fine whine

War of the worlds may have been ripe for remaking, but this year's attempt wasn't a worthy successor to the 1955 award-winner. It wasn't even as good of a movie.

It wasn't the worst movie we watched tonight, but it's definitely among the top three. The other two were Dead presidents and Benny & Joon. That last one was least worst of the bunch, but by no means a fantastic film.

Compared to the other two, though, it was fine art.

Some bits of it are pure brilliance. The idea of a poker game with non-monetary bets and raises is quite well done, in no small part due to the great cast. The way Sam makes mashed potatoes and grilled cheese are classic scenes, too, though nothing in comparison to Johnny Depp's Buster Keaton work. Aidan Quinn is just creepy, though, and far outshined by everyone else on screen. The screen is a bit muddled by the cinematographer's choice of filters and whatnot for the lenses: most of the movie is shot through a mesh (basically a pair of nylons) and the higher-fidelity of the DVD presentation makes that practice all the more visible and distracting.

More distracting, though, was the first four-fifths of Dead presidents, which resembled more The deer hunter than the heist movie that the commercials I remembered would have me believe. Chris Tucker shows that he can, in fact, act without being completely annoying, but little else is all that noteworthy. I much preferred Chris Rock's serious turn* in New Jack city when I watched that last week. But not by much.

* As opposed to every other role he's apparently ever played (save maybe for CB4, which I haven't seen), such as Dogma which I also recently re-watched.

Even since Carina wrote about 43 Things I've wanted to make a list of my own on the site. It offers people a very simple interface for making a 43-item to-do list of sorts*, and easy access to items and lists from other members. It took me some effort and thought, but I too have written my 43 things.

I've even begun working on some of them. This one is rather specific but still one that I want to do. The 43things site lets me add updates and even pictures to show what I've done.

What I'm doing, I should explain, is making the wishlist feature of online DVD retailer DeepDiscountDVD more usable. The way it works on the site is this: you add discs to your wishlist and then email the list to the people you hope will buy them for you. Other wishlists, such as the ones Amazon offers, are pages available online that link back to the site and can be accessed and updated easily without spamming people with more emails.

So the script I've created so far takes the email from DDD (which is sent to a mailbox I've created just for this), scans through the titles and links, and grabs DDD's cover art image links, and links those to the pages to buy the discs. My next steps are to cache links, so that I'm not hitting DDD's servers many times to get the same data, and to create some sort of presentation better than just the cover images.

Then again, it does look neat with just the pictures. Check it out.

* Other 43-item list sites provided by the creators are 43 Placess and 43 People. They are all linked together by userid and equally easy and fun to use.