Refenestration Daily.
From Paris with Love is a new action movie starring John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. To get right down to it, I had a fun time and I rather liked it. In fairness though, I’ll also point out that it currently has a score of 42 at Metacritic (which equates to “mixed or average reviews”).
If you like action movies, I think it could be worth a shot.
I was a bit surprised when I recently came across the trailer for the remake of Death at a Funeral. (After all, the first one only came out in 2007.) Just to see how the films compared, I made a mashup trailer out of the two trailers—and, yeah, there are a few similarities. (For one thing, Peter Dinklage stars in both films.)
Minor spoilers below. But, heck, I’m talking about stuff that’s in the trailer(s) anyway.
Admittedly, I haven’t seen either film, but on a more serious note, one thing that struck me was the wafting homophobia in each of the trailers. The unmashed-up version of the trailer for the 2010 remake, for instance, includes a shot of Martin Lawrence’s character in a full-body grimace upon learning of his dad’s sexuality. For cripes sake, who cares if your dad is gay or straight? Family is family, no?
(To be sure, I’m not in favor of outing nor blackmail, but I don’t think either of those factors fully explain away the “eww—teh gay” vibe from each of the trailers.)
On a lighter note, though, if I get some recommendations to see the 2007 film, I might consider adding that to my Netflix queue. On the other hand, I think I'll be staying far, far away from the 2010 remake.
This “laundry formula testing facility” commercial for Clorox’ Stain Fighter & Color Booster seems to imply that only women do (or should do?) laundry. Even the man-unable-to-operate-a-washing-machine scenes from 1983’s Mr. Mom seem unwatchably dated today. And that was almost thirty years ago.
I expect better, Clorox.
It should have been simple:
So, that’s the short version. The longer version is that I bought Liza Pro Display the other day, partly because I needed a script typeface, but partly because it had some sweet ligatures.
Ligatures, in case you’re not familiar with them:
“In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called “contextual forms” where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line. […]”
Liza Pro is published by the Underware foundry and their website has an online test page where you can try out the typeface beforehand. Try as I might, I couldn’t replicate those results in any of the common apps I had. I didn’t annotate all the rendering errors in the accompanying image, but among them, OpenOffice and Pages both do a poor job of linking the letters together, and Word simply refuses to create any ligatures.
Going off the foundry’s website, they do include a table of apps known to include contextual alternates (which is apparently the secret sauce that one needs to get this working). Indeed, many of the apps listed there come as little surprise—InDesign, Illustrator, and QuarkXpress all basically work out of the box.
As luck would have it, I have none of those.
I do happen to have Photoshop CS3 (which did make the list), but that’s probably the last app I’d want to use for composing a letter, jotting a note, or anything approaching word processing or desktop publishing. So, at this point, it seems I’m kinda stuck.
To be fair, I don’t consider Underware at fault here; it just so happens that top-to-bottom OpenType support for ligatures & contextual alternates seems relatively sparse within the I-can-afford-this application space at the moment. And it’s not that I have qualms about paying for software—I just don’t have a spare $520 for Illuatrator or $640 for InDesign lying around [sad fontbone].
I saw The Book of Eli with some friends the other day and, well, it wasn’t exactly my favorite movie of the year. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you haven’t seen it yet, you’re probably not missing much.
Review: The Book of Eli from Alex Bischoff on Vimeo.
Minor spoiler warning: I give away the name of Denzel Washington’s character. I doubt it’ll affect your enjoyment of the movie (or lack thereof), but there you go.