Free your mind~!

There Will Be Blood

Earlier today, I finally found the time to watch “There Will Be Blood” a film about a silver miner turned oil tycoon’s rise to power during early California oil boom.   Much of the story involves Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and his efforts to develop an oil empire along with his conflicts with Eli who founds a Church that goes at odds with Plainview’s goals.

The subplots in “There Will Be Blood” involved Plainview’s interactions with his adopted son and his then-brother.  Plainview takes in his son when the child’s real father was killed in a work-related accident and he goes on to raise him as if he was his own son and as a business partner.  Despite the character’s ruthless business practices, he still does genuinely care about his son, HW, especially when he loses his hearing by first trying to find doctors to heal him and then sending him away to learn sign language.  However, the audience learns Daniel’s reason for taking in HW was mostly for business reasons and the emotional bonding was just an afterthought.

Plainview also cares about his family when he finds his supposed brother looking for work.   He takes him on and begins confiding his goals to him in confidence but slowly discovers that the man may be an impostor when the brother fails to remember important locales from his hometown.   Plainview is horrified brutally deals with the impostor when he learns the truth but the audience later sees him weeping when reading his brother’s diary and old family photos.

Daniel Day-Lewis portrays Daniel Plainview as an ambitious man who is willing to go to lengths to achieve success.  He presents Plainview as a man who is willing to lie to gain a better deal, who is willing to convert to a religion simply for the sake of acquiring property, and the way he toys with his enemies.  At the same time he presents some redeeming qualities by the way he cares for his adopted son, despite initially seeing him as a selling point for his oil business, and by the way he treated his “brother” before learning the truth.

In the end, however Plainview becomes consumed by his success which has cost him his family, his sanity, and health despite living in great success in a mansion and achieving his goals he confided to his fake brother.  This is why it was fitting for the character’s final line to be “I’m finished” after realising that he has lost himself and everything he values despite becoming extremely wealthy in the process.

Like Looking in the Mirror

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 7

The episode starts with Cameron dressed as a police officer breaking into a local power plant to trigger a citywide blackout. She then drives to the police station to search for the severed T-888 hand but notices that Agent Ellison has taken it for examination as Sarah visits Andy’s grave. Using this information, Sarah calls the local FBI office to get clarification of the missing evidence, which Ellison later denies taking, and orders Cameron to track down Dimitry, who had the Turk.

Cameron enrolls in a ballet class to get close to Dimitry’s sister in the hopes of getting information from her. She notices that Dimitry’s sister is in trouble with the Russian mafia because of her brother and Cameron offers to help him if Dimitry gives her information about the Turk.

In his home, Agent Ellison pours over past videos of Sarah Connor’s time in Pescadero as seen in “Terminator 2″ and starts to suspect that Sarah may be sane after looking at the severed hand. He makes a visit to Pescadero to examine Sarah Connor’s cell and then goes to contact Dr. Silberman since he is the only one who is still around in the area. Meanwhile, Sarah breaks into Ellison’s home to find the hand but instead steals one of her videos taken during her time at the mental asylum.

Sarah comes home with a stolen tape and asks John to find Silberman’s latest address. John secretly steals the tape and gets very upset over it because it was the tape that shows Sarah signing custody of John away to his foster parents. Sarah later learns about John viewing the tape and asks Derek to talk to John when he is back. Later John tells Derek that he grew up in a bad environment after Sarah was taken away and that he was almost adopted by his foster parents until he got them killed in “Terminator 2″. Derek assures John that people sometimes make bad decisions when they are heavily isolated.

Agent Ellison decides to pay Silberman a visit to learn more about Sarah Connor. While having a chat about what Silberman saw in “Terminator 2,” Ellison realises he is becoming drowsy after drinking Silberman’s tea. He later wakes up to find himself tied up with Silberman accusing him of being a terminator despite Ellison’s claims that he is an FBI agent and with reminders that assaulting him will result in life in Federal prison. The doctor ignores Ellison’s pleas and stabs him in the leg to see if he has any metal parts on him. After realising he made a mistake, Silberman apologises and Ellison tries to get on his good side by telling him about the severed hand stored in his car.

Silberman goes to examine Ellison’s car and sees the T-888’s severed hand and decides to burn his house with Ellison in it. Apparently, Silberman believes that Sarah Connor’s stories and the Book of Revelation are one and the same and he has gone insane after seeing the T-1000 walk through guard rails as seen in “Terminator 2″. While on his way out, the doctor bumps into Sarah Connor who knocks him out, retrieves the hand and saves Ellison from the fire. Later Ellison interrogates Silberman in the rain about the hand but Silberman claims that it was Sarah who took it back.

