a pile of reviews

you come here to find out what's hip and what's not, you rely on me to provide you with the information you need to make the important decisions in your life, you read this crap so you'll have some ideas what to do with all that spare time and money you've got. well, dear imaginary reader, i've got just what you need: something like 4 or 5 reviews in a single blog post! How exciting! Let's get started!

Review #1) ipod mini

I've had mine for a week.5 or so now. I got it "free" from citibank by letting them hold on to $1k for 12 months and using their website to pay my bills. I have several mp3 players already, the one that the ipod competes with is my iRiver ihp-120. Here's how the ipod mini stacks up.

Pros :
- it makes me look young and cool and hip because it's so goddamned stylish. man, it's sleek. if there were any chicks where i work, they'd be all over me because of this thing. it's mega 1337.
- it's small and light and the shape is nice. ihp is bigger and heavier
- 4GB seems to be enough for me, even though I somehow "ran out of space" on my 20GB ihp
- the wheely dingus is really nice, better than the joystick dingus on the ihp
- awesome battery life.
- games and stuff. backlight. nice.
- little apple touches, like pause-on-headphone-disconnect. iriver doesn't think of "nice touches" like that.

Cons :
- have to use itunes to put songs on it (though I may be able to hack up a better way to do it). itunes sucks.
- relies totally on id3 tags, which are not always correct for my mp3s. i hates it when the album name is misspelled in one track and that fuxors up playback. yes, i spose i could fix it with a playlist, but if ipod could deal with FILENAMES and TIMESTAMPS like my ihp, it wouldn't be a problem
- sound doesn't sound as nice as the ihp. maybe i need to play with EQ a bit more.
- ihp has an FM radio, ipod does not
- ipod doesn't display album name on playback screen
- ipod doesn't scroll album/song names in the selection screen! how the hell am i sposed to know "The Wall Part 1" from "The Wall Part 2" when they both show up as "The Wall Par..." ????

Most of my beefs are with the way it manages mp3s -- relying on itunes and id3 tags. I'm old and set in my ways, I've been listening to mp3s since 98 or 99 or whenever the hell they first came out. some of my mp3s date back to those days and hence are "sloppy" as far as id3 tags (i think some of my mp3s predate the invention of id3). if i was brand new to mp3s i'd have 0 complaints aboot ipod. well, okay, i'd still complain about the display problems. but overall, if someone were to give me another free ipod, i wouldn't kick him in the crotch for it.

Review #2) pyramid brewery in berkeley

Not bad. Not great. I had a porter and a chicken sangwich thingus. The porter was a bit disappointing. Not bad enough to spit out, but it wasn't rich and creamy and chocolatey like a good yummy porter should be. The menu was pretty standard brewery fare -- compare to Steelhead in burlingame. Or don't, cuz IMHO pyramid doesn't stack up. Back when I was a beer snob (doing twice-weekly written beer reviews, no less) I wasn't a big fan of pyramid. Maybe it's my fault for having a porter instead of their award winning hefeweizens, but dammit, i was in the mood for a porter. atmosphere was nice and staff was good. as a restaurant: no complaints. the beer: meh.

Review #3) Parkside Theater in oakland

Holy the crap this place rules! I wish I'd known about it sooner. It's a movie theater that charges five bucks for a ticket (and 2 for 1 on wednesdays!), serves wine and beer and pizza and salads and baked goods including brownies and lemon bars, and has comfy love seats instead of chairs for the first several rows in front of the screen! It's laid back and apparently owned by very cool people. If the above description doesn't convince you of that, the short "announcements" film made by the owners that plays before your movie will convince you. They joke about the crappy movies they get and they poke fun at the crappy movies they're getting soon, they ask folks to please stop bringing outside food on the Free Movie nights (!) and so on. You're not dealing with a mindless, faceless multinational movie conglomerate -- your money goes to keep a small band of middle aged movie-loving hippies off the streets and provide the public with an awesome place to enjoy a movie. They show Rocky Horror Picture Show every saturday at midnight, it seems. I've never seen it, maybe I'll go some time.

In short, the place rocked. I don't often "get vibes" from a place, but this place definitely had one: welcoming, laid back, personal. It's a happy place, and I don't mean that like "Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth (run by Nazis, we're watching you, some restrictions may apply, no cameras, outside food, or fun allowed)" kind of Happy Place, either.

Pros :
- beer!
- pizza!
- lemon bars!
- love seats!
- those urinals that go all the way to the floor so you have a very wide range of stream-altitude options!
- non-mainstream movies!
- your money goes to cool people instead of asshats like Jack Valenti (ok, JV still gets your money but the cool people get to touch it first)

Cons :
- none that I noticed

Review #3) Oldboy

Great movie. Bad subtitles (white with no outline, kinda hard to read against snow or white shirts or bright lights).

(Be careful now, past this point are very mild spoilers.)

A tale of revenge and paranoia and action and suspense where it's never clear who The Bad Guy is. Well acted, well directed, nice soundtrack, great plot, good themes. Some scenes of torture and violence and that kind of thing.

Compare to Sin City, another story sort of about revenge and torture and violence: SC was almost entirely gratuitous. SC had well-defined Bad Guys who were Just Plain Bad. In this movie, though, the bad guys are bad for reasons and it makes a tremendous difference in how the viewer relates to the characters. It's one thing to see the Good Guy righteously pound the brains out of The Totally Evil Bad Guy -- it's quite another thing to see The Good Guy plagued by remorse when he finds out why The Bad Guy is Bad. The former is watched with detached boredom -- just more violence and torture like we see on TV every day. The latter, though, involves the viewer and invites them to ponder what's going on: to think.

This is a movie about thinking, not just people getting killed and tortured.

And the fight scenes are realistic, too. In one scene, the protagonist takes on a gang. You don't know if the hero will come through all right, like in a Bruce Willis movie, because it's not that kind of movie. But you know he'll land a few good punches. Watch how the bad guys gang up on him instead of taking him on one at a time (Kung-Fu style). Watch how the gangsters react, fearfully, after he injures several of them. Even the stuntman punching bag people are real people: they start to wonder whether they should mess with this guy.

That kind of realism is absent from a film like SC (or even Die Hard!).

Another thing that I liked was the exploration of the Price of a human being. For enough money, Oldboy tells us, anyone can be purchased. Witness the loyalties of a character who has some dental work done. Where do his loyalties lie? Are you sure?

The movie is thoroughly involving and definitely one of the best I've seen this year.

Pros :
- emotionally involving
- great acting, direction, music, plot, fight choreography
- a real Thinker that also involves kickass action
- the octopus scene
- the movie doesn't wimp out and take the Happy Ending until the very very end.
- it's internally consistent. things don't happen Just Because. People don't just Do Random Shit (like in the awful h2g2 movie).

Cons :
- subtitles, gramatically correct for a change, are nonetheless hard to read
- couple of icky torture scenes. ew.
- the ending is a little weak, almost hollywood. up until that, however, it's great.

Go see it. See it at the parkside. It rocks.