Checksum Arcanius

Wednesday, I woke up late, so I went to class and then work instead of the normal order. I left work around 8:30, watched some Law and Order with dinner while lifting weights, and then I went for a run — about 3.8 miles according to MapMyRun.com. The “run “involved a little too much walking for my taste, but it also involved two sets of Montlake Stairs.

When I got back, Mario had just returned with some stuff from the lab, so I offered to take him down there to clear the rest of the stuff out of what has essentially been his primary living space, with the house here used only intermittently for showers, cooking, and laundry. He had the movie Syriana with him, so we ended up watching that starting about 1:00am. No wonder why I have trouble waking up. Anyway, the movie was pretty good at weaving together a lot of interesting threads into some powerful and dark messages. Too bad they didn’t show the explosion, though. 4/5.

Shopping list:
Sweat bands
Leatherman Micra

On Wednesday I went to see Transformers with Courtney and Dan after finishing up some Human Subjects Training for my Capstone lab group as well as some CSE 461 Networks homework. I missed Shai in my text message advertising the event. Sorry. Anyway, we went to see it at Lincoln Square. The movie could have been pretty good, but instead it was pretty lame. It still had me hoping for about 2/3rds that it might end up pretty good, but it just didn’t fulfill. Still, it wasn’t terrible, I guess. And the company was good. 2/5.

I just got back from Lincoln Square where I ended up watching Ratatouille with Dan. And, simply put, Pixar has done it again. Another masterpiece in their growing collection of fine offerings, I’m pretty sure that this was the funniest movie I’ve seen in a while and it left me happy and fulfilled to boot. Highly recommended!

After dinner at a Mongolian Grill with Maria, we decided to rent and watch a movie. I had recently visited IMDB, where I saw again that the Shawshank Redemption was rated as the second best movie ever (The Godfather edges it slightly). Curious, I have always wanted to see the movie, and last night was the perfect opportunity. After eating, we stopped by Scarecrow, rented the movie, and headed back to my place to enjoy it on my recently acquired 22 inch widescreen LCD monitor.

The movie was very good, certainly a 5/5 on my scale. Score one for IMDB.

I went to see the second Fantastic Four today with Kunlun, Alex, Alice, Jeremy, and Ian (I think). Although Kunlun and Alex liked it fairly well, the movie didn’t really work for me. Indeed, I have found that most movies where the whole world needs to be saved at the last minute don’t work as well for me as the smaller-scale, yet deeper struggles of similarly-themed, but almost always more successful movies.

– An Aside –

Take, for example, Star Trek: First Contact versus Star Trek: Nemesis. In the first, the earth is saved early in the movie, and the rest of the time they are trying to convince a drunkard to fly a rocket. Yet that movie, in my opinion, is far more compelling than Nemesis, where the world has to be saved at the last minute. Its just so trite that most movies that attempt it can’t help but to fail.

– Back –

Anyway, I would give FF: TRotSS (haha, trotss) a 2 out of 5. Don’t go out of your way to watch it unless you need mindless, predictable action and you tend to like this sort of cheesy action movie.

Yesterday Shai finally got to be as old as me again, and after an interesting dinner, he treated us to Spiderman 3 at Lincoln Square. I actually thought the movie was quite good — maybe a bit formulaic, but it was a formula that worked well. It shared a lot of the character subtleties that made Pirates II compelling, but fortunately lacked the overabundance of darkness of the Pirates offering. And Spiderman offered some legitimate humor, unlike Pirates which played so heavily to the legitimate humor that had been in the first movie, but lacked much if any of its own. I’ll go ahead and give the third Spidey a 4/5.

Saw two movies this weekend — the new, animated, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (they appear to be no longer teenagers, they are now in their twenties), and then, this night, Namesake. I liked both, although as far as movies go they couldn’t really have been more different.

TMNT — 3.5/5 — Worth seeing if you like em for sure
Namesake — 3.5/5 — Much slower paced, not for everybody, but a good show