Three movie reviews for your reading pleasure...
- The Animal (2001) - Average movie with a nice performance by Rob Schneider in the lead. He plays Marvin Mange, a cop who is caught in a horrible car crash, and is later "revived" by a nutty doctor who puts animal parts in him. As a result, Marvin gets new "abilities" - like sniffing out heroin in a guy's butt, and other things... with some amusing side-effects. Colleen Haskell (from Survivor) stars as an animal rights activist who is attracted by Marvin's weirdness. Overall, this was a pretty good movie. I read a few reviews of this at various websites, some people thought it was extremely hilarious, some said it was just plain bad. I found it amusing, and I think it's worth a look. My favourite comedy movies are still Hot Shots! (both parts) and Dumb and Dumber, though. Written by Tom Brady and Rob Schneider, directed by Luke Greenfield.
- Life is Beautiful (1997) - Italian movie from writer/director/star Roberto Benigni, that won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. This version I saw was dubbed in English, released by Miramax Pictures. The movie is set during the time of World War II. Benigni plays a Jewish man called Guido, who is always cheerful and happy - this impresses Dora (Benigni's real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi) and they soon get married and have a son, Joshua. One day, they are captured and taken to a concentration camp. Dora is separated from her husband and son. The major part of the movie is set in the concentration camp, where in spite of the horrible things going on around him, Guido keeps his son happy, pretending that the whole thing is a game. It's very touching, how he shields the very young and innocent boy, from all the horrors in that place, and sees beauty in life inspite of that. Very nicely made and acted.
- Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) - An AWESOME movie from writer/director Guy Ritchie. Four friends, Eddie, Bacon, Tom and Soap - put together a hundred thousand pounds, and Eddie gambles with this sum of money in a card game with Porn King Harry Lonsdale, also called "Hatchet" Harry (because of his tendency to quickly do away with people who don't pay their debts to him). Unfortunately, Eddie loses - and the four friends end up with just a week to somehow get an extremely large sum of money. Otherwise, Barry "The Baptist" (the person who ensures that Harry's business runs smoothly) will start cutting off their fingers one by one. Now the clever situations in this movie start when Eddie overhears his neighbour, Dog, and his gang plotting to steal drugs and money from some chemists. The four friends plan to wait for the neighbours to come back from the robbery... and then, rob them!! What happens after that is pure chaos! I really admired the way the numerous plot threads and characters were set up, and how everything came together properly at the end. This is an absolute must-see movie, it's hilarious, it's very well acted, written and filmed, and it's very fast-moving. Great music too.
I'm talking about my NIIT Semester C Module Test I, in Visual Basic, which was at 7:30 PM today. It's the one I got 66% in. People told me they were surprised when they heard that, I was surprised too! Oh well, I'm not one to brood over things like this, it IS disappointing, but if at all there's anyone/anything at fault it's got to be me. Like I said, that could have gone better...
Too bad they didn't let ME design the testing software... I'd have put in a CHEAT CODE like in my K-Test Testing Engine. (what, you didn't find it? Don't worry, cheating doesn't help) :)
Anyway, on to other things, my cousin Dipak left for Chennai today evening after a few days' stay here. We had a lot of fun. Very busy these last few days. Lots of stuff downloaded. 24th was a holiday from college because our juniors were having a Freshers' Party. And 25th was Christmas. I watched two movies, on 23 Dec., we all went to see The Animal, and on Christmas Day, STAR Movies showed Life is Beautiful. Reviews follow. And I even saw Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels yet again... what a fantastic movie.
Among other things, thanks to everyone who sent Christmas wishes, thanks Pablo for his card. This comes a little late, but Tobias updated Fehler 404 with a very nice article (which he translated from a newspaper). You should read it. I also got a couple of, shall we say - gifts - in the form of EXEs from Vivian Jason (who as I said before likes playing pranks) - one was HyperExe, which disabled Ctrl+Alt+Del and then proceeded to shut down the computer after about 10 minutes! The most recent one is X-Mas Gift.exe, which I executed about an hour back. It hasn't done anything so far, which is suspicious...
