Requiescat in Pace, Artorius

We watched "King Arthur" yesterday. I mean the one released in 2004 with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley since there have been quite a few re-tellings of the Arthurian legend over the years. I was half afraid that this would be another re-hash of the tired old story but those fears were put to rest when the movie began with the following words: "Historians agree that the classical 15th century tale of King Arthur and his Knights rose from a real hero who lived a thousand years earlier in a period often called the Dark Ages. Recently discovered archeological evidence sheds light on his true identity." In fact, I spent most of my time after that worrying about the historical accuracy of the movie to worry about the story :p So this is going to be about the history in the movie and not about the movie itself – it’s fairly entertaining and if you like the Arthurian legends, you’ll definitely enjoy it.

I initially thought that the movie was a bunch of bull and that most of their "historical" facts were inaccurate or misplaced. Upon later investigation though, I found that most of it was either historically accurate and that in fact, they had obtained the services of a historian, who himself believed that the story of Arthur had historical basis, as consultant for the movie. Anyway, for anybody who is as nitpicky as me, here are the points that struck me and a brief discussion about them :p

The movie opens with a story about Sarmatians and I was immediately up in arms. My reaction was, "here’s another movie inventing a fictitious people for story purposes". Turns out that the Sarmatians did indeed exist. They would be Iranians in today’s terminology. Apparently, they were pretty similar to the Scythians (whom I did know about :p) There is an interesting similarity between the Sarmatians and the Picts (who also appear in the movie) – they both had their women participate in warfare. I didn’t find anything about the Sarmatian pact to send their children to serve in the Roman army but there is evidence that Sarmatians served in some of the Roman garrisons in Britain.

Then comes the whole "knight" thing and while it’s a nitpick, it’s a sore point with me :p The term "knight" did not actually come into origin till about 1100AD and this particular story is set around 5th century AD. Since the Arthurian legends are usually set in the medieval period, the term knight is used when referring to Arthur and his men. However, there were no "knights" in the Roman army. The closest term from the Roman period was Equestrian – a member of the upper social classes. While this term (and what it implied) is pretty near that of a knight, I don’t believe that the Sarmatian’s, who were more or less conscripted into the Roman army, were in a position to be part of the upper social class. So the only "knight" in the merry band would have been Arthur. But I nitpick :p

The story progresses and we have the Woads enter the scene. Now what they call Woads in the movie are actually Picts – a group of tribes from what today is called Scotland. The term woad comes from the plant they were supposed to have used to obtain the dye for the intricate tattoos that covered the bodies of the Picts. One comment suggests that the term Woads was used to convey the sense that it was a derogatory military term, like many others used since like Pandy in India by the British or Gook in most of Asia by the US or hundreds of other epithets used by soldiers throughout history to identify the "enemy".

I had other doubts about Christianity in Britain at this time period, about a pope being there in Rome and a few other things. I thought that historically the events were either too early or too late. But turns out I was wrong :p Most of these things did take place (or were at least possible) by around 5th century AD. So overall, it does appear as if the movie is indeed as historically accurate as the movie makers claim. Now I don’t know about the little tiny details – there probably are plenty of anachronisms and slip-ups (there usually are :p) but at least the base facts seem to be straight 🙂

From Ashes …

Laurie and I watched "Cinderella Man" yesterday. I don’t particularly like boxing or movies about boxing. As Laurie put it, "when one man has to knock another man unconscious to win, I don’t like that sport". That’s exactly how I feel – it just has too much of a feel of the old bread and circuses days. And seeing all those people sitting there cheering on two people beating themselves to a bloody pulp does nothing to inspire good feelings about humanity in general – well, at least not for me:

