Maybe this is happening more and more over time, but there has been a lot of discussion about how the films nominated this year are amoung the lowest grossing films ever to be nominated.

-Josh

Revolutionary Road

I hated this film. It is dark and devoid of hope and is completely unlikable. I'm sure that is what Director Sam Mendes was going for and I respect it, but I don't like it. The film touches on a lot of the same themes as American Beauty (also directed by Mendes) but where American Beauty was poetic and engaging Revolutionary Road was dark and depressing. Both Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio delivered fantastic performances but I don't recommend this film.

Doubt

First off Doubt is a fantastic looking movie. The cinematographer was Roger Deakins. Something that I have noticed about cinematographers are either average (get the job done) or excellent and Roger Deakins is the best of the excellent. It isn't like directors and actors who have performances that vary from film to film, if someone tells you that Roger Deakins shot the film you know it looks amazing. Blah blah blah. Doubt brings three great performances from Phil Hoffman, Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. My only complaint about the movie is that it gets a little 'stage play' talky in the third act. The film was directed by John Patrick Shanley who also wrote the original play and screenplay.

Waltz with Bashir

This is an animated film that was Israel's submission for best Foreign Film. It deals with a massacre that occurred at the Sabra and Shantila POW camp during the Lebanon war in 1982. More specifically it deals with Ari, a former Israeli solider who has blocked all memory of the event at Sabra and Shantila and how he reconnects with other soldiers that were there so he can try and remember his involvement with the event and come to terms with it. The film looks just stunning and the vector animation that drives the film really adds to the movement and momentum that live action just could not have delivered. If the academy was smart (which we already know they are not) they would have nominated the song 'Beirut' from the film for best song.

The Wrestler

This film was amazing. It knew what it had to do and it delivered on it in spades. This is by far the most straightforward film by Director Darren Aronofsky and it shows his impressive talent and vision with the film medium. Both the film and the director deserved nominations (which they did not get) for this film. Based on his performance in this roll and who he is up against Mickey Rourke earned this nomination and deserves the award.

-Josh

"Invalid Server Response - The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid".

And so I googled around and found this site that listed several fixes and none of them worked.]]> Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:27:24 -0800 http://virb.com/schalicto/posts/text/1062507 http://virb.com/schalicto/posts/text/1030614 Well well well. Turns out there is a pretty handy app for the blackberry called bbmetablogger that allows me to blog on my wordpress from my phone! How rad is that? The app isn't as elegent as something for the iPhone might be, but it works and that is all that matters.

I'm on my second week at my new job and I love it. Almost zero stress. Very easy-going. And I feel secure in the job. All of my mysterious stomach problems have gone away (except for the nausea from ridding the bus).

This Friday I am going to Madison for my first yo-yo contest since MWR last year. It sounds like WI States is going to be awsome and I'm looking forward to it.

Plans are afoot for the 2009 Minnesota state yo-yo contest. Stay tuned.

I'm on my second week at my new job and I love it. Almost zero stress. Very easy-going. And I feel secure in the job. All of my mysterious stomach problems have gone away (except for the nausea from ridding the bus).

This Friday I am going to Madison for my first yo-yo contest since MWR last year. It sounds like WI States is going to be awsome and I'm looking forward to it.

Plans are afoot for the 2009 Minnesota state yo-yo contest. Stay tuned.

I'm on my second week at my new job and I love it. Almost zero stress. Very easy-going. And I feel secure in the job. All of my mysterious stomach problems have gone away (except for the nausea from ridding the bus).

This Friday I am going to Madison for my first yo-yo contest since MWR last year. It sounds like WI States is going to be awsome and I'm looking forward to it.

Plans are afoot for the 2009 Minnesota state yo-yo contest. Stay tuned.

Also one of the sites I built is now live at www.bwhawksoccer.com. The header was done by my friend Ryan Power and the xhtml was all done by myself and Kari Root. The xhtml validates as strict, because I'm awesome.

