Author: andy

Posted on

Summer Viewing List

…not to be confused with a “summer reading list,” ’cause that’s so 1992… I don’t really read, that is, so movies will have to do, and more specifically, trilogies. Thus, I’m going to do my best to watch all the trilogies I own this summer. The goal, of course, is to watch each trilogy in one day as best as possible. This may be difficult for some of them, but I’m sure going to try…

So let the list begin:

    Star Wars
    The Matrix
    Back To The Future
    Indiana Jones
    Pirates of the Caribbean
    X-Men
    Spider-Man
    The Terminator
    Ocean’s 11/12/13
    Lord of the Rings

I watched the Star Wars original trilogy this past Saturday whilst playing games with Josh, and I’ve got 2/3 of Pirates watched (…need to re-watch the first one again…) – Spider-man is also getting spread out, in that I need to re-watch 1 and 2, after seeing 3 in theaters a few weeks ago. I’ll try to watch all ten Star Trek movies as well, but those are more difficult to fit into one day, so I’ll have to spread that set out over the entire summer.

Of the nine trilogies listed above, Lord of the Rings will be the most difficult (extended edition, of course!). I mean, Nathan, Jerry and I watched all three in one day back in Undergrad… That’s a good 12 hrs straight, of course… I guess I’m saying that I’ve done it once, so I’m unsure as to whether I need to do it again…but I probably will, anyway…

Obviously, I need to be spending more time in the lab… 😛

Posted on

Review: POTC – At World’s End

So, if you’re read any reviews for “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” you’ve seen that they’re somewhat mixed, and honestly, I think I agree.

While the acting and effects were just as good as either of the previous iterations, the story was all over the place, to the point that I really didn’t know what was going on for half the movie…and when a movie is nearly 3 hours long, that “half the movie” quickly becomes 1.5 hrs. I don’t like being that confused for so long… As other reviewers have stated, much of this confusion comes from the fact that you don’t really know who’s on whose side until the very end of the movie…and even then, it isn’t completely clear… Then again, the double/triple-agents amongst each side are to be expected, as we are dealing with a movie about pirates…

But then again, there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and at least some of the charm of the original made it through the second movie and into the third. I think the trouble for me comes in deciding whether this movie was better than the second one or not. Many were disappointed by the ending in the second movie, especially after following a mostly stand-alone first movie (and in my review of “Dead Man’s Chest,” I correctly compared this series to what was done with “The Matrix”…), and I can’t say that this third movie leaves me feeling all that much better. In all honesty, I still wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending of this one – but if you want some peace in your life, wait until after the credits for one additional, and useful, scene…

So, did I generally enjoy the movie? Yeah, I guess… Will I buy it when it comes out on DVD to complete my collection? Absolutely… But was it better than “Spider-Man 3?” Nope…

Posted on

Review: POTC – At World's End

So, if you’re read any reviews for “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” you’ve seen that they’re somewhat mixed, and honestly, I think I agree.

While the acting and effects were just as good as either of the previous iterations, the story was all over the place, to the point that I really didn’t know what was going on for half the movie…and when a movie is nearly 3 hours long, that “half the movie” quickly becomes 1.5 hrs. I don’t like being that confused for so long… As other reviewers have stated, much of this confusion comes from the fact that you don’t really know who’s on whose side until the very end of the movie…and even then, it isn’t completely clear… Then again, the double/triple-agents amongst each side are to be expected, as we are dealing with a movie about pirates…

But then again, there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and at least some of the charm of the original made it through the second movie and into the third. I think the trouble for me comes in deciding whether this movie was better than the second one or not. Many were disappointed by the ending in the second movie, especially after following a mostly stand-alone first movie (and in my review of “Dead Man’s Chest,” I correctly compared this series to what was done with “The Matrix”…), and I can’t say that this third movie leaves me feeling all that much better. In all honesty, I still wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending of this one – but if you want some peace in your life, wait until after the credits for one additional, and useful, scene…

So, did I generally enjoy the movie? Yeah, I guess… Will I buy it when it comes out on DVD to complete my collection? Absolutely… But was it better than “Spider-Man 3?” Nope…

