lots of people liked wibble, including Google, so wibble went away with a high pagerank. Net result of this is that Aquarionics is spidered four times as often as it should be, as www.aquarionics.com. www.wibble.co.uk, programming.bleurgh.net and various others. On top of this, people like Dorathea link to me, meaning that Google thinks my witterings are worth anything. Tot this all up, and strange things happen like Aqcom becoming the worlds numberone authority – by Google, the only standard that matters – for the phrase ‘I Hate Dominos’ purely because of a comment that someone made three folds down.
Anyway, to keep categories 1 and 2 happy:
This weekend was fun. Saturday we (Me and Lonecat) wandered up to see Pol & Supermouse and watch Eurovision with Añejo, Adrian ccooke, James Green and his other half Nikki. It was fun, it was tacky (Incredibly so. Mouse redecorated the sitting room in glitter and made party-food, and served chicken-inna-basket and such things) and we got Nil Points. A Good Time Was Had By All.
Next day we went to see Matrix Reloaded which isn’t as good as it thinks it is, but is still cool, had dinner and jelly and went home.
Today I have been adding things to Epistula, including Descriptions (Short summeries for every post that will trump content-extracts for RSS feeds and Trackbacks), and I’m working on CutIDs and the reviews system.
Those who spoke on this:
Dorothea Salo:
Well snif I can snif remove the link snif if you really snif want me to. sob
The weird thing about it is that CavLec should make an iota’s worth of difference. I mean, it’s only CavLec! I have trouble imagining myself as, like, influential, you know? Eck.
Aquarion:
Scary, isn’t it?
When I started, I spent two months watching the hit-counter climb as far as 200. Right now I’m getting 800 unique people every day (3000/week, which puts my repeat-visitor count somewhere horrible)
Someone out there must be reading this stuff…
Reading Material
So, Books then. (I’ll add links to these when I’ve got a graphical browser again. I’m mid-compile of Firebird on Gentoo at the moment)
I’ve just finished reading “Going Out” by Scarlett Thomas, which is a Couplandesque tale of personal discovery, focussing mainly around a character who has “XP”, a rare ailment that means he is allergic to sunlight. Like Coupland, the plot evolved very slowly for the first two thirds of the book, then rapidly picks up pace. It’s very well and somewhat transparently written – rarely does the wording interfere with the plot.
It’s an addictive book, or at least me and Lonecat both found it so, having that “One more page” quality that occasionally leads to the “Bloody hell it’s 3am” quality, and I’d recommended it to anyone who enjoys Douglas Coupland.
“Welcome To Coolsville” owes more to Jeff Noon than anything else, a tale of corperate morality in a near-future world where the corperation is your friend, trust the corperation. Some nice ideas, but not a life-changing book, though the gradual slide into “Expensesland” of one of the centrals is very well done. Recommended.
Also reading the O’Reilly XSLT book and the MYSQL reference manual. A little light reading there.
Yesterday morning, however, I started re-reading Preacher from the very beginning right though to the very end, since I recently got the last book (Thanks ccooke :-)) and then sat for a while in silence. It’s amazing. The story arc, the characters, and the gradual changes of over the previous eight books are completed and resolved totally. If you haven’t read Preacher yet run – don’t walk – to your nearest large book shop and start buying them, Or get me to lend them to you. This isn’t Sandman, this is something equally fantastic, yet completely different. And if you don’t read comics, you really ought to.
New Matrix Prequel
From Something Awful’s Comedy Goldmine feature: Unmade Movie Prequels (Article is work-safe, rest of site is decidedly not)
Viewometers
On the front page of Aquarionics there could be at any one time several little pictures with the names of TV programs or films or something in them. These are the Viewometers, and this is why they exist:
A little while ago, I made a concentrated effort to catch up with Buffy by borrowing nine boxes of VHSs from LadyLark. In order for interested people to keep track of where I was on these, the Buffometer was created, a ever-changing graphic that represented where I was.
