'The Wolverine' review: Looking sharp

The Wolverine
Action. Starring Hugh Jackman, Rila Fukushima and Tao Okamoto.
Directed by James Mangold. (PG-13. 120 minutes.)

Somewhere along the line somebody must have had a crazy idea, that
maybe for once the Wolverine required a decent script, and shouldn't
rely only on action, audience goodwill and the sight of Hugh Jackman
with his shirt off. And so a team was assembled, made up of people who
have made some very good movies.

Those movies are too many to list here, but for a taste: Director
James Mangold made "Walk the Line" and "3:10 to Yuma," and
screenwriters Mark Bomback, Scott Frank and Christopher McQuarrie made
"Live Free or Die Hard," "Out of Sight" and "The Usual Suspects,"
respectively. This time out, nobody is slumming.

Within five minutes, it's apparent that the audience, and "The
Wolverine," are in good hands. The movie, a sequel to 2009's "X-Men
Origins: Wolverine," begins with three gripping sequences, including a
vivid one in which our hero survives the atomic bomb blast at
Nagasaki. Of course he does - he's that kind of person. His hair and
skin may be burned off, but he flexes and growls, and a moment later,
everything has grown back.

Less immediately apparent than the quality of the action is the subtle
and welcome change the filmmakers have wrought in Wolverine. Of the
mutant superhero X-Men, he was always the sad sack, the depressive,
the self-hating one, the one who didn't want to use his powers; but in
"The Wolverine," he is less angst-ridden, and more angry and
motivated, which activates the movie.
Straight-up action hero

At the start, he is drifting and haunted by nightmares, but he still
has the gumption to pick a fight when he witnesses an injustice. In
the best way, he is more like a straight-up action hero - no longer a
miserable guy like Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolf Man, but capable, dangerous
and, when it's called for, sarcastic.

The clash between mutants and humans has been the relentless focus of
previous "X-Men" movies. "The Wolverine" drops that exhausted subject
in favor of something more clear-cut and immediate: The Wolverine is
asked to travel to Japan in order to say goodbye to the man whose life
he saved in Nagasaki. The Wolverine, who's not doing much of anything
these days besides growing out his sideburns, agrees, and soon gets
involved in a tangled and dangerous conflict over the old man's will.
The old man skips over his own son and makes his granddaughter, Marika
(Tao Okamoto), the richest woman in Asia.

A nice feature of "The Wolverine" is that it always stays with our
hero, and his task is always simple and easy to grasp, despite
whatever complicating machinations are taking place off camera. He
saves Marika's life - as soon as people find out that she is about to
inherit everything, armies of assassins pop out from everywhere - and
he becomes determined to keep her alive. Why? Because he's a nice guy,
and he likes her.

Unfortunately, the Wolverine is not the best relationship material at
the moment. He can't go to sleep without having nightmares that cause
him to leap out of the sheets, waving his adamantine knuckle blades,
ready to kill anything that moves. Handsome or not, he is definitely a
case for separate beds.

"The Wolverine" is the first film from the X-Men universe to show
Jackman to full advantage. The actor has worked himself into a
physical condition that is downright humbling, or inspiring, depending
on your viewpoint, and his performance is in the best action tradition
of strength and humor.

The action sequences are not perfunctory and, though they had to have
been cooked up on a computer, they don't look like it. Or at least,
they're imaginative enough that you don't have time to think of them
in that way.
Train chase

For example, there's a chase on top of a train, a familiar
action-movie trope last seen as recently as "The Lone Ranger," a few
weeks ago. But the chase in "The Wolverine" takes place on a Japanese
bullet train going 300 mph, which completely changes the dynamic. The
scene is faster, quieter and more eerie, and the fighting requires
different strategies.

"The Wolverine" shows that, while originality would be nice, a little
novelty and enthusiasm in the presentation of the familiar can be
quite enough. The bottom line is that audiences aren't stupid and will
not settle for just anything, as the anemic box office for recent
blockbusters is showing. "The Wolverine" deserves to break out from
the pack.
Copyright http://www.sfgate.com/

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After 75 years of marriage, couple die one day apart at age 94

High school sweethearts Les and Helen Brown, who were born on the same
day on Dec. 31, 1918, died at age 94, within one day of each other.

