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Surely the Simpsons require no introduction? After all they have been one of the top animated sitcoms both in America and around the world for around two decades, winning 23 Emmy Awards and 26 Annie Awards while bringing fun and laughter to millions of households worldwide. No other animated sitcom has come close in terms of popularity as almost anyone will immediately recognise the yellow skinned family. Thus, it’s surprising that they waited till the 20th anniversary of the show before they finally brought the Simpsons to the silverscreen in the very aptly titled “The Simpsons Movie“.

While the show was brought from a 20 odd minute long TV episode to a full length film of 3 times the length, the very essence of The Simpsons still hasn’t changed. The same family made up of Homer, Marge, Maggie, Bart and Lisa Simpson go on a wild adventure in this feature-length film unlike any other episode of The Simpsons. Once again sticking with the tradition of other Simpsons episodes, the plot makes no sense. It starts off with Green Day performing on a makeshift stage, and then dying when the polluted lake they are on errodes their makeshift stage till they themselves go underwater (yeah, that’s really how wild the plot can get). After which, Homer adopts a pig (dubbing it spider-pig) and dumps all its waste in a silo which he eventually dumps into the already polluted lake. The water then causes animals who touch it to morph into wild monsters, hence “President Schwarzenegger” randomly chooses a plan to cover Springfield with a dome to prevent the problem from spreading. From then on, hilarity ensues as the entire town is after Homer’s head for causing such a problem after they realise the silo belonged to him.

Don’t ask any questions about the plot, it’s supposed to be this illogical, as most other Simpson plots are. Yet this completely weird plot makes way for some downright hilarious moments which I won’t spoil for you here. Anyone who’s a big fan of the Simpsons TV series and loves the humor found in the hundreds of episodes thus far won’t be disappointed here. The writers have stuck with the tried-and-true formula of Simpson TV episodes and provide similar jokes throughout the entire film that will undoubtedly have you laughing. For example in the usual opening of any Simpsons episode, the camera will show Bart writing lines on a board through a window, in the movie, he’s writing “I will not download this movie” or something to that effect, obviously showing how the movie will have you laughing from the very moment it begins, not to mention how Homer laughs at us for paying to watch the film when it’s something we could watch for free at home.

Despite becoming a feature-length film, the filmmakers didn’t take any chances with the art, which is a good thing. You can see some improvements made to the show as a whole as the colours seem a lot more vivid as compared to the usual TV episodes. Other than that however, nothing’s changed in terms of how the film looks. None of the animations are overdone and everything just looks and feels the same, as if none of it would feel out of place in any other Simpsons TV episode. It’s a good thing they didn’t decide to do something radical for the film in terms of its art style or else it might have caused a few people to be turned off.

Also, all the brilliant voice acting is back to voice the various characters obviously. From Nancy Cartwright voicing Bart and Yeardly Smith voicing Lisa, the family is sitll voiced by the brilliant cast who have been doing their job for 2 decades. Knowing this, there’s obviously nothing to complain about the voice acting, after all these people have been at it for 20 years, how could they screw up now? The fact that they’re producing a movie now instead of the usual TV episode, all of them manage to inject the same life and energy into their characters that allow them to exude the same amount of charm as they always have been.

Still, this film isn’t perfect, while the voice acting and animation might be great, no one ever expected a Simpsons movie to be perfect. The plot really gets too outrages at times, and while the writers tried to include some form of “moral dilemna” into the film, it just doesn’t fit well. In the end, all this movie was meant to do is to provide us with a Simpsons TV episode that’s 3 times as long, and that’s exactly what it does. Packing in more humour than ever possible in the past, The Simpsons Movie is a great comedy since practically everyone is already familiar with the characters. If you miss out on this film, I only have one thing to say: D’Oh!

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Over the years we’ve seen all sorts of Disney style inspirational movies: Drumline, Remember the Titans, The Great Debaters, etc. All of them focus around one particular subject (for example drums, football and debates respectively) and all have this climatic performance/scene where you’re supposed to get goosebumps while watching the characters shine. Plots like that certainly sound good on paper, but it all comes down to whether these movies can set themselves apart from others in some ways, unfortunately Step Up completely fails to do so.

