2010.03.09

March 8th, 2010 Metapost

00.00.04 - Mark

Eye Candy [list of other movies]

The Hurt Locker Rated 4.0 stars for The Hurt Locker
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) Rated 4.5 stars for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

Link | 0 Comments |


2010.02.19

February 18th, 2010 Metapost

00.00.02 - Mark

Eye Candy [list of other movies]

Yes Man (2008) Rated 3.5 stars for Yes Man (2008)

Link | 0 Comments |


2010.02.14

February 13th, 2010 Metapost

00.00.02 - Mark

Elsewhere Online [collection of past links]

Cool Tools: No-Knead Bread

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/004156.php
Tagged : bread cooltools food ideas kk recipies todo

Saw this a while ago, but I'm actually trying it now, and hoping it's worth linking to.

Eye Candy [list of other movies]

Get Smart (2008) Rated 4.0 stars for Get Smart (2008)

Link | 0 Comments |


2010.02.11

February 10th, 2010 Metapost

00.00.02 - Mark

Eye Candy [list of other movies]

9 (2009) Rated 4.0 stars for 9 (2009)

Link | 0 Comments |


2010.02.05

February 4th, 2010 Metapost

00.00.02 - Mark

Eye Candy [list of other movies]

Hardwired (2009) Rated 3.5 stars for Hardwired (2009)

Link | 0 Comments |


2010.02.01

January 31st, 2010 Metapost

00.00.02 - Mark

Eye Candy [list of other movies]

Frost/Nixon Rated 4.5 stars for Frost/Nixon
Dollhouse: The Complete Second Season Rated 4.5 stars for Dollhouse: The Complete Second Season

Link | 0 Comments |


2010.01.19

January 18th, 2010 Metapost

00.00.03 - Mark

Elsewhere Online [collection of past links]

First-Person Tetris

http://www.firstpersontetris.com/
Tagged : flash games puzzles tetris

A literally twisted version of Tetris, which makes it a fun little puzzle. It would be either more entertaining and/or more sickening if it was using the accelerometer on an iPhone / iPod touch to control it. [via BoingBoing]

Religion of Comic Book Characters (esp. Super-Heroes)

http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/comic_book_religion.html
Tagged : articles comics fiction ideas religion

I enjoy comics, but I'll admit that I never put alot of thought into the religions of the characters, from beliefs in the real world to created faiths created within their universe. And while the wide range itself is interesting, there are also notes on the religions of the creators. [via neatorama]

Les Dangereux - A Ninja Love Story

http://www.lesdangereux.com/
Tagged : animations funny ninja videos

Fun little video I found [via notcot]

E.T.A. by JUNK on Vimeo

http://vimeo.com/1165693
Tagged : animation films funny movies scifi space

Somehow easy to find good little short films today, this one fits well aftr I watched Moon the other day [via Laughing Squid]

Eye Candy [list of other movies]

Moon Rated 5.0 stars for Moon

Link | 0 Comments |


2008.02.10

A Collection of Thoughts

22.54.59 - Mark

I've been lazy this past week. There have been things I've wanted to say, but nothing that really deserved it's own post So I'm going to lump a few together. There's some other stuff that I want to get out, but deserve more thought and longer posts - like how "old media" still can't produce a useful website, even after 15 years of the world wide web and a solid five years since "new media" platforms like blogging started appearing in a big way.

First up I finished George Carlin's When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops last week, and while I enjoy Carlin's material it felt like binge reading a thing-a-day calendar. I'm pretty sure they formatted it so it was easy to stop after 5 or 10 pages, which in a way helps but for a book that has a list price of $24 (I was given the hard cover edition as a gift) you would hope there's at least a little continuity.

