Infernal Affair 2 and 3

This is essentially just a follow-up to my review of Infernal Affairs as I don’t intend on going through it again here. The two other movies in the series follow the same formula as the first: a police drama with a lot of twists and turns and great acting. I don’t know if all three movies were planned beforehand, but it sure looked like it. Though each can actually stand and are great on their own, the experience would be even better if you watch all of them and in sequence. It would also be less confusing that way.

Infernal Affairs 2, is a prequel to the first movie. It follows the stories of the lead characters Yan (Tony Leung) and Ming (Andy Lau) as they rose up the ranks of Sam’s organization and the police, respectively. This is while they grapple with identity issues that plague moles. As a backdrop to this is a complex and sometimes bloody struggle between and within the police and a powerful crime organization.

Infernal Affairs 3, is a sequel to the first movie. The original cast returns and picks up where the first movie left off. It follows the story of Ming as he tracks down all of Sam’s moles while grappling with his worsening identity crisis all the way to the climactic ending. As the events unfold, there are constant flashbacks to put the current event into perspective. Needless to say, this can sometimes be disconcerting and this is the most confusing of the three. Here’s where you will appreciate watching the first movie.

Rating: 4/5

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

I was finally able to watch Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. After failed attempts to watch it during the CineManga preview and the actual CineManga festival, I finally succeeded over the looong weekend. The movie is about robots going berserk and killing people. Batou, the main character, has to find out who is behind all these killings. This seems to be a rather common theme in robot movies. The movie actually reminded me of Blade Runner and I, Robot (which I would guess is based more on Blade Runner than on Asimov’s work). But why does it always go like that? Why not about people killing robots? Is it because robots are non-living? But what if robots also think and feel? Or if humans can be replicated into robots? Wouldn’t that blur the fine line? These questions are pose to you during the movie as it delves into the uncanny valley and other robotics issues. It’s a bit heavy. More so than Ghost in the Shell and it would help if you have seen the first movie and have an idea of robotics, cyberpunk, and other common anime themes. In the end, there really were no answers. But I suppose those are questions we don’t need to answer at least until several more decades. Thankfully.

Rating: 4/5

Feng-shui

No, this is not about that lame horror movie starring the misguided daughter of an ex-president :P I was just watching a feature on feng-shui on the National Geographic. I find it amazing how feng-shui is so popular. In Hong Kong they build buildings based on it. In fact, there’s a building with a hole on it to allow the dragons of the mountain behind the building to drink at the bay in front of the building. So, thoughtful of them :D And at the HSBC, they have a good luck escalator and a bad luck escalator . The good luck escalator is for employees while the bad luck escalator is for clients. The result is that the bank gets higher revenues. Very comforting thought if you’re a client, huh? :P

In another case of feng-shui strangeness, my finance professor related to use how a financial institution in Hong Kong contracted the services of feng-shui masters to predict the stock market for a certain year. The actual outcome turned out eerily like the predicted outcome. So alike that they contracted the services of the feng-shui masters to do the same for the following year. Although my professor didn’t say what the result for the following year was, he said that they expected that the actual outcome would also follow the predicted outcome. Make you wonder, though, if all those feng-shui believing traders traded, consciously or unconsciously, based on the prediction. A case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then, doesn’t superstition work that way?

Aquaventure, Anilao, Batangas

Went scuba diving with Ren’s group yesterday at Aquaventure Reef Club in Anilao, Batangas. On the first two dives, the visibility was good and there were lots of fishes but the dives were pretty much uninteresting. On the third dive, things got a bit more interesting. As I opened the tank valve when I did my pre-dive check, I heard a loud hissing sound. Investigating it, I saw two or three pinprick-sized holes on the high pressure hose. Ren tried sealing with glue it but the seal won’t hold.

I was thinking of not joining them on the dive but Ren and the others told me it’s nothing to worry about. Since the leak doesn’t seem to be too great and I was assured that there’s no chance of a catastrophic hose rupture, I relented and decided to proceed with the dive. Besides, since the last dive will be shallow, there’s the option of an emergency ascent. Of course, even from a shallow dive still, it still carries the risk of bends. Funny because we were talking about whether we would choose drowning or the bends during lunch. Fortunately, nothing bad happened during the dive. I did stick close to Ren ready to grab his backup regulator if necessary. Call it a precautionary measure ;)

Back at the surface after the dive, I checked the hose again and discovered that it was no longer leaking air. My theory is that the starting tank pressure which was higher than normal– the pressure gauge read 225 bar instead of the usual 200 bar– went above the hose’s age-degraded specification and so leaked. But when the air got used up, the hose was able to handle the lower pressure. I’m not sure if it would have been able to handle the normal 200 bar but considering healthy hoses should be able to handle 300 bar, it definitely needs to be replaced before the next dive.

Sony Ericsson K700i

My Nokia 6100 is now definitely dead. The repair guy said the board has been cracked. No surviving that I guess. It was pretty saddening. The Nokia 6100 is really neat no-frills phone in a small package. Worse is I wasn’t ready to buy a new phone yet. So I put off buying a new phone for several days. Thankfully, Jem lent me his old but still functional Nokia 3530 and I used that for for the meantime while I scoured around for good deals.

The best deal I found was Globe’s zero interest installment promos for existing subscribers where you can pay for your phone via credit card for up to 18 months. Supposedly this is at no interest. Of course the base price are a bit higher than your typical side-street mobile phone vendor. But installment payment sure is hard to beat especially if you have little cash on hand.

I’ve decided beforehand that I will be getting a Sony Ericsson. My first choice was the K750i. I’ve been lusting over this phone for some time. It has good features including a serious 2 megapixel camera. Unfortunately, it’s so good that it’s out of stock in most if not all Globe Centers. Besides, it was rather expensive. My next choice was a K300i. It is a lot less expensive but is a bit too shabbily built for my liking. So I settled for the middle-ground which is the K700i.

For a phone, this basically has everything you would expect: tri-band, hands-free operation, voice commands, SMS, MMS, etc. For connectivity, there’s IR, Bluetooth, GPRS, and USB cable. The only phone feature missing is a speakerphone mode which is rather a bummer but not so much as to earn it negative points. UPDATE: It actually has a speakerphone though it’s a little bit unintuitive to activate.

On the extras side, the influence of Sony is very evident as this is essentially an entertainment phone. It has a media player that can play MP3, MP4, 3GP, and WAV files. It also a radio that uses the headset as an antenna. Both the media player and the radio can be minimized and run on the background.There’s a Java engine for some pretty neat games. There’s a VGA-resolution camera that you can also use to record videos albeit lower resolution. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have external memory card storage which would have been great for music files as the internal memory is only around 40 MB.

And the design is pretty cool too: simple lines, subtle accents, and a silver, gray, and black colored casing. It has Sony Ericsson’s dual-front design: The front of the phone is your traditional vertically-oriented display and keypad but the back of the phone is horizontally-oriented and designed to look like a camera. I actually like the overall design better than the K750i which, although shares the basic shape and design, has a charcoal colored casing.

Definitely a good deal.

Rating: 4/5