I've frozen my hard disk today. Yep, the one that got fried in the summer. Apparantly, the method gives good results, only not with my hard drive... still buzzing and clicking and I've left a message to a tech guy on the Internet, asking if I should really say good-bye, because going to a professional lab to have the data recovered is out of the question - 500 Gb of data... that's about 10 milion old lei... so yeah - I am, surprisingly, quite calm about the whole shit, but I think it's only the training I got after paranoid 2009 - after one year of being constantly convinced that I've got God knows what, suddenly, the perspective of losing my entire data feels like a minor annoying itch... which I'm doing my best to scratch: spending all the money I've left plus a loan from Mom on a new external 1Tb hard drive. And soon (15th of December) i'm getting a small, 250 Gb one, as well, cause this baby (the 1Tb one) is staying home! The small one (http://www.emag.ro/hard_disk-uri_externe/hdd-extern-a-data-320gb-25-usb-rezistent-la-apa-si-socuri-galben--pHDD_ASH93-320GU-CYL) will be dragged around, but the big one will stay home, "my preciousssss"- style.
Now that I have successfully spent the past 4 hours researching broken hard drives and methods of reviving them on the internet, and alternately did the "looking at it-shaking it-listen for sounds of broken glass"-routine with my broken hard disk, I say it's time to go to bed...
The fact that today the full impact of the last 4 weeks of school (complete with classes "ca la foc") + one project + one possible trip to Drobeta AGAIN + diploma gaining on me (and me being a total sloth about it) + my responsibilities in the various stuff I do (Fairies group, where I feel slightly guilty; JMJ fansite, where people WANT me; my own Wordpress site which are on halt right now), well, everything's just hit me right in the face. Good news is that 2010 seems to be the true year of the bull (unlike 2009....) and I've just put my head down and started ploughing... Last year, I was lurking in a puddle of desperation and psychological exhaustion - this year, I seem to be more like myself. However, bad as it was, I cannot deny that 2009 has definitely taught me something, a lesson that, unfortunately, is why I'm probably here for: you're not invincible and everything is just built out of dust - it's sheer luck, artistry and life if things don't fall apart, and falling apart is SO easy to do.
Tomorrow? Run to job at 10 (big, serious, real-time,real-life,real-size 3D job I've just started today... need to finish it by next week probably...) and drop my turkish dancer "salba de galbeni" back at the theatre (used it for the Cadana costume at the Revelion party) and then go to school at 16:30... and then in the evening, hopefully get to go out with you guys...

guys, ce faceti miercuri seara? iesim la un ceva?

btw, dand Post aici, am fost intrebata daca vreau sa recuperez the "draft previously written" si eu, totally without a clue, am zis yes si iata ca mi-am regasit the long-lost movie-critic post pe care il incepusem acum o luna si l-am pierdut cand a picat netul si m-am ofticat, and I thought my artistry in movie-criticising shall be forever lost and hidden from human eye... well, iata ca nu... oricum, mi-e lene sa-l termin, supa incalzita nu mai are acelasi gust, asa ca il las asa, neterminat, ca simfonia lui Beethoven... (and modest, too...)


I've updated myself, lately, to some of the major sci-fi flicks (my favourite genre, as you all know) out there. I've watched Transformers 2, The Day the Earth stood still and X-Files-I want to believe. Why the hell am I bragging about some Hollywood farts? Because I used to love Hollywood farts, and I still do, but, as I have found out lately, either something's changed with my perception or something's changed with theirs...

