Allister Sears

Best Movies of 2011

2012-01-26T15:32:00.001-05:00

Some years it's easy to pick the best picture of the year because one movie clearly stood out above the rest, even if that movie doesn't end up taking home the Oscar (ahem, The Dark Knight). Some years, it's not so easy. This year, was an exceptionally good year for movies. It was so good, that I admit I ended up missing half of the award season contenders because of the large volume of critically acclaimed movies that were being released around December.

That being said, here's the top ten of the ones I did manage to catch this year:

10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt. 2
Yes, I know I'm going to catch hell for putting this one at the bottom of the list, but the decision to break this movie up into two parts apparently meant that the filmmakers didn't feel a strong need to edit the material for the sake of keeping the pace moving along. At least part 2 was the more action packed of the finale, but it suffered a bit because most of the dramatic setup took place in part 1. Still, it was a worthy sendoff for a much beloved film series that had been running for ten years.

9. Super 8
J.J. Abram's film about the love of filmmaking was also a valentine to those 80's movies about kids having wild adventures in their own backyard that they just don't seem to make anymore. It's hard to watch this movie and not want to grab a movie camera and some friends and make a film of your own. This might also be the first movie I've seen Steven Spielberg produce and not direct that actually had the feel of a movie he might have directed himself. I did have one complaint about Super 8. It's clear that this film was two story ideas merged into one. It's a film about kid filmmakers and it's a film about a government conspiracy. We see both stories through the same characters, but as the conspiracy plot takes center stage, the filmmaking plot seems to get pushed to the side, and they never intersect as well as I think Abrams had hoped they would.

8. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Brad Bird is one of the few animation directors out there today who has been able to make a name for himself. (Previous credits include Ratatouille, The Incredibles and the highly underrated The Iron Giant). Naturally, I was excited to see what he could do with his live-action debut, and he did not disappoint. Considering that the Mission: Impossible franchise is so easily associated with explosive action scenes, it comes as a surprise that the best moments from Ghost Protocol are so minimalist in nature. For example, in one scene Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg are trying to break into the Kremlin and only have to outsmart one guard. It's a subtle scene. No big over the top orchestral score, and minimal dialogue, and yet it keeps the tension levels high.

7. Captain America
I can't even begin to describe how glad I was that they chose to set this entire film in WWII instead of just using his WWII days as a prologue for movie set in modern times. Considering how hilariously bad previous attempts to make Captain America movies were it's good that this version managed to hit the mark. I was also impressed that they managed to come up with a reasonably plausible explanation for why a soldier would go behind enemy lines in a getup that is as far removed from camouflage as possible. Best of all, this movie makes me very optimistic about the upcoming Avengers movie, as they managed to work in references to Iron Man and Thor, and have them feel like they're part of the Captain America story.

6. Hanna
Everything about this movie felt like director Joe Wright was going out of his way to break typecasting, and it sure worked. Wright is perhaps better known for his adaptations of period pieces like Pride & Prejudice starring Keira Knightley, and the award winning Atonement. With Hanna, he delivers a kinetic action thriller that's a cult classic waiting to happen. The titular Hanna is a girl raised by her father, deep in the Scandinavian wilderness and trained for the sole purpose of assassinating a government agent. Her mission doesn't quite go as planned, and she finds herself on her own, trying to escape a rather flamboyant psychopath hired to kill her by the agent Hanna tried to kill herself. It's a heavily stylized movie with a soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers. On occasion the stylized cinematics do start to feel less like you're watching a movie and more like you're watching a music video for a Chemical Brothers song, but for the most part it gives the film a unique look and feel among action movies.

5. Rango
Nickelodeon finally seems to have gotten its act together to make serious entries into the animated film genre. Most of their previous movies were just big screen adaptations of existing shows, like Rugrats or big screen pilots for upcoming shows like Jimmy Neutron. With Rango, Nickelodeon has finally delivered something highly original more than just a movie that you drop the kids off at. I suppose some aspects of a story about a chameleon having an identity crisis may fly over the heads of some kids, (and I would hope that the references to Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas fly over the heads of all kids,) but it's a well animated western with a great voice cast that includes Johnny Depp and Bill Nighy.