I also got three beautiful pieces of music in the form of MOD and XM files recently. One is a tune called Eufrat, which I pulled out from Espi's very small Doom II level called tolwatt.wad which he released some time back. Then there was a fast techno/metal song called Kharismatron, which was used in a recently-released Deathmatch level for Doom II called DM Morpheus Wannabe (music originally from Unreal Tournament). (Thank you, Csabo, for XWE!!) And finally, I downloaded Aardappel's game engine called Cube, and that had a terrific techno song called Cubez0r.
And what else? Yes, on 25th, my father bought me a book on PHP - this is called PHP: Fast & Easy Web Development by Julie C. Meloni. I can now display a directory listing with PHP! I was also trying to send an email through a PHP page, but it didn't work. Anyway now all I have to do is to connect PHP and MySQL together and interesting things will happen.
Finally, it's back to college tomorrow - 23rd was Sunday, 24th and 25th were holidays, I didn't go yesterday and today, so you might say I almost got away with an actual Christmas vacation!
If this update sounded a bit different from my normal style of writing, it's probably because of that 66% still in my mind. Guess I have to "release the resources" it occupies.
Whew! It was a relief when the IEEE Technical Paper Contest held at our college (21st and 22nd) came to an end! After two days of hectic work, everything went off well, and the students who came to our college to present papers said the whole event was very well organised. For that, the credit must mainly go to Nirish, my senior, who was in charge of almost everything. Help came from other IEEE members, from IV, III, II and I Year students.
So what did I do? Well, not that much, during the actual events, I was in the Computer Science Room, just making sure that everything went smoothly, basically conducting the seminars in that room and announcing the papers to be presented. And at the end I also gave a short report on the entire proceedings of the two days. So I didn't have time to do much else, and yesterday I watched most of Bloodfist II. Basically that was because the computer wasn't there - it was under servicing (there was lots of dust in the cabinet). Everytime the computer was switched on, for the past few months, it would make a noise - as if someone was grinding up the hard disk! Anyway, it came back today.
...and we also got a new CD WRITER! (ACER CD-RW 16 x 10 x 40). Cool!
My cousin Dipak has come to visit us from Chennai. He came this morning. Varun finished his half-yearly exams today and he's done well. Tomorrow we're all going to go to see The Animal (starring Rob Schneider).
Today's two episodes of Dragonball Z were terrific - they were filled with fights and not much else, but what fights! Goku is fighting the Saiyan Warrior Vegeta, and he used the Kayoken attack (in different forms). Goku seemed like a match for the alien - and he actually succeded in beating him up pretty badly! But then something happened - Vegeta had a nasty trick up his sleeve. He used a weapon (which was supposed to have been invented by Goku/Khakarot's father) that allowed him to create artificial moonlight - because of which he could transform into a huge ape! Goku tried using the spirit bomb against it, but at the last moment the ape sent a powerful blast of energy that dropped Goku to the ground. Sapped of all his strength, Goku seemed doomed to be crushed by the ape. But then Gohan and Krillin came back and decided to help out Goku (unlike the short, fat guy Yajirobi). But every second counts now... we'll see what happens in the next episode.
And oh yes, Fehler 404 was updated again, this time by Pablo, who wishes us all a Merry Christmas in style :). Also, I uploaded Ganeshan's downloads page properly, so you can go to his site and see all his recent updates.
After I came home yesterday, I watched the Clint Eastwood video by Gorillaz on Cartoon Network. Then on STAR Movies at 11:45 PM they were showing The Exorcist III, and I watched it. Nice, scary movie! Review follows...
- The Exorcist III: Legion a.k.a. William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist III (1990) - Now I saw the first movie a very long time back. I haven't seen Part II, so if anything important related to this movie happened in it, I didn't see it. Anyway, Part III was an enjoyable movie, and let me tell you it IS scary. I turned off all the lights when I was watching and somewhere in the middle I was forced to put on a dim bulb :).
The movie stars George C. Scott as investigator Bill Kinderman. Some particularly gruesome killings have taken place. The strange thing is that the murderer, whoever he is, appears to be following the EXACT modus operandi of The Gemini Killer, a serial murderer who was executed fifteen years ago! As Bill tries to solve the mystery, some nasty stuff happens - for example, Bill's preacher friend, Father Dyer, is killed and beheaded with not a drop of blood spilled (because someone literally sucked out all the blood in his body into small jars!). And then, Bill meets Patient X.
