It’s once again been a long time between posts. My last posted post was back in January and now it’s April. This isn’t my first attempt at posting since January, just the first post I actually finished since then. I’m going to incorporate bits of the now defunct posts below and hopefully I’ll actually update every once in awhile (I know I say that all the time).
So what have I been up to? Back in February I finished up the PS 3 game Prince of Persia. Overall I had fun with the game, but it was a bit short. I’m not sure it was worth the $55 I paid, but it would be worth picking up at a bargain basement price. If you’re into achievements and obsessively collecting stuff then you might get more mileage out of the game.
On February, 21st I attended AMC’s Best Picture Showcase with a friend. There we watched all 5 best picture nominees in one, very long, day. It was a fun experience and I might do it again next year, depending on what gets nominated.
My favorite picture of the day was the best picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire”. Compared to the other movies it did the best job balancing happy moments, sad moments, action, and comedy to tell a truly engaging story. The only thing I found a bit annoying was the heavy use of shakycam during some of the chase sequences, but it’s probably to be expected from the director of “28 Days Later”.
My runner up choice for the day would have to be the Sean Penn film “Milk”. Penn’s performance was great, and I learned a bit about the history of San Francisco. Having only recently moved to the bay I wasn’t even aware of Harvey Milk’s struggle for equal rights in the 60’s and 70’s.
I was also surprised that the movie “Frost Nixon” was enjoyable, I expected it to be pretty slow and dry but it they did a good job keeping the movie interesting throughout. Even so I’m not sure why they did a dramatization of the events behind the Frost/Nixon interviews. The overall story really wasn’t that exciting.
The final two pictures, “The Reader” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” were not very entertaining. Overall, “The Reader” was slow and I’m not really sure what I was supposed to get out of the movie. Plus the movie failed to get me to care about either of the characters. The worst movie of the day was “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and that’s because the movie was at least 2 hours too long. At a runtime of 166 minutes this film was the longest film of the day, but had the least actual “plot” of any movie. It felt like they were trying to do a “Forest Gump” like film, but unlike Gump Button’s life was pretty mudane (minus the aging thing). Sadly aging backwards cannot take a boring story and make it exciting.
The orignal source material was a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I don’t believe the short story had enough material to really fill up the 2+ hours of this film, there was a lot of time spent showing off the special effects for the movie which didn’t really help the plot. If they took the whole 166 hour movie and compressed it into a 46 minute film then maybe it would have been a tolerable film.
Well that’s it for the movies. The main reason I haven’t posted in a couple months is that for the entire month of March I’ve been working 10-15 hours a day, every day for most of the month. At least on weekends I was only working 4-12 hours depending on the day! So that sucks but I had stuff to get done and I think I’ll be back to a normal schedule going forward. I also have taken up to playing Dungeons and Dragons every other Saturday with someone from my WoW guild and his friends. So far that’s been fun I’ll maybe talk about D&D and how it’s changed since last time I tried playing it.
P.S. I didn’t spell check or proofread this post. I’ll go read through it later and fix up typos, don’t hold them against me. If I don’t get something posted soon it will sit in my drafts FOREVER!