Rihards Unplugged

Just finished watching You Kill Me, and holy cow is it a great movie or what. Really loved it. Shame that it’s probably not going to come to the cinemas here (Austria), or even as DVD. Even greater shame that there will probably be more people who have seen say, Doom movie, or Fantastic Four than this movie.

So what’s it about? It’s about an assassin from the Polish mafia in Buffalo. It tells the story of Frank Falenczyk, a member of this mafia, who has an alcohol problem which starts getting in the way of his work, and he botches several big jobs. So he gets forced to attend AA meetings in San Francisco, and work part time in a funeral parlor.

Don’t want to spoil the rest of the movie. So just going to say that it’s an excellent movie. It’s smart, funny, very dark, but mostly it’s really different and fresh. If you have a chance to watch this, don’t miss it.

A Gentleman’s Duel is a short animation story from the Blur Studio. As with all other Blur animations, it’s excellent. I really love the humour as well.

Does anyone know where I can get a higher resolution version of this short movie? I’ve been trying to find it on Stage6, but their search engine is as useless as a hubcap on a tractor (thanks to Google for wonderful sentence completion help). So if anyone knows, please do share.

Some of you, especially those that browse a lot will have by now probably noticed that more and more webpages have started switching from flv based videos over to divx based videos. It’s quite easy to notice it as well, for one, you need to install a special plugin to view these videos, and also you get to see a big divx logo first.

At first I didn’t like this at all (I don’t like most things that require a plugin to be usable), but after getting the plugin and watching some videos, especially those on Stage6 site, I must say that I’m very pleased with this new web video format. Now divx itself is quite old of course, but it is new to the web, and beats flash video and sound quality any time of the day.

Here’s an example, and don’t be alarmed if it asks you to install the divx plugin, it should be perfectly safe to do so. It’s the Theatrical Starcraft 2 trailer.

For someone who has expressed his dislike for Halo 2, and quite a sizable chunk of the Halo community, I sure do seem to post quite a lot of Halo related things. Especially lately, but I do have my reasons. It’s not so much because of Halo, or Bungie (who are really good game developers, even if they did produce Halo 2), it’s because of WETA Workshop.

WETA Workshop, who are they? They are a physical effects company from New Zealand, famous for their work on Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as other movies that have had really great sets, costumes and props. And yes, they are once more working together with Peter Jackson, this time though on the Halo movie. Which doesn’t look all that bad.