Dear readers, I have been abroad much this month, and I will continue on this track with a visit to Finland from the 27th until the 5th of January. Before that I probably won’t have much time either, being occupied with pre-christmas tasks…
I hope to post some pictures of my trips to Paris and Milano before Christmas, but I can’t promise anything in this regard.
Archive for 2003
Traveling. More traveling.
Sunday, December 21st, 2003Le premier fois.
Thursday, December 4th, 2003This weekend I will be in Paris for the first time! I have driven along the highway around Paris (never have I been so concentrated as in these 40 minutes driving through Paris rush hour traffic) but I have never ever set foot on the city’s grounds. La terre française. The trip is sponsored by the post-graduate college and we will make exkursions to two sites: Le Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers et La Vilette.
Well, we might also visit one or two cafés on the way…
Big cast. Good cast.
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2003It took a while but yesterday Kerstin and I saw Love Actually. After being bombarded with trailers for the last couple of weeks or even months it seemed inevitable not to go and watch this movie. Also, I really like many of the actors: Heike Makatsch was fun even in the olden days, Keira Knightley is quite thin but also quite charming, Colin Firth fit his character very well, and Alan Rickman is one of my all time favorite actors; even when he is not playing a bad guy such as the sheriff of Notthingham in Robin Hood – The Prince of Thieves. Ah, the sheriff’s death scene. One of the best deaths in film history… *ehem* back to topic
Not every one of the storylines ends happily, which I liked, and there are still enough happy endings and funny moments to make this movie be a worthwile pre-winter entertainment. And I love to listen to Portuguese.
Finally, a day for NWN again.
Saturday, November 29th, 2003It has been about two weeks since I had time to play a bit online, and I am quite excited to meet my online gaming friends again. Yay! Hagen Elsternhorst is back!
People say they don’t like animated movies.
Thursday, November 27th, 2003But when you take them along to watch Antz or, as I did last weekend, Finding Nemo, they like it nonetheless. Is this because they were erring on their preferences? I don’t think so. I think it is because these movies are really nice, even though they are co-produced by Disney. Finding Nemo has a rating of 8.3/10 at IMDb. This is a very high rating, and many better movies have a lower rating there, but it still speaks for the movie, which is really funny and quite wonderfully animated. The trailers do not show the best animations, they seem to focus on the funny shots. The story is perhaps not as good as the Woody Allenesque story in Antz, but it still works if you’re not too opposed to somewhat cheesy father-son relationship stories. The German dubbing was nice, though I would still like to see it with the original voices to be able to compare it (being a nosy ‘I don’t like dubbed movies’ kind of person wanting to distinguish himself from mere mortals).
Getting an RSS feed of my blog.
Sunday, November 23rd, 2003I reposted the link to the RSS feed of this site. With this link you can use the RSS client of your choice to be informed when a new entry for my blog has been written. You don’t use RSS yet and have no idea which client to use? For those of you using a Mac, I can recommend two freeware apps: SlashDock or NetNewsWire Lite. If you are a windows person, you might want to try Feedreader – it has been put on an internet software collection CD-ROM by the German computer magazine c’t and it is a sourceforge project, both being good recommendations. I have no information about RSS readers on Linux… :-(>
Scandinavian camera and British story telling in L.A.
Friday, November 21st, 2003I am getting accustomed to small movie theater screens again. Every time I go to see a movie in the Helia here in Darmstadt, I sit in the same theater, number six. It is small and uncomfortable, and, what is much worse, Marc and I accidentally toppled our popcorn bag very early in the beginning. Talk about leaving the seat blushing because of the sea of popcorn that surrounds you…
However, there are more exciting things to report: Thirteen is a very good movie. Story, camera, setting and acting are all very good. It might be described as a teenager/high school movie photographed in a Dogma-ish way, portraying a lower class social milieu in a new British movie style and set in Los Angeles. It has some very funny moments (especially the chicken scene), several sad/moving moments, and a lot of fast paced story telling to offer. The ending was better than I thought, too. Check out the trailer.
Do the XHTML.
Tuesday, November 18th, 2003Hah. I did it. After reading an encouraging article in the c’t (issue number 23) two weeks ago, I decided to update my website to the XHTML 1.1 standard as recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium. I also changed my own pages to relative size definitions (no px sizes anymore, instead I am now using ems and percentages all over the place). I am quite proud of this. I did not update my start page since I really like the layout and I do not want de-table and change it yet…
From yuck to yeah.
Saturday, November 15th, 2003Lars and I have been to Pizza Hut for lunch today. We shared an x-tra cheesy crust spinach/philadelphia pizza. It was the opposite of delicious – neither crusty nor hot nor spicy nor interesting. It was a bland mixture of dough, sugar and fat, so that both Lars’s felt really bad after swallowing the stuff. To our relief we discoverd the 603 qm – the first really nice cafe/lounge that I have been to here in Darmstadt – to be open on Sundays. The prices are very fair (1 € per espresso) and the crowd relaxed and interesting. After drinking a good hot espresso and trying to look as relaxed and interesting as the others we happily made our way back to the Kraftwerk.
November 15th: corrected encoding for Euro sign
Visitors.
Saturday, November 15th, 2003I am back in Berlin again. This weekend my father is visiting, so I prolly won’t have time to post much. Instead, I will do things like eat excellent duck, like we did today (self-prepared, of course) and take a sip or two from a nice glass of Armangnac. Like it did before writing this post. Skål! Or better: Santé!
Mehrwert zum Buch.
Monday, November 10th, 2003Gestern Herr Lehmann im Kino geschaut. Der Film hält sich sehr nah an die Romanvorlage. Die Umsetzung ist gelungen. Wenn ich mir Herrn Lehmann auch nicht wie Christian Ulmen vorgestellt hätte, finde ich doch, dass er die Rolle gut spielt. Zu Beginn des Filmes hab ich mich mehrfach daran gestört, dass die Dialoge und das Spielen der DarstellerInnen manchmal sehr theaterhaft waren – nach einer Weile ist mir das jedoch nicht mehr negativ aufgefallen. Der schöne Leander ist halt ein Theatermann und das hat auch seine guten Seiten. (Wenn mir im Augenblick auch nicht einfällt, welche eigentlich. Aber man sdarf ja nicht schlecht über’s Theater schreiben.)
Sigourney and the slime.
Sunday, November 9th, 2003I have not noticed anything new in the Director’s Cut of Alien, but it still has been worthwile to watch it. It has been the first time that I have seen this classic movie in a theater and I have to emphasize that this is the proper way to watch it. Check out these featured clips at apple.com.
Marc says: the music is good.
Sunday, November 2nd, 2003There won’t be much debate about the soundtrack of Kill Bill. Even though it is unlikely that it will have as big an impact on party dance music as Pulp Fiction had, the soundtrack is very nice too (and in style similar to Pulp Fiction). Then, there is Uma Thurman, who is a good actor and, of course, extremely good-looking. The rest is more controversial: the amount of spilling of blood and cutting off of limbs in this movie is huge, and I am not sure that this actually pleases me. Some of the fighting scenes are somewhat close to Hero in the way they use color – but in my opinion Hero‘s aesthetics beat those of Tarantino’s movies by several leagues. What remains is a typical Tarantino product with some extra blood and a stylish Lucy Liu. Ah, almost forgot: you will find yourself reminded of Hable con ella in the beginning of the movie. Never knew that Tarantino is an Almodovar fan…