Nacho Libre

Most comedic actors have their own personal style that flows with them into any movie they do.  Jack Black, however, shows surprising acting ability in his role as Ignacio in Nacho Libre, a movie totally original and separate from any of Black’s other films.

Ignacio is an orphan who grew up in a Mexican monastery to be a monk.  Yet none of the other members of the clergy give him any priestly duties, leaving him to be the under-funded cook.  After a new nun arrives (eventually becoming a friend and source of inspiration for Ignacio) he begins moonlighting as a luchador named Nacho.  With a little help from a tag-team partner, he begins to earn a little money to buy fresh ingredients for food for the children.

The premise is nothing new.  Though Ignacio’s objective to become a pro luchador provides a setting virtually untapped by Hollywood, the plot does not astound and is fairly predictable at parts.  Even so, I rarely thought about where the plot was leading thanks to the great comedy.

Black gives a masterful performance and only brought attention to himself as an actor once.  The rest of the time, I thoroughly enjoyed the hilarious facial expressions, silly situations and genuinely funny comments.  Even the luchador fights were great fun to watch.

While not the best movie I have seen, I couldn’t help but love Nacho Libre.  The humor sometimes reminded me of Napoleon Dynamite, but I easily recommend this movie to anyone.  I could find no objectionable material in the whole show, not even any swearing (a rarity nowadays).  If you haven’t seen it yet, seriously consider watching Nacho Libre next time you need a good laugh.

Brick Oven

So I went to Brick Oven for the first time tonight.  A tour guide company called Mountain West Travel was looking for Japanese speakers to hire, and they held a meeting here to entice Japanese students at BYU to attend.  Naturally, they had pizza as well.

First off, I doubt I'm going to apply.  They seemed like a good enough company and the job looked enjoyable, but I just didn't feel like it was a good fit for me.  I did see a few people I know from my mission and Japanese classes, though.

As for Brick Oven itself, it was a pretty good restaurant.  The pizza was good, and the atmosphere was better than what I had anticipated.  It was hotter than I would have liked, but that's not surprising considering how many people we had in the one room.  On the whole, I quite liked it and would love to go again, assuming I've got the money for it.

Left 4 Dead

So yesterday between classes, I downloaded the Left 4 Dead demo on Steam.  I love good zombie games, even though they can scare me like crazy.  Left 4 Dead is not only a zombie game, but it's also a Valve-made FPS, and it has a heavy emphasis on cooperative play.  Basically, that means it's entirely awesome.

There are a lot of things I could say about this game, but I'm not going to talk about the general gameply too much.  Instead, I'd like to write about a few of the more memorable moments I had in the game.  One thing I love about it is how heavily it empasizes team work.  I was in a game with one of my friends, buzh3rd, and we had a really stupid guy join our game.  He did a couple dumb things, like shooting teammates or throwing a moltov coctail in close quarters.  Moltovs frequently make fire, and lots of it, so throwing one where there isn't a lot of room means that you're going to set yourself and your teammates on fire.

That wasn't the dumbest thing he did, though.

The dumbest thing he did was when we were in the subway after we had just fought off a wave of zombies.  Down the hall, we could hear a little girl crying.  In Left 4 Dead, that means a witch is near, one of the most deadly enemies in the game.  The good thing is that they don't attack until disturbed.  Well, he disturbed it, and not by throwing a pipe bomb or riddling it with assault rifle bullets, but by teasing it with a pistol.  That not only did almost no damage to it, but made it attack us before we were ready to fight it.  Fortunately, she only killed the idiot, after which time we kicked him from the game.

There were some great games, though, like the times I played in the same game as some of my other friends.  Once, I got in a really good group on a random server, and we totally owned everything in our way, which was a ton of fun.  Taking out a tank zombie with two teammates still living afterwards on Expert mode was a great experience, too.  I swear I loaded that thing with about 25-40 shells of shot gun at point blank range before it died, not to mention my teammates fire.  It was quite fun.

Overall, I love Left 4 Dead, and I can't wait to get the full game next week.

