The Billionty-Oneth Geek: Older Than 8 Since 1991

Honestly, I don't know what happened to this series. It started off promising and then fell off a cliff real fast. To recap, in 2000, the first Final Destination movie directed by James Wong was released. It was a fun piece of mainstream horror and while not great, it was still pretty darned entertaining. It was followed by a sequel a few years later, directed by David Ellis, which is not only my favourite movie in the series, but I'd even put it up there with some of my favourite horror movies in general. It was funny, campy, and the kills were gory and creative. Not only that, but the story took a unique approach to connecting with the first movie. It was a solid package all around and a great popcorn horror movie. Then came the 3rd movie with the returning Wong, which was not so great. With this 4th movie, I had high hopes going in. You see, it was directed by Ellis who had a strong showing in the 2nd and plus it was going to be in full-length 3D, what could go wrong...

Today was the first in the Reconstruction of Christmas series at FreeChurch Toronto . David McGhee, a former pastor at FreeChurch (Freedomize), kicked things off with a message on Gathering. The artsy peeps did a tremendous job of decorating the place for the occasion. Below are a few pics.

After watching 10 minutes of The House of the Devil , I had to do a double take and almost stopped the movie completely. You see, the movie was so eerily similar to Babysitter Wanted that I thought I was watching the same movie. House tells the story of a young college girl named Samantha who accepts a babysitter ad she saw on campus. She gets to the house with her friend Megan and slowly, things start to get creepy. They arrive at the house to find a certain Mr. and Mrs. Ulman who confess that they don't have a child for Sam to babysit... but rather they need her to babysit their mother. The creepiness factor tips the scale and Sam is reluctant to take the job, but Mr. Ulman offers her $400 dollars to do it because it was of the utmost importance. So $400 for four hours, what could go wrong? Need I mention that this particular night is a full and total eclipse, what could possibly happen? Like I said, the movie is very similar to Babysitter Wanted , but whereas Babysitter bui...

It's time for another edition of Review Haikus; a feature I like to write when I'm too lazy to write out full reviews~!!! The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 Tony Scott schlockfest~! All his movies seem the same. A needless remake. Denzel's a bad-ass. Given up on Travolta. 1 of 2 ain't bad. Public Enemies Well? Disappointed. I expected more from Mann. The pacing felt off. Acting was good though. Man-crush on Depp and Bale. 5 more syllables! Saw VI Yes, another Saw. Harder to tell them apart. Blood, guts, bad story. Why more Saw movies? Each movie makes less and less. End this series now. ====== Later geeks!

Continuing with my Campaign of Cheapness, I finished reading Adland by James P. Othmer this past week at Chapters. I picked it up not knowing anything about it but I knew two things: a.) I wanted to read a book that was somewhat related to business and/or economics and b.) it was on a display shelf, so I figured it had some sort of notoriety. Last year on a trip to New York, me and my friends took a ferry tour of the upper bay in Manhattan. The tour was led by a fast-talking witty young man, chock full of jokes and fun facts about the Big Apple. One of his trivia questions to us was, "what's New York City's biggest industry?". We threw out guesses and if I recall correctly, we guessed the top 2nd to 5th biggest ones, but we couldn't figure out that 1st one. After leaving us stumped for a while, he finally revealed that, yes, the advertising industry was the largest. Those of you who know me or have been reading my blog for a while know that I'm an engineeri...

I think I went into this series with the wrong impression. See, with a title like Wolverine Origins you think that you'd get an origin story or a young Wolverine going through his adolescent age to becoming a young man journeying into adulthood. Well, if you're like me, then you'd be quite mistaken. Written by Daniel Way, Wolverine Origins is actually more of a present day storyline following Logan as he discovers elements of his past. We discover that Wolverine and an American soldier named Nuke were responsible for a village massacre during the Vietnam war, both who were under the influence of the government at the time. With help from Emma Frost (a telepath), it's revealed that Wolverine had a son, who he thought was dead since childhood. His son, Daken, is not only alive and well, but is angry and seeks to kill his own father. That's basically the first 15 issues in a nutshell, but of course I'm missing several elements. Well, needless to say, I didn...

I don't know if it's a good or bad thing but today I watched Public Enemies , a film by Michael Mann with the likes of Johnny Depp and Christian Bale and later I watched The Tournament , a DTV lower budget action movie. For whatever reason, I enjoyed the latter more. I guess it appealed more to my primal sensibilities. Although The Tournament was produced on a low budget, it was still a higher low budget movie than your usual fare. I think this movie is as close to an American version of Battle Royale that we're going to get. Basically every 7 years there's a tournament held by all the big wigs and high rollers that pit 30 different killers together in a last man standing battle. The winner is awarded $10 million dollars. The tournament lasts 24 hours and at that time, if there is no winner, then a tracking device lodged inside their bodies would explode, killing them in the process (just like Battle Royale !). There's all sorts of wacky killers in this movie, f...

