Dolphin's Dock
Small Splashes
Main Posts
Three Quick Movie Reviews from the Weekend
I managed to pack three movies into a fairly busy weekend. Here’s a very brief review of each of them (there are no spoilers):
Stargate: Ark of Truth
Put simply, if you enjoyed Stargate SG-1, you’ll enjoy this movie. If you were not a fan of SG-1, you won’t even understand what’s going on in this movie (even if you enjoyed the original Stargate movie, so much has changed in the 10 seasons of the show that that movie inspired, and this movie starts where the show left off). This wasn’t as much a “movie based on a tv show” as it was a TV episode of Stargate SG-1 that was too long to play on the air. I enjoyed it, and it nicely finished the Orai plot line that was left fairly open at end of the final episode of the series.
Jerome Bixby’s Man from Earth
I’d never heard of this when TheBoyfriend™ handed it to me in Blockbuster. I flipped it over and read the back which essentially described the plot as a college professor has quit his job and is leaving town when is friends (other professors) show up unexpectedly to see him off and question why he is leaving. He decides to tell them his secret; that he is a 14,000 year old cro-magnon man who has to move on every so often when people begin to notice that he isn’t aging.
How freaking corny does that sound?!?! Well, don’t let it fool you, it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in quite awhile. Modern movies (especially in the SciFi genre) seem ready to spend their big budgets on visually dazzling special effects that are all too often designed mostly to divert your attention from the apparent lack of money they spent on writers. This movie doesn’t take that route at all, and in fact, the entire movie takes place in a rustic cabin packed and ready to be moved out of, devoid even of most of its furniture. Beginning to end the “action” is nothing more than a conversation between colleagues. Yet it keeps you intensely engaged beginning to end. It has the feeling of being based on a book, and I was unhappy to find that it was not. Seems to me that they could have explored the plot much deeper than they did and was hoping a book would have done so. Even still, it was definitely a worthwhile movie.
Highlander: The Source
TheBoyfriend™ bought this as an impulse buy. After watching it, even he was wishing he could go get his money back. Probably because the first movies came out when i was too young to be interested in them, I’ve always thought of Adrian Paul as the real Duncan MacLeod, so I was glad that he was cast in the role in this film. That was where my enjoyment of it ended. “The Source” utterly butchered the original highlander mythology and the mythology it attempted to replace it with was poorly thought out, underdeveloped and inconsistent. Even ignoring the fact that the film seemed oblivious to the entire Highlander story up to that point, as a standalone movie it was poorly done. Seriously don’t see this movie if you enjoyed the Highlander movies and tv series. I’m trying my best to forget this movie so as not to tarnish my memories of the rest of the Highlander franchise.
Light As…
The only (minor) concern I had when I opened up my new iMac for Christmas was that I had heard the rumors that Apple had recently made a purchase of some obscene number of ultra-thin LCD displays meaning a brand new sleek and sexy MacBook was certainly just around the corner. Well that MacBook, the MacBook Air, is here and to be honest, I’ll happily stick with my iMac. Apart from its dimensions, the MacBook Air doesn’t impress me.
It’s not that the I don’t like the idea of a laptop that is only 3/4 of an inch thick at it’s thickest point (though I admit I have some questions as to the durability of such a machine), but with a $1799 price tag, this isn’t something many people are going to be able to buy for the “cool factor” alone. I suspect anyone paying that price will be using it as their primary computer and, for that purpose, the MacBook Air just doesn’t stack up.For one thing, the hard drive is a wimpy 80gb. That might be ok for Joe Schmo who doesn’t do anything but check his email and surf the web, but then if that’s all you do with your computer, why are you buying a $1799 laptop? And if you don’t mind the smaller hard drive, why not go with the baseline MacBook. That’ll land you a faster processor and even if you add an extra stick of RAM to match the Air’s 2gb, you’ll still be saving yourself $500. I find it difficult to believe that there is a significant market out there of people wealthy enough to drop an extra $500 bucks to shave a quarter-inch thickness (and .4 GHz of processor speed!!!) off of their laptop.
Then there’s the lack of a CD/DVD drive. Kudos to Apple for looking to the future, but… …I’m not sure that future is here yet. Sure, you can download alot of your movies, music and software from the web now, but what about when you want to give a 500MB file to a friend (or a client)? Without the ability to burn to a disc, I guess you’re left purchasing webspace (a .Mac account perhaps) to upload to, so your friend can download from. And what if you want to watch your home movies on your home tv? I suppose you may be able to wirelessly transmit them there if you own an AppleTV, but that won’t help Grandma three states away see them. Not to mention that if you’re storing your films on your hard drive, that 80 gig ain’t gonna go far.
Now, you could BUY an external drive to burn your discs with (in fact Apple would be happy to sell you one specifically intended for the MacBook Air), but my question is where do you plug it in? The MacBook Air contains a single USB port. Plug a (wired) mouse into it and you’ve lost that.
I’m not saying I don’t think the MacBook Air is “cool.” I just don’t think it would fit the bill as my primary computer. I’d love to have one as a cool toy (err… a secondary computer), but I think at $1799, it’s priced out of the toy range.
Night on the Town
I don’t think I have what it takes to be a trendy sophisticated socialite. A friend of ours was playing with a jazz group at some little swanky jazz club about an hour away (our city wouldn’t have enough potential patrons to support such a thing), so we headed out there. It was a fun night and the music was superb, but this place was trying way too hard.
