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A surprisingly enjoyable film

25 December 2005

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Tags: Movie, TV & music reviews

Posted by ianadmin

I'm not a big fan of Jim Carrey...

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Democracy and the elephant

23 December 2005

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Tags: Cultural, social & political grumblings

Posted by ianadmin

Democracy is like the tale of the blind men and the elephant. Every one of them has a different idea of what the elephant is because they're each patting a different part and can't see what the others are patting.

When you elect someone to represent a large part of the population, they become part of the elephant...

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Zhou Yu's Train

22 December 2005

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Tags: Movie, TV & music reviews

Posted by ianadmin

It's always difficult to watch a film from another culture, in another language, and get the fullest depth from it. Subtitles never carry the inflections, the meanings. And they distract from the visual imagery, sometimes forcing the viewer to choose between dialogue and image. It can be an unfulfilling, frustrating experience.

...

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Mysterious Christian Meanderings

21 December 2005

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Tags: Religious & spiritual brouhaha

Posted by ianadmin

I was surfing randomly last week, using the "next blog" link at the top of Blogger sites (after a visit to local blogger Garrulous Credenza's somewhat rambling blog site). And through clicking past a bunch of other rambling sites, I found Milogos blog...

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Murder and music still hold up in West Side Story

18 December 2005

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Tags: Movie, TV & music reviews

Posted by ianadmin

1961. It was the year of Breakfast at Tiffany's, the Guns of Navarrone, Yojimbo,...

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The Slumber Party at the polls

17 December 2005

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Tags: Cultural, social & political grumblings

Posted by ianadmin

So far in this dreary and dull election campaign...

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One helluva big monkey

11 December 2005

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Tags: Movie, TV & music reviews

Posted by ianadmin

Watched King Kong last night - the original 1933 version...

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Mr & Mrs Smith: silly, but still fun

05 December 2005

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Tags: Movie, TV & music reviews

Posted by ianadmin

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a send-off of the action-thriller-adventure movies ...

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Stealth in name only

04 December 2005

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Tags: Movie, TV & music reviews

Posted by ianadmin

In modern terms, the Frankenstein legend has been revisited to become a plot complication: humans invent superior technology to solve a problem which then turns on them and they have to battle their creation. Redemption comes not in the solving of the original problem, but in victory over their own folly.

It's quite not the moral ...

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Canadian humbuggery

03 December 2005

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Tags: Cultural, social & political grumblings

Posted by ianadmin

An election looms in this grumpy northern paradise. It wasn't a surprise, but it is certainly unnecessary, and an egregious, unwelcome waste of our tax dollars - money better spent on something useful, something not connected intimately with politicians' egos.

While I don't quite share my fellow blogger's cynicism...

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SUV gene discovered

03 December 2005

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Tags: Cultural, social & political grumblings

Posted by ianadmin

Scientists have discovered the SUV gene. That's right: they have found the genetic reason that causes some people to buy SUVs and others to buy Smart Cars:
Obviously, pre-natal testing for this gene could help marketing agencies identify men who are most likely to make pointless, stupid, irrelevant or even harmful lifestyle choices based on their susceptibility to advertising hype. It may also help researchers discover why some men prefer to listen to country & western music, wear baseball caps backwards and drink mixto tequilas.

According to this report...

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Trying to help the Humane Society again

30 November 2005

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Tags: Collingwood's Municipal Madness

Posted by ianadmin

The Collingwood and District Humane Society is at another critical time...

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The Deification of Santa Claus

28 November 2005

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Tags: Religious & spiritual brouhaha

Posted by ianadmin

Every year around this time, I worry about what we're saying to our children about who we are, what we believe, and what values they should grow up with.

I'm talking about Santa Claus, that deity who has come to represent Christmas in the past few decades. So ubiquitous has he become as the commercial God of the season that I prefer to call it Xmas, since even for the most devout Christians, there isn't much of their Christ in Christmas any more. And for the billions of non-Christians, Santa Claus has become the visible icon of Western faith, the omnipotent deity who sits on the throne of consumerism.

Wordnet describes a deity as:
Coreweb...

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Political scolding, Hollywood style

28 November 2005

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Tags: Movie, TV & music reviews

Posted by ianadmin

The Interpreter is an interesting political thriller...

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Bore of the Worlds

27 November 2005

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Tags: Movie, TV & music reviews

Posted by ianadmin

Watched Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds last night. I was truly astounded at how a veteran producer like Spielberg could put together a movie of that length without a plot.

The latest WOTW stands out as one of the best examples of Hollywood replacing dialogue and plot with visual effects. WOTW is a shell, a hollow shell of a film.

Visually it's stunning, as one would expect from Spielberg. The dialogue might all fit on a single sheet of paper, however. That might be a blessing since it offers so little character development that Spielberg could have used entirely unknown actors instead of frontrunners Tom Cruise and Tim Robbins. Neither contribute much in terms of either character or content, but there really wasn't...

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Evil and the ordinary

26 November 2005

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Tags: Literary musings, reading, books

Posted by ianadmin

Hanna Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem was subtitled, A Report on the Banality of Evil...

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Should the town have a flu strategy?

22 November 2005

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Tags: Science, technology, computers

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Every day I read headline news about avian flu....

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Dreary, dismal and dysfunctional

20 November 2005

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Tags: Movie, TV & music reviews

Posted by ianadmin

Winter Solstice is one of those slice-of-life films,...

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Canada's 'top 100 books' fails to live up

19 November 2005

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Tags: Literary musings, reading, books

Posted by ianadmin

The Literary Review of Canada has identified the 100 most important books it believes are milestones in Canadian literary development (Story from the Ottawa Citizen here).

The list dates from Jacques Cartier's 1545 description of his second voyage, to Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead...

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The puzzle of the book

18 November 2005

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Tags: Literary musings, reading, books

Posted by ianadmin

It is a meandering, quixotic Renaissance romance titled "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," a mouthful of syllables that took me a week of practice to learn. Its anonymous author is possibly Francesco Colonna, who may have been a nobleman from Rome, or another man of the same name who was a Venetian priest. Or maybe it was written by ...

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