Monthly Archives: June 2012

Haywire (2011)

Haywire is an uncomplicated spy versus spy movie. With one noticeable exception; the lead character is a woman. A woman that would put the fighting skills of James Bond to shame, meaning she can’t be killed and can beat up and kill any man alive with barely a bruise to show for it. So it’s extremely realistic. Plus she’s a flat bitchy character, and when I say flat, I’m not talking about her boobs.

For an uncomplicated movie, the first few minutes come across the complete opposite with seemly overly complicated dialogue and plot. They want us to figure out on our own what the movie is about. Not a new concept in story telling, but for many reasons, the process they take here is extremely annoying.

Our movie makers also constantly change the techniques they use in portraying the film, by using different camera and editing styles in one scene than another, lacking sound effects in some scenes and having far too many in others. I got the impression it was a film student’s first attempt at making a movie, and thought that using every movie trick he/she learned in the same movie would be artsy. It’s not, it’s obvious and irritating.

Haywire is not fun to watch, it’s painful on several levels. Don’t watch this, you have better things to do.

4/10

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Google Street View Disappointment

When has Google Street View gone too far?

You’ve all heard the stories of people offended by Google Street View, having invaded their privacy. The tales are amusing, and always about someone else. These people are shown walking down the street, pissing in their garden, doing something in their home windows, etc.

We recently purchased a lot in cottage country, and too my surprise, the out of the way lake road is on the frickin Street View with images of the lot entrance and lot numbers. It’s not exactly looking in my windows or catching me doing something embarrassing, but I still find it disturbing that our no-longer private country retreat is as open to the Internet as our house in the city.

This is hardly a major violation of privacy, but it is definitely sad, and brings to light how little privacy we all have these days, even simply getting away to the lake for the weekend.

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BlackBerry Playbook Update 2.1.0.560

Last week RIM made available to developers and beta testers a new version of the OS for the Playbook tablet. To get the 2.1 beta download you have to request it via this link, and it will show up on the device soon after.

The only new features I’ve noticed as a user, are being able to use the new apps from the v.2.0 update in portrait mode. So apps like Contacts and Messages for example, you can now turn the tablet and they rotate. Wow! Amazing! RIM is so on the cutting edge as usual. But the app rotation is really slow to occur. After rotating the Playbook you have to wait an annoyingly long moment to see it happen. And the other new feature is having Android apps display and run in their own window. Before they all ran inside an obvious emulator app window. Yes, once again, a profound new concept in modern app appearance, display an app in it’s own window.

So the only 2 features that are noticeable to the typical user were once again things that we would have expected by default in any modern tablet, and I know I was fully expecting in the long awaited 2.0 update a short while back. But at least they are finally here, so when I take my PlayBook off the shelf (which is rare) to use instead of my Android based Asus Transformer Prime (which I use daily) I can rotate the screen. Good job RIM! We were expecting those apps and the ability to rotate them I think over a year ago when you released the PlayBook.

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Drive (2011)

The uncomplicated storey of a mysterious and skilled car enthusiast, and his relationships with the seedy characters he finds himself involved intertwined with.

At first glance this movie appears to be a snoozer. In fact it seems to go very slowly for the most part. But I think the audience would be divided in half, between the average impatient viewer, that sees only the the surface and is bored. And the more astute viewer that is impressed with the subtle nature of everything that happens.

Our lead, Ryan Gosling, is not an actor I personally have watched a lot in film. But in Drive there is no doubt he has mastered the nack for conveying emotions (and even dialogue) in subtle facial expressions and mannerisms, as well as minimal conversation. And that is the key to making this slow paced suspenseful show work. In this film he reminds me of the late Charles Bronson, who was famous in his movie career for playing many of his roles with this type of quiet strength.

Ryan Gossling is nothing if not impressive in Drive.

9/10

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