One of those little things that required adjustment in a marriage is one’s individual preferences for movies. Personally, I enjoy movies themed around the indomitable human spirit the most, e.g. movies like Apollo 13 or TV series like Band of Brothers.

Ling on the other hand prefers movies that don’t involve a lot of swearing, exploding things or flesh-consuming critters from outer space. Now and then whenever we’re both free on a weekend afternoon, she’d prompt me to dig into our library of DVD movies and find a romantic movie. It must be a girl thing. So chick flicks like Enchanted, Just Like Heaven, Sweet Alabama, 27 Dresses - all those are her thing.

Now, as far as those romantic movies are concerned though, there’s a bunch I still haven’t dug out to watch with her. For example, the three movies based on books by Nicholas Sparks. He’s a current American author who’s written a bunch of bestseller movies, several of which are of the love + tradegy type. And everyone of those three movie adaptions already released are tearjerkers. There’s Message in a Bottle, The Notebook, and A Walk to Remember.

How’s that? Well, bluntly put… I don’t think I can handle a sobbing woman who’s crying her eyes out because the two lovers on the screen can never be together because of an accident / illness / whatever and take yer pick.

Hey I know what I’ll do. I’ll just dig out the DVDs and put them on the TV cabinet. Ling is enjoying part of her year-end break now, so she can watch them all without me LOL.

I don’t as a rule follow authors, preferring instead to read selected works after having first checked them out first if they’re any good. There’s a few however whose books I’ll pick up without hesitation. There’s Colleen McCullough who wrote seven novels dramatizing the Roman Empire, with several of those volumes 1000+ pages long.

And there’s also the late Stephen Ambrose, a historian who wrote several books based on the oral accounts of men who fought in World War II. Ambrose is best known for three books: Citizen Soldiers, which is one of my most-loved books ever, D-Day, and Band of Brothers. The latter was turned into a 10 part HBO miniseries in 2001. It’s still generally regarded today as one of the best miniseries ever, picking up several Emmy Awards, including the ones for Best miniseries and casting.

The book and TV series should be semi well-known, but here’s the capsule version. The story follows a Company of paratroopers from the US 101st Airborne that fought in several key battles in World War II.

I read the book to which this series is based on some years back in 2001, but didn’t actually watch the TV series adaption itself then. So, as soon as the Region 1 DVD set was released a year or so thereafter, I bought it online and had it shipped to Singapore. It was a beautifully produced set, coming in a specially made metallic box (below left). There were a couple of niggling issues though, specifically that the DVD set didn’t include English subtitles, which made it at times a little hard to follow. I did had the book beside me so I could roughly follow through the story in each episode, but it wouldn’t had been necessary if there were subtitles.

I picked up the blu-ray edition of Band of Brothers as soon as it was released, and Ling and I have been watching the episodes at 2-3 per evening. Like the DVD set, it came in a similar nifty metallic box (above right). There are subtitles this time, and the high definition release really makes one sit up and notice all the little details that was missed in the DVD release years ago.

I don’t know how Ling feels about the show (she at least seems to be able to follow the stories and the main characters). The show is meaningful for me as it demonstrates the heroism from a time and generation past, and the sacrifices they made just so that people today can live the lives they do now. Each episode starts with interview segments from seemingly random veterans of World War II. Ling was asking me were these veterans actually soldiers from the Company. It’s only at the very last episode when it’s finally revealed who are these veterans, and I remembered tears welling up when I finally realized that that the characters portrayed in the 12 hour series was indeed the very same elderly gentlemen recollecting their experiences from 60 years ago.

It’s sad that very few of these veterans are alive, as more have passed on since the interview segments were recorded during the series’ production 7 years ago. But Ambrose’s novel and the series have done some measure of justice to their experiences, and hopefully will introduce to future generations what some have called The Greatest Generation that has ever lived.

Several months ago I wrote a short entry about the high-definition ‘war’ waged between the two competing standards, HD DVD and blu-ray. Now, one of the battlegrounds between both standards was the support each format had from major movie studios. Basically, enthusiasts were going with the standard which had the movies from the studios they each wanted.

