Mark's Blog

First of all, I saw Master and Commander tonight, the newish Russell Crowe movie. I'd definitely recommend it, it's a solid period action movie (which I tend to like), with good acting and an enjoyable plot. The only thing that kept on annoying me was continual changes of weather and light. Seemingly five minutes would pass and it would go from pitch dark to a bright sun, with no indication that any time had passed. I give this movie an 8. Worth seeing in the theatre for the action on the big screen. Not a must-see, nothing ground-breaking, but a good all-around effort. There were some vaguely amusing parts foreshadowing Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos Islands, where the ship's doctor expresses his interest in the flora and fauna there, but his expeditions understandably play second fiddle to the Captain's orders.

Anyway, this post also marks my first anniversary of blogging. In the first year I made 78 posts, which works out to about one every 4.7 days. I don't know what I expected but I've enjoyed sharing some of my random comments and I'm sure I'll continue for the foreseeable future.

The five most popular blog entries, in order, have been:

• Joe Millionaire Episode 3 (mostly because I initially made a typo, "millionare", which drew a large number of spelling-impaired people, obviously such as myself)
• Curb Your Enthusiasm (mostly visited by people looking for information about the fourth season)
• Finished GTA: Vice City (mostly visited by other gamers looking for 100% completion stats).
• The Bachelor Finale (which seems to draw in some more people for each Bachelor season)
• Spammunition (this was an entry I wrote on a spam filter that I used to use -- I now use, and am extremely happy with, Spambayes -- there's not much on the web on it, and my blog entry is on the first page of google results, so that pretty much explains things)

I saw The Matrix Revolutions, the much anticipated final chapter of the Matrix trilogy on Friday. I'm sure most people who have seen the first two are going to watch this one too, although in my opinion it's the weakest of the three. I really liked the second installment, and of course the original Matrix, but this one is lacking. Not much in the way of deep, or even potentially-deep thoughts, and a lot of dull moments leading up to the final overly-long action sequence. There wasn't all that much kung-fu in the movie, which was kind of disappointing. I probably could have followed the plot a bit closer, but I didn't and got a bit lost a few times. There is a rather detailed post on IMDB which gives one explanation of the trilogy as a whole, which I probably should have read before seeing the movie.

I gave this movie an 8, which is probably more than I would have given it if the title didn't have the code word "Matrix" in it. However, there is something highly entertaining about sitting in the theatre in the world of the Matrix with Neo, Trinity and Morpheus that just doesn't get old. The same goes for Agent Smith ominously intoning "Missterrrr Anderrrrson" as only he can.

Hmmf. Well, I ponied up my eleven bucks and went to see Kill Bill: Vol. 1, the fourth Quentin Tarantino film, tonight. What a disappointment. I had initially been really excited about seeing the movie. Then I saw the trailer and thought it looked stupid. Then everyone (including Roger Ebert, who mysteriously gave it five stars -- seriously, was he paid off by Miramax?) started raving about it and I got excited about seeing it again. So I went in with decent expectations. Not through the roof, like they are going to be for Matrix 3 and LOTR 3, but I was really expecting to enjoy the movie. And finally, the almost always reliable IMDB voters have it at an 8.3 average, an extremely high rating.

Now, I like a lot of violent movies (Natural Born Killers is one of my "10"s on IMDB ), I like martial arts movies and I've liked everything (with the sole exception of the zombie-rrific waste of time that was From Dusk Till Dawn) I've seen from Quentin Tarantino, but this movie just sucked. It was sadistic, overly violent, fetishistic, gory, and quite frankly, just plain sick. It's slow, repetitive, and boring. We spend minutes watching the various characters squirming in pain. Is this supposed to be entertaining? There was precious little classic Tarantino dialogue -- no hit men chatting about foot massages, no healthy debates on the virtues of tipping. The movie doesn't have much of a plot, other than a trivial revenge theme. Somebody nearly killed Uma Thurman's character, so she has to kill them. Snore.

The movie supposedly paid homage to a number of other movies, but they weren't ones that I'd seen, so that kind of fell flat with me. Were there any good parts? Not really: a few nervous laughs here and there which broke the tension, and some fairly picturesque settings, like the final samurai sword fight between The Bride (Thurman) and O-Ren Ishii (the typecast Lucy Liu). The fight scenes were well-choreographed, but too graphic and harsh for my tastes.

