Archive for January, 2006
Frank Martin is a transporter. He delivers things – not asking what or for whom. But at the moment he is filling in as chauffeur for the family of a high profile government policymaker engaged in narcotics control. Then a doctor’s appointment leads to a kidnapping, and Frank’s specialist military background implicates him as being responsible for abducting the family’s son. But Frank promised Jack never to let anyone hurt him. And the Transporter always keeps his promises…
So, what about the movie? I think the best way to describe Transporter 2 it is that it is the kind of movie that has a top of the line German sedan – armored to the outer coat of paint. And Lola, a heroin chic-type who considers the best accessories to pink lingerie to be a pair of laser-sighted sub-machine guns. And a latino mercenary practicing Kendo, as well as a few russians, including thugs and a scientist. Oh, and high-tech vials containing cartoonishly bright substances. You get the idea.
I don’t think there’s much to say about the acting – Frank Martin might not be the deepest of characters, but Jason Statham plays a good enough anti-hero, and the rest of the cast does a good job of providing various sterotypes. The script (by Robert Mark Kamen and Luc Besson) won’t win any awards. Some bits are way over the top, but it’s good enough to last the duration of the movie and provides for plenty of action.
Compared to the original Transporter, it feels like a combination of sequel and remake. The story, with Frank Martin working as a family driver, feels like standard sequel-seasoning, and the overall feel is, well, more American than European.
As a mindless action movie, I think it was quite entertaining. If you’re in the mood for something in that direction, but can’t decide if you want to watch Die Hard or something with Jackie Chan – then Transporter 2 might be what you want. There’s plenty of gunfights, car chases and clever Hong Kong-ish fight sequences. But if you’re looking for more than an hour and a half of simple entertainment, look somewhere else. Rating? 8/10 on the roundkick scale, 5.5/10 on the regular.
Some convinient links:
amazon.com: Transporter 2
| The Transporter (Special Delivery Edition)
amazon.co.uk: Transporter 2
| The Transporter
Tags: movies, review, Transporter 2
January 19, 2006 at 11:48 pm · Filed under Entertainment & Culture, Movies & TV
If you take the name Gyllenhaal, and pronounce it in Swedish, it would be GyllenhÃ¥l (“aa” substitutes our “a”-with-a-ring), which� means “golden hole”. So, starring in Brokeback Mountain, we have Jake Golden-hole. Haha. Get it, gay cowboys, golden hole… nudge nudge, wink wink?
Sometimes I crack me up.
Tags: random, thoughts
January 17, 2006 at 4:16 pm · Filed under General
I must admit that when I finally caught up with Firefly (when it got to Sweden it was on a channel I didn’t have, so I had to wait to get hold of DVD material), I watched the whole series with much gusto – and after wrapping it up with Serenity I was even left with a feeling of sadness that there was nothing more of the brilliantly entertaining setting that Joss Whedon dreamt up.
Now it seems fans have decided to take matters into their own hands, and started Browncoats Rise Again, a campaign to raise enough funds to finance a new series. I don’t know if it’s possible to raise the kind of money such a project requires – and I’m personally not sure about giving money to a website that lacks any information about who’s behind the initiative, but hopefully that’s just information lost in the burst of enthusiasm that created the project.
But it did get me thinking about how far off using the web as a medium for productions of that size is – to simply produce a series and sell the episodes online. Something like Firefly, that already has a dedicated fan base, may be a good starting project. If people pay $29.95 a month to get access to naked ladies doing naked things, maybe it isn’t impossible to find a large enough audience that is willing to subscribe to something with the quality of a tv-series. And since I guess that many Firefly fans are in the more tech-savvy demographics, many probably have what is needed to take something from the net and comfortably watch it on a TV. (Personally I’ve never been really comfortable watching anything but short clips on my PC, I prefer to be more active when I’m in front of this screen.)
Tags: firefly, sci-fi, tv
January 17, 2006 at 1:43 am · Filed under Movies & TV
I’m not going down to the wharf to work on the longboat today, mostly since some of the neighbours decided that heating the buildings and using electrical tools at the block’s wharf are an uneccessary luxuries that we do well without. Personally, I prefer a bit of comfort when I’m working, and I don’t really see the point of carving boats anyway. I am, however, going to enjoy the mug of coffee I just made, and it will definitely not be the last.
I’m still compliant with one of the three things associated with Swedes on the Prejudice Map from Google Blogoscoped (by way of The Presurfer). Data-mining can be interesting.
Tags: random
January 12, 2006 at 10:24 am · Filed under Random ramblings & reflections
“I will pledge to never purchase a CD contaning any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but only if 500 people around the world will too.”
— Elizabeth Stark and Fred Benenson, Freeculture.org
I signed up on this plegde to boycott DRM the moment I saw it (which was a couple of days ago, but it seems I’m a bit slow with the blog updates here). They reached the 500 signature mark shortly after that, but the deadline isn’t until February 6th, so it’s still open for anyone who wants to join in.
Why? I feel that all that is achieved with that kind of technology is to cause inconvinience (or, as in the case of the Sony DRM debacle, possible damage) for the customers, while not doing anything to effectively hinder music piracy. I don’t that will be achieved even if they come up with a DRM software that makes it impossible to make an unauthorized copy directly off the CD, even for a power user (or “hacker”).
All it takes is a good CD-player hooked up to some studio grade recording equipment, and you’ll have a copy that’s perfect to everyone but the most discerning audiophile. And that kind of equipment is probably easily accessible to the kind of people who, for example, also can access movie reels long enough to run them through a telecine machine to get a good copy to distribute.
So it will end up on the internet anyway, and all the DRM does is not only to annoy the consumers by not letting them play back the media the way they want, but also send a message that the producer considers their customers to be possible crooks.
Tags: tech
January 10, 2006 at 6:25 pm · Filed under General, Music
I’m too passive with the posting, so let’s talk about my expectations of the new year. Or rather not. I’ve never been into the year “thing”. Same shit, different number – or something like that. Where’s the big difference? Is it simply a matter of perspective, that people need to cut existence into smaller pieces thinking that they will be able to grasp it more easily? Personally, I think grasping existence is a pointless excersise, so I try to focus on whatever is at hand. Try to process life as it is within reach, and not bother with what happened last year or can happen in 2011.
When it comes to entertainment, a field where lot of people seem to put their anticipations, there’s not much either. I can’t think of any announced albums that I really want to hear, for example. Anyone got any suggestions on what will happen musically in 2006? Same thing goes for books, I guess.
I havn’t given the movies much thought either, but there one of the titles is Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi or Lady Vengeance, original Korean and U.S. titles respectively), Chan-wook Park’s third film about revenge (following the, in my opinion, brilliant Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy. It was released in Korea last summer, opens here in Sweden in January and I think U.S. release is in March. I’m also a bit curious about how the adaptation of A Scanner Darkly will turn out, since Philip K. Dick
is one of my favorite authors. But when it comes to adaptations, anticipation can be a bad thing, so I try to keep my hopes down and assuming it will be a total screw-up. The filming of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition falls in the same field.
Tags: movies, Music, thoughts
January 5, 2006 at 5:43 am · Filed under Entertainment & Culture, General
