Movie Review: Wind Chill

I found yet another movie service online. Now that we have the bandwidth to work it, work it good baby, we’re workin’ it. Workin’ it good.

The new service (which, of course, is probably only new to me) is called Crackle. Once we registered and all, I was able to view a movie with no cost attached. No monthly subscription, no fee for on-demand rental…just load it up and go. So, being cheap, I like free. I loaded up a movie and watched.

The movie I chose was a ghost story called Wind Chill. It’s from 2007 and stars Emily Blunt (best known for The Devil Wears Prada, I’m sure) and Ashton Holmes. It’s about two college students who ride share over the Christmas holiday through a mountainous area. When they detour off the main highway to the more scenic “shortcut”, a careless driver leaves them stranded on the side of the road with a storm front and plummeting temperatures in a valley without cell signals and no traffic.

The set up was pretty good, if a bit predictable. Then the pace picked up. Things went from bad to worse pretty steadily and by the third act things were really hopping. I’ve seen two movies like this now. One was called The Innkeepers (which I’ve already reviewed, I believe), and now this one.

The acting was good. I liked the characters. And the situation unfolds in a logical manner for the most part. The gore is minimal and only used to jolt the audience, and the backstory came along nicely. (If you don’t know, it’s really, really hard to tell a ghost story without backstory.) Overall, I give it an A-, and that’s quite something.

I’ve been looking for a good movie for a long time. One without gratuitous violence and gore, not a slasher movie, one with a good story. And this scratched that itch for me, mostly. It wasn’t perfect and got a little ham-handed sometimes, but the overall performance and story really worked to me. A good movie. If you like ghost stories, I think this one’s worth seeing. Nicely done.

We also had an awesome Thanksgiving and even took a midnight jaunt to the store to finish out our centerpiece for Christmas. My darling wife will have photos soon, I’m sure.

Hope your Thanksgiving was fantastic, and for those of you outside the US, it’s Friday! You can always be thankful for that, right? 🙂 But for those who had the holiday, what’d you do? Where’d you go? Did you go? Tell, tell!

See ya next week, hopefully. I’m back at work and it’s APPMAGEDDON.

-jdt-

A Different Kind of Thank You

I don’t want to compete with my loving spouse’s amazing movie. Go check it out, please.

But I do want to say thank you to the families of the soldiers whose memories we honor today, who gave everything in service of their country, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Your sacrifice doesn’t go forgotten. Not by us.

God bless you.

Weekend Round-Up

Well, to all the moms out there, I hope you had a happy and wonderful Mother’s Day.

To the rest of you, I hope you had a good weekend, too. I did. I spent time with my mother of choice, my WIP, Angry Birds and my kids. What more can I ask?

Had a great day at work on Friday after all. I found one possible solution for my VWD2010 issue (remember my discussion of that?), and so I emailed myself a copy of the file which somehow got damaged and the location path so I could find it again. When I got to work I deleted the file in question, replaced it with the new file from home, and BANG! The software worked again! YEE-HA!

I coded my happy butt off all day. Finally got some ground gained, too.

THE END IS NEAR! THE END IS NEAR!

Today’s the last Friday of my vacation, and of the year. Coincidence? I think not.

Seriously, as you may or may not have noticed, I don’t have a post for today. Matter of fact, as I sit here typing this right now, I’m tempted to jump on my SANDWICH searcher bash-rant machine just to see if I can generate some hits from those not yet drunk in anticipation of the New Year.

But no. No, today I’ll refrain from using the word sandwich simply to giggle over the hits I’ll get because of it. Today I salute my wife as the ULTIMATE sandwich queen. Never before have I loved sandwiches made at home so much as when she makes them. I can only imagine what she could do with really good ingredients like I had as a child.

Final football weekend of the 2011 season is this weekend. I’ll miss it, despite not having seen a single game. My two teams — one from my dim and distant past and one I’ve chosen for myself — both did great this year and are going on to the final single-elimination tournament. I can’t wait to see if one or both will go to the Super Bowl. And what if they faced each other? Oh, the joy!

Alas, I think the Green Bay Packers are destined to win again. I see no one capable of stopping them, really. On the other conference’s side, I would think the Baltimore Ravens or the Pittsburgh Steelers (UGH, really, again?) would be the ones to beat. Much as I hate both teams — and make no mistake, I hate the f**king pi$$ out of both of ’em — I have to acknowledge not being surprised to see either in the ‘Bowl this year.

Oh well. I’ve been working out pretty consistently over the last week, and I think it’s already working despite how simple and short the workouts are. I can’t wait to see how things shape up over the next several months. Baby steps, for sure, but steps nonetheless. Let’s face it, you can at least move forward with baby steps. Doing nothing tends to make one stand still.

How ’bout you? Plans for the New Year’s Eve celebration? We like to stay home and watch it on TV. I mean, crowds, noise and drunkenness don’t hold so much appeal as they did once. I guess it had appeal once. When I was about 21. What are you doing?

Whatever it is, have a Happy and Safe New Year.

God bless and see ya in 2012. It’s the year the world ends according to a race of people who checked out off the face of the planet about 1200 years ago, you know, so make sure it counts for something.

-JDT-

Movies, Movies, Movies!

I took all last week off, as you’re well aware by now. And I spent a lot of that time watching movies, trying to relax. (I also spent a lot of it watching Star Trek: Enterprise too, but that’s not a movie.) In addition to those things, my ass did, in fact, increase in size over the holiday. I’ve really felt myself broadening lately, and not in the high-brow sense, either. I’ve got to do something because if I get any fatter I’ll need one of those little Walmart shopping scooters to get around on when I’m not in bed or in the car.