the klog

Just wanted mention how I'm kinda surprised at how bad the reviews are for Speed Racer. It filled me with blissful joy. It was like the ultimate movie for 5-year-olds, but in such a way that turns all of us into 5-year-olds. I'd like to add two comments to my review: (1) I was surprised by how Speed Racer's younger brother Spritle and his pet monkey Chim Chim (who acts more like another brother) were actually funny. Usually the little kid comic relief is annoying, but not here. (2) One positive review I read mentioned how some movies, like The Fifth Element, show you some crazy insane visuals in the trailer, and you think the whole movie's gonna be like that, but then you realize that's only 10 minutes, and the rest of the movie is kinda normal. Not the case here. If anything the movie feels even faster paced and looks more insane than the trailers, which isn't an easy feat.

Look, if the idea of watching bright and shiny colors that requires zero attention span for 2 hours doesn't appeal to you, if you don't want to watch the equivalent of the PowerPuff Girls on meth, (the main character is called "Speed"...) then you probably won't like the movie. And I guess maybe there are a lot of people who don't want that, and that's why they didn't like the movie. But if that does sound like a good time to you, then you will like this movie, regardless of what the critics say.

P.S.: I have never actually watched a single episode of the original cartoon, but now I wanna say, GO SPEEDRACER GO!

[ IMDb Entry ] [ Trailers ]

Speed Racer leaves any semblance of reality in the dust and never looks back. I didn't have any problems with suspension of disbelief while I watched it because there was nothing to believe in the first place. It was just completely insane. People sometimes complain about CG in movies looking too fake, including in the Matrix sequels, but here the Wachowskis have embraced the fakeness and made you not even think about it.

I also liked the editing, which involved nearly non-stop gimmicky sweeps, cars flying across the screen to reveal another scene, that sort of thing. A trailer for The Incredible Hulk preceded the movie, and that reminded me of the comic book editing in Ang Lee's Hulk. Here, they took it to an extreme, so the whole thing felt like the spirit of a comic book directly transposed onto the screen... except shinier and more brightly colored. Excuse me. Except SHINIER and more BRIGHTLY COLORED! That's better. :)

The plot was sort of a standard sweet families good/corporations bad message, but my favorite part is that it actually featured patent abuse! When was the last time you saw what's essentially a kid's movie talk about "IP infringement"? And in a negative light, too! Awesome. Speaking of the family-friendliness, the movie was firmly PG-rated, but with the one allotted instance of "shit", just like the animated Transformers movie from the 80s. :)

My only complaint is that the plot kind of disappeared toward the end. The motivation for the final race wasn't very strong, and the montage near the end was cliched, but the sheer primary-colored craziness of the whole thing outweighed that. It's not at all a perfect movie, and not everyone will like it (only 35/100 on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic), but I went in not quite knowing what to expect, and I got a really fun time with shiny bright new sights.

Update: I added a few comments in a new post.

Actually, this was shot through a reflection in a window. The band is The Mary Onettes, from Sweden, playing at Pop Scene. They were so-so. Kinda new wavy, with a dash of Bloc Party's more poppy stuff.

...but awesome. She made a series of tiny short films starring herself in outlandish costumes explaining the nature of insect sex in the first person. It's called Green Porno, but it's more or less SFW, though very strange.

Here is the heartwarming story of the day.

I went to see Lyrics Born [MySpace] at The Independent in San Francisco Friday night. (He's a half-Japanese, half-Italian rapper who lives in Berkeley.) I like that they actually officially let us take photos, which they rarely do in SF, even at some smaller venues. The show was really fun. I like that he had a full band and backup singer with him:

It was a great contrast from the opening act, who only had a DJ for music. It was also an interesting contrast from a typical rock show because the music never stopped! Every time he finished a song, the band would immediate segue into the next, just jamming along even when he's talking to the audience. It gave the show a non-stop party feel.

The hipster crowd wasn't quite as loud as it could've been, but it was still a lot more into it than the crowd at a typical nod-your-head indie rock concert. All-in-all, I'd say the music was actually even better live than on the album. I think that Galactic [MySpace] album I've been listening to, From the Corner to the Block [Amazon] has really gotten me to like this whole funk music backing hip-hop thing.

