I wasn't at all sure what to expect with this movie, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find an oddball comedy very much in the the vein of the classic "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle"
This movie delivers well on its promise: it's a fun mix of Sherlock Holmes with a typical period Kung Fu movie. Although I didn't crack it, the mystery is certainly solvable, which is nice for those among you who likes to work out these types of whodunnits ahead of time. The main character is lovable. There's plenty of romance and intrigue. And, the action sequences are pretty sweet. Nothing in this movie transcends to the level of an amazing cinematic opus. But, everything about it is solid.
This movie had two strikes against it at the get go, as far as my wife and I were concerned. As much as I really like Ryan Reynolds, I don't like many of the movies he's in -- good actor, bad agent, as far as I'm concerned. And while some of my favorite movies are extremely artistic ("Pi", for example), it's more often the case that I really don't like the artsy films. It makes sense, when you push the boundaries and do something experimental, it's a gamble that will either pay off big or fail miserably.
The first thirty minutes or so of this movie are fairly amazing. Whomever wrote the screenplay is something of a genius, in my opinion. There's a lot of modern critical analysis out there these days which says that the modern story should set up conflict immediately and push to onward from there. This screenplay kind of mocks that notion, and the Western genre as whole, all the while living up to it's simple and beautiful title. It goes to painstaking lengths to set up the very definition of cliché Western.
"Murphy's Law" is maybe the best example of a specific, technical concept which has been broadened and taken out of context. There's some debate on the origin of the idiom, but the story I like is that it was invented by a aeronautics engineer working on the space program. He was working with a group, building a high-G centrifuge-like device. When they ran the device, there was no reading on the sensors designed to measure the G-force. And when they investigated that oddity, it turned out that the sensors had been placed inside the device backwards.
While I'm on the subject of Unix philosophy, I'd like to speak for a minute about Postel's Law. Postel was instrumental in the development of the Internet. Specifically, he was involved in the creation of communication protocols. He Law, if I remember it correctly, was that programs dealing with communication over a network should be conservative in what they send out, and liberal in what they accept. In other words, they be careful to "speak" in formalized and well-formed languages, but they should know how to "listen" and interpret any old garbage sent their way. Good idea.
A lot of people think of me as a "Mac person". But, in reality, I'm a Unix nerd. I just happen to also really like Photoshop, and I haven't found any other Unix flavors that will run it. The secret is that Mac OS X is really Unix under the hood. I spend more time on the prompt than I do in the traditional windows desktop interface.
I've long thought that outside the basic teaching of love and brotherhood, the idea of the Trinity is the most important insight that Christianity has to give us. My reasons for believing in God are divergent, in the same way that the Trinity is, and I'm not sure how exactly they relate to each other (or, to put it in Christian parlance, "it's a mystery").
I'm not sure where this movie came from. I never heard about it being in the theaters. My brother-in-law mentioned that he had seen it and enjoyed it. And then a week later, I noticed it on Netflix's "new releases" list. I would have thought I would have seen this coming -- it stars one of the actors from "Reaper" and one of the actors from "Firefly". Both of those are favorites of mine. So, normally I might have seen words about this on the blogosphere or from word of mouth.
