Old friend/Earphones/ Deja Vu

One line synopsis: Deja Vu is a movie about a police investigaor trying this best to reverse tragic happennings when he chanced upon a method to look back into the past, and to possibly change it.

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Met up with secondary school pal F, talking about movies and music and stuff like it was year 2000 all over again. Thank goodness for friendships that never change! Too bad most everyone we knew were either busy or overseas, so it was only me and him splitting my free GV voucher 2 ways (too evil to keep that voucher all for myself yeah. How did I get my voucher? I paid for it with my own blood. Blood donation drive, that is.)Just hung around for a while and after that it was like, earphone-shopping to replace F's recently-deceased earphones.

A quick word on earphones. Usually when it comes to audio equipment, the most commonly asked question is: How do you tell if the product is good? Answer: by listening to how good it sounds!

However, the thing about earphones is that sampling booths are hard to come by (Sennheiser and Creative sometimes have listening areas at various fairs and roadshows, Sony has sampling booths in some of their showrooms.) and even if you find one, would you really plop an earphone that'd been in the ears of hundred people into your own ears? I've had 2 bouts of outer ear infections myself from in-canal earphones - and I don't even share my earphones.

To be honest, there's no good way to determine if any pair of earphones sound good. Online reviews help alot, but make sure you read a few such that you can eliminate the bias. For the lower-end market price is also one major determining factor - you can be sure that $50 earphones would sound better than a $20 pair.

Look at the size and form of the earphones for good fitting. For earbud type: big ears, big earbuds and vice versa.

Don't bother to look at the technical specifications on the back of the box, they mean nothing.

KC's recommended list for portable usage:
Foldable headphone: Sennheiser PX100 - $99
In-canal earphone: either Creative EP630 (price varies from $40 to $70) or Panasonic HJE50 $55
Plain earbuds: Almost any from the $20-$40 price range
Clip-ons: no idea, any recommendations from the readers?

F eventually got a $17 pair of earphones (against my advise!) but then he's no audio fanatic like me. I currently have 3 different sets of earphones in use - huge expensive Sennheiser headphones for home use, cheaper Creative EP630 in-canal earphones and Sony clip-ons from my MP3 player for comfort. Not to mention other earphones that're dead now or have been retired. Don't ask why! They might sound all the same to you, but it really matters to me if I can get to hear every bass note clearly, the sizzle of every hit of the hi-hat, and the breath sounds of the vocalist.

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Back to Deja Vu. It's sort of a weird movie. The pacing's quite slow and irregular, but it's no immediate-fail. If you'd watched the 1998 action flick Enemy of the State you'd like this movie by the same director, done with similar themes and style.

However, the idea of going back and forth time, while being explored in many movies so far, was quite originally done this time around. While most time-travel movies of the past focused on the 'cool' factor of time travel, this one explores the logical implications with a more sombre tone. Can we really change destiny? Will we really travelling through time, or merely travelling through alternate universes? Will changing the future or past do any good?

All in all, after watching the movie, I can't help but to feel that while the protagonist tries to save the lives of the people who died in the first reality, all he really could do after all that effort was to transport himself into another reality where those people didn't die. The people who died in the original reality, still died in that reality - what's the point?

Even if you don't dig all these pseudocientific mumbo jumbo it's probably still worth a watch, for all that action, gadgetry and twists.

Grade is 3.75 stars out of 5.