Stardust is a *****/***** (5/5)

Stardust is superb. It's a fairy tale, but unlike most fairy tales, it's not written by some old hack who has died half a century ago, but written in modern times (1998) by the famed writer Neil Gaiman. I admit I'm not much of a novel reader, and I've never read the novel itself, but the movie really is excellent.

It has all the good things you expect from a fairy tale, without the pitfalls of a fairy tale created in olden times. Old fairy tales were made for people of that time. The way its told, the kinds of magic and stuff that are in it, the story elements, all are conceived by by old day mentality and experiences. That's why though some of those stories are good, they never really "clicked" perfectly (for me, at least). You have to condition your mindset to the way the story's needs it to be. But with Stardust, there's no need for that. There aren't any of those little quirky things in the story that you never really "get" just because "that's what people back then used to do". It flows effortlessly without interrupting your enjoyment of the movie.

This Neil Gaiman guy must be really good. I look up for more of his work on IMDB, and found out that he is one the the screenplay writers for Beowulf. I wasn't really interested Beowulf when it came out, but after seeing Stardust, I'll surely make an effort to download it when a DVDRip of it emerges.

The Strike Is In Full Swing.

The WGA strike is in full swing. A lot of tv shows have stopped production. Shows that matter:
  • 24: Production shut down with 8 episodes taped. Show on hiatus. Premiere has been delayed until such a time that the Day 7 season can air continuously with no or few interruptions.
  • Lost: 8 episodes out of 16 ordered taped. In event of protracted dispute, the 8 in the can could run as a mini-season starting in the New Year with remaining shows held back for 2008-09.
  • House: 12 episodes have been completed. Repeats to air after American Idol in January.
  • The Simpsons: 22 of this season's 23 episodes will be completed.
  • Heroes: Heroes: Origins spinoff suspended. December 3 episode to serve as finale of volume two.
And all the talk shows have stopped production and airing reruns. The surprising thing is that they are actually ending Heroes early. Not that this season has much to shout about, but still. The conclusion I have come up with about all this is, "this sucks".

Just give the writers their damn money. At first I was somewhat against the writers and their strike. But after watching this video, I think it's fair game for them to have this strike. Whether they actually get what they want is another matter. Just give me back my tv shows.

Dimmented is Live!


My latest app, Dimmented is live. It's still in beta, but all of the functions work, I hope. Only the UI stuff needs to be fine-tuned. It's my first Flex app, haven't got around to reading about transitions and effects yet, so there are no fancy animations yet in Dimmented.

Dimmented is an app that shows your Digg comments or any other Digg user's comments. I used to keep track of my Digg comments by using their API and reading the raw xml. But the problem with that is it doesn't show the replies to my comments. With Dimmented, I made it show replies, and not just the first level of replies, but all the replies, plus, it can also show the first level of "reply to".
I also included the "remember me" function so that I don't have to type in my username each time. At first, I tried to do this using cookies and php, but for some reason, it didn't work. Then I found out about Flex's shared objects, and it was so much easier, and boom, it was like the feature made itself available.

It is a good learning experience for me. At first I thought Flex was very different to what I already know about scripting/programming, but it turns out it's very similar to the xml-script structure that I'm used to making Konfabulator/Yahoo widgets. So, it wasn't that difficult. And the next version of Flex will have better support for making AIR apps, I don't know whether I'll ever go back to Konfabulator. I already have plans for my next Flex app.

Amazing Race 12

The Teams

The best reality show on tv, The Amazing Race, will be starting it's 12th season on November 4th. I went throught the teams compteting this time, and the only team worth following is the "sisters" team of Marianna & Julia. A double dose of hotness. I hope they win the 1 mil prize just because they're hot.
The Sisters

There's also another hot chick from the "dating for almost one year" team, Rachel and some guy with 2 letters as a name. Who gives a shit who the guy is.
The Hot Chick and Nobody

The other teams are just extras. They replaced the obligatory gay team with a goth couple. The "minority" team is now an Asian father/daughter team. I know the term "Asian" can be vague and I hate to use it, but where in Asia wasn't mentioned in the article. They're the sepet kind of Asian if I have to further drill down. Just look at the damn picture on the site.

