Zorse!

So, when you cross a girl horse with a boy zebra, you get a zorse. A Year-old zorse has just moved to a german safari-park.

By Ian on July 5, 2007 at 2:37 PM
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I Made This: Wine Sediments Newsletter

I just finished putting together this arrangement for The Wine Shop's monthly e-mail newsletter, which is called Wine Sediments.

I previously designed this layout for their weekly newsletter as well. It's called Wine Buzz.

I'm trying to go for a bit of a separation between the two since they have mostly the same audience. Sediments is basically a digest verion of Buzz, so I decided to make Buzz a little more fun and Sediments a little more serious. They both have some tweaks pending, both in terms of layout and content.

Let me know what you think.

Labels: creations, The Wine Shop

By Ian on June 29, 2007 at 2:38 AM
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Movie I Saw: Live Free or Die Hard

The wait is over. I'm a big Die Hard fan. You internet folk can have your Chuck Norrises (Norii?) and your Jack Bauers but I'm a John McLean man - yippee ki ay, motherfucker.

I love practically everything about the Die Hard movies.

I love the increasingly-insipid titling scheme, by which the name of every sequel has used "Die Hard" as a verb, rather than properly as an adjective or noun. They nearly fumbled the ball by calling the latest movie Die Hard 4.0, but decided on the raw patriotic power of Live Free or Die Hard instead.

I love how John McLean always winds up as the only person capable of dealing with the situation at hand, no matter how unlikely that might be.

I love how John rants outloud to himself, and how he mockingly repeats the reassurances of whatever idiots got him into his current mess.

I love how John can readily use any weapon or vehicle he encounters, deftly.

I love how John never takes a moment to clean up, getting bloodier and grimier in every scene.

I love how John McLean just kicks every fucking ass that needs to be kicked, until everything is hunky-dory again.

Live Free or Die Hard earned my love by lovingly handling all those elements. The movie's plot was taken from a short story, around which the Die Hard stuff was molded, and the effect could have been disconcerting and disastrous, like in Oceans 12 - another movie which had franchise elements shoehorned into an existing story. But it plays perfectly well in this movie, with ruthless cyber-terrorists as worthy an adversary for McLean as any other dirtbag.

After all, the plot allowed the casting of Justin Long as this installment's sidekick-of-the-moment: Matt, a young, hip hacker with a heart of gold who was tricked into aiding the cyber-baddies with a crucial crack. Per the formula, it's McLean and Matt against the world for the majority of the flick, as they always-just-barely make their way through Washington D.C.'s crumbling infrastructure and a few squadrons of terror-types.

The one disappointment I had with the movie was the performance of Timothy Olyphant as Gabriel, the film's major villain. Olyphant isn't a favourite of mine, but I won't say that he did a particularly bad job; I just couldn't take him seriously as the movie presented him. Gabriel is a disenfranchised former intelligence agent, righteously bent on exposing America's weaknesses for her own good, and Olyphant doesn't convey the gravitas of the character in any way. He's just too young and pretty. Live Free or Die Hard needed its own Alan Rickman, William Sadler or Jeremy Irons - gritty, sinister actors that the audience can love to hate.

Olyphant's casting, along with that of Long, are clearly attempts to make the movie more youth-friendly and this scheme is largely successful - there's a higher and more relentless energy level to the latest installment, with a more visual choreography to the fights and set-pieces. In particular, a fight inside a cooling shaft and a freeway chase scene seem inspired more by Casino Royale than the previous Die Hard pictures.

What more can I say? Even Chelly said she dug this one, so you should probably check it out.

Labels: die hard, movies

By Ian on June 28, 2007 at 1:24 AM
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Movie I Saw: Next

Next is already out on video, because it didn't last very long in theatres. When I saw the first trailers for the movie, I was pretty dubious: Nicolas Cage as a dude who sees the future? Jessica Biel as his monkey-faced love-interest? It's hard to know whether to groan or barf, right?

