Category: Movies

So Tekman invited me to watch Serenity tonight. As you may have noticed, I’ve been dying to watch it. If you haven’t watched, GO SEE IT. I thought you needed to watch the series first to understand it, but all the info you need for understanding the story is incorporated into the movie. Watch the trailer here. I also posted the 9 minute high quality intro to Serenity a few days ago, so you might wanna check that out too. Though I do have to say, watching the movie will revewal a lot about the series. If you’re planning to watch the series at all, you might want to watch the series before watching the movie. The TV series is short, only 13ish episodes.

Many people have heard this series is a western in space and others say it’s very similar to Cowboy Bebop if you’re into anime. Personally, it was neither of those that attracted me. It was the values that the characters held that made the series so attractive. You may argue that these values are common in western series, but I’d have to argue the values the characters hold can be in any series and I’ve defintely see such values in many different genres of anime series. I’d have to say, if you’re an anime fan, you might want to check out the following 2 series: Trigun and Rurouni Kenshin.

SPOILERS!!! I was quite disappointed, actually that’s an understatement, more like extremely disappointed with what Captain Malcom Reynolds did to the guy during his escape from the 1st heist. Zoe did bring up a good point regarding the payload. I guess he did redeem himself somewhat later on, but my respect for him is wavering.

Welp, I won’t say much more than that so to not spoil it for you. If you haven’t seen it yet, GO WATCH IT!!!

It’s been a really long week. I’m really happy it’s Friday, though I don’t think I’ve ever been unhappy it’s Friday. So much to do at work this week that I’ve been leaving rather late. Though I did make it up with sleeping till 10am.

So I watched The Myth 神話 (yes! unicode now works!). It’s a new movie by Jackie Chan, though I had to see it in Mandarin. I’m pretty sure the movie is in Cantonese, but according to my dad, China is allowed to bootleg Hong Kong movies as long as they don’t bootleg it in the original language: Cantonese. That’s why you always see dvd screeners of Hong Kong movies in Mandarin months and months before the Cantonese version is released. How true is this? Who knows? My dad probably just made that up because it sounds right. Although, this gave me a chance to brush up on some Mandarin, which I haven’t used for some time. The overall movie storyline wasn’t all that great, but it was fun and the 2 female actresses on it were pretty cute.

The movie website wasn’t loading for me, so you can check out these links instead:

• 神話 THE MYTH – Yahoo!奇摩電影
• 【神話】玉漱公主為愛痴等兩千年，金喜善惹人憐 – Yahoo!奇摩電影頭條
• Endless Love – Music Video 1
• Endless Love – Music Video 2
• San wa (2005)

No wonder I had parts I didn’t understand! The main female character was korean! Haha! Probably also explains why she’s cute too! The movie poster image I posted above doesn’t really show off her cuteness. Try the 2nd link or either of the music videos. Though I’ve gotta say, the Indian girl didn’t really get enough screen time. She probably got less than 15mins of screen time for the entire movie.

Stop reading here if you don’t want spoilers. So a simple synopsis of the movie is Jackie Chan is an archeologist. He keeps having these dreams about a general and a princess back during the Qin Dynasty (秦朝) and the mystery slowly unravels. Wow! I didn’t know there was a Qing and a Qin dynasty. No wonder the subtitles in the movie didn’t make sense. I kept thinking they used the wrong character for it. My Chinese history is pretty weak. I don’t even know how many dynasties there are in total. I just know that the 3 most important ones are Tang (唐), Song (宋), and Ming (明) because these were the only dynasties where we were ruled by our own people and not some foreign tribe.

my mom’s bday is tomorrow, so

HAPPY BDAY MOM!!!

so it was a nice weekend. rained a lot. i did manage somehow to spend $320 @ costco. haha. that evil place! everything just looks like a bargain! on the other hand, i am stocked with food. frozen spicy chicken wings, croissants, salami, cheddar cheese, seafood dip, crackers, dumplings, butter, pesto sauce, and more.

so my office depot chair finally arrived. might have to put it together tomorrow since i’m quite tired tonite already.

