David’s Ramblings

Just taking a quick breather from my pages upon pages of English that still need done to post another journal I’m writing. Realize that these didn’t have to be about anything in particular and are only graded on completion, so I decided to try and write some things about Rick… maybe in an attempt to pretend that I’ll some day write that book my aunt suggested.

Media

Harry Potter is evil. Well, yes, the mass commercialization is disturbing, and the writing isnÕt my favorite, but IÕm talking about true evil here Ð the fact that J.K. Rowling is Satan incarnate trying to take our children with her down to hell. Do I sound a bit crazy? At least IÕm not serious. My stepfather, on the other hand, is quite serious about Harry Potter being evil. When watched the first Harry Potter movie, The SorcererÕs Stone, as a family one Thanksgiving, he swore that he felt the evil entering our household.

Mind you, this same man bought my mother Predator for a gift to go with our new DVD player. (Side note for those that donÕt know: Predator was a crappy eighties alien film starring Schwarzenegger and lots of blood.) No evil was felt from this movie, though he did throw it out after watching it once or twice. I guess thatÕs beside the point though, because a little violence and some skinning of humans is always less evil than kids in robes who learn to be friends and say ÒmagicÓ words at school.

Of course, Rick has always had a knack for finding the evil that other people arenÕt righteous enough to find. In our house, we were greatly blessed to have his enlightening view on every form of media. While not exactly what he said, roughly translated, the religi-babble always came out Òthat stuff is of the devil!Ó Rock music Ð ÒOf the devil!Ó TV Ð ÒOf the devil!Ó Internet Ð ÒOf the devil!Ó

Rick made his point very clear one time my cousin was unrighteous enough to play his punk rock while in RickÕs presence. He sat my cousin down and started talking to him about how this kind of music drives out the Holy Spirit. I walked away at that point, because I didnÕt want to get tangled in that kind of discussion. All I know is that when I came down an hour later, Rick was wrapping up his sermon with a seminary video that showed a bunch of dirty people destroying a perfectly clean house while telling my cousin, ÒThis is how I feel when you play your music in my house.Ó

IÕve had my own discussions with Rick on the subject of music as well. One time, he told me that I was not allowed to listen to the Lord of the Rings Soundtrack on Sunday, because it brought in the Òwrong kind of spiritÓ. When I objected, he simply went to prove the undeniable logic behind his reasoning. Classical music thatÕs played when Sauron is on screen represents Sauron, and since Sauron is evil, the music represents evil, thus, the classical music must be evil and is certainly not appropriate listening for Sunday.

Speaking of Sunday, letÕs not forget about TV. Our family is not allowed to watch TV on Sundays because it brings in all sorts of evil. TV on Sundays is apparently more evil than every other day of the week. While I can see his appeal that it makes Sunday less peaceful, heÕs got a very holier-than-thou attitude about it all. When the whole Janet Jackson Super Bowl half-time wardrobe malfunction scandal occurred, he proudly declared to everyone that our family didnÕt watch TV on Sunday, and that it was obviously a sign of GodÕs approval that we didnÕt have to experience the evil of a womanÕs nipple being flashed on television.

There is, in fact, very little media Rick does approve of, unless of course, he likes it himself. If I was on the internet too much, heÕd prove the evils of the internet by talking about how much pornography there was. If I played video games at my friends, I was in the wrong because these video games involved hurting other people. And music? Oh yes, Satan was talking to me there Ð just listen to the song backwards. ThereÕs no winning against a fanatic.

Today, since I’m totally out of anything interesting to post about (like anything I posted before was interesting…), I’ll write about three awesome movies – Donnie Darko, Boondock Saints, and Equilibrium. None of these movies is appropriate for people who take issue to an R rating, especially for violence, language, or both. So, if that applies to you, you can just ignore my praises and go on with your lives as normal.

Donnie Darko is a genre bender. It seems to be a drama, but once you’ve watched the whole thing, you might be more apt to call it sci-fi. It’s about a troubled teen named Donnie Darko who has an imaginary six foot tall bunny for a friend. As the movie progresses, we see Donnie becoming apparently more troubled, doing all sorts of naughty things that his imaginary friend Frank tells him to do. And then the ending happens, which totally changes the whole meaning of the movie, but I won’t give that away. This movie has a fair amount of swearing, but is otherwise relatively calm. This movie makes you think, and for that it gets a 5Ï€ rating (out of 900º). See if you can figure out what the hell is going on in only one viewing (I couldn’t).

