Hans lunch turns into disappointment

I took my lunch at Hans @ Harbourfront Centre with Jia Lun this afternoon.

Photo of my lunch


The scene after the carnage


Spotted anything between the 2 photos ?

The cali-flower soup takes like warm water and the iced-lemon tea tasted just as weak. No amount of salt and pepper could save the miserable bowl of soup so they were left for dead. I made a comment about the soup to the waiter but he made no offer for me. Not that I expect any but apparently, they have no pride in their food. If they are serving this crap everyday, I will suggest that this branch should be avoided at all cost. I doubt I will be revisiting this branch anytime soon.

By the way, for your information, my list of cheap and nice western food has strunk again. Last year, the Ah Beng western food stall at Adam road hawker centre has closed down, and now the Ah Beng western food at Hougang Centre has also quitted. Aston Prime at East Coast Road (just opposite Katong Mall) has joined the list of recommended steak house on the cheap.

Devil's guide to the movies : The Golden Compass

(Entry updated 9 Dec 2007)

On Thursday, I went for Desmond's movie premier event for The Golden Compass at Great World City. After grabbing a quite bite from the self-service buffet, I redeemed the free drink and popcorn from the junk food counter before making it to the silver screen with Qinghai in tow.

The pre-movie advertisement segment was so long that our popcorn was gone before the movie started. The popcorn was made too long ago and had became soft. It didn't help when the ice in the coke was also half melted too.

Without revealing the plot line, here are some of my thoughts of the movie.

The architecture of the city was nicely done, something like a glorified Rome. The transportation devices in the movie were powered by globes of energy, bearing some similarity to the many transportation devices in The Matrix series. The movie is scores average in the story telling department, the acting generally good and the CG is reminds me of Final Fantasy X in style and design. Nicole Kidman's acting really shines in this movie, as she brought her creepy bad ass lady character alive.

For some crappy reason, the characters in the movie have long and unmemorable names which are basically tongue twisting impressive sounding names which are really hard to pronounce and remember. Everyone in the theater probably got the "What's-up-with-the-name-of-that-XXXX" feeling after the show. In fact, at the end,I only remembered one name, Pan, which is the incidentally the shortest name in the entire movie.

The movie is based on a book, "Northern Lights", featuring people with animal pets that speaks. The pets, called daemons shares a life bond with their human counterpart in which when the human or the pet dies, both will perish together. The daemon will disappear in a puff of rising golden powder, which looked suspiciously like the animation of the defeated Aeons in Final Fantasy X. Oh well, the Daemons are able to fight too, but the fight scenes all ended very quickly.

It didn't take long before it was revealed that the golden compass didn't actually point north or have any navigational properties at all. The Alethiometer as they later call it, is actually more special device for the gifted that "tells you the truth", aka the modern day google search. This brings us a to a grand total of 2 "compasses" that didn't point north in recent movies. Captain Jack Sparrow's version in the pirates series, points to the thing that your heart desires.

The lead character is a young girl who kept lying throughout the movie to achieve her objectives. That's quite different from the normal muscle male hero driven storylines.

Battles scenes in the movie are generally quite lame.

There is a scene where 2 polar bear fought for the royal throne which is actually the best fight scene in the movie. That's until the last part when the good-guy bear stole victory from the bad-guy bear by throwing a fatal strike after apparently feigning an arm injury. That left me a What-the-fXXk feeling when the bad-guy bear got plummeted because he left his guard down while taunting the good-buy bear. It's so sad to see the good guy had to use such a honourless and desperate attack to win the better. Didn't the bad guys hand guide includes a rule that saying something like kill first, talk cock later ? At least the bears wore armour and looked better than the druids in bear form in WoW.

The last battle where witches, children and men fought was utterly disappointing. It's just a big melee where witches flew around like cupid, firing arrows, men firing guns and swinging weapons while children ran for their lives. That's right, the witches didn't have any fireball spells or what-nots, just bows and arrows. Before the battle began, some character in the movie implied that whoever the witches sided with in the battle, it will be be certain defeat for the counter party. I therefore expect a one sided battle with the witches on the good-guy side like the scene in LoTR 2 where the dead human spirit army overran in the invading coalition. But all I saw was witches dropping dead one by one while being shot at by riflemen.

There was also a scene in the movie where a parody of the famous Starwars scene, " I am your father!" by Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker is replicated with "I am your mother!, followed by a resounding "nooooooooo!" which is awfully lame.

And just after the battle draws to a close, the movie ends so abruptly that everyone was stunned when the lights came on. At least they didn't bluntly put up a screen saying, "To be continued suckers !".

I suggest that if you are not in a hurry to catch this movie, wait for the second installment and watch both together instead of leaving the seats after watching a bad cliff hanger like i did.

Also you might want to take note that this story reeks of Atheistism. The bad guys were a obvious reference to the Catholic Church, and this lead some US schools to ban the book from their libraries. If you are aware the accusations against the Church, you will be able to understand the movie better.

For example when Lord Asriel was trying to get fundings to study "dust", the Magisterial, fearing that the truth will destroy their grip on power because their fortunes are built on lies, tried to silence him at every corner. This is quite similar to what happened to astronomy in the early days when talented people like Galileo was labeled a heretic for his discoveries that proved that the Church was wrong.

If the script had went any further with it's pro-Atheist shots at the church, this movie will most likely be virtually banned by the Church.