July 2006 Archives

On Saturday night Kelly and I went to the BSO's performance of some movie favorites. We went to this performance as a makeup for the July 4th performance that was cancelled. Also this was a performance that really interested me. The description of the event mentioned my two favorite movie composers John Williams and Danny Elfman.

We left my house about 6 PM and headed out to Oregon Ridge. As we approached we saw the backup on 83 north heading toward Shawan Rd E. We headed west to Wegmans. We got out of Wegmans by 7:10. We then began heading back toward the backup we saw coming in. It was pretty much not moving and we only made it about half a mile in 40 minutes. We decided to take the cloverleaf and head back west and found a back way to where we were going.

As we approached on Beaver Dam Rd we got much closer than we were before in just a few minutes. We got to the point where we could see the parking lot and the performance area. We were making much better progress. While we were waiting to get into the parking lot I opened the windows and we got to here the intro which was the 20th Century Fox opening. I also got to hear a bit of Mission Impossible from the car. We got within 10 cars of entering the parking lot when they closed the lot since it was full. Needless to say this was disheartening. Luckily from the point we were at we could get to the Oregon Grille parking lot, unlike all the poor people still stuck on Shawan Rd and being turned away. We debated for a bit what to do. We finally decided to attempt to walk back.

We walked the half mile back to the parking lot. We cut across the grass lot. I stopped for a few minutes to help a woman find her cell phone; she called it from mine and found it. We got to sit down and enjoy the performance about 8:30 (it started a few minutes after 8). We missed the first couple sets of songs. We were able to catch songs from Harry Potter, Superman, Beauty and the Beast and one other. The finale was a combination of songs from the original Star Wars trilogy and fireworks. It was an impressive show of fireworks and they were nicely timed with the music.

Other than the traffic mishaps the night was a lot of fun. I got to help others identify the music, since as Kelly says I am a movie nerd. I really enjoyed the performances as well. Getting to hear the music I know so well in a live performance like that was great. The one bonus to parking as we did was that were able to exit the area much more quickly than those that were in the main lot. For those who enjoy movie scores I would highly recommend a show like this.

This year I received an invitation to this years Pig Bastard roast. This party is put on by my co-worker Julie and her boyfriend at their house. The main attraction is a 225 lb whole big that is smoked overnight for the party. To go along with it two large turkeys are also smoked. The smoker that is used is the size of the bed of a pickup truck, huge. I wanted to share some of the features of the house and party that I think my past roommates and other friends would be impressed by.

When I first got there I was greeted by the two dogs. One of the dogs is a fairly normal large dog that I can't remember the breed of. The other dog is the size of a pony and is still growing. It is an Irish Wolfhound. This dog would tackle anyone easily that isn't about my size and could probably tackle me if it wanted to. When seated and eating it looks face to face with me, it is truly huge.

Julie gave me and Phyllis a tour of the house. Inside there was a room for the dogs. There is a double bed that the Wolfhound uses as his bed, not sure if he shares with the other dog. There is also a crate for the Wolfhound. The crate is 5 ft tall and is the size of a closet. This crate is probably bigger than jail cells that some people live in.

We then went down to the basement. They are working on the basement in stages. So far they have a home built bar on wood flooring done. Julie's boyfriend is 6' 4" and he built the bar for people of that size. The rail is at chest height for me and chin height for some of the women there. Also the depth of the bar is such that I can barely reach from the front to back. It is quite a sight to see. The bar has a working tap built into the wall that leads to the workroom next door. There is a keg in the next room in a fridge. The bar was the most stocked bar I have ever seen in a house, more with variety than quantity. The next closest one I have seen is Matt's and this was probably 50% more. There were also several types and brands I had never seen, which was surprising for me. The keg down here was the first of 5 for the party.

