David’s Ramblings

In the last few weeks, I’ve been subjected to a number of good movies. It is of course my humble duty to share my completely unbiased, objective observations of them with you, my reading audience. So, here goes: The Fountain is the best movie of 2006 and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters is the best movie of 2007. End of story. Without question. If you think otherwise, you’re retarded.

Now that the objective part of the reviewing is out of the way, let’s get to my own opinions on the movies.

 The Fountain – 4.9π / 900º

Everything about The Fountain screams out “masterpiece.” Visually, it’s a feast for the eyes. The visual effects are top-notch and will remain so for a few years to come at least. The entire movie is just pretty, the golden color leaking in to almost every crack of the film. The acting is well done. They couldn’t have chosen a better man for the leading role than Hugh Jackman. Rachel Weisz makes an absolutely stunning leading actress. All of this pales in comparison to the story, however, which is absolutely brilliant in ways that will leave a more active mind turning over for days.

 It’s helpful to understand that the storyline is left intentionally vague and open to interpretation. This is part of the brilliance. The intention wasn’t to write a story that you passively follow while watching the film and throw away when you’re done. It was to write a film that makes you think for a while, makes you scratch your head. And while that might seem a bit pretentious to some, I think it makes up for it by really making you think.

The movie follows three stories, each somewhat distinct. There’s a story set during the Inquisition and Spain’s conquests in the New World. This story is the first introduced, and later we find it tying into a story set in our own time of a man trying to find a cure for cancer – hopefully in time to save his wife. Turns out that the story of the Conquistador is one being written by the man’s wife. Later we’re introduced to weird floating tree in space with Hugh Jackman living next to it. There are many possible interpretations of how this last story fits in, and I think that the line is intentionally blurry on this one. If you think your brain might explode reading just the explanation than you probably wouldn’t appreciate this movie to the fullest extent possible, but if it sounds intriguing to you, I highly recommend seeing the film.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters – 4.5π / 900º

If you’re not an Aqua Teen Hunger Force fan, you’ll probably be able to ignore pretty much everything I say, but I warn you that you are a horrible person for not liking Aqua Teen. Yes, I know that 2007 isn’t over yet, and that, as far as movies go, the year has just begun, but in my mind they might as well just start 2008 right now to make it fair for all of those other movies. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters is hands-down the best movie of 2007.

The story starts millions of years ago, in Egypt. 3 PM. Downtown New York. 1492. The humor continues from there. Actually, it starts before that. I could have walked in and sat down for everything up to the opening credits and been amused enough to have had my money’s worth. The rest – as in everything following the opening credits – was just a bonus. It was like watching an hour and half long ATHF episode, which is just awesome.

To everyone not understanding what I see in Aqua Teen, I know where you’re coming from. When my roommate subjected me to a season’s worth of it, I had no clue what he saw in it. After a while though, you start to see some really funny stuff. It just takes a certain taste (or lack thereof) to enjoy. It’s probably even better if you’re high when you watch it. In many ways, it is sort of a spiritual descendant of Beavis and Butthead. Brainless, but almost witty at the same time.

Windows Vista. The newest offering from Microsoft. Software just very recently released from a company that has a bad habit of releasing software that needs to be out a year or two before it’s stable. Naturally, I decided to install it on my brand new, super awesome computer. Why? Mainly because I had a free copy lying around and wanted to give it a test drive so that I could tell other people what I think.

 Yes, you read that right. I care so much for your well-being that I installed a Microsoft product on my computer. Now, when you come up to me and ask me “I was thinking about getting Vista, what do you think?” I can respond without simply making broad generalizations about how Microsoft steals everything from Apple, always writes insecure stuff, and Windows generally needs to be avoided, especially if the version hasn’t been baptized in the fire of a thousand hackers and virus writers.

 Now, instead of making all of those somewhat lame generalizations, I can give you my true opinion: “Meh.” That’s right. “Meh.”

What exactly does “Meh.” mean though? Granted, I’ve only had Vista for a few weeks, now, but that’s long enough to see what issues I have with it. To be honest, I haven’t had as many as I expected to have. I would have loved to have been able to say, “Yeah, Vista sucks more than I possibly could have imagined,” but that’s just not true. Vista does have its weak spots though.

 The first thing one might notice is that trying to use an account with limited access and keeping an admin account separate is annoying. For security purposes, it is a good idea to not constantly be logged in as an administrator, because then you aren’t able to do things that might break your computer. Microsoft has taken a step in the right direction for this too. In XP, it was so painful to do things the right way that you just made your main user an administrator. Now, with Vista, you can actually be a limited user without feeling crippled. The unfortunate side effect is the constant nagging and asking for the admin password for all sorts of tasks, which can get old pretty fast, but doesn’t happen enough to make it unusable.

This stricter control on access rights can cause some issues with programs not ready for it though. I’ve personally had trouble uninstalling a botched installation of Firefox. It will tell me to input my admin password to continue uninstallation, and then tell me that I don’t have permissions because I need to put in the administrator password.

 Some other things that bother me are more cosmetic. For example, the start menu has a button that should shut down my computer, but instead the button puts it in sleep mode, which leaves my computer on. There seems to be no easy way to make this button act as I think it should though. Another thing that bothers me is that when I have two monitors plugged in, Windows can’t figure out how to put a different background on each monitor. This is a purely cosmetic matter, and won’t affect many people, but the fact that they completely overlooked this (something that’s so trivial to accomplish in the Mac universe) makes Vista seem just a tad unfinished.

There are a few other details that aren’t so much annoying as different from XP. The file structure is a tiny bit different, and many things have been moved around or changed a bit. These aren’t bad, it just takes a while to get used to.

In the end it’s not the big things, but the smaller things that make me displeased with Vista. Over all, it’s quite usable, even a bit more usable than XP, which is good, since that means they’re making progress. It’s still a Microsoft product though, and it certainly has its own flaws.

“So, I haven’t posted in a while. Mainly because I’ve been playing too many video games on my cool new computer. I decided to put together a computer capable of blasting most of the current games on the market out of the water with maximum settings. If you don’t game much, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, so let’s just say that games are much prettier on my new computer…”

It was at this point in the post that I stopped working on it and played more video games for a week straight. A firm example of how much I like my new computer and all the games I can play on it. I’ve decided it is in my best interest to leave it off while I finish this post.

Back to how cool my setup is: I’ve got it set up for dual monitor support. I can drag windows back and forth between two monitors. Add the power of synergy, which allows my mouse to drag over onto my Mac whenever it wants, and I have three screens sitting next to each other controlled with one mouse and keyboard. It’s really nifty.

I decided to install Vista, the latest offering from Microsoft, since I have a free copy from my school. I’m overall somewhat disappointed in it, considering how long it took them to release it, but that’s another post in the making.

Uh, oh, power’s back on. Suppose I’ll just have to get back to playing Supreme Commander.