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Reviews of Movies, Games, Books, and Things I Enjoy

Now, I haven’t read a single page out of J.K. Rowling’s immortal works, but I do enjoy the series of movies that have spawned from them. I know, they say the movies are never as good as the books. I was told that there was a lot left out of the movie, such as a longer scene at the end in Dumbledore’s tower.

For me, though, I enjoy the visual effects and flashy objects on the screen. Does this mean I have no imagination? I did read the first two books of The Sword of Truth Series and part of the third, so I had my own ideas of what Richard, Kahlan, and other characters looked like before The Legend of the Seeker came out as a television series. That’s a different story.

I’m just amazed at what we can create on the screen now with special effects. The whole magic and wizardry happenings are much more appealing to me to see with my eyes, than to imagine in my head. Some of the best special effects shots of the summer were in Harry Potter. They were magnitudes greater than the death of John Dillinger in Public Enemies. And how cool was it to see a real spell that gamers would love to see cast like Dumbledore engulfing dozens of nasties in fire?

It was a nice change to see a nerdy movie (besides Star Trek) this summer that had a good story and actually made sense most of the movie. I think there was only one part that actually had me perplexed. If the Death Eaters were inside Hogwarts, don’t you think they would do a little more damage than just kick a bunch of dinner plates and destroy some windows? I actually heard that more happens in the book, but I won’t go there.

This is definitely a movie to see for the summer. I would suggest watching the other Harry Potter movies beforehand so you aren’t a little confused going into it. Or, you can get a quick recap of what happened up until this movie like I had to do. I’ve only seen each movie once, so I needed a little reminder.

This summer’s movies have done a good job at using small tidbits that I enjoy. Public Enemies gives us the story of notorious bank robber John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp, and portrays him as a charismatic, protagonist-like figure. He is pursued by Christian Bale playing agent Melvin Purvis.

Christian Bale can actually play a character other than Batman! I know he was in Terminator, but I’m still convinced that John Connor was Bruce Wayne in disguise. He didn’t show many faces as Melvin Purvis. His character seemed to be just a stoic agent who just does his job day in and day out.

On the other side of the law was Johnny Depp as John Dillinger. As always, Depp plays a likable character, but this time he wasn’t eccentric.

Public Enemies had a lot of good points to it. The song at the beginning of the movie and during the bank robbery scenes was an awesome choice. It fit well with the movie. There were also some funny moments in the movie like the theater scene when the picture showed a shot of Dillinger on the screen and asked people to look to their left and right, because he may be in the audience.

There was also a classic Tommy Gun moment where the gangster stands up to the cops to be inevitably gunned down while spraying bullets everywhere.

The only thing I didn’t like was the very end where it shows the bullet go slow motion in and out of somebody’s head and it doesn’t even look real. I didn’t think that shot was necessary. Maybe it fit the actual story of John Dillinger, but they could have shot it differently. At least Public Enemies was way better than Transformers.

Well, we rode the Dow Jones all the way up to 8,800 before taking a nice drop in the past couple of weeks to get another entry point. I’ve taken advantage of this not only in my fantasy portfolio, but also in my real portfolio. My fantasy portfolio positions that I bought this past week have already seen gains. The stocks I bought for my real account have just seen a break even point, so I wasn’t able to time the bottom for them perfectly. Hopefully I can get another decent buy point this week so I can add make some more money.

This dip in the market was once again caused by stocks being overbought, so it had to cool off for a little bit while the big money managers take their profits. The market isn’t terrible like everybody makes it out to be. When dips come in the market like this, it’s a golden opportunity to jump in and make some profits yourself. Keep looking for these dips and get your money in the market, you’ll be glad you did.

I finally changed the layout of my stock positions. It looks a lot better in a table than my original layout from last week and the previous with all the dashes. What do you think?

Dow Jones at Year Start- $9,034.69
Dow Jones at End of Week – $8,438.39
Dow Jones Point Gain – (-$596.30)
Dow Jones Percent Gain – (-6.60%)

Portfolio at Year Start – $104,435.54
Portfolio at Week End – $114,584.54
Portfolio Total Gain – +$10,149.00
Portfolio Percent Gain – +9.72%

Transactions

6/22 Buy 200 Shares of CAT at $33.49
6/22 Buy 100 Shares of AEM at $51.15
6/22 Buy 200 Shares of NAT at $32.00
6/23 Buy 50 Shares of AAPL at $133.92
6/23 Buy 100 Shares of BA at $43.99
6/23 Buy 100 Shares of BP at $47.10

Dividends Paid

6/9 $168.00 from 525 Shares of MO at $0.32 per Share
6/11 $56.25 from 250 Shares of HD at $0.23 per Share

I have to say, I enjoyed the Autobots and Decepticons plot and main story of the new Transformers movie. Their battle for dominance on the Earth and the involvement of Sam and Mikala went well together and would have made for a good movie. I say “would have,” because there was just too much in this movie that detracted from my enjoyment and really put me off in my overall reaction to it.

Begin rant:

My first big beef is there were too many characters in Revenge of the Fallen that nearly made me walk out of the theater and demand a refund. The first two on the list are the twin Autobots Mudflap and Skids. These two bicker back and forth too much with each other and use too much profanity and vulgar language. They are just plain annoying and inappropriate. Next is Sam’s college roommate Leo. He is one of those characters who whines and is always scared and serves no real purpose in the movie other than to find somebody who can help with the symbols Sam is seeing. He reminds me of Jar Jar in The Phantom Menace, but a Jar Jar who gets hit in the nuts in every scene he is in. Last is the Pretender Decepticon Alice. All of a sudden the Decepticons have a hormone-crazed Terminator on their side that has a long, hidden tail and a long, lashing tongue. In my opinion, she wasn’t very attractive, but Leo was drooling all over her.

There were more than just a few characters that could have been done away with. Several little clips and scenes could have been cut out and made the movie a lot more enjoyable. Sam’s family has a new dog in this movie, and it unfortunately gets humped by the original dog at least twice in the film. I don’t know what purpose this served other than to get a crude laugh. Once was enough, even though it was not necessary. Speaking of humping, we have a horny Decepticon turncoat named Wheelie who changes sides when Mikala catches him spying on her. Let’s just say Wheelie takes a liking to Mikala doing something that every adolescent male would love to do to her. Then comes the giant Decepticon named Devastator. I thought it was pretty neat getting the Constructicons into the mix, but to have a pair of wrecking balls hanging from between its back legs and a character saying he was under its scrotum was just too much. This movie isn’t American Pie or any other movie with Sean William Scott in it.

The last point I want to touch on is also a topic that has been much talked about since the first movie. The whole damn movie was just one long GM commercial. With the way things are going, they could use all the help they could get in advertising. There was a Corvette Stingray concept car as the Autobot Sideswipe in one of the first scenes. Sideswipe was a bad ass in that scene, but I didn’t see him in the rest of the movie except in auto form. That kind of annoyed me as it seemed like too much of a teaser. Cisco-acquired Webex also made an appearance in the movie when Sam and Mikala were supposed to have a cyber date. More lame product placement.

There you have it. Another box office smash that is going to rake in millions and millions of dollars that actually sucked. If you cut out everything I didn’t like, I think you have an awesome movie that didn’t waste two and a half hours of my life. Oh yeah, it was also unnecessarily long, unlike this post.