₦airaland Forum

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vescucci:
Ah! Got caught I see. No point employing my plausible deniability clause since that might be 'misconstrued' as further insult to your intelligence and I do not believe you're simple. Really I do not.

dude, do you have a problem with word economics? whats with the high-falutin bombasts in a forum populated overwhelmingly by simpletons? "plausible deniability" "misconstrued" "gastrointestinal astrometaphysical conundrum" yada yada yada and so forth.

jesus.

you sound like a darn lecture.

Man of Steel took a darker turn than the Superman series, as did the ones featuring the Eradicator.

EPOMA:
Your statement above is not correct, on your printscreen , it says connection name, That does not make it to be connection to 3g.I spoke to mtn and they only have MTN 3G running in Lagos, PH and Abuja.So youare getting the whole stuff wrong and you are lucky to be getting that speed from gprs

i see. so my datacard is lying then, as is the N95 which says "3G" below the signal bars, or my bros' N80 which ALSO says 3G below the signal bars, and i thought when a 3G phone displays "3G" under the bars it meant theres a 3G signal within reach.

you people are just silly.

im not as daft as some of you, apparently. unfortunately for you THERE IS 3G in kaduna and my Datacard and my bros PC ARE connected to the 3G network so stop making lame excuses for MTN's poor services. even those claiming to be getting 120kbps are ignorant of being ripped off; 3G should give you AT LEAST 600kbps with very low latency since it is broadband.  or are those complaining about EVDO and Starcomms IZap dense too?

heck, MTN is not even calling it 3G, they insist its 3.5G (HSDPA too) and you guys think 120kbps is okay? at 3.5G?

jesus.

get this into your thick skulls:  THERE IS NO NETWORK IN NIGERIA OFFERING TRUE BROADBAND SPEEDS. some of you have never had anything above 10kbps and now that you have mtn's supposed 3G you think its godsent and marvelous and yada yada yada so help me god.

BS.

its a fraud and y'all victims, albeit ignorant ones. so wake, dammit and stop yammering on about how 3G is confined only to lagos and PH as if those are the only places MTN has customers. call MTN's connect center here in kaduna and confirm if indeed they have 3G before you start pouting crap all over the place.

you sound like the kind of people that'D praise NEPA to high heavens for giving you six hours of steady electricity instead of 24 hours.

MTN 3G sux.

vicero:
The suggestions are good, though most are rather wrong ( practically), asking one to disable system restore? this is supposed to a forum to encourage good computer ethics, its rather wrong, u shld be arrested for ever suggesting that, but tumbs up to u, u've done a good job, thanks for the advice.

i have absolutely no idea what you mean "wrong (practically)", can u enlighten us please? and who said anything about turning off system restore?

honsule:
wonderful thread.guy i have this windows vista Hp laptop,and just yesterday while browsing the firefox closes itself automatically.i was just wondering.after tryin to see whether it was due to settings,but to no effect.when i restart the system the theme settings just changed and likewise resolution.the battery that before then i could change the power settings,this time around the power settings was just on high reformance,it refuses to change.could this be virus?what should i do?Note:i used a card reader with one MMC and it changed the folders to an exe files.

most probably you have a virus from the sound of things. when you inserted your MMC which probably is infected im sure explorer executed Autorun. ive found out that most viruses now piggyback on Ravmon.exe in order to install themselves via the autorun feature (which mostly runs with Admin privileges) so turning Autorun off is a good starting point.

since your box is already infected, a bit of viral housecleaning is called for, so choose your poison:

1. use an antivirus software

2. swallow your pride and format.

goodluck

adewaleafolabi:
@Ex
are u within 3g coverage area ? Maybe its falling back on gprs

kaduna IS within 3G coverage, thats why i put up the pic above. d'uh, like i cant tell when it reverts to GPRS.

flyuche:
@Ex. i don't agree with u. if you're within 3G coverage u can't get that kind of speed. besides u don't need to get the data card if u have a 3G phone. your phone can serve as a modem. 3G phones r cheap this days for example sonyericsson w880i { 3G phone} is about 24k ,compare that to 25k data card frm mtn.

your argument refers you to the same response above: i AM within 3G coverage unless the datacard is lying when its profile says 3G rather than GPRS as you can see above. besides, where in heck can MTN GPRS give you 44kbps?