E4X in Flex

I've just started working on an Adobe Flex project, and I've messing around with E4X. I'm familiar with Xpath 1.0 from working with Konfabulator widgets, but it took me a while to get to grips with E4X. Most of what I learned, I got from this website. So, I'll just go ahead and use some of the material from the site. Here's what I've learned so far. I'll be using the below XML as an example.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf>
<channel>
<title><![CDATA[Test file]]></title>
<link>http://www.sephiroth.it</link>
<description><![CDATA[A custom description of this document]]></description>
<language>en-us</language>
<items>
<item id="001">
<resource url="http://www.sephiroth.it/tutorials.php" />
<channel>FLASH-PHP</channel>
<author email="alex@alex.com">
<name>Alessandro</name>
</author>
</item>
<item id="002">
<resource url="http://www.sephiroth.it/tutorials/flashPHP/E4X" />
<channel>Flash 9</channel>
<author email="mich@alex.com">
<name>Michael</name>
</author>
</item>
<item id="003">
<resource url="http://www.sephiroth.it/tutorials/flashPHP/scrollRect" />
<channel>Flash 8</channel>
<author email="fk@alex.com">
<name>Frank</name>
</author>
</item>
</items>
</channel>
</rdf>


httpResult.lastResult..item will give all the items in XML fromat:


<item id="001">
<resource url="http://www.sephiroth.it/tutorials.php" />
<channel>FLASH-PHP</channel>
<author email="alex@alex.com">
<name>Alessandro</name>
</author>
</item>
<item id="002">
<resource url="http://www.sephiroth.it/tutorials/flashPHP/E4X" />
<channel>Flash 9</channel>
<author email="mich@alex.com">
<name>Michael</name>
</author>
</item>
<item id="003">
<resource url="http://www.sephiroth.it/tutorials/flashPHP/scrollRect" />
<channel>Flash 8</channel>
<author email="fk@alex.com">
<name>Frank</name>
</author>
</item>

httpResult.lastResult..name.text() will give all names in normal text, without the XML formatting. That's what the .text() is for.

AlessandroMichaelFrank


httpResult.lastResult..item.@id will give the ids of every item:

001002003

httpResult.lastResult..item[1].@id will give the id of the second item. But there's a warning that popped up in the debugger that discourages from using square bracket operator. It recommends using the ArrayCollection.getItemAt() instead.


002

After knowing all that, I can virtually get any value I want. But there's still along way to go in mastering Flex.

Grindhouse




Grindhouse is a mixed bag. Death Proof, the Tarantino half of the movie is one of the most boring movies I've ever seen. You can literally fall asleep watching the movie. The dialog is filled so much with "inside" reference, if you're not into the "Tarantino" state of mind, you wouldn't give a shit about what they're talking about. By "Tarantino" state of mind, I mean you're into old vintage cars, and 70s pop culture, and stunts and stuff. I'm not into that stuff, so the only good part of the movie was the lap dance scene by Vanessa Ferlito. Other than that, it just stretches itself with pointless rambling about car stunts. Even the violence isn't that heavy compared to the other half. I'll save you the hassle of watching the whole movie by embedding the only good part of the movie, the lap dance scene, here. Enjoy.




The other half of Grindhouse, Planet Terror by Robert Rodriguez, on the other hand, is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's one of those over-the-top ultra violent zombie movies that is fun to watch, and at the same time, it doesn't feel old. They've put new ideas into it to make it feel different from the other similar movies that have been made. I can't even begin to tell how much I enjoyed this movie. A must watch.

If you're going to catch this one on DVD or download it, I recommend Planet Terror and give Death Proof a pass.

New Season

Well, it's time again where good tv shows start their new season. And there're a few new ones too. The new shows that people are saying is good is Pushing Daisies, Journeyman, and Chuck. Of the three, I've only watched the first episode of Journeyman. I'm not sure about Journeyman after reading that the creators are going to focus more on the weekly time travel escapades rather than unraveling the mystery of why he's traveling through time. What got me interested is the mystery, not the lame weekly outings. I just haven't got around to watching the other two shows.

What I'm actually downloading and watching is House, Heroes and Smallville. I know, Smallville is kinda lame, but I'll watch it until 24 or Lost returns, or until one of the new shows really makes a breakthrough. Kristin Kreuk makes it worth the download. If you don't know how hot she is, then you're really missing something. And there's a new set of pictures that show that she is one of those girls who get more beautiful when they're upset. These pics prove it. There hasn't really been any "breakthrough" shows yet this season. Last season's "breakthrough" was Heroes. I don't think there'll be one this season.

