ugh.

i am totally procrastinating.

i just completely cleaned my desk, a desk that's been an utter mess for the past few months but has been working fine for me thank you very much until tonight that is, when i felt this overwhelming urge to clean it. piles of magazines and catalogs thrown into bookshelves, pens and pencils tossed into a can, loose change added to my loose change section of my desk drawer, layers of bills and letters grouped in an orderly manner, things reorganized and placed neatly on my table, upright, stacked, layered, the ikebono of desktop rearrangement.

this is the ritual i go through when i have work to do and i don't want to do it. this is the cornerstone of procrastination, the nation of procrasty.

with my desk cleaned, i can now focus on my programming work. or can i? my room seems a lot dirtier for some reason...

i ran this morning after having gone the entire week without any running. note to self: getting out of bed, getting dressed, and then head outside to run in 80+ degrees weather without properly feeding or hydrating is not a good idea. but at least i stretched for 5 minutes! by the second half of the run i was tired and ran pretty slow. luckily i was by myself and nobody would ever know about this hidden shame (unless somehow i write about it online).

after my saturday double movie matinee, i grabbed the gps and traced my jogging route on motorcycle so i can find out the distance of my belmont running route. i was afraid that it'd be less than 3 miles and that i was getting all winded despite the fact that i might be running a shorter distance than what i normally run. to my delight though, i discovered my route is actual 3.4 miles. and that's a nasty 3.4 miles too, dotted with hills, we're not dealing with a 2d flatworld course here!

i'm going to be honest, but the first 30 minutes of legally blonde i just totally hated the movie. i thought the characters were stupid, the story was weak, and i was afraid this be the first movie this summer that i would actually tell people not to go see. when the film finally ended, i left with a big smile and a good feeling, and realized that once again the force of cinematic good has triumphed over cinematic evil, and a movie that was number one at the box office opening week can't possibly be that bad. the mainstream taste of the theatre going population is never wrong!

observations:

• it's nice to see a movie based in cambridge/boston. i found myself trying to match all the exterior shots with real life local locations. but can we stroke harvard's ego even more? maybe it's because i went to tufts, but i'm so sick and tired of harvard being this unimagineably great school that only accepts the intellectual elites of the world!
• i don't like chihuahuas. i personally think it'd have been a better movie without the chihuahua. i know the chihuahua's there for comedic purposes, but i find nothing funny with chihuahuas. they actually scare me, with their bugeyes and miniature bony frame. i was so happy when taco bell got rid of that chihuahua mascot.
• throughout the film there's this unspoken battle between blondes and brunettes. basically, all the good girls are blondes, and all the bad girls are brunettes. good girls: elle woods (reese witherspoon), blonde, brooke taylor windham (ali larter), blonde. bad girls: vivian kensington (selma blair), brunette, chutney (linda cardellini), brunette. i personally prefer brunettes just a bit more (blonde girls, you gals are all right too!).
• is this a girl empowering movie? there were a lot of young girls in the audience, and the message of the movie seems to be, for a girl, that sure guys might harass you and only want you for your body, but if you persevere and try hard, you can do anything. hooray!
• bend and snap! if you see the movie, you'd understand!
• why was almost everyone so mean to elle woods? they were mean to the point of cartoony. i don't think the movie painted a very flattering image of harvard law school (so maybe it wasn't stroking harvard's ego, but i know a stroking when i see one, and it still looks like a stroke). vivian kensington in particular, she was so mean from the start even before realizing who elle woods was, what was vivian's motives? it was sort of weird in the ending when she tried to be friends with elle. i was pretty suspicious, waiting for vivian to maybe suddenly attack elle once again.
• my jaw dropped when i saw lindsay from freaks and geeks as the daughter, chutney! oh girl, that perm, ugly! nice to see lindsay working after the demise of f&g. the only other movie i've seen her in is strangeland, that really disturbing horror movie where she gets tortured.
• "what's your boyfriend's name?" "chuck." once again, if you saw the movie, you'd understand! teehee! the film surprisingly is filled with some pretty funny lines.
• the movie ended with the new go-go's song perfect day. unlike some other films, this movie song didn't only just appear just when the final credits were rolling. it was used quite effectively in the final scene of the film.

this movie was a real surprise. it was pretty funny, and good funny, not the gross funny of scary movie 2. here are some reasons to go see it: 1) you like funny movies, 2) you want to see a movie filmed in boston, 3) you went to harvard and want to see your alma mater stroked on the big screen, and 4) you're a girl and want to feel empowered. the movie is about the stereotypical blonde culture, with things like sorority sisterhood and wearing really bright colors, but it doesn't make fun of it, and if anything, at least these airheads are nicer and more fun even if they aren't so smart, versus the smarties, who are mean and dull.

