Month: January 2001

Bleah

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I so don’t enjoy being sick. Came down with a really nasty flu virus a couple nights ago that has just knocked me for a loop…no fun at all. Worked all of about 3 hours yesterday, made it through 7 today…but am feeling better, though, so hopefully will be back to normal (whatever ‘normal’ is defined as in my case) by tomorrow. The worst part about the whole thing, though, was on top of battling the flu and feeling like crap, plus I spent all of today battling really strong hiccups too. Not a combination I’d recommend.

In other news, I picked up the 2-disc collector’s edition release of Disney’s Dinosaur today. Should be fun to play with. The only question will be how much of it I can make it through before the NyQuil kicks in.

Why I collect movies

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Every so often I get people expressing amazement, wonder, or just shaking their heads in confusion when they see my DVD collection, either by checking the listing here on my site, or coming by my house and seeing the bookcase full of discs. I just found a page on the ‘net that had a really well-written explanation of why I (among other people) enjoy collecting movies, so I’ve added it to my site. There is a link to it in the contents listing on the home page (underneath the heading for my DVD list), or if you’d rather, you can just start reading.

Apt Ringers? Dead Pupil?

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Two new ones today — one of which I’ve never seen, and the other I’ve only seen part of. Yes, I do this on occasion…luckily, very rarely come up with a real dud.

Apt Pupil: This is the one that I haven’t seen yet…but it’s been catching my eye for months now, so finally broke down and bought it. It’s directed by Bryan Singer, the same director who did The Usual Suspects and, more recently, X-Men; from a story by Steven King; and stars Sir Ian McKellen (who is generally wonderful in anything he does). The general rundown is that Brad Renfroe plays a 16-year old honor student who discovers that a neighbor is an old Nazi (McKellan) in hiding. He tries to blackmail the old man into telling him stories about the war, but eventually gets the tables turned on him in some form. Looks a lot like the kind of thing I enjoy, so I’m giving it a shot.

Dead Ringers: This is the one I’ve only seen bits of. The big kicker that gets me to spend my hard-earned money on it? It’s a David Cronenberg film (one of the most wonderfully twisted modern directors), and it stars Jeremy Irons, another of my favorite actors. Irons plays a set of identical twin gynecologists, and the movie explores what happens when a woman comes between the two. With Cronenberg’s usual style and Irons’ amazing ability to take any role and add just the perfect level of unsettlingly creepy airs to it, this should be a very fun one.

Unfortunately, my roomie just started watching Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, so I don’t get to watch any of my movies. Bleah. Shmuck. ;)

A dark day for buttrock

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Well, just found out that Metallica’s bassist has quit the band. I guess it’s kind of a bummer…never been a huge Metallica fan, but never really disliked them either. Oh, well, these things happen.

I’m just kind of curious how long it’ll take before we start hearing news stories about the majority of the Mat-Su valley slitting their wrists in dispair…. ;)

Lock, Stock and Logan’s Garden Stomper

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First off, just finished watching Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, which I borrowed from a co-worker. Absolutely hilarious little crime drama. Took me just a couple minutes to get used to the heavy cockney accents that most of the characters have, after that had no problems. Not very predictable, either, and a great questionmark of an ending. If you’re into English humor and/or crime movies, this one’s quite worth the time to catch.

Next off, three more DVD’s to my collection. I wanted to fill in some holes in my collection with a couple movies that I’d been thinking about for a while, and added one more just ’cause it caught my eye.

Logan’s Run: A classic Sci-Fi film. If you’re at all into Sci-Fi and haven’t seen this one, you really should. Set in 2274, mankind has escaped the ravaged planet into covered cities, where they live with virtually no concerns (and a fair amount of hedonism) — until Lastday. On the day of your 30th birthday, you either submit to Carousel and die, or become a Runner and are hunted by the Sandmen. So what happens when Sandman Logan 5 gets long into his 29th year? I have to admit, though this was heavily spoofed in the film Free Enterprise, the closer I get to my own Lastday, the more I think of this film….

