My Wushu Blog

I like to watch horror movies from other countries, and not just Asia (the entire J-Horror category is getting absurd). They tend to have different dogma’s in them, or cultural references that I’ve never heard of. This is a Swedish movie (Yay subtitles!!), and it takes place after The Great Norther War (1780?). Sweden and Russia are drawing new territory lines post-war, and a group from each respective country has to survey the land and get any town or village on the border to sign an agreement about the new lines.

This is an abstract horror movie, and I thought it was really awesome. It was pretty creepy, almost no gore of jumpy scary stuff. It had a lot of atmosphere, good dialog (from what I could tell, the subtitles were a little too literal), and very good pacing. There were a lot of allusions and symbols, it is the kind of movie that if you watch a couple of times you’ll continue to get more out of it.

If you like horror, and not gore or slasher horror, this is well worth watching.

mike Movies

It’s October, and that means I naturally start to gravitate towards horror movies. Ahh, it feels so good The smell of a smoldering chimney is in the air, or someone is burning evidence…

I Sell The Dead is about two grave robbers, one of the two is eventually arrested and tried for murder. He tells his story to a priest, hours before his planned execution. Oh, its not as serious as it sounds, its pretty funny.

The movie is really low budget, but it has a great cast who must have either worked for free, or well, were the result of the rest of the films cheap look. It even has Angus Scrimm, or “The Tall Man” from the Phantasm series. Has that guy ever NOT looked creepy?

I’m going to have to get a copy for my Mom, this is right up her alley.

mike Movies

I was conflicted about posting a little blurb about this movie. I wanted to actually post some other movies, good ones, and I felt it was only fair to also post a little something about this one. If I don’t like a movie, I usually just don’t bother with a post. I think this is the first movie in which I was so disappointed with, I had to at least get that out there before I posted anything else.

So yeah, this movie was TERRIBLE. Hugh Jackman is a good actor, and I liked the first two X-Men movies. Also, when I was into comic books, I had a decent wolverine collection. So, as a kid, I had read a bit on the various back stories of Wolverine. They were all really cool (okay, I was about 10, so cool for a 10 year old), and it was just lame how it ended up on the screen.

What was really terrible is the lack of any character development, so all the decisions made in the movie either lack any motivation at all, or have so lack-luster logic behind its laughable. The movie starts off with a couple really awful plot devices. First, Wolverine kills his father, runs off with his brother, Sabertooth, and minutes after they escape they decide “Hey, its cool, he lied to us… now, lets go fight in some wars and kill a crapton of people!”. So, they fight in every major war until Vietnam when lo and behold, Wolverine decides he’s killed enough… Really? You slaughter how many people and then when a ranking officer threatens the life of something else you decide then it was all wrong and become a lumberjack… I couldn’t suspend my disbelieve, and I watch Zombie movies.

Maybe I have been spoiled from the last decade of really good superhero movies, so it is just natural that eventually, this genera returns to its roots as a cheesy B movie. Seriously, don’t bother with this movie, you will feel your brain dying.

mike Movies stupid

This movie was LONG. 3 hours, and most of the time it’s pacing was perfect. Except when it wasn’t. I had decided to start this movie at 11pm, so I finished it around 2am and I was pretty sleepy.

This movie has a lot going on, and I probably would have felt very lost if I had not read the graphic novel (okay, okay, “comic book”). Now, I read that almost 3 years ago (I flipped between that and a Reg Exp book during a very boring LANDesk training class), and from what I remember, the movie is nearly identical to the comic. When I first read there was going to be a Watchmen movie, I didn’t think it would pan out. I also wasn’t even interested in seeing it when it came to the big screen. I decided to buy the movie on a whim, and I’m pretty glad I did.

When I read the comic, I found Rorschach to be the most engaging and interesting character. He is a complete sociopath, hardly a “good guy”, but his unrelenting moral code that he does not budge from is great. He also has some of the best lines in the story. What is very cool about all the characters in the storyis that they are all heroes and villains at the same time. Maybe that is really what a vigilante is, and I think the story goes to great lengths to reinforce that idea, especially if those vigilantes are not kept in check. Hence the phrase “Who will watch the Watchmen?”

Rorschach is the primary detective in the story, he moves everything along. The other main characters, mostly the Night Owl and Lady Jupiter, I found a little boring. I was drifting a bit with their scenes, and I didn’t care for the romance angle.

There was also Dr. Manhattan, who aside from Rorschach, was the other well developed and entertaining character. His complete detachment from humanity proved an interesting contrast to everyone else’s struggle to stop the inevitable mutually assured destruction (remember, this story takes place in the 80’s, where the Cold War scare was rampant… I think, I mean, I’m not THAT old ).

The second disc had 3 bonus features, and I liked those a lot too. One covered real life vigilante’s, and provided multiple angles on how they are viewed in our society. The feature had members of the Guardian Angels, a combat trainer for the FBI, a history professor and a writer. All of them had their own rational for whether self-appointed hero’s were needed or even justified.

