Little pearl of a quote...

Dan: Didn't fancy my sandwiches?
Alice: Don't eat fish.
Dan: Why not?
Alice: Fish piss in the sea.
Dan: So do children.
Alice: Don't eat children either.

This is a quote from a movie that I just love... probably one of the Top 5 best-written movies of the decade... anyone knows what it is?? Come on, I even left the names of the characters there... just don't Google on it 'cause it's not fair!!! :-)
I'll probably post about it on the next couple of days, but if anyone knows what's the name of the movie, comment on it...

Movies on Sunday

Yesterday, being a Sunday and all, I woke up pretty late, had a lazy lunch and watched a movie, The Good Shepherd... later on, after some goofing around, I went to the movies and watched I Pronounce You Chuck and Larry... it was a pretty eclectic Sunday, movie-wise... pitty none of them was particularly good... The good Shepherd is a loooong drama about the "birth" of CIA, so it starts right before the US gets into WWII (when Matt Damon's character is recruited) and goes until the Kennedy era... it's a solid movie. Robert DeNiro is actually a really good director, and the cast is good too... but the movie is just too damn slow and confusing... I'll admit: I didn't get the ending at all... of course I won't discuss it here, if you want to know about it, you too have to go through the 3-hour-process of finding out, but if anybody out there got it, please let me know... I have quite a few questions I wish someone could answer...
As to I Pronounce You... what can I say??? Well, If you've seen any Adam Sandler movie at al you know the drill (except for 50 First Dates, I love that movie!!!!) it's pretty much same ol' same ol'... pretty funnyy at times, dull some other times... stupid ending (that Goddamn "Dead Poets Society"-effect again!), but good enough for a Sunday night overall... if you like that sort of silly movies, that is...

Marvel Movies

OK, so yesterday I wanted to watch a movie and have some pizza, so I went to the video store. The thing is I stumped my foot really bad, and walking around the video store forever (as I usually do) really hurt. So after a few minutes of not finding anything good I hadn't seen yet, I saw The Ghost Rider... I know, I said something good, right?? But, let's face it: I'd have to watch it eventually anyways, so I just thought "what the hell, I'll take it!" I had very low expectations for this movie (as would any sane person), but even then it was bad. It's an ugly movie, the effects kinda suck, the action scenes look like cartoon (which is sort of what they are), and it is stupid as hell. I mean, I won't even go over the shred of a script that it has, it's just not worth the trouble... but I gotta mention one quote, so you know just how stupid it is... at one point of the movie, Johnny Blaze (who sold hist soul to the Devil and thus got the whole plot of the movie going by being turned into the Ghost Rider) says: "He may have my soul, but he doesn't have my spirit." Come on!!! That's just embarrassing...
So, even though I wanted to blog on this stupid, stupid movie, I didn't think it deserved a whole post of its own. So I decided to do a quick and dirty retrospective of Marvel Comics-based movies which became really huge business in the last few years... OK, even though movies and cartoons based on Marvel characters have been made before, only in 1998 did things begin to get serious with Blade. I mean, I don't even think they themselves took stuff like Nick Fury or Captain America seriously... but Blade rocks, and it showed everybody that the house of X-Men, Hulk and Spider-Man could maybe compete head to head with the house of Superman and Batman (which was going through a really rough period in the '90s too, with the whole Batman & Robin fiasco...) Well, a couple of years after Blade, in 2000, we got to watch X-Men, and, well, the rest is history... two more X-Men, two more Blade, three Spider-Man, two Fantastic Four, Hulk, Daredevil, Elektra and this Ghost Rider thing afterwords, Marvel Comics actually got enough money to start its own studio and, from now on, is gonna make movies about their characters by itself (well, at least the characters that aren't already sold to other studios as most of the aforementioned). So, if they steer away from fiascos like Ghost Rider, Marvel is bound to become a pretty strong force in the movie-making business, with as of yet unexploited characters such as Iron Man, Hulk (let's face it Ang Lee, your Hulk sucks), Captain America, Avengers, Dr. Strange, and many many more...
So, to end this (already pretty big) post, my rank of Marvel movies so far:

1. Spider-Man 2
2. Spider-Man and X-Men 3
3. X-Men 2
4. X-Men
5. Blade (1, 2 and 3)
6. Spider-Man 3
   
7. Fantastic Four
   
8. Daredevil
9. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
   
10. Hulk
11. Elektra, The Ghost Rider
    

And I'd say my threshold is Daredevil: anything below that isn't worth the price of admission.