Of the three shows I'm currently following, House is easily the best. This season's House is hilarious. I find the chemistry between House and James (James is the friend, not one of those docs who works for him) just perfect this season. The banter between them just hits the right spot for me. And Heroes, the first season wasn't great, it was just good. And this season looks like its going to continue being good, not great. I've figured out a way to heighten my enjoyment of Heroes. The trick is not to take the show as seriously as 24 or Lost. If you do that, you'll just get disappointed. You need to see it as a show like Smallville with a slight touch of mystery like Lost, but not as deep. If you can manage that, you will surely increase your enjoyment of the series.

What I'm really looking forward to is Lost, but it ain't coming until next year. Other shows to look forward to 24 where rumors say there'll be no CTU, and Battlestar Galactica. And the fact that the coming season being the last season of Battlestar, it is surely going to be EPIC. But there are rumors that say that the final episode of the season will be pushed to 2009. It'll really suck if it's true.

New Rambo Clip

Stallone released new footage the latest Rambo film. From the look of it, it's going to be as violent as it can be. I wonder how anyone can enjoy this film when it hit theaters after the censors have had their hands on it. I'm starting to believe it's going to be good. The earlier footage that they released wasn't convincing, but this one did it for me. They totally set up what the movie is going to be about-- it's about Rambo killing South East Asians in creative ways. The previous clip tried to present it as an emotional film with Rambo having to make moral decisions or something. But this one hit the mark. Can't wait to download it, then watch it.


http://view.break.com/362761 - Watch more free videos

Journeyman


There's a new tv show called Journeyman that's going to be shown soon on NBC, but as usual they leaked the first episode on to the internets to get the buzz going. There has been a lot of leaked first episode new series that has come out, but the only one that piqued my interest was Journeyman. I gave it a go, and it was somewhat entertaining.

Basically, Journeyman is Quantum Leap recreated for the 21st century. There's this guy who goes back in time to help certain people. But unlike Quantum Leap, he's not stuck in the past, but goes in and out of it throughout the episode. And to give it the 21st century touch, they added some mystery and drama. First, why he time travels is made a mystery. He has no control over when he leaps into the past and back, so his life is turned upside down, sometimes disappearing from the present for days. And for the drama part, he meets his ex-fiancee who died in a plane crash during his escapades into the past, but he's already married in the present. And to top things off, plus spoiler warning, the ex-fiancee is actually not dead, but is alive and well, and she has something to do with the guy time traveling. He actually met the future version of his ex-fiancee in the past.

But the show has its flaws too. First of all, the dialog/script needs a bit of work. There were too many cliches. I know it's the first episode, you need to introduce the characters, so it's hard not to fill a few cliches in, but there was just a bit too much of it. The acting ain't that good either, but I don't know if it's the actors' lack ability, or the script that made the acting look not so good. The only good acting came from the journeyman himself and his ex-fiancee. The others just weren't into it.

Aside from that, overall, I enjoyed the show and will keep watching it to see how it develops. There needs to be a deeper plot than going into the past saving another person each week. The unraveling of why he time travels should be a good tactic to keep audience wanting more, but it better be a good reason and reasonably paced.

Sucks x 3

Left Leg Shorter Than The Right

I've started jogging again after stopping for several months due to a knee injury. I think the injury occurred because I tried too much too fast. This time around, I'm taking it slow. Not pushing too hard, building my distance gradually. But one thing I've noticed this time around is that my left leg is getting or at least has gotten shorter since I started. I'm not sure why, but it may have something to do with my previous injury. It kinda sucks to have a leg shorter than the other, but I like running. I'll continue running, but if my leg gets any shorter than it already is, I'm afraid I'll have to stop. You can't visually see that the left leg is shorter, but I can very well feel it. My whole walking mechanics needs to be change to adapt to the new imbalance. And I even have to change the way I run. It really sucks.

YouTube Account Permanently Deleted

And few days ago, my YouTube account got permanently deleted. I've uploaded excerpts of movies that I've downloaded, and after a second warning, they directly deleted my account without telling me that they'll delete my account. At least give me a warning that my account will be deleted. The warning they sent only said that I'm not allowed to upload copyrighted material. I've put a lot of effort in creating some of the videos, and I don't have backups some of them, so they're gone permanently, and it will take a lot of time to make them again.

I created a new account, with a different username, but I found out that they not only blacklisted my old username, they also blacklisted the email address that I used in the previous account. So I registered with another email address, but in the account options, there's an option to change my email address. I figured that I've already succeeded in registering, so changing the email to the previous one wouldn't have any effect, but alas, changing the email to blacklisted one deleted my newly created account. So I had to register for an account for a third time and this time not changing my email settings. Losing all my videos really sucks.

