Z/Web

This is a movie about the nomination process of the first female vice-president in U.S. history after the current VP dies in office. Fortunately, it's realistically done, so we get an inside glimpse of all the dirty back-room dealings, subtle manipulations of public perception, and more. Like sausage, you don't want to know how politics gets done. Unfortunately, that realism is also the movie's flaw, for it can be quite tedious -- like watching an afternoon of C-SPAN. For the political afficianado, it's great. For those like me that abhor politics, it has its moments, but should have been at least thirty minutes shorter. Still, I loved the subtle way the politicians manipulated each other, and the ending was predictable but extremely well-done. I'd give it a B.

Wow. I wasn't expecting much of this at all, considering the level of most superhero adaptations, but this is pretty good. Very good, in fact. The overall plot is limited, but that doesn't matter. What shines here is Robert Downey, Jr. in the lead role. He plays a billionaire playboy-slash-wonderkid who has inherited his father's weapons company and believes he's protecting the world with his weapons. When he's kidnapped by rebels in Afghanistan he discovers they have all his weapons as his company sells them to both sides in the war. The rebels force him to build them a supermissle (improbable) but he builds a robot rocket-suit instead and uses it to escape. Back home, he announces the company is getting out of the weapons business and faces a battle with his own board of directors and company president. Meanwhile, he refines the suit idea and perfects it. Of course from scene one we knew that the bad guy was his friend and mentor, the real power at the company, and it is obvious to everyone but the main character that it was him selling the weapons to the enemy to prolong the war and escalate profits. The climax is ridiculous as the bad guy creates his own even bigger and better robot suit (lame) and of course there's the big fight scene at the end. But despite many stereotypes, the film works. It works mostly because of Downey, who is magnificent as the guy you hate/love/envy/cheer for all at the same time. He's both super and pathetic, weak and strong, genius and stupid, which is just like real life. His character allows us to ignore the plot's failings and occasionally silliness and just enjoy the entertainment. The bottom line: totally a popcorn movie but above average with perfect casting. Lots of fun.

This is a forty-minute concept fleshed out into a two hour movie. It's kinda interesting: a staid accountant accidentally swaps cell phones with a hip guy. When he answers the other guy's phone, he finds himself in a mysterious sexual network where people on the list call each other for anonymous sex. This is a new world for this quiet man, who opens up and starts having sexual encounters all over the city. Then he meets his dream girl via the list but she vanishes and it appears she's been kidnapped. Then the owner of the cell phone calls and it's revealed he's not out of the country, but has grabbed the girl -- and he demands that the accountant steal $20 million for him or he'll kill the girl. It's all a setup. Of course there's more to it than that, as the accountant has to turn the tables of the bad guy, but it's all too predictable and the ending is just weird and makes no sense. (He walks off and leaves the briefcases in the park? Huh?) Ultimately, this has potential, but there are huge flaws in the direction and script that bring it down. Ewan McGregor is miscast, too: I don't buy him as a wallflower accountant. The rest of the cast is decent, but there are just too many problems with this for it to matter. Nice idea, though.

Fun little martial arts movie. Not up there with the level of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but not bad. It starts off with a geeky modern-day kid who's a Kung Fu movie nut getting beat up by bullies and he gets magically transported to a fantasy land of ancient China where he has a Task. Along the way he meets some friends and there are elaborate fights and such, culminating, of course, with him learning to defend himself, save the kingdom, and return home to beat the bullies. Yeah, the plot's predictable, but the events are not, and it's totally fun.

Yawn. The "88 minute" deadline is supposed to create dramatic tension, but instead it just complicates an already complicated muddle into gibberish. There are some good cast members and a handful of good scenes, but the whole isn't there. Weak. Don't waste your time.

This is Ben Stein's anti-Evolution documentary and I purposely have avoided hearing much about it or any controversy. I wanted to judge it for myself. My first surprise is how much screen time the opposition is given. Most documentaries give minimal screen time for the opponent, but this movie has plenty of scenes of evolutionists explaining their ideas. Granted, sometimes it's just unflattering bathering, but he does give them a voice.