Patient X is one of the inmates in the hospital's "violent ward". Curiously, he has the exact same face as that of Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), the priest who was responsible for the exorcism in the first movie. But this is not an ordinary human - Father Karras' body is possessed with the soul of The Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif in a chilling performance). You see, the devil wasn't too pleased when the exorcism happened fifteen years ago - and The Gemini was executed at that same time when Father Karras committed suicide. The devil was apparently impressed with The Gemini Killer's work and so he allowed him to possess the body of Father Karras! And he's continuing his killings even when he's locked in a cell. Finally, Bill and Father Morning (Nicol Williamson) who appears at the end of the movie, must save Father Karras' tormented soul.
Leonard Maltin's review for this movie said that it showed strong evidence of post-production tampering, which, well, may be true since I thought Father Morning's character was suddenly introduced without proper development. Anyway, despite it's flaws, this movie, which was written and directed by William Peter Blatty, based on his own novel Legion, is a very effective, chilling horror movie, that I was absorbed with for it's entire 110 minutes or so running time.
There is something very interesting in Fehler 404's recent update. Tobias has written quite a lengthy article about the Euro Currency that he will be using from this New Year onwards! It makes very good reading for those of us in other countries, especially since Toby has scanned all the coins and posted a picture on the site. You can almost feel the coins :).
Thanks to Damian Lee for some very useful information he sent recently in an email - I'd asked him how to convert images down to the Doom Palette and he wrote a detailed explanation on how to do it with Paint Shop Pro.
The 9th Gate site was also updated by Tobias - there's latest information there about the current status of the project. And I've resumed work on my E4M3, I'll also be submitting my unreleased Doom level called karthik2 to Doom Center's Bigdog for the Unreleasables feature that he recently started.
Lots of good movies on STAR Movies in the near future - Snake Eyes (in January), Enemy of the State (New Year's Eve Special), The Road to El Dorado (tomorrow), Life is Beautiful (Christmas Special).
As usual, here is the recent news -
- Sat, 15 Dec - I watched Dragonball Z - great episode as usual. Piccolo is sent to "the next dimension" by Nappa. Finally Goku arrived and beat up Nappa nicely - because he's stronger than the Saiyan warrior now! The little guy, Vegeta, sent his partner to the next dimension as well, and Goku decided that they would go off somewhere where no one would get hurt, to fight it out. Krillin and Gohan decided to return home. The battle began between Vegeta and Goku, and Vegeta's size was obviously deceptive - he was actually a match for Goku! To be continued next Saturday, of course.
- Sun/Mon, 16/17 Dec - Varun is busy with Half-Yearly Exams. On Monday I updated Karthik's Doom Pages with FIVE new Winamp skins - go there and take a look. These are obviously Doom-based ones. Also, I went to http://www.1337.org.uk and found out all about 1337-speak, and got a very funny All Your Base Are Belong To Us Flash Movie.
- Tue, 18 Dec - Didn't go to college, because I was supposed to start studying for the NIIT Module Test I in VB, which was supposed to be on 20th. It was postponed however, because on 18th, 20th and 22nd we have Personality Development classes (PEM sessions). So I decided to go to college on 19th. Anyway, something important happened on 18th. I set up Apache HTTP Server and used PHP for the first time!! All I can do now is just print out variables on the HTML page, but I only spent maybe half an hour on the whole thing, so it is a start. I'm pretty proud of this, so when I start the server and type in 127.0.0.1 in the Address Bar in a browser, it opens the index.php page from the directory I set up as the Document Root. Now I've also got the MySQL Server up and running, so I've got to figure out how to connect these three components together, and I'll have a database driven website! This is all now only on the local machine - if I am to use it on the web, I'm going to need a host that gives me freedom to use all this stuff!