Bourne Ultimatum Nuked

Then there's Bourne Ultimatum. I prefer to watch in the cinema but a good copy surfaced already, plus I don't want to wait until October to see it, so I downloaded the R5 version. As it turns out, the version I downloaded is missing about 15 minutes of the movie. The moment I realized something is wrong I stopped watching. I checked the forums and everybody was saying that the R5 version was nuked. Now, do I download the whole movie again in lower quality, or do I wait for a better version to come along, or do I wait for it to be released in the cinemas? I've already watched a third of the movie, and I need to know how the story ends. This sucks.

Mmmmmmmore... Natali Del Conte

Natali Del Conte



She keeps getting hotter. The green outfit from episode 68 has a lower neckline, but was loose and doesn't show the contours much. The outfit in this episode is tighter, but doesn't show as much cleavage. I can't decide which one I like better. But this time I know how to optimize YouTube videos, so you can see her in all her glory in better quality.

Yann Tiersen Makes Good Music

I was searching for mp3s on Google one day, and stumbled upon a song from the soundtrack of the movie Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain which I've just watched days before. It all started when I was listening to the radio and heard a remix of the 80s song, Africa by Toto. I wanted to listen to the original, but I didn't have it in my collection. So I searched Google for it using this magic string:
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "toto africa" - Google Search

You can modify the search string to fit your needs by replacing the "toto africa" term to any song you want. However, back to that Amelie soundtrack, I downloaded the song I found, and kind of liked it. I searched around for the whole soundtrack album, downloaded it, listened to it, and it is a good album. All the songs are from Yann Tiersen.

I personally think this Yann Tiersen guy is a musical genius. Most of his songs are instrumental where he mixes sounds of the violin, piano and accordion to make exquisite music. I downloaded a few other of his albums and I like his work. It's a good alternative if you want to listen to music that has no or minimal singing apart from classical or techno. It sits in the middle between the two, not as slow classical, but not as fast as techno.

Here's a sample of what he's all about:










And about the music player above, I searched around on how to present multiple mp3 files so that the user can easily play them across platforms, and I found a Flash-based solution called XSPF by a guy called Fabricio Zuardi. This page tells you how to set it up, but the code on that page didn't work perfectly for me. It worked okay in Firefox, but in IE it loaded a different playlist. The syntax on how to create the xspf playlist showed on the site is okay, but I had to tweak the object embed code to make it work on both Firefox and IE. Here's my modified code:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="400" height="170" id="xspf_player" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="http://www.yourwebsite.com/xspf_player/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=http://www.yourwebsite.com/music/playlist.xspf?xn_auth=no" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />

<param name="bgcolor" value="#e6e6e6" />
<embed src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/xspf_player/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=http://www.yourwebsite.com/music/playlist.xspf?xn_auth=no&autoload=true" quality="high" bgcolor="#e6e6e6" width="400" height="170" name="xspf_player" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></embed>
</object>

And about the code above, I found out in that you can't just paste code to show it or it will run the code rather than display it. You need to "escape" it or something. Here's a website that con do it for you.

PC Security Overhaul

I replaced my anti virus and firewall software recently, and the thing that made me do it was ZoneAlarm. The electricity went out during my computer's start up and during that time, just before it happened, ZoneAlarm was doing its loading or something, and after restarting when the electricity was restored, it went bonkers. It lost all its settings and it began blocking some stuff it shouldn't be blocking. So, I decided to overhaul everything, and needed to do it anyway because both my anti virus and firewall are really out of date.

Before this, I was using Antivir anti virus, ZoneAlarm firewall. I haven't updated my firewall and anti virus for more than 2 years, and during those years, the security technologies have progressed a lot. I searched around to find out what's hot right now. For firewalls, I found this page where it has results of leak tests for all of the popular firewall programs. At the top of the list ranked no. 1 is Comodo Firewall Pro, and what's even better is that it's free.
Comodo Firewall Pro

For anti virus, there's this website where it lists out the top 10 anti virus of 2007. No. 1 is Bitdefender. I searched for a download of Bitdefender Anti Virus but every copy that is available for download is a "Plus" version. The "Plus" version includes a firewall with it, and don't want it as it may cause conflicts with my new Comodo firewall.

So no. 2 was Kaspersky. I downloaded it, but decided not to use it as the installation process was somewhat cumbersome. To install the crack, you need to boot in safe mode and stuff, I don't want to go through all that. So I settled for no. 3, Nod32. It's as secure as the previous to firewalls, but its user interface ain't that good. I can live with that. Plus, people say it's lightweight, so it doesn't consume much of my computer's resources.
Nod32 Anti Virus

I've run these two softwares without a hitch so far.

