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DVD Review: Never Back Down 2: The Beatdown (2011)

September 7, 2011 in Movie Reviews, Reviews

There are two versions of this poster: one with the MMA dudes, the other with Dean Geyer. I picked the one with Dean Geyer.

For those who have ever watched Australian Idol, have you ever wondered whatever happened to that Dean Geyer guy, the South African teen heartthrob who came third in 2006?  Well, after his music career failed to fully take off, it appears he has switched to acting, and his first feature is the lead role in Never Back Down 2: The Beatdown (!)  Holy crap!

Here’s a reminder of Dean the singer.

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The original Never Back Down was about a beefy high school kid (Sean Faris) who moves to Florida, gets his butt kicked by Cam Gigandet, and decides to get even by training MMA with the guy from Blood Diamond (Djimon Hounsou).

And let’s face it: Never Back Down wasn’t very good, and the only reason it has kind of endured is because of Cam Gigandet’s amazingly ripped bod.  I am not gay.

I think it moved

Never Back Down 2: The Beatdown essentially recycles the original from head to toe, except Djimon Hounsou is replaced by Spawn (ie, Michael Jai White — who also happens to be the director), and the Sean Faris character is split into four different college kids — the aforementioned Dean Geyer as a wrestler and the new kid on the block (with his long locks trimmed down), Alex Meraz (one of the werewolves from Twilight) as an ex-boxer, Todd Duffee as a gentle giant and Scott Epstein as the wimpy comic book store clerk (the last two of which are real life MMA fighters).

The obligatory eye candy waiting to be stolen away is played this time by Jillian Murray (probably best known for the seminal motion picture, Wild Things: Foursome), replacing Amber Heard from the first film.

The only returning character is Evan Peters, the obnoxious computer geek MMA fighter wannabe who’s always recording everything on video — he’s the one who organises ‘The Beatdown’ and I suppose is the catalyst who gets the ball rolling.

You don’t need me to tell you this movie sucked.  To be fair, it’s probably one of the less criminal straight-to-DVD sequels in recent times.  Spawn looked mean and buff, the fighting is well choreographed (perhaps more realistic, but nowhere as slick as the original), the acting is surprisingly decent and the kids are nice to look at.

But it also happens to be plagued with all the things you’d expect — a truly atrocious plot, even worse sub-plots (including corrupt cops, girlfriend envy, stripper moms and gay dads), cringe-worthy dialogue and horribly formulated characters.  In fact, the four young protagonists are all douches, maybe with the exception of Todd Duffee’s character, but it’s quite hilarious that they were trying to pass him off as a mild-mannered college kid — all you have to do is paint him green and he’s the Hulk!

You might wonder why films like Never Back Down 2: The Beatdown get made in the first place.  Well, I can almost imagine how this movie came into being.  Michael Jai White probably rented Never Back Down one rainy afternoon and thought, damn, I should have been in that movie instead of the Blood Diamond guy!  Let’s just make another one with me as the mentor, hire some kids for cheap, make some light modifications to the script and let’s make some money!

And the sad thing is, it probably will make a lot, paving the way for Never Back Down 3.

1.75 out of 5 stars

Never Back Down 2: The Beatdown will be released straight to DVD in Australia on 21September 2011

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View of Canberra from Mount Ainslie Lookout

September 5, 2011 in Canberra, Travel

The Parliamentary Triangle - Parliament House in the centre, the Defense Headquarters on the left and City Hill on the right (near the water fountain). The Australian War Memorial is down the bottom.

Don’t have much time today so here’s a Canberra quickie.

The friendly volunteer lady at the Information Office told us that if we wanted to get a great view of Canberra from afar, in particular the uniquely famous ‘Parliamentary Triangle’ (comprising Parliament House, Defence Headquarters and City Hill — I believe it is isosceles), we had two options: the revolving restaurant Alto at Telstra Tower at Black Mountain to the West, or Mount Ainslie Lookout to the East.

Option one most likely involved a massive and pricey meal, something we weren’t interested in after stuffing ourselves at Brodburger and with an exquisite meal lined up that evening at Aubergine (to be reviewed), so we went with option two — the free and unfilling one.

Mount Ainslie was a short drive from our previous destination, the Australian War Memorial.  Mostly mountainous terrain but it was a leisurely cruise with little traffic.

