Category: Movies

Jul182008

Just saw The Dark Knight

I’m pretty sure this is my “Best Movie of 2008″. Thankfully, it was so good, morons at the theater didn’t have time heckle, so watching it with an opening night crowd (even 3 rows from the screen… we showed up an hour before 12:20AM showtime, but I guess we needed to show up 3 hours early or something) was still incredibly enjoyable.

Christian Bale was hot. (He was looking pretty good as John Connor, too.) Heath Ledger was an amazing Joker. The movie was action-packed, wonderfully dark and sickly humorous. The only thing I didn’t like about it: even with a runtime of over 150 minutes, it could have used another half hour. I wanted another half hour.

I think that’s all I can talk about at this hour and without spoiling stuff.
Rating: 9.7/10… at least until I see it again whenever it comes out on Blu-Ray. We’ll see how it holds up to rewatch.

 

I really need to go to bed now.

Jun112008

King of Fighters ‘69 trailer - Going too far…

I don’t feel like writing a massively long post today, so I figured instead I’d show everybody Kelvin’s latest dabbling in editing. A few years back, I think around the time they were working on Nescaflowne, Kelvin and Andrew were messing around with footage from the Fatal Fury: Double Impact DVD. The anime is absolutely terrible; I’m not even sure why Kelvin owns Double Impact. They came up with some concepts and characters, even going so far as making a trailer, an intro, and doing some voice work. I guess they were just bored cuz nothing ever came of it. From what I witnessed, it seemed pretty funny. It was mostly Kelvin’s idea (you can tell by how crude everything is), so I bugged him over the years to do it. I even went so far as to buy him the second Fatal Fury DVD, Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture. (You know, I paid $20 off eBay for that DVD in 2005 and was annoyed I couldn’t get a better deal. Now both DVDs are out of print, and sellers are trying to hawk that crap for $50+ a pop on Amazon and Half.com. Shyeah, good luck with that!) Anyway, Kelvin blew it off until a couple weeks ago, when he treated himself to Final Cut Pro. He tried out his new toy by redoing the trailer quickly, and here it is:

*snicker* Just so you know, no voice recording was done for that trailer; it’s all original audio footage from the DVD. And what the hell is that kid wearing?? I hope KoF’69 eventually gets made. I wants me some Krauser…

New thing I learned today: Krauser is one of the bosses in the Fatal Fury video games. His full name is Wolfgang Krauser von Stroheim.

Jun32008

Veidt Sport: Break some brick walls!

The makers of the movie Watchmen recently had a Youtube contest, asking fans of the comic book series to make advertisements for products of “Veidt Enterprises”, a company in the fictional world of Watchmen. (btw, I haven’t read the series yet, but people keep telling me to read it, so I assume it’s really good.) One of these hopeful contest participants is my buddy Sandra, who worked very hard on a commercial with her friend Bryan Newton. Here is their most excellent final product:

I think it fulfills the contest objectives quite nicely while is still very clearly a Sandra work. Unfortunately, the story does not end with just a sweet commercial…

Hey everyone,

I don’t email huge groups of people at a time usually, but I wanted to share a story/some work with everyone.

Recently, a contest was started by Warner Bros for the new Watchmen movie (based on the comic book by Alan Moore - guy who also wrote From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, amongst others) that will be coming out next year. The contest was to make a commercial, highlighting a fake product by “Veidt Enterprises” (Adrien Veidt is the alter ego of Ozymandias, in the book.) (www.youtube.com/watchmenmovie) Bryan and I chose to make a commercial about their shoe, under the title, “Veidt Sport”.

The timeline was severe - they only gave us from April 22nd to June 2nd, 11:59 pm Eastern time. Not a lot of days. However, Bryan and I took on the challenge, coming up with a concept and even challenging ourselves to animate the ad, in flash. I asked my coworker, Bruce, to do sound - and as always, we were down to the wire. We were feverishly spending all our free time working on this thing, outside of our full time jobs.