Stupid Facebook

So I don't really want to, but I finally put a picture on facebook today. Stupid thing, making me book my face. Now I'm going to get stalked. I guess getting stalked wouldn't be too bad if it was by a hot girl, but I'm probably only saying that because it hasn't happened to me yet. Oh wait, yes it has. That sucked, and that is only losely classified as stalking. Ok, so it was just a girl that had a crush on me. Great, now I'm rambling, but I guess that's what this thing is for.
A day or two ago, meaning Monday, I had fun blowing up a bazillion balloons with some other people in our apartment. It was pretty insane how full that living room got from just balloons. I even got a blister on my finger from tieing all those things together. That's one thing I've never been able to do very well, but I managed and did well over 50 balloons all by myself. It was impressive. In other news, I officially got an A in Japanese 101, 102, 201, and 211. That makes me happy.

In Colorado

So I guess I don't really have a lot to talk about. I'm in Colorado visiting my brother, so you'd think that moving here for a month or so would give me something to write about, but I've got nothing. Things here are ok, I suppose. I really like getting to hang out with my brother and his family. They're all great. I adore my nephews and little niece. It was great to see them play the Wii, not so much because it looked fun, but because I helped them get to do something that made them happy and laugh and stuff. I've just really enjoyed being out here and spending time with this family that I haven't really seen very much for the past 3 years.

As far as a social life... well, it's not my strongest area thus far. It's just hard to find a group of friends and stuff when you don't know anyone and they all have their own friends already. Oh well, I won't be here too long anyways.

All signed up for fall semester

So I signed up for my BYU fall semester classes today. It's amazing how much a good counselor can help. My first semester at college was a train wreck, largely because the counselor I had gave me horrible recommendations for classes. He had me in classes that either were way too hard or didn't fulfill any requirement, sometimes both. I ended up doing very poorly, but I also didn't study much. My wonderful high school (and by wonderful I mean crappy) really didn't prepare anyone who attended for anything important.

Anyways, my wonderful counselor helped me pick a class schedule that satisfies me for now. It might change depending on how my summer courses go, but here it is for the time being:
Japanese 311 (yaay!)
Some physical wellness class (I forget the name, but if fulfills a GE requirement)
Biology (yuck)
Sociology (meh, whatever)
Book of Mormon (hopefully I learn something. It's been hard to find new things that I haven't heard of or really thought about since I got back from my mission, and I really love learning new things about the gospel.)

So there it is, for the time being at least. I'm really excited to go take these classes.

Iron Man

So I saw the movie Iron Man maybe a week ago, and it was good, but it's been bugging me for a while because I didn't like it nearly as much as I thought I would. I think I'm the only person I've heard of that didn't think it was amazing. It was impressive in the way it showed Tony Stark becoming Iron Man, but that's it. The fight scenes weren't all that thrilling; I've forgotten most of the details already. The graphics were excellent, but isn't that more or less expected from a movie now? The plot was decent, but had no surprises. It was clean, well organized, and fit together fairly well, but it was too easy to guess what was going to happen from the first 10 minutes. I remember seeing the bad guy for the first time in the movie and thinking "wow, he looks like a bad guy. There's no way he's going to be good through this whole series." And I was right.

But there was a bigger problem with the bad guy. He was a villian, yes, and he was evil as a matter of necessity. But he wasn't a super villian. Iron Man is a super hero with his intelligence, cleverness, resourcefulness, and priorities, to say nothing of his very cool suit. He also was dynamic, changing and realizing things throughout the movie, and it was very interesting to watch his character. The bad guy, however, was boring. There was nothing "super" about him except for

*SPOILERS* that he stole the technology to make his own suit. But regardless, he was a petty crook that only worked for money, unlike Magneto who had different ways of doing things from his nemesis, Prof. X, but had the same objective, causing a conflict of principles and less oof blatant good/bad, or Dr. Octopus who had good objectives on the whole, but was overpowered by his invention into forcing something he should have forsaken at least until doing more research. But the bad guy in Iron Man (I can't even remember his name) was little more than an average double dealing business man looking only to further his profits. *END SPOILERS*

Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed Iron Man. Just not as much as I would have liked.

Review: Not bad. Entertaining. Expected more. Definately see the sequel.