Chikuru

The latest Star Trek movie may well be one of the best action movies I've ever seen.

Or is that just the Imax talking?

Decadence is ignoring the sunny, 63-degree January weather to stay inside and watch three Harry Potter Movies (we watched the first two last weekend). Last year we watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The next movie starts at 5pm and will be accompanied by roasted chestnuts and drinking chocolate.

I'm filling in the spaces between installments by playing a computer game called "Write a program to generate a hydraulic model from GIS data." I've tried to play this game at work, but other stuff keep getting in the way.

Last night I saw U2 3D at the Imax. It features U2. And it's in 3D.

If you are a U2 fan, you'll want to see this one. Its last show time at the Austin Imax is Saturday, July 12. The show is not a documentary (like the recent Rolling Stones movie)--it's a film of a concert in a stadium in Buenos Aires.

The lead singer, Bono, was a little full of himself, and I was reminded of the following joke:

A man goes to heaven and is shown around the premises by St. Peter. He's impressed by all of the famous people he sees: Lincoln, Gandhi, Elvis, and many others. Then he grabs St. Peter, points, and asks, "Is that Bono?" St. Peter says, "No, that's just God. Sometimes he thinks he's Bono."

That aside, I personally am a fan. Music is a powerful thing and this band knows how to use it. They remind me of missionaries--trying to get the world to live in harmony. Bono wore a "Coexist" head band in which the C was a crescent, the X a star of David, and the T a cross.

One thing I noticed about the band is how strong is each of the four members (on vocal, lead guitar, bass, and drums). For fun, I tried to find examples of songs in which each instrument can be used to identify the song at the very beginning. Here's what I came up with:

"Sunday Bloody Sunday" is recognizable by the drums.

"Where the Streets Have No Name", at least in the concert version, is recognizable by the lead guitar.

"With or Without You", at least in the concert version, is recognizable by the bass.

[Spoiler alert: the following talks about the ending of the movie.]

Lyn and I saw Juno this evening. It's a hip little movie dealing with the wacky shenanigans, inscrutable neologisms, and general drama of the modern high school student. Oh, and teen pregnancy. There are those who feel the movie romanticizes teen pregnancy and I can see their point. Getting pregnant is certainly an effective way to become the center of attention while putting annoyances like algebra and social studies in their place. On the other hand, as Lyn points out, not every one wants to become the center of attention, and especially not for something like that.

I enjoyed the movie. The writing was funny and the characters were fun to get to know. Three of the actors have been in the TV show Arrested Development including those playing my two favorite A.D. characters--the dad and the son. Michael Cera (who played the aforementioned son from A.D.) was a great choice for the boyfriend. He oozes sincerity. And Ellen Page's Juno was a delightfully fresh mixture of precociousness, teenage immaturity, and human kindness.

At the end of the movie, when the protagonists lives were pretty much back to normal, I thought, How very sensible and efficient these two were: they partake in one of life's grandest experiences (procreation) and then, nine months later, they're back to business as usual, having fulfilled a barren woman's dream and dispatched their genetic duty without paying a cent in diapers or college tuition.

At the aforementioned party, the subject of Firefly came up. Someone said he hadn't watched but decided he didn't like it because everyone kept telling him how great it was. If everyone liked it, he figured it couldn't be very good. (I admit I might not be fully capturing the subtlety of his position.)

I was surprised by the strength of my reaction to this. I love the writing (both story and dialog), the characters, the cinematography, the music, and the overall beauty of the series and so of course I want everyone else to love it too. If you give it an honest try and discover you don't like it, then OK, but to not even watch it and have the audacity to prejudge it--unacceptable!

The movie Space Balls came up in conversation at a party this afternoon and I casually mentioned that I had never seen it. Lyn said she had never seen it either. Our hosts were amazed at this and took it upon themselves to remedy the situation on the spot. And so we spent the next 90 minutes getting caught up on our pop culture. I was surprised and a little horrified to hear the other viewers reciting half of the dialog word for word. I hadn't realized the movie was so popular.

If you haven't seen it--it's a spoof of Star Wars, with references to A Princess Bride, Alien, Indiana Jones, and probably several other movies thrown in for good measure. I may be biased against this movie because of the preponderance of movie spoofs these days. Perhaps it was original at the time.

My recommendation: see it when it first comes out. (Oops, too late.)

We watched the movie Lucky # Slevin this evening. The story and the way it was told were both very creative. And with a cast of Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Bruce Willis, Josh Hartnett, and Lucy Liu, how can you go wrong? Lucy Liu usually doesn't play characters I find attractive, but this time she did. At times, Josh Hartnett made me think of a young Tommy Lee Jones.

Recommended unless you have a low tolerance for violence.

Last evening I was able to realize one of my lifelong dreams--to lie flat on my back and watch a movie projected on the ceiling. This was at a friend's birthday party. We watched 3:10 to Yuma, a western starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. It's a good movie, if you like westerns.

There is one drawback to this setup it turns out. After an hour of lying on your back, you tend to want to roll over onto your side. Clearly the solution is to have the movie projected onto both side walls as well.

Did you know that in France they have socialized transportation? In France, you don't decide where the roads go, the government does. If you're hanging out in Arles and want to nip on down to Montpellier, you can't just plot a straight line between the two and drive, you have to follow the route that some government bureaucrat came up with. Scary but true.