i chose to go for the datacard besides sometimes family and friends borrow the modem, cant hand them my phone now, can i? and what if i need to place a call while downloading? heck, i use an iphone and sadly its EGDE-only until the 3G variety hits us.

its rubbish. they promised me 800kbps minimum with a tops of 3.2mbps but all i get is a top out of 44kbps and a minimum of 20kbps. rubbish, before my Wifi broadband went kaput (the ISP is overhauling its system) i get a minimum of 100-90kbps.

mtn 3G is not proper 3G (they are even claiming its 3.5G). the speed they offer for 10k a month is befitting only for a dialup, and i spent a whopping 40,380 for the entire dreadful package.

@karmamod

much as you make of accomplishment in your definition, the real judges are the ones who finance the movies, and since show business is show BUSINESS it stands to reason they will finance and hire a box office success story and NOT the one who films the most artistic/inventive commercial bombs. catch my drift? Bay may not be in the same class artistic wise as your precious Nolan (i doubt that) but he has many a summer blockbuster to his credits, and that is a guarantee that producers and studio execs will fall head over heels to have him helm their next summer blockbuster. especially with the success of Transformers which however much you diss, is still a rousing good fun and made lots of money.

On the subject of Transformers, the genius of Bay is in tackling the complexity of bringing the Autobots and Decepticons to life and integrating them so well with the live actors. isnt this sort of accomplishment what made Terminator 2 so successful, or did you go for the warped story with all its Time Paradox etc? the story may subpar, but it was entertaining enough to make a hit in the BO.

truth is, most producers would rather have a blockbuster than an Oscar material. the latter don't rake in much money and mostly are pet projects (i mean the sort of movies that gun for older audience-the pianist, mamma mia, michael clayton) considering the bulk of the movie going demography is of the younger thrill-seeking variety.

in essence, shooting successful blockbusters qualify you as a formidable hollywood darling; shooting even more adds to your rep. its all about the money.

see brian singer. the dismal box office performance of superman returns overshadowed Xmen and X2, and now he is desperately praying for someone to mercifully give him a script.

back to topic. yes directors can walk away from bad scripts, but in most cases its the finished product that betrays the failings or otherwise of a movie (after editing and post production) and not the directing process. sometimes a potent-looking script will fail to connect with audience only because they either failed to see the directors vision or that vision was poorly presented. case in point: Existenz.

nonetheless, some directors have to eat too, so walking away from every dubious-looking script wont add much to the bank balances. some of them say" this is a bad script, i can make it better" but end up making things much worse.

i still maintain producers and studios share the greatest portion of the blame.

@karmamod

michael bay HAS shot some iconic movies and it is precisely because of his capability that spielberg convinced him to shoot Transformers. remember bay called it a stupid toy movie while he was working on shooting GI Joe, but spielberg saw the potential of the movie and the young directors skills and agreed to be executive producer.spileberg didnt call anyone else.

since the success of a movie is judged by ticket sales as well as dvds and merchandising, arguably Bay qualifies as one of the most successful directos in the same league as Nolan. transformers brought more money than War of the worlds and AI put togethre so yes, Bay qualifies to be up there with some of the best.

why do we bother with the comparison with naija "directors"? they don't have the education, training, resources, support and financing that the Amricans have. the socalled actors can't act a hoot to save their necks so why bother?

@siskill

yes it is the directors movie ONLY if he has the final say on how the end result turns out. there are aspects of film making that transcend his powers. we all know editing can make or break a movie, especially action movies. in most cases producers and the studio will demand the editor cut a movie in certain ways that negate the directors vision, removing good takes, and that is why sometimes we get theatrical pieces and DVDs called director' cut. at the end of the day, the directors vision may not well tally with the studios budget and in such cases many things in that vision may have to get cut out, crippling the final product. other times the directors choice of an actor may hit a stone wall with the execs who would rather hire a cheaper nondescript actor than the high grade ones. its the studio that finances the project and pays everyone so really the final choice on how the movie turns out rests with them. why do you think the likes of QT and Rob Zombie prefer to go indie? so they wont get pressured to cut cut cut and suffer the dreaded overbearing studios who all want to make a PG 13 to rake in more money.

