07.30.2005Constantine

I heard all the reviews, talked to my friends, and have had several bad experiences with comic-to-movie ports. And it had Keanu Reaves (whoa!) in it. Everything about this movie had me thinking it was going to be a stinker. Despite all those reservations, I purcahsed the movie during a recent Costco run.

Imagine my surprise when I actually ended up liking the movie. Critics and everybody that have seen and reviewed this movie have basically said that the movie appears to be in a test reel state, i.e. a finished movie waiting for the final tweaks before moving to theatrical release. While they are correct, the visual style was extremely interesting, and the movie was just different. The plot is predictable, but that didnt matter as I enjoyed the ride. And Keanu Reave puts in his best performance in quite some time.

The special features were semi interesting here as well. The film was constantly pushing the bounds of it's budget, so many of the decisions of how the movie was filmed and indeed some of its structure was driven my money. While I'm sure this is pretty much standard operating procedure for most Hollywood studio films, it was very interesting to see how the financial decisions impacted various fixtures in the film.

Although it's pretty obvious that a lot more could have been done with this film in terms of character development and perhaps even plot, this movie is a welcome addition to the Heaven vs. Hell Genre.

07.30.2005Hello ‘Dere

I've had many sites in many different formats on several web spaces. I've tried CMS's like Nuke (and their variants), Mambo (I still have one site running that), Powerboard with it's portal software, and even vBullein with vPortal. And yes, I even had a previous site with Moveable Type. This site will be using Moveable Type as I believe it meets most of my requirements. The deal-sealer for me was the fact that will a little work, I could tie my flickr pics in rather seamlessly and even post to the site from flickr. Wicked Cool. Keep your eyes open for slow but steady progress on this site. I will be making some modifications on presentation and will be adding pages with perhaps a more CMS type of feel. In the past, it has always been about the process of creating a new site vs. the end site result. I am feeling different this time, only time will tell I love new toys.