Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

With all the movies coming out of the Hollywood these days, one needs some set of mental filters (aka stereotypes) to pick good films and avoid all the rest.  But, as with any other area of human life, stereotypes can heal and harm.  According to the set of movie stereotypes in my head, I was totally going to avoid the movie “Doomsday“.  I’ve heard that it was about some virus outbreak, sealed contaminated area, and a bunch of people going in to find the cure.  That’s all I knew, and that sounded a lot like something along the lines of “28 Days Later“, “Resident Evil“, and many other movies.  Those movies, they aren’t bad, but I’ve seen enough of them.

Luckily, my friend and colleague Igor likes this type of movies a lot.  So he managed to persuade me to go and see “Doomsday”.  And I’m glad he did.

The story of the film was very much like I expected it.  But, we weren’t there for the story, were we?  It’s how one tells the story.  And in this type of films, it’s all about how you show infected people, their mutations, human flash, body parts, horror, black humor, and the rest of the visual effects.  “Doomsday” was pretty good in this regard.  I’d say it was a little bit more bloodier than it needed, but no serious complains in this department.

All that is not very important however.  Because “Doomsday” has something that so many other movies don’t.  It has the spirit.  The atmosphere, if you will.  And it suits it very well.  It is a very rock-n-roll movie.  So much rock-n-roll, that it is much closer to punk rock in its spirit (and literary, most of the characters appear to be some serious fans of punk rock music).

There are a few places in the movie, which are either boring or a little bit too far fetched, but, gladly, they are very few and very short.  In most of it, the film provides excellent entertainment and positive energy boost.  It is mostly funny, and hilarious at places.  It has excellent special effects and strong characters in it.  There are a few memorable quotes, including some very peculiar ways of using an F* word (the film is very British in its nature).

So, if you like uncensored punk rock with lots of fun, if you are not easily destabilized by motion pictures, if you don’t truly belief that people in the movie suffer in pain or die in pieces, if you welcome the creativity of the creator even if it is a little bit out of your bounds sometimes, if you enjoyed “Mad Max” trilogy and darker (non-romantic) side of “Waterworld” than I strongly recommend to watch this movie.  You won’t regret it.

7 out of 10.

It seems, Maxim was carefully choosing the virus to bring back home. He managed to convince Dr.Simos that antibiotics are necessary. Then he passed his virus to Olga, who doesn’t feel very well for the last couple of days. And Olga, in turn, passed it on to me. Or, maybe, it was Maxim again. Anyway, I feel like I am getting sick. I wonder if I will be able to fight it off this time…

Maxim looks much better today. The temperature wasn’t there in the morning. It came back in the afternoon, but did climb higher than +38C. Then dropped. Then got back. But overall, he looks healthier and more active.

Because he still has the temperature, I guess we’ll be visiting Dr.Simos again tomorrow. There’s also a side effect from all the syrups we are giving him in a form of a few tiny red dots on his forehead and some more on his tummy.

He still eats good and drinks a lot though…

Maxim’s temperature didn’t go down, so we went to see Dr.Simos. He checked the kid thoroughly and said that Maxim’s throat is soar. He seems to have some sort of virus infection - nothing serious though.

Maxim was prescribed a couple of sirups that should easy up his throat and help fight the temperature. It is expected that by Wednesday he should be fully OK.

By the way - to those of you who trust only in “natural” ways of healing I have to say “Reconsider!”. I was once again amazed by the wonders of technology and progress today, when a sample was quickly taken from Maxim’s throat and analyzed with a bunch of chemicals, giving a rather precise result within 10 minutes - what was and what wasn’t there and what is the best way to fix it.

Amen to the technology!

P.S.: Oh, and the front upper teeth are coming too. We can almost see them.

They say that your unpatched Microsoft Windows machine will live for only 12 minutes on the net before getting 0wned. Now, a lot of people are saying a lot of different things about Windows security, but I tend to agree to this particular one. I’ve seen it plenty of times at work. In fact, we now have a requirement for all colocated clients to fully patch their servers before connecting to our backbone.

Slashdot has a story. And a dup.