(5-31-08)

September 8th:

     Obviously, in order to feel as though I've saved the absolute maximum amount possible, I used this as my chance to go on a movie renting spree and rent any and all movies I wanted to. I figure that even if the movie is a total dud, who cares because it didn't cost me anything. So I figured I'd give a 30 second analysis of each of the movies that I've rented so far in my month of membership. If you don't really care about movies you can just skip past this part.

Joe Somebody - (2001, PG): Tim Allen movie about an unlikely scenario where this guy, Joe, gets beat up in his company parking lot in front of his kid. He then sets out to redeem himself by challenging the guy to a rematch. Weird, mildly entertaining, not real big on plausibility. Not really a hit, but totally watchable. Still I'd rate it 3 out of 5 sporks.

National Lampoon's Van Wilder - (2002, R): Comedy about a guy who's in his seventh year at college and his unloving father decides to stop paying his tuition. Wildly popular on campus, the main character uses his reputation and party clout to manage to continue to raise money to pay his tuition. He then finds deeper meaning to his life, faces his fears, gets the girl, saves his family, and so on. Not real great, but also has the quality of being equally entertaining even if you don't really pay any attention or walk out of the room and miss scenes.

Orange County - (2002, PG-13): Big Hollywood movie with an indie feel to it. About a smart kid who grows up as a carefree surfer in Orange County, California who in his senior year of high school decides to become a writer and get serious about his education. He applies at Stanford and is expected to get in but his high school sends the transcripts for the wrong student and his application is rejected. He then sets out on an adventure to somehow get accepted in time for the fall semester. In this adventure he finds deeper meaning to his life, faces his fears, keeps the girl, saves his family, and so on. I don't really like any of the supporting actors, but it was decent, had an almost original feel to it, and at only 81 minutes long, it avoids dragging the somewhat thin story too long.

Being John Malkovich - (1999, R): John Cusack plays a puppeteer who discovers a doorway that leads inside the mind of actor John Malkovich. This turns in to a very strange love square (four people in this mess) between John Malkovich, the puppeteer, and the puppeteer's wife as well as one of his co-workers. I should have known better than to think that a film starring Cameron Diaz was going to be good but the movie got 3 Academy Award nominations so I thought it was going to be good. Well it wasn't. I did manage to get through the whole movie without falling asleep, but it really just wasn't entertaining, thought provoking, or redeeming in any particular way.

The Shipping News - (2001, R): Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore star in this off-beat movie about a man who finds deeper meaning in life, faces his fears.. oh, you get the idea. Reminded me a lot of the movie Deeply, possibly because they're both set on small fishing islands in the cold Atlantic and involve a strange curse of some sort. The movie sort of starts out as something of a mess but is quickly rescued by the change of venue to the island. Overall a pretty good movie about being able to become something more than you thought you were.

Collateral Damage - (2001, R): The latest Schwarzenegger action movie. This movie managed to have the exact same feel as every other Arnold action movie ever made. It's really weird because I've seen plenty of action movies over the years and somehow every one that Arnold does seems exactly the same. Some just do a better job at it than others. Collateral Damage is just another example of the same old formula which isn't really novel anymore. There's nothing wrong with the movie really, but it still just seems unsatisfying.

Amelie - (2001, R): The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain; this film is entirely in French and at times felt like you were missing out on the true meaning of certain parts in the translation to English subtitles, but overall this is a great movie. The picture at the top of this month's update is actually an image from Amelie. Needless to say, I really enjoyed this movie. It's about an introverted woman in her 20's who longs to live an exciting and fulfilling life. When she gets a special chance to do exactly that, she struggles between her fears of rejection and failure and the chance of making a difference and finding true love. A very fun movie and has excellent camerawork and use of color and visuals. The woman who plays Amelie gives an unusual and thoroughly enjoyable performance and captures the idea of a sky adventurist perfectly.

