명탐정 코난: 침묵의 15분 Detective Conan: Quarter of Silence
감독: 시즈노 코분
목소리 출연: 타카야마 미나미 (에도가와 코난), 야마자키 와카나 (모리 란), 코야마 리키야(모리 코고로), 야마구치 캇페이 (쿠도 신이치)
제작사: 명탐정 코난 극장판 위원회
국내배급: 미디어데이, 얼리버드 (수입 및 공동제공), CJ E&M (공동제공)
올해도 어김없이 코난이다. 극장판만 따져도 이제 15편째를 맞게된 침묵의 15분은 스펙타클있고 손에 땀을 쥐게 만드는 액션신이 많은 편이다. 특히, 극 초반에 코난이 스케이트보드로 터널을 역주행하는 장면이나 스노우보드를 타고 눈사태에 쫓기는 장면 등은 스릴있다. 만화답다고는 하나, 7살짜리 꼬마가 이 액션을 한다는것만으로 상당히 눈길을 끈다.
하지만, 요즘 극장판이 늘 그렇듯이, 추리에는 많이 치중을 하지 못한 분위기다. 이번 작은 특히 그렇다. 후반의 액션부에 시간을 주기 위해 코난이 확실한 증거를 가지지도 못하고 진실을 밝혀내는 초유의 사태가 벌어지지를 않나, 사실 그렇게 진실이 일찍 나오더라도 그간 있었던 일을 잘 생각해보면 비슷하게나마 결론에 도달할수 있음은 물론이다. 게다가, 중간에 키타노사와 마을(국내판은 북촌 마을)을 소개하는 과정에서 너무 스토리가 늘어지는 경향이 있는 것도 아쉬웠다. (이 마을이 일본에 실제로 존재하는지조차 확인이 안된다.)
하지만, 코난 극장판다운 스펙터클은 조금 그런 면에서 약했던 천공의 난파선보다 많이 좋아졌다는 점에서 추가점을 주고 싶고, 그리고 웬일로 아가사 박사의 퀴즈가 일본어 장난이 아니라는 것도 재밌는 요소다. 게다가, 자막판은 어떠한 지역화도 거치지 않은 개념번역으로 코난 팬들에게 엄청난 찬사를 받고 있다. 문제는 자막판이 이제 남은곳이 얼마 없다는거… 심지어 7광구보다도 재밌단다.
출연 Cast: 크리스 에반스 Chris Evans (스티브 로저스/캡틴 아메리카 Steve Rogers/Captain America), 휴고 위빙 Hugo Weaving (요한 슈미트/레드 스컬 Johann Schmidt/Red Skull), 헤일리 앳웰 Haley Atwell (페기 카터 Peggy Carter), 토미 리 존스 Tommy Lee Jones (체스터 필립스 Chester Phillips)
제작사 Studio: 마블 스튜디오 Marvel Studios
배급사 Distributor: 파라마운트 Paramount Pictures
마블의 슈퍼히어로 기원 공식을 그대로 따르는 영화. 자체로서 봤을때는 상당히 재밌게 볼수 있다. 판타스틱 4의 휴먼 토치에서 캡틴 아메리카로 직종을 갈아탄 크리스 에반스는 이 영화에서 꽤나 선전하는 편이고, 페이싱이 좀 과도하게 빠른 부분도 몇몇 있었지만, 그것이 지속되는 경향은 없었다.
다만, 정말 아쉬웠던 부분은, 캡틴 아메리카의 단독 이야기로서의 잠재성이 내년에 개봉할 어벤져스로 인해 완전히 짓밟혔다는 점이다. 이 영화는 아이언 맨 2나 토르: 천둥의 신처럼 어벤져스 떡밥은 없었지만, 결론적으로 이의 바로 뒤 이야기가 어벤져스임을 감안할때, 영화 자체가 떡밥이 되버린다는 치명적 문제점이 있다. 즉, 장면장면마다 이를 느끼는것이 아니라, 영화 전체가 내년에 나올 영화의 예고편이라는 생각이 많이 들게 만든다. (실제로, 이 영화의 끝에는 어벤져스의 티저 예고편이 삽입되어 있다.)
