a buh?
Rachel & Jacob: Wow, what a nice head bartender!
Dad: At least he’s not a bartender’s head!
[thank you for the correction "secret" agent man hehe]
Re: The Village
[WARNING] Do not read this if you haven’t seen the movie yet. It may spoil the experience.
Speaking of spoiling it, I think the key to this movie is not knowing any bit of critical information about it before seeing it. I refused to watch the previews in full and did not let anyone tell me about it. I picked up this habit from Nat and it has made the big time movie experiences that much better! Try it out sometime. It allows you to form your own uninfected ideas of the movie and then love or hate it to its fullest potential.
Anyways - re-visiting this flick… It seems there are mixed feelings across the board. Some poeple were expecting and hoping it to be an all out scary thriller. I’m not going to lie, the suspense in the movie was loose your breath, pee your pants worthy! The filming techniques bring you so close into the moment of each actor that you can’t help but almost feel exactly how they are. You become linked into their experience on a gut wrenching level. Did I say suspense? It was enough to make our friend Pam scream out loud and practically amputate her brother’s arm right in the middle of the theatre! HA! Good times. (Note: The Pam experience is usually a treat and uncommon to most movie goers) It also heightened my own fright to have someone screaming their head off right next to me while “those we do not speak of” come jumping out at you. Whoooey! Good times!
The movie is slower paced compared the recent trend of knock your socks off crazy acrobatic exploding action such as Spiderman 2, etc. It starts out a little slow as if the movie is allowing you to get aquainted with everyone before letting you get up close and personal. I really enjoyed this approach. As soon as you are well acquainted to the community though, you begin to hear the secrets and the rumours floating through their small village. One of which will send you reeling. (I wont spoil that one).
Let’s also touch on the message. It speaks greatly of innocence and peace and how a country/community may have lost it. The message seems influenced by the Amish way of life minus the hardcore Christianity. This is not to say they dont have a religon. They seem to worship “those we do not speak of” in a way that is supposed to keep everyone harmonious and happy. They are not to sin by speaking of “them” or showing “the bad color” or by crossing into “their” land. This one may take some more thought…
What is innocence? Do we all loose it eventually? Is there a common catalyst that robs us all of innocence?
The Village
I went to see the movie “The Village” tonight on the UltraScreen. It blew my mind. M. Night Shymalan is one of today’s greats when it comes to story telling through cinema. With movies like “The Sixth Sense”, “Unbreakable”, and “The Sign” under his belt, it was no surprise that he could leave me more than satisfied with the movie.
It is fantaastic how he used imagery, color, emotion to create such personal and thought provoking experiences. You really get drawn into the movie on an intimate level. I love that he doesn’t need fancy computers to add special effects. He simply tells a story with a vision and meaning through pure artistry.
I go to bed tonight full of thought….
Re: Back in The States
Pictures from my Europe getaway are up!
Escaping To Nature
Rachel, Nat, Joe, Meg, Adam, and I went to the Boundary Waters for from July 11-20 (includes driving time). Those pictures are now up!
If you haven’t had enough of the above Nat and Adam also have their own slew of pictures on their own sites.
Jacob’s Boundary Water Pics
Nat’s Boundary Water Pics
Adam’s Boundary Water Pics
* Be sure to check Adam’s for a view of the BEAR that gave us a visit!
XBox Part 2
The XBox is doing just wonderfully. The mod was successful after hours of not realizing we had one little wire with a bad solder connection. The digital multimeter helped us find it and voila! we were off into the modded world. The 200GB drive is ready for action.
The new idea is to build a super terabyte server per Pete’s specs/ideas (see Pete’s comment on previous XBox entry). This way I can have all my movies archived, playable, and burnable (ISO images) in one easy to access place. Not to mention every thing else: MP3’s, digi pics, etc etc.
Hopefully one of these days the coders for XBox Media Center will figure out how to not only play the ripped DVD ISO, but to also display the menu system allowing full control of an imaged DVD.