Heroes: “Save the cheerleader; save the world!”

Terminator 4: “Save Kyle; save the world!”

Terminator Salvation is the fourth Terminator flick. Despite the title (“salvation” sound final to me) it is not the last one of the Terminator series. Last weekend I had the pleasure of finally watching the movie and I was disappointed.

Imagine T4 as a mix of elements taken from other movies. There is one or two elements from Terminator 1/2/3, one from the Mad Max series, one from AI (2001) and another one from War of the Worlds (2005). All of these elements are used in a not-very-unique way. In addition there is Sam Worthington who does better acting than Christian Bale …and a lot of machines. The best part is the “Schwarzenegger cameo”.

4.5/10 points!

PS. I would have used the alternate ending. At least that would have been a very cool twist to the whole Terminator saga!

Right after we left the cinema last night I posted this twitter message

The Hangover. A W E S O M E ! We laughed our a***s off!

and that is what sums this movie up in less than 140 characters. Now let me try to produce a more comprehensive review.

The last time I had to laugh through an entire movie was while watching You Don’t Mess With The Zohan (2008) last year. It started out hilarious and kept being hilarious all through to the end. The Hangover starts out being hilarious, too. But instead of keeping this level, the hilariousity is constantly increased. It keeps getting better and better straight through the movie (including the end credits)!

So what is The Hangover about?

Doug is about to get married in two days. Time for a bachelor party in Las Vegas with his four best buddies. Starting with some Jäger they are in for a night they will never forget — kind of.

The Hangover is another masterpiece by director Todd Phillips who already brought us movies like Road Trip (2000), Old School (2003) and Starsky & Hutch (2004). Among the cast are Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Heather Graham and Justin Bartha.

Let’s get to my rating. Instant classic! 9 out of 10 points. Best movie I’ve seen this year.

Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is unusual, weird, confusing, sad and a little disturbing.

A friend of mine lists it as one of her favorite books. On a visit to an actual bookstore I saw it on the shelve, picked it up and took it home.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is about a boy named Oskar who is on a quest through New York. At the same time the novel is also about Oskar’s family history, fear of losing, fear of committing and enabling/disabling people.

Jonathan Safran Foer has a very unconventional style. The novel starts out like any other one. Then you turn a page and see just one sentence. Another single sentence on the next page. Then the story continues until you turn another page to find a picture… I’ve never seen anything like this before.

It is hard to make up my mind about this novel. It definitely is unusual (in a ‘have to check it out’ way) but on the other hand the story is confusing and in parts unsettling. At some point I was alienated by the fucked-up-ness of every character in this read. Nevertheless I think Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a worthwhile experience. 3 out of 5 stars.

Elmore Leonard: Tishomingo Blues

I’m a big Elmore Leonard fan. In 2005 I decided to read Get Shorty (the novel one of my favorite movies is based on). I was instantly hooked. Now, four years later, I have novel #16 by the King of Cool under my belt.

Tishomingo Blues is set in Mississippi (and not Detroit or Miami like most of Leonard’s other novels). One look at the ingredients tells you that this is an original Leonard: a high diver, gangsters from De-troit, other crooks, the Dixie Mafia and a Civil War reenactment. The characters are as always unmatched. The dialogues are unique. And then there are some costumes…

Extremely fun read & incredibly entertaining. 4 out of 5 stars.

Angels & Demons (based on the novel by Dan Brown). Starring Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor and Ayelet Zurer. Directed by Ron Howard. Moviewise it is the sequel to The Da Vinci Code (2006) but bookwise it is the prequel. Anywise it is another scavenger hunt lasting for 138 minutes.

There is really not that much to write about this flick. We have

• a secret society (the Illuminati)
• the Catholic church (without a pope) threatened with extinction
• anti-matter
• Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Harris)

While the story might be described as solid it is also unimpressive. There is not the slightest whiff of suspense in this movie (even though even Dan Brown managed to build up a little suspense in his novel). Angels & Demons is a sequence of unintriguing riddles solved by Tom Hanks who appears to be not attached to- and tired of his role as Robert Langdon.

I did not feel thrilled or moved while watching this flick. As I tweeted right after the screening it was mediocre. Rottentomatoes rating is 38%, IMDb rating is 7.0/10, my rating is 5 out of 10 points.

My favorite activity on a lazy Sunday (or any other lazy day) is to gather my bros, head over to our favorite cinema, have some mixed popcorn and a Pepsi and watch a movie. Yesterday we had to follow the hype and check out Star Trek 11 (even though the last few Star Trek movies were way below average – or let’s call it hardcore fan material, and we therefore didn’t expect very much).

To my surprise Star Trek 11 was a great movie. The writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman put together a solid story. Up and coming actors like Zachary Quinto (Spock), Chris Pine (Kirk), John Cho (Sulu) and Karl Urban (Bones) performed great and J.J. Abrams did an incredible job as director. In addition we also got to see Leonard Nimoy as Spock Prime and an awesome performance of Eric Bana (he once was the Hulk) as evil guy Nero.

And besides all that Abrams and his crew kind of undid the last few ‘hardcore fan material’ Star Trek movies. IMDb says that there is already a sequel (due 2011) in the making. Guess I’ll look forward to watch it. Star Trek 11: 8/10 points.

