It was a slow week for links from Pukka…
Not from Pukka, but worth noting:
Tag: Reviews
As my long time readers might recall, I watched a show called Firefly a while back and greatly enjoyed it. This week, thanks to one of my co-workers, I had an opporunity to drive 5 & 1/2 hours to plant my butt in a packed movie theater at 10 o’clock with a broken air conditioner. That is to say, I was able to attend a special preview showing of the Firefly movie, Serenity. Though the movie hasn’t quite been completed yet; it was fanatastic!
It started off with a short speech by Joss Whedon. He basically thanks the fans for their support and asked them to continue that support by asking them to help promote the movie. Then the movie was off and running. It appears to pick up at least a couple of years after the t.v. show ended1. Not all of the crew is still flying on Serenity though most are. The Alliance is still after River and they seem more desperate than ever to get her back. Desperate to the point where they’ve sent an unamed agent after her. During this agent’s introduction, we get treated to see a holographic recording of Simon rescuing River from the facility where they were experimenting on her; as well as finding out one of the reasons the Alliance wants her back so badly.2 Overall, I thought the story worked very well for fans of Firefly but I’m not sure how well it will play with people who never watched the tv show. The movie doesn’t have any big-name actors and it hasn’t been getting much in the way of promotion from the studio. I hope it does well at the box office (mostly in hopes of the tv show being revived).
Closing thougts about the preview:3
- The preview didn’t have much in the way of music. This really bothered some people and it is one of the things that they’re still working on.
- There weren’t any credits; again this is something they’re working on.
- Supposedly there were some placeholders for special effects that aren’t complete yet, but I didn’t catch them.
1 Supposedly there is a comic book coming out in July (?) that covers what happens between the show & the movie.
2 I bet you’d like it if I told you why, wouldn’t you?. Too bad, this preview-review is going to be spoiler free. :p
3 Sorry, but 11 hours of driving in 2 days plus watching the movie at 10 o’clock, staring straight up at the screen from the front row, doesn’t exactly leave me pumped up for writing an indepth review. Maybe I’ll have something more to say after the official opening on 30 Sept 2005.
My rating: 5 out of 5
I recently finished reading the last of my unread stack of books, took a look at my bank account and realized that continuing to buy more at the current time would be… unwise. So I started looking around the apartment for something else to read, but nothing really sparked my interest.
It probably wasn’t helping that a good friend of mine kept writing in her journal about how much she was enjoying rereading The Count of Monte Cristo. Then it occured to me that story is most likely in the public domain, so a quick jaunt over to Project Gutenberg and I’d confirmed that it was in fact in the public domain. Then I started downloading a copy of this and a few other stories when I realized that I didn’t have a book reader on my PDA any more. So I looked around at some review sites and ran across TiBR Pro by inDev Software. Niiiiiiiiice.
TiBR Pro supports reading eBooks off my PDA’s memory stick and even cooler; it allows me to rotate the screen sideways for a much more natural viewing area. They also had a free version, but the description didn’t mention reading from a memory stick and I’ve got enough stuff on my PDA that I really wanted that feature. So I coughed up the measly $9.951 and I’m most pleased with my purchase. So far I’ve worked my way through ~50% of The Count of Monte Cristo and I’ve already downloaded several other books that I look forward to reading using this great new tool!
As a side note while I was searching for eBook readers to load on my PDA; I ran across the ManyBooks website. ManyBooks takes etexts from places like Project Gutenberg and converts them into popular eBook formats. This makes it easier for lazy people like myself to quickly get the stories onto our PDAs for reading whenever we have a spare moment (e.g. during boring meetings).
1 I’ve seen other readers for my PDA costing twice that, which would definitly be out of my budget for the moment.
Like many wage slaves in the US today, I recently had to fill out a self-evaluation form. After doing so, I started to wonder what these useless time wasters would look like if both the employer & employee were being completely honest…
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The Wheel of Time is a series of books by Robert Jordan. The series started out very promisingl, interesting characters, good descriptions, better dialog than I could ever come up with but the last couple of books, Crossroads of Twilight in particular, have failed to deliver on that early promise. The description has been focused more on how worried everybody in the story is without really giving a good sense for why they’re so worried. For all that Jordan has tried to make his villans, the Forsaken, seem to be horrendously powerful; the heros never seem to be truly overwhelmed by them. Rather the heros seem to simply lack the necessary self-confidence to deal with them. The other problem that the series is suffering from is “feature-creep”. First we had the Dark friends, then Padan Fain, then the Whitecloacks, then the Forsaken, then the Seachan. Is there going to be any end to the villians that are going to be thrown at the heros? Will we ever see a resolution to all the diverent plot threads that make up this series? From the way that last book read, I think Jordan has lost or forgotten whatever it was that he originally intended to do with the series and these days is more interested in turning just another book to continue the series because like George Lucas; he knows people might hate it but they’ll buy it anyway.