- Wed, 19 Dec - Hectic day. I came home from college only at 10 PM!! I began my III Year II Semester at college - this time we have the following subjects - Computer Graphics, Computer Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Database Management Systems, Language Processors and Management Science. From the afternoon onwards, I was busy helping out the other IEEE members in organising things for the Contest that will be held on 21st and 22nd. The other members did a lot more work than me, I think, but until 5 PM Ganeshan and myself went around collecting some documents that we needed to send for printing in the magazine. After that I went with Nirish (my senior, one of the organisers of the whole event - he has been working so hard for many days on this!!) to the place where they were printing the magazines to look over things. Nagesh, Srikanth also joined later and after a long time there, I came home at 10 PM. I was very tired but I watched The Exorcist III on STAR Movies until 2 AM. :)
- Thu, 20 Dec - First Language Processors Practicals Class today - I wrote a C program to convert an expression into separate tokens. For example, you could enter a string like var1 = (b + c); and it would print out id assign ob id add id cb semi - where id means identifier, ob and cb are the open and close brackets. Basically, this is the first step that a compiler does when it's translating a program - it will try to figure out what each part of a statement is - whether it's a variable, an operator, etc. Interesting. Today I didn't go to NIIT class because it was late by the time I got ready to go :). Tomorrow is the IEEE Technical Paper Meet at our college and I'm in a few of the organising committees - Magazine committee, Publicity committee, and Technical Events Committee :). Today I listened to Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz (listening actually, as I type this). This is a great song and I've seen the video on Cartoon Network a couple of times (I did yesterday before I saw The Exorcist III). All the good stuff comes at night - 11 PM to 1 AM in their Night Shift, where they show content for more mature viewers.
You can scroll up this page to read some more stuff and a review of The Exorcist III.
First, the important news. This morning, I got the finalised list of all the technical papers selected for presentation at the contest that's going to be held on 21st and 22nd in our college. As soon as Nirish sent it to me I updated the Contest Info Page, but Tripod wouldn't let me FTP to upload it! Finally at around 1 PM I was able to connect and I've uploaded the list.
Go to the IEEE Contest Info Page to get the latest information regarding the schedules, etc. The list contains the dates and timings for all the seminars. I have been getting lots of calls since this morning, so hopefully the page will provide all the necessary information. Out-station students should send an email to tell the organisers about when and where they will be arriving so that they can be received by our college students.
I also went back to the Eiffel 65 Fan Site I was talking about earlier. I got the lyrics to the songs on the album Europop and some great drawings of the group members (by Taryn Sanders). I also read some interesting stuff about the group itself (singer Jeffrey Jey, composers Maurizio Lobina and Gabry Ponte).
There is one MIDI file of Eiffel65's Blue (Da Ba Dee) on this site, I even used it as background music on this page (that was long ago, when I did have music in the background). Click the link to the song to listen to it. Speaking of MIDIs, yesterday I got three more great MIDIs of Robert Miles songs. And yesterday I read Jim McDougald (Rellik)'s Doom Movie Screenplay - which I think is available at Rick Clark's Site. This was a pretty cool script with lots of action. If there ever IS a Doom movie, then I'd expect it to be an action-horror movie with LOTS of violence and gore! Now I really MUST update Karthik's Doom Pages today and when I do, I'm going to upload FIVE of my Winamp Skins there.
I finished my exams yesterday, but was too tired to update - so here it is now -
- Sat, 8 Dec - Went to NIIT, watched some of the late-night shows on Cartoon Network's Night Shift. After that, me and Vivian Jason tried out an experiment - he set up an FTP server on his computer - and I connected to it and transferred files! This was made easier thanks to Yahoo! Messenger, because he could tell me his IP address through that. At NIIT, I also got to see an old archived copy of my Buffy website (which no longer exists) at the Internet Archive. Conicidentally, the page I saw was from 8 December 1999!
