It'll Never Fly

Freddy Krueger meets The Ring meets Hackers.

I wouldn’t call this movie DVD-worthy, and likewise I probably won’t ever watch it again, but I do feel you need to see it at least once, in the same fashion that Hackers needed to be watched at least once. If you like survival horror video games, you need to watch this movie to cringe at the use of all the survival horror video game references and conversations that real gamers don’t actually use or have (like watching actors in Hackers read lines about processor speeds).

It’s a clever premise and they mostly pull it off. It gets much better near the end when they start to use the game against itself.

I was in Edmonton for the weekend, trying to take in the Oilers/Red Wings game, and my cousin and I went to see “V for Vendetta” Friday night at the West Edmonton Mall IMAX theatre.

I must mention something first. You might remember I wrote a PHP script to generate a graph based on a rating out of 10, and I only used it once (which I just noticed isn’t working after upgrading to WordPress 2.0). Well, I’m abandoning that rating system in exchange for a thumbs up/thumbs down system. I could go through the trouble of giving movies an exact rating, but it’s too much work. Essentially, it’s all about whether I would recommend a movie or not. So there.

On to the review. Based on a comic book series of the same name, it’s the story a dystopian future Britan where people have become complacent to the totalitarian government that rules them. V, disguised in a Guy Fawkes costume, represents the rebellious force against this regime. I won’t go too much more into the synopsis, when a more detailed one is available on Wikipedia.

I enjoyed the movie. I like a story that portrays a plausible near-future much more than a distant-future with fantastical events. It feels more real; like it could actually happen. I’ve not read the original story, but I’ll have to check it out when I find it. I’ve not read Orwell’s 1984 either, but I’ll have to do that , too.

My only possibly complaint is that it felt a bit long. However, that could be due to the crappy seating in the IMAX theatre in the WEM. The Kramer IMAX here in Regina has much better seats.

Spoiler: At least the main character dies in the end, so hopefully the Wachowski brothers won’t be able to Matrix-ize it by creating two crappy sequels.

I have to take a moment to praise the guys at Telestream, Inc. for their indispensable Flip4Mac suite of WMV tools. I bought their WMV QuickTime component so I can now load and play those annoying Windows Media files, as well as edit and convert them into better formats that are eminently more useful. For Windows people out there that don’t like Apple’s QuickTime Player for Windows, that would be like being able to play QuickTime movies natively in Windows Media Player. Now you see what I mean, right? Pretty sad that we have to pay a third-party for this kind of rudimentary functionality, when Microsoft should have provided this from the start with the craptastic Windows Media Player they have for OS X already.

What that all means is I can now watch Leeroy in all his glory in any QuickTime enabled software. Hell, if I really wanted to, I could easily make a screen saver that rotates the movie whenever my computer goes idle for more than 3 minutes.

‘Cause if it can do what it was doing in Kung Fu Hustle, then “Look out!” Just finished seeing it at the local multiplex and it was as good, if not better, than I had hoped. I’ve seen a lot of his earlier movies, so I had high hopes that I’d be able to include this one as one my favourites. I’ve placesd my order with LaYoYo.com, so soon I’ll have my own copy on DVD.

Now that I’ve got a new blog engine with more support, I thought I’d try out some swanky new software that works with it. MarsEdit by Ranchero Software is what’s called a weblog editor, a stand-alone desktop application for posting to weblogs. It’s a lot like an e-mail application or a Usenet news reader, but you’re posting to a blog service instead.

I guess the theory being it’s easier/more comfortable (arguably more natural?) for people to post using an app with a familiar GUI than using a form in a Web page. That remains to be seen, and I won’t know until I see my post frequency increase or plateau.

As for how well it works? Well, that depends. Have you just been reading this?

Update: I should also point out that I used it with Mac OS X 10.2.8, and it seems to work fine. However, I have only used the basic features.