Unlike the other films, Step Up’s main premise is dancing. It starts off with Tyler Gage (Channing Tatum), an average teenager growing up in a slum neighbourhood and hangs out among Black boys, getting into trouble when he and his friends break into the Maryland school of Arts and wreck havoc for the fun of it. Unfortunately he fails to escape with his friends and ultimately has to do a few hundred hours of CWO in the school itself as a janitor. It’s during this period of time that he crosses paths with Nora Clark (Jenna Dewan), a dance student of the school itself. When her dance partner sprains his ankle and is thus unable to continue rehearsing with her, Nora eventually accepts Tyler as her dance partner after auditioning a few other students who couldn’t make the cut and realising that he was a pretty good dancer (Tyler was a break dancer on the streets). Initially, both of them are pretty hostile towards one another, both unwilling to completely accept each other’s style of dancing (Nora teaches ballet while Tyler is a breakdancer). However, as they spend more time with one another, they begin to grow closer and Tyler helps Nora with her senior showcase performance. It’s at this point in these sort of movies that a series of unfortunate events begin to unfold, and it’s no different here. A lot of things go awry, causing Tyler to quit helping Nora and even the death of one of his friends. However, it’s as if in the last 10 to 20 minutes or so the movie suddenly realises it’s supposed to end on a happy note and all of a sudden Tyler rushes back to the theatre at the eleventh hour and helps Nora with her dance. And they all live happily ever after.

That’s precisely the main problem with this film: the plot. It’s just boring. We’ve seen these sort of plots a ton of times in other movies, and Step Up does nothing whatsoever to change or even tweak it at all. In fact, in the last 30 minutes or so everything suddenly randomly happens without much explanation for those things happening in the first place. You’re just left wondering why this particular thing is occuring on screen when suddenly the climax just pops in from nowhere and you start watching Nora’s senior showcase performance. Then after that the movie just ends with a few closing scenes. It almost seems like little effort was put into the later stages in the movie (ie the part where everything is supposed to go bad and then get better again before everyone lives happily ever after).

Unfortunately, the mediocre plot is hardly the only problem. Everything in the film just feels so cliche, from the characters, to the settings themselves. It’s one of the things that makes this such a boring and uninteresting film because it’s just so stereotypical and unimaginative. In my opinion that’s a real waste of the talent present. While both leads aren’t exactly popular actors and actresses, they still do a pretty good job throughout the film, though there’s room for improvement. However, the parts where the film really shine are during the dance sequences, both leads do a great job of flaunting their talents on the dance floor. It is unfortunate that throughout the entire film there’s only one full length dance performance since the film could have been so much better just by introducing more dancing sequences since it’s where the leads are best able to shine.

All in all, while this film has a pretty mediocre storyline and lousy plot mechanics were used to get the story to move along, it’s far from the lousiest film I’ve watched. I’d still recommend it for casual viewing, especially for people who love dancing, but don’t expect much out of it. Hopefully, it’s sequel, Step Up 2: The Streets, which was recently released (though I haven’t watched it yet), will be a better film.

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Mircosoft took 5 whole years to develop their next operating system, Windows Vista, which was released in 2006, 5 years after their previous OS, Windows XP. In the early stages of development, Microsoft made some pretty bold promises, yet even with repeated delays, the final product failed to deliver on many of those promises. While Microsoft’s been busy delaying the release of its next OS, Apple has been chugging along just nicely. Since the first version of OS X was released back in 2001 (Cheetah), Apple has come a long way and released version 10.5, Leopard, last October.

For those who aren’t familiar with Apple’s Operating Systems, 10.5 marks the fifth update to the original OS X, meaning that in the time Microsoft took to release a single OS, Apple released 4 of them (from 2001 to 2006), and this fifth update definitely delivers. Granted, while Apple boasts that Leopard has more than 300 new features as compared to the previous iteration of OS X, Tiger, you definitely won’t see that many improvements immediately. However, you’ll “feel” the improvements made the more you use it because they’re hidden throughout the entire OS. For example Safari 3, Apple’s own internet browser, is included in Leopard which has several new enhancements, most importantly it’s been given a huge boost in terms of performance which many avid web surfers (like me) will appreciate. Other improvements have also been made to the browser that will take me forever to list here.