4. Source Code
Source Code was certainly a fresh take on the genre of time travel stories. Despite its far fetched plot, where a soldier relives the last 8 minutes of a terrorist victim's life in order to determine the identity of the terrorist, it almost felt plausible. What's even more impressive is that director Duncan Jones manages to create a strong romantic subplot between the soldier (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a woman on the train (Michelle Monaghan) despite their interactions together being based over the same 8 minutes.

3. The Adjustment Bureau
2011 seemed to be a good year for sci-fi, with intellectual sci-fi movies like Source Code and The Adjustment Bureau being released. Despite having a sci-fi plot device central to its story, The Adjustment Bureau has a very realistic drama at its core. It's a love story where a man (Matt Damon) has to decide if the sacrifices both he and the woman he loves (Emily Blunt) must make to be together are worth it. The sci-fi twist is that only he knows there's a team working behind the scenes who are working behind the scenes to make sure they stay apart. What I really liked about this film was that it wasn't a love story told over a weekend, where a man goes nuts over a woman he just met. Instead, it's a story told over several years, which allows the audience to really believe Damon's character is truly a man fighting to be with a woman he loves. The movie also takes a pretty serious look into the ideas of destiny versus free will, which usually just get the pop-philosophy treatment in most films.

2. X-Men: First Class
I had reservations about this firm when I first heard about it. Prequels are almost always a disaster. X-Men 3 and Wolverine: Origins were both massive disappointments. It seemed inevitable that First Class would be a disaster. Instead, it turned out to be the best one of the series. It's a mix of a prequel and a reboot, tying in elements from previous movies while abandoning other parts. First Class also touched upon some of the campier elements of its comic book origins without loosing the realistic feel of previous installments. It also produced some standout performances by up and coming actors, such as Jennifer Lawrence's potral of Mystique, or Caleb Jones as Banshee. This film also proved to be one of many breakout roles of 2011 for Michael Fassbender who proved to be a worthy successor to Ian McKellen for the role of Magneto.

1. Midnight in Paris
In other years I might not have picked this movie as my Best Picture, probably deferring to a film that was more epic in scope. However, I think this movie hit a personal chord. It's about a writer, played by Owen Wilson, who wishes he could have lived in the Golden Age of 1920's Paris. One night while wandering around Paris, that wish gets granted and he finds himself schmoozing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, having his work critiqued by Gertrude Stein and trying to steal away Pablo Picasso's mistress. As a fan of so many old-time things, I suppose it's only natural that I be a fan of a movie that's about nostalgia versus living in the present.

Writer/Director Woody Allen managed to pull together a great cast, especially when it came to the actors playing the celebrities of 1920's Paris. Tom Hiddleston's portrayal of F. Scott Fitzgerald actually drove me to re-read The Great Gatsby, a book that I didn't care for when it was assigned to me in high school, but I now see why it's a classic. However, everybody in the movie took a back seat to Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway. I thought it was by far the best supporting actor performance I had seen all year, and was surprised that he was overlooked for the Oscar for the role.

Black Aggie: Washington DC's Haunted Statue

2011-10-27T09:16:00.002-04:00

When I was a kid I had a thing for reading tales of allegedly true ghost stories. I kept going back to them, even though they terrified the hell out of me. Some of the stories popped up in several of the books I read, such as the Berkeley Square Horror, or the Borley Rectory, but one of my favorite stories appeared in only one book stocked by my local library.

It was the tale of Black Aggie, a statue that would supposedly come to life at night. The story, as I remembered it from the book, was that the statue was angel carved out of black marble and it served as a grave marker. Not long after it was put in place, tales about the statue began to spring up. People claimed that at night it would stroll about the cemetery or that it would blind you if you stared into its eyes at night. Grass wouldn't grow in its shadow.

