I broke the fifty reviews-barrier at eat.fi the other day.
And certainly don’t intend to stop.
The first couple of months in a very abbreviated format:
Yay! Bob Howard returns in 2010.
Almost missed the visiting exhibit that explains the relationship of Walt Disney and european art. The exhibit closes on Sunday, and this was definitely not to be skipped. Especially on a Friday when the entrance fee is omitted.
The contents indeed concentrate on the first three decades of animated classics – the films whose production Walt Disney himself oversaw. There’s a room for each film (from Snowwhite to Junglebook) as well as some generic background material in the form of books and even earlier films. Each film is illustrated with a short clip that concentrates on a particular theme.
By far the biggest discovery in the exhibit was that of Destino, the cartoon co-implemented with Salvador Dalí in the forties and the subsequently forgotten. The short film was completed a couple of years ago (about sixty years after it was started), and hasn’t been promoted much.
A lupin, with Pikkuhuopalahti gloriously unfocused in the background. This was the very second picture I took with the D450 when I bought it pretty much a year ago.
See It Sunday #181: Violet.
Fluffy towel or the undulating landscape of a weird planet?
Macro Day 31.5.2009: Red.
A decent offer for the second half of 2009.
Yy kaa koo nee #31: 13.
The X-Men prequel on the feistiest member of the group turned out not so good. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a moderately entertaining movie, with both a quite large set of interesting moments but plenty of long boring scenes inbetween.
Indeed, this vehicle for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is far less than the sum of its parts. Even the appearance of the movie itself is an oddity – the character’s background having been semi-well established in the second part of the saga.
This is a busy movie. There’s plenty of characters famous from previous filmed installments as well as from comics. I’m pretty sure I missed most of the references, not having read the superhero soap opera since they heydays of Claremont & Byrne (the post-reboot set by Whedon et. al. does not count). On one hand this intertextuality is good, on the other it’s very distracting, and borders on conflicting with the canon established by the original trilogy. Gambit’s portrayed in a very cool fashion, and I’d expect the character more screen time in the inevitable sequels (two have already been announced).
And for the spendex-clad hero with serious self-control problems in the comics, the conscience-ridden pacifism just does not sit very convincingly. The alleged troubled past he shares with Stryker is very curtailed in this movie – at odds with (again) the X2 movie.
Other than the script-induced issues, Jackman remains excellent as the protagonist. Apart from Danny Huston’s turn as the scheming Stryker, the rest of the actors suffer either from paper-thin characters or too little time on screen to establish any real presence.
And I’m disappointed they did not tie the events on Three Mile Island to the actual narrowly averted catastrophe of 1979.
And I’m even more disappointed at the constant barrage of cliches on screen and the most blatant reset-button used at the very end of the movie.
But even then, the origins of Wolverine do entertain for the two hours the movie takes. Too bad the plot falls to pieces upon closer inspection.
Well, I’m horribly late to the party, but definitely should have discovered the Empire Blog before.
After all, that’s just the finest movie magazine in the world.
SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest and highest-flying aircraft (shown in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institution).
Photo Friday 29.5.2009: High Speed.
Summer.
Rockstar Games just anounced the second (and allegedly last) piece of downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV.
Ballad of Gay Tony is scheduled for release sometime in the second half of the year.
And based on the reception for the debut, the Lost and Damned, this will quite worthwhile.
As with Fallout 3, the current king of DLC, I’m not even close to finishing the base game.
As far as bad ideas are concerned, doing a remake of the Buffy movie without EITHER Joss Whedon or Sarah Michelle Gellar is a capitally bad idea.
Looking at the bright side of things: Luke Perry seems not to be involved either.
Two worrisome pieces of news:
A manga fan faces 15 years in prison on account of his collection. Pedophilia-scaremongering at its very worst.
DRM turns honest users into pirates. Exactly as predicted in strip last October.
The bit about Cthulhu violating a trophy is not included. Go look for it yourself.
Close-up on a sneaker.
Who Do You Love 27.5.2009: Sports
An April day Berlin – the haze neatly layers the elements in the picture.
So straw’s not only for goats, but you can craft pigs as well?
Photo Thursday #133: #133: Oh, really?
Humongous soap bubbles conjured by men in strange clothes – one of the many things we didn’t have back in the seventies.
Thursday Challenge 28.5.2009: Childhood.
As your attorney, I advise you to take a hit out of the little brown bottle in my shaving kit. You won’t need much, just a tiny taste.
A very limited edition boardgame based on Hunter S. Thompson’s classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
[ via boingboing. ]
Films rendered in four frames.
Some brilliant, most not.
Like the late Michael Crichton, a CSI scriptwriter has taken to using the product as an implement of vengeance.
Nope, that’s not a crossroads in New York, rather an oblique reference of two websites that popped up in the reading queue lately:
Today, May 25th, is towel day, a day to honor the late great Douglas Adams. And this year, unlike many previous, I actually remembered to carry a towel with me. Who knows, it might come in handy on a post-work picnic. And it’s definitely a high time to seek out the original radio play and its magnificent finnish translation.
That was 42.
For 24, I refer you to 24tuntia.com is the story of implementing a reasonably complete and useful web application from concepting to publishing it in a single day. No clue what’s the implementation technology, but I bet it’s Ruby on Rails.
The first ten minutes were scary. But the blaugrana machine quickly took over the