Sherlock

Having watched season 1 and the first episode of season 2 of Sherlock, I absolutely love the show, although 2×01 was very weird; very slow, very drawn-out, you think they’ve wrapped it up then discover that it was just the beginning. A bit like those games I shall not name where you play for 20 or 30 hours before you realize that was just the tutorial. Continue reading “Sherlock”

Pi

More-or-less aimless surfing brought me to an old blog post about math in movies, which mentions Pi and Contact. This mostly coincidental juxtaposition reminded me of the conclusion of the novel behind the latter.

When I first read the book, a zillion years ago, I thought the ending was pretty clever. Then I realized that it was incredibly dumb. It later occurred to me that it might actually be intentionally dumb, and therefore incredibly clever, because Carl Sagan really ought to have known better, but… I don’t know. I think he either genuinely goofed or assumed (probably correctly, in most cases) that his readers wouldn’t notice. Continue reading “Pi”

The brave ones

K is away, so I stave off the loneliness and boredom* by playing Morrowind and spending some quality time with the idiot box. Yesterday was Madagascar 2 (not as good as the first one), today was The Brave One.

I didn’t expect much of a film I found in the DVD discount bin barely more than a year after its release, but I thought it was pretty good, although I agree with the critics that its artistic pretensions came off as, well, pretentious, and did more harm than good. The rolling camera angles in some of the scenes (such as immediately before the attack where David is killed) made me seasick, and the sitting-in-the-diner-talking-not-looking-at-each-other-except-they-are-actually-looking-at-each-other-in-the-mirror-behind-the-bar trick passed me (and probably 99% of the audience) by until it was pointed out in the behind-the-scenes featurette, and even then it just seemed… lame.

Still, I’m never one to turn down a Jodie Foster flick. She’s one of my favorite “strong woman” actors, along with Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton. Continue reading “The brave ones”