The Finder (ie OS X’s version of explorer for those who don’t know) has been given a huge facelift as well, giving a completely different look and feel. They’ve even included Coverflow in the Finder so you can scroll through your documents like you previously would with your albums in iTunes. By itself, Coverflow is nothing more than eye candy. Coupled with Quick Look however, it becomes a very powerful tool which can be used to quickly search for documents, especially when you’ve forgotten the name of the document. If you do remember the name however, all you have to do is hit Command+Space to open up Spotlight and search for the title of the file (Spotlight even searches WITHIN the file, meaning you instantly search through the contents of ALL your documents, including pdf, word documents, powerpoint slides and even the metadata of pictures or movies) and have the results instantly show up. And when I say “instantly”, I’m not exaggerating. If you search for a file and it doesn’t turn up in the results in at most 5 seconds, the file doesn’t exist on your hard drive. This feature has been around since Tiger, but I never bothered to use it then since it was quite buggy and sluggish, not only not instantly showing you the results, but even slowing down your Mac. It seems like Apple finally responded to everyone’s feedback and improved Spotlight in Leopard by leaps and bounds so that it really does work as advertised now. On the whole, the Finder’s new look will take some time to get used to, but it works just fine.

It would be impossible for me to provide a full review of Leopard here because it would take up at least a few thousand words if I were to really delve into the numerous improvements made. Where would I start? The new Front Row menu; Boot Camp; new enhancements to Photo Booth; Spaces (virtual desktops); Time Machine (backup utility), etc. What I would like to point out though is how Apple is trying it’s best to support older Macs with Leopard despite there being so many new features being added as can be seen from Engadget’s experiment. This unlike Windows Vista’s requirements, whose are so steep that even some brand new laptops being released have trouble supporting it. While not every single new feature will work in Leopard on older Macs (as Engadget’s test has shown), it beats having to buy a brand new computer just to run the latest OS.

All in all, Leopard still isn’t the perfect OS, there’re still points in time when you’d wish some small issue could be tweaked to your liking. However, as compared to Tiger, it really is a much better OS from my experience. It’s a lot more stable and snappy, unlike Tiger which would begin to feel sluggish after some time. Still, the US$129 price tag (PC Connection is selling it at a discount price of $109.95) might turn some people off for what seems like a pretty similar OS, but for those of you who can afford it, I’d dare say it’s well worth the price.

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Wizards, witches and magic all seem like childish ideas, yet those are the exact things that Neil Gaiman revolved his novel, entitled Stardust, around when it was released back in 1988. Now, almost 20 years on, Hollywood director Matthew Vaughn brings this book to the silver screen as a movie of the same name. Personally, I’ve never read the novel, but if it’s as good as this movie is, I’m beginning to regret not doing so.

For those who don’t know, Stardust is set mainly in the village of Wall. It has such a queer name because one of the walls which border the town separates the village from the magical land of Faerie. It starts off with Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox), who is the son of Dustarn Thorn and Una (a princess), as a young man after the first 10 minutes of the movie show how his parents met and fell in love despite only meeting each other once. Tristan is smitten by the prettiest girl in the village of Wall, Victoria, and wants to win her hand in marriage by promising to bring back a fallen star to her. Unfortunately, he doesn’t realise that the star is in the magical land of Stormhold only until he teleports there through a magical candle Una left him and that the star is in fact a young woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes). Even so, he decides to bring her back to Wall to present her to Victoria so as to win her hand in marriage. Along the way back to England, he has many encounters, a lot of which involve him trying to save Yvaine’s life as he’s not the only one after her. Both a prince and a witch are hunting for her as well for their own self interests. Hence the movie turns into a pretty exciting and hilarious one as Tristan and Yvaine get into and out of so many situations.

The plot of the film is pretty good in my opinion, and that’s thanks in large part to Neil Gaiman’s brilliant piece of work. I won’t cover much about the plot since it’s adapted from a novel. Vaughn managed to do a pretty commendable job of bringing the story to life. Many of the scenes in the movie look brilliant and really make you feel like you’re in some sort of a magical land, yet it doesn’t overdo it so thankfully you don’t feel like you’re watching a Disney movie most of the time. Even though most of the movie is set in a magical world, there still seems to be a certain sense of reality grounding it, so that the movie doesn’t get too outrageous. Yet there’s always a certain sense of magic being just around the corner. In my opinion, Vaughn has found the perfect way to portray a magical world without it being overly exaggerated. Not to mention the film has its funny bits as well, with some parts that actually made me laugh out loud. Most of the actors and actresses managed to pull of these few parts scattered throughout the film with killer timing in my opinion.

Speaking of the actors and actresses, their performances throughout this film were all top notch. All of them help make you feel you’re really in the magical world most of the time. Danes plays her part perfectly of being a rebellious “star” most of the time since she’s initially unwilling to follow Tristan back; Michelle Pfeiffer plays the role of the evil witch after her with such brilliance that she’s immediately a character you’d love to hate; Robert De Niro does a great job as well of playing a “tough on the outside but soft on the inside” pirate, definitely drawing plenty of laughs from the audience with his comedic performance. I could go on and on about the others, since every single character in this movie played a big part in making it such a joy to watch and enjoy.