We then walked around the backyard a bit. The deck has a built in hot tub. There is another bar and gate to separate the hot tub from the rest of the deck and to keep the dogs out. The deck also had the customary corona bottle opener mounted. Sitting on the ground near the back door were two untapped kegs. Next to the smoker was the dual keg setup. There were two keg tubs with ice in them. They had tubes leading to a modified cooler. Inside the cooler it cooled the beer right before it came out the tap. The front had two real taps with official identifying tips on them. The kegs were also fed by CO2 tanks so there was no need for pumping. Also hanging in the tree behind the kegs were two beer bongs.

Next was the entertainment part of the yard. There was a volleyball net that had lines spray painted on ground. There was a pair of nice horseshoe bits. They had the U shaped wood outline and were filled with sand. Caddy corner to the net and pits was a large fire pit with a dozen log benches and stump chairs. The back of the yard was lined with logs from the trees that were chopped down in the yard and ready to be split.

The final part of the yard was the beer pong tables. Yes multiple you heard me right multiple tables, four to be exact. Each one was prepped with pong balls and rising Tupperware tubs. When I arrived about 2:30 they already had one game of team beer pong going and appeared to be several games in. The other surprising thing for me was that they used 10 cups instead of the 6 I am used to seeing. They also seemed to do some of sorting/stacking of cups as the game went on that the players I know frown upon. I am not sure whether this group of players could keep up with my friends in the marathon pace they set but it would be an interesting challenge.

I left about 4 PM as I had other things to attend to, but I am sure this party would be interesting site to see. Just like many of the parties held at the house of the damned in which I used to reside. Maybe someday I can arrange a meeting between this new beer pong group and the one I know so well.

Update: Two things I forgot to mention. They also had custom made cups for the party. They were Hokie House size and shape cups with their party name and logo on them. The cups also glow in the dark. The second thing was the Jell-O shooters they had. They had 550 Jell-O shooters they made. They bought these things that looked like mini test tubes that had caps. Brian also had several ammo belts that fit the shooters. He came out with two across the chest and one around the waste, each one filled with about 20-30 shooters a piece. It was quite and impressive Jell-O shooter setup.

Update 2: Driving backwards on a bridge is dumb. Throwing a hatchet to someone else is dumber.

Last Sunday the 23rd Kelly invited a bunch of her friends over to my house for a BBQ. Six people showed up and to have some food. We made corn on the cob, burgers (Kelly made and Brian made) and some chicken kabobs. We also had lots of sides like veggies and chips. Dessert was some chocolate chip cookie brownies from the Amish and brownies and a cherry pie from Kelly. A good time was had by all. The visitors also seemed to like my basement and were already planning a movie night.

After the BBQ we all headed out to see the Charm City Roller Girls at the Putty Hill Skateland. This is a re-imagining off the old Roller derby. They take a standard roller rink and create a track on it. The track is an oval taped off that is the width of the rink and about half the length with an infield. At either ends people sit on the floor of the rink and watch the action. There are four teams and they pair off and challenge each other. The ladies participating in the derby are of all varieties. They go from 90 lb speedsters to close to 200 lb blockers.

The one match up was between the undefeated team and another. That match up wasn't that good since it was so lopsided. The other match up was much more competitive and fun to watch. There were a few fights and few ejections. It was a lot of fun at times to watch. There was a fair amount of downtime though. There was a general announcer and then two play by play announcers. The announcers were more color commentary then anything else since the action is so fast.

There was a good amount of people at the match, I would say several hundred. The only downside really was the sitting on the floor. My legs were asleep quickly and I had to move around a fair amount. We will investigate the bringing of folding chairs in the future.

Last Saturday the 22nd Kelly and I went up the Markets at Shrewsbury. It is about 35-40 minutes away from my house North on 83 just across the Pennsylvania border. We had seen it when driving back from Dan's wedding and wanted to visit. When we got there we first walked around the outdoor show space of their sheds, barns, guest houses and gazebos. I would definitely like to get one of their gazebos to go in the gravel spot in my back yard. Just need to save up to afford it later.

We then went into the first building which was a store of various home items. It had things ranging from shelves to carpets and mats to lamps. It had all sorts of items. The one thing that was surprising was the amount of stuff that was imported, mostly from India. It just didn't seem very Amish to import items.

