The African Queen (1951) Review

Take two aging stars worried about their careers and one dangerously close to being blacklisted director, stir in a splash of Technicolor, then add location shooting in Africa. What does this recipe make? One of the most unlikely films to ever grace many a list of greatest movies.

Star Humphrey Bogart reunites with director John Huston with Katherine Hepburn onboard for a wonderfully adult romance about two losers trying to sink a German boat in WWI Africa. Spectacular scenery, great acting, and fantastic writing make for a highly entertaining experience that has easily withstood the test of time.

Adapted from a novel by C.S. Forester of Horatio Hornblower fame, this gem of a film starts out in somewhat unconventional fashion. The name of the movie appears with a very important caption under it, “Color by TECHNICOLOR.” We’re used to color today, but in 1951 most movies were still in black and white making this a big deal.

So watching the credits go by while moving through exotic jungle trees with equally rare animal noises in the background had to be quite a thrill to theater goers. I know it got my attention as a little kid and I grew up with color. An air of promise fills the screen, promise that you are about to see an adventure straight out of National Geographic Magazine.

But does it live up to those expectations? Read on to find out.

Sailing the High Seas of Spam Piracy

No, this post isn’t about hijacking trucks coming out of Hormel’s canning plants.What I’m on about is the latest referral spam to visit Blogger’s stats for From the Sidelines, http : // getfilesme . com / UPDATED 19 Oct 2013 to include filesw8 . com

 

First off, don’t click on the referral if you see it, there is no point in feeding the spammers and associating yourself with piracy if the government comes snooping around on behalf of the entertainment industry. You also don’t know what you could catch from visiting such sites since they are a favorite way to spread trojans, keyloggers, and all sorts of malware. In other words, don’t try this at home kids.

UPDATE: A nearly identical site showed up today as filesw8 . com and I have no doubt it is put up by the same people. Stay away from it too.

A Ripping Good Time

An adventure into audio featuring:

• Sound! (an Asus Xonar DSX)
• Action! (CD ripping)
• Thrills! (swapping an op-amp with an OPA2111KP)
• Wildlife! (Media Monkey)
• And a cast of thousands! (my music collection)

When opportunity knocks, you are obliged to take it up on its offer, no matter how dangerous it may be. That’s living life on the bleeding edge of technology and it isn’t for everyone. But for the daring there are rewards to be had, oh yes.

So when the onboard audio of my new motherboard didn’t impress me with its decidedly unmellifluous tones, it left me looking for a new conduit to pump my eight thousand odd music tracks through. It had to have good clarity and not cost over a hundred bucks.

More Polish Spam

It seems I’m getting more referral spam linking to websites in Poland than anywhere else these days. The latest is http : // butyairmax90 . pl / which leads to a Nike shoes site (via my virtual Windows XP machine):

How much you want to bet these are knockoffs and not the real thing?

Wrist watches have long been status symbols, so cheap copies of Rolex’s is something one expects. However, the rise of the expensive running shoe has been something that has occurred in my lifetime and is extremely silly to me. There is money to be had there no matter what my viewpoint is so this kind of spam is getting common.

Do not click on the link if it shows up in your Blogger stats or emails!

The Wolverine in Theater Review

The opportunity to go see The Wolverine with a friend presented itself this weekend, so I decided to journey out for the occasion. Promises of Thai food had nothing to do with it, or so I’ll claim. It was entertaining if not as nuanced and filling as the meal beforehand.

To understand where I come from in this short review, please understand that I though Wolverine: Origins was one of the worst superhero movies ever made. Even Daredevil was better and I will speak of it no further, for I do not wish to relive the trauma.

My introduction to Logan aka Wolverine was finding the first issue of his 1982 miniseries in a drug store in tiny Spring Grove, Minnesota. Though a big comic book fan, I didn’t know the X-Men at all and that Frank Miller miniseries was a mind blowing experience. Combing aspects of film noir and Japanese art house movies it contributed to my becoming fans of both.

So Hugh Jackman finally got his wish and got the story from the miniseries adapted for the latest movie to my interest. The end result was a mixed bag as the plot fails to be coherent in places and the ending fight is simply one fight too many. However, the cast was excellent and how I wish they could have done a straight adaptation given the uniformly excellent performances.

