Long time no blog! Actually, I have blogged since that last post, but in vain… more of that in a moment.
Rent
Moving, beautiful and fun. This movie made me think that maybe I might like to see New York one day. Be fully warned though: this movie is in no way subtle with it’s message about AIDS. I don’t approve of Matt and Trey’s Everybody has AIDS swipe at it, but I can’t deny that the message comes on pretty strong.
Kung-fu Hustle
Absolutely frickin’ hilarious. Not only a brilliant Kung-fu move and great silly Chinese comedy, but also an elegant parody/one-upmanship of the Matrix movies.
Wolf Creek
Horrible, terrifying, excellent. I now have exactly zero desire to ever see wolf creek crater, or leave main roads and major cities at all ever again. In fact, I want a police escort 100% of the time, and I may have to start carrying a gun. A methodical thriller which gains a vast added power from being based on fact.
Final Fantasy VII – The Movie
Wha? I still don’t understand, but it was pretty. Assurances that I should play the (very long) computer game in order to understand the plot are, uh, nice. Thanks.
Mirrormask
Mesmerizing. Neil Gaiman is still obviously filming everyone’s dreams and nightmares. 
An original take on the coming-of-age / acceptance-of-the-strangeness-of-childhood story. Gaiman has clearly spent more on the effects for this than he did on Neverwhere, which was awesome anyway. Thorne want DVD!
Ghost in the shell II : Innocence
Funky. Shirow Masamune rocks but he knows it. Be prepared for a lot of philosophical musing on the subjects of identity, intelligence, self-awareness, and cartesian existentialism. Oh, and some blood, and a lot of very very pretty animation and cool-but-faintly-disturbing music and sound effects.
I have also lately been reading an incredibly helpful book: “NOT ‘just friends'” by Shirley P Glass, PhD. I am presently only part way through the book, so a review will have to wait, but I am already feeling strongly inclined to recommend the book to all and sundry. So many things that seem obvious as soon as I read them, but which were far from it when it mattered. Enlightening.
Trouble has been troublesome lately in the sense that there are still on-going modem difficulties. My last post here was swallowed by one such outage, with Trouble falling over between my logging in and my pressing submit on the post. Grr! It has also been troubling insofar as I have not quite managed to put together the right finances to buy Trouble 2.0 yet. At least for this month, new shock absorbers have taken precedence, in the hope that my old car will stop grating itself on the driveway whenever I enter or leave. Specs for Trouble 2.0 are holding pretty firm at this stage, with all the alternatives being insufficiently cheaper to warrant their lack of performance. Presently:
| Shuttle SD31P SFF barebone | $659 |
| Intel P4 D820 CPU | $319 |
| RAM: 2x1GBDDR2533 | $238 |
| 2x250GB Western Digital HDD | $274 |
| No-name DVD-RW drive | $65 |
| Total | $1,555 |
| Plus: | |
| APC CS500VA UPS | $139 |
| Maxtor 250GB external USB drive | $235 |
…with the slim possiblity that I will pick up a cheap or free USB2 internal DAT-72 drive from work in the interim, removing the need for the expensive Maxtor disk box.