Wow, lots to talk about today.

First off, I was over at the Matrix website and I started looking through some of their photo galleries. The behind the scenes photos from the freeway chase scene are excellent. It was refreshing to see how many actual physical cars they wrecked (as opposed to say, the George Lucas all digital all the time theory.) I think this is why the scene worked so well. Computers are getting better but they still can't make fake stuff move just like the real stuff does. Go see that particular gallery here, here, and here.

While I'm looking through those photo's I saw something that made me straight laugh out loud. Check out this picture. Although only the hard core computer nerds out there will get that joke. Yes, that truck was really one of the semi's on the freeway - I missed when I watched, but will look for it when I see it on IMAX. With Trinity hacking a computer using nmap, ssh, and crc32 (all real life computer nerd things) and that truck The Matrix Reloaded offered quite a bit of fun inside jokes for us computer nerds. If you're wondering what the joke with the truck is you can get info about it here. Bonus: I learned something reading that link, turns out the terms Big and Little Endian originally come from Gullivers Travels.

Because I miss my surfing days I watched Boarding House: North Shore on the WB last night. It was suprisingly good. I watched some of MTV's Surf Girls a while ago and it wasn't so good. The main difference for me is the surfing. The WB show has real life professional surfers who are really good (well, most of them) and shows them surfing a lot. The MTV show has aspiring surfers and shows them surfing very little. The MTV show focuses on what most MTV reality shows focus on, interpersonal issues and people trying to grow. The WB show focuses on surfing. It's actually a very intruiging reality concept. As far as I can tell there are no gimmicks, no voting people out, nothing like that. They just took some really talented people, put them all in a house together for the duration of some big surfing events, and filmed them (this is remarkably like the first few Real World seasons on MTV, you know, back when it was good.) It kind of feels like a documentary about these professional surfers during the competitions. This works quite well if you like to watch surfing.

Then after that I watched Frida. Wow, what an artistic and pretty movie this is. Bright colors and images all about that just makes the screen seem like a painting in motion. And there are some scenes where they transition from actual Frida Kahlo paintings to live action in a wonderfully seamless way. I was impressed. Unfortunately I don't know enough history about Frida or Diego Rivera to know how accurate the movie is from that perspective, but nothing stood out as wrong. One thing did keep distracting me: I know Frida Kahlo had those signature eyebrows, but Salma Hayek is one of the best looking women around and the eyebrows kept distracting me - pulling me out of the movie. Still, I thought it was great and recommend it to you.

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