Jackman simply is Logan to most people, but I’ll say this is the character I remember from the 1980’s on screen for the first time. The wounded ronin tired of living a life of loss and finding his reason for being was what made the 1982 comic book so interesting. Likewise, the story here gives us a much more fascinating and human Wolverine.

I should point out the actresses dominate this movie. Mariko, Yukio, and Viper are all strong characters played with style by their respective portrayers. It is hard to feel sorry for Logan when he has such women to interact with, I must say. Of the many changes from the original story, there is one I approve of: the softening of Yukio’s personality. Never a fan of her in the comics, I loved this version of her.

If you are a fan of Asian martial arts cinema, you will enjoy the fight scenes for they do go somewhat over the top while not going too far.  Without giving away too much, I’ll say some of them were overlong and the film could have lost ten minutes and been much leaner. The much advertised train battle was much better than I expected.

Something I’ve noticed lately is that superhero and other blockbuster movies this year are having third act problems. Iron Man 3, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and The Wolverine all feature violent battles at the end that lack any genuine emotion or suspense. They are very fill in the blank in the way they’re written, not just formulaic. For examples of how to do it right, see the Chris Nolan Batman trilogy, Man of Steel, Captain America, Star Trek, and even Pacific Rim.

Anyway, the movie came in fourth on my list of X-Men movies, behind X-Men: First Class, X-Men 2, and X-Men.

The movie is entertaining and great fun for action fans, comic book nerds, and Japanese film buffs. Be warned there is profanity with the F-bomb deployed once and blood. Not suitable for small kids in the least.

A Couple of Drive-by Spams

We all notice the spam that hammers our referral statistics on Blogger’s control panel. But there is spam that only hits once or twice and is only seen if you are there at the right time. A couple of cases of these “drive-by” spammers were seen by me this week and you couldn’t get any different in what they were promoting.

First, one that hit today: http : // girlswithglasses . blognet . pw /

This happens to be hosted on blogger but with a name like that I was suspicious and fired up my virtual machine. Sure enough, it is a porn site looking to make money off of clicks. Do not click! Needless to say, there won’t be a screen capture.

The other one was suspicious since it looked like it was masquerading as a legitimate site: http: // quitcoal . org / node / add

Well, it is a legit site. This is a Greenpeace run anti-coal page and it appears someone was trying to make people who clicked on the link automatically join the petition/site. Of course that’s an error message you see in the screen shot, so that forced recruitment failed.

Political referral spam, this is a first in my experience. I’m sure the individual responsible felt righteously motivated and justified in saving the planet. However, a policy of the ends justifying the means always leads into darkness and soon the would be do-gooder is a force of evil rather than good. In other words, a spammer.

By the way, I included the entire virtual machine window to show off my new way of flirting with disaster (cue Molly Hatchet) – checking out sites with Windows XP. The installation is setup to be roughly what an average user would have in the way of security to see what kind of nasty infections I can get from these sites. It’s actually a clone of a clean installation too, so I can do this without any hassle of reinstalls.

Building a Better Beast

I mentioned awhile back that I’d built a new computer and would write more about it. Now that the origin of the post is dispensed with, on to the actual content! It is going to be long – consider yourself warned. This post is for the casual tech geeks out there and won’t be as in-depth as individual reviews would be. However, it will still be a bit much for those not technically inclined.

The titular beast with all the main components installed before the first power on. It’s a mess before cable rerouting was done. These days it is slightly less messy.

A Slow But Fast Moving Sunday

Today has not been a good day thank to freakishly cold weather upping my pain and a digestive system that decided to get out of sorts. Sharp changes in temperature and weather fronts in general cause my allergies to flare up too, so it is a multiple pronged attack on my health.

So today there was no going to church to spiritually recharge and that is one sure way to ruin a Sunday for me. Next Sunday better be healthier, I’ve got a class on genealogy starting then that I’ve been looking forward to. Twitchy sinuses and extreme tiredness have shifted my brain into lowest gear which means I’m plodding along dully through whatever I attempt. Even so, it is 3:00 PM and I’m not sure what has happened to the day.