Yet, Stardust (2007) doesn’t exactly revolve around the magical world, rather in the end it’s still about finding true love. I have to admit the ending of the film (ie. the way they defeated the evil old witch) was pretty darn corny and the only part that really made me cringe. Still, it’s a minor problem and on the whole the rest of the film more than makes up for it. I would definitely highly recommend this to almost anyone, even as a family film since even children will tend to get lost in that magical world.

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While Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser for the past decade or so since it began bundling it with its Windows OS, we have seen quite a few new web browsers surface over the years. Opera, Safari, and most importantly Mozilla Firefox. By now practically every single casual web surfer is either using or has at least heard of it before. Since it was first released back in 2004, Firefox has slowly gained momentum in the browser wars and with the latest beta released just a few days ago, it seems like the next major release of Mozilla Firefox 3, is only going to increase this momentum.

Note first of all that the program I’m reviewing is the Mac version and there might be slight differences between this version and the Windows/Linux version which I might not know of. That being said, the Mac version of the Firefox 3 beta works like a dream. In the past I’ve always favoured Apple’s Safari over Firefox 2 because Firefox was basically a port of the Windows version, making it a very sluggish and irritating browser to use, especially when it takes like 5 to 10 seconds to open. However, despite only being a beta, Firefox 3 for the Mac runs a lot more smoothly in terms of performance. When you compare the speed at which it loads webpages with Firefox 2, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference, which is a good thing. In my opinion, rendering a website can only occur so fast and Firefox 2 is probably as good as it’s gonna get.

Firefox 3 looks a lot better as well, but this probably only applies to the Mac version since Firefox 2 really looked pretty bad on the Mac. Now, Firefox feels a lot more like a program that belongs on a Mac instead of one being shoehorned onto the Mac. While it’s just an aesthetic feature, it’s surprising how big of an impact it makes.

When it comes to new features, Firefox 3 definitely doesn’t come up short. From the release note, it’s obvious that the development team hasn’t been lazing around since it released Firefox 2 back in 2006. It’s based on an updated rendering system that allows web applications like Gmail to run at “twice the speed”, which is a pretty true claim since the lag times I used to experience while using Firefox with Gmail in the past no longer exist.

A brand new download manager has also been introduced which has a few new features. For example it has a search bar at the bottom so that you can quickly search through your downloads if you have a long record of them in the download manager. It also displays when and where you downloaded the file from, making it much easier to manage your downloads. Most importantly, users can now resume downloads even after you restart the browser or reset your internet connection as long as the server you’re download from allows resumable downloads. This will hopefully save a lot of people some frustration if their internet connection gets dropped when their download reaches 99%.

One of the biggest problems that users have repeated complained about is Firefox’s memory usage problem as Firefox is notorious for memory leaks after long periods of usage, seriously slowing down the user’s computer even if he/she isn’t doing much web surfing. Just letting it sit in the background will cause your other applications to experiecne a significant slowdown. Thankfully, Firefox 3 is addressing these problems by making use of new technology to prevent such memory leaks in the future. From my experience with it thus far, the development team has done a pretty good job, since I’ve been using Firefox for the entire day now without having to restart it even once and neither has it crashed on me yet, unlike Firefox 2.

However, being in its beta stages, this software is obviously far from perfect. Most plugins and themes (understandably) don’t work with it yet and the in-built dictionary that was perfect in Firefox 2 now draws squiggly red lines under words like “doesn’t”, thinking it’s an incorrect word. The text editing window that I’m typing this post in right now in Wordpress is also slightly buggy, occasionally not showing a space on screen even after I tap the spacebar several times. Still, all these are understandable problems that one would expect from a beta version of any piece of software. Just take note of this if you currently heavily rely on your Firefox plugins because none of them will work with this beta version, but it’d still be fun to download and play around with in anticipation for the final version.

With Netscape down for the count, only Firefox has a chance at unseating Internet Explorer as the dominant web browser. With Microsoft recently releasing the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 as well, it seems like the browser wars are far from over. Yet, from what we’ve seen from the beta version, Mozilla Firefox 3 just might have a shot at stealing even more IE users away from that darn browser. In fact, the only reason why this is getting a 4/5 rating is because it’s the beta version, I can’t wait to get my hands on the final version when it’s ready.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 4 can be downloaded here

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