I’m a long-time fan of the Zatoichi series of movies starring Shintaro Katsu. This 2003 remake was intended to be something of a reboot for the series. I finally got around to watching it last night.

Replacing the late, great Shintaro Katsu is Takeshi Kitano, aka Beat Takeshi. His bio on IMDB claims he learned comedy singing and dancing during his early years. Sadly, none of this was on display as the titular Zatoichi.

Takeshi barely had any dialogue in the entire movie. The comedy was provided largely by Ichi’s side-kick Shinkichi (played by Gadarukanaru Taka) and was occasionally pretty funny.

It’s hard to watch a Zatoichi movie without making constant comparisons to Shintaro Katsu. How can you not? After some 20-odd movies and 3 tv-series spanning nearly 30 years, Katsu invented the role. He studied the way blind people eat and react to their surroundings. He was a brilliant comedian yet wasn’t always playing the part for cheap laughs. As an actor, Katsu had a tremendous range, a gentle, funny comedian in one scene and an ominous monster in the next. His fighting style was… unique.

So, when I was told to expect “bad CGI blood” in this remake of the venerable series, I thought, “hey, I can put up with bad CGI blood in a Zatoichi movie.” One of my criticisms of the title was that there wasn’t enough blood in the earlier films, but was largely overdone in some of the later movies. Sadly, this was not the worst part of the movie.

Takeshi’s portrayal of Zatoichi was only recognizable during the fighting scenes. For the rest of the movie, he was largely mute, sitting like a piece of wood on the set while the supporting characters acted out the drama around him. By the end of the movie, I felt like this Zatoichi was barely human. He showed some signs of life around the gambling den but that was about the extent of it. There were glimpses of potential. Takeshi’s facial tic was often the only way you knew he was actively paying attention to what was going on around him. And his sword-fighting was impressive. Really though, the best performances were from the supporting cast.

Notably, Tadanobu Asano, who went on to play Genghis Khan in Mongol [Blu-ray], played a ronin with an ailing sister who took up local criminals to pay for her medicine. His screen presence was palpable and he dominated every scene he was in.

I had a hard time finishing this movie. It felt draggy, cutting from one minor character to the next in an effort to flesh out … what, exactly? The supporting cast? To distract you from the immobile blind man in the corner? And the music… Oh the music. Occasionally accompanied by synchronized percussion with farm implements and building tools, the first time I saw it, I thought, “heh, that is kind of cute, though unnecessary”. The second time, I was annoyed. The third time I compared them to a japanese version of “Stomp” or “The Blue Man Group” and the movie (I don’t care if I spoil this for you, I may be saving your life) eventually devolved into a full-on, Bollywood style musical number as the village’s festival cranked up the jams. There was tap-dancing. I am not shitting you.

While this is going on, Takeshi-Zatoichi is mopping up some ninjas a few blocks away so we still didn’t get to see him dance.

* / *****

I can not recommend this software to anyone in its current state. Yes, they say it is beta software right up front, but there’s “beta” software and then there’s “BETA!!!*” software. This is the latter.

While diagnosing a problem on my system, I took a look through system.log on my machine. It was loaded chock-full of exceptions from Nambu.app. Also, perhaps humourously, my Twitter credentials were pasted in there, in plaintext, on every single post I made.

Why bother storing my passwords in Keychain if some douchey app is just going to paste them all over my system? Thanks for the fun-times. I may check back later.

One annoying bit that has irked me from the get-go is the relative inefficiency of the Cylons to completely destroy the humans. It would have been a short series if they were more effective, but let’s be reasonable. Artificially intelligent robots, with biological brains or not, would have some pretty impressive advantages in the realm of killing. Cavil in the final episodes lamented his human physiology. Having to watch a star go supernova “with these eyes” was a great disappointment for him. The mechanical cylons presumably have a wider spectrum of vision, highly-augmented hearing and a whole host of other sensors and doodads to make their given tasks easier. And more efficient.

Some of the scenes from the earlier seasons when humans were on the surface of some planet hiding in the woods and cylons were walking past without noticing them smack of silliness. Also, one of those same cylons with an integrated machine-gun for an arm missing a human at anything inside kill range is similarly ludicrous. They should be able to throw bullets as easily as any human can throw a rock and far far more accurately.

Still, the mechanical cylons were pretty damned awesome. In the episode “Boarding Party”, a group of cylons crash into the docking pylon on Galactica and start raising hell on the ship. One particularly vivid scene where a centurion dives into a group of people, guns-ablaze only to be shot down by a nerves-of-steel Lee Adama was one of the most memorable action scenes in the entire series. They could be terrifying in their swiftness and capability for violence. I only wish they’d been depicted like that more frequently instead of the plodding, inaccurate machines they usually were.