But speaking of blood and circuses, we have General Maximus himself in "Cinderella Man". Actually, for some reason, Russell Crowe looked younger in this movie. I don’t know if anybody else thinks this but he’s got a little Mel Gibson thing going in there. See, all the Aussie actors who make it great in Hollywood have this rugged, unshaven look – think back to Mel Gibson during the Mad Max days and then there was Paul Hogan … not not the wrestler, that’s Hulk Hogan, this is the other guy – remember "Crocodile Dundee"? :p Then there’s Guy Pearce too – even he had that whole unshaven look going on. Anyway don’t know if Crowe calls himself an Aussie or a New Zelander but even when he was shaven, he’s always managed to look menacing and unshaven. Mel Gibson used to be that way and then suddenly he became everybody’s favourite baby-faced boy :p In this one, Crowe too has a completely different personna – he’s got this whole, Irish boyish charm thing going and as I said before, he actually looks younger somehow. So hence the comment about him doing a Mel Gibson.

But getting back to the movie itself, even though I hate boxing, there was the whole underlying thread of one man against all-odds that I always find irresistible. There is something about the victory of human spirit over all adversity that just appeals to me. Then there is the time period – the story is set in depression era New York and the two time periods from American history that I love the most are the pioneer "Westward Ho" days and the depression era 🙂 Add to that the fact that you have a lot of charming characters (and some good actors too – Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Bruce McGill) and then it also has kids, who can resist a movie with kids? :p I loved the scene where Braddock (Crowe’s character) teaches his daughter to spar and gets smacked in the face when he looks away and where he says that he’ll have to buy some turtles if he wins the title because he told his kids that he’d come home with a title and they thought he said "turtle" 🙂 Overall, a pretty good movie to watch!

Entries, Comments and Connections

It’s weird how these things go … Well, not really weird if you stop to think about it for a second but I just like to be amazed … or was that amused? :p I hadn’t received any comments or spam on this site for the longest time and I was beginning to think that my anti-spam measures were finally paying off. Then I made an entry a couple of days ago and then I heard from my friend Edward today – he said that he couldn’t post comments since they don’t appear and that he can’t leave a tag since the tag board tagged anything he posted as spam :p I checked on it and found that there had been a reason for the absence of comments …

Both the comments system and the tagboard have a spam blacklisting feature. Basically, I adapted the WPBlacklist plugin code to work for the tagboard as well. So, they both run off fairly similar blacklists and for some inexplicable reason, the letter "b" had gotten in to the blacklist :p And that meant that you couldn’t post anything with the letter "b" in it without it getting tagged as spam. I fix the problem and what do you know? Barely an hour later, I get my first tagboard spam in ages and I get two comments posted on various entries over the course of the day! I am not even certain if one of the comments is spam or not but the other is not spam. However, it is intriguing that all this happened on the same day because there really were no comments till now for a while – even if the comments had been deleted because they were mis-identified as spam, I would have received a notification, so I know that there were no spam comments 🙂 Anyway, that’s my little bit of wonderment and mystery for the day … Now I’m going back to doing other stuff – like watching the really gory and fairly pointless "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" :p

Back again …

I’ve finally decided to come back to blogland :p When I started to write this entry, I thought I’d never been away from blogging for this long since I started blogging way back in ’99 or so (or was it earlier? :p) But then I took a look at the archives for this site and realized that at least here, I seem to have had a habit of cyclically going offline for long periods. The last time was in October of 2003 and and I didn’t come back till April 2004! So I guess this time is a much faster recovery … that is, if I keep on writing after this and not stop again after this entry or a couple of more entries.

So what has been happening? A lot actually. Around the end of October both my sister and sister-in-law (Laurie’s sister) paid us visits. While my sister’s visit was brief, Laurie’s sister and her family stayed with us for a while and we really enjoyed the visit. Of course, having guests in the house meant going sightseeing, going shopping and so on and time really passed by in a blur.

