Archive for 'Entertainment'
Ms. Dewey: A high-maintenance search interface
Posted on October 19, 2006, under Entertainment, Web Dev/Tech.
How not to build a search engine:
Ms. Dewey: Taking cute too far
The actual Ms. Dewey site took me six tries before the page would finally load. It wasn’t worth it.
Team Hoyt
Posted on August 22, 2006, under Entertainment.
Dick & Rick Hoyt: Team Hoyt
Taking the stairs and dropping the chain
Posted on May 10, 2006, under Entertainment.
We did a little urban riding in the Old Market last night. Don’t worry, Jon’s chain is fine. 
Superballs!
Posted on March 23, 2006, under Entertainment.
Sony shot a commercial with a ton of superballs for one of their new TV product lines.
Sending 250,000 multi-coloured ‘superballs’ bouncing down the streets of San Francisco may seem the strangest way to do this, but that’s exactly what Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig did for the BRAVIA commercial in July this year. San Franciscans have seen some unusual things in their time, but even this gave them something to talk about. And we’ve got the feeling that this commercial is going to do exactly the same thing.
Tip: I had to disable my adblock plugin to see it.
Hell brings the brotherhood of heaven
Posted on April 30, 2005, under Entertainment.
I re-watched We Were Soldiers last night. Such a powerful movie. One of the things that strikes me when seeing accounts of war like this is, why do we seem to need to go through hell before we have the brotherhood of heaven?
The movie is full of inspiring and moving scenes, but I really like the speech given by Colonel “Hal” Moore when addressing the 7th Calvary before going out to fight. That speech is one of the highlights of the film for me. I know a lot of the film is supposed to be historically accurate, but I can’t remember if this speech was actually given by the real Colonel Moore or not. The movie website seems to convey that a lot of the speech was accurately portrayed. Either way, it’s moving and Gibson deliveres it powerfully, through his voice and his eyes.
American Rhetoric has the speech available as an mp3 as well as text, which I’m quoting here:
Look around you. In the 7th Cavalry, we got a Captain from the Ukraine. Another from Puerto Rico. We’ve got Japanese, Chinese, Blacks, Hispanics, Cherokee Indians, Jews and Gentiles — all Americans. Now here in the States, some men in this Unit may experience discrimination because of race or creed. But for you and me now, all that is gone. We’re moving into the ‘valley of the shadow of death’ — where you will watch the back of the man next to you, as he will watch yours. And you won’t care what color he is or by what name he calls God.They say we’re leavin’ home. We’re goin’ to what home was always supposed to be. So let us understand the situation. We are goin’ into battle against a tough and determined enemy. I can’t promise you that I will bring you all home alive. But this I swear before you and before Almighty God: That when we go into battle, I will be the first to set foot on the field, and I will be the last to stop off. And I will leave no one behind.
Dead or alive, we will all come home together.
So help me God.
The official website for the historical information behind the book We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, where you can find out more about the men who really lived the story, is located at LZ Xray. Don’t miss the video of the real Colonel Hal Moore filmed right after the intense battle.
Robots vs. Million Dollar Baby vs. You
Posted on March 29, 2005, under Entertainment.
Robots, Million Dollar Baby, and Terri Schiavo: Stories of Life and Death
*** warning: the column contains spoilers for both movies ***
G.K. Chesterton once noted that “children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.” Youth is idealistic, while many of us, more advanced in years, have become jaded — trying to find our way through a fallen world, praying we are not judged too harshly. These disparate attitudes create very different stories — for children, fairy tales; for adults, sometimes desperate dramas. Children’s stories are fantasies, we tell ourselves, while the uglier stories of our adulthood are “realistic.” The existence of this dualistic view of the world is the only way I can explain the simultaneous success of two films currently sharing space at the cineplex: Robots and Million Dollar Baby.
Warriors with Wrenches
Posted on March 26, 2005, under Entertainment.
Warriors with Wrenches is a website dedicated to the soldiers, families and friends of D Company 140th Aviation. They have some pretty good (enjoyable) video and pictures of their experiences.
Family Values are worth something..
Posted on March 17, 2005, under Entertainment.
Showing that Hollywood is so detached from the rest of us that they can’t even read their financial statements right, the National Association of Theatre Owners is pleading with movie makers to make more family-oriented movies. Why?? They make more money.
“We want to call on our friends in the studios to continue this trend and to continue to distribute to us family titles, because that’s where we sell more movie tickets,” John Fithian, the group’s president, said at ShoWest, an annual convention of theater owners.
Re: Hotel Rwanda
Posted on March 7, 2005, under Entertainment.
I saw Hotel Rwanda last night. I don’t feel like I know enough of the history behind the story to really comment on specifics, but it was a good movie. Based on true events in 1994, almost impossible circumstances, and characters that cause you to do some self-introspection. I’d recommend seeing it. The cast was larger than I thought it would be, which was cool. Several times during the film I thought, “The’re in here too?” The movie was also a lot less visually gruesome than I had assumed it might be going in. I hadn’t realized it was only rated PG-13 and not R. Definitely disturbing concepts and scenes, but I didn’t feel like the movie went overboard on showing what happened. They probably kept it pretty tame. Overall, worth seeing in theaters or renting..
The Chronicles of Narnia – Controversial?
Posted on February 25, 2005, under Entertainment.
Disney is having a hard time deciding how much history to reveal about their upcoming December 9 release of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
The ‘problem’? C.S. Lewis based the story off of his personal faith and the history of Jesus Christ.
But this time, the pros at Disney are wrestling with a special challenge: how to sell a screen hero who was conceived as a forthright symbol of Jesus Christ, a redeemer who is tortured and killed in place of a young human sinner and who returns in a glorious resurrection that transforms the snowy landscape of Narnia into a verdant paradise.
I think to a lot of people this doesn’t come as much of a surprise (search Amazon for books by C.S. Lewis), but some related to Disney seem very worried, and want to distance the story from the greater story it was originally written to allude to. This is just one more thing that tells me a large part of Hollywood, including some at Disney, are out of touch with a large part of its intended audience. However, the Senior Vice President of Publicity, Dennis Rice, said:
“We are trying to make this movie to be as faithful to the book as possible. And if you connect to the book, we think you will connect to the movie.”
I sure hope that’s true. They don’t need to put forth extra effort to be ‘Christian’, but hopefully they will be true to the story and the nature in which Mr. Lewis wrote it. Hopefully Disney doesn’t ruin the story with Political Correctness and abstracting Postmodernism.
All that having been said, I’m really looking forward to seeing this movie, as I was read these books and watched the mini-series on TV when I was younger. I’m excited Weta is doing the effects, given they did an amazing job on LOTR. Apple has a quicktime teaser for the movie, go check it out.
By the way, contrary to some extraneous commentary on the LOTR DVDs, J.R.R. Tolkien was not a “pagan”, and was partially responsible for introducing his personal friend, C.S. Lewis, to Jesus Christ.
