Damn you, Deep Blue Sea (1999). I was going to get ahead on my reading and everything and then you popped up on TBS this evening.

As a movie, you really suck. Though you have big budget production values and star L.L. Cool J, I got the feeling while watching you that you started life as B-movie material. You should've known you couldn't out-Jaws Jaws, so why bother?

The thing that irritated me the most about you is that your plot was ostensibly about super-smart sharks that were bred as part of a research-project-to-cure-Alzheimers-gone-wrong. Instead, it had a lot of people running around bickering, with the sharks functioning as a mechanical plot device. The only interesting twist was that your main characters get picked off one by one by the opportunistic sharks, until only L.L. and some other dude are left. But once I got over the shock of seeing Morgan Freeman Samuel L. Jackson being splattered in his own blood in the middle of a run-of-the-mill inspirational speech, the schtick was up.

Finally, a word about your theme song, which L.L. Cool J. took the time to personally rap, entitled "Deepest Bluest." Couldn't you try any better than --

Our Father who art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Killers sworn to beast
Swallowed them in flames
Switch my DNA
Flip me into Cool J
I can't fight the feelin'
I'm born to kill prey
To survive an attack
There's only one way
Battle to the death
That's how sharks play

Gah!

After a late Trusts & Estates class and a visit to the KMOB firm reception in the law school garden, I came home needing to do some reading for tomorrow.

Instead, because our cable got connected today, I ended up watching the adapted-for-TV version of Triple-X with Vin Diesel. It was on FX. With commercials, that's over two hours.

The old adage that "it's so bad, it's good" certainly applies to Triple-X. I was glued to the TV screen and I could not stop watching. The plot actually sucked and had no point. But as long as you didn't ask the quintessential question, "why was this scene necessary?" the action scenes were quite entertaining. Come on, Vin Diesel snowboarding in front of an avalanche to pointlessly destroy a bad guy's snow base? Driving stunt bikes and snow boards and boogie boards into direct machine gun fire? If that's not entertainment, I don't know what is.

Damn you, Triple X, for ruining my evening.

I have been able to mix studying with fun things, seeing friends and such, this past week, but I feel like I'm not doing enough work. I've barely finished my course review for one class and I have two more to go, with finals beginning on January 4th. At least I feel busy, and hopefully the review will get faster now that I have some experience.

I am done with my initial summer job search.. I sent out feelers to ten various big law firms that have substantial intellectual property law practices. Since I don't have a laser printer at home, and my ink jet produces unprofessional printouts, I made several trips to Kinko's and racked up $15 in printing and computer usage fees. I really tried to write a personal cover letter to each firm, but we'll see soon enough if that was enough. Of course, if I get that unpaid externship with Judge Otero, I'd be happy and maybe not work for any firm at all this summer.

Yesterday I drove out to Alhambra to see House of Flying Daggers with Lien. It was a bad day for driving, and every road on my way (Los Feliz Blvd., the 5 South, the 10 East) were stuffed. But since I don't have to deal with that traffic on an everyday basis, I found that experience interesting, rather than stress-inducing. Anyhow, the movie was really weird, pretty good, and kind of depressing due to its "tragic ending". Zhang Yimou has really created a visually exquisite fantasy world where even foot soldiers have fantastic fighting skills and projectiles have a vicious life of their own. The plot was a bit implausible, but so is flying through the air. I still can't figure out how they pulled off all those improbable fighting scenes (in my favorite one, a whole army jumps around in the tops of a bamboo forest.)

Oh yea.. I finally got a new phone, after two years! My old one was apparently so beat up, large and lacking in features that the other night, a friend of a friend told me that it was an "embarrassment to Asian people everywhere." I got a no frills LG 4500 without one of those retarded built-in cameras.. It does has a speakerphone, which I actually find useful. And after rebate -- $30!