What is really interesting is how much forward this has gone today. Hoover may have balked at tapping of journalists’ phones, but today that seems like a small thing.

Of course thanks to the fact that Hoover’s secret files were never recovered, one assumes that a lot of the story is “filled in” for the sake of a story. But it is a movie, not a documentary. So the license is there for the taking. Watch the movie for DiCaprio’s portrayal of J Edgar.

Bond – Classified

This is another great album from the string quartet Bond. For a long time Habanera fan (from Carmen), a song like Señorita is just a joy to stumble upon. The entire album is like that. Just familiar enough and just contemporary enough.

Cheryl Cole – 3 Words

This has grown on me over time and there are a few songs that I really liked. Not great, but good.

The Saturdays – Chasing Lights & Wordshaker

Chasing Lights is my favourite of the two. Up alone is worth it. A worthy Girls Aloud replacement now that GA are not making music.

Coeur de Pirate – Coeur de Pirate

Fantastic chansons françaises. Lovely voice, nice for listening to while driving.

The Bad:

Rihanna – Rated R

I have tried, really tried. But I cannot like this album.

Owl City – Ocean Eyes

Fireflies sounded good enough to get the album. But loaded as it is with songs like Dental Care, whose lyrics were probably composed when under the influence of some mind numbing painkillers, it is very hard to listen to this without fear of losing one’s sanity.

The Ugly:

Kesha – The Animal

I wish I could get back the minutes I spent listening to this stuff.

Applications too are not as easy to find as in the alternate worlds. Windows apps are everywhere of course. And Linux distros have had “app stores” for a long time (Synaptic / rpmdrake / whatever). But I like the way of installing new apps: just copy the application install to wherever needed (e.g. the applications folder). Discovering what apps are installed already and how to manage them is still a problem for me. Given that Darwin is a BSD kernel and the underpinnings are Unix style, will a ports type of repository work for mac?

The presentation is very good. However it feels very restrained / claustrophobic in some ways.  The fact that everyone adheres to the basic user interface guidelines means that Firefox looks like Safari, VLC like Quicktime and so on. I guess the reason it is so successful is that it is a controlled system. In the same way there is the tight-knit ecosystem of itunes, ipod, etc. where the choices of what is available has been made for you. This feels so wrong for someone coming from an open environment like Mandriva (which is what I’ve been using for the past few years).

The basic reason I went in for the change in operating systems has not been tested yet: that is Adobe Lightroom 2. Unfortunately this nice piece of software is only available for Windows or Mac, and after trying XP for a while, I am not going to stay with it. Being perennially worried about viruses and other harmful software is not something I want to do. Loading the system down with a firewall, anti-virus, etc. is the surest way to slow the machine down to a crawl. I even tried running XP in a virtual environment (VirtualBox), but Lightroom runs like it is moving through molasses in that configuration. Tomorrow I shall test Lightroom out. It will also give me an opportunity to test how the export / import of the catalog of photos works.

Percy Jackson = Harry Potter, the protagonist who discovers that he is special. There is a prophecy about him. Even in the demi-god (magical) world he is special because of his birth. PJ because his father violated his promise not to have children and HP because he lived.

Grower Underwood = Ron Weasley, the sidekick.

Annabeth Chase = Hermione Granger, the know-it-all wise-girl. In Annabeth’s case literally since she is the daughter of Athena.

Luke Castelan = Draco Malfoy, the antagonist. The roles they play are very different though.

Camp Half-Blood = Hogwarts, nothing more to be said really. There is a magical spell that prevents mortals & monsters from getting in.

Dionysus = Severus Snape, the camp director who immediately manages to antagonize the hero.

Chiron = Albus Dumbledore, who takes the hero under his wing. He is also mis-trusted by those around him.

I could go on and on.

Obviously then the director tried to make this the anti-HP film. So the scenes at camp were cut short and this became a sort of "road trip" movie. What I missed most was the lack of some of the strong points of the books – the interplay between Percy and the various Gods he meets (Dionysus and Ares in the first book). Also, they left out the Oracle of Delphi.

In a way because of the differences between the book and the film, the film became more watchable (the story was new). The characters were also developed differently. All the characters are older in the film than the movie, so there is romantic interplay between Percy and Annabeth, which would have been weird in the book where they are 11-12 years old.

Overall, watchable but don’t expect any real Greek myth stuff. All that has been taken out and this is pretty much a dumbed-down version of the books, which are dumbed-down versions of Greek tales.

This movie was badly written. There’s not much else to tell. I came home and saw that metacritic had a score of 27 for it. The wonder is the one or two positive reviews it seems to have picked up. Some reviewers’ lines are quoted below. Check out the metacritic page for the gory list of quotes. Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker try to do their jobs even though they have no lines for half their screen time. It looks like someone took a TV episode and stretched it out to fill a feature length film.

Selected quotes from reviews:

When the material gets really bad, as it does in the dismal Did You Hear About The Morgans?, Grant’s pinched facial expressions become an inadvertent commentary on the movie he’s making, as if he plainly realizes that his one-liners are tanking. (Onion AV Club)

The editor responsible for the trailer is clearly a genius. (Globe and Mail)

Grant and Parker stand around as if they’re waiting for someone to yell, “Cut.’’ (Boston Globe)

PS. The first line of this post is from the Washington Post review.

PPS. Pay attention: the trailer editor is a genius. There are no lines in the movie outside the trailer. It is not a sampler. It is the movie.