I got to try Sylvie’s cooking today. She cooked a savoury rice and barley dish that I liked. Not too bad at all in my opinion. I also found a way to restore my nuked Galeon portal page. Galeon keeps three backups of your bookmarks in files called bookmarks.xbel.[0-2] in the .galeon directory underneath your home directory. The bookmarks.xbel.0 file is the most recent backup (a day or so old) while the bookmarks.xbel.2 file is the oldest (three or so days old).
It occurred to me that I painted a rather ugly picture of my housemates in my last blog entry. My housemates are really great, and I don’t think I’d find better ones anywhere. I’m just learning to deal with the idea of having other people live in my house, I guess.
It was Nigel’s 22nd birthday yesterday. We also celebrated my Uncle’s 50th birthday at my grandmother’s house. Afterwards Alex, Terry (two of my cousins), Nigel and I went out to celebrate Nigel’s birthday on our own. It’s the first time I’ve been clubbing in Redcliffe. Apparently the club we went to is the only club in Redcliffe. Alex seemed to know almost everyone that was there! It wasn’t too bad in the end. It filled right up and the place started rocking. It’s the first time in some time I did some dancing without having first drunk copious amounts of alcohol. I enjoyed it, and I think Nigel did too.
Today we watched Vanilla Sky and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. The Vanilla Sky DVD was damaged and the PS2 wouldn’t read it at all. I took it back to Blockbuster and they gave me another copy of Vanilla Sky as well as another DVD of my choice. I chose The Blair Witch Project, which I still haven’t seen.
Vanilla Sky was excellent. I hadn’t read or heard much about it beyond the trailer, and it wasn’t at all what I envisioned it to be. It turned out to be exactly the kind of movie I like. It’s a tragical love story, with a liberal sprinkling of science fiction and a happy ending. Perhaps sprinkling isn’t the right word to use, because that kind of implies that elements of science fiction are interspersed throughout the film. This is not the case at all. You don’t realise it has anything to do with science fiction until very close to the end. I won’t reveal the ending here, in case you haven’t seen it. I adored Penelope Cruz in this movie. It’s the first of her movies I have seen. I’ll have to see a few more now. So why do I say the movie is a tragedy? David Aames (played by Tom Cruise) is a guy who has everything. He has money and good looks. He can have any woman he wants; a fact that is impressed upon him by his best friend, Brian Shelby (played by Jason Lee). On the day he falls in love with Cruz’s character, Sofia Serrano, he finds himself in a horrific car accident in which his current sexual partner, a suicidal nymphomaniac played by Cameron Diaz, deliberately drives the car off a bridge and into a cement wall. She is killed and David’s face is horribly disfigured, but it also changes David as a person. However Sofia loves him the same until David murders her. Or does he? And did Sofia really take him back after the accident or is David’s mind playing tricks on him (and us, the audience)? I’ll leave it at that. I might watch this movie again before returning it to the video store.
But what can I say about Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? Not much. Silly, stupid, crazy and cheap are words that immediately come to mind. But fun nonetheless, as long as you can put up with a torrent of explitives. The movie actually boasts a star studded cast. It features Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Lee and Chris Rock. There’s are also appearances from Shannen Doherty, Mark Hammil, Carrie Fisher, Jason Biggs and James Van Der Beek. The premise of the movie is this: Jay and Silent Bob are peeved at people on the Internet saying bad things about them and they want to do something about it. Well, actually, they are saying bad things about a couple of comic strip characters who are based on Jay and Silent Bob. The comic strip is about to be turned into a movie, and so they set out to prevent the movie from being made. On their journey from Jersey to Hollywood, they get caught up in a diamond heist among other side shows. This movie is entertaining if you’re in the right mood or alternatively (I’d hazard to guess, because I really wouldn’t know for sure) ingested the right drugs.
We concluded a big day of movie watching by viewing The Runaway Bride, which screened on Channel 7 this evening. It starred Julia Roberts and Richard Gere (the same duo from Pretty Woman). Julia Roberts played a woman (maggie Carpenter) who has left her groom standing at the alter on more than one occassion, and Gere plays a newspaper columnist (Ike Graham) who reports on her exploits. Taking offence at the column, Maggie writes to the newspaper and gets Ike fired. Ike decides to pay Maggie a visit to see if the things he wrote about her are true (he wrote that she was a man-eater and so on). Being a romance, you can probably guess where the story goes from here. Not a bad movie, but not a great one either. There are much better romance movies out there.
I also managed to fit in a load of washing and I cleaned the bathroom and toilets. All in all, a very nice Sunday, thank you very much!