Similarly, the cylon Raiders weren’t piloted they were the pilots. In the episode where Starbuck finds the downed Raider and climbs aboard the gory interior remains, you fully-realize how incredible and alien these things are. Each one is an individual. We knew this from the episode “Scar” where Starbuck and her band of pilots have to contend with a particularly malicious and devious cylon raider in an asteroid belt, but it isn’t until you see the biological interior of the raider that you realize, hey, these things aren’t just spaceships with a chip or a cylon head bolted to a console – they are the ship.

Earlier comments about why these things aren’t capable of killing humans apply 10-fold here, but I’m willing to make allowances for how awesome the space scenes were. Still, most of the scenes were distant shots of squads of vipers plowing through cylon raiders by the hundreds. Each cylon raider should have been a more than capable adversary and this was never really felt.

Cylons were at their scariest when humans screwed up, which, I guess, they owe their entire existence to. Only when the humans made the mistake of linking their computers together did the cylons really come into their own. They seemed capable of taking down any computer system at will, not even requiring a physical connection to it. The Mark VII vipers were immediately made ineffective because of all the linked computer systems onboard. I guess it’s hard to beat machines with machines. Then again, the human Raptors were full of computerized systems. The Galactica had a bunch of separate computers to manage individual systems, only too primitive for the cylons to fully take over. Apparently cylons required a certain degree of complexity in order to take over a ship’s computer. Maybe it’s a warning about ubiquitous wireless technology.

The humanoid cylons could go one further and even interface directly with the machines on board Galactica. Sharon, aka Boomer and Athena (another Sharon)… Model 8 could plug light pipe from the ship’s systems into her arm and take control of that system. The cylon hybrids could do this as well and lived their gooey lives connected to the cylon base ships. That was never really explained, but surely they’d require some sort of physiology to allow that to happen. That should have made the earlier efforts to discover which humans were cylons easier. You’d think.

But wait, I hear music…

All Along the Watchtower. It’s a great song. The cover by Jimi Hendrix appearing in the final scene of the show may even be superior to the Dylan original because of the fantastic guitar solos. But, for all Bear McCreary did to vary it with piano and the “eastern” arranged version, is this really a piece of music that would echo through time and space calling humanity and cylons together? Wouldn’t a grander bit of music have been more appropriate? Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”? Maybe something moody from Liszt? Miles Davis’ “So What?” Anything other than a simple three chord folk tune, really. Integrating the lyrics into the show was a cute trick.

What was with 6′s glowing red spine (in the miniseries)? Never explained or repeated. We can assume it had something to do with her “joining” with Baltar or creating that weird mental image of herself in him. Those were never really explained either.

I can kind of forgive the Starbuck is an angel (/unknowable entity/ghost/alien/…) disappearance at the end. By that point I was like, “sure. Why not?” It kind of fit and the sudden disappearance was almost Kubrickian, though I would’ve liked a bit less of a reaction from Lee when he turned around.

Which brings me to the final, annoying bit. The really annoying thing about BSG: The religion. They had prophets. They had visions. They had ancient prophecies foretold and told again in ruined chambers buried on distant planets. Their mythologies roughly equivalent to Roman were superceded by the cylons’ weird monotheism. There was talk earlier in the show’s life that the writers were writing about the lost tribe of Isreal and the whole thing was the Story of Mormon. I don’t know if that’s true or not, and I tried to ignore as many of the religious themes as I could, possibly because that’s the way I deal with it in everyday, non-tv life. In any case, it was frequently annoying. Frequently broke the illusion that I was watching a piece of science fiction. And very frequently provided an easy out for the writers to provide a “reason” for something impossible to happen. Finding a planet? Sure, it was part of a prophecy. Being led to Earth? Starbuck had the Arrow of Hercules in her belt so she knew the way. The president’s having visions? Well, sure, it was prophesyed. And so on. If it were less frequent and maybe a little less intrinsic to how they managed to get around space, I’d have been happier.

So when people say that they couldn’t stand that Starbuck just vanished at the end, I say, “so what? You put up with it for this long”.

With all that said, I have to say that the final wrap-up with the “opera house” was fantastic and powerful. For all the times that I was annoyed in earlier episodes that they were showing me these cryptic visions, in the end I really thought that bit worked. Full props to the writers for that.

