Movie Marathon

I gave Blockbuster $15 on Friday, July 17, for the privilege of watching as many movies as I want for a week, checking out two at a time. So I've been having a bit of a movie marathon this week. I've certainly gotten my money's worth:

Knowing (Nicholas Cage): Freakin' intense! Do not watch this alone or before you go to bed; this is the stuff that nightmares are made of. The story is compelling and intense, and punctuated by horrifically realistic and realistically horrific scenes of death and destruction: a jumbo jet crashes in the country, a subway at high speed derails and crashes through a subway station filled with people, and ultimately . . . well, I don't want to give away the ending, because it isn't what you expect to happen. It was a good story, but I won't be watching this again.

Zombie Strippers (Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson): Another in a long line of great, low-budget, campy zombie movies. If you liked Shaun of the Dead or Night of the Living Dorks or Evil Dead 2, you'll get a kick out of this one.

Religulous (Bill Maher): What Michael Moore does to conservativism, Bill Maher does to religion. If you don't like Bill Maher, you won't like this movie. I enjoyed it. I thought it interesting, though, that, out of all the purveyors of all the religions that Maher interviews, the Catholics come out seeming like the most down-to-earth and reasonable.

Burn After Reading (Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton): You've gotta love the Cohen Brothers. They're plots go together like Celtic Knots, and are even more interesting to look at. One of the things that I think sets them apart is that they aren't afraid to suddely kill off major characters, completely obliterating any idea you might have about the "happy ending" just before the credits role.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett):
After watching Burn After Reading, I realized how much I enjoy so much of Brad Pitt's work: Fight Club, Ocean's Eleven, The Mexican,
Twelve Monkeys, The Devil's Own, Thelma & Louse, even Mr. and Mrs. Smith. So I got this one with Brad and my favorite Cate, and was surprised to see Tilda Swinton pop up again. This is a wonderful movie for both the story and the acting. For my money, this movie should have gotten the hype and accolades given Titanic so many years ago.

Taken (Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen): I'm not sure Liam Neeson was the best casting choice for this movie. (A decade ago the role would have been filled by Harrison Ford.) I'm not sure who else I would have cast, though. Neeson certainly did a good job with the role as a retired "preventer" — a Bond-esque U.S. government agent who, according to the character, prevents bad things from happening — who has to save his 17-year-old daughter from the black market sex trade in Paris. It is a nice action-packed movie, and anything with Famke Janssen in it is worth watching. I give it OK.

The Savages (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney): I just love Laura Linney, so you'll never hear me say anything really bad about anything she's in. This was a touching, sad movie about love, hope, death, and family that follows these two siblings as they come together around their absentee father who is descending into old age and dementia. This is one of those movies that should be re-watched about every decade, because it will mean someething different to you as you change and grow older and more experienced. This time around, listening to Linney and Hoffman argue and laugh makes me miss my brother.

The Reader (Kate Winslet): This is a good, thought-provoking story. I don't understand why the movie was so long, though, or why they needed to jump around in time so much. It's just your average illiterate Nazi ethical conundrum winter-spring romance. And within the first half hour of the movie, you get to see every part of Kate Winslet's bare body, including the bottoms of her feet, her furry armpits, and the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. (Not that I'm complaining; I'm a big fan of naked women on film.) So, all in all, a good film, but it could have used a lot less brooding.

12 Rounds (John Cena — not to be confused with Michael Cera...huge difference): This could have been a great, exciting movie, along the lines of Speed, if only they could have gotten (a) Matt Damon to play the protagonist, instead of John Cena, who just looks like Matt Damon on steroids; and (b) Ed Norton to play the antagonist, instead of some unshaven guy who kind of looks like Ed Norton, but doesn't act as well — though he acted circles around John Cena. This is the kind of movie to watch on Fox on a Sunday afternoon, when the only other thing on TV is golf, infomercials, and political roundtables.

Role Models (Seann Michael Scott, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks): Maybe it's because I totally connect with his character, but I think Paul Rudd is just outstanding in this movie. With SM Scott in it, I was expecting something along the lines of American Pie, but instead I got something closer to Office Space, so I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. And this is one DVD that has some good deleted scenes that are worth watching, instead of a bunch of scenes that got cut just because they weren't very good. The movie poster might remind you of Adam Sandler's Big Daddy, but don't let it fool you; this is a much better movie.