Now, The Matrix was one set of movies in a small corner of such a battle, and for a while was published on HD DVD but not Blu-Ray. But 10 months since that post, it’s been finally released on the latter.

So, I plunked down a not too small sum of money on the blu-ray edition of The Ultimate Matrix Collection. The contents of this set of discs is roughly similar (I think) to the ten disc DVD set released a few years ago, and is stuffed to the brim with around 35 hours of content, with the main trilogy of movies themselves taking up about 7 hours.

Lots has been said about The Matrix movies of course. Many people agree that the sequels extended the story scape and depth substantially but to the point that the story also became convoluted. Who could really make sense of what KFC guy er The Architect was droning on about?

But now that I think back to the point when I first saw the movie (on disc as I missed the theatrical release in 1999), I can see why the movie was such a huge hit. No, I don’t for a moment believe we’re really right now living in a computerized virtual world created to pacify human beings who’re in reality each cocooned as some sort of biological battery. But that very premise of machines enslaving humans is interesting in itself, and makes for great story telling. If nothing else, it’s a nice change from machines only keen on exterminating humans like bugs e.g. The Terminator or the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series (up till a point).

That said, I never really understood the back story from the first Matrix movie alone. All Morpheus said, vaguely, is that at some point the humans waged a big war against the machines, with the former blocking out the sky in a desperate attempt to eliminate the machine’s source of power.

That back story was of course fleshed out in a couple of episodes from The Animatrix. And we watched that too the other night after completing the trilogy of movies. Ling remarked that two of the shorts (The Second Renaissance Parts I and II) that told this back story were so depressing.

Still… another set that’s on its way is the blu-ray Band of Brothers. I’ve got this on DVD already, but it remains the best TV limited series I’ve had the pleasure of watching (The Sopranos remained my favorite recurring TV series). So, it’s well-worth the expense for me. And hopefully Ling will be able to enjoy it too.

Since I haven’t been blogging much, here’s an echo of a game review for the other blog I write for.:)

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

Naughty Dog as a game development studio has been around for more than two decades now since their founding in 1986. While they’re better known for their Jak & Daxter video game series, they scored a surprise and big hit with Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on the PS3 a year ago.

In order to properly appreciate what the scene was like a year ago though, one has to realize that the PS3 didn’t have very many big titles at that point, especially when compared to the XBox 360 that had already been released one year earlier, during which a number of well-received and popular titles had already been published for it.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is console-based action-adventure at its best. It has all the blockbuster production values, likable characters, amazing visuals, and all the nods to established icons of the game story’s genre . The story concerns a Nathan Drake, a (fictional) descendent of famous English explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake of the 16th Century. The modern Drake is a treasure hunter, and in Uncharted, takes off on an expedition to recover the mythical treasure of El Dorado. Along the way, he’ll be supported by a cast of memorable characters, friends and foes alike.

What’s special about Uncharted? The visuals for one. While fans of the Metal Gear Solid series will swear that Hideo Kojima’s last magnum opus, MGS IV (with an upcoming review by GET staff Mr. Ng soon) is the most visually stunning game available on the PS3, there’re other gamers who’ll point to the year older Uncharted as an equally if not more visually impressive effort that uses fewer overheads, er, MGS IV loading times *koff*.

Simply put, Uncharted is replete with numerous moments where you’ll stare with eyes afixed at the screen taking in the visuals. Seeing what the PS3 can produce on screen will give you that sense of vindication of having spent a small fortune on a gaming console. Among especially outstanding scenes include the German U-boat run aground on a riverbed, a massive monastery that is hundreds of years old and in ruins, and a submarine pen that is a page out of a similar scene in Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Animation was developed with the now ubiquitous mocaps, but still spendidly done nonetheless with eye, cheek movements and texture morphing on the faces.

The narrative in MGS IV is substantially stronger, with the story in Uncharted almost workmanlike. That said, the ingame story sequences in Uncharted are hugely enjoyable. They move along briskly compared to the occasionally indulgent story telling in MGS IV, with dialog that’ll make you chuckle and laugh on occasion, and carried through with a likable cast of characters. Nathan is assisted by a journalist, Elena, and a cigar-smoking companion, Victor, whose loyalties will seemingly shift in the course of the story. It’s probably a result of both the dialog script and also voice-acting that Uncharted is one game whose ingame scenes you’ll want to watch repeatedly, if only because they’re so well done and acted.

