June 30, 2005

Nothing too exciting to post about from the past couple days. When I am not working I watch quite a bit of TV and movies during the week. Lately I have been watching two new shows: Into the West and 30 Days.

Into the West is one of those shows that isn't all that great, but since I started watching it, I feel like I should keep watching it just to see what happens. Into the West is a mini-series produced by Steven Spielberg. I loved Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers, so I was very excited when I heard about this show. I think the thing that I really don't like about Into the West is that there are so many characters and the time skips forward so fast. It makes it very difficult to care about the characters and be interested in what happens with the story.

30 Days on the other hand is a very interesting show. It was created by Morgan Spurlock, the guy that made Super Size Me (I was really mad when he didn't win the Oscar). In the show, a person spends 30 days living a different lifestyle. The first episode was about living off of minimum wage jobs, and the second episode is about the use of steroids to help middle-aged people feel younger. So far the show has been really good.

Other than watching TV and movies, I play quite a bit of Counter-Strike: Source. I usually play it at least a little bit every day, always online. My computer is 3 years old, so I have to turn the graphics quality waaaay down. Even then, it still runs like crap. I guess I just have to put up with it until I can afford a new computer. I wasn't doing very well tonight for the first half, but then I really picked it up at the end. I think I might actually be getting better though...

June 29, 2005

I'm a little behind on my blogging, so I will have to cover the last few days all at once. I got back to Manattan Monday after spending the weekend in Kansas City with Jermaine. We had quite a full weekend.

Sunday night we met up with a few friends for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. I had heard so much about that place, but I had never been there myself. I heard it was expensive, and it was a little more pricy than the average sit-down restaurant but not too bad at all. Many people I had heard talk about The Cheesecake Factory said that they have been there a few times but have never had the cheesecake. Now I can understand why. The meals are pretty big themselves, but the slices of cheescake are also pretty big. It took four of us to eat one piece of key lime cheesecake. It was really really good though. The Cheescake Factory also has a very large menu. It took me quite a while to figure out what I wanted to eat.



After dinner, Jermaine and I talked to our friends for a while longer and then decided to watch a movie. We had planned on seeing a movie in a theater, but it was 8:15 and all the movies we wanted to see were only showing around 8:00 (which had already passed) and 10:30 (which was a little too late for us). I just thought it was weird that every single theater in Kansas City was pretty much using the same showtimes for their movies. You would think that one of them would change it up a bit. We finally decided to just rent a movie at Blockbuster. We had been given free movie rentals from the Casino in Topeka several weeks ago.

It had been several years before I had set foot in a Blockbuster, and now I remember why. I was pleased to see that they had finally moved out most of the VHS tapes and replaced them with DVDs, but it was still very difficult to find a movie that we wanted to see and that was not totally checked out. The other thing that I noticed was that Blockbuster uses a very loose definition for "new release". Their new release movies include DVDs that came out months and months ago. One movie I noticed on the new release shelf was Dogville. I remember watching that movie on DVD at least a year and a half ago. It's a very good movie, but I think it's about time to take it off the new releases.

Jermaine and I finally decided on The Aviator. My brothers told me it was pretty good, and Dillon's only had it in Full Screen for some reason when I tried to rent it before (I hate "Full Screen"). I knew it was somewhat of a long movie, but I didn't know that it was over two and a half hours. Still, it was pretty good. Not Scorsese's best movie ever, but I liked it. Cate Blanchett deserved her Oscar.

Monday night I watched True Crime, which I purchased for $2 at the Dillon's store in Kansas City. This movie was somewhat entertaining, but I thought parts of the story weren't very well written. Again, not Clint Eastwood's best performance as an actor or a director, but it was alright. For $2, it's still a great deal.

I also watched this week's episode of Family Guy when I got home. I was worried for a couple week's that the show was not going to be as funny now that it was back on the air, but that doesn't concern me as much anymore. I still think the show is quite a bit different than it used to be. It seems like the writers feel as though they can get away with more now that the Family Guy DVDs have sold so well, and it appears that they would be right. The show seems to take jokes a little bit further than it did in the first three seasons.

My friend Kyle finally talked me into watching the pilot episode of Firefly last night. He and his girlfriend have been talking about it all summer. They said it was really good and they don't understand why it was ever cancelled. From what I hear, there is quite a following for this show, and although it was cancelled, Fox did make the show into a movie now. That seems a little weird to me, but maybe the show's DVD sales will help it make a comeback just like Family Guy. I thought the show was pretty good. I was afraid that I wouldn't like it because it seemed like it might be a Star Trek type show. I seem to be very picky about what kinds of science fiction that I enjoy, but this show wasn't really science fiction as much as it was a futuristic show.

June 26, 2005

Today I was interviewed for an entertainment survey!