themadone

Last night I caught most of "Clueless" on telly and this got me wondering. What would Austen/Shakespear/etc make of the remakes of their classics in a modern setting? I've never read Emma or seen a film adaptation so I can't compare it, but "10 Things I hate about you" certainly seemed to capture the essence of "The Taming of the Shew".

Amusingly I've also heard a rumour that they're planning on making a TV show based on 10TIHAU. Weird.

Went and saw Transformers last night. I thought the last showing would be quieter, it being midweek and people not wanting to stay out too late on a work night. How wrong I was. There was a queue stretching a good distance out of the doors. Being a clever bunny though, I skipped happily past the queue and went straight to one of the pay-by-card machines and got my ticket. I guess the people who queueing were only doing so to get their Orange Wednesday discount.

The film was pretty damn fine. There were a few glaring plot holes or whatever and the love interest wasn't visually appealing, but not being the kind of rabid perfectionist that has to have their films completely perfect I didn't see any of that being a problem and enjoyed myself instead. The robots were very shiny too.

Next film to look forward to is Bourne 3.

Yesterday for lunch we tried the replacement to Cafe Uno. Not that much different to before, except the focus isn't on Italian food. There's burgers and steaks now. And the price tag has gone up. The head waiter/manager is still the same though.

The burger I had wasn't too bad. A tad over cooked. The jalepenos were barely noticable though.

ION I also saw Spiderman 3. It's pretty good, although I'm not sure it's better than #2. I won't go into details cos most people won't have seen it yet and I don't want to spoil it for them. I will say that the effects for Sandman and Venom are awesome.

So I saw "300" on Saturday...it was awesome! The fight scenes are just so bloody amazing...bloody being the operative word. There's blood flung every which way as the Spartans slice and dice their way through the Persian army. The way the weapons interact with their victims looks flawless. Spears and swords jut through flesh. The only bit that looked a tad suspect was sometimes the bloody sprays did just seem to vanish mysteriously in midair. But that's only cos I was concentrating on watching one of them to see what it did.

The ladies (or men who like men) have plenty of half naked beefcake to oggle, but thankfully there's plenty of naked eye candy for us guys (or girls who like girls) too. On the IMAX the nipples at one point must have been several feet tall :D

It's wierd how Frank's work seem to get translated onto the silver screen so awesomely and yet other comics get turned in to shit?

Yesterday, I had the afternoon off. It was meant to be because I thougth GameSoc was going to Laser Quest again, but I got the date wrong - it's next week. But rather than cancel the time off, I decided to make the most of it.

I gorged myself at pizza hut on their lunch time buffet deal. What may come as a surprise to people (it was to me) was that I had a huge plate from the salad bar as well as pizza. Afterwards, I watched Hot Fuzz. Definitely not as good as Shaun of the Dead. And not just cos it doesn't have cryx in it, either. I'm not saying it's a bad film though - it's very funny - but SotD was funnier.

I briefly nosed around the various book stores. There's quite a large number of books I'd like to buy, but my unread book pile is already very large and not going down very quickly. I'd also like to make more use of the IFIS library too.

And then I spent the evening learning all about Ajax and writing something useful with it.

I think I need more time off to do random stuff like this more often.

A fairly average 3rd weekend all told. I watched "Just My Luck" - a gifting from noseynick's clan - on Friday.

Saturday I didn't really end up doing much during the day and then there was Dark Ages in the evening where nemy and lawrencegillies put on a fine xmas (we're a month behind gametime) celebration. The highlight of which was the Blind Man's Bluff game, in which nemy made a lunge for lawrencegillies and ended up grabbing him by the family jewels.

On Sunday I managed to drag myself up the hill to stick my head in on fight practice. Didn't do much except watch and eat as I'd had far too little sleep from spodding online 'til stupid o'clock in the morning. Plus I think I might need a bit of a refresher as it seems like ages since I've picked up a sword.

izzy_stradlin came by to unpack/move stuff in some more with eggwhite in the evening. I had no idea she had so much stuff. It's little wonder she needs a place of her own to store it. I also watched Contact which has a very sad ending - at least for the main character. I think the bureaucrats need slapping upside the head. I wonder what the book is like.

So far my days off have been very uninvolved and relaxing. Yesterday I mucked around with OCR software and worked out what copies of RWAV I have. I also watched "Stranger Than Fiction". Will Ferrell was strangely able to act in it. I guess this is his "Truman Show" (I always thought Jim Carrey was a bit crap and always reprising his role as The Mask in whatever film he was in until he did "The Truman Show").

Of course the real reason to watch it is for oggling Maggie Gyllenhaal who unfortunately doesn't bend over and get spanked, but does look damn fine still.

Today I went xmas shopping. Some how I manged to randomly bump into darklittlefox and lucfia who were also xmas shopping. Didn't find the one item I was looking for though, but did decide to pick up a copy of RuneQuest.

ION: Yay pub in a bit!

I just saw The Prestige. If I were clever, I probably would write this entry in three parts. But I'm not and can't really be bothered.

The film however is very clever and something I am glad to have bothered with. It does start off a little slow, but it soon picks up and then starts really with the clever mind games. I could have blinked and missed Bowie. His performance is excellent and very understated with what you'd normally expect from him.

So in conclusion, I heartily recommend it. It's also a lot easier to get in to than Bond.

I know Snakes on a Plane has been out a couple of weeks already, but I'm not used to having my own private screening. It's unfortunately not that bad. There's a noisy/chatty couple behind me. Hopefully they shut the hell up when the film starts.

ION I've spent the past few days playing catch up on my life. Hopefully our Aussie-bound chums arrive safely and avoid stingrays.

Put the scanner through it's paces at the weekend. Managed to scan in ~150 titles in a few hours. With a pile of DVDs next to me, it took hardly any time to scan them in. Most of the time was spent making piles of DVDs to scan. Might see how long the laptop can last without mains power and go wireless so that I don't have to move the DVDs to me.

The only technical problem I found was a bunch of DVDs I got cheap from Tescos a few months back had dodgy barcodes on them. Dodgy in the sense that they seemed to be used several times for different discs. I guess Tescos was using them for pricing rather than product identification.

Other than that, I did pretty much nothing of note except rack up yet more time off in lieu.

I'm glad Film Four is free now. It'll be interesting to see if they show much worth watching.