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I dedicate this trailer to Happy Simpleton, whose love of Rambo knows no limit:

Looks pretty funny.

We don’t see a ton of first-run movies in the pcg household anymore. So I frequently struggle with the idea of reviewing older movies that I happen to have just seen. On the one hand, I don’t want to get all excited about what is already common knowledge — “Dude, did you know DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER!!!1″ On the other, we watch a number of off-the-beaten-path movies that maybe not everyone has seen, or even heard of. With that in mind, we’ve recently seen a couple of Elijah Wood independent flicks from 2005 that were quite good. Both are nice and moody, with soundtracks and scenery to complement excellent scripts and actors.

Green Street Hooligans (2005) chronicles the life of a Harvard dropout as he escapes to London and into the dark, conflicted world of soccer gangs. While there are a few missteps in the acting (most notably at the outset of Wood’s interaction with his sister (Claire Forlani)), a number of gritty supporting performances (led by Charlie Hunnam) and a good script more than make up for it. The soccer is merely a backdrop for the incredible character transformation and rich storytelling that take place in urban England. It’s a very good watch.

Another thing we try to do is watch the trailers before a movie, particularly if it’s a lesser-known or independent film. That way, if we like the movie, we might have a few other similar movies to try out as well. This is how we came across Everything is Illuminated (2005), the story of a Jewish man’s quest to uncover the meaning of a mysterious photograph of his grandfather and an unknown maiden. The story winds through the Ukraine, starting in the city of Odessa, through abandoned and dilapidated Soviet outposts, out to the gorgeous countryside where the photo was taken. Surprisingly humorous, rife with subtleties and subversive Cold War pokes and beautifully shot, Everything is Illuminated is another very good watch.

Stay tuned, as next time I’ll review the new Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies.

MAGIC || MADNESS
It sometimes bothers me that sci-fi aliens are almost always depicted as humanoid with slight variations in shape and color, or perhaps with lots of sharp teeth.  One of the things I enjoyed about Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is the idea that we might encounter an alien and not even recognize it as sentient life.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but there’s a similar deal going on with magic in fantasy books - magical protagonist characters learn neat stuff at magic school and have fun adventures, and the only real downside to being magic is that if they’re good enough at it someone else might come after them because they’re jealous or consider them a threat. This issue bothered Justine Larbalestier and she applied her mad author skills to the problem. I just finished reading the first two books in her trilogy - Magic or Madness and Magic Lessons - in which magical characters are presented with two options: use magic and die young (most likely in your teens or 20s) or don’t use it and go insane. This makes for some interesting plot development.  I enjoyed the first two books and need to go find the third one now.

MAGIC == MADNESS

I spent last weekend losing a little sanity to getting a particular Rails app running on my Macbook. One of the reasons I switched to OSX from my dual-boot Linux/XP system was that “things just work.” While that’s largely been true, I did not find it to be the case for a Rails app that needs RMagick to process images. Given the percentage of Rails developers that use OSX and that RMagick seems to be the standard way of dealing with images in Rails apps not to mention all the fantastic Mac eye candy, I would have expected installation to look something like this:

macrails:~ fanboy$ gem install rmagick
Holy crap, you’ve got a Mac!!! I know *exactly* what to do for you, your apps will look fabulous!!!!!!
Successfully installed rmagick-1.15.11

Instead, I got to spend time running down a series of rabbit holes that all involved installing prebuilt versions of what I needed along with a bunch of dependencies.  I suppose that’s not too different than the RPM package management that I’ve come to know and love on Linux distributions, but if that sort of thing is necessary to get a development environment working on an OSX system I’d prefer that it was based on a standard packaging system that Apple baked into the OS.  Oh well.  I eventually got things working with Locomotive and an RMagick bundle, although it took a bit to figure out how to install/update gems in the bundle’s ruby installation.

With apologies to The Knack.

Ooh my little pretty ones, pretty ones.
When you gonna check out my chacojones?
Ooh you make my motor run, my motor run.
Seven-liter supercharged chacojones.
Never gonna stop, give it up.
Such a crazy pair. Always have ‘em out, like the feel
of the open air.
Cha cha cha cha cha woo. Cha cha cha chacojones…

Come a little closer huh, ah will ya huh.
Close enough to look at my chacojones.
Keeping it a mystery gets to me
Noone knows the strength of my chacojones.
Never gonna stop, give it up.
Such a crazy pair. Always have ‘em out, like the feel
of the open air.
Cha cha cha cha cha woo. Cha cha cha chacojones…

Why are you avoiding me, avoiding me?
Is it just a fear of my chacojones?
Is it just fantasy, fantasy?
Or can we play a game with my chacojones?
Never gonna stop, give it up.
Such a crazy pair. Always have ‘em out, like the feel
of the open air.
Cha cha cha cha cha woo. Cha cha cha chacojones…

What’s with the new trend of theater hosts stopping the previews to brag about whatever new doodad of technology they are using to show the movie I’m trying to watch?!?

I was excited to visit a new theater tonight because I wouldn’t have to go through that again, but there it was. So and so comes out acting all smarmy and brags about all the hoo-hah they’ve been working on. wtf? If your new shit is so good I would be able to tell if you would shut your pie-hole and show the freakin’ movie already … if it is not good enough to notice, I don’t want to hear you bragging about it and you should really be ashamed of yourself.

Honestly … next time I’m bringing a sloppy tomato with me.

I am very excited for Ratatouille, particularly after reading a very interesting article by the writer/director. This film looks very promising. Go Pixar.

I want to be excited for Evan Almighty given that I liked Bruce’s version and I think Carell can pull it off like Carey. I have a feeling that it won’t be spectacular, however, and the reviews that I have read so far seem to agree.

I am not excited for Live Free or Die Hard. I will watch it out of respect for the first of the series, but it looks to be jam packed with ludicrous stunts and action that are well beyond plausible.

What are you excited for?