Reviews and More

My six-year-old son loves taking pictures and videos with our digital camera. He can easily spend an hour snapping candid photos of us around the house or setting the camera up on a tripod to make a video of himself hamming it up. I like seeing him cultivate his artistic side like this, as it sure beats having him play video games or sit in front of the TV all day long.

The only problem with this scenario is that our digital camera is a rather nice one, and since my son is just a kid still, he requires supervision while using it. Otherwise, he’s likely to be just as rough with the device as any other little boy, and might drop it or mess up the settings or something. That’s why I’m thinking about getting him a camera of his very own.

While browsing through Buy.com today, I saw this Argus Bean Carabiner Digital Camera that looks perfect for my boy. It’s meant for rugged use, which is why it comes with a durable rubber coating as protection against knocks, drops, and dings. It also has a carabiner clip so it can be hooked to a belt or backpack, which I’m sure my son will love. I can already see him carrying this camera around with him everywhere he goes!

As for the technical specs, this Argus Bean digital camera has a decent 3.2 megapixel resolution, 16MB flash memory, a color LCD preview screen, and a rechargeable Li-Ion battery. It also comes with the usual software and USB cable so you can transfer the images from the camera to a computer. Obviously this is probably not a camera that we’d want to rely on for a once-in-a-lifetime vacation to an exotic locale, but I think it sounds perfect as a starter unit for a child.

Right now, the Argus Bean Carabiner Digital Camera is on Sale for $43.24, which I think is a reasonable amount to spend on a child’s camera. Yes, there are cheaper kids’ cameras out there, but those are actually more like toys than real cameras and I’ve heard the photos from those are pretty worthless. At least the Argus Bean is a real camera that will yield good pictures.

Anyway, my son is set to graduate kindergarten soon, so I’m thinking this Argus Bean Carabiner will make a nice present to celebrate that occasion. I’m planning to check out a few other cameras as well, but so far this is the front-runner!

I read Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner last year, and was less impressed with it than most people seemed to be. I felt that too many circumstances in the book came off as wholly contrived and highly coincidental, to the point that while reading it, I could practically see Hosseini in the background pulling all the strings. This is certainly not the kind of effect that writers strive to create, so in that sense Hosseini’s novel failed for me.

Despite this experience with the book, I decided that the movie might still be worth seeing, so I recently decided to rent it. Unfortunately, the film suffers from the same problems as the original work, and the compressed format made the flaws of the narrative structure even more glaring.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): The film opens with an adult Amir (played by Khalid Abdalla) receiving a package in the mail. The box contains copies of a novel he has recently published, his first. He quietly shares in the triumph with wife Soraya (Atossa Leoni), but the celebration doesn’t last long. Amir soon receives a phone call from an old family friend, Rahim Khan (Shaun Toub), who asks him to come back home to Afghanistan to take care of some old business. “There’s a way to be good again,” he says cryptically.

This sets Amir off on a trip down memory lane, which the audience sees in the form of a flashback. The scene shifts to Kabul in the mid-1970s, where a young Amir lives a life of wealth and comfort with his father Baba (Homayoun Ershadi). Amir even has his own servant, a slightly younger boy named Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), and the two appear to be the best of friends. Amir writes stories that he later reads to Hassan (who himself is illiterate), the two play together around the house, and they both love to fly kites, which was a major pastime back then. They’re inseparable, even though it’s revealed that Hassan is Hazara, which apparently means he’s of a lower class.

The friendship comes to a crashing halt when Hassan is brutally beaten and raped by a couple of older bullies that had been bothering Amir earlier. Amir couldn’t stand up to the bullies before, instead relying on the smaller, younger Hassan to bail them out of trouble. Now the bullies found Hassan while he was alone, and take their revenge. Amir witnesses the terrible act, but again is paralyzed by fear and runs away instead of trying to do something to help his friend. This leaves him wracked with guilt. He is unable to look at Hassan without remembering the incident, so he quits hanging out with the boy and also frames him for stealing a watch, which results in Hassan and his father leaving the house.

Shortly thereafter, Amir and Baba are forced to flee the country as the Russians invade. They eventually wind up in America, where Baba takes on a menial job in order to put Amir through college. Amir graduates, gets married, and writes a book, but through it all, he’s still haunted by what happened with Hassan. So when Rahim Khan says that there’s a chance to be good again, Amir can’t refuse.

