SPIDERS ON DRUGS

I *heart* the National Film Board of Canada so very, very much.

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DAVECOBB.COM

With a little help from iWeb, I've spruced up davecobb.com a bit for the New Year. Most of the links still go to content on my old .Mac site, which I'll eventually migrate over.

I'm also hoping to dig up tools to embed other web content; I've found iWeb Enhancer (which re-codes iWeb's CSS sheets to handle non-iWeb code), but due to my utter lack of knowledge (or desire to know) about web scripting, it's a tad clunky.

For a code-clueless guy like me, iWeb is an effective WYSIWYG design tool. Maybe Apple will actually put better HTML tools in later versions...

CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER

fidgetcub and I saw The Curse of the Golden Flower tonight, and it's not quite the movie we were expecting.

Judging by the flashy trailer, and the record boxoffice grosses in China, you'd think it was yet another epic action-adventure like the exciting House of Flying Daggers or the gorgeous Hero or the incredible Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Instead, it's basically a soap opera.

Sure, there's one big battle scene in the last fifteen minutes, and it's pretty impressive. And the preceding one-hundred minutes are filled with some incredible sets and costumes. It's gorgeous and colorful and, for the most part, works as pageantry alone.

But the story just amounted to melodrama. Even the incredible cast were reduced to moustache-twirling soap clichés. It may have some epic historical resonance with Chinese audiences, but to us it was just a big-budget version of those historical costume-drama series that play late-night on AZN.