Bourne [Movies]

So, last Tuesday I finally watched The Bourne Ultimatum. I'd heard wonders about it, which includes it getting 10/10 from Set magazine (the biggest movie magazine in Brasil, albeit a not very good one) and it being rated 8.5 in IMDb as the 20th best movie ever to include "action" in its genre (the list includes movies such as The Matrix, Fight Club, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings, Apocalipse Now, The 7 Samurai and The Good, the Bad and th Ugly). So I had my hopes very high for this one, specially since the first two Bourne's were pretty cool. A couple weeks ago I re-watched both The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, just to be sure the whole "Bourne dilemma" was fresh in my mind. And there I went. First of all: God bless Paul Greengrass, he really is an amazing director (well, at least for action/thrillers). He really has a unique style, the camera is always moving, and very nervously so. And the best thing is he perfected that technique in the third part of the trilogy: what was a little sloppy and annoying in Supremacy (I mean, it was pretty hard to understand any of the fights), was perfectly done in Ultimatum. Second, you have to praise the cast, specially Matt Damon; his presence holds the whole thing together. And I even liked Julia Stiles in this one!!! All the fight scenes are really impressive and raw, and the fight between Bourne and Desh is as good as any I've seen, reminding me a little bit from the very beginning of Casino Royale (but in full color). In the end it's movie about Bourne's quest for knowledge of himself, and when he finally gets it (in series of pretty shocking flashbacks), he must fight to cope with it all. Besides being one of the best "action/thriller" movies I've seen, it's a great movie period. It's so seldom you see a true trilogy that actually makes sense and finishes on a top note that it's refreshing. And in a year as weak as this one has been, it's probably on my Top 5 list so far.

Back in Campinas

Well, after two weeks of "almost vacations", I'm back in Campinas. These were two pretty cool weeks, the first in Rio for a congress (as I posted before) and last week in Salvador for some well-deserved (well, at least much-expected) rest. I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I should have, but Rio is as beautiful as ever, take my word for it. We stayed in a pretty cool hotel, in Leme (right next to Copacabana). Actually, Brasil's national volley team was also there. It had a pool on the top floor, with an awesome view!!! Check it out...


(I know I'm kinda blocking the view, but you can get the idea... :-) )
So, Rio was really great, partying in Lapa, going to the beach, actually doing some work and attending some great lectures... just fantastic!!
Then saturday, september 1st, I went to Salvador for the week. This first weekend we had great weather, I spent the whole day on the beach, just drinking and relaxing... terrible way to spend a week, hey!?!? :-) Unfortunately it rained a lot during the week, so all my beaching was restricted to these first couple of days... I did get a pretty cool picture of the sunset, though... check it out...


I actually took that one with my cell phone... and I used to wonder why the hell people would want cameras on their phones... well, there you go! That's in Itapuã, by the way... so if you ever listen to "Tarde em Itapuã" (An afternoon in Itapuã, that is), you now have an idea of what Vinícius de Moraes was talking about... ;-)
The whole week was pretty nice too, saw lots and lots of people I hadn't seen in a while, did some beer drinking, watched a pretty good old movie (On the Waterfront, more on that on a later post), and some bbq-ing... that was pretty cool too, specially for all these people from school I hadn't seen in a year or so...

