Goggles

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I laughed.

Contest

What ... the ... fuck? Are Obama and The Crazy Little Man having a fucking contest to see who can pick the worst running mate. Good luck with the next four years America.


Historical Analysis of the '08 Election.

Review : The Dark Knight

Just saw this in my drafts for this blog. Got as far as putting the picture and links in and then promptly forgot about it. It's been a while since I've seen it at this point. Sure it made a bazillion dollars at the box, sure it's good, but was it that good? I don't think that it was. It was certainly too long. I think Robert Downey Jr said it best when he said.

"didn't get it. ... [I] still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character." He said that while watching the movie, it dawned on him, "I get it. This is so high-brow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie." He then added, "You know what? Fuck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

Which is, maybe, a little harsh, but Downey is a Marvel whore now, so what do you expect, but this sequel wasn't any better than Batman Begins. Don't get me wrong. It's a great movie, and you should see it. It's just not all that, as the kids say now-a-days. It's about twenty minutes too long and parts of it feel a little forced, bit it's still pretty good. Good enough to earn


8/10

Review: Wanted

Here's everything you need to know about this movie in three easy steps

1. Physics ... who needs it?

2. Long on action, short on story.

3. Angelina Jolie is ridiculously hot.


Like Tropic Thunder, I'm torn between a three and a four for this movie. I was entertained, certainly, but it could've been so much better. I going to take that as I sign that I should be rating on a scale of ten, instead of five and give Wanted


6/10

Review : Tropic Thunder

Checkout at the hotel in LA was at noon, and our flight was at 8:30 so some of had some time to kill Saturday. There was a theater across the street from the hotel, so Nick, Keith, Simon and I walked over to check out a matinee showing of Tropic Thunder to help wile away the afternoon.

I've seen a lot of movies. I've been in a lot of movie theaters. I've seen movies at Mann's Chinese and the Arclight. I've seen world premieres at the Hollywood Bowl. I've been to drive-ins. I've seen movies on big screens. I've seen movies on small screens. I have never, never, in my life been in a movie theater as awful as the one that we saw this movie in. Simon and I were going to get popcorn until Keith pointed out the, sadly full, glue roach traps just out of sight around a corner in the lobby. I was wearing sandals and I really didn't want to put my feet on the floor while we were watching the movie. The carpet was dirty. The seats were threadbare. Bad screen, bad sound. It was just terrible.

Which is too bad, because Tropic Thunder is really, really funny. It does a pretty good job of taking the piss out of Hollywood in general, an actors in particular. Robert Downey is brilliant as the melanin-challenged Australian, but Tom Cruise is just as good as the studio exec. The two of them are almost good enough to make me forget that I hate Ben Stiller. Worth seeing. I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and round up to


Four Stars.

Quickie Movie Reviews

All the new Qantas flights from Auckland to LAX have on demand movies. In no particular order, I can remember watching ...

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Neil Patrick Harris reprising his role as himself? Classic. Some flat spots, but overall pretty god damn funny. George Bush as lovable pot head. Awesome.

Three Stars

Jason Statham, the most underrated action hero in Hollywood today in a supposedly true story of Royal intrigue and West End thuggery in Early Seventies London. Pretty good. It's no "Snatch", but worth a rental.

Three Stars





Crap. Put me right to sleep. You know you've fucked up when you can make George Clooney look bad. No Country for Old Men might not be the Cohen's worst movie after all. Fuck that, yes it is.

Two Stars

I've read the book that this was based on so I was looking forward to this one. Spacey is excellent. Good Movie

Four Stars








I think that I'm forgetting one but it's all a bit of a blur.

Day [4 .. n]

So classes started on tuesday, 8:30 to 6:00 or so every day, which is hard enough when you're not jetlagged. On top of that, the subject matter is sometimes, shall we say, dry? So going to a party Tuesday night and being up until two or three in the morning was not condusive to being a fully functioning human at 8:00 in the morning. It was my one and only party this year as I am getting far too old for that shit.

Classes went until thursday and I went to a lot of stuff. Saw some presentations for "Wall-E", "Horton", "Kung-Fu Panda", "Pirates III" and "Indiana Jones". Went to a couple really interesting technical presentations on hair scanning and rendering. By Friday my brain was jam packed with new stuff. Spent a couple hours on Thursay walking around the Booths, you can't walk ten feet without seeing someone you know, so it's cool to catch up with people. Frankie and I went down to Imageworks on Friday for a while and I caught up with some of the old timers there.