Then in November, I got a new job through the help of my friend Tracie (thanks Tracie :)) and finally left my previous employer – I’d been with them for close to five years (the longest I’d been with any one employer) over two different periods. I always will remember them with warmth because I truly felt at home there but I was going nowhere there since they really didn’t have anything to keep me occupied full time. My new job on the other hand, keeps me so occupied that I am exhausted at the end of the day :p I work for a hosting company as a remote systems admin now and since I’m administering servers, I am on alert most of my working hours in case one of the servers decides to act up. While it’s not very physical work (I sit on the couch staring at my computer screen the whole day :p), it’s mentally exhausting because you can never really relax. But I’m getting better at it and learning to relax a bit more than I did at the beginning, when I was too scared to look away from the monitoring screen for even one second lest something go wrong with the servers and I might miss an alert :p

The new job, the new schedule, the changes in work habits etc. have kept me busy and away from blogging (or even doing any other stuff like coding …) for the last couple of months. I now seem to be finally getting into a new groove (which I hope does not become a rut :p) and so am able to think about blogging again. Plus, I started blogging as an outlet for all the thoughts crowding in my head and also because I needed to, was compelled to write. But since I’m so busy now, the compulsion to write is gone. Indeed, I found that the couple of articles a month I was doing for two different magazines was getting to be draining because of all the research that I had to do. So I gave up most of my writing too (I still write for one magazine – but that’s on an occasional basis) and become a gentlemen of leisure … albeit without too much leisure time :p

That brings us to about yesterday 🙂 I spent most of my spare time yesterday cataloguing my DVD collection. I’d been keeping tabs on my DVD’s using an application that I’d found online (what geek doesn’t? :p) but had stopped updating it like three years ago. And since we’d been buying a lot of DVD’s recently, I found that we had a lot of DVD’s not in the system and worst still, that we were buying duplicates at times because I didn’t have an updated system! So I finally decided to bite the bullet and update the system. I started with around 220 DVD’s in the system and now have 456 after I’d entered almost all of the new ones :p I still have about 10 more to go which are mostly Tamil or Hindi movies which aren’t in the database of selectable movies of the application that I use – DVD Profiler. So I’ll have to entere those manaually – I’ve become really anal about making sure that the cast and crew information is as correct as possible so that I can do an offline cross-reference of any actor, director, writer etc. based on the movies I own. So, I guess I’ll just have to do a lot of IMDB refrencing to update the last 10 or so movies – yes, that’s something I found out yesterday … even Tamil and Hindi movies are in IMDB! Granted, they don’t have as much information as the Hollywood movies, but they are still there and that’s probably one of the easiest references for referencing Bollywood or Mollywood movies too 🙂

Later in the evening we watched "Ocean’s Twelve" on DVD. Yeah, I hear you going, "What? It’s not out on DVD yet!" :p These were pirated copies of the movie – and bad pirated copies at that since somebody had shot it in a theater (probably) and the camera was slightly slanted and so the whole movie was slightly askew :p Then there were all the French titles, place names etc. which made the story a bit difficult to follow since I like to know all the details :p The movie was good but the ending wasn’t breathtaking – in fact, I could see it coming a mile away. I don’t know whether Hollywood writers are becoming more predictable each year or if I’m just beginning to see the patterns better but I can predict what’s going to happen in a movie more and more easily as time passes. The last movie that I can remember surprising me was "The Sixth Sense" and even that I was able to figure out what was happening before the movie ended.

Speaking of "The Sixth Sense", is M. Night Shyamalan’s career going in reverse or what? He came out with his best movie as his maiden offering and it has been steadily going downhill since then. "Unbreakable" was good but left me feeling as if there was something more – as if I’d seen only half a movie and there was an untold story I was missing. "Signs" was just a bad movie – no two words about it. The story was atrocious, so lame that it probably wouldn’t have floated even in the beginning days of science fiction. Come on, aliens who are afraid of water? I read something very similar in one of my first Sinhalese science fiction novels when I was like thirteen and even then, I was sceptical of that whole idea :p I haven’t even bothered to see "The Village" since the guy at the video store was like "This is the same guy who did ‘Sixth Sense’? But this is such an awful load of crap!" ‘Nuff said 🙂