The second half of first building is more of a permanent flea market. This section had two types of items in it. One was various food markets with things from produce to seafood and baked goods. The other half of the stores were random trinkets and seemed like a true flea market. There were shops that sold NASCAR memorabilia, some that sold dolls and others that just had boxes of junk. We got some baked goods that looked good and then some produce for a party on Sunday.

The second building was basically a furniture store. The store had all sorts of furniture from bedroom to living room and chairs. There was a really cool corner booth that I liked. I am not sure where I would put it, but it was cool. There were some nice bedroom sets as well. Of course none of it is cheap.

The markets weren't quite what we expected but were nice. It is difficult to resolve the whole Amish thing and some of the stuff happening there.

On Saturday July 15 Jerry, Karri, Kelly and I watched The Weather Man. I wasn't quite sure what to expect since the movie was delayed eight months from its original release for no reason other than Paramount couldn't decide when to release it. When it did come out it was in theaters for a very short time and the commercials seemed odd. The commercials played up more of a comedy angel. This was a mistake because this movie is not a comedy. It is essentially a character driven drama. For Jerry, Karri and I it was a painfully slow movie that just didn't seem to go anywhere. Kelly seemed to enjoy it more for what it was. The movie was mostly a depressing look at the destruction of a man's life and how he deals with it and moves on. It wasn't a horrible movie, but just wasn't the pacing I usually enjoy. If you want a good drama it might be worth a viewing.

On Saturday the 22nd Kelly and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest at The Rotunda Cinematheque. In preparation we watched the first movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl earlier in the week on DVD. It was cool to go back and watch that as I hadn't seen it in quite a while and it is a really fun movie. The new movie was also really good I thought. I laughed even more at this new movie than I did the first one. Also this one had every better battles and action than the first movie. The production values on this movie were just amazing. The entire crew of Davy Jones ship was digitally created or at least modified and looked great. The story wasn't quite as good as the first, but I think when this movie is seen with the third it will be viewed better. Speaking of which the third movie is coming out in May of 2007, I am betting Memorial Day weekend. To ensure the third one got made the second and third movie were filmed together. The post production of the two movies was then split apart to allow for completion in a timely fashion. The ending of the second movie is a cliffhanger leading to the third movie. However it isn't quite the cut in the middle of the scene like the ending of the second Matrix film, it is a much more natural ending that seemed good to me. I highly recommend this movie it is just a lot of fun, good summer action / adventure flick.

For almost six months Karri and I had been attempting to find a weekend that she and Jerry could come up and visit and go to the National Aquarium. We finally found a weekend that nothing was going on and we were all in town. Unfortunately I decided to get sick that weekend. I was hoping to recover enough to go downtown so I didn't cancel. Also we had tickets that were for a specific date and time and I didn't want them to go to waste.

Well I didn't improve at all by the time they arrived on Saturday morning. As a result Kelly went with them to downtown. When they arrived downtown they attempted to redeem the tickets Jerry and Karri had to get into the Aquarium. Due to crowds they couldn't get the same time and access that the tickets Kelly got had. Kelly was nice enough to give them our tickets so they could get in and see everything. She then entered later and joined them to see the rest of the Aquarium.

They returned to the house around 4 PM. I was asleep or close to it. Kelly went out to get BBQ from a local Pit Beef place. She got a family meal that was HUGE. We barely ate any of it. If I had been healthy I could have eaten it all week, but I didn't get to enjoy any of it until Tuesday night.

After dinner we went down to basement to watch a movie. Karri and Kelly being far more picky than Jerry and I attempted to settle on a movie. We watched The Weather Man, I will discuss it in more detail later. Afterwards I was pretty wiped and went to bed. Jerry and Karri stayed downstairs and enjoyed the basement a while longer.

Karri had seen the basement previously during the fantasy football banquet in the early spring. Jerry hadn't visited my house yet though. He seemed to like the basement, even though I didn't get to spend much time showing him all the features. Hopefully he can come back some day so I can show him some more stuff.

