My Blog is now my Site

Surprise! Due to the financial crisis, I have decided to cancel my web hosting with Yahoo and make this Blog the official BMF site instead. Ok, honestly it wasn't the financial crisis, just that the hosting's awfully expensive that it's taking up half my annual movie budget, which could have been put to much better use. Also, beautiful though the old site may look, creating a new page is awfully time consuming, even with a ready template. Too many variables to customise. I could spend an entire night just to put up a new review. Blogger is a little aesthetically-challenged, but postings are relatively fuss-free and archive themselves automatically. A lot of other sites are also using this type of neater and simpler blog-posting format.

There'll be a lot of "transfer" work in the next few months. I will definitely bring over all my reviews and other stuff. Expect some funkiness on the blog too, with pictures missing from certain posts. I shouldn't have "borrowed" the pictures from my Yahoo-hosted site. (sigh)

I do feel a little sad because I really loved the old site's design. I have it backed up already, so I could still maybe one day restart another hosting again. We shall see.

This week's highlight: Star Trek!

If you're the kind who can't tell the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek, you'd likely not watch the latest "reboot" of the series, restarting the franchise with new actors reliving the adventures of familiar characters, albeit updated to current sensibilities. Similar treatments had been done and done successfully to the Batman and James Bond series. But based on what I've heard, this may finally be a rendition of the rather cult-ish sci-fi series that is meant for mainstream audiences, a.k.a. your "kind". The new Star Trek has the sexiest and youngest cast, as far as I know, and seems more action packed than the other Trek films combined. Friday U.S. box office receipts indicate a huge weekend opening take, while most critics reacted positively. Might be worth a watch.

This week's highlight: X-Men Origins: Wolverine!

Wolverine is arguably the most interesting and popular among the myriad of mutants that inhabit the world of X-men, despite having almost no significant offensive ability apart from his retractable and indestructible claws. His grizzled tough guy personality plays off to his team mates’ characters very well, but he rarely brings that magic to his comic book spin-offs when he becomes the centre of attention. Will the movie equivalent suffer the same fate? With the first cellulite appearance of Gambit, Tsotsi director Gavin Hood at the helm, and Liev Schreiber as Sabretooth reloaded, don’t count on it, bub. (Wait a minute, is that Cyclops in the poster?)

This week's highlight: Knowing!

Before you dismiss this one as just another one of Nicolas Cage's career disasters, Knowing is actually director Alex Proyas' latest movie, he of The Crow and Dark City fame. Coincidentally, Roger Ebert is one of the very few critics who lauded his new movie, just like what happened with Dark City before. I'll have to go with Ebert on this one, because I too agreed with him on Dark City. Could be the Speed Racer of 2009.

Alternative: chicks and fast cars in Fast and Furious (a.k.a. The Fast and the Furious 4.) I live my life a quarter of a mile at a time... (snicker)

This week's highlight: Gran Torino!

Clint Eastwood is 78 years old and still kicking ass. He's considered one of cinema's most iconic action stars, with memorable roles such as "The Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns*, and the blueprint for endless reiteration of the movie rogue cop, Dirty Harry. Nowadays, he's more into directing and acting in his own work, and has created Oscar pedigrees like Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and The Changeling. Will Gran Torino be a reworking of Dirty Harry, like how Unforgiven was to his westerns? Nevertheless, it's just exciting to be able to see Eastwood sneering while wielding a gun in a movie poster again.

*There are only three with Eastwood: A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.