Jersey Girls and Spammer Jerks

I watched "Jersey Girl" on Saturday with Laurie and I must say I loved it 🙂 I’ve seen other Kevin Smith movies like "Chasing Amy", "Dogma" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" and while they all had certain thought-provoking aspects, they never appealed to me emotionally the way "Jersey Girl" did. I don’t know if Keving Smith is growing as a writer and a director of if he is simply becoming one more "Hollywood" writer/director but what I can say is that I liked this one better than most of his previous works. It still had little touches which make it a non-run-of-the-mill movie – such as Gertie doing "Sweeny Todd" for the school (complete with slitting of throats and all :p) and Liv Tyler’s character which was so over-the-top and yet kind of true to life. Most people would probably say that Kevin Smith has sold out because this wasn’t a gritty, realistic, thought provoking movie but instead actually has a happy ending :p But I say, I loved it!!

Spammers seem to be evoking very harsh reactions these days. I’ve heard many people call them jerks (the title was just to go along with Jersey Girls – I really don’t think they are any more of jerks than the rest of humanity … people are just people :p) and even had a couple of users of WPBlacklist write to me and say that they should rot in hell 🙂 I don’t particularly like spammers myself (notwithstanding me not thinking of them as jerks) and so I’ve been conducting my own one-man campaign to do what I can to stop people from being bugged by spam. I’ve been posting over at the WP support forums in response to every spam-related query and have even updated the WPBlacklist plugin in a frenzy of updates to make sure that it can do the best possible to combat spam comments. While I was doing all of this, I seemed to be safe from spam myself for the longest time except for a couple of comments every other day. That seems to have changed now :p Either somebody is determined to get me (no, I’m not paranoid :p) or the spammers have come up with a new set of scripts/tools which circumvent most of the spam deterrents that I’d already put in place. I’ve been getting a steady stream of spam comments since I woke up in the morning today – but the good news is that WPBlacklist has so far caught them all and deleted them instantly. So I sit here with a smug smile on my face saying "another spam comment gone" while the flood of spam continues to hammer at my site :p

The Miracles around us

Have you recently sat in the rain and looked up at the lightning playing across the sky? Or, sat on the grass on an early morning, feeling the freshness and the coolness of the grass under you and the warmth of the sun on your face while the birds sang and the fragrance of flowers wafted all around you? I don’t know about you, but I seem to be doing less and less of this kind of thing which actually makes us realize how good life is and all the little miracles that surround us … and this is not a good thing.

It started raining heavily in the morning today just as I got up. I washed, prayed and then sat on my couch for a little while, staring out the window at the rain falling down and the lightning streaking across the sky. I really wanted to go out and just sit in the rain and let it splash all over me like I used to do when I was a child. Why is it that as we get older, we get more and more conservative and so …. dull? :p Why is it that we start thinking about what other people will think/say, whether we’d get sick and so on, instead of just going out and doing something which is fun? I don’t know. But I do know that I didn’t go out and just romp around in the rain. But I did sit there and look at the rain and think about all these things 🙂

It was then that I had the thought that the rain falling outside, the sunshine on our face, all these things are little miracles of God. When something big happens, like a huge storm coming up (I was thinking of "The Day After Tomorrow" at this point but that’s a different discussion :p), we start thinking of God and sometimes even say that it’s an "act of God". But we always disregard the little miracles which are all around us, I guess because we’ve gotten so used to them and they have lost their miraculousness. This is probably why I love a child’s viewpoint of the world much better than I love an adult’s – because children have still not become so blasé about all the little wonders that are all around us and they still look out at the world with innocent eyes. But the truth of the matter is that there is beauty and wonder to be seen, enjoyed and marvelled at, all around us … if we’d just take the time from our daily grind to notice these things. So just take a minute off your day to smell the roses, to stare out your window at the greenery of the trees or how blue the sky is and realize that the world might not be as dreary as it sometimes might seem 🙂