Next, Voice actors are amazing. Period. Almost entirely unrecognized and it's a true shame. I love animation and have been chewing though some "old" cartoons from the mid to late 90's (back before the FCC's Educational and Informational rules kicked in, when Saturday morning cartoons still existed and didn't totally suck) as well as some more recent stuff (like Futurama) and it's amazing when you watch these shows and realize that in a recording booth somewhere, these guys are having conversations with themselves. It's great when you can just see (or hear) these people working - like the Simpsons episode of Inside the Actors Studio or some of the DVD extras - The live reading of the comic on Bender's Big Score comes to mind. It's a shame that more and more animated movies want to fill ranks with celebrity voices. Afro Samurai strikes a good balance - a few big name voices supported by some voice actors.

Third, and kind of similar to voice acting I never realized how amazing Who Framed Rodger Rabbit? was, and how it's the sort of movie that would never get made today. Intellectual property lawyers, standards and practices, animators, and celebrity voices would totally ruin the thing before it got started. You would never see alcoholic detectives helping cartoons, kids with cigarettes, social commentary (the description of freeways is far from positive) the same level of animated violence, or some of the more sexual scenes and obfuscated language in the easter eggs. Maybe some of them, but not all of them. It's a treat

Link | 0 Comments |


2008.01.09

A Year of Rating Stuff

22.10.20 - Mark

For the last year I've been rating the books and movies I've read or watched (and then bothered looking up on Amazon) and I just entered the last book I finished (Scalzi's The Android's Dream) and I skimmed over the 25 books and 100 or so movies I've rated in the last year and started thinking about how I actually rate them.

Books I tend to rate higher. I'm using an 10 point scale (5 stars in half star increments) and I tend to rate high. The lowest rating I've given was 3 stars to William Gibson's Spook County which was lower than the 3.5 I gave to Children of Men (the book, not the movie) which is off because I liked Spook Country a whole lot more than Children of Men.

I think part of the reason is I was comparing Spook County to other Gibson works that I love, and felt that Spook Country wasn't hitting the same pace. In a similar vein I was comparing Children of Men to the movie. The movie was amazing (and is one of the few that I've bought since getting Netflix) but the book was slow and had a lot less action, I'm not the type who likes reading scenes that take place in Bed and Breakfasts. The other part is that I have a low tolerance for bad books if something is less than average - like the books you're forced to read in High School English class, or ill advised college textbooks that get selected because there was a great sales pitch from the publisher - I don't finish it.

To an extent the same is true with movies. If I managed to sit though the Dukes of Hazzard with out massive brain damage I'd probably rate it under 1 star (I've got the common sense to walk away when it's on) but I've got a higher tolerance for bad movies that only eat up an hour or two of my life (I managed to walk away from The Fast and the Furious 3 - Toyko Drift more or less unharmed and it got 2.5 stars) Overall though, I rate movies more on enjoyment than cinematography or story, or plot, or acting. Snakes on a Plane (which got points for campiness) is a whole different beast than Helvetica (a smart visual documentary about fonts) and they don't have anything in common with The Last King of Scotland (which had great acting) but I gave all three 5 stars.

Something to think about if you ever look at my ratings.

Link | 0 Comments |


2007.12.03

Tin Man

00.29.48 - Mark

Scifi channel has been hyping Tin Man (their big budget overly sponsored miniseries movie thing for the year) since last December, and I haven't been paying much attention to it since the whole "Wizard of Oz" remake thing just wasn't that attracting to me. I'm not a fan of the bright sun shinny fantasy world we see in the 1939 version (which like most people is the only version I'm really familiar with).

However with nothing much else on tonight when it started I turned it on and I'm glad I did. The acting is solid and the writing is enjoyable (even if the revamped scarecrow's lines are a little too good for someone lacking a brain). I love the visual aesthetic of Tin Man - some of it's a little unworldly (hovering cyborgs), but there are huge swatches of steampunk that get backed up with some steampunk character and world elements. Like the Battlestar Galattica reimaging, it's not trying to paint a Utopian picture, it's a darker grittier world where we get to see real problems and how the characters make tought decisions to overcome. However it still throws out referances to the source material that keep you paying close attention (I was reminded of a few when I looked over the wikipedia entry for the original book).

