The Descent

This is just a quick post to say that The Descent is indeed a great, tense horror flick. Even my wife enjoyed this one. It plays out in not quite three acts each focusing on slightly different aspects. You have the initial character setup (with some really nice shock and mood building segments), the initial cave sequence that is quite tense in its own right, and the final everything's gone to hell arc. And for those of us on this side of the pond, YouTube has the original British ending of the film. I'm not certain which I like better, they're both powerful in their own ways.

At any rate, go give it a gander.

Thoughts on podcasts

So, Pseudopod has launched. Relatively decent first story. I've noticed that a lot of the podcasts I listen to tend to be rather focused: a couple short story podcasts, some roundtable type stuff on gaming/tech themes and so on. Which brings me to Geek Fu Action Grip. Geek Fu incorporates some of those things - Mur is currently wrapping up part one of her story Heaven, but it's a much more conversational podcast. It reminds me a bit of some of the tapes my friends and I used to send back and forth while I was in Scotland for a couple years.

It's rather different from the rest of the things I listen to. But in a nice change of pace sort of way. In a lot of ways it reminds me more of an audio blog than a typical podcast. But that's probably splitting hairs...

Picked up Castle Keep the other day. Fun little game. Nice amounts of strategy in a game that can be played fairly quickly. And once you get the basics they include some advanced rules that make sense and there are about 4 or so different game variations (including a solitaire option) that sound pretty good. And it was only $10. Really good value (and the pieces are very nice).

Odds and ends

Ju-on, the original Japanese film The Grudge was based on was fun to watch. Still a creepy story although it was robbed of some of the chills due to knowing the plot. There were a couple twists that didn't make it into the remake that I thought should have.

Insomnia was interesting but rather different from what I expected. It ended about as well as could be expected. Didn't realize that this was also a remake.

Caught the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly the other night. I love Clint Eastwood Westerns. High Plains Drifter is probably my favorite, but they're all good...

Snagged Michael Palin's Sahara from the library today on CD. We'll see how that is. I suspect it'll be interesting. I remember thinking Palin has a rather nice narrative voice. He apparently has a whole series of travel related books/shows.