Sunday Kelly and I got up fairly early. We sat around for a bit and waited for Jerry and Karri to get up. Once they got up Kelly made pancakes and bacon for breakfast. Kelly had to leave to go raspberry picking in the early afternoon. Jerry and Karri left shortly thereafter.

It wasn't even close to the weekend I had hoped for their first visit. Thanks to Kelly it wasn't a total disaster. Maybe sometime they can come back up and we can hang out some more in my humble abode.

Those that had visited my house in the past may have seen the "newspaper room". This was the third bedroom in my house that was used as storage of stuff I haven't put anywhere else yet. The major thing in there however was old newspapers. You would say "Brian, why do you have old newspapers?" and I would say, um dunno. Honestly at one point I thought I would read them, not sure why. At first it wasn't too many but it kept growing and growing. When I signed up for the paper I got the Washington Post only on Sunday. I want to also get the Baltimore Sun only on Sunday, only they didn't offer it. Instead I signed up for the weekend which included Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Somewhere along the way they added Wednesday to this subscription. On occasion they would also give me Monday, Tuesday or Thursday in a random fashion. This resulted in my pile growing faster and faster. I eventually cancelled my Sun subscription but the monster had been created. It just got to a point that I didn't want to deal with it and just kept piling more on top.

In preparation for Jerry and Karri's visit Kelly and I cleaned the room. It was so they could stay in it if they wanted. We did it the night that I was beginning to get sick. I took some pictures of the process here. In the first you can see Kelly opening and piling the papers. In the second picture you can see the completed bags, there were 18 total. The last two is my car full of the bags. We took them to my school that has a paper recycling dumpster. The school gets paid back by weight so they like people using the dumpster.

Now the room is clean and can be used. Also I now only get two papers a week and will be able to keep up or throw them away.

One of the reasons I didn't post for a while was that was nasty sick for almost a week. Starting mid-day Friday on the 14th I began feeling weak and tired. That night Kelly and I did some cleaning and I was fading fast. By dinner later I had lost my appetite and was beginning to get chills. We went back to Kelly's apartment and I almost immediately went to bed. Throughout the night I had a fever on and off. With it came a combination of chills and sweating, loads of fun.

After sleeping I felt a little better. I went back to my house and did some more cleaning since Jerry and Karri were coming up. I cleaned for about 90 minutes and then essentially collapsed again. I stayed in bed for the rest of the day. I got up for a little while to eat a small amount of dinner, which was the last I ate for a while. I also watched a movie in the basement before heading back to bed. I had a fever most of the night on Saturday night as well.

I got up Sunday to attempt to eat breakfast, not much there. I said hi and bye to Jerry and Karri before going back to bed again. I stayed there the rest of the day other than a quick support call for my parents. I didn't eat anything other than some crackers, toast and 7Up.

On Monday I stayed home and split time between bed and basement. I slept most of the day. I was still not eating anything substantial. My fever was done by Monday night.

On Tuesday I got up and was finally improving. I was still very weak and not eating though. I stayed home again and did pretty much nothing. I did actually eat a real dinner that night.

On Wednesday I went back to work. I was still moving pretty slow and didn't have much energy. I was very tired when I got home.

Finally Thursday I was back to 100%. This was the sickest I had been in a really long time. I was out of commission for almost a week. Hopefully that won't come around again.

At least that is if want to be able to do stuff with premium CableCard content and probably DirecTV content. According to Matt Goyer's recent post you won't be able to do it.
"Q: Will I be able to buy a cablecard reader off the shelf, a video card off the shelf and be able to playback [OCUR] content?
A: No."
This has been the rumored belief for a while, but it is good to have it confirmed. What this means is you will be forced to buy a semi-closed box from a company such as Dell or HP on the low end or Niveus on the high end. One saving grace may be semi pre-built but highly customizable systems like Shuttle's XPC M.