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: I actually have yet to see all of this film, to be honest. I first caught the last half over at a friends house, and have since found the book that the movie is based on. Considering what a bizarre murder mystery and cast of characters this story has, imagine how surprised I was while reading the book to find that it’s all a true story! The book is a thouroughly enjoyable read, and had me laughing aloud quite a few times while reading it — enough to catch my dad’s interest, at least, as this was happening while we were on vacation. I’m looking forward to finally seeing all of the movie, and just might watch it before crashing out tonight.

Romper Stomper: This one was actually something of a whim purchase — I’ve heard very little about it, but enough for it to catch my eye while browsing the movie racks. It was the breakthrough performance for Russel Crowe (most famous for Gladiator), where he plays the leader of a group of skinheads. Having known a few skinheads here in town during the years that they were a presence, I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by the various portrayals of them that I’ve seen (one of the best so far being Edward Norton‘s role in American History X), and from what I’ve heard, this movie does a very good job of portraying the skinhead mindset. Plus, the DVD edition looks pretty nice — a 2-disc set, including director’s commentary, background info, and a documentary on how skinheads have been portrayed in the movies. Should be an interesting night when I get to this one.

That’s it for tonight, though…time to either dive into ‘puter putzing or pop one of these into the player and catch one more movie before I crash out. Hmmm…anybody got a coin I could toss?

Antitrust (Hackers 2000)

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First things first — anybody remember when winter in Alaska meant snow? Not that I’m really complaining, I figure this is just training for when I move to Seattle…but it’s sure wierd as all getouts.

I went out to see Hackers 2000…er…sorry, make that Antitrust tonight. Not a bad little flick…nothing that’s really going to tax your brain, but an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. I do have to give them some props, though — this is one of the first movies since WarGames that I can think of that had a realistic computer user interface for the most part. Aside from a few dialog boxes that were pretty obviously mockups made for the sake of movie world clarity, the majority of the screens shown were using some variant of UNIX! I’m not sure which one — it’s pretty tough to tell from a command line, and most of the window managers out there have been ported to most *NIX flavors — but one little thing made me really wonder.

At one point in the movie Milo (the main character) is accessing a terminal and grabbing a bunch of video clips and stills, using a combination of GUI and CLI commmands. At one point, he calls up a program from the text prompt called “grabapp” — now, I know for certain that under Mac OS X, the screen grab utility is “Grab.app”, ported from the NEXT program “grab.app”. Made me take notice…could these be NEXT boxes? I highly doubt it, there could be any number of grab.app’s out there, or it could have just been put in to make it look semi-realistic to those of us geeky enough to watch the command line, but I thought it was at least a nice touch.

Anyway, a very entertaining, if predictable flick — catch a matinee sometime. I may pick it up when it comes out on DVD just to make a custom slipcase for it that actually says “Hackers 2000″….

Mom?!?!

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Just picked up one new DVD to add to the collection today — George Lucas in Love. If you’ve never seen the film, it’s well worth it…it’s a 9-minute long short film exploring the truth behind the story of Star Wars. You can find it online at MediaTrip.com, but I liked it enough to get a good quality copy. Plus, it comes with three other short films, all parodies of popular movies…not bad for twelve bucks!

Bowling

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Had a good night, tonight. Got picked up by my friend Airy, and we went out to La Mex for dinner (one of the few places left that you can get dinner and enjoy a cigarette, if you’re so inclined) and then headed out to Jewel Lake Bowl to meet Bill and Rich for midnight Neon Bowling. I got a 148 my first game (great, since my average right now is 108), and went steadily downhill from there. Not that much of a surprise, though, as we didn’t start until right around my normal bedtime! Afterwards we came back here, and Airy passed out for a bit while Bill and I talked…but, once it hit 4:30 in the morning, I figured it was time to get them home and get me to bed.

So after this quick site update, I’m off to bed. Gotta make it to work tomorrow….