Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Bryant

I caught Blood Work

I caught Blood Work last night at the Somerville Theatre. Much to my relief, the central theater is still there; I’d been worried because the listings showed five movies playing there at once, and in my previous Bostonian life, there was only a single large auditorium. But it seems they’ve simply added small screening rooms on the sides, and the main theater (with balcony) remains intact. Good.

Alas, the movie didn’t benefit from my resulting good mood. I hadn’t truthfully been expecting all so much, since I wasn’t overly fond of . The bones of the plot worked better on the screen than on the page for me, perhaps because Michael Conneley’s prose isn’t very fluid, but the acting in general wasn’t terribly strong. Jeff Daniels as the guy next door was good, and Eastwood himself was passable, but everyone else — even Angelica Huston — was strident and strained. Big drama with big declarations and horrendously arrhythmic patterns of speech. Not so good.

Again, the story is certainly solid and it’s a very clever idea for a mystery. The screenplay was by Brian Hegeland, who wrote L.A. Confidential, so I’m not surprised that the adaptation went well. The tension was there in theory. The actors simply let the script down.

So: skip. Maybe rent if you’re a real Eastwood fan.

Alive, healthy, no wiser

Landed in Boston successfully, and currently tapping away at the keys of my iBook in my brand-new apartment. Well. New to me, anyhow. Earthlink came to my aid in time of need, thus the connection. Later I expect pizza.

Could be worse!

Pictures of the new place may come at some later date. Updates will continue to be sporadic until I get the real network in here, mmm mmm good.

Home stretch

Almost all packed, which is a darned good thing considering that the movers are showing up in about 12 hours. It’ll be down to the wire, yep.

Posts will be very sparse for the next little while.

Two fists no waiting

Adventure Strips looks just amazingly cool; it’s a subscription-based webcomics site focusing on — well. Adventure Strips. Gotta love the straightforward branding. I wouldn’t be quite so excited except that the art samples look wonderful. Mike Barr is doing one of the titles, too.

Hugo where you want

The Hugo vote breakdown is now online. Bujold fans like Gaiman, no surprise. You can always get so much out of poring over Australian Rules voting results.

Perhaps a better use of time would be reading the Hugo nominated stories. You won’t find the novels there, but almost all of the other fiction is online. Nice. I remember when Clarinet did a CD containing all the stories (and some of the novels), and that was a big deal.

Welcome to the jungle

In a fit of automation, I have abused the excellent MTMacro plugin to create an <amazon> tag. <amazon title=”Monster Manual II” asin=”0786928735”> would be blithely transformed into the appropriate link to Amazon. I do this, yes, because I’m too lazy to build affiliate links by hand each time.

The macro code, for those even lazier than I:

<MTMacroDefine name="Amazon" tag="amazon">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/<MTMacroAttr name="asin">/unofficfengshuih/ref=nosim/"><MTMacroAttr name="title"></a>
</MTMacroDefine>

Mind you, I’m also too lazy to implement this in all the site templates, so until I get unlazy and do a bunch of editing, the feature’s pretty worthless.