Dimension Shift: Artwork by Richard Horsman

3D renders of old 2D images.

Pretty cool methinks.

Dimension Shift: Artwork by Richard Horsman

Mr T gives some good advice

Learn about "recouping" with the one and only Mr TRecouping

Bad Rappers

Someone has collected mugshots and police records for a selection of the most popular rappers (No Eminem though).

I doubt they no longer live at the addresses given if rapper stalking is your thing.

Macgyver 2008

Well following my earlier posting about the boxset, it looks like Macgyver is popular again, at least in my world. I've had discussions at work on him the conclusion being that people fall into 1 of 3 groups; those who love him, those who hate him, and those who have no idea what I'm talking about. It is funny however hearing people say "MacGyver that guy who could make a bomb from string, pen and some chocolate.

I'm still making my way through the DVDs. I am pleased that the "turning a coffin into a jetski" episode is in the set. Hopefully seasons 2 & 3 will be released soon.

Well it now looks like not only is his popularity on a high but he's going to be given his biggest assignment yet. I knew it was a good idea to campaign for the boxset's release. Looks like a new campaign might be looming.

Macgyver 2008

M C Escher Drive

I'm a big fan of the artist MC Escher. This advert is a nod to some of his most famous pictures. Watch it then watch it closer a second time. It's not as obvious as it first seems.

M C Escher Drive

The Sports Ka ad you weren't supposed to see.

and it's not the one where the door slams into the pigeon.

Sports Ka Cat Commercial

There is a God!

MacGyver has finally found it's way to DVD and the series 1 boxset is now available.
I signed the online petition to get this to happen years ago, so it was quite surprising to see it actually on the shelf.

Needless to say I bought a copy immediately and am working my way through them. You can pick up some great survival tips from this show; I now know how to stop a reactor leak by sealing the crack with chocolate bars, I know that a fire hose can clear debris from an explosion and I know how to destroy laser security systems with a pair of binoculars; and that's just the pilot show.

Woohoo!!!

Welcome to the 419 Eater

The 419 scam is one of the most common scams doing the rounds on the internet. Surprisingly some people are still gullible enough to fall for it. It usually takes the form of someone in an African nation coming into a lot of money but needing a foreigner to access the funds as they're locked down. The scam then relies on the scammer needing money to get the paperwork in order, the requests never end and people continue to pay up until they realise they've been had.

Some people have turned the scam onto the scammers by getting them to meet conditions before the victim joins in. Most of these take the form of asking for the scammer to pose with a sign, but others have gone further asking them to pose with bread on their heads or kissing the head of a dead fish; the funny thing is that the scammers will do as they're asked as long as they think they're going to get their victim.

Here's a site with some of the pictures.

Welcome to the 419 Eater

Weebl and Bob - piepod

A nice ipod advert parody with everybody's favourite pie loving eggs.

Weebl and Bob - piepod

9/11 tapes

Came across the following on the internet. It looks like after some legal wranglings the U.S. courts have finally allowed the 9/11 Emergency Service tapes to be release into the publich domain.

If you're interested in hearing real thoughts from the people on the scene, as it happened then visit the site.

9/11 tapes

Keith Lard

Tonight Channel 4 showed a repeat of the "Eyes Down" episode of "That Peter Kay Thing". This show was quite funny but the funniest bit had to be the Keith Lard character, an over-zealous fire inspection officer who is rumoured to have sexual relationships with dogs.

This is quite funny in itself, but what is even funnier is that in the area where the show is set there is a real Fire Inspector called Keith Laird who took offence to the show and quite obviously filed a complaint with the TV ombudsman.

Although we never found out if the real guy "bummed dogs", Channel 4 did agree to pay out and he got a nice £10,000 for his troubles.

On tonight's show they still made reference to the complaint even though the show was originally shown years ago.

BBC News | ENTERTAINMENT | Fire officer fumes over comedy

Big Brother 6 is over

Well I did post my thoughts when the show started; it's only right I post something thought provoking and as deep as the show's content now that it has finished.

Anthony won. Whoop-de-doop.


Roll on the next episode of Lost.

Crash

The final film in my "Malcolm has nothing better to do with his holidays but watch movies"-alooza left me with a choice of Crash or the new Herbie film. Given the choice of Lindy Lohan and a white volkswagen or an ensemble cast in a moving drama about race I went for what seemed to be the most grown up of the two. Sorry Lindy!

This film brings together the following stars
Miss Congeniality
George of the Jungle
the black cockney guy from Oceans 11 (without his terrible Barney Rubble accent)
Rumblefish (who coincidentally also stars in the Herbie film), some hispanic actress
Some hispanic woman but not Eva Mendes
Ludacris
Buffy's brother in Cruel Intentions
The love interest in MI2
and a bunch of other people who I can't remember from other films.