watched a bunch of movies this weekend, unfortunately haven’t gotten to watch Serenity yet. finally watched Resident Evil – Apocalypse. wasn’t as bad as i was expecting it to be. the storyline actually continued from the 1st one pretty well and gave an ending which would probably lead to RE3. also watched Four Brothers. movie was pretty good as i’ve also been told. then i watched March of the Penguins. didn’t know it was in french so it caught me by surprise. the baby penguins were SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO cute!!! and you might guess the kid’s voice was my favorite. also watched a chinese movie called Seven Swords. it was so so. nice choreography, but storyline was pretty stale. Valiant (the bird 3d animation) was pretty good. enjoyable and not too much thinking. and to end this, i went to watch The 40-Year-Old Virgin with cdmcc and elizabeth today. movie was really funny. would definitely recommend that.

got this link from our company meeting: poorsport. i was checking out their songs and videos. they’re pretty good and then i found this video: challenge. makes me wonder what the heck baby food makers are thinking sometimes. i loved gerber baby food. they’re so good! i remember i stole some from my siblings when i was small. from the cupboard and not from their plate! i wasn’t that evil. but some flavors were just so gross, a dog wouldn’t even eat it. is it cause the baby can’t complain?

so msticazn told me about this new site: blingo. it’s basically a search engine like a9 that uses google results, but they give away prizes when you use their search engine. How Blingo works: 1. We pick a bunch of random winning times. 2. Search at the right time and you win. No registration required. 3. Then tell us where to send your prize. at first, i was pretty skeptical, but thought why not. i use a9 and they give me 1.57% off @ amazon, but i dont have to use it that frequently. might as weel give blingo a shot. later today, msticazn sends me this image:

a movie ticket a friend of msticazn actually won from blingo

i haven’t won anything yet, but it’s only been a day, and it looks like there usually around 30-60 winners per day. do note that only your first 10 daily searchs qualify for winning. that’s probably to deter people from spamming their servers for redundant requests just to win.

thanks to belldandy for donating this article: SplashPad: Cut the power cords. remember my rant about wireless energy/electricity. well, apparently there’s been a technology called inductive charging (learnt this from a colleague at work) that’s been utilized in electric toothbrushes all these years: How can an electric toothbrush recharge its batteries when there are no metal contacts between the toothbrush and the base? however, inductive charging wastes a lot of electricity and isn’t efficient, but things like toothbrush which gets wet all the time is a good reason to use inductive charging. one disadvantage of inductive charging is it requires very close proximity to the charging base, which then again defeats the main purpose of wireless power.

thanks to my officemate for donating this link: What’s the story behind R.E.M.’s song “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth”? never heard the song, but interesting way of how the song title came about (remember to read at least the last paragraph).

got this article from /. : So what do you have to do to find happiness? the article was pretty common sense, but the /. comments were hilarious:

• happiness is overrated. After having been chronically depressed for the past years i found out that happiness is just a balance of the right drugs.
• <<Yes.. It’s human nature to be discontent.. and that separates some of us from the apes.>> I always thought it was the fact that some of us don’t fling poo at eachother that seperated us from the apes… I guess I was mistaken.
• “Men don’t know what happiness is until they are married, but by then it’s too late”.

got these from pya!:

• img: 浮世絵 – Ukiyoe – japanese art in plant field
• vid: シャイニング – Shining – the shining parody trailer
• img: ちょっと見てみ⇒ – Look at this – shocked mongoos

hopefully the stupid washing machine will be fixed today. grrrrrr. anyway, today was a pretty fun day. my friend mercurial from UCR (aka my Chinese VCD source) sent me 4 different movies today (once again leeching off berkeley’s bw; muwahahahaha!) who knows, esca unexpectedly shows up @ my apartment w/o any notice beforehand. welp, he hung out @ jake’s place until i got back and which he came to get his “My Sassy Girl” DVD1s. while he was here, he got our linux box finally up and running. (esca = the linux pimp to cunndogg).

thanks to esca for donating this link. i’ve read bits and pieces of this before, but this is by far the best and longest compilation i’ve seen yet. One thing i don’t particularly get was:

23. Disney movies are more than classics

is there a 2nd meaning to that? or does it just mean disney movies are awesome (which i know is a fact) but disney movies are awesome to all ages (young and old).

thanks to ladydevilot for donating this link. many of you may have seen the panda dog before, but here he is again, stealing your hearts from your boy/girlfriend. hehe. ^_^x

welp it’s 7:20am, and i’m offta bed. need to study tomorrow. grrrr =(