Our apple tree (heavily pruned) is budding.
Author Archives: tony
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
An above average comedy with some engaging characters and just enough solid laughs to keep you going and Pegg holding the movie together.
Body of Lies
Body of Lies is a reasonably good action-thriller with some strong performances and interesting context, let down by a soft-ending.
Babylon A.D.
A fractured and unrealised sci-fi drama which results in a dissapointing and unsatisfying action viewing experience.
Spam
To the authors of spam bots, or to the people paid pennies to submit spam comments – don’t you think it would be worth your while to check after submitting the spam (say after 5 days), to see if it was actually posted. If it wasn’t you can assume that it was successfully blocked, and can stop trying to submit to the same site again.
If it was posted, you can assume it wasn’t blocked and resources you save from trying to post to sites which don’t publish your posts can be re-directed at the sites which do.
Clearly this is more efficient at your end, saves you money and time, and reduces green house gasses across the planet. We can presume that sites accepting your spam either want it or deserve it, and hence are acceptable targets.
None of the spam (several thousand, a tiny amount I should think compared to real blogs) you ever try and post here makes it through and yet the same sources try and try and try again – give it up guys – it’s not working for you.
iPhone + Skype?
O2 (in the UK) can’t be very happy? I can now call any other skype user from my iPhone for free as long as I have a wireless connection somewhere. It’s not as easy to receive calls, you need to be logged into Skype on the phone and you can’t run 3rd party apps in the background, but if you know someone’s calling you via Skype you can be ready for it. And making outgoing calls for free to other Skype users is the real cost saving I guess.
Sound quality seemed pretty good as well.
I bet the Skype charges for calling real phones are cheaper than the O2 network charges as well, I may look into that.
iPhone 3G (v2.2) crashes when deleting photos
As I said, I’m impressed with the iPhone – the only annoyance so far is that when using Windows Explorer to delete photo’s from the iPhone, it crashes (the phone, not Explorer) and resets. It’s a soft reset, don’t lose anything, but it means the only way I can remove pictures is by deleting them on the phone. Apparently it’s only an issue with XP – Vista and Mac’s are fine.
It’s going to be annoying if I take any substantial number of pictures though.
It’s spring
I’m back at work after a two week break which means less energy to post stuff, although my posting rate dropped dramatically during February / March anyway (yay, I hear some of you say). We’ll see if it picks up, I don’t consciously do anything about it, just sometimes I feel like talking more than other times.
Got myself an iPhone for my birthday, and it’s pretty cool. Clearly I don’t need one, no one rings my mobile anyway, and I don’t make any calls usually from a mobile, but I love the other features and I feel like I should be one of the people using mobile internet even if I really have no use for it. I promised myself if I got one (or an iPod touch, was a close race), I’d do more walking at work again and use the iPod stuff. So been out both days back so far, the fact that the weather is gorgeous helps obviously.
So clearly spring out there today – green buds at the end of every tree branch and a lot of insect life making an appearance. The last time I walked and listened to music at the same time was around 1992 when I lived in Sheffield and worked in Rotherham. I used to walk to Jack’s house through a park in Sheffield, early in the morning, to get a lift to work. Since I basically stopped collecting any music at that point in my life the stuff on my iPhone is from the same era (a lot of Queen, Eurythmics, INXS, Paul Simon) and in combination with the weather it really invokes memories of those (mostly good) times in Sheffield.
It certainly makes going for a walk a lot easier, I was actually looking forward to it today – yes Grete, you can say you told me so.
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
You don’t have to have watched any porn to enjoy Zack and Miri, but it certainly helps. If you needed evidence that Kevin Smith can make just about anything in life both funny and heart-warming at the same time, then this movie is it. Zack and Miri are best friends and have been since school. They share an appartment because neither of them can afford it on their own, and they complement each other. It’s clear to everyone viewing that they should be in love, married and enjoying life together but because they’ve been friends for so long, they don’t see anything other than that when they look at each other.
A trip to a high school re-union where Zack meets a male porn star, a few missed bills and having their power and water cut off force Zack and Miri to a rather weird solution to raise cash – they should film a porno and distribute it to their ex-high school companions. They gather a few friends and employ a few more colourful individuals and set about making their movie. Needless to say, it doesn’t go to plan, but eventually they get under way and the moment arrives where Zack and Miri have to do it. I’ll leave the content there, you’ll have to watch and find out what happens.
If you’d seen any Kevin Smith films and then saw Zack and Miri without knowing Kevin wrote it, you’d probably be able to spot it anyway. His trademark dialog is strewn throughout although it’s slightly more refined than it was in say, Clerks II. This is probably because it’s not two guys mouthing off to each other for a change, however it doesn’t detract from the humour in that dialog and there’s plenty to laugh about. The situations are funny without being too twee, all the characters are amusing if a little flat and the story isn’t quite as straightforward as I’d expected. There’s one laugh-out-loud and cry-for-days moment which made us both laugh so hard it hurt, and plenty of good relaxed funny moments. While the ending certainly won’t come as a surprise, the journey is worthwhile and interesting.
Zack and Miri do indeed make a porno, and learn an awful lot about themselves, each other and the business in the process.
Bulletproof Monk
I bought this movie an age ago, and then I read a review saying it was pure tripe. So it sat on the shelf for a long old while in the ‘to watch’ section. However, the universe works in karmic ways and while a friend was visiting, we asked her what she wanted to watch and she picked this. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It’s a pretty straight forward buddy movie, an Asian monk protecting an ancient scroll, a young American martial arts movie loving kid and the love interest. The monk takes the kid under his wing (even if the kid doesn’t know it), prophecies are fulfilled and the world is saved.
There are some above-average action sequences, some sassy dialog, some tin-pot wisdom and a couple of scenes which make you glad you watched. There are some frustrations as well, the villain introduces some over complex technology near the end to explain away one minor plot issue that could have been countered in more simple and pleasing ways and bits of the final battle leave a sour taste in the mouth for their paint-by-numbers feel. Overall though it satisfies the comedy action glands and presses some of the right buttons. Certainly no more than 5/10 but it’s a solid 5.