- Sun, 9 Dec - Watched previous day's episode of Dragonball Z. As usual, plenty of action! It started off with Piccolo and Krillin using their tri-form technique to fight the alien Nappa - which proves to be of no use. The three-eyed Tien (whose hand was cut off by Nappa in the previous episode) gathered all his strength for a powerful energy blast - which didn't work either, against the invincible alien! Vegeta and Nappa went for a three hour break, and during that time Nappa had a bit of fun decimating an entire naval fleet! Seems the Earth's Special Forces are no match for the Saiyans... but wait! Goku's finally arrived - and he's extremely powerful after his training. Today's episode should be interesting, to say the least. Thanks to Anne Petersen of A Fan's Mark Dacascos Page for signing my Guestbook. Jai also sent a small text editor he had written in VB (the mail he sent was written with his own software!), unfortunately I couldn't get it to work because I didn't have some required .dlls and .ocxs. Jai had sent a screensaver before, and going by what he told me, I tried renaming an .exe to .scr and was surprised to see it work as a screensaver! Doesn't work with DOS .exe files (you probably already guessed that I'd have tried doom.exe first), but works with Windows EXEs. In the previous night's chat session, Vivek sent me a ZIP file, and since he likes to play pranks I was hesitant to execute the EXE.
karthik_abhiram: What's in the file you sent?
karthik_abhiram: Winchen.exe
vivekcog: a virus :)
karthik_abhiram: I don't like surprises
karthik_abhiram: Tell me what it does
vivekcog: it takes control of the ram manager cum scheduler
karthik_abhiram: "takes control" and does what?
vivekcog: sends the ram tables haywire
vivekcog: messes up the way windows controls the ram
karthik_abhiram: And?
vivekcog: actually decieves it into thinkin' that its run outta memoryIt turned out to be a Windows Chess Program, a nice one too (RAM tables haywire, eh?). He is very very good at Chess, but I am not - I guess even computers get puzzled at the insanity of my moves!
- Mon, 10 Dec - Wasn't actually in a mood to study but I did read through a bit of Operations Research. And the last two units of that (Inventory Models, Waiting Lines) are full of formulae that I just couldn't memorize, so I stopped reading after some time. Anyway, I also did a bit of reading for Prog. Languages. Thanks to Pablo Dictter for signing my guestbook. He appreciated my comments on his MP3s - well, I wouldn't have said they were good if I didn't really like them! I asked Pablo about linking to his MP3s Page and he said he didn't have a problem with that, so here is the URL - Pablo's MP3s Page. Listen to his songs. I really like them. Tobias updated Fehler 404 with a serious article this time. That night I downloaded about 30 MB worth of stuff! First, I got Games Factory Shareware from Clickteam.com (10.8 MB). Then, I went to Apache.org and got myself the 1.8 MB Apache HTTP Server for Windows in .msi format. I got PHP 4.0.6 (4.8 MB) from PHP.net. And finally, I downloaded MySQL for Windows (12 MB - in 52 minutes!) from MySQL.com, and the PHP documentation in .bz2 format (792 KB). The purpose of all this? Well, PHP seems really nice and all the three Doom news sites use PHP/MySQL so I want to learn it too. Eventually, if I get my own server, I'm going to make my site completely database driven.
- Tue/Wed/Thu, 11/12/13 Dec - Spent most of Tuesday studying for PPL (Priniciples of Programming Lanuages) exam. I didn't go to NIIT that day. On Wednesday, I did well in the exam and that made me happy. After I came home I watched a little bit of Ring of Fire II which was on STAR Movies (3:15 PM). This is a great, fun movie. I also played Mike Reed's Villa of Pain fully in Ultraviolence skill in ZDoom (something I couldn't do before). Then, I got a MIDI file of Eiffel 65's "My Console" from this Eiffel 65 Fan Site. On 13th, I was studying for my last exam - Operations Research. At night, STAR Movies was showing John Woo's fantastic Face/Off. Watched a few minutes of that (the scene in the church at the end). I finished studying earlier than usual - by 1 AM.
- Fri, 14 Dec - Last exam! Unfortunately I didn't do as well as I'd hoped in this one... and I never like to make estimates on how many marks I'm likely to get. Given the unpredictability of that, I can say I'll score anywhere between 60% - 75% on that exam. A bit disappointing. After I came home I watched the last hour of Fight Club (I recorded it when they showed it on STAR Movies and watched the first hour some days back). I really like this movie. Watching it a second time is a whole new experience (because of the twist at the end). Thanks to Ravi Shrikanth for his comments in my Guestbook. Felt very tired after coming home, had somewhat of a headache too, but I slept it off. Relaxed the rest of the day.
