MULTIBALL MULTIBALL

The Lost Room:

"You like science movies?" my buddy asks. He's the kind of guy who goes to the movie rental place and just grabs random stuff. This is not a good sign.
"Uhh you mean science fiction? Well I sure did like Starship Troopers when I was 15 so let's go for it."
A scifi original miniseries (or something), it promises only failure. What it delivers will rock your world. We didn't stop watching this thing until all six hours of it were over, pretty much the only marathon viewing I've ever done of anything.

The thing about this series is that it is totally original and compelling. Here's the premise: A detective comes into possession of a hotel room key that opens any door. On the other side of that door is an empty, cheap motel room. He can enter it and close the door, and when he re-opens the door it leads to any door in the entire world. The only problem: At one point, the door closes on his daughter while she's still in the room, and when he opens it again, she's gone.

But that's not all: Every object that's supposed to be in the room is missing. In the first episode, we find a guy who has a pen that microwaves people to death. Also, there's a woman with a nail file that knocks people unconscious when she holds it to the light. There's a comb that, when used, stops time for 10 seconds. Spectacles that inhibit combustion. A deck of cards that drives you insane. A pencil that, when tapped, makes a penny. These "objects," as they are known by their collectors, are all taken from the mysterious motel room, and each one has a strange power that seems totally unrelated to the object. Why do they exist? What does the room have to do with it? I figured it out by watching the whole series, and you should too.


Deja Vu:

Another entry in the "I found this movie at the movie store, so it must be good" files, this one is not really as good or interesting as The Lost Room. Set in New Orleans (for no good reason other than the city is a charity case), some terrorist blows up a ferry full of smiling, happy Navy seamen, their smiling, happy families and a few random smiling, happy passengers. Denzel Washington is called in to investigate the case, where he promptly finds a hot dead body and falls in love with her. C'mon, man, the CSI guys don't get the hots for every cute corpse that comes through the morgue. This is why you work in post-Katrina New Orleans and not in a cool city like Las Vegas, Miami or New York.

Little does Denzel know that he's not the only one to be assigned to this case. A super-secret government team with their own experimental chronosphere recruits Denzel to sit in front of a big monitor to look back in time four days and try to figure out who commits the crime. Denzel figures out pretty quickly that he's not really looking at a monitor screen, but through a time portal. Maybe because their lies about how their system "really" works are so insane and retarded that no idiot would believe them. Unfortunately, their explanation for how their "wormhole through time" works is just as bad. Anyway, as Denzel is busy playing peeping tom with the still-alive version of the pretty corpse (as she existed four days ago) when he decides to shoot a laser pointer at her head through the screen, which promptly breaks the whole thing somehow. Then he starts hollering at everyone to tell him the truth, and then things really start happening.

Denzel comes up with some pretty innovative ideas for how to use a time machine. Maybe instead of dicking around with it to see what happened back in the past we could, I daresay, go back in time and prevent the ferry bomb from going off? Gee, I dunno... We only went to Harvard and invented a time portal, it's not like we could creatively come up with ways to use it.



Smokin' Aces:

Here's a fun little flick, along the lines of Lock Stock and Two Smokin' Barrells and Snatch. If you've seen either of these movies and went apeshit over them when you first saw them, then you'll probably go apeshit over this one too. It has the same overblown "style" and quirkiness and goofy characters as the first two movies, and if you're easily amused by that kind of thing then, surprise!, here's more of the same.

Each of the goofy and/or formulaic characters in this movie is an assassin, all after the million-dollar price put on a mob boss/magician's head. Oh yeah, and they're all introduced by their names being printed REALLY BIG ON THE SCREEN AS THE ACTION PAUSES (with their profession printed in smaller letters below). If that little detail makes you mahogany hard with excitement, then this movie's for you.

-Two FBI agents (good guys)
-Ben Afleck and his two ex-cop pals (semi-good guys)
-Two Black chick assassins. The hot chick/master of disguise is a good guy. Her militant-feminist and less-hot lesbian pal with the ENORMOUS semi-auto .50 caliber sniper rifle is is not a good guy.
-South-American professional assassin/torturer who kills people with wrist blades and chewed off his own fingerprints (bad guy)
-Three neo-nazi kamikaze chainsaw-wielding kill-crazy assassins (good guys. J/K)
-Master of Disguise assassin who kills people and sticks their faces in a machine that makes a rubber mask and then assumes their identity to kill more people (bad guy)
-The mysterious "Swede" who's supposedly the most professional assassin on Earth. He figures prominently in the significant plot twist at the end (neutral guy?)
-Random cross-dressing lawyer
-Random karate kid with ADD who talks like a rap star
-Random people who die

There is a twist, as mentioned, and it's pretty big. I'm, like, a genius though so I figured it out before they explained it (at length) at the movie's end. Geniuses like me can't watch movies like this or the Sixth Sense because we figure out the plot twist and ruin it for everyone else. Ok, i'm not really a genius (I was kicked out of G.A.T.E for eating paste) but the twist is pretty easy to figure out.

