Archive for November, 2005
Elektra (2005)
I saw this, nervous that it would be stupid, but wanting to keep my streak together of seeing all new comic book related movies. It wasn’t bad for the reasons I thought it would be, but for different ones.
These were the reasons I thought it would be stupid. I didn’t think they would give a very good reason for how Elektra came back from the dead after the Daredevil movie. Reason 2, I don’t tend to like overly tough female leads in movies, infallible (etc etc). Reason 3, the previews made the special effects look stupid and unrelated. Reason 4, the previews made it look as if she was going to train some little girl to fight for some unexplained reason.
This is how the movie was good in those areas. Reason 1, they didn’t dwell on how she came back, they didn’t refer back to Daredevil, probably to scared to even be associated with it. You just have to believe in asian magic is all. Reason 2, Elektra was humble, lost, and imperfect. Almost too much, and I will get to that. Reason 3, The special effects were perfect actually. The Hand, a force of ninja fighter type people from the comic book, made a perfect transition. They weren’t feared as much for their fighting skills like they were in comic books, but for their special powers over disease, speed, and animals. The effects helped support this perfectly with the whole movie using sparring cable tricks. Reason 4, the girl actually is the whole focus of the movie, with special powers in and of herself. She is already trained. The girl is obnoxious and her father is the token love interest, but it is better than training her.
The main reasons that I didn’t like this movie that much, was that Elektra was a bit of a crying baby, almost too lost I thought, too vulnerable. I never thought I would say that, but she was really tough at most times, but it seemed like the unsure bit was only there to support an already weak premise. What would be a good premise that would resonate with today’s audience? That I can’t answer, it certainly couldn’t be what was in the comics, but I am not sure this worked either. And that was the other reason I didn’t like it and wouldn’t watch it again, the story didn’t hold me. I wasn’t involved in the character, and I can’t explain that any more, than I just wasn’t engaged.
If you are into comic books see it. Even though Jennifer Garner is more “athletic” looking than Elektra, all girls in comics have an unrealistic chest and to see her in a great translation of the actual costume is pretty cool. But otherwise, I don’t think anyone else will care that this movie even came out.
19th November 2005
Wow, I was hung over. It was one of those pass out nights that when you wake up and don’t remember stirring during the night you are awake for good, there’s no going back no matter how tired you feel.
I bagged some more leaves in the morning, and then Sarah went up to school for most of the day, so I worked really hard on freelance stuff until around 6 when Christine and her girls came over for dinner with Lady dog. We had mexican and the girls were as bubbly as ever, just like little Christine’s. We did the whole works, hot chocolate, ice cream, and then a movie, Charlie and Chocolate Factory. They left around 9, so that gave me enough time to get back to work on more freelance stuff before bed. It would be a big day tomorrow with the dedication.
18th November 2005
Today ended up being pretty cool, thanks mostly to my beautiful wife.
I decided that I would treat myself and work from home, or so I thought. I worked from home until just around noon, taking a short break to rake the front lawn. It was nice to be relaxed, and I had some leeway with my hours since I had already put in a certain amount for the week. I did end up going into work with some persuasion from my co-workers, had some cake, and found my monitor wrapped in Batman lights (like Christmas lights of Batman’s head) via Chris. That was a neat idea.
Then on the way home I went to Home Depot and got some lawn bags and new ceiling tiles. When I got home, Emily had called so I talked with her for a little bit, bagged some leaves, then talked to my parents.
Sarah had made a whole bunch of calls on Thursday night, such a sweetheart, but only four people were still free. Around 7 the fun started. Wes and Kate got there, and then about 7:15 or so Chris and Michelle arrived. We had a lot of beer, pizza, and played a ton of Batman Uno (one of Sarah’s presents as well as some other stuff including a Colts Jersey to be picked out by me.) Later on we switched to playing sequence and then briefly to Scene It. It was a decently short night, we had started early enough that everyone headed out before 1.
What are Conditional Comments in Internet Explorer?
It would figure that about five minutes after the ink dried on my previous post about child selectors, and “proper” use of them to send specific rules to each browser by exploiting a shortfall of Internet Explorer’s rending of CSS (breathe…..pause), I am now going to explain the better way to deliver specific rules to each browser using Internet Explorer’s Conditional Comments.
As reports on the Microsoft developer blogs, and many numerous other places have told us, Internet Explorer will now support child selectors. While this is exciting for more specific rules, that also means that any rules that were previously written to fix something between Firefox and Internet Explorer will start to cause problems. As a designer, if I wrote a rule that used a child selector (.class > .classTwo) that was specifically aimed at Firefox and would break Internet Explorer, now IE 7 will look in that rule, understand it, render it, and break your layouts.
Fortunately, the big CSS guru’s who are writing about breaking news, cutting edge stuff as it happens have populated the internet with enough information about what can be done about this problem.
I have coded a handfull of extensive CSS websites now, and know that no matter how many rules you may have, if written properly, you won’t have too many hack rules in a sheet. I think the most I have had in some of my mine have been 5-10, 5-10 rules using the child selector.
We know these are the rules that will break, so what we need to do, is set the regular rules back to these values, and take the values we want Internet Explorer to see and seperate them into a whole seperate stylesheet.
