Recently

The Kite Runner - never read the book. The film is good. It reminded me of my "burador" days back when I was the same age as the kids in the film.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry - Adam Sandler in a comedy film about same-sex marriage. The last two Adam Sandler flicks I saw before this one were serious ones and amazingly he acts good in serious roles. Check out Reign Over Me and Punch Drunk Love for proofs.

Live Free or Die Hard - saw this one before inside a bus on a trip to the city. I thought the one I downloaded is the Unrated Edition with bloods and cursing. It's the same sanitized version.

I'm Not There - a artsy Bob Dylan flick where he was portrayed by six different actors including Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Kate Blanchett. Took me three installments before I finally finished watching it today. I pause the video a lot to check out real bob Dylan videos on youtube.

Viewing Subtitles on VLC Media Player

The last two divx flicks I watched - 10,000 B.C. and Lust, Caution - needs subtitles. The people in 10,000 B.C speaks good english but some speaking parts uses unknown languages. Lust, Caution, directed by Ang Lee is in Chinese. Torrents of foreign language films are often bundled with an .srt file which is the file for the subtitle. To be sure if a torrent comes with a subtitle, you should look at the file name. There's a code thing going on in the torrents world. If there's something like [sub] somewhere in the torrent's filename, then a subtitle is included, either on the film itself or as a separate .srt file. If there's no subtitle file included, never worry. there are lots of websites offering free subtitles for downloaded movies. Try here for some samples.

And since i'm a VLC fan, here's how to make the subs appear on the video:

1. Open VLC media player.
2. Open the divx movie.
3. Click on Settings....then Preferences.
4. Click on the small arrow button before the Video option to expand the video settings.
5. Click on Subtitles/OSD
6. Click on browse next to the Use subtitle file text box.
7. Browse and select the .srt file of the movie you are watching.
8. Click OK.

That's it. The subtitle should appear after a few seconds. And while you're into foreign language viewing mode, try these titles: The Orphanage, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Pan's Labyrinth. Happy viewing and reading!

Sine + Wikipedia = my new habit

I've just noticed that every time I finish watching a movie (mostly on an old laptop), I immediately check out the film's wikipedia page. Sometimes I even check the film on wikipedia first before watching it but mostly it's movie first, wikipedia second. I prefer the wiki than the imdb site. The reason why I do it is I want to know more about the story behind the film - how it was made, how it fared with the critics - and to learn more trivia. I'm a sucker for the-making-of thingy. Here are the last two flicks that I watched:

The Golden Compass. A fantasy film set in a parallel universe where people's soul in the form of animals (called "daemons") live outside their body. The battle of the two talking polar bears strikes me as funny. What i learned from wikipedia: This film almost bombed in the US and caused a restructuring in New Line Cinema's organizational chart.

This film lives in the same neighborhood as Narnia. I think this would be my last serving of films with talking animals for the year.

10,000 BC. It's like Apocalypto with mammoths, saber-tooth tigers and big chickens. What i learned from wikipedia: Two companies recreated prehistoric animals. To cut time (it was taking sixteen hours to render a single frame) 50% of the CGI models' fur was removed, as "it turned out half the fur looked the same" to the director.

Last Week's Movies

Alien Autopsy - a film starring Ant & Dec about the famous hoax "alien autopsy" film by Ray Santilli. The film flopped on release, taking back less than half of its budget.


Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (released in some countries as Harold & Kumar Get the Munchies) is a comedy film released in 2004. The plot revolves around the two title characters, who decide to go to the fast food restaurant White Castle after smoking marijuana, only to find themselves on a series of comical misadventures instead.

Horton Hears a Who! (also known as Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!) is a 2008 computer-generated imagery animated film based on the book of the same name and the fourth feature film from Blue Sky Studios. It was the first Dr. Seuss adaptation fully animated using CGI technology. This also marks the second Dr. Seuss adaptation to feature Jim Carrey in a lead role, the first being 2000's How The Grinch Stole Christmas! for Universal Pictures.

Watch this.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Watched the flick yesterday during lunch break. Entertaining. Kept me awake during my most dozy time of the day.