그런 관계로, 캡의 1940년대 동료들은 모두 가차없이 버려진다. (영화의 대부분은 배경이 1942년이다) 캡이 일단 현대로 와야하기 때문에(어떻게 오게 되는지는 스포일러) 이들의 이야기는 발전할 기회도 잡지 못하고 바로 소멸당한다. 이들의 이야기에 대해서 충분히 풀지도 못하고 급하게 어벤져스로 넘어가는 분위기가 굉장히 아쉬운 영화였다.
Captain America: The First Avenger directly follows Marvel’s equation of superhero origin movies. I really enjoyed the movie. Chris Evans, who changed his job from Human Torch in Fantastic 4 to Captain America, made the transition quite well, and while there were some way-to-quick pacing issues, it did not last for long.
However, the biggest bum with the movie was that the potential of Captain America as a story arc has completely disappeared thanks to a movie opening next year, The Avengers. While there weren’t excessive references to The Avengers, such as Iron Man 2 or Thor, but the whole movie itself feels like a giant reference. Well, I think the whole movie feeling like a giant preview of The Avengers would be the right term. (Actually, the post-credits scene of this movie is actually the teaser trailer of The Avengers.)
So, Cap’s 1940s buddies are all just abandoned by the end of this movie. (The movie takes place in 1942) Since Cap has to come to the present somehow (I won’t tell you how) the story of these characters are just dead, even without a little hope of expanding. It felt like this movie was created to just advertise The Avengers, which was a huge bum. (But then, probably that’s the main purpose of this movie.)
“We’re inspired by some of those innovations (in iOS). And we want to bring them back to the Mac.”
Steve Jobs said this as he introduced OS X Lion in last October. iOS was based on OS X, and made a lot of innovation in the past four years of its life, some of them even more innovative then its father.
Now, it’s time for the father to learn back from its son. So, how did that work out?
Install
OS X Lion’s installation process can be described as either most innovative, or most radical.
Firstly, the proper way to install Lion is to buy it from the Mac App Store. If you think about installing operating system, it usually involves a disc put into the computer, then go through 40 minutes of some gibberishes. But, with Lion, you download the install file, launch it, and let it do its thing, and you’re done. The whole process took about half an hour on my early 2008 MacBook Pro, which is from equal to faster than that of Snow Leopard.
If you happen to live in an internet dark zone, Apple has got some solutions for you: you can either get a little help from Genius Bar in Apple Stores and download it there using the stores’ blazing fast WiFi, or you can buy a USB stick that contains Lion. Just letting you know, the thumbdrive costs $69, a $40 premium over $29 from the App Store. (But with this, you may be able to update to Lion even from Leopard.) You can clearly see that Apple is trying to make you install it from the App Store.
Overall Look and Feel
When you first boot Lion, the new login screen greets you. There are bubbles of icons resembling each account on the brushed-metal-looking background which clearly is from the iOS. It does remind me of the login screen from the company up above, but while the Windows 7 tends to be vibrant and fancy, Lion kept things simple.
After the login, you’ll be greeted with something very familiar. The desktop itself hasn’t changed that much from that of Snow Leopard. But there are subtle changes enough to confuse you.
When you first login to Lion after the install, it tries to teach you about the new inverted scrolling. It’s basically scrolling in a computer as you know it, only in backwards. It sounds simple, but it takes time to get used to it. Apple took this idea from… iOS, obviously. Just try to do the scrolling in an iPhone or iPad. You’ll get what I mean. Of course, scrolling on a Mac is rather indirect that scrolling in iOS, so it takes time to get used to it. It took me about half an hour to get used to it when I was using Developer Preview (it took longer to go back the conventional scrolling when I came back to Snow Leopard), but if you insist that you’ll never get used to it, you can revert it in System Preferences.
Influence of iOS doesn’t end on scrolling. Not only now the scroll bar disappears when you don’t need it, but now the whole scrolling has that rubber band feeling from iOS, such as the bouncing action when you reach the bottom.
Finally, the design of selection buttons, progress bars and window action buttons has changed. They look cleaner than those in Snow Leopard.
Gestures
Lion has various new gestures. Listing all of them would just hurt my fingers, so that’s one of the three pages of gestures info.