Chain Of Events That Led To Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain and Beyond

It all started with a Digg post about a horse breaking free and joining cyclists on the Tour De France. One of the comments of the post pointed out that the story has already been submitted before and got frontpaged on Digg in this original post. A comment on that original post pointed out that this footage was from a movie called Amelie. Replies to the comment and other comments were in praise of the movie. I became intrigued, and did a search on this Amelie movie that I've never heard of before. IMDB gave it an 8.6, Rotten Tomatoes gave it 90%.

So, I search mininova for amelie, and the torrent of the movie with the highest number of seeds is one with around 70 seeds and 40 leechers. That's a good enough number of peers for a non-mainstream movie. However, none of the torrents from the search results had English subtitles in them. The one with the highest number of seeders only gave a link to an .srt file of the subtitles.

I've never watched a movie with separate subtitles before, so I didn't know what player to use to view it. My google search on this showed VLC can load .srt files with movies, and I tried it, it works, but another player that cropped up in my search was Crystal Player, and there was high praise for this player. I decided to check it out, and managed to find a link for it on IT Hot News. And to my surprise, it is actually a very good media player. Not only can it load subtitle files, but the killer feature of this player is its ability to control the brightness/contrast of the video being played. I've been looking for this feature in a media player for so long, and I finally found a player that can do it. It is very convenient to have this feature, because more often than not, videos that I download, especially tv series like Lost and 24 have very dark scenes where it's very hard to tell whats happening. Couple that with my crappy monitor's low max brightness, it's unbearable.

Now, for the movie review itself. The title Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain more or less translates to The Fabulous Life of Amélie Poulain, at least that's what the subtitles I downloaded said. This film is touted as a masterpiece, as one of the best romantic comedies ever, but for me, it doesn't deserve that kind of critical acclaim. It's good, but not THAT good. It's not a romantic comedy in it's traditional form, because the romance part of the romantic comedy doesn't start until about half way through the movie. Even the guy she's supposed to be romantically involved with appears late in the movie, so I don't think this movie set out to be a romantic comedy.

First and foremost, this movie is about Amelie, and Amelie alone. Even though the other main characters of the movie have their own littles stories in the movie, but the main reason for their character's existence in this movie is to illustrate who Amelie is, what kind of a person she is, and what she is going through.

The movie has an artsy feel to it. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and the camera work complements this approach. And the use of special effects to convey Amelie's emotion was done well too. Audrey Tautou, who plays Amelie is cute. She's the chick who plays opposite Tom Hanks in The DaVinci Code. She looks a lot younger than she did in the Da Vinci movie.

Overall, I feel like the movie lacked focus. There was no pre-destined endpoint to get to. The movie doesn't start out with "Amelie is a lonely woman who's looking for a guy". This is more of a slice of life / coming of age movie. It shows a series of events in Amelie's life that leads her to becoming a new person, and the other characters in the movie are there just to facilitate her (albeit indirectly) to get to that point. The movie itself doesn't stick to me, but the character of Amelie, for some reason, still lingers in my mind.

So, there it is. From a lame story on Digg, to a fairly good movie, to a very good media player.

The Simpsons Movie

I went to see The Simpsons Movie today after finding out that the movie is being shown without any cuts. And the verdict? It was great. It's like a simpsons espisode, only longer, with better animation, and no boring parts whatsoever. The movie is packed with funny bits. Watching this movie, I can see why it took such a long time to make. The time they took certainly was not due to rendering the animation. This a 2-D movie, there's nothing to render. I feel like during all those years of production, they threw in hundreds of thousands of ideas for the film, and finally they filtered it out to only the few best ones to put into the movie, and result was a Simpsons fan heaven.

It's starts off insulting the viewers of the movie, saying they are stupid for paying for something that they watch on tv for free. And in the opening sequence where Bart writes something on the blackboard, He writes, "I will not download this movie". Yeah, like THAT's gonna work. Tom Hanks and Greenday make a cameo, and there's too many funny things to mention, or even to take in for that matter. It warrants a rewatch to get everything.

A Simpsons fan needs to watch it more than once, so for me, I ain't wasting another 7 bucks on it, I'll just wait for the DVDRip and download it. Watching it in the theater kind of spoilt the experience a bit for me.

