Before Sunrise (1995) – Movie Review

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before-sunrise-movie-poster-01

Why did it take me 18 years to see Before Sunrise?! I was absolutely mesmerized by it. The movie starts with the characters placed in a somewhat normal situation, but it becomes kind of magical, and yet totally believable at the same time. And the plot…well, was there a plot? Not really, but the dialog and acting were so great that they carried the movie. It is basically the story of two people meeting and falling in love over the course of one entire day. Simple, right? But there is something different about it. I think it is that the acting/casting really works, and the dialog is both off-the-wall, yet completely human. Julie Delpy is fantastic and Ethan Hawke impressed me as well.

I think I really connected with the story because my experience of moving to Japan and meeting Mariko was had some similarities to the film: I was living in an unfamiliar but fascinating country, and also became completely head over heels in love with Mariko in that first night after we met, and we are about the same ages as the actors in the movie. As you can tell, it’s a very romantic film, but I can really be a sucker for stories like thise, and who doesn’t like being in love? In the movie, Celine says “But isn’t everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?”

I’m looking forward to the sequel “Before Sunset” to arrive from Netflix, and then the third movie “Before Midnight” as well! Highly recommended!

Honey and Clover / ハチミツとクローバー (2006) – Movie Review

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honey-and-clover-movie

I found Honey and Clover (Japanese movie) at the local library and decided to give it a try since I have heard about the manga, but never really knew anything about it. The description on the back seemed to match the kind of movie I would be interested in: A group of art school students’ lives and the relationships that develop between them. While the characters were interesting and the setting of the story kept my attention, the plot itself was so lacking that I found myself wondering why I was watching the movie. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen, but nothing really does. Well, at least nothing that I would make a movie over. The love stories never really develop, the characters don’t grow so much, and I kind of find it difficult to remember how the movie ended, even though I just watched it a few days ago. I’m sure the manga must be good, but the movie just falls flat. Disappointed!

Ubuntu = New Life for the Laptop

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Dell 11z with UbuntuPhoto info: OLYMPUS IMAGING CORP. E-PL1, 14mm, f/3.5, 1/40 sec, ISO1600

My old hand-me-down laptop, a Dell Inspiron 11z, was feeling really sluggish for the past couple of months. It was so painfully slow, that I really didn’t like using it and most of the time opted for my phone instead. Web browsing was so bad that I literally fell asleep a couple times waiting for a page to load. I finally had enough and decided to do something about it, and came to the decision to install Ubuntu onto it. I have used Ubuntu before a few years ago on another old laptop and was pretty happy with it. It is so lightweight that I hoped it would be a nice alternative to the heavy and slow Windows installation.

I copied the latest n greatest version of Ubuntu (13.10) to a USB key for the installation. I read that you should install Ubuntu while connected via cable to your network so that Ubuntu could download all the files it needs, including wi-fi drivers. I found that when the laptop was hard-wired to the network, web browsing in Windows was much better. In fact, it was just about like before! Could it be the wifi card causing the slowness? The answer was Yes. I downloaded a new set of drivers for the card and it seemed to fix the speed issue. I’m very happy about that. But… all was not rosy. It turns out that YouTube videos were still kind of choppy. I figured that the laptop just could not handle the higher quality videos, or new types of compression being used.

So, onward with the Ubuntu installation. I followed some directions to set up a dual-boot environment so I could use both Windows 7 and Ubuntu. In order to do that it is recommended to repartition the hard drive and install Ubuntu onto the new unallocated space. Well, during that process I encountered a few errors and that led me to do run Error-checking on the hard disk. The utility found some errors, fixed them, and then booted back to Windows. I decided to fire up some YouTube videos, and lo and behold, the choppiness was gone! My laptop was running great again! I probably didn’t need to install Ubuntu.

But, I was pretty psyched to try out Ubuntu again (and the screenshots of the latest version looked pretty cool), so I went ahead with the installation. All went without a hitch and I am now enjoying the new OS and the speed that comes with it. I love it! To anyone who has an older laptop that is getting a little slow, I recommend trying Ubuntu. It could extend the life of your computer a few years. And an added bonus: it’s FREE!!