Hereafter

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We went to Redbox today and were pleased to find the film Hereafter available. Don't you just love Redbox?

I'm a huge Matt Damon fan, and I think Clint Eastwood (who directed) has been turning out some if the finest cinema in the last couple of years. Have you seen Gran Torino? An excellent film.

When we got home, we settled in for a cozy movie night, and the DVD player would not work.

It's been weirding out quite a bit lately, and we've been unsure of the reason. We check a lot of DVDs out from our local library, and they're often not in the best shape, so when they wouldn't play, we would blame a bad disc. But this is a brand new disc, just released today and it wouldn't read.

Well, you don't have to hit us over the head with a hammer to get our attention, we finally decided it was time for a new DVD player. Do you think that maybe jostling the old one around in a motorhome for five years may have sped up its' demise? Or is five years about what we can expect from high use electronics these days? Who knows.

Whatever the reason, we needed a new player, so it was off to Costco. Once there, we were faced with the decision, should we buy a regular DVD player, or perhaps upgrade to a Blu-Ray player? We don't have an HDTV, so the Blu-Ray wouldn't really be a plus, but since we figured one of these days we may upgrade the TV, we decided to get a combination DVD/Blu-Ray player. For the same price, we were also able to get a player that has built in wifi. I'm not sure if we really have the speed with our aircard for streaming movies, but it didn't seem to add to the price of the unit, so we decided on that also.

Finally, we got to go home and watch Hereafter. What an excellent film, very different from most of what we see these days. Beautifully shot, intelligently written and very though provoking. I give it two thumbs up, my highest score.

And because I'm still playing on the iPad, I have to include a couple of pictures from yet another ap I've found. It's called ToonPaint. You load one of your own photographs into the application, and it turns it into a sort of cartoon type drawing.

I really like this look,
kind of like an old linoleum block cut,
or a wood block print.

I just keep loving my iPad more and more.
I'm finding new uses for it every day.