"My mom often said she didn't want to see my father die, and he didn't
want to live without her," Daniel, the couple's youngest son, told the
Long Beach Press-Telegram.

Helen died on July 16, and Les died on July 17. The Southern
California couple celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in
September.

"It was a real love match, wasn't it?" their oldest son, Les Jr., told
the newspaper. "They were together every day for 75 years."

According to the sons, the pair met at Huntington Park High School and
eloped on Sept. 19, 1937, at the age of 18 against their parents'
wishes. They thought a match between a wealthy man and a working-class
woman would never work out.

The couple moved to Long Beach in 1963. He was a photographer for the
Navy. She sold real estate. They had seven grandchildren.

The two, who were friends with many of their neighbors, were known to
take road trips and worshipped at Kingdom Hall as Jehovah's Witnesses.

Eventually, Helen was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and Les suffered
from Parkinson's disease.

"Like the Bible says, 'They were as one,'" Bob Brobst told the
Press-Telegram, who was a friend of the couple's for a decade.
Copyright http://news.yahoo.com/

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Miami hostage standoff leaves 7 people dead

MIAMI -- Seven people were shot and killed at an apartment building in
a Miami suburb early Saturday, including the suspected gunman who was
holding two hostages when a SWAT team moved in, police said.

The hostages were rescued unharmed, Hialeah Police Sergeant Eddie
Rodriguez told NBC News.

The standoff began on Friday evening during an argument between the
gunman and the husband and wife who ran the apartment complex. Their
bodies were among the six found after the SWAT team moved in on
Saturday morning, police said.
The gunman lived in a fourth-floor apartment with his mother, the
Miami Herald quoted the landlords' daughter, Shamira Pisciotti, as
saying.

The couple, 78-year-old Italo Pisciotti and 68-year-old Samira
Pisciotti, went to the unit to discuss a problem with the gunman, who
opened fire and killed them both, their daughter told the newspaper.

Three other victims were found shot to death in that building and one
was walking into a building across the street when the gunman shot him
from a balcony, police said.

The shooter was barricaded inside a fifth-floor apartment with the two
hostages when police negotiators made contact with him during the
night. The SWAT team swarmed in after the talks broke down about 2
a.m., the Herald said.

The apartment complex in the blue-collar, mostly Hispanic community
housed about 90 families.

Copyright © 2013, Reuters

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New Android, new Chromecast, old marketing tricks: Ars readers react

On Wednesday, Google held an event in San Francisco announcing a
couple of new products that proved interesting to Android and Apple
adherents alike. These included the revamped Nexus 7, Android 4.3, and
the Chromecast, a tiny dongle for your TV's HDMI port that pushes
music, photos, and videos from Android and iOS devices and laptops to
the...um...medium screen.

Ars sat down to run some benchmarks on the Nexus 7 as soon as we got
our hands on it, and Andrew Cunningham wrote up the results in The
2013 Nexus 7 performance preview: a huge speed upgrade in every way.
The benchmarks showed the newest tablet vastly outperforming the
original Nexus 7 as well as the Nexus 4, and coming close in
performance to the larger Nexus 10.

Storage, incidentally, was the most controversial part of the new
tablet. daneren2005 wrote, "I think the better storage performance is
the only thing I really care about in an upgrade. The Nexus 7
deteriorated so fast it was ridiculous and got extremely laggy when
approaching full. I'm hoping this version doesn't have these issues,
or at least not at the same level." charleski agreed: "Hmm. I was
planning to keep my old N7 since I mostly use it for reading. But
storage speed is the one thing that really bugs me about the original
model, and these improvements are quite enticing."

Digitali missed the old ways. "Still no SDCard storage? I love my
original one, but the lack of additional storage options is insane."
Chronoreverse didn't want to hear it, "You're never going to see
MicroSD storage in a Nexus device." But greenmky stepped in to offer a
more thorough response:

I'd prefer an SD card slot too, but considering the bang/buck that
Google offers with Nexus devices I've been willing to overlook it. I
don't keep that much music on hand, and on a tablet, the only reason I
use the space is for disc images for DOSBox or something. I don't
watch movies or TV on a tablet (would rather wait and watch on the
plasma/HT setup).