SBSeg 2007

Well, I arrived in Rio last saturday to attend SBSeg 2007, the national conference on computer security. It encompasses a few different events, amongst them the one that interests me the most, the Workshop on Cryptographic Algorithms and Protocols (WCAP). Being a Workshop, there is no actual presentation of original work, so if you are publishing something it's probably on SBSeg, not on WCAP. But usually a handful of quite impressive lecturers come to speak at WCAP, and it is always a nice opportunity to hear what they have to say. It's pretty hard trying to keep yourself up-to-date without being able to attend almost any conference at all because they are so damn far away, so it's nice for a change that something actually goes on around here. So, this year, we were supposed to have five speakers: Carlile Lavor (UNICAMP), Paulo Barreto (USP), Michel Abdalla (ENS, Paris), Benoît Libert (UCL, Belgium) and Claude Crépeau (McGill University, Canada). The main topics were pairing-based cryptography (Michel and Benoît) and quantum computing/post-quantum cryptography (Carlile, Paulo and Claude). Unfortunately the very competent people of the travel agency that made the arrangements for the international speakers never mentioned to prof. Crépeau that he'd need a visa to come to Brasil, so he never made it here, which is a real pitty because I feel his talk would've been really good. On the first day we had lectures by profs. Carlile, on the basics of quantum computing, and Paulo Barreto, on a few of the available options for doing cryptography in a way suposed to be resilient to quantum computers (after all, the two main "hard problems" underlying most of modern cryptography, namely factoring and the discrete log problem, can be solved easily in quantum computers). That was really interesting too and it seems to provide quite a few interesting research opportunities. The next day we had lectures by Benoît Libert, once again by Paulo (filling in for Crépeau) and Michel. Benoît and Michel both did pretty interesting suveys of the most significant results in provably-secure pairing-based cryptographic protocols (which is sort of the theme of my master thesis, so that was specially cool for me). The last day had more talks on pairing-based protocols and more results, most of which I wasn't aware of. But I'd say the best part of the conference wasn't the lectures in themselves (even though, I finally can say that I sort of understand what the hell quantum computing is all about), but the people you meet and the opportunity to discuss various things with such well-known and respected researchers. That was really amazing, and I gotta admit it felt a little frustrating to not be going for a PhD right away, because this would've been a great chance to work something out... but, I mean, who's in a hurry?!?! Of course I'd get hesitant being here and being so into it all, but I'm still pretty sure I made the right choice by working next year, specially since I had the opportunity of working somewhere I'd always dreamt about... but I gotta admit the prospect of going somewhere like ENS and working in such an amazing crypto group kinda made it all a pretty hard decision.

The Simpsons [Movie]

OK, The Simpsons used to be the one exception to the rule about never dubbing stuff: I don't know where the hell they found the guy, but whoever did Homer in portuguese was just freakin' hilarious, far better than the original guy!!! I didn't quite understand why, but they got someone new to do it for the movie and it's not the same. That aside, the movie is pretty good, maybe like a good Simpsons episode, not one of the best though... I don't know why the hell these cartoon scriptwriters can't live without that dull part of the movie where everything kinda gets screwed up for the main character and he's forced to realize how wrong he was the whole time, repent and live happily ever after (in this particular case, all this happens in Alaska, which doesn't help shaking off the whole dullness of the moment)... and if they really need it, why does it have to be so mind-numbingly boring?!?!!? Those lonely walks, sad song on the background... it's like wasting 10 minutes of the damn movie... and Simpsons is no exception to that rule... it starts off great, maybe for the first 40 minutes or so it's the funniest thing... then, it kinda gets stuck for 15-20 minutes, and almost manages to recover (but not quite) by the end... sorry, but in my book South Park did far better than the Simpsons on the big screen... (even though, South Park too had the whole repent scene, but it takes like a minute or so...)
It's still pretty funny, much better than your average comedy... but after "18 year in the making", I kinda expected better from these guys...

