Category: Personal

The Skeleton Key
I watched two movies again yesterday. Seems this 2 movie a day thing will continue till the end of Ramadan. The first movie I watched was The Business and the second movie was The Skeleton Key. I will start talking about The Skeleton Key first since it was the crappiest of the two. The movie was just not scary enough. I mean the name of the movie is actually scarier then the actual movie. Here is the movies plot summary from IMDB:

A young woman helping care for an invalid in New Orleans finds herself caught in the middle of morbid going-ons centered around a group of Hoodoo (Not Voodoo, it’s different. Hoodoo is an old African American magic that only works if you believe in it.) practitioners.

The movie starts off slow and as I said it wasn’t scary at all. The ending of the movie was the best part but to get to the ending you have to sit through the whole movie which isn’t worth it. So if you want me to save two hours of your life and tell you what happens in the end just send me an email.

The Business
The other movie I watched, The Business, now thats a cool movie. I wasn’t expecting it to be any good since I hadn’t heard of the director nor the actors but decided to take the plunge and watch it. Here is the plot summary:

Set in the Thatcher era with the cool sounds of the 80’s, THE BUSINESS is an action packed gangster flick set in Spain’s sun drenched Costa Del crime. Frankie (Danny Dyer), is on the run from the high-rise’s of South London to a new life in Malaga with nothing but a tin stuffed full of cash. Having no idea that this delivery of cash to super-suave playboy and ex-con, Charlie (Tamer Hassan), will change his life forever, he soon becomes one of the gang, and finds himself drawn into a flamboyant and violent world of organized crime.

The first thing that grabbed my attention in the movie was the cinematography. Every shot in the first 30 minutes of the movie was just gorgeous. The colors, the angles the situations, it starts off as a very beautiful artsy movie but then after 30 minutes the movie starts looking normal. I don’t know if they were pushed with time or something but the first 30 minutes looks allot different then the rest of the movie. The story is pretty cool, the movie never felt slow or boring, there was no nudity or excess violence yet the movie was still entertaining to watch and by the time you get to the end of movie you get really attached to the main characters. So between these two movies I watched, I would definitely recommend The Business.

Waterworld
Yesterday I watched Waterworld and A History of Violence. I watched Waterworld before but I felt like watching it again since I remember I had really liked it the first time I watched it. When Waterworld first came out I don’t think there was any movie like it, or at least I don’t remember knowing of one. Waterworld was the first movie I watched were the whole world had been destroyed because of a natural disaster. Now there are other movies like that for example The Day After Tomorrow. The thing is with new movies they really love showing earth devastated, in Waterworld we have just one small brief scene where you actually see whats left of the cities and you barely see anything. Thats because Waterworld came out a decade ago and they didn’t have the technology we have today to computer render vast cities destroyed and buried below the ocean. When Waterworld came out it was the most expensive movie ever made coming in at over $200 million and I am sure if they redid the movie today it would cost just a small fraction of that.

A History of Violence
Anyway the second movie I watched I was really looking forward to because it was directed by David Cronenberg. The movie is called A History of Violence and stars Viggo Mortensen who previously played the role of Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings series and Lucifer in The Prophecy. Here is the plot summary from IMDB:

Based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, A History of Violence is the tale of Tom Stall. Tom is a loving family man and well-respected citizen of a small Indiana town. But when two savage criminals show up at his diner, Tom is forced to take action and thwart the robbery attempt. Suddenly heralded as a hero who took the courage to stand up to crime, people look up to Tom as a man of high moral regard. But all that media attention has the likes of mobsters showing up at his doorstep, charging that Tom is someone else they’ve been looking for. Is it a case of mistaken identity or does Tom have a history that no one knows about? Either way, someone’s about to find out if there’s a history of violence.

So I watched the movie and I have to say, this is the most “normal” movie directed by Cronenberg. Its not a bad movie, I mean I did enjoy it but it was really missing Cronenbergs signatures. There wasn’t any excess sex, violence or graphic scenes. There wasn’t a twisted story or even a weird ending! I was disappointed of course but at least I got to see Maria Bello (Coyote Ugly, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, ER) nude in one scene.

Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids
I watched one and a half movies yesterday. I started watching Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids but I got bored 30 minutes into it and left to go have lunch. I knew it was going to be a documentary but I didn’t think they literally meant a documentary. Plus there was no nudity and all they were focusing around were these young kids growing up to in the brothels were their mothers work. Pretty boring stuff, would rather it have been a movie about the prostitutes themselves and not the kids or atleast I was expecting them to focus more on the prostitution part. The first 30 minutes I watched was about how they were teaching the kids to use the camera and take pictures!

Happy Endings
The second movie I watched was called Happy Endings. I really liked this movie a lot and I think its my favorite Tom Arnold movie ever. I really like Tom Arnold but in most of the movies he is just too silly so it was a good change to watch him take a serious role. It really suites him a lot. I won’t summarize the story in the movie since the movie is actually made up of many little stories that all interweave, kinda like Magnolia just not as hardcore. I actually had the movie for a couple of days now but I kept putting off watching it because I figured I would hate the movie because Lisa Kudrow acts in it. I really hate her, she is really annoying on Friends and I wouldn’t have been able to stand her for 2 hours in a movie. Luckily shes a completely different person in this movie, she’s allot more mature, quieter, not as high pitched and darker. I think this is probably one of her best movie roles also. Oh and Will’s cop boyfriend from the show Will & Grace is also in this movie which is pretty cool. So anyway, from the recent movies I’ve watched, this is one of the top 3. Its a happy movie with many happy endings that will put you in a happy state of mind.

The Bourne Supremacy
Once again I was able to watch two movies yesterday. The first movie I watched was The Bourne Supremacy. It was very forgetful and I think it would be a waste of my time to talk about it allot. I don’t know how the movie scored a 7.4 on IMDB. It was better then Be Cool and Kicking & Screaming but not better then the second movie I watched, The Village.

The Village
Two days ago McArabian suggested I should watch the movie The Village starring Joaquin Phoenix. So I downloaded it and watched it last night and it was a really good movie. It’s not one of the best movies I’ve watched this year but not every movie has to be the best movie ever to be good. Here is the plot summary from IMDB:

In a quiet, isolated village in olde Pennsylvania, there lies a pact between the people of the village and the creatures who reside in the surrounding woods: the townspeople do not enter the woods, and the creatures do not enter the village. The pact stays true for many years, but when Lucius Hunt seeks medical supplies from the towns beyond the wood, the pact is challenged. Animal carcasses, devoid of fur, begin to appear around the village, causing the council of elders to fear for the safety of the village, the pact, and so much more.

So the movie starts off very quiet and “normal” but by the time you get to the last 30 minutes everything changes, you just sit there and go no fucking way, no fucking way. I like movies who can do that to me. McArabian was also right when she said that The Village is a good Phoenix movie. Since I watched Ladder 49 and now this, my views on Joaquin Phoenix have changed a lot and all for the better. Adrien Brody and Sigourney Weaver also star in this movie. I personally think she should stick to fighting aliens, it doesn’t suit her to be an old mother in a village. So if you readers can watch this movie I would definitely recommend it.

Kicking & Screaming
I am a big fan of Will Ferrell, so when I heard about his new movie Kicking & Screaming I had to get it. Once I read the plot line of the movie though, I had a feeling this was more of a kiddie movie not an adult movie. According to the plot summary on IMDB “Family man Phil Weston (Will Ferrel), a lifelong victim of his father’s competitive nature, takes on the coaching duties of a kids’ soccer team, and soon finds that he’s also taking on his father’s dysfunctional way of relating…” Reading that I was a bit reluctant to watch the movie but since it starred Will Ferrell I decided to watch it yesterday afternoon. The movie didn’t turn out to be THAT bad, there are some hilarious scenes in it, but the movie is really made for kids so there are a lot of silly jokes and cute little kids doing stupid facial expressions. This is nothing like Old School basically, nothing like it.

Unleashed (Danny the Dog)
Second movie I watched last night was Unleashed (Danny the Dog) starring Jet Li. I was expecting this movie to basically be a beat-em-up but it turned out to actually have a story. This is the plot summary from IMDB “A man (Jet Li) raised into behaving like a dog, escapes from his captor to start a new life, who seeks to reclaim him because of his unnatural martial arts skills that are triggered when unleashed.” I really liked the cinematography of the movie so no matter how lame the story was it still looked good. The way Jet Li acts like a dog in the movie was pretty stupid. I hate it when people act like animals and this time it was no exception. The soundtrack which was composed by Massive Attack is also very forgetfully so not much was going for this movie. Now I am not saying it was boring or as bad as Be Cool, because its not. The movie was just not special, the fight scenes were regular and nothing different and the story was stupid. I didn’t enjoy it that much and I would have rather watched something else.

