Cassandra’s Dream Review

Cassandra’s Dream is Woody Allen‘s 3rd London based movie he has made in as many releases and at first, I thought this was a very different type of story compared to anything Allen has done previously, but after a few days of thinking about it, I realized I was wrong.

First off, the movie stars Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, has Tom Wilkinson in a small, but interesting role as well as Woody Allen finding one of his most beautiful leading ladies he has ever put on screen, Hayley Atwell, a woman I can understand wanting to do anything for, to keep interested in me.

The problem though is that after seeing Match Point, this London based Allen film falls flat. The acting performances are uneven, at best and there was more than one scene that was written to be serious, but ended up causing laughter from the audience! Collin Farrel‘s performance was by far the most varied, there were some scenes where he shined, but for a majority of them though, he was pretty disappointing to watch. Wilkinson, an actor who has become one of my favorite actors to look out for, after his small, but memorable roles in such films as In the Bedroom, Batman Begins and Michael Clayton, also had scenes that switched from well acted to absurd in what seemed like a blink of an eye… very disappointing.

The ending, something I won’t reveal here, just seems too tidy for a writer/director as talented as Woody Allen. It’s a shame, I adore Allen, but this movie seems like a far inferior combination of Match Point and Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Thanks to 20minutos.es for the above pic.

Dany

Windows Tweaks with allSnap and Taskbar Shuffle

I have a great love-hate relationship with the Windows operating system. I have been a faithful user since installing Windows 3.11 with a handful of 5.25″ disks way back before laptops came in color! I love that there is a whole hell of a lot of software is created for this operating system, even if it is probably the least stable OS of the big 3 (Windows, OS X and Linux).

There are a few things about Windows that I wish were different, so ever since I found out about allSnap over a year ago, I have made sure to use it on all the computers I use on a regular basis, but it wasn’t until I heard the program mentioned on the most recent episode of Security Now, that I thought about talking about it.

The other issue is that that during that same episode of the podcast, Steve Gibson talked about a program that I hadn’t heard of, which is great for those like me who want certain programs to be in a particular place in the taskbar. The program is Taskbar Shuffle and with it running, it allows you, for example, to drag your mail program to the leftmost section of the taskbar, even if it is the last program opened instead of the first program opened.

Thanks to TWIT and GRC for the tips. Thanks to b.tech.review for the above pic.

Dany

Free Swiss Army Knife Digital Media Players

There are a lot of media players on the market and I’ve tried a whole heck of a lot of them. There seem to be more media players than there are media formats… and there are a LOT of media formats.

The most well known all-in-one player is probably the VLC player. This is a great player for playing almost any audio or movie format you can think of, dvds, iso, divx, mp4, mp3, the list goes on and on and you can also use this player for transcoding these files into one of the other formats as well. This program works with pretty much any system, Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS and BSD!

There are some people who do not like this player. For those of you who fall into this category who run Windows, you might want to try GOM player. I tried it 2+ years ago and enjoyed using it, it looks nicer than VLC, but since I hadn’t really had any problems with VLC, I didn’t really need GOM player, especially since VLC handled dvd playback better.

I heard a few of my favorite podcasts (Tekzilla and Windows Weekly) talk about GOM player today though, so that reminded me about this player and now that there is a lot more HD content available compared to 2 years ago, it’s important to note that GOM player seems to handle HD files a bit better than VLC (at least on my humble XP laptop).

Thanks to Tweakers.net for the above pic.

Dany

The Orphanage – Review

The Orphanage is a new movie that has gotten a lot of press for being produced by Guillermo del Toro after his success with Pan’s Labyrinth. The movie is directed by J.A. Bayona and he looks like someone we should be watching out for in the future.

I will avoid giving away as much plot as I can, since finding out about this story is part of what makes this movie fun and I carefully avoided hearing anything substantive about the story before seeing the film and was rewarded greatly for that decision.

Let me just say that this movie was truly scary, there were no fake scary moments where they used music and quick camera moves just to make the audience jump and no scenes of torture porn, which does not make a movie scary. I really appreciate seeing a film that is still able to scare the living daylights out of me sometimes.

Also, I have to say, this movie’s ending gave me a real Hillary Clinton moment, I teared up and it almost made me cry. This was the only part of the film that really even reminded me that del Toro had a hand in this film.

I saw this film in a PACKED theater and there was one scene which scared one woman so badly that her scream made the ENTIRE rest of the audience jump from their seat! It was great! If you like creepy, scary movies, you should definitely find a theater and see this movie.

Thanks to European-Films.net for the above pic.

Dany

Macbook Air Idea Stolen from Brian Hogg!

This is a really funny short from Brian Hogg over at dobBoom that explains how Steve Jobs REALLY got his idea for the new Macbook Air.

dotBoom is a great adult oriented puppet video podcast. No, adult oriented does NOT mean this is puppet porn!

Enjoy it.

Dany

Tiki Bar TV Brings in a Battlestar Galactica Mainstay

These clips may not be new, but they are still worth seeing for any Battlestar Galactica fan. The people at Tiki Bar TV were able to bring on Cally (Nicki Clyne) acting all crazy and pixie-like and shot a two part episode. Episode 2 is at the bottom of this post.

Enjoy

Dany

The Simpsons as Simpsonzu

This is a great artistic rendition of the mainstay Simpsons crew created by spacecoyote. See the original Simpsons pic below and his take on the cast of Futurama (not a show I really like, but a great piece of art nonetheless) below as well.

Thanks to Diggnation for turning me spacecoyote‘s way in their recent episode.

Dany

50 Things Men and Women Should Know About Each Other

Here are two stories, the first is 5o Things She Wishes You Knew and the second is 50 Things Men Wish You Knew both are from Men’s Health and they are both funny and accurate… well, I can only vouch for the accuracy of the tips that women should know.

Thanks to Diggnation (Eps: 132 and 133), where I found out about the above pic (from IncredImaging) of the amazingly sexy of Carmen Electra as well as the the second set of 50 things to know, which is a funny coincidence since the picture is a perfect example of tip#11.

Enjoy

Dany

Urban Legend ER

After subscribing to the podcast (get the iTunes version here) called College Humor TV, I saw this Urban Legend ER video and I HAD to share.

Thanks to College Humor, a site I don’t spend much time on, but it’s a good site that is a pretty good filter for funny videos.

Dany

Dexter on CBS This February

After weeks of speculation, it is official, CBS will be airing Dexter, season 1, starting in mid February!

This looks to be the same model that TBS took with Sex in the City and A&E uses to air The Sopranos. The episodes will be edited for tv, which means commercial breaks as well as content neutering of more extreme language, sex and violence. I am not a huge fan of this style editing, but I am a fan of bringing this show into more people’s homes to give them a chance to experience, what I think is one of the best shows on TV. I think this model has really been a boon for Sex in the City, so I hope this does the same thing for Dexter.

I first heard inklings of this when I saw an ad for CBS tv shows and after seeing the poster for CSI flash across the screen, they followed it with a signature shot of our favorite serial killer. Now I came across this press release from Showtime which confirms this story!

I still think the best way to watch this show is on either Showtime, DVD or both, but this is still exciting news and I WILL be checking out the network airings starting this February to see just how much the show changes with these edits.

Thanks to Toxic Shock TV for the above pic.

Dany