And who pays for these roads? The taxpayers.

So guess what movie I saw this evening.

Sicko is my favorite Michael Moore movie, and not just because it features the song "Cuba", sung by our very own Austin Lounge Lizards. Actually, it's the only Michael Moore movie I've liked so far, though I confess I haven't seen them all. Fahrenheit 911 was over the top in sentimentality and was unnecessarily propagandistic. It did have its moments, but he would have done much better to let the facts speak for themselves.

He was better at doing this in Sicko.

Moore interviewed a French family with a high standard of living to demonstrate that the French aren't overly oppressed by taxes. He failed to ask them how much they actually spend in taxes. Perhaps he did ask, but edited out that part of the conversation. Personally, I'd be willing to pay more taxes to get better health care. I'm less crazy about contributing to the salaries of billionaire HMO CEOs.^{[citation needed]}

Here is something I (and evidently many Canadians, Brits, and French) don't understand. What is it about the term "universal health care" that disturbs so many Americans? (Perhaps I would understand if I were more willing to talk politics. In general, I avoid politics in the interest of keeping conversations friendly.) And why aren't these concepts equally disturbing: "universal water and wastewater treatment", "government-sponsored lending libraries", "social security", and "state trooper"? Perhaps to staunch libertarians these are equally disturbing.

Bottom line: I recommend the movie. It's fun to see our culture examined through the eyes of foreigners.

Quote of the day (from Mike): People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.

Woohoo! I made it to IMDB. I now have a finite Bacon number.

Really, I should be learning Spanish in the evenings like raaga123, but after a long day of pump-station design, sometimes I just wanna push the recliner chair to within six feet of a 65-inch TV and watch an episode of Star Wars.

I watched Episode II tonight. Great special effects, but sitting that close to the TV I was able to tell that the source wasn't HDTV quality even though it was recorded from an HD channel.

I also noticed that the directing wasn't Spielberg quality and the writing wasn't Whedon quality. But Lucas does have a flair for creating alien races.

We saw Ratatouille tonight. I recommend it. The short animated film Lifted that is on the same DVD is also a lot of fun. That's all. Good night.

I'm watching Albert Brooks's Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. The humor is subtle to the point of nonexistence, but I'm loving the beautiful images of India. I'd been hoping for some insights into Muslim humor, but the film went no deeper in that direction than to state the obvious: humor depends on culture and context.

We went to see The Brave One last night. This is a revenge film, like Charles Bronson's Death Wish, with Jodie Foster in the lead. There are many ways a story like this could go. I know someone who had something similar happen to her and she dealt with it very differently, with understanding and forgiveness. Understanding and forgiveness are wonderful things but seeing bad guys get theirs is easier to sell as a Hollywood movie.

I recommend the movie. I didn't find the story predictable and I admit I found the violence a little cathartic. The best part was the great job Jodie Foster did with her character. That woman can act.

This evening we saw the movie Hot Fuzz with friends. This movie comes from the same folks who brought us Shawn of the Dead. With this movie they seemed to realize that even with a good gimmick, you have to have good writing to make a movie work. Shawn of the Dead almost worked. Hot Fuzz was a definite success.

Today I finished the final Harry Potter book and saw the Simpsons movie. I recommend both. I am now up to date with pop culture. And Lyn no longer has to worry about giving anything away.

We saw the latest Harry Potter movie yesterday. The author of the book and the folks who turned the book into a movie all have wonderful imaginations. I highly recommend the movie. This particular book was a little hard to read, being so dark and arguably too long. The movie condensed the broody bits into manageable bites.

Lyn and I saw Transformers with a friend today. I had low expectations and ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would. The movie was richer in plot and characterization than I'd been expecting. If you like action flicks, you might want to check this out. Especially if you like giant monster robots from outer space.

You know that feeling you get when you almost recognize an actor but you can't quite figure out who it is but then you finally figure it out and it's so satisfying when you do? It's cognitive dissonance resolved. It's like seeing a dalmatian pop out of a picture of random dots.

I had that experience this evening with the actor playing the grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine. First I recognized the voice but couldn't place the actor. Then I figured out which actor went with that voice. Then I finally convinced myself that the face of the grandfather was in fact the 30-years-older face of my actor, that being the actor who played Sidney Friedman on M*A*S*H.

Lyn was impressed with how perceptive I was.

After the movie I checked with IMDB, just as a formality, and discovered that Sidney Friedman was in fact played by Allan Arbus whereas the grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine was played by Alan Arkin.

So I was off by a few letters.

A friend this evening pooh-poohed the idea of watching Little Miss Sunshine. She hadn't liked the previews and was afraid the movie would be full of screaming children. The movie delivered one long scream, just as promised by the preview, but the rest of the movie was scream free.

It was Tank Girl that taught me to ignore previews when deciding whether to see a movie. My response to the preview was, "What the heck was that? That looks really stupid." But then somebody convinced me to see it and it became one of my favorite movies.

The moral of the story? There are two: 1) Trusted friends (in this case a sister-in-law) should be trusted more than previews when it comes to film recommendations. 2) Getting a satisfied feeling of closure when you finally believe something doesn't make it true.

We saw Zodiac this evening. It seemed very long, especially after finishing two full glasses of water. But I recommend it. It had a good cast and I liked the realism that came from the story being based on actual events.