Traitor (Don Cheadle): I think Don Cheadle is a great actor, but I don't think this was the best movie to show off his skills. It certainly had suspense, and tension, and excitement, but I think the moral of the story got in the way of the story. Don Cheadle plays a devout Muslim trying to stop Muslim terrorists from the inside. Throw in a devout Baptist FBI agent who doesn't know Samir (Cheadle) is undercover, and you've got a movie about how Christians and Muslims can work together for the greater good. Unfortunately, I was expecting a movie about espionage and terrorism. I also don't think that "Traitor" was the best title for this movie.

Network (Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Robert Duvall): This movie from the late '70s is a little weird, in the sense that you'll want to watch it again after it's over to see if you really saw what you think you saw. It's a story about a television network that will do anything to get ratings. On a larger scale, it's about the things that we'll do for love. This is the "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore" movie, and there's a lot of other great, though completely unrealistic, dialogue. This is one movie that everyone should see at least once.

So there you have it: Twelve movies totaling about 24 hours of Hollywood magic. Now I need to actually get some things done.

A New Web Site!

This morning, I moved my Web site off of Geocities and onto my new domain, InfiniteCadenza.com.

I registered the domain and bought some space on GoDaddy's servers. They advertised a nice monthly price for Web hosting and gave me a discount on the domain registration for getting it and the hosting at the same time. Unexpectedly, even though GoDaddy shows you a monthly rate, they don't take monthly payments — I had to pay it all up front. Not exactly a bait and switch, but, as I said, unexpected.

Still, I'm excited about the new site!

One Small Bonus for Man, One Giant Bill for Mankind

My annual bonus was deposited in my checking account early this morning. The bonus itself is based on last year's performance, from the performance of the company as a whole down to my own personal performance. These economic times being what they are, this year's bonus is relatively low, but still, it's nice to have this little budgetary boost in the middle of summer.

This year's bonus payment will be put to good use:

• Some of it will go to repay the cost of my recent trip to Santa Claus, Indiana. I schedule my summer vacation based on when I expect my bonus to come in so that I know I can pay for it. This year's bonus came a week later than I thought it would.
  
• I'm going to get a new mattress. I may just get it from Big Lots, but I certainly won't start there. Even if I crawl into bed at midnight, it can still take an hour or so for me to be comfortable enough to fall asleep. I blame the mattress and not the caffeine. [Update 7/13/19: I'd forgotten how expensive mattresses were. Or maybe I just assumed that sleep technology, like every other type of technology, would come down in price over time. Not the case. A nice mattresses is now easily more expensive than your standard home PC. It'll have to wait.]
  
• I'll pay off my speeding ticket.
  
• I'll get a new mouthpiece for my clarinet. My current mouthpiece was purchased in 1993 and is quite a ways along on the slow trip to greenness. I'll likely end up with a Vandoren M15 Profile 88, for the few of you (okay, one if I'm lucky) who are interested in such things.
• I need to get a new cell phone. My other one disappeared about two months ago. I keep expecting it to pop up somewhere, but Murphy's Law dictates that I won't find it until I buy a new one.
  
• I'll buy a domain name and some Web hosting space from GoDaddy. This is the least expensive (at least in initial cost) but most exciting thing on my list. I have to move my current site off of Yahoo!'s Geocities, which is closing down in October. I'm taking this opportunity to remake the site, learning a lot about CSS in the process, and I have the structure, all of the main pages, and most of the sub-pages already put together and ready to go. And I've already picked out the perfect (and available) domain name for it. (I don't want to publish that domain name here because someone could beat me to it and then try to sell it to me at 50 times the price I can get it for now, but certainly I'll post here when it goes live.)
  

I haven't done all the precise math, but what's left of my bonus combined with my federal tax refund ought to leave me with enough extra padding in my checking account to keep me from worrying at least until the school year starts up again.