Eventually the statue caused such a commotion that the family had it removed from the cemetery and donated to the Smithsonian Institution, who then hid it deep in storage, not wanting to take any chances of supernatural phenomena occurring if it were put on display. The book, the name of which I have sadly forgotten, had a single illustration of the statue, showing a black angel with glowing red eyes against a moonlight sky. If anybody knows the book this is from, please let me know, as I would like to credit it.

Unfortunately for years, that was all the information I had on the Black Aggie. It wasn't until the internet started to proliferate that I could find enough information to verify the story. Of course, the internet, being what it is, I found a good amount of versions of the tale that seemed to merge it with other urban legends. A popular one merged it with the story of the college student who took on a dare to spend a night sleeping on the statue's lap, only for him to be found the next morning dead of fright. (I'd usually heard the story told without the statue. The dare was that the student was dared to stick a knife in a grave plot. Something holds him to the plot and won't let go, and he dies of fright convinced that the dead body below was grabbing his foot, when in reality he'd stuck the knife through his pant leg.)

Eventually, through sites such as this, or this, I found more information that filled in some of the gaps of the half remembered story, and suggested there was some truth to it after all. For one thing, it turns out the statue was actually an unauthorized copy of another statue known as the Adams Memorial, (sometimes referred to simply as "Grief") The Adams Memorial was made in 1891 by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and commissioned by Henry Adams for his wife marion who had committed suicide. The original still resides in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D.C.

The unauthorized copy was made by Edward L.A. Pausch and purchased by General Felix Agnus for his family plot in Druid Ridge Cemetery, in Baltimore, Maryland. It was this statue that became known as Black Aggie, although according to Wikipedia, the legend sometimes was mistakenly attributed to another statue in Druid Ridge Cemetery that represented the greek fate Clotho. They are similar in appearance, and the Clotho statute is actually of an angel, which may account for Black Aggie being described as one in some versions of the story, such as the book I previously mentioned. However, as the Wikipedia article states, it isn't likely to be the statue of the legend because among other things, there's no reason for it to be named "Aggie."

The one fact I was glad to find on doing my research as an adult was that the part about the Smithsonian losing the Agnus Memorial in storage was false. In fact, the statue is currently on display in the rear courtyard of the Dolley Madison House on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. In 2008, I was passing through D.C. and decided to see the statue for myself.

Standing in front of the Dolley Madison House, at first glance it appeared that the courtyard was inaccessible from the street, due to the way the house was adjoined to the nearby buildings. However, it turned out the courtyard was rather easy to reach from the street. Starting in front of the house, just take a right on H Street, and then turn right under the first archway in the red brick building right next to it. If you're not looking carefully, it may just look like an alleyway or an entrance to the brick building but it leads right behind the Dolley Madison House.

The Black Aggie, in it's current setting looked more serene than terrifying. When I saw it in the courtyard, it was in the shade, nestled between several bushes (none of which appeared to have any difficulty growing around it.) I suppose at night it may have been a bit unnerving to walk past, but in the daylight, the statue, and the courtyard it sat in, looked like a nice quiet place to visit to ease a bit of midday stress.

When I went home that night, I did a bit more research on Black Aggie and the Adams Memorial that it was based off of. I thought about seeing the original Adams Memorial, but passed on that idea upon learning it was all the way in Baltimore. However, it turned out that there was a second, authorized replica of the Adams Memorial on display in the national gallery.

It seemed I wasn't the only person who was interested in the statue because when I asked the guard where the Adams Memorial was, he told me that I was the fifth person to ask about the statue that week and he wanted to know if it was mentioned in a book or something. I didn't really care to get into the backstory about Adams and Agnus Memorials, so I just told him I thought it was an interesting statue and moved on.

Oddly enough, the Adams Memorial, the one that didn't have any ghost stories about it, seemed creepy to stand in front of. It sat alone at the end of a hallway. I took a picture of it with my Holga camera, which seemed to exacerbate the creepiness factor of it when I got the photo developed, especially since the way the camera flash hit the eyes, it made them seem to glow a bit. Had I seen the real Black Aggie when I was kid, I would have simply thought it was cool statue, but had I seen the Adams Memorial, it would have certainly haunted my nightmares.

