[ Posted by Tara
Tue, 31 Jan 2006 16:00:00 GMT ]
Woody Allen’s new movie Match Point is interesting, disturbing, and entertaining. Kevin has deemed it one of his favorite movies, which is even more interesting to me because his feelings about almost every movie we’ve seen together have ranged from mild disappointment to hatred. I can’t say I liked it as much as he did, but it was certainly thought provoking.
The most prominent theme in the movie is that luck is often more important than any talents, ambitions, or hard work a person has. This theme may be misleading…
An underlying theme is how perhaps a lack of character leads to the preeminence of luck/chance in one’s life. The main character starts the movie by answering questions about what he wants to do with his life with “I don’t know. Something big.” His “something big” turns out to be what others in society deem worthwhile (good job, rich friends, material wealth), while internally he struggles with the physical embodiment (Scarlett Johansson) of his own belief that this isn’t really what he wants. In the end, he symbollically kills this piece of himself. All the while, he is blessed with amazing strokes of luck that keep leading him down this path of societally-defined happiness. He struggles against it but eventually gives in. Was it really luck? Or simply an inability to chose the life he would have wanted if he had any character?
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[ Posted by kevin
Sat, 28 Jan 2006 15:12:53 GMT ]
You need a mobile phone to sign up for Gmail! What better way to alienate the non-techie world from their service. Is it for geeks only? Do non geeks not click on ads? For a company that doesn’t seem to try to make money, they’re sure being stingy here.
They say on their site that it’s to help prevent spammers, but that just doesn’t make sense to me. Rules like this just hurt the everyday interested-in-google joe, spammers always have ways of getting around things like this, and care enough to bother to…
1 comment
[ Posted by Tara
Wed, 25 Jan 2006 21:05:41 GMT ]
This is my first post at this blog! I am starting a Photo Journal, which will be posted on this blog (as well as Flickr). I feel like we need a stronger connection with family and friends who live far away. I hope to post pictures that expose a little of our daily lives, show exciting events, or share a little of the fun we see each day. I imagine we’ll post photos a couple of times a week, but we’ll see!
2 comments | 10 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:13:30 GMT ]
.. when the forecast says it might rain in 5 minutes.
Just got caught out in the middle of a fricking blizzard – the temperature dropped 30 degrees, it started hailing, and I was soaked to the skin and colder than I’ve been in my life.
Tara’s scared I’ll never run with her ever again, but I really do like it, just not when I’m near death!
1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Tue, 24 Jan 2006 18:02:08 GMT ]
“But if I killed your Queen, you’d be sad, wouldn’t you?”
<—now every time she has the opportunity, she kamikaze’s her queen in to get mine early in the game. She’s won the last 3 games though, I guess it’s not that bad of a strategy.
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[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 16 Jan 2006 18:42:59 GMT ]
I was thinking about this, as I set my movies out on my porch in 20 degree weather today. There’s no mail today, so they’ll be out there 24 hours until the mailman picks them up tomorrow. Being frozen and unfrozen can’t be good for them – maybe thats why so many have skips and halts here! Tara and I never had this problem in Seattle…
1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Sat, 14 Jan 2006 15:23:09 GMT ]
I’ve gotten addicted to World of Warcracft lately. Once a year for a month I get into some stupid game. So I’m picking up where I left off last year when I played WoW for a month as well. I love it when technology stays the same for an entire year. Sorta.
Anyways, last night I had a really weird dream. I was wandering around in WoW, searching for something named ‘KevinWatt’. I’ve never had such an obvious metaphysical trying to find myself moment. I even realized in my dream how stupid it was, but still I was so passionate about finding it, it would get me to the next level, or some cool powerup weapon, etc, etc.
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[ Posted by kevin
Tue, 10 Jan 2006 15:03:05 GMT ]
Kinsey’s fascinating research deserved to be rediscovered by this movie, and I probably wouldn’t have looked into it for some time. Not much of a plot, but a very interesting story/ historical fiction documentary.
After watching it, I found myself thinking how unfair it is that we spay and neuter our cats, and they never are able to experience the joys of copulation. Wouldn’t it be great if one day a year all cat owners gave their cats hormones and we went to a big gym to watch them enjoy themselves? I bet it’d be possible, and it would be a fascinating way to meet other people if you were single (I see our cats are having sex, want to go out to dinner after?).
Technorati Tags: cat, kinsey, sex
Posted in Society | 1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 04 Jan 2006 20:48:49 GMT ]
I’ve been wanting to be more creative lately, and so today as I was thinking of what to make for lunch at 3 pm, I decided I needed to experiment with my toaster oven more.
We got a bread machine recently, and we made this great bread with too much yeast so it’s really fluffy. So it doesn’t usually make very good toast because it’s all air. So I decided to take two pieces:
1) Marshmallow creme with cinnamon, sugar, and pecans (always mix pecans into your cinnamon and sugar, it’s great!)
2) Peanut butter (of course, don’t leave home without it!).
Then I toasted them for awhile, (on aluminum foil), added jam to the peanut butter one and ate them. Yum!
1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 04 Jan 2006 17:20:05 GMT ]
Sorry if I offend any Spielberg or Clint Eastwood lovers out there.
If you’re going to have a movie with a heavy moral, 1) make it easy so that everyone will understand it, and 2) tie it into a movie storytelling experience. And don’t forget #3 – Get an editor!
This movie read like a documentary. The characters are incompetent, don’t question what they’re doing, and are just plain stupid.
Spielberg wants to show us that terrorism is bad, that these people are stupid for not questioning why they are doing things – but I worry that whoever sees their movie will read their own agenda into it. I spoke to a man in the theater after and he couldn’t figure out why they showed the twin towers in the end (the obvious, to me, answer being that this is a movie about Terrorism & America). He thought it was trying to show that if we were in that case, we’d do terrorism too. NO NO NO! It’s trying to show how stupid we are for terrorizing Iraq for a bunch of Afghanis who terrorized us. “An eye for an eye will blind the world” is one of my favorite quotes.
A reason i was so frustrated with this is that it’s the perfect time for a movie like this – Terrorism is something the US is intimately familiar with right now, from what was done to us a few short years ago, and the idea of retaliation makes the news every day with events in Iraq.
One of my pet peeves of directors is when they waste tons of time on beautiful pan shots of scenery. This movie moved too slow for me! I wish he worked more philosophy into the anti-patriotic and anti-religious statement that terrorism is stupid, and that you can’t trust who gives you orders when you don’t know what you’re doing. They don’t even know who the people they are killing are! The matrix and a few other recent movies show how well philosophy can be worked into a story.
Also, there was no beginning/middle/end to this. The main character spirals into insanity in the end, but it’s not clear whether this is fatal or he is able to recover. Anti-patriotism is evident, and the use of “no” powerful, however, the relationship between him and his boss is not made clear, and there is no closure.
If you’ve seen this movie, and have any defense for it, feel free to comment. It had great emotion, decent cinematography, but in my mind was a pretty bad movie.
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