A while later, it was updated for my following of Buffy Season 6 (For which I’ve given up until the DVDs come out) (The DVDs have now come out, and I’m now waiting ‘till I can afford the DVDs).
Later still, I designed one for my minor obsession with “24”, and then later for The West Wing. If these are increasing quickly, you can probably bet that I’m watching lots of DVDs (probably via Kazaa) which may be why there is a lack of other stuff being updated on the site. Mostly it’s a way of allowing the rest of the world to keep ever-increasingly detailed tabs on what I’m doing with my life, which – after all – is what the site is here for, isn’t it?
Januaphobia
Some time in the future, when I’m rich, famous and living in a huge mansion house somewhere, I shall declare January null and void.
I shall, on returning from whatever New Years party I go to, retreat into a room with a water supply, a kettle, a large amount of tea leaves, mug, sugar, spoon, a series of notebooks and a sofa.
This room shall already contain my music system and all MP3s.
I shall then emerge only for meals for an entire month. I shall not leave that room, save for meals & showers. The economy will collapse, world war three will start, end, restart, destroy life on this planet except me, and I shall remain in my room.
It will have a thick baize backing on the door, so I can’t hear anything.
This way, I shall avoid whatever January brings me. Because January always sucks. Nothing ever works, nothing ever suceeds, all that happens is things that once were good get worse, and things that were worse get life-threaterning.
Last year I dismissed it as karma, which was silly. It *is* karma, but dismissing it as such is depriving me of a study of exactly how much things can get worse when I don’t believe they can.
Last year I lost my job, almost lost a friend, lost my finantial stability, began the process of losing the one place I’ve activly enjoyed living in.
This year… well, I will laugh when it’s all over. Until then I shall content myself with this demonstration of this day:
Today we hosted a meeting for the DTi about BrowserAngel’s future, which was a positive meeting.
I left at 17:30. On the dot.
I arrived home at 19:25, having spent an hour on a 25 minute journey from London, because something went wrong with the train half way. The 18:00, which has about 50% more passangers than seats, so I was standing in the vestry.
We waited at the station.
And waited.
The train was broken, said the Train Manager, and whilst this had been fixed, the train had applied the emergancy parking brake.
Great. We couldn’t move because the driver left the hand-brake on.
It was fixed – by disabling the emergancy brakes, yay safety – and we moved on.
At 19:25 I got back. At 19:30 Adrian arrived, we were going to see Spirited Away. We got in. The movie started.
The movie continued.
The movie stopped making sense.
I wasn’t really suprised at this. I’m a low-level Anime fan, so I’m fairly used to Japanese animation making little to no sense for most of the movie.
This time the movie wasn’t making sense because the cinema had the reels in the wrong order.
So we got our money back and went home
I still would like to see the film, preferably in the cinema, but it’s coming on R2 DVD some time this year… (Yes, I know it’s out on R1, but I prefer to get R2 DVDs)
Microreviews
Saturday I watched the copy of the movie Bulletproof Monk that I rented from Blockbuster.
It was a Good Film, but it went choppy in the middle, because it was scrached, so I reported this to Blockbuster, who gave me a free rental.
Yesterday, I used it to rent Tomb Raider II: The Cradle of Life
It was worth exactly what I paid for it.
Hitch-Hikers
I don’t actually believe that the HitchHikers Movie will suck as much as everyone seems to think it will.
First, a major source of annoyance appears to be that Americans have been cast as Ford, Trillian and Zaphod. First, note that Sam Rockwell (Zaphod) was in Galaxy Quest (He was Guy), second, Trillian in the TV series was american, and competely different to the described character in the books. The TV series was still good.
Second they’ve still – to the best of our knowledge – got Stephen Moore (the original (Radio & TV) Marvin) as Marvin (Though the design of the robot is kinda Gir-ish)
Third, the script is still the one DNA wrote just before he died, we’re told, with only a couple of minor changes.
Fourth, Hammer and Tongs (Who are the production company directing it) have previously done things I found quite good (They are, for UK people, the people do did BT’s ‘Exploding broadband pipe’ thing) From interviews I’ve seen, they appear to have a sense of humour.