It was decorated beautifully with a sorta chic industrial/modern look. You know, exposed aging brick walls, with everything else super sleek and loads of brushed metal. I dug the look of the place until the first trip to the bathroom which took the look to the point of being a parody of itself. Seriously, they had metallic tiles running halfway up the way up the wall to meet a series of mirrored surfaces divided by rectangles of brushed metal. The two pieces of artwork were long skinny photographs that were close-up of eyes (because the bathroom is really a place where you want to feel like you’re being watched?), and the sinks were those kinds with the plateaus in the middle that look real nice until you go to use them and find that it’s impossible to wash your hands without splashing water all over the counter.
A first glance at the menu revealed no prices (which seems to be the startling new trend), but upon closer examination the prices were there only it seems the dollar sign has fallen out of favor so everything was listed like “Shrimp Noodle Soup /15″ (instead of “Shrimp Noodle Soup - $15.00″). Of course the numbers following the slash tended to be predominantly more in the 25-60 range, that’s per plate without your beverage (in fairness, this place did boast of a 5-star chef so their prices were not bizarrely high for restaurants of that caliber, just bizarrely high compared to the places we usually eat). Before the slash, it seemed they had had trouble deciding if their menus were going to represent a fine dining establishment with formal description of each dish or a more trendy coffeeshop-like feel with some clever Web 2.0-ish remark, and they frequently switched description styles from one menu item to the next.
Needless to say, with those prices, we chose to skip dinner. We did find out that if we ate, we didn’t have to pay the cover and the desserts were only $2 (or should I say “/2″) more than the cover charge so in a sense we could each get a dessert for 2 bucks. I got the cheesecake. If we’re operating on the assumption that (by ignoring what I would have paid as cover) dessert only cost me $2, then I’d say I paid about a buck per square inch of cheesecake. That didn’t stop them from bringing it out a 15″ plate though. TheBoyfriend™ got sorbet which came in four scoops (each about the diameter of a quarter and in flavors such as “Apple Cider”), and another friend who was with us got some little golf-ball sized cube of chocolate cake with some kind of cream drizzled out to the side (presumably for no other purpose than to at least appear to be using the foot long rectangular plate it was served on).
We didn’t dare risk a cocktail lest we have to take out a small loan, so we opted for the (surprisingly free) “filtered tap water.” It was all I could do to keep from laughing hysterically as waiter brought out a bottle of tap water and momentarily presented it to us as if it were a fine wine before gingerly pouring it into our glasses.
Despite the waiter more or less ignoring us after it became clear we weren’t gonna spend half a paycheck on one meal, it really was a fair bit of fun but I can’t imagine (other than for the music) going there for any reason other than to laugh at the pretentiousness of it all.
Good TV
As I said before, getting ready for my annual Halloween party is an all day event for me. Usually I watch Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas at some point during that day, but this year somehow the television got tuned to Mtv (I don’t know how, I think it’s the first time my tv has ever been on Mtv) which was running the entire second season of “So You Think You Can Dance.” Now I realize that that season has come and long gone for those who were fans, but I’d never seen it before. I have but one thing to say, there should be more shows on tv with scenes like this:
I might watch more tv if there were…
Peaceful Warrior Review
Blockbuster finally had Peaceful Warrior in last night, so I was able to rent it to see it since it never came to any theaters around my area. For those who don’t know, Peaceful Warrior is based on Dan Millman’s best-selling book Way of the Peaceful Warrior which I read a few years back. Going into it, I’d already read that the movie only covered about half of the book and I’d seen that Nick Nolte was cast in the role of Socrates (not the ancient philosopher, if you’ve not read the book), so I had had time to brace myself for seeing a much sturdier Soc than my brain had conjured while reading the book (though despite my misgivings about his physical stature, Nick Nolte does a good job with the role).
The writers did a brilliant job of covering a vast amount of material relatively smoothly in the course of a two hour movie. Still, Way of the Peaceful Warrior is not the kind of book that can be covered in detail in a movie, so despite having cut the book in half and doing such a remarkable job in writing, the movie still reduces most of the books most profound thoughts to inspirational one-liners that one might stick in an email signature rather than change their life with. Anyone who has read the book will really enjoy how the writers incorporate so much into the movie, because they give you enough to recall the book. Those who’ve not read the book may enjoy it (though possibly get just a touch lost in a place or two), but you won’t get near as much from it as if you’d read the book. Book purists might not that the movie takes something out of chronological order, but a movie is not a book and if things have to be adjusted to make the story clear, I’m willing to concede that right to the filmmakers.
My biggest complaint was that, while the book is about Dan Millman, the human, overcoming Dan Millman, the movie seems to be about Dan Millman, the gymnast, overcoming his motorcycle accident injury. Had I not already read the book, I may have mistaken this film for just another inspirational sports film. I don’t know, it’s hard to know exactly how I would have taken the film if I hadn’t read the book already, but I think the film offers a watered-down and slightly different message than the book.
If you have read Way of the Peaceful Warrior, I would recommend Peaceful Warrior the movie. If you haven’t read Way of the Peaceful Warrior, then I’d highly recommend Way of the Peaceful Warrior, THEN Peaceful Warrior.