When we arrived, the lookout point was not particularly busy, with plenty of parking spaces available.  There were a group of noisy kids and a couple of adults doing nothing to stop them from running amok, but just about everyone else was there to take in the beautiful scenery.  There was even an old couple working on their paintings.

Anyway, here are two more photos.

The zoomed out view from Mount Ainslie Lookout. There really isn't much in Canberra, is there?

Most of these buildings to the right of the triangle belong to ANU, Australia's top university, and the building with the little loopy thing at the peak of the strip of land is the Australian National Museum

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Welcome to the new blog!

September 5, 2011 in Blogging, Misc, Technology, Websites

I'm back, baby!

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Deep exhale.

Finally, I have successfully migrated my old blog from pacejmiller.wordpress.com to my own domain at pacejmiller.com.  It was a little shaky at first but I think the blog has finally settled in.

The Big Move

To cut a long story short, I ended up doing it all myself, and it took a good couple of days and hours and hours of messing around and reading (and deciphering) online guides to move the blog over from the WordPress domain to my own purchased domain (from SiteGround) and to get it into the shape it is now.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to pay the $119 fee for WordPress.com to do a ‘Guided Transfer’ for me, after previous attempts to export the material on my old blog to new blog failed miserably.  However, as it turned out, WordPress can only do Guided Transfers for people who have purchased a domain from one of their affiliates.  So I got the kind engineers at WordPress to do a full refund for me and I proceeded to do the damn thing myself, including how to redirect traffic from the old site to the new one.

For those interested to learn how it is done, I am going to do a post shortly that sets out exactly what I did, where I looked and where I sought assistance.  Hopefully it can help people in my position — ie, want to move your blog to your own domain but don’t really know what the difference will be and find the whole process a little overwhelming.

New Blog, New Features!

The first thing you’ll notice on this new and improved blog is that I have a new theme.  From day one I stuck with Regulus (a free theme from WordPress.com) and it served me fine for more than two years, but I felt it was time to go with a slicker, more professional look that made better use of the space.

So I ended up picking a new theme called Custom Community by Themekraft.  Custom Community is also a free theme but you can upgrade it (for $39) to gain access to more custom features, widgets and so forth.  The best thing about this theme is that it already has plenty of customisation options — the ‘how to’ guides are not necessarily the best, but if you muck around with it for long enough you’ll eventually figure it out.

The most noticeable difference with this new layout is that I have a massive slideshow just below the banner.  I have customised the slideshow so that every time someone opens the Home page it will display four random posts from my new ‘Best Of’ category.  Essentially, I picked out around 20 or so posts which have either been highly popular at one time or another or represent some of my better works and ideas and put them in this category, and I customised the slideshow to show posts only from that category and at random.

The second main difference is the three image boxes directly under the slideshow, which lists my three most recent posts.  Personally, I would have preferred to get rid of them but they are not customisable in the free version of the theme. [Correction: I just figured out that you actually can get rid of the post list under the General/Default Homepage tab under Theme Settings but I realised the blog looks better with them so I put them back in]

The biggest hassle with the slideshows and image boxes is that I have to create these new Featured Images on my existing posts.  There’s a new box in the new post creation screen and I have to separately upload an image to it — and the image has to be resized (to 756px in width) in order for it to fit properly.  And I had to crop the images in cases where the slideshow zoomed in on the wrong part of the picture.  Hours of work, I tell ya.  Hours of work.

Those are the most obvious differences but boy did I have to do a lot of stuff.  Even though migrating your blog keeps all your old posts and comments, etc, none of the widgets in the sidebar are moved over, so I had to redo everything from scratch.  On the bright side, it allowed me to clean out a lot of the old stuff and links that weren’t being used.

Lots of other customisations that you probably won’t think much of but took me forever.  For instance the header of the blog (that little blue strip of the night sky), which I grabbed from my old theme — that alone took like three hours because I had to get the size and placement exactly right.  The drop down menus as well — the colour, the shape, the shadows — all that crap had to be customised.

One of the biggest changes I’ve had to get used to is all the Plugins that I have to install in order to replicate some of the features I had on WordPress.com as well as the new ones to give me additional features that weren’t available on WordPress.com.  It’s been a struggle but I am slowly coming around.

The next step is to install Google Adsense and other advertising mechanisms to take advantage of the ability to advertise (something which WordPress.com prohibits).  I’ve already signed up for Adsense but it might take a few days before the application is approved.

