Hghhhhhughhhgh

I went for a screening of Dead Silence in KLCC last night. As the name would suggest, it’s not a pleasant show. From the creators of Saw (which I hadn’t really watched before but peeked at it enough to know I do not want to watch it), you can expect some pretty horrific stuff. And to tell you the truth, I absolutely hate horror movies because they scare the daylights out of me. Like how cats are scared of water. Only worse.

 
The movie’s official poster is not kid-friendly. This is my version.

As my friends and I entered the cinema, we found out that it’s free seating and Howard chose of ALL places, the third foremost row. And there’s nobody else in front of us. They have common sense. Apparently we don’t. We waited for a couple of minutes, and they started running through the trailers. 3 minutes into the trailers, I wanted to go home. *whimper*

Okay, so I couldn’t go home because no one did. That was actually the first ever horror movie that I watched in the cinema. Under normal circumstances, my sanity and judgement would never allow me to agree to a horror movie in the cinema. But my friends caught me off-guard and I was stuck in the boat.

So after the trailers ended, the movie finally started with a deathly sombre opening with a wicked theme. I wanted to go home for the second time.

Miraculously, I survived past the trailers and the opening. I don’t want to talk about the storyline here in case any of you are interested in catching the movie personally, so Iet’s just say that I had a good time. In a bad way.

My field of vision.  

I watched about a third of all of the horror scenes. A third in terms of screen space. The rest were my fingers. And I used more expletives in a night than I would’ve in a year.

After the movie ended, we were all laughing. Though I doubt it was because the movie was funny. Because it wasn’t even remotely funny. If there’s such a thing as laughing out of fear, this must be it. I think we were all laughing out of fear. At least I was.

I think my life got shortened by a year or two.

Stupidity

Condensed

Two letters with a punctuation.

Short and succint,
but carries a point to almost any encounter.

A good point at that,
like a bullet taking down a castle.

A question itself,
only to bring forth even more questions.

Enough to undermine,
Even the strongest statements.

Cool, no?
Depends.

PS: Sorry, I haven’t rambled like this in a long time. Not since I lost the ability to do so but looks like it came back. Don’t want to turn this blog into a jumble, so I’ll try to avoid this.

Books vs Movies

I’m not a very bookish person so this post will be a rare one, but I’m sure many, if not all of you have heard about how movies based on books pale in comparison with the actual book. Obviously, movies cannot hope to achieve the level of detail as books can – but does that mean movies are not “good”? How is “good” defined, anyway?

There have been quite a few movies made after books, some very popular ones, most noticeably the Harry Potter series. But I cannot comment on them, because…. I’ve never read a single Harry Potter book (I can hear gasps now). The reason I thought of this was because I recently finished reading The Da Vinci Code(I can hear even more gasps now. Yes, I know it’s old. Yes yes. I know it’s VERY old. I’m old, okay?!) Being the only book that I’ve read before which spun-off a movie which I did watch, it did make me think about how different a book is if compared with its movie counterpart.

It was a good thing that I watched the movie before I read the book, because if it was the other way round, I wouldn’t be able to remember of the book, because I have much better memory of pictures rather than words. I could usually identify a movie almost instantly (which makes me wonder why I waste my already-limited memory remembering something like that), but I couldn’t identify a book from a whole page even if my life depended on it. Serves me right for not reading often enough.

That said, the moment I started reading The Da Vinci Code, I started to recall bits and pieces of the movie – the cast, the scenes, the key events, etc. I thought there wasn’t much left in the book which I don’t already know, but oh boy I was wrong. However, to be fair, The Da Vinci Code movie was one which I didn’t really fully understand. I watched it in the cinema and sad to say, it was one of the most boring movies I’ve ever seen. At least I didn’t sleep through it. The movie was dull and barely had any climaxes, almost nothing to keep the audience awake, not to mention to keep them on the edge of their seats.

It was not until when I started reading the book that I started to understand what was behind the whole story. A picture is worth a thousand words, I would definitely agree. But being able to have FIVE thousand words in place of that single picture is another matter. The book definitely gave me a better understanding on what’s happening – something the movie couldn’t possibly achieve unless the characters were to stand still for half an hour with thought bubbles popping up from their heads. The thing is, The Da Vinci Code is such that the story relies heavily on very fine details and cryptic messages that’d be quite impossible to relay effectively without using words. And that is possibly the reason why the movie failed to deliver.

All is not lost, though. I must admit that although the movie was lacking many finer details, it was… well.. a movie! With picture! If I hadn’t watched the movie before, I’m certain I’d have trouble imagining many parts of book, no thanks to my non-existent sense of imagination. That’s just me, though. I guess veteran readers will have no trouble at all. Although the author did an impeccable job of detailing the countless scenes, some I couldn’t make out at all. That especially happens when the author is trying to describe art and architectures – something which is abundant in the entire story – simply because I don’t have the faintest idea of how it is supposed to look like although I do know what he is talking about. It’s like me rambling about how sexy a motherboard is with its sleek circuit lines and UV reactive card slots and solid state capacitors to you (I know you’re giving me a one-kind look now).

In a nutshell, I think movies are more of a complement to books rather than being a substitute or as many would put it, a stripped-down version of the real thing. Movies cannot hope to illustrate the same amount of detail as the books could, but movies simply does a better job at giving a clear picture (pun intended) to viewers.

Now that I’m done with the book, I would say that The Da Vinci Code movie wasn’t bad, it’s just that it wouldn’t have been able to do justice to the actual story.

PS: There’s one very bad thing about doing a double-review like this. I kept thinking about the stupid APPLE throughout the entire book, if you know what I mean.

Scheduled Maintenance

Okay, it’s more like a uncalled for maintenance.

WordPress’s latest update broke my theme. Some major internal upgrades broke my custom… customisations and a few things stopped working.

Not entirely a bad thing, since I’ve been wanting to strip this page bare and leave a no-frills theme running. Just hadn’t got the time and motivation to do so, I guess now is a good time. Not the best time actually, but it’s either now or I’ll never get my bum off to work on it.

Don’t expect anything fancy though, because that’s precisely what I’m avoiding. This page already loads slow enough as it is (yes I’m aware, I apologise for the irritating wait).

I don’t know when I will actually get it done, but just so that you’re aware that I’m aware that my site is broken