Category Archives: Movies

Films to me but movies to the rest.

Shopping For Books, Music and Movies

Posted on by
3

I gen­er­ally tend to ask people for book or cd tokens for my birth­days and Christ­mas. It’s easier some­times than try­ing to sug­gest a spe­cific item that I would like. At time like that I seem to only be able to think of ter­ribly expens­ive or obscure things that I want. So, hav­ing got some tokens for my birth­day last week, and hav­ing some left over from Christ­mas, I finally got round to going shop­ping today. And what a lot I got! :-)

I had £95 worth of tokens to spend. Some were for Bor­ders, some were for HMV and some were for Water­stones. Hav­ing looked around for the last couple of weeks at some of the things I might buy, I finally got round all three shops this morn­ing and spent all but £2 worth of tokens. Here are the things I bought:

Three Brian Jaques Red­wall books: Triss, Loam­hedge, and Rakkety Tam. I’d got behind with the Red­wall series. These will bring me up to date. Three Terry Good­kind books from the The Sword of Truth series which I only star­ted last year: Blood of the Fold , Temple of the Winds, and Soul of the Fire. Two Neal Steph­en­son books: Quick­sil­ver and The Con­fu­sion. These are the first two of the Baroque cycle which I have been wait­ing to read. The third, The Sys­tem of the World, is still only avail­able in hard­back so I’ll wait to get that one.

The last two books I got were Black Cof­fee Blues by Henry Rollins: I love his music, but I’ve not read him before; and O’Reilly’s Extreme Pro­gram­ming Pocket Guide (I had to get one com­puter book didn’t I!)

I also bought some music CDs: Michael Nyman — The Piano, the Begin­ners Guide to Bol­ly­wood which is a 3CD set for a budget price, and Serge Gainsbourgs’s Ini­tials Sg which is a great com­pil­a­tion of his work through the dec­ades. Quite a mixed bunch that lot. I’m cur­rently listen­ing to the first of the Bol­ly­wood CD’s real vin­tage stuff from the 60’s and 70’s. I don’t under­stand a word if it, but it’s great!

Finally, I bought a couple of DVDs (I set out to get more, but I can get three books for the price of a DVD!)Akira — The Ulti­mate Col­lec­tion. Jan had already bought me the second Akira graphic novel for my birth­day. I also got Sioux­sie and the Ban­shees Best of: Deluxe Sound and Vis­ion which has a double audio CD with a DVD. I real­ised the other week that I no longer owned any Ban­shees stuff so I’m glad to get this even though it’s only a best of.

So, I’ve got a lot to enter­tain me for the next few weeks. I’ll try to review them as I get through them. I’ve missed doing reviews for the last 18 months.

This And That

Posted on by
5

It’s been a while…

I see that Amazon UK have star­ted their DVD Rental scheme (like Net­flix et al) [Link in top left corner of the page]. I also received an offer from WH Smith with a sim­ilar scheme. The WHSmith’s offer seems a little bet­ter if you watch a lot of movies. £13.99 per month for unlim­ited quant­ity, three at a time. Whereas Amazon’s offer is £9.99 per month but a max­imum of 6 per month, three at a time. Other deals are Amazon £7.99 per month, four per month, two at a time, and WHS­mith £9.99 unlim­ited, one at a time. Both offer free post­age both ways; WHS­mith says first class both ways, Amazon doesn’t spe­cify. For my view­ing pattterns, neither of them rep­res­ent good value! I seem to watch less than one movie a month. But then if I has some­thing as con­veni­ent as this, I would prob­ably watch more. I’m sure Jan and Jamie would.

I’m pleased to report that Kitten’s Spam­in­ator is hand­ling about 90% of my com­ment spam (up to 300 a day). A rename of wp-comment-post.php has elim­in­ated a couple of brain dead script kid­dies. WordPress’ own spam block­ing com­ment mod­er­a­tion cur­rently catches 99% of the rest, but I have to manu­ally mod­er­ate those. I just need to elim­in­ate the rest of those. I’ll invest­ig­ate some more of the WordPress Plu­gins to stop the spammers.

I’m this close to imple­ment­ing David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done. I’m thor­oughly con­vinced, I just need to get over the hump of that ini­tial pro­cess. Actu­ally I have star­ted and man­aged to throw away two bin bags full of old paper­work and magazines.

Gmail con­tin­ues to impress me. I use it every­day and it is cur­rently my main email sys­tem. Though now that Thun­der­bird has reached 1.0, I’ve installed that and I’m test­ing it too. I need to be care­ful though: I have (almost) all my email either redir­ec­ted or copied to my Gmail account. But I can still pickup up some of it via POP3 with Thun­der­bird. I don’t think I want to then have Thun­der­bird also retrieve some of the same mail from Gmail via POP3 (now that is sup­por­ted). I guess I really want an IMAP inter­face to GMail (I think it will come even­tu­ally) with Thun­der­bird as another way to access that and act­ing as a local backup by mak­ing an off­line copy.

Audrey Hepburn

Posted on by
1

For no par­tic­u­lar reason, I’ve watched two Audrey Hep­burn movies today. Funny Face with Fred Astaire which I watched with Jamie and then Paris — When it Sizzles with Wil­liam Holden, which we all watched. Sur­pris­ingly, I’d not seen either film before. I say ‘sur­pris­ingly’ as we have had the Audrey Hep­burn Col­lec­tion DVD Box Set for quite a while.
Any­way we thor­oughly enjoyed both movies. Jamie par­tic­u­larly enjoyed the dance routines from ‘Funny Face’ and the com­edy in ‘Paris’.

Matrix Revolutions

Posted on by
3

I went to see Mat­rix Revolu­tions tonight. I can without doubt say I loved it!
After the frankly mediocre Reloaded, I was pleas­antly sur­prised. I thought this was a great film, they got the mix of jaw drop­ping spe­cial effects and almost bewil­der­ing plot rev­el­a­tions just right. I won’t spoil the plot for any­one who hasn’t yet seen it, but I will say that the final events and explan­a­tions around Neo, Mr Smith, The Oracle, et al were quite sat­is­fact­ory.
There were some issues which stretched the credu­lity of even a hardened Sci Fi fan like me, but that’s no sur­prise given the found­a­tions of the Mat­rix world.
All in all recommended.

Star Trek Next Generation

Posted on by
7

You would have to be a major fan with money to burn to pick up a copy of Star Trek The Next Gen­er­a­tion: Sea­sons 1 – 7 Borg Mega Cube at the amaz­ing price of £338.23! That’s with 25% off! I know that

The “Borg Mega Cube” con­tains all 7 sea­sons of Star Trek Next Gen­er­a­tion (48 discs in total), a lim­ited edi­tion col­lect­ors card includ­ing unique num­ber­ing and an exclus­ive free ST Next Gen­er­a­tion clock.

but it’s still over £300

Disney Animates Dali’s Flick

Posted on by
Reply

I would really like to see this short film. I am a great fan of Dali’s works.

“In 1946, Walt Dis­ney and Sal­vador Dali, in one of cinema’s oddest col­lab­or­a­tions, teamed up on a short film called Des­tino. But Disney’s stu­dio ran into fin­an­cial trouble and put the unfin­ished film on the shelf.
Now, 57 years later, a team of Dis­ney anim­at­ors has fin­ished what Dali started.”