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Zhastar.

It's been awhile since I did a movie nitpick, and of the two films I saw most recently: X-Files: I Want To Believe and HellBoy 2, it's X-Files that gets the nod.

Not so much for the film itself, but for the very mixed reaction I've seen to it.

IMDB has fans who liked it, fans who hated it, and fans who were disappointed but grudgingly appreciative as only truly devoted fans can be.

It also had non-fans who liked it, who hated it, and some who thought it was OK. Some non-fans thought it entirely accessible. Some fans thought you had to have seen all nine (or at least the first six, maybe seven) seasons of the series to truly appreciate it.

So this nitpick isn't really going to be a review of the film; at some point, fandom takes over and makes a review something of value only to other fans, who all have their own reviews in their heads anyway. Instead, I thought I'd take a look at some of the more common of the criticisms of the film and nitpick those.

I hardly ever do these blog meme things, but since I liked this one when I saw it on Heptarch's blog, I figure'd I'd do it. He got it from jenderelly.

1. How old were you in 1980?
Nine. 1980 was also notable as the birth year of my younger sister.

2. How old were you in 1989?
Eighteen. This was my senior year in high school; I turned eighteen that October.

3. Were you a Toys R' US Kid?
No way. The familial relations of giraffes, however cutely stylized, did not inspire me to purchase toys. I was a Child World fan. Pandas > Giraffes.

4. Did you watch Transformers?
Yes, although at the time I was starting to think to myself that it wasn't that good, a feeling which had eluded me regarding previous shows in a similar vein, like Force Five and Battle of the Planets. Star Blazers was good.

5. Did you see E.T. on the big screen?

Ron Gilbert at Grumpy Gamer stole my thunder with his succinct post on the monster movie Cloverfield. However, while he was pleased that it was a film that features a giant monster killing annoying hipsters/yuppies (do yuppies still exist?) I was annoyed that it didn't happen fast enough.

As always, spoilers, blah blah blah.

Cloverfield is that rare film that dare asks the question, how long can it really take for a monster hundreds of feet high, sporting teeth the size of intercontinental missiles and towering over midtown Manhattan, to eliminate half a dozen annoying twentysomethings.

The answer, unfortunately, is too long. The problem is that while the message comes through clearly: do stupid things and you're going to die-- the movie lets these people get away with stupid thing after stupid thing, and then kills them later, usually when they aren't doing something so stupid.

As a latecomer to Mystery Science Theater fanhood, I'm glad that former head writer/host Mike Nelson is continuing to make bad movies enjoyable with RiffTrax. Being a longtime fan of Star Wars since seeing the first film at the age of six, I felt morally obligated to at least take a look at the new trilogy. With each passing film I was more and more horrified. Mike's rifftrax on the prequels got better and better as the movies themselves became more humorless and unwatchable. Some fans might consider the third prequel the best of the bunch, but for me, it's the worst. Luckly the rifftrack for that episode is the best of the three; it's the only reason to subject oneself to the film.

300 falls into that same category.

MST3K tended to focus on films that were so bad, hardly anyone would watch them. The show eventually ran into trouble when the very existence of MST3K increased the value of the rights to the films they were lampooning beyond the point where they could afford the rights to the movies. RiffTrax escapes that loophole by distributing only MP3 audio files, which they then help sync to your DVD of the movie by having a disembodied voice (named Disembaudio) do line readings from the film periodically. Files are also available to sync with NTSC or PAL versions of the film, and there's even a special Windows program that handles the sync for you if you're playing the DVD on a computer. If you don't already own the DVD of the movie in question, you can order it from RiffTrax.

There, of course, is the catch-22. Riffing is funniest on movies that aren't very good, or that you don't like. I've also listened to the tracks for the Bourne Identity and LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring, which are films I like. At some point these tracks fall a bit flat compared to the others. So in order to get value out of RiffTrax, you have to own (or at least rent) the movie. But riffing works best on films you wouldn't necessarily want to own.

RiffTrax seems to realize this, which is why they are also offering a video on demand option. Perhaps what they really need is a deal with NetFlix.

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The following is from a Financial Times story about the recent investment ratings drop for Kazakh banks. Banks in Kazakhstan have gorged themselves on foreign borrowing for expansion in recent years, and the credit crisis is starting to affect them.

No problem, says the president:

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, has pledged to prevent any collapse of the country's banking sector and accused international ratings agencies of being "non-objective" after Standard & Poor's lowered its outlook on eight local banks.

"Ratings companies should realise that Kazakhstan stands firmly on its feet and will not allow a single bank to fall," Mr Nazarbayev said.

This statement is not so much interesting for itself but as it is representative of a curious mindset I've noticed over the years. It's this complete unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to accept the idea that there is any validity to information that comes from an independent-- meaning in this case, non-governmental-- source.

So the entertainment conveyor belt finally brought this past summer's hit The Bourne Ultimatum into view, and I have to say I enjoyed it. I think my favorite of the three films is probably the second; the first has to spend a lot of time setting up the character and the situation, and so seems a bit slow-paced at times. The third is "non-stop action" in that way that studios seem to think is good but that any self-respecting person who isn't a dramamine addict thinks is actually bad. Also, it never met a camera move it didn't like enough to chop up into several quick cuts and throw at the viewer in quick succession.

Bourne gets referred to a lot as a "thinking Man's Bond" which is a pretty fair assessment. Still, for a person with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge and aptitude there are a lot of places that severely strain your ability to maintain suspension of disbelief.

Warning: There are spoilers for the Bourne movies in this article!

Because it's all about the countries. Although it seems I'm overlooking a continent or two.

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Shamelessly borrowed from heptarch... but I'll go one step further momentarily...

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.