Meanwhile, Dimitry’s sister brings Cameron to a motel where his brother is hiding. Cameron offers to give him a diamond if he tells her what he did with the Turk and Dimitry tells her that he rigged the chess tournament to pay off some debts. He also adds that he had sold the Turk to someone for $20,000 and hands her the contact’s business card. Afterwards, Cameron walks away from the room just as loan sharks come in to kill Dimitry and his sister.

Sarah eventually talks to John about the tape. She tells him the tape was made the day she made her attempted breakout shown on “Terminator 2″ which was the same time he and the T-800 came to get her. She adds that she made a snap decision to breakout after signing the papers because she could not bring herself to losing John.

The episode ends with Ellison committing Silberman to Pescadero, Silberman in a Bible study while having visions of Sarah saving him, Cameron learning more ballet, and Derek being amused at Cameron’s attempts to pass as a human.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 6

Charley manages to save Derek’s life as he flashes back to the final moments of the Future War while recovering. In his flashbacks, we learn that John Connor has sent Derek and Kyle out on a diversionary mission to get them out of danger from their local base, which was going to be attacked by the machines. Kyle manages to evade the machines, but Derek and his team are captured by the terminators and brought to a safehouse to be tortured for information. Eventually the machines leave their safehouse once someone gave out the location of their base.

During his captivity, one of the resistance fighters confides to him that his name is not William Wisher and that he is the one who created Skynet. It turns out that this person is the same Andy Sarah Connor considered killing in the present. Derek keeps slipping in and out of consciousness in the present, but is given a blood transfusion by John to stabilise his condition. Charley starts suspecting that Derek may be John’s father until Sarah assures him that it is someone else.

Derek and his team return to find almost everyone killed, and a burnt picture of Sarah Connor. It is implied that the battle was basically Kyle Reese’s flashback from the first “Terminator” movie where Sarah’s picture gets burned during the battle. Later, they are met by another tech com regiment who brings them to another base. During the process, he is informed that John Connor and Kyle went with a team to destroy a research facility and Kyle became MIA in the process. It is again suggested that John had sent Kyle back in time as shown in the first terminator movie. Once he arrives at the new base, Derek panics when he sees Cameron until he is reassured that it is a reprogrammed terminator, which is a project John initiated to change the tide of war.

Derek also remembers a reprogrammed terminator going rogue and killing several soldiers before it was stopped by Cameron. Finally, he is summoned by John Connor to go back in time with a team and await further instructions. It becomes clear that Derek has intentions of creating a safehouse and killing Andy once he finds him.

In the present, Charley is shown the remains of the deactivated terminator from the last episode and he is clearly frightened but now understand why Sarah and John left him. Cameron then prepares to destroy all traces of the terminator by first extracting the flesh before incinerating the endoskeleton with thermite. Sarah then orders Cameron to find the missing arm from the last battle and to destroy all pieces of the T-888, but Cameron secretly keeps a piece of the T-888’s CPU for some reason.

After stabilising Derek’s condition, Charley bids Sarah farewell but not before informing her that an FBI agent had visited him asking about her. Derek regains consciousness in the present and John informs him that Kyle was sent back to the past to protect him. He also tells him he died a hero. The episode ends by revealing that Derek is in fact the one who killed Andy with previews showing Agent Ellison showing the T-888’s severed hand to a scientist, Sarah finding a tape, and Cameron acting strange.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 5

Brian Austin Green is Derek Reese, Kyle Reese’s brother and John Connor’s uncle in “Queen’s Gambit”. The episode begins with Sarah Connor thinking about her time in Central America and John’s interest in chess. The scene then returns to the present where Sarah getts a call from Andy who invites Sarah to watch his rebuilt Turk play in the SoCal chess tournament. Meanwhile John and Cameron start dealing with the death of the girl from the earlier episode.

Cromartie pays a visit to Charley Dixon to ask him about Sarah Connor’s whereabouts. Charley tells him that he has moved on and he remembered Sarah and John dying in a bank explosion. Cromartie as an FBI agent then hands him a business card and explains himself in an awkward fashion. Later that night Charley and his wife have a fight over his feelings for Sarah Connor to which he confesses meeting John earlier.

John becomes interested in a girl in high school but he is warned by Morris that the girl he likes has baggage and an abusive father. Cameron undergoes grief consoling and does not express any feelings towards the girl’s suicide.

