This is either the smartest thing we've ever done, or really stupid.

My favorite thing about Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is that it doesn't take itself seriously, at all. I mean, the trailer for this movie says "starring the Asian kid from American Pie One and Two, and the Indian guy from Van Wilding." They of course ignore that John Cho (Asian guy from American Pie) starred in Better Luck Tomorrow, an excellent film. They even make a reference to that, early in this movie one of the extreme moron characters tells him "better luck tomorrow."

Anyway, it really doesn't take itself seriously, and is one of those movies more in the veign of a sketch comedy then a movie. It moves from set piece to set piece, with a very thin plot holding it all together. This mostly works, and some of the parts are very, very funny. The odd thing for me was that the sketch comedy just felt out of place a bit. Harold and Kumar actually have real characters, I would believe that they're real people. The actors that play them have genuine moments. A few times I came close to getting sucked in, thinking it was a real movie - but then a silly sketch bit comes along and I get pulled back out.

So there you have it. This movie is funny, but if it were a little smarter, and relied a little less on juvenile set piece humor, it could have been really great.

Side note: Did you know that you can be socially responsible by going to see this movie? Yes, that's right, Harold and Kumar is being called a cultural breakthough. No kidding, you can't make this stuff up...

It's not a mistake. They don't make mistakes. They don't do random. There is always an objective, always a target

The Bourne Supremecy is a fantastic movie. For me, this is the pinnacle of what spy movies should be. People who are exceptionally good at what they do, with no distractions.

This movie has no unneccesary romances, no silly side plots, the fate of the world is not at stake. The movie deals in a smaller, more realistic scope. This movie feels like it actually could happen. Yes, there are some crazy moments where you're skeptical if he really could walk away from that crash, or if that car would still be driving after all that damage. But those are standard action movie fare, and true realism would really be entertaining.

My only complaint (no kidding, I only have one, that's rare) is the camera work and editing is very jumpy and quick. They did this for a reason, they wanted to convey a sense of confusion, especially in the quick moving crowd scenes. Sometimes this is valuable, personally I almost never like it - not just my style, but I think this movie went overboard by any measure.

Ahhh, I love watching good movies. It's been a great summer for them....

Live Strong

I became fascinated with Lance Armstrong and the Tour De France this year. Lance is such a great story, but for me the big thing was hearing about his total dominance at the tour. At the premier world competition level it just isn't normal that one person is that much better then everyone else, it's remarkable.

I also agree with Guy that the Nike Ad with Lance is one of the best ads I've ever seen. If all advertising was like this I wouldn't mind it intruding on my life so much.

Well done Lance, we're all proud of you, and amazed.

As a rule of thumb I don't attend parties where the guest of honor has no idea what's going on.

Somehow I didn't start watching Scrubs until this past year. People talked about how great it was, but my TV quota was sort of full, there's only so much TV I can watch in a week. TiVo allows me to maximize that time, and spend it watching good stuff, but you look carefully there actually is lots of good tv out there to watch.

Anyway, I started watching Scrubs this year - and I really enjoy it. It's my kind of wacky quick comedy, where there will often be one or two running jokes through an episode that they'll loop back to in clever ways. This show is way smarter then most comedies, and I appreciate that.

But it can also be real. Last week they did a thing where they showed four repeat episodes on Thursday night (mostly as a way for star Zack Braff to promote his new indie movie: Garden State.) Today I watched one of the episodes they played, "My Screwup." This episode was fantastic, and believe it or not actually made me cry (granted, I'm sick and a little loopy right now.) The episode has one of those twist kind of endings, and I went back and watched it a second time to pay more attention. It turns out they weren't even subtle about it, but I just don't expect that kind of intelligence from a 30 minute comedy, so the first time through I wasn't even thinking about that stuff (and I'd even seen this episode before, I'm clearly ill.) Anyway, I won't spoil it, but I consider this to be one of their best episodes, and if you've never seen it and want to really get hooked, track this one down.

Of course, they're almost all good, so just watching it when it's on will probably also get you hooked as well.

Human: Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot take a blank canvas and turn it into a masterpiece?
Robot: Can You?

Major Spoiler Warning

I watched I, Robot last night. I'd sort of given up on this one after I got the early buzz on it. And Ebert's review really made me think they had screwed it up. You see, I like Asimov's robot stories. Almost all of them center around this theory of the three laws of robotics, which are intended to keep robots from hurting people or getting out of control. But the three laws have a lot of potential for creative logical ambiguities. I think just about all the robot stories (every one I can remember at least) was about exploring some of these logical loopholes, and how it causes robots to malfunction.

