My wife and I invoked our “30 minute rule” when watching this movie. The rule is: if the movie can’t interest either of us in 30 minutes, then we turn it off and quit wasting our time. According to Wikipedia, this film is based on a 1974 novel and “the story follows the hunt for[...]
[Wikipedia and IMDb disagree as to the year this movie was made. It was either 2011 or 2012.] Short summary: A bunch of people attend their 10th high school reunion. Hilarity ensues. (I’m only kidding about the hilarity part.) The movie had two major downfalls. One, all the characters — supposedly 28 years old —[...]
This movie irked me so much that I broke my two-year habit of not writing movie reviews anymore. Billed as a sci-fi adventure on an epic scale, it was actually just a slasher movie dressed up in big-budget sci-fi clothes.
Another year in which I’ve not seen most of the movies that won Oscars. (List of nominees and winners.) Rango was the only winning movie that I’d seen, and I’ve seen Bridesmaids, which was nominated but didn’t win anything.
I haven’t done a review in a while, but I had to review this movie. Not so much the movie itself, but the DVD on which we watched it. 20th Century Fox isn’t the only company that’s starting to make DVDs this way, but this disc was the worst we’d seen. The company has programmed[...]
It’s about owls. Computer-animated owls in 3D. I never thought I would like a movie that could be described so simply, but I really liked “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.” The film was fun, the story wasn’t too confusing (though it came close in places), and the three-dimensional animation was amazing in[...]
I’ll almost never review a movie before it comes out, because I don’t get sneak peaks like some big-time critics. But a few things deserve to be said about this one, based purely on the advertisements playing on TV and in movie theaters. “Karate” is a Japanese martial art, developed in the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa)[...]
This year’s top-billed Valentine’s Day movie was named appropriately enough: “Valentine’s Day.” Add in about 20 huge stars, a soundtrack that includes Taylor Swift’s “Today Was a Fairytale” (record-holder for highest first-week sales by a female artist), and the promise of a cutesy blend of several romantic stories, and you should have a winner. This[...]
Despite some negative reviews, Daybreakers held its own. I strongly disagree with Rolling Stone, which called it a “B Movie.” Maybe because I didn’t pretend it was something it’s not. Daybreakers is a vampire movie, plain and simple. Like most vampire movies, it does not aspire to be an Oscar-winner, nor does it crave critical[...]
“Planet Earth” is a five-disc DVD set produced by the BBC Corporation as a TV series, originally aired in 2006. I could not find a site that correctly listed its run time. IMDb.com said it was 60 minutes. Other sites said 550 minutes. But the DVDs we ordered from Netflix contain 14 episodes of one[...]
Flickr’s marketing department is taking care of publicizing what’s been added to the site, and how the design has changed. They’re real proud of it. So far, I haven’t seen anyone documenting what’s been taken away from Flickr users. I’ve made a page just for that, here. I’ll be updating it as I learn more.
Title: The Raven, A Biography of Sam Houston Author: Marquis James Year: 1929 Publisher: University of Texas Press, Austin ISBN 0-292-77040-5 View it on Amazon View it on Google Books Sam Houston on Wikipedia This book was awarded the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for “Biography or Autobiography” (James is one of the very few people who’ve[...]
Flickr holds a special place in my heart, at least compared to other internet sites. I’ve spent more time on Flickr than most people have spent on Facebook or Twitter — daily participation since I joined in Sept. 2005. Not only have I uploaded over 30,000 images to my photostream (most of them now non-public),[...]
“I thought the left loved freedom of the press and open government. I guess that’s only when ‘The Man’ is someone else.” That’s what one commenter said on a news story about the federal government hoping to charge a journalist for publishing news. It’s an astute observation about the way our two-party political system works:[...]
Commentary: A record Powerball jackpot isn’t a record to celebrate (Christian Science Monitor) The editorial board of CSM concluded their piece with this: Before the news media play up the next record-setting mega-lottery like Powerball, they may want to add these kinds of caveats in their reporting. It could deter people from rushing to the[...]
Following are some passages I underlined during a reading of To Sail Beyond The Sunset (1987) by Robert A. Heinlein, the last novel he published before dying in 1988: “I remember Earth. I knew her when she was clean and green, mankind’s beautiful bride, sweet and lush and lovable… It is futile to mourn over[...]
There is a school of thought, albeit a relatively unpopular one, that poor grammar or punctuation on printed signs should be corrected with a Sharpie or other tool, vigilante style. In the News: Vigilante Copy Editor (New York Times) And there are older instances, such as this one (The Virginian-Pilot).
Following are some passages I underlined during a reading of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls: A Comedy of Manners (1985) by Robert A. Heinlein: “It does not do to encourage bad banners; one should retaliate, urbanely but firmly.”
In The News: Adobe starts subscription for Photoshop and Dreamweaver (BBC News) This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone; many software companies are moving in this direction. Instead of having to ship millions of boxes and discs every year when they upgrade the software, they’re just going to add the updates to the online[...]
Following are some passages I underlined during a reading of I Will Fear No Evil (1970) by Robert Heinlein: “…most people think of money as something to pay the rent. But a money man thinks of money in terms of what he can do with it.” “…it’s impossible for a woman to lay it on[...]
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