Like I said yesterday, the words "A PM Entertainment Group Release" on a movie are enough to make me want to watch it! So today I saw Deadly Bet on STAR Movies. I remember that this was shown some years ago (probably 1995) on our cable channel (when cable operators used to play videos on their channels). But I hadn't seen more than the first 15 mins. at that time. STAR Movies of course showed a very good quality print of the movie, and I enjoyed it.
The movie is directed by Richard W. Munchkin, produced by Joseph Merhi and Richard Pepin, and written by Joseph Merhi and Robert Tiffe. Jeff Wincott stars as Angelo - a gambler who has a weakness for risky bets. He accepts a challenge from a guy called Rico (Steven Vincent Leigh), and fights him. Only, he loses - and he ends up owing Rico fifteen thousand dollars, and loses his girlfriend Isabella (Charlene Tilton) to Rico. He only gets deeper and deeper into debt with nasty people - and soon becomes an alcoholic. But later he picks himself up, participates in a kickboxing tournament where he defeats Rico, settles his debts and wins back his girlfriend. This movie doesn't have a lot of plot. But it has a decent screenplay, and good acting too. The only problem is that it becomes very sluggish in the middle (much like our hero) and the fights, although well filmed, tough and brutal, are not outstanding. Otherwise, an entertaining movie. And one thing I'd like to point out - Jeff Wincott has a beer belly early in the movie (when he's playing the alcoholic), and then at the end, he loses it and gets in shape. I don't know how long this movie was in filming, but it sure looks like they put in a good deal of effort into making it. And my favourite part of the film is when some thugs confront Angelo and ask him for his money. He says - "You want money? I owe one guy five thousand dollars. And my best friend one thousand dollars. Last night, I lost fifteen thousand dollars - and my girlfriend. You want money?"
In other news, Sharad put up his website at http://sharad35.tripod.com yesterday afternoon. I checked it out last night and it's got some good stuff on it - especially a very nice Sarah Michelle Gellar wallpaper that I now have on my desktop. Also I went to some terrific movie review sites. The links page has been updated.
I know I said I wouldn't write Doom stuff on this site - but see Doomworld today for a write-up of Varun's terrific level The Anomaly Part II. More on that is at my Doom Site.
I made some small changes to the site - I got rid of the old links page (which was pretty outdated and had links to sites I wasn't even visiting) and replaced it with a proper one. I rewrote the Site Intro, because after reorganising the site a few days ago, I felt I needed to. And, two of my older sites have been shut down. My Buffy Site which was previously at Acmecity, is no longer online. The reason for this is that Acmecity recently merged with AOL Hometown, and required all it's users to transfer their sites. I didn't - because transferring would mean me using AOL's page building tools, and FTP isn't available for anyone except AOL members! So the site is officially gone. Anyway, I hadn't updated since May 31, 2000, so I guess no one will miss it. Thanks to the 800+ visitors who visited. My Themes Site is officially closed too - the links don't seem to be working (although the files are there, I checked), and it hasn't been updated for about a year also. I'm not making themes anymore, and I don't have the time to maintain those sites. Thanks to the 600+ visitors who were there.
Yesterday, I saw the excellent The Devil's Advocate (starring Keanu Reeves, Al Pacino, Charlize Theron and directed by Taylor Hackford, with a screenplay by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy, based on the novel by Andrew Neiderman) on STAR Movies. Young Florida lawyer Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) has never lost a case in his life - and when he succeeds in acquitting a schoolteacher who's been accused of molesting a teenage girl, he gets an offer from Milton, Chadwick and Waters - a firm in New York. Kevin and his wife, Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) go to New York, and soon, Kevin is hired by the firm's elegant head, John Milton (Al Pacino). Kevin becomes very successful, but his wife feels something is not right. And soon, as he rises to the top, his wife becomes sick - and later starts going insane. The shocking events in this story are all subtly orchestrated by John Milton, who is actually the Devil himself! Perhaps the most chilling part of this story is the ending, which shows how the Devil only sets the scene - it's man's free will that drives him to damnation. Even at a running time of well over two hours, this movie was always engaging, brilliantly acted (all three stars give terrific performances) and the demon effects were never very gory and were glimpsed for a very short time, still they managed to be some of the scariest things I've ever watched. After watching the movie I tried to get the screenplay for this, but couldn't find it on any of the sites with scripts. I wanted the screenplay because STAR Movies had censored the movie a lot (as they usually do).
