I picked up the three Bourne novels today out of curiosity, hoping for some good bedtime reading over the next few weeks. I don’t generally require these books to be award-winning, just entertaining enough to keep me occupied for the hour or so until I doze off. So Ludlum’s trilogy seemed to be a good choice — moderately complicated spy thriller with late 70’s cold-war feel. How bad could it be, right?

Well it turns out that How Bad was Pretty Damn Bad. I hadn’t gotten more than two sentences into the book before doing a double-take. The writing was atrocious, ladies and gents. It was like reading poetry by Dan Brown.

Some excerpts from the first chapter:

The wounded man screamed, his hands now lashing out at anything he could grasp, his eyes blinded by blood and the unceasing spray of the sea. There was nothing he could grab, so he grabbed at nothing; his legs buckled as his body lurched forward. The boat rolled violently leeward and the man whose skull was ripped open plunged over the side into the madness of the darkness below.

“… there was nothing he could grab, so he grabbed at nothing.” Ho-boy. “The madness of the darkness.” Yowza.

Hold it! It will ride you to peace. To the silence of darkness … and peace.

So not only is it clumsily written, it’s full of annoying attempts at depth too. Needless to say, I had to put it down after the first 4 or 5 pages. It was like rubbing my eyeballs with sandpaper for God’s sake.

Imagination 3 (pronounced “Imagination Cubed”, as far as i can tell) is a really cute collaborative art tool that I discovered by way of Gizmodo today. Basically, it allows up to three people to all draw at the same time, regardless of where they are in the world. It’s very similar to Yahoo Messenger’s Doodle IMvironment, although it improved on a lot of the things that made that tool cumbersome to use, namely that you both have to be using YM, and that you have to squeeze your drawing into a space about the size of a business card. Oh, and Imagination3 actually records your movements, instead of just the finished output, so you can playback the entire session, in case there were some good bits that you forgot to take note of.

The only problem I noticed was that the very noticeable lag prevents you from drawing very accurately, but it’s still a ton better than, say, describing something over the phone. That said, if you really wanted a serious drawing app with collaborative capabilities, you’d probably be better off paying a hundred bucks for Corel Grafigo, instead of roughing it with a web-based freebie.

Oliver Stone’s first feature film in over 4 years (the last was 1999’s Any Given Sunday) has me both excited and kinda freaked at the same time. Colin Farrell looks like an absolute twat in this photo for one thing, and it’ll be Stone’s first time to direct something that wasn’t firmly grounded in the 20th century. Angelina Jolie looks a bit old too. Is that on purpose, I wonder?

Oh, and will they be showing Alexander’s hobbit-y homosexual side? Man, that would rock.

… ok, no it wouldn’t.

I finally caught Dodgeball (haha, a pun! So funny!) two nights ago with my girlfriend. Not exactly what I would call a good date movie (the last movie we saw together was the lucid Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind), but what do you expect from the post-Zoolander Ben Stiller?

I love a good loser movie, but in order for it to be effective, your lead loser has to be really, really good. Vince Vaughn is, unfortunately, not. My whole problem with this movie, in fact, is how Vince Vaughn’s character was fleshed out.

My favorite comedic losers of all-time include Kramer from Seinfeld, Jason Schwartzmann in Rushmore and Ben Stiller himself in Zoolander. The key to those characters are that they are blissfully unaware that they’re losers. In fact, they think they’re one step ahead of everyone else, and they can’t understand why people don’t revere them. This is why those characters are such classics.

Vaughn’s character, on the other hand, seems to know he’s a loser, yet does not actually do anything remotely loser-like throughout the movie. He’s not clumsy, or disgusting, or crazy, or awkward with the females. He’s a loser, simply because he says he is and we’re expected to just take his word for it. It escapes me why they would choose to tell a story from the point of view of the most boring character in the whole movie.

The reason why I find this so wrong is that the whole story hinges on the fact that Vince Vaughn is a loser that eventually wins at the end. But since he doesn’t feel like a loser, outsmarting Ben Stiller’s character after the tournament seems so easy. There’s nothing thrilling about seeing a smarter person beat a stupider one. In other words, there’s no growth, which is what makes loser films fun to watch (i.e., seeing your endearing loser finally make something of himself).

