If you avoid only one movie this year..

Avoid “Trust the man” : P I was forced into watching this movie by my girlfriend, and while I was expecting pleasantly packaged chick-fluff, what I got was a movie that was so poorly made, I was able to pretty much “armchair screenwriter” all of it.. and that’s saying a lot because I’ve never made any effort to learn about the “technical” side of making/writing a movie.

Primary reasoned it sucked major balls:

Most classical plays/movie use a “3 Act” format (and I’m paraphrasing here) in the first act, life would be merry and all the characters would be introduced in ways that will make the audience become interested in following their stories. Act two will usually involve a crisis which sends the protagonist/other character’s lives into upheaval/other bad-juju. Finally, act three will see the protagonist/who-the-fuck-ever find a resolution to the crisis and ultimately everything will turn out hunky dory in the end, and GI Joe will say “..and now you know, and knowing is half the battle.” ‘THE END.’

Well not this fucking movie. The movie was 93 minutes. Over an hour of that was spent “introducing” me to the characters. IMHO – one of the finer points of a (good) movie is that every character has some kind of “hook” that creates interest in them within the first minute they’re on screen.. sometimes they’re not even doing anything interesting, but by virtue of badass acting I think great actors can bring even banal scenes to life.

So you know you’re in for a shitty movie when an hour has gone by and none of the characters has done anything to capture your attention at all. Sitting around watching people be boring.. hmm.. sounds like the monthly business meetings I have to attend, but at least I’m getting paid for those.

Probably the saddest note here is that David Duchovny was in this movie. Those X-Files royalty checks must not be adjusting well for inflation, because time was when he would have had higher standards than to have gotten involved in this stinker. Yet I digress. I know life as a star is hard.. or at least I can imagine.. I mean here you are one day on a yacht, snorting coke off the backs of supermodels with X-Files bikinis on, and the next day, all the money has run out and the bank is threatening to foreclose on your 5 million Malibu beach house. So you call up Ari the agent, and ask him what he’s got for you, and you get offered an indie flick written by Diablo Cody’s 12-year old crack dealer that’s “already creating a lot of buzz for sundance”, and you look wistfully at your drydocked yacht and, with a crestfallen sigh, you say “I’ll take it..”

Everyone else in the movie was mostly forgettable. I will give credit to Juliana Moore though. In the scenes she had with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character, her character was almost believable.. but that was probably just due to the fact my cat is more believable as a human being than Maggie Gyllenhaal.

So this is my sarcastic movie review for the year. I’d probably never post a movie review longer than a paragraph if a movie was good, but this movie wasted an hour-and-a-half of my life, so I figured I’d go for the 2-hour coup de grace, and write a blog entry about it.

p.s. on this same kind of note – does anyone else have MAJOR reservations that HULK is going to be a complete waste of 9 bucks? : P

p.p.s. can you tell I only got 4 hours of sleep last night due to my dumbass cat scratching my door last night? ; P

The greatest laptop I’ve ever seen

http://zaverio.org/laptop/legnatile/tn/01l.jpg.html

The guy makes some pretty crazy desktops too..

http://zaverio.org/

Standing next to a mountain

I started reading “Joel On Software” today and I can finally understand why people follow blogs daily now.

Reading this guy’s blog was seriously a life-changing event.

I don’t like to tip my hat when it comes to my plans for the future, because it just seems kind of “vaporware”ish to do that, but in this case I think it’s warranted.

For a fairly long while now, I’ve wanted to become a programmer. Specifically, a game programmer, if possible, but I’m a pragmatist and would gladly settle for being a “Yet another accounting app that connects to a database” programmer.. but hopefully not a web programmer/developer, because I’m the one geek on earth who doesn’t find that shit glamorous.. at all.

I like to be prepared before making any big decisions, so I’ve read a few sites regarding above-mentioned-career, and even went to the Game Developer’s Conference last fall. However, it’s usually hard to find someone who is a veteran in the (programming) field who runs a site dedicated to straight-talk about the industry and the requirements to be successful in it. Enter Joel Spolsky.

After reading his site, and the thorough discourse on “why Java (which is the main language taught at most universities) won’t really teach you in-depth Computer Science fundamentals” I realized there might have been a little hubris in my attitude, and assessment of my own “IT” knowledge up to this point. Sure, I’m pretty competent in ANSI-92 SQL and Bash scripting, but how much do I really know about the really conceptual stuff.. like stacks and pointers and recursion? More importantly, do I have the capacity to learn things like that?

I felt a dizzying blow to my self-confidence, and questioned my choice to go to school full-time this fall. In more metaphorical terms, I’d just climbed mount everest only to see another, far, far greater mountain standing in front of me.

Fortunately, one of the resources on Joel’s site was a series of instructional videos covering some of the introductory, yet deepest issues that a freshman at MIT would be instructed in. (http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/)

So I’m gonna watch all of those, and see how confident I feel about the material.