Super Mario Bros. 2 Theme, Gypsy Jazz Style

I was never a fan of Mario Bros (never did own a gaming console), but I am a big fan of Django Reinhardt, and this rendition of the Super Mario Bros. 2 theme by Adrian Holovaty in the gypsy jazz style is brilliant. Monstrous technique. Check out his other videos too.

Super Mario Bros. 2, gypsy-jazz version

On a side note, he is one of the lead developers of the Django framework.

Published
Categorized as Music

Lou Reed — Perfect Day

Whatever Lou Reed had in mind when he wrote the song, it definitely wasn’t this interpretation by Asbjørn Tejdell.

Lou Reed - Perfect Day

Great imagery, and I love the animation style.

Published
Categorized as Music

Redbelt (2008)

redbelt_xlg

4.5 stars outta 5

“A fight is not won by one punch or kick. Either learn to endure or hire a bodyguard.”

— Bruce Lee

In my previous review of “Ip Man” I mentioned that I felt strangely dissatisfied with the movie’s lack of wushu spirit in its theme and for the weirdest reason, I just couldn’t let the flaw of the movie go while half wanting to recommend it.

I needed a closure; and what better way do this than watching yet another martial arts movie.

Yet,to call Redbelt “another martial arts movie”, is like saying The Dark Knight was merely another comic book movie. A bold claim, yes. But not entirely unjustified.

The latest movie from David Mamet shows us the fight that most of its peers does not offer enough of: The struggle within.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (quite a mouthful, eh?) plays Mike Terry, a jiujitsu instructor who explains that he doesn’t teach people to fight, but to prevail.  An interesting comment, since his dojo is not making money, has a shattered glass from an incident that may lead to his one of …two(?) students going to jail, he’s unable to pay his rent and to top this off, his wife ends up borrowing money from a loan shark for a bust business deal that she could never pay off.

It sure is a good thing that Mike’s brother in law happens to be running an ‘Ultimate Fighting Champion-ish’ tournament. And with a $40,000 top prize carrot dangling in front of a desperate man, could this finally be the straw to break the camel’s back ?  Does every man, even a honourable one like Mike, truly have a price?

I have but merely scratched Redbelt’s surface in its intricate plot lines, a wonderful character piece case study on the theme of honour, a subject matter sorely missing in many martial arts movies; and to see it  on an American movie actually makes it even more remarkable to me.

Now, the movie does have its flaws.  The overly macho dialogue sounds like they belong to another world (Who talks like that in real life!?!) the fact that everything piece of the puzzle falls oh so neatly into place in the film.  But I am more than willing to ignore this shortcomings because I have simply enjoyed the ride that Mamet is bringing me.

Of course, it would be ridiculous of me to expect all martial arts movies to suddenly stop fighting and to start preaching, what would be the fun in that?

But, dear reader, hear me out.  In today’s world where money seem to be the most important thing, it heartens me to think that old fashioned values like honour and respect still means something to somebody, even he is a work of fiction.

THAT should be the spirit of wushu, of martial arts, and for better or worse, for our lives.

Published
Categorized as Movies

Irregular Oblivioning: Foundations

Before you begin any serious usage of mods, you will need a few resources that will enable some other mods you will be installing.

  • Oblivion Script Extender (OBSE)
    The OBSE is an amazing piece of software. It hooks into the Oblivion executable and provides new scripting functions while keeping things rock-solid. If you don’t understand what that mean, just know that the OBSE enabled the creation of much more complex mods than what would otherwise be realistically possible. Note that D2D users and No-CD crack users are out of luck. Installation is simple, just follow the instructions in the readme file.
  • Pluggy
    This is a multifunction OBSE plugin, and adds more scripting functions.
  • Common Oblivion (Cobl)
    Cobl adds lore-friendly races, books, ingredients by itself, but its true value comes from it being designed as a shared resource for modders. It doesn’t come in an OMOD unfortunately, so read the installation instructions carefully. I have just the Core ESM/ESPs installed. Salmo the Baker is nice but unstable for some users, you’ll have to test it for yourself.

I’ll be doing game play tweaks next.

Sueetie

All I can say is, SUEET! It is a project that integrates best of breed Open Source .NET software to produce an online community suite. That makes it a direct competitor to Community Server and, to a smaller extent, mojoPortal.

I’ll be looking at the possibility of migrating That Stupid Club which is currently running on CS to Sueetie. CS was nice, and for a while was the only choice, but it is just too big and too complex to customise easily.

Ip Man

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3 out of 5 stars

I left the cinema with a strange feeling of dissatisfaction after watching Ip Man, Donnie Yen’s latest kung fu flick.

The film talks about the life (and brief) times of the title character, a practitioner of Wing Chun Martial Arts whom was considered the most highly skilled martial artist whose disciples would include the legendary Bruce Lee.

