Team America was way more funny than I had thought it would be. Maybe it was the crowd or the ridiculousness of all of it, but I found myself cracking up on several occasions. The movie felt a little dragged out as well, and I’m afraid that most of the audience didn’t catch on to how they were portraying America as this “International Police”. Or, maybe they did, and just didn’t catch the jokes.
The theme song, the terrorist disguise, the sex scene, Matt Damon. Great stuff. I highly doubt I would pay to see it again, but still some really good laughs, and I’m sure nobody would be disappointed at paying to see this.
Big thanks to JP for the heads-up on this one. November is National Novel Writing Month, where participants are invited (challenged) to write a 175 page (50,000 word) novel from November 1st to November 30th.
I’ve been a bit discouraged about writing for a while now, mainly because I just can’t find the energy, motivation, or ideas. This looks like it’ll be a good motivator though, so everyone out there either sign up with me or make sure I do my writing.
I’ve never seen CNN’s Crossfire before, so I really don’t quite understand what Jon Stewart was arguing, but I got the general gist of it. It’s really great to see him go on the show and completely bash it by saying it hurts the democratic purpose.
These sites all say it much better than me though. A link to the actual appearance on the show, as well as a link to what Boing Boing had to say on the subject. Be sure to checkout Salon’s write-up on it as well.
Otherwise known as “Lovers” (I’m not really sure what title they’re going with here in the States), or by its chinese title, “Shi mian mai fu” (translation: Ambush from All Sides), Daggers is the follow-up to “Hero” by director Zhang Yimou. Well, not really a follow-up, I mean it’s the movie he made after “Hero”.
Set back in ancient times when everyone could fly around and carried big swords and wore funky hats, the story follows two soldiers, played by Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro attempting to locate the rebel faction known as, wait for it, the House of the Flying Daggers. They come across a blind dancer played by Zhang Ziyi who is purportedly a part of the group. Cool action scenes, romance, and betrayal ensue.
I enjoyed this a lot more than I did Hero. The story’s quite a bit more cohesive, and while I watched a bootleg with washed out colors, the cinematography and scenes were a lot less “grand” like they were in Hero, something that I thought worked much better. There’s lots of really cool CGI shots of, wait for it, flying daggers. One of my favorite scenes involved our main characters being surrounded in an open field, and seeing all the soldiers work in unison to attack them. Aside from some stuff at the end that made me sort of cringe and suspend disbelief for a while, definitely worth a watch.
Update: American site with a little teaser and some nice stills from the movie.
I first visited this site almost a year ago, at the time to checkout the video for Her Space Holiday’s “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend”. I return now for the excellent video for Dealership’s “All The Kids”. These guys make some really good motion-animation videos. Citizen’s “Appearances” is worth a watch as well.
The Marc Newson-designed cell phone called the talby for KDDI is actually being made. Japan gets all the good stuff.
U.S. trailer for Jean Pierre Jeunet’s latest movie, A Very Long Engagement.
I’ve been really iffy about the whole Christopher Reeves thing just because it’s like, eh, another celebrity passed away, should I really be sad for someone I didn’t know, much less for a death that wasn’t all that tragic (well, I guess the paralyzing was), but this is a nice touching tribute. From the article at cex.co.uk:
Subscribers to NCsoft’s City of Heroes online PC game have been holding memorials to the medical research campaigner and former Superman actor Christopher Reeve, who died earlier this week.
Link to the screen capture here. Sometimes showing things through actions rather than words is the best way to say anything at all.
Wow, I don’t think that saying even meant anything.
I now have a new candidate for the “…” awards. Her birthday is on Christmas.
valloq: maybe you need better intuition then
dotsloke: so…u just gotta give it a try
dotsloke: intuition my dear..
dotsloke: is a gift
dotsloke: THAT…my dear.
dotsloke: i don’ have.
dotsloke: God gave me life on christmas day
valloq: I have it!
valloq: me! me!
dotsloke: and he figured he could just give me one gift
valloq:
dotsloke: and be cheap likethat.
valloq: LOL
valloq: stupid!
A late happy 22nd birthday wish to Jennie, even though I already said an early happy birthday on Monday, but I’ll give her another one anyway since she thinks she’s extra special and gets a week-long birthday celebration. We celebrated last night by going to Casa Bianca for their great thin-crust pizza, spicy penne, garlic bread and mozarella sticks. Oh, and I got an orange cream soda. Orange cream soda rocks.