Tin man is a real treat to watch since it's more on par with a major movie production than what you expect from a made-for-TV movie.

My only real complaint with it so far is the CGI. This wouldn't be a problem, except Sci Fi has this horrible habit of getting the cheapest computer generated animations available, as if they dumpster dive at all the major CGI firms and walk away with 10 year old backups that they then hack into new movies. For example the Tornadoes in Tin Man look worse than the ones I remember being in Twister from 1996. Any SciFi channel original picture with a giant killer wave will always look far worse than what was created for The Perfect Storm in 2000. I'm willing to admit that Twister and The Perfect Storm had bigger budgets for special effects, but Moore's Law has had a clear effect on special effects - just look at the problems Hollywood is having with the Uncanny Valley. There's no good reason that the Scifi Channel (whose main audience by definition is geeks) should have shitty visual effects.

Link | 0 Comments |


2007.11.07

Law of Hollywood #22

18.12.39 - Mark

All remakes suck, it's almost a law of movie making, a corollary to the rule all sequels suck. Yes there are exceptions, but they're generally few and tend not to use a lot of the source material. They certainly don't start with classic examples of great movies either, so I'm really not looking forward to this news about a Day the Earth Stood Still remake, and I somehow doubt the monster that is Hollywood will stop making it if I start yelling Klaatu barada nikto

Link | 0 Comments |


2007.10.13

Another reason I hate DRM

20.32.54 - Mark

I've ranted on DRM before (I may have even started a post like that before), but when it's wasting my money, I tend to get upset. I'm a happy Netflix customer, I've slowed down my watching a lot since I first started but I still like the service. I'd like it more if I could use their watch now feature, but right now I can't. It would be one thing if the software on their end wasn't there yet, but it's not. As Hacking Netflix points out the watch now stuff works just fine on the Mac (I've checked on the Mac, but not the Ubuntu box) It's the fucking DRM that's depriving me use of my Netflix account and the 17 hours of video I could be getting every month.

Link | 0 Comments |


2007.10.02

Insomnia Film Fest - the Sequel

01.37.02 - Mark

Apple is running another Insomnia Film Festival this year. I thought about entering last year, but I don't qualify this year.

They must have gotten a great response from it last year since they've really scaled it up. They've opened it up to high school students, they seem seem to be promising a lot more publicity, and there's a much larger prize package (5 MacBooks, with copies of Final Cut, Shake, and Logic, as opposed to just software last year)

Can't wait to see what this year's teams produce. They produced some great films last year

Link | 0 Comments |


2007.09.20

Grindhouse

23.29.38 - Mark

There aren't that many movies that I want to see in theaters anymore, too many horror movies trying to induce involuntary bowel movements, tired parodies of those horror films, and cheesy comedies that while they might not be bad, they're not $10 price of admission good either, however I really wanted to see Grindhouse in theaters. Unfortunately for me the local cinema axed it after a week and I couldn't quite bring myself to driving around 3 hours to see a movie that was 3 hours.

Time passes and movies come to DVD, and yesterday Netflix provided me with a copy of disc 1 of Grindhouse Presents, Death Proof. I liked it, it was fun with everything that was promised - well at least promised by Death Proof fast cars, good explosions, weird plot ideas, classic B movie turn off your brain and enjoy entertainment.

Too bad that the enjoyment of the movie is cut off by all the stuff the distributors left out. While I liked watching the movie, I was interested in Grindhouse because it was offing a whole package. Two movies, cheesy fake trailers, everything. They're trying to screw up this release in every way possible from the near non-existent theatrical release, splitting the damned thing, doing that annoying as hell "exclusively at blockbuster" deal, and overall trying to get customers to pay upwards of $100 to get the movie as originally intended ($25 for Death Proof, $25 for Planet Terror, and probably ~50 for super special un-retarded, trailers and everything edition you know they're planning on releasing). It's almost enough to make me want to go and DL a pirated copy of the theatrical version.