The film is a very clever look at racism in all aspects of society and has the obvious white-on-black and black-on-white but also goes beyond this looking at black-on-black, black-on-hispanic, black-on-arab, arab-on-hispanic etc etc. All the characters are either on the giving or receiving end and all are brought together with a car crash.

The film deserves to get some oscar nominations but it won't be for best actor or actress, screenplay perhaps. The problem with ensemble casts is that no one person stands out enough to carry the film. I can't really pick one person who stood out for their performance.

However I was moved by a couple of scenes, there is some very powerful film-making going on in this film and you will find yourself sympathising with just about everyone.

The most serious film I saw this week and easily the best one.

I saw a BB person today

I was walking down Sutton High Street and started getting paranoid when I saw the chav populace pointing in my direction. It turns out they had spotted Sam from Big Brother who was walking right in front of me. I didn't realise at first because she's shorter than I thought she'd be and she was also dressed in some awful pink outfit that looked like it should have been on a 14 year old.

She was clearly enjoying the popularity that comes with being voted out of Big Brother in the first few weeks. I also realised that her "friends" walking either side of her were probably security making sure she was clear of riff raff interaction until the final show tomorrow night. She will no doubt be appearing if only to milk a little bit more of the public's adulation until her next naked photo shoot is organised.

I then went for a shit, in a nearby shopping centre; I'll leave you to decide which of those two events was the most interesting.

The Island

The big Michael Bay summer blockbuster (although no Jerry Bruckheimer this time) follows the exact same direction style as Bad Boys 2, Armageddon, The Rock and all those other leave-the-brain-at-home movies he churns out. If you like the camera to slowly pan around the hero at waist-height in slow-motion capturing a little bit of lens flare then you're not going to be disappointed; there is plenty of it in this.

Ewan McGregor plays Bravo-Two-Zero or something equally banal, a person living in a wonderful enclosure where they wear white puma clothing, play xbox and interact with other branded products. He falls for Breaker-20-20 played by big lipped Scarlet Johannson but they can't get close because the rules of the enclosure say so. Everyone there dreams of winning a trip to The Island, a dream destination that is offered as a prize in a lottery where you don't even have to by a ticket. The compound is run by Sean Bean, the only guy in Hollywood with the ability to change one letter in his first name to get his surname. Hopefully his sister Jean and brother Dean don't aspire to join the acting profession as that would spoil this.

It turns out that they're not real people but clones that have been paid for by their sponsor and the trip to the island actually means their body parts are needed in the real world. I can spoil this for you now because some stupid executive decided to do the same thing in the movie trailer. If this film had a twist it doesn't now.

The two eventually escape into the real world and are chased by that black guy from Gladiator, and this is when the film picks up.

We have the obligatory car chase along the freeway. This time Bay tops the Bad Boys 2 chase by replacing the shedded cars with train axles. When the first vehicle goes up you can quite clearly see the metal log used to launch the vehicle up into the air. I guess they thought we'd think it was still an axle even though it was shaped different to all the others. A couple of speeder bikes are added to the mix (this is set in the future) but they reminded me too much of the bikes in Return of the Jedi, even down to the sound they made.

The chases on foot seem to be shot through lots of areas where spark-welding is taking place, purely for aesthetic effect I guess but stupid all the same. I did however feel sorry for the stunt man who agreed to slide on ball-bearings into a metal pipe, that looked like it hurt.

The obligatory falling from a height scene sees them hanging from a giant letter R that is blasted from the top of a skyscraper. It seems odd that a company would go to the trouble of having the letter R as a logo, I wonder if they were allowed to copyright it, and it was convenient the letter had a hole they could stand in. If they'd been stuck on the I corporation's skyscraper they'd have been stuffed.

The ending sees Miss Scarlet and Colonel Mustard going back into the compound to rescue all the other clones. Along the way he gets into a fight with Mr Bean but we know he can fight even though he looks weedy due to the xbox scene earlier in the film (do you see how this works now?)

When the woman gets to do some solo stuff she has to be backed up by the Gladiator guy who changes sides just when she had scenes where she wasn't just following Ewan around. Girl Power! At least in Stealth the woman got some of the action to participate in on her own.

If you've seen the trailer you'll have seen the clip of all the clones leaving the compound into a desert. Yep, they even revealed the final scene of the film too. Dumbasses.