Lyrics Born live:

Lyrics Born / Later That Day... (2003):

It has two awesome tracks, "Callin' Out" and "Do That There", but the production is a bit spare, and I wasn't that into the album as a whole when I got it.

Lyrics Born / Same !@#$ Different Day (2005):

Half the tracks on this album are remixes of his first album, but in most cases I actually like the remixes together (with the exception of the two songs on the original I really liked already). The interesting thing is that most of them are more than "remixes" in that they have whole new verses or even new guest rappers with new lyrics, so they're more like alternative versions than mere remixes. The production on this album is much fuller and more exciting. I particularly like "Shake It Off (Bad Dreams Part II)" and "The Last Trumpet (Halou Remix)".

Lyrics Born / Everywhere At Once (2008):

Galactic / From the Corner to the Block (2007):

I might as well review this while I'm at it. It's the best album I've heard in a while. Galactic is this New Orleans funk band who joined up with a different rapper for each track on their new album, and it's awesome. (Lyrics Born is on the first track, but it's not really one of the best tracks on the album.) My favorite is track 2: "...And I'm Out", featuring Mr. Lif. Click that link to listen to it. Pure awesome.

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And now for something completely different, from Maker Faire on Saturday:

[flickr video link]

Over three decades ago, the memristor was theorized as the fourth basic passive electrical element, to go with the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. The memristor Wikipedia article explains it better than I can. HP Labs just discovered that some nanoscale switches act as memristors.

We already know of one practical application: They could provide RAM-like speeds but be non-volatile, keeping their data while powered down. According to some of the comments in the /. article where I read about this, they could also simulate a transistor at smaller than what we have now, and it could be used as analog memory, which may have some AI uses, among others.

In any case, it sounds like there will probably be tons of applications for this that we haven't thought up yet. I don't know how far out commercialization is for any of this, but it's still a great reason why science research is important.

Update:: Ars Technica has a nice writeup that describes how HP's memristor works. It also shows the symbol for it, which apparently looks like a square wave (whereas the resistor's symbol is a sawtooth wave).

I've had a few conversations lately about how I've been fortunate not to have experienced direct racism much growing up, at least not of the "Hey, Jackie Chan Ching Chong!" type. A week ago, I experienced it for the first time in a while, late night in front of Denny's in Santa Clara: A drunk white couple in their 20s walked by me and said, "Yo, Harold! Where's Kumar?" I kind of had this, "Um, is that it? Is that the whole joke?" reaction. I didn't actually say that, of course, non-confrontational Asian that I am. :P

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay often felt a little like that racist comment. For instance, they had an unsympathetic character talk in mock Korean, "Aaa waaa looo zaaa moo taaa," that sort of thing. I was like, okay, your point is that racist jokes like this are lame, so why are you spending so much screen time on this racist joke, without any real follow-up? Breaking a taboo isn't inherently funny; you have to do something more with it. In the original, when Kumar's dad unwittingly said lewd things because of his Indian accent, it was funny not just because he had an accent, but because he was Kumar's dad, and so the comment was embarassing to Kumar. Layers.

When the original was released, I compared it favorably to that darling of Asian-American cinema, Better Luck Tomorrow. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle didn't treat Asian-Americans as a totally separate group, but as Americans who also have Asian in them. It basically said that Asian-Americans don't have to ignore their race, but they don't have to let it define them, either. The sequel ruined that by making race the primary topic.

Despite all this, though, I still found myself enjoying the movie, and it's only because of the fundamental likability of the two main characters. That's why I'm giving it two slices of toast instead of one and a half or less. Occasionally, the movie did focused on personality traits of the characters that rang true, like the math joke, but those moments were few and far between. I think this sequel was a misstep, but I think there could still be life in these characters. I would look forward to seeing Harold and Kumar back in action if they came up with more subtle and nuanced writing again.

"He has no idea. He really has no idea."
"Have you heard anything I've said?"
"There are pragmatic realities he refuses to face."
"Well that's the problem, of course. He's saying what he thinks is right."
"Well yeah. He's Lee. Thing is it probably is the right thing, but... sometimes the right thing is a luxury, and it can have profoundly dangerous consequences, and it's... it's almost as if he doesn't want that to be true."