The film's premise is that evolutionists control science in this country and are systematically blacklisting scientists who write anything even remotely positive about Intelligenet Design. While the film shows a handful of examples of this, there's not a lot of evidence that shows how widespread this is or isn't, so I can't really judge on that. However, the movie does a great job of pointing out the dangers of evolutionary thinking: evolution is inherently mindless and if we as a society adopt that mindset, we run the risk of eliminating everything that makes us human, such as morality and compassion. The film demonstrates this dramatically with a comparison to Nazi Germany, interviewing people who point out that Darwinism was the source of Hitler's eugenics program and other beliefs. That might be over-the-top for some people, and it is difficult to watch, but I would argue that it doesn't go far enough: society without God or purpose is doomed.

The promos of this didn't interest me at all: a gritty crime drama of some kind with mysterious goings-on and good cops and bad cops and no suggestion of a story. But I went anyway and it turned out to be an excellent movie. I really liked the way it plays with shades of gray instead of black and white. Our "hero," for instance, is a bad cop. He's loose with the rules, violent, and racist. But he is honest, and when he finds himself in the middle of a cop cover-up, he's determined to uncover the truth no matter what the cost. The ultimate bad guy is totally predictable, but the adventure of getting there is interesting, and there are a few surprises on the way. There are times when the film's too talky and the plot slows, and occasionally scenes come across as pretentious, but it general this is surprisingly well-done and definitely will have you thinking about the complex morality of police work. Ultimately the subject is given short shrift, but just the exploration of it is worth the ride.

I wasn't too interested in this film, but there wasn't much else out there. It turned out to be better than I expected. The premise is a group of American tourists go off the beaten path to a hidden Aztec ruin only to meet gruesome deaths due to Something Awful. Typical of these kinds of horror films, they are killed off one-by-one, and I guess we're supposed to be in suspense as to who will survive. It is the monster in this story that is different and unusual, and that's pretty cool (I won't spoil it by revealing the creature), and the characters, though somewhat stereotypical and not fully developed, are compelling enough to carry the film. There are a few surprises, but it's still too predictable, and it's more gory than scary. Still kinda fun, though.

This is an old movie from the 80s. I probably first watched it 20 years ago. It holds up surprisingly well. On the surface it's just your typical slapstick road movie with all kinds of chaos and bad things happening, but deep down it's got some heart. It is serious without being serious and fun without being too stupid. I actually was very impressed by John Candy's performance. He plays a buffoon, but with sincerity. It's really quite remarkable. Steve Martin is always good. A great classic flick.

This is a movie about the true story of MIT students who formed in a card counting club to gamble at blackjack in Vegas. They were led by their professor and the movie is the story of one young man who is trying to pay for his Harvard Medical tuition. Of course he gets greedy and wants more than the money he actually needs, and that leads to all sorts of trouble. The story is somewhat predictable, but it works. We like the main character and root for him to succeed. There isn't really a whole lot of story here -- it's mostly the thrill of the high lifestyle of Las Vegas. But it's fun and interesting, the performances are good, and the ending is typical Hollywood. I liked it.

Today the shipment of my new book, Eat Big While Eating Lean, arrived! That means I can start fulfilling early orders and new orders will be sent out quickly. Check out the book and let me know what you think!

I had never read the original story, so I didn't know what to expect, but I think I like the original story better than the movie. There are places where the movie has obvious Hollywood-isms. When the movie sticks to the original story (the places where narration is used), the movie works very well. But often the movie add silly comic sidebars that don't work. But overall it's still a rather harmless, entertaining movie. Kids seem to like it, but I'm not sure adults will get much out of it. The story is surprisingly mature for kids, in the sense that it's about tiny creatures that live on a speck on a flower that an elephant is trying to protect. But the story's theme is that all people, no matter how small, are important -- and that's a good lesson for kids.

