Movie Review
Pursuit of Happyness
Seen: 1/06/07
Starred: Will Smith, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, Thandie Newton, Brian Howe
Everyone loves a success story about an underdog. So of course a movie about the life story of successful stockbroker Chris Gardner would be a hit. Add in the fact that he spent sixth months of training for this job while battling poverty and trying to keep him and his preschooler son off the streets, and you've got a stereotypical winner, right?
But Happyness has a lot more than the stereotypical happy-story elements. The movie grips you with the hard reality of Chris Gardner's situation from the opening credits, in which shots of Chris Gardner waking up his son and getting ready for work are interspliced with images of homeless people on the streets, being passed up by wealthy businessmen and women.
Before going to see Happyness, I did my research. I read about Chris Gardner's life, his remarkable childhood, his time as a salesman, and his determination to become a stockbroker. This movie does not toy with Chris Gardner's life. It is not loosely based on circumstances. It is authentic down to the night he spent with his son in a bathroom.
Furthermore, the acting is exceptional. Will Smith shines in a role that does not rely solely on his talent to portray funny people. Thandie Newton, who plays Gardner's wife, delivers a tear-jerking performance as a strong mother fighting to keep her family in their apartment and fed. And the premier performance by Will Smith's son, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, is probably the best of all. His chemistry with his father is touching and ernest, and brings little Christopher Gardner's love and trust for his father to life on screen.
Rating:
PS3 vs. Wii
Has one side already won?
This article is intended to relay events taking place in the United States. The facts may not necessarily be the same for other countries.
Okay, you know the whole PS3 and Wii competition thing right? You probably do. But in case you don't, here's the short version: PS3 comes after the PS2. That was some math there, let me tell you. It sports a DVD player, incredible graphics, and a popular array of third-party games. The Wii is the successor to the GameCube. It sports motion-sensitive gameplay and a popular array of first and second party games. The two came out at nearly the same time last year, and both sold out incredulously fast.
With the backstory aside, I continue. While both consoles did very well at the beginning (if you don't count stabbing incidents, that is,) recently one of those consoles began to drop a little in buying. I can actually walk by a store and see one of those consoles in stock, but never any of the other. Care to start placing bets which one isn't selling? It's the PS3.
Didn't see that coming, did you? Sony has led the console market with its PS2 for so long, it seems impossible that it the new one just wouldn't sell. Yet for the past two weeks, I keep walking by my local GameStop store, only to find that they still have that sign up saying they have PS3s in stock. The GameStop employees tell me that no one will buy them. I went so far as to speculate why, and the staff at the store were kind enough to confirm my suspicions.
Let's start with a basic comparison of the two consoles, starting with the price point. PS3s currently sell from 500-600 USD. The Wii sells for 250 USD. (The difference in the PS3 price depends on what size hard drive you want in it.) Now, controllers, memory cards, and other accessories aside, you can see that the PS3 has a significantly higher price than its competitor from Nintendo. Aside from that, the Wii is exceptionally innovative. Though its graphics lack the near-perfection reached by the PS3, it tries to make up for it using innovative gameplay, and several launch released and soon to be released titles, like The Legend of Zelda, Super Smash Bros, Super Mario, and Fire Emblem.
So why did the PS3 go flying off the shelves during the first week of release, then just stop, while the Wii is still hard to get hands on? One staff member at my local GameStop cleared that up for me: sales. It makes perfect sense. The reason a lot of people bought the expensive console was so they could sell it on eBay for profit, not because they wanted to keep it for themselves. But now that they are more widely available, there's no point anymore in trying to hoard and sell them.
What does this mean for Sony? Was their next-gen console a flop, only to be run over by the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo's Wii console? Or is it going to do a 180 soon and rocket back up to being the leader of the console wars? Only time will tell.
Movie Review
Stranger than Fiction
Starring: Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson, and Linda Hunt.
Rated: PG-13 for some disturbing images, sexuality, brief language and nudity.
I gotta say: I don't do comedy usually. Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, all those lovely comedic actors...usually I avoid their movies. But when one of my closest friends slaps me for my career choice and invites me to a movie, how could I turn her down?
Stranger than Fiction stars Will Ferrell as Harold Crick, a tax collector working for the IRS who takes delight in numbers. He counts his steps, the number of strokes he uses when brushing his teeth, and exactly what time he needs to get to the bus stop to get to work on time. Highly calculating, his world is thrown in shambles when he starts hearing the voice of a British female narrating his life nearly every waking moment, and he's the only one who can hear it. After the expected period of time he spends making everyone think that he is insane from hearing voices, the narrator states that one day, when his beloved watch (around which he bases his life) goes on the fritz and has to be reset, it starts a chain reaction that would inevitably and invariably lead to his demise.
Completely freaked out, Crick seeks psychological help. After pleading that he did not have schizophrenia, the psychiatrist advises him to see a literary expert. The expert helps him narrow down who his author might be, so he can perhaps stop her from killing him, just as his life was beginning to become worth living.
Plotwise, I think the movie was excellent. The plot was immersive and intriguing, and you really begin to connect with Crick, and you want to see him escape the prediction of his death. The only complaint I had for the entire movie was that I don't think it was as funny as it was intended to be. That's beside the scene full of naked overweight men in a shower room. Rather disturbing. Other than that, the movie was excellent, and I highly recommend it to anyone.
Rating:
She may not be named Mogli, but Ro Cham H'pnhieng did survive in the jungle for eighteen years. The Cambodian woman and her sister dissappeared when she was just eight when sent to watch cows near the border of Vietnam.
Everyone knows that eating oysters raises your libido. It's a common and well known fact. But remember, people once thought the earth was flat and that pleather was cool. We now know neither of these facts to be true. And according to the FDA, the sexual potency of aphrodisiacs like oysters is based more in folklore than fact.