Another cool feature was an interview with a Physics Professor as the science consultant of the movie. Which was fantastic, and super nerdy. I thought it was great that even a movie based on a comic was trying to maintain a balance between the story and plausibility. I thought he did a good job.

So, to summarize, I really liked this movie. It was fun, sometimes a little too graphic (it has this hyper-stylized feel to the violence, and it didn’t feel necessary all the time), and it continued to make me think about the story over the week.

mike Movies based on a book, Blu Ray

This movie was released here in the US, though HBO, as Pu-239. It is based on a short story with the above title.

Poor Timofey, he works as an engineer in some type of reactor. There was an accident, and he was exposed to 1000 REMs in a few minutes. They read this from his Dosimeter which I though was cool. This isn’t about his half-life, but the very painful last two days of his life while he tries to obtain enough money for his family to live on.

How does he plan on getting a large sum of money? By selling 100 grams of very pure (he says its 100% pure) super-grade Plutonium. Well, he tries to sell it, by standing in a open market with a cardboard sign.

There are many aspects of this movie that I really enjoyed, mostly I’m a sucker for long monologs and voiceovers. I have no idea why, thats just something I like. It also focuses around a moral entanglement, which is essentially, would you steal to provide for your family?

Good movie, I don’t have HBO but man, the internets kick ass.

mike Movies based on a book

I had never seen this movie, I mean, I think I saw the ending of it a long time ago when it first came out on VHS, but I didn’t know what it was about. Over the past few years, Jenny has asked me maybe a half dozen times if I had ever seen it, and after the last few times she finally brought it in for me to watch

This movie was complete shit… Ha, just kidding Jenny

No, really, it was hilarious. There is a lot of quick come backs and one liners that you really have to pay attention to catch. At the risk of sounding (even more) like an old man, they don’t make comedies like they used to. Really, you don’t see this kind of a movie now, this is the kind of comedy I like, way more than what Judd Apatow and the like pump out. It’s classy, yet its about coning people which isn’t classy at all.

Now, back to chasing kids off my lawn….

mike Movies Jenny

It’s long overdue, but Mark, Shahaub and I finally got together for a movie. All three of us are movie geeks. Mark was part of the industry with Jet Li and Rotten Tomatoes, Shahaub is in film school right now (and posted a few demo reels, like this one, on vimeo.com), and I like to watch them and then write about what I watch. Our conversations immediately started off with George Lucas movies,  Arrested Development, and then oddly to my fear of Bees and Black Widows. How did we get there?

I figured since they were coming out (of the closet) from Berkeley, I’d prepare lunch for them. We had DELICIOUS cheese steak sandwiches, baked chicken (which Mark provided), and a big salad with Avocado. One thing with those two, is I don’t have to worry about pickyness or food allergies. They will eat anything, and everything on the table

The movie itself was pretty awesome, there are a lot of great fight scenes, and they all prompted Shahaub to imitate the Wing Chun style:

as well as trying to stand up from a kneeling position, using the strength of his feet (as in the movie):

The movie is based on Grandmaster Ip Man (or Yip Man), who was most notable for teaching Bruce Lee Wing Chun. I’m sure there are some artistic liberties taken to make a more entertaining movie, the back story was still very interesting. After the movie, we went though a bunch of wushu clips that I had, then some on youtube, and then squeezed an episode of Arrested Development in (The “Nelly” episode, oh it feels so good to talk like this!). When Michele, Caralyne and Owen came back home, Caralyne had a lot of fun shooting all three of us. his fueled the inner child in Shahaub, and made him question why he doesn’t own Nerf weaponry. We know why, its because no one would be safe, and every crotch in a half mile radius would require medical attention. After a few rounds of destroying each other, Mark and Shahaub left to meet Chase and his family for dinner.

mike Movies, Wushu Home Theater, mark, Shahuab

It is no secret that I love watching movies in the comfort of my own living room. I get to eat what I want, drink and not have to worry about driving, and most of the time I’m by myself so I don’t have to worry about shushing people. What can I say, its a great way for me to recharge and get lost for a few hours.

Since I upgraded my HTPC to playback the new high definition formats, Blu Ray and HD DVD, I’ve come across a few little hiccups and had to re-think how I was going to get the most out of my setup. Some hiccups are just part of the new format, like decoding Dolby TrueHD/Dolby Digital Plus/DTS HD/DTS HD Master, the whole “trusted path” for the audio and video (HDMI output). Others were limitations of my equipment and what others were willing to put up with (both Michele and Caralyne did not welcome using a computer to playback movies). So as I started refining things, I new I needed and wanted a few things:

• HDMI Switch for both the HD DVD stand-alone player, and for the HTPC
• HDMI 1.3a support
• A working remote (my old Pioneer remote is busted, in pieces)
• Support for decoding the new HD audio formats
• A working FM receiver (Michele’s request, the pioneer was never able to pick up a FM station)
• Multi Channel analog inputs (for uncompressed LPCM audio from the HTPC)