The Accidental Spy - (2001, PG-13): Another installment in the long line of enjoyable Jackie Chan movies. Starting to suffer from the Arnie syndrome, Jackie's latest movie is quite good, but quite unremarkable at the same time. If you like Jackie Chan movies, it's certainly worth watching. The fact that I had to read the review online just to remember any details of the plot at all only serves to solidify my impression of it being a forgettable movie.

Little Man Tate - (1991, PG): Jodie Foster's directorial debut film about a waitress single mother raising a child prodigy. She reluctantly agrees to permit her son to go to a summer camp for gifted children where the camp director attempts to make the boy, Fred Tate, act like a grown-up in pursuit of intellectual greatness. Although excited at first, Fred becomes overwhelmed and longs to just be a normal boy. A very good movie and has some funny moments inside the imagination of Fred.

Sleepless in Seattle - (1993, PG): Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan star in this film that was supposedly really good. I've heard all about it for I don't even know how many years and sadly it failed to live up to my expectations. It's supposed to be something of a love story, but the two people don't even meet until the last scene of the movie. To me, that's the movie equivalent of having 3 hours of pre-game talk before the Superbowl and then deciding to only have the superbowl game itself last 2 minutes. The movie created the sensation of stalling out every time it started to get going.

Blade II - (2002, R): Wesley Snipes is back for the sequel to the 1998 action flick Blade. The setup is that Blade is a man born as a half-vampire who is actually trying to seek and destroy as many vampires as possible. Quite surprisingly, Blade II seemed less graphically violent than the original, and thus the action scenes don't seem quite so tainted by the wildly excessive blood and gore of the original. The storyline was pretty simplistic, but it never tried to head off in too many directions at once. Most noteworthy in my mind was the fact that when you fast forward and back on the DVD, it actually displays the subtitles automatically! Although such a feature is largely wasted in an action movie, I've never seen any other DVD's with this feature and think it ought to be standard.

Judge Dredd - (1995, R): One of my all time favorite action movies. Stars Sylvester Stallone in a futuristic movie about what the world could be like if governments and the traditional justice system could not react to crime fast enough to protect the citizenry. An excellent action movie on all counts and Rob Schneider acts as comic relief in just the right times. In my mind, this movie stands out not only for being a good action film, but for really making you think that this future where street cops are the judge, jury, and executioner could actually have some potential.

Max Keeble's Big Move - (2001, PG): Typical of a sucky Disney movie, the film contains all of the following elements: A neurotic mother, a weak and bumbling father, kids who are way smarter than anyone I knew in junior high, an evil plotting principal, a staff of teachers made up entirely of 30-something women, bullies that never get in trouble but are eventually beat up by the student body, and an animal shelter at risk of being bulldozed (literally, there is a bulldozer scene in the movie) down by an evil white guy wearing a suit and tie. Worst of all, this "kids movie" included scenes of kids using bad language to talk back to adults. Not really appropriate for young kids and too dumb to be entertaining to adults, this movie has a narrow target audience of angsty 12-15 year olds.

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - (2001, PG-13): This really long movie is an expensive and elaborate adaptation of the series of books of the same name. This probably appeals a lot more to the people who've read the book and wanted to see a movie version of it so they could say "Oh, I know this part!" the whole way through or something. To me, the best part of the movie was when Hugo Weaving, who plays some elf king addresses everyone and lapses into an Agent Smith tone of voice. That would be Agent Smith from The Matrix of course. Ok, I've run out of things to say about this movie. I'll no doubt rent the sequel when it comes out, but mainly just because this movie, even in 165 minutes, fails to feel like a complete movie on it's own. They ought to just put "To Be Continued" at the end right before it starts playing a really pleasant Enya song.