If you use those fancy new MacBooks, these gestures are pretty welcoming. If you have older ones or have older hardware accessories, $30 won’t be the minimum of money you pay as you upgrade to Lion. Not only getting used to these new gestures is a task, since Apple did change things around a lot, but if you have older generation of hardwares that don’t have multitouch pointing input, things aren’t easy as you try to navigate through. Even my two-year-old Magic Mouse, with Apple’s customization trying to fit in the gestures for Lion, struggles. At least my MacBook Pro was the first to have multitouch trackpad, and that even struggles in some of them because it has less space than the trackpads in new ones. If you use mice other than Magic Mouse, you’ll probably need to blast through about $69. I personally recommend Magic Trackpad.
Lion represents OS X’s complete transition to gesture-based navigation, so if you don’t get used to it, you can never use Lion to its full potential. Not to say you won’t be able to use it, but gestures provide so many shortcuts to otherwise tedious tasks. Making matters even worse, Apple decided to change around almost all the gestures, so even the Mac faithfuls will need some time to get used to these gestures. I think Apple went way ahead into the future on this one.
Launchpad
Let’s talk about something else that I didn’t like about Lion. The Launchpad. When you turn it on, the Mac becomes a 15-inch iPad. That’s how I felt about this. Sure, I’m used to this view on my iPhone and iPad, but do I really need to see this on my Mac? Even worse… I have to organize this stuff. It has all those jiggly actions that Steve loves, and you can even uninstall an app from here, though that app has to be downloaded from the App Store. You can even create folders, using same actions as its iOS counterpart. I see no point in this. I already have great app organization tools such as Dock and Stacks, why do I need a third way?
Full Screen
Lion finally supports full screen view of an app. Although it’s quite a late foray into this charted-by-Windows territory, Apple has decided to do things a bit different: Lion assigns a Space to each app that is in full screen. This move maximizes the use of the screen real-estate, which really is a boon for users with a small screen, such as 11-inch MacBook Air or 13-inch MacBook Pro. The only problem with this is that once in full screen, there’s no way to use the secondary display you have. This is perfectly understandable on an iPad, which has NO secondary display, but it’s no excuse on the Mac.
Mission Control
Let me just get this out of the way: Mission Control is my favorite new feature of Lion. I have to be honest, I’m an Exposé junkie. It makes navigation through windows that quick, and I never thought there would be a way to improve this. And well, Apple has done it.
Mission Control is Exposé on steroids, then eating up Dashboard and Spaces. When launched, you can see the Exposé of current Space, then previews of the other Spaces, Dashboard, and even apps in full screen. You can then swiftly navigate into other space you have to go. Also, using multitouch gestures, you can swiftly navigate through spaces. If you have various full screen apps running, Mission Control is a must-have.
One gripe that I have about it is that you cannot move Spaces around. The manual (and very confusing) way to do it is to to click on the icon in the Dock, making it to move up on the list. But I need something stronger than this. It is really confusing because I distinctly remember Snow Leopard could rearrange Spaces with no problem.
Auto Save and Versions
It’s 3 AM. You have a paper due the following morning. You’re working on that very paper. Suddenly, your whole apartment complex lost power. Your computer, being a desktop, loses power. First, surprise comes to you, but then it is suddenly eclipsed by the worst panic you’ve experienced. “I lost all of it! What am I supposed to do?!” Next day, you explain what happened to the professor. Some would give you extension, but most would say this: “You should’ve saved.”
That is right, saving whatever you’ve been doing is something you have to learn as a second nature. People learn it, mostly through the hard way. However, Apple has thought, ‘If users have to save their documents all the time, why do they have to do it?’ Thus comes Auto Save, a concept that Apple has also borrowed from iOS. If you think about it, whatever you do on an iPad, everything auto saves. Have you seen an app saying “Would you like save what you’ve done?” as you exit to home screen? Probably not.
Lion saves every single change done on a document and such on system-wide. (In order to save space, it only saves on a delta basis.) Thus, even if the event described above occurs, since the system already saved the document for you, you have much less work lost. Heck, you might not have even lost anything.
It doesn’t end there. Apple has more tricks up its sleeve when it comes to Auto Save. If you like the current version, you can lock it, so that the system does not overwrite what you like, or you can create a duplicate, so that you can save the version you like as a separate file, and work from there. However, the best thing about all this is the restoring the previous version. Remember what I’ve said about Lion saving all the deltas on your file? Well, now it shows all the changes you’ve done over time, something like Time Machine, but for your document. It even has a Time Machine-like interface. You can compare previous versions to the current version, and you can restore it, or you can even pull one thing (i.e a picture that you have deleted in the current version) from a previous one into the current version.