Funny thing: Ask your friends if they do read/have ever read comic books or graphic novels. 83% will answer “NO!” and might even start to make fun of people who do read/used to read them. Ask the same friends whether they want to go to the movies with you and watch the latest flick based on a comic book/graphic novel. 83% will answer “sure!”.

From all the comic book heroes who made it to the silver screen Wolverine is THE coolest one. The moment I read that there would be not just another X-Men- but a Wolverine movie I got excited and started to anticipate opening weekend. When I finally made it to a screening my expectations were pretty high. Unfortunately they were not met during the 107 minutes of runtime.

The story of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is set before the other X-Men movies. As the title implies it is about a mutant guy named Logan (Hugh Jackman) who is bound to become the superhero Wolverine. So the job the writers had to do was to develop a straight plot that ends with Wolverine becoming that cool loner without memory we know from X-Men (2000). They came up with a great basic idea and the first half of the movie was awesome, but then came a twist. And another one. And another one. Way too many twists for (a) a straight story, (b) a good story and (c) a good movie.

I was disappointed by X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The story was way too lame (even for a comic book flick) and not even Hugh Jackman’s great acting as cool Wolverine could save this movie. Therefore my rating of 6/10 points. (And yes, I used to read comic books.)

Duplicity. Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti. 125 minutes. Something like a romantic spy-flick with a portion of humor. The writer of the script (Tony Gilroy) must have watched and liked Oceans 11-13. What really got me through the movie was the work of the cinematographer Robert Elswit. He brilliantly emphasized the two sidedness of the story. Otherwise the flick was a letdown. The plot was too twisty and turny and the jumps back and forth in time made it hard to follow. After about an hour I took the first peek at my watch and after about ninety minutes I really wanted it to be over. My rating: 4/10 points.

On May 1st the Administration of rock star- and world- President Obama rolled out a bunch of new web appearances and showed everyone how simple, easy and cool e-Government can be. Besides on WhiteHouse.gov (incl. blog with RSS feed) you can now find and befriend the Obama Administration on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, get (audio)visual input on Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube as well as subscribe to podcasts in iTunes. This step into Web 2.0 territory stands proof that

• basic e-Government and modern government-to-citizen communication is possible without reinventing the wheel and investing a lot of time and money in inventing new e-Government platforms.
• at least some politicians and administrations know where to find and how to reach the citizens.
• the people are ready for more e-Government (over 30,000 @whitehouse followers on twitter in just two days and over 130,000 White House friends on MySpace), want more input from their government and wait for administrations around the world to realize this.

In addition this approach of the Obama Administration is also a way towards a stronger democracy. It takes policy to where the people are (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) ( = passive acquisition of information) instead of holding court and letting the citizens come and get information ( = active acquisition of information).

Ingredients (for 2 persons)

6 oz / 170g pinto beans, soaked
1 bell pepper, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
1 small celery, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1/4 cup / 50g ham, cubed
1/4 pound chorizo, cubed
1/4 cup / 50g dried parsley
1 bay leave
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon Tabasco
1 teaspoon Worcestershire
4 cups / 1liter chicken broth
1 cup / 250g rice
3 tablespoons olive oil

Preparation

Soak the beans in water overnight.

On medium heat put oilve oil, onions, bell pepper and celery in a large pot and fry for about 10 minutes. Add garlic, chorizo and ham and fry for 2 minutes. Then add the rest of the ingredients.

Increase the heat and let it boil for 20 minutes before you turn the heat down again. Let it simmer for 40 minutes with the lid on the pot. After that take the lid off again and keep on letting it simmer for another hour. In the meantime prepare the rice so it is ready when the beans are. Add the rice to the pod, stir it and then serve it.

What did the engineers at Apple think when designing the new Shuffle? Here is what I think

1. It is kind of cool that the new Shuffle is even smaller but isn’t the older Shuffle small enough? Building an even smaller device doesn’t justify removing the controls and attaching them to the headphone cable. That’s a big step backwards and no progress at all. After watching the guided tour video I thought that I might as well learn Morse code. Shouldn’t operating a device like that be as simple and self explanatory as possible?
2. I’m one of these people who can’t use regular earphones because they don’t stay where they are supposed to stick – in my ear. With attaching the controls to the earphone one is forced to use the regular ones Apple sells with the iPod. People with “irregular ears” can’t switch earphones anymore and therefor might even feel discriminated.
3. What is the deal with Voice Over? Even if Apple’s computer generated voice is/was the best in the industry still is not good enough to sell it as a feature of a mass product. Wasn’t the basic idea of the Shuffle to have a small device without one of these tiny screens that suck anyways? So now Apple added an annoying voice to this great concept!
4. As a last annotation concerning style: That clip looks cheap and not very sturdy. It reminds me of the clip you have on some of these ballpoint pens.

Conclusion

With the iPod Shuffle (2nd generation) Apple had a great device. It was small, had a sufficient capacity and looked cool. Unfortunately it was already as awesome as possible but even awesome products are supposed to get developed further to increase sales. In this special case the development towards the iPod Shuffle (3rd generation) went into the wrong direction. Therefor I hope that (1) Apple corrects these “glitches” when working on the 4th generation, (2) Apple doesn’t add these “great new features” to other iPod products and (3) my iPod Shuffle doesn’t go bust for a very long time!