Later this afternoon, I’m leaving for a 3-day trip to Montréal on the occasion of a good friend’s bachelor party. The number of things I know about Montréal are few: it’s clean, everyone speaks French, they have a famous jazz festival which I fear that I will be forced to attend, and it’s generally cooler than New York — at least it had better be, because it’s sweltering here. I imagine my experience will be somewhat like the experience I had in Syndey: pristine, elegant and pleasant, yet small and mediocre. I’m such a snob! Anyway, I’m looking forward to it, and keeping an open mind.
I debated last night whether I should bring along my PowerBook with me on this trip. Ultimately, it seemed a little too nerdy to tote along a laptop on a leisure trip that’s going to fall just short of 48 hours — I’m returning Sunday afternoon. So I figure I should try and clear our some of these random items that I’ve been thinking about all week, but haven’t had the time to turn into real blog posts:
- There’s a new redesign up at Absenter.org by my friend Naz, and it looks very dapper.
- For the past few days, I’ve been doing some new marketing materials at Behavior, using Adobe InDesign. Notwithstanding the fact that I’m once again working in print, I find InDesign to be a really terrific application — I like it far, far better than QuarkXPress 4. And no, there’s no way that Behavior is going to fork over US$1,045 for QuarkXPress 6; I hope such exorbitant pricing results in a huge bellyflop for that mendacious company.
- I didn’t write much about the new Apple announcements, but I’m very, very tempted to treat myself to a Power Macintosh G5. The price is astoundingly reasonable for such a powerful machine, and it’s possibly the best-looking tower chassis I’ve ever seen.
- A co-worker and I installed iChat AV on our respective Macintoshes, and we were able to get the microphone up and running effortlessly. I’m pretty sure I’m going to buy an iSight.
- Despite the so-so reviews, I’m so ready to go see “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.”
- I’ve been thinking about a critical rating system for movies, one that can gauge the various factors that influence people’s opinions of films: artfulness, entertainment value, personal affinity etc. I’ll write more on this later.
- I can’t believe how busy I am. Summers are supposed to be slow!
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You hit the nail on it’s head with the movie review system. I’ve had this idea that movies are so hard to judge now, and should be decided on various factors as opposed to say how it would stand next to something else. For instance, Charlie’s Angels next to The Pianist share perhaps the fact thatthey are movies but in terms of what their goals and narratives are, are different.
Thus judging them ot trying to set them against the same assimilate criteria is a preposterous idea, and they undoubtedly should be judged for what they are: one is a serious movie whilst the other is a fun summer blockbuster.
I’ll be interested to see with what you come up with.