With the absence of anything else to blog about I am going to blog about a movie (*Booooo). Quiet down, believe me I know how lame that is. The lamest part is the the movie that I'm going to be blogging about wasn't that great. It literally gets 2.5 stars out of five in my book. Meg and I subscribed to Blockbuster.com's movie rental service because, well it seems we pay about $20 in movie rental's every other month or so becasue of late fees and such and it will end up being cheaper this way. Go fig.
Now for the big reveal. Can you feel the anticipation? We most recently watched "21". This 'heist movie' and I use the term loosely, follows the formula pretty well with the appropriate twists that catch you almost off-gaurd. But what it lacks in suprises, it makes up for in ... um, getting a good actor to play a supporting role?
The K-Pax dude who's name escapes me and I'm about to imdb him was really good. Spacey!! That's it. Kevin Spacey. A quick aside to note how big a loser I am. I just imdb'd K-Pax to find out who it was that was playing the role in "21". Why didn't I just search for "21" and find him? I don't know.
Anyway, Mr. Spacey plays the former card counter turned MIT professor and leader of the new generation of young card counters. And he plays it well.
The other supporting actor "Lawrence Fishburne" (I didn't have to look that one up so suck it imdb) did a really good job too.
The rest of the cast however, did their jobs fine I guess, but overall the story was a little flat. This is one of those cases where you can tell the book by it's cover, or in this case DVD. By the by, I would bet the book is probably way better. If I ever read books, you could take solace in my critique of it.
A quick word now on Blockbuster.com. They've managed to make it even harder to find a decent movie than it is in the store. I don't know how these big chains operate but I suspect that they have contracts with only certain movie studios to exclusively stock that studios new releases. The selection is HORRIBLE. The only other movie we've ordered was "Bruce and Loyd ... something something" which is basically a promotional straight to DVD movie made up of footage that didn't get used in "Get Smart" thrown together and turned into a story that follows the timeline of the actual "Get Smart" movie just told from the point of view of the gadget makers Bruce and Lloyd. Oddly enough, even though it was pretty obviously an afterthought, there were enough funny parts and comical performances from Bruce (played by the guy that plays Hiro Nakamura on Heroes) and Lloyd (who I'm sure I've seen in a commercial or something but I'm not going to IMDB him since you can do it yourself) ...... what was I saying? Oh yeah, their performances are comical enough to keep you watching through the painful cheez.
Labels: 21, movie review
Only geeks like myself are probably aware that Google has entered 'The Browser Wars'. It's really not much of a war anymore. I'm under the impression that if you're a Mac user you stick with Safari. Windows users stay with IE with Firefox getting a little bit of the action, but you hardly ever hear about Netscape, Opera, Konqueror or Lynx anymore.
Since I'm a huge nerd and on the outer edges of the 'tech' field I was excited to give it a try. It pretty much sucks. I'll say that again. Google Chrome pretty much sucks. You would think that it would work better with the google services at least, but it doesn't even do that.
Being a regular user of Gmail, Google Maps, Google Finance, Picasa, and obviously Blogger, I expected to see some better performance or neat features that would be available only to Google Chrome users. But alas, Google Chrome actually does either the same or worse than Firefox for all those services.
In fact the last post that I wrote (Monterey Trip) was originally done in Chrome, but I couldn't publish it. Luckily it didn't crap out completely like it has at other times so I was able to copy it open Firefox and get the post ... posted.
My only hope is that since it's still in Beta, they'll get all the kinks worked out in a timely fashion so that I'll be able to see what all the fuss is about.
I love Monterey and Meg will testify to the depression and anger that I felt at having to leave paradise. It is the only town that I enjoy more than my own city.
Although the reason for our trip was to see the wedding of Taylor to Melina (spelling?) we really only spent about 3 hours in close proximity to them, and I still haven't actually met my newest cousin-in-law.
We did however get to have some other great times. Randy's Sandwich shop (which can be seen with google.com/maps street view feature got our money twice and Compango's (My other favorite sammich) got my money once. The Bagel Bakery was breakfast every morning but one, when Granmama made everyone pancackes. I swear I will steal that skillet someday, because I've used the recipe and they never turn out quite right.
In lieu of photos of the trip on the blog (isn't it interesting how picasa, flickr and the like have become the new 'slides of our trip' forum) Meg uploaded them to picasa and I post for you here the graphic evidence of our travels.
http://picasaweb.google.com/margaret.riddle/MontereySeptember09#5244081233183503026
Wait that's just my favorite shot of Logan.
http://picasaweb.google.com/margaret.riddle
Try that one.
I'm watching "The Love Guru" right now. Every joke is semi-crude and obvious. It's the whole reason that Mike Myers is not funny. Every joke he tells gets told about 3 seconds before the punchline.
In other words he telegraphs his punches worse than an amateur boxer. The one thing he does well is put funny people on screen. People like Daniel Tosh, Stephen Colbert and Jim Gaffigan are of note.
He puts himself on screen way too much though.
Today is the first day back to school for the older boys. That's weird to be able to call them the older boys now. We're going to have two sets of boys. The 'older boys' and the 'younger boys'. Huh. But back to the point.
Today the older boys started a new school which is convieniently located about 2 blocks from our house. I have to say I am just busting with pride for my boys. They both had voiced displeasure in having to go to school over the last week, but today when it came time to go to class, Sean went right in, grabbed his name tag and sat down with the other kids. We didn't have to coax him at all. All we had to do was point Hyrum towards his new classroom and he went straightway as well.
For some reason I was really nervous for them, but they seemed to be taking it all in stride. They are some great kids in spite of Meg and I.