Link | 0 Comments |


2007.05.31

Thank you Al Gore

09.08.09 - Mark

AMC is showing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea right now, and its one of those movies I had vague memories of but couldn't remember the title. It's an old Scifi flick, and I picked up the movie halfway though, but I've been wanting to see it for a while now, and I was a little disappointed when I saw Netflix didn't have it. turns out that there's only been one DVD release of it and that was a double billing with Fantastic Voyage in 2000. However there's a new version coming out this week, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Global Warming Edition) comes out June 5th.

I realize the movie deals with a radical global warming, but why on earth would they release any DVD (other than maybe An Inconvenient Truth) as a "Global Warming Edition"? I don't even see anything that remotely resembles mini documentaries on global warming in the otherwise impresive list of special features. I blame the Cult of Al Gore.

Hopefully netflix will buy their share of copies and I can sink my teeth into it.

Link | 0 Comments |


Impossible Dreams

01.13.02 - Mark

I love Escape Pod and with the exception of a 3 or 4 episode backlog (that I'll have cleared by Saturday) I've listened to every show since episode 1, and while I've got some favorites, I was blown away by EP105 - Impossible Dreams. I don't know that it's my favorite recording, but it's easily my favorite Escape Pod story to date. I'm not a movie buff like the characters, but I relate, and while listening to it I found myself empathizing with them far more than I do in most fiction. It's been a long time since I've been pulled into a story in the same way as Impossible Dreams (which is a 2007 hugo award nominee ) did, and that easily is worth donating some money to Escape Pod.

Link | 0 Comments |


2007.05.25

Robots in disguise

00.40.10 - Mark

I'm really looking forward to seeing Transformers this summer, even if Michael Bay has traditionally produced mediocre movies (but with great visual effects) The previews I've seen for Transformers just amaze me. The fluidity of the CGI transformations makes me want to have the highest quality copy available to view frame by frame on a 30" wide screen monitor (which means I will see it in a theater) I didn't even imprint on Transformers as a kid that much. I might have watched a stray episode here and there, but by the time I was really watching Saturday morning cartoons that had moved from the original version and onto the Beast Wars Series and that never really clicked (despite involving both robots and Mainframe Entertainment - the people behind ReBoot)

Still, I'm looking forward to the movie.

As an aside, videos that can't be downloaded suck ass. I had to stop and restart the yahoo streams on my ubuntu linux box before I could watch the trailers (and even then it got cutoff), and the yahoo stream despite opening up quicktime was choking up on my macs.

Link | 0 Comments |


2007.05.05

Spiderman

00.50.15 - Mark

If you want my favorite superhero, it's Batman, but Spiderman is an easy second. Peter Parker is a geek hero, a shy socially awkward kid who after a freak accident gains super powers and uses those powers with his brain to not only create a hero, but also almost manages to balance it with a "regular" life.

The movies have all been enjoyable, and while I can't say they remain true to the comics (I haven't really picked up comics with guys running around in tights), they seem to have the right spirit. Spiderman 3 is no different. It's two and a half hours of fun that doesn't even feel like it's 150 minutes long.

My only complaint with the series is that somehow they keep killing off or otherwise retiring the cool villains. I'll refrain from spoiling it for those of you who haven't seen it yet, but in every film they kill off at least one villain. Even with a wide variety of enemies to work with, not everyone watching these movies is familiar with the comic universe - look at how many people never catch the Stan Lee cameos (which are getting bolder all the time)

With this Spiderman being one of, if not the, most expensive films ever made (story) it wouldn't take too much for the series to jump the shark. I don't want that, but I can see it being really easy.

