We went to see Evan Almighty this weekend.  Great movie.  Well, not “great” as in Scorsese-esque, but it was quite good.  I’d say that in many ways it was better than it’s predecessor.  It probably makes a big difference if you prefer Steve Carell vs Jim Carrey type comedy.  I prefer Steve Carell, although I have him stuck in my mind as Michael in The Office.  Note that the writers were different between these iterations of the story.  Steve Oedekerk was the writer on this one.  I love his style and it comes through.  Morgan Freeman does quite well.  The overall film really is one of the summer’s best.  Highly recommended!

We went to see DOA: Dead or Alive this past Sunday.  Don’t bother seeing this in the theater (if it even lasts past this first weekend).  If you really want to see it, wait until it’s on video and go rent it.  In fact, wait until it’s been on video a while and wait for it to get the bargain bin rates.  I used to love playing one of the early versions of the game, so I had to go see it.  Video Game based movies rarely (if ever) turn out any good and this one was beyond bad.  Acting was generally bad (although it really depends on which actor, there were a few that were okay).  The directing was very amateurish.  I’m surprised it’s from Cory Yuen.  Even low budget Hong Kong films done in 2 or 3 weeks have better camera angles, editing, and scene composition.  Maybe he was under orders to construct scenes to replicate the video game and had to spend all his time there.  The fight scenes were probably the best part.  Except for a few corny things, they were passable.  The dialog was beyond bad.  To the point that the few decent actors really had to work to make the lines remotely believable.  It was so bad, they could have even tried to be Austin Powers campy about it, but no, it’s almost like they tried to be serious.  Anyway, thumbs down.

We went to see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer this past Saturday.  This was another film I’d read some poor reviews of, so I tried to keep my expectations from getting too high.  What was I thinking when it was over?  Like I had just watched a long TV episode.  Really.  Despite the huge budget, lots of special effects, and super heros I just didn’t feel the “blockbuster” intent.  The acting of the team felt like it was missing something.  There was no energy there, no sense of urgency as the world is going to be destroyed.  The only character I felt delivered was the Silver Surfer.  General Hager was the next best, but he was very much a cliche.  In fact, the corny nature of many little segments just took away from the film instead of adding anything to the characters.  It was a disappointment, but even more so when I analyze it.

We went to see Ocean’s Thirteen a little over a week ago.  I tried hard to keep expectations low.  I had read some early reviews and knew to not get over hyped.  It worked.  I wasn’t over expectant and as such I wasn’t disappointed.  This iteration of the story certainly wasn’t as engaging or as well written as the first two, but it was “good enough.”  I’m certainly not raving about it, but I’m not feeling like I wasted the ticket money.  The quality of the film was quite good.  There were the neat bits of action, the twisting story, the large large scenes with lots of little things going on.  The mis-en-scene brought a very real feeling to it.  This certainly wasn’t an amateur project.  It just lacked the polish of the first two iterations in the STORY.  The casting was good.  The directing was good.  The acting was good.  No where along the line did I feel like I was watching actors.  The story, though, it feels more like a draft than a final version.  It could have used some more work.

Well, another day, another shooting.  I didn’t even see mention of this on the local news tonight.  Maybe I just didn’t hear it as I wasn’t watching/listening too closely.  This time maybe it was self-defense, but the alleged attacker certainly didn’t seem to have benign intentions and if he hadn’t been shot, what might he have done with the gun he brought while trying to break-in to the residence.  The scary part, all 3 involved are police officers.

http://www.wmctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=6610489

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,277480,00.html

The latest OpenBSD Hackathon has produced some truly amazing results. Sure, every Calgary based Hackathon has produced something cool or amazing, but this one has resulted in 3 things that are home runs to me:

FFS2 – no, it is not done yet, but it is in a testable state and big disk/partition support has been lacking and this will bring OpenBSD back into the fold for my consideration as a fileserver. I’ve got one of those 750GB disks in my TV, you can imagine how much data I want to be able to store on the network, and I’d prefer it to be logically contiguous.

Bluetooth – I can just imagine a bluetooth access point with all the magic of PF, plus the simplicity of OpenBSD.

PF performance optimizations – the sheer amount of performance increase they’ve achieved in this Hackathon is nothing short of amazing. PF was pretty dang fast before, but now …. wow. Should be able to use lower power boxes for the same throughput in most of the situations I’m imagining.

Big thumbs up!