No, those are not lines from The Warlords, starring Jet Li, Andy Lau, and Takeshi Kaneshiro and directed by Peter Chan, winner of Best Picture at the 2008 Hong Kong Film Awards, and which just had its North American premier tonight as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. They're lines from last night's episode of Battlestar Galactica. But while watching The Warlords, I kept thinking about how it's like Battlestar Galactica in 19th Century China.

The Warlords is about three blood brothers who join the Qing army to fight against the Taiping Rebellion in order to bring home food and money for their families. They are imperfect, but they each try really hard to do the right thing. Unfortunately, just as in Battlestar Galactica, doing the right thing can sometimes lead to tragic results.

Another conversation, this time between a friend of mine and I after I watched the movie:

"So how was the movie?"
"It was pretty good!"
"How was Jet Li?"
"He.... acted!"

Before the movie, someone brought up Jet Li's vow that Fearless would be his last martial arts movie. But I don't think The Warlords breaks that vow because it's really a drama in the guise of an action movie. The action scenes were gritty and efficient (if not neccessarily totally realistic). The movie instead focused its attention on the story and the characters. I much preferred that approach to fancy cinematography with a crappy script. (Zhang Yimou's martial arts movies, I'm looking at you guys!)

So, like I said, well-written drama about complex characters in complex situations, with nice action scenes as a bonus: Battlestar Galactica in 19th Century China! (Of course, BSG itself has been going downhill since mid-3rd season, and the 4th season so far has been seriously irritating me (the aforementioned dialog notwithstanding), but that's a rant for another day.)

This movie was released in China December of last year. I don't know if it's going to get wider US distribution, but I hope it does.

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P.S.: One bit of bad subtitle translation: There's a scene where a number of soldiers chant before attacking a city, "Take their money, take their food, take their women!" And the subtitle read, "Take their money, take their food, take the city!" I would chalk it up to harmless bowdlerization except for the fact that the last bit becomes a significant plot point. (To be fair, when it's repeated at a point where it's more obviously a plot point, it's translated directly. So I think this was just a bit of sloppiness.)

This is an anti-smoking ad in a magazine. On the left you see a warning flyer posted on an elevator, and on the right is a closeup of the flyer, which is mostly in Chinese. The small print at the bottom is in English, and it says, "In some developing countries, one tobacco company voluntarily placed warning labels on cigarette packs in English."

So it was showing you how useless a warning label in another language is. The cool thing, though, is that the Chinese isn't gibberish, but it isn't just a normal warning label, either. It roughly translates to:

ELEVATOR WARNING IF YOU CAN READ this message, that means you understand Chinese. Congratulations! The reason we're doing this is because we want you to know how people in Third World countries feel when they read warnings on cigarette packages that they can't even understand. But we think the fact that you understand Chinese is really great.

ACTUALLY, WE'RE EVEN A LITTLE ENVIOUS. Elevator warning if you can read this message, that means you understand Chinese. Congratulations! The reason we're doing this is because we want you to know how people in Third World countries feel when they read warnings on cigarette packages that they can't even understand.

[Yes, it repeats.]

When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka the Mormon Church, aka LDS) shunned polygamy, some members left and formed the spin-off Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka FLDS), which continued to practice polygamy. A large number of them have been living on a large ranch in Texas.

Recently, Texas law enforcement raided the ranch and removed over 400 children. Here is an interview with three women from FLDS who want their children back:

YouTube link

Oh, and here's that former FLDS member who recorded a statement in that video talking about her escape [YouTube]. It's pretty intense. The summary of her autobiography is worth a read, too.

Roger Ebert finally has a blog, though I don't know how often he'll post it. Sadly, his first two posts are about the passing of his friend Arthur C. Clarke and how he can't attend his own film festival this year because he broke his hip. I'm definitely going to attend his film festival next year.

Someone got his hands on a copy of the old Infocom servers. Infocom is most famous for making the classic text adventure game Zork, but they also made a pretty good text adventure game based on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The sequel got mired in development hell, though, and never got very far. Now, you can read about the story behind the sequel's development as well as play the work-in-progress!

Not much more to say about this that I haven't already said in the title.

Break.com Link

I was watching the Duck and Cover video again, and a thought occurred to me: What a stupid monkey! Pay attention to what has happened after the monkey's dynamite has gone off.