Miami Vice (2006)

Miami Vice (2006)
dir. Michael Mann
viewed on: 2007-10-13
rating: 3.5

I can't say I watched the TV series much, mostly because I wasn't really into cop dramas when I was ten years old. It seemed sort of cool, though, and fun in that it didn't seem to take itself too seriously. The movie is the opposite. It takes itself WAY too seriously-- or, at least the characters (good guys and bad guys alike) never smile and rarely crack a joke. I realize the drug trade and drug war are serious business, but does it commonly cause constipation? 'Cause that's what everyone looked like: constipated... which, come to think of it, is sort of ironic given the crappiness of the movie.

Though the plot is about Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) trying to infiltrate a major Columbian drug cartel, the focus is on the sort of forbidden romance between Crockett and the drug lord's top aide / concubine, played by Gong Li. But even then, the movie seems to be more about mood than about... anything. Stuff happens, there's a shoot-out, yada, yada, yada. I was so bored after about 45 minutes that I stopped paying attention and instead worked on setting up a wireless network in my apartment.

I have almost zero skill when it comes to computer networking, so after some fruitless tinkering on my own, I searched the web ad nauseum trying to figure out why my shiny new Apple Airport Extreme base station was not working with my AT&T DSL, beyond the obvious fact that AT&T is lame to begin with. (Would it kill them to write a decent guide to setting up a wireless network? Isn't writing a good set of instructions cheaper than hiring tech support staff?) It was night, so calling tech support was out of the question. I wasn't keen on it anyway, since not only do you have to wait on hold, but when you finally get through it seems to take forever for them to walk you through a problem. I tried lots of keyword search combinations on Google and got several near misses: every time, the potentially useful page ended up referring to a different DSL modem than I had, or a different Mac model, or a different Mac OS, or an older version of Airport, etc., etc. I thought Macs were supposed to be easy. Sheesh.

Anyway, finally, FINALLY... I threw in everything I could think of:

wireless networking at&t yahoo speedstream 4100 airport extreme

Third result on google:
http://community.livejournal.com/macosx/5545889.html

Bingo! Someone in some forum had the exact problem I did. (Of course, it took a while to then follow this solution and change my DSL modem to PPPoE mode... whatever the hell that is.)

Out of curiosity (and because I still wasn't interested in watching Miami Vice, which by this point was nearly over), I tried some of my searches on Ask.com and Yahoo. I got some similar hits to Google, but mostly crap. And for the final, prize-winning search, the link was nowhere to be found on either Ask.com or Yahoo. Ask returned only three hits (plus a bunch of ads), and Yahoo essentially truncated the search to "wireless" which was about the most useless search ever. Oh good, 1 trillion hits. I'll just click through those now. So, at least in this instance, Google was the better search engine.

I'm not sure what the point of that digression into wireless networking and search mechanics was, but if it bored you, good. Now you know how boring Miami Vice is. I just saved you about two hours.