You know something's odd when I'm closer to agreeing with the Ned Flanders of the Internet than the mainstream. You know, the "suggestive eye movements" in KB1 didn't bother me, nor did the "29 uses of the most foul of the foul words", and the presence of people "drinking" (the horror!) was fine. It was the "beheadings, repeatedly", "amputations, repeatedly", "sadism" (this one word sums up the entire movie very accurately) and "selling sex with a comatose woman" that did it. Disgusting.

The only win I see here is for the film company, that is probably going to double their revenue on this crap. Am I going to see Kill Bill: Vol. 2? Well, I'd like to say no, but I'm sure I'll end up seeing it at some point, if only to see just how bad it can get. Suffice it to say, my expectations could not be much lower. I rate this movie a 4. That's right, a "failure" on my scale. Right alongside Judge Dredd, Escape from L.A. and Congo. Give this one a miss.

This is a movie with an overriding theme of enjoying the suffering of others. The fact that so many people are enjoying this movie is disturbing to me.

I might have been nineteen years late, but I finally watched Ghostbusters. As with other comedy classics, I was underwhelmed, but it's interesting to finally see the origin of some popular references. Venkman, the name of Bill Murray's character, is now the name of the Mozilla Javascript Debugger. Then there were the various comments such as "He slimed me" and phrases like "ectoplasm" and other ersatz scientific terms. Of course, the theme song by Ray Parker Jr. was instantly recognizable. Murray, playing a pseudo-scientist with deadpan comic delivery, and Rick Moranis, playing an uber-geeky accountant, provided most of the humor for me. The graphics were almost laughably bad. I'm not totally sure if that was on purpose or that was just the state of the art in 1984, but that green ghost looked like it was straight out of a cartoon. I gave the movie a 7. I didn't find it laugh-out-loud funny, but it moved along at a good pace and it was entertaining enough to watch, if mainly for the 100-minute trip back into the 80s.

I haven't been to the theatre in a while, mostly because there doesn't seem to be much of anything worth seeing. I'll go to see the latest Tarantino effort, Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2, but I'm not expecting much. I've seen the trailer and it all looks a bit over the top. I've really enjoyed pretty much everything Tarantino has been a part of, that I've seen, except for From Dusk Till Dawn, and Pulp Fiction is my favorite movie of all time, but I'm going to go into the Kill Bill movies (what is the equivalent of "trilogy" for two items?) with low expectations and hope they are exceeded. Of course, I can hardly wait to see The Matrix Revolutions and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

I've been playing a little more Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed recently. This is a terrific driving simulation, and a great bargain right now since it is three years old. I've seen copies for $15 in the stores, and there appear to be numerous copies for less than $10 U.S. on ebay. Last night I figured out the binary file format for the high scores, and wrote a little perl script to extract my record times. I cleaned it up a little bit today so I could post it on my site without being too ashamed of the code.

One slightly odd thing I noticed was that the time was stored as a 2-byte integer. I unpacked the first one in the file and got 8932. The record time associated to that was 2:19.56. So I figured I'd convert the time to seconds, and got 139.56. I divided the former number into the latter and got something suspiciously close to 64, so I had my answer of how the times were stored (the names and cars were in plain text). So this is the strange thing: the displayed resolution of the times both in the game and in the records list is in hundredths of a second, but there are obviously only 64 of the 100 different hundredths available using this method. I wonder if this is a simple matter of the computer's clock not being that accurate anyway, so there would be no need to store more precise data, or just a weird design decision? I seem to remember that the old DOS time resolution was 1/18 of a second, but I would have thought that would be better by now. It certainly wasn't anything to do with saving file space -- the whole file was about 18K and there couldn't have been more than about 4K of actual data, the rest was null characters.

In movie-going news I watched Marci X, which is currently rated 3.1 on IMDB. It's yet another whites-introduced-to-urban-black-culture comedy. Obviously a lot of people thought it was terrible, and I can see where they're coming from. There were a few really funny moments though, and if you go into the movie expecting a satire you might enjoy it a bit more. Anyway, I cast my "6", which was probably a little generous but I don't think the makers were trying to be serious and they did have me laughing at times. I wouldn't recommend this movie to many people.