Yesterday I was able to scan all my CD collection into Delicious Library using the CueCat. I was surprised at how good the CueCat worked. Since it cost me only $10 I was expecting it to be inaccurate and unreliable but out of the over 300 CDs I scanned I had maybe only 5 instances where the CueCat couldn’t read the barcode and those were often because of non standard sized barcodes (ie very small) or because they were inverted barcodes (white stripes instead of black). For $10 the CueCat is a real steal.

I had some issues with Delicious Library though. I was able to scan the barcodes of most of my alternative music without any problems and I wasn’t expecting any problems since most of my alternative music is made up of mainstream stuff like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails etc.. When it came to my downbeat music I was expecting Delicious Library to have problems since the majority of the stuff are low profile and from small labels but since Delicious Library connects to a wide variety of sources it didn’t have a problem recognizing the CDs and loading up their info with CD covers. Sometimes though Delicious Library would load details from Amazon.co.uk for example where they wouldn’t have a CD cover while if Delicious loaded it up from Amazon.com it would have gotten a CD cover so I had to manually go to the Amazon.com website, take the ASIN number and dump it into the library myself to reload the info to be able to solve this issue. It did this less then 10 times but it does slow things down.

The big problems with Delicious Library came when I was trying to add my old techno stuff from the early 90s. The majority of the labels and CDs don’t exists anymore and Delicious Library had a hard time finding the CDs at all in the online databases yet alone finding the CD covers. So I was forced to add around 5 CDs manually because they didn’t exists online while the rest of the CDs which it did find didn’t have CD covers, but thanks to a wonderful website called Discogs, I was able to find the CD covers and drag and drop them into Delicious Library.

Today I will start adding my books to Delicious and then will follow with my DVD’s and videogames. I don’t know what I will do with all this information when I am done but I am sure I will figure something out. Oh and by the way, you can scan barcodes right after each other without having to wait for Delicious to load up the info. This saved me a lot of time since I just scanned CDs non stop without delay.

Be Cool
My streak of good movies ended yesterday after watching Be Cool. Although the movie features a lot of celebrities including John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, The Rock, Danny DeVito, James Wood and Steven Tyler, the movie was still boring and slow. John Travolta plays the part of a successful movie actor who wants to get out of the movie business and decides to go into the music industry where he ends up getting into trouble with the Russian mafia and a competing music company. The coolest person in the whole movie was surprisingly The Rock who played the role of a gay bodyguard who wants to become a movie actor. I swear if it wasn’t for him I would have turned the movie off after the first 30 minutes.

Ladder 49
The second movie I watched yesterday was Ladder 49 which also starred John Travolta. This movie was a lot better then Be Cool and a lot more exciting. The movie is about a rookie firefighter who joins John Travolta’s fire station and matures to become a seasoned veteran. The firefighter who is played by Joaquin Phoenix gets married, has two kids and then reaches a point where he has to choose between his risky job which he loves or taking a desk job which would make his family a lot happier. The last good firefighting movie I watched was Backdraft but that was ages ago so it was good to watch another one. I usually hate Joaquin Phoenix in movies since he usually plays the role of a dickhead but he was pretty cool in this movie and John Travolta’s acting compared to Be Cool is wayyyyyyyy better. It really doesn’t suite John Travolta being a tough guy, maybe it worked in Pulp Fiction but it wasn’t working in Be Cool. I got a lot more movies still to watch and hopefully I won’t have another Be Cool.

Yesterday afternoon I watched Green Street Hooligans starring Elijah Wood. The movie is about Elijah getting expelled from Harvard and then moving to England where his sister lives. While there he starts hanging out with his brother-in-laws brother who is a leader of a bunch of hooligans. He starts hanging out with them, learns to fight and becomes part of their gang. The movie is pretty cool and half way through it you just want to turn it off and go out and pick a fight with someone. The problem I found with the movie is Elijah Wood. After watching him in Lord of the Rings as a tiny hobbit, its hard to imagine him as a soccer hooligan, the part doesn’t suit him at all. Still though it was a cool movie I would recommend watching.

