more about movies and life

i watched pay it forward over at the potts’ a few days ago. i walked away feeling kind of mixed about it. it wasn’t a hollywood storyline, but it felt like a hollywood film trying really hard to be edgy and non-predictable. either that or it really was an edgy and dark story, but it got in the hands of hollywood and they sort of cleaned it up and made it sort of awkward. the idea was kind of cool, and the characters were interesting takes on things. but it felt like hollywood portraying people like that, and not really getting it right, instead of really being the people they were supposed to be (that goes for everyone in the film).
i was going to watch wishing stairs a few days ago but the dvd was scratched too much for my player to read it very well. i’m returning it to netflix for a replacement. this is the first one i got from them that was this scratched up.
yesterday i watched little miss sunshine again. that movie is really, really good. i’m not going to say it’s one of the best movies i’ve ever seen or anything like that, but it’s really well put together and nice to watch. it deals with serious subjects well, it does slapstick well — it packages real life, amplifies it, and plays it back. i really do recommend it.
a few days ago i ordered a t-shirt from the devil makes three. i was poking around online and discovered they just released a live cd recently, which i’ll probably be picking up soon, but i also decided i needed to have one of their shirts. the first album (self-titled) is really brilliant, imo, and i highly recommend it. 2 of the 10 songs aren’t very good and don’t fit in well with the other 8 (imo, again), but most of the album is top notch.
yesterday evening i ate at chuy’s and had the good fortune to sit near axl rose and the karate kid. well, actually it was two teens with dates, and the guys looked (were dressed) like axl rose and the karate kid. it’s possible they wouldn’t even know who those people were, but they provided our table quite the laugh. they obviously thought they were really cool, as you could tell from their body language and behaviour and very loud conversations. but they were both there with attractive girls, and they all made sure to show plenty of pda, so maybe that’s what attracts the junior high girls and they have reason to be confident about their hilarious styles.
after chuy’s i went over to the briar shoppe and picked up my barling pipe. because the manufacturer was evidently going to take several months to get it and repair or replace it, they ended up just sending it to their guy who replaced the original vulcanite stem with a lucite stem. on the good side, this should mean that i won’t have to worry about oxidation, but on the bad side it means the stem no longer has the “barling” logo on it.
there are some changes going on at work. nothing too exciting yet, but we’ll see if anything develops out of it or not. also, someone was looking to ditch an old sgi indigo 2 (circa 1995 or so), so i offered to take it. i ripped the guts out of it and am planning on putting either a dell box running linux or a mac mini inside of it. what i really wish they had given me was an sgi o2. i love those toaster boxes. i found out from someone else there were a couple in storage or somewhere, so they asked if they could get them. unfortunately, they’d evidently already been sent off to computer heaven. *sigh*
the superbowl. yawn. i didn’t care about either team, and the game wasn’t all that interesting. how the score managed to stay as close as it did, i’m not sure. and the commercials didn’t fare much better. oh well.