I watched The Hurt Locker, a 2008 film by Kathryn Bigelow not released in the US domestically until 2009. The film stars Jeremy Renner as a Sgt. 1st Class William James, a reckless man talented with defusing explosives. Sgt. James deploys to the U.S. Army’s Bravo Company in Iraq in 2004 after their unit’s team leader is killed in an IED explosion. James is blessed with natural skills so he’s very good at what he does. However, his reckless behavior and disregard for protocol unnerves his team, and causes serious conflict. The film counts down the last 30+ days of Bravo’s Company’s tour in Iraq, and the soldiers’ primary goal is to stay alive until they can get home.

This was a pretty good movie. Of course, the acting was good, and the direction was good. No doubt about it. What I liked most about it was that I couldn’t predict what would happen next. So many films that I’ve watched recently, I could predict the plot twists a mile away. Here, with the nature of the film being a bomb disposal unit during an intense war, you don’t know what is going to happen next. A war zone is inherently unpredictable.

The Hurt Locker (2008)

Here’s the update on all the gardening efforts of the past month.

Short summary:

The grass is growing, but the flowers ain’t blooming yet.

Details:

Our lawn after one week

I have good news. I may not be any good at raising aquarium fish, but I’m not so bad at gardening. I still don’t know what I’m doing, but we’re making strides through research and hard efforts. Our perennials and annuals planted this year, and the hanging flower baskets are still alive, which is the good news. The side flower bed hasn’t sprouted much except errant clovers. I’ve done more mulching to fill in areas where the weeds are sneaking through. It’s a never-ending battle against the weeds. Those Scott’s commercials are rather sadly accurate.

Now, for the big news on the front lawn. About a week since we readied, tilled, and planted grass seeds in the front lawn, grass sprouts began shooting up. I was initially ecstatic, but upon closer inspection, I noticed they were primarily growing where there were heavy concentrations of Miracle-Gro. Where the Miracle-Gro was light or non-existent, I had barren dirt. Still, it was progress. Not to get discouraged too early on, we waited and continued to water the grass/dirt daily. I figure that if the grass doesn’t sprout later in the barren spots, I’ll just do additional tilling and reseed those problem areas.

Fast-forward another few more days, and today the grass is looking healthier and fuller. It’s not perfect, but it’s looking more respectable. I still have problem areas, such as the barren spots, and the original grassy areas that are dead or are wilting. I suppose I should have ripped those up at the same time when I put down the new top soil and seeds, but live and learn. I plan to wait a few more weeks until the heat wave is over, then do the fixing up.

Our lawn after 1.5 weeks of growth, view 1

Our lawn after 1.5 weeks of growth, view 2

This week, the kids and I finished watching Green Lantern: Emerald Knights off of our Netflix queue.

As the home planet of the Green Lantern Corps faces a battle with an ancient enemy, Hal Jordan prepares new recruit Arisia for the coming conflict by relating stories of the first Green Lantern and several of Hal’s comrades.

Good voice acting cast: Nathan Fillion, Jason Isaacs, Elisabeth Moss, Henry Rollins, Arnold Vosloo, Tony Amendola, Kelly Hu, and even Roddy Piper. The overall storyline about this giant baddie named Krona who seems invincible was just a backdrop for the producers and storytellers to tell a collection of stories about some of the famous members of the Green Lantern Corp. The specific vignettes are:

1. The First Lantern (about Avra, the scribe.)
2. Kilowog (as a new recruit in bootcamp.)
3. Laira (on her first solo mission to confront her family’s atrocities.)
4. Mogo Doesn’t Socialize (meh, but the baddie is voiced by Roddy Piper.)
5. Abin Sur (not bad, and you get to see Abin Sur in action.) 
6. The big action of the finale as the entire Corp fights Krona.

It wasn’t one big story, just an anthology of smaller stories that, to be honest, weren’t the most interesting. I don’t know precisely why, but they just weren’t all that interesting. Green Lantern: Emerald Knights isn’t the best film in the DCAU, but it’s not the worst either. It’s okay, but I think the kids would like it. Josh liked it, but it’s PG, so there is some violence that happens on screen, so I tried to distract him until that part of the scene was over.

Green Lantern: Emerald Knights (2011)

Friday night was “date night” for the Ipes. After work, we rushed home to get the kids to their Friday night hang out at Lily’s school. We had from 7pm to 11pm to drop them off, eat dinner,see a movie, and then pick up the kids. Based on timing, we selected Metropolitan Cafe in Freehold, and then a quick 5 min drive to the AMC @ Freehold Raceway Mall. So what did we decide to see? Horrible Bosses.