Going home on Saturday was an adventure. I had so much crap with me that I bought in LA, that I totally got profiled and hassled by customs in Auckland, missed my flight and had to get the next one down to Wellington.

I wish that I could have made it to a Dodgers game, but it's amazing how busy you feel like you need to be when you're there on someone else's dime. Looking forward to next year in New Orleans.

Day 3

Pixar took us out to dinner on Monday, or maybe Weta did, all I know is that I didn't pay. And since we were meeting with the software development guys, and the head of software development at Pixar has a brother who just happens to be a world famous chef, who just happens to have an Italian restaraunt in Los Angeles with a two month wait for a table, well, we got treated pretty well, I guess. All fourteen of us. We got to sit in the private room in the back. I wouldn't say that Italian is my favorite food, but this was a very good meal. I even drank some red wine, and it wansn't awful. For me that's saying something, since I usually can't stand the stuff.

President of Walt Disney Feature Animation and founding member of Pixar Ed Catmull gave the keynote speech for Siggraph. He was awesome. He talked about "ideas" vs. "people". In short, you can give a great idea to a mediocre team, and they'll just fuck it up, but if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they'll either make it work, or throw it away and come up with somehting better.

Day 2

I don't travel well across multiple time zones. Very jet lagged. Got up late, 10:45 local time, 5:45 biological time.   Went to Chano's for lunch. OMG best burrito in LA.  Dan L and I walked down to the LA Museum of Contemporary Art. Stopped and checked out the Architecture of the Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry up close.  Both very cool.  Work took us out to eat at a fancy, of course, Mexican place.  Stayed up too late at the fourth annual Siggraph poker came.  Won a couple bucks.

Quickie Day 1

Left Wellington at 11:15. Five hour layover in Auckland. Seat next to very large, not fat, just a very large person. Squeezed into seat. Kid kicking back of seat. Insane mom. At various points in the flight she told her daughter that "we don't use toothpaste, it's poison" and "no it's not butter, it's margarine, you can't eat that, it's made of plastic" and something about her "third eye" and "astral travel". Left my favorite brown hat on the plane. Picked up rental car with Guy, went to In-and-Out. Discovered that I had lost all my travel documentation and my per diem, ouch. Went to hotel and checked in. Showered. Actually took mass transit in LA to Hollywood from downtown. Still had to take a $10 cab ride from a totally insane Armenian taxi driver from the subway stop to The Guitar Center. Mrs. bought me a brand new JS1000 for my birthday/father's day. Very first brand new guitar. Very excited. $30 cab ride back to hotel. Haven't really slept in much in 48 hours. LA is a shitty place to not have a car.

Talk

When it comes to the police, in my opinion there's only one thing you need to remember, despite the "protect and serve" claim on every cruiser in the country, the police are not your friends.  They are not there to help you.  Now, I have another rule for dealing with the police.  Keep your fucking yap shut.  If a cop wants to ask you a question, refuse.  We're talking "a nice young policeman came up to me as I was walking down the street seemingly at random and wanted to ask me a question".  No, no, no, no.  Never talk to the police.  Think I'm paranoid?  Well, maybe so, but here's why I'm right about this in two parts ...

one from a lawyer



and one from a cop

Flat

According to the BBC, there's quite a healthy flat-earth subculture on teh intarwebs

Do they really think the earth is flat?

John Davis, a flat earth theorist based in Tennessee, has this to say

"Many use the term 'flat-earther' as a term of abuse, and with connotations that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualism."

I'm going to go with, C) People who think the earth is flat are preaching blind faith, monumentally ignorant and anti-intellectuals of the worst kind and while it's nearly impossible to put into words how much people like that aggravate me, it's a nice segue to an interesting article that talks about how the internet is, instead of spreading truth, enabling this kind of idiot to only receive positive reinforcement of his totally fucked world view and his "pursuit of willful delusion".

My Facts, Your Facts

Holy crap the Greeks knew that the earth wasn't flat. In 400BC they had already figured out how big and how far away the moon and the sun were. Flat earthers are a creation of religious backlash against science in Victorian England. Thank you Christian Apologists, the same knuckleheads that brought you this


Anti-Itellectualisim, it's not just for the dark ages anymore!