Top 10 Scary Movies

2011-10-14T13:58:00.002-04:00

I felt the need to throw my hat in the ring for a Top Scary Movies list because every year I come across lists that mention the same old movies that aren't really scary at all. Personally, I'm still trying to figure out why the original Wicker Man is on so many lists, because it's not suspenseful or terrifying, and it's not like there's anything frightening about Britt Ekland dancing about naked. Yes, I realize I omitted a few genuine classics, such as Alien, but I decided to shed a bit of light on one or two you may have missed out on.

10. Silent Hill
Okay, it is based on a video game, but unlike most other video game adaptations, this one came out pretty good. In Silent Hill a mother named Rose wakes up in an abandoned town after wrecking her car. The town is covered in ash that falls like snow, the road she drove in on now leads to a gaping void, her daughter is missing and at first the only other person she can find is a police officer who doesn't seem to grasp of what's going on.

This movie comes in at number ten because I'll concede that it won't be everybody's cup of tea. It's twisted and surreal, and it gets very strange very quickly. The town of Silent Hill turns out to be populated by religious fanatics who think Rose's daughter is some sort of evil, and every now and then the world becomes a darker, more twisted form of itself and bizarre creatures come out of everywhere to kill anything in sight. The whole atmosphere of the movie is extremely unconventional, and the monsters are are uniquely designed. Instead of goblins or demons, the creatures are faceless perversions of humans. The result is that the film doesn't visually fall victim to the usual horror movie tropes, and instead looks like unfamiliar territory. For that reason it's probably the closest thing I've ever seen on film that depicts what a truly unbound nightmare is like.

9. Joyride
You may have passed up on this movie when it first came out because it stars Paul Walker. You should check it out because it's co-written by J.J. Abrams. Steve Zahn and Paul Walker play brothers driving cross country who decide to play a prank on a random truck driver they started talking to over a CB radio. The driver doesn't take too kindly to their little joke. After the brother's pick up Paul Walker's girlfriend, the trio finds themselves relentlessly hounded by the driver no matter where they go.

Once the action gets going, it maintains the tension straight through the end of the movie. It may toe the line of plausibility every now and then, but there's enough suspense to get you to suspend your disbelief. As an added bonus for film buffs, the DVD of Joyride includes not just an alternate ending, but an entire alternate final act for the movie. The theatrical version is the best one, but it is fun to check out a version of the story that hits the same plot points but in a different way.

8. Nightwatch (1997)
There's several movies out there named Nightwatch. The one I'm referring to is the 1997 film starring Ewan McGregor. McGregor plays a law student who takes a job as a night security guard at a morgue. As if that weren't enough to deal with, it turns out a serial killer is at large, and the lead investigator, played by Nick Nolte becomes convinced that McGregor is the killer. McGregor, in turn, starts to suspect it may be his best friend, played by Josh Brolin.

This film does a great job of establishing how unsettling an environment the morgue is by starting with a scene where McGregor is shown the rounds he will have to make each night. When begins his first round of duty, you get a feeling of dread and isolation as you watch him go room to room, doing his check ins.

I would have put this movie higher on the list if the film spent most of it's time in the morgue, which I honestly found to be a creepier environment than the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Unfortunately, as the serial killer investigation moves closer to the forefront, more scenes take place in the outside world and the solitary, confined mood dissipates as a result. On the plus side, the suspense picks up after the atmosphere dies down.

7. The Mist
Sometimes a B-movie premise can result in a top notch film when in the hands of a the right creative team. In The Mist, a story about a small town besieged by monsters becomes an allegory for the darkness of humanity due to the creative vision of Frank Darabont, who was most recently the show runner for season one of The Walking Dead.

