I bought the Director’s Cut DVD of Donnie Darko
Donnie Darko is about time travel and parallel universes, and mixes a dark atmosphere and scary imagery with what almost seems like a typical high school flick (but really isn’t).
The Director’s Cut is 128 minutes and thus 20 minutes longer than the original version. The package includes 2 DVD’s, one with the movie itself and one with extras.
Watched three movies on my way to Detroit.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: Not the worst movie I ever watched, but hardly a piece of art – or even very original. If you’re a guy, the blond female lead will keep you watching because quite honestly she’s very cute. Watchable.
Rush Hour 3: Crime comedy action movie with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. Boring story, action scenes were okay. I think the only reason I did not hate this movie was Jackie Chan who’s pretty fun to watch even in his old age. Chris Tucker should be banned from making movies, on the other hand. Most annoying actor ever. They threw in a lot of France-bashing, which was just stupid, and the plot was the most predictable I’ve seen in a long time. (Hint: When you think “oh this guy has got to be the evil villain” you are correct.)
Transformers: Oh, where to even begin. This movie SUCKED. Bad. Not so much the premise, giant robots slugging it out is always a good thing to me. The plot was contrived and stupid, but it wouldn’t have been a huge problem. No, what got me was all the small, tiny errors. For example Air Force One almost certainly doesn’t look like a huge bunker from the inside. I have been in an empty 747 cargo plane and it’s not that huge. The defense secretary states that the US is on “Defcon Delta”. Defcon levels are numbered 1-5. I guess they feared that the average dumb audience member would have said “Gee golly, Defcon One sounds kinda low”. Idiots. And don’t even get me started on the portrayal of hacking in the movie. Only watch Transformers if you’re a fan or if you are stuck on an airplane for nine hours and have nothing else to do.
I watched The Simpsons Movie last night. I liked it, but I thought it wasn’t spectacular. On the good side, it’s a long, long episode of The Simpsons. But on the other hand, unfortunately it’s a long, long episode of The Simpsons. But let’s look at the story first:
Warning: Heavy Spoilers
In the movie, Homer ruins Springfield’s attempt to clean up its environment. The EPA moves in and puts a huge dome over Springfield. The citizens are outraged and attempt to kill Homer in a classic example of mob justice, forcing The Simpsons to flee to Alaska. However, when they learn that the EPA wants to blow up all of Springfield, Marge and the kids wish to go back to save their town. Homer, on the other hand, wants to stay in Alaska. Marge leaves him to save Springfield anyway.
All alone, Homer gets stranded on an ice floe and is rescued by an Inuit woman. After he has a vision, he decided to follow Marge and – in the end – does save Springfield.
End of Spoilers
So, what’s so bad about this? Or good, for that matter? Well, it’s an overly-long Simpsons episode. So all the elements people like from the TV Show are in the show as well. There are some great gags in there. But on the other hand, the movie is hardly original. The entire time I had the feeling that I had already seen the movie.
One of the best things about the movie is that they did some things that I had never thought they would get away with. They made fun of creationism. They showed Bart naked (and yes I mean you get to see his penis). In the end, Homer gives someone the finger. Gotta love it.
So, should you watch the movie? If you’re a Simpsons fan – chances are you already did. Anyway, if you like the show, you’ll probably like the movie. But do not expect a revolution in animation movies.
So I have a (small) confession to make. I actually watched a Harry Potter movie in China. I have no idea what it was called. If they displayed the title during the intro, I missed it. Or maybe it was Chinese.
What, may you ask, drove me to such insanity?
Clearly I had no desire to actually see the movie. Nor had the lady who accompanied me. But when we got to the cinema in Beijing late in the evening, it was the movie in English that had not yet started. Tickets were 50 Yuan each, if I recall correctly.
The movie’s plot is fairly simplistic. Potter’s school gets taken over by a headmistress who, for no real reason, begins to enact all kinds of totalitarian rules and tortures the pupils. When she cancels the practical use of magic in class, the kids band together, and Harry Potter becomes their substitute teacher. (“If we don’t learn how to use magic, how can we defend ourselves from the evil villain?”).
The kid’s voluntary studies are uncovered by the school’s staff, and their secret classroom is betrayed by Potter’s romantic side plot, a Chinese chick. (Why is it that the foreigners are always the traitors? It doesn’t help that the betrayal is explained much later as not the girl’s fault; Harry never looks at the girl again, and there’s hardly any closure of the issue.)
But t doesn’t really matter because, uhm, something happens (the movie doesn’t really explains any of it; the characters act basically on pure divine inspiration in the form of Potter’s nightmares) and a small group of children (and later adult wizards) confront whatever-his-name-was in a magic ministry. Epic battle and all. Whatever.
