Tuesday, June 21, 2005

I saw Batman Begins

I saw BATMAN BEGINS yesterday. Whilst strolling along Orchard Link, I decided to walk over to Cathay Cineplex Orchard and view the cinema posters. I was curious about how many people would turn out to see BATMAN on a Monday so I purchased a ticket to the 1:40 PM show and was surprised to find the theater to be only half full!

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If you are a fan of the comic book series , GO SEE THIS FILM! It is the closest you're going to get to the comic book. It is different from all of the other Batman movies in that it is made much more in real life style. It is serious all the way through. Christian Bale did great! Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman were brilliant too. Michael Caine's portrayal as Alfred was amazing and as for Ken Watanbe, I wish he had more words to say ... I love his acting and totally enjoyed his character as Katsumoto in "The Last Samurai". By the way, Gary Oldman is perfect in his role as Commissioner Jim Gordon! After seeing this film, I think I can safely say that this is one of Christopher Nolan and David S Goyer's best films without a doubt. The cinematography and the bat effects are fantastic! I must confess I was literally in awe after watching this movie.

One drawback was that the fight sequences in "Begins" were edited too quickly, and the lighting too dark so that you really couldn't tell what was going on and determine who was hitting who. Hopefully the next film will open up the fight sequences so that we can actually see Batman use the martial arts skills he developed during his exile.

Looking forward to the sequel !

Sunday, June 12, 2005

VLC media player

VLC (VideoLAN Client) is a multi-platform multimedia player. It handles most MPEG, AVI (including DivX), ASF, WMV, OGG, MP4 and WAV files as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

I stumbled across the latest release of VLC (version 0.8.2 - test2) during the latest round of my never-ending search for a way to play back WMV files on my iMac. Couldn't be happier with this Mac OS X version ... the only drawback is that VLC does not support the WMV3 sound or video format due to no suitable decoder module for fourcc WMV3.
When you try to play WMV3, you get only audio, no visual, most probably due to M$'s new Digital Rights Management (DRM) structure.

By the way, WMV3 is the fourcc code of the WMV9 codec, so both are the same thing. WMV3 itself is just an updated version of Microsoft's MPEG4 codec variant and will only work in Windows.