SIFF picks

Two SIFF movies that I recommend:

Murderball

http://www.seattlefilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=7194&FID=5

This won the American Documentary Audience award at Sundance this year.

Description: Quad rugby, aka “murderball,” is played by quadriplegics in customized wheelchairs that resemble something out of MAD MAX. It’s a full-contact sport, played with manic intensity by super-competitive jocks. MURDERBALL looks on-court and off at the indomitable spirit of true athletes.

Layer Cake

http://www.seattlefilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=7193&FID=5

From the producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

Description: After a shady pharmaceutical transaction goes violently awry, a levelheaded con artist discovers that leaving the thug life is a tad more difficult than anticipated. Matthew Vaughn (Guy Ritchie’s longtime producer) taps down the flash in favor of a burnished professionalism that harkens back to the glory, gory days of British crime films.

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3 thoughts on Star Wars 3:

1. If you’ve seen 4, 5, and 6, Star Wars 3 is incredibly compelling because you finally find out why Anakin becomes Darth Vader. In fact, I contest that this is the ONLY interesting thing about all 3 prequels (Star Wars 1, 2, and 3). Lucas is a brilliant man for milking it because the 3 prequels could have just been summarized with this movie (+ a little more background, possibly done by scrolling more cheesy text at the beginning 🙂 Then we all could have skipped boring Senate meetings.
2. Lucas should milk it some more (if it doesn’t bore him to death) by re-making episodes 4, 5, and 6 with all-new digital effects. The fans would love this, and the new kids that never even saw 1, 2, and 3 would love it too. After all, if the kids watched 4, 5, and 6 after episodes 1, 2, and 3, they’d gasp at the special effects cheesiness.
3. Big round of applause for the artists and programmers that did Star Wars 3. The rendering is the best I’ve ever seen. The fakey world seems amazingly real (except for Dooku’s flip off the top of the stairs).

I just clipped this from an AP news wire.

“The couple first met when Fualaau was in the second grade. Their relationship became sexual when he was 12 and she was a 34-year-old married mother of four, a teacher at a suburban elementary school.”

You don’t hear that every day!

Did you see the finale of the Apprentice? My wife and I wonder how much longer it’ll last; she speculates Apprentice 5.

Anyway, it’s ironic that Street Smarts Tanna (sp?) lost because she was disrespectful to her employees, which shows a lack of um… street smarts?

Fun article over at Wired:
http://www.wired.com/news/e3/0,2879,67568,00.html

“Nintendo leads the charge with games like Nintendogs, a virtual puppy simulator with adorable, lifelike dogs who obey your voice commands and respond to being stroked with the stylus. You can use the DS’ Wi-Fi capabilities to link up with strangers’ dogs — if you are within range of another Nintendogs player, your dogs will automatically bark at and play with each other.”

I refuse to stroke things with my stylus, especially touchscreens.

A coworker of mine, Kyle, called a meeting to review a document that he was working on. Before the meeting began, he immediately apologized & told us about his horrible relationship with the network printer. All of his page 1s were stapled together, then all of the page 2s were stapled together, and so on. He had to remove a page from each stapled stack & hand-collate. While we laughed at him, he wondered out loud about what sick person would program the printer to provide such an option. Soon, the job was done & we began the meeting.

5 minutes later, another guy showed up. Kyle had vowed never to hand-collate again, so he just tossed the multiple stacks at Tim and told him to take one page from each stack. Tim had the funniest, bewildered look on his face as Kyle said, “don’t ask.”

Hmm, a textual description of the event doesn’t seem very funny, but trust me it was worth a few laughs. You know us office types.

i think that it’ll be required soon to have closed captioning on most programs on tv. you could use this to extract lyrics for songs from mtv.

“Science is often more of an art than a science.”

Just made that up. People often say, “x is more of an art than a science,” meaning that x is imprecise. But lots of science (like a visit to your medical doctor) is just an educated guess. Got sniffles? Yeah, probably allergies.

Society tolerates flatulence in men far more than women. Why is that? Is it because men naturally excrete more cubic centimers of gas than women? Nah, it can’t be; must be a social norm thing.

So, perhaps women should fart more to promote gender equality. Should we start a group to promote this idea? NOFW, National Organization of Farting Women?

———– <–Cheek shown here
| Tongue |
———–

Roman numerals really need to die.

Quick test:
a) 1999
b) MCMXCIX

Yeah, that’s what I thought. Not only do the letters suck, they even have multiple meanings based on position, making them even more complex to parse/understand. How many movies have you watched where you said, “gosh, I’d love to know what year that was made.” And then you desperately tried to translate the string of Ms and Xes as it raced towards the top of the screen? Why the heck do movies use Roman numerals? When were movies invented again?????

Problem: kids won’t know what the heck that XVI means in Pope Benedict XVI. Is that his last name, but caps lock was left on accidentally? An abbreviation? Is it like MC Hammer?