da vinci babble

I managed to see the Da Vinci Code on wednesday. Having read the book before, the film didn't come as a surprise at all ... it's more or less exactly like the book. So it wasn't a film to be surprised by. Instead I could focus on the act. I must say the disappointment came from Audrey Tautou, a very good actress otherwise, her roles in Amelie, Les Poupees russes and The Dirty Little Things were good or very good. One of the explanation I could find ... she wasn't very comfortable with her English role and that affected the whole performance. Or maybe she was nervous acting next to Tom Hanks? Anyway, Tom Hanks performance was mediocre at best. So nothing much to say there. The best actors were Ian McKellen as Teabing and Paul Bettany as Silas, the albino.
I also don't like that much films shot in the dark (no pun intended) ... where everything is so dark. Harry Potter was like that too. Yucky!

What else? Ah well, tomorrow I'm flying to Dublin for the long bank holiday weekend. Let's hope the weather is not as shit as in the last week (with the exception of yesterday afternoon).

the wonder of the internet

The internet is so big.
Besides being true and sounding like a 1st grade sentence, this has some interesting implications too. In the same way a language vocabulary is big ... but mostly irrelevant, as people use only a tiny fraction for daily verbal communication ... in the same way, the Internet is used by people in a very limited way. So here's how I use the internet. Next thing ... ask yourself how do you use it. You can even spam my blog with comments about your usage.

1. I use it for email
My primary email used to be Yahoo, but then I switched to gmail. It's leaner, it's more usable, more searcheable, it checks itself. I still use yahoo but not so much - it's also blocked at work.

2. I use it to read news
My two news feeds are
http://news.bbc.co.uk
http://www.hotnews.ro
One being news about my current living place and adoptive country, the other news about my real country.

3. I use it to keep in touch with some people, social networks, groups, forums.
Social networks I use www.orkut.com and that's it.
I use groups.yahoo.com for groups to keep in touch with old friends, colleagues and other people I know.

4. I use it for instant messaging although I only talk to very very few people
I use yahoo messenger - main one.
And I use msn - secondarily.

5. In the category reference I use mainly
www.dictionary.com
www.wikipedia.org - fantastic and one of my favourites!

6. I use it to keep this lousy blog on blogspot

7. I use it to search for info
www.google.com - no other search engine
I also use groups.google.com to search for solutions to technical problems I have at work because if you have a problem, it's likely someone else fixed it before you somehow.
www.multimap.com - to find my way around London

And that's it.
What else would you recommend?

long time no see

I didn't feel like writing recently. Don't know why ... spring must have something to do with that.
What have I been up to?
I've started organising the football again, on saturdays, last time we played in Hyde Park and it was a good one. For the foreseeable future, we'll stick to that.
Still no news about the flat. Solicitors are the scum of the Earth. But I'm sure it comes as no news to you all.
I'm sick, so I've been restrained to my own flat recently. But the weather's been shit, so no loss there.
No new film, planning to see Da Vinci Code, although I heard it's shit, so not too keen on that. Also planning to see X-men 3 soon.
And finally ... I think I'll be going to Greece in July. Yupie. Athens, Mykonos, Crete, still to see, I'm not in charge here, more like a baggage :P
And yeap, the world cup is round the corner, I'm preparing a football fantasy site, I'll let you all know soon.

Did you notice that the posts here keep shrinking? So did I. Must be the nice weather coming up.
Anyway, I saw Mission Impossible 3 yesterday. It's entertaining, keeps you interested and you don't feel it's too long (although it's 2 hours and lil bit) mainly because it's full of action. It's full of gadgets too. It's not too bad for this sort of films.
Da Vinci code and X-men 3 are both coming out this month.

The weather was dissapointing this weekend, so instead of going to Brighton, we digested french films. And they weren't bad. The films in question are Lemming and Russian Dolls, they're both good films and my opinion of french films improved with these two.
Also a bit of Borough Market and seeing Cold Mountain and The Claim on DVD. Nothing much really. On wednesday, there's another film, Mission Impossible 3. Back in the film "business". :P

An excellent film

I don't say that often, on the contrary, usually I find films that other people enjoy very much to be missing something (e.g. Ice Age 2). Moreover, I always think that I haven't seen a good film in a long long time. Not anymore! Everything changed this wednesday and all due to a quebeqois film (french canadian) called C.R.A.Z.Y. I knew the film was good as it scored 8.5 out of 10 on imdb.com which doesn't happen very often with many films. As I hadn't heard anything about this particular film, I was a bit sceptical.But in the end it is a very good film. It's a normal every day life film, that's why maybe it's so great, because you can relate more easily to it. It also has different stories: a story of a relationship between father - sons, a story about accepting/denying homosexuality, a story about modern christic figures, a story about a "normal" family. It's all wrapped up in a layer of delicious humour which makes it a very enjoyable film to watch. Very recommended!

2 films on DVD

In the old times, when people had some secrets, they would go to a mountain, find a tree, carve a hole in the tree, whisper their secret in the hole and cover it with mud, so no one could ever find it.
Nowadays we have blogs and no one really cares anymore.
It's strange that some people in fact choose to make a film about it, that's their own hole in the tree. Instead of covering it with mud, they cipher it so that it becomes a metaphor, no longer a secret spelled out clearly and release it out for the wider audience.

These 2 films then come out on DVD and maybe someone like me, manages to watch them in a weekend ... the titles could be "In the mood for love" and "2046".

I must say they're good but overdone. They're very slow and you end up wondering when the heck will they ever end. When they do, you burst in a cheer of relief.