Meanwhile, Sarah is at the tournament and learns that Andy has partnered with a Russian chessmaster to get the revised Turk working. John and Cameron make it to the tournament with a backup plan to kill Andy should his machine win the chess match. Fortunately Andy’s machine loses but he is found dead by Sarah just as a shady individual leaves the tournament. Believing the shady person to be the killer, Sarah tracks him down and fights him but backs off when he is caught by the police.

John hacks into the LAPD database and learns that the man is one of their resistance sleeper agents. Cameron adds that he is one of John’s best soldiers and Sarah plans on visiting him with a disguise. At the same time, a local T-888 finds the resistance fighter’s location and picks a fight with some cops to get arrested in the same jail. The first person to meet with the fight is Agent Ellison, who presents him with evidence of his comrade’s death and with deaths that are connected to the synthetic blood found in each crime scene. The man tells him that they are all going to die and Ellison tries to convince the local police to move him into federal custody.

Later Sarah manages to get into the jail posing as the man’s defence lawyer. The fighter tells her that he was not the one who killed Andy and that the Turk has gone missing; presumably with the Russian who also has military connections. He later advises Sarah to leave so she will not be targeted by the local T-888 who will kill him and then says that she looks better than in the picture. She asks about the picture since she only knows Kyle has it and he tells her that he is Derek Reese of the Reese brothers.

With this new piece of information, Sarah picks up John and Cameron from school with a plan to break Derek out during his prison transfer. Just as he is transferred, the T-888 breaks out of his cell to kill Derek at his cell before realising he was transferred out. Cameron stops the prison van and takes it over with Sarah as Derek continues to freak out over the terminator. The T-888 then shows up and Cameron fights it while Sarah continues driving out of danger. In this fight Cameron manages to sever the T-888’s hand but she is later knocked out. Just as the T-888 shoots Derek, Cameron knocks it out and proceeds to remove its CPU with household tools to “kill” it.

They then bring Derek back to their safehouse where he is in critical condition. Sarah wants to kidnap a doctor to save him but John objects until he learns that he is his future uncle. Sarah does what she can but it is no use until John comes back with Charley Dixon, who is shocked to see Sarah.

Agent Ellison investigates the breakout and is amazed that a short girl managed to successfully break his prisoner out. He then notices the T-888’s severed hand lying in the sidewalk from the earlier fight.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 4

In “Heavy Metal,” John Connor is still upset at being prevented from saving his classmate from suicide. At the same time, Cameron learns that Cromartie has survived the time warp and is secretly rebuilding. She presents Sarah and John with video showing Cromartie’s skull and news reports of coltan being smuggled into Los Angeles. John convinces Sarah that they should prepare to blow up the shipments to stop Cromartie.

Meanwhile Cromartie breaks into a plastic surgeon’s office to have reconstructive surgery to resemble a man who matches his “bone” structure. He later kills the surgeon after staying at his clinic to recover only to leave a crime scene for Agent Ellison. Based on the strange evidence and the trail of mystery blood, Ellison believes that all of these murders are connected and begins to investigate after security footage was found showing Cromartie’s presence.

He is able to identify the man shown in the security footage and brings him in for question. It turns out that the man was a struggling actor who visited the surgeon to have work done on his chin and nose and has a strong liberal dislike of the authority. Ellison is willing to let the actor go in return for a blood sample due to the lack of evidence against him.

John, Sarah and Cameron make it to the docks where they find some thugs loading coltan into a truck. According to Cameron, coltan is a titanium alloy that can be used to mass produce terminators and speculates that Cromartie may need this metal to repair itself. After scanning the sleeper terminator in charge of the smuggling operation, Cameron concludes that this is not Cromartie’s operation as it is another terminator on a different mission.

This prompts them to leave for further observation, but John decides to sneak back in to plant his blackberry curve into the truck so they can track them. Sarah and Cameron are then confronted with a local security guard, which Sarah knocks out. However, John winds up hiding in the truck when an armed thug decides to ride in the back. John tries to retrieve his blackberry to call Sarah but winds up damaging it in an attempt to knock out the goon, which causes Sarah and Cameron to lose track of him while monitoring him via the Internet.

As a result, Sarah revives and tries interrogating the guard she knocked out but leaves it to Cameron to extract information from him. They later learn that John and the truck are headed towards an decommissioned air force bunker. Meanwhile the truck has made its final stop inside the bunker and John gets out trying to figure out how to reach Sarah while evading the thugs. The hired thugs are puzzled that one of their guys is missing and assume that he must have left over pay. The terminator then appears and kills the guards after they finished their job, closes the bunker and goes into standby mode.

