Budget
April 14th 2003 -
Budget
I set myself a “toys” budget yesterday. I figure I need to put a cap on my reckless spending, and budgets always make the anticipation more enjoyable as well – there’s nothing like waiting and waiting for something when you have to, rather than just going out and buying it. One of those stoopid human condition things. Anyway, having set my budget…
Gameboy Advance
…ah, yes. Now my budget is almost gone for the month. The new GBA has a completely different design and is rather cool – rechargable battery, brighter screen, silver casing. I’d been putting off getting a GBA ever since they came out, and now I’m glad I waited. This one is pretty cool.
I got a couple of games to start me off: “Legend of Zelda”, and “Advance Wars”. The former is a rather cool adventure game set in a great big world with lots of extras, and the latter is a turn-based strategy game of surprising sophistication and it quite enjoyable. Mmm. War games in the middle of a war. Tasteful!
Shanghai Knights
It’s a sequel to the Jackie Chan/Owen Wilson vehicle Shanghai Noon, and it turned out to be quite OK. I kinda like the older, slower Jackie Chan – his schtick is now more oriented towards physical comedy with comedy coming slightly ahead of the gosh-wow-that-looks-tricky. It works. There were a number of scenes (as with most Jackie Chan films, even the bad ones) in which I was laughing out loud. The rest of the film – well, it was alright. It passed the time, was a wee bit too twee and cute, and didn’t engage to nearly the same effect, but it was pretty skillfully put together and didn’t hold the action scenes too far apart. A hell of a lot better than Rush Hour 2.
Weekend
Missed my roleplaying fix on the weekend due to various clashes, so I mainly sat around playing GBA games and relaxing. Parties on Friday and Saturday night with Anna’s friends and relatives, so I’ve been asked over a dozen times when we’re getting married.
A fish called Wanda
I also watched a bit of the “A fish called Wanda” documentaries and was suitably impressed by some of the deleted scenes and John Cleese’s extremely analytical take on the writing and editing process. One of the scenes, which is shown in full in one of the documentaries but not in the deleted scenes themselves, was a hilarious extended scene of John Cleese’s character trying to get Michael Palin’s character to say where the safety deposit box containing all the diamonds was. Their efforts to write it down go on and on – there’s a typewriter but no paper, so John tries to feed in tissues. There’s a pencil, but the lead is broken and they can’t find a pencil sharpener, and when they do, they’ve lost the pencil. Just hilarious, and a real pity that it was deleted – it would have been one of the highlights.