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House Renovation Continued

September 12th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal, Movies. No Comments.

Oh my, I couldn’t enjoy the long sleep today. The workers kept making a lot of noise at the house. They were cutting the floor with an electronic cutting device. Yeah, the renovation at the house had not been finished yet. In fact, it was only about 30% completed. When I opened my door, gosh, a thick fog of dust covered my sight. Not mentioning the bad smell and the disturbing noise. I quickly went to the bathroom and took a bath while trying to close my ears. I really couldn’t stand that noise.

After taking the bath I rushed to the garage, took my bike, and go to the church. From the church, I stopped by a movie rental. No interesting new movies were available, so I tried to find the older ones. Torque seemed cool. Resident Evil would be a great idea though. I knew I had watched Resident Evil, but it was two years ago. Since the sequel, Resident Evil Apocalypse, is about to be played on theaters, I might need to refresh my memory. Torque is a movie about bikers. Full of cool and somewhat unlogical actions were performed in the movie. Yeah, not bad to kill some time. I got a holiday tomorrow anyway.

Mean Girls

September 9th, 2004. Published under Movies. No Comments.

I borrowed the Mean Girls and New York Minutes DVDs from Vebby a few days ago. But I didn’t have any time to watch ‘em yet, so I just copied them to my computer. Carla also lent me her Psycho VCD. Woah, I’ll watch it tomorrow. For today, Mean Girls is the way to go. I had watched New York Minutes before, but the worse pirated version. Vebby lent me the better one, yet still a pirated version.

The Plastics Get Mean

Lindsay Lohan played as a teenage student in this movie. She just moved to the USA from Africa with her parents. In Africa, she had her mom giving her private lessons. But in the USA, she had to take the regular school. There she met new friends. Her first friends were a lesbo and a gay. It couldn’t be worse :D. She got along pretty well with ‘em though. Her friends seemed to have a problem with a group of classy girls, called the Plastics. It was a group of three beautiful girls. They were rich, fashionable, and attractive. Unfortunately they were mean to others. They even collected the pictures of everyone they knew and gave a mean comment to each picture. They collected the pictures in a secret book. Later the Plastics’ leader were interested in Lindsay and even invited her to join the group.

The movie is just like the other teen drama movies. The story goes around school, fashion, girls, boys, crushes, loves, friendship, dating, and the like. The point of interest here is Lindsay Lohan, the main actor. She currently is one of my favorite teenage celebrities. In case you want to know, the others are Hilary Duff and Elisha Cuthbert. I love Hilary Duff’s sweet angle voice. She is currently the best teenage pop singer according to me. Elisha Cuthbert, on the other hand, is blessed with an impressively gorgeous body. Lindsay, IMHO, is between them. Her voice is close to Hilary’s and her body is pretty well as sexy as Elisha’s. Go girls. You rock…

The TOEFL Test, A Cinderella Story, and The Bourne Identity

September 4th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal, Movies. No Comments.

Today I had a TOEFL test with Shirley W. at EF Delta Plaza Surabaya at around 9 AM. I needed to take the test as a requirement for the ADS scholarship I am applying. But I was so sleepy I sent her a message that I would be late. Just before I left my house at 9.30 AM, my grannie told me that she had run out of money and inquired if my dad had sent her some. My mom did say to me that she had transfer the fund to my bank account but I needed to withdraw it from an ATM. So I went to the nearest ATM, got the money, and gave it to my grannie. Damn another delay. I arrived at EF at about 10.15 AM. I saw a girl seating in front of the building. I thought I had met her before but I couldn’t remember who she was. The heck, I was so in hurry I passed her. Shirley had begun the test the moment I entered the office. Fortunately I was allowed to catch up.

I entered the test room. A small room containing about ten Hewlett-Packards computers. I sat beside Shirley and the officer allowed me to begin my test. The first part was a writing test, but the officer told me to skip it and went throgh the second. It was a listening test. I put my headset on and started listening. Damn I was so screwed. I forgot that was an English test. I neither take it seriously nor listen carefully the first conversation. I didn’t understand even a sentence. I really needed a luck for that.

