http://www.gojensen.no from the mind of gojensen Mon, 28 Aug 2006 10:47:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en "Walk down the right back alley in Sin City and you can find anything." Certainly unexpected, co-directed by the man who swore he'd never work with Hollywood again, Sin City is a gritty, violent film noir retelling of the comic book series of the same name. Perhaps the greatest filming of a comic book ever. 5/5 not for the squeemish. Collecting the film versions of "Sin City", "The Big Fat Kill" and "That Yellow Bastard" the film FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY is a unique experience. Digitally filmed and altered to look as much like the comic panels as possible this movie takes no liberties with the stories and art fans Frank Miller's Sin City have come to love. Though love for such a violent topic as Sin City is a weird connection. Sin City is not for everyone... it's black and white (with colour added for effect in very few scenes) and violent as hell. With stellar acting from all involved, Bruce Willis as the retiring cop, the enticing Jessica Alba as the ever alluring Nancy Callahan. "Skinny little Nancy Callahan. She grew up. She filled out." Benicio Del Toro as crazed, over the edge Jackie Boy, Clive Owen as the unlucky Dwight McCarthy, and Mickey Rourke IS Marv. Honourable but confused Marv. Rounding out the cast is a plethora of Hollywood top picks, and Rutger Hauer (again). Many folks credit Robert Rodriguez for this movie, but in my eyes this is Frank Miller thru and thru, and I see Robert Rodriguez only as Miller's mentor in the art of filmmaking. As with any CGI/Digital film there are parts of this I didn't like - most specifically a scene involving Marv and a car which ended up being so over the top it pulled me out of the story. But as a fan of the comics I can not give this adaption anything but top score. http://www.gojensen.no/2006/08/28/sin-city-2005/ Anew. It fell upon Christopher Nolan (wizard of Memento) to revive the legacy of the BatMan. Retelling the story of the loner billionaire Bruce Wayne who lost everything as a Child and takes up the fight against crime in the dusk of the night, this is truly a film in the spirit of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight. 5/5. Revisioning (or retelling - as Nolan stays pretty true to the legacy of the DC Comics Dark Knight) we follow Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) fall from the light as it may be to his rise through years of training, from the playboy billionaire to the scourge of crime known as the Batman. Eventually returning to Gotham he is confronted by the love interest of this flick, young District Attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), and spurred into action against the Scare Crow (Cillian Murphy) - possibly the best incarnation of the particular villain I've seen. The excellent cast is rounded out with stellar performances from Liam Neeson, Michael Cain, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freem, Ken Watanabe - and even Rutger Hauer manages a presence. The film is much more to my envisioning of the Batman. I've always been more fond of the dark and gritty hero vs. villain stories - a place where Mr Freeze and his like does not fit in. And luckily this is a film that quickly lets you forget the atrociousness that was Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. In my book it trumps Batman and Batman Returns aswell. http://www.gojensen.no/2006/08/28/batman-begins-2005/ I used to have, or atleast intended to have, a movie log here.... However, as anyone can see, and especially those of you that have been here previously, I'm not very good at updating the site. At one point I ended up seeing so many movies that I couldn't keep up with my log, and it dissipated into nothingness. Not that that would refrain me trying again. So I may. No, I will. The next time I see a movie, and in the meantime I may, no ... I will, post on some of the more memorable movies that I've missed commenting on. At least that will leave the spammers out there some new posts to spam :D http://www.gojensen.no/2006/08/27/once-upon-a-time/ I have these past years tested various MMORPG games, and come to the conclusion that we will never see any MMO with truly integrating roleplay as many of us have experienced from NeverWinterNights or PenAndPaper games. There are several reasons for this, but I think I can point to two of the major reasons. 1) Population With a game consisting of 5 million subscribers (World of Warcraft) or even 1 million players (GuildWars) there will always be masses of "players" as opposed to "roleplayers". Roleplaying was always a niche, and I think even more so in computer games. Though a "true" roleplayer will always wish for more people to immerse the world with a more realistic outlook and more options - I do believe that roleplaying works best where there's a majority of roleplayers. This harkens back to the old "war" of PowerGamers vs. RolePlayers. 2) Automated quests Automated/Game generated quests kills creativity, and leads to a powergaming mentality. Very quickly the casual roleplayer will find himself just running waypoints, killing X amount of mobs and returning for the reward. "What story?!" GuildWars has kind of tried to fix this problem in a few neat ways like instanced maps and cut-scene driven "main" plots. However it helps little when you reach a town to hear the cries of "SUP? LVL?! ASL?" or "WTS God-defying fullplate only 100K" over and over and over. Heroes of Might and Magic V (the coming online variant) has tried to take the "small league" world of NeverWinterNights and turned it into an MMO world, where players match-up in a "chat-room" and launch an instanced map of the "mission". So far, I've yet to get past this match-up section so I can't say how well the game will work - but I have my doubts. Most games have crafting of some kind - which we all know leads to farming. Even the first futile attempts at crafting back in Exaria (a NeverWinterNights "persistant-world") led to a handfull of farmers. In the end, farmers ruin crafting, which ruin player economy, which leads everyone to farming, which... well... Other games simply leave out the Massive part of the game, like AutoAssault, and works best when soloing. Unlike AutoAssault, at least GuildWars is designed for parties of players - though with the addition of AI Henchmen the game can be played solo aswell. Unfortunately I have no real solution to this. We all want a game where we can play when WE want, and do what WE want. And for this we look to MMOs... when really I believe we should be looking to pen and paper or the instanced world of NWN/similar-game where there's 4-8 players and 1-2 DMs following a tightly plotted scenario. However, I've said this before, MMORPGs we won't have, and why they call them that is kind of beyond me. Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games? Well, most are fantasy themed atleast - however I think there's a reason why more and more people just stick with MMOs... http://www.gojensen.no/2006/01/30/why-mmos-will-never-have-true-roleplaying/ So... my MythTV (linux TiVo, digital "video" recorder) box died a while back. When I got the hardware back up and running my software was ofcourse outdated - and the update function gave me some weird error about virtual libraries. Heeding a friends advice, I set of trying to install Ubuntu instead of my nice old gentoo... Claiming that install was a breeze and updates just as quick and simple as I remember from back in the old RedHat days I bought his arguments for using Ubuntu and downloaded an installation CD. Well, installing seems to be easier said than done. I believe my problems stem from the fact that I decided for a server install instead of a preconfigured desktop install. Anyways, my first attempt using the Wizardry-like simple server setup resulted in a bootable Ubuntu server with no network. However hard I tried to convince the stuff to setup networking I failed (even though networking worked fine during install!)... so I decided to try the expertly-like server-expert setup options. A lil' hour later I had a fresh server installed, and wooo I even had networking! Next, I wanted Gnome (a graphical user interface for linux') so I used the install manager to download and install all the packages... high on exciteing linux stuff I quickly punched in "startx" to launch the GUI. Wooo! A screenfull of linux-techno-jibber-jabber-gibberish that looked very much like a head ache inducing error message... :-( So, that was it for me and my Myth box... We're going back to gentoo. Sure it's slower to update, sure it has it's weaknesses like eliminating all your hard-worked-out configuration files... but at least it let's me decide for the most part what's happening - and the docs doesn't say "not yet done" :-) http://www.gojensen.no/2006/01/25/unbelivablybuntu/ Something just hit me... I can't do bungee jumping. I'm pretty sure it would put too big a strain on my troubled back. Now, I probably wouldn't have done it... but the idea that my body is limiting my choices for fun or fear is rather unsettling. Actually, it pisses me off. I think I will use this agression to work more intensively with my physioterapeut to get my body and specifically my back in better shape. Perhaps there's other fears I can face :D http://www.gojensen.no/2005/11/07/the-big-dive/ Well, I gave it another shot. People've been raving about FireFly for a while, and even though I didn't quite "get" the first few episodes I caught a while back, with the current pause in new TV programming it was time to look at something old. I can probably say this is the best series I've seen that got canned so quickly and undeservingly. Sure, the first episode wasn't that great (The Train Job) in my opinion, but from reading on the net I understand FOX made Whedon (creator of the series) do that episode instead of the pilot to have a more action oriented start for the series. (Note to fans, I did watch the series in their correct order as presented on the DVD set not in Broadcast order). There were some episodes that were more or less good than others - but I hardly think there is any TV show that escapes this peculiar phenomen. At the End though I really craved for more - and I'm now looking forward to the Serenity movie - though my real wish would be that Sci-Fi Channel bought the rights to this and continued production with Whedon at the helm. As with Buffy it's got a quirky off-beat humour - I especially loved the Jaynestown episode and "Hero of Canton" written by Ben Edlund (creator of another fun character... The Tick!), and the setting is rather unique... Welcome to the Wild Wild Space - where there are no Aliens, people fire beefed-up black-powder guns and lasers are extremely rare. http://www.gojensen.no/2005/11/07/firefly/ Well, yesterday was a new experience. Courtesy of the guys responsible for social happenings at work arranged a mini-cup... a total of 17 persons raced warm-up heats and qualifying heats before we were divded into A, B and C finals. I never knew driving could put such a demand on you. After the warm up and qualifying heat I was desperate for some water, my throat was hoarse and my back strained (which may be a side-effect of me having back problems for 3 years, but I heard the "healthy" guys complain aswell...). And when I came home I felt almost as worn-out as after a training session, and had the perspiration to show for it. But man did those small carts go! This being my first try at such a "sport" since 1997 (which coincidentially was just a "gimmick" ride) I must say it could have fared worse. The "Winner" of the A cup had a best lap round of 25.56 seconds, with me clocking in at 28.40 seconds. In my defence it quickly became clear that the Cart I was racing was not quite as good as the others, it flattened out on the long stretches never reaching it's top speed. Still, I don't think I could've coped with the Winner - he was a joy to watch fly around those bends ... and with an average speed of 52kph compared to my 44kpg it was a good thing that we were in different finals. Certainly a fun experience, and one I could redo... http://www.gojensen.no/2005/11/04/gocart/ Well, I did an emerge (which is akin to Windows Update for those that don't understand linux techtalk) on my system yesterday. And whee, seems the guys at Gentoo has grown tired of the way they had Apache2 configured so they changed all the configs... Which of course resulted in me spending a lot of energy on reconfiguring dozens of virtual hosts and secure servers... (not to mention that ClamAV stopped processing my emails on Thursday - so I had to debug that aswell earlier... oh and nothing on the system really told me that it was ClamAV that was the culprit :D) http://www.gojensen.no/2005/10/11/the-penguin-indians/ Well, seems I stopped updating my sites again... You see, 2 days after my last post I got some terrible news. A very good (albeit only online) friend of mine was murdered. This took some oomph out of my lust for online experiences - but as they say life goes on... My friend was an adventurous bright lad, with seemingly a bright future. Several turn abouts found him stranded in southern America - a fugitive from his own country and majorly injured both physically and mentally. Slowly regaining his sense of life, being partly nurtured by a good friend he had there, things were looking bright. He had found a steady job in Brazil and he had a lovely new girlfriend. Unfortunately, this sat poorly with the girlfriend's ex - whom in a fit of rage/jealousy/isthereanyexcuse shot and killed my good friend. As I said it's about time to move on for me, but I'll never forget him or the times we shared. Rest in peace friend, thanks for everything! http://www.gojensen.no/2005/09/12/2-days-later/