Well, I've been falling behind so it is time to cram:

Here is what has passed through our rental queue since Curves

• Barbarella (1968)
  

  1 star. This movie goes so far past bad it wraps around to good.
  Right up there with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes




• The Guns of Navarone, 1961
  

  4 stars. Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, David Niven. Covert
  operation to blow up a giant german gun.



• Johnny English, 2003
  

  1 star. Rowan Atkinson doing his thing. He is his usual funny
  self but it just wasn't worth it for me.




• Pushing Tin (1999)
  

  1 star. Didn't finish watching



• The French Connection (1971)
  

  4 stars. Blast from the past. Who knew that Gene Hackman had
  brown hair!?



• Alias: Season 1: Disc 1 (2001)
  

  3 stars. Spy stuff. A bit formulaic



• Gangs of New York: Disc 2 of 2 (2002)
  

  3 stars. Amy watched all of it, I didn't.



• Donnie Brasco (1997)
  

  4 stars. I didn't see all of it but it looked very good.



• Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
  

  4 stars. Lots of violence but creative in parts. fun tribute to
  the super spy / samurai / assasin.



• Road to Perdition (2002)
  

  3 stars. Not good but bearable



• Veronica Guerin (2003)
  

  5 stars. Powerful 'based on a true story' movie. Cate Blanchett
  rocks, as always.



• Beyond Borders (2003)
  

  did we rent this? Not only did I not see it, I didn't even know
  it was in the house...



• Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
  

  1 star. I watched the whole thing. Wanted a refund of my time
  afterwards. Parts were amusing but overall not worth it.



• Enemy at the Gates (2001)
  

  4 stars. Jude Law and Ed Harris face off as Russian and German snipers during the WWII
  siege of Stalingrad. Joseph Fiennes too.



• Morvern Callar (2002)
  

  4 stars. Scottish gal's boyfriend commits suicide. She submits his
  just written novel to a publisher as her own.



• Boogie Nights(1997)
  

  4 stars. Stellar cast and performances.



• Happiness (1998)
  

  say what? Another mystery DVD. Maybe Amy will come back and fill
  this in



• South Park: Season 1: Disc 3 (1997)
  

  4 stars. I love SP.



• Holes (2003)
  

  4 stars. Good kids movie. Follows the book closely



• Flirting with Disaster (1996)
  

  4 stars. Good film. Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda make it really good



• Iris (2001)
  

  5 stars. Free spirit genius slice of life movie meets
  Alzheimer's / end of life story. Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, Kate
  Winslet



• 8 Women (2002)
  

  1 star. This was so awful it was awful. Depending on your
  tastes it may be so awful that it is good

Time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin, into the future ...

Boy, I lay down to take a nap and when I wake up a month has passed!

ain't nuthin but a party. Gretel, Jim, Gadget and Lisa are here. We watched the Stoned Age and laughed up a storm. The wine hasn't run out yet so I gotta go and hang.

computer stuff: Our old HP 855 cxi printer died a few months ago so we bought an HP psc 2175xi scanner/copier/printer. Amy is having fun scanning pictures from her extensive collection. It does lots of fancy stuff but for now, printing school papers and scanning photos in enough.

movie: Bend It Like Beckham. Indian girl in London wants to play soccer but her parents won't let her. Jess (Parminder Nagra) is on the television show ER these days. Nice gradual build up of romantic tension at the end. The DVD extras include Gurinder Chadha's family recipe for Aloo Gobi. 4 stars.

movie: Real Women Have Curves. A cranky mexican teenage girl graduates from high school and wants to go to college but her parents want her to work. 3 stars.

movie: South Park, season 1, discs 1, 2. I love South Park. It is so wonderfully irreverent! It is also fun to see who 'old scratch' will be this time. 4 stars.

movie: Lagaan. a Bollywood block buster. 3 hours and 40 minutes, phew! They sure like long films in india. I generally don't like musicals and I was a bit leary of seeing a Bollywood flick but I was pleasantly surprised that there was only about 1 song and dance routine per 30 minutes (perhaps less). Some indian friends tell me "yes, Lagaan did not have as much singing and dancing as a typical Bollywood movie". The plot was very predictable but, like a shakespeare play, we are not here to be surprised. The singing and dancing was actually very good. I see more Bollywood films in my future. Here is a movie poster Since IMDB doesn't have an image for this movie. 4 stars.

movie: Exotica. I think one of the critics on Netflix recommended this film. It was kind of fun trying to figure out the accountant character... Elias Koteas (who was in Crash) is in this one. Usually I like strange films but I only give this one 2 stars.

movie: Dazed and Confused. A cultural reference point. While I was not of high school age during the period depicted, I don't think the types of hazing shown in the movie were common in the S.F. bay area where I grew up. Lots of good cast and nice vibes. 4 stars.

movie: The Virgin Suicides. What was this movie about, anyways? I saw it but I still don't know. None the less, I give it 4 stars.

geek stuff: I bought a 40G iPod a few weeks ago.
I love it! The iPod is a wonderfully engineered piece of consumer electronics and iTunes is a very good program. I've used Roxio's Easy CD Creator suite of tools for a while and developed several gripes about the Roxio stuff. iTunes does a better job at doing the simple stuff well.

I've bought a few things from the iTunes music store. The music store is pretty cool but has a way to go before I stop buying CDs in favor of iTunes albums.

