"You say you got those carpet burns whilst in the bedroom..?"
I went to see another free film screening the other day, this time for a movie called Taken. Paying to go see films is just so last month, isn’t it. ;-)
So was it any good? Well yes, actually it’s bluddy grate.
Well, it is, as long as you realise that Taken is one of those films that you shouldn’t think too hard about. If you analyse the plot for more than about two nanoseconds you’ll probably come up with some kind of plot hole. At 90 odd minutes they could’ve probably filled a few of them, but rather oddly, I think Taken would’ve been worse for any added length (so’s to speak). As it is, the pace is enjoyably quick, the action is enjoyably good and the plot is enjoyably simple.
Oh, and Liam Neeson absolutely shines. Yes he is kinda Harrison Ford/Indy 4 creaky looking, but I couldn’t imagine a younger actor making the whole thing work so well.
In true movie review style… “Taken opens nationwide on the 26th September”.
8/10.
Plus you get a stereotypical Frenchman avec une baguette. What self respecting film set dans la Paris wouldn’t have one of them, right? Awhawhehaw.
Isn’t it funny how sometimes things just seem to fit neatly together? Take the first 90 seconds of Pineapple Express (see right).
See what I mean? In light of recent blogtastic Blogalism goings-on, that just seemed particularly appropriate.
Saying that, I did actually watch Pineapple Express a few weeks ago now, and that clip would’ve been far more apt had I got around to posting it sooner. But not to worry, I’m sure no-one will notice my supreme laziness.
Anyhow… it’s basically a film about a hardcore stoner called Dale Denton who accidently witnesses a murder. Bungling his exit, Dale gets spotted and has to go on the run with his (even bigger pothead) drug dealer, Saul. And that’s pretty much all you need to know plotwise. Nothing too taxing here, just sit back and enjoy!
…and you know what? It’s very funny. Well ok, the first two thirds of bumbling high-ness are very funny. The final third isn’t so much - as thats more of a mildly crap action film, but in an ideal world, you should probably be too monged out to worry what’s happening by that point.
It might not leave you feeling like a slice of butter, melting…
…but it’s still worth a watch. Now bring on the munchies! 7/10.
Want to see what’s going on over in the new Large Hadron Collider? Well, now you can.
They might’ve spent £5b building the LHC, but at least they’ve splashed out a few quid on some public webcams showing exactly how that money has been spent.
It’s been a quiet day so far both inside and outside of the LHC, but it’s still interesting to watch.
Definitely worth a look, no?
Has anyone tried installing/using Google Chrome yet?
If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, then where have you been the past week? Anyway, the short answer would be that Chrome is a new ‘open source‘ web browser from Google.
Game of Simon anyone?
Personally, I really quite like it. It’s bloomin’ quick for starters. To blind you with some geeky factoids - on my PC, the Sunspider JavaScript browser test benchmarked Chrome about 49% faster than Firefox 3 and a whopping 925% quicker than IE7. Wowzers.
Other than the speed, Chrome is quite pretty to look at and work with. You can play about with Tabs, drag them around or quickly create new windows out of them, plus the barebones feel to the whole thing maximises the web page screen area.
It’s not all good though, the ‘Omnibox’ (which combines a search engine query box and the location bar) whilst very good, could still do with a bit more work. I’d prefer it to favour pages I’ve visited before a lot more heavily than it currently does. I mean, suggesting websites or search engine queries that only partially match what I’ve typed is all well and good, but since most of the stuff I look at on the internet is from websites that I’ve been to before, it would be more helpful to me if page titles and urls of pages in my history were given priority - chances are that’s where I’ll be going again.
The Find (ctrl+f) feature also sucks badly - any words that appear in a Textarea on the page for instance just aren’t included in the Find, which I find incredibly annoying. It’s also a major pain if you’ve got multiple tabs open and you accidently try to close the browser. IE7 or Firefox 3 would give you an “are you’re sure?” prompt box, whereas Chrome just closes everything no questions asked. There are also a few sites, like Microsoft Hotmail (shock, horror there) that don’t currently support Chrome - which is a bit of a bugger.
Anyway, I expect most/all of those creases will get ironed out pretty soon, after all, it is only the first (beta) version we’re talking about here, and once they add in a few more features like Plugins, I might even switch to Chrome permanently.
Give it a whirl if you haven’t already, and let me know what you think of it…
Lightning over Ely Cathedral this afternoon.
More lightning over Ely Cathedral earlier today.