So there’s a lot of problems with the movie. I’ve already mentioned the Chinese girl. And I shan’t get into the idiocy of the basic storyline (kids with little twig wands… meh). But there are other issues. The plot has no real beginning or ending, and there’s hardly any substance to it, the climactic battle sucks too. The adults take over from Potter; nothing gets resolved, and when the movie ends we’re basically back to where we were before it started. And did I mention that the characters are incredibly annoying? All of them; there is not a single character that doesn’t get on the viewer’s nerves after about three seconds of screen time.
There are of course also some highlights to the movie. The imagery is quite nice in several scenes (the magical school / castle’s well designed, especially the aerial views). But that is hardly a reason to waste money and time on the movie. No, the real highlight of the movie is that it eventually ends.
I guess I have seen worse movies. But I’d be hard-pressed to name one.
The bottom line is: Yeah, I was right, Harry Potter sucks cold donkey balls.
I completed the book last weekend. It’s not very big – about 400 pages paperback. I can’t really review the physics; and the book isn’t very technical or mathematical. It’s a book for everybody and I think that anybody with two braincells or more should be able to understand it.
Dr. Kaku describes the history of cosmology, and how modern cosmology came to the realization that parallel universes aren’t as unlikely as once thought. In the end, the jury is still out on the issue, but if the topic fascinates you as much as it does me then you will find this book to be a good overview of the argument for parallel worlds. It’s also quite a compelling read; I basically read it in three evenings.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and thus can recommend it to anybody interested in the topic; however, if you’re a physicist or mathematician you will find this book to be very superficial.
I read “The Annals of the Heechee” while I was in Detroit. *Annals* is the fourth book of the “Gateway” series by Frederik Pohl.
As you may or may not know the Heechee series centers around the story of Robinette Broadhead who escaped the nasty life of lower-class workers in a dystopian future to become a prospector on the Heecee asteroid, “Gateway”.
The astroid was discovered years before the story begins to contain working space-ships left there by a mysterious race, the Heechee. Using them is extremely risky, however, as the humans don’t know how to control them at all. By sheer luck, Broadhead strikes it rich and becomes a prominent figure who shapes Earth history when mankind finally do encounter Heechee. Things don’t go quite so well for Robinette, as he is killed in book three and converted into a digitized person.
Book 4 picks up some time after the Heechee technology has solved most of mankind’s pressing origin. However, book three had left one loose end that Pohl had to tie up: Namely the reason for why the Heechee ran. This “Foe”, the so-called Assassins is a race of energy beings who have been known to eradicate all intelligent life in the galaxy, and to introduce so much additional matter into the universe to cause its expansion to slow down. Broadhead and the other characters speculated that the Assassins aim to cause a big crunch and to re-create the universe to their liking afterwards.
Unfortunately for Pohl book three not only suffers from the lack of the mysteries and powerful motives that had powered the first two – and to some extent the third – book; it is exceedingly difficult to relate to the protagonists who are all digital personalities. There are a few two-dimensional “special” children with the personality of cardboard. And there are two “former terrorists”, who escape their high-security prison and kidnap aforementioned children. These two antagonists are about as well-developed as the Whale in Hitch-hiker’s Guide. Pohl tries so desperately to build them up as villains that he has to resort to having one of them enjoy child-rape. This is never actually carried out in the book, except for the use of robots as substitutes, and then only hinted at; but it just reads as a cheap device.
The greater plot, however, is about mankind’s contact with the Assassins. These energy-beings use the children to travel to Earth, infiltrate the global computer network, and, oh-wonder, talk to Broadhead as he tries to free the children from their predicament. Unfortunately, Pohl also manages to screw up this villain: Turns out, and I am sorry to spoil this, that the Assassins aren’t really evil. The extermination of intelligent races was just a mistake, one they won’t repeat with mankind and Heechee, and anyway, their manipulation of the universe is a good thing because it will save the universe from the big freeze (when the universe expands so much that stars are extinguished and the entire universe literally freezes solid). By the time this will happen, Mankind and Heechee will have evolved to become energy beings too – because, what afterall are AIs and digitized personalities but beings made of energy?
I have to be honest here – The entire book is one long disappointment. Pohl has obviously lost whatever creative energies he had in creating the series; he thoroughly manages to end the series in one big anticlimax. He’s screwed up two good mysteries (Heechees and Assassins) with boring explanations. He’s screwed up his characters. He’s managed to go out not with a bang, but with a whimper. It’s not that the book is really badly written; it’ll just bore you to death. The only thing that kept me going was the determination to find closure to the Heechee saga. I did not find it, and fans of the series should just ignore the fourth part.
