Resident Evil Extinction

Obviously aimed at the male 18-33 zombie movie fan, Resident Evil: Extinction features a cast of 1) tough dudes, 2) hot babes and 3) zombies. That of course doesn’t include the “final boss.” After all, the Resident Evil series of movies is based on a video game series of the same name. Expecting it to be anything other than adolescent would border on delusional.

Did I mention birds? Yes, they use a page out of the old classic by Alfred Hitchcock “The Birds.” Flocks of zombie birds killing people by pecking out their eyes is always exciting. Besides that, the movie contains the kind of T and A you would expect from Milla Jovovich. If she’s been in another type of movie, I’m certainly unaware of it.

Given it’s quite expected limitations, Resident Evil: Extinction was watchable, if you like hot babes and zombie movies. Besides the plot and the dialog, the only real lameness comes when the movie tries to depict a post apocalyptic Las Vegas, overtaken by the desert. It’s obviously a slapped together model.

Valkyrie

Tom Cruise with an eye patch. Nazis trying to kill Hitler. What is not to love about this movie? Tom Cruise with an eye patch. Nazis trying to kill Hitler. Tom Cruise can be a great actor. “Interview With a Vampire” is a great example. When playing a tough-guy Nazi, however, his annoying scientoligist arrogance takes over, and his uber-assertiveness leaves no room for anything else. He is a Nazi, after all, yet his apparent lack of compassion or sensitivity makes it difficult to believe his character is driven by remorse for Nazi atrocities.

This movie was supposedly based on a true story. The plot would have us believe that there was widespread German resistance to Hitler’s Nazi Germany based on their crimes against humanity. Forget that it only appeared after Normandy, when it was apparent they were going to lose the war. Maybe being invaded and facing a suicidal fight to the death was more incentive to turn against Hitler than anything else. I don’t know - I’m not a historian. I’m just a movie view who didn’t buy it.

Pandorum

I like this version of the Pandorum movie poster. The more popular version shows a man’s arms with various tubes shoved under the skin. That has nothing to do with the movie. The version to the left… well … you can’t tell what the hell is going on. And that is a very accurate represenation of what you will experience when watching this movie. I guess having everything so dark, moving fast, and just visible in flashes, especially early in the movie, was supposed to add to the mystery and suspense, but it ended up just being disorienting. “What the hell was that?” “What just happened?” You’ll figure it out halfway through the movie, but not before paying a price of discomfort and annoyance at the poor execution of cinematographic trickery.

The Blair Witch Project

The movie “Paranormal Activity” came out last year (2009). It was basically a lower budget “”Blair Witch,” but in a house. I rented it for Halloween because someone where I work was “freaked out” by the commercial. It sucked.

“Paranormal Entity” doesn’t even pretend to be a movie. It’s just a scam aimed at thouse stupid enough to want to buy “Paranormal Activity.” A certain percentage of those people will buy this movie by mistake. Who cares? Not me.

“Paranormal Entity” is one of those movies that is so bad, from the first line of dialog you know the only way you will enjoy it will be to make fun of it. So we did. It was still a waste of and hour 20 minutes.

What is so bad about the movie? Everything. The set is obviously an unoccupied house with cheap crap thrown in to make it look like a set. It was so ugly that it was probably the most disturbing thing in the movie. The dialog is annoyingly slow and repetetive, as if the actors were making it up as they were going along, and weren’t graced with the quickest wits. I doubt the producer, director or actors cared. They all new they were just part of a scam and were trying to get it over with ASAP. And that’s all of a review this movie deserves.

Problems:

1. It’s not scary. Unless you are OCD or hydrophopic. A lot of dirty water messing up the apartment. That’s about it.

2. No suspense. There are scenes where you could have had some startles to get your adreniline pumping at little, if they had been directed and edited properly. But apparently the director didn’t know how to do those. The DVD cover made mention of Alfred Hitchcock. Survey says: Buuzzzz.

3. Very familiar plot. Dead girl in water comes back to haunt someone. Think ”The Ring” but dull and not scary at all.

4. Stiff and phoney characters. You can’t tell if the building super is trying to be menacing, friendly or just confused. The teenage “tough guys” are as threatening as Opie and Goober.

