TheFranciscos.Net

It was quite a labor-intensive weekend for me as I re-stained my deck. Our deck is not that huge, but for someone who’s as lazy as I am, it was pretty tiring to do. I think I did a pretty good job with it though. I’ll post pictures when I get time to take them.

We also saw a James Taylor last Friday. That was a lot of fun, although Aileen was a bit bored. James Taylor is not really one of those artists who you stand up and dance for. He’s more of a “sit down and relax” type of artist, so that’s what most people did. He played a lot of his great songs, including “You’ve Got A Friend”, “Carolina In My Mind”, “Your Smiling Face”, “Copperline” and my personal fave, “Up On The Roof”. For a guy who’s easily into his mid-60s, JT still sounds great.

I’ve been feeling better today than I’ve had throughout the whole week. I got some good sleep last night (around 7 to 8 hours) so that helped out a lot. Zoe’s been starting a habit of going to our room in the middle of the night

On the news front, it’s a sad day for male tennis fans throughout the world …. Anna Kournikova may be retiring soon.

Comic book lovers have been spoiled lately when it comes to movies. We’ve had a slate of pretty good flicks as of late – X2, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Hulk come to mind. Most have been generally been good, some have also been stinkers (e.g. Hulk). In general though, this genre of movies have been consistently entertaining. So how does the “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (starring Sean Connery, one of Aileen’s favorite actors) fare?

In a few words, it was extraordinarily just okay. I thought it was a pretty good popcorn movie, but apparently critics just hate it. Rotten Tomatoes has an 18% rating for it, which is probably one of the lowest ratings for a movie I’ve seen at that site. It’s certainly not as good as other comic-based movies like X2 or Spider-Man, but it’s at least as good as Daredevil and certainly better than The Hulk. The problem for this movie is that, there are some plot points that aren’t fleshed out well enough, such as the motivation for Mina Harker to join, or the reason why the League journeyed to Paris. For that matter, that plan that they worked out to stop the bombs underneath Venice was just plain confusing. It was also dragging at some points in the movie. Still, it was entertaining enough to see all these literary figures like Alan Quatermain (whose name is strangely mispelled as Quartermain in this movie), Captain Nemo, Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray, Mina Harker, the Invisible Man, and even Tom Sawyer, joining up and creating their own version of the Justice League.

As far as it being faithful to the source material (the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill), it certainly deviates a lot from it. The original leader of this ragtag team was Mina Murray (maiden name of Mina Harker), and Alan Quatermain is the reluctant hero who had doubts about himself. Of course, when Sean Connery says that he wants to be Quatermain, the writers had to find a way to make him the lead character. In addition, Tom Sawyer is nowhere to be found in the original book as well. The producers probably thought that to appeal to American audiences, they needed to add in an American figure. Anyway, if you take the book and the movie as totally independent works, you can certainly enjoy each one separately. Of course, you’ll always have purists that will say that an adaptation of a book absolutely needs to be faithful to the book, but I’m not one of them.

Pluses:

– Acting and casting was very good.

– Good action.

– CGI was decent enough.

Negatives:

– Dialogue was a bit campy. Assumes that the audiences are morons who don’t know who these characters are.

– Some parts just didn’t make sense. How could the canals of Venice accomodate a submarine of the size that the Nautilus was? How come Tom Sawyer is a CIA agent? How did Tom figure out how to drive a car?

– Not enough explanation on what the characters are supposed to be doing.

My Overall Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Finally updated the picture gallery, after 3 months. Click here to check out the new photos.

Just finished up the newest Harry Potter book – Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix last night. The book was released about three weeks ago (June 21st to be exact), but I only started reading it after Aileen got done with it. My thoughts? It was easily the best book in the series so far. These tales of Harry Potter and his gang of wizards just seem to be getting better and better with every book. The series kicks into high gear for this one, with a revelation that sets the tone for the rest of the series. I don’t really know how to explain the parts that I love without spoiling it, but rest assured that it’s very much worth the 2+ year wait. Stephen King, in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, puts the Harry Potter series up there with such literary classics as Alice In Wonderland, Wizard Of Oz and The Lord Of The Rings. I couldn’t agree more. These books definitely deserve the “instant classic” status.