This is unfortunate by understandable. The Cable industry is very concerned about protected content becoming easily and freely available. To get CableLabs certification the device must be a complete and essentially closed box. Each system will have to be certified as a solution not an individual component. The one upside to this is you will have a solution that is guaranteed to work and is supported.

I was considering building my own MCE box sometime in the future. Now it is apparent that I will be forced to wait for Vista to ship and system builders to release their own certified solutions. Hopefully I can buy one that isn't too expensive and then add things like extra RAM or disk space myself. Also it will be interesting to see if certain system builders go with HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray and will there be any to offer both.

My major remaining concern is can additional tuners be added. If the box is sold with one or two tuners but I want more can I upgrade? The tuners I am talking about here are OCUR or DirecTV, since adding OTA HDTV tuners seem to have no controls on them.

I heard a discussion recently that I wanted to elaborate on. The competition of DC Comics and Marvel Comics at the movie theaters. There is actually a third comic company called Image Comics, but their movies are covered by Spawn which I barely like and I tried.

When these movies started the media conglomerates of today didn’t exist. All of the DC movies have been released by Warner Bros and at this point DC is owned by Time-Warner giant just as WB is. This will almost guarantee all future DC movies are WB released. Marvel doesn’t have a direct relationship with any studio. Many of the movies have been released by 20th Century Fox, the one major exception being Sony Pictures releasing the Spiderman films.

First I will list the respective franchises. I am not going back before the modern Superman films. The ones before then are before the modern movie blockbuster era. I will list them in chronological order (of first in series). I got some of this info from Wikipedia and some from IMDB, both are amazing resources.

DC
Superman 1-4 (1978-1986)
Supergirl (1984)
Batman 1-4 (1989-1997)
Catwoman (2004)
Batman Begins (2005)
Superman Returns (2006)

Marvel
Blade 1-3 (1998-2004)
X-Men 1-3 (2000-2006)
Spider-Man 1-3 (2002-2007)
Daredevil (2003)
Hulk (2003)
The Punisher (2004)
Elektra (2005)
The Fantastic Four 1-2 (2005-2007)

There are a few ways to evaluate the collection of movies against each other. One way is to compare total grosses or more currently total DVD sales. That is a tough comparison since there are different numbers on either side. Along those lines the rankings in all time top 100 might be a good check point. As far as critical acclaim goes most of these movies are polarizing, with those either liking or disliking almost all these movies.

The top 100 all time lists 8 of the movies from these superhero franchises. There will probably be 1-2 more shortly with Superman Returns and X-Men: Last Stand. The two Spiderman films have been the biggest hits of late, both in initial weekends and staying power.

One thing I think that can be universally accepted is that the franchises that made it to three or four movies in length fell apart. It seems that the third movie begins the downward trend and the fourth hits rock bottom. The best example of this is the original Superman and Batman series. The third Blade and X-Men films aren't horrible but aren't as good as earlier films. Hopefully the third Spiderman film will not follow this trend.

It is interesting to note that with these movies there seems to a true hit or miss mentality. The good movies are really good and the bad movies are really bad. Look at Supergirl and Catwoman for DC and then Daredevil, Hulk and Electra for Marvel. I guess Fantastic Four isn't horrible but it leans more that way than toward being a classic.

I would say DC had the early lead in the race. However they burned out for a while by running their franchises into the ground. In the interim Marvel stepped up and re-invigorated the genre with Blade, X-Men and then really hit it big with Spiderman. Now DC is back in the game again with their re-imaginings of their original franchises Batman and Superman. Hopefully Marvel doesn't fall into the same trap that DC did and at the same time I hope DC doesn't ruin their franchises again.

The worst thing must have for DC and Warner Bros when they began a 7 year drought beginning with Batman 4 and ending with Catwoman. That is a really sad period of time. Hopefully it won't be repeated any time soon.