Amir learns that Hassan also got married and had a son. Hassan never forgot his childhood friend Amir, leaving a letter for him that Rahim Khan hands over. Rahim Khan also says that Hassan and his wife were assassinated in the street by the vicious Taliban, leaving the boy as an orphan. Rahim Khan says that Amir can make things right by rescuing the boy and giving him a good life in America — which Amir does.

My Reaction: As I said, I felt the narrative structure of this film was highly flawed. The best parts were the flashbacks to Amir and Hassan’s childhood, but those didn’t last long. The whole second act that showed Amir and Baba fleeing Afghanistan and relocating to America was boring and difficult to get through because the adult characters and their struggles weren’t nearly as interesting. I realize that some sense of how Amir adjusted to life in America had to be conveyed, but it could have been done in far fewer scenes.

After that, the coincidences and contrivances pretty much killed the film. Assef, the same bully that victimized Hassan is now a powerful Taliban leader and has control of Hassan’s son? Yeah, right. The boy, who didn’t know Amir from Adam, would risk his own well-being to shoot Assef in the eye? Yeah, right. Amir was able to escape from a guarded compound with the boy with ease? Yeah, right. After willingly escaping with Amir, Sohrab suddenly turns completely silent and refuses to say a word, smile, or otherwise acknowledge Amir or his wife in any way? Yeah, — well, you get the picture.

Overall, The Kite Runner suffers from a series of problems that get in the way of what otherwise might be a decent story of redemption. The idea is ok, but the execution, both here and in the book, is not very good. I give this film 5 stars out of 10.

The 3-D animated family film Monsters vs. Aliens cleaned up at the box office this weekend, earning a whopping $58.2 million to easily outpace the rest of the competition. This movie features the voice talents of an all-star cast, including Reese Witherspoon, Kiefer Sutherland, Hugh Laurie, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Stephen Colbert, Rainn Wilson, Will Arnett, and many more.

There was a new entry in second place as well. The horror/thriller The Haunting in Connecticut overcame very negative reviews to generate $23 million in ticket sales.

Meanwhile, last weekend’s box office champ, Knowing, slipped down to third place with just $14.7 million in gross revenue, and last weekend’s No. 2 film I Love You, Man dropped to No. 4 as it added another $12.6 million to its coffers.

The only other new release to crack the list was the action flick 12 Rounds, which earned a meager $5.3 million in seventh place.

Here’s the complete Top 10 at the box office for the weekend ending 3/29/09:

1. Monsters vs. Aliens, $58.2 million
2. The Haunting in Connecticut, $23 million
3. Knowing, $14.7 million
4. I Love You, Man, $12.6 million
5. Duplicity, $7.56 million
6. Race to Witch Mountain, $5.64 million
7. 12 Rounds, $5.3 million
8. Watchmen, $2.75 million
9. Taken, $2.7 million
10. The Last House on the Left, $2.61 million

I guess one good thing about being in the public eye is that when you commit to a particular course of action, there’s a lot of pressure to come through. I’m talking here about Valerie Bertinelli, the 49-year-old actress (and former wife of Eddie Van Halen), who a couple years ago, in the April 2007 issue of People magazine, said that she needed to lose 30 pounds to get out of her size 14 clothes.

Well, whatever exercise regimen and appetite suppressant she was using has definitely worked, as Bertinelli appears on the cover of People in a bikini! She looks terrific, and I love the fact that it took her this long to shed the pounds. That shows me that the weight loss was due to hard work and commitment to a program rather than just binge dieting or liposuction surgery.

Way to go, Valerie! You look fabulous!

Grey’s Anatomy 5×19 — “Elevator Love Letter”: I tell you what, ever since the reveal about Izzie’s condition, Grey’s has been awesome. This was another terrific episode that I really enjoyed watching. I barely glanced at the clock at all, which is unusual for me, as I’m usually bored well before the halfway point. There were just so many terrific scenes in this ep that I didn’t have time to get bored.