Well, here's where I bring you up to date with what happened on STAR World's Monster Thursday (24th) this week. It was the first Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel crossover, because the story was spread over both shows. Spike returned to Sunnydale in search for a very precious gem - that would make any vampire who wore it immune to sunlight, fire, stakes, that is, practically invincible. Spike actually got his hands on it, but then Buffy fought him and took away the gem (actually a ring). She thought the best person to have the ring would be Angel, so Oz drove to L.A. to give Angel the ring. And Spike wasn't too far behind - he captured Angel, got a vampire to torture him. But Angel, with the help of Oz, Doyle and Cordelia managed to get the ring back, kill the torturer, escape from Spike. Finally Angel destroyed the ring.
On Millennium's Season 3/Episode 3 (which I just saw), a shooting at a school brought Frank Black and Agent Emma Hollis on a very interesting case. The FBI finds out that eleven very rich people actually believed that the end of the world would come on January 1, 2000 - and their preparation for what they thought would be their fate had a very devastating effect on their children.
It's about time I updated! These are supposed to be the holidays, but somehow I'm not finding time to update the site. So what's been happening these days? As usual, I have been busy with Doom - writing reviews, playing levels, doing demos, etc., and I have also started making another level.
On 20 May, I finally got to see The Last Boy Scout on HBO - a most excellent movie with Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans, directed by Tony Scott. Willis plays a private detective called Joe Hallenbeck. Joe is given a job by his friend Mike (who is having an affair with Joe's wife, as he finds out later), and the job involves keeping an eye on a stripper, Cory (Halle Berry) who is in some serious trouble. Mike ends up dead, and soon Cory is killed by some professional hitmen. So, Joe and Cory's boyfriend, an ex-football player named Jimmy Dix (Wayans) team up to find out just what she was involved with, and uncover a big corruption ring in pro football. The movie had terrific action scenes and a very fun screenplay courtesy Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black. But if you are planning to see the movie be warned - it has lots of stong violence, and an extreme amount of profanity. In my opinion, it's a simply fantastic action film!
It was only two days ago that I saw last week's episodes of Buffy, Angel and Millennium. All were very good. Buffy had troubles with her roommate Kathy and wanted to kill her - an understandable thing because that's the only thing to do when your roommate is actually a soul-sucking demon! The reason I watch Buffy is - excellent episodes like this! On Angel, there was a very nasty parasitic demon that preyed on lonely people and kept transferring itself from one person to another until Angel and friends put an end to it. And then on Millennium, part 2 of a very interesting story showed how the Millennium Group was trying to eliminate a family of "remote viewers" - women and their daughters who could see things happening anywhere if they tuned their minds - because they felt the women were a threat to their plans of causing the apocalypse. Frank Black and FBI Agent Emma Hollis (Klea Scott) saved Mildred Carson and her grand-daughter - who "saw a different future".
Now I have to see today's episodes of these three shows! Nowadays at NIIT we're learning about Windows NT Administration. It's interesting, but since they don't give us administrative rights to fool about (obviously), we won't get lots of practice. Anyway, it's nice, though I'll have to put in some more effort in understanding the concepts. And college will reopen on Monday, May 28 :( - time always flies when you're having fun. Only a few more days left to enjoy myself, then it's back to the old routine.
By the way, I forgot about this - some time back I got a mail from Damian Lee - he was pretty surprised when he saw my photo on the site. The reason is the both of us resemble each other a lot! Check out his page here. And my friend Harry redesigned his page as well. Sravan's also made an update on his site.
This site has been online for almost a year now. And along the way I added a lot of stuff to the site - but some weeks back I decided there was a lot of redundant material. It was only today that I actually got rid of some of the older stuff and reorganised everything else. I changed the colours/fonts of the site yesterday (somewhat similar to the colours I used in my NIIT project, one of the reasons I changed the font was because I have a lot of text). All the important material remains, I only eliminated what I thought nobody was interested in seeing (so no one's actually going to miss anything). I've freed up a lot of space on the server by removing unnecessary images, MIDI files, etc. If you aren't able to find a page that was there before, check the Other Content Page. This is where I moved everything that didn't fall into one of the main sections of the site. If you can't find it there either, it means I've deleted the page. By the way, that's where my Fortune Teller Applet is located now.
