ENTERTAINING, IN A WAYANS BROS. SORT OF WAY "Attack the Gas Station!" IMDB dir. Sang-Jin Kim (I) | starring. Sung-jae Lee, Oh-seong Yu Cheap, silly and mostly entertaining, "Attack the Gas Station!" is a harbinger of fluffy nonsense to come from Korean cinema.

Coming soon: "Attack the Gas Station II: Electric Boogaloo"

Riding the coattails of a resurgence of interest in contemporary Asian cinema is a handful of Korean imports including this raw but ultimately entertaining story of four hard-ass thugs who rob a gas station in the middle of the night and end up complicating their heist by staying to earn more money pumping gas. "Attack the Gas Station!" reminds me a lot of cheap 80s urban indie films in the rawness of the direction and apparent lack of budget. Like a lot of those films, "Attack the Gas Station!" tries to make up for it by sheer weight of entertainment. There's lots of camp, low humour, fighting and even a musical number. The four thugs are paper-thin characters who could just as well not have had backgrounds (though the director tries to show it in a series of painfully earnest flashbacks). All are young, disaffected and fast with their feet and fists. At first easily taking over the gas station, the gang's take-no-shit attitudes begin drawing an ever growing cast of characters into what is essentially a one-location movie. After robbing the first few customers and storing them with their first group of prisoners the group's boredom and swaggering manner run them afoul of gangsters, the police and any customer who pisses them off. Each incident adds more and more to their haul of prisoners. Even given the single-location shtick, there are easily a dozen subplots involving both gang and prisoners, with most of them forgettable but one memorable sideplot involves a group of high school punks who break into a musical number that happens to be noticed by a passing record executive. Like I said, really really silly. Although this is not usually a good comparison, the whole film feels like a Korean Wayan's Bros. movie. Really stupid, sometimes funny, and not boring. It sounds like a putdown but it's not. There's an energy in "Attack the Gas Station!" that puts a smile on your face more times than not. From the over-the-top performances to the chance-taking direction, "Attack the Gas Station!" throws a lot up on the screen. Some of it sticks and some of it stinks. On DVD.

Two funny videos
This one is encoded in Clipstream Video. It's what happens when you don't fix your dog. The second one is a clip from Conan O'Brien where Triumph the sock dog interviews a bunch of Star Wars nerds waiting in line for the "Attack of the Clones" (requires Windows Media Player). Finally, it seems that a lot of Star Wars nerds are going a bit overboard in their reaction to criticism of the quality of the Episode Two.

World Cup fashions
The Koreans are nuts but at least they know how to have fun with the world attention focused on their World Cup. I know my eyes are focussed on it.

Nintendo's Yamauchi To Step Down After 52 Yrs As President
The 74-year old Hiroshi Yamauchi became President when Nintendo made playing cards and helped build it into the game console powerhouse it is today. Yamauchi is credited with the Famicom.

Moby - 18
There are a couple tracks that sound a lot like cuts from "Play" but so far it's sounding pretty good despite the currently overplayed "We are stars" single that you can't get away from.

Main perpretrators of Nigerian email scam arrested
You've probably received this a dozen times this year. It's the email claiming that, for a little money, you can help unlock millions of dollars held up in some obscure bank. Of course, they take your money and you never hear from them again. There are many other versions of this scheme that have bilked thousands of gullible people every year.

Former prisoner escapes using same hole in fence as before
A murder suspect being held in Tennessee escaped from prison by using the same hole in a fence that he used 10 years previously. It had not been fixed since.

'Steel Battalions' shots at E3 - Xbox
Charlie Chu from Grammarporn posted this pic of the upcoming Capcom XBox game "Steel Battalions" that comes with its own custom controller. No word on cost for this nerdly masterpiece. I mean.. look at it! (Click on the image to bring up a larger one) It's beautiful in its nerdliness! Here's another shot showing the controller more.

My friend Iain tells me that the designer originally wanted the eject button put behind glass so the player would have to physically break it. Also, when you die in the game, it wipes out your saved game. Hardcore.

My only previous experience with a custom controller even approaching that thing is the two joystick controller for Virtual On: Ortatio Tangram.

As for E3, I don't envy anyone going. It's a real headache of a convention. All I can remember from my only E3 trip was "Infograammmes is entertainment...Rocks my world! Rocks my-y-y-y worrrllddd!"

Sacrifice one 'everyman' for the sake of the world poll results:
43 Delphi users wanted Ben Affleck sacrificed. Next was Tom Hanks (26 votes), Mel Gibson (21), Bill Pullman (19) and almost no one wanted Tim Robbins gone (4).

Poll: Sacrifice one 'everyman' actor for the sake of the world
On Grammarporn I've posted a Delphi poll seeking one 'everyman' actor to sacrifice so that other everymen can step in. These actors are so interchangeable and boring that losing one could not make any possible difference to movies. The choices are: Ben Affleck, Tom Hanks, Tim Robbins, Bill Pullman and Mel Gibson.

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)
Famed evolutionary biologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould died of cancer at the age of 60. He was the prolific author of such books as "Bully For Brontosaurus", "The Mismeasure of Man" (about intelligence testing), and "Wonderful Life" (about the Burgess Shale).

He was probably one of the best known science writers in America and popularized the science of evolution. His writings on the Burgess Shale, a stretch of rock in the Columbia mountains that show several hundred years of evolution condensed in layers of fossils evident there is his best known contribution to evolutionary evidence.

But he was also known for examining other statistical evidence to support a view of evolution that doesn't stress an always upward trend. For example, he said that the disappearance of .400 batting in baseball was not so much evidence that batters were getting worse, but that pitchers were getting better to cope with the batters.