The ad was due at 11:59 EST - 8:59 for us west-coast-ers. I frantically tried to upload the ad at 8:30pm, and youtube kept spinning its’ wheels. After 15 minutes of this, it gave me an error message. I nervously tried to upload it again…and it posted at 9:02pm. Unfortunately, to “submit” the ad, I had to be able to select it from my group of youtube videos, through the Watchmen youtube page (for an “official” submission), which added an extra step. Since my ad was “processing” (i.e. encoding, whatever’s going on over at youtube), I could not select my ad, to submit it. Reloading the page over and over again for half an hour, I finally was able to submit it. However, the last step - a confirmation through email - led to our downfall. I got the confirmation email, clicked on the link - which led me to a blank web page with only this on the page:

:(

Yes. A sad face. Which was what was reflected in my face. Along with a lot of other facial expressions, I’m sure.

In any case, this is where the story goes from me to you. I really believe in our ad - it is one of the best things I’ve worked on, I feel. All the reaction I’ve been getting from people is positive. So, if you could take a moment to check out the ad, (It’s only 30 seconds long!) rate it, and pass this along to other people to check out - I want to at least get some attention to this ad to get these contest guys to understand our plight, and at least get it seen and judged like all the other ads.

Without further ado, here’s the link to the ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjGCStiBwLM

Please, send the link and this email along, and you’d be doing me a huge favor. Please, comment on it, good or bad.
Thanks in advance!

Sandra Leong
heysandra.com

and
Bryan Newton

So yeah, their entry didn’t get submitted. Which is really sad, considering how much work they put into this and how many other crap entries there are. Sandra and Bryan have contacted watchmenmovie through Youtube, but they haven’t gotten a response yet. The contest just ended last night though, so it’s still early. Anyway, click the video and check it out on Youtube, rate it, leave a comment, and help a couple great artists out. They deserve it.

Sep132007

What happened to my YMDb list?

I think some time toward the end of 2006, the YMDb domain name got taken by IMDb, as going to ymdb.com would lead you to imdb.com (it doesn’t anymore). YMDb didn’t disappear tho; it came back up at shompy.com. So the lists the were still preserved and whatnot. However, I went to check on my list today, and my list is totally empty! What the heck? The comments are still there, but the actual top 20 is gone.

Out of boredom (can you tell I’m bored a lot these days? I don’t really see how blogging about nothing quenches my boredom…), I re-did my my top 20 list. I think I have most of the movies back on, tho mostly not in the right order. For those too lazy to click links (Kelvin), here’s my top 20 so far:

    Judy’s Top 20 Movies
    1. Bian Lian (King of Masks)
    2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    3. Lashou shentan (Hard-Boiled)
    4. Jui kuen II (Drunken Master II)
    5. American Psycho
    6. Election
    7. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
    8. Twelve Monkeys
    9. Hot Shots! Part Deux
    10. Coming To America
    11. Hsi yen (Wedding Banquet)
    12. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    13. Stand by Me
    14. Shawshank Redemption, The
    15. L.A. Confidential
    16. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    17. Total Recall
    18. Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Raise the Red Lantern)
    19. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
    20.

I am missing one movie though. I can’t remember what it was. Kelvin thinks it was The Usual Suspects. I think he’s probably right, but I don’t like it as much as I used to. Every movie I listed I’d be willing to watch again right now; The Usual Suspects… not so much anymore. I’m not sure what to put for the 20th movie. I thought maybe Batman Begins, but at moment I don’t feel like watching it again, which makes me think I shouldn’t put it on the list. Hmmm, maybe it was A Bug’s Life? It seems weird for me to not put an animated feature on my list, tho I do mention Pixar films in general in my comments. I think Back to the Future used to be on my list, but I took it off for Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind. I think I’ll put that one as my 20th.

I don’t know why, but they don’t list the year of the movie next to the name anymore. That’s kind of lame.

New thing I learned today: The names of different types of wedding dress trains (the cloth that flows in the back of the dress). Basically, there’s short (sweep or court), medium (chapel), long (cathedral), and really freakin’ long (monarch/royal).

I got tired of looking at cakes (yeah, I didn’t think it was possible either), so I started looking at dresses. *sigh* What a waste of money and closet space…

Aug232007

I need naps. (and Rush Hour 3 mini-review)

I was originally going to complain about how neurotic and high strung I am (and how I can’t parallel park worth shit), but the last couple days I’ve discovered something that has greatly improved my mood. I went home during lunchtime last couple days, and I’d eat a quick lunch and take a nap (sorta… it was a really light nap, so I’m not sure if I actually fell asleep). The nap (plus a soda after) greatly increased my energy and improved my mood for the rest of the day. While it’s nice to find a fix for the bleh-ness during the day I’ve been feeling, I’m hoping this isn’t something I’m going to be dependent on.

