Fantastically Normal

Two really good action flicks and I HATE ITUNES

So over the past weekend, I caught some dang good action movies. I think that the action movie was by and large a thing of the late eighties, early nineties and with the exception of a fair amount of good fantasy / comic book / sci-fi movies, there really haven’t been that many good lately that I have seen (the Bourne movies being another exception). But this weekend, I had a great time with two great action flicks.

First, Mission Impossible 3 was fantastic. Could it have been better? Sure, Phillip Seymore Hoffman could have more screen time, but dang it was fun with some simply awesome sequences and some pretty cool gadgets. I thought it was a excellent pull back from Mission Impossible 2 where John Woo went too nuts for his own good. Fighting on motorcycles? Come on. This movie really made me feel badly for Cruise’s career being derailed by Tom Cruise himself. The man can act a mean action movie (Top Gun, Minority Report, MI movies) and do pretty well in other flicks as well (A Few Good Men for example). Part of you just wishes that he would keep making really good action movies and shut up about everything else. But he seems not to really want to. Oh well. 7 out of 10 stars.

Second, I saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I didn’t really know what to think with all of the celeb gossip going around the movie, but the wife and I watched it and found it to be GREAT. It had some good action stuff, parts were somewhat contrived feeling, but the husband / wife interaction stuff was priceless. The curtains bit alone was well worth the price of admission. Overall, just really good mix of humor, stuff blowing up and good old action movie fun. 8 out of 10 stars.

Lastly, I just want to say how much I hate iTunes. When iTunes 7 came along, everyone was raving that there were all kinds of cool features and yada yada. I personally have been a Winamp fan just due mostly to the fact that it plays exactly what you ask it to, no frills. But with the onset of podcasts and video blogs like diggnation, I took the iTunes plunge. Well a month ago, iTunes helpfully got info for my music and deleted all of the music file folder structure. Was there any way to reverse this? Nope, are there programs out there to work with this? Sure, but you have to know exactly what you are looking for. Overall, I am going to continue to using iTunes because it is the only way to get stuff on my iPod easily, but for a program that has users like my father, iTunes is a FAR cry from what it needs to be.