Month: June 2008

Movies Watched: Shôrin shôjo & Narnia – Prince Caspian

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Shôrin shôjo [少林少女]
Xinyun got free tickets from her colleagues for the prescreen of the movie and I was given the priviledged to watch it with her. My impression of the movie is this: Women’s lacrosse + Shaolin Soccer + Kungfu Hustle, and a tad of Star Wars (Dark Side?!). You can possibly even pass it as a sequel to Shaolin Soccer itself. (Hardly a surprise considering that Stephen Chow is the Executive producer, two of the original actors from Shaolin Soccer and one of actress is from CJ7!)

My feelings are rather mixed for this movie. First of all… when the heck did Shaolin take female disciples? Next, while I am rather pissed with Stephen Chow trying to pass this off as a sequel to Shaolin Soccer – a wonderful movie of its own – and the storyline was pretty much meaningless (in xinyun’s words – wtf?), there are things in the movie which make it redeemable. In fact, for those who are born in the 70s and have watched Japanese TV series on tennis (I think it was tennis) and volley ball, it would be a little nostalgic to watch the computer graphics depicting the absurd trajectory of the ball, albeit done with better quality in the movie. Personally speaking, that’s the other thing – other than the fact that the actors are speaking Japanese – that reminds me that this movie is Japanese.

Synopsis: Shaolin Girl Rin Sakurazara returned to Japan after 3000 days of training, to find her grandfather’s dojo abandoned. Her original master has quit and is now a chef running his own restaurant. She subsequently learn that simply teaching the martial techniques is not quite enough and there are other things to learn – such as the spirit of Shaolin itself, and teamwork. (Here you find a shadow of Stephen Chow in Shaolin Soccer, where he needs to learn that his ability to kick the ball hard and fast is useless if you can’t put it on target.)

Rin slowly learn as a lacrosse player that it’s not just about her and in a team one has to trust her team mates and cooperate with them. She also learn why she was sent away to Shaolin and what caused the dojo to be abandoned during her absence. Ultimately, she has to face the evil enemy and the temptation of the dark side to protect the very people who were trying to protect her, and also the people she cared about.

You are really not missing much if you give the movie a miss. But if you like to see cute Japanese girls… and could let your mind wander and think of the meaning of certain things in a movie, then there’s really no harm watching it either. There are still lighter parts of the movie which is quite entertaining in my opinion.

Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
I have not read CS Lewis books, and I watched these movies simply for the objective of entertainment. But before I begin, I must say Ben Barnes (who acts as Prince Caspian) has much room to improve as an actor. One Keanu Reeves is quite enough and personally I felt both are better off playing poker than acting. After all, you can’t tell if they are angry, excited, happy or sad.

Synopsis: One year has passed since their defeat of the White Witch, but 1300 years has passed in Narnia. At this time the wife of Miraz, uncle of Prince Caspian X of the Telmarines, has given birth to a son. Seeing that the line of succession is now secured, Miraz moved to the final step in usurping Prince Caspian’s throne and made attempt on the life of Prince Caspian. During his escape, Prince Caspian blew Susan’s magic horn and summoned the Pevensie siblings back to Narnia’s rescue. The Pevensie siblings arrived in time to assist Caspian and to unite the creatures of Old Narnia in their last stand against the Telmarines at Aslan’s How, the location of the destroyed Stone Table, now an underground fortress.

Ultimately, everything that the rest of the Pevensie siblings (except Lucy) do in their own strength was futile. In the end, Lucy has to seek Aslan to deliver the Narnians and restore the land.

I felt this sequel is less exciting and mesmerizing as the first installment of the series. There were also several distortions to the original novel that several bloggers had pointed out. I personally do not know what direction it will take if another novel of the Narnia series is taken to the big screen. I can only hope that any further sequels won’t end up either maiming or destroying CS Lewis’ masterpiece. To prevent that from happening, I will probably start reading the books myself.

Movies Watched: Kungfu Panda & The Incredible Hulk

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Kungfu Panda
This is one of the funniest animation I have watched in a long time. There are parts which are exaggerating but compared to some of the Chinese kungfu comics I am reading, it’s medium rare compared to over-cooked.

There’s also many parts of it that I would considered ‘very Zen’ . For example, Master Wugui (乌龟) saying ‘One often meets his destiny on his way to avoid it’ , and it is generally true, as many people end up facing what they tried to avoid because whatever they did inevitably resulted in it. The Dragon Scroll is the other thing that is ‘very Zen’ too. But I won’t reveal anything about that because that will be the spoiler if I did. (It makes me wonder if that’s the general view of Westerners of Oriental culture because there are parts of Forbidden Kingdom which I felt are quite Zen too.)

