Movie Review - The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnasus

Quick review here...

This was Heath Ledger's last movie (he died about 1/3 of the way into filming) so they got creative and finished it out using Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law. These 3 guys actually work in the way they shot it which was very interesting. The movie itself is beautiful, very neat costumes and set designs and interesting concept. It was hard to follow at times and could have used a good bit more back story but the real beauty of this movie was Heath Ledger.

Heath is really shown off in his smallish part, you can see just how good of an actor he was, the Dark Knight really had him hitting his stride and compared to the 3 others that played him only Depp rivaled in performance. I am not a huge Ledger fan but I really began to appreciate his skill in the art of acting in this movie and look forward to seeing some of his other movies that I may have missed.

The story of the movie is also a little creep especially related to Ledger's death, you will have to watch it to find out :)

I give it a Red Box rental because it isn't the type of movie everyone will like but might just be up your ally.

Book Review - The Lost Symbol

Before reading this let us make a quick check list:

Angels and Demons - Read it
The DaVinci Code - Read it

p.s. Don't worry about the movies.

Ok now we are familiar with Dan Brown and his character Robert Langdon, who is the lead role as a Professor of Symbolism who finds his way into crazy situations where he is the only person capable of deciphering symbolic messages. The Lost Symbol doesn't stray from the formula. Unfortunately unlike the story lines where the point of Langdon's adventure makes some kind of sense, this is not the case. The whole story is spurred on by this demi-god-like man who is searching for the lost secret of the Masons. Masonic culture is very richly ingrained in the history of our country so a lot of that aspect of the story was interesting although somewhat fictional I am sure. The part of the book that disappointed me was the villain who gives himself several different names throughout the story. He believes that there is a magical power that will turn him into an all powerful god, and you know right then that this story is going to be a let down because it is spurred on by some moron who thinks there is magic, you know there won't be any magic.

So while the story still has the excitement of the chasing and puzzles, the expected end result of the villain isn't even plausible, so you know it is all a waste of time. There isn't even a great moral victory for the end, no new knowledge or anything. The only positive part of the story line was the beliefs of the Masons and how they view religion (all which could have been learned by looking at their Wikipedia page I am sure).

I would not recommend reading this, if you really feel the need to do so get it from the library for FREE it is not worth paying any money for. The only thing that kept me going was the hope that maybe I was wrong...but I wasn't. I really hope this isn't made into a movie, it would be a gigantic waste of time and money and you are better than that Tom Hanks.

Movie Review - Alice in Wonderland

I could go on for a very long time about this one. I REALLY enjoyed it! To keep it quick, I was very nervous because it is technically a sequel to the original story, normally that means FAIL. I thought they did a very good job with it though. The characters were great, a lot of CG and Mr. Depp too. Depp was not amazing in my mind, the breakout was Alice herself. She did a wonderful job. This will definitely be a buy for me when it comes out. There is no reason to see it in 3D...I hate this 3D fad, it is stupid...most of these movies are not shot to be in 3D they just "can be 3D" where something like Avatar was shot to be specifically in 3D. One of the best movies I have seen in a long time.

Movie Review - The Box

The Box had all the potential to be a great thriller/scary movie. My dear god did they screw that up. It is a very mysterious story where they could have taken it in a really interesting direction but instead it kind of went no where and eventually involved some kind of aliens and/or a government conspiracy. The thing is that by the end you still had no idea what was going on because they only explained like half of it. PLEASE DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE.

Movie Reviw - Where the Wild Things Are

Disappointing is a good way to describe this movie. We all know that the book is probably one of the best literary works of all time so the movie had a lot to live up to. It is always a bit difficult to take a 10-20 page childrens book and turn it into a full length feature film, and this one fell short. It felt more like a commercial for kids who have ADHD than a movie. Max who is the main boy clearly has issues instead of just doing something bad and being sent to bed without dinner, he basically goes crazy and runs away. The story then goes a bit long and it does make sense but it just doesn't hold that wonderment the book did. The thing that finally turned it from "ok" to not great was when one of the wild things ripped off an arm from one of the other wild things, it just didn't seem to fit in with my memory of the book.

This brings up something that has always bothered me, is the telling of these children's classics in full length movies...they just don't do the original work justice. The only one that really has so far that I can remember is Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but in order to make that work they basically told a different story. Not everything needs to be made into a movie, it isn't always the best idea...

If I see a smurfs movie being made I think I might die

First Day of Spring

This picture turned out really well! It is even better when it is regular size. We took the little guy to the beach this weekend, not for us to go swimming but to see how he did with the scary waves. He did really well, had to be on leash though so that meant someone had to go into the water with him...FREEZING COLD (as expected), but he really enjoyed himself. He liked walking on the sand and the waves were fun to run away from and then jump over. I love the picture because he is so crisp and clear and his normally blank mind seems to be showing a lot of thought (probably something along the lines of "my balls would have frozen if I still had them"). The beach was in Brigantine, NJ which is the town directly north of Atlantic City (which was on fire by the way) and driving in I was not expecting much...seemed pretty trashy. Once we got past A.C. it was a nice little town and the beach was very wide so hopefully somewhere we can go later in the summer. One thing N.J. likes to do is to charge you to use the beaches so that kind of sucks...we did not pay to go on there today!