For today's news see the update just above this one. Some important information is there, regarding the IEEE Technical Paper Presentation Contest in our college.
I re-uploaded the Drive Desktop Theme without the offending screensaver file. So now there's absolutely no problem if you download it.
Fehler 404 was updated again by Tobias. This time there's a nice new Flash logo - based on the earlier one, but with a little bit of animation now. Look at the logo. Look closely... your eyelids are getting heavy... heavy...
Tobias also signed my Guestbook. Thanks a lot for those nice comments, Tobias, and I hope to see your own personal page back up soon. I heard two more Pablo Dictter MP3s. One is a recent song called Gloterus Manarus Tuterus - a very weird song - and an older one of his called Nestrarra, which I really, really liked. I have six songs of his now - The End, Nestrarra, One Night, Gloterus Manarus Tuterus, Getting High, and Son of a Funk.
I watched Lake Placid last night, a nice movie. Before that, on STAR Movies, they were showing Gen-Y Cops - which seemed very good. I saw the last half-hour of that. And I cleared my Inbox yesterday, deleted 111 mails (4.6 MB) after copying them into HTML files.
I uploaded one of my old desktop themes on the Downloads Page - this is a theme I made way back in 1999. Based on the Mark Dacascos movie Drive (directed by Steve Wang). This along with some of my other (old) themes is supposedly there on my desktop themes site, but I've got a few mails from people who have said the files aren't accessible! They ARE there, I don't know what the problem is. Anyway, I don't want to upload all that stuff on this site due to space constraints (I'm using almost half of my allotted 50 MB space on Tripod). But the Drive Theme is I think the ONLY one of it's kind on the net, so I've uploaded it. The package contains 4 themes in one. And it's a pretty cool theme though it's not of the highest quality.
This theme package contains a screensaver called melt.scr (which melts your screen down) - I got this from somewhere and I included it here. It never gave any problems before, but all of a sudden, my virus scanner identifies it as a dangerous file! If yours does, don't get alarmed, it's not a virus, just delete the file.
Four exams over, two more to go. In the mean time, while I write those, you can read the latest news -
- Sat, 1 Dec - Two great Dragonball Z episodes, this time, thankfully, in English. These two were full of action... in the first episode, the Special Forces fight against the little green Saiba Men. And later, in the second episode, it was a fight against the Saiyan Warrior Nappa - who seems almost indestructible. Many members of the Special Forces died - leaving only Piccolo, Gohan and Krillin to defend the Earth. Goku is on his way to Earth still. Next episode promises more action. Pablo Dictter uploaded some more of his MP3s. I heard these two - Son of a Funk - a short and weird song, and One Night, which was very good.
- Sun/Mon, 2/3 Dec - On Sunday, I spent most of the day studying for my Data Communications exam. The exam on Monday went very well. Monday was also Opulent's birthday. I downloaded Ganeshan's game called Terra Destroyer. He had actually uploaded it to his site the last time he updated, but his downloads page didn't get uploaded properly (heh). The URL is this, and it's a 672 KB download. Pretty cool game, a little buggy though. I watched Ace Ventura: Pet Detective at night on STAR Movies - well, what to say about this? I've seen it so many times and I really like the movie!
- Tue/Wed, 4/5 Dec - Tuesday was a holiday, studied for Theory of Computation exam and didn't go to NIIT. The exam went well on Wednesday. Jai sent a small screensaver he had made in VB. Tobias sent some very nice looking shots of E4M2 of The 9th Gate. And at night on AXN Action TV, I saw Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels again. Excellent movie.
- Thu/Fri, 6/7 Dec - Spent most of the day studying for System Programming exam. Pablo made a new MP3. And I forgot to mention last time about a number of updates at Fehler 404. Today's exam also went well.
I've got a few days time before the next two exams. Principles of Programming Languages is on 12th and Operations Research is on 14th. Lake Placid is on STAR Movies tonight at 9:30 PM.
Here are two reviews for the two movies I saw yesterday (technically, one of them was today)...