Holiday World/Splashin’ Safari 2009

The boys and I journeyed to Santa Claus, Indiana, early Wednesday afternoon. We arrived at the Lake Rudolph Campground & RV Resort, where I had reserved a tenting site. I hadn't been to a campground since I was little, traveling with my parents to spend two weeks in Colorado with my maternal grandparents and great grandfather. That was a while ago. I didn't really expect that we'd be on our own, out in the woods, surviving by our wits and guile — after all, the Web site advertises water and electric hookups for the RVs. I forgot what "amenities" really meant in this situation, though: swimming pool, a couple of playgrounds, boat rental, a camp store full of crap, a game room. And in this case, golf cart rentals (which I didn't use) and free WiFi (which I did). If you're a camping purist, you wouldn't like it. If you like the outdoors and want to save some money, it's just the right thing.

Santa Claus, Indiana, is a small country town, but without the town and without the country. It's the exact opposite of the suburbs that I have gotten (perhaps too) used to: A gas station, a hardware store, a pizza shop, a sandwich shop, and a grocery store. Note the use of the indefinite article a, signifying singularity. There were no superfluous retail shops: not the familiar drug stores on opposite corners; no gas wars between Shell and Speedway; no used car dealership; no five "Starbuckses" (not even one!). Maybe there was more to Santa Claus than just what I saw, but we came in from the north and didn't see anything. When we left the campground to find some dinner, I went west and didn't see anything. The next morning, looking for a nice breakfast, I went south, toward the border with Kentucky, and passed through two small towns before I turned around empty-handed. Our breakfast came from the gas station's convenience store.

Just about the only reason anyone would ever go to Santa Claus, Indiana, is for Holiday World/Splashin' Safari. And I guess that suits the locals fine enough. That's the only reason we went there.

We were waiting at the gates when Holiday World opened the next morning at 10:00 our time (because this is one area of Indiana that, for some reason, chose to follow central time). A note to parents and grandparents: If you make this an early-morning trip so you can be there when they open, Kringle's Cafe, near the front entrance, is the only place that offers coffee, which is included in HW's free unlimited beverages.

We spent nearly the entire overcast day in the Splashin' Safari section of the park, which amounts to a large water park within a park. I won't get into the specifics of the rides, except to say that Bakuli was my favorite, if only for the ingenious design of it. Here are a few of my observations overall, though:

• The water: Was damn cold!
  
• The hair: We weren't there long before I noticed the remarkable (and, in my opinion, alarming) number of mohawk haircuts. Most of them were on young men between the ages of, say, eight and twelve. But I did notice at least one mohawked man in his late teens or early twenties.
  
• The illustrations: Never before have I seen such a collection of tattoos! (Not to mention various facial and nipple piercings.) Apparently, the management of the park noticed, too, because they included "offensive body art" on their list of park no-nos. One man had his entire back done up in what looked like a symmetrical skull, though I suspect that, on closer inspection, the image was actually made up of a number of smaller items arranged to look like a skull from a distance.
  
• The attire: The water park was filled with hard bodies, soft bodies, thin bodies, thick bodies, bony bodies, and blubber bodies, all in various swimwear. There were a lot of bikinis there; I can see why a teenage boy would want to get a summer job there. Not all of the bikini'ed guests were, shall we say, enriching the aesthetics of the locale, but many a young, tanned lady showed her soft flesh. It made me glad I don't have daughters.
  
• The staff: I know my boys probably didn't really appreciate this, but I was impressed by the enthusiasm of the park staff. The rides weren't manned by the indifferent, dull-faced teenagers that you might find at some other theme parks (and here I'm recalling our trip to Indiana Beach two years ago) or worse — the shirtless, chain-smoking, carny wannabes that show up at the state fair midway each year. The staff at HW smiled and interacted with the guests. At the bottom of each water attraction, a staff member was there to help us out of whatever inflated flotation device had transported us through watery twists and turns, and more often than not, we were met with a smile and either a question about how the ride was or encouragement to enjoy the rest of our day at the park. Maybe this was because my two boys were just so cute, but I'll assume that this was standard practice. As both a parent and a guest, I really appreciated the friendliness of the staff.
  