Family

We are finally, after seven months, a family again. We picked up the dogs on Saturday. I think it's going to take Zipper about seven more months to calm down. I'm pretty confident they are very happy to be 'home'.

Review : Hancock

Another Fourth of July, another Will Smith movie. Can someone tell me exactly how the Fresh Price got to be the biggest, baddest, most bakable movie star in the universe? Let's see ... Independance Day, Men in Black, Wild Wild West, I Robot, Hitch, Pursuit of Happyness and I am Legend. That's what, a couple billion dollars box office? Some of those are actually really good movies and Smith is actually really, really good in a couple of those movies.  Can he continue his summer movie domination with Hancock? Does the pope wear a funny hat?  The critics hate this movie, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why I like it.   I think the only thing it proves is that critics are idiots.  Mrs. STFU did like it as well, which means that you'll probably like it.  Smith is great as the anti-hero Hancock. That's about all I can say without getting into spoiler territory.  It's a good movie, it not the usual Will Smith summer blockbuster, but I liked it enough to give it





Four Stars

Review : Kung Fu Panda

I'm a little behind on the movie reviews. AM has been talking about seeing this movie for, oh, I don't know, like, a year. It finally came out, and off we went. it's Dreamworks' first real animated offering that wasn't a Shrek movie since, hmmmm, Over the Hedge? It's been a while, anyway. The only preconceived notion that I had going in to this movie was that I was pretty sure that I was going to annoyed by Jack Black, as the voice of the Panda. I was, thankfully, not. Yeah, you could tell that it was Jack Black, but he at least attempted to play a character. Quite unlike Shifu, who was played so brilliantly that when the credits rolled, I was utterly astonished to find that he was voiced by Dustin Hoffman.

I flat out loved this movie. I loved the look, and the art direction. The plot was offbeat, but still engaging enough that at the end, when it all came around full circle, I wasn't sitting there thinking "yeah, I got that thirty minutes ago, thanks". I was genuinely caught off guard. Maybe because I'm slow, maybe I was just too busy being entertained, hard to say. The escape of Tai Lung is probably the most awesome action sequence I have seen in a film, live action included, in a long time. I usually don't like it when all of the voices are played by "name" actors, who, in general, couldn't voice act their way out of a paper bag. And although most of the voice actors for Kung Fu Panda were A-List types, it didn't bother me as much as I would have thought.

This movie was funny because it was a funny movie, not because it was a movie that had funny people in it. It was hugely entertaining. Good fun, enjoyed by the entire gang and can only be given


Five Stars

Gallery

I am sitting at my desk, at work, right now, looking at

www.thisoneparticularharbor.com

so I know that it's working.

Want

Nerf chain gun, fully auto, belt fed. Want.

Teh Werk

Sorry about not posting. I've been slammed for the last two or three weeks at work. Starting to calm down a bit. Getting ready to go to LA in August.

Promo

Just a quick news flash. I was given a field promotion to CG Supervisor on my show. It doesn't really mean anything more than recognition for the job I'm already doing, but it's official, so it's nice to be appreciated.

Rules

I'm not usually one to pass on e-mails, but this is pretty funny.

Rules for Men.

• Men are NOT mind readers.
• Learn to work the toilet seat. You're a big girl. If it's up, put it down. We need it up, you need it down. You don't hear us complaining about you leaving it down.
• Sunday sports It's like the full moon or the changing of the tides. Let it be.
• Crying is blackmail.
• Ask for what you want. Let us be clear on this one: Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Just say it!
• Yes and No are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question.
• Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That's what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.
• Anything we said 6 months ago is inadmissible in an argument. In fact, all comments become Null and void after 7 Days.
• If you think you're fat, you probably are. Don't ask us.
• If something we said can be interpreted two ways and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one
• You can either ask us to do something Or tell us how you want it done. Not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.
• Christopher Columbus did NOT need directions and neither do we.
• ALL men see in only 16 colours, like Windows default settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not A colour. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.
• If it itches, it will be scratched. We do that.
• If we ask what is wrong and you say 'nothing,' We will act like nothing's wrong. We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.
• If you ask a question you don't want an answer to, Expect an answer you don't want to hear.
• When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear is fine...Really.
• Don't ask us what we're thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as instant replay or the designated hitter.