Sometimes leaving things open is better than finding a bad explanation.
I paid $1 for this book in a used bookstore, and I consider it a waste of a perfectly good dollar, not to mention my time.
I’ve finally managed to stomach completing The Number of the Beast, by Robert A. Heinlein. Number of the Beast tells the story of four characters, who have to flee after an attempt on their life, and end up in various parallel universes through the means of a device invented by one of the four. This knowledge of inter-dimensional travel is also the reason why an unknown enemy is trying to kill them. Towards the end, the book turns into a discourse of Heinlein’s favorite world-view (that universes are created by the belief in them; meaning that all fictional worlds actually exist somewhere).
Number of the Beast has been hotly disputed like few other Heinlein works. Fans of the work contend that it is a brilliant parody and a textbook on how not to write a story. Critics claim that Heinlein must have been senile to produce such drivel.
I’m almost inclined to follow the first line of logic. There are sections in the book which are intriguing and well-paced. Unfortunately, the book slows down and the four protagonists begin to squabble among one another almost constantly. At other times, Heinlein degrades into his often-used more or less graphical descriptions of of sex and various very liberal sexual practices. The same pattern holds true for “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls”, which is tied to this novel at the end. The well-crafted parts surely are not the work of a senile mind; *Cat* is probably written even better.
Unfortunately for the prospective reader of *Beast*, the critics are correct in that the book is simply too annoying, too tedious to bother with. What good is any book that is so annoying that it makes you want to drop it into the next recycling bin? If Heinlein’s purpose truly was to demonstrate how not to write a book, he failed in that few people will have to patience to complete it, and even less would be able to draw a lesson from it. A more traditional “how to write” textbook might have been a better idea.
As it stands, *Beast* is a horrible book, and you’ll have to be an absolutely die-hard Heinlein fan – or a masochist – to even make it through it, much less to enjoy it. Not recommended for any sane person.
Just watching Aeon Flux. Gotta be one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a while. A German production, should I have foreseen that? – They do have a few hot chicks in the movie though. Not worth your time and barely worthwhile as in-flight entertainment. Maybe the uncensored version is more fun.
Saw Revenge of the Sith last night. I had intended not to, but people I visited wanted to go, so I went along.
The movie pretty much lives up to its expectations, and that is: Nice graphics, crappy story. The acting was alright to bad, and the dialogue was abysmal. George Lucas isn’t even trying anymore. The whole thing was a forced movie, blown up into a movie that turned out to be too long, and included references to Star Wars IV-VI that were so artifical as to not even be cute anymore.
And they didn’t even kill off Jar Jar Binks.
The “main” villain of Revenge of the Sith, General Griveous (sp?), is, howveer, a worthy Jar Jar replacement. I mean, come on, how serious can you take a villain that’s basically a cyborg with asthma?
However, the visuals are really good. Right at the beginning there’s a battle over a planet (Corouscant, I think) where capital ships slug it out with each other, pretty nicely done. Doesn’t even matter if the technology displayed doesn’t fit one bit into the Star Wars world.
I have to say that the final moments, with Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader, were the best part of the movie (if you ignore the really horrendous dialogue between him and Obi Wan), especially with the betrayal of the Jedi. Also, Yoda’s fight against Dark Sidious is really well choreographed. It probably says more about _Sith_ than anything else that the CGI Yoda out-acted all the other actors in the movie. Sad, sad.
At any rate, if you are a die-hard Star Wars fan, you’ve already seen this movie. If you’re not, go watch this if you are really bored and if you think you can survive your ears bleeding from the painful dialogue. And if you happen to miss Star Wars III, you won’t miss much. The best advice, however, that I can give you is to go and watch the original trilogy instead.
2 out of 5 stars.
Hollywood Homicide tries to be a spoof of cop-and-gangsters suspense/action movies. In short, two homicide detectives are sent to investigate the murder of a hip hop group. Everything is set up for some great comedy: One of them (Harrison Ford) is a part-time real estate broker, and a veteran detective. His younger side-kick teaches yoga / tantra on the side and wants to be an actor. The actors certainly could have pulled it off. But the script starts off lame, then slows down and becomes boring. You can get a few chuckles out of some scenes, maybe a stifled laugh here or there if you are tired or wasted – but overall the movie is definitely sub par. A sad waste of many talents.
Borrow the DVD and watch it for free, if you must see this movie. Otherwise, I would recommend that you watch Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero instead.