Next quarter I am taking "Introduction to Web Development Software" which I guess is just about Adobe Dreamweaver (lame), but I'm not sure what the other class I am going to take is. Rasmussen keeps insisting that I take classes online despite the fact that they advertised a 100% in classroom and at every chance I get I reaffirm that I don't want to take classes online. Hopefully they will get their act together and get me in a solid programming class like Perl. Bye for now.

-Josh

I am deep into development on two sites right now, www.bwhawksoccer.com and www.tlcelectronics.com , (what you see there right now is not my work). The first one should be going live in about a week and the second one might take a couple weeks because the company is still trying to figure out exactly what they want.]]> Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:41:21 -0800 http://virb.com/schalicto/posts/text/939837 http://virb.com/schalicto/posts/text/933748 Just saw Quantum of Solace and it kicked ass.]]> Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:34:08 -0800 http://virb.com/schalicto/posts/text/933748 http://virb.com/schalicto/posts/text/914170 We are already over taxed and passing this legislation was a huge mistake for Minnesota. Why doesn't the pioneer press report the facts of the legislation instead of the touchy feely environmental crap, shouldn't the loto dollars already be going to this? And I love the arts, theater, etc, but the government should not be passing a sales tax to support it.

Not only does it raise our taxes it also amends the Minnesota constitution in a move that says "let's take two completely unrelated things and make people vote on them like they are one thing". And this amendment gives a dissenting voice to those who chose to have no voice at all.

It does make me wonder if this amendment had already been in place if this bill would still have passed. Should they subject it to it's own scrutiny?

This is a message to Pawlenty and the Minnesota Legislature, STOP TAXING! STOP NEEDLESS SPENDING! Let's fix some bridges and potholes and do the things that the government supposed to do.

-Josh

Work is going the best it has all year, knock on wood. School is also going well. Wife is good and dogs and house are well.

My M1330 on the other hand has had some problems that have caused me stress. I crashed it the other night and I'm having a nightmare of a time getting it back up to stable performance. I had a marathon session with Dell today and got nothing at all accomplished, last time I had to call Dell (5 years ago) I got the best service I have ever received from a company today I got just about the worst service. I asked for documentation specific to my M1330 on how to reinstall Vista, which drivers are specific to my machine and so on... seems like an acceptable request right? My dell service tag identifies my specific laptop and they should know exactly what drivers my laptop needs, right? Well when I asked this very simple question I was met with the audible equivalent of a stare. Why on earth would I need to know what drivers my laptop uses? After much poking and prodding and restating the question the guy (guy was supervisor of first person I talked to... first person was completely useless.... I mean that.... she told me everything from 'it's caused by Google Chrome', to 'your memory needs to be reseated', and my personal favorite 'windows update is breaking everyone's computers and Dell recommends that you turn it off because it's not compatible with your hardware'... but I digress) the guy told me that I need to install the chipset driver first and when I asked if Vista would recognize my chipset driver on installation he said 'yes it would, but it might not be the best driver' so I asked 'how do I know what the best driver is?' he back peddled and basically the whole conversation was a waste of my time and utterly (utterly) useless. Finally he provided this build order for reinstalling Vista....

Install the Hardware Drivers on the Portable Computer

Install the appropriate hardware drivers. Locate the Drivers and Utilities CD you received with your computer.

For the system to function properly, you must install your hardware drivers in the following order:

Desktop System Software or Notebook System Software

Chipset or SMBus driver

Processor Driver (if applicable)

Video

Audio (sound)

Input Drivers (keyboard/mouse)

Modem (Desktop computers have a separate CD for the modem)

Network Card

I mean wow... right? That's just the kind of documentation that I'm glad I paid extra for.

Alright, enough venting. Time for me to get back to my javascript studies. Bye!

-Josh

1. No more solo tour. You can create a band and go through the world tour and it doesn't matter if it's just yourself or if you have three friends with you.

2. Quick Play; Play all songs. Now in the Quick Play mode there is an option to play all the songs in a category (i.e. apprentice, or genre).