This one rolls up! And this one rotates!
I forgot to mention that after the Norah concert I got hungry and ended up going to my wonderful cousin Jennie’s, where she made me a delish ham & egg sandwich. I then owned it up at Spider Solitaire (Two suits!). Thanks Jen, and early happy birthday even though we celebrated it tonight and you plan on having a week-long celebration cause you’re selfish like that.
Norah Jones was just as good as I remembered a year ago. She played about 21 songs through the whole night, throwing in variations on songs like “Don’t Know Why” and “I’ve Got To See You Again”, and even doing a couple of cover songs where she got to rock out.
Getting to the show was an adventure in itself, where I managed to get ourselves lost while trying to get to the LA Zoo so we could take the shuttle to the Hollywood Bowl instead of being stack parked. Getting back was even more fun, when they almost turned Brad away because they didn’t believe he was part of our group (All asians except for him). Yeah bitch, see how you like being discriminated against now.
Big thanks to Julie, Erin, and Brad for coming along, even though the whole night we kept arguing over who was responsible for bringing Brad. I wrote down the setlist for anyone interested, available in the full entry
- What Am I To You?
- Nightingale
- Those Sweet Words
- The Prettiest Thing
- I’ve Got To See You Again
- Painter Song
- She (Gram Parsons Cover)
- In The Morning
- Carnival Town
- The Nearness Of You
- Humble Me
- The Long Way Home
- Don’t Know Why
- Creepin’ In
- Above Ground
- Sunrise
- Come Away With Me
- (Cover song, forgot to write down)
- Turn Me On
- Lonestar
- (Cover song, forgot to write down)
Class photo = too much fun. The teacher’s right there too! From Boing Boing.
I’ve been watching the documentary on Space Ship One on Discovery Channel recently…really cool stuff. Here’s a batch of photos, and this one has to be my favorite.
Disgruntled employees everywhere, rejoice. I seriously think this could turn out to be one of the best-selling DVDs when it comes out.
Congratulations: You have completed all the requirements for the Bachelor of Science degree in Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine as of spring Quarter, 2004.
Diplomas will be available in approximately five months, but an official UCI transcript with the notation of graduation is available to you now at the Office of the Registrar.
5 months? Are you kidding me? I graduated in June!
I am obsessed with organizing things in my life. I pride myself on my management of iTunes, which I promise to get into another time, but recently I’ve discovered a wonderful plugin called Audioscrobbler that works for iTunes as well as Winamp and a myriad of other mp3 players.
The premise is simple. Create account. Install plugin. Play music. Now watch as Audioscrobbler collects statistics on what you’re listening to, who your favorite artists are, and then recommends music to you based on your favorites and even connect you with other people who share similar tastes in music.
For anyone interested, here is my Audioscrobbler page. Damn that Iron & Wine, I don’t even listen to it that much, I think it just happened to come up in my playlist. Feel free to add me as a friend.
Next up is del.icio.us, dubbed a “social bookmarks” manager. Create an account, and then go bookmarking away. The latest bookmarked pages are shown on the main del.icio.us page, but the revolutionary feature is the ability to add “tags” to bookmarks.
Rather than the hierarchical structure that is more commonly used where bookmarks are sorted into folders in an attempt to categorize them, tags allows you to apply as many tags are needed to describe an item. Tags are separated by spaces, so for example, tags for my site might like look “blog babes wasteoftime”, or something similar. Definitely something so simple yet ingenius that it’s amazing nobody had thought of it earlier.
Again, for anyone interested, here is my del.iciou.us page.
For her, I would vote for Kerry over and over again.
dotsloke: beatles are european band?
valloq: …
This pay chart I received from my boss at my last job might come in handy for everyone out there who’s looking for a job. It shows pay rates by hour/week/month/year.
The return of the “…”
strjules: you kno what this means????????
valloq: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=this
strjules: you lil
valloq: =)
valloq: sometimes, I surprise even myself
strjules: …
The Art of the Incredibles. Looks like it’d be a nice coffee book.
Ad-Awards. A collection of the best ads. A lot of these are really good, and most of them are international ads. My favorite is the one for French School under “business / services”
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