I really like SD cards (for media storage, Titanium Backup,
Photos, etc), but somehow I've ended up with a Nexus 7 / Nexus 4 combo
anyway.

My wife grouses about not having enough room for her music all of
the time on her Nexus 4. She's talked about getting another Android
device with MicroSD just for playing music. So far, it's just talk.

For my kids (age 7 and 5), however, an SD card slot is critical. I
load it up with episodes of My Little Pony: FIM and whatever else they
want to watch for trips, camping, etc. They load up the internal
storage with terrible insipid games and such :p

Devil's in the details

Verizon also announced it's Motorola Droid lineup this week, and while
the phones sounded awfully impressive, the specifics of the "Motorola
8X" chip that powers the lineup revealed decidedly average hardware.
Again, Andrew Cunningham took down the details in Motorola's "8-core"
X8 chip gives us a lesson in marketing-speak.

The deception made Doctor Hoot mad. "So your new 'flagship phone' has
a lower-resolution screen, a similar processor, and the same RAM as
the GSIII? Way to produce a flagship last year's flagship phone and
sell it for $199, Motorola. No wonder your market share is dropping."

ounkeo already hit the acceptance stage:

This is just the general problem with companies and manufacturers
in general. Nearly everyone inflates. The goal is to bedazzle ignorant
users. The fact that it works and you have users going on and on about
yet more pointless cores means it will continue to be done.

This has been happening in the PC market for a long time though
not quite as blatant as Motorola, Google, and Verizon. We had the
almighty Jiggahertz warz, the megapixie wars, the core warz. And
ignorant people lap it up.

Outside of Ars, pretty much any other blog comment section is
filled with "it doesnt haz 16corez...it is bad and useless."

Others joked about the offending 8 core chip. "Reminds me of the time
I went to a 'computer blowout' sale and saw vendors selling MP5, MP6,
and MP7 players," wrote RolandKSP.

And TerribleTony told us of his incredibly intriguing product: "I'm
working on a 36-core SoC design. 16 of the cores are 6510's, 10 ten
are Z80's, two are Hercules Graphics Adapters, two are FM synthesizers
I pulled off of old SoundBlaster Pro or Adlib cards (whatever I could
find at Goodwill), three are 8088s, and the remaining three are
actually people doing jobs it offloads to Amazon's Mechanical Turk."
Chrome...um...castic?

At Google's Wednesday event, a tiny little device called the
Chromecast. In her article, New "Chromecast," a $35 HDMI dongle to get
video streams to your TV, Casey Johnston took a look at Google's pitch
to get one of these things in every TV in every home. Ultimately, Ars
readers were enthusiastic, but some were skeptical that it would
really be a great at Google promised.

"Looks nifty, but no 5GHz Wi-Fi will be awful in any area with
congested 2.4GHz operation," Bob Loblaw posted. DOOManiac had another
idea: "I wish the thing had an IR port on it so you could
pause/play/rewind/ffwd using your remote instead of digging your
phone/tablet out again."

Ars of Ares thought the dongle's ultimate usefulness would come down to content:

I'm cautiously excited about this. I really dig connecting my PS3
to my phone via YouTube, so I'm fairly aware of the potential.

I do wonder about dev support though. It's great that they got
Netflix right out the gates, but that's kind of a given these days; I
already have five separate options to watch Netflix on one TV, how
many more do I need? HBO Go, on the other hand...

I hope they have some way of syncing the audio, but I sort of
doubt it. It would be awesome to have Google Music or Pandora playing
the same stream on multiple receivers and/or TVs throughout the
house—like the Nexus Q—but this little stick doesn't seem to be meant
for that. Hopeful, there...

They hit the pricing right out of the park. $35 is deep into
impulse territory!

outlaw2005 had no such reservations though. "I just ordered one for
each TV in the house. This is exactly what I was looking for."
You are where you eat

Towards the end of the week, Nathan Mattise brought us the story of a
programmer who kept being thwarted in his attempts to get a table at a
swanky San Francisco restaurant. To realize that fine dining dream,
the programmer built a bot to make online reservations—only to realize
that others were using superior bots for the same task. In Engineer
can't get decent dinner reservations, creates Urbanspoon-dominating
bot you can get the whole story of the eatery arms race.

psd sort of missed the point, but had a good DIY sentiment. "I'll tell
you where you can easily get a reservation—your own kitchen table!
Ditch the laziness, get off the keyboard and finally learn how to cook
gourmet meals for yourself! Start being self-sufficient for a change."

