Category: words mean things (Page 142 of 223)

Rollerball
Huge stinker. The “no script” problem, which you would reasonably expect from a project like this, could have been overcome with decent direction. As it is, the action sequences are choppy and uninvolving. A large section of the movie is filmed in grainy green low-light goggles style, which gets annoying. LL Cool J tries (he made parts of “Deep Blue Sea” entertaining), but most of the movie is given over to Chris Klein and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos – need I say more?

If anyone has any suggestions for a mindless action movie that’s actually entertaining, it’s what I’m looking for right about now.

I’ve played most of the Sim games – SimCity (all versions), The Sims, etc. They were interesting, but my interest usually fell off pretty sharply after the first few “that’s cool” times playing them. The Sims moves too fast, and you spend too much time making sure that your little fella goes to the bathroom and doesn’t burn the house down to make it all that fun. SimCity I always found too complicated.

Well, now I’m seriously addicted to SimGolf, a collaboration between Sid Meier of Civilization fame and Maxis. And I don’t even like golf. The best thing about it is it doesn’t drown you in all kinds of detail right off the bat. Building a course is amazingly fun, and you get to see the little SimGolfers enjoying the course as you go along. Plus there are different environments: desert, coastal, tropical, and my favorite – “links,” which emulates European courses.

Highly recommended, especially if you liked other Sim games.

Read in Entertainment Weekly that if the “Friends” crew comes back for another season, they will likely each get $1 million per episode.

What this means is, for each episode, each “Friend” will make 50 times (!) what I made last year.

50 times.

Now far be it for me to question the law of supply and demand. But 50 times? For David Schwimmer? I just don’t get it.

Trillian keeps getting blocked out by AOL, over and over, to the point where they are releasing a new patch about once a day. I guess for me, AOL’s tactics have worked – the cool interface isn’t worth installing a new patch almost daily. Plus, when I try to sign on using Trillian and it doesn’t work (again), AOL then blocks me from signing on to the “real” AIM for about a half hour.

AOL, you evil empire – you broke my spirit.

So if a friend sends you one of those e-mail forwarding hoaxes – “send this e-mail to 10 friends and win a prize!” – should you tell them it’s a hoax, or just ignore it?

Brotherhood of the Wolf
Just your average 18th-century French martial-arts armored-werewolf secret-society incest costume action horror epic.

Thought of this quote today, and while I’ve posted it before, I thought it was worth revisiting:

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my job, it’s that nothing is certain. Nothing that seems very bad, and nothing that seems very good. Nothing is certain. Nothing.”
-Dr. Susan Lewis, ‘ER’

I have long been a fan of the Google toolbar for IE, which allows you to enter a search term right in the toolbar, without going to Google first.

Well now there’s Nutshell, which is the same idea, but you can choose to search in Google, IMDB, Amazon, Dictionary.com or Daypop. Cool.

(Bonus geek points if you know which current computer program, eclipsed by its Microsoft rival, was called “Nutshell” when it was first released in 1983.)

The newest Air Jordans disturb me on so many levels, it’s hard to keep them all separate.

But just off the top of my head, is anyone else a little disturbed by the idea of Spike Lee helping to advertise $200 sneakers to kids?