Kelvin and I went to check out Rush Hour 3. You know, it was bad… but I didn’t think it was 20% bad. Sure, some situations were totally unbelievable, and half of the jokes were racist or not that funny, but overall I left the theater feeling positive. There was enough action and non-sucky action sequences. Jackie Chan is the man, even if he is getting old. Chris Tucker is just… annoying. The French taxi driver was pretty cool. 4.5/10

 

I saw this article today about May Zhou. She was a girl in my year back in college. I didn’t know her personally, but I remember she was in some of my classes, and she did problem sets with folks in my dorm hall. Based on what I saw during those pset sessions, she was REALLY smart. I think she had a boyfriend or something at one point, because I remember thinking she must be perfect: she’s smart, nice, pretty, works hard, and has time for relationships. So when I first read that she committed suicide in weird circumstances, I figured something MUST have happened to her, especially since the cops were revealing no info about their investigation. But after reading this new article… it seems like it really was suicide (despite what her father says). It really hits home, that someone who had so much potential (A LOT of potential) just wanted to go to sleep forever. I wish she had known there were better options, and I hope she’s happy whereever she is.

New thing I learned today: A “free right turn” is where it’s legal to turn right at an intersection without stopping when the light is red. Most common example is where the right turn has its own designated lane, with a sidewalk island with the traffic signal separating the lane from the rest of the intersection. When the traffic signal is to your left (and no other traffic signal or stop sign is to your right), you may yield (meaning if there’s no cars, you don’t have to stop) into the intersection. I also learned those triangular islands are called “pork chop islands“.

You know, I always thought you had to stop at every intersection when you right turn, unless you had a dedicated lane in the road you’re turning into. Kelvin always said it was a yield, so I guess he’s right. While it’s good to know this, I’m worried that people think this gives them a right to go barreling into your lane when you have the green. (People already do that a lot now… Mr. Roadshow really needs an article to remind people what “yield” means.) Or people will think it’s okay to turn right on red without stopping at EVERY intersection. This newfound knowledge doesn’t really change my way of driving, since I have to significantly slow to almost a stop to see what’s coming in my direction. Before knowing this law, I’m pretty sure I was doing “California stops” anyway; it’s just now I know I shouldn’t get a ticket for it.

Aug52007

Probably no internet for a couple days again (+Jackie Chan DVD mini-review)

Kelvin’s coming home from Hawaii tonight, which means I’ll be heading back to the apartment. I figured I’d get a post in while I’m at home, since the apartment currently doesn’t have internet. That may be surprising for the three people that regularly read my blog, since they would know from my posts that we just got internet hooked up a couple weeks ago (after many AT&T customer service phone calls and emails). Kelvin upgraded to their “Elite” service, which is supposed to be super-fast or something. He signed up for a month-by-month term and didn’t opt to get the free equipment, since we have a gateway already. Unfortunately, right before Kelvin left for Hawaii, the gateway completely died (it reboots itself over and over again), so Kelvin told me to deal with AT&T and try to get the free gateway we were supposed to get anyway. If we couldn’t, just cancel the service. We were still within the first 30 days of sign-up, so either getting that or canceling the service shouldn’t be an issue. I should have done this earlier last week, but being the slacker I am, I didn’t work on it until Friday, so the soonest we’ll be back online is probably Tuesday.

Speaking of AT&T Customer Service, working with them was… interesting. (Rest of the story in the spoiler)
show

Yesterday, Chris came over, and we went to Best Buy to buy some DVDs. Best Buy was having another Movie Money deal with Rush Hour 3, similar to the 300 one. So basically, buy certain DVDs will get you free $10.50 to go watch Rush Hour 3, and since the DVDs are $9.99, you’re basically getting a free DVD if you were planning on watching Rush Hour 3 anyway. The Rush Hour 3 trailer looks… stupid, but I want to watch it anyway because Jackie Chan is the man. The Rush Hour and Rush Hour 2 DVDs were cleared out, but surprising there were still a handful of Movie Money thingies left. I wasn’t planning on getting the Rush Hour DVDs anyway (waiting for the uber-box set); I wanted to get these cheap-o double feature sets from New Line that include Jackie Chan movies. I never bought the individual releases of the films because, frankly, they suck. I’m a huge fan of Jackie Chan, but I can’t get myself to buy the crap DVDs they put out for his movies. They’re usually dubbed-only, minimal special features, and bleh quality.