I also bought a couple of DVDs, The Matrix and Minority Report. I was tempted by The Two Towers but I will hold out for the inevitable mega-extended-collectors' box set they will no doubt be releasing around a year from now. Apparently they will be releasing the extended versions of FOTR and TTT in the theatres a few weeks before the release of ROTK, which will be awesome.

Wow, I slept a ridiculous amount this weekend. Around 12 hours both Friday night and Saturday night. I cannot remember the last time I did that. Which means, of course, that it's going to be nearly impossible to get to sleep any time soon. Fortunately, I'm used to this sort of thing.

I saw American Wedding on Saturday night, which was very enjoyable. There seem to be no limits to gross-out humor, but I wasn't complaining. The Stifler character was a bit over the top at times, even more than in the other installments of the series, but I guess that could have been expected. I gave it an 8, and I would highly recommend this movie to fans of the adolescent humor genre. A number of the characters from the first two movies did not appear, but it didn't seem to matter all that much. I was kind of expecting the Shermanator to crash the wedding, but that didn't happen.

I think American Pie 2 was the best of the series, with this one a close second. American Pie was good, to be sure, but there was a bit too much romantic comedy for my tastes (i.e. the less, the better). I didn't think the whole Chris Klein / Mena Suvari sub-plot was all that funny and the movie dragged a bit, although I did like it overall.

Saw an interesting film on DVD on the weekend, Gang Tapes. It's short, checking it an around 80 minutes, but very intense, so it felt longer to me. The movie takes place in the middle of Bloods territory in Los Angeles. What you see in the film is what Trivell, a 15 year old boy, shoots on a stolen camcorder. The subject the movie is his initiation into a gang and the associated violence.

Apparently the director pitched it as a cross between The Blair Witch Project (which I still haven't seen) and Boyz N the Hood and it's probably a pretty decent description (although the camera work is very steady and not in the least nausea-inducing as BWP supposedly was). There were a lot of little moments in the movie that made it extremely believable and realistic.

Gang Tapes is probably to be avoided if you're easily offended or shocked by violence or profanity. The CAPalert guy hasn't rated this one yet but I'm sure he'd give it one of his lowest ratings ever. Apparently a lot of theatre owners refused to show it, which is usually a good indicator the movie makers are doing something strong.

If you enjoyed other films in the genre though you would probably like this a lot. A 9 from me, due to the originality and (presumed, since I haven't been there) authenticity of the movie. It's only at 5.9 on IMDB, but that is after only 121 votes and there are a lot of 1 ratings. There is supposed to be an Official Web Site but it doesn't seem to be working right now.

I haven't blogged in a while so I figure a wrap-up of the movies I saw in the last week should be good for a few words. I saw Grosse Pointe Blank, American Graffiti, Old School and The Guru: four comedies, which is unusual for me. In general, comedy isn't my favorite movie genre, mostly because there's not usually much to fall back on if you don't find the movie funny.

I was disappointed with Grosse Pointe Blank, which quite a few people had recommended to me. Maybe I was having a comedy-impaired day, but I didn't laugh once, which can't be a good sign. Somehow It seemed inappropriate to be laughing at or with this guy who is a professional killer. I gave it a 6, since there were a few somewhat amusing scenes at the reunion, and the banter between John Cusack's character and his real-life sister Joan Cusack's character, his secretary, was moderately funny.

American Graffiti is one of those classic movies that speaks to a generation other than mine. I think "you had to be there" (so the cliché goes) to really love this movie. I kept waiting for something to happen but nothing much ever did. It was the last movie George Lucas made, before spending 30 odd years on Star Wars and some executive producing and writing gigs. I'm not a big George Lucas fan and this didn't do much to change matters. The movie had some strengths: I enjoyed the way everything happened in one night, and the look and feel of the location seemed authentic (although I have no way of knowing for sure). I gave this a 7. I think I can see why other people love the movie, but seeing this once is enough for me.

Old School was a fun movie. Any time you see James Carville get shut up in a debate, that has to be a good thing. (Seriously, I really miss Crossfire on CNN now that it is at 4:30, with or without Carville.) The plot, such as it was, concerned three thirty-something guys with less-than-solid marriages trying to rekindle their youth by creating a fraternity. There was a cameo by Snoop Dogg, who performed the old-school classic "Paid in Full". This was not a sophisticated movie, following in the footsteps of American Pie, Scary Movie, There's Something About Mary, Road Trip and others, but that suited me just fine. There were more than enough hilarious moments, many provided by Vince Vaughn. An easy 8 from me.

