Click images for desktop size: "Fabio" by Eric Hamilton Went to the Chinese Buffet last night. I ate myself sick. It was great!
I got these little breakfast style steaks for the pack, and a porch chop for the little blind dog with all his allergies.
Instead of being grateful I think the dogs were more like, "Why don't we get good food like this all the time!?!"
We got them dog food. It felt like normal stuff.
Also got them treats, rawhide strips and these odd bones made out of salmon skin for the little blind guy. He's strutting around with one of them now, very proud and the others are very envious. That just makes little blind boy prouder.
I got sick from eating a crab leg, I think. I should know better than to eat something fancy at an all you can eat soiree. I didn't get sick enough to put a damper on anything. I felt like a starving man who just came out of the desert into the land of milk and honey.
We watched Daniel Lee and Andy Lau's "Protege". It was okay. Andy Lau was great. He's such a likable actor that its hard to be against him when he plays a villain. It was also hard not to remember that the last time he played a villain this well Scorsesse remade his film ("Infernal Affairs") into a mega Oscar winner ("The Departed").
Daniel Wu was excellent as the undercover cop. I now know too much about the heroin trade . . . the revelation in the movie was Jingchu Zhang as the junkie mother quasi-love interest. She was brilliant. She let you see through her eyes and into them. When her character lied and manipulated it was as convincing as when she was loving and motherly. She played pathetic with a fierce but beaten pride.
I also watched "Kung Fu Dunk", a monster hit film in China. It was light, moving and highly entertaining, sort of a less maniac but far more human "Shaolin Soccer". It also had a great fight scene.
What's of note about this film is that the copy I got had horrid machine translated subtitles that
Click images for desktop size: "Wasp" by Wallpapers Mania often only translated Chinese phonetically! So that there were lines like "Well, the xiojang most way to be comacackphon, we do fire jang to xapheus."
At first this was disconcerting and I figured this movie would be a waste. It ended up differently and posted what was a real education for me in the "why I like Asian movies" so much vein.
The director and the actors remembered how to tell the story visually. I had very little difficulty in following the story. In the exciting parts I had no trouble at all. I didn't even think about it.
All the actors managed to convey a pretty large gamut of emotions and reactions that didn't need to be spelt out for me or illuminated with words.
I remembered once being in Paris and going to the Cinematheque to see the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup". The audience was almost all French and the film was not subtitled. The theater was packed.
The audience got a bit lost with some of Groucho and Chico's puns and banter but they laughed almost through out. During the classic mirror sequence the theater was literally rocking with people shifting and howling and fearing for Harpo as his charade disintegrated.
A few years ago in London I took a woman to see Rowan Atkinson's "Bean". She was Italian and spoke no English at all. She wasn't that keen on going to an English movie, but she laughed and enjoyed herself through out.
Movies are a visual media and somehow most filmmakers have tried to turn them into plays with long boring monologues or leaden dialogs that explain and point to what we're seeing. They stopped trying to tell the story with pictures and just want to lecture us.
TV, with its all encompassing medium shot, is the cause of this, I think.
I didn't want to talk about the movies so much as I wanted to talk about encoding . . .
Ti get "Protege" onto the Apple TV. I originally ripped the DVD to H264. It produced a very nice watchable image at 720x360 16x9. Later I got a copy of the movie in 720p (1280x720) resolution in wmv format, ripped from a BluRay disc.
I decided to experiment and ripped the wmv (a ghastly clunky codec that works on XBox 360) to H264 and ProLogic II AAC.
Using multi-pass encoding it took about 24 hours, with the computer using 100% of the cpu . . . For the Apple TV to play the movie I had to restrict the data rate to 5mgb per second. DVD's are typically around 3mgb per second.
I wasn't stoked about the sound quality but the image quality was stunning.
The difference between the DVD and the 720p in this film was not only noticeable but clearly added to the dramatic telling of the story.

Click images for desktop size: "Fathom" by Michael Turner The junky and the undercover cop bot live in the same rat trap apartment building. In the junkie's apartment you can see the dirt clinging to the air and the filth that touches all the furniture and the little girl's toys. While the undercover cops place is just as ramshackle here the air is clean and the same dank belongings have the appearance of some sort of minimal maintenance.
None of this is even remotely visible in the DVD version! There are further examples of this through out the movie, where surfaces and environment reflect much of what is going on inside the characters minds and in their self constructed little worlds.
When Andy Lau and Daniel Wu ride elephants to visit a drug lord in the Golden Triangle the workers they pass have a sweaty patina to them, while Lau and Wu are dry and pink from plenty of facial massages. This visual image has much more impact then a laborious pair of scenes that make the same point. (Wu tells a little girl in the city not to eat candy she picks off the ground. In the Triangle Lau feeling pity and empathy for the worker's children throws huge handfuls of candy on to the ground from the perch of his elephant and the kids run to scrabble it up from the dust while the workers look at Lau with sheening gratitude.)
Part of the thing you learn in psychoacoustics is that the human brain is much more impacted by what it sees than by what it hears.
The mind retains visual images but retains little of audio memory, which is why its so cool to listen to the same song over and over again, I suppose.
Anyway, I like anything that lets someone tell their story better. I like being led to understanding.