Review – The Bourne Legacy

Here we go with a new operative same as the old operative. They’ve replaced Matt Damon with Jeremy Renner, and they stirred in some nonsense about a virus. The IMDb notes indicate that Paul Greengrass, the director of the first two Bourne sequels, suggested that this round be called The Bourne Redundancy. Which hits the nail squarely on the head. See if desperate

Review – The Tenant

This is like two rotten movies for the price of one. The first half of the picture tells the story of a mad scientist whose genetic research ends up infecting one of his two unborn children. The best part about it was Randy Nolnar – who played the scientist – looking just enough like James Lipton to supply a brief “hey, what is that Actors Studio guy doing in this crappy movie?” moment. Then right around midway through, it abruptly shifts course and turns into the umpty-millionth “hey young folks, don’t go into that abandoned asylum” story. The best part of the second half was when the credits rolled. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Zombie Lake

Ugh, what I won’t sit through just to get a movie that starts with Z. Imagine Shock Waves redone as one of those crappy Euro-softcore porn movies that Cinemax used to show late on Friday nights. If you want to watch a stupid zombie movie, the video world abounds in it. And if you need porn, they make this new thing called The Internet. The only thing this picture supplies that can’t be had in abundance elsewhere (thank you, movie gods) is a painfully corny soundtrack. At one point in the Netflix Instantview copy, the sound dies. Oh glorious respite! Unfortunately it comes back later. Additional crime against humanity: getting “Fire Lake” stuck in my head. Who wants to go to Zombie Lake? Seegah! Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Rig

Even though this has to be the zillionth time someone has trapped a group of workers in an enclosed, industrial space with a monster, this actually isn’t too terrible. Or maybe it’s just that I’d watched two or three monumentally horrible movies before taking this one on, so anything that spent any time or money or had actors of any kind was bound to seem good by comparison. An oil rig in the middle of the ocean is attacked by a humanoid fish monster. Mildly amusing

Review – The Messengers 2: The Scarecrow

When I watch movies about evil scarecrows, sometimes I find myself wondering if I were a crow, would I find this scary? Given that crows are actually quite smart for birds, I’m betting even they wouldn’t give a fig for this production. A down-on-his-luck farmer (The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus) digs a Freddy-Krueger-looking scarecrow out of a hidden niche in his barn. He puts it up in his cornfield and then has the gall to be all surprised when evil stuff starts happening. See if desperate

Review – Barrio Tales

If this is any better than an average “moron with a camcorder” movie, that’s due more to improvements in video production technology than to upgrades in the moron department. Three shorts held together by a cheap bracket. Frat boys kill their maid and suffer a horrible curse. Suburban kids are turned into Mexican food by Uncle Tio (doesn’t that mean Uncle Uncle?) and his taco truck. And rednecks who kidnap and torture undocumented workers get a violent comeuppance. This might work as a minor critique of anti-Mexican racism if it didn’t wallow so heavily in the racist muck along the way. It’s also hard to side with the sound editor’s guess that viewers would have more interest in the twangy guitar soundtrack than in the dialogue. See if desperate

Apple, are you kidding me?

Late last Wednesday afternoon I had what by now has become all too familiar: a Mac hard drive crash. Fortunately I learned my lesson after the first three times this happened to me, so this time I had a reasonably current backup. I lost just three or four days, almost all of it stuff I’d uploaded to the web already.

So the issue wasn’t data loss. The issue was the hard drive itself. The problem required a trip to the Apple Store (not exactly right next door), where the computer had to stay for three days. As down times go, that honestly wasn’t too bad. It was actually sort of nice to have an excuse to take a break from connectedness for a little while.

Plus the Apple “Geniuses” were nice to the verge of customer service overkill. One even told me that the company’s in-house code name for the computer I bought is the Ultimate. That made me wonder what their name is for the model with a few extras I didn’t get. Best not to know. I’d hate to think about people unwittingly using a computer known as the John Holmes.

My problem with all this (aside from this being the fourth hard drive crash in less than two years) was that in days gone past I could have tackled the repair at home. If the hardware was seriously torched (and in this case it may have been), then off to the store it would go. As I’d had it only a month or so, it was still under warranty. But at least I could have tried running some diagnostics and attempted to fix it myself before swapping in an expensive replacement part.

But in this brave new world that doesn’t happen. Because I needed to be able to boot from an external system disc so I could go to work on the internal hard drive. And do new Macs come with a CD system disc? They do not. Of course there’s a certain logic to that, as the new Macs don’t have disc drives. But I have an external drive that I use mostly to watch DVDs on the computer. So if I’d had a disc, I could at least have given it a try.

Another option would have been to use a Firewire connection to link the problem child up to an older, functioning computer that I happened to have downstairs. But Apple in its wisdom decided I didn’t need a Firewire port in my new machine.

Here then is the deal: in Apple’s imagineered vision, we’re all going to live in the cloud. We’ll store all our data in the cloud, connect to our peripherals via the cloud, watch movies from the cloud, do everything we do entirely from the fabulous world of the net-connected cloud. For the full effect, read that last sentence aloud while standing on your tiptoes, flapping your arms like a happy little bluebird and employing your most sarcastic tone.

In Apple’s defense, the cloud works great. Until it doesn’t. It provides us with all kinds of new possibilities. But if we rely exclusively on our net connections, we lose a measure of autonomy (not to mention opening our lives up to scrutiny by hackers at the government, corporate and freelance levels). At the very least, we appear to have surrendered the ability to opt in or out at our discretion.

So if Apple is going to watch over us like we’re a mass of ignorant children, then the corporation is going to have to make a bigger commitment to being a better parent. A few more geniuses in the design and assembly stages might save employing fewer at the customer service end. Just a thought.