They, basically, I think can do it.
Disney I’m not so sure on…
Those who spoke on this:
Artela:
Ah – the person playing Zaphod will probably be fine… I’m not so sure about the rap artist I’ve heard is playing Ford Prefect :-(
Aquarion:
Mos Def is a an actor as well as a rapper, and has been in things in the states since the late 80s. This isn’t an Ice-Cool style “I wanna be an actor so people will take me seriously” thing, anymore than Claudia Christian (Ivanova from Bab5, who is also a a musician and writer of childrens books) is.
Gary Fleming:
I’ve only seen him in The Italian Job remake, and he was terrible in it. I can’t imagine he’ll do a better job as Ford.
Pendrive Good
Yesterday something bad happened.
Yes, it was Valentines, not traditionally a day my mood is good (Especially with the whole “togetherness” aspect of local programming that’s particulally annoying at the moment).
Yesterday, though, the hard-drive of my desktop decided that since nobody had sent it a Valentines card, today was a good day to die. Click. Boom.
XP decided it couldn’t find it’s system files. Couldn’t recover it’s system files. Couldn’t reinstall it’s system files. Couldn’t go on living. Goodbye, cruel world, may you find a better operating system than me. Blam.
This was annoying, because I was looking forward to playing computer games all weekend. Nothing more than that, really, because I run something of a Teflon Windows install. Nothing sticks. Everything I want is kept on the server (My ‘My Documents’ folder is a subdirectory of my home dir on the server, shared over Samba), All I have to do is format the hard-drive, shove my Windows XP CD in one drive and my Unattended Install Disk into the floppy drive and come back in a half hour to a clean, new windows install.
Nuh-uh.
You see, somewhere between now and last November – when I wrote that article – I’d decided that the most vital thing I needed was not my emergancy must-have-so-system-downtime-is-minimal floppy diskette, but a dos-boot diskette so I can play my older games still. So I had copied an image of the diskette onto c:, and turned my emergancy-vital-important diskette into what was, now, three and a half square inches of worthless plastic.
At this point I called myself a number of impolite things. I told myself I was being a bit harsh on me, but I disagreed and continued raging on the general theme of me being a moron who didn’t deserve a computer.
I reread the article I wrote last time, wished my writing style was slightly less florid and slightly quicker to get to the point, downloaded the example file and recreated the disk. Mere hours after the inital crash, a spinny-rotaty question-mark informed me that I was now in the New XP Experience! Yay. Rapture. Spiraling shapes of pure entertainment, now go away and let me get to my desktop.
It went away and I was left in teletubby-land. With a speed caused by months of experience, I got rid of teletubby land (Replaced with a rather nice picture of a Cambridge sunset) and turned the green/blue to darker-green/silver. Then I realised the important thing.
I had no drivers.
You see, I don’t keep installation CDs. I have this connection to the Internet, no bandwidth limits, and the exact knowledge of what is in my computer. I can get drivers from the source, damnit.
Or rather, I could. Right now my connection to the Greater World is via my dad’s PC. The contents of our home-network are my desktop and my server, because my parents object to having wires trailing around the house (Don’t have time/money/equipment for wireless). Hmm.
I do, however, have an MP3 player.
I have, over the last few years, spent quite a lot of money on MP3 players. I had one of the orignal Rio’s, a replacement cheap one when that died, a Rio600 when the buttons fell out of the cheap one, and my current one. The best example of why Digital Rights Management is a Bad Idea (And yes, Virginia, there are good reasons for both DRM and copyright, but that’s another article) is that my current MP3 player is the first one that Just Works.
It’s a USB Mass Storage device. PC, Linux, even OS X recognises it as a USB Mass Storage Device. It’s a 128mb USB hard-drive that has a headphone socket and will play any MP3s it finds though it. It has a built in USB plug, too. It Just Works.
Therefore I was able to spend an entertaining day ferrying my MP3 player between dad’s computer upstairs and mine downstairs containing drivers for the sound, 3d, modem and network cards; Direct X; Game, System and Application patches; without having to burn CDs of them.
