Saturday, November 20, 2010

Movie Night - November 20, 2010

Movie night, and a note that holy crap it's icy out there when i left. Car coved, driveway slippy, stay safe out there people.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
   Do i need to say how much i love, love, love this movie? Watched it four times or more now since getting the bluray, and still want to watch it more. I'll make the obligatory note that the graphic novels are great too, but both hold their own. You will get a lot more information about backstory in the books, that makes you appreciate the movie more, but the movie can stand on it's own. So many scenes were right out of the books, and most of the characters looked right out of the movie. Anyway, see this movie and read the books. I don't know of anything else like it.



Funky Forest: the First Contact
   Speaking of nothing else like it, this movie. Wow, Japan sure can bring the weird. It was long, with an intermission, and then another intermission, but that was more a joke, but it kept you on your feet wondering wtf was going to happen next. Eventually, most of the parts sort of connected, mostly by characters, but still, very random performance art feeling. Not necessarily in a bad way, but a very, very weird way. Think dreams you can't control. That pretty much sums it up i think, but i could be wrong.



Hot Tub Time Machine
   Liked this, tons of great call backs to 80s movies, and a great cast. Not the most sympathetic characters at times, but that is part of it's charm, and it's also not very PC. Not sure what else to say, but i'll have to see if i can find out more about certain characters, who seemed familiar.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Culture Fest and other stuff

Tuesday i decided to go to culture fest, after many hours of pacing around, changing my mind back and forth, etc. Part of why i was so undecided was that i only heard about this from the online calendar that UW-RF has on their site, and that they also listed the rehearsals but didn't make it clear which one was the "real" event. Sadly, it also showed i seemed to miss another drag show the week before. They really need to advertise things better, but who knows, maybe they have tons of info at the university talking about it, but off campus, even the local newspaper site, had nothing at all that i could find. Another part of tossing around if i should go was that it was at the North Hall Auditorium, which i've only been in a couple times at most, and many years ago. So i did't know if there would be a good spot to photograph from without bothering too many people.

Eventually, i did decide to just go. Fought the anxiety and just went. Also forgot my extra memory cards. D'oh! If i had the 5D with me that would be less of a problem, as with the 16GB cards it can hold around 800 photos, but i had the 7D and with the same card it holds about 500 or so. Sounds like a lot, but with still being not so used to low light, performance shooting, i set it on high speed capture, and try to get some good shots of motion. So sadly i had to set the capture to medium sized RAW, i'm not a fan of shooting in JPEG, as RAW saves so much more information, and allows more recovery of borderline shots post shoot.

So i get there, walk in the auditorium, and see it's got a balcony. I ask a lady working if it's okay to go up there, and she says it should be. I was mostly worried the doors would be locked, as there were lights up there, but once i got up one door was unlocked. I grab a decent seat, and get ready. Side note, have i mentioned how much i hate stairs? I really need to get in better shape, ugh. Before the event starts, three more people end up sitting up there, but after intermission aren't there anymore. I hope my camera wasn't too noisy, especially during the quieter moments, but that's part of why i sat where i did, to not be such a disturbance.

The event itself was pretty awesome, very similar to the Unity in the Community events that had people perform. A couple things of note that stood out to me the most (and i'll probably be talking about these on my daily photo site, but i wanted to post like this here, yeah, yeah, i know).

It started with a fashion show, various countries, here is the Japan group. All pretty neat, and well done, but the Japan ones were just adorable, they had fans they held up, even the guy.

The belly dancer, i believe her name is Dalal (i heard her last name, but no clue if i'd mangle it), and if i 'm not mistaken, the same woman who preformed the belly dances at the Unity in the Community events i've been to the years before. She's pretty damn awesome, i don't know much about belly dancing, but she did a great job. It was funny though, that when she was ready, they kept having problems with the music. They got it going right though, and off she went. Personally, i prefer her hair like this to the very curly she had before. This outfit is neat too, the layers of the white and red really played off each other well.

The swing dancers were pretty amazing too, doing moves like flipping around, tossing each other around and up, all that. Not what i was expecting at all, that's for sure. Just sad that at the shutter speed i had to use, a lot of them had a lot of motion blur and didn't look as good as i would hope.

I forget this guy's name, (i really wish they had programs for these, lots of hard to remember names) but he started out with a ukulele and moved on to a guitar and singing a medley of  songs that one wouldn't think of as fit for acoustic guitar. Pretty awesome really.

The guy on the right was the main performer for this bit. Started out with telling a joke, then asked for someone from the audience, who he asked to help him take his clothes off, joked about her being his wife, and revealed a tattoo (fake?) of the falcon and UWRF. Then said it was because it was because of all the great people he has met here. (awww) Then the guy on the left came out, and they did a fight routine, with different music and such, that worked it's way into music from Mortal Kombat theme song and them fighting in slow motion. It was hilarious, they even had fake blood and were amusing. Some of the moves were very impressive too, so hard to describe really. One of the best of the night for sure.

Ha Family Lion Dance Troupe. I've always loved these, not sure why, but it was pretty cute how the tail wagged as it moved too. At one point it lost one of those balls on it's nose.

The singer, who's feet you can see on the stage, told people to sing along and dance if they wanted, so people did. It's was pretty fun, at first people started waving arms around, then a couple held up lighters, then several started dancing, more than you see here.

There were more pictures, and performers, but this is what i felt like elaborating on for now. Good times, good performers, but bad advertising.

I was going to talk about some other stuff, but this is getting long, and i'm sure people don't really want to hear about that. More just weird dreams, feelings, all that emo stuff. ;)