On Saturday, I saw the movie The Departed which is basically the Americanized version of the very successful Hong Kong crime movie Infernal Affairs.
Most people I know who haven't seen the original loved it. Most people who have seen the original thought the original was much better.
While it's been long enough since I've seen Infernal Affairs that I don't remember the details, I remembered enough of it to note some of the similarities and differences.
Spoiler warning - stop here if you plan on seeing it.
In short, The Departed was stretched out too long. They should have ended it much earlier when Castigan came in to the station to get his money and move on with his life. They both know who each other is, and the audience would be like "ooh, you can't bail out of this mess that easily" or something. Maybe there could have been a sequel. Or not, it doesn't matter. It's just a cool place to end it.
Americans films seem to be obsessed with making a storyline where everything's tied up neatly in a bundle at the end with the good guys winning and the bad guys losing. Sure, some movies do a good job at leading themselves into a satisfying but vague open ending (like X-Men 3) and some movies do a shitty job at it (Pirates of the Carribean 2). But all in all, most Hollywood movies tend to do the "and they live happily ever after" crap cuz it sorta defines the American storybook.
And so they stretched it out the movie much longer than they needed to by killing a bunch of people off just so the good guys can have the last man standing? Sullivan knew in the end he's been a bad guy for a while, but he was actually trying to go to the good side. Killing him off was kind of a waste. Same with the extra bodies at the elevator.
The one thing I thought was kinda poetic was how Costello basically did it all to have some sort of legacy. It wasn't about the money, as he mentions he had enough. It was about having somebody he could treat as his children. And if that fails, having some sort of impact that people would remember him by despite being overall a bad guy.
Oh well, if you don't remember the original, I guess it's still worth a watch. But yeah, they could have done a better job editing it.
So my weblog was down for a little over a week. Not a big deal since I didn't have much to post. In fact, the entire OCF website was down for a little over a week.
Apparently, sometime between when I graduated and now, the OCF staff rolled over into a new group which didn't quite understand the idea of getting a backup system up, and keeping track of the status of their filesystems and raid arrays.
As I learned from Derek today, due to a bit of oversight by his successors at the OCF, I lost some data like some other people. On the upside, it appears all the data I wanted to keep is still here, so whoo hoo! In fact, the only data that seems to be messed up at first glance is a cell phone pic of a Dodge Caravan with a GTR badge, the DBI.pm file which lets Movable Type talk to a database in the first place, and the table that held the Movable Type event logs which was mainly telling me how much spam got rejected in the first place. I might find more later, but so far, so good.
Anyways, yeah, I should make backups.
Thanks Derek for contributing to the data recovery effort at the OCF and also happy birthday one more time :)
Sometimes it's really bothersome when the female population can't make up their minds.
You can get grilled for doing something nice and thoughtful, because one doesn't seem to like it because they feel confident enough in doing it by themselves.
You can get grilled for doing something nice and thoughtful again, because another one doesn't seem to like it and thinks you're shady for suggesting it.
You can get politely declined for doing something nice and thoughtful again, because yet another one doesn't like it.... and grilled cuz you simply don't learn.
What happens next?
You learn, and you get grilled for not doing it cuz the next one says "all girls like it when you do that."
What am I talking about?
Walking a girl to their car after a social gathering.
Sometimes I'm not sure if I should feel old or feel young.
A girl I met a while back considers me too young to date. At the same time, I think she's a little too young for me date as well. How often does that happen?