I did, however, lose my game saves for every game that doesn’t follow the (sensible) Microsoft recommendations and put them in the My Documents folder where they won’t get lost. This is, obviously, most of them, so I’ve spent most of today burning backups of my server home directory (Dying hard-drives concentrate the mind with regard to backups) and wandering back through “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time”.
Oh, and watching Office Space (IMDB). Which is good.
Misc
- AqWiki 0.3 delayed due to an authentication bug, no thanks to the zero people who followed the link on Thursday
- Examine the logo carefully, since that is the last use of the old Aquarionics logo. Two weeks of Other Things, then the new logo debuts.
- All moterists who think that it is appropriate to overtake on the inside, at the approach to a roundabout, at the top of a hill are to report to the bladesman for extremity removal. Even if the person you overtake is a cyclist.
- Starsky & Hutch not a good movie, but is still worth seeing.
- Steve Jackson Games have announced Gurps fourth edition
Van Helsing
Just got back from seeing Van Helsing.
Van Helsing starts with a village mob raiding the castle of Frankenstein with the aim of destroying him and his monster. This is done in black and white, with the traditional flaming torches and “We belong dead!” style dialogue. The film continues in the same vein for another few hours.
It’s a creature movie, absolutly traditional, every clich in the book, “Good going romp” style action movie with explosions, werewolves, last minute rescues and funny side-kicks. Switch off your brain for two hours, and enjoy.
Hurry! We're behind on our rope-swinging quota!
Contains spoilers for Every B-Movie Ever via Van Helsing.
Link found by Missiedith, who doesn’t like the film and is therefore a level 14 Philistine, but Jedit did.
Lucas in 'Moron' shocker
Knights of the Old Republic made me care about Star Wars again.
This doesn’t.
Lucas has announced what will be new in the new DVD edition of the Original Trilogy, and he’s rewriting history again.
Ain’t it cool news (It’s about halfway down) confirmed the rumour that’s been circulating for a while now, Lucas is replacing Old Anakin in the final shot of Return of the Jedi with new, improved Anakin with half the facial expressions and twice the angst. Here’s a screenshot
Some people don’t know when to leave well enough alone.
Those who spoke on this:
Kevin:
But that Hayden lad is too young! Yoda and Ben look the same age as when they die, Anakin will now look younger than his son. It’s wrong! (Just to make sure you realise.)
Rosemary:
They might be going to make him look old. really, really hopes so
Unless it’s meant to symbolise when he died as a Jedi or something. shudder
Thom:
No, no, Lucas has exactly the same amount of talent as he had then, only it’s stretched further across the timeline of his life, and it’s basically like… Its like as if talent were a piece of string, and then if you were to scrunch up that piece of string and where it touches itself.. No, that’s Quantum Leap. Look, I can draw you a graph.
Aquarion:
This is how I see it:
Imagine a large rubber sheet of the movie industry, onto which you place a large lead ball marked “The Starwars Franchise” and larger lead ball marked “Selling Star Wars Action Toys” then, you roll a small George Lucas across it, and watch as rolls the “Action Toys” ball into the “Franchise” hole, and leaps in after both, meaning he can now sink lower than any film-maker has ever sunk before…
3 out of 10 - Must Troy harder
Epic.
Terribly, Terribly epic.
Contains epicosity.
Epicality.
Epicness.
Arse-numbing, “Woo cool” inducing, “I never need to read the poem” thanks-giving, Epic.
Also, it contains a moment which totally needs giant kittens bouncing down the hill.
Troy in fifteen minutes is really funny; Jedit’s review is really accurate; and IMDB is really, really comprehensive as ever.
Also: LoneCat didn’t recognise Sean Bean, despite looking exactly like Boromir, which is silly.