Tomorrow is going to be more of a Monday than usual since it is time to fill out reviews for assistance again. While not as burdensome as forms used to be, every time I do this it reminds me of that I’m not even a fifth of a normal person. Why a fifth? You have to be below 20% of functionality to qualify in the state of Minnesota.

I believe the old phrase “adding insult to injury” applies here.

Meanwhile, I’ve got another movie review to write this week. The old rotation of  Godzilla/Studio Ghibli/Marx Brothers/random has slowed down and will be changing a bit. Godzilla movies already expanded into kaiju flicks and Millennium Actress marks the beginning of my widening the Ghibli focus further to include animated films of all kinds, East and West. So now the Marx Brothers slot in the rotation will become a classics category.

The reason for that is I’ve discovered just how old some of the films I like have become. Black and white films are no longer fifty years ago, but closer to seventy so a lot of color films now count as classics. Anything pre-1975 can be classified as a classic in my opinion.

So next up to review is something falling under classics. Hints include: Technicolor, leeches, and a director looking to regain his reputation after being suspected of un-American leanings.

A Change of Pace: Porn Spam

It’s been awhile since porn site referral spam showed up and today a false Blogger referral showed up from http: // asian . erolove . in / The title gives away the content right away, so don’t expect screen captures. A simple rule is that anything that has “love” or “ero” is going to feature pornographic material.

Strange as it may sound given my disapproval of pornography, this was almost nostalgic because I remember when porn spam and letters from Nigeria asking for banking help were the norm. These days weight loss and get rich quick schemes dominate with attempts to sell pharmaceutical products right behind.

One of the most bizarre things I’ve run into has been the flood of email spam from a Canadian pharmacy trying to sell Viagra and similar products.

“That doesn’t sound bizarre” you say thinking about your email account’s junk filter. What made it strange is that it posed as a lot of different things in the titles including weight loss, celebrity scandal information, and -- porn. It used to be the porn masquerading as something else! We live in a bizarre world.

Don’t click the referral!

A Failure to Load a Spam Site

While I post about referral spam as a form of public service, I sometimes get sites that won’t load right in my Linux based virtual machine. I can’t tell if the error is due incompatibilities or attempted shenanigans by the spam site.

http: // ceae2122 . dyo . gs / is once such site that appeared in my Blogger stats today. It goes straight to LinkBucks and is supposed to be a video. When I clicked on the video it wanted me to update my video player.

It looks like an ad before the actual destination, but curiosity led me to see what would happen if I clicked the button. First came instructions and then it got interesting:

It wanted me to download and install a customized version of VLC player. Being very familiar with that software, I recognized that isn’t the real release file. Not being interested in cleaning up an infection when I haven’t even gotten to the final destination, I canceled that.

So where did clicking “skip this ad” end up taking me?

Well that’s disappointing. I have no clue what it was supposed to be thanks to the server error. It could be a missing destination for all I know.

LinkBucks is a very shady bunch and to be avoided like the bubonic plague anyway. Don’t click on anything going to them!

I really need to get ReactOS or WindowsXP running in a virtual machine for some of these investigations.

Comment Spam in the E-mail

The experiment with removing bot checks from commenting continues and so does the spam in my email account. Always posing as an anonymous commenter, it only shows up in my Gmail account but not in Blogger. So at least some of the filters are working. That’s the only silver lining since I have to check each email out.

Once again it is time to fire up the virtual machine with Ubuntu on it to do some investigating. Here are some examples and where the links lead to:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)":
Cygiefiania xaikalitag icergeallonia [ url = http: // usillumaror . com ] iziananatt [ /url ] Juicillenna http: // gussannghor . com EnedonoMory

The first link is embedded in xaikalitag and is ww2 . wikaswieier . com which throws up an error message. The secong link gets the same result.

The third time is the charm and we get to see a fake search engine made to mine money from click referrals.