Just to finish off on a good note, here's a pretty cool version of the title song... you reckon this guy

Poses, by Rufus Wainwright [Album]

Rufus Wainwright is yet another great artist I discovered thanks to Nick Hornby: after reading his 31 Songs (and, of course, listening to all 31 of the songs), my Top 5 emerged naturally, and One Man Guy was amongst them. I'd never heard of Rufus, but now I just had to find a way to know more of his songs... Poses is the album that has "One Man Guy", and it's one hell of an album. First of all he has a beautiful voice, which is of course of utter importance. All the songs in this album are so beautifully arranged, ranging from a flurry of instruments and voices in "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" to the simplicity of One Man Guy, with her sister harmonizing with him in a way that , in the words of Hornby, "will make you believe that God exists". He was really good to pick the songs he'd cover: One Man Guy (originally by his dad, Loudon Wainwright III), and Across the Universe (by the Beatles). Both are really good in his rendition, but the whole harmonizing in One Man Guy is really amazingly beautiful... and the lyrics... well, he has that sort of intelligent sarcasm that's just captivating... in Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk he sings:

"Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk
there are just a couple of my cravings
everything it seems I like's a little bit stronger
a little bit thicker
a little bit harmful for me
...
and then there's those other things
which for several reasons we won't mention
everything about them is a little bit stranger
a little bit harder
a little bit deadly"

For those of you unaware of it, Rufus is gay. Which actually makes him covering One Man Guy even the more interesting...

"People will know when they see this show
The kind of a guy I am
They'll recognize just what I stand for and what I just can't stand
...
And they'll recognize I'm a one man guy
Always was through and through"

Which at first seems like an ode to faithfulness... but then he sings...

"I'm gonna bathe and shave
And dress myself and eat solo every night
Unplug the phone, sleep alone
Stay away out of sight
Sure it's kind of lonely
Yeah it's sort of sick
Being your own one and only
Is a dirty selfish trick"

Beautiful (OK, it's much better on the record than in this live version)... this is one great album that is both lyrically and musically brilliant... let me just finish with some quotes from Greek Song...

"You who were born with the sun above your shoulders
You turn me on you turn me on
You have to know
You who were born where the sun she keeps her distance
You turn me on you turn me on
But so does she
...
You who were born where you shiver and you shudder
You turn me on the girl is gone so come on
Lets go"

From Russia with Love [Movie]

So this is my first (guest) post on Demian's blog. As my Hesse-inspired friend wrote, we've started a James Bond marathon (a marabond if you will). From Russia with Love (1963) might be considered one of the best Bond films but I wasn't terribly enthusiastic after watching the movie.

Yes, I do agree that the plot is better devised and enacted than Dr. No's. And yes, Daniela Bianchi, the Bond girl, is definitely a better actress than... oh wait, Ursula Andress (Dr. No's Bond girl) shouldn't even be considered an actress, so no comparison here. Apart from this, I don't know... Dr. No was the first film of the series, so there's an inherent charm to it. We forgive everything because it was the first, it started an era, it created an industry. It defined Bond. However, I didn't end up with the same fondness for From Russia with Love. I found the action scenes choreographically (is this a word?) poor, I didn't like the oh-so-stereotypical portrait of Turkey and the gypsies (should I say travellers?), I didn't like the casting, and I was quite fed up with those cliché Bond lines that seemed too excessive, including the ending scene. But then again, I might have been in the wrong mood.

Of course there are good things about the movies, and the second in particular: the opening scene that's a distinctive feature of James Bond's movies, the gadgets we all love, the spy story that captivates so many of us... and, ha!, the famous hand petting the cat that Mike Myers perfectly mimics in Austin Powers. Ok, I admit I don't have much to write. It was an ok film and I'm tired of writing about it. Let's wait for the next movie.

One interesting note: Tatiana Romanova's (Daniela Bianchi's character) voice was dubbed by another woman.

One odd note: while I was watching the film I wondered if Margaret Mead had the opportunity of watching the first Bond movies, or reading the novels. Weird thought.

Who knew they could do that??

Does anybody have her phone number?