So, I’ll be forward: I loved this movie. You can choose to stop reading now, or you can continue and find out why, it’s up to you. But just know that this is going to be a positive review of a movie that’s been getting a fairly even number of reviews from both end of the spectrum.

Keep in mind that this movie follows (quite well) the trend of the first three - that is to say, it is over the top in terms of action, and one is required to suspend one’s disbelief with something tensile and strong. If you have no problem doing this, or more appropriately if you had no problem doing this with the first three, you should be fine. Because I will say it right now - these movies are not meant to be taken seriously. I’ve always felt more like the Indiana Jones movies were like thrill rides. They throw a few twists at you, but you know it’s just a ride, so you smile all the way through.

To its credit, KotCS does not require one to have seen the first three movies. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. It certainly helps - both so that you know what kind of movies the Indiana Jones series is comprised of, and so that you can catch the throwbacks. I was relieved to find that a sizable chunk of the audience was comprised of true Indy fans when they applauded as these throwbacks came on screen. But much like the other three were separate stories with the same hero and a few consistent characters, so is KotCS a movie that is not meant to be a continuation, but rather simply another installment in the series.

This is where I, and many others, were afraid. Harrison Ford is, I believe somewhere around the age of 60. For a whip-cracking hero that spends a lot of his time running, jumping, rolling around, and getting beaten up by men twice his size, 60’s not exactly the ripest age at which to do so. However, with the exception of a few more lines on his face and eyes that one can tell have seen a lot, Ford is in as good a shape as he’s ever been. He’s still got the humor, too, which for me was very important. I can never stop smiling when I’m watching any of the Indy movies, and this was no exception.

The plot is where it falls apart for some people. Without giving too much away, this plot does differ greatly in that not only does it take place in the Cold War era (rather than World War II, so we’re now dealing with KGB instead of Nazis), the ultimate mystery that Indy unravels is a bit more science fiction-y in nature, and less religion-themed. Once again, though, all four of the movies are built on the premise that any of these fabled artifacts that Indy’s after are real, as are the legends behind them. Now, I’m somewhat biased, being interested already in what the plot has to offer, and the crystal skulls themselves have some basis in history (although its been said the real skulls were discredited as being made in the 19th century, rather than much earlier as the legend assumes), but in contrast to the nay-sayers who found the plot too ridiculous, I thought it fit the Indy theme quite well.

Naturally I had a few gripes with the movie, but then again, I don’t recall ever seeing a perfect movie. This is totally off the topic of suspending disbelief, by the way - these gripes are more like “well that was kind of unnecessary,” rather than “well that would never happen.” Shia LeBouf played his role as sort of a wanna-be badass quite well, always either a comb or switchblade in hand even in the face of death. His acting was not an issue. However, his screentime, while plentiful, was in some cases sort of superfluous. There is a scene where he’s swinging through the jungle alongside monkies on vines. Now, this isn’t a totally ridiculous notion: anyone of decent strength, a concept of momentum (or someone who’s seen Tarzan), and some luck could probably pull this off. I mean it happens in real life, monkeys do it, it’s not that outrageous. The fact that it was part of the movie, though, is sort of the main issue. It was clearly intended to add some comic relief, which it did, but mainly because it was just such a silly way out of a situation. Lucas could’ve written that part a little better, I think, or perhaps not written it at all.

The other main gripe is at the end. Again, I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s mostly CGI-related. George Lucas, as most Star Wars fans know, as well as Steven Spielberg, are avid users of CGI in their movies, to the point where it’s almost annoying. I’m eternally grateful that the use of CGI was not obscenely overdone in KotCS - everything seemed to fit pretty well with the other movies in terms of the use of real props and sets and perhaps even on-location shooting rather than green screens. The end, however, is sort of where Lucas and Spielberg decided to pull out all the stops and kind of go nuts. If you see the movie, perhaps you’ll agree that there wasn’t much choice in doing the ending any other way other than CGI, but certainly they could have used less, which would’ve been fine.

There’s also a scene with a refrigerator and a nuke - you’ll know it when you see it - that was a bit hard to take seriously, but I did enjoy the comic value it added and laughed with it, where the monkey scene just kind of had me laughing at it.

Overall, though, I thought it was excellent. The Indy movies were written for the sake of entertainment. There aren’t many heroes like Indiana Jones anymore - these days it’s all about grit and realism, blood and violence and death. I loved this movie for its ability to simply be watched and enjoyed, an ability shared with the other three. The plot works, the acting was great (in my personal opinion), Harrison Ford’s definitely still got it, the music gave it the same feel as the others, and I smiled the whole way through - and for me, that last part was crucial.

