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Archive for the ‘Pop Culture’ Category

As a big Transformers fan back in the day, I have to say: the movie is okay. Action-packed and a fun popcorn flick. The story’s nothing to win an oscar over, but everything looks SO COOL!

Some questionable things though:

Spoilers!

Hell of a movie.

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Based on my last.fm profile, at least, I am only around 13.94% mainstream

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Pretty good movie, as expected. The story is what you’d expect from a comic-book movie, but the mid-air fight scenes are really great.

The whole Sandman thing is basically fluff, the movie could have been done without him. He was like a cheap pop to make the whole “dark side” thing easier to start off, but then they had trouble resolving his story. It’s not like he’s a major Spidey villain anyway. Green Goblin, Doc Ock, Venom…that would have been good enough for a trilogy of Spidey movies, all the major bad guys covered.

J. Jonah Jameson is funny as always. It’s hard to take Topher Grace seriously when I keep thinking of him as Eric Foreman. Some of the drama parts are a bit over the top, but The funny bits of the movie are pretty good. The ending is a bit lame though.

I don’t think I made any spoilers. Unless you didn’t already know Sandman and Venom would be there.

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Due to pressing work concerns, I was unable to go to confession for Holy Week this year. So much for being a devout Catholic.

As is tradition, most of the long weekend was spent watching a whole lot of stuff:

24 - I’ve been keeping pace with the episodes so far. The thing about 24: people die. A lot of them. And amazingly, Jack Bauer gets off every single time. They should have a season where Jack Bauer dies around episode ten or something (or at least gets hospitalized and taken out of the game) That would shock people. Still a very entertaining show.

Heroes - still need to watch the latest episode (18), luckily they decided to take a break so I can catch up. Heroes started out strong and with solid writing, but the plots and subplots started to get a bit messy after Peter saved Clair. It looks like they’re finally getting on track again these last few episodes though.

One Piece - I finally caught up to Kaizoku Fansubs, having started watching One Piece from the very beginning last January. I had to skip most of the fillers though to catch up. And from the pirated DVDs I’ve seen in some stores, there’s probably some other group subbing One Piece that are already at least eighty episodes ahead of KF. That being said, I think I’ll follow their pace for now, as their subbing is of really good quality. One Piece is an awesome series and continues to be entertaining. The best arc in the series so far has been the Alabasta arc, and I’m looking forward to Movie 7 which supposedly covers this arc.

Gintama - a new series that people at the office got to know from Jump Ultimate Stars for the NDS. It’s mostly a parody/comedic anime, often breaking the fourth wall and using a lot of puns, references, toilet humor and visual gags. There are some really funny bits that made me laugh out loud, but it’s a bit of hit-or-miss unlike, say, Excel Saga, which would have me laughing a good 70-80% of the time.

As I said, uneventful.

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if you’ve ever lived in the Philippines during the summer months, you’re well aware of the sweltering heat. Not being in the mood to feel like french toast during this Sunday noontime, my brothers and I decided to troop to the nearby mall and catch a movie - in this case the return of those childhood stalwarts the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the big screen.

Now, as my youngest brother asked, what were we doing there? TMNT is a kids’ movie right? Yeah, more or less I suppose, but all of us brothers saw the first 3 live-action Turtles movies, played the NES game with the annoying dam sequence and watched not just a few episodes of the cartoon series. Thankfully, none of us had any Turtles jammies.

Anyway, yeah we saw the movie. Before I saw the trailer about a month back I actually thought it was gonna be another live-action thing. The animation is ok, the turtles look less brutish than before and it’s action-packed as expected. As expected, Leo tries hard to be a leader, Mikey provides the comedy, Raph is the serious brooding one, and Donatello provides the tech support (literally). It’s no high art, but it’s entertaining enough, but it’s pretty much the equivalent of watching a multi-part episode of the TV series. The turtles have a spat, they kick some ass, extradimensional monsters appear, the turtles kick some more ass, etc.

I hear that the movie is selling quite well in the States. Not so much here though, as the theater was maybe 50% full at best, and on a Sunday afternoon at that.

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Mostly due to my antisocial nature and my laziness, I haven’t actually seen a movie in a theater since…forever. I broke that fast mostly because of the hype surround 300, the movie based on Frank Miller’s comic book retelling of the Battle at Thermopylae.

