It's the Bollywood Harold & Kumar! The Bollywood Pineapple Express!

Well not really, but there are some similarities. If nothing else it's a Bollywood zombie movie, starring Vir Das and Kunal Khemu as the buddies Luv and Hardik (it does make for a joke), who after getting into an untraditional low decide they need a breath of fresh air, and wind up with a girl at a party arranged by the Russian mob, on a remote island near Goa. It's a wild night, full of booze and drugs they can't afford.

Which is good, because apparently those drugs turn everyone into zombies, and when they wake up in the morning... the party's pretty dead. You could say they're the life of the party, though they do their best to escape it as soon as possible, and pick up the girl on the way.

The zombie island idea isn't all new, but this particular approach feels pretty fresh, and when the Indian Russian Boris (Saif Ali Khan) appears, along with his more Russian buddy, things get interesting.

The zombies look authentic, the action's badass, and the intrigue's not all bad either. The jokes are mostly harmless, and the setting either light and fun, or somewhat unsettling. It's a strange hybrid, but effective, and in the end a much appreciated addition to the zombie genre. The movie is as it sounds: playful, with a little romance and decent dose of action.

Alternative stylistic title image: here.

 rated 4/5: fo shizzle

Well that was depressing.

This is the movie that I Am Legend (2007) was based upon, and if you've seen that one you pretty much know what this one's all about. Only it's in black and white, and stars the legendary Vincent Price instead of (the equally legendary) Will Smith, as Dr. Robert Morgan - the last man alive. In the newer movie his name is Robert Neville.

It builds on some some not very future-proof theories as to the source and working of the plague that rid the world of life and turned the world population into zombies vampires. They make sense of it in the movie, though it doesn't sound much like the sense of today.

The dystopian world is realistic though, and even if the zombie vampire threat is never all that intense, they do manage to keep it eerie and airy, like the steps the last man treads above.

The world looks convincing, and both narrative and flashbacks do their part, but the acting has a tinge of old to it, forced and awkward. No doubt this is all due to dated vocabularies, expectations, emotional responses and all that. Time may stand still in the movie, but not in the real world. In a sense, the contrast adds to the eeriness, painting a picture of a world that no longer is, as well as one that never was.

We follow Robert Morgan as he does his bid in cleaning up the world, and surviving, though the focus in finding a cure is lost in lack of time. He does cure one girl though, before the mutated close in on him and kill him. And so... the last man of Earth is gone.

I'll admit it was a bit slow, which is probably to be expected from a fifty year-old movie, but you start living into the world of the movie as it moves onward, matching the pace, and when it's all over... it's like a nail in the coffin. They bring you in slowly - into this outdated dystopia, and you don't realize the lid's going on until it's all over and everything is black. It doesn't compare to the new in terms of intensity, but the atmosphere and build-up's stood time well.

 rated 3/5: not bad

Check out the IMDB page for Vincent Price's list of merits if you haven't btw. Though he starred in many a low-budget film, he managed an impressive 200 titles, and kept acting until the day he died - 82 years old. I think I've seen him in other titles before this one...

Here's a cute, creative, fun, animated flick full of music. It's a bit like The Grinch, but with trolls. Trolls, you know? Like the little ones in the cover image.

The Bergens (like the evil-looking one in the cover image) are the threat here - and their unhealthy obsession to eat trolls in order to gain happiness. To make a long story short: one day the trolls are kidnapped, and Poppy - the great king's daughter, embarks on a quest to get them back! She's the most positive one of the bunch, and by her side she has Branch, who is all the opposite. Of course, polar opposites attract each other, even if takes a while before they realize it.

They're voiced by Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake, btw, and there's some Gwen Stefani, Russell Brand, James Corden and even some John Cleese in there too - playing the Bergen king of all people bergens.

The voicing is good, the animation's refreshingly imaginative - with some musical bits, and plenty of comedy and atmosphere. With a crazy creative bunch of main characters and suitable milieu in style of old fairy tales, it makes for a pretty fast-paced and feelgood adventure! One that appeals to all ages, and has a moral to it too: happiness is inside all of us. Sometimes, we just need some help to bring it out.

Or better yet, here's my personal interpretation: you don't need to eat to be happy. You're already full of it! ;)

Overall it was a bit fast and frantic sometimes, with a somewhat anti-climatic finale (too simple), but I did get a few laughs, and a lingering smile when it's all over.

 rated 3/5: not bad

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

I work with webshops, and as such I work with .XLSX files a lot, and convert these to .CSV prior to import/export. It's the OS-independent format. The big standard. Also: the much bigger file! A 821KB XLSX is 87MB large as a CSV!! Considering the difference - even though they supposedly contain the same data, I thought I'd dig into the file format a bit, using this particular file as my example, and see how it really works and what they really contain.

I used to think XLSX files used some smart algorithms or formulas to effectivise the way they store data, like finding similar instances and grouping them together as one entity, or skipping delimiter symbols altogether, and instead using spaces or line breaks (which I assume take less space), but as it turns out it's nothing like that. They just use heavy compression, and if you change the filename you can see exactly what they contain - which is not just the worksheet itself (apparently only 8MB big, though, in XML format), but a lot of other resources, and even the image file for the script icon! Some very unnecessary things, I feel, but the file size does decrease drastically with compression.

Looking at the files, the worksheet I'm currently working with (it's a workbook with only one worksheet) contains these:

(more…)

I found a new speedcheck site! Fast. So simple.

Think I'll be using this one from here on out, even if useful details on location, latency and upload are all omitted, unlike my old favorite Speedtest... which coincidentally seems to power this service as well, even if the Netflix brand appears in the corner.

Give it a whirl! If you wish, good sir/madame. I know I am.