Highlander

So I finally decided to watch this movie as I’ve heard it many times. Initially I thought it was something Braveheart (also another movie I have not fully watched), where it’s about Scottish swordsman and the Highlander was a hero defending them. Turns out I was semi-right, but it really mixes into modern day. I was somewhat disappointed by the movie, but given it was made in 1986, it might’ve been great for its time.

IMDb: 7.1/10 (23,033 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: Yahoo! Users: B
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 71% / Average Rating: 6.1/10
Amazon.com DVD
MY RATING: 6/10

highlander poster

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寶貝計畫 (Rob-B-Hood)

So I watched this movie expecting Jackie Chan to play a modern day Robin Hood, steal money from the rich and distribute it to the poor. But it was completely not that. Jackie Chan and a couple other people play a group of thieves with a conscience, until one of their jobs requires kidnapping a kid and the whole story goes crazy from there.

Official Site
IMDb: 7.0/10 (200 votes)
Rotten Tomatoes
Trailer/Teaser (more trailers on the Official Site)
MY RATING: 6.5/10

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Canadian man on trial for putting baby in freezerA Canadian man who could not figure out how to deal with his girlfriend’s feverish 10-month-old daughter put the baby into a freezer to cool her down, a local newspaper reported on Friday. Funny thing was I read this article yesterday and when I watched the movie and saw him placed the kid in the fridge, it totally reminded me of this.

Of course, with every Jackie Chan movie, there’s bloopers (WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS). I won’t say it’s my favorite part of any of his movies, but it’s something I look forward to. His bloopers generally contain well when bloopers of when people forget their lines, stunt mishaps, and interesting ways to “solve” problems. This blooper wasn’t really as funny as his other ones, but there was one blooper that made it all better. They were trying to get the baby to suck Jackie’s nipple, and the baby wouldn’t do it, so he said, “Add more honey.” I did notice that Jackie Chan doesn’t spring right back up after an accident anymore. A clear sign that he is getting old.

Desert Plushies

Thanks to ChewyDenise for sharing these:

desert plushydesert plushydesert plushydesert plushy

They’re so adorable and delicious looking. I can see myself biting into them. If a plushy isn’t an animal, are we still allowed to call it stuffed animals?


Random Crap:

There’s this new free song on iTunes Music Store: Rodrigo y Gabriela – Tamacun. It really sounds nice. It reminds me of Mexican folk songs and the guitar strumming is really soothing. It’s been playing on repeat for 16x already. Though it has kept me wondering why the the album cover has an image of a dinosaur eye.

Transformers Movie Character Designs, Images and Toy Prototypes (from Digg) – I’ve got to say, I’m impressed. I wonder how the movie will turn out.

Black Friday Commotion – Insane Shoppers Rush To Door – after Black Friday a few years back (with UngsungHero), I’ve sworn never to do Black Friday shopping again, unless it was online. The above video shows you what I hate the most. Speaking of which, a couple you probably tried the Amazon.com $100 Xbox 360 promotion. I slept right through that. ;p

How To Bypass The Zune’s WiFi Sharing DRM (from Digg) – Interesting idea, but this probably would only work for songs that aren’t already DRMed under your user account. By renaming a file’s extension and sending it across as an image file, no DRM is attached to it. They also had another interesting hack for the Zune: How To Use The Zune as a Hard Drive, which was one of the things I regret the Zune actually disabled. Now, with a hack to re-enable this, it might actually be reasonable.

Balls of Steel – Negs Urban Sports – Big Stranger Rodeo 2005 (from CMDCC) – a British TV show similar to Trigger Happy TV, where they play pranks (sometimes quite mean) to random people. One recurring theme is called: Neg’s Urban Sports. This one is about a new sport called Big Stranger Rodeo, where you jump onto the back of a stranger and like the bull riding machines, the longer you can stay on their backs, the higher score you get. They also had one called Urban Sprinting, where you set off the alarm of a shopping store and run from the security guards. You win when you reach a burger joint (i.e. McDonalds). The show is called Balls of Steel. They also have another recurring theme called Annoying Devil.