Everyone who’s seen the movie has the same thing to say: it’s really good. So I went to see it with a brother of mine. And it was good. Really good. The highlights of the movie are the very impressive battle scenes (which is like 90% of the movie), with awesome usage of slow-motion to enhance the battle drama. It feels like a video game!

Unfortunately, I think the movie was hyped a bit too much for me. It’s good, but not OMGWTFThat’sAwesome!!!111 good for me. History lessons told me how that battle ended, and some of the lines in the movie sound like trash-talk from WWE shows.

Still enjoyable though, despite the high theater prices nowadays. It’s just that I went in expecting my socks to get knocked off; they rolled up a bit, but they stayed on my feet.

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If you’re not familiar with the series, One Piece is an anime about pirates, the same way Naruto is about ninjas. Like Naruto, they don’t live in a world very different from our own. The One Piece universe is a lot more insane than Naruto’s though. I’ve only watched less than a hundred episodes, but so far the Straw Hat Pirates have encountered giant sea cows, talking reindeer, a guy who can eat anything, a man-shark…too many to mention.

Side note: It’s really difficult to multitask when watching anime. I can watch episodes of 24 or Smallville while working since I can rely on the audio to keep track of the story, but since I prefer my anime subbed, it really needs my full attention to watch it.

The series is pretty good, occasionally funny, and doesn’t have the same pacing problems as Dragonball (the pacing of the Naruto anime seems better though). The action is decent, most battles are simplistic slugfests where Luffy and his crew win simply by more “will to win”; a typical thing in these types of anime. The only complaint would be that they spend too much time summarizing the previous episodes at the start of each new one, but that’s a problem only because I watch multiple episodes at a time.

I have more than a hundred episodes to watch, and since I can’t watch them during work I typically marathon at least ten episodes on weekends. At this rate I’ll be done in, what, half a year?

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I’m testing the Extreme Video Plugin for Wordpress, and I thought, what better way to do so than to further propagate the extreme music videos of Ok Go.

[gv data="RbdbVhBGETQ"][/gv]

Some of the new guys at the office performed the above dance as their Christmas initiation…er, presentation, and let me tell you, the audience was on its’ feet. Ok Go is an American band that is known for outrageous live performances like the above. The above video is their own song, “A Million Ways.” They have another video for another song, involving treadmills. It’s said that they did that treadmill thing in one take. That sounds too awesome to be true…

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I was going through the bookstores at yesterday’s sale day at SM North, hoping to find some bargains. I found a copy of The Rock’s book, The Rock Says going for the bargain basement price of 50 pesos (roughly 1 US dollar). What a steal!

In case you’ve been living under, well, a rock, you’re probably aware that The Rock was one of the most popular, most electrifying men in professional wrestling, lovingly termed “sports entertainment.” As a wrestling fan, such a book is a real page-turner for me. It details the story of Rock’s childhood, his football days in Miami up to his days in the WWE leading up to his historic Wrestlemania XV match with the Rattlesnake, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. As a fan whose view of the wrestling industry has been limited to what I’ve seen on television, the book gives a good look into the inner workings of the industry. The history, the way things are, the pitfalls, the demons of the wrestling biz are explored by The Rock’s stories, especially his days of growing up to become a third-generation wrestler.

There are people in the world who don’t “get” professional wrestling, wondering why others like to watch it when it’s “so obviously fake.” Those people miss the point entirely, and reading “The Rock Says” might do give them some insight as to why it’s called “Sports Entertainment” these days. But for wrestling fans, especially those who grew up watching the trade blows with the likes of Mankind and Steve Austin, the book is just one hell of a ride.

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What a long, arduous journey it has been for Roland of Gilead, last gunslinger, in his inexorable quest for the Dark Tower. And now that I’ve read the final volume of Stephen King’s magnum opus, I find out that it is an even crueler fate that awaits him at the end of the seven books.

I dare not spoil it, though Wikipedia has a nice summary, say thankya. Save to say that Stephen King seems to be correct - the ending of the Dark Tower series does seem to be the “correct” one, despite some disappointments in writing.

All in all, the Dark Tower series remains an incredibly good read, and Stephen King is admirable for having completed the epic story over a more than twenty-year period. People often know King as the “guy who writes those creepy horror stories”, but the Dark Tower series shows his bent is really towards a type of dark fantasy. I wish I had time to read his other novels, as many of them tie up with the Dark Tower story itself.

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