Welcome to Sin City

"If you turn the right corner in Sin City you can find just about anything."

I'm going to post today as if I wrote it late last night and then write my weekend edition tomorrow. I finally got to see Sin City at the Alamo Drafthouse and I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, I think I might've set the bar a little too high for it. When I saw Kill Bill I was ripe with anticipation and the movie just hit the spot. This time though, I think there were parts that were a little too intense for my taste and could've been handled a little better. I'm not here to bash the film though because it was truly an experience to be remembered. Some scenes stuck with me even today and they were just picture-perfect. It was divided into three stories: "The Hard Goodbye" (Marv looking for Goldie's murderer), "The Big Fat Kill" (the hookers' war in Old Town), and "That Yellow Bastard" (two words: Jessica Alba). The acting was phenomenal throughout with a few exceptions. Mickey Rourke really did try to make his character stand out too much and the fact that he was attempting to flesh it out more than the other actors made it look bad. And also, I was really expecting more out of Alexis Bledel given the complexity of her persona. These inconsistencies can be easily forgiven by the spot-on acting of basically every other actor. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) was a great tragic hero, Nancy Callihan (Ms. Alba) was the stripper you couldn't help but love, Miho (Devon Aoki) was a total badass, Junior (Nick Stahl) was truly repulsive, Shellie (Brittany Murphy) was almost charming, and Kevin (Elijah Wood) was intensely creepy. Those were all compliments if you couldn't tell because they all contributed to making the pages come alive in a very big way in weaving these totally far out stories. All three had this twist that made you a little sick to learn the truth, and that was what really made the movie pack a punch. Given the gratuitous violence and blatantly scandalous female wardrobe (this was a series written for teenage boys), I definitely don't reccomend this for everyone. If you want to know what to expect, take a look at that novels because that's the screenplay. If you hated Kill Bill Vol. 1, steer clear. I thought it was tons of fun to watch though and give it my approval with an A-.

Now for some nerdy news. In a surprisingly bold move, one fan of Apple has put up pictures of the supposedly upcoming iHome from Apple, which is a home media center as some predicted would be on its way. It's sounds really cool and I'd jump on it if I had money to play with. Google really went all out for April Fools Day. One thing was a drink called Google Gulp that would make you smarter through a highly complex process "you'd need a PhD" to understand. One gag they had for Gmail was an infinite amount of space, but they did have some real additions to the e-mailing interface including POP3 access, rich text formatting, thumbnails for attachments, and much more. If anyone wants Gmail just comment on this post with your e-mail and I'll give you an invite; I personally love it. But wait, that's not all. Google also started the beta for their Ride Finder that allows you to find transportation wherever you're at along with their locations. Another April Fool's joke yesterday was this program that would comment your code for you and you could set how sarcastic or serious they turned out. That would be pretty cool if someone actually did make it though. Yet another joke was this article that had actually fooled me at first about Paris Hilton becoming a new symbol for Linux. It's amazing how much news yesterday was just April Fool's joke because even Wikimedia claimed that they were being taken over by Encyclopedia Britannica. One of the few real articles was a tidbit from BBC about Sony's optimism with regard to making an iTunes for movies. They have quite a vested interest given the capabilities of the PSP.

There's not a whole lot of exciting movie news today. If you saw Sin City you can take a quiz over here and see how well you paid attention. There were a few notable movie pranks today. One was some secrets about the new Star Wars flick, one was a sequel to David Fincher's Se7en, and the last was a sequel to King Kong called Son of Kong. There's a new extended trailer of Kingdom of Heaven up at Yahoo! Movies, and it's pretty telling of the premise. However, it makes me a little less excited about the film than before because it sounds like it's going to try too hard.



I think it'll at least be a B+ movie, but it's obviously built to fit its big budget. I am looking forward to seeing Unleashed though and now you can see the first minute and a half of the movie. It's a pretty cool fight scene so take a look at it. Lastly, Vince Vaughn will now be in another comedy flick, but this one is directed by the creator of Three Kings, David Russell. I guess that what I had posted before about the comedy clique thing is true.

I'd feel pretty strange if I didn't mention the death of Pope John Paul II. I'm glad that he's dead only because I think he's finally free now. The poor guy was so old and I'm sure that having Parkinsons wasn't any fun, especially when he was being pressured to not retire. He's a pretty important Pope because of how liberal he was and his peaceful stances in international affairs. He will definitely be missed in the Catholic community.

Since I missed out on the best meme day of the week I'm going to do the Friday Fiver today:

1. Tell us a clean, family-friendly joke:
Two asians walk into a bar. A week later, they own it! (Yes, it's a Dat Phan joke)

2. Do you take part in April Fool's Day antics?
I can never think of anything good enough so not usually.

3. Tell us about the last prank you pulled:
This isn't really a prank but we had an NSC exec meeting last night and when the VP was getting the pizza we found this sheet he left on the table with the title of the meeting and nothing else. So we all wrote a little something on it. The first guy wrote "go back to Mexico", I wrote "I can't remember your last name", one of the girls wrote "you suck", and so forth. One guy, John, wouldn't write on it so someone else wrote "I like the way you smile - Love, John" and that really cracked me up. It was great when like twenty minutes he noticed the sheet and while we were doing some work he said "what is this?"

4. When is the last time you were fooled?
Yesterday when my mom told me the Pope died at 12:30PM. I don't think she intentionally tried to trick me, but it was a voicemail and so I told a couple of people that he had passed away only to later find out that he was still gravely ill.

5. Tell us the dirtiest, most crude joke you know:
Only one comes to mind, but I have heard better than this one. Two boys were walking in the woods one day and came upon a beatiful, naked woman. One of the boys ran off soon after encountering her, so his friend followed him. When the boy had finally stopped the friend asked, "Why did you run when we saw that hot chick?" To which the boy responded, "My mom told me that if I ever saw a naked woman I'd turn to stone and I felt something getting hard so I got scared."