I’m an Asian film fan (in that I like a lot of films made in Asia, rather than being Asian and liking films, but I digress). I like that films get made there that don’t cause grey matter to commit beautiful ritual suicide, and that I can imagine such a thing having seen it in such a movie. Infernal Affairs showed us that action could be stylish, violent and have a plot, while Audition showed us that cheese wire is pretty nasty stuff. Silly ideas can become excellent films.

It is with dismay, then, that I say Phone is awful.

Korea is supposed to be where the horror genre is at the moment, having allegedly created the best version of seminal flick, The Ring. Sadly, Phone shows no signs of intelligence. Instead we’re greeted with terrible acting, bad dialogue (not aided by a translation that should have been spell-checked), and some of the worst pacing I’ve seen. This film could have been cut by an hour and retained what plot it had.

Sometimes silly ideas are just silly.

Ye had best be participatin’ in International Talk Like A Pirate Day, ye scurvy sea swine. To celebrate the day, Pirate Morning replaces the usual Hazy Morning design and I’ve piratify’d the text. Yarr!

Live Bookmarks are a new feature in the FireFox 1.0 candidate release. It basically lets you view an RSS feed is a folder of bookmarks, updating as the site updates. Very clever idea, decent implementation too.

However, to claim it is a browser innovation is wrong. Internet Explorer has been doing the exact same thing with CDF feeds for an age. As long as the MIME type is being served correctly, clicking on a link to a CDF file adds it as a live folder in bookmarks.

Clever, but now new.

I was going to post another few film reviews today (the backlog is stopping me from writing anything worthwhile). Instead, I present another selection of random links featuring DRM, caverns and more:

• GBA Unix – Unix on the Gameboy Advance. File under “Some people have too much time”.
• DRM Problems – Tim Bray on the trouble with DRM.
• sIFR2.0b – The next generation of flash image replacement gets updated.
• Gecko Coloured Scrollbars – A buggy An interesting implementation of coloured scrollbars for mozilla based browsers. Nice idea, but too zapped to work if only there was a way for it to work on-hover.
• Secret Paris Cinema – For the one person who hasn’t heard about this cool discovery yet. Secrets and lies under Paris.
• Emacs Jabber – Although I haven’t tried it yet, this is another reason for those who are strong in Emacs to never leave it for another program.
• FireFox Keystrokes – Some useful keystrokes in the world’s best browser. Joy.
• Creative Commons Search – Excellent idea! Search for what you need amongst creative commons licensed projects.
• XKeymacs – Use Emacs bindings in other programs. I tend to use them for saving anyway.
• XPath.js – An XPath processor in javascript.
• RSS Delta Encoding – Use the recent idea for delta encoding RSS feeds in WordPress. Great idea, few oversights in the implementation. Keep an eye on it though.
• Gmailomatic – Give away your GMail invites or sign-up to recieve one. I’ve passed a dozen on so far.
• Springfield Map – Obsessive map of Springfield, that seems to ignore the episodic inconsistencies. File under “Some people have too much time”.
• Politics And The English Language – Fascinating article by George Orwell on the decline of English. Expect more on this article soon.
• Gallina – GMail blogging system. People keep finding new ways of using that gig of storage.
• Successful Lisp – A slightly poor book on Lisp. I’ll read more of it when I can be bothered.
• TargetAlert – Fantastic FireFox extension to add icons after PDF files and other strange links.
• Version Control With Subversion – Everything you need to know about using subversion, which you should be doing.
• Rome syndication framework – Making Atom and RSS feeds easy to use in Java. Nice.
• Bandwidth Consumption In RSS – Just lie in your usage of 304. It’s not like you’re shooting someone.
• Word Recognition – Astoundingly good article on word recognition from Microsoft. Long, involving but very worth it.
• Chocolypse Now – And finally, what would happen if Apocalypse Now was melded with Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory? Find out here.

Phew. More film reviews then some real content coming soon.

The advantage that comic book to film conversions have over less conventional comic-style films is a rich backstory on which to draw both characters and scenarios. The disadvantage is that writers have to maintain a coherent storyline from such a wide source, while preferably keeping fans happy. This is the downfall of Hell Boy.

There are so many characters, interactions and plot details obviously lifted from the comic books that are either dealt with incidentally or completely skimmed over that, to someone who isn’t familiar with the material, it comes across as a sham of a film with no substance. This is a shame because there is obviously a good film in there, if only it had been better focussed. A shame.