Heck. Even the characters resisting Nathan and his team’s efforts are likable. Of particular standout is the Indonesian (?) pirate Eddy Raja, voice-acted by James Sie. Sie’s comedic timing and with many of the game’s funniest lines, including a couple in what looks like Bahasa Indonesian, will have you laughing.

There’s a fair balance of platform-based and combat action in the game too. The platform based components and puzzles are pretty forgiving, so players looking for a bigger challenge would be better off with the Tomb Raider series. But they’re perfect for everyone else, including casual gamers.

The combat sequences in Uncharted don’t approach identical levels of realism or sophistication compared to some first-person shooters, but they’re still nonetheless enjoyable. Apart from four grenades, Nathan gets to carry just two guns at any one time; one side-arm and a rifle, and Nathan can only carry a limited amount of ammunition for both at a time too.

Fighting off pirates, rival treasure hunters and other critters isn’t simply an issue of charging head on too. Rather, your enemies will gun and duck for cover behind physical features of the terrain or buildings you’ll explore, and will in return typically flank or use grenades to flush you out.

Perhaps the litmus test on Uncharted’s appeal is to the untapped market segment of non-gamers. My wife for instance isn’t a computer gamer at all, but she got hooked on Uncharted’s platform scenes. She doesn’t possess much of the dexterity that PS3 gamers have when it comes to using the SIXAXIS controllers, but she enjoys having Nathan explore areas and solving puzzles on getting from one point to another.

The one down side though is the game’s comparatively short length. Experienced action game players will zip through Uncharted’s 22 chapters (levels) in less than 10 hours. But even if one doesn’t replay the game through the different difficulty levels and bonus treasures for those who’re game completists, the 10 hours will be a tremendously fun ride.

Highly recommended for those who have PS3s.

- Dr. Foo CY, 6 Oct 2008

Here’s another multi-entry post about Le Nozze di Figaro, or The Marriage of Figaro. Yep, that favorite opera of mine for years now.:)

Now, how I got acquainted to this opera by Mozart is a bit of a story. In 1984, director Milos Forman made a movie based on an adaption of Mozart’s life. The movie was titled Amadeus. If you’re wondering why that title, Mozart’s full name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  My memory’s a little fuzzy on this one, but I think it was my elder brother who brought tickets for the both of us to see that show.

Amadeus went on to win 40 awards, 8 of which were Academy Awards. That 8 included the Holy Trinity of Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. The film ran for a whopping 3 hours and while the general gist—about an alleged rivalry between Mozart and his contemporary composer Salieri—is easy enough to follow for any movie goer, the numerous subtleties are easily missed and require repeated viewing.

As if the awards won weren’t enough, the soundtrack of Amadeus was performed by the famed Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields with founder and conductor Sir Neville Marriner. Bit of nugget; the stunningly beautiful music from The English Patient (yeah that movie that makes women swoon!) was also provided by this same orchestra. The Amadeus soundtrack went on to become one of the most popular classical music movie soundtracks ever, and introduced to many Mozart’s range of compositions beyond already well-known pieces like Eine kleine Nachtmusik or his Symphony No. 40 in G minor.

Now on that soundtrack there were three pieces of music that especially struck me. The first is the slow movement from the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor. This lovely and very gently lyrical musical piece was among the short list of music I chose for our Wedding, the music of which I think I’ll blog about soon.:)

The second is the third and fast movement from the Piano Concerto No. 22 in E Flat. Like many of Mozart’s other fast movements, the piece is dominated by a catchy and cheerful main melody that is hard to forget. I remembered heading to the old National Library at Stamford Road at all of Secondary One into the dustiest and most mite-invested section in that old institution… the classical music score section to look for the written score! My Grade VI piano-playing skills at that age was not nearly adequate to handle the piece in its entirety, but to be able to play little bits of the concerto on my old piano at Lentor is a memory I will always keep.