Infinite Mario Bros! (from Digg) – Infinite Mario Bros was made by Markus Persson for a Super Mario themed java programming contest.
Please don’t sue me, Nintendo!
Wow! It looks and feels like Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s a game developed on Java and works quite well actually. Though I wish the buttons could be configurable, but I can’t really complain.

You Can Pick Your Doctor, and You Can Pick Your Nose… (from Digg) – There is an Austrian doctor who has gained notoriety by advocating the picking of one’s nose and the consumption of the resulting bounty, particularly in children. Dr. Friedrich Bischinger, a lung specialist working in Innsbruck, would have us believe that people who pick their noses with their fingers are healthier, happier, and more in tune with their bodies. His argument stems from the notion that exposing the body to the dried germ corpses helps to reinforce the immune system. The good doctor feels that society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking, and encourage children to take up the habit. That’s so cool! Maybe that’s why I don’t get sick that often. Mmmmm, crunchy!

“As God Is My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fly” (from Digg) – An advertising stunt dreamed up by a local Cincinnati radio station went terribly wrong when twenty live turkeys plummeted to their deaths after being dropped out of a helicopter under the misguided assumption that they would all just fly away. Sigh…

Alkali metals (from Digg) – what happens when alkali metals enter in contact with water (i’ll give you a hint, it goes BOOM!) Yay! More stuff blowing up! I want some Cesium!

Ant-breeding project with a stingA company in northeast China raised the equivalent of 198 million pounds from gullible members of the public by promising big profits from a project to breed ants, Xinhua news agency said on Friday. Sigh…

Resonantware (from Digg) – Near-Future Ubiquitous Networking Devices Visualized by Designers. Some really neat designs by NEC. I really like the idea of having a camera in the middle of the screen. When you have a camera attached to the top of your monitor, video conferencing always appears you’re not looking directly at the person you’re conferencing with.

Bad Man Plays Emulators On His Wii (from Digg) – Nintendo won’t be happy about this. It looks like a combination of the Action Replay with the software program SDload and the official Nintendo SD card adapter will let very bad people with no morals whatsoever enjoy emulators such as SNES9x on their Wiis. Disgusting! Don’t you villians know what the Virtual Console is for? Interesting…

The 25 Funniest Analogies (Collected by High School English Teachers) (from Digg) – I have to share these “funniest analogies” with you. They came in an e-mail from my sister. She got them from a cousin, who got them from a friend, who got them from… so they are circulating around. My apologies if you have already seen them. Here are the ones I found very funny:

  • She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
  • He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
  • The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
  • Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
  • The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
  • Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
  • The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
  • The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

Hidden storage – a very funny Little Gamers comic dealing with Xbox Live, downloading porn, hidden storage, girlfriends, and moms.

Panda poop paper yields big profitsWhen keepers of the country’s panda couple — Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui — got tired of disposing the 55 pounds of feces daily produced by the duo, Prasertsak Buntragulpoontawee came up with the idea of turning it all into notebooks, fans, bookmarks and key chains. … But the multicolored paper products have proved hot selling-items at the zoo, with the 300,000 baht (US $8,200) earned to date helping balance the accounts of panda keeping. Neat!

Clerks II

Just watched this movie today. Worthy to be called the sequel, but not as great as the first one. Then again, I guess my expectation of Kevin Smith has always been somewhat high after watching his first few movies.

Official Site
IMDb: 8.1/10 (15,246 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B / Yahoo! Users: B+
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 63% / Average Rating: 6.1/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack
MY RATING: 7.0/10

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You Me and Dupree

Saw this movie today. Wasn’t expecting much and I found it funny and enjoyable. The main actress Kate Hudson is also pretty.

Official Site
IMDb: 5.5/10 (4,565 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: C+ / Yahoo! Users: B-
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 22% / Average Rating: 4.4/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com HD DVD
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack
MY RATING: 6.0/10

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HD Movies

So I watched 2 HD movies this weekend, both involving the Wachowski brothers.

The 1st one is my all time favorite movie: The Matrix
Followed by another awesome movie: V for Vendetta

I’m part of the Xbox 360 beta program where we get to test new things before they’re push down onto everyone and in a week or two, they’re about to unveil their TV and movie downloads in the marketplace. For more information, please read about it at Movies and TV on Your Xbox!

