My computer crashed last week. Well, no, that is not exactly true, my computer got very sick so I reformatted it. It had been running very slow for a few months. Strangely, it got ridiculously slow whenever I ran iTunes. Like every 90 seconds or so, it would just lock up for a minute or two, then run fine only to freak out again after a little while. This would be exasperating to anyone but it was hopeless to someone like me who spends inordinate amounts of time listening to and manipulating music.
I looked around a bit online to see if I could find any help, but all suggestions did not fix the problem. I resigned myself to taking it to the Apple store, but first I wanted to back everything up just in case they needed to restore it. I have two external drives totaling about 1.5 terrabyes, but this wasn’t enough to house all my movies, documents, pictures, and music. So I bought another 2 TB drive and started backing up everything. At first, I just wanted to backup my photos and music, but then I figured everything else might as well be backed up and so I worked on all that.
Once everything was backed up, I decided I might as well restore my drive myself and not mess with hauling it to the store. That worked perfectly and now I’m enduring the long process of putting all the back ups in place. That’s kind of fun actually because I get to sort through everything, weed out junk I should have gotten rid of ages ago, and rediscover things I’d forgotten I had.
This is all a long-winded way to apologize for missing last week. The big restore happened early last week and as such I wasn’t able to really even look at what came out much less write about it. But here I am, more or less good as new (though still sorting through the mess), ready to let you all know what’s hitting the shelves this week.
Keanu Reeves has had such a strange, interesting career. He’s pretty universally derided as a bad actor and yet he has remained hugely successful through a career that has lasted some three decades. Though his success has mainly come from big-budget action flicks, he’s managed to balance his career with many low budget, art-house, indie films. He’s continually found interesting films to be involved in and though I don’t really know why, I’ve always really liked him. He’s so much more than Ted “Theodore” Logan, but hardly a week goes by that I don’t quote something from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
John Wick sounds like the sort of film that’s right in his best wheelhouse. It’s an action-adventure revenge film with lots of Matrix-style, martial-arts sequences. It seems to also have a big old dark side, and perhaps a touch of that Asian style he seems to be doing a lot of lately. The reviews have mostly been good, and the fanboys have come out in droves praising it, which is more than enough to get me interested and call it my Pick of the Week.
Also out this week that looks interesting:
Hector and the Search for Happiness: Simon Pegg plays a psychiatrist obsessed with what makes people happy, or rather how some people find true happiness. He travels the world looking for answers and apparently finds lots of quirky comedy and a bit of drama (and perhaps some romance). I’ll watch pretty much anything with Simon Pegg i it, but add Rosamund Pike, Jean Reno, and Christopher Plummer (plus Toni Collette and Stellan Skarsgard) and I’m all in.
ANZAC Girls: Based on the true story of Australian nurses serving in the (very near) front lines of WWI. Read my full review.
Dear White People: A comedic satire about race relations at a modern American university. The previews looked really good, but this is the sort of thing that could easily go very wrong very quickly.
Ouija: When I was a teenager, many of my friends were obsessed with devil worshipers, the occult, and Ouija boards. Some times we’d get out a Ouija board and play, but I always found it a bit silly to think we were going to be able to contact the dead via something made by Parker Brothers. Does anyone really think that the company who made Clue and Candy Land are going to have our only access to the spiritual realm? Although come to think of it, the folks who made Boggle no doubt have been in contact with the dark nether regions. I’m surprised it’s taken this long to make a movie based off the game. It will no doubt be dumb, but I like dumb horror movies sometimes.
Dracula Untold: A big, dumb action flick telling an origin story of everyone’s favorite vampire. The previews look terrible, but I’m a sucker for vampire tales.
