Last night Rachel, Kirk and I decided to go to the cinema to see some films before we all went home for Easter. The first one we went in for was the animated film Robots. As expected, this was a family Easter feel good experience, and for me at least it didn’t disappoint. There were some genuinely heart warming parts throughout, although the plot in general was fairly predictable, and I was laughing most of the way through so it must have been good. We also saw a trailer for the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before the film, which looked really cool—especially Marvin the Paranoid Android who made me laugh every time he said something.
The next film we went in for was Hostage. Again, it was fairly standard fare for the type of movie, although towards the end it got a bit gruesome for my liking and I had to actually look away at one point (as I mentioned to Kirk at the time, I can stand guns but not knives). I think I could have skipped the last 20 minutes and probably enjoyed it more. Kirk, on the other hand, seemed to have the opposite opinion—he enjoyed Hostage but didn’t think Robots was all that good.
As for today, the man-lug meeting kicked off with a talk by Mark Johnson on how Speedy Hire deployed Linux across the country in their 300+ depots (sidestep: Speedy Hire pipped one of my clients to the post in the web site category of the Hire Association Europe’s annual awards 2001). Afterwards I spent most of the time chatting to someone who runs Roots Chat, a family history site that has got very popular since it was launched. It was an interesting discussion and I was reminded of the possibilty of switching on query caching in MySQL to speed things up on my forum (must remember to try that out at some point). All in all it was a good meeting and as usual I went away having learnt something.
In other news, I’ve been feeling under the weather since Wednesday afternoon, had a sore throat and a blocked up nose and felt really sick on Thursday. Today I’ve nearly recovered but I still feel a bit sickly so I’m taking it easy this weekend. My FreeBSD book arrived though which cheered me up (need to learn BSD quickly so I can fix things if and when they break on Compsoc).
I’ve also found out that Rachel and Mike share their iTunes music folders in our house, which is cool because I can find out new types of music. Unfortunately I know have a few songs annoyingly stuck in my head, although I rediscovered Summer of ‘69 by Bryan Adams which is a classic, especially good for balls/proms.
Finally, I am now the “proud” owner of a Robots Slinky courtest of Rachel who got me one from the Filmworks (apparently they have hundreds of the things to get rid of). Amazingly I’ve had it for nearly an hour now and it still hasn’t broken, which must be a record as slinkies go.
Hmm. FreeBSD book and cheering up.
Nope, I fail to see a connection 😛
I wouldn’t mind watching that robots film. I’d like to see the one with pigeons in too. They look like they’d be good films.
Constantine is pretty good but rather weird.
I’m going to see Constantine this evening, so I’ll probably post about it when I get back. From the reviews and trailers it does look a bit weird, SFX magazine says it’s a good movie but Keanu Reeves isn’t much cop in the lead role. We shall see…
When was the last time that Keanu Reaves was good in anything? Like most actors he has one mode of operation, in his case it is best described as spaced out surfer dude who says “Wow’’ a lot. When he gets the typecasting right he is acceptable, the rest of the time he is just crap. Still, there are worse actors out there, and some of his films are good fun so I won’t complain too much.
Two good K. Reeves films that spring to mind straight away are the Matrix and the Devils Advocate. Both great films.
I wasn’t so keen on the Devil’s Advocate but I remember it being a good film nevertheless. Unfortunately Keanu seems to have become a bit typecast now.
You were not keen on the Devil’s Advocate? I’m shocked and stunned.
I love that film. Really good. One of my favourite films. I know half of the words too. Lets do a sing a long with Satan!
It was a bit gruesome in parts for me, like when that woman slit her neck whilst looking into a mirror (or something like that, I only have vague memories). I don’t like seeing people cut each other and bleeding slowly—guns and quick deaths I’m fine with but knives and slow painful deaths I tend to turn away from. That’s why it was a good film (in terms of plot and most of the action) but I wasn’t overly keen on it.
I have to squint when I see the woman (ashley judd) slit her throat with some glass. It is gruesome but a great film. Al pacino suited his character to a T.
I wanna watch it now.
“I don’t like seeing people cut each other and bleeding slowly”, “Event Horizon’’ 😀