Torrentreactor in The Constant Gardener

11/03/2006 21:00 | Categories: Movies | 1 Comments 

Yesterday I watched a very good movie called "The Constant Gardener". The funny thing is that in a couple of sequences, one of the characters is having a video conference with iChat in a Powerbook and in the background, you can see a Safari browser with a bookmark pointing to Torrentreactor, a well-known source of torrents. Considering how BitTorrent has been demonized by the movie industry, this is kind of a funny Freudian slip Look at the top left corner in the image below.

Movies: Finding Nemo

25/12/2004 21:29 | Categories: Movies | 0 Comments 

Just watched this movie a few days ago and I must say that I really liked it It's very funny (some of the gags were just hilarious) and the design, and animation is fantastically well done. It's no wonder that [Steve Job's] Pixar has earned such a good reputation in the animation industry and now that they parted from Disney, half of the industry wants to buy/merge/whatever with them!

Speaking of the movie, the plot is fairly simple but I really like the colourful characters. Even if only animation characters, they had a lot of life in them and not only because of the design but because of their characterization. I could have never imagined a fish with short-term memory problems, a bunch of sharks going to "Fishes are friends, not food" group meetings (my favourite gag ) or a supercool marine turtle and his offsprings! I really recommend this one

Starsky & Hutch: The movie

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Movies | 0 Comments 

Looks like Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller will be together again in the same movie: Starsky & Hutch. By the looks of the trailer, looks like as "good" as their latests appearances together in Zoolander and Meet the parents (though the second one was still funny, sometimes)
I wonder what's the next movie remake in the line in Hollywood...

Star Wars saga coming to DVD!

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Movies | 0 Comments 

It's about time this happened! According to this article, a boxed edition of the Star Wars saga, including 4 DVDs with Episoses IV, V and VI and an additional disc full with extras will be released the 21st of September in US and Canada, later in the rest of the world. Can't wait for it The movies have been remastered by THX and Dolby Surround 5.1 sound has been added.

The only thing I can't understand is that if in a few years a new video standard appears, will they also release Star Wars in that format? I have the special remastered edition with added scenes of Star Wars that was released some years ago in VHS, and now I have to buy (I have=I will ) buy this one because it will apparently look and sound better... But, haven't the big studios squeezed some sagas, trilogies, and movies too much? In other words, aren't they squeezing consumers too much??

I, robot - Trailer

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Movies | 0 Comments 

There's a new high quality trailer (Quicktime format) of the movie "I, robot", based on the work of Isaac Asimov. The movie looks cool even though in my opinion it doesn't really have much of the atmosphere that Asimov gave to his writings. Don't know why, perhaps because of the spectacular car chase scenes, or the fact that Will Smith is the leading actor playing the role of the police investigating the mudered for which the only suspect is a robot. The fact is that the director is the same person who directed "Dark City" and "The Crow" but the movie has a much more 'Hollywoodian' feeling to it... or again, perhaps it's just Smith playing his stupid jokes (watch the trailer) Let's see when the movie comes out, but I have to say that I wasn't very impressed by the trailer. We'll have to wait until July to know more about it!

Frank Herbert's Children of Dune

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Movies | 0 Comments 

Last weekend I finally got my hands on the 3 episodes that make up Frank Herbert's Children of Dune. This mini-series is the continuation to Dune, based on the 2nd and 3rd books of the saga: "Dune Messiah" and "Children of Dune" (the saga has 6 books, being "God Emperor of Dune" the 4th, "Heretics of Dune" the 5th and "Chapterhouse: Dune" the 6th and last for the time being) The second book follows the life of Paul Muad'Dib after he has destroyed the Sardaukar forces of the former emperor Shaddam IV, his new status of messiah and his life as a living God, showing how much he despises the religion and myths created around him (not by him!), including a bloody jihad by his Fremen troops that reached the farthest corners of the known universe. The book also tells about his enemies and all the plots to destroy Muad'Dib, who is as much worshipped as hated... The third book (episodes two and three) tells the story of Muad'Dib's twins, Leto and Ghanima and the demise of Muad'Dib's sister, Alia.

Warning: Spoilers in here!!

The first I would advise everybody who's interested in watching this is that to first read the books and then watch the series. I didn't have any problem following the events in the series but I had the feeling a few times that, I hadn't read the books', I'd have absolutely no clue what is going on at some moments... While the series stay quite true to the book, some things just went too fast and some others were changed a little.

I really liked the way they represented the capital city of the empire and the most important city of Dune: Arrakeen. I didn't like, though, the way they represented the desert, or the sietchs (more on the 3D effects later) About the desert shots, they were always sets! I mean, you could always tell that it wasn't a desert but a closed set! It felt really annoying to me because the whole planet of Dune spins around the maginificent presence of the desert, the sandworms and of course, Shai-Hulud, and they gave such a crappy view of it.

About the special effects, they just look soooo lame and childish! It's not that they're bad, it's that if you compare them to stunning work like the effects in The Lord of The Rings trilogy, they simply look like crap. They never look real, they always look synthetic and it was really annoying because there were plenty of them! Also, they designed the desert sietchs to look more like the ancient rock-carved city of Petra than a real sietch, as described in Herbert's books. And speaking of the things that were changed in the series, some of them didn't annoy me much (for example, in the series Stilgar is never captured when he revolts against Alia, while in the book he's keep in the dungeons of the keep, with Jessica, until Leto frees them) but I didn't really like some other litlle details: Leto's transformation into a sandworm is simply awful. In the book, his whole body is covered by sandtrout while in the series only part of his shoulder is covered... More things, the Bene Gesserit reverend mothers are supposed to wear a black aba and in the series they're dressed as if they had come from the latest fashion catwalk from Paris (and the same goes for Jessica, when he returns to Arrakis) The Bene Gesserit are supposed to look powerful, mystical (like in David Lynch's version of Dune) while in the movie they look like a joke. I noticed a few more like those mistakes but I think you get the idea...

Don't get me wrong, the series was fine but I wouldn't rate it with anything higher than a 6 out of 10. It had too many mistakes and the effects were so bad that those things really substract from the final score... And about the acting, it was also quite believable but just bearable. I couldn't really see any outstanding performance so my final veredict is that this series will be interesting for the legions of Dune fans and for some people interested in sci-fi.