Monday, February 26, 2007

Oscar ramblings, PC ponderings, and more...

Checked out the Oscar nominated shorts on Saturday, most of the animated, live action, and short documentaries were shown. It seems Pixar got nominated this year for the animated short Lifted and were only going to show it in Chicago prior to the awards, although it is supposed to be attached to the front of Ratatouille when it comes out in June at theaters.
This year was the second where they were shown at the Murdock Theater instead of the main branch library. The theater is a nice setting as it has a 'movie' type environment with tiered seating and a larger screen plus they sell concessions. This year we were told that Magnolia pictures, and Apollo films had bought the distribution rights for the nominated shorts, this means it's easier for the library to get the shorts as the studios will just issue a DVD with the shorts on it. I guess it means they get to set the order in which the shorts are viewed also, normally they do the all day showing in a festival format one animated, one live action, one documentary, etc. The DVD was setup so that we seen all the animated shorts, then live action, then documentaries plus Magnolia slipped a trailer in between the categories! The library coordinator apologized for the 'advertisement' but when we actually seen the preview I was pretty stoked, it turned out to be a trailer for The Host which is the US version of the Korean film Gwoemul. I like monster movies so this looked really good, so much so that I came home and found that it doesn't open in the US until March 9th (you can watch the trailer here, but the Korean DVD is already available with English subs so I ordered it.

I originally wrote this blog post late Saturday night but thanks to a Firefox shutdown I lost it, and since it was so late I just went to bed. In the original I had predicted the winners, and pointed out my favorites, but after watching the Oscars last night I was way off. Anyway my picks were as follows:

Animated - No Time for Nuts (taking into account I haven't seen Lifted) If you own the Ice Age 2 DVD this is the scrat short that is on the disc. The winner turned out to be The Danish Poet which by no means a bad short but was not the one I thought would win.

Live Action - These were all pretty good I was leaning towards Helmer & Son, and the winner was West Bank Story which would have been about the middle of my choices.

Documentary - Recycled Life was my favorite, but the academy liked The Blood of Yingzhou District which out of the 4 would have been my second choice.

Remember how I said that usually I don't see whatever wins Best Picture? This year I thought I was pretty safe having only seen The Departed out of all of the nominees, I didn't see it as a 'Best Picture Oscar Winner'. I even rented one of the other nominees from Netflix Babel because the synopsis sounded good, unfortunately it turned out to be one of those features that is telling 3 intertwined stories but not in any particular order. I'm not a big fan of those (probably why to this day I've never finished Pulp Fiction) and while this one wasn't bad it definitely had that 'Best Picture' vibe to it. You can imagine my surprise last night when they announced The Departed as the winner.


I've been green lighted to buy some new computer parts to put together a new system, but now that I'm actually piecing it together I'm coming up short. I thought I could stay within my budget but I'm finding that difficult as I keep finding more and more stuff that needs to be replaced. I haven't put together a totally new system in probably ~6 years, sure I've upgraded parts here and there, but this time I'm finding it would be better just to update everything (sans the case and monitor). The hard drives have went SATA, and even some of the optical drives too. I've found that some of the new motherboards don't even have IDE channels, and most don't have parallel ports or serial ports anymore.


I just want to play World of Warcraft like this, is that too much to ask?

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