Michael Bevilacqua

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us. Please comment here.

Great movie. Excellent acting, screenplay and story.

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us. Please comment here.

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us. You can comment here or there.

I’m healing well. I felt strong enough to head to Physical Therapy at the YMCA the other day without my cane. I also arrived an hour too early and had to kill some time. I was planning on picking up my blood thinner medication refill on the way back from the “Y” so I just went over to Target and picked up it and a Starbucks Cafe Mocha and played with my iPhone for a half hour.

Today however, I am extremely weak and sore. My body is not happy with me for some reason. This, combined with other mental and emotional problems happening in the house are starting to wear on me a bit. This has been, and well… is one of the most challenging situations I’ve put myself through in a long time. Recovery is going well though. And I can’t ask for much more than that. A little at a time. I have to stay focused on that.

In my spare time while not doing work related duties from home I’ve been watching more of the Blade Runner Ultimate DVD collection. So far, my favorite portion is DVD 5, which contains an ultra rare version of the Blade Runner Work Print version of the film. But, what makes it are the extras. And wow. The Work Print has a commentary over the entire version by Paul M. Sammon, author of Future Noir: The making of Blade Runner. He reviews the Work Print much like professionals review Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and rightfully so as this movie is the Citizen Kane of SciFi as far as I’m concerned. He covers this version in such great detail it is this reason alone why you should consider purchasing the set.

The other feature on this 5th disc is the Making of the Final Cut, which points out the tremendous amount of work performed to correct the many filming and continuity problems with the different releases. It’s very impressive how they used CG to enhance and get the scenes working better. And don’t worry, none of that George Lucas Jabba the Hut extra CG crap… the only reason I still own a VCR, so when I do want to watch Star Wars I have to break out my original Trilogy VHS set so I don’t get upset that he had to go and ruin a favorite few movies and end up turning it off…

Hate:(

Love:)

I’ve also been working on finding a way to get Linux back onto my laptop without having it interfere with my WinXP install. Obviously using a dual boot setup would work fine only, with the OEM install, installing into a single partition was not an option. The installer would repartition the entire disk no matter what I would do. Fortunately, Elizabeth turned me on to Ubuntu’s NTFS resize function. Granted, no matter what I do, no Debian nor Ubuntu release will ever run on this machine without a lot of work around on my part. So I simply downloaded the text based installer of Ubuntu, burnt it to disk, backed up my WinXP install, defragged (a few or more times), and resized my NTFS partition. I can happily say that Ubuntu’s gparted implementation successfully resized the 100G partition to 50/50. I was then able to install Gentoo 64-bit, or try to. I tried a few times to get AMD64 working, but ran into many strange build errors. I ended up sticking with 32-bit x86 optimized to the K8 processor spec. I’m happy to say I have a working Linux Laptop again.

Elizabeth also introduced me to Last.fm’s Linux based player, which is available in Portage and for Debian based distributions using apt:

* media-sound/lastfmplayer
Latest version available: 1.4.1.57486
Latest version installed: 1.4.1.57486
Size of files: 7,129 kB
Homepage: http://www.last.fm/help/player
Description: The player allows you to listen to last.fm radio streams
License: GPL-2

Very fun stuff. I know I’ll be spending some time in Last.fm’s player in the next few weeks.

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us. You can comment here or there.

Our good friend Ian bought Elizabeth and myself the Limited Edition Blade Runner Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition.

It arrived in the mail yesterday. Caligula was even more excited than I was to get it open and begin enjoying crystal clear, subtitled movie magic and special features for one of the greatest films ever created. Around 5PM I began to happily enjoy segments of this magnificent collection. I watched, in their entirety, the International Theatrical Version which contains a few more detailed violent scenes and the original neo-noir narration. After this I watched “Dangerous Days - The making of Blade Runner”, the longest, most detailed documentary on the making of a movie I have ever watched. And yes, they even spoke some about Vangelis and his creative process in scoring this movie. Both features were just fantastic.

I think tonight I will be watching the “Remembering Philip K. Dick” disk and then perhaps the Final Directors Cut, which I sneak-peaked already and found the audio and video quality to be jaw-dropping good. Like, grain of the film on my 27″ Sony Television that I’ve had for over 10 years good.