We watch as the occupants of a small grocery store find themselves trapped inside when a strange, impenetrable mist rolls through town, and a man runs screaming into the store claiming that something in the mist is killing people. The monsters, which range from giant insects to carnivorous tentacles, do provide their share of scares, but the real horror comes when some of the people in the store start convincing themselves that they are being subjected to the wrath of God, and that the sinners must be sacrificed to the things in the mist. As the people whip themselves into a frenzy, you get a sense of the worst of human nature, made more terrifying by how convincing it feels.

6. Dawn of the Dead (2004)
This list would have been incomplete without a zombie movie, and there were many good choices but Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead proved to be my winner. I almost picked 28 Days Later, but passed because that film's director, Danny Boyle, has another movie on this list. Shaun of the Dead was close as well, but while it's a great film, I wanted to go with one that was outright scary.

Zack Snyder's version of Dawn starts out with an intense scene of a zombie outbreak at its peak. It mellows out for a bit while the survivors hide out in a mall, but the threat of danger is always in the background. As the characters start to get too complacent in their hideout, all hell breaks loose. I'll admit it's more suspenseful than scary, but either way, at the end of this movie your pulse will be racing.

For purists who don't like the fact I picked this over George Romero's version, I'm sorry, but the remake had better pacing and a better balance of horror and humor. Also, it didn't have the heavy handed social commentary of the original. (Okay. Consumers are like zombies. We get it. Move on already.) As for those who thought I should have gone with Night of the Living Dead, just remember that Romero is more likely to get royalties from Zack Snyder's movie than the original Night. (Due to a legal technicality, the original Night is now in public domain.)

5. The Descent
The Descent is another example of a B-movie premise that turned out to be far better, and far scarier, than it had any right to be. A group of women go on a cave expedition only to find themselves hunted by a legion of subterranean creatures. It sounds like it should have "direct to video" written all over it, but writer/director Neil Marsall did a great job of crafting a thriller that slowly transitions from a tale of friends having a safe little adventure to one of everything going horribly wrong. It really plays upon the viewer's sense of claustrophobia, as the women realize they are hopelessly lost deep underground and are being slowly stalked by things they can't see. Like in the original Alien, the scares don't come as much from the monster attack themselves, but from knowing they're out there.

4. Fear(s) of the Dark
This movie might not be for everybody either, because it's heavy on the artsy side. In other words, it's French, animated and in black and white. Fear(s) is an compilation of short horror stories, interwoven with each other and is a film that almost certainly needs to be watched in the dark, alone, and late at night for maximum effect.

My one gripe with this movie is that they didn't re-dub the lines for the American release. Having to watch the movie with subtitles slightly ruins the creepy minimalism of some of the stories. However, some of the stories are so minimalist that there is no dialogue.

The stories range from very literal to very abstract, but none of them are about things jumping out at the viewer. Instead, you'll get a slow sense of dread that builds throughout the movie so that when the credits roll, you won't feel safe, but you can't put your finger on why.

3. Shallow Grave
As I mentioned before, I passed on including 28 Days Later on this list, only because director Danny Boyle's debut film was so much more intense. The first time I saw this, I had to double check that it wasn't a remake of a Hitchcock movie because I honestly didn't think any modern directors had it in them to make such an intense suspense thriller set in such a limited environment.

In Shallow Grave, a trio of roommates, two of them played by Ewan McGregor and Christopher Eccleston, decide to take on a fourth roommate. Not long after moving in, they find their new roommate dead with a suitcase full of money. Rather than going to the police, they decide to desecrate the body to hide his identity, bury him and keep the money. When it comes time to mutilate the corpse, they draw straws to decide who has to do the deed, and after the job is done, that lucky individual starts to lose it.

The tension buildup through this movie is slow, but unrelenting. Once the protagonists cross the line by getting rid of their new roommate's body, you as the viewer know that there will be consequences, but you don't know exactly what they will be. It's hard to describe the movie in too much detail without ruining its many twists and turns. The story doesn't rest on one big twist. Instead you watch the characters slowly descend into paranoia towards each other, causing them to behave in strange, unexpected ways. Shallow Grave may not exactly be a scary movie, but its suspense will definitely leave you on edge.