In short, if you’re a fan of the Indy series and the style of the movies, you will enjoy Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. If you go in expecting a modernized Indy movie, with more grit and realism and less comedy, I think you will be a bit disappointed. So, my recommendation is to go watch it with purely entertainment in mind, perhaps brush up on the series by watching the other three first (I did; it’s nothing you won’t mind doing), and suspend your disbelief for the sake of fun and excitement, and you will get your money’s worth. Do I understand the negative reviews? Sure. Some people were expecting something a little less “ridiculous,” as it were. But as that’s the way the first three were, that’s exactly how I expected this to be, and my expectations were met. We’re so accustomed to movies that force realism and complex story lines on us that many of us have forgotten what it’s like to go and just have fun at the movies.

I’ll abstain from rating movies, since it’s hard to do that fairly and accurately, so I’ll just say I highly recommend it.

I’m out.

Later.

This was my proposal, to which my good friend Ryan responded that he had in fact been president, for about an hour and a half…and he did pretty well.

Words can’t describe my anticipation of the new Indiana Jones. The anticipation was almost too much; I found myself going back to watch the original three, something which I haven’t quite finished doing, but I’m awfully close. Something about Jones just makes me smile when I watch those movies; perhaps it’s his cock-eyed smile, wry wit, his ability to wriggle out of situations that are almost too hairy for comfort, or something else entirely, but he’s a real hero, the kind I’d follow into a series of dark, bug-ridden tunnels any day.

I got a job at the dining commons, something which I had previously thought to be no longer a real possibility. However, when I discovered that all I had to do was work mornings (I say this now, but I know in the back of my mind that it’s going to be rather…awful sometimes), I jumped at the possibility, and tomorrow is my first day working for $8.00/hour doing next to nothing. Sounds good to me.

I think I need to do some restructuring of this site; new layout, maybe a new direction? I don’t think I’d follow this blog if I were anyone else, I need some recurring content that perhaps my peers can relate to. I’ll see what I can do.

Also, please check out my friend Dan’s blog, located in the links to the right, “Full Combo.” He’s a good friend of mine writing about video games and his thoughts on them, and his stuff is well worth reading.
I’m out.

Later.

Alright, so, I’m not sure what happened to my last few posts, there were definitely some between now and “Of Woe and Agony.” I suppose I’ll have to do a recap of some kind.

So, what’s happened in a month? The Percussion Ensemble returned from Ohio with a silver medal. That was a good time, save for sleeping on the floor of a coach bus during an 18-hour bus ride and having a drum stick fall on your eye. It was sort of a surprise this year: Mansfield High School, from Mansfield, MA, beat us by nearly three points in finals, after edging us out by a little more than two points in preliminaries. They received the second highest score in the whole competition (or at least of the groups present at our awards), a 97.something-or-other, with Ayala, I believe, netting a 98.

The trip itself was pretty fun. There was an unfortunate mishap with a local Taco Bell, which had 6 people working and still took nearly 45 minutes to finish 6 orders. Yes, that’s right. It averaged almost 8 minutes an order. Let’s compare: I went to Taco Bell today with 4 friends, totaling 5 people for the math-impaired or the lazy, and it took them all of 10 minutes to fill those orders. At the time we seriously considered phoning the number on the receipt to complain, but…nah.

So apparently, one of my entries which was deleted was referenced by another blog about my Spiderman 3 review. I’ll write it again, because it deserves to be re-written, not to mention Dr. Hypercube of Diary of a Mad Natural Historian seemed to enjoy something I’d written about Peter Parker’s sudden unwillingness to conform to society, as accentuated by that bit of hair in front of his eyes and all-black clothing.

Ok. So the movie was excellent. This is my personal opinion and I stick by it. It was long, I concede: two hours and 45 minutes, give or take, with some Return of the King-style fade-to-blacks that aren’t actually endings. It’s times like that when I begin to get antsy for the other people I’m seeing the movie with, just because I don’t know whether they’re bored or wondering when it will be over while I’m over in my chair oggling at the greatness of the movie.

That said, it was well-done. Three villains are hard to pull off, especially Harry, because of his complex love-hate relationship with Peter, but I think the movie executed it fairly well. There definitely wasn’t enough Venom, and for anyone who’s read the comics and knows that Venom lives on to later partner up (more or less) with Spiderman, the fate of Venom in the movie becomes kind of a bad thing, but they can’t make as many movies as they can comics, so they did what they had to do. Sandman was pretty cool, too. He’s kind of a difficult character to figure out; his back story makes you sympathetic to his plight, trying to help his children and his wife, although he’s an escaped convict. He’s not a true villain, in a sense, he just is constantly hindered by Spiderman in his attempts to acquire money, and so he kind of develops a grudge against him based on that. You never really truly come to hate him, just as you never truly hate Harry. You hate Venom though. That guy’s a jerk.