I had high hopes for the movie, as long as it remained smart it could be a really interesting sci-fi movie. And the director, Alex Proyas, has a resume that implies he could make this a really smart movie (he did Dark City and The Crow.) In the end it landed somewhere in the middle. The movie stays true to the spirit of the robot stories. Robots only break the three laws because there's some logical loopholes at work. But it doesn't stay true to them because it doesn't explore those logical loopholes at all. The movie is set up as an action/thriller movie, and most of the mystery involves why these robots are misbehaving. This is revealed, and with it the logical loophole explained in about four lines of dialog, near the end as part of the climax. I should note that I don't mean it took four lines of dialog to explain the loophole, I mean they only spent about four lines on it - total.

This means the story itself can't focus around the logic of the three laws. Instead it focuses on Will Smith and the robot psychologist Susan Calvin (a constant character in the robot stories.) And it ends up being basically an action movie. As a pure action movie it's decent though. There's some good action, and some fun chase scenes. They rely on cgi a little too much, and it all has that feel of pretty pictures but it's not a real object with real mass you're looking at. But that ok, it's fun.

Where the movie succeeds spectacularly is in it's beauty and visual imagination. This movie was pretty, and props, vehicles, and robot designs are all well conceived and fun to look at. The "Audi of Tomorrow" concept was so nice Audi is using it in real world advertisements ("Look at the cool looking concept car from this movie! Isn't it cool! Now buy an A4" - I'm not kidding!)

They didn't totally take a pass on the robot quandaries. The main robot character spends a fair amount of the movie dealing with issues of self awareness, identity, and other traditionally human concerns. The movie never really slows down enough to really dig into these issues, but at least it gives them some screen time.

So it's ok that the movie mostly took a pass on the really smart content. In a sense it might even be good, since those kinds of heavy dialog kinds of problems often don't translate to film so well. They took the safe route and did an action/thriller, which translates to film very well, and added some robot stuff in for the people to consider if they felt like it.

Side notes:
1. I really disagree with Ebert on this one. I liked it, and found his review to be totally unhelpful in determining if I'd like it or not (he is usually very good at this, it's why he's my most trusted film reviewer.) But I totally agree with Orson Scott Cards thoughts on it, which is rare because we almost never agree about movies.

2. CJ had my favorite post movie thought, which both sums up the movie nicely and is topical these days based on what my company is doing (and how people think we're trying to take over the world.)

It all happened because of auto-update

It's the greatest feeling, to make a big play at the end of the game and just hear the crowd errupt.

- Lauren Jackson, in a post game, center court, quick interview that almost the entire crowd stayed to watch.

I went to two professional sporting events today, and they offered a great dichotomy.

First I went to the Chelsea vs. Celtic Soccer Game at Seahawk stadium. These are two English professional teams that came to Seattle to play an exhibition game. They were very talented, but because it was an exhibition game, it didn't have that much intensity. Plus, to make it worse it was super hot; it must have been 100 degrees on the field. So the players were just kind of out having a good time. This was fun to watch from a "hey those guys are talented" point of view, but it was kind of expensive for it to be just that. Also, Seahawk stadium is huge and was only about half full. There wasn't all that much energy around.

Then I went to the Seattle Storm game. What a contrast. Admittedly the skill level within the sport wasn't the same. The players were good, but they're not good like they are when you watch European Pro soccer players, or a good NBA team - things like that. That said, some of the best women basketball players in the world were on that court, and they were fun to watch.

It's more then that though. They play at Key Arena, where the Sonics play, but they close off the upper section of the arena and actually put up a barrier. All the fans are down in the lower section (where even the back row seats are pretty good) and the place feels packed. Even though it's less then half full if they didn't have the upper section closed. The fans were engaged. They really liked being there, they liked watching the team. Late in the game when the officials made a call that was bad for the storm (even though I'm pretty sure it was the right call) the boo's from the crowd were deafening, and lasted for a long time. Being part of that energy is just plain fun.

Also, the whole thing doesn't take itself too seriously. The players take the game seriously, play hard, and are there to win. But it's like the whole environment knows everyone is there because they like basketball, and want to support this women's team. They did lots of fun (and silly) things you'd never see at an NBA game to help the crowd have a good time. My favorite was during a time-out late in the game they had a train dance party (you know, where everyone forms up a train and hops around in a line) and kids just came streaming down from the stands. There were at least 100 kids down there dancing on the floor in the middle of the time-out. I was thinking it was going to cause some problems when the timeout ended and they had to get on with the game. But no, a big horn blew and everyone scattered back into the stands. It was neat.