Last weekend Kelly and I went to Pennsylvania to attend Dan and Heather's wedding. I picked her up from work on Saturday evening. We planned to head directly out of town but we looked at my iPod and the book we wanted to listen seemed to be missing. We stopped at my house to attempt to fix that. It later turned out to be just iPod not showing it in the right place. We then started the trek to my parent's house where would spend the night. When we were a bit over half way there I realized I had forgotten my parent's house key. This is a really big issue since they were in Wisconsin or on the way there. I called information and got my Aunt's phone number. Luckily she had a key to my parent's house. We stopped by there on the way and picked it up.

We got up Sunday morning to get ready for the wedding. I had to go and get Kelly some essentials, Starbucks and hair gel. The gel was a little more difficult since I don't often buy it. We left the house a little later than we had planned but not too bad. On the way up it rained on and off, this was not a good sign since the wedding was supposed to be outside. We got to The Riverside Inn at 2:55 PM for a 3 PM wedding.

We saw the original setup out side that wasn't being used. We walked in and found the new location. We were seated by Travis in the next to last row in the hallway leading to the room with the ceremony. Very shortly after we were seated the groom and his party filed in with the priest then from the opposite side the bride and her party came in. The ceremony was quick, probably less than 15 minutes which was great. The shorter the ceremony is the better. After the ceremony everyone moved over to the reception area. As we went in there was a receiving line. After the line they had a couple of people taking Polaroid’s. The Polaroid’s were then put into a scrap book and people signed the book.

There was an open bar before and after dinner which most people took advantage of. Dinner was very good, a good selection of entree choices. Also the cake was very delicious. There were very few cheesy wedding things done in the reception. The only ones were really the tossing of bouquet and garter. The DJ's were ok, but had some questionable music choices. The table I was seated with was cool, even Kelly seemed to enjoy Roger, Travis, Kevin and Jim. We left the reception about 8 PM since we had to drive back to my parent's house.

Monday we got up and I did my chores that my dad left for me. We started directly back toward my place. I had hoped that we would find a Starbucks in Murrysville on the way toward the turnpike. We didn't however; it ended up taking almost an hour to find a Starbucks on the turnpike. Needless to say Kelly the caffeine junkie was not happy with this. She ended up getting an iced latte as well as a frappuccino to get her caffeine level high and continue her buzz.

We got back to my place about 3 PM. Along the way Roger and Travis managed to pass us and actually beat us home by a few minutes. They came over for a BBQ and some movies. We first went out to get some food and drinks. We got some steaks, beer, corn on the cob, fries, potatoes and chicken strips. We made everything but the strips for dinner. After dinner we watched Independence Day, it was the Special Edition which actually isn't available any longer. We noticed a few scenes that were added or extended. They weren't noticeable due to quality which was good. I hadn't watched the movie in a while and it is a great summer action flick even ten years later now.

After ID4 we had some discussion as to what to watch, with all of us offering options and refining them. We finally settled on BettleJuice. I hadn't seen the movie in really a long time. It is one of my favorites and has the trio of Tim Burton directing, Danny Elfman music and Michael Keaton starring. One thing I immediately noticed about the DVD was just how bad the video quality was. This DVD was one of the first DVD's released early in the DVD format's life. It is one of the original Warner Bros DVD that came in a snapper case and was single layer double sided. One side had a widescreen anamorphic picture and the other was full screen. The combination of a questionable transfer and an early encoding combined to make the picture noticeably bad on my big screen. I still really enjoyed the movie but I just hadn't considered the quality on the early movies such as this.

On the 4th we were planning on going to the Baltimore Symphony at Oregon Ridge. We headed out toward Hunt Valley and it was potentially going to be rained out. It was raining a bit while we ran some errands. We headed over to Wegmans to get something to eat while at the show. While their Kelly's friends called and said the performance was cancelled. Apparently there was a power outage at the park and the show couldn't happen. We just went home and ordered a pizza instead. We then watched Garden State.

