A Toute Le Monde

What a screwed up video! Everything seems hurried up. Very Corny. Worst of all, the song never needed a remix in the first place! Can't imagine this is the same band that had a videos like Holy Wars and Hangar 18.

Pacers

The Pacers didn't make it to the Playoffs for the first time since I started following them and the NBA. It doesn't feel good! But then it had to happen. And from what Bob Kravitz says, it'll get worse. And its not hard to see why! Tinsley is still here. We still don't have a player who can play in the clutch. We don't have the cap-space to get better players (unless of course we make a trade.). And we might not even get to draft a player in the first round.

Doesn't feel good to see this happening!

Playing With Time

Brian Eno and Will Wright had a very interesting discussion (almost a year ago. I stumbled upon it today via this site) about their use of generative systems in their respective fields - music and simulation games respectively. Generative systems, to describe them in a simple manner, are systems that start with small basic components each of which follow the same set of very simple rules. But then the interaction of these rules and the components evolves into something that is very complex and not easily predictable at the outset. Cellular automata are an example of generative systems. Ant colonies are a more complex real life example as we see in nature.

The discussion was organized by The Long Now Foundation. Two things I found particularly interesting in the video are Will Wright's demo of a new game he's working on called Spore which he said was inspired by the documentary/
concept Powers of Ten; and Brian Eno's mention of the website for a record he released with David Byrne called My life in the Bush of Ghosts. They put up the multitracks (guitar tracks, drum tracks, etc) for two songs from the album on another website for anyone to download for free and then remix them as they like. People can then upload their work back on the website for others to listen to and rate. Very cool! The video is about 1 hour and 38 minutes long.

You can also click this link to go the original hosting page for the video.

Yet Another Tale of Two Movies

Sunday afternoon I felt like watching a comedy movie. Had been a long time since I'd seen one. Wanted to get a movie that I had seen the trailer of and had The Rock in it. But for some reason I just could recall the name of that movie. Ended up getting the wrong movie on a gamble (called Walking Tall and also starring The Rock of course) and had a sidekick who was funny. But unfortunately the movie was not. Turns out the movie I was looking was is The Rundown. The back of the DVD cover for Walking Tall says its inspired by true events. If they say so! But I'll be surprised if a lot of things shown in the movie really did happen. There's this scene in the movie where The Rock is on trial for breaking up a casino. When it's his lawyer's turn to present his case, The Rock fires him knowing that he can't trust him. After that he gives quite a speech to the jury, showing them the gruesome wounds on his body caused by the villain's henchmen on an earlier occasion, paying no heed to the judge's warning that he's in contempt of the court. He then goes on to inform them that if he is acquitted, he'll run for the Sheriff's office. He also reminds the jury that that town taught its children to stand tall and not to close down a Mill and start a Casino instead. Then later in the movie, he spends a romantic night with his girlfriend while still at duty in the Sheriff's office. So much for the walking tall part. A movie starring The Rock is never boring. He is good at action and he has a natural flair for comedy. But then I never wanted to watch a movie whose only plus point was that it wasn't boring.

At the end of that movie, I felt a bit relieved that I still had Ocean's 12 to watch. But after watching the latter, I was even more disappointed. I hear Ocean's 13 is releasing soon and that it stars Al Pacino. I hope the performances in that movie are not as causal as it was in this one. The humour in this movie appears contrived (wow! I always wanted to use that word! yeh! :-). And the plot while not predictable (a heist movie better not be predictable), is nowhere near as clever as the original one. See, a director of a heist movie by default holds all the cards by virtue of the script. And a great director shows his quality by showing a few of the cards to the audience without giving away the aces of course. And there lies the "clever" part. Its always easy to surprise the audience. Its the feeling at the end of the movie - of not having seen the trick despite being presented with the clues that make a movie clever. Ocean's 12 wasn't clever. Actually to be frank, one of the heist's pulled off in the movie was clever and that wasn't even the main one. And thats all I have to say about that! :-) So there you go. Two movies watched so far and I wasn't happy with either of them. But then I still had an ace up my sleeve. It would be my second viewing of the movie, but still Syriana is as good a movie as they come. Great performances, great plot and even better characters. But I'm already at the end of my essay. All I'll say is that the movie's highly recommended.