TaoSpace

My movie setup

Oliver writes about his Torrent Setup for TV Series and asks how others do this. 

The answer (from my side) is: far more primitively. 

I do not have an always-on machine, sitting and downloading stuff. Instead things are downloaded manually to my MacPro. Oliver's use of Dropbox is a master-stroke and one I might just try and copy. It would be the first really practical use for this (pretty neat) service. 

On the MacPro I'm running Connect360, which published all movies to XBox, which is directly connected (by ethernet cable, since the XBox doesn't do wireless-N) to an Airport Extreme basestation. The MacPro connects wirelessly to another Airport Extreme, which is bridged to the first one. The convenience of sitting on the couch with a wireless controller and being able to turn on XBox with it remotely, browse for a movie and play it on my flat screen TV is amazing. 

I am running into issues though. Firstly the XBox is noisy as hell. That's fine when watching a Prison Break marathon, but not so much when watching a latest drama or near-silent movie like No Country for Old Men. Furthermore, having a full-HD TV means you really want to watch HD content, yet this is harder than it seems. Most HD content is encoded using MKV, which the XBox doesn't play. Converting that into h.264 is not straightforward and very time-consuming. You need to demux audio and video, encode each one and then recombine them. If the file is larger than 4Gb is needs to be split first, etc. 

Even after jumping through all these hoops the result is often a h.264 that stutters like crazy (not a function of the network). If Apple upgrades the hardware of the mini, I might buy one. Right now mini's aren't powerful enough to play MKV directly either. 

The solution I'm eying at the moment is Popcorn Hour. This includes torrent downloading and playing of MKVs. It should also be a lot more quiet than the XBox. Now if it could only be made to watch a Dropbox folder...

Cute...

A mesmerising video indeed: Meridian

Don't miss it.

Immortel

Hans found out that my favourite series of comics has been made into a film! Immortel is a film adapted from Bilal's Nikopol trilogy, which consists of La Foire aux Immortels, La Femme Piege and Froid équateur. The comics are excellent; In fact Bilal comics are just about the only comics I still read.

I haven't seen the film myself but the trailer looks promising enough. Apparently almost all the sets are totally digital. The DVD will be released towards the end of October, so I put in an order with Amazon.fr immediately.

Update: Someone should definately make a movie out of Partie de Chasse, which deals with the days before the fall of communism. With Poland (which is the location of the book) now being part of the EU and all sorts of European grants being given for cultural exchange etc. it shouldn't be that hard to get money together to do so...

I knew I shouldn't have...

Went to see Spider-Man 2 today, and I really don't understand where all the rave reviews come from.

The movie is slow and filled with boring melodrama that doesn't work at all. The "Peter is clumsy" routine get really old really fast but is still repeated ad-nauseam. The side-story about his powers failing is way to easily solved. The supposed inner conflict doesn't come across well at all, etc. etc. etc. OK, Spiderman is supposed to be a troubled character, but to spend by far the largest part of the film dwelling on it is unnecessary and just plain yawn-inducing.

At the same time the action scenes were excellent and imaginative, even though the physics were way off base for no explainable reason. A fusion "ball" that sucks in everything, except humans? And that right after it is pronounced to be "self sustaining" can be switched off by pulling the plug? While the second version of the same thing can't be?
And a guy that survives huge explosions and being thrown through walls etc. drowns in the slightest bit of water?

And what's the deal with the special effects? They were "OK" in the Spiderman I, although you could see that it was CG in some scenes. Here is was glaringly obvious from the very first scene Spidy appears in. The colors were off, the grain was off, and the whole thing would have looked more realistic if it was made in claymation ala Sinbad the sailor. For just a supposed blockbuster movie sequel, that I'm sure has had a staggering budget to use, this is just unnecessarily poor. Not that this in itself would have been a problem, but on top of everything else?

Still the film had its moments in both the action and the drama, but just sags bigtime in between them in a way that makes you want to shout "Get on with it!".

The main problem just seems to be that they wanted to put way to much stuff into this movie. As if they wanted to make 3 movies, only got budget for one but still ended up with 3 scripts and 3 directors all madly trying to get their story told.

After seeing The Eternal Sunshine...yesterday I knew I shouldn't have gone and seen this tonight...

In case you are wondering if my view is all distorted because of that: well, the girlfriend agreed and so did most of the audience, judging by what I heard in the lobby.

I really don't get it.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Just came back from the cinema. Wow! This is one of the best movies I have seen in ages. The acting (who knew Jim Carrey could actually Act!), the cinematography, the visual effects and the crazy cross-cutting. I've never seen anything remotely like it, unless you want to bring up Helzapoppin.

I can't say too much about the movie without giving away the plot, but if you like "complicated" movies, like Mulholland Drive for instance, you'll love this one.

Just go and see it, OK?

And now to bed.

Lost in translation

As usual I'm late in seeing good movies. This one has been running for a while now and I only saw it last weekend. It is however truly excellent!

I've always liked Bill Murray and felt that, given the right part, he could do far better then he did on his 80s comedies (Stripes, Ghost Busters, etc.). Who would have thought that waiting for this "right part" would take some 20-odd years? Playing a jetlagged, fading actor with a lousy marriage and a midlife crisis seems to come natural to him. Although the utterly aliens atmosphere of Tokyo helps to make his "lost-ness" feel even more real it really isn't needed all that much. It could have just as easily been Paris or Stockholm.

Next to him Scarlett Johansson plays a vibrant young woman crushed by a life she doesn't yet know what to do with. I've seen her play in "Girl with a Pearl Earring" recently but I have to say that where she was "good" in that one, in "Lost" she is excellent.

If you don't mind movies that don't feature loads of violence and explosions or juvenile humor you should go and see this one.