thwartedefforts

Sex sells, especially when you’re selling sex products. Take this image for example:

You may recognize this as Shredder, of late 80s kids television cartoon fame, fucking April, also of late 80s kids television cartoon fame, from behind. The guy can’t even be bothered to take off his cape. April appears to be saying “I am your Woozy-Oozy Cutie little Brain”, and the caption reads “Our pills made him so sweet”. I believe those are stylized cartoon pills behind the text. What’s even better about this is that the spam email that contained this contained only this image, no links or names of products or anything.

But that’s nothing compared to this spam subject line, though:

Starscream DOA

Talk about getting rilled up! When I read this in my inbox, I immediately clicked to read the full message, since Starscream was one of my favorite characters from the Transformers television series. Unfortunately, the email contained no further information on Starscream, why or how he died, or information about contacting his next of kin. Only information about male enhancement drugs.

These guys just gotta new agents. With TMNT back on the big screen, with Transformers not far behind, I hope they can get back on their feet and not have to stoop so low as to do the Internet equivalent of late-night television shows hawking male enhancement wares.

David Lightman just wants to play Duke Nukem Forever, and after reading about its pending release date on an Internet forum, decides to try to break into the 3D Realms website to play it. While war driving, he stumbles upon an interesting computer system and plays a game of “War on Terror” with it, thinking that it’s a demo release of DNF. Unfortunately, it’s no game, and the budget for the military is automatically increased. He realizes that something is up when he sees a Whitehouse press conference on television that mentions additional troop deployments to the Middle East. But the G-Men are on to him, so he tries to destroy his research notes by overwriting his harddrive seven times. When the FBI picks him up outside a local 7/Eleven, they fail to read him his rights before throwing him in the van. He’s taken deep into Crystal Palace, where he sees the WOPR, which is run in emulation on a Video iPod—the video being used to similate WOPR’s blinkenlights. At this point, we learn that the DEFCON system has been replaced with a series of color-coded warning levels, DEFCON 1 being called “Blackwatch Plaid”. After breaking out of NORAD using a DoS attack against the building’s security system, he rides a tour bus out, avoiding the ID checkpoint and metal detectors. He locates the supposed dead Dr. Falken on an IRC server that is only available during certain hours, and convinces him that he needs to help stop the “game” from being played. Back at NORAD, they teach WOPR that the only way to win is to not play at all by forcing it to play Star Wars Galaxies by itself (”How do you make it play itself?” “Just login.”). While playing and learning from SWG, WOPR tries to buy tracks from the iTMS by brute-force cracking the 2048-bit NORAD keyring that holds all the passwords.

This “updated for our times” remake of War Games would star either Mark-Paul Gosselaar (“Saved by the Bell”, “Hyperion Bay”) or Wil Weaton. Weaton definitely has the real-life and acting nerd background and experience, but Gosselaar has played a semi-technology role before on that WB Turd Ferguson Award Winner “Hyperion Bay”, and I think he’d play the necessary arrogantness better. Also, I bet Gosselaar could use the work.

The David Lightman character could be a script-kiddie so they could keep the flunking-out-of-school-but-tries-to-game-the-system stereotype, or they could make him the modern stereotype of a nerd (smart, sucessful) rather than the 80s stereotype (smart loner loser). Lame Hollywood style technology references like using war driving would seem more modern while keeping the Hollywood impracticability at a sufficiently high level (accessing WOPR in Colorado from Seattle through an unsecured wireless connection today seems just as plausible and yet unrealistic as WOPR having a direct modem connection in the 80s). Or maybe he could try ssh attacks against a domain list downloaded from a warez site. There’d be a number of DDoS attacks thrown in for good measure, maybe a closeup of a screen (scroll all the way down) showing an ssh exploit being used. No line printers with fan-fold paper, no green screen terminals (rather, 24″ LCD monitors), no 1200 baud acoustic coupler modems (left over piles of free-with-signup DSL hardware instead), no ASCII art representations of geography (they’d use Google Maps), and no 8″ floppies (USB keys instead).

“My Kung-fu is pretty good.”

“You may be ugly, but you’re no virgin.”

“I’ll show you my ‘Nothing Special.’”

This movie fucking rocked. None of the hokey seriousness of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to get in the way of the fighting, and none of the serious fighting to get in the way of the hokey story. (As mentioned on IMDB) it’s a far east version of Robin Hood. It has all the classic kung-fu movie fighting aspects: stupid chatter before a fight, an initial butt-kicking, assume the stance, cue the gong letting the audience know that the shit is gonna hit the fan. The story is coherent and complete and the movie is relatively short (1 hour and 27 minutes). I thought it was going to end at a certain point, but I’m glad it didn’t.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any goofier, it does. And then, it gets even goofier. Watching Iron Monkey is like watching someone play a video game. Some people would say Mortal Kombat, but since that already has its own movie, and it is hardly only like Mortal Kombat, its like Super Mario or Quake. First, some good guy has to fight some bad guys, and he kicks their ass. Then a bigger, badder bad guy shows up and kicks the shit outta the good guy. Then a bigger badder good guy shows up to fight the bigger badder bad guy. And this goes on for a few rounds, then the plot progresses. Eventually, the Ultra Boss shows up. And nearly everyone has some “super power”, “special weapon”, or “specific strength” (and, in good video game and kung-fu movie fashion, the Ultra Boss has all three) they always use.