Inside the replica Voight Kampff briefcase are other goodies beyond the 5 DVD folder. There is a toy Spinner Vehicle replica, a shinny Unicorn, a Motion Film Clip in a magnetic picture frame and a folder of Concept Art and still images.

Call me easily impressed, I think they did an excellent job in the creation of this collectors set. Thanks Ian!

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us. You can comment here or there.

Is it Christmas? Happy Holidays everyone :)

Last night Elizabeth and I watched Neil Gaiman’s very entertaining fantasy entitled “Stardust” on the laptop positioned on a chair just next to the roaring fireplace. While sitting on the couch, Elizabeth sipped a Delirium Noel Belgian Christmas Ale and I enjoyed a pain-free night thanks to generic Percocet.

Up until now the Doctor had subscribed me Lortab, 5mg of codone and 500mg of acetometiphin. The Lortab wasn’t working very well in it’s minimal dose so I was taking 2 every 4 hours instead of 1. This dosage was causing me to have cold sweats throughout the night most likely caused by the acetometiphin. I would also wake up in the morning in more pain than usual due to the lack of a comfortable nights rest. Last night was the best nights sleep I’ve had since arriving home from the hospital. I suppose this was my Christmas gift from Santa.

Speaking of Santa, according to Google’s[1] Norad Santa Tracker, Jolly Ol Saint Nick skipped visiting Pennsylvania and New York. I doubt that was the case as the cats were repeatedly caught gazing out of our front windows at the overcast, yet brightly moonlit sky. They only tend to do that when there is activity out there :-)

Last evening we also discovered that Simcoe dislikes whistling when one of the guys from Rifftrax.com started up a tune to the movie Spiderman. I continued the tune with the result of her ears and eyes paying cautious attention to her surroundings. After seeing this I couldn’t whistle any longer due to my difficulty in trying not to smile and chuckle. Simcoe also gets a little nervous when you sing to her while she is in your lap as I discovered the other day. I find this strange as she enjoys the ambient music that plays on the home stereo.

This is the first year Elizabeth and I did not acquire a Christmas Tree. We have had a tree every year since we started living together in our apartment in North Wales. In the past few years we have enjoyed going to a local tree farm, getting onto the farm tractor pulled trailer, hunting down and together carrying a nicely sized tree back to the convoy. They give us hot cider and if you are there off-peak, you get the experience practically to yourselves. I wonder if our lack of tree had an effect on the lack of Santa. Hmm…

[1] michael@nano ~ $ host www.noradsanta.com
www.noradsanta.com is an alias for NORADSANTA.L.GOOGLE.com.

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

Alright, here is what you do. Download, legally, your copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special from Google Video (use the download option for an mp4 file).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=323909610753051544

Then, watch http://rifftrax.com for their commentary which should be released very soon. Here is what they have to say about it:

http://shop.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/star-wars-holiday-special

I only wish I could watch this tonight!

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

It’s rare I get excited about new SciFi. I just watched Jerome Bixby’s 2007 “The Man From Earth” and was blown away. This movie is excellent and masterful in all of its aspects. Had me captivated the entire way through. Do not spoil it by reading about it though. Just check it out.

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

Elizabeth and I have been enjoying many of the selections from Michael J Nelson’s creation RiffTrax.com in recent months thanks to and initial recommendation by some friends. Last evening we watched The Island of Dr. Moreau with the accompanying RiffTrax, which was just painful. And on Saturday evening we watched Daredevil which was entertaining mostly to watch Ben Affleck try to act blind and as a superhero. Lots of comedy in that one. You can see how some movies vary on the pain to comedy factors. People familiar with MST3k know this factor well :-)

So far we have seen the following:

Roadhouse (A personal favorite, a must see)
Star Wars II (Another favorite)
Predator (Yet another favorite)
Firewall
The Matrix
Star Wars I
The Island of Dr. Moreau - 1996
The 5th Element
AeonFlux
Battlefield Earth
Reign of Fire
Daredevil
Lord of the Rings I
Star Trek VI
Star Trek V

I highly recommend RiffTrax.com and a six pack of craft brews to enhance a boring Saturday evening.