The cast does include some good actors like John C. Reilly and Tim Roth, but they are wasted and can’t quite rise above the material. Touchstone made a profit of 19 million on the flick, so I guess the got the job done. Good work on a movie that sucked.

The thing I don’t like about Firefox is that it is incapable of dealing with a limited user account on Windows XP. I try to access the Internet from a limited user account as much as possible, because if I can’t install programs, neither can malicious websites. Internet Explorer 6 works fine, and it appears that Internet Explorer 8 does too. Firefox, however tries to update, but can’t because it doesn’t have the permissions. Going to a admin account on the same machine and updating Firefox doesn’t help for some reason, and neither does selecting “Run As” an admin account from the limited user account. I still get the dialog that Firefox was unable to update. But I digress. Back to Microsoft Internet Exploder 8.

I’ve been using it for a couple of days now, and have noticed that it crashes every once in a while. No surprise there. However when downloading files to the hard drive, I noticed that it fails to download the complete file on a regular basis, without warning. On two seperate occassions today I need to download some zipped application files, and about 75% of the time, the file was truncated. I guess it’s not confirming the checksum or something, but the bottom line is, I need to switch to Firefox to properly download files. Good work Microsoft! You screwed up Vista, the X-Box beyond anything that could be expected from a high school junior achievement class, and the hits just keep on coming!

Now if  you are a 1 & 1 shared hosting customer, you know how utterly useless calling their customer support is, unless you like talking to a rude american high school dropout or to someone reading off a card in a Filipino sweatshop. So I did the only sensible thing. Moved the site to another web host. Guess what? Forms are working perfectly!

Japanese cars aren’t better quality and value because the Japanese are a better people than Americans. They are better because the Japanese manufacturing process is better. Their manufacturing process is better because their economic system allows it to be. It doesn’t insist on maximizing profits for the shareholders RIGHT NOW like the American system does.

I heard Mayor Gavin Newsome on Larry King spouting some more garbage, that may make sense if you know absolutely nothing about automobile manufacturing. He said that Japanese and other foreign automakers made better bets than did the U.S. in the kind of automobiles they manufactured over the past few years. The U.S. bet that big gas guzzling SUVs would be the way to go, while other countries’ manufactures focused on smaller, more energy efficient cars. BULLCRAP!!! American automakers did not bet on anything. They geared their manufacturing towards SUVs because George W. Bush and his cronies gave huge tax breaks for businesses to purchase these gas guzzling monstrosities. Do you think the oil companies benefited from this? They did too. Short term profit is the overriding motive. Greed is God.

Until we fix our out-of-control brand of cronie capitalism, we aren’t going to be able to make a car as good as they can in Japan. Until the shareholders in this country can tolerate short term cost in acheiving long term benefits, such as are necessary in high quality manufacturing processes (ever heard of TQM, Demming, or continuous improvement?) then the US will continue to be second rate. As long as we think that management is divorced from manufacturing, and hiring some MBA as a manager, who doesn’t know his ass from an allen wrench, US cars will suck. That is if there are any cars manufactured in the US in years to come.

Because it is such a miserable website, you’ll need to contact customer support if you have problems with their services, which you will. In my first experience with submitting a ticket, the support person politely directed me to an FAQ, which had absolutely nothing to do with my problem. After wasting valuable time trying to figure out where the useful information was, I told them the FAQ was useless. The person apologized and sent me to the correct FAQ, which did help.

I don’t know if their customer service is outsourced to another country, or they just hire people who can’t spell or use correct English grammar, but either way, it makes you wonder about the quality of the support you are getting.

Last, but not least, when I tried to log into my support account after a couple of weeks of using it. I discovered that my username no longer existed. I’m not surprised. This company is a freaking mess, so stay away!

Furthermore why is in necessary to repeat the warning every 3 minutes, so if you are asleep in the middle of the night and have misplaced your cellphone, you lose a night’s sleep over it? I know! I went for the FREE phone with my cellular plan. Should have bought a phone for $250! I would hope a phone that is that expensive is not designed in such an idiotic manner.