To celebrate its first birthday on November 22, Xbox 360™ becomes the first and only gaming console to provide HD and standard-definition TV shows and movies direct to you.

After an intense game of Gears of War®, turn on Peter Jackson’s King Kong on HD DVD, play PAC-MAN on Xbox Live® Arcade, or even watch an episode of CSI: Miami that you downloaded earlier.

Xbox Live Marketplace is the place to download your favorite movies and TV, and remember to check back on Xbox.com to see what’s new!

Most TV shows come with both SD and HD version. SD costs 240 points and HD costs 320 points. That translates to about $3 and $4 respectively. $4 for an HD version vs $2 on iTMS for a 320×240 version. I’d definitely go for the extra resolution and pay the extra $2. Or I could *cough* *cough*. Anyway, the biggest problem right now is the small hard drive. With only 20gigs and a movie like V for Vendetta being 6GB, it’s obviously not enough. The initial line up isn’t bad either, though it’s far from being great. Unfortunately, movies could only rented at the moment. You must watch within 14 days and once you start playing the movie, you have 24 hours to complete or rewatch as many as possible. It’d be nice if I could keep an HD version of these great movies.

The servers aren’t extremely fast, though I guess 6GB in a few hours is reasonable, considering I’ve also been downloading on my main computer. I’ve also download a couple episodes of Numb3rs as Liam has recommended that series to me, so I guess I can check this series out while testing this new marketplace.

The picture quality is amazing. I can’t even describe how pretty they were. I was mesmerized by the beauty. I’ve started to dislike the quality of DVDs as I’ve been spoiled by HDTV episodes and now HD movies. Even many animes nowadays come in HD resolution. I’m thinking of buying one of those HD-DVD drives that was just released for the Xbox 360 and then I remember, I don’t have an HDTV yet. Been eyeing a few, but it still seems rather expensive. The cost is between $2000-$2500 for a 56″ – 62″ DLP rear projection TV. My minimum requirement is that it supports 1080p.

Oh well, maybe it’ll be a Christmas present for myself. Maybe a deal will pop up around Black Friday (god forbid that I’ll actually go shopping on Black Friday this year). It’s what I decided to get for myself with my bonus money this year, which has been just sitting around accumulating interest at 5.05% at HSBCDirect. Speaking of which, Krrk told me about E-LOAN awhile back and they’re doing 5.50% savings. However, the minimum they need is $5000 (which I do have), but not enough that I wouldn’t pull from this. Plus HSBC has been treating me well and not like how INGDirect screwed their current customers in favor of new customers.

Ghosts of the Heartland

My friend Sschwartz has directed a new film: Ghosts of the Heartland.

Explore the trials and tribulations of two roommates who endure supernatural anomalies in the heartland.

Written/shot in 1 hour on zero budget with a 50 dollar DIY 35mm adapter like the redrock M2 micro35. Used a Nikon 50 f1.4 and Nikon 35 f2.

Directed/DPed by Sheldon Schwartz; starring Drew Greene and Pablo Parravicini – written / adlibed on the spot.

It’s rather amusing and hilarious. Pablo does an awesome job. Sschwartz’s usage of his 35mm adapter and having the out of focus background worked greatly for this film.


Random Crap:

Study shows why young shun condomsSome sexually active under 25s associate condoms with a lack of trust, while others believe carrying them could imply sexual experience, which might be a plus for men but not necessarily for women.

gotAPI/search (from RayAlome) – an awesome tool for web developers! Searches through many documented APIs such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Perl, etc.

