We were actually hoping to see Stardust when we went to the movie theater. It was about 2 hours after we showed up, so we decided to see Hairspray instead. I think we still would have rather seen Stardust. Hairspray is a classic musical movie, similar to Grease or West Side Story in some ways.
People are singing with somewhat no reason, and others don’t notice. That is the way of musicals however, and this one is pretty good.

Tracy Turnblad is a high school student (because really, what musical isn’t set in high school?) who wants to be a dancer on the Corny Collins show in Baltimore. Her dad runs a comedy shop while her mother, played by John Travolta, runs a laundry service. Auditions end up being soon enough, and she tries out and fails miserably. That’s okay though, because at a school dance she gets spotted by a star who overrules the producer of the show somehow and gets her on. She’s a hit with everyone in the town and very popular, much to the chagrin of the other girls on the show and the producer who didn’t think she had the talent.

The show evolves from there into a story about the desegregation of the show, which Tracy is all about. She’s had a friendship with some of them since she’s in detention all of the time with them. They are planning a march because even the one segregated day of the show has been cancelled. They end up doing it and things develop from there.

Nikki Blonsky has a good showing here as Tracy, and for the time she is on screen, she pulls it off wonderfully. James Marsden as Corny Collins is also very good. Travolta plays the part well, but it feels like a gimmick in order to get another star on screen. Allison Janey also has a small part which is just hilarious as a ultra-christian mother, whose daughter is a little crazy. Overall the acting is pretty great, and the feel of the film is perfect for all of the small parts of people you recognize to show up and not be jarring at all. However, my favorite role has to be Christopher Walken as Wilbur, Tracy’s father.

There is one particular scene with Walken and Travolta which is very strange to watch, but enjoyable just the same. The songs are just about the right length apart, and are catchy enough that you’ll be humming at least one on the way out. Hairspray has a good number of jokes and laughs too, and the ending just wraps it all up nice and neat. Hairspray holds up with a 7.

When I finished watching Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, I was really mad. I thought it was such a cheat to have so many story arcs open when the movie ended. It was obviously leading into the third movie, but I still thought it was cheating the viewer out of a good movie. There were not enough arcs closed in the second part. Unfortunately, the third installment was a huge let down.

The same old cast of characters is back in what is thankfully the last in the Caribbean trilogy. Unfortunately, the first half hour of the movie is focused on just reintroducing all the situations that the characters were in at the end of the last movie. Jack Sparrow is dead, and he needs to be rescued. Somehow the Black Pearl is in the other world as well, but it’s stuck on an island. The rest of the crew procures a vessel from a random “master of the sea”, and they head off to get him. The way there is peppered with some interesting one liners.

After they get to the land of the dead, they need to use a random map in order to get back, and of course Jack figures it out the riddle, right after they see it. Crazyness ensues and they return to the land of the living. The rest of the plot revolves around getting together captains from around the world in order to complete a random strange quest that Barbossa decided they needed to be on.

I had some high hopes for the plot when they introduced a goddess and played up the story. Unfortunately the huge buildup is just playing with you – it has no resolution, which doesn’t make any sense because it was the main goal of the entire first half of the movie. The second half is just a ride that you need to watch yourself through. Flashy fight here, one-liner joke there. The special effects are played up far too much, and the acting just gets worse and worse as the movie gets closer to the end.

At least this movie closes all of the story arcs that were opened by the second part of the trilogy. It at least counts as a guilty pleasure. The small in-jokes are littered throughout the movie and give you a chuckle or a groan every couple of minutes, even when the special effects budget is showing. It doesn’t make up for the not-so-great acting and completely predictable ending to many of the stories, and the complete lack of resolution of the most interesting story line that fizzles out and the completely boring last half hour that made me happy when I was at this movie’s end. It gets a 3.

The first thing that I noticed about Safari 3 is that they still haven’t fixed some of the bogus behavior that is present in Safari 2: the behavior of tabs. They have a preference that is selectable to make links that are clicked from other applications open in a new tab instead of a new widow, but any random site can create a new window by using the target=”_top” or target=”_new” tags to links. This can’t be a hard fix (there may be a way to do it in Mac Safari), but it is a major usability oversight in my opinion. At the very least, I would like to be able to ignore the targets that make a new window.

One of the biggest jarring things about moving from Firefox, my normal browser, to Safari for a couple of weeks, is that there is no Adblock Plus extension – meaning I see all of the ads that I would normally have completely blocked out. Some ads aren’t horribly bad, and I have even clicked on a few and learned something about a product or service I didn’t know about before that was actually useful. Unsurprising to me that almost all the ads that I ended up following were Google Adsense ads. Unfortunately, most of the ads on the web aren’t simple ads that just advertise, but they get in your face and flash and sometimes even make sounds that are unwanted. Most of the annoying ads are Flash ads – I feel like if I could only selectively run flash, the ads would be fine. They are highly annoying, and possibly the sole reason that I will be switching back to Firefox after this.

However, it is not all bad – Safari lives up to the advertising on it’s page. It is easily the fastest rendering browser that I have ever used, and I have used almost all of them. The speed is nice, and it’s something I need to get used to not having. It makes the web fast again, like it was before all of the new-fangled stuff. It is also pretty quick on startup, but I think that pre-loaded IE is faster on windows at least. The other good thing about it is it brings good font rendering to windows. I’ve been working on my Mac for a while now, and I’ve gotten used to the fonts that some people call “fuzzy”, and I actually prefer them that way. Working in windows is hard when I’m trying to squint through ClearType’s bad font hinting that makes reading a pain. The inline search is also fairly clean and nice with the animations. It is something I would gladly be happy with in Firefox.

The good isn’t enough to outweigh the bad, however, so it’s back tox Firefox (and iceweasel) for me.