This suffers from the same problem as Stealth in that it doesn't really have any big names carrying the film. Ewan does OK but he's probably been picked because he can work with bad scripts and even worse directors although I can't say how much blue screen he had to work with but it wouldn't be as bad as Star Wars. Maybe some exec picked him because he's the only good actor with a Scottish accent and the audience might confuse him with Sean Canary (I mean Connery). In all honesty I think it's because Nicholas Cage, Bruce Willis and Will Smith were busy elsewhere. Johannson was great in Lost in Translation but she's not ideal for action movies, she's just too demure and pretty. I reckon the reason they picked her was solely for the weak Calvin Klein commerical gag they included in the film. At the end of the day all they needed was a woman who could run behind the male lead. There's even one continuity mistake where Ewan sends her ahead then in the next cut he's back in front.

In summary; tosh but big budget tosh that kills a couple of hours.

Lost

Woohoo, a reason to watch TV properly again.

Over the last few months my TV has been neglected as there hasn't really been anything worth watching. The last thing was "Hustle" which I've posted about before.
In the last few weeks Channel 4 have been trailering this show Lost that was shown in the US last year and which is being downloaded by mates off the internet.

Tonight we got to see the first 3 episodes and the show looks like it is going to be a corker. Great characters, a really fucked up story, and some great effects really do come together to make a show that will mean my Wednesday evenings are now booked up.

Roll on next week!

My early observations.

We don't see any attempt to land the plane and it does break up at altitude. Therefore there is next to no chance of anyone surviving but somehow at least 48 manage it. I'm going to deduce that they're all dead already and lingering in some sort of purgatory.

Polar Bears don't exist in tropical climes but they do exist in the comic that the kid finds. We know its not his because its in Spanish, could they be some sort of manifestation caused by him?

Stealth

Day 3 of the Malcolm-has-a-week-off-and-is-spending-it-at-the-cinema-athon.
Today's film was great if you've always wanted to see a film that was a mix of Top Gun, Short Circuit, 2001, Firefox, Behind Enemy Lines, Charmed and Iron Eagle whatever number it went up to.

3 ace pilots; one white male, one white female and one black male (so that's the politically correct executive happy) are partnered up, not with a gay welsh atheist, but with a super intelligent computerised pilot which develops a mind of it's own when zapped by lightning (why wasn't this picked up in testing?). Rocking the status quo and the power-of-three mentality the pilots get a little bent out of shape, the black guy literally when he flies (nicely in slow motion I might add) into a cliff. Anyway, the computer robot decides to ignore everything he's told and seeks to blow up Russia on his own (because he's good at that).

So the film goes off all "kill the robot at all costs" and then guess what, the robot becomes friendly and how convenient that they built the thing to carry a human passenger. Without that plot device the white male would have been stuck in Alaska; which they flew to in a matter of minutes from the Indian Ocean with just the single fuel stop at a zeppelin that was able to maintain a perfect circular flying formation for no apparent reason other than to have a circular explosion when the computer plane decides to blow it up.

A side story sees the woman survive a several hundred foot drop into North Korea with just a few cuts and scratches after she ejects from her plane over North Korea. For a country used to war you'd think their pursuit dogs would be used to explosions. Alas it looks like the one dog sent to chase the woman down saw fit to bolt it as soon as the sound "boom" was heard. How lucky she must have felt to have seen that!

This was supposed to be one of the big summer blockbusters but without any big names to carry the movie it falls flat on its face. In hindsight seeing the film was directed by the guy who gave us such wonderful films as XXX (the original one) and Fast and Furious, I should have known better. Having it as the tagline on the movie poster should have sent alarm bells ringing but then it did have Jessica Biel in it and she was worth tolerating Trinity Blade for. Could it be any coincidence that in that film she was partnered by 2 guys and it bombed too?

Ah well.

Danish Bacon Breakfast Transformer

Another parody of the Citroen advertDanish Bacon Breakfast Transformer

Important Protest this Friday

Skeleton Key

Day 2 of the week off was almost identical to the first; a trip to the cinema then sitting in a bar working on ideas for the Japan trip.

Skeleton Key stars Kate Hudson (not Kate Winslet as I'd misread the poster) as a care assistant looking after John Hurt (not too taxing a role for him this time). She spends much of the night being scared whilst sleeping which leads her to explore the old man's house in her underwear.

There is also a lot of hoodoo voodoo (that you don't dare do people) nonsense as always happens in any film that's set in Louisiana that may or may not be important to the plot. You will find a new use for red brick dust if you watch this though. It would also appear that the League of Gentleman's Papa Lazarou has new kin in the form of Papa Justify, a minister who took the Hoodoo Voodoo to a new level! It was also nice that the executives didn't insist on Prodigy's "Voodoo People" be played on the soundtrack.