Those who spoke on this:
Corinne:
Don’t worry, LC isn’t alone not recognising Seany, most of the blokes I watched it with yesterday didn’t have the faintest idea. Still…LC is female so she’s probably not forgiven ;)
Iris Maessen:
I presume that you mean Homer’s writing credit when you refer to IMDB being comprehensive. (The link is broken). That did give me a laugh, too. Pity that in Troy the whole thing seemed to be over in a year, max.
Boromir (Sorry, Sean Bean :-)) was grossly underused. But I can still hope for an Odyssey.
Iris
Aquarion:
IMDB link fixed, and yes, that was what I meant :)
And according to the movie timeline, the whole thing was over in just under two weeks, most of which was mourning HulHHector.
Spirited Away
After a number of false starts I have now succeeded in seeing Spirited Away.
It’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s wonderful, fantastic, bizarre, complete and generally great.
And it has the cutest blobs of soot you’ll ever see. Highly recommended.
Those who spoke on this:
BumpyC:
Ahh, yes. Me and Cat saw it in the cinema. Very cool film. Have you seen Kiki’s Delivery Service as well? It’s by the same people.
I think my favourite element had to be the transformation of the baby and the bird. They made such a cool team together.
Potted History
Harry Potter: The Movie: Part III: Prisoner of Azkaban is better than the previous movies, but is still a little rushed.
Evil
So, having seen Thunderbirds (Capsule review: The fact that the plot is microns thick, the acting questionable and the directing iffy is rendered completely and totally moot by the sheer “Oooh, Shiny!” factor of seeing the swimming pool slide back so Thunderbird One can launch. Also: The intro sequence is the best thing ever), I decided to check out the Ben Kingsley (who plays The Hood) Official Site.
DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK IN ANYTHING BUT IE UNTIL YOU HAVE TURNED OFF JAVASCRIPT
Turn off Javascript (If you’re not using IE4+) and go there, then view the source. If you go there with JS enabled, you get thrown into an infinate loop of “You need a version 4 browser” alert boxes until you either close the tab or the browser. This is horrible. And god forbid you try to enter with a site reader, or any kind of spider.
Ick.
- 2004-07-29 18:13:59
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Accessibility, Movies & Web Development
Those who spoke on this:
Sarabian:
So of course I had to click on the link thinking that I could just close the browser when it goes into the loop.
What I forgot was that I’d created a new profile and in this profile, the tabbrowser extension was set to reopen any tabs upon restart.
After the forth kill, I got a bit worried.
After the 7th go, I won the game of clicking the close icon before the page loaded and I was out of the loop.
/me will listen to Aquarion next time.
Peter:
Works fine in Opera (no popup), whether I set it to identify as IE6, Mozilla 3 or Opera.
Rory Parle:
So you sent them an angry email right? It’s the only decent thing to do. The address is mraproductions@benkingsley.com.
MP:
OK… So you are complaining about the website of the evil Hood being evil… Maybe that’s the idea… :-)
Non-harmful
Shaun of the Dead is really good.
Other things under construction:
- Review of Locomotion
- State of the Education System
- The Sands Conspiracy
- Oxford Tweed and the Lawn Chairs of Doom
Also:
It should be noted, to start with, that Stave was not chasing after multiple-centries old bottles of port because he had nothing else to do. Far from it, its just it was a conveniant way to keep out from under the feet of the several hundred groups who were currently trying to kill him.
- 2004-09-14 22:23:06
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Computer Games, Movies & Stories
Lovefilm
I really, really like LoveFilm
The premise is this: You pay them 15 a month (Except the first month, which is free) and choose DVDs. They send you the first three you ask for. You watch them and send them back, and each time you send one back, they send you the next in your queue. The subs include postage each way, so returning them is just dump in enveloper, dump in postbox.
But the two best things, and the reason why they’ve completely replaced all use of Blockbuster, are these:
- You keep them as long as you like
- They have Series DVDs.
That is, They have Every Film Ever, as always, but they also have Futurama, X-Files, Simpsons, Firefly and Buffy. All these series you might want to watch, but don’t really need to own. The ones that no DVD rental store ever carries, and you can rent them one DVD at a time, and watch them over forever.