Comments/suggestions on the reorganisation? As usual, mail me with your comments at karthik@newdoom.com. And check out the new About Me page!
Finally, after some days of work at NIIT I finished all the programs I had to do, and today was the submission of projects. Things went pretty well, and I got 91%! After finishing that I spent the rest of the time (about one and a half hours) surfing the net there (the speeds there are real fast). I went to this gopher site - gopher.quux.org (which I also saw yesterday) and was reading all the jokes.
I managed to sneak in a movie yesterday. After 6 hours at NIIT I slept for quite a while when I got back home. After I had dinner I was at the computer for sometime, checked my mail, etc., then made some changes to a C++ program, and then by this time it was nearing midnight. After that I started watching The Coroner (which I had taped earlier). I watched from 1:30 AM (so it was practically today that I watched it) till around 3 AM.
The Coroner, as I'd seen from the advertisements, is an ultra low budget movie. Now normally I like watching low budget movies because they're fun. Take No Escape, No Return for example. Maybe the story didn't make much sense, but I enjoyed the movie's atmosphere and the action scenes were very good. But The Coroner was different.
The movie is about a demented weirdo who kidnaps women, tortures and later kills them. He does this only to women who have attempted suicide and didn't die. Because, he's a medical examiner, and he feels he's been "denied" in some manner. Our coroner, Dr. Leon Uraski (Dean St. Louis), kidnaps a lawyer named Emma Santiago (Jane Longnecker). She escapes from him and tries to warn to police, but they don't arrest him because he's their medical examiner! Later, she tries to break into his house to find evidence that he's a serial killer - but the police think she's a nut. So soon she takes matters into her own hands, kidnaps Leon, and later, kills him. The movie ends with her in a cell of a mental asylum.
The movie could have been a tense, chilling, scary horror film that could have created some interesting characters and situations. As you can obviously see, there are some good ideas in Geralyn Ruane's script. But the movie is SO BADLY acted that it's laughable. Some of the dialogues are absolutely ridiculous - you've got to see this movie to believe it. At any rate, I enjoyed the movie (not because it was scary), because it was so bad, that I had a lot of fun. It's just 75 minutes long, but since I had recorded it from STAR Movies, I could make out that some scenes had been obviously censored. Directed by Juan A. Mas.
I've been busy with my C++/CGI programs at NIIT for the past two days - really busy - I was at NIIT yesterday for 6 hours, and today, for 9 hours (because I had a regular class apart from the extra time I was spending). We have to submit these programs by 19th, so that's whay me and my friends are working extra time to finish them off. What I did today was pretty interesting - I sent data from a text box on a webpage, to a CGI script which in turn used this to retrieve information from a database, and send this back to the user in the form of a HTML page! It's a little tricky getting this type of stuff to work properly (since I am just learning all this it takes time to figure out just what is wrong when a program isn't behaving the way it's supposed to). But I had fun because I had company, and a cup of coffee at the right time does wonders.
Thanks everybody for all your wishes today, thanks for all the birthday cards! I had an e-card from my parents waiting for me this morning, and Varun made this card for me - it seems he'd actually made it days ago, and had kept it hidden from me until today! Also thanks Jean-Yves Delpech, and all my friends at college and everyone at NIIT, and thanks Pablo Dictter for sending me as a birthday gift one of his old WADs (called Red Evil, for Ultimate Doom E2M7) that he made back in 1996 (it's a cool level set in a sort of hellish cave - good fun to play - it was thoughtful of him to send it to me!). And today at NIIT (like last year) I got to give out sweets to everybody - I could never do this when I was in school because my birthday is always during the summer holidays!
I just got back from seeing Red Planet (a pretty good movie with Val Kilmer, Carrie Anne-Moss and Tom Sizemore, directed by Antony Hoffman). The story goes like this - by 2057 Earth is so heavily populated that terraforming on Mars has begun - and when things aren't going as planned, a ship called the Mars-1 is sent there to find out exactly why the algae that were supposed to grow and produce oxygen aren't doing so. Unfortunately crisis after crisis makes the crew's mission nearly impossible (pun not intended...) and it ends up with Kilmer, Sizemore and another crew member stranded on Mars, with Carrie Anne-Moss on Mars-1 trying to get them back home. One astonishing thing the crew discover is that there's actually breathable air on Mars! A good action/space thriller - with a story by Chuck Pfarrer (who wrote Hard Target!) and a screenplay by Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin.