Maybe I am a few years late but I just watched Swordfish yesterday for the first time. Halle Berry’s tits were fine but other then that the movie was pretty lame except for the last few action scenes. The hacking / worm building scenes have to be the worst in any hacking movie I have ever seen. The way they visualized the hacking into a 3D Lego like building process was just stupid and very fake. I think that ruined the movie for me the most. I wasn’t planning on watching Swordfish yesterday, I was planning on watching Dark Water but it turns out I accidently downloaded Honogurai mizu no soko kara… the original Japanese version of Dark Water which I couldn’t watch because it was in Japanese and didn’t have English subtitles. If it was anything like Ringu (The original The Ring movie) it most probably was going to be crap anyway. I also think Dark Water is going to be crap, I mean it looks like a movie about someone with bad plumbing, but Nat wants to watch it which means I have to watch it..

I got my CueCat today from Aramex. So far I have been having problems with it. The CueCat works like a keyboard, when I scan a barcode with the CueCat, it types out the barcode number on my mac. The problem I have is that when I scan the number in the organizing software Delicious Library and when I scan a number into TextEdit (like Notepad on Windows) I get 2 completely different numbers where the one in TextEdit is the right one. For example I picked up a random book lying around here, when I scan it into Delicious Library I get the barcode “978908090103408” but when I scan it into TextEdit I get “9780891348382 90000”.

I don’t know whats wrong with Delicious Library, I am going to try and google it now and figure out the issue. Other then that the CueCat is pretty cool, works like a charm. Unlike regular barcode scanners you don’t hold the CueCat from a distance and highlight the barcode, you have to take the CueCat and touch the barcode and then swipe it across. It doesn’t matter if you hold the barcode upside down or vertically it will still scan it right.

Anyway if you are interested in the CueCat it sells for only $9.99 on Amazon. The cheapest barcode scanner you can get.

Update: Ok figured out the problem, or atleast figured out how to get the barcode scanned right. Instead of clicking on “Add a new item” and then scanning, I should just scan right away and it will add it for me. Cool.

Oh I nearly forgot, I watched the Family Guy movie yesterday night. It was so so, some scenes were really funny like the Thundercats one but they were few and spread out. I was expecting the movie to be a lot more funnier, maybe its because I prefer the Simpsons.

Oldboy
I just finished watching two really great movies. The first one is called Oldboy, its a Korean movie that made a big splash at the Cannes Film Festival back in 2004. The movie is available with an English soundtrack but the one I manged to get was Korean with English subtitles. I can’t say much about the movie without ruining the plot but basically a guy gets locked up in a studio apartment for 15 years by some unknown assailants before getting released one day. Once he is out he tries to seek revenge by trying to find out who locked him up and why. Quentin Tarantino loved the movie and thats why it got the extra attention in Cannes.

The Devil’s Rejects
The second movie I watched was called The Devil’s Rejects. This movie reminded me a lot of Natural Born Killers except its way cooler and more violent but they both involved violently sick people who are on the run from the cops. The movie was written and directed by the freaky Rob Zombie and it features A LOT of violence, nudity and general weirdness. If you liked Natural Born Killers you would really like this movie then.

With all this free time now that Ramadan has started I was able to watch a few movies the past two days. I watched Cinderella Man first and I didn’t like it. It was too long and it starts off very sad and doesn’t really turn into a happy movie by the end. Million Dollar Baby was way better. I watched Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy second, I had never read the book but the movie was pretty cool. I mean any movie where earth gets blown up in the first 5 minutes must be cool. The movie was filled with a variety of weird and strange characters so it was very odd and entertaining. Finally I watched Land of the Dead yesterday night. This was fun to watch. Its not as scary as Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later but it was interesting none the less and it did play from a different perspective. This is the only zombie movie I have watched where the movie makes you side with the zombies. It’s definetly worth watching.

What are your Ramadan working hours?
Mine is Saturday to Wednesday, 9AM to 3PM.
Thursdays its 9AM to 1PM.

Nataly is the same except her agency get Thursdays off!

I know everyone recently has been complaining about the traffic and I want to add something here. Today the traffic was the worst I had EVER seen in Kuwait EVER. Not even the great winter floods or the Thursday night Salmiya traffic could even come close to todays traffic. Everywhere I went, all my little traffic escape routes, every corner, intersection, road, everywhere was just packed with cars. There was traffic in places I couldn’t imagine their ever being traffic in! I got to the office nearly 30 minutes late so I hope this isn’t going to be like this everyday now…