By default, you get a two week trial for signing up, but you can double that by using a referral code (Like FR25) and whoever referred you (Nicholas at Aquarionics dot com) and the referer gets a free month too, which is nice.
Those who spoke on this:
stephen:
In Ireland, we have video rental places. Honestly, it’s just like _so_ last century. Downloaded movies are better quality, er, I’m told…
Nick:
The only trouble with the series rentals, of course, is that you never, ever get sent them in the right order, which means you can’t put more than three series discs in your queue at once and still be sure of being able to watch them in the right order.
It would be helpful if it knew which DVDs were parts of series and didn’t send you part 3 unless you’d already been sent part 2, for instance.
Polly:
Lovefilm are REALLY bad – they have sent me 1 disc from my top 10 since I joined several months ago. Every other disc has been from waaaaay down the list, and they even don’t send me my FastTrak discs – they just keep sending the stuff at the bottom of the list!
loosey:
I have been with Lovefilm for 2 years. The service was excellent to begin with, for the first few months, with fast turnaround, and prompt email replies when I requested titles not stocked. Then I noticed that I was never sent any of the first 15 titles in my queue. After a year of waiting for these titles (which were by then available in shops for sale at a discount) I asked Lovefilm why I hade not yet been sent these titles. They vowed to improve my service, sent a couple of those titles, and then back to titles lower down on my list.
When I saw Lovefilm had taken over Screenselect, I decided to see if new customers were being given preferential treatment. I signed up on the free 10 dvd deal with Screen select and, whaddya know? The 10 titles I’d waited for for a year (such as Constant Gardener, Goodnight & Good Luck, Walk the Line) all arrived straight away.
Moral of the story. Lovefilm now have too many customers, not enough dvds, and I’m looking for a new dvd postal rental company. So much for loyalty!!
Vaneet:
Believe me. This company is in a mess. Reason being that they have got a good way of making x-tra money from customers without customers knowing it which according to me is cheap and frustrating. Its in the allocation process. Somehow, they deliberately delay the allocation process of DVD’s for more than 36 hrs minimum with a blame excuse and apologies having more than 30 titles in the rental queue. On calling their customer support number at 0870 609 5384, and after waiting for more than 9 minutes, the systems are usually not available and guess what. They give you the same answer. Apologies. Which i guess is a smart way of making money by delaying the customer decision of cancelling the membership and not posting them dvd. This i experienced first had in which i emailed them thrice in 2 months about the delay and got email reply back for apologies and repeated assurance to fixing the dvd allocation issue. But here i am, back to square one. That when i was revealed that Lovefilm has not more than 8-10 copies of the hit movies which keeps their capital cost down but is a problem when you have more than 30 customers every day wanting same title at any given time. This further has impact because of high turnaround of DVD’s and their wear and tear. What is frustrating is to see yourself getting stuck with such cheap tricks with a phoney company. My membership details are available at below number.
Vaneet
07745852668
Incredible Movies
Yesterday, I went to see The Incredibles at the cinema. It is, as the name suggests, good. It is a Pixar film, and therefore would be.
Pixar’s next film, Cars, for which the sneak preview trailer was released quietly last fortnight also looks good, and will be Pixar’s last film for Disney, the once Gigantic Film-Making Empire which is now a Gigantic Empire which funds the occasional movie. Disney are founding their own 3D Feature workshop, and there are rumours that their first feature might be Toy Story 3, which Pixar refused to do. I really hope Pixar retained the rights to Incredibles sequels, because they could be fun in a way that – for example – a Disneyesque version would be over moralized and probably involve one of the parents vanishing. (It is a sad fact that in most Disney movies of the last 10 years children only ever get one parent, the other – usually the mother – is killed off either in the first moments of the film or before the story begins. I know several parents who refuse to let their children watch Disney movies due to this).
Incredibles is darker than previous films, but then again Bounder – the short that precedes it in classic Pixar style – is bright, sunshiny and saccharine. Also fantastic, but you knew that.