a lot of parents with kids in the audience, which makes sense, cause what normal kid doesn't like dinosaurs? trailers included the others (children endangerment movie, goodie!), musketeer (interesting action premise, but musketeers using chinese swordfighting style? ain't it just so hollywood?), rush hour 2 (three words: zhang ziyi), ice age (another cgi movie!), and american pie 2. it was kind of weird to see ap2, cause that's an r rated movie, and most of these kids (i'm assuming they're all good kids with good parenting) have never even seen american pie the original. there was an awkward stillness in the theatre while the trailer ran, parents squirming in their seats as their kids were being exposed to something they would rather shield them from.

without further ado, here are my observations about jurassic park iii:

• the movie started off with the hinting of dinosaurs, but it took a little while, until they actually arrived at dino island, before we see our first dinosaur, and even then, it wasn't a real dinosaur but a dream sequence dinosaur. however, this dream sequence dinosaur is important symbolically because it's a talking raptor, and one of the underlying scientific notion of the movie is that raptors were actually able to talk to one another (vocalization is what they called it).
• the first real sighting of dinosaurs was a rather boring herd of herbivores viewed from the window of a lowflying plane. the first payoff interaction between dinosaur and man was definitely exciting though, as the team encountered this super predator dinosaur (sort of this semi-bipedal crocodile with a raised spinal fin) that quickly dispatched with the muscles of the team (how convenient). the remaining team only managed to escape because the spiny dino-meanie encountered a tyrannosaurus rex and a major battle ensued (i had a momentary godzilla flashback, winner: spiny dinosaur). that scene was also symbolic because from that point on, tyrannosaurus rex seemed like a lesser dinosaur evil compared to this spiny dino (it never really got a catchy name), smart raptors, and pterodactyls.
• there's a brief scene in the beginning where the teaching assistant billy is sort of flirting with this girl. it was kind of unnecessary, i don't really know what was the point, because we never really go back to this relationship. maybe it was to show his attention to details in extracting dino bones (there's a joke in there somewhere) in a fun and flirtatious manner so the audience won't get bored and will find the character enduring! who knows.
• okay, is that a sony camcorder? everyone knows that they run on special proprietary sony brand lithium ion batteries and you can't just take out a couple of batteries from a flashlight and suddenly be able to use the camcorder! only a real tech nerd would notice this goof, but i'm just pointing it out.
• when billy disappears and dr. alan grant asks him where he was ("just taking some photos"), i knew right then and there that he must've stolen some raptor eggs, and i knew that somehow these eggs would become important at the end of the movie. no surprise there.
• when a pterodactyl grabbed the kid eric, i could see the parallel between taking a ride with a flying dinosaur and taking a ride on a parasail. symmetry!
• i thought it was great when barney the purple dinosaur appeared on tv and distracted the attention of dr. ellie sattler's (laura dern) young son from giving a very important phone message to his mommy.
• i totally thought that when billy jumped off the aviary catwalk with the parasail, that he was backstabbing the team and running away from danger. so i was impressed to see that he was actually trying to save young eric from being baby pterodactyl food. he was a very interesting character. maybe i bought into the movie too much, but i thought most of the characters were pretty interesting and multidimensional. the father (william h. macy) who lied in order to get alan grant to come along to the expedition, the scientist (sam neill) who is once again thrown back on dino island after vowing never to return, the little kid who survived 8 weeks on the island alone, and even laura dern's character, who has a brief cameo in the beginning of the movie but rescued the team later on.
• last but not least, unlike aliens (see evolution, see final fantasy), DINOSAURS ARE AFRAID OF FIRE! in the final scene with spiny dino, how does the fearless team escape from being dino snack? with fire of course! plus the help of a little bit of flammable fluid in the water.

i was told by people who saw the movie that it was short, about 90 minutes. i thought it was just the right length. the story is very straight forward, survive long enough to get off the island without becoming dino food, with a secondary story of divorced parents coming together to search for their lost son. i thought this secondary story was very spielbergesque (he only produced the movie), likewise with the child endangerment angle of the plot. téa leoni, whom i have labeled box office poison, is also pretty good in the film. maybe mrs. duchovny isn't so toxic after all! what is a summer without a big dinosaur movie, right? definitely worth seeing. not as intellectual as a.i., but definitely a smart movie that even people who aren't very smart (raising hand) can understand and enjoy!