Before the Devil Knows Your Dead
Dec 3, 2007 Movies
I just got back from seeing Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, a new movie starring Ethan Hawke, Phillip Seymore Hoffmann, and Marisa Tomei. Here is IMDB’s synopsis:
When two brothers organize the robbery of their parents’ jewelery store the job goes horribly wrong, triggering a series of events that sends them, their father and one brother’s wife hurtling towards a shattering climax.
I don’t know about shattering, but the climax was pretty good. In fact, I really liked this movie. Instead of the story being told in a linear fashion, you get certain parts at certain times in no particular order. For example, one scene will take place at a certain time, then the next will take place 3 day prior, then the next would be 2 days later. But that effect makes a good story seem even better.
The acting in this movie was amazing, especially the scene where Hoffmann and Tomei are in the car and pull over for his little breakdown. Added to the story, this movie was pretty solid. Although, there was one HUGE plot hole. You will know what I mean when you see it.
I give it a B+.
VisualHub - The Ultimate Movie Converter (Mac)
Jul 29, 2007 Uncategorized
A lot of people have written reviews for this piece of software, and every one I have ever seen has been good. Well, this short review can be filed right next to the others. Visual Hub is the best and most useful piece of software that I own. It can handle almost any video file type you can throw at it, and then convert it to many of the most popular formats. It has presets for iPods, AppleTV, Divx, and many others. You can also tweak any setting you wish in the conversion process.
Yeah yeah yeah, we all have read that before. I want to share my favorite feature of the software. There is a tab for DVD. Plain and simple, it authors a DVD from the videos you have put in the window. What makes this so great is that you don’t have to worry about figuring out how to convert your whatever-kind-of-video the a DVD-compatible format. Instead, whatever kind of video you have, you just dump it (or them) into the window and hit start. It does all the work, then burns it if you want. You can fit several hours of video onto a single disc, and it compresses the video as needed.
The window above shows the main window in the DVD-creation process.
This is a very brief review, but I wanted to point out my favorite feature this software offers. For $23.32, this will be the only conversion software you will EVER need!