Those who spoke on this:
Paul Freeman:
What do you mean the last ten years, look at the “classics”
Cinderella – 0 parents, 1 evil stepmum
Snow White – 0 parents, 1 evil stepmum
Beauty and the Beast – 1 dad
Sleeping Beauty – okay 2 parents but ones who got rid of her straight away. Brair Rose essentially had no parents for 16 years.
Harry Potter – 0 parents (oops, not disney)
Aquarion:
To be fair, Cinderella, Snow White & Sleeping Beauty are all not Disney’s fault, and Beauty and the Beast … bah, falls just out of my last 10 years bracket, but still was within the realms I was refering to.
Harry Potter I can forgive, since the parents – and the loss of them – are a major part of what makes the story, rather than being just one less character to animate/introduce.
Doomed Movie
From the set of the Doom movie:
The monsters have nothing to do with hell, the plot is not taking place on Mars and “space marines” are not well “space marines” as their outfits are more like SWAT team members.
So, another game of spot the licence then.
- 2004-12-04 21:08:51
- By Aquarion
- From Catrion Towers, Reading
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- Filed under Computer Games & Movies
Rule One: You do not talk about the fight club game
So, they’ve made a game of Fight Club
In this game of Fight Club, you beat the living crap out of people.
STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID
Have they even seen the film? Talk about missing the point.
- 2004-12-15 06:02:46
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
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- Filed under Computer Games & Movies
See you Lotr
I’d have written this earlier, except I broke Aquarionics’ admin section with a badly formed class. ‘tis fixed now.
This weekend I did something that could be seen as slightly foolish. Me, and 10 other people, watched the entirety of Lord Of The Rings, Extended Editions, from Shire to Doom, A to Z, Beginning to all three false endings.
It took 13 hours, including pizza, dead limb and disc changing breaks. It included a count of Legolas’ facial expressions and various other fun things. It lasted from mid-afternoon on Saturday to 05:30 on Sunday morning. Then we slept. We were very tired.
As three theatrical releases they were quite good movies. As extended editions they are very good movies and in some ways tell a better story than the original books (Not as deep, certainly, but a more engaging story in places), but it’s as a single movie in three parts that they really do shine, and the running threads make far more sense. I’m still not entirely sure about some of the changes (Though the two major scenes removed – Tom & Scouring – were reasonably obvious ‘whole chunks’ to keep the thing under, say, a day) but I’m positive this is the best version of the classic series that we were ever going to get.
The weekend was fun though – although the trip back was something of a disaster – and I got to meet New and Interesting people, and exchange puns.
Which is always fun.
Those who spoke on this:
Rory Parle:
I did the same thing on New Year’s Eve/Day, but I started at 8PM so there was an additional struggle to just stay awake. I think it detracted from the movie(s) somewhat. Did you find yourself wishing they’d just left out the whole Frodo/Sam thread entirely? I mean, I know it’s the whole basis for the story and everything but wasn’t Aragorn’s story so much more interesting?
Domino Rally II - Cruise Control
A couple of years ago we had a minor problem with Dominos Pizza, and since then we have not ordered from Dominos.
Well, we probably have, to be honest, but not in the last couple of years. More because Lights Pizza (near Letchworth. Good pizzas, and we’re getting to the “It’s us” “It’ll be there in an hour” stage) is better, and we didn’t do pizza as often in Reading. (Thats it! I can blame the breakdown of our relationship on not having a sufficient community area in which to eat food and watch movies! I can stop angsting now!) but today is the first time since that point I can remember ordering from Dominos.
I ordered from the website at 18:15. It was on my doorstep by 18:35.
Colour me impressed.
Nice pizza, too.
I also finally got around to watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s which Lovefilm (Tell ‘em nicholas at aquarionics sent you) sent me for free for converting people to them. It’s a wonderful film, and everyone should see it at some point.
Mostly, though, I’m catching up on five years backlog of CSI. Why didn’t anyone tell me how good this show was?
Those who spoke on this:
Jason:
You put up with waiting an /hour/ for a pizza? Wow.
