Mr.Chachee

Just another enjoyable video:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)rent a car bulgaria from optical communicationsдиваниMatthew Harding on Vimeo.

I haven’t posted here in a long, long time.

I’ve posted cool commercials in the past (about Alexander Hamilton, Bouncing Balls, and Long Balls). I have a couple more that are awesome, and must be added:

This Discovery Commercial just makes me feel good. I don’t understand it. It’s just the perfect ad to make people want to watch Discovery Channel all day long (now if only their HD channel had something besides Deadliest Catch 2000 times in a row). It just makes me think that all the people at Discovery love their jobs, and it makes me want to watch them do what they love.

This is an old Bombay Sapphire commercial that I have an odd obsession with. It’s just a pretty commercial with a nice mellow tune behind it. It was made by an ad company PsyopLa poker est un jeu de hasard dans lequel chaque joueur, assis autour d’une table de jeu, mise sur un numéro, une couleur ou la parité du numéro qu’il espère être tiré. that has a lot of other awesome and familiar ads:

That is all.

Friday I gave in and bought one of these new fangled iphones. In fact I’m currently using it right now to type this message. While the iPhone technology is wonderful, it does have a few things that annoy me.

1) No GPS navigation feature. Yes, it has the fun google maps, but it cant tell me where I am while looking at the maps.

2) Not enough viable ringtones. And the new iTunes ringer section is lame without a few more standard ringtones or polyphonic songs. I’m a simple man with simple ringer tastes.
3) Gmail has this weird problem where it puts your sent messages in your inbox. That’s more of a Google problem.

There are more complaints but you know what? My iPhone rocks! I don’t have any real complaints, I just wanted to practice using the awesome sideways keyboard with the crazy touch screen and built in word detector.

Oh, but one final note: I had to switch from Sprint to AT&T to get this sweet phone, but I have no regrets. Sprint was awesome but the iPhone was too good to pass up.

So I thought this was probably the worst of the 5 HP movies so far. It had really bad pacing and spent a lot of time showing random scenes from the book that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the movies main plot. Everything felt rushed and poorly explained. I feel like if I hadn’t read the book, I would think the movie was even worse than it was, but I can’t tell.

My least favorite parts of the movie in no particular order. Sorry for the length:

-Hermione and Ron almost seemed like minor characters. Neville, Luna, Cho Chang, and even that little redhead guy seemed to have bigger parts than them. Hermione also is turning into a really bad actress.

-The movie featured way too many montages instead of actually having people talking or acting. There were about 5 different “newspaper” montages, the whole middle of the movie was basically an inter-spliced montage of Dumbledore’s Army training and Umbridge posting new rules or laying down the law. If you count Harry’s weird dream visions and his training with Snape as montages, there were no less than 10 montages in the whole movie, which seems a bit excessive (and really lazy of the director).

-The movie sort of picks and chooses random parts of the book to show on screen, and some of them make sense, while others just take away screen time from the main plot (which they really poorly explained). There was a Christmas scene with the Weasleys, but it really did nothing with the plot. There was the whole Seamus sidestory, which was done well, but why did they choose to focus so much on that and not more on the other weakly developed parts. They spent the first 20+ minutes going over Harry’s possible expulsion, which is really important, but felt like it dragged on too long. The Cho Chang kiss sort of happened then faded away with very little explanation.

-Speaking of which, Cho Chang just disappeared from the movie in the second half, and there were a few scenes where Harry & Co. were shown looking mad at her, but there were NO SPOKEN WORDS about it! The movie shows her being held captive by Malfoy when Umbridge finally breaks into the training room, clearly she did not willingly betray her friends. And yet, they spend the next 15-20 minutes sort of hinting that people are mad at her. Then finally they reveal “oh, she was sort of coerced into ratting on them” and Harry gives this knowing look to Hermione. That’s the plot? That’s all it took to wrap it up? It’s like the director really wanted to prove that he could convey a story without any spoken words, which I guess is nice, but….why??

-By far the most annoying part of the movie is the extensive screentime given to Prof. Trewlawny at the beginning, as if setting her character up for something big. In the book, she actually has a huge role, but I understand the books are different from the movies. Still, why bother building her up if she is completely absent from the second half of the movie? Yes, it was a very sad scene when she was getting kicked out of Hogwarts, but it’s another example of the director/writer just choosing random scenes from the book and throwing it into the movie.

-One of my favorite parts of this book is that we learn that 2 characters who were useless and cowardly joke characters were actually hugely important in the HP-Voldemort saga. Neville could have ended up exactly the same as Harry Potter, but Voldemort chose to kill Harry’s parents instead. Either Harry or Neville was destined to be Voldemort’s enemy, and that was prophesied by Prof. Trewlawney. I understand that the movie can’t do everything that’s in the book, so maybe both these tidbits are unimportant in the film. I could accept that if the film didn’t setup both these plots as if they were very important, but never actually explained them. We see Trelawney as a major character at the beginning, but then she never comes back, nor does Dumbledore explain that the prophecy is hers. We see Neville struggling with the torture of his parents, which happened on the same night Harry’s parents were killed. But then there’s no resolution. No connection between the plots there, so why bother starting them up at all? Why did Trewlawney even need to be in the movie???

-Finally, I felt like the visual effects in this movie were pretty bad. Parts were good, like the battle at the end, but a lot of it was cringingly bad. The centaurs and giant looked awful, they were sort of dark, blurry splotches on the screen. And the flying through London was just so blue-screeny, it made me sad. Speaking of which, that flying scene was another montage!

My new “thing” is bringing words back to the forefront of American dialog. These are tried and true words that need to be reintroduced to the greater population. So give them a shot and spread the magic:

Broham – It’s fun to use surfer speak as a non-surfer. Just call anybody you know a “broham” to be obnoxious, and eventually it will become so obnoxious that everyone will think it’s cool. “Broham” does not fit in the modern vocabulary, so you really have to jam it into sentences.

Examples: “What’s up, broham?” or “That broham is wearing a gnarly t-shirt.” or “Excellent powerpoint presentation, broham!”

So’s Your Mom! – “That’s what she said” and “your mom” are so common these days, but why not reach back to an old classic of “So’s your mom!” It’s best to use this in reply to other people’s observations or insults. Sometimes it’s useful just to shout it out and establish that you are superior to others.

Examples:
Person A: “What’s up, broham?”
Person B: “So’s your mom!”

Person A: “This homework is hard.”
Person B: “So’s your mom!”

Gam-Gams – A very popular word in the olden times, it means a woman’s legs. But because of the mysterious shadows of history, gam-gams can now mean any part of anybody’s body. This maximizes its potential usages.

Examples: “Look at the gam-gams on her!” or “My doctor says I have a strange growth on my gam-gam.” or “Personally, I’m a gam-gams man.”

TA-DA!!! – For centuries, it was used simply at the reveal point of a magic trick, but with new advances in linguistics, you can now use the phrase anytime. I like to think of all my jokes as “verbal magic tricks” so when I unleash the hilarious punchlines, I stand up, open my arms and shout “TA-DA!!” It makes everyone smile, and allows me to be the center of attention.

Examples: “And then she said, ‘Those aren’t life buoys!’….TA-DA!!!” or “How do you like these gam-gams?….TA-DA!” or:

Person A: “This homework is hard!”
Person B: “So’s your mom!……TA-DA!!!”

So those are my latest additions to popular language. Go forth and multiply.

TA-DA!!