This anime is the best that I have watched since (all seasons/full features of) Ghost in the Shell. In fact, I like this one more than Steins;Gate – which I can also recommend, but it takes patience to watch the first 3-4 episodes. With Parasyte, no patience is necessary: it is a very smooth flow from the very start until the very end. Luckily, season 1 is all there is. Just like with the legendary single season of Firefly

If you love Sci-Fi movies, this one is a definite “should watch”. I’m not sure if it has much “watching again later” value, but for one evening it is very good.
The story holds well together, has a good (though noticeably compressed) pace, and proceeds in a fairly expected way. Overall, I liked how this movie was made. The music also blended in organically.

Some share of the reviewers claim that watching this movie does not spoil reading the book after the movie. Some even go as far as to claim that this entire 2-hour movie can be deemed a “trailer” to the book. I had also seen disgruntled reviews of people comparing the movie to the book and complaining about the changes in the movie, and timeline compression. Well, compression was noticeable, but without it the movie would probably be boring. Also, not having read the book, I believe that the changes were necessary to make this movie hold together better. Honest film adaptations of the books are not necessarily good – these are different media, after all. Moreover, if a movie incites interest to read the book (and Ender’s game did!) – this is only for the better. Especially if a movie is like a trailer to the book

If that sounds familiar – go watch Pacific Rim. Go with the above-described expectations. Do watch the HD trailer. Try not to read anything revealing the plot – that could be a serious spoiler. Just one hint: you may want to sit through the 3D credits (about 2 minutes) for one final movie scene. I’ve heard there’s also something after the non-3D credits, but wasn’t patient enough to verify that.

Pacific Rim leaves a pleasant double-sided impression. On the one hand, it seems painted with juicy, crude and colorful paintbrush strokes; on the other, details get a sometimes unexpected extreme attention. Overall balance – not only in terms of details/overall rigidity – is good. Cliches are used with the tiniest hint of a burlesque feature, helping mitigate distasteful impressions.

This movie, just like most others in the Sci-Fi-tangential sphere, will not survive detailed critical analysis. However, it will not fall apart while you are still watching it. Even when you start analyzing it afterward – you may recollect some details you haven’t paid attention to initially, but now – after you try disassembling the plot points – they will start making more sense.

Obviously, this one should be watched at the movies and in IMAX or RealD. I found 3D quality to be good. I wonder if they filmed it in 3D… too lazy to search for that

HandBrake is a very high-quality piece of software – next time you need recoding something into H.264/MPEG-4 (using MKV or MP4 containers) – try HandBrake. It easily saturated all my CPU cores – which I failed to achieve with ffmpeg, which even with threads=8 was only saturating 2 cores.

Attached to this post are 2 profiles for recoding movies for Nokia E71. The “_best” profile has exhaustive motion detection, otherwise is identical to the base profile.
E71.plist
E71_best.plist

Related:

• x264 ffmpeg mapping and options guide
• ffmpeg audio/video encoding cheat sheet

• Jython – Python for the Java platform, compile your python scripts into Java bytecode
• Groovy – not Python, but still a scripting language which compiles to jars

Many of the epic and thrilling worlds have been brought to the wide screen in recent decades. So today I came to IMDB looking for just any film adaptation of the excellent novel series by Roger Zelazny, and found… nothing! Roger himself is accurately catalogued, though.

The Amber multiverse seems to me even bigger than that of JRRT’s world, yet the LoTR has a screen version, and Amber doesn’t. That’s unfair! I want a screen version of Amber world!

I’ve found a thread at IMDB, which asks for the movie, so I’m not alone in that.

P.S. Inspired by the recently re-viewed episodes of SW, including the CW animation series.

If you enjoyed Jeeves and Wooster – be sure to check House M.D.. It is completely different, but Hugh Laurie really excels in both.

Highly recommended!

P.S. “Jeeves and Wooster” differs strongly from the IT Crowd I had written about before. IT crowd is an every-day-situational-comedy, while J&W is genius-serving-the-idiot, with most laughs at Wooster’s plans and deeds.

Yes, I do believe the creation of sentient machines is within perceivable future. And yes, I do think that the problems of “robot personality” will be acute.

In support of my view – cloning is an unresolved ethical problem, which also grows into legal and social problems in the case of human cloning. When even the possibility of having two genetically identical humans arises, this leads to debates and disagreements (to clone or not to clone?). What could be said about a machine claiming it’s right for life?