The third piece of music on the Amadeus soundtrack was a stately dance “Ecco la Marcia” from the third Act of Le Nozze di Figaro, and which was itself acted out as a scene in the film proper. Now, what really made me sit up wasn’t the music number itself. Surprisingly, it was the 20 seconds of recitativo, or accompanied dialog, by the singers just prior to the dance starting. It was all in Italian mind you and I didn’t understand a word at that point then.

But the singer was Samuel Ramey who alongside Welshman Bryn Terfel possesses the most sexy and manly voice you’ll ever hear. That baritone voice of his will send you to Amazon.com to look for his CDs while dumping all your Josh Groban and Russell Watson albums along the way.

Now while I couldn’t understand what he was singing, the enunciation and dynamics of the sung dialog gave me all sorts of hints as to what the story could be about that was being set to such stunning music. And that was my first introduction to classical opera.:)

More on Figaro in the next entry.:)

I remarked in an earlier post the other day about how there were two printing blemishes in the photobook I did for Ling. It’s a sort of inch long ink smear on one of the last couple of pages in the book (see picture here).

I was pretty displeased with the blemish. But users in the Blurb forums have noted the superb customer service offered by this printer, and in most instances Blurb readily offers to reprint books with even the smallest defects in binding, covers etc.

So I decided to put the same customer service to the test. Took the pictures above, wrote out a polite email noting the blemish and enclosed the picture link. I didn’t ask for a reprint.

Within 6 hours, I got a reply from Blurb’s customer service apologizing for the blemish, and stating they’ve just sent the book for a reprint and I will be getting a new copy in due course.

Now that’s great customer service.:)

Here’s a continuing post from the last entry on flying to Bali.:)

Ling was musing out loud yesterday evening while on our way home why is it that Asians are happy with 3D2N stays when the Europeans come to Asia and think nothing of spending a fortnight here.

The way I look at it, it’s everything to do with travel proximity and the experience differential. I don’t think Asians would want to do 3D 2N night stays if they were flying to say London but I can’t imagine a Parisian wanting to do a fortnight stay in London either.

In any case, as soon as we got the flight dates that SQ had remaining, we next determined where to stay in Bali itself. Bali is several times larger than Singapore and there’re specific areas of stay depending on one’s persuasion. There’s the wild and noisy Kuta, the beach front Sanur, the expensive Nusa Dua etc.

Kuta was right out at the onset as neither of us are big on night life or like what Wikitravel calls, the “drunken bikini scene”. Nusa Dua was next on the top of the list as the hotels and resorts there are more luxurious and area more peaceful less crowded, but the preferred choice of resort was fully booked. Sanur was next but I experienced the same problem with preferred accommodation availability.

That was about the time when I toggled into sour-grapes mode and all but said to myself “screw the tourisy beaches let’s go for something else”. After all, can the Bali beaches be any better than Rawa’s? I decided on the island’s cultural centre in Ubud. Most of the accommodation available in Ubud aren’t hotels or resorts, but privately-owned and run small villas spread over a huge price range.

And boy, it was so not easy getting accommodation there, given that many of these villas are perhaps a dozen units big whoops ’small’. My first choice Tegal Sari was fully booked. As I traversed down the recommended list of Ubud stays from TripAdvisor and queries repeatedly showed that each stay was fully booked, I started getting worried. So, at the point when I *did* find an available place at Tepi Sawah Villas (pictures here from the villa’s web site), I was especially relieved. The ranking wasn’t, thankfully, that far down the list too at #8 of 86 recommended Ubud stays.

The price for a 5 night stay there worked out to SGD577 for the Padang Tegal Villa. Not too bad; certainly cheaper than the Ayara Hilltops suite we stayed at and similarly sized at 81 square metres, if less opulent from the photos. Ling though is at least thrilled of the upcoming stay as it overlooks rice fields, a request she had while I was browsing through Ubud stays.

So that’s that. Next blog entry about scouting for our driver in Bali.:)

There were three big huge Hollywood actors in the mid 80s, and whichever movie they appeared in, it’d be a big hit at the box office, even if the movie was a turkey. The three were Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone. I have this vague recollection of efforts by Hollywood agents to get the three megastars to appear in the same movie together, but I guess there were just too many problems getting their schedules in sync and an agreeable budget to work within.

