a record of thoughts

It’s been a while since I rented DVDs. I was hooked on the many new KDramas that aired before the year ended. I just couldn’t insert Hollywood in between episodes. So right around Christmas week, I returned my Blockbuster envelopes after they scattered around the house for months for new DVDs. Allow me to digress and explain how my rental routine works.

I signed up for Blockbuster’s online rental; just like NetFlix, only better. I say better because I can return my envelopes at my assigned Blockbuster store for free DVD rentals — 1 DVD for 1 envelope. The rental rules applies. While I have the DVD from the store, the online rental will already send me whatever is next in my queue (availability of the title succeeds the queue). Again, if I return 1 envelope, they’ll send me 1 DVD also. In essence, I’m getting twice as many DVDs.

Back on topic — this weekend, I saw three good films: Meet Bill, Step Brothers, and Traitor.

Meet Bill is a story about identity crisis. I enjoyed it because Elizabeth Banks was hot and not because of the story. The story was okay, but left hanging just like its characterization. Aaron Eckhart’s personification of Bill was praiseworthy and Banks’ body display was delightful to my eyes.

Step Brothers is a story of two middle-aged men becoming stepbrothers after their parents remarried. It’s another one of those Will Ferrel films where everything is blown out of realistic proportion. It’s stupid funny.

Traitor is a story of an FBI undercover who was of Sudanese decent from Chicago (sounds familiar?) He is caught between his beliefs and reality. He sacrificed himself in order to battle terrorism that killed his father and at the same time, he is battling to keep intact his spiritual beliefs. I consider this film to be one of the year’s best because it is substantial overall. It wasn’t overloaded with Hollywood effects and at the same time the story wasn’t dragging. The audience would know that Samir was undercover, but the film would still grab one’s curiosity. That’s because of the nature of the characters, one cannot know what will happen to Samir in the end.

I strongly suggest to anyone the movie Traitor. You won’t regret it.

I have had Verizon FiOS for more than a year now and as the service areas continue to grow, with the technology’s excellent service, I’m sure a lot have signed up for it. If Verizon provides you with an Actiontec modem/router then let me advice you to purchase another router because Actiontec will drive you crazy in the long run. I have 10mbps/3mbps down/up throughput and I download a lot as in I average 1GB/day (that’s a modest number). They aren’t illegal downloads per sé because they are distributed openly (KDrama). If I have more than 3 huge files in my μTorrent (or any other bittorrent client), others in my network wouldn’t have Internet access. That’s because I have NAT running and the routing table in Actiontec is not enough to handle huge amount of traffic. Therefore, overloaded packets are dropped giving my users nil resource. (more…)

Finally, I had the time and resources to watch this movie. I did not bother watch the series, nor have an intention to. The reason being that firstly, I don’t like the theme of the story and secondly, I don’t like the lead actress in the series. The movie, however, is an exception because of Song Hae Gyo (there are countless spelling in the web, but I chose this for no reason other than it’s easy to pronounce). I will not elaborate on the story because I’m not Korean and I don’t have the background of the story. All I can say is that Song Hae Gyo did her part as Hwang Jin Yi [only from what I know of the character] wonderfully in this motion picture. Not only was she stunningly beautiful, her acting did not fail. I’ve been wanting to see this film even before it was released, but it took me this long to finally see it. I’m not disappointed. It made me watch Full House again.

I woke up with a good morning smile on my face, but it was ruined. It was ruined after watching a Korean film Lovers’ Concerto. Essentially, it is a story of friendship that ended with eternal separation. Like most Korean films, Lovers’ Concerto has a fragile sense to it with two terminally ill characters who eventually died leaving a friend alone reminiscing their past lives. Just thinking about the film, listening to the last letters pushes my gut deep down inside of me. Do not watch this film if you are physically or emotionally alone because it will hit you hard where it hurts.