I missed The Inglorious Basterds during its theatrical run and it's a shame too because I'm a fool for Tarantino movies. But I finally got to see it this weekend and I'm happy to say that I mostly enjoyed it. I don't think it's his best movie, but it was damned entertaining. The Inglorious Basterds takes place during World War II and tells its story by following three different groups of characters: from Lt. Aldo Raine and his squad of soldiers infamously known as the Basterds, Col. Hans Landa, a Nazi colonel better known as "The Jew Hunter", and from a young Jewish girl named Shosanna, who had her family murdered by Col. Landa. We follow the Basterds in their Nazi killing business (and business is good) as they lay out a plan to take out several high ranking officials all at once. We follow Shosanna as she operates her theater and lays down her own plans in exacting revenge on the Nazis. And of course, the "Jew Hunter" is hot on their trail...

In lieu of the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 this week I just wanted to do a small review of the first Modern Warfare game. I guess that's the problem with adopting a new system in the middle of its shelf life; I'm playing catch-up with all of the big releases over the recent years. Buy hey, I'm not complaining. I welcome all lower price tags! COD4: Modern Warfare originally came out in the Fall of 2007 and was touted as the best shooter (at least on console systems). The game has you playing as Sergeant 'Soap' McTavish who together with a squad of soldiers, travel around the world tracking down a terrorist named Zakhaev. Most of the levels you'll go through are "desert" levels of Middle Eastern cities, but you also get to travel around parts of Russia. The story is told basically only in the segments between each of the levels. For me, the story wasn't the strong point, it definitely has a cinematic feel to it, but let's fa...

When I first read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation , the stories he told of the fast food industry made me so disgusted that it threw me off of fast food for a good 3 or 4 months. So it was with some trepidation when I watched in Food, Inc . knowing that Schlosser had produced it... because... well I just couldn't go off of all food for 3 to 4 months. Food Inc. manages to cover a wide range of topics related to the food industry in an attempt to unravel the insidious and corrupt aspects of the business. We're shown how more and more of all the food products we see in the supermarkets are controlled by fewer and fewer companies. Often on food labelling, we'll see pictures of farms or farmers, yet the food in reality is produced at factories, not farms at all. The great irony. Perhaps one of the most sickening sights we see is at a chicken house operated under the Perdue company. We see how chickens are mass produced and how many of them often die because they can...

You know, I try to avoid writing music reviews if I can. To this date, I think I've done zero reviews, only concert reports. I just find it difficult to review music. I find it's a whole different beast than reviewing a movie, where it's more clear whether it's good or bad. With music, to me whether you like a band/genre or not, relies more heavily on your preference. So even though I don't like country or techno, I can't say they're bad because I don't regularly listen to them and therefore, have no grounds to say whether they are any good. But I was listening to this album this week and it caught me off guard, so I decided to do a little write up. Which brings us to Say Anything's latest album, the self-titled Say Anything released this past Tuesday. I'm not a huge Say Anything fan, just a casual fan. Every now and then I'll fancy a listen to Is a Real Boy , but aside from that I don't really follow them. The album opens up wi...

Welcome to another installment of DTV Madness!!! This time we take a look at Wrong Turn 3 and Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned. Both are horror movies and that's about where the similarities end. Wrong Turn 3 I saw the first Wrong Turn when it originally came out for a theatrical run and I quite enjoyed it thanks to the gory effects, Eliza Dushku *drool*, and Jeremy Sisto. Somewhere between then and now, Wrong Turn 2 was released. I never saw it or even knew it existed, but it's out there apparently. So I saw Wrong Turn 3: Left For Dead last week and actually had a pretty good time with it. There's not much to the plot (well, it is a horror movie). Basically a busload of convicts are being transferred from one prison to another. On their voyage, the bus gets runoff the road and taken down by the mountain men that dwell in the forest. From then on, it becomes a survival story but the mountain men are watching... and are hungry. The story is as predicta...

I was reading John 13 last week in an attempt to catch up with my devotionals and its funny how sometimes you want to do one thing, but you discover something else. At the time of reading, verse 21 stuck out to me where it says that Jesus was troubled in spirit. After reading the whole thing, I took a shower and was just reflecting on the passage that I had just read. Even though my mind was focused on that one line (and how unfathomable is it, just the thought of God being troubled), my head started thinking more about earlier in the scripture, specifically the story of how Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Whenever I read this scripture, the take home for me is always on servant leadership. You have Jesus our Lord, bringing Himself down to our level to perform one of the most menial acts: washing someone else's feet. He said to His disciples that if He being our Lord could bring Himself to do this, that we should learn from His example, and do this for each other. So...