Boondock Saints is a very violent movie. Very violent is actually putting it lightly. We’re talking blood, fingers blown off, toilets dropped on people from the top of a ten story building… the whole nine yards. Boondock Saints is about two brothers who believe they are on a mission from god to kill the bad guys. All of them – the mob, the pimps, the drug dealers, everybody. And they’re good at it. The whole movie is awesome, but I especially love how it transitions between scenes of the detective looking over the crime scene and the actual things that took place. This movie is not for the faint of heart, it includes large amounts of violence, swearing, and a hint or two of nudity… but it’s so cool. 5Ï€.

Equilibrium is also violent. Though it is not as bloody as Boondock Saints, more people die in Equilibrium. The story is somewhat akin to 1984. The world has been devastated by the third world war, and in response has taken action to prevent a fourth by destroying man’s ability to feel emotion. Everyone takes an emotion inhibiting drug, and there’s an iron-fisted force to ensure that “sense-offenders” are caught and given their just reward. The Grammaton Cleric is the main strength behind this force, a person trained with near supernatural fighting ability. We start the movie by watching one take out a room of men with machine guns using only pistols. An awesome movie with a pretty good story line, it’s a shame it got buried by the Matrix in theaters. 4.5Ï€.

There are so many great movies in the world, but these three are definitely worth putting on your list.

Movie Review

Score: 3.6¹ out of 900¼, unless you understand the words “open source”, then 4.0¹

I’ll take it easy today – a review of Antitrust. Antitrust is a movie for the nerds out there. I’m sure non-nerds can enjoy it, but it helps to harbor a hatred of Microsoft, which is pretty much equivalent to nerd status.

The basic plot is this genius programmer named Milo and his friends have just finished school and are going out into the real world. Where most of his friends join together to form a startup of their very own, he decides to take a lucrative offer to work at NURV (which is, for all intents and purposes, Microsoft). Milo is put on the most important part of the latest NURV project, but soon finds out that he’s getting help from other programmers… without their knowledge. NURV is basically stealing everything anyone else comes up with and putting it into their own project before those people finish theirs. There’s even a conspiracy, which goes further, but that can’t be given away without ruining some of the fun.

All in all, I really liked this movie. Though I wouldn’t accuse Bill Gates of killing programmers for code, this movie sort of rings true to all of us OSS fanatics who believe code should be free to the world, not exploited by some company. If you like computers, especially programming, you should certainly give this movie a shot. If not, it’s worth a look anyway.

I saw “Memento” a night or two ago. This is perhaps the coolest movie I’ve seen in oh, I’d say a week at least. The brilliance of it comes through at so many levels it’s hard to cover them all, especially to an audience that hasn’t seen the whole thing before. The movie is just a completely masterful piece of work. It’s rather sad it took me, err, 5 years from the time the movie came out to see it. That’s okay though. I’ve seen it now, and you should too (assuming you haven’t… if you have, you should definitely look into watching it again for fun).

The first thing you may, or rather, will be forced, to notice is that the story it going to go backward. Now, don’t take it for the whole movie playing in reverse order. The first scene plays in reverse order to help us understand what’s going to happen, but the rest of the movie plays in a very backward yet forward fashion. By this I mean that there are forward playing scenes played in reverse order. In this way, the movie is a masterful piece of art, even if you hate the storyline.

The storyline is in itself another great piece of work. It’s not a whodunit in classic style, because we see that the main character has done it within the first 30 seconds of the film. It’s a whyhedunit. We don’t have a clue why the man has killed this other character, and, as we later come to find out, neither does he. He has short-term memory loss, so he can’t remember anything for more than 10 minutes or so. We later come to find out, as he does through exploring his impressive array of tattoo notes to himself, that a man has raped and killed his wife and he seeks revenge. When you can’t hold a train of thought for more than ten minutes, you’d think you’d have a hard time doing this, but he manages to make it through quite well, as we already saw in the opening credits. The twists and turns we take later (actually earlier) is why this man was killed, which isn’t as straight forward as we’d like to think when the movie begins.

After you take time to rearrange the story in the correct order in your brain, you realize that this would have been a great movie had it played in forward order, and it’s just marvelous in reverse fashion. I definitely recommend this to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.