and that is why Todd Macfarlane ditched spawn, and prefer a pseudonym to his credit. the studio wanted to cut the violence of what made spawn spawn and shoot a PG 13.

remember also that the cinematographer arrays his cameras and choses his lenses and shots based on camera work in the script, just as the actors say their lines and act along as demanded by the script. and that script is mostly greenlighted by the studios/producers. many directors walked out on the watchmen because the script stank and had the potential to ruin their reputation. even michael bay had to rewrite transformers because most of what was okayed was rubbish, with a female Autobot while the writers couldnt explain the need for gender in robots. Bay was able to get what he wants because speilbetg was exec producer (meaning he either financed most of the project, or he repesented the one who did)

there are however a breed of directors and writers who are given enough wiggle room and yet they still murk it up. those are the outrightly condemnable ones.

@gamine

we'll find a way to detach TDK from his reputation when he films his dud, so we get the benefit of dissing him. it happens to all filmmakers; forget the masterpiece of days gone and wallow in the shite of today.

or would you rather we forgive utter crass just because Nolan had a hole-in-one sometime ago? move on, girl, TDK isnt the greatest movie of the century and i cant dig what the din is all about. its an average hero movie done right with few flaws and a memorable bad guy who stands out more than the titular character. nothing more. theres nothing particularly ingenious, and i dare say when and IF johnny depp is cast as the riddler he will one-up heath ledger even only because of the pressure and the endless carrying-on about TDK.

i refuse to join the bandwagon.

Elf.

we shouldnt blame a flick's failure on the ineptitude of the actors: the culprits are the ones who hired misfits in the first place. you can never expect bad acting from a spielberg/scorsese/scott/Nolan/cameron/burton/bay/ movie.

the rectors good at their craft have some influence with the studio execs and hence dont hire rubbish.

Gamine:
Ex!



The Producers, surely could make or break a movie o!

and many a movie have they broken too. they bask in the glory when a movie goes right, and cowering in their velvety cocoon-like offices while the hapless director/actor/writer/grip ( ) take the flaming for a dud. funny, directors have it easier reviving their careers after a crushing blow from a bombed flick, while actors find their star wattage dimming considerably. (Ray Liotta, where fore art thou, liotta?)

many directors have had to walk out of projects because of differences with pig-headed actors/producers, many had to use a pseudonym in the credits to distance themselves from the eventual dogturd

and a CHAN to you too.

Yautja, better known as The Predator. invisibility, able to see in the dark, dishing out pain with no remorse, high-tech weaponry.

pure evil.

Omen scared me way back then because my mind hadnt grown cynical and immune to the fakery of modern day horror movies. heck, these days the horror is in the shoddy acting and effects (say, The Haunting).

i dont like teen-infested slasher movies, they never made any sense.

QT is decaying, Reservoir Dogs is unmatched.

Noir is dying, the Indies are being gobbled up.

The Happening is utter tripe, wrinkled dog's bollocks is more apt. shyamalan is decaying.

nothing much in the horizon to excite me.

hmm, back to video games.

iice:
[color=#9900ff]And the casting director? [/color]

an actor is supposed to play whatever role confronts him. casting directors choose the best known crowd puller box-office wise. such type dont do auditions, just a read-through.

when one of the Dear Unknowns is to be casted, auditions are held, and the most promisisng cheapo is casted. but the final choice often rests with the producer who has the power to fire everyone from the director down to the Gaffer.

Wordsmith:
Talking of Spielberg, AI was his worst. . .

wrong! stanley kubrick began work on AI, in his honor after his death his pal Spielberg finished it for him. it is kubricks vision, not spielberg's.

hello Elf .

you are leaving out a whole bunch of other culprits: the screen/scriptwriter,the producer and the studios. sometimes a director doesnt have much influence on WHO plays WHAT, that honor falling to the bankrollers mostly the producer or the studio. other times a director not given enough leeway to polish and present his vision (because of budget or plain tyranny by the studio execs) may not be fully motivated to let his talent shine.

screenwriters design the characters and their attitudes, the actor just plays along. an actor without clout cannot improvise and hence only acts a script.

but the bottom line is, good acting makes a dreadful story entertaining, while bad acting can never uplift a poorly written and/or executed sript.

everybody shares the blame.