Metropolitan Cafe, Freehold NJ

Dinner worked out well at Metropolitan Cafe. It initially appeared that we’d missed the last free table, and would have to wait 30 mins, but they then immediately sat us (albeit near the kitchen.) We ordered quickly, and while we were still eating our bread, dinner came out. With a full restaurant, and our entrees were readily quickly? That was fast service, and much appreciated. I was in the mood for some protein, so I ordered the “Twice Cooked” Cuban Steak — skirt steak, black beans, arroz verde, and the tomato salsa. I’m trying to drink more wine, so I had a glass of this Spanish red wine (“Garnacha”) — Castillo De Monseran. You know, cuban steak, spanish red wine, I figured they must go together. I’m a newbie with wine, but I’m all for practicing! Dinner was very good, and I liked drinking wine with steak.

My Cuban skirt steak dish from Metropolitan Cafe

With plenty of time before the 8:45pm showing, we drove to the mall, picked up the tickets I ordered on my phone using the Fandango app (worked out very well), and we had good seats to watch…. 25 agonizing minutes of previews/trailers we had no interest in watching. Final Destination 5? Nah, I never saw 1-4. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark? Who buys spooky houses anymore? When you’re on a tight schedule, who wants to watch trailers at the movie theater anymore? I can watch them at home on my computer. Or on my phone.

How was Horrible Bosses? My wife liked it a lot, and she laughed a lot throughout the movie. Personally, I thought it was alright. It stars….well, all the people you see below in the movie poster. The bosses are terrible, but I thought Spacey, Aniston, and Farrell played caricatures of “bad bosses.” I’m not saying their particular acting wasn’t good, but I think it was more to do with the script. For me, the way the bosses acted and what they said seemed to ridiculous, or maybe cartoonish. You know, if you had a “bad boss” who was so outrageous, this is how they would act. The boss characters didn’t work too much for me. I take that back, as I liked Jennifer Aniston’s character, who did the sexual harassing. I liked her, because I enjoy raunchy humor, and I found her behavior entertaining. I’m not into gross-out humor, but I do like raunchy humor that takes chances and shocks you.

Of the three main stars (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day), at times they were a little dumb, but overall, they were funny. Charlie Day’s character Dale had me laughing, because he was such a sweet-hearted dumbass. Sudeikis and Bateman were okay, but they all worked well together, much like a modern day Three Stooges.

Horrible Bosses (2011)

When we were house-hunting, I still remember walking around our now-current (but then-prospective) house, and being impressed with the flowers and manicured flowering bushes. Coming from an apartment, the whole idea of a house of our own, a garden, all of that, was pretty heady.

Fast-forward through the next several years, and the reality of managing a young family presents some stark reality. My wife and I managed raising two young children, and taking care of them (and managing our own careers) took precedence. Second priority was managing the interior of the house, while the exterior was a distant third.

As a result, I’m embarrassed to admit, the front, back, and sides started to look rather unkept. Sure, we made small attempts at gardening here and there, but we never could dedicate enough time and money for proper upkeep. Add in the limited gardening green thumb knowledge and experience, and that resulted in us doing the bare minimum. The bare minimum means cleaning up here occasionally, a few hanging flower baskets that die in the heat, a backyard patio that was in a losing battle against the encroaching weeds, and finally a largely ignored front yard.

Sad, isn’t it? Well, it was reality, and I’m not one to sugarcoat it. Time for the good news. If you’ve been keeping up on our doings and happenings, the past two years have seen many much-needed updates and welcome changes around here. The kids have gotten easier to manage, and monthly childcare costs have decreased. Also, we felt a strong urge to make the big fixes.

In the past few years, we made many updates to the kitchen, the living room, and many other parts of the house interior. This year, we started looking askance at the exterior, and we declared it “Not good.” Again, we’ve done the mulching thing, the few planted/hanging flowers here and there over the years, but the whole exterior area needed work. In my mind, I recall the beautiful grounds that the previous owners cultivated, and I personally grit my teeth in consternation. We drew a line in the weeds, and said, “This far and no further!”

We wanted to start in the spring, but this year it rained an awful lot, so that didn’t work out. Better late than never, I say. In the past two weeks, I’ve personally made four (or is it five?) trips to Home Depot for new gardening tools, mulch and garden/potting soil galore, flowers and seeds. Sometimes it was the whole family, sometimes it was just me making a quick run after work. We’ve had top soil delivered, replanted plants, and arrived at a stalemate with the almighty underground tree root. We’ve done a lot, and now we are waiting and cultivating the fruits of our labor. Shall I recap the work performed? Are you still reading?

Backyard

After a brief flirtation with some hanging baskets we bought through a church fundraiser, those flowers burned in the direct sunlight. My wife did research, and she found some hardier plants. During our first Home Depot trip, we picked up new flowering hanging baskets, flowers for planting, and the first in many bags of mulch and gardening soil. After much effort, the backyard looks pretty good. I keep spraying the weeds, but they keep sprouting new ones like a many-headed hydra. Next year, we want to redo the backyard patio with pavers, ones that don’t allow gaps for weeds to spring forth anew.