Anyway, the story line is about picking one among the inhabitants of the valley as the Dragon Warrior to face the greatest threat they have ever faced, and the Panda Po was chosen. (I won’t get to the part on how a Kungfu ‘moron’ got chosen as it would be yet another spoiler.) The task to train him into the legendary fighting machine fell on the master of the five kungfu experts – Tigress, Mantis, Viper, Monkey and Crane. It is a daunting task that left the master disillusioned and disheartened as Po definitely isn’t cut for the job.

Master Wugui finally convinced the master to have faith in Po and nothing happens by coincidence. After Wugui passed on, the Master finally had enough faith to put his mind into training Po. It is then he discovered Po’s hidden potential and ultimately found an ingenious way to train him – as most of you would probably have seen parts of that in the trailers. And of course in the end there would be the showdown between the villain and the hero where our hero will be triumphant. (And oh, don’t forget to sit through the credits… it will round up the story nicely, and there’s a little bit more at the end.)

The Incredible Hulk
In spite of what American audiences prefer, this is definitely a better make than the previous one made by Lee Ang. In other words you can just wipe your memories and forget that there was ever a Hulk movie made previously. (Just like the Batman Begins completely restored our faith in the series after the disaster of the previous few featuring Val Kilmer and George Clooney.)

No more picking up tanks and throwing them this time round and the story line is way better. The pace of the movie is also controlled very well as it at least keeps me captivated. I do not know how much it has deviated from the original comic series itself but when I looked up Wikipedia articles, at least some of the characters, for e.g. General Ross and Betty Ross etc are from the comic itself.

The story line revolves around how Dr Bruce Banner turned into the Incredible Hulk after a gamma radiation experiment went awry. Unknown to Banner, the experiment is a secret army program to create super soldiers. In General Ross’ own words: Instead of making the hardware better, we made you better.

After destroying the lab where the experiment is conducted, and causing harm to his beloved Betty, Banner escaped to Brazil, where he and ‘Mr. Blue’ tried to find a cure to his condition. While at the end Banner and ‘Mr. Blue’ did almost find the cure (or at least a method to suppress the creature within), Banner was forced to make the choice between living peacefully forever, or to wake the creature within him to fight the Abomination, a creature created by the remnants of the very experiment that created the Hulk, and blood samples taken from Banner himself. The story climaxed with a battle between these two creatures of immense strength and power in the streets of New York.

Spoiler: At the end of the movie, Tony Stark (Iron Man) appeared to invite General Ross into joining him in a special force. I wondered, is Marvel setting up the scene for an Avengers movie featuring all the Marvel Superheroes featured so far? (And no, this is not another ‘after credits’.)

Vishing

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Nope, this is not spelling mistake.

Vishing is the criminal practice of using social engineering and Voice over IP (VoIP) to gain access to private personal and financial information from the public for the purpose of financial reward. To know more about it, you may want to read up this Wikipedia article here. (You may also want to refer to some of these examples: [1], [2], [3].)

To be frank, I wasn’t really aware of Vshing until I read APLINK’s article. The closest thing to Vishing I have experienced, is when Headhunters impersonate as a staff from an overseas office asking for phone numbers or email address who are from the same mailing list.

The usual scenario goes like this: Someone will call claiming they are on a business trip or vacation, and they are having some computer problems which prevented them from accessing the company network via VPN. But the matter is important or urgent and they need to know the numbers to call certain people, or to send them an important and updated spreadsheet / presentation via their own private email account in Hotmail or Gmail.

I have developed a way to frustrate these people by asking them to go through a verification process which requires them to provide certain personal information, for e.g. their immediate line managers, their corporate-issued mobile number (for call back verification), the last 4 digits of their employee number and, on a good day we feel particularly charitable to the International Red Cross, their credit card numbers. Usually, by then they either realise they are getting nowhere and hang up in anger, or they realised they are so thoroughly busted they just hang up.

Anyway, the other thing that reminds me of Vishing in Singapore, would be cases of ‘High Court Officials’ – or was it ‘officers from the Commercial Crimes Department [CCD]’ ? – calling one up to say that one’s account is going to be frozen by the government gahmen due to some ongoing criminal investigation. My understanding is that they will then ask for the person to transfer money to a holding account’

Another one would be someone impersonating as officials from even the CPF Board, calling up to advise the victim to transfer their GST Rebates to a certain account number, as it part of the CPF’s services to automatically remit that money to their account.

Frankly, do not trust any form of communications whereby you are unable to verify the source. Even if they give you a call-back number, it is not to be trusted. The best thing to do would be, as APLINK advised, to trust only the number you already know – for e.g. for credit cards, the number you find at the back of your card, or in the case of gahmen departments, the numbers listed on the .gov.sg websites.

In summary, don’t panic and stay calm. Don’t jump the gun and never do what those people tell you right away.

