What's John watching?

After the Sunset: I love this movie poster; the movie almost doesn't live up to it, it's so good. But so's the movie, as I'll get to in a second.



Woody Harrelson stole the show as Stan Lloyd! He was phenomenal! At times so desperate, at times so smug, but always real. We could dream of being as good as Max (Pierce Brosnan), but we've all had Stan moments. Scenes with just the two of them were among my favourites: especially that scene where they're out on the fishing boat. Excellent dialogue.

Note: spoilers follow...

I didn't realize that Stan wasn't drunk that night. I noticed that he seemed too with it when Max showed up to crash, but I chalked it up to an editing error. :-) Oh well, it made for a great ending. ¶ 8:13:00 p.m. (0) comments

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Can't find the name of the episode on the Web site; it's the one where the stalker watches his victim through a Web site he created with live feeds from her apartment. It's funny, thanks to the PATRIOT Act, he was a cinch to track down. From that Electronic Privacy Information Center Web page:

Section 210 expands the type of information that a[n Internet service] provider must disclose to law enforcement to include, among other things, records of session times and duration; any temporarily assigned network address; and any means or source of payment. This heightened authority to use subpoenas (rather than court orders) for a broader (and more revealing) class of information is not limited to investigations of suspected terrorist activity.

At most they would've needed the logs from two ISPs: the one hosting the Web site and the one hosting his connection. ¶ 8:25:00 p.m. (0) comments

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Mea Culpa: So, that's what Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) is up to these days, eh? :-) She looked strange as a blonde.

My wife was telling me that young people are flocking to forensic science these days, thanks, at least in part one would think, to this show. It's the show among the university crowd, again, according to her. I guess that was ER when I was in uni; can't believe that show's still on.

I really enjoyed this episode. I don't normally watch it, but now I'm thinkin' it's because I've lumped all these CSIs together, and Horatio (David Caruso) really bugs me; he's so over-the-top, arched eyebrow 'n' all. ¶ 10:10:00 p.m. (0) comments

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason: A number of hide-the-eyes moments, laughs and smiles; much like the first one. I didn't enjoy it as much as the first one, and, as I typically do, I kept myself entertained throughout much of the middle by trying to determine why that was.

I came to the conclusion that a large part of the movie captured a fresh, but not brand new relationship very well. Too well, you might say. The doubts that can plague these relationships don't necessarily make for good cinema. I also concluded that the soundtrack was strange, taking me out of certain moments. It almost seemed that they were looking for opportunities to insert top-40 stuff at every turn. The one place this worked was during the tussle between Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant): The Darkness' I Believe in a Thing Called Love struck just the right chord of madness. :-) ¶ 9:52:00 p.m. (0) comments

The Incredibles: Oh, man, I won't go for the obvious pun, but this was a fantastic movie. And I'm not just talking about the animation - which was incredible... Oh, there, it slipped out - the story, the characters, the dialogue: it was a well-oiled machine, my friends, a tight ship.

It doesn't matter how good your ideas are - and a superhero relocation program is pretty good - if you can't bring the human element to the story, make us really care about what's going on, eventually we'll tune out. (Yes, even when you throw in explosions at ten-minute intervals.) By the 30-minute mark, these characters were human, in my mind. Occasionally I'd take a moment to appreciate the animation - especially around any body of water - but mostly I was just thinking, "Yeah, that's what marriage is like," or, "Yeah, that's the way my little cousin talks about Disney World;" the list goes on and on.

Did anyone else think of those speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi during Dash's (the voice of Spencer Fox) tears through the jungle? :-) I'm sure it was the sound coming from those fantastic hovercraft chasing him, quickly followed by the side-by-side looking at each other as they sped along. :-) Just wicked!

And then, of course, there was the family as the perfect team, their powers complementing each other beautifully. The thoroughly-addicted City of Heroes player in me just reveled in that. That's what makes the game so much fun: teaming with groups that just work. ¶ 10:37:00 a.m. (0) comments

Big Night (1996): I hadn't even heard of this one, but as soon as Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub were billed I knew I was in for a good time. Now I'm no historian, but the illusion of Italian immigrants trying to make it in... 1940s? 1950s? America was complete; as far as I was concerned anyway. And Ian Holm! Is there anything that man can't do? I was convinced that Pascal (Holm) was Italian. Beautiful performance. Well, what I saw of it, anyway: they shut the movie off an hour and a half in, even with another half hour to go in the flight. :-( Oh well, I'll have to rent it; watching this one again would be a treat. ¶ 5:10:00 p.m. (0) comments

Phew! Just poppin' in for a bit, then it's off to the sunny Caribbean! Saw a couple o' flicks on my flight back from two weeks in the U.K.

Spiderman 2: The perfect in-flight movie. In my dozy state, I think I liked it more than the first time. I loved that scene in the bank: funny and action packed. My favourite part was when Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) got hit with the second desk, crashed out the front window of the bank, and then - wait for it - whipped parts of the cab he crashed into back into the bank at Spidey (Tobey Maguire). :-) Wicked stuff.

Other than that, I like how the movie was true to the comic book genre: they cut to the office to show a woman running up to the camera screaming; they have innocent bystanders hauled out of a speeding train and thrown in harm's way. That over-the-top stuff, mixed with stories that teach kids something, is what made comics great, in my mind anyway. ¶ 4:52:00 p.m. (0) comments