Front yard

Ah, the front yard. We never go out here, except to get the mail. The original owners had some sort of plant ground covering instead of grass, a bush, and two trees. The extent of our gardening was placing a new hanging basket and occasionally remembering to water out here. Sadly, we were remiss last year, and the basket and the ground covering died an ignominious death.

Two weeks ago, Josh and I raked up all the dead plant matter. We Ipes did some hedge trimming, put out a new hanging basket, and planted three new hardy ground plants.

My first dirt shovel

Namita and I wanted grass, but it turned out that the entire front yard was covered in tree roots. No wonder the previous owners had a ground covering — there was no top soil for grass to grow. I bought a tiller and a shovel, but there was no way we could grow a lawn in this situation.

After much discussion internally and with friends, we decided on a plan. We ordered 3 yards (a total of 300 square feet) of top soil to cover our yard with at least two inches deep of soil. Namita read up on how to best grow grass. I borrowed a wheelbarrow from my friend Doug. The top soil arrived yesterday, and my neighbor and I shoveled and transferred it to the front yard in the wheelbarrow. Today, I leveled the soil as best I could, spread around the Miracle-Gro garden soil and grass seeds, and Namita did a helluva lot more tilling. We’ll have to put down more mulch around the trees in a week or two. Next year, pavers to make a raised area next to the house, and we’ll plant some flowering bushes.

Borrowed wheelbarrow	Did you order 3 yards of top soil?
Front yard view 1	Front yard view 2

The Side

Our new flower bed

The side of the house along the sidewalk is our responsibility. We had a lot of dead and dying plants here, due to years of not taking care of them. In the past week, starting last Sunday and in the evenings this week, we ripped out the dead plants, dug out many roots, and planted new perennials and seeds for a new flower bed. Of course, don’t forget the mulching.

So here we are. Two weeks of gardening, and we’ve attacked the grounds with gusto. We are now in a waiting and cultivating stage. Continuously watering, pruning, and weeding. 30 days until we see if the front yard grows some grass. If the flower bed starts to bloom. If the backyard flowers survive or burn in the sun. I never did so much gardening in my life, and yes I’m sore and tired. I’ve also gotten a lot of good exercise, learned more about gardening, and now I own my very first tiller and shovel.

Winged Migration is a 2001 documentary about various migrating birds, featuring up-close-and-personal footage of birds in flight. To best descibe the film’s background, here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

The movie was shot over the course of four years on all seven continents. Shot using in-flight cameras, most of the footage is aerial, and the viewer appears to be flying alongside birds of successive species, especially Canada geese. They traverse every kind of weather and landscape, covering vast distances in a flight for survival. The filmmakers exposed over 590 miles of film to create an 89-minute piece. In one case, two months of filming in one location was edited down to less than one minute in the final film.

I heard about it, and watched maybe 15 mins of it in 2006 at my sister-in-law’s house on their widescreen television (also a first for me.) At the time, I was fairly amazed at watching migratory birds in flight, and in widescreen. This was only three years after the documentary came out. Five years after that, I finally get the chance to watch the entire film through Netflix. Finally!

So here’s the thing. It was “meh” for me. WHAT?!? Meh? What do I mean? What’s wrong? I love documentaries, especially nature documentaries. I’ve watched them since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I love HD. I should love nature documentaries filmed in HD. What was wrong? Um, here’s the worst part — I didn’t even bother finishing it. It wasn’t a bad documentary at all. It was pretty neat. The thing is, after the first 45 minutes of watching birds in flight, it all became more of the same. I found it kind of boring, actually, and I’m sorry to say that, but it’s true. Every 5-10 minutes, it was another species of birds…. in flight.

What can I say? I wasn’t that impressed. Instead of trying to slug through it, I decided to chalk it up as a loss, and returned it.

Winged Migration (2001)

Friday night, we finished watching Kung Fu Panda. This is the 2008 Dreamworks blockbuster animated film starring Jack Black as the… panda protagonist? He plays Po, a panda who works in his father’s noodle shop. Naturally, this being a kids movie and doesn’t need to make a lot of sense, his father is a crane. Well, whatever. Although Po slings noodle bowls all day, he dreams of learning kung fu and fighting alogside the Furious Five, who are the local martial arts masters. During the film, we find out that he’s destined to be the Dragon Warrior, but being such an incompetent novice, it’s hard to believe. Of course, we adults know he will be Dragon Warrior, but it’s the journey of how he finds himself.

