Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

Wow, I can't believe we're already starting the reviews for the original trilogy of Star Wars movies. Where has this month been going? Does time really go by this fast when you're having so much geeky fun?

Regardless, we press on, yes?

This is part of an on-going series of blog reviews where I finally post my thoughts on all of the 6 Star Wars movies. It's just my little way of celebrating the upcoming release of The Phantom Menace in 3D this February, whether or not this whole 3D translation is necessarily a good thing for the franchise as a whole. I'm weird that way.

Admittedly we're going to look at things with respect to the Special Edition of the movies that was re-released in theaters around the time the prequels started up a well. Purists may argue against this stance, but you have to admit the new version is supposedly closer to George Lucas' original vision and thus merits some study. Plus it's the more commercially available version now, thus it's what more people are going to end up watching whether on DVD or on whatever pay TV movie channel happens to be showing it.

[TV] Sherlock: Series 2 (BBC)

I've always wondered by a lot of British television shows run such short seasons versus their US counterparts. This could probably be best illustrated by how the UK version of Being Human only lasted about 6 episodes (depending on how you count the pilot) while the US adaptation of the show lasted for a full 13.

That oddly gets me thinking about the differences between writing poetry, short stories and novels. Each are beautiful in their own right although each requires different skills and techniques to achieve the "maximum effect" in terms of each version of prose or what have you. With the shorter poems, brevity and word use become key to being able to express the message or meaning that you want to without losing too much due to lack of details or more deliberate description.

And maybe that's part of the appeal for a lot of these British shows. Their writers tend to work with seasons (series) between 3-8 episodes long, thus requiring more concise writing and somewhat better action.

And this show remains to be one of the more brilliant ones that I've encountered in a while and I can't think of a US counterpart that has achieved so much with such limited airtime.

[Google] The 2012 Privacy Policy Clean-Up

Image by Aray Chen via Flickr

This may be a case of "Be Careful What You Wish For" in terms of Google's recently announced changes to their privacy policies and their terms of service. It all depends on where you stand, I suppose.

On the one hand, a lot of folks have written about how complicated a lot of the various privacy policies are, especially for companies with multiple products like Google. In the previously linked blog post, they detail having over 70 different privacy documents and interrelated terms of service policies in place to manage their different products and services. Thus the natural thrust for many privacy advocates has been to push for simplifying such policies documents and making it easier for users to understand how their personal information is used and for what purposes.

Also, a lot of folks expect the different Google products to play nice with one another. It's not unreasonable to expect that using Gmail should have natural synergies with other Google Apps like Google Calendar and so on and so forth. Until the advent of Google+, the Google ecosystem felt largely scattered with each product sort of living on its own with very limited integration.

The new Google privacy policy attempts to address these concerns by creating one larger policy document that covers most of their products except for a few special cases like Google Chrome and Google Wallet. For the most part this seems like a tremendous step in the right direction since it means only needing to read and study one larger policy document.

The flip side, as other bloggers and journalists are already pointing out, is the fact that part of the changes includes language indicating that Google will now freely use data gathered from all covered products to aid with their efforts to personalize its services based on your user habits and such. It makes sense given greater integration between Google products can't happen unless data sharing happens as well, but naturally this has some people uncomfortable

[Books] The Sandman: Book of Dreams

The Sandman series of comic books remains to be a landmark achievement in storytelling and is definitely one of those titles that "everyone" is expected to have read at one point in their lives. And it's not because the comics were so universal, but more because they're just that good and you're doing yourself a major disservice if you wander through life without having read at least one of the issues or have gone through one of its story arcs.

Thanks to my partner, I finally managed to scratch this item off my bucket list a few years ago, but it took some more time before I finally got around to reading this collection of short stories based around the Sandman comics. I can't exactly explain why - anyone with a large collection of books can probably relate the random nature of how one title gets ignored while others move quickly through the pipeline, as it were.

The book has proven to be quite the delightful experience - a lovely return to the tales of the Endless and somewhat related adventures. And yet the stories don't wade too deep into the established continuity, making the book highly accessible to non-fans of the comics and others.

[Movies] The Bounty Hunter (2010)

It's interesting how a lot of what we perceive to be "action heroes" (perhaps based on their physique and initial movie roster at times) tend to make for interesting romantic leads as well. There seems to be a natural tendency to have such actors bounce between those two genres in an effort to give them some sense of range and of course reap the benefits of cross-genre movie marketing.

Gerard Butler is interesting in that regard since he has a pretty diverse movie background to begin with. While a lot of folks associate him with the testosterone-fueled movie 300, he's also the same guy involved in the Phantom of the Opera movie and others. He's probably not a "hardcore" action hero per se, but he does seem to have the proficiency (and the physical build) for it. But at the same time he seems to have a genuine enjoyment for romantic comedies, despite their lackluster performance at the box office.

Admittedly I wasn't in the mood for anything too serious when we sat down to watch this movie. We pretty much just watched it so I'd have something to review for today. It wasn't the most amazing movie by any right and I can see why it didn't do too well.