Archive for July, 2005
Walking Tall (2004)
Starring The Rock, Johnny Knocksville, and Neal McDonough this is a remake of an older movie. The idea is that The Rock was in the armed service for eight years, and when he comes back, he finds his home town overrun with gambling, drugs, and prostitution. The law is in on it, so he decides to take the law into his own hands and set things right.
I like The Rock. He isn’t a bad actor. He’s better than Vin Diesel that is for sure. I don’t like that this is another movie where he just doesn’t use guns for some divine reason. But, he does use a huge piece of cedar to beat the crap out of everyone, so I liked that. McDonough is great, haunting eyes and the perfect corrupt business man.
There are a good many parts that will make you go, “Yeah Right” but I knew that coming in and I don’t care. It is a good popcorn movie with good action and a fallible hero with some good humor with both The Rock and Knocksville. I recommend this to most people, most of my friends, but I know that my any of my parents would not like it, and most people I know over 35.
27th July 2005
Sections Updated: H-J Movies, K-L Movies
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Starring Orlando Bloom, Liam Neelson, and Eva Green, I was kind of lost through most of this movie.
Set around 1100-1200 A.C. during the Crusades, Bloom is the bastard son of Neelson with the right to his wealth and noblesman lifestyle, which also involves protecting the king to his death. Looking for answers to faith, which is the underlying base in every aspect of this movie. The king, and the Christians, own and live in Jerusalem, but there are two warring parties amongst themselves. One wants a war with the Muslims, and one does not. The king does not and does his best to keep peace. But he is a leper, and eventually passes away.
The Christians then go to the Muslim’s, to war, and are slaghtered in the desert. This leaves Bloom, who is impartial to religion and faith, to defend the city. A born leader, he holds the city against the muslim’s for a number of days before finally negotiating terms of surrender, that allow the people to leave without harm.
Directly by Ridley Scott, this is a bloody movie. The scenery and battle scenes were very dramatic, with some news ideas, and the colors in this movie were vibrant. They sometimes made me thing of LOTR, similar in armor and machinery, different types of fighting. I didn’t really understand why Bloom didn’t care about anything but the people in the movie, it was a little anticlimatic, and you couldn’t relate to why he was so lauded. But I will say, that Bloom shines here as a strong lead male character, and looking old enough for the part, where he fell short in Troy.
Like I said, not too many modern movies that show The Crusades, but this is bloody. It was interesting to see Jerusalem, and see all of the faith related items in the movie. It just could have been a little clearer for me.
26th July 2005
This morning I mowed the other half of the lawn, a real pain, clogging the mower and generally leaving our lawn a mess. But, it was good because it rained later on in the day, and I didn’t need it wet when I got home, or growing any more by that time.
We went to see Kingdom of Heaven tonight, and we watched the Rock Star INXS show, which had very few good performances tonight. It felt a little more like American Idol.
Sections Updated: E-F Movies, H-J Movies
25th July 2005
We had a good weekend, fun, but short.
We left Friday night to go up to Michigan for the Varner’s housewarming party. We got in pretty late on Friday, talked a little bit and saw most of the house and then went to bed.
Saturday, they had pretty much everything taken care of, except we had to pick up the keg. The party consisted mostly of two waves. The first wave was friends, family, high school, past and present. Then, later on just after dinner time, a huge wave of his friends came from work. Then the house turned into a frat party type atmosphere with drinking games even in the garage. I wasn’t in a particularly social mood to meet a ton of new people, with my eye bandaged and stuff, so I huge out with Dave Woodward and Dustin, watching some baseball on tv, playing darts, and then finishing off with a couple of games of cards. They had such a great turn out, I was really happy for them, and they are really psyched about their new house and all of the things they have improved on it already and plan to do to it in the near future.
Both sets of our parents were able to come by, which was great to see them. Especially Dad Chapman because we haven’t seen him since March. We’ll be in GH in August for the weekend for Jessica’s shower, so we’ll get to see them more then.
Sunday we took a trip to Justin’s work to see where that magic happens, and we also stopped by Dave’s house (who also lives in GR) for his son’s first birthday party. It was really hot, which made being outside kind of tough, but we stayed in the shade and had some beer so that helped some. We came back for a little bit to Justin’s place for some more food and we played Five Crowns, a card game that we got them as part of their house warming gift.
We came home 31 and made good time on the way home. Sarah had gotten a book on tape that we got about 4 cd’s into. I also listened to some financial related CD’s intermittenly. We got back and it was still roasting at 10pm. I mowed the front lawn, and about died, only later on the news learning that with the heat index it was about 104 in Indianapolis yesterday.
Tonight I needed to mow the back, but only had time for just over half. Sarah is at Wheeler, starting her second to last week. We are supposed to be going over to Johnson’s tonight, I may be taking a photo of their four girls.
Sections Updated: A-B Movies, E-F Movies
Flight of the Pheonix (2004)
This was a solid movie. Some sparsely used stylized action, an awesome sequence of a desert storm, interesting information about what it would actually be like to be stuck in a desert and trying to survive, and an awesome acting performance by Giovanni Ribisi.
Other than Giovanni, this movie has Dennis Quaid, Tyrese, and Mirando Otto (Lord of the Rings fame) and a cast of good supporting standees. The Pheonix is one huge, chrome plated airplane that has a fateful voyage across the desert. With too much weight, the pilot Quaid cannot sustain flying up and over a sand storm as the plane crashes violently. Then the crew must decide on whether to hope of spotting rescue, or an outlandish plan to rebuild the plane by Ribisi’s specs with little to no water.
So many sub conflicts happen, between characters, nomads, and other problems in building the plane that this movie keeps your interest throughout. Ribisi’s role as an engineer who designs and builds planes is really interesting, confident and cocky, and a self preservist above all else, Ribisi is spooky and enthralling all at once. Quaid does a good job as the hard nosed hunky guy, but this is just like every other role he’s played in the last five years.
In the end, they build the plane and escape, even with the revelation that Ribisi designs toy planes for a living. This is a great movie that I recommend for all, action, drama, a tiny touch of love, and most important well placed supporting special effects.
21st July 2005
I am starting to think that I am accident prone.
Goofing around is usually how it happens, and in this case, just outside the office door I made too hard of a turn in my rollerblades, somehow fell forward (I don’t know where my hands were in this transaction) and landed on my hip, my already injured shoulder from earlier this summer, and my sunglasses managed to cut my eye open. I immediately started gushing blood like some sort of cheesy Hollywood act. That sucked. So I am tender on my left side, and my eye does not look good. But at least the shoulder is fine, just tender like any normal injury, not because of earlier.
We got to talk with Thomas via MSN and a web cam. We got to see him, but he didn’t see us.
How do I make a gradient with transparency in Fireworks?
Not often do I learn something new about Fireworks. Granted, this may be one of the lowest areas of entries on this blog site, but I use Fireworks on a daily basis. The other day I realized something so simple that I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before, and it saves me a ton of masks on very basic vector shapes.
Gradients are a great tool to give a website color and interest, and simple usage can turn a couple of flat colors into a three dimensional area of interest.
In this entry, I am going to show you how to create a simple button. This button, our “More Info” button is pretty commmon on the web, I took mine from cue on the Tiger Direct website. The nice thing about this button is that it is completely scalable and editable at any time later on.
Being self taught, some things that seem so simple to other designers are things that I may have totally missed in my own training. Gradients with transparencies was one of them.
Let’s get started
Step 1: Open Fireworks, and choose File > New (New Document)
Step 2: Make your new document 77 x 24 pixels, set your resolution to 72 DPI, and set your canvas to “White”.
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