Meanwhile in other news
Monday, April 09, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Apple got me again. I broke down and ordered an AppleTV yesterday. I saw someone did an RSS reader for it. It's pretty bare-bones. But now I have to get my fingers in there and start adding my own hacks. I also bought an HDMI-to-HDMI cable (theirs was pretty cheap!) and an extra Mac power cable. Someone asked if I would be buying an ApplePhone, and I groaned. "I don't want to, but I probably will," I admitted. 
Saw two movies over the weekend -- House of Sand and Fog, and Stranger than Fiction. Both had chances to be great, but neither achieve anything close to it. House is a really grim movie, which is something I don't mind in a movie, but -- it had zero suspension of disbelief. So I was watching from the outside, not in the story at all, amazed at how bad things could go, but not really feeling it. Oh well.
And Stranger than Fiction was trying to be Sixth Sense-ish or John Malkovich-like, or a clone of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a tricky movie, with great acting. It had good acting, and great actors, but a stupid plot that oversold itself. In the end you feel the energy was sucked out of you for nothing. Just a void. You wanted to laugh (Will Ferrell is the star after all) and you wanted to get involved (Emma Thompson) and you owed them respect (Dustin Hoffman) and they had style (Queen Latifah) but the whole thing didn't come together. Oh well. You gotta watch some mediocre movies so you really get to appreciate the great ones.