Overall, it was a great show. The fact that they didn’t overwhelm the show with the religious aspects and merely made it a part of the story was a good thing. And why not? Having 50-odd-thousand stragglers trying to make it across the blackness of space with no destination while a seemingly limitless army of sentient machines is trying to kill you might require a little help. It would have been easy to be heavy-handed there, but they managed not to be. There was enough to hold my interest throughout that I didn’t really mind the plot devices they used to get from Point Caprica to Final Destination. The varying stories about humans on their last legs struggling to stay alive were compelling, terrifying, frustrating and heart-wrenching in varying degrees, frequently all at once. This is what good story-telling does, it pulls you in and makes you feel it on an emotional level. The journey was a good one and I will miss it.

(also, no Boxey)

Last night, we stayed at the Aloft hotel near the airport. Nice place with comfy beds. It’s part of the W chain of hotels. I’d recommend it for anybody not spending a lot of time in town, but it’s a bit too far out to really be a good base of operations.

Vacation. Two weeks. In southern France. Possibly with no Internet and no phone. I’m looking forward to copious amounts of wine and cheese and taking lots of pictures of the local ruins. And of course, hanging out with Deb and my friends in a decidedly non-tech environment.

See you in two weeks!

I’m going to try something a little different for this post. I don’t normally talk about myself much here, I intentionally keep a low-profile and babble about things like computers and iPods. Today, I’m going to talk about feelings. Specifically, how I feel about moving.

Y’see, I moved recently. All the way from Ottawa back to my home-town of Moncton where I spent a big portion of my formative years. I had some good reasons to do this and I think we’re going to be pretty comfortable here.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about. I want to talk about the actual process of moving. In short: it sucks. Big ones.

Now that we’re finally getting settled in and can reflect on the whole ugly business, there are a few thing that really stand out. It was time-consuming, for one. I spent whole days in different vehicles traveling many thousands of kilometers. Redirecting utilities and getting things like internet hookup and satellite dishes and telephones and all that stuff? It’s tedious and it eats time. But I think I’m through the worst of that.

The absolute WORST part of the whole process was dealing with the moving company. I’m not going to name them, though I’m really tempted to. I don’t know if it was malicious or if it was purely incompetence that caused it, but the moving company really tried to give us the shaft. We were given a quote, then, after all our stuff was packed up and hauled away in a truck, we were told that the weight was 50% higher than the original estimate. The revised bill was adjusted commensurately. I took exception to this. After much complaining in email and phone calls, they agreed to honor their original quote.

This is an unbelievable position. Our stuff is literally held hostage in this situation. We have no recourse. The driver shows up and if he doesn’t get a certified cheque, he drives away with all your belongings. Neat! They can make up whatever fares they want. You don’t even get to see the tariff.

In the end, they charged us what they originally estimated but the time and stress involved was not something I’ll get back. In addition, they destroyed deb’s $3000 computer and cracked my acoustic guitar. These are both going through their insurance process for replacement but I’m already hearing them saying that the computer is going to be a problem because we didn’t pack it properly and they’ll want a technician to look at it. A custom-built, silent gaming PC that looked like it had been dropped from the top of a building. The cost of replacement of both of these items is almost as much as the whole move.

And then the kicker. The person I’d been dealing with for most of this emailed asking if the move was OK and congratulations on the new house. Best of all, the reweigh on our stuff came out just a little over the original estimate and wasn’t that funny how the scale broke at “just that time”? Yeah, right.

Pictured is my entry into the Build your own Rock Album meme on flickr (672 images and growing!). Image pasted using the new and kind of awesome Flickr Helper tool in Ecto 3. It’s still a bit new with some missing features, but I’m looking forward to it’s completion. Its sibling, the Amazon helper looks similarly awesome and should be a bit easier to figure out for first-time users than the previous version’s Amazon tool.

There are a few rough edges. There was no ability (that I could find) to import Ecto 2′s settings forcing me to enter my login info and Amazon affiliate id. One of my earlier posts here was displayed in the preview using center alignment for the text after an inline image (we’ll see if this one does the same), even though the tag was closed. But hey, it’s Beta software and software is Hard, right?

Some new welcome features: Editing post in an external editor (options include, BBEdit, TextWrangler, SubEthaEdit, and my personal fave, TextMate). Also, links can now be created using a “URL from clipboard” context menu, eliminating the need for an extra dialog. Nice (but how ’bout a shortcut?). Also, I understand this is a complete rewrite, so I’m sure there are many more improvements under the covers.

I look forward to writing more with this app in the coming days. Mad props to Adriaan for his hard work.

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