@logica

that sounds logical (pun intended)


@miders

sounds like iboot is not kicking, im gussing your screen is backlit but is dark. press and hold the power button and the home button for a few seconds until the apple logo appears. when you let go you get recovery mode. then use ziphone to go into normal. try reflashing 3.9BL, cos sometimes 4.6 makes windows (vista in my experience) to start the dreaded FOUND NEW HARDWARE and prompts you to scour windows update for the iboot driver. (iboot allows itunes to communicate with your phone when its in DFU/recovery, and is what ziphone actually exploits to upload its ramdisk)

i took it upon myself to watch Mirrors thinking its going to be just another fuckerization of asian horror. boy, was i wrong: totally wacko ending (must everything have a twist?) but the scare factor was off the chart! now im afraid to look into reflective surfaces (ive always thought theres more than me staring back in a mirror). if you scare easily or don't like gore, don't watch.

ice_zik, you are so darn right, SR IS a cartoon. but, er, why make a cartoon of a cartoon?   


vesc, you don't want spikyn and i to start on Da Vinci code since we've left off Tolkien.

i hate bank job, i think jason statham is a stocky person.

waddaya mean, d'uh? that stuff wasnt easy to pull off, technically not as complex as FF Spirits Within, but still a bitch to do.

im not one to judge your taste but i must say if you allow the technicalities of a movie's production design to distort your reality field you get tunnel vision and overlook the flaws, which are legion in SR. that movie is a famous example of attempting to make a fuckload of money from suckitude. the formula is downright insane: take an old anime series, grab a couple of barely known live actors, toss them all in a bubbling pot of nausea-inducing visual affrontry and sprinkle a doze of the requisite CGI and cross your fingers hoping to god that the recipients of this visual and sensoral assault are in a dream-like enough trance to overlook the stale plot and laclustre performance and put lots of money in your pocket. the first half hour has the wow-factor expected of the crafters of the matrix, but after that the whole thing slid to live actors acting anime in a vicious whirpool of gaudy colors. it hurts my eyes more than iice's fonts.

the rickety vehicle cannot strike a balance between the Racer family's tiny life (as drawn by a begrudging script writer) and the wacky race scenes which to me feel like two separate movies. the narrative and emotions are sorely lacking, just adrenaline pumping fake races and tons of neon and acid green and other wild colors off the scale shot with a camera that doesnt blur the backgrounds.

but thats just me sha.

im not saying, im just saying. you may not entirely agree with my summing up, but watch it and you will find agrreable substance in what im saying.

no wonder jason statham aped it; only he is that daft, being B-List and all.

but as gamine said, one man's meat, eh?

hey, adolf hitler was a husband, son, brother, uncle. does that mean his death shouldnt be celebrated?

yah, maybe im too hard on the mac man. sorry dude. rest in peace and all that. no disrespect meant, will shed my tears soon.

@tezz

i did get 1604 in DFU, and the only way i recovered was to click recovey mode in ziphone, and then normal mode. its not guaranteed to work all the time though. the other method is to hold power and home button until apple logo appears, then quickly release power button. this most times places the phone in recovery mode.

miders can try both recovery and DFU, if it doesnt work then more drastic measures are called for. apple is not helping much regarding 1604, i cant find a reason for it in their knowledge base.

does anybody realize this is getting academic? perhaps we oughnt bore the readers spikyn, much as i enjoy our pithy discourse. please dont relent in sharing your thought process.

iice, ice-zik, vesc, garmin, spikyn, thanks for a great job. lets keep them cylinders firing.

signing out for now.

laters.

@spikyn

all youve said-er, typed- is food for thought and i do agree that The Hobbitt will not fit in its guise to the overall storyline. however that does not invalidate the source material from being rewritten to take into consideration the earlier happier days before the war. the "trilogy" ended on happier notes after a devastating war; starting from that step wont necessarily take the prequel out of context.

remember we ended The Return of the Jedi with the destruction of the Deathstar and then on to a happy ending. all of a sudden we get taken back decades in The Pantom Menace as a prelude to all the culminating events of A New hope, Empire Strikes Back, and of course Return of The Jedi. some of the characters mentioned in passing were developed in the prequels etc.

the only pertinent question is whether a prequel is necessary.

yeah ledger wasnt big, but his performance was, and since a great deal of hype was made about that acting a lot of people wanted to see the swan song.

