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I get criticized a lot for my taste in movies; one of my favorite movies is Hackers; I’ve seen it dozens of times and I’m still not sick of it. I readily admit that it not a good movie by most (any?) standards, and it is very inaccurate as far as computing goes (Either use actual computing terms relevantly or don’t bother at all, okay?). But I love it all the same. One quality it has that is often overlooked is the way they portray navigating a file structure; it’s very difficult to make something so dull interesting, and flying through a digital cityscape was a decent way of handling that.

To me, there’s a two dimensional scale on which movies fall with quality on one axis and entertainment on the other. I’ve seen a lot of high quality movies that are extremely boring, and a lot of low quality movies that are extremely entertaining. The trick is getting one that scores well on both axes. I guess those on the low quality end of things are like little guilty pleasures; anyone want to confess to any bad movies that they love (I happen to know that a certain reader entered the Computer Science field because of The Net …)

One of my all time favorite movies is Vertigo starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak. It was an Alfred Hitchcock film from 1958; I won’t go into the plot because it’s difficult to explain without giving it away. But the film was very interesting, and had a great visual feel and score.

Anyway, one of my college roommates introduced me to the song Carlotta Valdez by Harvey Danger which is about the film; I’ve been looking for it a while and saw it pop up on imeem.com today; so listen to it- and if you don’t get it, then watch the film and listen again

I might see Cloverfield just for this…

Most awesomest thing ever:

(YouTube video embedded; RSS users should go to http://www.mattlary.com to view it)

Ok; back from the movie (Stranger Than Fiction). It was really good by the way; it was original, and Will Farrell did an awesome job in it; and it wasn’t just the normal crazy Will Farrell, it was a fairly serious role. I would highly recommend it. I’m pretty excited about some of the movies that are coming out in the next year or so; I just saw a teaser ad for Spiderman 3, and Tenacious D: Pick of Destiny has the potential of being an awesome movie (it has an equal amount of potential of being a really dumb movie too). There were a few others too that looked good, but I can’t think of them right this moment.

Anyway, one of the things I wanted to blog about was a program that I’ve had for a while; it’s called Pure Text, and it allows you to strip the formatting out of text you paste from your clipboard. I really hate it when I try to copy text from a web page into an email or something only to have it mess up my font and everything. Anyway, it’s free, and you can get it here. Many thanks to lifehacker for that by the way; I check it daily and find all sorts of cool tips.

They’re making a new Star Trek movie!! I found out a little while ago but just decided to post about it. Look here: http://www.startrek.com/

Yeah, we ended up watching the Awards- and I’m glad we did, it was good to see the recaps of some of the movies and some of the fun skits they did making fun of the actors.

Thoughts:

• Jon Stewart is a no-talent ass clown (Sorry about the language Grandma)
• A few people made comments relating to DVDs killing movie theatres- while this is true to an extent, they should be making better movies, and being more creative about how to make theatres lucrative again (I’ll probably make a more detailed post about this one of these days)
• The montages were very well done- it made me go on netflix and queue up some that I haven’t seen before or in a while.
• Everyone who I really wanted to win won!

Well, it looks like this year wasn’t as bad as I thought- I’m really happy that Philip Seymore Hoffman won- he really deserved it, and I need to see this movie Crash now- I was sure they were going to give it to Brokeback Mountain (I haven’t seen any of the nominated movies yet, so I didn’t even know who to root for)
I need to get myself to bed- got work early tomorrow!

Tonight is the Academy Awards, but I don’t think I’ll watch- I love movies, but I hate Hollywood- and on top of that, the Academy Awards are always political and try to push some agenda. In any case, I’m hoping Philip Seymore Hoffman will win best actor- he’s been good in everything I’ve seen him in, and he’s from the Rochester area. I haven’t seen Capote yet, but I’ve heard he did an excellent job in it. Let’s just hope ‘The Academy’ doesn’t give all of their awards to Brokeback Mountain to make a statement or something.

It looks like we weren’t able to cheat Winter this year; it was very cold today, and from what I hear it’s not going to get better. I’m sure this is no surprise to most readers, but I thought I’d complain a bit. In some ways I don’t mind the cold, it makes the air feel clean and crisp- I just wish my walk from the parking garage to work was a bit shorter.
I watched The Game again yesterday; it’s an awesome movie, especially the first time you see it. Calin doesn’t like it though because she thinks it’s creepy. I don’t want to say too much about it because it’s hard to explain, but it’s basically a story about a rich guy who gets caught up in a real life “game”, and it has lots of twists and surprises. If I had a list of “must see” movies, it would be way up there.