Meanwhile, the actor is still complaining about his mistreatment in his apartment when he is visited by Cromartie. The cyborg later kills the actor after observing his mannerisms and steals his identity. Ellison presents his findings to his peers at the FBI, who later dismiss his assertions and reprimand him for illegally obtaining blood samples from a suspect. He later visits the actor’s apartment to apologise over the incident, where he is met by Cromartie in disguise, and starts to suspect strange behaviour based on Cromartie’s speech patterns and habits.

Sarah and Cameron arrive at the base and we learn that this will be the future site of a terminator factory where Cameron and others are mass produced. Cameron then suggests that this terminator’s mission is to stockpile raw materials and assist in the factory’s construction once judgment day comes and passes. The thug that John knocked out later wakes up and confronts John, who tries to dissuade him from confronting the terminator after pointing out how he killed his friends and to work together. Dismissing John, the thug threatens the terminator and pushes him out of standby mode, which prompts the machine to simply kill him. After seeing another termination John is frightened but sees an old phone, which he uses to call Sarah about his location.

Sarah tells John that he needs to find a way to open the bunker and to run out before the terminator finishes his 15-second reboot. John manages to remove the master key out of the terminator’s neck to open to bunker. While the terminator boots up, Cameron picks a fight with him while John decides to drive the truck containing coltan, but is having trouble because he doesn’t know how to drive manual. Cameron and the terminator fight while John and Sarah struggle to drive the truck out. Eventually they manage to get the truck out and trap the terminator inside the bunker after a long struggle.

Cameron then proceeds to destroy the truck containing the coltan and they all return home with John badly shaken from the day’s adventure.

And Now for Something Different

What the hell is this shit?!

Here is a conversation I had with a friend earlier today -

BarryAllen: have you ever seen Club to Death Angel Dokuro Chan?
Me: no
Me: i stopped watching Anime
Me: since the last Ghost in the Shell movie
Me: solid state society
Me: and a few Keroro episodes
BarryAllen: Oh
BarryAllen: I guess you wouldn’t like it
BarryAllen: it’s really otakuish
BarryAllen: like Excel Saga
Me: im not surprised
Me: lucky star seems to be the in thing now
BarryAllen: it’s about this boy who’s going to grow up to invent a way to keep all the girls in world from growing beyond 12
BarryAllen: he’s doing this because he’s a pedophile
BarryAllen: so God sends an angel from the future to go kill him
BarryAllen: but she ends up living with him instead
BarryAllen: and she kills him at least twice per episode
Me: thats not a real premise
Me: you made that shit up
BarryAllen: i have the episode if you want it
BarryAllen: i think it might kill my bandwidth if i sent it to you though haha
BarryAllen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dokuro-chan

BarryAllen: Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan tells the story of Sakura Kusakabe, a second-year junior high school student who sometime in the future is going to offend God by inadvertently inventing immortality. Women are affected so that they stop aging after the age of twelve and Sakura is accused of creating a “Pedophile’s World”.

Dokuro Mitsukai, a member of an order of angel assassins that are called Rurutie, has been sent from the future to kill him. Believing that Sakura can be redeemed, Dokuro decides instead to keep Sakura so occupied that he can never develop the immortality technology.

Due to her impulsive nature, however, she frequently kills him - with her gigantic spiked kanabo- (club) she has named Excalibolg - on a moment’s impulse, returning him to life moments later with angelic magic.

Sabato, another assassin of the Rurutie order who uses her feminine wiles to do her jobs, is dispatched to complete Dokuro’s original mission: Sakura’s assassination.

Me: this is so wrong

I’m leaving for Hong Kong

There have been much change in this life, but I have good news. After much requests and consideration, I have finally been granted the right to relocate to our Kowloon office in Hong Kong. I am so excited that I am finally leaving the cesspool called the State of New Jersey. It was also great that I was able to wipe off all my commitments that would have taken 2 years in just less than 3 months!

I don’t know what to say but this is the right step to finally move on. As they say garbage is garbage, and I have made sure that all ties with the immature and the sick-minded are severed. No more immature nonsense, no more craziness from anyone that would make me feel worthless. I know I am my own worst enemy but I have made peace with myself. It would be only a matter of months before I start enjoying the sights and sounds of Victoria Island, Kowloon, Ocean Park and Hong Kong Disneyland!

It’s been a helluva ride but it’s going to be great. I am glad I am leaving all this baggage behind in a place where it truly belongs like New Jersey. Since wordpress.com is banned in China, it looks like I will have to switch over to a new service using typepad. I’ll keep you all posted on the switch.

APRIL FOOLS!