Happysin saw the future in this particular story: "This seems like the
natural beginning of agent-based life management. We've seen it in
Sci-Fi for years, but it would be great to tell your personal agent
that you want reservations as X place, and make sure to notify Y
person of the date when it's finalized. Then also manage things like
dentist and doctor scheduling, etc. Having an agent manage calendar
for things like that would be pretty great. You lose direct control
over parts of your schedule, but if it's set up properly, it shouldn't
be a problem."

But surely the restaurant would see something strange afoot. Right?
"'How come our only patrons are IT geeks?'" Stone joked as the
restaurant owners.

But FoneFreak spoke the voice of the common man (and woman): "I'll be
eating my Stouffer's Lean Cuisine and watching 'Rin-Tin-Tin' reruns on
antenna TV while these startup guys feast on braised peacock tongue
and in vivo monkey brains while they furiously blog about it in
real-time on invisible, holo-keyboards projected from a Google Glass
add-on dongle. *sigh*"
Copyright http://arstechnica.com

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Europe and China Agree to Settle Solar Panel Fight

BRUSSELS — The European Union's trade chief said on Saturday that a
deal had been reached with China to settle a dispute over exports of
low-cost solar panels that had threatened to set off a wider trade war
between two of the world's largest economies.
The settlement essentially involves setting a fairly high minimum
price for sales of Chinese-made solar panels in the European Union to
try to prevent them from undercutting European producers. Those
producers accused Chinese manufacturers of benefiting from enormous
loans from state-owned banks and other government assistance that
enabled them to charge prices that would otherwise be uneconomical.

"We have found an amicable solution that will result in a new
equilibrium on the European solar panel market at a sustainable price
level," Karel De Gucht, the European trade commissioner, said in a
statement.

The deal immediately met with ferocious criticism from the European
manufacturers that had filed the complaint, and it complicates a
similar dispute between the United States and China.

Mr. De Gucht's decision in June to carry out his threat to impose
tariffs on solar panels from China generated significant fears within
the union about retribution from China. Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany called for further negotiations to avoid harm to German
exporters. European importers of solar products from China also
opposed the tariffs.

At the time, Mr. De Gucht said he had been left with no choice but to
impose the tariffs since his investigators found a systematic effort
by Chinese companies to sell solar panels in Europe below the cost of
making them, a practice known as dumping.

On Saturday, officials at the European Commission said they could not
give details of the deal, including the price that Chinese exporters
would pay to sell their panels in Europe, until the arrangement had
been formally approved by the commission. But a European Union
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal had not
yet been formally approved, said the two sides had agreed to a minimum
price of 0.56 euros per watt (74 cents), which would base any
potential surcharge on the amount of electricity generated by each
imported panel.

The European solar manufacturers who lobbied for tougher action
against the Chinese exporters on Saturday promised to sue over the
settlement.

The agreement "is contrary in every respect to European law," said
Milan Nitzschke, the president of EU ProSun, an industry group. A
minimum price of 0.55 to 0.57 euros was at the level of "the current
dumping price for Chinese modules," the group said in a statement.

The arrangement would cover exports from 90 of about 140 Chinese
exporters that were examined during the investigation, and that
represent 60 percent of the panels sold in Europe, the government
official said. Those 90 companies would no longer face tariffs that
were put in place in June. Chinese exporters that did not agree to the
terms will still face tariffs that are set to rise to 47.6 percent on
Aug. 6 from the current level of 11.8 percent, the official said.

The Chinese government hoped from the start of the trade case with the
European Union for a negotiated settlement instead of a legal battle.
This deal comes as a relief, said He Weiwen, the co-director of the
China-United States-European Union Study Center at the China
Association of International Trade in Beijing.

The European settlement with Beijing in some ways complicates a
similar dispute between the United States and China. The United States
Commerce Department imposed final anti-dumping and anti-subsidy
tariffs last spring on imports of solar panels from China. China
responded on July 18 that it was preparing to impose tariffs of more
than 50 percent on polysilicon, the main material for solar panels, on
imports from the United States and South Korea.