Sadly, these double feature DVDs were even worse than those. Both movies are on one disc, with ZERO special features (not even animated menus!) and ONLY full-screen (I believe the individual DVDs have those double sided DVDs with widescreen on one side and full-screen on the other). What’s even sillier is the “Switch Movie” option. When you load up the disc, it takes you to this bare-bones menu with only the titles of the movie, and you pick a movie title to go to the bare bones menu for that particular movie. With nothing but “Play Movie”, “Set Up Screen & Sound Options”, and “Select a Scene”, “Switch Movie” seemed like a pleasant surprise. It makes sense to be able to switch to the other movie’s menu on a double feature DVD, but you know what? It doesn’t even do that. It goes back to the MAIN bare-bones menu, where you have to select the movie again. I mean, it’s not like there’s more than two movies on the disc, there’s only one movie I could be talking about when I want to “Switch Movie”…unless switching to the same movie makes sense to people. (It doesn’t to me.)

Regardless, these DVDs were essentially free, and Chris and I watched the First Strike/Mr. Nice Guy movies. Awesome movies. Jackie does his own dubbing, so it doesn’t even matter that it’s dubbed. (Well, it’s not like it really matters anyway. The films were mostly shot in English. It’s a little unfortunate some of the horrible acting can’t be partially hidden with dubbing.) I remember on Gorgeous DVD, Jackie doesn’t do his own dub; instead, it’s some white guy who doesn’t even attempt at making a corny Chinese accent, making the dubbed version REALLY weird. Overall, I think Mr. Nice Guy is better than First Strike. First Strike tried too hard to be James Bond-ish and have a plot, so it didn’t have as much time for nitty-gritty fighting and silly comedy. Mr. Nice Guy’s plot consisted of “Where’s the tape?” for most of the movie, with Jackie constantly being dumped into fighting sequences. But it was really fun watching them again. I <3 Jackie Chan, even in full screen.

I’ve been getting a ton of traffic because I linked a blog post from a ZDNet blog, and I’m listed as a trackback close to the top of the post. People all over the intarwebz are reading my rant on Chris Hansen. I’m still getting occasional hits from weird web searches. I think maybe the random stuff I talk about is perhaps too random, because I’ve gotten a hit for “gay_milking” and “jet_zuko_yaoi” (spaces replaced with underscores to… not further encourage these kind of searches).

New thing I learned today: First Strike is the fourth installment of the Police Story series.

Once Jackie Chan movies started appearing in US theaters, I stopped paying attention to his movies in Asia, so I wasn’t aware that First Strike’s actual full title was Police Story 4: First Strike. Watching it yesterday and seeing Jackie being a cop/agent again with the same inspector, I was wondering why this wasn’t just another Police Story. Plus Maggie Cheung isn’t in the movie as Jackie’s girlfriend, which also makes it more confusing.

Jul52007

Transformers: Not as bad as I thought it would be.

DSC00374.JPGI hadn’t planned to watch this, but I had nothing else to do, so I went with Kelvin and Andrew. So admittedly, I walked into the movie really low expectations. Actually, so did Andrew, but he still hated it. Kelvin got what he expected and enjoyed it.

What was exactly was I expecting? Well, knowing this is a Michael Bay film, lots of explosions, nauseating editing… and more explosions and special effects, usually at the expense of plot and story. I also expected to hate the humans, because come on, people watch this movie for giant, battling robots, not little, squishy humans. And since we want to watch fighting robots, humans can only mean attempts to make story, which takes away from battling robots, which is bad. I also expected very little connection with the original series (tho that isn’t as big of a deal for me, since I was more of a “My Little Pony” girl in the 80s anyway), so I wasn’t expecting to like the robots either.

