Terry Smith's Weblog: August 2006

Movie Review: Natural City

Excellent Sci-Fi from South Korea

Natural City is a visually stunning sci-fi movie produced in South Korea. It is dark, gritty, slow-moving film noir at its best. The plot revolves around a futuristic SWAT team hunting down rogue cyborgs and the love affair between one of the men and his cyborg girlfriend who is about to "expire". There are plenty of comparisons both in plot and in elements within the movie to Blade Runner, and in fact the director's cut of this film on Amazon is subtitled "Korean Blade Runner".

However, all of that said, Natural City is not a rip-off and is an awesome movie in its own right. It has an excellent story line, great acting, incredible visuals, action-packed scenes clearly inspired by The Matrix, and a very worthy Dolby Digital 5.1 surround soundtrack. The film has English subtitles; but otherwise, you would not be able to tell it apart from a Hollywood film. On the contrary, Hollywood hasn't produced science fiction on this level for quite some time.

In particular, many months were spent building small-scale models filmed for a lot of the special effects. I still find this technique of using miniatures "realistically superior" to 95% of the computer graphics produced these days.

If you love dark, post-apocalyptic, film noir science fiction then you will love this movie. It's worthy-enough to reside in your DVD collection next to Blade Runner and the Alien trilogy.

Buy it on Amazon

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la la - For Music Lovers

Heard of la la?

If you love music, then you will love la la. It's a music CD exchange website. Think of it as peer-to-peer Netflix for music. It's been around for a few months now (as of this writing), but a lot of people still haven't caught on. I've been a member since March 2006.

You list all of your CDs on the la la website, and you create a want list of all the CDs you want to receive. To get CDs you have to mail out CDs. All of the mailing is done with la la provided postage-paid envelopes, and unlike Netflix and other such services you actually mail CDs out directly to other la la users. For example, Tom in Nebraska wants Seventeen Days by 3 Doors Down. Tom has to send someone else a CD before receiving the CD he wants. After he's done so then Sarah in California sends the 3 Doors Down CD out to him and in return Sarah gets 8701 by Usher from Madison in New York. The matching-up is all automated via the la la website.

How much does this cost you ask? You pay $1 plus .75 cents shipping for each CD you receive, and you ship CDs for free. (The la la shipping cost recently increased from .50 cents per CD to .75 cents.)

Since joining in March I have shipped out 42 CDs and received 44. As of this moment I have 4 CDs in the mail to other members and 4 CDs on the way to me. My total bill for all of this? $52.15 This amount doesn't include CDs in the latest billing cycle, but obviously this is CHEAP for the amount of new music you get. Your credit card is billed monthly. There are no contracts and no fees. If you don't ship/receive in a giving month then you don't pay anything. How can you beat that? For the month of July my bill was only $4.47. Now I'm wanting a lot more new music so I'm shipping CDs out, and receiving more in return, every chance I get.

Conclusion: It's CHEAP. And fun. And their website is really ingenious and easy to use. And you get a lot of new music and get rid of your old stuff.

And yes, it's perfectly legal. 20% of each trade goes back to the artists which is more money than they would make if you bought and sold CDs at a much higher price through a local used CD shop.

I feel like Paul Harvey doing a sales pitch, but really, sign up! What are you waiting for? There's no obligation! :)

As I write this la la is still in its beta phase. This means you either have to sign up for access on their website and wait to get approved (like I did), or you need someone who is already a member to send you an invite. I have a limited number of invites I can send out, so if you need one just email me with "la la" in the subject line.