The Warrior’ Path

I watched "The Last Samurai" yesterday. Or rather, I actually began watching it on Saturday but couldn’t finish it on Sunday since I had some other stuff to do and so finished watching it yesterday :p I loved the movie. I had not thought I would like it as much as I did when I started watching it but by the time the movie ended, I was loving it. There were moments in the movie which left me pondering about things and that always is a good thing for a movie. What struck me most about the film was the fact that we all have habits, customs or a way of life that we think is the "right" one. It is only when we come face-to-face with something totally alien do we realize that there are other ways than ours and while that might not be the suitable way for us, we must respect the ways of others if we are to ever live in peace on this Earth of ours.

One scene that struck me especially was towards the end when Algren (Tom Cruise) and Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) charge the army of Omura (Masato Harada). While I by no means like violence and would rather find a solution through discussion, I was left with the feeling "this is as it should be, person to person, face to face" when I saw them charging the opposing army. And then … they get cut to pieces by the Gatling gun of Omura and fall in their tracks. I was thinking how low have we fallen, no longer will we even take the honourable way of fighting (if we must fight) by facing our enemy and taking the same risks as s/he does. Instead, we stay far away in safety and fire upon our enemy with weapons that kill without distinction – combatant or non-combatant … there is no difference. Worse yet, our commanders and leaders (the ones who actually order these wars/killings) sit even further away (perhaps even in a different country) safe from all the destruction that they order. I see no honour in such a way.

But then again, was is not about honour any longer, is it? No, wars are fought by the greedy, the opportunistic – people like Omura in "The Last Samurai". People who are only concerned with gaining power or wealth – not about something as transient as honour. Of course, on the other hand, one might say, "What honour is there in killing somebody else?" but that is not my point. My point is that if kill you must, then kill face-to-face, against an opponent who is armed the same as you and has as equal an opportunity of killing you as you them. Perhaps then we would have less wars … but then again, given humanity’s track record so far, that seems unlikely.

Peter Pan the boy-man

Watched "Peter Pan" yesterday with Laurie. Actually, we started on the movie the day before but stopped half-way since there were other things to watch on the telly :p Anyway, it has been a long time since I read the original book and I’d forgotten most parts and in the interim, the image that had stayed with me had mostly been the Disney version and not the original. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I actually saw the story in a new light – not sure if the original book had the same perspective or if the movie maker had given the story a new twist or if it’s just me …

Whatever the case may be, this time around I saw the tale of Peter Pan more as a parable or an allegory. Peter Pan seemed to symbolize all males – never wanting to grow up, always eager to have fun but not ready to have feelings, to be hurt. And Wendy seemed to epitomize womanhood, always wanting a man instead of a boy, somebody who would love her and not just be a playmate 🙂 One of my favourite lines from the movie was Peter saying "I taught you to fight and to fly. What more do you want?" And sometimes I find myself echoing his words, "what more indeed?"

I don’t know about everybody – whether all males never want to grow up and to be honest, I’m not really certain that what most of the world calls growing up is really growing up. It’s all in the perspective. Is becoming hard, mercenary, cynical and suspicious growing up? Some people seem to think so. Is being selfish and thinking of oneself before others growing up? Some people seem to think that too. If that is growing up, I’d rather retain the innocence of childhood. However, I believe that some of us are lucky enough to retain a part of ourselves from our childhood and yet be able to adapt to the so called adult world as well, while there are others who never grow up at all and then again, there are a lot of people who seem to completely grow up and forget all about their childhood. But even this, is all in the perspective of each person since "grown up" is such a subjective term :p

