Entertainment

Another movie from the Canadian cinema, balancing the francophone with the anglophone, the drama with the horror. Yeah, is in a way a girly movie (Tamara made fun of me while renting it), but it's a gory horror movie too. If the Bubba Ho-tep mummy was going to give Tamara nightmares, this one really would have given her nightmares, so it's a good thing she didn't watch it. It's pretty much all about puberty bring out the monster within, taken really literally, which is a pretty common theme for werewolf movies (or TV shows).

Excellent acting, pretty good puppetry (way better than low budget CGI could have done I think), chills induced in the appropriate places (although that might have been due to the window being open). Good movie, although maybe not the one for those who are squeamish about the female side of puberty.

We saw this a while back, at Cinecenta. This is a movie from the French-Canadian cinema, and I think it won an Oscar for the best foreign film. And now for my best, most cliché movie reviewer line:"it paints a damning portrait of the Canadian health care system..."

But it really does; maybe hospitals in Québec are worse off than those in Alberta, or maybe I just have been fortunate enough to have been able to avoid hostpitals in general for quite a while, but in this movie it's pretty bad. People are stacked in the hallways and so on. It's actually a critical part of the story; a man is dying and his stockbroker son comes from back from London and throws some cash around to give his father some last moments of dignity. He also goes to a great deal of trouble to get all of his fathers old friends together again, which is good, because they each have an excellent sense of humor and really lighten the movie up.

This is a really excellent movie, funny and moving, and a great portrait of a father-son relationship.

é is my new favorite HTML character identity.

This one has a simple plot, almost like a Dick-and-Jane reader for preschoolers. It has realllllllly obvious wire work. People fly in straight lines for miles it seems like.

BUT, there is some pretty cool action and some pretty good lines. If you are into comic books, and know the Hellboy books in particular, then you'll probably enjoy this movie. Otherwise, you might as well go see Ella Enchanted or something, you know, if you liked the Princess Bride, and wanted to know what it would be like with more singing and dancing.

Double plus evil undead Nazi bad.

"My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!"

As I predicted, Bubba Ho-tep did indeed turn up at Cinecenta. We went on Thursday night. It was pretty funny. Tamara even liked it, so much so that she murmered somthing about getting the DVD. But she still doesn't like Army of Darkness. This one admittadly doesn't have the chessy lines and cheesy puppets that Army of Darkness does, and it's overall a lot more subtle and refined.

There are quite a few crude jokes, but some of the best stuff comes from Bruce Campbell deadpanning Elvis lines, like "thank-you, thank-you very much."

Double plus undead good.

Tamara's not as excited as I about zombies. But, come on, zombies!

I just finished reading (well, two days ago) Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. It's a sort of cautionary tale of biotech gone wrong, about playing god, revenge, jealousy, personal pain in a complicated world, and so on. It's a really good book and there's lots to think about, the responsibility of an engineer for what they produce, for one thing.

This was only the second Atwood book I've ever read, the first being A Handmaids Tale, which was for a undergrad English class. I'll probably read a few of her others now. I tried to read Orwell's 1984 after I read The Handmaids Tale, as they deal with similar themes, but I never quite got through it, or started on it really. Too much oppressive society all at once is bad. Atwood hasn't had the pop culture impact as Orwell, but I guess he had a few years on her.

We went to see a documentary film called The Corporation this evening. It was very interesting, and gave me lots of stuff to think about. It was basically about how the corporation gained status as a "person" in the eyes of the law, and what the effects of that has been.

A major component was detailing how the corporation, as a person, has many of the same characteristics of a psychopath. It looks at what motivates corporations, what the consequences are, how people within a corporation behave, and asks questions about how much ethical responsibility various individuals within a corporation have.

There are a number of case studies, from Goodyear (tires) to Interface (carpets), and the interviews with their CEO's are revealing. Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, was asked to give a speech to a task for that was being created in his company to look at Interface's environmental impact, so that they could formulate a response to customer queries. He didn't really care about it, but he looked around for inspiration, and found a book, or it landed on his desk, and read it. And it really opened his eyes to how his company relates to the environment, and he worked to create positive change at Interface, by increasing the use of recycled material and so on.