I didn't attend any of the Vegas Vacations in 2005 due to trying to save for and afford a house and then the basement in it. One might question if I could afford this trip due to continuing to pay off the basement. That is all beside the point. This year the original idea for the trip was a potential bachelor party for Dan and his pending wedding. However as is often the case with Vegas trips, many dropped out from original plan. It ended up being Roger (the planner), Jim (I can drink again), Greg (Uh oh I guess I should wakeup to see what I won) and me (I lost what how fast). Later in the trip Mandy and Mike showed up and stayed after we left. We left DC on 6/23 and returned on 6/26.

The primary purpose for me to go to Vegas is gambling. Every time I go I say I will see some shows, well that hasn't happened yet. I still would like to see some shows like Blue Man and Penn and Teller. In recent trips my bankroll to lose had been larger. This time I shrank it a bit, since it really is how much I am able to afford to lose. Losing is what I did and fast. In past trips I would play blackjack primarily and be able to have some ups and downs to allow me to play for a long time. I tried three card poker this time however and didn't have a similar experience. Instead I lost and lost fast. I just didn't get enough wins to allow me to play longer. Even in slot play I had no winnings to speak of. Oh well, next time.

The other problem with this trip was the weather. The temp was a high of 110 in the day and a low of mid-80's at night. The next trip I am voting for winter, and then it is only highs in 80's. Much more pleasant.

Our trip home was relatively painful as well. Our flight from Vegas to Fort Worth was on time and fine. It was the Fort Worth to National leg that had issues. On that day (and before and after) there were massive storms in the DC/Balt area, it was equivalent to a hurricane in water dropped and length but was simply a big normal storm. This caused our plane to take off almost 2 hours late. Once we got close to National the visibility was so low that the pilot couldn't land. We kept circling for an hour or so. At one point the pilot said it was likely we would have to divert to Dulles. Luckily we were able to approach from the North instead of South and land. I finally got home about midnight that day.

Who knows what Vegas 07 will bring?

A couple of weeks ago on 6/17 I went to see Cars. Kelly and I went to see it at Muvico because they are the closest digital projection. The movie itself was very good; it had a nice story and would easily be enjoyable by both kids and adults. The story is not quite as good as some previous Pixar films, but still better than others out there by far. At one point I was crying I was laughing so hard, my favorite scene was the tractor (cow) tipping. Graphically and technically the film was amazing. I think it helped watching it on the digital screen as well. I am figuring this will be the first Pixar release on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and it should be amazing. It was very obvious how much research and work went into the design of the vehicles. Also if you watch NASCAR at all it is really obvious the links and voices. Highly recommended, especially if you are Pixar or animation fan.

A little over a week ago I watched Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at Hoyt's Cinema (my basement). If I read any of the C.S. Lewis books as a kid I didn't remember them so I didn't know as much of this story as Kelly did going in. One thing about this movie that I did notice and others have mentioned is its religious overtones. This movie was a special effects and animation extravaganza. It was primarily done by Weta Digital who is best known for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong; some additional work was done by ILM and other shops. I liked the movie a good deal, it was really inventive how they created and used all the various animals and creatures. The idea of the entire time spent in Narnia being equivalent to no time in the normal world is an interesting twist as well. I would recommend it if you like fantasy stories.

Last Thursday 6/29 we went to see Superman Returns. We first tried to see it on Wednesday but it was sold it out. It actually turned out good since we got to see it Thursday at the Senator. At the Senator that had a pretty unique 70 MM print that few theaters had. It was a really high quality picture. This film was done by Bryan Singer who had most recently worked on the first two X-Men films and was credited with making those films so good. Even after watching this movie I am not exactly sure when the movie is supposed to pick up storyline, after the first or second movie. There was a lot of homage paid to original films, they used video and voice over from Marlon Brando as well as some of John Williams score. I also think there were a few direct quotes from the original movies. I really enjoyed this movie as well, there were a few slow spots of the movie but I think they were good development. The action scenes were amazing, it was great seeing how the new tech is being used to make superman do his thing. There were quite a few openings for sequels so it is obvious they are hoping to re-create the franchise. I recommend the movie, especially if you are a super hero fan.