The movie, if you excuse the cheesy pun, literally packs a punch. Donnie Yen portrays Ip Man as a modest family man who is always ready to offer a helping hand but would never asks for any in return. The opening fight scene between Ip and a fellow master is a masterpiece showcase in this genre. The viewer has no doubt that the challenger is out to probably humiliate Ip, but instead, he was offered hospitality by Ip. And strangely, this increases my curiosity of how good Ip really is. And the fight does not disappoint. While most fighting movies aims for the absurdity these days, the opening fight scene demonstrates how control and discipline can be even more impressive. Ip whom easily outmatched his opponent could have easily beaten him to a pulp not only held back most of his punches; he modestly thanks the opponent for doing the same afterwards.

It was at this time, when my friend turned and told me “I love this movie!” I eagerly concur, but once again I spoke too soon.

The second to third act of this movie unfortunately derailed from the intial set up. The Japanese invasion came along and all in Fo Shan goes to hell. And all these eventually led to a series of ‘misunderstandings’ which results in some meaningless over the top fight scenes which turned Ip turn from the humble kungfu master into a one man Mortal Kombat-ish fighting machine. All these of course are an overly elaborate lead to the final showdown between Ip and the Japanese General Miura, whom surprise surprise, happens to be a highly skilled kung fu Master in his own right.

Oddly enough, I was more than ready to ‘forgive’ all that went wrong with the movie if this last fight was played out … respectfully. And I humbly offer my thoughts on what totally went wrong with the third act.

The scene that personally I feel could have saved the movie was when General Miura came in to offer Ip a meal on the night before the big fight; a mirror of the opening scene of the show don’t you think? I would rather have Miura and Ip use the scene to state their respect for each other’s skills in Martial arts and I would imagine that the two are opposite sides of the same coin entwined in the middle of WW2. But alas, Ip sprouted some speech on Jap bashing, and later on, bashed up the Japanese General. *YAWN!*

You probably think I’ve put too much thought into a simple kungfu movie, but what I’m trying to say is what should have been a great film on the spirit of wushu, ends up as another generic chop-socky flick, and to that, I lament.

Irregular Oblivioning: The Essentials

The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion

I’ve been a fan of the Elder Scrolls series since the Arena days and apart from the action adventure Redguard I’ve played them all (never did finish Arena or Daggerfall though, pesky bugs…).

The series really took off with Morrowind. While the main quest was OK, if a bit formulaic, the excellent plugins feature and the Construction Set were what really made the game shine, and almost instantly a huge community sprung up around Morrowind modding.

Oblivion continued the fine tradition of extensibility. I started playing it earlier this year, as I did not have a PC capable of running it. I did not even bother to finish the main quest, as I did with Morrowind before downloading and using user-created mods.

I’ll be writing about a series of posts about the Oblivion mods I’m using mostly for my future reference, but I’m hoping somebody else will find them useful too.

And remember, whatever you want to change in-game, somebody’s probably already done it.

In this first post, I’ll be doing through files that I consider musts for every Oblivion on PC player (Xbox 360 and PS3 Oblivion can’t use user-created content, sorry).

Before everything else, make sure you have the last official patch (v1.2.0416 at the time of writing). You should ideally get the Shivering Isles expansion, as it adds a few scripting functions. Well, you should get it anyway, as the quest is actually more interesting than the Main Quest.

First up, you want, nay, need Timeslip’s Oblivion Mod Manager. As its name imples, it manages your mods. But more than that, it handles OMOD files, which are specially packed mods. This utility can easily add or remove mods, warn of file conflicts and most importantly, mod authors can provide an installation script which allows one to, say, install optional parts of the mod. Always prefer OMOD if that option is available from the author or perhaps a third party, and it’s usually worth it to make your own OMOD if not. And for the mod authors who are not yet providing OMODs officially, what are you waiting for? Get to it. Follow the instructions!

Even fully patched up, Oblivion has bugs. Modders to the rescue though. Grab the Unofficial Oblivion Patch. You will want the Shivering Isles and Official Mods patches too if you have them. Bethsoft should be paying these guys for what they do. OMODs are available.

You will want one of the UI mods too. Out of the box, Oblivion looks like a console game. Everything’s just so… big. And clumsy. Modders to the rescue, again. BTmod was the gold standard for a long time, but it’s been superseded by the excellent DarNified UI. It’s what Oblivion PC should have been. Personally, I’m using DarkUI’d DarN. Both DarN UIs comes in delectable OMODs.

Now grab the Better Oblivion Sorting Software, formerly known as the FCOMhelper. Official description: ‘A simple program for mod users to quickly optimise load ordering of ESP/ESM files in their Oblivion load-order.’ MS Visual C++ Runtime 2008 is a requirement.

With these mods, you will still be getting the Vanilla Oblivion experience. Next up, foundations.