My favorite moments were those that had to do with Izzie. I know a lot of people hate the character or Katherine Heigl or both, but she has always been my favorite, from way back in Season 1. I thought Heigl was awesome in this ep. I felt really bad that her supposed “friends” completely avoided her on the day of her big surgery. Thank god for Bailey at least — and how nice that the scarf was for her. Aww. And Alex came through at the end, as I knew he would. When he got up on that bed with her, it reminded me of Burke doing the same for Cristina when she had her ectopic pregnancy a few years ago. Look how far Alex and Izzie have come from their S2 days of getting it on in the On-Call room.

I’ve never been interested in Meredith and Derek, but I have to admit that his proposal was sweet — and just what he would do. No candles at the house, just brain scans on the wall in the elevator. Nice!

Lost 5×10 — “He’s Our You”: I’m about to give up on Lost for, like, the millionth time. I just don’t think this show is worth watching on a weekly basis. It plays out much better on DVD or TiVo, where you can watch several eps in a single sitting. Why? Because hardly anything ever happens anymore! I’m so sick of the patented Lost formula of giving us utter dreck for 59 minutes, and then tacking on a single WTF moment right before the episode ends. That is SO PLAYED OUT by now. So Sayid shoots 12-year-old Ben? Yeah, we’ll see how that affects the already fucked-up timeline now….

24 7×15 — “10:00pm-11:00pm”: This was kind of a weak filler episode, but I realize they’re necessary for a series like 24. I think it’s kind of laughable that some of the other characters actually believe that Jack is leaving behind a long trail of dead bodies (of good guys, I mean). Why do they continue to speculate about whose deaths Jack is responsible for? With all this guy has done for the country in the past decade, there should be statues of him in every state capitol across the nation. Sheesh.

I doubt that Tony is going to “die” again, so there will likely be some rescue mission coming up. The White House stuff continues to bore. Too bad the writers feel there has to be something going on over there as well. I’m not at all interested in what the president’s daughter might be up to, so the less they show of that storyline, the better.

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End-of-the-world disaster movies are nothing new, so I was a bit hesitant to go see Knowing, the most recent entry into the genre. Usually these films are based on faulty science to produce the cataclysmic event, and of course most of the time a hero or team of heroes intervenes (in a highly unrealistic way) to save humanity. Think of Armageddon. Deep Impact. The Core. The Last Mimzy. Just to name a few. Would Knowing prove to be any different than these? A bit, but not much.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): John Koestler (played by Nicolas Cage) is an MIT astrophysics professor who tells his classes that he believe everything in the universe is more or less random as opposed to being determined or created by an all-powerful being. His classes view him as rather cynical, but that’s probably because he recently lost his wife and is struggling to keep things together for the sake of his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury).

One day, Caleb’s school holds an event to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Part of the festivities include opening a time capsule that was buried by the very first class of students half a decade ago. The time capsule contains drawings of what the students believed the future would look like. Each new student gets one of these drawings to open — except Caleb, whose paper is not a picture but a seemingly random string of numbers.

John is intrigued by the numbers, so he sets to work trying to figure out what they mean. He eventually comes to realize that the numbers can be broken off into sets that contain three pieces of information: a date, a number of casualties, and a latitudinal and longitudinal position where a disaster occurred. Every major disaster from the last 50 years in locations all around the globe were written on that piece of paper.

There are a few dates remaining on the paper. When the next two events come true, John begins scrambling to see what he can do to prevent the third — until he realizes that the final “number” is not a 33, as he initially thought. Instead, they’re the letters EE, which stands for “everyone else”. Yep, the end is coming.

Through additional events, John comes to realize that his son Caleb and a girl named Abby (Lara Robinson), who happens to be the granddaughter of the schoolgirl that wrote the list of numbers, are actually the “chosen ones”. They, and a handful of other children, will be saved and whisked away to another planet to begin a new civilization. John says his goodbyes to Caleb, and then returns home to his estranged family as a massive solar flare burns up Earth.

My Reaction: I thought Knowing was fairly interesting to a point. When John found out what the numbers meant, I was hoping for a better payoff than a solar flare, but I guess there are only so many ways that the entire planet can be destroyed in one fell swoop.

What I didn’t like about this film were the tenuous connections between the 1959 schoolgirl and John’s son Caleb. Was it ever explained why Caleb was a chosen one? If so, I must have missed it. How did Caleb just happen to end up with the numbers document instead of a drawing? Was that part of the whole preordained plan? If so, why even go through the motions? Caleb would have been the chosen one even if he and his father never saw the numbers at all, right?