You see, different people have different kinds of sense of humor. I had the unfortunate luck of sitting beside a girl who thinks every little funny thing warrants a laugh. However, I also have the feeling that her overzealous laughter is because she wants to show her boyfriend that she's having a good time watching this movie with him, while the fact is that she couldn't care less about it. Oh, the things people do for love. And apart from her, the other members of the audience laugh at different times, so throughout the movie, there's constant laughter, and its hard to concentrate on what they're saying in the movie over the laughs. So, I'll definitely need to watch this movie again, alone.

"Grey Image" Problem Fixed in Wickr

My Flickr widget, Wickr, has had this problem where parts of image(s) being displayed are "greyed-out" as if the image is being displayed before has completed its download from the net. The problem is that the images is not from the net, they are from the hard disk. The cause of this problem is the fade animation used on the image. It only happens when the fade animation effect is used on multiple images, or big images. I've tried to get around this problem by creating my own fade function instead of using the built-in fade function in Konfabulator, but it resulted in the same greyed-out image. I've even tried a 2-step fade where the image goes to 50%, then 100% opacity, and even then the problem still persists.

The "grey image" problem.

I posted this problem on the Konfabulator forums, and at first they didn't understand the problem and said that the image hasn't completed its download from the internet, but I keep telling them that it is from the hard disk, not the net. I was somewhat miffed at the fact that they thought I was a n00b at widget making. I told them I know my stuff, and gave instructions on how to recreate the problem on Wickr, and finally the problem is recognized as a bug and has been reported. It's a Windows-only bug and doesn't occur on Macs.

So the "fix" to the problem was to do away with the fade animation altogether. It's a small aesthetic blow to the widget, but a necessary one to maintain a high degree of usability. In the course of fixing the problem, I also decided to update the widget for Kanofabulator 4.0. So, Wickr now has a dock icon, and its id is a UUID. The update also requires me to address the change in the onMouseMove function in Konfabulator 4.0, as it is not the same as in previous versions. onMouseMove is now called whenever the mouse moves over the object, not when the mouse drags over the object. For the drag action, they introduced onMouseDrag.

Wickr dock icon.

I plan to overhaul the whole widget sometime in the future as some parts of the code are really dated, and Flickr have changed their API quite a bit of too. I don't know when I'll get around to doing it though.

Pink Panther Surprisingly Good


I saw the first few minutes of Pink Panther on a HBO or Star Movies, I can't remeber which channel, but I was surprised that I enjoyed the portion of the movie that I watched. I didn't finish watching it on tv, so I downloaded it, and watched it, and liked it.

I don't usually find these kinds of goofy physical comedies, like Naked Gun, National Lampoon etc. that funny as I mainly watch them for the sometimes-funny parodies that they have. But Pink Panther is not a parody movie.

When it was first shown in the theaters, I wasn't even remotely interested in it, and the trailers and promos that they showed didn't help either. They marketed it as a physical comedy for kids with Beyonce thrown in to bring in the cool factor. I am not one of their target audience.

Sure the movie has some physical gags and fart jokes and genitalia jokes and stuff, but there is something different to it that makes it funnier than usual. And that something different is Steve Martin. The single most outstanding thing that made me enjoy this movie was Steve Martin's silly French accent. From that French accent alone, numerous hysterical jokes is derived. He portrays Inspector Jacques Clouseau excellently. I'm not saying his accent is good, I'm saying it's funny. And he's the only one form the cast that maintains a French accent throughout the movie, apart from Jean Reno of course. The other casts slip in and out of their accents.

Maybe it's just me having a French accent fetish, but this is one of the better comedies I have watched. Almost everybody else hates it, but like it. IMDB gave it a 5/10, and Rotten Tomatoes gave it 24%. If I have to rate it, I'd give it a 7/10.

I've compiled some of the funny moments from the movie to give you a taste of my sense of humor:

Getting YouTube Videos to Look Good

I've been uploading video clips to YouTube, Metacafe and Veoh for a couple of months now, and I've seen a few good quality clips on the sites which make mine look like abstract art. Somehow they manage to crack the secret encoding settings that make videos look good on these sites.

Yesterday, I found a page that teaches you how to optimize video for YouTube. So, I decided to give it a try. The site teaches you how to do it using almost any of the popular video editing/encoding software available. I'll try doing it with 2 software that I have installed on my computer, Sony Vegas and Movavi Video Converter.

