Yes, I saw this movie.

It was directed by Kurt Wimmer, director of Equilibrium (one of my favorite movies)! It stars Milla Jovovich, who did a pretty good job playing an action-heroine in the Resident Evil movies. The trailers made it look good! Action and guns and swords and stuff… I was ready to pay $2 to see this one.

I really don't know what to say about the movie overall. There wasn't much dialogue, which is a plus, since the only lines were flat, worthless, and worse than predictable (I would have predicted less cheesy lines).

There were two basic fight scenes – in the first, a small army rushes in and surrounds her. She spins around somehow with a sword, and they all fall over dead at once. In the second, they run at her one at a time, and she slashes 'em down.

Either way, half the movie is taken up with those same two fight scenes played over and over again on mildly different sets.

Let's see, bad dialogue, bad fight scenes… those were really the defining points of this movie. It's hard to say too much about the acting, since the actors weren't really given much to work with, but they didn't appear to make much of an effort anyway.

There were some bad CG effects… shaky camera work… all those scenes where the picture was blurred to make up for a lack of effort in shooting… yeah, don't even get close to this one. If you ever feel tempted to check it out, go watch Equilibrium instead. There's a quality film.

Browsing my RSS feeds this evening, I stumbled upon an interesting read. Apparently, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft got raked over the coals recently by Congress.

There's already been controversy surrounding the major internet search players recently-developed versions of their page for Chinese citizens – created in cooperation with China's censorship policies.

China filters thousands of web pages from it's citizens. Though it seems to have blocked a few random porn pages for some reason, it's main focus seems to be blocking out news and other information (including, for unknown reasons, pages on homosexuality and sexually transmitted diseases). I tried to find a list of pages that were known to be blocked, and found some good information from a study done at Harvard. It includes a page devoted to some of the highlights of the web pages filtered by China. The website choices range from confounding, to angering.

Anyway, Google appears to be blocking everything China wants them to, and more – why they block the home pages of some beer producers, I have no idea. More information on the random website blockage on CNet News.

Google's now-famous motto ("Don't be evil") has been getting thrown around a lot in light of their recent flirting with China. I don't know, no matter how badly you want to be providing services to China's huge population, this seems like too much bad publicity – why would an internet staple like Google want to get in bed with a government so concerned with blocking the Internet from it's citizens?

It seems that most men and women between the ages of 18 and 22 would like to meet those of the opposite sex in one or more of these ways:

1. By going to meeting places frequented by people with similar interests
2. By talking to someone at a meeting place they both spend time at (work, class, other organizations).
3. While under the effects of alcohol.

I just don't see the point of social events (for the purpose of meeting new people) that don't fall into one of these categories.

It's 3:30AM right now, and I'm still awake.

If I was living in the dorms, I would have probably been in bed by 12:00-1:00. I could have gotten 8 hours of sleep easily.

The only reason I'm still awake now is because I went downstairs to talk to one of my fraternity brothers about a social event going on tomorrow evening involving ice cream and females (simultaneously!). I didn't get upstairs until 2 and a half hours later because I got caught up in talking with my brothers about random crap while watching the show Homewreckers, featuring the crazy pranks of some guy from Jackass.

I finally managed to tear myself from the hilarity, only to get caught up in a discussion about girls with two other guys at the bottom of the stairwell. Eventually, the conversation degenerated into a discussion of what crazy movies we were going to watch this weekend. (The Japanese zombie movie "Wild Zero" is the headliner.)

Holy crap – if I lived in the dorms, I doubt I'd have more than one or two friends. My roommate would probably be the only person I knew well. And, there would be an automatic 50% chance that the person assigned to be my roommate would grate on my nerves horribly, making my life that much suckier.

I can't help but pity those dormies. I'd guess that only 10% of the campus is actively social – and I'd say half of those people are members of the greek system (7% of those on campus are in a greek house). Crazy.

There seem to be two acceptable definitions for the term "easy class." To my understanding, what most people mean when they talk about having an "easy class" this semester is that they are in a class that
1. Doesn't require homework very often
2. Doesn't have many quizzes/tests
3. Requires little in-class participation
But when I'm looking for classes (and I *do* like to have it easy) I find myself hoping for classes that
1. Have lots of take-home homework (that I can do right and be sure of 100%)
2. Lots of small quizzes that I can prepare for a little at a time
3. Chances to make up bad grades on old quizzes/homeworks
I'd rather do some more work to get a guaranteed A then do minimal work and roll the dice for a grade between B- and A.

It seems odd that a government that had so little reason to appreciate Martin Luther King Jr. and his annoying views of the US Government would create a national holiday in his honor.

It's almost as if a bunch of old white guys got together to discuss Ways to Make Black People Happy. Why not give them a holiday? We've got some notes on the calendar to remind us of some dead president's birthdays, and we even bother to take note of the First White Guy to visit America.