Posted on

Strange days…

“Times, they are a changin’,” says Bob Dylan… Not that things are drastically different right now from where they were a month ago, but school has certainly shifted to a different “chapter,” so to speak… As of a few weeks ago, I have no classes to attend anymore in graduate school, so I’m working completely on research now. Really, I’ve just been spending the last two weeks getting in to all the literature on the subject(s) I’m investigating, getting papers from the last few years and as far back as 1948…

I guess it’s just that it’s going to be weird getting used to not being spoon-fed information anymore. It’s not like I can go to a textbook for this stuff, or go to a few lectures on a general subject and take an exam after you learn the material… Nope, now it’s reading directly from the fringes of all scientific knowledge, sifting through hundreds of papers and data to try and decide what information to focus on, and what to set aside… It’s just a different kind of learning, a kind that I’m not terribly used to…yet… Kinda like solving a puzzle, really, in that you run across various pieces that you have to fit together. If they fit, you win a Ph.D… 😛

Anyway, life is good, otherwise. We’ve got three weddings to attend in June (let alone our own anniversary…), and we’ll probably spend a little vacation time up in Minnesota while we go to one of them, but that mostly takes care of the weddings for the summer. We’ve gotta figure out what to do with Edie for a few of those weddings, but I’m sure there are plenty of people that’d be willing to watch her (hint, hint…).

Onward, summer!

Posted on

Turtle vs Cat

Don’t believe me? Well…

For those of us with cats, it’s pretty damned hilarious… Makes me wanna get a video camera and find a turtle for Sam to play with…

Posted on

Of Generation Gaps and Twitter…

So, before yesterday, I’d never heard of Twitter…I had to learn about it from an NPR podcast I listened to… It’s apparently a new social networking phenomenon (a la Facebook or MySpace…) that tells the world what you’re doing at any given time. You can post, IM or use a cell phone with text messaging to post a short blurb giving everyone an update, and then you can subscribe to these updates by various means… For example, I could subscribe to your Twitter account and anytime you’d update it, my cell phone would vibrate and I’d receive a text message letting me know what’s up. You can write any message you want, from “looking at websites” to “eating a ham sandwich”…

According to the Wikipedia article, Twitter has been around since October of 2006… NPR and the New York Times, amongst others, have done articles about it… Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world use it, apparently…and this leads me to my point:

Why did it take until May for me to hear about it?

I guess it means I’ve reached something of a turning point… Up until now, I’ve kept up with technology and websites relatively well – Truman students knew about Facebook before it was even available for them to join, and well before news organizations jumped on it as a “phenomenon”… And I keep up with geeky things like that pretty regularly looking at sites like Slashdot and Engadget… So do we all eventually reach a point when our knowledge of the world becomes antiquated? You hear stories from parents beginning with “when I was your age…” all the time, and at some point, all of our parents probably realized that they were knowing less and less about the generation(s) that were coming after them… My generation is just barely involved in the whole “social networking” thing, but the high school students at church are all over MySpace – I simply have no interest in it. Back in college, I’d hear about stuff from friends in classes and new sites to visit, but we don’t really talk about such things in grad school…I’d assume that “real world jobs” would be similar…

I guess I just wasn’t planning on hitting this realization just before turning 25… I figured it’d happen after I had kids, and after they got a bit older and started getting into their own interests… I wasn’t thinking that I’d reach a point where I can visually see the generation just behind mine gradually distancing itself from mine…if only in this one sector of our lives…

I’m sure I’m just over-reacting, but with the world moving faster and faster and more information becoming available over the internet, it makes you wonder if the number of years between each generational shift is decreasing… For example, I’ve never thought that my sister and I (separated by 3 years) were in different generations, but maybe we are…

Has anyone else heard of or used Twitter, or is it just me?

Posted on

Review: Spider-Man 3

So, as of right now, “Spider-Man 3” is ranking something like 62% at Rotten Tomatoes, indicating that the feelings of critics are somewhat mixed…largely, they’re comparing the third iteration of the franchise to “Spider-Man 2,” a movie that garners 93% at the same site.