Contrast this with a former Goodyear CEO who said that if he could, he would make change, but the CEO is really beholden to all these other people and it's difficult to make "morally or ethically correct" decisions. True to a certain extent, and what I found interesting was that corporations, as legal entities, are required by law to maximize shareholder profit. That makes it almost impossible to make decisions which have socially responsible results.

There was also quite a bit from a former CEO of Royal Dutch / Shell. He entertained protesters on his lawn after they hung a "murder" sign on the roof of his surprisingly modest home out in the countryside. So he talked to them for a while, and basically found out that they are worried about basically the same things he is worried about, but that the difference was that they felt they couldn't do anything about it, while he felt he could.

They also talk about how Bolivia turned to the World Bank for a loan to fix up it's water supply in its third largest city. The World Bank told them they had to privatize the water supply to get the loan, and the water works ended in the hands of Bechtel (I used to work for a company that was largely owned by Bechtel, Bantrel, and I see they still have the same ugly ass web page as they did six years ago). The water was being metered out, with people having to make the choice between water and food, or water and sending their kids to school, and it led to a bit of a revolution, which returned control of the water supply to the people.

Then there was Monsanto, and the patenting of genes, and so on. Patents, especially on things like genes, always get my knickers in a twist. Anyway, I think it was a fairly well rounded documentary, there were people on both sides represented. The main theme of the film was the problems with the corporation, but I think it was a pretty fair look at it. It was well put together and cleverly done.

Apparently this movie has been receiving a lot of critical acclaim lately, but probably just because it uses the trendy disordered story line tactic. That worked really well for the English Patient, where the guy was dying and telling this nurse the story of his love affair with a married woman, and it worked really well for Memento, where the guy has no short term memory and the story is told in reverse. In both cases there was some reason for the disjointedness that could be tied into the story, but this movie seems to use it just as the device of the week.

To be sure, it keeps the audience guessing about exactly what is going on, which is entertaining in a way, but I found myself asking why they were doing this and when they were going to get over it and straighten things out. There was some really cleaver film making in this movie as well, like the way they hint about the accident; you don't actually see it, but some guy's reaction to it.

The whole 21 grams thing annoyed me too; it didn't have any relevance until the very end when one of the characters does a little monologue that could have been about just about anything. Tamara figured it was like, "oh my god, we need a title for this movie... well, I just snorted 21 grams of coke, so let's name it that." You lose 21 grams at the exact moment of your death? Sure, whatever.

I started reading it, because I need yet another distraction from studying for my upcoming midterms. They have these cars that run on methane, which some call fartmobiles. The protagonist throws a brick on one from a great height, and it explodes, and out comes the slang for methanol in this world: assoline.

Well, I thought it was funny. Humph.

Also, crypto-Tourette's: generating random input to help seed a new key!

Cory Doctorow, author of Down and out in the magic kingdom and Eastern standard tribe, gave an interesting talk at an O'Reilly conference recently about ebooks. Mostly he talks about how ebooks are different from paper books and so on, and why he's released his work under creative commons licenses. Down and out was recently relicensed such that anyone can create derivative works of it, such as plays, fan fictions, and so on.

Anyway, I'm not doing it justice, but if you are interested in intellectual property and how/why/if it should be protected, then it's worth reading.

On a side note, I downloaded both Down and out and EST, and put them on Chinook (our new laptop). As Cory Points out, downloads of ebooks tend to be more like people browsing books in a book store, except without the risk of catching something nasty. It remains to be seen if I will actually get around to reading them.

Finished it last night at about 4:00 am. I guess that would be this morning. Whatever. It was a very good book. I liked it. That is all.

Bruce Campbell as Elivs? Groovy. Bubba Ho-tep has won lots of film festival awards. Might be interesting. Maybe it will be at Cinecenta...

We went to see Kill Bill Volume 1 on Tuesday night. It was pretty cool, but I think the crazy blood was a little over the top. It's definitly very violent.

Good music though.

It's too bad Futurama is done for. Only a few more episodes to air, and then no more. There two were pretty good.

Oh my yes.

Adaptation is an interesting movie. It's by the guy who wrote Being John Malkovitch, and it's just as weird, in a certain endearing way. He really did write himself into his screen play. Movies like these are fun for me, because it's not always clear where reality ends and fantasy begins, but I'm pretty sure that reality ends at the point where I started wishing the nothing would continue to happen.

My favorite line: It's not what loves you, it what you love.