Year: 2004

No Way Back

Having DVD club as neighboors proves to be worth a while. We’ve just watched “No Way Back“. It is a bit old to cause any major shivering in the crowds these days. And even if it wasn’t, it is a pretty average movie.

Russell Crowe playes main part there even before he became popular, so if you like movies with celebrities before they became celebrities, this is one to watch.

Overall, the film is slow and mostly boring. There are a few nice scenes and a couple of funny jokes, but it lacks color. I’d give it a 5 out of 10 which tries to go into 6 out of 10, but fails. Get something else if you have a choice.

Picture of the day

Pear

It seems that I am getting pretty confident with photography of small simple items. Just to confirm that confidence, today I’ve made an excellent (by my measures) picture of pear. In order not to make is boring as Snickers bars from before, I played a little bit with the background. Instead of using a single solid white piece of paper, I used four face tissues put together in to the square. They do seem to compensate for absolute simplicity of the subject nicely.

The album with the only shot is here.

Yet another ultrasound examination

Today Olga went for the second ultrasound examination. Of course, I’ve accompanied her to get all the juicy details and see the kid for myself. According to examination, everything goes as planned. Everything is normal and the baby is growing good. The baby is about 370 grams now. They are able to determine weight by measuring the size of differnt parts of the body, like head diameter and leg bones length.

The important discovery was that according to this examination we are going to have a boy. Don’t you just love the technology? :)

Yet another video tape was recorded and plenty of screenshots were made. I will scan the pictures shortly (as soon as Alex will give me back his scanner). Digitizing video tape seems to be problematic for now due to differences in PAL/SECAM/NTSC/etc. We are still working on the way to do it and as soon as we’ll have it I’ll upload it here for you to enjoy.

Updated (19 Dec 2004 09:43): Video of this examination is here (135 MB).

CinemaBox movie forum

I came across an interesing forum at CinemaBox.net. It is all about movies. There are discussions about different genres, directors, actors, etc. Members do share their movie collections publicly and privately upon agreement. I’ve got a few ideas on what to watch from there. If you are a movie fan – you’ll like it too. The only thing that can stop you is that you have to read Russian. Yup, the whole thing is in Russian. Sorry.

Shaft

Olga and I just watched “Shaft” on DVD. This is a very classy action. The story is kind of predictable, but in the cop movies, I guess, it always is. Goes with the genre probably.

Anyway, this movie has everything a good crime movie must have – a bad ass cop (played by Samuel Jackson, and we all know who he is from his wallet in Pulp Fiction), nasty criminals, lots of car chases, gun fights and lots of cool talk. It’s all in there. And what I like most is that the makers of the film know that they’ve got everything right. They don’t hurry trying to finish up with the movie since they’ve got your money. Nope. No, sir. They take you through it slowly, so that you could appreciate all the details. Great work!

I’d say that this film is easily worth an 8 out of 10. And I was not in the mood for it! Get it and watch it – excellent entertainment for those who like good action and cop movies.