The United States began trying in early summer to arrange a
comprehensive deal among Beijing, Brussels and Washington that would
set new global trade arrangements for solar panels in exchange for the
removal of the American tariffs and the preliminary European tariffs.
But faced with a complex process in the United States for removing
tariffs once the Commerce Department has made them final, the European
Union pushed ahead with its own negotiations with China, a Senate aide
with detailed knowledge of the issue said on Friday.

"The administration has been doing the right thing on this, pushing
for talks and trying to get a joint settlement with Europe, but the
Europeans have not had the same attitude and instead are pursuing
talks with China independently of the U.S., which has stalled progress
on U.S.-China talks," said the aide, who spoke anonymously because of
the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative, which is part of
the White House, had no immediate response to the European deal, which
was announced shortly before dawn in Washington.

Solar panels represent more than 6 percent of China's exports to the
Continent, making them one of the largest Chinese exports to the
European Union. In 2011, Chinese exports of panels and their main
components to the European Union were worth about 21 billion euros or
$27.4 billion.

China grew from a tiny player in the global solar panel market five
years ago to the world's dominant producer now through a program of
enormous lending by state-owned banks and a wide variety of
manufacturing incentives by local and provincial governments. That has
allowed Chinese producers to drive down the price of panels by
three-quarters over the same period.

But Chinese manufacturers have expanded faster than the market, and
the largest of them now face severe financial difficulties.

James Kanter reported from Brussels and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.
Copyright http://www.nytimes.com/

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Google Asks Glass Developers To Start Working On Android-Based Apps Ahead Of Glass Development Kit Launch

It looks like Google is about to unleash a new wave of more powerful
applications for Google Glass. Currently, Glass developers can only
build apps that are essentially web-based services that talk to the
user's hardware through a set of relatively limited APIs. At its I/O
developer conference earlier this year, Google announced that it would
soon release its so-called Glass Development Kit (GDK), which would
let them build Android-based apps for Glass that can run directly on
the device.

So far, however, Google hasn't launched the GDK. Instead, Google today
encouraged developers who are waiting for the GDK to start working on
Android apps for Glass using the standard Android SDK (API Level 15)
to try out their ideas.

As Google notes, developers can use the SDK to access low-level
hardware to render OpenGL and use stock Android UI widgets, for
example. Developers can also access the accelerometer of Glass through
the SDK.

Glass, after all, runs Android 4.0.4, so it's a pretty well-known
platform for many developers. To help newcomers get started, though,
the company also released a number of sample apps (a stopwatch,
compass and level) today that highlight some of the things developers
can do with Android on Glass. Over the next few weeks, Glass team
member Alain Vongsouvanh writes on Google+ today, the team will also
use these sample apps to "demonstrate the migration path between a
traditional Android app and a full Glass experience."

For Glass to reach its full potential, developers need better access
to the device's hardware, so it's nice to see Google moving ahead with
this. It's still a bit of a surprise that Google hasn't released the
GDK yet. And the fact that it made today's announcement indicates that
it could still be a few weeks out. If you're a Glass developer,
though, now is probably a good time to start thinking about how you
would use Android on Glass.
Copyright Contains http://techcrunch.com/

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-Singer-songwriter JJ Cale dead at 74 after heart attack

Grammy award winning singer and songwriter JJ Cale, one of the most
versatile musicians of his era who played everything from rock and
roll to blues and jazz, has died after suffering a heart attack, his
official website said on Saturday.

Cale, who was 74, won a Grammy award in 2008 for "The Road to
Escondido," which he recorded with singer-songwriter Eric Clapton.


Born in Oklahoma City, Cale migrated to Los Angeles in the 1960s and
flourished. Rock legend Neil Young once described Cale as the best
electric guitar player he had ever seen other than the late Jimmy
Hendrix.

Cale's official website said he died on Friday night at Scripps
Hospital in La Jolla, California. There were no immediate plans for
memorial services, the website said.
Copyright Contains http://www.reuters.com/
(Reporting by Greg McCune; Editing by Vicki Allen)

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