Brokeback and Outback

The daughter had her first "official" sleepover, that is a non-family one, with a friend tonight and so the wife and I went on a date. We both wanted to see Brokeback Mountain and so off we went to the dollar theater. The film is being released to DVD on 4/4/2006.

I wish I'd not known that there was CG sequences in the film. There are CG sheep, CG vistas and some CG set pieces. And knowing this, I found myself looking for them. Still, cinematically, the film has some beautiful scenery.

NO SPOILERS HERE. The story was engaging and not a problem with me. The characters were interesting people and I thought they aged them well, especially Anne Hathaway. When she was talking on the phone to Ennis, you could see coffee or tea stains in her teeth. Randy Quaid seems to be in everything. I was remined of his role in Midnight Express.

SPOILERS HERE. High-light the lines with your mouse to read.

Jack's death immediately made me think of Matthew Shepard.

The switching of the shirt-within-shirt was poignant.

END OF SPOILERS.

The music was serene and I'm on the list at the library for it.

Afterward, we went over to the Outback Steakhouse for a late dinner.

<>
Mmmmm, steak....
< /homer >

I've not reviewed a movie or blogged in a while and I'm feeling pretty rusty. I should look at this in a couple of days and re-write this post.

(written 4/5/2006; back-dated to 3/31/2006)
(edit 9/11/2007 - hidden text didn't match the background color)

Music - TV & Anime Themes

Surfing around for the new theme to the 2005 Doctor Who series and I found this which I've listened to so much that the TV theme sounds foreign: Evan Spence's Tardis Crash. Most excellent indeed, or in the words of the Doctor - "Fantastic!"

Also, while surfing around for the music from Kiki's Delivery Service, I found this page with the both opening theme and closing theme from the original Japanese version. It also has them in French, I believe. But the coolest thing I found there was the theme to Planetes [wikipedia]which is an amine from 2003 that sounds so very good. Oddly, there is no IMDB entry for this show that I can find.

I also found a old page from 1998 on astronomy that talked about using Greek letters in your HTML which is quite easy and lets me write Planetes as it is shown on the anime and magna as: PLANHTES

Spiffy!

(written 5/15/2006; back-dated to 3/28/2006)

Animated Gnome

It was a GIF that, when posted, was coverted to a JPG by the Blogger software. It was over 500 KB, and that's a but much to ask of Blogger, so I'll code up a page someplace, put it there and link to it.

Funny thing is I was going to delete the JPG but then thought, how do I delete the copy that I uploaded in the first place? Hmmm. (4/5/2006)

(posted 3/26/2006; back-dated to 3/18/2006)

Book Discussion - Time and Again

Book discussion today at the city library. We are going over Time and Again [Amazon] by Jack Finney. What amazed me was that this was written in 1970. Truly a bit of time travel.

I received this late after two other attempts. The city library doesn't keep books as long at the other library I go to does. I've only got three days to pick it up instead of a week.

I've read about 45 pages of this and have over 350 to go, but I'm enjoying it so far. However, the Amazon reviews are boths sides of a pendulum. I'll have to see myself just how wordy it is.

I just looked up Jack Finney [wikipedia] and had no idea that he had written Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It looks like most copies of the book on Amazon were published in February of 1995 - just 9 months before he died.