VLC Media Player

My media player of choice is VLC. I've been using it for more than two years now and it pretty much does the job of playing all sorts of media files that I feed it. If you have this app in your arsenal, Quicktime, and Real and Windows media players will have a permanent vacation in your computer. I've been recommending it to friends and they also have no complains.

VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. (wikipedia)

You can download the free software here.

And once again, VLC was put to good use this afternoon when I watched this long (2.5 hours) film directed by Sean Penn. Into the Wild is a beautiful depressing film based on the life of Christopher McCandless, who hiked to Alaska after finishing college, tried to smoke a moose and died in a magic bus by way of a toxic plant. I had my own Henry David Thoreau spell but i never tried getting away from society and living off nature's bounty like the main character in this flick. The film is great. It's been waiting in my backlog folder for more than a month before I finally able to see it. The soundtrack by Eddie Vedder is great. Quotable quote: "Happiness is real when shared". That should be the motto of all the filesharers in the internets.

A MacGyver Movie Coming Soon!

According to this Gizmodo post:

MacGyver creator (and real life inspiration) Lee David Zlotoff announced he has a big budget MacGyver movie in the planning stages.

Yeah! MacGyver was my all-time high school hero. His influence in my life is that every time I do some hacking of sorts, the MacGyver intro music automatically plays in my brain. And so the waiting clock starts...

Of course for me the period between waiting and being able to see a film is like this. I read the news online, wait until the movie is finished and shown theatrically, wait a couple of months before the DVD rip appears on mininova or pirate bay (this period includes trying very hard to avoid downloading the cam or screener version which are still pretty low quality), download the film (takes between 24 to 1 million hours here in our neck of the woods), and finally watching the movie.

And as much as I liked Richard Dean Anderson as the original MacGyver, I hope that his only appearance in this new incarnation would be just a cameo. I mean, Richard Dean Anderson must be pretty old by now.

By the way. MacGyver's first name is Angus.

At the Movies: Batman Begins, The Bank Job, The Orphanage

There's no movie house in this town. There used to be a couple of movie houses but in the early nineties, the last one closed shop and converted to a storage due to lack of audiences. Since then, we locals of this town could only watch movies in the big screen whenever we go to the nearest city. Otherwise, movie watching is pretty much a VHS, VCD or DVD affair. Dibidi rules here. 60 pesos for a 20-in-1 compilation. I used to be a dibidi collector. That was before the arrival of the poorly packaged 8-in-1s or 20-in-1s. Back then dibidis are packaged like the originals. Whenever I go to Manila, a half-day dibidi-hunting trip to Quiapo is always in the sked. I pretty much stock-up a couple of months worth of film binge.

Then I discovered bit torrent and the rest is history. My ISP hates bittorrent. Whenever i run my favorite client, net surfing speed crawls to zero bytes per second. So I usually do the downloading after my internet fix and leave the computer running overnight - with monitors closed for energy saving. I heard that in Japan, you could download an entire film in less than five minutes. I could only dream of that speed. Here in our town, a film a day is really fast. Mostly with my setup, the average is 3 to 4 nights for an 800 MB divx film. I'm not complaining. At that rate I could add one film in my to-watch folder per day. And I only have time to watch movies on weekends. Now I have a 20 film backlog.

This weekend I managed to watch three movies. All in divx encoded .avi files. I'm not in reviewing films I watch. I'll just post this stuff for records purposes. Just like what I used do in college where I have a ledger of every movie I watch and every book I read. I still the lists.

I think Batman Begins came out back in 2005. This is the first time I saw the movie. I thought it was another one of those bad Batman franchise that started with Michael Keaton and ended with Val Kilmer so I avoided it. This one reboots the superhero and I love it. Can't wait for The Dark Knight. The Bank Job is another one of those heist films with all the ingridients thrown in. There are just some added twists and more time was devoted to the aftermath of the heist. The best of the three films i watched this week is The Orphange, a Spanish horror, suspense, drama that is not unlike another fave spanish film Pan's Labyrinth. Gotta search more foreign language films on the Pirate Bay.