The bad thing about this is the agonizing wait for the next book.

In other Harry Potter news – Gary Oldman as Sirius Black for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban movie? I can see that working somewhat. He can be a good scruffy-looking character, as shown in Air Force One and True Romance, and there’s no doubt he’s a phenomenal actor, showing that he can play pretty much anything. Aileen thinks that Sirius should be more heavy in the good looks department (maybe Viggo Mortensen?). At any rate, the movie casting has been right on the money so far, so I trust that the next movie will be at least as good as the previous ones. I had my doubts about Kenneth Branagh as the vainest wizard of them all, Gilderoy Lockheart, but they managed to pull it off nicely.

With the new movie not coming out until Summer 2004 and only God and JK Rowling knowing when Book 6 is coming out, the Harry Potter withdrawal now starts…

Just had a great, relaxing 4th of July weekend. Met up with some friends from Philly and some high school buddies in North Jersey for a wedding. I think we put about 1000 miles total on Aileen’s car during the weekend.

In Philly, we also had a nice, relaxing time, just hanging out with friends, playing billiards and mahjongg. We stayed at Eugene and Mae’s new townhouse in Exton, which was really, really pretty. Nice job on the paint! The club house was also very nice.

We must have attended one of the best receptions I’ve ever been to. The place was an extremely elegant Victorian-style building in Clifton, NJ. The cocktails started at around 6:30 PM and the food started coming. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a huge variety of hors d’eouvres served as the ones served at that wedding. I swear that there must have been at least 20 or so different ones. There were so many that by the time the reception proper started, most of the guests were already full.

Of course, what made the wedding fun was seeing several old high school friends of ours. The groom is a friend that I’ve known for 12 or more years now and he invited several of our batchmates that lived on the east coast. We usually have a gathering every year in Maryland, but haven’t been able to attend any since we moved to Pitt, so it was nice to see everybody.

It was an alcohol-free weekend for me since that incident last Thursday was still fresh in my mind. I didn’t even take advantage of the open bar at the wedding… that’s so unlike me. I really must be getting old. 🙂

Can I just say that I had a pretty bad “college flashback” experience last Thursday? Here’s what happened – I invited a couple of friends over to our house for a barbecue since it was the beginning of a long weekend. I figured what better way to start it with good friends and good food? Well, one of those friends thought that that would all go best with a bottle of good ol’ Bacardi Gold. I mustn’t have realized how much I drank, but during the night, I think I finished at least half that bottle – maybe as much as 3/4. It was a great night for drinking and eating, but not for my stomach. At the end of the evening, my stomach decided that it had had enough. Like a dam, it released everything it the way it came in. Puking was the last thing I remembered of that night… I woke up the next day in bed not knowing how I got there.

I really don’t think I’ve had an experience as bad as that since Aileen and I shared a bottle of vodka way back in college. Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll be drinking that way for a while.

This summer has certainly been a great one for movies, especially for geek fanboys like me. Among the best I’ve seen are X2:X-Men United (gets my vote for the best comic movie ever) and Finding Nemo (the best movie I’ve seen all year). Matrix Reloaded was a bit disappointing – 4 weeks after seeing it, I’m still trying to comprehend what the hell was going on in that one. The biggest let-down so far though has been “The Hulk”.

“The Hulk” is the movie I’ve been looking forward to the most. I love Ang Lee as a director – I think that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was among the top 10 best movies in the 90s. I also loved The Ice Storm. I’m also a big comic book fan, and also watched the old Lou Ferrigno TV series. All the ingredients were there for me to like it, so what happened? Somehow, it all just didn’t work out.

What worked:

– The CGI. Surprisingly, The Hulk was very believable. I loved the scene where he was being chased by the helicopters in the desert. Classic comic book Hulk there. Also loved it when he said “Puny human!” – great nod to comic book fans.

– The Stan Lee and Lou Ferrigno cameos.

– The conversation between Bruce and his father towards the end was extremely good acting.

– Jennifer Connely always works for me.

What didn’t:

– Hated the way the scenes were intercut. The “comic-book” style just didn’t work for me. Instead of conveying a “comic-book” look, it just became extremely confusing with too much information going on in a single scene. My eyes were getting tired of looking everywhere. I felt like I was watching a tennis match.