The kids liked it, and I don’t blame them. It’s an entertaining, smart film. The audio and video quality are top-notch on Blu-ray, and the voice acting and animation are good too. Good cast — Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Seth Rogen, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, David Cross, and many more. The story was good too, so Namita and I were entertained along with the kids. Besides the story and the audio/video quality, I liked all the kung fu references, which kinda reminded me in a way of the old kung fu movies I watched on Saturday/Sunday afternoons.

Kung Fu Panda (2008)

I’m trying to not obsess about my weight loss. Specifically, am I losing? Did I lose anything this week? I’m the type of person who obsesses, and it ain’t pretty. In the past few months, I admit that I’ve done well. Considering that, in the past five years, I have failed miserably to lose the bulk, and had no success. Now that I’ve lost 21 lbs so far, it gets harder to lose the weight.

From what I’ve learned, the body loves its fat. When it senses that it is losing its fat stores, the human body will adjust your metabolism to compensate. It’s a survival mechanism — fat has historically gotten us through the lean times. Unfortunately, I have a lot of fat still on me, due to years of cheese danishes and Burger King Whoppers. Also, after months of eating so little, and seeing good progress, you start to slide, snacking a little more, eating a little more, justifying it all. So what to do? I looked through the iTunes store for some good calorie counting apps, and found a few, but the two best I’ve seen are the Livestrong app (associated with the Livestrong website/group), and something called MyFitnessPal (screenshot below.)

The MyFitnessPal app

After inputting my profile info in these apps, you input what you ate, what exercise you did, and track at the daily and weekly level how well you’re doing to reach a specific weight loss goal. I found that the best apps to use allow you to search and find/identify a wide variety of food, whether you bought it at a restaurant, or you made from ingredients found at your local supermarket. I paid for the Livestrong app, which has an excellent food repository, but I primarily use the free MyFitnessPall app (available for both iOS and Android OS) to track my consumption and exercise. I especially like the features where you can:

1. scan the barcode of a particular food, and it pulls the name & nutritional data for you automatically.
2. input exactly what you ate, whether it was a partial serving or not.
3. easily find and add in calories lost during a particular cardiovascular activity (I’m not bothering trying to calculate calories lost through strength-training exercises yet.)

I had initially tried the Calorie Count app from About.com, and while it was the most aesthetically pleasing app, it was buggy and not accurate. Too bad.

This may all seem a bit much, but after one week, it’s been a good set of tools to help get me to the next level, and to keep me on the straight and narrow.

I loves me some symmetry. Months later, we went and bought the matching bookshelf for our living room. The living room is almost complete — now I need some fish that will love longer than 30 days.

I wanted to like this movie. I really did. I tracked its progress as it developed, and checked out spoilers and other news as it got closer to release. When the early reviews came with less-than-positive comments, I was disheartened. Marvel Comics has developed a better track record with producing Hollywood fils based on the original source material. Apart from Batman, DC Comics has done less than stellar.

Here’s a quote from io9′s review of the film.

It’s hard to imagine a story that has more wish-fulfillment stuffed into it than Green Lantern. This lucky guy gets chosen, out of all of us, to have this amazing ring that can do anything. And he finds out that he’s a member of the coolest organization in the entire universe. He says a cool poem (“oath”) to activate his powers, and almost nobody knows that plain old Hal Jordan is this mysterious all-powerful hero. It’s basically the purest, most escapist heroic fantasy ever.

It would take a lot of work to make something so pure and beautiful into a boring movie, devoid of fun or exhilaration. But Green Lantern rolls up its green sleeves and works hard.

There a lot of problems with this film, including it being boring, derivative, and the plot holes/contrivances don’t make any sense:

• The cast is boring. Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Tim Robbins, Angela Bassett, and the rest of the cast feel two-dimensional, and seemingly have no real chemistry between them.
• Reynolds “emoted”, but I was tired of being told that he was kinda of a loser with daddy issues. In Hollywood, this is a plot contrivance so that the protagonist can overcome his fear and come into his own. This is a cliched superhero origin story that has been told a hundred times now. If this came out in the 90′s, it would fit right in. Instead, it pales in comparison to good films like Iron Man and the Christopher Nola trilogy of Batman films. Heck, I’ve watched better films coming out from the DC Animated Universe studio at Warner Brothers.
• The Green Lantern Corp, faced with the imminent threat of the Parallax cloud monster, are ineffective. When told that the aforementioned cloud monster, who represents and thrives on “fear”, the Green Lantern Corp and the Guardians (on Oa) refuse to help. This only makes sense in a Hollywood movie, as now the hero must attempt to save Earth on his own. Oh please. The Guardians and none of the rest of the 3,599 Green Lanterns refuse to help? Really?
• The dialogue was cheesy.
• I don’t need any more cloud monsters. I. Just. Don’t.

This was a tired movie, a throwback to the superhero films of the 90′s and 00′s.

Green Lantern (2011)