3. The goals and 'levels' of the world tour are much better defined. It tells you exactly how many stars you need for a specific thing, and how many fans and so on.

4. All of my downloadable content just works.

5. World Tour over xbox live is finally an option! I haven't tried it yet, but I'm sure it's good to go.

Now the caviat. I've been pondering and wondering for months now about weather they are going to let you play the disc songs from Rock Band 1 in Rock Band 2 and then answer is YES! BUT!! Yes, but you have to buy a license key over xbox live for 400 points! Kinda bull shit if you ask me considering I already paid for those songs. But I'm stuck at the mercy and ponied up the dough.

I have not tried the drum trainer yet, so I'll report back on that later.

Otherwise the game is exactly the same. When I use the game I feel ripped of for being charged again for essentially the exact same game that I already own. But then I realize that the set list owns and if I were to buy each of those songs over xbox live it would have cost way more than 60 bucks.

-Josh

Eagle Eye

Directed by Shia Laboufs live in boyfriend D.J. Caruso who also directed him Disturbia.  This trailer is pretty great, they cut it together in a way that makes me forget it stars Labouf and it is directed by Caruso.  The trailer starts with Shia getting a call from an anonymous voice telling him to escape from the feds who are out to get him.  It all seems very Matrix-y and it's got a cool vibe.  But the movie is going to be terrible, I have already decided, and I'm sure people are going tell me months from now "It's actually pretty good" and then I'll be disappointed in them.

Blindness

Did you see City of God?  Did you see The Constant Gardner?  Are you like me and think they are amazing?  Me too!!!  The trailer for Blindness has a crazy dystopian Children of Men kind of feel.  A disease sweeps the world that causes people to go blind, and the infected get swept away into quarantine colonies.  Julianne Moore stays with the blind for some reason and becomes some kind of leader of the infected.  The trailer is amazing.  Ah-freaking-mazing.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Michael Cera is back as a musician snob who has one crazy night with a beautiful girl while trying to avoid his ex-girlfriend.  One thing can be said about this trailer, it sucks.  It did not make me want to see the movie, and that's pretty significant because normally all you need to say is Michael Cera and I'm on board.  The trailer suffers from the popular syndrome of talking too much about the films plot and failing to show us why we would actually want to see the movie.  The film is directed by Peter Sollett and it's based on a novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan and adapted for the screen by Lorene Scafaria.  Despite this trailer, Michael Cera is still enough to get me to see this film.

Death Race

Written and directed by the arch-nemesis of quality, Paul W.S. Anderson, who also brought us Alien vs. Predator, Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat (I guess I could soften the blow by mentioning that he also made Event Horizon).  Death Race is a remake of the '70s era cult classic Death Race 2000 and it stars Jason Statham and a few other people.  The trailing was crappy and totally not interesting and I'm making an early judgement call that this film is going to be equally crappy and uninteresting.

Hamlet 2

Wow.  Just plain wow.  Hamlet 2 looks like a brilliant mixture of Family Guy and Waiting for Guffman.  There is an obvious heavy influence from a particular episode of Family Guy in which Peter directs a stage version of the King and I which turns out schlocky and terrible and people love it.  But I digress.  Hamlet 2 is about a high school theater teacher, played by Steve Coogan, who needs to put on the best production of his life in order to save his schools theater department.  So he comes up with a sequel to Hamlet in which Hamlet uses a time machine to meet Jesus (which leads to the hit single "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus").  I really think that this film will be both brilliant and terrible at the same time.  The trailer for the film does a nice job of hitting key points and giving some good laughs, it's not the best trailer, but it'll do.  The film is directed by Andrew Fleming who directed an episode of Arrested Development and one of my favorite films Dick.  Fleming co-wrote the film with Pam Brady who I have mentioned before as being brilliant, she created the show The Loop (which I loved the first season of) and the film Hot Rod as well as working with the South Park guys on the features they have made.  Did I really just write this much about this film?

-Josh