1. Up – tear jerker, but brilliant
2. Star Trek – great plot, great acting, great special effects, great Leonard Nemoy work.
3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatloaf – silly, but fun kids movie
4. The Informat – This one is last place.  Don’t see it unless a moustached, fat, Matt Damon is your thing.  It is not my thing.

I haven’t seen five movies in the theater in one year in over a decade [newly wed in TX].

Uncle Ben, in the first of the 2000’s Spiderman franchise, tells a young Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Watching King Corn (website) tonight over Netflix’s instant watching service was sobering.  It isn’t the most entertaining movie you will ever watch.  Comparing it to Spiderman might be cruel because one is for fantasy and fun and the other is for education and presenting reality in a film format.  Despite my stating that it isn’t ‘fun’ to watch, you should watch it because the contents of the film are disturbing.

If you think that government spending is out of hand: watch this film.

If you think that Americans are nutritionally screwed up and need to eat better: watch this film.

If you think that you’ve got everything together and your life is all roses: watch this film.

I am allergic to corn grain and corn syrup, though corn oil does seem to be OK in moderation, and so for me corn is just not a great item to eat.  After watching how corn syrup is made, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to eat corn syrup even if I were able to eat it.  I’m convicted, once again, that I should be careful what I put into this body, but don’t take my word for it.  Watch this film, read Michael Pollard’s book “In Defense of Food” – and see where you land.  I bet it isn’t in a field of corn, or in line at McDonalds.

I just got back from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Cathedral.  Great googly-moogly this was a complete re-hack of the previous movies just look at all of the similarities:

 

I could go on with the similarities, but as you can see by the above chart there’s so much in common between the past Indiana Jones movies and this one that if you’ve seen the first three, this one’s a re-run.

Actually, its totally different, which was either refreshing, or not. Either way, we enjoyed the movie on an entertainment level, but were let down because we wanted to have that nostalgia come back, but instead found the difference too great to just feel like we’d come back to see another story in the same series.

Kudos to Steven Spielberg for not casting ET as one of the aliens – or having reese’s peanut butter product placements within the film.

Also Kudos for magnetic materials being attracted to the highly magnetic aliens only some of the time. It made for more suspense wondering when something would be attracted and when something would be artificially non-metal.

Also, Also Kudos for having the noise of a small class rival that of a full auditorium sound effects people, it was awesome.

Last night Jessica and I saw Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest.  Go see this movie.  It is worth seeing in the theater and it is as good or better than the first.  I can’t say that about a lot of sequels, but this one adds to the character development, has an engaging plot and includes some twists.  They’re making a third movie, and I hope it keeps going because I’m quite excited about it and I haven’t even seen the trailor :)

Oh, and the soundtrack rocks!  Zimmer is a brilliant composer and has quite a range.

The special effects are as amazing as we’ve come to expect in the last 10 years, and the acting, as before, is lots of fun.

Last night, for Jessica’s final part of her Birthday celebration we went to Rodizio in the LoDo part of Denver with our friends Craig & Krystal. It is a Brazilian grill. I have been to two of these before Rodizio, in Texas and knew that we were in for a treat. If you’ve not been to a restaurant like this before then you need to understand that this is an all you can eat food fest. This particular restaurant had various meats, seafoods and veggies that they served to some tables. Somehow our table only got meats. When you want their meat servers to bring various types of meat to your table you flip over a little wooden object that has red, yellow and green sections painted onto it. You flip this so that the green side is facing up into the air. As Craig said, this is turning on the meat spigot.

Between January and April they have ‘wild game’ feature meats. Yesterdays was Wild Boar and Rattlesnake Sausages. I had several rattlesnake sausage bit (they didn’t give you a whole sausage unless you asked for one, which is fine by me) and I quite enjoyed them. Our waiter was a young, spunky guy whose nametag read “Jeffizzle.” He had a funky liney beard. That’s the only words I can think to describe it shortly because the longer description would be a small 1/8th inch (2 millimeter) wide band that ran from his sideburns down around his chin up to the other side. Its an accent piece like a necklace, only made of hair. Yeah, it looked a wee weird.

Side Story
Craig had somehow escaped all of the noise about Brokeback Mountain in the last 4 months and found himself watch the video while exercising yesterday morning. He got 28 minutes into the film until the two men make lip contact. At which point he had to stop working out, had to go pour bleach into his eyes, and had to go find out more about the movie to see if this was just a funky one-time situation. To his dismay it was not and so he promptly wrapped up the DVD and sent it back to NetFlicks. I tell you that to tell you this. Jeffizzle was not afraid to break out into what he called his Brokeback Mountain routine when we had finally decided to turn off the meat spigot and survey the dessert options. He outlined the various options that were available for us in decadent desserts and when reaching a point in the dessert selection switched to a super accentuated ’s’ lisp and described the dish in rather sensual terms. We chuckled and he moved on into the next item in his regular speach pattern. Craig was probably mentally having flashbacks of the morning and wanting to run for the Rockies, but restrained himself.

When it came time to pay the bill we did so with a slightly liberal tip, but one that reflected the service and the length of time we had squatted at the table [definition: squatting is sitting at a table for a particularly long time at a restaurant. This can prevent wait staff from serving other customers at that table and possibly decreasing their income from tips for the year]. As we left we hit the restrooms to do what people do there and happened to pass the waiter showing off our receipt exclaiming, “I went brokeback on another table again and look at this!”

We then strolled through part of downtown Denver to walk off some of the protein we’d glutted ourselves on. This is always fun because there are pan handlers, vagrants, other strollers and lots of carriages waiting to draw you. Lights, busses, some cars, cops and shops all looking particularly metropolitan make for a fun walk. As is always the case I ended up talking about programming practicies with Craig who patiently teaches me all about the things he learned by actually going to school for his carear path. He’s also got a lot more life experience in coding than I do so I have to say that I like to be a sponge when he shares things. Fortunately some of the things he shared with me last night were things I knew which tells me that I’m starting to have some competance in the area of coding after 5 years :)

We had a good time with the Kaes’, Jessica got to have a fun meal, and in the end we really enjoyed a great downtown Denver experience.