Though I may be woefully ignorant of all of MLK's opinions and speeches, I know enough to wonder if he would really appreciate by being remembered for inspiring a federal holiday observed mostly by large corporations and government institutions.

But who am I to complain? I get a 3 day weekend.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon Pandora.com. Pandora is an online radio that builds a custom station for you based on a band you enter. It's a good way to find new bands in the same genre as your favorite artists.

I was listening to Sum 41 radio, and getting a bunch of crap punk – when all of a sudden, I hear a new sound. I was a bit worried at first – it seemed so outrageous, so ridiculous – what the junk was up with the lead singer's voice? It was almost as if he was trying to sing normally, but what he really wanted to do was be screaming at the top of his lungs.

A bit later, another song by the same artist rolled around. I was starting to get interested – this stuff sounded fresh, and I wanted more. I looked into the band – named Billy Talent, I had been catching tracks off of their self titled album from 2003.

I acquired the album, and started listening to it liberally. It's an album with a solid rock beat, appealing guitar riffs, and energetic vocals. Apparently, they're on the popularity upswing at the moment, and have a few music videos out already. They're worth noting just because they seem to have found a genre untouched by most pop bands – avoiding the ho-hum rock formula, they've got the energy to pull off the yelling and screaming that they let fly.

The lyrics might not be anything terribly special, but at least they don't try for some kind of vague deepness. The album is well executed, with an entertaining new riff in almost every song. A solid secular band – worth a listen or two, at least.

I can stand useless classes, crappy teachers, and the fact that attendance is a major factor in my grade. Whatever. But why does the university have to rape me once a semester when it comes to textbooks?

I'm aware of the fact that the publishers charge exorbitant prices in the first place. A standardized textbook for a class like economics, math, or computer science is just going to be expensive – because the publisher knows that hundreds of thousands of students will pay whatever they ask in a desperate attempt to succeed at their classes.

But why does the university have to play along? For the love of all that is good and cheap, the principals of algebra have not changed that much over the last two years. What could possibly justifying spending over $100 on a book to learn, say, economics – when you could be learning from a book dated (gasp) two years back – for $20?

The university doesn't move up to the latest edition when the books become dated. They have an equation based on the number of used books being sold versus the number of new books being sold. Once the ratio of used books sold to new books sold gets high enough, they move up to the next edition.

It's a good racket – hard to beat. I can get through my computer science classes without cracking the book, so I saved myself $120 on books for that class this semester. I don't feel optimistic enough to try my economics and statistics classes without the aid of books, though – I paid $20 for a $100 book for my economics class by searching used books on Amazon, but I couldn't find any worthwhile deals for my statistics books. I spent $190 on (USED) books for that class.

I still have to get some books for my history class, but since it's not one of the huge general classes (like American History after 1877, for example) it only has a few cheaper books – I should only end up dropping $30 to get the books for that class.

If I only knew that they would give me a decent price at the end of the year, it wouldn't be so bad – heck, I'd settle for 50% of the used price. But I know I'll be doing good to get 10% of the used price, if they decide to pay me anything at all. Once they move up to the next edition, they won't even give you a dumpster to throw your books in.

I don't usually pay full price to watch a movie in theatres, and King Kong reminded me of why this is.

Being a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings movies, how could I not be interested in watching Peter Jackson's latest production? I mean, it may have been based on a cheesy movie that I never cared enough about to bother watching, but still – I was willing to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt.

But not even an optimistically attitude could make this movie any more than a forgettable CG fest. Flanked fore and aft by half hours of corny tripe, the most interesting parts of the movie are the ones full of expensive looking computer generated dinosaurs and people getting crushed.

It turns out that the most interesting aspects of the movie are the details surrounding it, not the movie itself – the special effects were done by Weta Workshop, of Lord of the Rings (and Narnia!) fame, and they did look top-notch. The big monkey looked real, and the dinosaur/Kong battles were downright exciting. And yes, the bugs were creepy.

Apparently, I almost got to enjoy another Howard Shore soundtrack, but he had a falling out with Jackson a few months before the movie's release. The final soundtrack was composed by some guy named James Newton Howard, who's written soundtracks for other movies that are pretty well known (though perhaps not for their soundtracks, as LotR was).

I wanted to enjoy a Jackson movie between Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit – but it's starting to look like Hobbit might not get made in the near future after all. Peter Jackson's next two scheduled movies are The Lovely Bones and Halo – not Tolkien related at all! Maybe Peter Jackson is just good at remaking old stories. With lots of pretty CG.

He certainly had the budget to make it look all fancified and shiny – apparently, the film had a budget of $207 million. They've made about 75% of that back already. Jackson got paid $20 million in advance to direct the movie – setting a record, as well as emphasizing a Hollywood trend equating quantity with quality. Eh well, I should stop ragging on Jackson – I still owe him plenty of props for his big trilogy.