I think the best way to describe it is it just felt like a wholesome environment. It wasn't tainted by the money or fame you get in other pro sports fields. The player's intensity, and obvious thankfulness for being able to play their sport for a living was great was fun to watch. The crowd's energy was fun to be in. It was about four times cheaper then the soccer game, and for me, a whole lot more entertaining.

Well, I have all your equipment in my locker. You should probably come get it cause I can't fit my nunchucks in there anymore.
 
Napoleon Dynamite was awesome! Admittedly, it was a bit of a strange movie. But it iconified dorks superbly well. I proudly admit that I was a geek (and still am.) I more meekly admit that I was also a bit of a dork. But the key to my dorkiness, and the dorkiness in my friends, was that we were smart. Unfortunately for the characters in this movie they are 100% dorky and not so bright.  That's ok though. They're fun to watch. It's got that train wreck facination quality.
 
The strangest thing for me was trying to place what year the movie took place. Many of the clues pointed to 80's (style, music, etc.) But other things said it's modern times (Uncle Rico remembering the glory days of 1982, the internet, etc.) My verdict is we're talking about the middle/late 90's. That puts them a behind the fashion/music curve by 5-10 years and ahead of the internet curve a bit. But people in this, shall we say, social order, tend to be early adopters in the internet space so I can deal with that.
 
Warning: Only go see this movie if you want to watch a no plot character movie about some of the biggest dorks you can possibly imagine. Overall I found this to be a silly, pointless, and thoroughly entertaining movie. And just when you think it has no hope, a happy ending come along!
 
Pedro for President
 

What I see in this candidacy is the perfect becoming the enemy of the good. The reason I chose not to run as a third party myself, which took me about five seconds to think about - after I had really endured the slings and arrows of having been the front runner in the democratic nomination - is in the long run it's not important that Howard Dean be president of that Ralph Nader be president. In the long run this is about American people who can't defend themselves against the type of administration that George Bush has. And that's why I wish you were on our team Ralph - because we really need you.


Howard Dean and Ralph Nader were on Justice Talking on NPR on Friday. I thought their informal debate was fantastic. In the past I've been a big fan of Nader, but hearing him debate Dean just seemed like he'd gone off the deep end a little bit. I think he's crossed the line from a poignant liberal voice into zealot territory.

Then you have Howard Dean, who was a crazy phenomenon during the democratic primary this year. I loved Dean, and the more I hear him talk the more I like him. He's a realist, which resonates with me, where Nader is clearly no longer a realist.

I think the two party system causes a lot of problems, and I think there's a lot of places to improve on what we have. I think adding more choices is a good start to that. But one of the beauties of our government is that change is slow and hard to come by (and it's failing is the main tragedy of Bush's current presidency.) Nader doesn't seem to respect this, and that's the reason his message doesn't hit home with lots of people. You have to be very, very liberal to agree with him on all his points - and he has this attitude that if you don't agree with him on something you're wrong. Dean never came across like that to me.

You can read more about it and listen to it yourself at the show's website. I highly recommend it, it's very interesting - and makes me hope that Dean remains on the national political stage for a long time.

(Unfortunately while the main NPR stream is in a reasonable format, the Justice Talking stream is only in Real Player, the bane of the online media world.)

Oh Christopher Robin, I'm so dissapointed in you. You should be in this race, look what you're missing out on.

There are only a few reality TV shows that I enjoy. I didn't watch The Amazing Race the first few seasons it was on, but got hooked on it last summer. It's actually the only show I've seriously considered applying for (with my sister Lily - Jill thinks we would be spectacular contestants.) Unfortunately I missed the window to apply, since it's typically very short and not publicized much.

Anyway, the new season began last night. And low and behold, one of the teams is from my hometown: Eugene, Oregon. Kami and Karli are twins, my age, and live in Eugene. I was trying to figure out why I didn't know them (Eugene is a small enough town that I would have known of two cute twins my age) but then found out they're actually from Beaverton and just live in Eugene now. Anyway, the real insanity started when in their intro it showed them playing soccer. My affection for soccer players is well known, and the odd facination that men have with twins is clear, so I was happy to see two cute twin soccer players from my hometown run around for a while. Unfortunately they ended up being not too observant. They couldn't find the check point coming off of a ferry after their rest night, and then were one of two team that had trouble with instructions (how hard is "across the street from the blue and white hotel? You know, the big 18 story one you're standing by.) That's ok though, they made it and avoided elimination so they can get better next week.

To be eliminated next week: As cool as Charla is, her cousin Mirna is fingernails on the chalkboard obnoxious. They have my vote to go next week, if nothing else just so I can stop having to watch her.

I have to keep my eyes open for the next casting call, this race would be fun.

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