Judging by the ratings, I was the only one watching the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin Torino. I guess it’s just me, but I find skiing events (which seem to make up half of the Olympics) a lot more compelling than 99 percent of the summer games.
One of my favorites is the biathlon, which grew out of real-world concerns (“Hey, Ingmar, the family’s hungry and we’re snowed in. Go shoot us some food and do it before dark!”) instead of dubious events like Aerobic Dance and 99,000 different gymnastics events. Cross-country skiing, for those who haven’t done it, only looks easy: In reality, it’s exhausting and hard. Combine that with precision shooting — five bullets, five targets, and a lap around the penalty loop for every miss — and you’ve got a race where the sub-events actually make the other one harder. Trying to shoot steady after racing through the snow for 30 minutes ain’t easy. (In comparison, the triathlon, while certainly a demanding event, is three cardiovascular events that are mostly complimentary.) Great stuff.
And while the summer games have been marred in recent years by an obsession with Americans-only in the TV coverage, in the winter games, since the Americans didn’t have a chance in many of the events, they just went with the folks who were contenders. It was great seeing Estonia win their first winter games medals ever and watching the travails of Norway and Austria, two powerhouses having rough years. (Even though I haven’t been to Austria in decades, I find myself rooting for them in the winter games.) Maybe the lack of American focus hurt the ratings — I’m sure some TV executive is saying they should have spent all their time on #14 or whatever, medals be damned — but I’d like to think there are more people like myself, Jenn and Peter who actually enjoy seeing the smaller countries (without tour buses for individual athletes) excel.
TiVo was practically a must-have for the games, with some events only running in the middle of the night, but often being nearly uncut if so.
Now I have to start counting down the days to Vancouver in 2010.
Once upon a time, Tony Scott took a script by a then-unknown auteur named Quentin Tarantino and gave us the hyperkinetic, color-drenched True Romance. While it never got the raves of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill, it was, in its own way, a great film.
Fast forward more than a decade, and Scott reaches for that same bottle that once contained the lightning and tries to drink from it a second time. This time around, he has once again assembled a who’s who of actors (including Christopher Walken, who had a memorable scene in True Romance facing down some very unhappy mobsters), cranks up the color and hyper-kinetic style and … doesn’t quite end up with a great film.
Domino
is a good film.
A fun film.
But not a great film.
The problem is the script. While Tarantino’s scripts appear to careen wildly back and forth, they actually have a great deal of structure and he’s a disciplined writer who knows where he’s going and only includes what’s needed to get there, even if he enjoys faking the audience out about the final destination.
Domino, instead, ultimately becomes fairly flabby and overly long and it suffers the one fatal flaw such a film should never have: There are moments where it’s simply boring.
Having said that, it’s a film worth seeing. The all-star cast (including career-redeeming turns by two former 90210 stars), the music and the cinematography almost make up for what the script lacks.
Recommended for fans of Keira Knightley, the amazing Delroy Lindo, Tony Scott or, heck, even Quentin Tarantino.
After weeks of build-up, the supplies for the war in Silithus finally arrived from the cities of Ironforge and Orgrimmar tonight on the Silver Hand server in World of Warcraft and one of the guilds that had assembled the scepter necessary to ring the gong did so, and, at long last, the Ahn’Qiraj war began.
There were giant bugs, Egyptian god look-alikes and lots and lots of lag.
It was a pain in the butt at times, but it was cool to be a part of it, since we missed the big events like this in EverQuest, which tended to be long over before Jenn and I had even started playing the game.
And now we can look forward to killing lots and lots and lots of bugs.
As a major fan of Robert Rodriguez and a fan of Frank Miller, I think that I was expecting a bit more from Sin City. It’s hard to know exactly WHAT I wanted more of, since the film is suffused with style and violence, cheap broads with hearts of gold and mugs who never got a fair shot.
But for all the style the film oozes, its extremely stylized dialogue is sometimes hard for the film’s cast to get out and sound plausible doing so — this is particularly true of some of the lines placed in the mouths of the actresses.
Still, the film is ruthlessly true to Miller’s vision and is easily the most hard-boiled noir movie ever made. As a result, Sin City has to be strongly recommended to fans of either.
Twin happy birthday wishes to my buddies John Bartol and Sarah Biddle. Hope you guys each have great ones!
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