Why are we putting these in another stylesheet?
Well, this should be an easy preventative fix for when IE 7 is released. If you are smart, and have some sort of templating system in place for your websites, you should be able to add this line of code in one place, and have it affect the whole site. We need to add what is known as a conditional comment, something that IE parses and evaluates, and if it evaluates to true, then executes. This is how we are going to issues a second stylesheet to Internet Explorer to overwrite any necessary rules.
What you should have done if you were smart
If you used Smarty, or some other templating system, you would have a main background file that would pull in content in the body of the pages. Or, *gasp*, if you use Dreamweaver templates, same thing. For me, I use PHP includes because I wasn’t as comfortable with Smarty at the time that I built this site. But I have one file that I include for a lot of my information included in my <head> tags.
What you need to do, finally
Step 1: Underneath the link to your current stylesheet, make a link to your Internet Explorer only sheet. For me, this link looked like this;
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/styles/iestyles.css />
Step 2: Write the conditional comment. This is the format;
<!–[if IE]><![endif]–>
Basically, this tests to see “if” the browser is IE, and if it is, then it will include what ever is inside the comment. Pretty neat huh? Could change your world right? This is something that IE will more than likely never drop in support. Never is a hard word to say, but this is about as close as you can get.
The other neat thing, is this can help you if you are trying to validate, you can include propreitary css styles in your IE stylesheet, and it will only render in IE, like those tempting scrollbar styling properties.
So, finally, this is what my link looked like;
<!–[if IE]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/styles/iestyles.css />
<![endif]–>
Final notes
The other sweet thing about this is, you can test for other versions of IE. So, if you want to have this stylesheet only be spit out for version 5 of Internet Explorer, then just add a 5 in, it is that easy. Just like this;
<!–[if IE 5]><![endif]–>
Or add a 4, whatever is the case. A really helpful piece of information, and can save you from trying to rework any sites, learn anything new, etc. and isn’t that time consuming to do, if…you set the sites up right in the first place to easily maintain.
17th November 2005
Yesterday was a busy night for a change. I worked a good amount of time when I got home on freelance work, until just about midnight, exhausted, I just went to bed. Tonight I gave Chip a call and wished him a happy birthday (16th). He was on his way to Redding? to get a new drawing desk that he psuedo designed and has been working on with another guy.
Tonight after work, I had to work, for work until just before 8. So playing some hexic with Chris to relax a little after a long day.
I think our plans for tomorrow have changed, we may put off going out to eat, and have some people over. But I wanted to at the very least, type a little something I have learned in the last week about CSS, hacks, and the impending release of Internet Explorer 7 and what that means for old hacks.
Sections Updated: CSS
15th November 2005
A good day in general, teaching went well, cool to see some of the better students really start to excel. But it did rain all day pretty steady and part of the night. Chris came over after work and we ate dinner together, tried out a new monitor for my computer that I got at lunch. (My old HP monitor took a poo on Sunday, and it like looking through cotton.) Then we went and saw Stay. Very weird movie, not something I would recommend to most. Sarah was feeling tired today, a strained back so she got to bed right after the movie
Sections Updated: S-T Movies
Stay (2005)
The general feeling I left this movie with was, something was missing. This was a short movie by today’s standards, only 99 minutes. I thought about The Sixth Sense while I watching it, there was a similar feel. Death always lingering around the corner but never manifested, a psychiatrist in bad clothing and a patient that is barely coherent, with a huge reveal at the end. However, there is such a lack of storytelling that in the end, as much as one may guess to understand, there are so many things that still don’t make sense and you leave feeling unfulfilled.
My initial reaction was to give this a much lower rating. The whole movie literally comes about in the last five minutes of the show. Starring a good cast of Ryan Gosling, Naomi Watts, and Ewan MacGregor, the movie revolves around a young man (Gosling) who comes for help from a pyschiatrist named Sam Foster (MacGregor). Gosling declares he is going to kill himself on Saturday at 12 pm, and the drama begins. MacGregor becomes obsessed with this patient, and their lives become inseperable in this dreamscape of an environment.
My conclusion, that in the end, we see that as (Spoiler) Gosling is dying we realize the whole first part of the movie is the mind’s logical explanation for what is happening as he is dying, trying to grasp what is happening and making a more worthy cause of death then the present one. The effects in the movie are cool, they probably don’t add much to it, but for a visual person I enjoyed them a lot. But again, you leave without any true traditional storytelling, more with a gimic of trying to confuse you and nothing more, and you want some more truths.
If you want to be challenged, you may enjoy this. I would have given this a higher rating if I thought I would ever watch it again. I like it for being different, I just wish it would have been just a touch more traditional.
14th November 2005
After a stressful day yesterday, and for the last couple of days, it was nice to relax tonight, watch a lot of tv with my wife, do some writeups on movies, and getting mentally ready for the week. Yesterday the Colts went up 9-0, not without some drama in the kickoff returns, but a win none the less. Next week is the Bengals, that should be a good game, and Pittsburgh in Indy on Monday the following week is going to be the game.
Sections Updated: A-B Movies, E-F Movies, S-T Movies, U-W Movies
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