I'll start of with a 22 second video clip of MPEG2 DVD NTSC quality.
The file can be downloaded here.
The GSpot Data for the file is shown below:

Then, the clip is encoded to WMV format in Vegas using these setting:
Save as type: Windows Media Video V9(*.wmv)
Then Customize it with these settings:
Project >
Video rendering quality: Best
Audio >
Mode: CBR
Format: Windows Media Audio 9.1
Attributes: 128 kbps, 44kHz, stereo (A/V) CBR
Video >
Mode: CBR
Format: Windows Media Video 9
Image Size: Animation (320 x 240)
Pixel aspect ratio: 1.000 (Square)
Frame rate (fps): 30.000
Seconds per keyframe: 3
Video smoothness: 100 (Sharpest)
Bit Rate >
Internet/LAN: 1M

The video that I referred to for the Vegas settings is here:


The result is a 2.87 MB WMV file.
The file can be downloaded here.
The GSpot data for the resulting file is shown below:

Then, it's time to encode the 22 second DVD quality clip into an AVI file using Movavi Converter. It's much easier to do it with Movavi as they already provide a preset for YouTube encoding. The setting are below:
Output format:
AVI (DivX, Xvid, etc)
MPEG4 Xvid for YouTube

The video that I referred to for the Movavi Converter settings is here:


The result AVI is much smaller (1.75 MB) compared with the WMV created from Vegas.
The resulting AVI file can be downloaded here.
The GSpot data is shown below:

Now it's time for the YouTube results.
Here's how the original DVD quality clip looks after it has been "YouTube"d without any conversion:


Here's what the Vegas encoded clip looks like:


And here's the Movavi encoded clip:


From the results you can clearly see that the DVD encoded video turned out the worst of the three with it's video vertically stretched, and the video substantially pixelated. The difference between the Vegas and Movavi encoded videos isn't very obvious. The Movavi version seems to have more saturated colors compared to the washed out colors of the Vegas one. But I do feel as if the Vegas version is smoother compared to the Movavi version where it is sharper.

Since the Vegas version results in a larger file, I'll only use it when I have the patience to wait. When I want to upload stuff quickly, I use Movavi.

Innocent Voices - Good Movie

Innocent Voices

Smack in-your-face reality of the civil war in El Salvador. Though the acting wasn't that good, everything else was perfect, and more than made up for the poor acting. I found it really easy to immerse myself into the story. I think it has to do with setting. The school uniforms, the shanty houses in the village, the mango trees, the communal and family relationships portrayed are all very similar to that of what you will find here in Malaysia. Really good stuff.

Potter and Messi


Just watched the new Harry Potter movie, and I think it's a solid continuation of the last one. It's more focused this time around. Right off the bat, it's about Voldermort, with the lighter macigky stuff being put as a side story. And some cool new characters were introduced too, like Nymphadora Tonks played by the newcomer Natalia Tena, who is hot, by the way (why else would I mention her out of the all other new characters). And like most movies, the fight scene at the end of the movie was awesome. It looks as if they put most their special effects money on that fight scene, because there are some parts of the movie where the special effects looked cheap, but still better than the effects from the first movie. Harry Potter movies ain't all about special effects, the movie is mainly for kids, but there's enough depth to the story that adults can actually enjoy it without the need to turn off their brains.


Apart from the movie itself, another awesome thing that I saw today was Loinel Messi's goal against Mexico today. After watching that goal I had to clean the walls because it blew my brains out. The moment he chipped that ball, my brain went, "no way... No Way", then it happened, the ball went in, and my brain exploded. Argentina meet Brazil in the finals, my bet is on Argentina.

Cloverfield Trailer


Apple HD 1-18-08 (Cloverfield) Trailer

JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost, is working on a movie called Cloverfield, or at least that's what people are calling it. The title of the movie is still a mystery, but the trailer gives an idea of what the movie is about, and it looks awesome. Some say it's Godzilla, but whatever it is, it's good. At first, the Blair Witch style camcorder camera work made me assume that it was going to be a low budget indie thing, but then, at the end of the trailer, you'll see how kick ass this movie is going to be.

Hayden Panettiere Bikini Pics


She looked good in Heroes but few episodes towards the finale, it looks as if she had consecutive bad hair days. Plus, her acting during those episodes weren't good, but it's hard to make it good with lame dialogs from the script.

Wimbledon - Federer Wins, But More Importantly, Ivanovic Is Hot

Roger Federer just won Wimbledon, 5 times in a row. Great match between him and Nadal. Nadal is improving fast, and Federer, even though he's superb, his form is stagnant. If things keep going on like this, Nadal will become the better player soon.

Ana Ivanovic

But that aside, the main thing that I've discovered from the tournament is that Ana Ivanovic is HOT. Even slightly hotter than Sharapova. That is one of the greatest discoveries this year.

