Previous month: May 22, 2005 - May 28, 2005
Next month: June 19, 2005 - June 25, 2005

Sharkbait

No matter how low one ranks Renny Harlin's, Finland's most prolific Hollywood movie director's career, Deep Blue Sea is a decent blockbuster action movie.

The movie's best bit is, of course, the death scene of Samuel L. Jackson. It's total top-10 class, no doubt about that. I'm also always delighted when Finland is mentioned in a movie, and that's for sure in a Harlin movie (it's his trademark). In this, we see a Finlandia vodka bottle, a Finnish flag and a whiteboard note about Finnish pancakes.

2.06.2005 klo 13:00 | Be the first to comment | TrackBack (0)

Remote power

It's fun to notice I can still get quite excited by small things. One of them is Salling Clicker, a tool for Mac. Our PowerBook has Bluetooth capabilities, as does my mobile phone. Salling Clicker connects the two and allows me to control the Mac with the phone.

This can be used for presentations, reading e-mail, running AppleScripts doing whatever or simply as a remote control for iTunes! For example, I'm now listening to music and rating the songs as I hear them. Instead of bringing up the iTunes and interrupting my work (ahem) flow, I'll just reach for my mobile phone and adjust the rating. I can switch songs, adjust the volume and if somebody calls me, iTunes goes on pause automatically.

It's just fun. It's pretty useless, though at times I might want to control the music from the sofa, for example, but it's fun. It's just amazing, the way it works. I'm still a bit of a child at heart, I suppose.

Now I'm left wondering if this is something I'd like to pay $20 for... The unregistered edition is limited to 30 clicks on each connection, which is annoying. This just might be cool enough to buy, when I have more money.

2.06.2005 klo 09:42 | Be the first to comment | TrackBack (0)

Better and worse horror movies

Friday night we watched Final Destination from tv. It's very basic teen slasher: there's a group of kids, who start dying one by one. Will the survivors figure it out before they all die?

It was quite a horrible movie, and not in any good sense. It's not I like picking out mistakes, but here the plot was real Swiss cheese, just too much holes and movie character stupidity. It was bad, but scored some points from surprising splatter scenes.

Saturday's movie was much better: Ju-On: The Grudge 2. Now there's a movie I can recommend to everyone who's seen and enjoyed the Japanese Ju-On (the American version won't do, even if it's pretty good). The theme of the movie is similar and the chronologically broken structure is also quite familiar. However, there are some new ideas, too.

What's best, it's really, really terrifying. Especially the sounds: director Takashi Shimizu masters the art of horrifying noise. The home theater amplifier we bought yesterday got really good use. The better speakers and improved space effect (even if we're still using just two speakers) really made a difference. Even without the soundtrack the movie scared us real bad, Shimizu's subtle (and less subtle) touch worked really well.

29.05.2005 klo 20:11 | Be the first to comment | TrackBack (0)