Okay, well, the story and script were pretty bad. And the acting… generally terrible. And there was A LOT of it. For a Michael Bay film about Transformers, there was surprisingly a lot of attempts at story and drama, particularly with the humans. Actually, I’d say only with the humans. Way too much human time. Like I said, more human time = less robot time = suck. In fact, there was an entire tangent about hackers that should have been removed. But I do make an exception about the sucky-humans observation, and that was with the main character Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LeBeouf. He wasn’t hot, but I found him to be a very, very likable dork/loser. I liked his scenes, and his acting didn’t suck (probably the only decent human actor in the film). In one scene, he’s trying to subtly show off to his love interest with his (un)impressive biceps; he kinda reminded me of a Disney’s Aladdin with the way he did that. I was expecting to hate this guy, but I didn’t, so that really surprised me.

Of course, I ended up really liking the Autobots, but that shouldn’t be surprising at all. Another big plus about this movie was the special effects. I thought all the CG was really well done. There wasn’t once where I was totally distracted by the thought of “Man, that looks so fake.” The live action and CG stuff was put together seamlessly. Despite their somewhat ridiculous designs, the Transformers looked pretty gosh-darn good. I could tell the Autobots apart from each other fairly easily, while the Decepticons I had to depend on what vehicle they originally were. Even with Michael Bay’s vomit vision, I enjoyed the action sequences with Transformers, which of course had tons of explosions and destruction. Unfortunately, aside from the climax, these action scenes were spaced pretty far apart, cushioned with crappy story and human scenes. Yes, that’s right, I wanted MORE action sequences. And I’m not sure why, but they decided to use the Autobots for comic relief. In one scene, the Autobots are trying to hide from Sam’s parents. Instead of, you know, TRANSFORMING, they wander around his backyard, breaking garden decorations and ruining lawns, hiding on roofs and in porches. As entertaining as this is, I don’t remember the Autobots ever being retarded.

And while the Autobots get a pretty in-depth introduction, you don’t really get to see much of them. You’ve got Optimus Prime the Leader, Bumblebee the Lovable One, Jazz the Homie-G, Ratchet the Healer, and Ironhide the Weapons Dude. I think we see Optimus Prime fight the most, which is good, and Bumblebee gets into some fights as the main character’s robot. But we barely get to see the other three fight. Ratchet doesn’t do jack healing, Jazz is useless, and after showing off Ironhide’s awesome weapon arsenal in several scenes, he never uses any of them! The rest of the robot time is Decepticons wreaking havok on the humans. Major lame sauce. Oh, they also had some stupid little boombox spider robot that wasted a lot of screen time also. Whoopie, it throws ninja stars. And who fights the little bugger? Why, the useless hackers, cliched moronic super secret military base guy, and the Secretary of Defense Voight. Stupid.

Seriously, aside from the main character, what was the point of having the all these humans around to do anything except die? One branch of the movie follows these group of soldiers who make it from a Middle Eastern desert all the way to the urban metropolis where the climax of the movie occurs. And they’re fighting in the climax or something. Which is totally pointless, because we already know from watching them throughout the entire movie that their weapons are useless. There’s a couple of intense battle scenes of them basically doing nothing. But they’re doing nothing with lotsa large guns and explosions, which I guess is the important part? I mean, the film is almost 2 and a half hours, and it really shouldn’t have been more than 90 minutes. The hackers were pointless, nobody cares that main soldier has a wife and kid, and we already know the government is incompetent. Kelvin (who considers it a 2-star movie) says he can probably edit it to be a 3-star movie.

Okay, that was a pretty unorganized review. Summary: Get rid of every human-only scene (except for scenes that focus on Sam Witwicky) and get-rid of the boombox spider robot scenes, and you’ll have a decent mindless summer action flick. I still think it’s pretty entertaining, even with all the fluff. I think the Transformers movie was a good platform for Michael Bay to do all his excessive special effects crap; too bad he had to rape the fond childhood memories of twenty-somethings everywhere in the process. Oh, and I liked this more than 300. 6.3/10

 

While you’re at it, watch something with a better robot-time ratio:

Dancing robots = awesome. There’s also an ice skating one. You can check out the full commericals at the Citroen C4 site.

And FYI to folks that don’t know, I’m taking time off from work to do nothing, so I won’t be back until next Tuesday. And if you see my car in the lot, don’t worry; I’m not actually at work :P (but I do need to go get my car.)