Ok, so there were bad things about it too. For one, the bit in the beginning when Peter’s singing along with Mary Jane’s Broadway musical was sort of cheesy. This part made him seem cocky before he was actually cocky from the power the Venom symbiont gave him. That part didn’t bother me as much as his transition to emo-ness, though. It wasn’t even the fact that he was emo; it’s the fact that it happened in one scene. He literally looks at himself in a mirror, and flips a bit of his hair down to cover his eye, as if to say, “I’m unhappy with things right now, let’s limit depth perception while we’re at it.” And there, in that one brief moment, Peter goes from nerd to emo-nerd, in the blink of an eye. I feel like that transition could have been spread out a bit.

Finally, I tried to decide why people disliked the movie, and came to the conclusion that perhaps some people didn’t quite understand the basis for it. Spiderman was created in the 60’s, when cheesy dialogue was the norm. Seeing as how Stan Lee played a large part in the creation of the movie, it comes as no surprise, to me, anyway, that there would be a bit of cheesy dialogue in there, which seems to be a big complaint about the movie. There’s no explaining Peter’s hip-thrusting outside the clothing store, but that aside, I feel like people are forgetting Spiderman’s roots. Of course, some people just genuinely didn’t like the movie, and that’s fine. I just tried to narrow down the reasons.

Finally, an interesting thing happened to me recently. Yesterday I was minding my own business, surfing the internet or something, and my cell phone rang. It was a local number, but one I didn’t know, but I answered it anyway. A man named Derek introduced himself as being a representative of a company called Vector, and proceeded to tell me that my friend Brian Tompkins had recommended me for a job. “Go on,” I said, warily. He proceeded to describe the nature of the job (not the job itself): “It’s not telemarketing,” he said (I was immediately more suspicious), “but rather you setting up appointments with clients who are already interested in our product, and going to their house to pitch it to them. It’s not door to door, it’s not phone calls; it’s personalized.”

I was still wary, but I asked him to continue. He mentioned a “base pay of $16.50,” with “per hour” conspicuously absent. He set me up for an interview for today at 7pm, I thanked him, and hung up. I immediately called Brian to get to the bottom of this. Turns out, Vector is a company that sells kitchen knives. Yes, those things that cut food items that you have lying around, and spread butter and whatnot. The $16.50 refers to the money received for each house you go to, whether you sell the knives or not. I called the guy back, and in a roundabout way said I wasn’t interested, since I already had two jobs lined up (which is true). He graciously mentioned that there were internship opportunities available, as well as various offices around the country, and I thanked him and hung up. I hung out with my friend John later that day, and told him that I honestly could not envision myself selling knives. Maybe it’s just me, but I immediately thought of Kip from Napoleon Dynamite selling Tupperware, a thought which was immediately followed by an image of me walking out of a house waving goodbye and thanking the client for buying the knives, and decided that neither thought could ever happen.

That’s about it. Let’s hope this post actually sticks around. Just noticed the default “post status” radio button was set to Draft, I wonder if that’s where my others went. We’ll see.

I’m out.

Later.

The things some people ask. (He meant bank.)

I wrote an…well, it wasn’t angry, more annoyed, but not-in-a-happy-mood letter today to my principal. Not anything about him, but he’s new this year and seems especially receptive, so I’m directing my complaints to him to see what happens. Fact is, I’m at my wit’s end with the school’s firewalls and filters. SonicWall can go jump off a cliff for all I care. Actually, it isn’t even the filter, just the fact that the school (or maybe just the tech department) seems to baby all the students.

My main problem is that YouTube and Google Images are blocked. Now, I’m sure every school in the country has Google Images blocked, and for a good reason: SafeSearch is entirely changeable by whoever is using the computer, and of course one can find all kinds of nasty stuff on there. Fact is, though, many kids just want to use it to find pictures for their project or poster or something, and it can’t be done. I often find myself on google.de just to find a picture of, say, the Chernobyl sarcophagus. Harmless.

YouTube’s another story. If you’ve ever uploaded anything to YouTube - heck, even if you’ve just been to YouTube - you know that there isn’t anything undesirable on there, at least not in the way of exposed body parts and such. There’s the occasional curb-stomping video and maybe a weird Japanese reality show, but that’s about the worst of it. On the flip side, there are plenty of enjoyable, innocent, and dare I say educational videos to be found on YouTube. Even my teachers have expressed distaste in the absurdity of it all. It comes down to the principle of the matter, not that we can’t access those specific sites, but that the school doesn’t trust students or teachers to use the Internet responsibly. Granted, there are people who would use the Internet for porn and general crap like that, but there are so few of those individuals they could be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. No need to penalize everyone for it. Needless frustration.

