Been watching lots of movies over the past few weeks.
Just saw The Cooler starring William H Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin (and apparently he was nominated for the Best supported Actor Acedemy Award for his performance).
Nice interesting little yarn, surprisingly funny in places particularly even though I dont usually enjoy the humour of a really awkward situation.

In sharp contrast I watched DareDevil this weekend which wasn't even as good as I remembered it. The first time I watched it I enjoyed it substantially more than Spider-Man, I still wouldn't have claimed it was a better movie than Spider-man though. As often happens my expectations of the movie and seeing too much hype spoiled my enjoyment of Spider-man.
The annoying trailers that I couldn't skip past at the start of the DVD I'd gone and paid for annoyed me plenty to start with, hopefully I'll be less annoyed at having bought it when I have watched the extras on the second disk. I dont mind Ben Affleck and he plays Matt Murdock well but I must have blanked out the narration (usually a sign of terrible (under)writing and this is no exception), the origin back story felt overly long, wheras the scenes with the lovely Jennifer Garner felt too short :). I could hardly bear the horrifically stupid performance by Colin Farrell. Which moron thought it would be a good idea to have him play it Irish? They made a clown out of what should have been a ruthless borderline pyschopathic assassin, putting him in a really awful "non-costume", he would have been less silly in superhero spandex (or a black jumpsuit). I'm still surprised how well Michael Clarke Duncan works as the Kingpin, even though the original character was a huge white man (a mountain of muscle not fat), but I think more could have been done to make him seem larger than life and a much more menacing villian.
DareDevil doesn't live in Gotham city, he lives in the same New York city as Spider-man and although the technicolour parade in Spider-Man was a bit much, the attempt at dark and gloomy does not seem quite right in DareDevil. The movie seems to take span maybe a few weeks but I think it would have been more interesting if they had tried to make it span months and tried to imply more happening and build more tension. I would probably still go and see a sequel if they make it although I'd much rather see if they can make a decent movie out of Elektra.

I finally saw Pirates of the Carribean and despite assurances that it wasn't as crap as I might expect a Disney movie based on theme park ride to be I was still sceptical. I watched it anyway because Keira Knightely is in it, oh and Johnny Depp too, doing his best impression of Keith Richards. In spite of myself I really enjoyed it and even watched most of the DVD extras.

"Dances with Samuri", better known as The Last Samuri starring Tom Cruise, which I could have done without and Ken Watanabe who was great. Japanese culture is very interesting but I couldn't help wondering how authentic the movie. The movie was long but worthwhile.

American Pie 3 was better than the second one but the first movie had the element of surprise and the lovely Shannon Elizabeth.
American Pie 3 was to balance out the other movie I rented, 28 Days Later (was very careful not to rent 28 days. It worked pretty well, interesting story Cillian Murphy was cool and good o' Brendan Gleeson is there too. I enjoyed it and it provided me with another Zombies which should keep me going until Resident Evil 2 comes out but I'm not likely to watch it again.

Ben Stiller still isn't funny but I still sat through Zoolander and Starsky and Hutch. Better than watching TV.

Tomorrow I'm going to see a preview of Nathalie a French Film starring Emmanuelle Beart.

I was wondering how after deleting several CD ISO images I was still taking up so much diskspace. I had forgotten to check my virusmail folder, between May and June I had accumulated over 35000 messages resulting in close to 1.2 Gigabytes of Virus email. That does not inlcude the other spam and junkmail that I have been filtering for ages or the messages that regularly make it through to my inbox.

Dia 0.94 prerelease 1 works beautifully.