TF 2 - Revenge of the fallen... Plot = 0, Storyline = -1, Characters = -3, CG FX = 10+ The movie was kinda ridiculous - honestly. It doesn't even make the "serious bad-ass movie for kids" or the "remake flick for nostalgics" that defined the first TF movie... it's so lame that it sometimes hurts - beginning with the overdose of cliches and ending with the ludicrous characters... We get absolutely no insight on our favourite characters - the Autobots - there's nothing to stimulate any thought in there - only a hyper-active adrenaline production by the end of the movie... You get gaps the size of a Jurassic brontosaurus in the action, no matter which angle you'd adopt to look at things and the all-mighty American patriotic self-stroking is ever-present.... Seriously, I am VERY disappointed in the movie. The only part that didn't let me down, not even by an inch, was the 3D CG FX - kudos to the some one hundred folks army that worked on the effects because, unfortunately, they're just about the only thing that will keep this movie on my hard drive... I'm honestly thinking that they did the CG before the actual movie and then they went like: 'Hmm, lets see - how can we arrange this awesome, sock-blowing, orgasmic, marvelous series of CG transformers battle scenes into something resembling a movie?... OOh, I know, lets draw straws!!!" Honestly - I think Michael Bay wrote the plan for the script on a piece of toilet paper while taking a dump and by the time he was finished, he thought he'd just leave it at that, so he sent the piece of paper instead of an actual script... God, and when I think of all the awesome things they could've cooked up using the robots - there weren't even any delicious "nods" towards the previous Transformers franchise, like we saw in the first movie - seriously - it looks like they worked on the CG until two days to the first cinema airing, and when they realized they got only two more days left before having to actually show it to the world, they went and did some quick filming in Egypt, probably in-between two hookahs... I am well aware that there is very little constructive criticism in what I'm ranting right now, but hell, there's NOTHING to criticize, constructive or not... The movie, except for the visual artistry is devoid of anything except maybe a feeble message of "don't cheat on your hot girlfriend" or maybe "it's nice to be a hero from time to time, you know - you get all the honours and cool chicks in the end"... All I can say is that the first movie had sense to it, it was actually planned, thought out and studied - not at a Kubrik-level or anything, but it actually showed traces of gray matter. TF 2, however, is as braindead as any good doornail - nothing to be expected from this movie, except for CG orgies, Megan Fox as the cool hot chick and Shia Le Boeuf as the hero (who goes to college... yey! be good and stay in school and wear one of those protective cups :P ), which is too bad, because his acting is actually quite plausible as Sam, despite the movie falling apart around him. A pleasant presence to the movie is John Turturo's acting - he treated his part with just the right amount of ridicule that it deserves and probably this minuscule proverbial grain of salt is the only that draws some attention to the second half of the movie, which, otherwise, can be easily defined as a tempo-less collection of booms and bangs and robotic insides. Also, one the things that bothered me most is perhaps the ridiculous entrance of Skyfire (or was it Jetfire?). The old TF fans know what I'm talking about... I mean WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?! It looked like a badly written sappy TF fanfic that somehow made it to the big silver screen...
All in all, the movie is even below any criticism - they should have sticked to the first movie only - that was an honorable, enjoyable, good-looking and thought-out re-make that brought another good name to the TF franchise - TF2? This one is simply embarrassing...

The Day the Earth Stood Still
To quote Caesar, emperor of the Romans, in Mel Brooks' "History of the World": "Nice, nice... Not thrilling, but nice". To tell you the truth, after writing about the above movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still feels like a cinematic chef d'oeuvre, BUT.... The big "but" materializes as the major problems of Hollywood disaster-movies (and actually, Hollywood movies period, lately): a quite linear story, a too-smooth plot, a very predictable denouement, all peppered with cliches... That's actually too bad, because the premises were SO promising. Yet another remake, but it could have turned out good and extremely plausible, like, say "War of the Worlds" back in 2007. I myself haven't seen the original 1951 movie yet (worry not, in approximately 3 hours, I shall remedy this situation), but it feels that the authors left too much of the script to the imagination of nostalgic sci-fi fans who've already seen the 1951 classic.
The story is flat, predictable - you actually get drawn in, but everything crumbles right after Klaatu manages to escape the medical facility and basically, to me, it felt like that was the end of the introduction - that's the moment you expect for the entire plot to just explode and rush you to some sort of climax. The end result, however, is different - the build-up to the climax is... dull. Except for some moments of philosophical debates - admirably thought, but not quite exquisite - the action is linear and blunt, everything is too simple. No, mind you - simplistic, rather than simple. I know I keep saying that simple is beautiful, but Hollywood seems to have taken me a bit too seriously - TOO simple. The climax, which is diminished because of the crawling pace of the action, is set almost at the same time with the denouement - which blows it for both moments - and these two should have been like the key moments of the movie. Credit to them, the ending is not gloriously prolonged, in patriotic fashion, but the bluntness of it all makes you wish there was a glimpse of something, a hint of what was to be going on in that world, after the credits rolled - something to make the newborn world of that movie feel like it was real and alive and would continue after the movie ended, somewhere in a parallel universe. I guess that's the problem nowadays with Hollywood flicks - nothing feels real anymore, you can't emerge yourself in that world, no matter what 5.1 system you use, what IMAX or THX effects you get while watching. But I will be talking more about that in the conclusion of this post.
Acting-wise, the movie was OK - nobody overdid anything, and thankfully, the script didn't involve any romance between any characters... (thank God for NO ending scene with the two heroes kissing passionately, tho, I have to admit, I kinda gripped my seat in the beginning of the movie, when I realized that Reeves will be the all-mighty wise alien (yes, I do have a very soft spot for this hypothesis - do not forget my beginnings as an X-Files lover) paired up with the beautiful, smart, human female scientist - I really feared the script might throw in a kiss or something awkward like that, but, fortunately, it wasn't the case. Keanu Reeves does well in playing an alien - it might just be me and my afinity for males, but I think he did a good job in all those all-mighty-intergalactic-wisdom glances he keeps throwing while studying the humans at his side - Reeves does have something outlandish. Jennifer Connelly also does a good job - she's pretty convincing and she doesn't overdo the scenes where she's supposed to look shocked or baffled because of the intergalactic scheme of things being revealed to her.
FX and visual-wise, I must say that the movie scores somewhere around 8,50-9. The CG effects are just good, not breathtaking, but they do well in getting the message across. I hear that the cold blue-green tones of the movie were an intentional visual move, as blue and green are the natural and most representative colours of Earth - honestly, it didn't make me think of that at all, but I felt it went fine with the destruction scenes and the apocalyptic feeling of the movie.