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

Elizabeth and I watched ‘300′ recently. I’m very happy we were busy the evening our friends went to see this in the theater. It was awful. The environment and sound was neat, but it was the slowest, most predictable, completely built to make a quick buck film I’ve watched lately. Mystery Science Theater material, for sure.

I give it one bananna out of ten, and that’s being generous.

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

EDIT:

Monday (yesterday) had to be one of the worst days I can remember in recently history. It’s times like this I wonder how the fabric of the universe works with the flow of ideas. Nothing good came out of yesterday. Here is the short list:

Nor’ easter puts a half inch of sleet on the ground, in April, floods many of my friend’s basements and causes overall havok.

Virginia Tech gets shot up by some South Korean immigrant lunatic. 33 or so deaths of college kids and faculty.

The Copyright Royalty Board, a three judge panel responsible for the March 2nd ruling that set webcast royalties at their new increased rate, has denied all parties’ motion for rehearing of the ruling on procedural grounds. RIAA wins another legislation that ends your freedom to listen to what you want to from small or medium sized streaming stations. Land of the free, my ASS.

:END EDIT

Has technology taken a sharp left and ended up in a ditch recently? As all of the improvements over size of technology continue to amaze me the total lack of foresight of reliability and usability boggles my mind.

For example, Elizabeth and I are catching up on the HBO series ‘The Sopranos’. Along with just about every other in a few DVDs we rent, we get unreadable disk errors from imperfections and scratches in the disk. I keep a bottle of windex handy so I can clean the disks before putting them into the DVD player. I NEVER HAD TO DO THIS WITH VHS.

Yes, every once in a while there was damaged tape but it never forced me to skip an entire scene and then have to guess as to what happened previously, which is what we had to do 3 times last night. Obviously I’ll take this up with the angsty yet oddly-stylish clerks at Blockbuster and get a credit but the point is, how are DVDs better?

DVDs have more formatting issues than VHS ever did. DVDs scratch easily. When you have a DVD rental you know the last savages that rented it had buttery-corn fingers and a large jagged quartz-rock collection that they would conveniently use as a DVD resting place in between movies and jumping on their furniture like hungry orangutans.

And note that with all of the beer I drink I have never once used a DVD rental as a coaster. Perhaps I should start.

And now this morning, I wake up and find a half inch of white slush on the ground. Happy Monday.

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

Arrested Development is one of the funniest shows ever.

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

You finally get some recognition for your work!!! YAY Italiano!!! :-D

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

Elizabeth and I headed to the West Chester Wellness Center this afternoon to have our first Shiatsu massage sessions with our friend David Brown. Wow, we feel good. I’ve had one deep tissue/European massage before and that was very intense in comparison to the shiatsu I received today.

Afterward we headed to Bear, Delaware to meet up with our friends Kenny and Kati at Stewarts Brewing Company. Kati surprised me with this gem:

Screw all you SciFi purists, this was a fun show that shortly aired during the 80s. I loved this show. It had geek attributes, dystopia and all of the conspiracy you could ask for… just plain ‘ol fun SciFi with some great actors to make the lack of well written scripts tolerable.

Thanks for the gift Kati!

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

Elizabeth and I have been enjoying the latest BBC spinoff of Doctor Who entitled Torchwood. The only thing I was able to think about in this entire series was “Why the hell can’t the SciFi channel produce SciFi this decent?”

Besides that though, Touchwood is realistic, has some great plotlines at times, decent acting, no overuse of cheesy special effects, and one hell of a comeback by Burn Gorman.

I could watch this stuff all day long.

I should also add that if you like good drama and didn’t catch the remake of Charles Dicken’s Bleak House on PBS as you should have, you can still get it on DVD. It’s THREE discs of some of the best character acting for a story of this magnitude. GET IT. Sit by the fireplace and watch it with a hearty winter ale in hand. You will not regret it!

Originally published at Bevilacqua.us.

Elizabeth and I watched A Scanner Darkly last evening. It’s a brilliant new semi-animated movie based on Philip K. Dick’s novel. Thought provoking and intriguing screenplay that delves deep into the psychosis of LSD and methamphetamine abuse. Very tough to follow at times due to this aspect making it feel like Jacob’s Ladder or Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me.

If you like your mind thrown about the room like I do you should check this movie out.