Die Hard 4.0 Is Way, Waay, Waaay Better Than Transformers

I watched the 2 movies back-to-back over the weekend, and Die Hard was beyond expectations, Transformers was a disappointment.

McClane's 'Da Man!

At first I thought the PG13 rating was really going to hamper the "McClane"ness of the movie, but I was wrong, and this is one of the rare times where I'm wrong is a good thing. The movie really kicked ass. Its in-your-face action really worked. The tradition that McClane is one bad ass cop that's not invincible but can kick ass when it matters was done really well. And the action wasn't mindless too, it had a purpose. They didn't blow things up just for the sake of blowing things up, it contributed to the story and character development.

The hacker taking over the U.S. plot really looked believable, and they didn't dumb down the computer/hacker thingy like Transformers and so many other movies did. Overall, the best action movie in a very long time. I would happy if there was a sequel if it's going to be this good.

You know why the Autobots' logo is a sad face? It's because this movie sucked.

Then there's Transformers. They claim that there's more than meets the eye, but I say there's not much you can see with your eyes in this movie.

The way they designed the robots, coupled with their choice of camera work (which is usually shaky and quick close shots), it's hard to make out what the robots are doing most of the time. They design these robots to look kind of organic machines with small mechanical parts joined together. That made it hard to make out the the robot's features because everything looked like it was camouflaged. Even when they're not moving if hard to make out where's the head, which limb is the leg, and which is the hand.

Plus, they littered the movie with stupid, Stupid, STUPID jokes that just killed the mood. They made this a fluffy movie. They didn't show any respect. It would've been a lot better if this movie was more serious without all the stupid jokes.

Now I hate Michael Bay. He destroyed what could've been an awesome movie. Transformers got to a bad start, and it's sad that the sequel (I'm sure there'll be one) will as bad or worse. They need to remake it to make good, but that's not going to happen.

I really, Really, REALLY hope they don't mess up the ThunderCats movie.

Natali Del Conte... Mmmmmmm...

Natali Del Conte

Natali Del Conte on Cranky Geeks episode 68.

Natali Del Conte On Cranky Geeks Episode 68
Update:
Another cute video of here from Cranky Geeks episode 77 can be seen here.


2007 MTV Movie Awards

I just finished watching the 2007 MTV Movie Awards. This year's host, Sarah Silverman, was great. Her jokes were the highlight of the show.

Sarah Silverman has good jokes.

Mike Myers got one of those lifetime awards. At first I thought it was going to be lame, because he hasn't been very funny in his past few movies, but surprisingly it was good. The gag about not being a sell-out was really funny.

Mike Myers selling out to Pontiac.

And Cameron Diaz, who presented the award to him, wore this ridiculously short skirt. It'll be very hard to not see her panties (if she's wearing any) when she's sitting down. She'll need to cross her legs constantly.

A short skirt and Cameron Diaz.

Other things that happened, Jack Nicholson's acceptance speech was incomprehensible. Jerry Bruckheimer is afraid of his writers, specifically the writers of his Pirates movie. You can see/hear him whispering to Johnny Depp telling him to thank the writers of the movie. And speaking of Johnny Depp, he's still stuck in the 80s, at least in his fashion sense. He wouldn't be out of place if he walked in on the set of 21 Jump Street dressed the way he was. And the flailing hand gestures of Captain Jack Sparrow is actually natural to him, and not something he made up for the character. You can see it during his acceptance speech.

Depp stuck in the 80s. Torn-at-the-knee jeans & shirt tied around the waist.

Depp with Bruckheimer.

And this year, they have user submitted video spoofs thing. They are trying to get on teh user generated content bandwagon, and all 3 of the user submitted videos they showed were lame. The one they did themselves was very funny.

-
MTV Movie Awards 2007 spoof video.

And Rihanna performed live, and I was really impressed by it (the performance). She can actually sing, and the song was good too. The other performance was from Amy Winehouse. I've heard her name before, but never knew that she was a singer. She's not that hot, and I couldn't care about her music. Her performance, with her 60s hair and moves, with tattoos all over her arms, to be honest, she looked retarded. And she has bad teeth too.

Rihanna: Good.
Winehouse: Meh..

Then they presented the awards for the Best Summer Movie for this summer, and Transformers won. I'm more excited about The Simpsons Movie than Transformers. Of the all the 8 nominees, the one's I'll go watch at the theater will be Transformers, Rush Hour 3 and Harry Potter. I wish I could watch the Simpsons Movie at the theater, but I doubt it will ever be shown in Malaysian theaters, and even if it was, it'll be censored to death.