i love the dark knight only becuase it didnt feel like a superhero movie; it felt dark, real, a commentary on our morbid little world.

true. but the subject matter of the Hobbitt transcends mere humour, the danger and and everything that makes an adventure truly engaging is encapsulated within that world. its just a matter of rewriting to dilute the comedic tones and infuse grimness into the mix.

fellowship's pace is acceptable only on the premise that it is the first installment and must needs set the pieces for the grand motion. but after Bree it picks up remarkably, and i agree with you that in some respects it is the best telling of fantasy perhaps because the full menace of the eastern nemesis was still  distant off and that gave the story room to regale us with fantastic creatures and beautiful vistas. it is visual poetry in its most sublime (rivendell, lothlorien, Argonath, everything was mystically  decadent and ancient) whereas return of the king, as a climax to all the happenings, is battle-oriented and presented a marred and scorched landscape filled with trepidation and a certain foreboding of the evil confronting good.

The Ents of course must be in the flick, no doubt, but that doesnt deviate from the fact that they worked more in the book. this is not peter's fault, but more like Tolkien's.

back to  Nolan. the dark knight succeeded in only one respect AFAIK; presenting a spectacle of pure evil (joker) without an apparent shade of reason, sense, and logic. that is the most scary of the type of evil that we fear in all levels. all sort of evil must have an origin and a certain logic to its madness but here we are confronted with the Cosmic Evil of Kant. In all history the most evil of men have found one way or the other to martyr, immortalize or otherwise honour their enemy (except perhaps hitler), even Achilles went to Hector's funeral. but not the joker.

he was the darkest of the dark personified. and the death of the actor added to the mystique. if the role ledger played had been more mundane, typical of the beastly bad guys the likes of which we've seen in troves, or that ledger hadnt died, or both, i daresay the success will not have been what it now is. its just like Alex Proyas' The Crow during the shooting of which Brandon Lee perished. we all saw the movie as a sort of tribute to the late actor (not that the movie was uninteresting in its own right).

By Night
By Candle Light
by the flaming wrath of the Ancients

may the hellspawn of cursed nights feast on the carrion
of those who denounce the Elf

lime, salt and ICE are must shall decay in the wind
their base substance wafting to Hades, and damn their eternal soul

time shall burn the memories of the defiant ones, those who divinity defied

and defiled

the woodland Elf.



gamine, the god from hell shall not let apostates denounce you.



]

@gamine





me like Elf

@spikyn

ah, but in as much as tom bombadil is an aberration within the sphere of the ring, he also would have been an anomaly in the context of the universe as pete jackson drew it. the menace of sauron's Gathering Horde is much more palpable in the movie precisley because the gestures, music and mood all add up to a compelling atmosphere of trouble stirring i the east. the book can afford to draw out suspense because books are a leisurely journey you embark at your own pace: eventually it leads you there.

in movies, not so. action must be fast-paced, and any loitering must be something that contributes to the plot otherwise you will have people dozing or walking out (we have a thread for those sort) or critics tearing you to shreds.

pete jackson knows this, so he cut out the tom bombadil scene as something that does not directly add anything meaningful to te condensed retelling of Tolkien's universe. remember the lowest moment in the thrill'o'meter is in Two towers when the Ents were introduced and unfortunately dragged the scene no end.

symbolisms, except of the type outrightly proclaimed, may well fail to hit the mark. very few who have not read the book will appreciate the"allure" of bombadil and what he means as a seeming counterpart to the power of the ring. just as the reforging of Narsil to Anduril (a parallelism to Stryder/Aragorn's return to his heirage) didnt hit the mark with some people i know.

UPDATE: where you say, after LoTR? well since we are on the subject of sequels, why not a retelling of The Hobbit? it gives a good seamless background to the War of the Ring: how smaug the dragon lost it to smeagol, how bilbo got it etc etc

Transformers. the sheer complexity is mind-boggling. then the three starwars prequels where almost every shot is a visual  effect shot


@ice  zik. there is a difference between visual effect and special effect shots. the explosions, the city backdrops, the flying/gliding sequences, all those are visual effects. harvey dent's scarred face, some of the digital backdrops and the hospital explosions were digitally enhanced. those were special effects shots.

you cant really shoot batman (and gotham city) without any kind of effect.