After seeing the movie myself, I can understand some of the criticisms. Yes, there are a lot of characters and a lot of villains, and these don’t have the depth that the characters did in the previous two films. Yes, it is a little long, clocking in at around 2.5 hrs. And yes, the overall moral and point of the story can get somewhat muddled (but really isn’t that hard to discern)…

But to these, and others, I confidently reply: so what? Personally, after waiting 3 years for another “Spider-Man” movie, I wasn’t disappointed. I didn’t look at my watch until 2 hrs into the film, which is pretty good. I was able to follow the storyline(s) pretty easily, and didn’t feel like much more was needed for each…except for Venom, of course… The action sequences were still top notch, and the acting was just as good as the previous movies. There were even more comedic breaks throughout that had the entire theater laughing. For those of us wanting to see Spider-Man swing across the big screen again, you won’t be disappointed.

Now, don’t get me wrong…the movie wasn’t perfect… Sam Raimi (the director) said recently that the entire “Venom” story line should have been broken up into two films: get with the black, alien, costume…get rid of it after you find out it’s evil…give it to Eddie Brock…then have another movie where you deal with the new enemy (i.e. Venom). Raimi was “strongly encouraged” to include Venom in this film by the movie studio, and it shows – more could have been done with Venom as a character, with lots more development. He’s really only in there in that final fight sequence as an afterthought, but at least the sequence was relatively bad-ass… The entire Sand Man character was set up and he did his thing, but he wasn’t terribly necessary… And the New Goblin was a necessary evil, I think, to tie up that thread that started way back in the first movie. Really, I would have just done away with Sand Man and stuck completely with Venom…yet then again, it may have been best to have Sand Man in this one and develop Venom, but not actually fight him until the fourth movie… Either way, something different probably should have been done between those two villains, yet they were still fun to see…

So yeah, in the end, I thought it was pretty good. As good as the previous two? Probably not…but certainly not as bad as some reviewers make it out to be. If you liked the previous ones, or you’re a fan of the comics, you’ll enjoy seeing Peter’s turn to the “dark side” with the black costume, as many of us have waited for since the beginning… And in the end, the movie isn’t left hanging for a fourth, yet there are enough “open doors” available to make it worth doing. Then again, if Raimi will just get messed with again, do we really want another one done?

Just look at the Batman franchise (pre-“Batman Begins“)…

Posted on

Good weekend…

This was one of the better weekends I’ve had in awhile, largely because the weather was stellar and we didn’t spend it sitting around watching TV (or studying) like usual… We drove down to Ste. Genevieve for the day on Saturday to do some wine tasting from two different wineries and look at some of the historic sites. The Cave Vineyards winery was especially neat ’cause, as the name suggests, they’ve got a cave that you can sit in and enjoy your wine and picnic lunch. Neither Brooke nor I consider ourselves to be “aficionados” or anything, but the wine was decent…certainly, the atmosphere made it worth the trip. They apparently do live music on weekends beginning in May and occasionally host “dinner and a movie” in the cave over summer as well.

Regardless, we had church Sunday morning and then spent the afternoon getting the bikes out and ready to go for another season. As we don’t particularly enjoy driving to St. Charles to hop on the Katy Trail, we tried out the St. Louis Riverfront Trail, which is thankfully within biking distance of our apartment. It’s about 11 mi long (plus a few miles to get there), and we certainly didn’t do all of it, but it was nice to get out and enjoy the day and explore a bit of the area around our place, now that the weather is cooperating.

Of course, the weekend was especially good because my final was on Friday, leaving me with absolutely no school work to accomplish over the weekend (first time in awhile!). It “only” took me 5 hours this time (instead of 6 hours, like last semester), and the exam wasn’t entirely unreasonable…but regardless, the semester is officially over for me. Not only the semester, really, but also the sum of all classwork required for the Ph.D. program. Now, I’ve gotta buckle down and write a grant that follows along the lines of my research plans, then defend it, by the end of 2007.

Ready? Set? Go!