Kian Ryan:
Have you not got around to installing that site to site pizza transporter yet?
Get with the times. woosh
/me drinks Dew.
Dungeons, Dragons, Bananaguards and other random things
So, recently then.
Last week I passed my driving theory test. This was cool, but not unexpected (I passed it first time around, though that was before Hazard Perception.). Hazard Perception is a video based test of your reactions to events, you have to click the mouse when you see a hazard, again every time it gets worse.
It’s much like Grand Theft Auto, really, except with clicking on the pedestrians rather than running them down in cold blood. Close enough.
I have also accidentally bought a copy of “Regina’s Song”, the latest non-fantasy books by the Eddings’. I haven’t read it but I nevertheless own it, as the library fines are about to exceed the worth of the book. Taking it back now would mean paying them to take it away.
Isn’t Dr Who good? Yes. It is good. The tardis is apparently powered by a bicycle pump, which was something of a suprise.
This weekend was LC’s birthday, so we wandered down to Wagamama’s (which is a Tradition) and then to see Mitch Benn (which isn’t, but will be). She has written more on this day. And yes, I bought her a BananaGuard for her birthday.
Yesterday we finished the weekend on a low note with the Dungeons and Dragons Movie, which is an incredibly, amazingly terrible movie. It’s got The Bloke Who Played Jimmy In The New Adventures Of Superman (Jimmy mk 2, anyway) staring as a chaotic neutral thief who eventually duel-classes as a mage, his friend Snails who doesn’t really level up ever, and a Miss-Jones-You’re-Beautiful type female mage. Jeremy Irons (The thinking economist’s Alan Rickman) is the Lawful Evil Bad Guy, someone else is the Slightly More Evil, But Possibly Less Evil Chaotic Neutral minion, and a whole host of people you’ve not heard of. Oh, and Richard O’Brian as a crazy person who has a maze. Again.
We spent the entire movie eating chineefoo and discussing how each character had rolled in char-gen. Irons got a fairly high Charisma, for example, and Jimmy2 apparently took an extra level in swordplay when he leveled up near the end…
It’s terrible, but fun in a ‘My god, it’s full of cliches!’ type way. Perfect D&D, really. And there’s going to be a sequel, which I await with…
...fear.
Those who spoke on this:
Moth:
I can’t believe… I can’t believe you actually worked out the character classes and alignments for the people in Dungeons and Dragons! And you just skipped over Thora “My agent! I must kill my agent” Birch being in there. And a Wayans, of some description. To say that it starred Jeremy Irons and Jimmy Mk 2 from Lois & Clarke and nobody else is somewhat misleading.
Not that I would want anyone to watch it to find out. Folks, we suffered that so you don’t have to.
Kathy:
in other news the doctor is haveing far more fun persuading that big blue box of fun to move… one suspects the time wars made time travel about as simple and relaxing as trying to drive into scotland in a moris minor during a strmin winter after severe mudslides…
just a thought from the way tardis is bouncing all over those conduity things in flight, when it used to be the case that it sedately span across, allowing the Doctor a chance for a nice cup of tea and a relax in transit so to speak.
Much fun _
jester:
Watching a thing about movie effect which covered D&D.
Apparently, due to being on location in Eastern Europe they couldn’t make the axes in the maze out of lightweight materials and had to use wood and steel.
Yep, they actually built the real things, a
gilmae:
Assuming that you and I are part of the last generation that will never die, I plan to hound you from now until the heat death of the universe to finish that damn fanfic. Or you can just finish it. Your choice.
Aquarion:
I did! See! It says “End” at the end of the title of chapter 10!
gilmae:
The links to the Worlds Apart posts 404, but I seem to remember that that ‘End’ was an exasperated attempt to make me stop prompting you for a completion.
Cathy:
So it got there safely then…good to know you can trust Royal Mail occasionally.
And you’ve spelled the title correctly! Which is more than the film-makers managed to do – they added an “s” to the end of Jones’, something that has really annoyed me, ultra pedant that I am.
Glad you enjoyed it, anyway :)