Finally, I saw The Guru, which was an odd movie that dragged at times but provided a number of funny moments. Heather Graham played yet another porn star role and Christine Baranski played yet another high-society bitch role. The movie concerned an Indian guy, played by relative newcomer Jimi Mistry, who goes to the U.S. to make his fortune. He meets up with Graham's character when trying to film a porn movie. He lacks a certain ability for a male porn star, but soon finds a second career as a guru of sex, using phrases and philosophies that he rips from from Graham's character. There's the predictable romance between the two and a fairly unlikely ending. It's probably not as terrible as you might have thought if you saw the trailers, but that's hardly high praise. 6 from me.

I re-watched Traffic last night, one of my currently nineteen "10"s on IMDB. I originally saw it in the theatre when it came out, and would have voted for it over Gladiator for the Best Picture award (although I still really enjoyed Gladiator, as well as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was also nominated that year).

Last week I watched Traffik, the 1989 mini-series upon which Traffic was based. In both the movie and the mini-series I loved the interweaving of the three stories that have so much to do with each other, yet barely touch. The three stories are more or less: a government minister fights the "War on Drugs" while having to deal with a daughter who is an addict; a woman takes over her arrested husband's drug business; and a look at the supply side of the drug business. The movie expands upon the supply side part of the plot by following a cop who is basically good, but finds himself working for a drug lord. Between the movie and the mini-series, the equivalences for locations are basically London for Washington, Hamburg for Los Angeles, and Pakistan for Mexico.

There's an incredible wordless scene in the movie where Catherine Zeta-Jones' character, Helen Ayala, the drug dealer's wife looking to get in touch with a Mexican supplier, simply passes Benicio Del Toro's character, the cop, in the streets. They don't suspect each other for a second, but they would have so much to say if they did. In another scene, Michael Douglas' character, the U.S. drug czar, just misses finding his daughter on a downtown street. So near, and yet so far.

I was extremely impressed with Traffik, the mini-series as well. I watched one 50-minute episode a day for six days, which was presumably how it was meant to be watched. The mini-series was notably slower, but this is not to be construed as a bad thing. They had a lot more time to flesh out the story, and to take a look at the production of drugs in Pakistan. There is a lot more time to develop the characters. In the movie, Helen Ayala makes a seemingly too-rapid transformation from naive housewife to cocaine trafficker, whereas in the mini-series, we see Helen Rosshalde, the equivalent character, slowly tormented by the prospect of poverty and life without her husband. She deviously plots her entry into the world of drug smuggling and will stop at nothing.

Traffic's cinematography really stands out. Steven Soderbergh, the director, actually shot most of the movie, which isn't usual for Hollywood productions. He used different types of film to give the three stories a distinct feel.

Finally, I enjoyed both the movie and the mini-series because they didn't wrap up with the usual "Drugs are bad, mmmkay?" Simply seeing what addicts go through is enough of a warning, one would think.

I finally finished Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (warning, Flash) today, achieving 100% completion. If you can stomach the hideous color scheme, you can view my stats, which I saved to a file. I wish more games would let you easily print out your stats like this so you could compare them with other people and see how you're doing. It would also be nice to be able to see your progression in a game visually. The last mission, which took me way too many tries to finish, was the "RC Baron" mission, which involves flying a particularly twitchy remote control biplane through 28 checkpoints. My time was 3 minutes exactly, which is not great, but it was good enough to finish the race in first place. (Update 2003/07/31: if you're having difficulty with the RC Baron mission, try my Mini-Guide for some hints.)

I watched Office Space tonight, which I found to be completely hilarious. If you work in a cubicle and haven't seen this yet, There were just too many funny quotes to even list.

I've been using a new open-source spam filter, which has a toolbar plugin for Microsoft Outlook, called SpamBayes. It seems to accurately sort about 98% of my email, which is pretty impressive. I wish there were a few more stats about how successful the classification has been and the distribution of email received, but it's a great piece of software nonetheless.