– The movie was way too long. They could have cut at least 15-20 from the movie.

– You never really make a connection with any of the characters. They could have done a better job establishing the relationship between Bruce Krenzler (don’t ask) and Betty Ross. That way, Betty taming the Hulk would make more sense.

– Finally, the ending was too over-the-top for me. Plus, it was too dark to actually comprehend what exactly was going on.

I read from forums that this movie was greatly compromised by Ang Lee because of pressure from Universal to make it more commercial. In that case, I hope they come out with a “director’s cut” when the eventual DVD comes out. As it is now though, I would rate this movie as a 2 out 5.

Work, work, work… that’s all I do. So last Tuesday, I decided to have some fun and let my hair out. What better way to do that than to watch a Poison/Skid Row/Vince Neil (of Motley Crue) concert? Ridiculously long hair, heavy metal, and fat girls who might have been hot once upon a time in the 80s. I never really was a big heavy metal fan back then. I was always more into punk/new wave and in that era, you weren’t allowed to like both heavy metal and punk. You had to be one or the other and swear your allegiance to it. But there were songs that were just so catchy that you couldn’t help but like them. You had to keep it a secret though, or your friends would laugh at you. So underneath my The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Clash and Ramones records were heavy metal ballads like Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”, Whitesnake’s “Is This Love?”, Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” and my personal fave – Skid Row’s “I Remember You”. So when I found out that I could get tickets to watch two of my favorite hair metal bands back then for free, all I needed to know was when.

Strangely enough, the crowd at the concert was a mix of young and old, but mainly leaning toward the young late-teens to early-20s crowd. Some of these kids must have been just 5 when these songs were new, so I couldn’t really understand the appeal for them. Some of them were proudly sporting their Poison 2002 World Tour t-shirts to show that they were also there last year. Anyway, no matter what age you were, the performances were just amazing. Unfortunately, we missed the Skid Row set. I was thinking that Vince Neil would go first since he was the least known (at least that’s what I thought), Skid Row would go next, and Poison would end the show. It was just my luck – Skid Row and Vince Neil went in the opposite order and so what we started with was the tail end of the Vince Neil set.

I was kinda disappointed that I didn’t get to see Sebastian Bach and company, but Poison’s set was amazing. It was a throwback to 80s arena rock. Explosions and fireworks galore. Poison sang a decent set, including some songs that I kinda knew but had no idea was theirs. Of course, the “show-stoppers” (as Uncle Joe would call them) were of course “Something To Believe In” and “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”. All in all, it was a great night to see one of the bands I like – and best of all, I got to watch them for free.

I’ve gotta hand it to people like Mona (Renaissance Girl) and Mike (Just Another Geek’s Blog) who despite their seemingly hectic careers and lives, always find the time to write entries on their blogs. I’ve been burned out for the past month or so just from the stress of my own work, Aileen’s schedule, acting almost like a single parent for most of May, and at the same time trying like hell to lose weight(!). Something had to give, and I just chose to give up this blog for a while.

Some things that happened during the past month and a half:

– We spent a few days going around Williamsburg checking out the sights. Williamsburg is the site of the first English colony here in the States, and it’s pretty interesting to see how they try to preserve and recreate what it was like to live back then. The “Historic Williamsburg” area is the place to see down there, with a small town being preserved the way it was back in the 1600s. The Governor’s Palace is the building that is definitely the must-see one, decorated with colonial weapons and musical instruments from the past. Coming from a foreigner’s perspective, I thought that it was a great way to learn more about this country I’m now living in and understand how civilization here started.

The main reason why we did the 6 to 7 hour trip though (and don’t laugh) was to eat at Captain George’s Restaurant. Great, great food. Definitely the best seafood buffet I’ve experienced in the States, although I’ve never been to Maine, which I hear also has great cuisine. Was it worth the drive? Aileen and I definitely think so.

– We also had a nice Memorial Day weekend with some visits from our friends from Philly and New York City. That weekend was also when the annual Pittsburgh Folk Festival happened. Aileen and I were asked to man the Philippine booth. Thank God I’ve been losing weight or I would never have fit in that barong we borrowed.

Looks like our company made the news this week – click here