tehCpeng.net

Bytes: I see you.

Okay, so I was the last per­son on Earth to finally watch James Cameron’s lat­est ultra-hyped up sci-fi, Avatar.

And doesn’t get as clichéd as this — Avatar was indeed a spec­tac­u­lar mas­ter­piece. I walked out of the the­aters com­pletely blown away by the painstak­ingly CGI-ed planet of Pan­dora down to every lively leaf, twig, blade and feather of that breath­tak­ingly pic­turesque land­scape of a trop­i­cal planet.

The breath­tak­ing float­ing islands of Pandora

When I ini­tially saw the trail­ers, Avatar gave me the impres­sion of yet another CGI-overloaded sci-fi filled with blue alien crea­tures in war with humans. But boy was I wrong. Avatar’s Pan­dora wasn’t a world that was cre­ated overnight, rather, every insect, crea­ture, plant and Na’vi syl­la­ble felt as real as it could fic­tion­ally be.

Granted, Avatar’s sto­ry­line might not be as orig­i­nal — the younger of us might be reminded of a hand­ful of white-turned-native-leader movies such as Disney’s Poc­a­hon­tas and even the Tom Cruise-starring The Last Samu­rai. But Avatar excels at tak­ing such a story to a whole new immer­sive expe­ri­ence. Which also explains why Avatar absolutely has to be watched in 3D.

Per­haps it was the lack­lus­ter CGI (and weak sto­ry­line) we’ve con­di­tioned our­selves to in 2012 that made Avatar so much more appeal­ing. Or not. Maybe the­ater is all about the expe­ri­ence. Throw us a famil­iar story (although to Cameron’s credit — greatly refined and scifi-ed) portrayed on a visu­ally stun­ning can­vas like no other, everyone’s bound to enjoy it.

Nonethe­less, Avatar suc­ceeds as a tech­ni­cally impres­sive, breath­tak­ing and emo­tion­ally over­whelm­ing movie that does a good job at clos­ing the decade’s movie indus­try in a high note. Cou­pled with James Horner’s epic score that impec­ca­bly com­pli­ments the whole Pan­dorean expe­ri­ence, Avatar will be remem­bered along with The Dark Knight, as one of finest movies of the 2000’s.

babbled on 30th December, 2009 at 2am, Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 02:31 am GMT +8 6 Comments

Bytes: Introducing, Shorties

Hope ya’ll had a jolly Christ­mas! As you can see, I was busy for a bit dur­ing the fes­tive sea­son on a new imple­men­ta­tion on this blog what I call now, Short­ies. I still haven’t finalised what they’ll be called but short­ies are basi­cally mini-posts where I’ll share quick thoughts, links, or pho­tos that doesn’t deserve the glory and splen­dor of a full-length post.

I’ve been want­ing to have such mini-posts in between my major posts for quite awhile, for the sim­ple rea­son that I tend to get rather ambi­tious that every time I churn out a new post on tehCpeng.net, it has to be full-featured, care­fully worded and pic­to­ri­ally com­plete. More often than not, such posts lead into a grow­ing pile of dor­mant drafts in my Word­Press posts manager.

Post­ing short­ies allows me to put out more casual post­ings in between, while at the same time not draw­ing too much atten­tion away from the main post­ings. That said, look out for short, sweet and cheer­ful doses of short­ies as I sort things out before 2009 draws to an end. Between you and me, I hon­estly can’t wait to post my next shortie. =p

Happy Hol­i­days!

babbled on 26th December, 2009 at 5pm, Saturday, December 26th, 2009 05:49 pm GMT +8 2 Comments