• The lines: Weren't horrible, especially in the morning. They got longer as the day went on and the temperature rose. I had forgotten that I don't really do great with heights until we were stuck in line for the Zoombabwe.
  
• The worst thing about the park: Since we went on the second day of July, I assumed that the weather would be, well, July weather. Turns out that temperatures were uncommonly low, and the sky was overcast until after 4:00. I hadn't bothered packing any towels, figuring we would dry off in the sun and breeze between rides, which generally we did. But with the cold water combined with the cold air, it wasn't enough. So, I bought a towel. A nice, embroidered towel the color of canteloupe meat that we could use to dry off a bit, but mostly to keep warm, and that would serve as a souvenir to remind us of our splendid vacation. I didn't have it for long; someone stole it while we were waiting in line for a ride.
  

Holiday World has some great things going for it. The free unlimited beverages were great, and we were never far from either a restroom or a drink station. The drinks were all Pepsi products, but I was glad to see that dieters weren't as limited in their drink choice as they would be at a standard fast food restaurant. The free sunblock was a nice touch, too — I just wish I would have used more of it. The prices for food were high, as expected, but not movie-theater high, not totally exorbitant. The price to get into the park wasn't so bad, either. I know we certainly got our money's worth. We might even go back next year.

Nerdgasm Denouement: Galactic Adventures Review

Yesterday after work, I called the local GameStop and had them put on hold the very last copy they had of Spore: Galactic Adventures. I took the short journey over there and traded in two games (GTA: San Andreas for the PS2, which I was hiding from the children and forgot about when I traded in my PS2 so very long ago; and SimCity Creator for the Wii, which was an extreme let-down after SimCity 2000 on the PC), which covered about 65% of the cost of Galactic Adventures.

Spore: Galactic Adventures extends Spore's Space Stage to incorporate some of the types of interactions you knew from the Tribal Stage, and then some. In the original Spore, you might be sent on a mission to some lightly-guarded planet to retrieve a statue or a scroll, and you'd fly your ship over to it and beam it up. With Galactic Adventures, you don't beam it up, you beam yourself down.

Loading the game took a while — of course, you have to load the updates for Spore first before you can load the expansion pack — but I was expecting that. It gave me a chance to do something I rarely do: peruse the instruction manual. (I was happy with the effects of the recent updates, by the way: the regular game seemed to run more smoothly.) So I was ready to go when it finished loading.

First up was the basic tutorial, which was almost completely outside the regular game. What I found was a Second-Life-like town inhabited by talking bunnies, ugly aliens, and a reptilian mayor. My first reaction was mild chagrin. Not because of anything in the game itself, but because of how slow everything was running. The characters were choppy and slow to react. I had encountered this before on this computer — it comes and it goes — but I was hoping, just hoping . . . Anyone out there know which settings can give me the best boost?

But I ventured on. After the tutorial, I ventured into Spore space. I retrieved, at great risk to Captain Blurbius Maximus, the Golden Llama; and I dispatched a horrible beast that was terrorizing a village nightly. And it was all seamlessly incorporated into the regular gameplay. It would have been great fun if I had a faster computer, but I enjoyed it all the same.

I read about but haven't yet tried the adventure editor. One can create one's own adventure — creating buildings, terrain, creatures, and puzzles from scratch — and publish it online so other Spore users can have a go at it. Like I said, I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds an awful lot like a fun version of Second Life, but without all the geometry. This total customization offers great promise.

I have great hopes for Spore in the future. At one point in the game, I visited a spaceport, with all sorts of aliens wandering about and muttering to themselves. Add a multiplayer online feature, and these "spaceports" could take on a Second Life social quality. Imagine seamlessly going from the game to an online 3-D interactive space and back again! Pretty soon, we'd see users creating new gear, new color combinations, etc. and marketing those wares online (which, in my experience, was about the only thing you could do on Second Life without forking over the monthly fee). Soon after that, you could go on missions created and posted by other users and, again, it would be seamlessly integrated into your personal gameplay.

But that's the future of Spore, not the present. Needless to say, I like the direction that it's taking. Whereas Second Life was a great-looking car with no engine, Spore is a great engine, and now they're building a great car around it. If they keep it up, it'll go far.