This reminded me of what happened last year on my birthday - déjà vu, actually - I came out from my NIIT class a little earlier than 9:30 PM, and my parents, Varun were waiting for me - and we had gone to see The Green Mile. That was at Anand Cinema too, and it was the same time (10 PM show) as well!
Varun completed his Doom level, The Anomaly Part II, yesterday after a very long time in development. He is going to release it on the internet on my birthday! That's one thing to look out for on 15th... but you can see a pre-release review of it right now at my Doom site.
Been busy as usual in the last few days - I've had to do C++ programs at NIIT, and the code for five of them is here. I also finished a document on WML today - this is my Mid-ISAS (every semester we have to collect information on a particular topic, analyse and later present it). Also I got to see a couple of movies - No Escape, No Return on 5 May. This is a PM Entertainment Group release - and while it wasn't that great a movie, I always like the feel of watching a low budget movie. Starring Maxwell Caulfield (as Billy Sloan), Dustin Nguyen (as Tommy Cuff) and Denise Loveday (as Alison Weston) this is a decent action movie about three cops who are sent up by their superior to stop some bad guys in a nightclub. Actually he expects them to die, but instead, a bloodbath ensues and the three make it out alive. After that, they are framed for the deaths of 12 innocent people. The story after that (is there one?) didn't make a lot of sense, but I somehow liked this movie (written/directed by Charles T. Kanganis).
On 9 May I also saw Fortress 2: Re-Entry (starring Christopher Lambert, directed by Geoff Murphy) which was a pretty good science fiction/action thriller about an evil corporation who capture John Brennick (Lambert) (after he's been running from them for 10 years), and throw him in a maximum security prison from which he must break out if he ever wants to see his wife and child again. Only problem - the fortress is 26,000 miles above Earth!
And on 10 May I was occupied for three hours, because the new episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was terrific, and so was the first episode of Angel. Millennium was great too. We've started Windows NT at NIIT.
There are two sites I'm currently writing news updates on, this one, and my Doom site. So if you don't see new stuff here, it means I've been writing about Doom-related stuff over there!
Anyway, I recently got interested in making Winamp skins - I made two, Quake II which you can get from the Downloads page, and Doom, which you will have to go to my Doom site to download. I also have been busy with my NIIT C++ programs that I have to do.
Tomorrow is the day for Buffy, Angel, Millennium on STAR World!
Holidays started today - and today I went to college but came back in the afternoon. But there was an assignment in Probability and Statistics given, and I typed the whole thing for you if you're interested. There are 16 questions and you can see the page here (right-click and choose "Save Target As..." if you'd rather read it later).
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 4 - new episodes of this excellent series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar start on May 10, Thursdays 9:30 PM.
Angel, Season 1 - new series starring David Boreanaz, starting May 10, Thursdays 10:30 PM.
Millennium, Season 3 - the last series of this show from Chris Carter, starring Lance Henriksen - starts May 10, Thursdays 11:30 PM.
The Pretender - new episodes starting May 15.
And STAR Movies has some nice new movies too - there are a lot of movies from PM Entertainment Group (low budget action!) coming this month, and there's also Antonio Banderas in The 13th Warrior towards the end of this month.
Last night I saw Mickey Blue Eyes (starring Hugh Grant, Jeanne Tripplehorn and James Caan; directed by Kelly Makin) on STAR Movies. This was an entertaining movie in which Hugh Grant plays Michael - who's in the auction business - and is very much in love with Gina (Jeanne Tripplehorn). Unfortunately, what he doesn't know is that Gina's father, Mr. Vitale (James Caan), is a big mobster, and the "family" causes him all sorts of problems. Not an exceptional movie, but OK.
Today I had my Module Test I for Semester B (in Linux, C++ and CGI) at NIIT. I got a score of 80%, which is the third highest in my batch. It was in the morning at 11:45 AM today, so that's why I didn't come to college today. Yesterday was because I was busy studying for the exam!
My site crossed 2000 visitors on May 1!! Varun was the 2000th visitor, and he took a screenshot of the page too. I'll put that on the site soon. My Doom Pages, now hosted at NewDoom.com is also getting quite a number of visitors! Thanks everybody for visiting, keep coming back!