Month: January 2006

The Fantastic Four

FilmsLeave a comment

Comic books movies are pretty common ever since 911 happened. Although Spider-man was essentially already filmed, it too fits in with the trend Hollywood started, and so we got DareDevil, Spider-man 2, X-Men, Elecktra, The Hulk, etc. In all, except for The Punisher, comic book movies are a very good distraction from real world problems, like terrorism and politics; it is easier to make a movie that requires suspension of disbelief, because even if a theme is controversial, it is not analyzed as much since it is coming from a super hero that isn’t real. Most comic films though tend to be feel-good movies anyway, so there is not much serious thought to begin with. This leads us to Fox’s rendition of The Fantastic Four. A film that disappoints on the most important level of all, the action movie category!

The plot is pretty simple, good boy scientist and his best friend tough guy want to further their research but they are broke. The solicit the help of an old school friend who allows them to take a trip to his personal space station where they have to work together with his chief scientist and her brother. Everyone knows eachother and of course the space cloud they are suppose to study arrives early and the situation leads to a freak accident that gives them superpowers.

The rest of the movie is made up of the four main characters ironing out their personal conflicts, and of course the birth of Dr. Doom, which is a tad underwhelming.

For the most part the acting is not terrible in Fantastic Four, the special effects are neither disappointing, and even the dialogue does not suck. So what’s wrong with this movie? Why did the critics hate this movie? The answer is that the film is too nice! Unlike X-Men where the bad guys are really bad (even cool), and the main character Wolverine is not nice all the time, Fantastic Four has no dark side. The characters are mostly nice to each other and have good manners, with the occasional clumsiness of The Thing, nothing really happens in this film. Dr. Doom turns evil, but even his transformation could be explained as not being rooted in evil.

This all leads to a final battle, which is really the only battle! and then you realize you have watched an entire movie just to get one real good versus evil fight! Even Spider-man fought the Goblin a few times before he really kicked his ass.

Kids may enjoy this movie, I know my kids did, but older kids and adults may find the Fantastic Four lacking in the action department, and for a comic movie to lack action, is simply unforgivable.

Men, Please Stop Buying Women’s Deodorant

EditorialsLeave a comment

I’m just going to come out and say it. If your deodorant or anti-perspirant comes in a little black can/bottle, you are buying the wrong stuff. Men don’t have to smell like perfume to attract women. This is utter nonsense. Men are suppose to stink, it is their foul odor that creates the right environment for fermones to be created, which do in fact attract women. And if you know what fermones are, you should know that fermones do not have a very clean origin.

Stop listening to those supposed men’s magazines who are brainwashing you into buying all sorts of junk you don’t even need. Maxim wants you to buy Tag, Axe, and dozens of other products from their sponsers. That’s called advertising! It does not mean you have to buy into it.

If you still want to smell good, then actually go to the perfume counter and buy yourself a bottle of designer cologne. It will cost you, but at least people will know you spent real money on yourself instead of trying to pass yourself off as a playboy because you bought the deodorant that some magazine told you was cool.

For the rest of us guys who don’t care about offending as much, there’s Right Guard, Old Spice, and of course Brut. They are a lot cheaper and it’s what we grew up with. If you really do sweat a lot, then it’s called Mitchum, wear it if you need it!

MacOS X Is All Grown Up

Tech TalkLeave a comment

I broke down last week and ordered MacOS X Tiger after reading John Siracusa’s Tiger review on Arstechnica.com. The review is very much an depth technical review, so I would not recommend it for everyone. AnandTech.com’s review is probably a better start, since Anand covers such features as The Dashboard in more depth, and is more of a user centric review than John’s.

Of interest to me, were that Tiger has the following changes and features:

Faster GUI: MacOS X is inherently slow. It has been since its creation. The technology for GUI does a lot more than the old QuickDraw on the original MacOS Classic. With Tiger, Apple has embraced OpenGL even more and given the GUI a much needed speedup, supposedly even the rendering by the CPU is faster too.

New Kernel & Extensions: Drivers are what make the OS unstable. Microsoft spent years getting this under control with NT, and with Linux you have to recompile the kernel to add extensions. Apple went with an architecture that allows for easy extensions, but obviously it took them four years to deliver on what they exactly wanted to do with drivers and extensions. Tiger has a very defined architecture now, and hopefully this will mean less broken drivers and more stability.

Spotlight Searching: This is one feature which is suppose to be the reason why you should update to Tiger. The problem with Spotlight is that once you use it, you’ll never think about it again. In other worlds, the most modern OS should have had this a long time ago!

QuickTime 7: Apple has overhauled their multimedia system and has made it even more powerful. It is not that they added a new codec to it, but they have made it faster and more of an integral part of the technologies in OS X. QT 7 is one upgrade that will definitely impress. Unfortunately Apple still wants to charge users $30 for a fully enabled QuickTime Player application.

Overall Utilities & Application Improvements: Safari, TextEdit, Mail, Dashboard, etc… with Apple it is the little things that they do that makes a difference, and with Tiger, they have tweaked and added much in the way of applications and utility changes. Not one specific change will make you go out there and buy Tiger, but added all together, you do get quite a lot.

The Bugs Are There!

Undeniably Apple has delivered some very bad OS releases, (System 7, MacOS X 1.0, and even the last one OS X Panther). From reports on the Internet, it seems that Tiger may have a few bugs crawling around and it may have been rushed a bit, but I’m sure the .1 update will be coming out very soon. As always a 2 month delay in upgrading is a pretty good strategy to have.