The film does have a twist and I hadn't figured it out when it was revealed, although I knew there had to be one. This alone makes it worth seeing.


As Parappa the Rapper (or should that be Papa Parappa the Rapper) said "You gotta believe"

The Devil's Rejects

First day of my week off and it was started with a trip to the cinema. Devil's Rejects is the follow up to Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses" and sees the family from the first film continuing their sadistic trail, this time on the road instead of in the house.

The film was actually pretty good, free from the constraints of the big corporate control. The story excels in showing how much of a family they all were, when not killing and torturing that is; the scene when they're playing with ice cream perhaps the best example of Serial Killers having feelings too.

It was also good to see Sheri Moon Zombie (her real name) again. I'd forgotten how hot she looked in the first film. Perfect casting as the temptress of the family and those shot gun blasted jeans she wears.........hubba hubba!!

Are they back?

In the 80s, the KLF were one of the biggest dance acts; they were also extremely strange art terrorists reportedly killing sheep on stage, setting fire to a million pounds and at their "Fuck the Millennium" gig spending the entire show riding around in electric wheelchairs dressed as old men and carrying dead swans. Very strange indeed. As it happens it was their last ever gig and I'm glad I went along.

Anyway, I found this on a discussion board and it looks like they might be making a comeback.

There is no time like the present. There is no present like the future. There is no future...

Dear oh dear

Better luck next time...

DVD Weekend

Knowing I would be quite the worst-for-wear on Saturday I had visited Blockbusters in advance and got out a ton of movies to keep me occupied.


Assault on Precinct 13 was a rather dull remake of one of my favourite John Carpenter movies. The replacing of the bad guys being gang members with cops diminished the film quite a lot. The original saw lots of gang members pouring through the doors and windows of the station for a good half an hour. The remake has cops as the bad guys and the siege involves swat teams and helicopter troops which takes the film to an over complex level. Also the humour seemed to be lacking this time round. Anyone that has seen the original will be disappointed to know the "one potato, two potato" scene isn't in this version.


Harold and Kumar get the Munchies is a renaming of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle needed in the UK because we don't have White Castle here. The film tries to take the drug humour of Cheech and Chong and mix it with Road Trip and whilst some of the jokes hit home, most don't. The funniest are so close to the politically correctness line and a few do cross it. Accurate Police sketches of the two guys being perhaps the joke that made me laugh the loudest. There are some hideous continuity errors though. A whole hang gliding scene seems to change from night to day in seconds.


The London Underground prides itself in only allowing stations and trains to be shown in a positive light, so I have no idea how Creep got the go-ahead. It tells the story of a woman who misses the last train home and is locked in the station with a weird guy called Craig who kills men and gives women abortions regardless of whether or not they're pregnant. It isn't very good to be honest and as someone who knows Charing Cross station quite well I can see the corners that have been cut to keep the story in some sort of coherent form.


Finally I saw The Machinist, one that I had wanted to see at the cinema but it didn't get a long enough run and I missed it. Christian Bale takes method acting to a whole new level as a guy who hasn't slept in over a year and is ridiculously gaunt. Strange things start to happen to him when he meets a guy called Ivan. The film is one of those films that has as twist but it's not a "lead you one way when it's actually the other" kind of twist but just an ending that explains what has been going on, and does it well. It is very well put together, if you liked Memento you'd probably enjoy this.

Not surprisingly, it's a fake

This pic has been doing the rounds for the last few weeks. Thanks to snopes.com it has now been shown to be a fake, although most of us had guessed that. If you're interested in urban legends then this is a great site to go to. They look like they've investigated pretty much all of them.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (Tube Stake)

I'm definitely no Kevin Bacon

Last night I was round the best mates for a dinner with friends. The food was really nice and we got through quite a significant amount of red wine. In fact it wasn't until 5am that I left and to make the walk home easier I popped on the iPod.

The next half an hour saw me walking home, whilst dancing simultaneously in a very bad Footloose manner. I let the shuffle on the iPod determine the music which in turn dictated the way I'd be dancing. This included hands in the air raving, a little bit of headbanging and at one point I think I was dancing on garden walls. There was passing traffic, so if you were driving through Carshalton and saw me drunken dancing I apologise haha!!

Colour perception:

I've seen some of this before but the third illusion is very good.

eChalk colour perception: This is the most amazing optical effect in the world

Fantastic Four

Any excuse to put a picture of Jessica Alba onto my site I guess. This was a film I really wasn't too interested in seeing but I was in town and had some time to kill so popped in and saw it. Actually it wasn't too bad as comic book adaptations go; not as good as X-Men or Sin City but better than Elektra and Daredevil (could anything be worse).