Also for Ben Aflek-haters: You might want to see this movie! *hint*

Review: The Silent Hill Graphic Novels

Whether you like the psychological horror genre or not, there is no doubt that the Silent Hill games are the best of the best and sets the bar for anything related. With the great success of the games came the movie which was also extraordinarily brilliant in capturing the theme of Silent Hill. Usually, movies from computer games suck total ass, but the movie was near perfect. Why? Because the film creators stuck closely to the source material. Let me repeat that again, the creators stuck closely to the source material.

I love Silent Hill, and when I found out that the entire graphic novel series was on bittorrent (I ain't no chump), I was excited. I had heard great things about the comic books, especially that they were hard to obtain due to being completely sold out even before they were finished printing the actual paper. Being the true fan of Silent Hill, I abstained from reading any spoilers or trying to know anything about the comic before actually reading it. Big mistake.

I could write a book on how bad this comic actually is, but I'll just talk about the worst parts of this gigantic train wreck.

First of all, the name "Silent Hill" is perfect. It's not overly scary sounding, and only slightly creepy. This does two things. First, it initially gives the impression that the town of Silent Hill is some quiet, peaceful place, which sets up the irony that it's actually a hell-infested perversion of your innermost fears. Second, it keeps out the goth kiddies whose favorite movies are The Grudge and the Grudge 2. So what's the title of the comic book?


Yeah, that's right. Dying Inside. When I first saw this, through my sinking dismay, I tried to have a positive attitude. "Ok," I thought, "the title is totally lame, but it's the first of it's kind and everyone makes mistakes." Which is true, I mean, look at any great comic book and the first issues look like total shit. So I browsed the other titles in the series:




Keep in mind these didn't all come out at the same time, so there is no excuse for this shit. I mean, "Dead/Alive"? Seriously, could they get more obvious? It's misleading because the reader thinks that there are two options, when there is only one: "suck". Could they possibly be more uncreative? "Among The Damned"? Are they in hell or something, I can't tell. "The Grinning Man?" Could that be the Grim Reaper? It's as if the writers bought these titles 10 for $10 at a Halloween discount store.

Then there is the artwork. In evaluating comics, I place artwork on equal importance as plot. Now, I'm not some art elitist and demand that everything be drawn realistically, but for fucks sake, it has to include some effort, and it has to make sense. Everything in the Silent Hill comic is drawn very sketchy and with high contrast colors. I assume that this is to blur the lines between fantasy and reality and give a very depressing atmosphere. Sure, that's fine for a couple of pages, but every single page is like this. It's not artistic, it's retarded. For example:

I mean, I think something important happened here, and I'd really like to know what. I think the Grey Smudges Of Death and the Indescribable Shades of Black got our main character, Lauryn (with a "y" because anything else conforms to the mainstream and that's not hip enough). "Ugh!" she says. "Ugh! You paid $3.99 for something looks a shitswirl on the side of a toilet bowl. The expression of the two guys in the last panel is priceless. It's almost as if the artist knows how incomprehensible the first panel is, but "Fuck it, just a couple more issues of this crap and I can move up to drawing covers for game-inspired novels like the critically acclaimed Starcraft Novels. Greatness here I come."

Ok, the style sucks and is totally different than the game and the movie which relied on it's realism for psychological terror, but whatever. At least the drawings are alright, especially the faces:

Actually, just forget it.

Let's move on to the plot. The plot is terrible. I could say more, but even I don't understand the plot due to the sheer amount of bad artwork and horrible dialog. In short, it's something about a psychiatrist who takes his patient to Silent Hill in order to cure her nightmares of the place, and blah blah blah. Rather than describe it, I'll let the pages do it for me:


I am....

....surrounded....

....by cliches.....


So we got some kind of tentacle monsters. That's funny, because I don't remember anything like that in the game. Then we got the standard scary little girl, but she's not scary because throughout all five god awful issues, she has the witty rebellious sarcasm of a teenager, which gets old in 0.5 milliseconds. In the issue, they run around Silent Hill, and all the monsters which made the games so great never appear. Instead we get goblins and demons again which are straight out of a Halloween discount store. Next issue is great:


A bunch of teenagers from Hot Topic find a video of Silent Hill and decide to go there to shoot a movie and make some money. This is just perfect because this idea has never been done before, and I think will start a new genre. I call it, the teen slasher flick. This crap continues for four illegible issues where they fight monsters that again, have never appeared in any Silent Hill game. At the end they all die, or they live, whatever it doesn't matter. In fact, all the other plots aren't even worth mentioning, it's just a total shit fest.