Interruptions and holidays …

You start blogging again in earnest hoping to post at least every other day and what happens? You have a long weekend which lasts for like five days, that’s what happens :p Honestly, Sri Lanka is probably the country with the most holidays in the world! This time, the holidays went on from Friday the 30th of April to the middle of this week – Wednesday to be exact. When I got back to work on Thursday of course, I was flooded with stuff to do after such a long break. What else is new? :p
Of course, I had been planning to do a lot of stuff over the holidays but as usually happens with the plans of mice and men, I never actually got around to doing most of it – especially my coding :p Did manage to catch a few of the movies which have been lying around waiting for me to watch them though. Actually, that was mostly due to the fact that we’d recently gotten a new stack of movies and wanted to get through the lot before I totally forgot about them 🙂 So what’d I watch? Actually, I forget most of them now though I do recall that there were a few Hindi movies in there. Did watch the Kevin Costner starrer "Open Range" but found it to be a bit tedious. The story was OK I guess but seemed to plod on a bit at times and Costner’s propensity to have wide panoramic shots at times gets to be a bit too much :p

I also watched Tarantino’s "Kill Bill Volume I" in anticipation of getting my hands on a good DVD copy of volume II soon. Now if you are the squeamish type and don’t like to see blood spurting out all over the place like a hundred fire hydrants that had their tops knocked off, then you really shouldn’t be watching this movie. I normally don’t like movies with a lot of violence but then again, that is usually when the story is dark and moody and the violence is somehow "real". Here, the violence is so over the top that it seems comical or cartoonish and I just enjoyed the show to its fullest 🙂 I loved the improbable fight scenes and the way over the top storyline and am looking forward to watching the second volume whenever a good DVD copy comes out – the movie is too good for me to go out and grab one of those crappy camera copies, thank you very much :p

Matrices and mindsets

Sometimes I really wonder about how things turn out – I’d thought that I’d not get to see "Matrix Reloaded" for a while yet since the only way I’d see it would be as a pirated movie and that would probably be a bad camera copy. But guess what? Not only have I seen the movie within ten days of it’s release but I saw a copy that should be just as good as what’s shown at the theaters! But enough of the strange anomalies in life (or should I say the matrix? :p) and on to the movie itself … but don’t worry, I will try not to spoil it for anybody else who might not have seen it …

The first part of the movie was a bit of a disappointment to me – yes, it had all sorts of spectacular effects, more fights than before and so on but it seemed to drag a bit at points and to get a bit too philosophical at times. The philosophy in the first movie was a bit more subtle and didn’t get so wordy – or maybe this was just the mood I was in when I watched the movie (it was late at night and I was tired after a full day) and so I’ll probably have to judge based on a second viewing in a week or so – which I fully intend to do since I do need a second viewing to get all the finer points that I might have missed.

The philosophy? Oh there is a lot more philosophy believe you me – there is talk of causality, of freedom of choice, of the importance of hope and then there are the indirect references (like how the first movie set Neo up as a Christ figure with his death and resurrection and the promise that he will bring redemption/freedom to the people) to more eastern philosophies like reincarnation, the wheel of life etc. And of course, as always there are "explanations" of reality – they even do a bit where they explain unexplained phenomena :p Of course, the second viewing that I’ve promised myself might help me to get a better handle on all the different philosophy bits as well …

There was one scene where Neo gets attacked by hundreds and hundreds of agents that left me feeling a bit of deja vu (and you know that was a glitch in the matrix :p) because it looked so incredibly like a scene from Jet Li’s "The One" (and of course, Neo is *the one* :p) but be that as may be, the final portion of the movie fully justified it being the sequel in the matrix series since it had new revelations, surprises and conundrums. I am not too happy with the way they concluded the movie since unlike the first movie (which was self-contained) they left you with a slight cliff-hanger on this one and we’ve got to wait till November to find out what happens. I hate that! Ah well .. anyway, I did have some interesting thoughts on the movie and it’s connection to reality such as the fact what if we are really living in the matrix and the Wachowski brothers are simply making a movie about what they’ve come to realize as the "real" reality subconsciously? :p Of course, I’m sure somebody else has made this suggestion already but I was kind of interested in exploring the idea but time and space prevents me – time because I’ve got at least three more movies to watch today and space because this would become a very long entry if I tried to go into all the different ideas and suppositions I might come up with :p