Geschreven

Een jaarlijkse traditie afgerond, gisteren naar het derde deel van The Hobbit geweest. In tegenstelling tot de IMAX versie die we vorig jaar zagen, dit jaar een 'gewone' 3D versie bezocht, in ons eigen Trianon. Tja, wat zal ik er eens van zeggen. Het is vooral veel, veel beweging, veel effecten, veel uitbreiding ten opzichte van het boek, veel bijfiguren. En toch heb ik me ermee vermaakt. Het is er echt eentje voor in de bioscoop, die je gewoon moet ondergaan. Ik sluit me aan bij het artikel Everything They Said About Making Three Hobbit Movies Was True.

Gisteravond naar PJ20 geweest in Pathé in Den Haag. Best een indrukwekkende bioscoop (fijne stoelen!) trouwens, er mag van mij best bij Leiden CS zoiets neergezet worden. Bij binnenkomst werd reeds op concertvolume Pearl Jam gedraaid, dus de sfeer zat er al snel in. De film van Cameron Crowe zelf was erg interessant, vertelde uiteraard de geschiedenis van de band, het prille begin als Mother Love Bone, de komst van Eddie Vedder en later het plotse succes en de gevolgen ervan. Al met al een aanrader, ook voor non-fans. Op Metacritic de nodige reviews.

Not much going on recently. My parents have gone on holiday, to Normandy, Bretagne and thereabouts for a few weeks, so I've been given a list of stuff to record. Can't miss the regular shows now can we? ;-) Oh, and we went to see Ocean's thirteen, which was pretty decent. Basically the sequel they should have made in the first place. I've also been trying to ignore the hype surrounding the soon to be released iPhone. Which is proving rather difficult, because everyone appears to be mentioning it.

I have been quite busy at work though. I've been in charge of creating the protoype for the new WNF site. I received the design a while ago and am now turning it into a decent XHTML framework. Quite a challenge with all kinds of layers and fun with PNG's. Especially in IE6, of course. But it's slowly getting to where it needs to be.

This must be the strangest winter in ages. I'm still waiting for it to get started and all of nature appears to be in spring mode already. It's my birthday in ten days, and I remember last year, it was snowing around that time.

This reminds me, documentary An Inconvenient Truth is showing for free the coming weeks, in Trianon among others. I still haven't gotten round to watching it, so I might give the free viewing a go.

We finally picked a date to go see Babel, which had been on the to-see list for a while now. Despite heavy downpours we arrived at the cinema on time, bought the tickets and found a seat. What we took for previews ('hey look, it's Daniel Craig') turned out to be Casino Royale, the new James Bond. We ended up in the wrong room. Sigh. We did end up staying, as this one too was -though much further down- on the aforementioned to-see list. And it was actually quite good. I'd been ignoring Bond for quite a number of years now, but this one kept me interested all the way through.

Oh, and happy birthday Saint Nicholas.

Though I'm back at work on monday, at the moment I'm still enjoying my time off. Went to Amsterdam on wednesday, browsed most of my favourite shops, was amazed by the sheer amount of tourists in our fine capital. Going to the cinema tonight, to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

Went to see United 93 last week. A real time account of the events on United Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked on 9/11 that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers foiled the terrorist plot. Pretty impressive and luckily far less emotional than I expected.

Very different, but one I'd like to see when it finally opens over here, is Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. I've read some good reviews for it. I'm not at all driven by the knowledge that the cinema is one of the few places with airconditioning. ;-) Also, I've recently watched trailers for The Prestige (2006) and The Fountain (2006), both due out later this year and both looking quite interesting. Added to my ever-growing IMDb 'To See'-list.

My Tom Cruise boycott turned out to be very short lived, since I was invited to go to Mission: Impossible III yesterday. Though not terribly original, it's definitely one to see on the big screen. Here are some reviews and here's an interesting write-up.

Let's see, what else is new. Oh, Dutch painter Karel Appel died earlier this week. He is to be buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. And ofcourse we're celebrating Bevrijdingsdag today, which is celebrated each year on May 5 in the Netherlands to mark the end of the German occupation during the Second World War.

Went to see the movie 'Munich' last night, in the Trianon theatre.

Steven Spielberg directs an international cast in Munich, a gripping suspense thriller set in the aftermath of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munch Olympics. This dramatic exploration inspired by true events follows a secret Israeli squad assigned to track down and kill the 11 Palestinians suspected to have planned the Munich attack -- and the personal toll this mission of revenge takes on the team and the man who led it.

To find out more on the actual events, try Wikipedia on the Munich massacre. For reviews of the movie, try Metacritic. Also quite interesting, the article 'Photographing "Munich"' by the movies unit photographer Karen Ballard.