For now Spiderman 3 is worth watching, and worth watching in theaters. It may be cheaper to get it though Netflix in a few months, but there's no substitute for the big screen.

Aside: Today is Free Comic Book Day. I've been to the local comics place, and I'm not all that impressed with it (back corner on the second floor of a quasi-antique store), but there are a couple more dedicated comic stores in Winston I may try out.

Link | 0 Comments |


2007.04.24

F**k - It's a documentary too.

15.45.35 - Mark

I've been finding that Netflix's recommendations for me are pretty good anymore, so when Netflix started telling me that I would love F**k (4.6 out of 5) I went ahead and added it to my queue. It showed up over the weekend and I watched it yesterday. I don't quite regret renting it, but it also didn't live up to netflix's suggested rating.

F**k is a lot like The Aristocrats which I loved, except it's a whole lot weaker. Where The Aristocrats was comedy with a hint of documentary style story telling, F**k almost feels like a comedy film that had every intention of being a documentary. In an hour and a half there was plenty for me to laugh at, the producers were doing a great job of juxtaposing ultra conservatives like Pat Boone and Miss Manners with foul mouthed personalities like Ice T, Billy Connolly, George Carlin and others. So for about the first half hour they play with some of the urban legends surrounding the origins of the word, from Playboy's "Fornication Under Command of King" to it's appearance in Flen Flyys (a poem written around 1475). All in all a whole lot of good natured, foul mouthed fun. The problem with that is that I had almost written it off entirely as comedy by the time it actually got around to the 1st amendment and censorship issues 40-50 minutes into the film.

Even when it does start exploring issues and facts, they don't present much of anything. They shoot off a few well known facts about the Parent's Television Council for a couple minutes, go back to talking about profanity, and eventually try and make some weak connections between the PTC and the Bush administration, before going on and calling hypocrisy on various republican administrations for supporting decency standards while cursing like crazy themselves (of course Democrats get off easy - despite their various contributions to state sponsored censorship). The informative tidbits of information are so far buried in comedy routines that almost all of the value is lost.

I really wanted to like F**k. As deeply as profanity has entrenched itself into society, and with the regular threats to Constitutional rights and constant outcries from conservatives for decency standards to be made into law, I would really like to see a good documentary on profanity and indecency. Something that goes beyond simply reciting the Seven Dirty Words and goes into how and why we curse, why people take offense, why it continues to be a big deal in modern society, and when it comes time to call bullshit - not pull any punches.

Link | 0 Comments |


Shall we play a game?

01.53.46 - Mark

If you've never seen WarGames, and you regularly read this blog - what the hell are you thinking? Stop reading and go watch WarGames, it's a lot more worth while than reading my ramblings.

For everyone left, don't feel bad I'll be sending you away in a minute too. Almost perfectly timed with my relapse into Ambrosia Software titles, they've gone and release another game - DEFCON. Like Uplink (which started the relapse a few weeks ago), the new offender is a Mac port of an Introversion game (read: there's a windows version). The basic premise of DEFCON (if you haven't guessed from the post title, the command to watch WarGames, and/or the name of the game) is the same as Global Thermonuclear War. Nuke the hell out of your enemy, while keeping your enemy from nuking the hell out of you, and like Joshua you want to play the game until you "win". Which of course you can't do (it is nuclear war after all...) but you can try - and it lends itself to my favorite gaming philosophy (Easy to learn, hard to master).

Aside from its various cinematic inspirations (WarGames, Dr. Strangelove, Failsafe) it reminds me of Desktop Tower Defense or Missle Command on steroids, with a bit of StarCraft like Realtime Strategy for good measure.

I really wish there were different difficulty levels for the single player mode (I'm not big on network games), although I may register so I can add extra AIs and add a pause feature (a single round only takes 30 minutes or so) Single player against single AI really can't invoke the same paranoia the developer's aim for. Anyways. Go forth and download.(Mac | Windows)

Link | 0 Comments |





Previous Posts