Bendable Blog

I had forgotten that I wanted to watch Brick until Dan Trachtenberg from The Totally Rad Show mentioned that another movie was good, like Brick. The movie is about a high-school guy who is asked by his ex-girlfriend for help, before she turns up dead and a whole plot is discovered which I won’t spoil in case you haven’t seen it.
I’m not familiar with the writer/director, but I have to admit, I love the writing. The people in this movie don’t speak like normal people do, but I really wish they did, to have my verbiage met with near-prose by the people around me would only challenge me further. The dialog between characters at times seems more appropriate for a 1940s detective movie (“The ape blows or I clam”, “If you got every rat in town together and said ‘Show your hands’ if any of them’ve actually seen The Pin, you’d get a crowd of full pockets”), in fact there are lines lifted from the Maltese Falcon. There were a few times that I had to re-watch a scene wishing I had sub-titles, which is a little unfortunate.
There are maybe 10 people total in the cast, but they are fantastic; now I have to go back and find out what the other movie Dan was talking about when he mentioned Brick.

Rating: I would buy this movie and show to anyone who hasn’t seen it.

I admit I was a bit hesitant about seeing Hamlet 2, the movie about a struggling high school drama teacher who decides to make a sequel to (arguably) the best play ever written by William Shakespeare where everyone dies at the end. We were supposed to see it on Monday, but for some reason it’s in really limited release, so we saw The Rocker instead. After watching Hamlet 2 tonight, I wish I’d seen it instead of The Rocker; It was very well done. The movie was honestly funny, and I bet if I watch it a few more times there are a number of quotable lines (Raped in the mouth?).
Elisabeth Shue is adorable as… Elisabeth Shue; I’m not sure if she actually had given up on acting in real life, but that was the background of her “character” in the movie. It was perfect casting, and I really hope she gets back to making more movies.
The film pulls no punches with topics such as religion and ethnicity, which I think might have led to it’s limited release (mostly unknown actors probably didn’t help matters) but I think if you have half the sense of humour I have, you will find it very funny.

Rating: I plan on downloading this movie to watch again, it’s not necessary to see it in the theatre, if you can find it playing, but definately rent it.

I finally got around to watching Ratatouille, the animated movie about a rat who wants to be a chef, a chef that can’t cook, and the Parisian restaurant that makes their dreams a reality. I shouldn’t be surprised that a Pixar movie turns out to be fantastic, but I really didn’t have high expectations for this movie, and I was remarkably overwhelmed.
I think the magic comes from treating animated movies as a blockbuster live action movie, the cinematography, lighting, scenery, voice acting and story are amazing and should not be relegated to be only for kids.
I don’t remember animated movies being this good when I was a kid, and I think that is because they weren’t. There were some little jokes for the parents who had to sit through them, but generally the movie was kid-oriented. Gladly those times have changed, and now animated movies are for everyone as they should be.
Considering my previous misgivings for this movie, I should probably seek out any other Pixar movie, like Cars that I passed on due to not liking the trailer, and make sure I see them. The creative team behind movies like Ratatouille, Toy Story, WALL-E, The Incredibles, and A Bug’s Life are on a completely different level of film making.

I haven’t been using my rating scale for my past movie reviews (I may go back and edit them), so I’ll start now.

Rating: I would buy this movie on DVD/Blu-Ray, worth seeing with anyone who comes over and hasn’t seen it.

The Rocker, staring Rainne Wilson of The Office fame, about a middle-aged ex-rocker who helps out a group of teens with a band turned out to be a half-decent movie.  It certainly wasn’t as funny as the last few movies I saw (Pineapple Express, Step Brothers, Tropic Thunder) but there were some decently funny scenes and the story wasn’t bad.  I don’t know if it’s Rainne’s voice, or his delivery, that makes “Fish” feel very similar to his Office character Dwight, but it is somewhat distracting.  Most of the roles in this movie are cliche’d and there are obvious plot twists (the band breaks up just before their big gig for ridiculous reasons, but then they make up just in time to rock out.  What a coincidence, I’ve seen that at least a dozen times before).  There are several noticeable Toronto locations (where most of this movie was filmed) such as venue’s and skyline’s.

Christina Applegate was perfect as the yummy mummy, she is still very attractive and steals every scene she is in.

Rating: Worth renting once.

This year I participated in the Big Game, which is basically getting as many people as possible to run around in a forest with paintball markers. This is Canada’s biggest big game, last year they had 1,500 people and this year it was over 2,200.

I think there are some people in the military that go to this, and some people who just take it way too seriously. I was in the 1% that didn’t wear camouflage, and some people’s camo was 3D so it was designed to look like a pile of leaves. There was at least one person who showed up in a Ghillie Suit, which he apparently had to remove due to the heat. There were a lot of fancy lightweight markers, some of which looked like military replicas, I had to use a rental which was made of steel and was about 15 kg. I noticed a lot of teams from all over the country with their names stitched on their backs and they had radios, which actually would have been handy since I kept losing track of the people I went with.

The worst part about the whole experience was that shortly after I left the house, I noticed the rubber sole of my work boots were deteriorating, but I didn’t realize how badly until I got to the event and saw that I had no sole left at all on my boots; It was clean to the metal. The metal tang was of course slipping on everything so I decided to pull them off, hoping there was at least a thin layer of rubber underneath. No such luck, it was the fabric bottom of the insole showing. Unfortunately I had not brought any backup shoes and wore the boots anyway all day long, feeling every small pebble I stepped on and at the end of the day when I ended up in mud about 5 cm deep it all got inside. By the end of the day the top was nearly coming off and the toe had split like some old cartoon, so I just decided to drive all the way home in sock feet.

I was thoroughly entertained by this movie, way better than I expected. I had seen the trailers which I felt were very funny, and I was surprised that they are only a small part of the fun in this film.

Robert Downey Jr. is amazing in this film, you really stop thinking of him as Robert Downey in black face; great special effects. Tom Cruise steals every scene he is in, as bat shit crazy as he seems to be in real life, it always seems to work out in his film roles.

In the last 3 weeks I’ve seen Step Brothers, Pineapple Express, and Tropic Thunder. I don’t think Tropic Thunder was quite as hilarious as Step Brothers, that movie is just ridiculously funny, but it is a definite close second. Pineapple Express really loses out only because it was sandwiched between the other two. By itself it was a very funny movie, with memorable quotes and a lot of laugh out loud moments.

Rating: Worth seeing in the theatre with a bunch of friends, I’d see it multiple times.

When I got home I couldn’t get the lock to unlock. While I was waiting for the super, I noticed scuffs all around my lock, and my peep hole was knocked out.

I’m guessing they came around during the day, knocked to see if anyone was home, then busted out the peep hole to see if there was anything worth stealing. From the door you can see my Wii and Xbox, so then they tried to force the door. They busted the lock which just meant no one could get in.

Long story short, deadbolts are great security.

Tysun at work loaned me his spare Rubik’s speed cube, it moves so fast and easy I was able to get my time down under 4 minutes.

I’ve been playing around with this Rubik’s Cube for a few weeks now, and I’m down to about a 6.5 minute solve. Which isn’t anything to people who obsess over it, but is still better than most of the people on the planet.

I still get messed up every now and again when I don’t know a shortcut and just try one of the combo’s I know which makes a bit of a mess, but in 6.5 minutes I was able to fix the mess and continue on my way… twice. At some point I might look into the shortcuts which will probably reduce my time a lot.

The Bendable Blog is finally back up since it was previously being hosted at my friend’s house and that server was shut down.

I’m just setting things up, so I’ll make a proper post later.