I saw a shitload of movies (thanks to me bro, Wency) over the weekend.

Alpha Dog: Man, this movie fucking sucked to the bone. Almost everyone in this movie is miscast. The only person not miscast in the film in my opinion was Bruce Willis. And man oh man, Justin Timberlake cannot act. I wanted to kill his character by the end of the movie. By the way, this film features one of the worst make up jobs ever. Just watch the end.

Harsh Times: If Justin Timberlake couldn't act his way out of a paper bag, Christian Bale knows how to embody the characters he plays. From Patrick Bateman (American Psycho) to Bruce Wayne (Batman Begins), I will always believe the character he plays. This movie was pretty good with great performances (the only perf that was less than stellar was Eva Longoria) but the ending was a little bit anti-climatic.

Curse of the Golden Flower: Out of the three epic martial arts films of Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and this one), Curse is obviously the weakest. Despite this, I still enjoyed this melodramatic visual feast. I loved Gong Li's magnificent bodice and performance but most of all I enjoyed Chow Yun-Fat's performance as the asshole villain of a father.

Venus: Peter O'Toole truly deserved his nomination for this film but it is nowhere close to the performance of Forest Whitakers in the Last King of Scotland. I found the film to be quite hilarious at times and at the end quite sad. It's quite sad what drinking and smoking can do to the body. Just look up Peter O'Toole during his Lawrence of Arabia days and now where he's only 2 years older than Alan Arkin but looks much older.



Smoking Aces: I watched this film a while ago but man, what an adrenaline rush of a film. And man oh man oh man, I doubt Alicia Keys ever looked hotter. There's this one shot of her and I went DAAAMMMNNNNN!

300 is a very good film but it's not great. I was definitely entertained by it but there are two flaws in the film that deter it from the greatness that all fanboys say it has.



First, I really hated the soundtrack. To me (again, this is my opinion), they tried to make it sound too Gladiator-ish and in the end instead of feeling like something awesome just happened, it felt that the film ended on a unsatisfying note. The soundtrack should have been scored by Trent Reznor. In the theatrical trailer, his NIN instrumental track from the Fragile album "Just Like You Imagined" fused beautifully with the images of 300. He would have given the film a much different feel from other swords and sandals type films like Troy and Alexander.



Second, I really hated the final speech given by Dilios (David Wenham) to the Spartans. What could have ended brilliantly with the one spectacular silhouette shot of King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) with his arms raised ends in one of the stupidest speeches that goes on F-O-R-E-V-E-R.



Third, the sound can be horrible at times. Sometimes it sounds great but sometimes it sounds as if the actors were really in that soundstage that they shot in. However, I did like the low timbre they gave to Xerxes's voice because Rodrigo Santoro's voice isn't that powerful enough to impress anybody that he really is a God-king.



Despite these flaws, the film's visuals are fan-fucking-tastic. Your eyes will bleed at so many beautiful, gory, and violent images onscreen. The acting is quite good at times with Lena Headey as Gorgo as the standout of the cast. Don't expect this film to be the masterpiece that it is and you'll have a great time. Overall, it is extremely entertaining, gorgeously filmed, and decently acted piece of filmmaking.

Why Mozilla Firefox Sometimes Sucks, Major, and Mega Millions.

Firefox can have its benefits. It's association with FlashGet is great, the themes are pretty cool, and the extensions sometimes save you a lot of time. But Firefox can also backfire on you. Firefox really backfired on me today. Here's the story: I look over my advising guide almost day on Firefox. My classmates tell me that I don't need Recording I because I'm an Audio for Visual major. But yet on my advising guide, it says that I need it. I try Internet Explorer for once on the advising guide and lo and behold, I can change my advising guide to whatever major I want. I mind blew the moment I found this out because I realized where the problem was. Firefox wasn't allowing me to change the major but IE did. Because my Audio for Visual was for film, Recording I is required (or that's what they say). I felt so stupid afterwards because I kept on referring to the advising guide when the main problem was Firefox.

I also realized that whenever I use Firefox, I get a lot of spyware. Whenever I use IE, I barely get any spyware. Before it used to be the other way around.

Tomorrow, I'm talking to John Murray (President of the Audio for Visual Media section) and hopefully I don't need extra classes to graduate. Hopefully, I'll need less than 8 classes to graduate. Right now, I need 8 more classes to graduate after this semester (granted I pass every class this semester).

I was also pretty bummed this morning that two people won at the Mega Millions lottery with $370 million on the line. I always had hope that I would win but it looks like some bitch in Forest Park (Tita Perla, to be exact) keeps on praying that we won't win. That's something I won't understand, why she wants everybody to suffer. She always has to be a killjoy in everyone's lives. She prays that no one in the Tayag family won't win the lottery because she says that money is evil. That's another thing that confuses me, if she thinks that money is evil why the fuck does she have so much of it? The only one who had won the lottery was my Tito Efren (he won it twice) but he's so goddamn greedy he never told anyone in the family that he won it. The only way people knew he won was that he confessed while he was drunk.