And what else sucks about this comic is the-

[AIR RAID SIREN]

Oh shit! An air raid siren, that can only mean-

PYRAMID HEAD, HELL YEAH

Finally, in the very last issue, there is one panel of multiple Pyramid Heads with the middle Pyramid Head holding not one, but TWO Great Knives. If there is any redeeming factor of this garbage comic, this is it. The writers finally decided in between smokes of a crack pipe and contemplating suicide that "Hey, maybe we should include a monster that is actually part of Silent Hill!". What an idea. Unfortunetly, this is as much Pyramid Head that we get. Along with two dog monsters that also never appeared in the game.

So just who are these writers that managed to negatively contribute to the greatness of Silent Hill? Take a wild guess in this picture of the two writers with the original designers of Silent Hill:

This is like one of those children's picture puzzles: Who does not belong?

But wait, I've seen that face before!


It all makes sense now. The shitty art, the poor plot. It's not fiction, IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. ITS ALL REAL. The demon of Silent Hill has taken real form and is trying to invade our world, one shitty comic at a time.

At the bottom of that picture is this message:



No, you didn't. Fuck off, Kris Oprisko and Ted Adams.

I'd like to end this review with a video of the best scenes from the remake of The Wicker Man, which adequately conveys my feelings about this comic:

The Butterfly Effect(2004)

"Wrong answer, fuck bag."
Named after the famous precept of chaos theory, this movie became a cult classic during my freshman year of college. In the summer of 2004, I watched it for the first time on my laptop in a cramped 4-person dorm room of the Jian Tan international student center in Taipei, and was blown away by the concept. Traversing time with memories and changing the past? Holy shit, that might be my greatest wish, and im probably not alone. If that ability really existed, that would mean the end of human regret. Unfortunately, theres an issue of causality and the chaos created by the butterfly effect, meaning that there's a bit of discontinuity in the storyline.

This is a love story about a pair separated by timelines. He changes the past, things get fixed and then things get messed up again. The timeline takes him to all sorts of interesting places. However, if the ending isn't satisfactory enough for you, then try one of the ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS. What? It's a movie about causality.

Acting Talent: 80% Ashton Kutcher respect+
Logic and sense: 60%
Visual stimulation: 90%

Social Analysis: What Cho Seung-Hui Left Behind

The social mechanism of calamity is a pretty complex process that involves, among other things, The Five Stages of Grief, chaotic discontent, and political sifting. Here, I attempt to show that all parties involved, rational and working for their self-interests, actually make the situation worse. The fallout of VTech is basically like an itchy mosquito bite that causes you to scratch, worsening the wound.

This game tree shows that what is in the best interest of the Asian community is in conflict with the best interests of the media and the Fed. In other words, the best outcome for Asians is a bad outcome for government/media, and the best outcome for the government/media is a worse outcome for Asians. Thier interests are at odds with each other.
Someone has to lose and the situation is tending against Asians, as the voice of public opinion seems to be neither rational nor forgiving as you can see below. The first facebook group in the list was made by a reporter trying to collect information from Seung's classmates.




Cho Seung-Hui was described as a "guy that kept to himself", an English major that wrote morbidly dark liturature, a guy that played lots of basketball, and most of all, is asian. As society searches for causes that induced the shooting, they will look for the common violence indicators like small animal torture or self-destructive behavior. But because this shooter is ethnically unique, I predict that the evaluation will be ethnically biased.

So the million dollar question is, what is the best choice of action for Asians now?

Let's destroy the Internet.

Some of our best scientists from around the world, working in secrecy and corresponding over relatively outdated telegraph and carrier pigeon comm lines have come up with a plan that may save humanity. Populations are exploding, the environment is suffering and world health is in shambles. What can we do to destroy the underlying cause of all these problems?

Dive into the heart of the internet. And kill it.

Kill it with a virus, kill it by shutting off the infrastructure, kill it with denial of service attacks and through destruction of the telecom system. Either way, the internet as we know it will end.

But does it stop there?



No way! These same scientists are proposing we make an entirely NEW Internet, probably dubbed Internet 9.0 by this point, which sports a better infrastructure, a better-planned system of checks and balances and, more importantly, better control of how important information is relayed from the world-wide infoweb to your computing box.

What does this mean to you? Well, here's how things are probably going to be in the next 10-15 years while scientist and internet engineers create the new World Wide Web.



1. Porn will be strictly monitored and overseen by advanced supercomputers which document new porn sites and filter out those that do not comply with the newer, stricter internet porn standards. For example, granny porn and child porn will be filtered so that you don't get one while trying to search for the other.


