Not sure how much I’ll be posting in the near future, since I’m beginning a working vacation — or ‘workation’ — today, and won’t be back until Festivus. Today I’m at Whistler for a machine learning conference; tomorrow, I go to Tofino for the weekend with travel-buddy Janelle; then to Victoria to catch a plane to NYC, where I will be doing touristy things and also some research and networking. I’ve mostly been doing development work, lately, for the start-up I’m working with, but I’ve accumulated a stack of interesting papers that I will be going over. Bobo geek that I am, I’m kind of looking forward to travelling across the continent to stay in a low-budget art hotel and park my ass in a Manhattan coffee shop with a stack of papers and my old PowerBook.
A break is most welcome. This past week, I’ve trying to get out to see Janelle on her tour of the lower-mainland, attending NIPS and presenting my paper at one of the marathon poster sessions, and spending 10 or more hours a day coding so that I could leave town without blocking anyone else’s work or the next release. I’ve been a busy, busy nerd.
Though I http://prepaid365awards.co.uk/can-i-buy-caduet/ did have time to see The Mist — the Frank “hey, I did The Shawshank Redemption” Darabont-directed, Stephen “and so did I” King-written monsters-in-the-eponymous-meteorological-phenomenon horror flick. It has a few jokes and a weak set-up, sure, and parts are cheesy, but the whole damn thing is taken seriously — Darabont isn’t slumming by making a B horror movie, he’s rising to the challenge. And it works, mostly because the tension come not just from the mist-monsters, but from the survivors holed up in a small-town supermarket and reverting to a particularly savage Biblical superstition. But Janelle just thought it was cheesy, so there you have it.
And so, in conclusion, I give The Mist seven blood-encrusted tentacles out of ten. It has cool, hick-eating monsters, Marcia Gay Harden chewing the scenery, and a bizarre and bleak ending. Seriously, what more do you people even want?