I was compelled to watch the movie because the story was written by Philip K. Dick, the acclaimed sci-fi author whose novels and short stories have resulted in films like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly. The best Dick movies manage to preserve his skillful blending of situational sci-fi with believable drama, but even the worst adaptations usually still offer up a few exciting chases and some funky technology. Next belongs somewhile near the middle of the pile.

Nic Cage plays Cris Johnson, able since childhood to see ahead into the future - but only his own future, and only ever two minutes ahead. More interested in a quiet private life than anything else, Cris uses his ability to "wow" tourists with a low-rent magic show in Vegas and earns extra cash from slot machines and blackjack - not gambling at all, with his edge. As the film starts, Cris is shown waiting at the same coffee shop, twice a day at 8:09 for weeks, because he had a vision of meeting Jessica Biel's character there at that time of day. It's the first time Cris has forseen something more than two minutes ahead, and he has no idea why.

On the day that Biel's character actually arrives, Cris is on the run from Julianne Moore's FBI agent who is determined to exploit Cris' ability toward finding a terrorist cell with a stolen nuke.

The plot that follows is predictable in a some regards, but also delightfully surprising in others. There are some genuinely terrific elements of Next: Cage capably captures the essence of man tired of being harassed because of this ability. He runs from the FBI not because he doesn't care about the terrorists, but because he genuinely doesn't believe he can help with his ability's two-minute limit. He's world-weary, bored and just wants to meet his mystery woman and get on with things. The action set peices in Next are rather awesome, and it's fun to watch Cris use his ability to deftly handle situations that leave everyone around him scrambling. And when Cris really cuts loose late in the film, his abilities are demonstrated with a visual-effects trick that's smart and coherant but not over-explained.

If you want to enjoy Next, however, you'll have to overlook a few things. First, Nicolas Cage stays true to form with this role and gives Cris a number of personality quirks that are far more distracting than they are necessary to the character. So Jessica Biel's motivations in falling for Cris are utterly unfathomable, given Cage's just-plain-weird portrayal. Biel's monkey-like face is also a little off-putting. And Julianne Moore is dreadful. Her FBI agent barks every sentence, looks constantly constipated and doesn't display a lick of personality aside from a two-dimensional "cold, hard bitch" routine. What may have been a genuine attempt to portray the agent as brusque and business-like only comes across as flat and passion-less. I like to blame director Lee Tamhori, who has never gotten a really decent performance out of an actress. Monica Potter was limpid in Along Came a Spider and Halle Berry was laughable in Die Another Day - add Moore and you've got three actresses who have turned in tremendous performances for other directors. Perhaps Tamahori didn't give Moore enough time or takes to explore the character, or maybe Moore was just phoning this one in, but the result is a jarring note whenever her character is on screen.

Back to the positives, the absolute best part of the film,aside from Peter Falk's cameo, is the ending. I won't ruin it, but it's safe to say that there are not many films with an ending as gutsy, surprising or head-scratching as Next's. Keeping Dick's ending basically intact probably went against a lot of Hollywood instinct.

The movie represents a solid effort, and is a bit of a hidden gem, given it's theatrical reception. Check it out, why not?

By Ian on June 27, 2007 at 1:01 PM
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Lucid TV

Lucid TV is an inexplicably-named webcomic that I've been reading for a few months now. It's a little bit Red Meat and a little bit Cynanide and Happiness; it's extremely dark and dry with a retro feel to the artwork that really sets off the tone of the comedy.

Having nothing to do with TV, but still rather lucid, the comic is about doctors doing often-extremely-inappropriate things. There are no pesky characters or drama to get involved with, just a random cast of random medical personnel and patients enacting the most disturbing little vignettes.

Here are a few of my favourites to get you started:

actually, they're mad
because it wasn't his turn

a terminal case of catachritis

it appears she's
immune to the cootie shot (prep for surgery)

the 'hab

By Ian on at 12:47 PM
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Awesome!

I really, really enjoy watching Rube Goldberg machines in action, and this video shows one the more complex and just-plain-cool setups I've ever seen.

I love the inclusion on the slinky and the chess-board, especially.

By Ian on June 26, 2007 at 3:59 PM
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