December 14th, 2005 James
Being a film that I’ve read all the books for, although this was years ago and I can only remember bits of it, it did give me an idea of what to expect. I was utterly blown away with this film, in fact if it wasn’t for the mandatory intermission halfway through the film, it even managed to make me forget that I was watching it in the twilight zone that is Scarborough’s Futurist cinema. I did almost explode when the intermission came on, but I won’t dwell on it as this film deserves a proper review.
I thought this film was absolutely spot on. For me, it created a fully believable and fantastic fantasy world, with a range of interesting, quirky and sometimes downright evil characters, some with superbly chosen voice actors. You could almost feel the initial wonder and surprise of a child stumbling upon a fantastic new world. This film made me want to find the story that I was writing and continue with it (Yeah, that’s right I was writing a story!). The film also sported with what I thought was a stunning soundtrack by Harry Greggson-Williams, my apparently 3rd favourite artist, according to Last.fm. The children’s acting wasn’t too shabby and certainly wasn’t as bad as the acting in the early Harry Potter films! The only thing with the acting and the portrayal of the children is that with the exception of one, they were just too nice!
All in all, I can’t emphasise enough how good this film was. It came so close to being better than Return of the King (my favourite film) for me. In a way it’s almost dissapointing that I’ll never like a film as much as RotK, but when I have thoughts like that I think it’s probably best to forget about them and watch RotK again.
The Chronicles of Narnia receives the coveted 5/5 starfish. Go watch it, and if you can help it, somewhere other than Scarborough!
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December 14th, 2005 James
A couple of days ago I went out into town to get my fast growing mop on top of my head trimmed and also to buy Guild Wars. I sort of hit a snag when I got out money and realised it was the last £10 that was allowed on my overdraft. My town plans were pretty much ruined, so I went home, defeated. Further thought revealed that the extent of the situation was not only that I couldn’t get a haircut and the game, but even if I didn’t pay the electricity that I owed to my housemates I was unable to get home for Christmas, let alone going to London to see my dad and buying any sort of presents for people! Even worse, I didn’t have enough money to buy food for myself past another week anyway. Sort of a depressing outlook, as I’m fairly conservative with my money, so far this year I haven’t bought a single luxury item. My cool professional gaming mouse sort of counts, but in my defence my previous mouse sort of died. Special thanks to the support from my housemates, who offered me money to tide me over until my loan came in. Particular thanks go to Luke who gave me money so that I could enjoy the Indian meal to celebrate Matt’s birthday and Matt who gave me money to go to the cinema. As the prospect of spending Christmas on my own with nothing to eat didn’t particularly appeal to me I set off to the bank yesterday to ask for an extension on my overdraft. Luckily the woman who served me was particularly understanding about my plight and obliged on extending it. In fact, she told me that another student came in earlier asking the same thing. Made me feel a bit better.
Oh and as you can see, Last.Fm likes to translate all the Japanese artists that I listen to back into Japanese text, which is sort of neat to look at but means you can’t really understand it.
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December 2nd, 2005 James
Having a Computer Languages exam on Tuesday naturally means that I sit down with the full intention of revising for it, but not actually doing anything of real substance. I mean during the exam period my room is the cleanest, my file system on my computer is very well organised, all my music gets tagged properly etc. etc. I find every little thing a large distraction and having a permanent connection to the Internet doesn’t help at all. I usually start revising, then subconciously my mind gets completely distracted, next thing I know I’m spending an inordinate amount of time sorting out a suitable playlist to revise to or looking at something on the Internet that has nothing related to the subject I’m revising for, that accursed WEBoggle, it’s so addictive, if only I had found it after exams!
Well today my subconcious had exhausted the usual aforementioned methods of procrastinating and I found myself doing one of the most strangest things. It started when I found a bit of dirt on the side of one of my keys on my keyboard. The smallest distraction for a procrastinating mind proved to be fatal as the next thing I knew I had got my penknife out, was scraping inbetween all of the keys and getting an amazing amount of dust out. Given that my keyboard must be about 5 years old now, since then the computer itself has changed 3 times, there was a hell of a lot of dust in there. I even managed to find a small child within my keyboard who had lost their way down Bar Street and was living off the crumbs and morsels that fell between the keys if I ate near my computer. Bit of an exaggeration, but you get the picture. Anyway I challenge all you blogreaders maybe not to go so far as clean your keyboard with a penknife, but just to hold your keyboard upside down, give it a bit of a shake and see what comes out, you never know, you may be sitting on a goldmine of bronze age pottery or an undiscovered fossil. Well at least it’ll let you see the hardships of the poor keyboard!
Otherwise, procrastination has proved to get something else that isn’t pointless cleaning of keyboards, check out the sidebar on the right showing the top tracks that I’ve listened to the past week. Took a bit of fiddling as most of the default settings made it go way off the template on the right, but this’ll do until Geffy or someone writes me a script that displays my recently listened to tracks, instead of a chart of what my most played ones are a week ago.
In other Yoghurt news, Tesco are proving to be a regular blog reader on here, after me moaning about not providing ceramic plates, I already wrote that they now do, and now they stock chopsticks too! Thanks, Tesco. Thesco.
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