Auto Save has a potential to change the old habits that you always forget. One thing to reflect that is that as of this writing, I have never pressed save button on Pages. Of course, Auto Save is a separate Lion API that developers have implement to their apps, so future of not saving your progress every damn second is still little distant. But, it’s not as far as it used to be.
Resume
Resume feature is simply put, loading up the previous state before the app was quit when it is re-launched. For example, if you quit Safari (or Safari crashes) and re-launch it, Safari would have all the tabs that you had opened saved in its memory to pull it up. Not only just in apps, but Lion also supports Resume on system-wide, restoring all the apps and sessions in those apps that the user has kept opened before shutting down the system. This is a great feature, but it’s greatly performance-driven. I’ll get onto that in performance section.
Managing your Life and Accounts
I like to call Mail, iCal, and Address Book “Life Manager” apps. Past three years since I’ve started using the Mac, these apps has become essential part of my life. And now, those apps have changed in a big way.
Let’s start with Mail. Now it look pretty similar with the iPad counterpart. While the old version had a vertical split view of message list and the actual message on the right, and list of folders on the left, now it’s horizontal split view, just like the iPad if you look from landscape. I think this method uses the screen estate much more efficiently. Also, now you can hide the folder view on your left, and drag folders you visit the most to create something like Bookmarks Bar in Safari. Finishing it all off, now the Lion client also supports conversation threads, just like its counterpart in iOS 4.
Now, onto iCal and Contacts. Let me just say this: they’re a complete ripoff of the iPad version. Even to its book-like design. I already know my good friend Alex Slover hates this, but I did hear there’s a third-party workaround for this. But let’s just move on from that.
While Contacts hasn’t changed that much except for new looks, iCal went through significant changes. First, Reminders (also a new feature on iOS 5) has moved from Mail (which was Todo) to iCal, which seems much more appropriate place. Also, it features new day view (which was already there in iPad) and year view (also a new feature in iOS 5), and you can add events quickly via Quick Add. Say, if you type it “Quick meeting at 3 PM on Tuesday”, iCal automatically figures out the timestamp and automatically adds the event for you. Also if you have not entered time, it switches the event into an all-day event.
iCal and Contacts also finally supports push update. While until Snow Leopard, you had to wait for the whole system in 15 minutes interval to sync, now with Lion, each app can push the update right after the change occurred.
Last but not least, Lion features the new Accounts menu in System Preferences, just like iOS.
App Store
While the App Store was already came with an update in Snow Leopard, it is finally integrated into Lion. Lion supports in-app purchase, delta updates, and also push notifications, allowing apps to notify you even when the app is not running.
AirDrop
AirDrop enables users to wirelessly drop files into other Lion-supporting Macs. It is directly integrated into Finder, and when there’s a AirDrop-supported Mac in vicinity, it shows up in AirDrop tab. And then you can directly drop a file, and when the receiver accepts the file transfer, the file will transfer into the receiver’s Downloads folder. It does not even need a WiFi network, since AirDrop supports peer-to-peer connection. Sadly, AirDrop has hardware requirements, and my old MacBook Pro did not meet it.
Other small stuffs
With the new QuickTime X on Lion, you can merge multiple clips, and also export audio from the video, which was a missing feature from QuickTime 7 Pro.
Spotlight has seen multiple improvements as well. Firstly, you can drop the file you’ve found on Spotlight onto Desktop. This will make a copy of the particular file, making the file much easier to do tasks such as uploading it using a web browser, or sending it through email. You can now also search the web or Wikipedia directly from Spotlight, and it finally supports Quick Look, not only the file, but also cached websites. Thanks to all these new features, Lion takes much longer to index in the first boot. I advise you to leave it alone. Especially if you’re using an old Mac.
iChat finally supports tabbed chat window, so that you don’t have to leave messy chat windows on the desktop. What still baffles me is why is this and FaceTime still not integrated to each other.
In case of Finder, things are much simpler. Maybe, way too simpler. My personal gripe is that the additional pane that shows the remaining storage space of the specific drive is invisible by default. I figured out a way to turn it back on, but I don’t know why Apple is way too overdoing itself when simplifying the computer operating system.
System
Pop quiz: Which app is open?