This is the book the movie was based on; I listened to the audiobook edition while traveling. It's very different: the people are vampires, not mutants, and the story is hardly even similar, though there are occasional overlaps. For instance, a dog does die in the book, but it's not the man's only friend like in the movie, and the woman he meets has a different role and no kid. In some ways I prefer the movie version as the vampire thing seems sort of cheesy and unrealistic. (A plague that causes vampirism? Please.) But the book's interesting and less gimmicky in plot than the movie.

The conference is over -- it was great. Lots of neat people (really, really smart people), some great sessions that will make me a better programmer, and some fantastic new products. I cannot tell you how excited I am about Yuma. It's a PHP replacement built using REALbasic as the language: not only does that make it much easier to program than PHP, but I can reuse existing code to easily turn my RB projects into web apps! Wow.

In other news, the new Association of REALbasic Professonals was formed and I have the honor of being elected as one of the five board members. I guess someone thinks I'm capable of something!

It's now Saturday morning and in an hour I leave for the airport and my flight home. I sure hope it's uneventful. I've had enough travel adventures this time to last me for a long, long time.

Yesterday I got up at 4 a.m. to get ready for my flight to Texas. The news showed a picture of the U.S. with Oregon/Washington and Texas covered with rain clouds. "Great," I thought. "The two places where I'll be today." Well, not so fast. After 90 minutes on the airplane, they kicked us off saying they had canceled the flight: tornadoes in Texas had shut down the Dallas airport. I was now in a queue of hundreds of others trying to make alternative arrangements. American Airlines had no other flights, but after 90 minutes on the phone, I'd managed to get booked on an overnight Delta flight to Atlanta with a connection to Austin (my destination). The Delta flight was leaving San Francisco at 10 p.m. so I flew down there (having to go through Portland security a second time, this time getting a special "extended check") and arrived at 8 p.m. After waiting in the Delta queue, I was told they had my reservation, but needed an actual ticket voucher from American -- so I had to walk 10 minutes to the American queue (two terminals away). When I finally got to a rep there, they gave me a ticket and I went all the way back to Delta, only to have them tell that despite my confirmed reservation, the flight was overbooked my 18 people and there was no way I was getting on that flight. Delta blamed American, American blamed Delta. What a mess!

I had to go all the way back to the American desk, only to find it now swamped with people, where I had to wait in line for an hour to talk to someone. Nice. I'd only been waiting for American reps about four hours all day so far, why not longer? The American rep was nice but couldn't do much: she couldn't even comp me a hotel as supposedly my whole reason for the missed flight was "weather." (I don't agree: they flew me to San Francisco where I would need a hotel when I could have stayed at home for free.) I was booked on a 10 a.m. flight to Chicago today. I made reservations at a local hotel but the free shuttle never arrived. I'd also called a friend who lived nearby -- he was going to meet me at my hotel but since the shuttle wasn't there, he picked me up instead. After checking in to my room, we went out for a late dinner (it was eleven p.m. but he hadn't eaten yet either). I went to bed at midnight quite exhausted.

I arrived in Chicago at five with the anticipation of a four+ hour wait for my 9:30 flight. But looking at the board I saw there was a 5:45 flight to Austin so I wondered if I couldn't be bumped up. I hurried to the gate where the flight was just starting to board. Unfortunately, the standby list for the flight had 40 people on it! I gave up that dream. (There were still 35 on standby for my flight. I overheard someone say it was because so many people were still trying to make up for missed connections due to the original weather delays and cancelations.) So, to end a long adventure, I arrived in Austin at nearly 1 a.m. (our departure from Chicago was delayed by 30 minutes the flight crew was late).

I missed the whole first day of the conference, though it was kinda neat to be able to keep up with news from the conference via twitter and blog and forum posts with my iPhone.