FYI: the iTunes program (for windows PC or Mac) is freely available for download on the internet. Even without an iPod, iTunes is a good program for playing MP3s, burning music or data CDs and (of course) accessing the apple iTunes music store. iTunes is also OK at ripping MP3s but for some reason it is much slower (e.g. only 4x CD speed) than Roxio's Audio Central program (which routinely rips CDs at 30x plus).

Music Store Cons:

• no CD "booklet" when you purchase an album. How about providing a PDF with this info? I don't necessarily want to print it out but I do want to read it.
  
• 128 kbps AAC is the only file format available. You want 192 kbps AAC? too bad -- buy the CD and rip it yourself.
  
• many albums are simply not available.
  
• many albums are only partially available -- i.e. missing a few songs (What is the point of this anyways?).
  

Music Store Pros:

• great if you only want to buy a single (e.g. you want to pick up a few The Who hits for nostalgic reasons).
  
• convenient immediate impulse gratification (assuming what you want is available).
  
• it is the only HD based MP3 player that supports Audible.com content (I subscribe to Audible so this is a deal breaker for me).
  
• you don't have to deal with re-ripping a song that didn't rip properly the first time (e.g. because the CD was scratched).
  

I connect the iPod to our family PC via firewire (IEEE 1394). I bough a Belkin's 1394 + USB2.0 PCI card to provide the firewire interface. So far it has worked great.

movie: L'Auberge Espanole. Parisian guy goes to Barcelona as part of a foriegn exchange program. Has lots of fun. Typical for the genre but well executed. For all you xenophobic monoglots out there "l'auberge espanole" means "the spanish eggplant" in english. The meaning of the title is revealed at the very end of the movie. Nice cinematography. Audrey Tautou (of Amelie fame) has a small role in this flick.
I give this one 4 stars.

movie: Return of the King. After the liberties that Peter Jackson took with the Two Towers story line, I had my expectations set fairly low. Return of the King met my low expectations. I guess as a fantasy movie it wasn't bad. As someone who generally dislikes good books that are made into movies and as a fan of the Lord of the Rings books, it is hard for me to be objective. Still, considering some of the abominations that have the title Lord of the Rings attached to them, I guess this was pretty good. 3 stars.

movie: Driving Miss Daisy. Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd. The film opens with Miss Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy) proving herself no longer competent to drive. Hoke (Morgan Freeman) is hired, against Miss Daisy's will, by Boolie Worthan (Dan Aykroyd) to chauffer Miss Daisy around. Needless to say, Hoke becomes a great friend to Miss Daisy. 4 stars.

movie: Romeo Must Die. Jet Li kung-fu action flick that takes place mostly in Oakland California. Some of The Matrix special effects and choreography folks worked on this film. Jet Li is very charming (a la Jackie Chan but in his own way) and the fight choreography is very humorous. It is fun seeing a film shot on a familiar location. If you are into kung fu action flicks give this one a try. I'm ready to check out another Jet Li film some time. 3 stars.

movie: Kundun. Scorsese's flick about the Dalai Lama and China's invasion of Tibet. Great photography. 4 stars

movie: A Better Tomorrow. 1986 John Woo Hong Kong action flick. Apparently this film was really big in asia. In '86 Chow Yun Fat is a young rising star. Fun in a retrocamp sort of way. Two stars.

movie: The Deer Hunter. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania mountains, Vietnam. Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken. Three hours, three bullets, three vietnam veterans. Russian roulette. Wow, they're all so young! 3 stars.

movie: Lost in Translation

Amy: This one got off to a comfortably slow start. Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray are well matched. I developed just enough desire to know more about the characters' thoughts to really enjoy the subtlety Sophia Coppola uses to tell their story. I wish more big-screen relationships were as satisfying as this one. And I wish more big-screen endings were as perfectly matched to their big-screen beginnings. four stars.

Jonathan: Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a movie star who is in Tokyo making a whiskey commercial. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is also in Tokyo tagging along on her photographer hubsband's business trip. Both strangers in a strange land, they eventually become friends.

I felt the movie would have been better had
Bob Harris' wife (heard on the telephone but never seen on screen) been portrayed more sympathetically. The movie does not need so much emotional distance between Bob and his wife and it would have been better without it. In general though, the movie gives the audience plenty of room to develop their own ideas rather than bludgeoning them with a cinematic mace. Jean-Pierre Jeunet touches this very subject in his director's commentary of Amelie. There is a scene in Amelie where she takes an apartment key that has been left in a door to a locksmith to be duplicated then replaces the key in the door where she found it. In this replacing the key scene, there is an x-ray vision special effect showing that Amelie has a duplicate of the key she is replacing in her pocket. Mr. Jeunet commented that in test screenings many people did not make the connection that Amelie had duplicated the key in question when they later see her surreptitiously enter the apartment so hey added the x-ray key special effect. In seeing the movie again he felt that it was too much (i.e. lacked sublety). This is what I'm talking about; I also like the scene better without the x-ray key.

movie: Cilantro Y Perejil. When Carlos gets home an hour late and then refuses to ignore a cell phone call from his boss, Susana throws him out. Carlos weathers the separation fairly well but Susana has a more difficult time of it. Blind dates, match making services... . Netflix is definitely exaggerating when the say One of the best films to come out of Mexico. Not bad: two stars.