Blockbuster to take mail order returns at storesEffective today, customers of Blockbuster’s online DVD rental service—Blockbuster Online—will be able return movies to the company’s stores through a program called Blockbuster Total Access. Blockbuster Online customers who opt to drive their rented DVDs to a local Blockbuster for return will be rewarded with a coupon for a free in-store rental. Those rentals would then be subject to regular store rental terms and would have to be returned at the same store from which they were rented. I called it! I said this would be one of the best moves that Blockbuster could do to attract customers away from Netflix. By making returns faster, this gives people more movies per month. However, this also means that they can not group a bunch of movies to ship back to the warehouse and save on postage/shipping.

www.dontclick.it (from /.) – an interface design where the user never has to click anything, but instead just mouse over or do mouse gestures. See how long you can navigate through that UI before you click and you’ll see how entrenched clicking has become for us.

propan-2-ol (CH3CHOHCH3) (from Angelus) – The instructions of the hanging strips said to use “isopropyl rubbing alcohol” to clean the wall surface before use. Isopropyl alcohol sounds like some cheem chemical but if you go to any hardware store, I almost gurantee you that you won’t be able to find it there. … Hahaha… most of us would probably have one of these lying around at home, or used it before. It used to be quite popular as your simple floppy disk drive cleaner. I thought this blog post was hilarious where they were trying to find rubbing alcohol and had to go through all this work. I for one always have a bottle nearby. *sniff* mmmmm, smells so good.

This is how we built the Mac-O-Lantern (from /.) – the beauty of the functional and organic pumpkin case mod is its fleeting existence. the coolest thing about this project is the fact that such an extraordinary amount of precious time was squandered on a fruitless(!) pursuit. there are better case mods out there, and there are sweeter jack-o-lanterns. we split the difference.

Man builds 3,300-pound rubber band ballWith all due respect to The Spinners and T.I., prepare yourself for the new rubber-band man. Steve Milton, through concentration and perseverance, has created a 3,300-pound ball comprised of rubber bands. His creation measures almost 5 feet tall and takes up half his two-car garage. Though it’s not official, the 26-year-old Eugene man believes he has broken the record for the heaviest such ball, eclipsing John Bain’s mark of 3,120 pounds. The Wilmington, Del., man’s record has stood for eight years. You can also visit his MySpace page and watch videos of him using the rubber band ball to crush things like TVs and computers.

Man tries to use fake $100 ‘Bill’ billPolice knew this Bill wasn’t authentic. A man has been arrested for trying to use a $100 bill with no president’s face and the name of former President Clinton. I would love to see this bill.

Batman helps Ga. town infested by batsThat’s what the local bat remover goes by. George Perkins often makes public appearances in the caped crusader’s costume and drives his own Batmobile — a retro-styled Chrysler Prowler with bat emblems. Callers to his office in Eufaula, Ala., known as Bat Cave 1, or Union Springs, Ala., known as Bat Cave 2, hear the “Batman” TV show theme while on hold.

First question wrong on Who Wants to be a Millionaire (from Angelus) – the 100 dollar question, the easiest question on the show.. wrong! Hahahahahaha!!! Guess sometimes caffeine just can’t replace good old natural sleep.

Nacho Libre

Watched this movie awhile back. Movie was only so-so. The only redeeming features of it is the funny wrestlers, hilarious wrestling moves, and the pretty nun. Watched this because Jack Black is in it, and I generally like his movies. This one was somewhat of a disappointment.

Official Site
IMDb: 5.9/10 (7,316 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: C+ / Yahoo! Users: C+
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 37% / Average Rating: 5.1/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack
MY RATING: 6/10

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Click

Saw this movie a few days back. It was enjoyable, but nothing more than that. Well, the wife was hot… Oh, she’s the girl from Underworld… I like her in Click a lot better. Maybe I just don’t see vampires/creature like females as hot. Movie felt like a modern day A Christmas Carol.

Official Site
IMDb: 6.9/10 (13,331 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: C / Yahoo! Users: B
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 30% / Average Rating: 4.8/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
MY RATING: 6/10

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Eight Crazy Nights

This movie was pretty bad. Had some funny moments and times, but the story didn’t flow well, jumped back and forth about a kid who just couldn’t let go. If I had to put it, it’s the new Grinch with a reason. It’s about a guy that can’t stand others being happy during the holiday seasons, and goes out of his way to ruin it for everyone.

Official Site
IMDb: 4.7/10 (3,277 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: C- / Yahoo! Users: B-
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 14% / Average Rating: 3.2/10
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack
MY RATING: 4/10

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