The characters, although well known don't appear to be fleshed out enough in the film, which you wouldn't expect; Mr. Fantastic in particular comes off pretty weak in this. There are also some ridiculous plot holes and things that don't make much sense but you'd expect it with fodder like this I guess.

It's going to be one of those films that I'll forget about quite quickly I think.

The Wedding Crashers

Missed the train home so decided to take a lengthy detour to the cinema to see one of the films I had to catch up on. Wedding Crashers is not a bad film but Owen Wilson needs to move away from the "nice guy" roles as he's becoming a bit typecast. Once again he teams up with Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrel (albeit briefly). It's a predictable story about guys who play the field then fall in love then lose the women then reconcile as the end credits roll.

The film will stick in my mind for 2 reasons both of which are quote related.
The first is a term I will take to work to describe the sycophants that exist there.

"They're suckling at the power teat".

The second is much longer but nicely sums up dating

"I don't like the feeling. You're sitting there, you're wondering do I have food on my face, am I eating, am I talking too much, are they talking enough, am I interested I'm not really interested, should I play like I'm interested but I'm not that interested but I think she might be interested but do I want to be interested but now she's not interested? So all of the sudden I'm getting, I'm starting to get interested... And when am I supposed to kiss her? Do I have to wait for the door cause then it's awkward, it's like well goodnight. Do you do like that ass-out hug? Where you like, you hug each other like this and your ass sticks out cause you're trying not to get too close or do you just go right in and kiss them on the lips or don't kiss them at all? It's very difficult trying to read the situation. And all the while you're just really wondering are we gonna get hopped up enough to make some bad decisions? Perhaps play a little game called "just the tip". Just for a second, just to see how it feels. Or, ouch, ouch you're on my hair."

I'm such a cynic sometimes.

A guide to Italy

Quite amusing and some of it is very true, especially the crossing the road bit.

Guide to Italy

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Now I'm not a fan of Hollywood's latest fashion for remaking old and foreign movies. Has the planet really run out of fresh ideas? However if there's an exception it would have to be Tim Burton's reinterpretation of this film. I really enjoyed the original as a kid and it would be interesting to see what he would do with it.

He is one director that has an amazing sense of style in his films and this is no exception. The sets are stunning, my favourite being the squirrel room with it's blue and white spiral floor that looks like one of those vortex things you drop your money into outside charity shops.

The Oompa Loompas have had an overhaul, gone are the 30 or so face painted midgets. Now we have a single midget cloned by computer until there are hundreds of the critters. The original looked scarier but the new ones are a lot lot cooler.

The songs have changed too. Whilst the lyrics are the same Roald Dahl penned ones, the style varies between Soft Rock, 60s Hippy singing and a Caribbean style Mambo song amongst others. These are very funny.

The film seems to have a lot more darker side showing than the original. The characters look so perfect they're almost airbrushed. Anyone who's seen the video to Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" will know what I'm on about; some of the close ups reminded me of that. Johnny Depp plays an excellent Willy Wonka, slightly schizo but affable.

Burton also goes a little further with the story this time, giving us some background into why Willy Wonka is so reclusive and also bringing his Father into the story.

It's definitely worth seeing if only for the visuals they really work on a big screen. Even more so if you can get yourself to a cinema that has a digital projector. Whilst not as good as with the Pixar films the resolution is still pin sharp. Oh, and if you can get yourself to the West End I think they're pumping chocolate scents into the air conditioner; either that or someone brought very over powering chocolate to the movie.

Tune!!

Euphoria is a music compilation that started out containing the best trance tunes out there. Over time it's had several offshots such as an Old Skool, Chillout mixes and quite a lot of Hard House. I've been an avid collector of these compilations going so far as to locate the Ireland only and Canada only editions.

Last year the record label went into liquidation and the brand was picked up by Ministry of Sound, one of the most commercial labels in the world. The future of Euphoria didn't look too good.

This week the latest edition came out "Judgement Euphoria" and it's a corker. On the Judge Jules mix there's is an absolutely superb
track called "Without You" by Dogzilla. I've been looping that track all evening but I don't think i has been released as a single yet. If I see it I'm buying it.
dancelabel.com >> euphoria >> albums

Another attempt to get fit

Well after a lot of faffing over the last few weeks I have finally decided to go running in the local park. It was a really piss poor effort with me running 100 metres then walking 100 metres then running again but it gives me something to build upon. The aim is to get the evening routine in place and then go for a run in the morning too.