I don't know why I'd never heard of or seen this film, but I liked it. It's about a jaded advertising exec who (for not so nobel reasons) gives his free plane ticket (from his airline client) to a bumped passenger who then dies when the plane crashes. This event sparks a rethink for the ad exec who eventually meets up with the man's widow and falls in love with her and her kids but doesn't tell her he "killed" her husband. What's going to happen when she finds out? It's a little melodramatic, but mostly low-key and nice. Simple. I liked it.

The first samples of my new book, Eating BIG While Eating Lean, have arrived! (I just ordered a couple test books to make sure everything is working correctly.)

The book looks fantastic -- I am very impressed with the print-on-demand quality. I've gone ahead and ordered a bunch more and they should be here in a couple weeks (before the end of the month). You can go ahead and pre-order the book if you'd like: you'll get the digital version immediately and I'll ship the printed copy to you when I get them (end of March). As a reward for ordering early, you'll get a free license to my upcoming nuTracker nutritional management software!

I thought this was a standard bank caper/con job sort of film, but because it's based on a real life story, it's much different. Everything gets really convoluted, just like in real life. Let me see if I can explain the mess. Basically in 1971 the British government tried to prosecute a bad drunk dealer from Trinidad, but he apparently had taken compromising pictures of the royal princess -- thus rendering him immune from prosecution as the govt. couldn't afford to let him release the photos. But MI-6 learns the pictures are in a safety deposit box at a certain bank in London and since they can't do anything official, they recruit a group of semi-criminal losers to rob the bank. The thieves think it's just for the money and know nothing about the photos. Everything goes as planned, to an extent, but then the thieves discover that in the safe deposit boxes are a mobster's account ledgers which incriminate a slew of cops on the take, as well as a madam's compromising video and pictures of some of her high-profile government clients. Everyone wants their stuff back, of course, and suddenly the robbers are being chased by everyone: the cops, the mob, MI-6. It's crazy!

Despite such complexities in plot, the film works -- it's easy to understand what is going on and the complications and problems are hilarious. Excellent film. Not particularly deep, but definitely fun and well-done.

Flashy special effects are at the heart of this film and though the story tries (too) hard to be "important" it's way too generic and the "deep" aspects of the film just come across as silly. That said, it's not that bad a film. The story is simple: a tribe is attacked and their people taken captive, including a girl who is the main character's bride-to-be, so he sets out after them to rescue her. He has adventures along the way, there's action and drama, bla bla bla, he makes friends who help him overthrow the evil emperor, horray for everyone. There's a degree of "mystical" nonsense that plagues the film and that weakens the ending which goes a bit into weird territory with a death that makes no sense, but overall this is a fun film, the special effects are genuinely impressive and worth seeing just for them.

I haven't read the children's book(s) this was based on, so I can't compare, but this is a decent kid-friendly film, though it's not earth-shatteringly original or particularly innovative. It reminded me a lot of Luc Besson's Arthur and the Minimoys (which I actually liked better). In both cases the premise is that we live in a world where we are surrounded by invisible faires and it requires secret knowledge to learn to see them. Spiderwick the film doesn't explain much about these secrets so it's unclear exactly what the main character does, but basically he and his family move into an ancient house of an old aunt and he discovers an old book of secrets protected by a brownie and learns about the world of magical creatures. It turns out there's an even shape-shifting orgre who wants the book so he can take over the world, but the house is protected by a charm. The little boy's family doesn't believe his stories until later, when he and his brother and sister all confront the bad creatures and try to save the book and the family. It's all convoluted and confused; there's no explanation of why the creatures weren't trying to get the book earlier, why the boy can't find help in the book (except when it's convenient for the plot), how he expects to defeat the evil by hiding out in the house, or a million other loose ends, but this is a harmless adventure for kids, so I guess that means logic need not apply. It's still mildly fun, there's a hint of personal growth for the boy as he copes with his parents' divorce, and the digital creatures are interesting, though perhaps too realisitic for really young kids. Overall this isn't terrible nor great; it certainly is nowhere near the story-telling level of the Narnia series or Bridge to Terabithia.