I can not remember the last time I laughed through an entire movie. If you have not seen Iron Monkey previously, or even if you have already, go and see this. It is a lot of fun.

Paid $8. Worth $10.

Okay, Rush Hour 2 is decent movie, if you wanna see something that Mutie and I could have written on a slow saturday, and was apparently written from the ends to the middle. A lot of it was “let’s see how many already-heard racists jokes we can fit in” and “what kind if situtations can we put ‘em in so they can say the same phrases at different points in the movie” (because asians saying black things is funny, and blacks saying asian things is even funnier). The fight scenes that feature Chan are classic Chan, the fight scenes feature Tucker, are well, a lot of arm waving.

Yeah, whoever it was that asked who the the guy was that worked at the clothing store: WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN? Between Jeremy Piven and Saul Rubinek making minor apperances, I thought it was going to turn into a minor celebrity showcase. Admittedly the imdb entry for this movie is as thin as the plot, which is okay for the movie (as the story wasn’t the reason for this movie), but inexcusable for imdb. We get right into it, but if you hadn’t seen Rush Hour, you won’t know the background of the characters, or the reason for this film to exist, pretty much a single line at the end of Rush Hour, which will be the same reason for Rush Hour 3. Tucker has a half-dozen or so memorable lines, but apparently not so memorable that I can remember them. It features the requisite number of explosions (4), the standard “improable ass kickings” (3), the necessary uses of foreign traditional and hightech weapons (~3 and 1, respectively), gratitious tit (3) and leg shots (1), and the cheap jabs about American investigative method being superior than those used over seas (lost count, at least 3). Eddie Murphy does the funny, tough and streetwise California cop better than Tucker. The division of labor in Rush Hour 2 is much more apparent than in Rush Hour: Chan does the serious ass kicking, Tucker is comic relief. And this is how it should be. There were a number of places where Tucker’s line could have been “okay, who just kicked me”, but thankfully, they didn’t feed off Rush Hour that much. The fight scenes and the single leg shot are worth the price of admission alone. There is more movie and action than you see in the television trailers, this movie is not completely without merit.

Paid $9 (well, Mutie did). It is worth $5 if you wanna see a little more than just action, it’s worth $7 if you only wanna laugh, and it’s worth $8 if you go to a theater where they shoot people with cell phones and who are unable to pay attention enough to not have their friends state the obvious about the film all the way though.

“Hold still, Haley! We need to make 36 more casts of your body. You are squirming too much!”


An ice age in 2000 years?

A.I. Paid $9. How much it is worth requires some explaination.

If I was 45 minutes late to see it, and fell asleep about 15 minutes before the end (where I really thought it was going to end), it would have been worth $6.50 or $7. If I was 45 minutes late and fell asleep right as he gets up to go into the lab (I really really thought it was going to end here), it would have definiately been worth $7 or $7.50. As it was, this is a $4 to $4.50 movie, mostly because of an extra hour that didn’t need to be there. I kind of prefer the former, slightly longer version above, because that was the proper ending.

Spielberg takes all the responsibily for how bad the hour that shouldn’t have been there sucked. According to the credits, not only did he direct it, but he wrote the screenplay, which was based on a screen writing, which was based on a short story. The heavy piano background music, along with the 7/8 speed face shots of people looking at things with wonderment and walking on eggshells through the world, made the movie a study in Kubrickesque Style as portrayed in Eyes Wide Shut, which wasn’t completely done by Kubrick to boot! Like it’s an interpreatation of someone else’s interpretation of how it should be, and it wasn’t pure in that sense.

• The first 45 minutes could have been 10 or 15.
• The Teddy character was underused.
• The history of Gigolo Joe could have been longer, show more of his plight.
• The approach of Rue City was just plain goofy, as was the visit of Dr. Know. These same plot aspects could have been done in a way that fit in with the style of the rest of the movie (not counting the last 15 minutes).
• The movie was so long, that I know that there was narration at the beginning in the same voice as at the end, but I can’t remember anything that it said, so I can’t make the connection for the whole story.
• It should be used in writing classes as an example of what happens when you think every story needs a happy ending.
• It was a philosphical story, a spirital story. It was Spielberg’s answer to Lucas. It was not science fiction, the same way that Star Wars isn’t science fiction.

On the other hand, the visuals and effects were excellent. During the conversations in the first 45 minutes about how “real” he seemed, I wonder how they were going to make all the other mechas look “not real” or “fake”, and that was done excellently with the exact hairline and stiff complextion of Joe. The Manhattan skyline was cool. The visuals in the last 15 minutes are the only redeeming quality of that quarter hour, but they weren’t enough to make that a worthy addition to the film. The flesh fair scenes were tastefully graphic, that is, graphic enough to make you cringe (assuming you felt for the mechas), but not overdone and not gratitious.

The audio kept going out in the theather. From full THX or stereo or whatever, to a really faint mono. That was kind of annoying, but it didn’t really happen during scenes with conversation, so largely nothing lost… on the other hand, a large portion of the movie doesn’t feature important dialog/audio, so chance dictates that bad audio not happen to fall on critical parts.