Coredump

It was another movie night for all company employees. I missed the previous movie nights (Beowulf, for one), so I wasn’t about to miss out on the last one for the year.

Based on Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (part of his Dark Materials trilogy — ohnoes, not another one!), the film portrays the quest of an orphan destined to lead the fight against evil, for — among others — free will and self-determination. The antagonist is the evil authoritarian Magisterium, a finicky antagonist, and a bit O.C., too, what with its obsession against “dust”.

The visuals are stunning, as one would expect from any multimillion-dollar fantasy flick, and the actors are quite engaging. Nicole Kidman’s character, the Coulter “woman”, is a cunning villain who plots and does the Magisterium’s bidding. James Bond’s Daniel Craig is also cast in an almost cameo role — heck, we only see him for about 15 minutes, tops.

What is embedded in my mind, though, are the armoured ice bears, a warrior race in the north, where war is “breathe like air, drank like water”. They remind me of the polar bears in the Coca Cola ads:

Nice.

Despite the supposed bad press it’s getting — that it’s a diatribe against organized religion and authority — the film somehow dilutes it. There wasn’t enough tension, not enough build up of conflict that would have made the story richer and more engaging. But, heck, it was fun, and it’s just a movie! I give it four snow flakes.

It’s not a product at all — it’s a global humanitarian cause.

Our team went out for a movie. We watched The Banquet (Ye Yan, directed by Feng Xiaogang), starring, among others Zhang Ziyi.

Synopsis: Set in ancient China, the story revolves around intrigues in the imperial court. The Emperor dies mysteriously. The Emperor’s brother takes the throne and marries the Empress. His son, the Crown Prince, suspects foul play (”Tofu stinks in the Forbidden City.”). He seeks revenge. He’s got the hots for his stepmom. His girlfriend, the courtier, dies. His uncle, the usurper, dies. But there’s a twist.

Sounds like, hmmm…, yep, “Hamlet“. Take Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, minus the insane bloodshot eyes; add true-blue (royal red?) acrobatics and kung fu chops of Jet Li’s caliber, but better; add astounding landscape panoramas; and you’ve got Hamlet, Chinese style (or is it Little Ma-ling? ngwek. :P). Plus, this isn’t about the Prince at all, but about the women. I mean, hey, with Zhang Ziyi and the Qing lady what’s-her-name, who cares about the Prince?

But it was great. It was fun and refreshing watching something like this after a long day’s work. (I came to the movie late, joining my teammates near the middle of the film, because I still had a remote troubleshooting conference with a Turkish customer (something about Akamai’s servers not being friendly).)

Rating: four chopsticks.

Spoiler: they all die.

Not what you think.

It must be one of those days: just finished another exam — part of a winding-down (I hope) battery of fitness tests here in the workplace — and I barely passed (yay!); caught in the middle of a Debian netinst (heh, they only have the Sarge netinst ISO around here); doing a yum update (Fedora Core 3! How ancient.) on one of my boxes; and, oh, just watched X-Men III: The Last Stand (you know, I have a feeling this isn’t the last of the X-Men franchise {prolly because of that snippet of a scene at the ending? [oops! spoiler alert!]}) with my teammates — it was funny: we didn’t get to reserve seats beforehand so we took the queue and we got seats all right, a freaking column of seats (8C, 9C, 10C, you get the drift…)! — and I must say, take that, Puso ng Samar something!

Whew. Before I leave for home, here’s an interesting piece:

Just a sneaky of Fernando Escora’s work over at Hiraya Gallery.

Heh. Natalie Portman raps in Saturday Night Live with The Lonely Island.

via Boing Boing.