Anyway, Stallone is famous for two movie series: Rambo, and Rocky. Interestingly, three of his biggest movies in the 80s were all regarded as anti-communist, anti-red, anti-Soviet Union etc. The movies were Rambo II and III, and the very slightly lesser known Rocky IV. One of the most memorable songs in the latter was by a rock band, Survivor (no relation to the TV series), and its MTV had a montage of the movie’s memorable moments. It’s one of the more ‘manly’ songs to have shown up in the 80s, and for us who remember Rocky IV, it sure brings back nostalgia.:)

Well, after completing a review of Civilization IV as an education game alongside a colleague at work for the other blog I write for, I was asked to consider writing another educational game review, but this time for GTA IV. Yep, you read that right. No kidding.

This is going to be, putting it mildly, challenging. I’m not new to having to write hard sell documents. I used to write six or seven 20-30 page examination moderation reports every year to examination syndicates at Oxford and Cambridge explaining and then persuading them why students below a certain mark range should pass in a subject. But GTA IV as a learning device…! That’s going to take a lot of creativity and persuasion i.e. spin.

For those of us who’re playing GTA IV, you’d know the game is vulgar, violent, crass, full of morally corrupt characters, and very adult plot devices. Yep, all the things that make a game fun, but really not the sort of thing you’ll want your 12 year old kid to play.

Funnily, Ling has been watching me play the game one hour or so on selected evenings. She’s gotten used to the foul language, but she still sniffles whenever I (accidentally) run over a pedestrian. Or when I have to jack, whoops, ‘acquire’ someone’s car in the game to get going.

Maybe I should get one or two or my gaming students to help me in this. After all, they’re no doubt far ahead of me in GTA IV; I’m only at 52% game completion. But either way this goes, writing this review is going to be a lot of fun.:)

The game’s hero, Niko Bellic, likely before he offs some unlucky dude. Picture from Gamespot.

My earliest exposure to Japanese anime and cartoon was when I was in Primary 3 in 1980. There was a TV series running on the then SBC channel 5. Starblazers ran on the Monday 7 pm evening slot, and was an originally Japanese sci-fiction cartoon but dubbed in English about how the old battleship Yamato is brought up from the ocean depths and turned into a space warship in a search to save Earth. When I was in secondary one, in the midweek afternoon slots, there was Super Dimension Fortress Macross dubbed in Mandarin which I followed whenever I could.

I was absolutely fascinated with both series as a child, but I outgrew them when I was in secondary 3 or so preferring live action science fiction instead. It was my best bud, Matt, who got me introduced back into Anime some 5-6 years ago. Being in Missouri though it was hard to identify with the anime he was watching. But there was one series I got my hands on in 2003, and briefly for around 6 months, I was absolutely hooked again.

The series is Full Metal Panic!. Yep, quite a funny name. It’s a series that falls squarely in the pseudo-sci-fiction genre with big robots, pretty lasses, and heroic heroes. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. One of the years in this series departed from the usual action-heavy story telling and instead dwelt into light-comedy. This series is named Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, and concerns the continuing adventures of Sagara Sousuke, a young special forces soldier who as orphaned has known nothing but war, is sent to secretly protect a school girl, Chidori Kaname, who just doesn’t know what to make of him.

A lot of humor in the short 11 episode series is parody and situational. Typically Sousuke will attempt to solve every challenge or difficulty in school with guns, sniper rifles, grenades, bombs, mines and rocket launchers. It’s all just crazily hilarious and in good fun. Ironically, Matt didn’t see the series before, but when I passed word of it along to him, he was equally hooked. In fact, as I recalled it, he devoured all the episodes in a few nights, and even got people who’s never seen anime onto it too by sole virtue of these 11 episodes.:)

The video below is a segment from the last episode where Sagara Sousuke accidentally introduces a deadly bacterial weapon into his school, and locks his whole class in to prevent further spread of the virus. It’s in snippets though, so don’t worry if the sequence of the snippets don’t seem to make much sense.:)