Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a wierd movie. The kind I enjoy watching. It has Jim Carrey in a straight role, he still manages to pull a few wierd faces, but he’s not doing the Ace Ventura/Mask thing here.

It’s based very much on defeating the ‘you only get one chance to make a first impression’ premise. With a collander-on-the-head bit of science fiction, we get to go inside a mind and experience what it’s like to have defining moments of your life removed.

The ending was a qualified happy one, with a definite fatalistic feel to it, but it seemed ‘right’ anyhow. I thought this was great.

RodeoClown: sometimes wonders how he and Jen would go if they had another first meeting.

Have I ever mentioned that I hate going to the video store? There is nothing good to hire; you can either have sex or extreme violence, and even the violence generally comes with a pointless nude scene or two.

I went to the video store twice on Friday night. Didn’t get anything the first time, so Jen convinced me to go back and get something… fine.

I came back with Murderball and Primer.

Murderball is the original name of Quad Rugby – a wheelchair ‘football’ game. Obviously being quadraplegics there is no foot play to be seen, but rather a bunch of grown men stuffing themselves into armoured wheelchairs and then ramming the crap (technical term) out of whoever has the ball.

The movie/documentary focused on on the USA team, who were virtually undefeated until we saw them lose to Canada early on in the movie. There was also the Canadian head coach, who was the US’ best player for years, and then got cut from the team, so went to Canada to get them to win gold at the paralympics.

It was a pretty interesting doco – lots of swearing (but that’s pretty hard to avoid these days) and a completely unpredictable chapter on quadraplegic sex. With movies. That was kind of wierd to watch with a wife who was already annoyed that I didn’t get Serenity instead. FYI – I skipped to the next chapter. There was one guy who they filmed who had been disabled only a few months previously and he was really down, and then they stuck him in one of these chair/chariots and you could just see the guy light up like nothing. That was pretty moving.

Primer was wierd. Really slow to start, but you could see that it was heading somewhere interesting, so I didn’t mind. It’s a low budget movie about time travel, it’s pretty different to most mainstream movies, and has a feel very much like Cube, Hypercube and Donnie Darko. That is, it doesn’t treat the audience like idiots, leaves out a lot of detail, and makes for a large amount of conversation afterwards.

Also the plot gets a bit hard to follow, but it was interesting nonetheless. Jen decided after we finished watching it that she didn’t like it, I figured that I did, but it was a very considered opinion in both cases – we didn’t decide till about an hour after it finished (it was only an hour and a quarter, so it’s not a huge chunk of life gone in either case).

I went searching on the net after the movie finished to try and get a few things clarified, and discovered that at the movie’s official site is still running strong with people trying to decipher what the go with the story is. I also discovered that it was the director’s first movie (which explains a few things), and that it only cost $7000. Which means he should be rich just from me hiring it.

Two very different movies, I’d probably recommend Primer, but I’m still not sure about Murderball, with it’s crazy-sex stuff.

RodeoClown: thinks time travel is a great idea for stories.

Phil Steinmeyer sent me a copy (well, I downloaded it) of his game Bonnie’s Bookstore to review. Very nice of him

While installing, I skimmed through the EULA and spotted this little gem:

“If the Software is configured for loading onto a hard drive,
you may load the Software only onto the hard drive of up to
five machines that you own and run the Software from only
those hard drives.”

I think this is fantastic – I have multiple computers at home, and I know many other people do too, allowing installing the game on multiple computers without forcing the customer to resort to piracy is a very polite thing to do. And people do notice . This means I can stick a copy on my laptop as well as having one on the desktop at home. Handy.

Bonnie’s Bookstore is a word game, where you get a whole bunch of letters on a grid, and you have to make words out of those letters while trying to cover every tile before you run out of turns.

It’s actually simpler to play than to describe

As you can see in that screenshot, there are a few different types of tiles:

1. Coloured letters don’t get removed when you create a word
2. Stars count as a wildcard – use it as whatever letter you want
3. Padlocks cover tiles, and are removed when you use a letter next to them.

There are a few other types as well, but that’s pretty much it. It’s a pretty fun game to play – good when you want to kill a few minutes here and there as it doesn’t take 10 minutes to startup, unlike some other games out there *cough*Half-Life 2*cough*. I discovered (by accident – it wasn’t announced anywhere), that when I quit, it would save my position, so next time I fired it up I was exactly where I left it – I like this alot, and thought that I’d have to start from the beginning of that level again. Another handy little bit of polish that helps make the game good.

There were only a few things that bugged me about the game:

1. It feels very ‘girly’ – I think it would do better with a more asexual theme. Not that it really matters in the long run, but men who aren’t as secure in their manliness as I am (I’ve got TWO boys, heh!) might not want to play something like this on the train (what with the big pictures of princesses and the like).
2. The story felt extremely ‘tacked on’, it could be removed with no loss at all and a possible benefit, as it would mean you could jump to the next level much more quickly.
3. “Dogs” is not considered a valid word… but “dog” is.

All in all, they are pretty minor quibbles, the game is pretty good, nothing to rave on about, but it feels very polished and is relaxing to play as there is no time pressure (unless you choose to add it).

It costs $19.95 US, but when you go to buy it online, it will automagically give you the Australian price (assuming you are in Australia…), which at this time is $27.20, so it won’t break the bank. I think it’s a worthwhile buy if you are looking for a new time-killer, it’ll be sitting on my desktop for a long while to come I’d imagine.

RodeoClown: is cool with playing a ‘girly’ game.