Millennium Actress (2001) Review

Spirited Away wasn’t the only brilliant anime movie to come out of Japan in 2001 though it is the one everybody has heard of. While not as famous, this movie meant for adults is every bit the equal of anything Studio Ghibli has put out. Depicting the life of one actress from the tender age of ten to her seventies, it’s use of flashbacks that blur the line between film and reality make for a wildly inventive film. Incredibly vivid animation, a stellar score, and a terrific story make this a must see.

Most people associate animated movies with fantasy or comedic stories aimed at children. If you mention “anime” you will most likely will draw a blank look. If they have even heard of the term, the stereotype of kids using balls to summon monsters prevails. Mention something like Spirited Away and finally something positive will be said since it is the most well known anime movie in the United States. The whole concept of an anime movie telling a story aimed at adults never enters the picture.

As a result, people miss gems such as Millennium Actress rather easily. A mix of comedy, drama, and a touch of romance using the history of 20th Century Japanese filmmaking as a backdrop, this lovely movie is not for kids. No, this movie is for those who have lived long enough to have known success and heartbreak. It is also for fans of movies, period.

First impressions can be everything, especially with a movie. The film opens in somewhat surprising fashion with a scene that could have been out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A moon base is the setting with a woman determined to launch in a spaceship for a solo voyage despite the protestations of a man. Her stubbornness is fueled by a desire to fulfill a promise to another man.

Did I wander into a science fiction story by mistake? This certainly wasn’t what I expected from the description at Netflix way back when I first rented it.

A sudden pause of the scene reveals that it is a movie being watched by a middle aged man. Genya Tachibana (Shozo Izuka) is a fan of the actress, perhaps her greatest fan. Interrupted by an earthquake, he is notified by his assistant/camera man that it is time to leave and get to work.

Flashes of one woman’s life go by, first in black and white then color, as the videotape is fast forwarded. Not only is it an artistic way to start the credits, it helps explain the unusual introduction. Tachibana is making a documentary for the 70th anniversary of Ginei Studios and a certain actress was at the heart of their productions for decades.

Man of Steel Sequel Announced

Starring Batman!

No, I’m not joking. Superman/Batman is going to be made with the cast from Man of Steel returning and a Batman yet to be cast. Filming is set to begin next year and the movie released in 2015.

From the hint given, it sounds like the hero with two fathers will be facing off against the hero with no father. Plenty of inherent drama in that alone, but it will be their conflicting approaches to crime fighting that will drive the movie, I suspect.

I know the actor who should play Batman, but we’ll see how casting actually goes. After watching Man of Steel, I wondered how they could possibly top the events in that for a sequel. Well, this could do it.

Time for Some Polish Comment Spam

One of the best reasons to enable Recaptcha aka the oddly colored and jumbled letters in the comments form is the fact you will very quickly see spam show up in your comments if you don’t. I moderate every post and had done this to save time though it does stop real people from commenting due to frustration deciphering the text.

To make it easier for people to post, I disabled the Turing test last night. At 2:17 AM this morning, the following arrived in my mailbox (edited to defeat autolinking):

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Godzilla vs Biollante (1989)":
[ url = http : // www . page1 . pl] pozycjonowanie [/ url ]

Needless to say, that looked suspicious sort of like a masked man robbing a bank does. Firing up the trusty virtual Ubuntu machine, I investigated the link which led to a very professional looking site put up by a company called Arteria.

It’s a rather large page involving a lot of scrolling, so I present only the top and bottom of the content. I’ve edited out the actual contact information which includes an address in Krakow, Poland.

Courtesy of Google Translate, the opening text in English:

As you have probably guessed, they are selling something. In this case, SEO optimization and placement. What’s SEO? Search Engine Optimization. That’s why they are spamming websites, hoping to get someone wanting higher traffic to pay them for their services.

If you are a webmaster or blog owner, do not click on this and feed their shady practices.

UPDATE: Turns out I missed another comment spam from a mere hour or two after I disabled the robot check. What’s hilarious here is that the link goes to a page that no longer exists:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)":
When some one searches for his essential thing, so he/she wants to be available that in detail, thus that thing is maintained over here.
My weblog: southwest florida art galleries

atlcurling . info / wiki / index.php?title = User: JZFLourde

Once these spambots are set loose they seem to keep going long after the site is dead. I wonder how much zombie spam is out there?