The Business of Strangers - (2001, R): This movie is a rare piece. It's the first movie since I don't know when that was so incredibly bad that by about 15 minutes in to the movie I had hit fast forward to see if it ever started going anywhere. Then I started jumping ahead to the next scene on the DVD. Then fast forwarding through it too. Every scene seemed to start either in a hotel room, a hotel hallway, the elevator, the gym, or the airport. For the 15 minutes that I did watch, it felt as though I was watching some sort of bizarre and angry movie running on the Lifetime channel. The only happy moment was knowing that I only wasted 15 or 20 minutes of my life on this horrible movie instead of the full running time. That and the fact that I didn't actually have to pay anything to rent it.

A Beautiful Mind - (2001, PG-13): This movie won 4 academy awards, including Best Picture. Lots of people have said it was a really great movie. Hmm.. sound familiar? Actually unlike Being John Malkovich which was a horrible movie, Beautiful Mind turned out to be a pretty interesting film. Although it was sort of about this math scholar's life, it was really just a movie about a smart person who goes crazy and attempts to regain control of his life after totally losing it. That wasn't really what I was expecting, but it did a real good job of it. Although quite well done, the subject matter wasn't really interesting to me and felt like it lacked a real plot. It was more of an episode of Biography than something with a real storyline.

     So.. as you can probably tell, I have been making the most of my movie membership card. Anyone who actually read every one of the reviews above also probably enjoys movies or else they have just waaaaaay too much time on their hands. Also noteworthy is the fact that rumors continue to fly about my sector of my company being outsouced to another company. This would mean I'd no longer be working for my current company, but I'd be doing the same work and just being paid by someone else. The downside is that I'd no longer have the benefits and everything of my current company and could end up in a dead-end job working for some minimum service, cheapest price possible type of place. That's not really what I'd like to be doing, so I'll just have to continue to hope for the best.

     This weekend wasn't all movie-watching however. Not only did I find the time for this web site update, I also managed to clear out a bunch of messages in my inbox. I went from having 116 messages to just 32. After a certain point it gets real easy though because the messages are old enough that I'd just look silly if I replied to them, so it was just a matter of deciding what folder to file them away in. I also finished formatting all the pictures from my San Diego trip, my family get together in Pine, Arizona, and everything in between. My crowning achievement was installing this software that lets me stitch together multiple pictures into a single super wide-screen shot.

San Diego:

The Cabin:

My Back Yard:

     The only downside really is that the average computer monitor isn't 5 times wider than it is tall, so I don't have any particularly good way of displaying the pictures online. They look great when properly sized on my 21" computer monitor, but the world of web formatting just isn't really at the point where I can make everyone else be able to see what I can on my own computer. Some day, perhaps.

September 30th:

     Well I really didn't have a whole lot for the month of September. My house flooded out yet again. What a joke. This time around I decided to have all the cheap junky water lines in the house replaced - well actually every line in the house, period - with high quality stainless braided lines. I also had a water pressure regulator installed on the main for the house since apparently the city I'm in is notorious for water pressure spikes. This knowledge could have been really useful, oh LAST YEAR or so before all of this happened. At least Brady had a sense of humor about it all.

     With little else to do, I decided to start cleaning out all these old boxes of stuff that I have in my bedroom. I came upon one little gadget called the "I'll Get It!". I purchased it for $40 or so back in 1994 or 95 as an add-on thing to use my computer as an answering machine. This lasted for all of about a week or so and then I realized no one calls me. Instead, I then put it to work by using it to record some really great phone calls that me and my friends made to CompUSA over a 2 or 3 week period. Sure, we were actually just calling out co-workers and they typically knew it was us, but it made me feel like somehow I got my money's worth.

     Well, since I figured it probably still worked anyway, I decided to use it to record a few voicemails that I'd been saving for a while. Two of them were left for me by Brady way back when he went to the Formula 1 race at Indy. The other is a funny voice message that attempts to sell me a trip to Orlando, Florida but is apparently was messed up so it ended up sounding like a bad Max Headroom recording. Yeah, it was a slow month.

• First call from Brady at the USGP
• Second call from Brady
• You've won a Florida vacation for $99!