Another thing I will have to go through is the wealth of information provided on SEO (search engine optimisation), which is crucial if you want to increase your blog’s exposure and traffic.

In the meantime, life will be back to normal and I will continue to pump out posts.  I already have a handsome backlog.

Anyway, take a look around at the new site, check out the new features, and let me know what you think.  Any comments or suggestions would be much appreciated!

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Testing: Beta Phase

September 3, 2011 in Blogging

Please be patient while this blog is transitioned from its old address at:

http://pacejmiller.wordpress.com

I’m still looking to find ways to automatically direct visitors from the old site to the new site (without paying the redirect fee), find and implement a new theme, install the correct widgets, migrate the Blogroll and install Adsense and/or other advertising methods.

Stay tuned.


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Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

September 2, 2011 in Blogging, Misc, Technology, Websites

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I’m finally doing it. At last. Well, not me specifically, but someone at WordPress.com is doing it, for a handsome fee.

What am I talking about?

Well, in Feb this year, after consulting my blogging guru friend, I purchased my own domain name at pacejmiller.com. This friend told me that my blog had potential but was been kept in shackles because it was being hosted by the free and wonderfully user-friendly WordPress.com. However, being a free blog, there are of course restrictions on what you can do with it, including how it looks and operates, and the big killer, the inability to advertise. Accordingly, it was time for the blog to break free and soar to new heights.

So I purchased a domain (on special) at Siteground for a very very cheap price and it appeared as though everything was ready to go.

However, being a complete tool at the Internets, I got a bit overwhelmed by the numerous step by step instructions (which weren’t step by step at all!) on how to migrate my current site over to the new address. After all, my current blog is where everything is at — I lose the content I have on it and I lose everything. It was, frankly, a tad frightening.

I tried to use the supposedly simple migration process stipulated in the help articles at WordPress.com, which involved ‘exporting’ everything on my blog into a single file, which I would then take over to the new blog and ‘import’. Sounds easy enough, right?

Not quite. I made several attempts to create the export file, but perhaps it was because I had too much content or something, the system kept crashing. After a frustrating struggle, I finally obtained an export file, but the import process just wouldn’t work. The export file was corrupt or incomplete or just plain evil.

And even if it was successful, I’m not sure if everything could be moved over smoothly. For starters, I read somewhere that the embedded videos will not make the migration. Secondly, is it just the posts or do my numerous pages get moved over as well? What about all the custom drop down menus I painstakingly created? What about all the widgets (including the text ones I created myself)? Do I have to do everything again myself? And more importantly, what about my existing visitors and my Google rankings and what not? Will they become innocent victims in this seemingly innocuous move?

It was blowing my mind, and in any case I wasn’t in any particular rush. I also had a bunch of other things I had to take care of, so the migration almost entirely slipped my mind.

More recently, I started getting quite a few requests for advertising, which rekindled my passion for the migration. I had already wasted 6 months and who knows how much that has already held my blog back? But with a massive move on the way, job applications, freelance work, freelance work seeking and other crap, I just wasn’t prepared to go through all the time and effort of relearning how to migrate the blog and doing it myself again.

Thankfully, WordPress.com offers a ‘Guided Transfer’, which can be found in the ‘Store’ tab towards the top of the left side menu when you log in to the WordPress dashboard. In short, it’s $119 bucks and you work with an expert to do everything for you — seamlessly, of course. You agree on a date and time for the migration and they even stick around for a couple of weeks afterward to answer any queries and guide you into the world of WordPress.org.

Anyway, there’s no turning back now because I have just purchased the Guided Transfer, so the move will be imminent. I’ll keep everyone updated and informed on how things go, but in hopefully it will all go smoothly and visitors to the current address will automatically be redirected to the new one.

Moving forward, I think I will start a series of posts on the actual experience of migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org — including whether this Guided Transfer was worth it, any obvious differences between .com and .org, the impact of the migration on my visitors, rankings and stats, and (fingers crossed) my foray into running advertisements on the blog, in particular the best options for bloggers and the effectiveness they have in generating revenue.

So if you’re interested in any of that crap (told from a web moron’s perspective), stay tuned, and if you haven’t already, subscribe!

On a final note, having tried a couple of other blogging platforms, I can honestly say that WordPress.com has been absolutely fantastic and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone thinking of starting their own blog.

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