2. All of your weblogs will be erased, as well as all the sites that support user-generated content. All of these sites, such as YouTube and Myspace, will be relayed to one, big site called www2.webspace.com, which is maintained by the Department of the Interior. You get to put all of the content you desire on a simple, bland text document and upload it for others to view. If you want to attach a .pdf or a .wav file to your new blog, you will find your net-taxes sharply raised.



3. What's a net-tax? Simple. How much you pay in taxes is based not only on your marital status and income, it's now based on how much stupid crap you put on the internet. Every movie clip you make of yourself acting like a retard in front of a webcam takes up valuable space on the New Internet, and the New Internet doesn't like to put up with your bullshit. Even if you're a loser who works at Chipotle to pay for his marijuana and internet habits, guess what? Now you're paying 80% of your minimum-wage to the Federal Government (the best kind) to help maintain the internet you so love and also to fight childhood obesity.



4. No internet phenomenons. The New Internet doesn't stand for that bullshit. Anything approaching the level of viral video or site is treated as a virus that the immune system of the New Internet must destroy as soon as possible. If the Tubgirl pic or All Your Base or Hamsterdance or Zombo.com you upload to the net starts getting attention and infecting other valuable citizens, it is automatically deleted and your internet will be terminated. You personally will also be treated as a diseased individual and you will find it hard to land a job that has any sort of background check.


5. Any online computer game that involves interacting with other individuals in an online fantasy environment will be strictly illegal. This basically means that South Korea will have to invent its own special Internet so that their economy doesn't collapse. Productivity of American workers will increase by about 16% as people whose lives would otherwise be wasted turn their attentions instead to either industry or suicide.


I am excited and enthralled at the possibilities of the New Internet, and therefore invite all of you to prepare for this second (or ninth) coming of the World Wide Web. This is some serious Noah's Flood shit going on and you better be ready to sink or swim.

An Inconvenient Truth(2006)

This acclaimed documentary is basically a video of professor Gore's lecture seminars interspersed with heartfelt stories of his youth. Throughout the movie, he presents some pretty strong evidence for greenhouse warming and does a comprehensive emotional appeal. Gore portrays himself as "The wise man staring longingly out the window". His failed legacy haunts him, whether touring on the road or flying over by aircraft, he would always contemplatively gaze through the glass, watching the world pass him by.


This verbose and charismatic Gore is in great contrast to the diet-coke drinking VP we once knew during the 90's who shunned the media and thus earned titles like "Senatorial Robot", "Statue" and "Vice President Boring". It seems to me like he spent the last 5 years reinventing himself with a new theme, stirring up liberal society for a chance to relive the glory of the Clinton era.

As for the concept of Global Warming, I'm still not buying it.

This is why. He shows a positive correlation between C02 levels and atmospheric temperature that is pretty solid, but that's all he shows. You could just as easily draw a correlation between population growth and temperature, implying with equivalent logic that human breathing or sewage causes global warming. The point is that the evidence is just a correlation.

Is the Decline of Piracy Causing Global Warming?


Many are quick to think the evidence as irrefutable, but that itself is a fallacy. The rising temperature statistics he presented are just circumstantial evidence suggesting that pollution=heat. It is neither causal nor predictive and ultimately ignores many ecological solutions to global warming that have been proposed in the last decade.
As an example of why cautious doubt is always scientifically prudent, think about the veracity of science conducted during Nazi Germany. Institutes of the Reich tried to prove fictitious racial ideology with anatomical traits and anthropological data. Theories on global warming should be subject to scrutiny that is equally vigilant lest we be swept away by cult following and counterproductive eco-mania.

Despite this recalcitrance, I actually concur with ecological cleanliness values and the call for pollution reduction. Most of all, I am okay with Al Gore as the face of environmental advocacy for the next administration and beyond.
Only if he comes up with better jokes tho.

Acting Talent: 75% Visual Stimulation: 80% Logic and Sense: 100% Adrenal Stimuation: 5% (melting ice) Enlightenment Award

Diary of a Mad Black Woman(2005)

"What are you doing in my closet! That's my *Joke about black pplz* x50 get out of my house."

I wasn't expecting much from this. Nor did I get much. The theme is supposedly about revenge and forgiveness and true love and bla bla bla bla bla whatever. This is the image I saw. SCRIPT Black Comedy 1 Black Comedy 2 Black Comedy 3 Black Comedy 4 Ghetto Joke Black people are bad at math Joke Latino Joke Ghetto Party END That’s it. Some people described how they were inspired by the emotion and how it brings up racial issues and sexual battles, but I didn't really pick up any of that. The whole thing was just so degenerate. Besides, what's so funny about being an asshole your whole life and then getting paralyzed and then humiliated by people that hated you? HAHA ok maybe that part was funny. Acting Talent: 50% (much better than you would think) Visual Stimulation: 40% (its just a ghetto) Realism: 10% Self-Inflicted Racism Award