Movies

Gaming / Movies / Uncategorized — 48 Comments
23
May 09

The Best Online Traffic School?

After paying my red light ticket, the epic story described in a previous post, the San Mateo County Southern Branch Court provided me with a list of about 80 approved online schools. Which one to choose? I expected the Internet in all its collective wisdom to provide the answer with a comprehensive site of traffic school reviews including all sorts of evaluation criteria (price, time to complete, use of animations, etc) and user rankings. To my disappointment, no such site seems to exist. I was faced with scanning a large list of URLs to pick a traffic school.

The first approach was to start entering URLs in the browser and try to deduce, from the home page, whether the traffic school would be right. Here’s the list of schools approved by San Mateo County:

http://www.ctsi-courtnetwork.org/home_studies/san_mateo_county/index.html

An ideal traffic school for me would be:

  • Responsive. Pages load fast. No stupid artificial delays like I experienced many years ago when I tried an online traffic school.
  • Efficient. Don’t bug me with graphics, animations, games. Show me the information and let me take the test.
  • Not sneaky. Tell me how much it’s going to be and avoid hidden charges.
  • Try before you buy. Let me see what the content is like before I have to commit.

The third URL I tried look good, much like a few others, the price was competitive ($19.95) but what clinched the deal for me was that I could take the whole course and pay at the end. No risk for me: try the course and stop at anytime if I get annoyed with it.

The winner had the most appealing name: Easy, Fast, Cheap, Online, Traffic school. Here’s my short review of my traffic school experience. Continue reading →

Movies — No Comments
2
Mar 08

Paul Thomas Anderson: more of the same

After seeing Boogie Nights and Magnolia I decided not to see movies from Paul Thomas Anderson again. I found both movies hard to watch for one simple reason: the writer/director hates his characters and revels in seeing them suffer for no apparent reason. It’s really hard to watch a film where the characters go through bad stuff when you don’t care about them at all. And you can’t care for them, because the director does not care for them. It all becomes a spectacle of suffering for suffering’s sake. I don’t have time for that.

But I thought “There Will be Blood” would be different. It has good reviews (for some reason all his movies do), it has Daniel Day Lewis (always good) and to top it off, a music score by Jonny Greenwood. So, we went to see it.

What we found was more of the same. No love for any of the characters. The insane-for-no-reason oil man, the minister, the son, the brother… you can’t get attached to any of these characters. And therefore, when they start suffering, it feels pointless again.

The film was interesting for the first hour or so, as it explores the rough life of early oil explorers and the mechanics of finding oil, the real estate dealings, etc. After that, the movie focuses on the madness of the main characters and it becomes self indulgent with intimate scenes that end up just boring because you don’t care about the characters at all. The level of intensity goes out of proportion, and while that’s good for winning an Oscar (think Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin), it feels contrived in this story.

The movie is too long (by 45 minutes to an hour) and by that time you’ve forgotten the interesting first hour. It would have helped to do the Magnolia trick of ending a very painful film with a whimsical final segment (raining frogs). No such luck in this one.

For me it all comes down to my main criticism: the director hates his characters and enjoys seeing them suffer for no apparent reason. This time I’ve learned the lesson: no more PTA for me.

Continue reading →