So for the last few months, I’ve started to read up on the very helpful avsforum.com forum (yet another redundant statement, I’m getting good at these), looking at current receivers, and all of the quirks. Since every consumer electronic device now is a computer with its own embedded OS, we now have to be concerned with our alarm clock panic’ing, or our TV’s seg faulting. Receivers are no longer an exception to this. They used to amplify speakers and transmit analog, then there was bitstream decoding, and now we have complicated HDMI switching and handshaking, high res audio formats, auto-eq features and full screen menu’s. So I was not surprised to see a 200+ page thread dedicated to the HK AVR x54’s problems. Some of them were terrifying, with audio popping, black HDMI screens, all the stuff I was not interested in. There has been a new firmware update though, and that seemed to fix a lot of the issues, and while there were a lot of posts describing these issues, there were a lot of happy Harman Kardon owners. I’d like to add myself to that list, because so far everything has worked GREAT.

My Environment

Here is a quick rundown of the hardware and software I’m using

hardware

• Samsung HLR5067W DLP TV (720p/1080i)
• Toshiba HDA3 HD DVD player
• HTPC
  • Intel DP35DP Motherboard (Intel P35 Chipset)
  • Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66Ghz
  • 2GB DDR2 memory
  • 1×160GB Samsung SATA drive
  • ATI 4550 PCI-E with HDMI out and Realtek HD Audio
  • LG HG20 Blu Ray/HD DVD combo drive
• HK AVR 254 (that is obvious at this point) w/firmware 0.49.1.1 , 16-05-2008
• Klipsch Speakers
  • RC-3 Center Channel
  • RF-3 Floorstanding Speakers
  • RS-3 Surround Speakers (white, and they show every fingerprint I’ve made on them)
  • KSW-12 Subwoofer (AKA the “coffee table”)

Software

• Windows Vista 32bit SP1 (I “greatly dislike” Vista, but it was free and it works)
• PowerDVD 9
• Realtek ATI HDMI Audio Driver version 2.18
• ATI – 9.3 Catalyst,/8.59 Driver
• AnyDVD HD version 6.5.3.1

Lets get to the fun stuff, I picked up the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, so I’ll get a screen in of that.

I have to use a mirror and a flashlight, its pretty tight quarters in the entertainment center. the large pair of dikes there, well.. lets check out the rats nest behind the TV and it will become obvious.

I find the add’s for HDMI equipment very funny:

Its all so easy, this one cable replaces at least 5 -6 other cables. Its true, it does replace the separate video and audio cables. Of course, when you have a computer, an XBOX, a DVR, a DVD player, and a reciever, they all need their own power, video/audio cable, network connection (yeah, everything now needs to be online) not to mention the 5.1 surround sound cables. It would be great not to have all this mess, in the end, I’m too darn lazy to really clean it up. Just don’t look behind there…

Back to the environment:

So there is the HDA3, the Xbox 360, and the HTPC. All of them are now connected to th reciever. The HTPC and DVD player are native HDMI devices, but the Xbox is component. So, I configured the reciever to transcode the YPbPr signal to a digital 1080i signal. Sweet!

This is the output of the HTPC, I’m very satisfied with the image quality. The camera makes it look worse, its hard to capture the detail there.

Now for a coloring Break:

Okay, with it now late enough in the evening, I can watch a movie…

It sounded great, nice and punchy, and I got my subwoofer cable fixed again so I can rattle the windows again (and I really mean my neighbors windows). I’ll hold of on the firmware update, if I don’t encounter an issue, I’ll leave it alone.

mike Geekyness, Movies AVR 254, Blu Ray, Harman Kardon, HDMI, Home Theater

Let the Right One In is a very memorable horror movie. It’s in the vein (HA!) of a vampire movie, yet it never really addresses the question and creatively dodges it.

The two characters are a boy and a girl. Oskar and Eli. The young boy lives in an apartment complex with his single (and very absent) mother. Like most boys, he has a bully problem. He is also awkward and anti-social, which makes him a fine target bot both the bully, and Eli.

Eli is a 12 year old “girl”, though there is some ambiguity there. She shows up with her “Father” one evening at the same Apartment Oskar lives in. She and Oskar develop a friendship, and it starts to become obvious there is an ulterior motive. Eli is 12 years old, indefinitely, and she needs a new caretaker.

This isn’t your standard Vampire movie, where its full of cheesy Freudian-isms. My Mom complained about how awful she thought Twilight was. My Mother is into horror movies, and she’s always enjoyed a good Vamipre movie. I recommended this one to her, it’s very simple, and very cold (really, it will make you feel chilly). It’s also a Swedish movie, so prepare to read a little.

mike Movies

El Aura

This was a cool Noir film. A taxidermist who is a little unusual, socially disconnected, and suffers from epileptic seizures finds himself in the middle of a heist. Yeah, it is sort of a jump, it works though.

Thanks again to twitchfilms.net and their cool DVD reviews.

mike Movies