Okay forget it, let’s go to the second conversation. I listened very very carefully to the next questions and I could do them well enough. Although the discussions mostly took place in a classroom or a college, they varied and the topics were pretty entertaining: literary, physics, astronomy, math, the roman history, and the regular campus life. After about ten or more conversations, the second section was ended.

The third section was my favorite, the structure. I didn’t need to listen to any lengthy conversation nor read multi-paragraphs passages. I only read the sentences one by one and picked the right answer for each question. Gosh, I thought it was easy. But my last English class was well four years ago. Some uncommon structures forced me to think pretty hard and wasted my time. Screw me, the time ran out but I hadn’t finish all the third section’s questions yet.

I continued to the last section: Reading. It was boring since I had to read through some passages before I could answer any question. Anyway, it ain’t a big deal since I could finished the whole test in about an hour. I even finished much earlier than Shierly did although she started the test before me. I even got a slightly higher mark. My final mark was 223, higher than the minimum requirement for the scholarship (170). Thanks God. But Shirley seemed to be a bit upset with her score when he finally came out of the test room. Soon, the girl I saw earlier outside EF came in and asked Shirley’s result. I eventually remembered. She was Cimot (can’t remember her real name), a friend of Shirley. She accompanied Shirley there.

After the test, the three of us had our lunch at Mc. Donald’s. We chatted a bit while we were eating. Some times later, Cimot saw her boyfriend passing by and she went to him. After a while she returned to our table. After finishing our lunch, I headed back to the parking lot while Shirley and Cimot went to Cimot’s boyfriend’s mobile phone shop. I stopped by Flash Disc to rent some VCDs and DVDs. No interesting new titles were available. But I got A Cinderella Story and The Bourne Identity.

Hilary Duff is Cinderella

A Cinderella Story was another modern version of the classic Cinderella story. Hilary Duff once leaved only with her Dad. Her dad was her bestfriend and vice versa. Her dad ran a successful eating place. Things were good until her dad married a woman with two daughters. She got a new stepmother and two older sisters. Anyway she was happy for her daddy. Until a tragic earthquake killed her dad.

Then things changed drastically. Her stepmother took all her dad’s belongings and started to treat Hilary as a mere servant. She must now serve her stepmother as well as her two annoying stepsisters. I won’t tell the rest of the story since it is very easy to guess. It closely resemble the classic Cinderella only without the magical things. Simple plots, average actors’ performances, and great soundtracks performed by Hilary Duff herself. I only rent this movie because she is currently one of my favorite celebrities. She’s hot and she has a sweet angel voice. One of the soundtracks is familiar to me. It’s “Come Clean” performed by Hilary Duff.

The Bourne Identity

The story began with some sailors in a fishing ship. One day, they found a human body floating in the sea. They picked him up and he was still alive. Unfortunately, the man couldn’t remember who he was, what he was doing, where he was heading, and what was happening to him. He got amnesia. The only clue was a bullet burried under his skin that contained a Swiss bank account number. Soon after landing, he headed to Swiss. One night when he was sleeping at a park bench, two guards asked him to leave. He was upset and beat them up. He was surprised knowing that he had the martial art skill.

Upon arriving at the bank, the officer let him access his storage consisting a large amount of money, a gun, and many passports with his picture on it. He had the US passport with the name Jason Bourne along with other nations’ passports. French, Brazil, Italy, and UEA to name some of them. He got even more confused. He took all the money and the passports with him but he left the gun. And Jason Bourne’s journey to find his true identity was started. The movie was packed with some cool actions of CIA agents trying to eliminate Jason Bourne. Matt Damon performed well as Jason Bourne. I like the story as well as the actions. By the way, it had a sequel already on theaters, The Bourne Supremacy. Hopefully I can watch it soon.