- Fight Club (1999) - Directed by David Fincher. I liked every movie that this director has made (Alien 3, Seven, and The Game) and so I've wanted to watch this one for a very long time. And I wasn't disappointed with this at all. Edward Norton narrates the story of his character (who doesn't have a name in the movie!) - a man who is so frustrated with life that he has been unable to sleep for months. He attends support groups for people who have various diseases because it's only here that people actually listen instead of "waiting for their turn to speak". And this allows him to sleep well - until a woman named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter), starts showing up at these meetings too, ruining everything for him. Anyway, the narrator goes on a business trip and meets a soap salesman called Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on the plane. When the narrator returns home, he finds all his possessions destroyed because of an explosion in his apartment. Having nowhere to go, he calls Tyler.
Tyler meets the narrator at a bar and agrees to let him stay at his place. When they come out from the bar, Tyler asks the narrator to hit him - and they proceed to have a fight. And this is how "Fight Club" starts. "Fight Club" is a place for people with meaningless lives to fight - since, as the narrator says, "after fighting, everything else in your life has the volume turned down".
Soon, "Fight Club" becomes an underground phenomenon - clubs start forming in almost every city! But later on, things start getting a bit out of control. Tyler apparently is building an army to cause total anarchy! Unfortunately, I have to cut my review short here, because what happens after this is something that I wouldn't want to spoil. The twist is a big surprise!
Fight Club's screenplay was written by Jim Uhls, based on the novel by Chuck Palanhiuk. It's got excellent acting by all three stars, and nice music and photography (moody colours). It's extremely violent and definitely not a movie suitable for everyone. But it's very very good - well worth it's 139 minute running time (which by the way was shortened to about 130 on STAR Movies).
- Kickboxer 3: The Art of War (1992) - Sasha Mitchell stars as an American Kickboxing Champion David Sloan, who comes to Rio de Janeiro along with his mentor, Xian (Dennis Chan) to take part in a tournament. While having lunch, a young boy Marcos and his sister, Isabella, try to steal their camera. Sloan and Xian soon decide to take care of the homeless children. A rich man, Lane, kidnaps Isabella because he plans to sell the girl for a lot of money. It's up to Sloan, Xian and Marcos to resuce her. Entertaining movie. Directed by Rick King.
My final exams for III Year I Semester have started... All the best to my friends for their exams. Here's the news since the last update...
- Tue, 27 Nov - Ganeshan updated his site with a review of Unreal Tournament. I was supposed to show my Visual Basic project at NIIT. But I'd used a Microsoft Access 2000 database for it and that requires the Microsoft Jet 4.0 OLE DB drivers. They weren't installed at that time at NIIT so it didn't work. So I'll show it at a later time. Tobias sent his Duke Nukem 3D episode called Varying Killgrounds. There were 8 levels in this, and all of them were excellent. These levels were made separately, but then Tobias decided they would play better as a whole episode. And they do. I played through the whole thing and after that I caught the 2000th hit at Kalpana's World (1:38 AM on 28 Nov).
- Wed/Thu, 28/29 Nov - On Wednesday I went along with Varun for an exhibition at his school, and later I started studying for 30th's exam. Finished two units that day. Another two I finished on Thursday before I went to NIIT and after I came back home I had to only read about a couple of ICs - 8259 Interrupt Controller and 8257/8237 DMA Controller. I did, and that wrapped up my studying for next day's Interfacing with Microprocessors Exam.
- Fri, 30 Nov - First exam. Despite a little glitch in the morning (seating hadn't been allocated for 5 of us in any room) the exam went well. There were two questions in the paper with just Assembly Language Programs - very simple ones so I did those first. Then after answering another question well I went on to the one about 8251 USART. This one I had to cut short a bit because time was running out. Finally I had only about 5 minutes to answer the last question, which I did, but very quickly - and the answer was very short. Anyway, I was happy it went well. I also saw two movies at night, at 9:30 PM on STAR Movies, the one I was waiting to see for a long time, Fight Club, and the movie after that, Kickboxer 3: The Art of War. Look for reviews on this page.
Next exam is on 3 Dec - Data Communications. Next Friday, they're showing Lake Placid on STAR Movies, and on December 16, 9 PM on AXN, it's the Movie of the Year - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.