The final duel would have been so much better if it had been given to the high school kid, making him the big hero of the event. (I would have cut out the cheerleading tournament completely; it’s largely irrelevant anyway.) He’s the only other character that is properly fleshed out, and he’s likely the only one that the audience can really relate to. When you consider how many of the key characters are just there for flavor, it gives you an idea of how lacking in development this script really was.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to see this movie again, even on video. I had to see it though, because I believe that eventually Ben Stiller will come out with another movie of Zoolander’s quality, and I’ll be immensely happy to see it.

Just not this time, though.

Nokia has just released three new handsets, two of which kinda suck, and the third of which really really sucks, and is pictured below:



The Nokia 7280, my god.

Yes, that’s a phone, and no, I have no idea how it’s supposed to work without a keypad. Maybe you’re supposed to tie two of them on opposite ends of a long, taut string, and then kinda yell at each other in turn.

… Wait, no, the press release says it uses a “discreet keyless dial” and you can answer or end calls with a “flick of the wrist.” Oh, now I get it. It’s a phone for flambuoyant queers. Great.

Meanwhile, the folks at O2 will be releasing an updated version of the XDA II towards the end of this year. The specs are pretty similar although you do get a significant bust in both processing power (520MhZ up from 400) and camera quality (1.3M up from 0.3M). Oh, and it has a slide-out QWERTY thumb-board, which is utterly cool, but is unfortunately not pictured in the site.

Let me get the obvious out of the way first: this movie fucking sucked. Hard.

But it could’ve been worse. I could’ve been watching it hoping to be scared, for one thing. It could’ve been longer, for another. But I had already resigned myself to the fact that this would be an utter crapfest, and rather predictably, that’s what it was.

Knowing that you’re about to watch a crapfest tends to change your attitude just enough to make the movie fun to watch for at least the 90 minutes that you spend in front of it. And this is exactly what the experience was like last night, with my friends and I making fun of all the silly, predictable things that those cardboard cutouts onscreen were doing.

Everybody in this film is a cardboard cutout, from the crusty but benign riverboat captain, to the greedy expedition leader to the panicky computer-geek black dude. At least the rhesus monkey, Kong, was decent: he could at least act like a real monkey. The actors couldn’t even act like real humans.

I swear to God. When the most relatable character in a film is a twelve-inch-tall primate, you know you’ve got some major roblems.

But what bothered me most about this film wasn’t the acting, or the fact that it made no sense. It was that lack of imagination that seemed to pervade each snake scene. If there had been more violence, instead of lots of shots of people trying to act like they were screaming and running, it would have at the very least, made things interesting. They didn’t have to come up with any monster ideas themselves; I’d have been equally as glad if they had just rehashed some old favorites from better monster films.

This movie needed to have a scene where characters are swallowed then regurgitated in a writhing, partially-digested state (see the original Anaconda and Deep Rising), and scenes where characters are dismembered by several snakes fighting over them (see Jurassic Park 2). It also needed a scene where one of the characters would valiantly fight back, but is ultimately overcome after succeeding to wound the snake but not kill it (see Predator). Or a scene where the lovable comic relief escapes the monster by quick thinking and convenient set design, and then throws a punchline that makes the audience cheer (LL Cool J in Deep Blue Sea). Or a scene where the humans setup an elaborate trap that captures the anaconda momentarily, but is bungled by the ineptness of one of the well-meaning but stupid characters, and results in the death of the trap’s mastermind (see Lake Placid, although my memory of this movie is hazy at best).

See, any of those additions would have made this movie ten times better for me, but there was nothing even remotely like that, anywhere. Instead we get a shitty explosion ending, with a convenient fuel barrel and a miraculous flare gun. In a monster movie, you should never, ever have an explosion ending unless one or more of the characters have to sacrifice themselves in order to set off the explosion (see Aliens), and that particular ending is only effective if the character was weak and self-centered throughout the movie and only realizes during the climax that he must do something brave for his friends to survive.

It’s sad that this movie couldn’t have been made by a more self-aware director, because it could’ve been better simply by paying attention to what other monster movies were already doing. But as it stands, it didn’t even try.

Samsung announces phone with mini hard-drive. No specifics yet on the overall dimensions of the phone, but since the HD is 1.5gb, I doubt we’ll be seeing another Razor.

I’m not sure if having an HD in a phone is a very good idea, since phones see a lot more movement than say, an audio player. (In fact, HD-based audio players are usually not recommended for very active individuals because the constant motion leads to audio skipping and less stable performance than if they had used a flash-based player. I’m not sure if the same rules would apply to a phone, though. Either way, this is definitely not going to be the last HD-based phone we’ll see, although it may be some time before we actually see them in wide use.)