In short, if you enjoy Spore, and if your computer has decent processing capabilities, it's worth the $30 to get Spore: Galactic Adventures.

Oh, and Second Life sucks.

Nerdgasm: Spore Expansion Pack!!!

I just learned today that a Spore expansion pack hits shelves TODAY! According to the Spore Web site:

Get out of your starship and turn your Spore creatures into legendary Space Captains. For the first time, beam down with your allies to take on action-packed, planetside adventures. Complete quests, collect rewards, and even create and share your own missions!

They also offer some "free" adventures from the creators of Robot Chicken. In this case, "free" means you have to have a valid EA account. Don't know if it's worth it. But the expansion pack definitely is!

The Spore folks know what they're doing: Make a great game, and then keep making it greater.

(You know, I still haven't taken on the Grox and defeated the original version of this game, even though I've spawned species on no fewer than ten planets. Maybe I ought to concentrate on that before dropping the dime on this expansion pack. And then there's the issue of whether to start buying expansion packs for Civilization IV — something that was on my Father's Day wish list. [But I'm not complaining about the Wii Fit! {How deep can I allow my parenthetical statements to go? (I mean, really?!)}] Speaking of the Wii, I can only hope that we'll eventually see a Wii version of Spore that'll let me access my regular online Spore account without paying through the nose. Would I ever leave the house again?)

Father's Day 2009

This year's Father's Day gathering was Friday night, when everyone was available. Thanks to my children (and the ex) for a Wii Fit. I've done quite a bit of sweating this weekend, and hopefully this will give me the motivation I need to get my stuff together and really start to get healthy. Or at least healthier.

Father's Day itself was pretty boring. Started the day at the laundromat with four loads. Went out and saw Year One (wait for the DVD — the funniest bits were in the commercials). Was basically lazy all day.

Which isn't a horrible thing.

Google Analytics: Chasing Readers

Last week, while meandering through my Blogger account settings, I found a link to sign up for Google Analytics. I gave it a try. I was surprised by the depth and breadth of data that Google Analytics could give me about who visits my blogs and how they get there (and how long they stay). The most surprising thing, though, was that someone out there is actually reading my blogs! Since I don't think my mother is visiting this blog twice a day, every day, there must be a few other surfers out there who've found my stuff. A few bloggers have even included my other Logophilius blog in their blogrolls. Yeah for me!

Google Analytics also shows what search terms a person who found my blog put in before they ended up here. As it turns out, a lot of people are still wondering about Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" lyrics, because a lot of people land in this blog on my blog post about "Chasing Cars" after a Google search. (And now that I've mentioned "Chasing Cars" [three times!] in this post, some of those surfers will find their way to this post, too, and hopefully follow the link to the original post above.)

That's kind of sad, though. I was hoping that the less pedestrian of my posts — like my review of Man Without a Country, or my experiences with Henoch-Schönlein Purpura, or even the weekend I spent figuring out how to work my camera — would be more attractive than a piddling discussion of some song lyrics.

Looking back, though, the greatest portion of my blog posts are pedestrian. Maybe you should jump over to Logophilius to find something with more teeth.

Addictions

Summertime means having more free time than I am accustomed to. My Facebook friends have unwittingly presented me with addictive substances that quickly eat up all that extra time.

First, it was Bejeweled Blitz. Tonight, it's Farkle. Facebook itself is its own source of addiction.

When will I ever get something done?

Right after another game of Farkle!

Little Boys and Their Urine

The two Hollandbeck boys are spending the week with my parents. Yesterday, I received the following message from my mother:

Conversation from back of the car on the way home from fun, fun time at M'ville Park. I hope this sounds as funny written out as it was to hear.

Hollandbeck the Younger: E spinned me so hard on the tire swing I almost peed my pants.

The rest of the conversation is whispered.

Hollandbeck the Elder: Did you really pee your pants?
Y: A little bit.
E. How much?
Y: Maybe an inch.
E: That's not how you measure pee.
Y: How do you?
E: In cups. Did you pee a cup?
Y: What size cup?

After that we got a lesson in pints, quarts, and gallons.

Has Christopher Guest started scripting outings in our family?