Claiming other human rights?

Racism and xenophobia are characteristic for some countries even nowadays, and it can be even said that there is no country where the number of xenophobic or racist citizens is equal to zero. And that’s human-human relations problem.

In other words, I did enjoy The Second Renaissance, Part I (except for the clearly contradictional last two minutes of it).

Overall The Animatrix is good.

And the message I was trying to express is that mankind better be prepared to live side-by-side with machines – develop some realistic co-existence model. SciFi writes will help here . Just let’s avoid the fake, insincere model tried in The Animatrix: Matriculated (episode 9, the last one).

Note: I am copying this content as made publicly available on the web-site of the meeting, properly citing the source. If you know that this is against the rules of distribution of this exact GIF image – please let me know to make the post private.

Note 2: there’s my abstract at the posters list.

I liked the way she dreams. Imagine that you are following the plot of the story, but – suddenly – you are told that it was not really true, it was – to some extent – only dreaming. Film creators used an intuitive method to tell what’s true and what’s not. Adding the “dreams” ingredient makes the movie alive – you just believe that it was the factual story depicted.

Mondscheintarif is light and easy. (I suppose that on average women are more likely to positively evaluate this movie as appealing.)
I would recommend this as a one-time entertainment.

The weirdness of fiction-reality contradiction, enhanced by the disproportional “quiet man” and “action effects”, adds something special to the movie. The narrative style is relaxing, but the sense of events is not; events just happen, but slowly start looking like a doom on Ed, the main hero and the quiet man.

I’d say this movie is slightly above average, and with no doubt – quality-made.

It was also boring because the story doesn’t have any visible suspense. The intertwined past and current moments didn’t add anything sensible to suspense – only vagueness and disputes over what is actually being proved.

As for the emotional part, I didn’t feel anything of what the actors were playing. It all seemed artificial, most frequently – just over-reacting emotionally. It might be that possible madness of Catherine forced her hyper-behavior, and that it was specially played like that; even if so, it could have been done better – so that I wouldn’t have to guess what was it intended to tell me.

There was a single moment I liked: thinking of brains as of a house- locked, forgotten, with curtains down. This was somewhat simple, but nevertheless pleasant and vivid metaphor. Again, the problem is that if there’s only one bright and vivid moment in the movie – then it’s generally weak, because good movies either have lots of memorable moments, or are comprehended as a whole integral piece of art. The Proof is neither, in my opinion.

You may like this movie if you feel that watching anything will make you happier. But after – don’t say I didn’t warn you.

For me, this movie tells us that everyone has a path in life. The path, which can be changed by what we do. The path, which can be enforced.

The plot is built around an accidental murder of an innocent man. The story is displayed mixed, with both current and past events displayed side-by-side. Following the storyline, we learn the psychology behind the acts of each character. The interesting part is that completely nothing is said about the characters – we only observe them living, talking, acting, and feeling.

The innocent, who was killed, enforced a kind of fate both on his best friend and on his killer. The fate takes those two through the path of comprehension and understanding – different path for each of them, evidently.

Despite the serious ideas visible through the visual row of the movie, it is also a comedy. The woman going out with three men says to one of them, that she cannot escape with him to Mexico, because she loves her husband. In reply to “you told me I’m the only one you love”, she explains: “this is completely different…”.

The end of the movie leaves us completely uncertain as to what happened next to the main characters. Their common and differing paths ended by lifting the fate enforcement, and we cannot know what is next. Though it appears clear that the fate twisted their ways bizarrely, probably without any chances of restoring the status quo.

P.S. As a side note, inspired by review-comment at IMDB: boredom is really the engine for the events of the movie, except for when Pete takes on a quest of bringing his friend home: then it is not boredom driving him anymore. Boredom drives unmotivated actions in the movie, and this is worth seeing as well – to be warned.

Plot is somewhat predictable, and the beginning does seem a bit “forged”, but the more events occur, the more you want to know what’s in the end of all of this. Plot is predictable due to being schematic, sketchy; however, I prefer a sketchy plot of a movie to the soapy series or a huge loosing-the-essence, 9-hour-long story, which “Ring of the Nibelungs” is not.

I enjoyed the movie, and consider it worth watching – especially if you liked the “Lord of the rings”, but considered it to be too long and a bit childish.