If you buy the new MacBook Air or happen to clean install Lion, very confusing instance occurs: the light that indicates an app is open is no longer there. To walk back a bit, this was standard in Developer Preview version of Lion, even when you have actually upgraded from Snow Leopard. This caused a bit of chaos for all-time (or old-time) Mac users. “How am I supposed to know if an app is turned on?!” This is kinda important, since closing a window doesn’t mean the app is fully quit unlike Windows, so you have to quit it so that you can manage memory.
Turns out, Apple pondered a question (again): “If users have to quit apps all the time, why do they have to do it?” Thus, Apple decided to adopt the radical method: implementing the memory management process of iOS.
For a quick refresher course, here’s how iOS manage memory on a device like iPhone: while the OS saves the app state into the device’s memory, but when it starts to get full, iOS automatically kills the app of which state has not been reloaded for the longest time. Lion has the almost similar system, except one small difference: in order to avoid any confusion, Apple also added another condition that the particular app that OS X is about to close should not have any windows running. This would be a great move for switchers, since it takes most of them some time to get used to the concept that closing the window and quitting the app are two separate process. However, if you’re a long-time Mac user and can’t get used to it, you can turn this on in System Preferences.
Many people asked me how can they reinstall Lion, if it can be installed only from the App Store. Well, that’s where Recovery HD comes in. Recovery HD is a separate partition that has very important purpose: it restores your OS X partition. Not only you can restore the Time Machine backup of the whole drive, it also has Disk Utility, OS reinstall feature, and even Safari so that you can browse support documents. (yes, Apple actually says that) If your partition happens to be bust, Recovery HD can download a new copy of OS X from Apple’s servers. If you happen to replace your whole drive? I guess you should make a bootable DVD or a stick. (which is totally possible. Just Google it)
Apple also reinforced security measures in Lion. All the apps are sandboxed, which means even if one app is infected with malicious code, it will not affect the entire system. Same applied to Safari, sandboxing each websites.
(Oh, and answer to the question above? It’s Safari and Chrome.)
Performance & Compatibility
With Lion, Apple cut down the support of Macs with Core Duo CPUs in. With that in mind, Lion definitely feels heavier than Snow Leopard. However, once everything was in shape, it ran quite smoothly.
The biggest problem though, was the booting process. It takes about twice as long as Snow Leopard took. And when you use Resume feature to bring back all the apps you’ve used before the Mac shut down, it takes even longer. I guess this won’t be big of an issue on a system with faster hardware (or even just SSD), it starts to become an issue when you have slow hardware, like myself. I ordered a new hard drive to counter the issue, so let’s see how it goes.
Also, there were some issues with WiFi. It had no problem connecting to networks that the system already remember, it had a lot of issues connecting to a new one from scanning to actually connecting to it. Not only took almost three times the time it would take in Snow Leopard, I had to deal with numerous connection failures.
As compatibility issues are concerned, most apps that I used with Snow Leopard ran without a hitch. However, if you’re using PowerPC apps, (such as Office 2004) since Apple took out Rosetta, the PowerPC app emulation layer, you may want to buy the new version or find substitutes.
Wrap-up
Many people expected OS X Lion to be the last of OS X. One of the evidence was that Apple named it Lion, after the king of all big cats. Only Apple, or just Steve Jobs even, may know the answer to this question, but to me, OS X Lion is all about beginning OS X’s long way to the future. Just looking at the new feature set, and and quite an amount of system automation clearly resembles iOS.
As I said, Lion is halfway there. While there are over 250 new features that improves the use of the OS, it feels like the whole OS is not yet fully baked. Most pondering question is, “Why did Apple take this out as default?” Of course, there are many little tweaks that can be reverted back to settings in Snow Leopard (natural scrolling, dock lights, etc), but it seems Apple had some struggles in balancing out the difference between mobile operating system and full-on computer operating system.
However, I still think Lion is superior to Snow Leopard. It clearly still is a step forward, and better, with all these new features, it only costs $30. I just hope you’re good with getting used to changes.
Apple OS X Lion Price: $29.99
Pros:
Simple install
Pretty convenient system automation
Mission Control
30 bucks for an operating system.
Cons
Launchpad is useless
Gestures that take some time to get used to.
Natural scrolling (easier than gestures, but still takes time)
명탐정 코난: 침묵의 15분 Detective Conan: Quarter of Silence