Once we got back to the apartment and dropped off the now sleepy puppy we hit Rita's Italian Ice for the annual Free Rita's on the first day of spring and we plan on hitting it again after dinner :)

The Art of Shaving

I was given a gift card to the (at the time very new) retail store "The Art of Shaving" about 2 years ago. It was a very exciting gift as I had talked about wanting to get a straight razor shave...like the good ol' days. So long story short there aren't many locations and the only one around here is the one in downtown Philly. We had stopped by once before and at that point they didn't always have the "barber spa" available only on certain days so we struck out that day. Now they have it all the time and we went in without an appointment just going to buy some product to use and we were pleasantly surprised that I could get something done! So I chose a traditional shave which for me meant trimming my beard and shaving my neck with the razor. This included hot towels, cold towels, lotions, hot shaving cream and god knows what else as I was border line asleep once that hot towel hit my face. I COMPLETELY recommend for any guy to get this done at least once in your life...even if u get your whole face done. It is an amazingly relaxing experience and after you really feel like a million bucks.

I still have $20 on my gift card and I am debating between 2 things. While being unemployed I have though about shaving my head completely bald and that is a service the Art provides so I am toying with that just to see what it looks like and the other option is to purchase a straight razor of my own. They last for as long as you take care of them so you never have to buy new blades but they are a bit pricey to start out (saves you money in the long run) and I would have to teach myself how to do it (and be VERY careful!).

Check out The Art of Shaving, their products are pricey but their services are really fun to try!

Resolutions

The start of a new year is always a good time to really take an inventory of your life and see what you want to change. I am not a big resolution guy but I do know the things about me that I would like to change and I like setting up starting points for goals.

1. The holidays messed with getting to the gym with the weird work schedule and the trips so getting back to the gym is at the top of the list. Luckily I was able to regulate and control myself somewhat during the holiday eating season so I didn't really gain any weight!

2. As some of you know I am not the most hygiene oriented person out there so I am working on that.

3. Keeping a "want to buy" list which will double as a birthday/xmas gift list over the whole year so when it comes time for gift ideas BOOM here is the list.

That is about it though, nothing really huge just back to a regulated schedule, gradually working on each one. Once I get moving I set up goals and so on! Hopefully I get a full time regular working hour job too, but that is just a dream and we will have to see.

Christmas Breakdown

The holidays are finally over! Not that they were bad but just VERY busy. We had 2 weekends of visits to our families which was on top of me working the holiday retail rush. We had a good time but the retail portion really screwed things up and made it much more hectic, having to rush back to get to work. I don't think I'll be doing retail next holiday season, it just isn't worth it (for what I was getting paid) to mess with the holiday planning as much as it did. Thankfully we are pretty flexible and have some flexible family.

We got lots of fun gifts, and we are enjoying everything, thank you to all of you (probably the only ones reading this)! I am currently enjoying a delicious pot of coffee from my new coffee maker, it is like having my own coffee shop in our apartment! Aston and Kami are loving their gifts, Aston is loving Kami's as well (we have already lost 2 or 3 of hers to him). I also got a good bit of help paying for this new computer and Angela will be buying her hair straightener this weekend we hope!

I am continuing to work at Best Buy part time (no more than 20 hours per week) which will keep me getting my discount and enough money each month to pay my bills and hopefully build a little savings back up. So I will be doing that for as long as I can put up with it, but I am applying for jobs again too! So that is where we are at post-holiday season, hope you all had a good one too.

Movie Review - Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

We watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs last night. Let me start this off by telling you how much I loved this book when I was younger, one of my all time favorites. So when I saw that the movie was coming out I was excited UNTIL I saw how extremely different the story was going to be. I was turned off by it and didn't think I would like it but I was wrong! It was wonderfully cute, the voice acting was spot on and it was cartoony (didn't try and be too realistic). They added enough back story to make the changes to the real story work. It is very difficult to make a book with probably less than 20 pages into a full length movie and a lot of the time it doesn't really work out but this isn't one of those, it really did work. I would definitely recommend renting it, probably not a buy unless you have kids (kids would love it) but still a nice light hearted fun movie!

Windows 7 Review

Now that I have been using Windows 7 for about a month(ish) I can safely say that it is a huge huge improvement over Windows Vista.

Visually they are twins it is the behind the scenes functionality that really makes it work well. It is much more efficiently. They made some more "improvements" with features like windows snap anda multi-tasking feature where you can shake the window you want to concentrate on and all of the other windows will minimize automatically. Windows Snap is a feature where you can drag one window to the side of the screen and then another one you want to focus on to the other side and they will automatically re-size to each share half the screen. These couple of additions aren't crucial to using a computer but if you find them useful they are at least available now.

The other big improvement has nothing to do with Windows at all, it is the technology that is coming in the computers now (as standard). The amount of RAM and processing speed has caught up with what Vista really needed to run well so 7 running more efficiently is even better. BVista wasn't so much a piece of crap as it came out much earlier than it should have (as far as technology restraints are concerned) and it didn't DO anything worth the while. Now the other thing and this is kind of the real definition of 7 is that they basically give you options now for how annoying you want the computer to be. For example in Vista EVERY time you did anything it would ask you if you really wanted to do it but now you have the choice to turn those notification on or off and do it based on what those actions are.

So Windows 7 is basically an apology for Vista, it is nothing amazing but it is what Vista should have been. I do not recommend spending the money to upgrade from Vista or XP (mostly because a new computer wouldn't be too expensive) and it just isn't that great to pay at least $100 (depending on the version and what you are upgrading from).