iG.STUDiO: Ilya I. Gerasimenko

Six years ago I bought a Sony MiniDV camcorder, which is still an a good working condition, and does what it is supposed to do. After initial euphoria of taping everything which moves for a couple of years, I kind of drifted away from home-made videography, moving towards home-made music production, so the camera was not used a lot. A little over a year ago I finally upgraded our family entertainment center to a flat-screen TV, which made me understand how poor the quality of the standard definition home video actually is. So the caressingly used camcorder is now used even less. But—Dar's new show is coming up, and needs to be properly documented for many important reasons. Preferably in a modern day video standard. So I stumble upon this one: Sony Webbie HD Camera MHS-CM1 Not only it costs about 1/6th of what I payed for my MiniDV cam, it is four times smaller, ten times lighter (no moving parts, duh) and records up to 5 hours in 1040 HD on a 16GB memory card. So I grab one. Did...

"The Pursuit of Happyness": Tired of being unable to sell several pieces of medical equipment and facing a necessity to provide for his family, the main character of the movie sets his goal higher—to sell stocks. How inspiring.

The first page of hits Google returns if you run a search on "casino royale film review" are all basically the same. Everybody agrees that it's the best Bond movie ever made and Daniel Craig is the best Bond ever. I beg to differ. I may not be a true 007 fan, I must admit, although I have seen all of them, and some more than once (I do not consider myself a true fan just because I don't remember what many of them were called, and who played Bond in which particular one). I do, however, have a very clear idea, why I like those movies. Because they provide the very best brainless entertainment the movie of this genre can provide. Well, they used to. They had an enchantingly evil villain, many bad guys of different calibers, tons of cool gadgets, beautiful girls, world-scale crisis and, of course, indestructible, classy and cool main character. There would be a half an hour of the "character introduction" proving time and again, that 007 is the coolest, classie...

How come in the movies they never light up a cigarette from a disposable lighter? Seriously, it's either a match, or a "Zippo". I think, I only saw a disposable lighter once in my movie watching life—it was "L. A. Confidential", if memory serves me well—and the lighter didn't work. Sometimes I make very keen and equally useless observations.