ABC usually overhypes their Lost episodes and they usually end up being about fucking nothing. NBC on the other hand uses the visuals to preview the next episode and I did not expect Heroes this week to be as good as last week's amazing episode. But something happened, this week's episode blew away last week's episode. Every subplot was perfect, almost every minute was suspenseful and awesome. Here's one screenshot from this week Heroes:



EDIT: Just found out that this is the last Heroes episode until six weeks from now. FUCK!!!!!!!

Zodiac is meticulous, asphyxiating, thrilling, but most of all BRILLIANT. This Fincher magnum opus may be the best film or one of the best films I will see all year. The film does require a lot of attention AND patience. It's too bad the people around me thought it "SUCKED" or "THAT'S THREE HOURS OF MY LIFE I'LL NEVER GET BACK!" It is still not as perfect as Fincher's previous serial killer masterpiece, Se7en, but it is still a near-perfect film (seriously, can anyone write a better ending to Se7en?). Robert Downey, Jr. and Jake Gyllenhall both give great performances but the one performance that stood out for me was Mark Ruffalo in the role of David Toschi. I also found the misc-en-scene of food being throughout the film being quite amusing. Some people may find the ending too anti-climatic but I found it to be perfect. Major points go to cinematographer Harris Savides and his use of the awesome Thomson Viper HD hard drive camera. I would really have wished to see this film in a digitally projected theatre.

The Weather, Vinyl, Jesus Camp, and Some Other Shit

I really hate the weather over here in Lombard. It's either fucking cold or fucking snowing. I really, really hate the fucking snow. I hate it. Most of all, I hate shoveling it. Because of my perfectionist dad, even though the snow on the ground is only one inch we still have to shovel it. This morning my dad and I were about to leave to go to the train station and he said that we had to shovel it before it turned to ice. Of course, I swore in my mind and just did what he wanted to do. After bringing him to the train station it began to snow hard again. After getting in the house, I went back to sleep again thinking that I'd have to shovel it later. When I went to get the mail, all the fucking snow on the driveway had been melted by the weather. It's snowing again right now and I fucking hate it. It's already March and it's still fucking snowing. The fucking Evangelicals say that global warming is just something scientists just created. Well, fuck any Evangelical who says that because it is happening NOW. The icecaps are melting, hot is becoming cold, babies are fucking trees, it's global warming bitch!

This now blends nicely into my next subject, the documentary Jesus Camp. You see, it is a great fucking doc. Not only did me make me sad, it made me fucking furious. To see all these children missing out the best years of their life to some fucking lesbo who says that anyone who reads Harry Potter should be burned is just so fucking sad. I found one scene really hilarious with kids at a table talking about Harry Potter and how he's such a bad influence because he's a warlock. All of a sudden, one kid says that his mom doesn't let him watch Harry Potter but when he goes to his dad's he watches them. The kid even seems happy that he watches Harry Potter. The reaction on the other kid's faces was effing priceless. You knew that kid never saw the light of day again after that statement. One scene in particular really threw me for a loop because one kid named Levy was preaching and all the shit that came out of his mouth was actually the same sentence over and over only with different words. Another interesting scene is seeing Ted Haggard talking about how gay people are wrong, gay this and gay that, how gay is against God. The fucker turned out to be a homosexual who later said after his gay scandal that God removed all his homosexual tendencies. Uh, what? Once gay you're gay forever, bro.

On a lighter note, I downloaded the vinyl rip of the Red Hot Chili Pepper's Stadium Arcadium and it is fucking amazing. The sound is so effing clear without any clipping. It has recently been playing on my playlist for the past five days and I really really love the sound. Every album should be mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray. I wished that the Bloc Party album was mastered like this. It really would have sounded amazing. And when I mean amazing, I mean AMAZING. Mozzie, once you get the money get your albums mastered by Hoffman and Gray, they're fucking fucking shit!

School has been pretty easy for me before. Every semester was pretty nice with great teachers but now, it's not that hard but it's not that easy either. You see, I'm afraid of failure, I'm scared of being the one with the worst project, worst assignment, or worst test score. And in the class of Sound Film Production, I think I may have the worst edit of the class. During mixing yesterday when I was listening to the other classmates' mixes I was floored. One classmate said that it took him five to six hours to record sounds for his edit. I wondered why it took so long but after listening to his mix, my jaw dropped. My mix had only 4 tracks, his had 16. At one point of my mix, there's only ambience (environmental noise like air) and no sound effects because I didn't record that much. I'm scared what the class thinks of my edit because it's so poor compared to theirs.

This brings me to my next note, will I be able to graduate in May of 2008? My advisor told me to just use the advising guide to choose classes. Looks like she was wrong because I'm missing so many required classes it's crazy. Everyone in my Sound Film Production has been taking other classes like Aesthetics of Motion Picture Soundtracks

This only makes me wonder one thing after Tito Luis asked me earlier when I was eating dinner.

Will I be able to return to the Philippines this Christmas?

I hate to say this but today's Lost must have been one of the its worst episodes EVER. Hell, it's one of the worst episodes on television, period.