Because these things were preordained and would have happened no matter what, the beginning of the film just felt like a big waste of time. The numbers ended up not being all that important, since neither John nor anyone else could stop the disaster. The only thing that came out of the whole numbers nonsense was that John was able to reconcile with his family (sort of) before being burnt to a crisp. Was all that really just for him?

Overall, I’d say Knowing was probably a bit better than the average disaster film. There were definitely some pretty intense scenes along the way and a few truly creepy moments, plus the special effects were rather good. The flaws in this film lie in the plot, and are difficult to overcome. I give this film 6.0 stars out of 10.

I have a couple boxes filled with VHS tapes that I want to save. Some of them are commercial films and television shows, but most are home movies — including my wedding video — that obviously have a lot of sentimental value. The problem is that we don’t even have a VCR in the house anymore, as we got rid of that machine years ago when we realized that DVDs were going to be the dominant format.

Of course, what I need to do is get those VHS tapes transferred to DVDs so I can continue to enjoy my home videos for years to come. There are professional studios that can do this, but after asking around, I decided that their prices are way too high (I have a LOT of tapes). So I continued looking for an alternative, and came across some software that looks like it will do the trick. It’s called Roxio Easy VHS to DVD, something I’ve never heard of before but that sounds very easy to use.

Roxio Easy VHS to DVD is a software package that allows you to convert your video tapes into DVDs right at home. The product comes with cables so you can hook your VCR or camcorder up to your computer to capture the videos. Then the software will digitize the videos for you, and get the files ready for burning onto DVDs. You can even use the same process to convert LP records and audio tapes to CD. Customer reviews indicate that the software works precisely as advertised and is well worth the price.

Speaking of price, I was expecting something like this to cost over $100, but that’s not the case at all. The Roxio Easy VHS to DVD software is on Sale at Buy.com for only $48.99, and there’s also a $10 mail-in rebate, which would further reduce the price to just $38.99. That’s a real bargain, especially since I’ll be able to convert an unlimited number of tapes from the comfort and privacy of my own home!

Anyway, I can’t wait to get this project off the ground. It will be so nice to know that my wedding video, old vacation videos, and other assorted home movies will be preserved for posterity!

I haven’t been a big fan of House recently, and was especially harsh on the show during Season 4 when the hunt for new interns dragged on and on and on. I do have to say, however, that the S4 two-part finale was some of the best television I’ve ever seen. I’ve been re-watching House’s Head and Wilson’s Heart on my TiVo, and am still amazed at the amount of emotion the two eps can generate — even though I know exactly what’s coming.

I didn’t realize how much I liked Amber until she was on her deathbed. I didn’t realize how much Wilson loved Amber until he was there to comfort her as she passed. I didn’t realize how much House cared for Wilson until he allowed a hole to be drilled into his head in an effort to save Amber. And I didn’t realize how awesome Lisa Edelstein’s 42-year-old body was until I saw her dancing in sexy lingerie in House’s dream. Wow!

The show has definitely improved in recent weeks, but still… I can’t help but think back to seasons 1 and 2 where this was must-see TV for me. I want that old dynamic back!

Last night’s episode of How I Met Your Mother was called “Old King Clancy”, and was pretty much just a bunch of filler. Nothing happened to advance any of the major story arcs, so we still have Ted being single, and Barney and Robin haven’t discussed anything about being together or trying a real relationship. I realize that filler eps are a necessary evil with network shows, but they’re a lot easier to take when they’re funny. This one was just ok.

– My favorite part of the ep was the bar discussion about Canadian sex acts. The names were absolutely hilarious, and of course the HIMYM crew went and reserved the domain. It’s not exactly a real site like others from past shows, but there is a bit of content.

– Is Ted supposed to be a good architect? Every time he pitches a project, it seems either completely boring or totally unrealistic. A rebirthing chamber in a room meant for firings? Really? Ted is almost like Vincent Chase: they both suck at their jobs, but no one in their crew will tell them the truth.

Hmm, that’s about all I’ve got this week, as not much happened in this episode that was worth commenting on!