Entertainment
Last night, we went and watched V for Vendetta, a movie based on a comic book series. The movie itself was fairly entertaining, with the right mix of humour and seriousness combined with slightly unconventional plot.
Before we got to the Feature Presentation, though, we had to sit through trailers for a:
- Sequel of a movie based on a amusement park ride
- Movie based on a Japanese game
- Movie based a comic book hero
- Third movie based on an old TV show
I guess this is where Hollywood is headed, though looking at companies like EA will easily tell you that making a sequel after sequel will eventually lead to saturation and people getting tired of the entire genre.
In any case, I’ve been going through season 3 of 24. It’s an interesting show. I’ve always believed that one of the reasons why animes are so popular is that because they typically don’t conform to the episodic nature of most TV shows, it allows them to have connected, tightly written stories. They can have overarching theme that doesn’t need to be resolved in 30 minutes, which allows them to tackle stories and themes with epic proportions. With the shows that have been coming out lately, I guess Powers That Be has figured out some of that magic.
Just because I like the show doesn’t mean that I can’t critisize it. As an engineer, I’ve basically been cringing everytime something technical comes up. Some of the funny things I’ve noticed:
- Infinite resolution photographs. They’re everywhere!
- What kind of operating system are they using? And they completely mis-use some of the common technical terms, like kernel, and socket, and mount, and crontab…
- The entire signal processing section is laugh out loud funny. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think about Kalman filters without chuckling at the phrase “I’m losing the signal, do a Kalman on it”
- “This search is taking too long! I’ll try using a tree!”
Well, I suppose they could’ve done far worse…