
Matrix Regurgitated Yawn.
Return of the King Vaguely disappointing, though beautiful and worth seeing anyway. I didn't hate it as much as the first nor love it as much as the second. Very disappointed at how the drama of the actual return of the king was completely obliterated, followed immediately by the cheesiest effects in the whole series. Minas Tirith was lovely, though.
That's about it for recent stuff. Too stressed out to see any grownup movies lately. I've been enjoying the first Rocky & Bullwinkle DVD, which almost compensates for the complete lack of new Power Puff Girls releases since their fiasco of a feature movie. It's almost enough to motivate a guy to get a television.
Anyway, I'm reading E.O.Wilsons Consilience, and it turns out that this Matrix fantasy wasn't even a new idea when Philip Dick came up with it in the 70s. (My favorite instance of this paranoid worldview is Dick's book Ubik.)
Quoth Wilson "Louis Agassiz,
Well, here it is. Why did I mod that "redundant"? Well, see the followup posting? There was no "ripoff" choice.
It at first appears that a perfectly reasonable article has been reposted by some toad looking for karma points and reposted in another thread. But, um, it was posted by an AC. So who knows why this thing got posted. Anyway, it's noise.
I propose that moderators be allowed to place a comment on their mods, for the benefit of metamoderators only.
Down With Love Silly, but that is as it should be, and visually brilliant. Worth seeing on the big screen. Worth seeing twice. Four quacks. It is absolutely astonishing that this woman played Bridget Jones. Not just a chick flick. This is the most fun I've had at the movies in a while.
Anger Management Not Jack at his best, despite what the blurbs say. Diverting and funny but basically silly despite some pretension at wisdom. Saved by great work by Sandler, but badly damaged by a celebration of violence near the end. Three quacks with a demerit.
Bruce Almighty Nice to see a hint of the old schmaltzy Hollywood sincerity coming back, though it slows the thing down toward the end. The first half is every bit as funny as you hoped, though. Three quacks.
X2 Unlike Matrix Reloaded, not burdened by pretension. Loads of fun from start to finish. Three quacks.
Matrix Reloaded What's the point? You'll see it and convince yourself it's profound anyway. Nice explosions and outer limits kung fu scenes do not rescue this story from being a pompous muddle. Barely rates two quacks, at $80 million per quack.
Adaptation If you were Douglas Hofstadter you would think this movie was conscious. If you were a paid film critic you would think it was original and clever. If you were a novice and had two days to come up with a screenplay, you would think this was embarassing. Nicely executed, but sometimes recursion just isn't all that interesting. Two quacks.
Still (about three months and four tries later) haven't managed to get my Windows boxes talking to the wireless network.
I need Windows to support my customers' needs, but if Virtual PC works well enough I may abandon Intel hardware altogether. The lesson here may be that Apple had it right all along - hardware/software integration. If I get back into the climate business I thinking about advocating an FPGA approach for similar reasons.
I need to write code and test commercial software, not do mysterious try-and-try-again sysadmin stuff. What a waste of brain cells! Small shops, even highly technical ones, do not need this sort of time sink.
I've read Friedman's Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, and found it to be an excellent exposition. It's been very valuable to me as I try to move form being an academic to being a businessman. I also think it's deeply, fundamentally wrong at the macro level, no matter how insightful it is at the micro level.
I appreciate your recommendation and will probably read the book you suggest, but I'm unlikely to be convinced by it.
The wrongness of radical capitalism as a complete organizing principle for society, as I see it, arises from several fundamental areas:
I would welcome commentary on these points, if only because that would mean someone besides myself was reading them.
Croupier I saw it. I sort of enjoyed it. Even crazy people in British films sometimes seem saner to me than normal Americans, somehow. Unfortunately, not only did I fail to follow all the plot twists, as far as I could tell from a web search for good spoilers, nobody else could either. So you're left feeling sort of unsatisfied by the whole thing. On the whole, one thumb up, one down.
The Core Saw this in the theater for some damfool reason. Go see the trailer, it had all the money shots in it. The story was every bit as stupid as you expected and then some. If you're over 10 you will be bored. If you're over 12 you'll probably see everything coming a mile off. The hotpockets joke wasn't that funny the fifth time. Avoid.
You have a massage (from the Swedish prime minister).