That’s really that, though. It’s the weekend now, and I need to find something to do. Next week looks like this: Monday & Tuesday: school; Wednesday-Early Sunday: Ohio for WGI Percussion World Championships; Late Sunday-Monday (Vacation): Green Mountain college to visit a friend; Tuesday-Thursday: California to visit UC Santa Barbara; home. Then who knows. Busy week ahead of me.

I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We’re watching it in Visual Literature, and it’s fantastic.

I’m out.

Later.

I just finished watching Pulp Fiction for the first time. Or, well, I should say watching the whole movie for the first time; I can’t count how many times I’ve seen the first half hour or so (which is a good half hour, let me tell you). Quentin Tarantino is most definitely the kind of director you can either absolutely love or absolutely hate. The way he goes about story telling, with multiple plot lines and a sort of circular motion in the way things meet up, is unique to him and him alone.

The movie reminded me of Sin City, which needless to say would have been the other way around if I had seen Pulp Fiction first, but that was a lot of fluff to bulk up the first sentence of this paragraph. It caters to those who enjoy blood and occasional gore (or more appropriately, the thought of occasional gore, since a lot of it is implied, rather than shown), and most certainly who enjoy a twisted sense of humor. My dad came down for the last third of the movie or so, and he was laughing along with me, but on my end it was that nervous sort of “they use the N-word an awful lot” laugh. But hey, nothing like a family movie.

Of course, the question on everyone who’s seen its mind is, what the heck is in that case? I’m taking a class on mythological and biblical allusions, and so I’m noticing them left and right now, although it doesn’t take a religious scholar to see the significance of the lock code on the briefcase (666), not to mention Jules comes right out and prefaces his long quotations with the fact that they’re from the bible, but nevertheless, I can’t help but try to make some kind of biblical connection to the briefcase. What do I think is in there? I have no clue. Kind of a buzz kill to this whole paragraph, but whatever. Whatever I think it is, it’s probably not right, so it doesn’t matter, but it’s fun to think about anyway.

I’ve got lots of Easter chocolate and candy sitting next to me, uneaten. What’s going on? I’m positive there’s some unspoken rule that chocolate should never last beyond some specific amount of time if a person is within a specific radius surrounding it. I’m eying it now, hungrily. Some carnal, chocolate-craving instinct brews inside me, hungering for what my ancestors maybe feasted upon most heartily in those times of celebration (or maybe whenever they were hungry). We’re talking jillions of years ago. How long has chocolate been around, anyway?

I’m out.

Later.

So here’s what I’ve got in store: talk about Pan’s Labyrinth, talk about The Departed, musings about upcoming stuff, and so on. All for later posts so I don’t waste all that I have to talk about in one.

Currently I’ve got a Do-It-Yourself project going on to mount my monitor on my wall. As the day progresses I’ll make a work log and post that. The idea is to create a custom mounting bracket for my Samsung Syncmaster 940BW 19″ widescreen. I already got the bolts, which was an adventure in itself, since it required hunting around for first the type of mounting bracket it normally takes, followed by the standard screw sizes (which were metric @_@), and finally a trip to Home Depot, but now they’re sitting on my desk, so all is well.

I saw The Guardian last night - or most of it - and just wanted to mention that Ashton Kutcher is quite respectable in that movie. I had my doubts, since it’s honestly hard to take a guy like him seriously after some of the things he’s been in, but he played his Coast Guard rookie role very well. The movie itself was also really good. Gave a very interesting look into one man’s way of preparing the rookies what, to be honest, nothing can really prepare them for. But he came close, and it pays off.

That’s that. More will be posted regarding that work log as time goes on. Stay tuned.

Later.

I’m sitting here next to Nicole and McKenzie, having finished my Cyberspace assignment in just under 60 seconds, wondering what to do now. I could watch Scrubs. I could play Tetris or Sudoku. I could watch Hellboy or The Incredibles or Demetri Martin’s comedy special. I could listen to music. I could draw. Am I doing any of that? No. Instead I’m typing this update.

What an incredible waste.

Anyway, I saw Children of Men recently. That was exceptionally good. It was kind of an under-the-radar movie, not very well-known or even heard of until after it came out, but my god was it worth it. The cinematography of all things impressed me the most. There was one scene where they literally did not cut for almost 20 minutes. It was very documentary-ish, but with lots of subtleties that kept things feeling very realistic. The mood also changes very quickly in that movie (it’s quite fast-paced).

Oh. Right. I’m 18 now. Almost slipped my mind. Had a great birthday, probably the best I’ve had in years. Got an 80gb iPod to replace my 30gb (which was full), which is where all those movies and all that music I mentioned up there are housed. It’s sitting in my pocket as I type this, just itching to be used.

I think I’m going to go use it.

More in a bit. Time to use this thing to its full capabilities again. I didn’t spend $23.70 renewing the domain and space and a few hours setting up Wordpress for nothing.

Later.