In the new Naruto Shippuuden filler episode arc Naruto & Co are currently sailing from one island to the other. Along the way they meet all kinds of strange people, most of them villains. They stumble upon a ghost ship, an islands that looks like a battleship, a treasure cove of herbs, pirates, a flying ship, an island with giant animals on it... deja vu anyone?

Did the staff run completely dry on inspiration or is this all on purpose? An attempt at competing with One Piece? Or an experiment on how Naruto would function in the same scenario? Of course Naruto can't stretch his arms like Luffy can, but he does his best to prolong his punches when he does... punch. Since Luffy & Co went underwater maybe Naruto is taking over? I don't know what the fans think, but I for one look forward to the end of this arc.

The ocean is no place for ninjas.

This is the final movie in the Taxi series before Luc Besson went to Hollywood and started making English movies instead. The movie with the same name with a different cast of characters is pretty much the whole series put together in one more commercial piece of regular action comedy. (more...)

I wonder if the year and the numeral of the movie were planned out or if it's just a coincidence?

Anyway, for car upgrades this time think snow, for plot think police inspector Gilbert being seduced by a reporter, both Daniel's & Emilien's girls pregnant, a gang dressed as Santa Clauses robbing banks and as always a ton of light-hearted comedy mixed with people who constantly make fools out of themselves... and a lot of driving. I can't say this movie is better than the two previous, but it sure isn't worse, it delivers what you expect it to. Car chases, comedy, drama, a funky hiphoppish soundtrack as always, and a great plot.

A noticeable addition to this movie is the intro, a twisted parody of the James Bond movies, pretty interesting. Also notable is Sylvester Stallone making a guest appearance at the start of the movie, as a passenger, a sequence you don't want to miss. ;)

As always Besson manages to film everything from the right angles, at the right speed, patch everything together at the right pace, and make all the characters seem down to earth and personal (though obviously a bit exaggerated). Another thing he manages to do is make fun of France, even though it's a French movie, without making the French mad about it. I'd say that last point is the most admirable feat. Another recommended movie!

4/5

Here's a sequel that beats the original many times over.

There are more car crashes, more crazy stunts, more humorous accidents/events... more everything except for the love/drama, of which there is a little less than in the first. So, the plot in this movie: the Japanese minister is in France to check out a new armored car prototype (of course inspector Gilbert is the one showing the car, and constantly making a fool out of himself) and the minister gets kidnapped. Daniel somehow winds up in the middle of the mixture, along with his police buddy Emilian, and things get crazy.

Since the gang behind the kidnapping is Japanese there's a lot of flips, a lot of cartwheels, parkour-style building climbing flipping tripping running, good fights (always light, no blood, no brutality) and of course, as the name states, there's a lot of cars. More than in the last one. It is easy to assume the first movie was a hit since they 1) made a sequel and 2) included way more vehicles being creatively broken in this movie than in the prequel. If you liked the first one, you'll like this. Also, Daniel has installed some new creative adjustments to his Taxi (to make it fly), it turns out his girlfriend's dad is an army general, and in the end they all... oh wait, no spoilers. ;)

To sum it up, it's a great movie. Recommended!

5/5

Before Luc Besson went to Hollywood and gave us the Transporter movies with Jason Statham he made a series of movies about taxi driver Daniel and a cop called Emilian. Daniel hates cops, Emillian is a cop. Daniel is a great driver, Emilian is an incredibly bad driver. They meet by coincidence (when Emilian is trying and failing miserable to get a drivers licence) and become good buddies despite their differences. Well, actually, they don't know about their differences at the beginning. Apart from these two main characters there are also their girlfriends and the inspector Gilbert along with the rest of the incompetent police force in their village (oh btw, story takes place in France, in French, I watched it with English subs) and a gang of German criminals robbing banks. Furthermore there's a bunch of stereotypical characters with various occupations and nationalities, a lot of dumb jokes, a lot of comedy, a lot of driving, drama & some crazy stunts along the way. (more...)

Maybe you read my post a few hours ago about installing Windows 98, an OS I've used plenty in the past, but never actually installed myself. I haven't actually installed very many OS's at all, XP & 7 have so far been the only ones I've installed regularly, and of which the installs have been successful. As it turns out Win 98 wasn't a very easy OS to install.

The procedure took a couple of hours and when all was finally done things still were not working right. For starters, the system didn't support more than 16 colors. To get more I'd have to install better (or rather, the proper) drives. After some searching I managed to find drivers that seemed to suit my computer perfectly. I downloaded them through my stationary computer and was about to put them on a floppy when I realized something. The floppy (1.44MB) didn't have enough space for a single one of the drivers I was about to install! At this point I could have burned a CD with the drivers, but fate has it I'm running low on CDs right now and it felt like a waste to use one of them for just 20-30MB worth of drivers that might not even work. I stashed the files on a USB drive instead and plugged it into my Armada.

Turns out Windows 98 doesn't have built-in drivers to handle USB 'Mass Storage Devices' as it calls them, so it tried to search for a driver that worked. It didn't find one. I searched for a driver that worked manually, but it didn't exist. I then downloaded the driver for USB 'Mass Storage Devices' on the stationary computer. It was only around 700KB large fortunately, so I stuffed it on a Floppy and stuffed the floppy in my Armada. The Floppy wasn't recognized at all.

I'm not sure if I should blame it on a faulty floppy, Windows 7 formatting the floppy in the wrong format, or Windows 98 just being a pile of crap, but whatever it was, I decided not to use Windows 98 after all. It's a shame, since I have a bunch of games I'd love to play that don't work on newer systems... probably mentioned that already.

So what next? I booted up Killdisc again and wiped the drive clean while searching for some better alternative. I don't know much about Linux, but apart from old Operating Systems and Internet-based ones (and I don't plan to use Internet at all on this antique computer) like Google Chrome, there isn't much else to chose from. Linux builds tend to be complicated. I'm not used to typing in commands or anything like that, so after looking around for a Linux I could probably have some fun with without complication, one with a GUI, I settled for the OS I had picked initially, Slax. Turns out there was a module to simplify installing the OS, so, module added to my previously saved (lucky) build, I downloaded it, burned it, and booted my now completely clean Armada once more to install it.

Error. Disc not recognized.

The Slax CD I burned earlier during the day had worked fine with a wiped drive to boot. This one didn't. After much trial and error and utter failure I gave up on the disc (it worked fine on the other computer btw) and tried the old CD that couldn't be installed. Didn't work. I tried Killdisc and that worked fine. Thought about installing Windows 98 again but that doesn't seem like such a wise choice. My sister has an old laptop with Windows 2000, so I suppose it's time to give that one a try. As I type this a new partition is already halfway formatted and the installation on its way.

I'll keep you posted.