Transformers: More than meets the eye? 0 lalalas

Kuantan, June 28:

My friends and I went to watch the Transformers. I've watched the Transformer cartoon as a kid, but unfortunately, due to some serious brain injury,

my poor skull...

I don't remember much of it. And being out of contact with things related to Transformers many years, it became nothing more than a shadow of my innocent, happy childhood.

It's entertaining alright. Oozing with metallic mecha-coolness, this movie boasts of fast-paced, explosive action featuring the ultimate showdown between the Autobots and the Decepticons. Watching them pounding and blowing each other up into scrap metals is an exhilarating experience, with all those explosions and the robots' unbelievably agile moves, not to forget car-chase scenes. The CGI animation is brilliant - all the robots are designed to the tiniest details and their transformation is pretty cool.

Besides that, it features an attractive and youthful cast. With her tight abs, curvacious body, and angellic face, I bet Megan Fox (as Mikaela) got a lot of guys (and lesbos) drooling over her - and I'm a hot-blooded, healthy youth. The few scenes where she shows some skin were really... ahem, pleasing to the eye.

And the hot Australian hacker played by Rachael Taylor is not bad either. Shia LaBeouf as Sam Witwicky is alright, energetic and lively as he is, and a bit on the cute side.

Yhis movie is filled with cheesy jokes and witty remarks, which, while not making the movie smart, manages to amuse.

Top notch animations, youthful lead characters, romance plot, funny scenes... Seems perfect.

Unfortunately, no. The plot is far from convincing, and the character development is practically non-existent. In this movie, the transformers are just impressive transforming robots without distinguished personality. Well, that's robots for you, I guess. And the romance plot is obviously just for the sake of being there. The lead characters jump from barely knowing each other to becoming lovers. And the scene when Sam was looking for his ancestor's glasses in his house: Although it's amusing, it's needlessly long and clogs up screentime which would have been better to flesh out the characters.

All in all, this movie is superficially entertaining. Well, just like many of the modern things, this movie is wrapped with an attractive package - pleasing the visual and auditory senses - but neglects the content. While it thrills the audience with the animations and explosions, it fails to contribute to his thoughts or rouse his deeper emotions of pity, anger, and sadness.

More than meets the eye? I'm afraid not.

Some remarks on Vancouver/UBC 0 lalalas

Here's something slightly more interesting than the previous report-like post:

- I heard from somewhere or someone that 60+% of the Canadians are overweight, but ... I don't see that often on campus. But they do eat a lot: 4 slices of pizza is just like a regular meal size to some guys, considering the size of one slice here is about 20-30% larger than that in M'sia. Yeah, I ate 4 of them at noon, but hey hey, I only had dinner just now, like 11 hours after lunch.

- They love alcohol!

- They got LOTS of Starbucks. I've already came across 4 of them in my campus.

- A lot of them wear sunglasses. I think it's kind of cool, and people can't see your eyes, which is handy when you got your eye's fixed on some chicks.

- They got too much events going on. I've got to make a lot of choices, and it's tiring chasing after the activities.

- I don't know how to approach the Chinese! Some of them are from Vancouver/Canada and they got accents. Those from China/HK, I feel like, you know, like how a half-elf is a human to the elves, but the humans see them as an elf. Yeah, so I feel a bit trapped like the half-elf.

- A lot of those Asian-like people (esp. Chinese) speaks in accents. About 90% of the people I meet here speaks in accents. Darn, I feel weird!

- The gay people here have more rights than women do back in Malaysia.

- In larger shopping establishments, you need to pay for the plastic bags if you want to put your purchased goods into them. A pretty good way to conserve resources if you ask me.

- People here are rich!

- You don't have to wait for 15 minutes for a train.

- Drivers don't accelerate past the zebra crossing.

- I don't know, there seems to be more hAwt chicks here than in Malaysia.

- It's not always cold here, just now the sunbeam was scorching.

- You have to walk a lot here. I think I walked more than 20 kilometres during my orientation just now.

- People actually recycle here. The recycle bins are not just for show!

- Calling back to Malaysia costs a fortune with Ring Ring card: it's more than RM1 per damn minute!

- There's a nudist beach VERY near to my campus; I gotta check it out as soon as possible.

- I have less than 5 dollars in my wallet.

- I am so very extremely unbelievably extraordinarily tired. I seriously need some serious rest, which is not very possible considering the amount of things I have to get done, like writing this post

Signing off -

Playboy Indon 0 lalalas

The first issue of the toned-down Playboy Indon is out! Guess what? The Guess Timeless Beauty and M'sian Best Female Model of the Year - the sometimes-lovely Amber Chia - posed in it, in scanty and appealing clothes. When I saw it, I was like "Walau A! This is solid stuff!". Looks like Playboy Indon is not as lame as suggested. About Amber Chia's looks, it really depends on her makeup and camera angles - sometimes she looks like an angel, sometimes like I-dunno-wut. Nevertheless, I like the pic because she doesn't look that bad with the oozing sensuality and sexiness.

The reaction from Indons:
The conservative Muslims are preparing to protest again, an action which couldn't be blamed as this kind of "suggestive" magazines really doesn't accord with Muslim's faith, even to the extent that it causes corruption to the belief which is "already inundated by [negative] Western influences" (New Straits Times, Apr 8).

On the hand, supporters were disappointed by the absence of nudity in the issue. "It's sinful to read Playboy if there's no nudity" or "It's a scandal! There's no nude women in the magazine" (NST, Apr 8) were some of the feedbacks. When I read this, I was like "Hello? This is Indon, not US, you voyeurs!". My viewpoint? Nudity is no good, only good looks matters. There is no point reading an explicit Playboy with nudes of cow-faced beauties (an example of oxymoron for ya!).

The moral:
We should read newspapers because we can get solid stuffs like this. Cheers!