After all, if what those people are saying is true, whatever bad things that is happening to your account cannot be averted. In fact, tell them you will come down personally to whatever department they say they are calling from to meet them and pass them the information. Insist that you want this to be done for good order sake. And if they threatens you, then all the more you should meet them, insisting that you are trying to do your part as a good citizen.

If they refused or gave you excuses that this is unnecessary, just hang up. After all, if they are indeed gahmen officials, why should they be afraid of you going over to meet them, at your own expense and your own inconvenience?

Moral Degenerates on the Internet

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I was going through the feeds on my RSS reader and was speechless after reading the comment quoted here.

“I wonder why the lady slept without locking her door at night? She was renting a room, so she should have been wise to lock the door.

Just curious about such a suspicious circumstance. She was like inviting trouble. No doubt the landlord should not have opened her door, but why she took such a risk to ruin a man and his family?”

It is not wrong to say that the lady was careless and that she had no threat awareness, but the above comment goes even further. It actually puts the blame on the victim for what has been done.

I won’t go further to give examples on just how absurdly wrong the above comment was. Alice has given several examples already. What the hell makes anyone think that for women who has no threat awareness or those who are simply being careless deserved what is coming for them?

Anyway, I would not not quite agree with Alice when she said ‘this exactly shows how the moral of the society has deteriorated’. But I can understand where she is coming from (even when I am no paragon of virtue), after I read the posts from Jean on my RSS reader, and went through some of the the comments and a link to Sammyboy’s forum in one of Jean’s post here.

All I want to say is, being a strong believer of retribution (or poetic justice), my opinion is that the only way people like these can be shown just how wrong they are, is to have some crime or wrong done (or some mishaps happening) to them as a result of their own carelessness. Then, some other person should come around and made a similarly insensitive remark.

I sincerely do hope they are made up of sterner stuff and won’t go about whining like a wimp at hust how insensitive those comments are when it happens to them.


A fine example of retribution (or poetic justice) would be having made prank calls, one gets a series of nuisance calls in return…

Storm in a Teacup – Over Endoh’s Post

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I was rather amused when I got the link to this post. Obviously, the blogger needs to have his final say after failing to force his opinion down the throat of everyone else in the comment section of Endoh’s blog post here.

I find this part of the post the most amusing:

Especially since he keeps contradicting himself with statements like, for example, on one page that says “the taxation of petrol in Singapore was never designed as a measure to counter traffic congestion”, and on another page that says “I do not deny petrol taxation is one of the various methods on top of ERP and higher road-tax charges etc. [to control traffic growth]”.)

Erm… there is actually a contradiction here?!

For example, it is my considered opinion that a 10-cent coin was never designed specifically for the purpose of prying the cover off a tin of Milo. Yet at the same time, I also do not deny it can be used for that purpose, on top of a screwdriver, or a spoon.

Am I being contradictory, when all I was doing was simply making my stand clear? Is the blogger trying very hard to prove to everyone with his example of a ‘contradiction’ that he is challenged in the department of logic?

Anyway, it was within this blogger’s right to comment on Endoh’s post, but if all he wanted to do was to point this out, no one would really object to that!

Unfortunately, the blogger obviously believe strongly enough that his perceived reality is the way the rest of the world is looking at the matter (or perhaps how the rest of the world should look at it). This is alarming because the question here is no longer whether the blogger’s comprehension capabilities is impaired, but also if there’s a more serious and fundamental problem with his mental state – something like that of Adolf Hitler in its infancy – whereby he should seek immediate and professional psychiatric assistance…

I would hope it’s not something that serious, but rather that the blogger had obviously over-estimated his rather limited mental capabilities. Apart from failing to recognise how mistaken he was, the concept of ‘agreeing to disagree’ must have been beyond his capability to grasp. In fact, when confronted with that option, it must have triggered yet another hitherto unknown mental deficiency, which caused the blogger to ‘pitch tent’ in the comment section of Endoh’s blog post for some time trying to force his opinion down the throats of anyone who dares to oppose him!

Nothing insightful or valuable was really offered in that period, though the blogger would dispute that as he repeat the same old shit in an impressive number of ways. On top of that, a blog-less wonder which staunchly defended the blogger has caused me to wonder if that wasn’t a sign of a bout of schizophrenia. * shudders *

Even so, the blogger’s lack in debating skills is far less glaring than his obsession with making people see things in one way – the way he sees it. That’s clearly a mild form of mental sickness.

However, I am a little puzzled why he has finally written this piece, when he has been content with ‘defecating’ on the comment section of Endoh’s blog for the better part of two days. But let me hazard a guess on what drove him over the edge:

The Akismet plugin in Endoh’s WordPress setup got so ‘upset’ with this blogger’s comments that even the bot has marked those comments as spam and deleted them automatically.

And that, would be classic example of a level of idiocy that really takes the cake!

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