2. Session 9
Lets get this out of the way. Yes, this movie stars a pre-CSI: Miami David Caruso. Don't think that means Session 9 is at all anything corny. In fact, it's very much the opposite.

A team of asbestos removers gets a contract to clean out mental asylum in Maryland, but as they spend more time in the asylum their they start to unravel as individauls. In a way, Session 9 is a haunted house movie, but it isn't clear if there's anything supernatural at play. What is clear is that there is just something wrong about the asylum and that it's having an effect on the removal team.

Unlike the previously mentioned Nightwatch, this movie takes full advantage of its setting and keeps most of the action contained in the asylum, all of which builds up to a truly disturbing ending. It's worth mentioning that this film was actually filmed in a genuine abandoned asylum. The real life location has since been turned into a series of upscale apartments, which prompted one blogger to make a point of watching this cult horror movie in the building it was filmed in.

1. The Ring
The first time I saw this movie, I went in with little to no idea of what it was about. If you haven't seen it yet I almost don't want to reveal any of the plot to you so that you can go in completely unprepared. In my book, this is easily the most frightening movie to come out in the last decade.

I suppose what made this movie so terrifying is that it preys upon a fear that when you watch disturbing imagery, it won't just unsettle you. It can actually harm you. It definitely helps that the cinematography in this movie is simply incredible. Dreary, ordinary visuals are mixed with the surreal resulting in a movie that is both beautiful and haunting. Perhaps it's greatest strength is the way that it messes around with horror movie tropes, taking familiar scenarios and giving them unfamiliar twists.

What's most impressive about this film is that it manage to pull off genuinely scaring the hell out of the viewer with a PG-13 rating. It just proves that to be scary, a movie doesn't have to have buckets of gore.

Movie Tie-Ins I'd Like to See: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-10T15:52:00.000-04:00

Captain America

2011-07-29T17:47:00.000-04:00

The mark of a good comic book movie is one that can remain faithful to it's source material while being equally as enjoyable to fanboys as it is to people who have no intention of ever picking up a comic book in their life. It was true for Christopher Nolan's Batman movies. It's been true for the Iron Man movies as well as Thor, and it's definitely true for Captain America.

Just as Thor was presented less as a super-hero movie and more as a fantasy/action movie, Captain America is treated more like a mash-up of a World War II movie and a sci-fi adventure. The film follows Steve Rogers (played by Chris Evans) as he goes from being a scrawny kid unfit for basic training in the Army to a true soldier going deep into enemy territory. In fact, one of this film's more impressive accomplishments is the way they work up to Captain America even being a costumed hero in the first place. The idea of a soldier charging behind enemy lines in full All-American regalia is realistically a bit absurd, but the film leads up to it in such a manner that it ends up working pretty well in the story, taking a few jabs at Captain America's roots as a piece of WWII propaganda, along the way.

Although the film is Captain America's origin story, it stands strong enough on it's own two feet. Even though by now everybody is well aware that this movie is among many that's a lead up to next summer's Avengers movie, this would be worth seeing even if it were stripped of all of it's Marvel Comics licensed characters. At heart, it's a tale of American soldiers going against a fringe science division of Nazis trying to use an ancient power source to power futuristic weaponry. It doesn't rely on you knowing anything about the characters going into the movie.

That being said, the producers made a point of taking advantage of the fact that The Avengers movie isn't just an idea being kicked around, but is fully into production. Instead of the quick references to other Marvel movies that were thrown about in The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2, the wider Marvel universe plays a more prominent role in the plot. It doesn't rely on you having seen the other movies, but it builds upon the foundation laid before it. For example, there's an early scene that takes place at a 1940's version of the Stark Expo that was central to Iron Man 2.

Chris Evans is probably the perfect choice to play Captain America. Having already appeared in numerous other superhero/comic movies such as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Push, and the Fantastic Four movies, it's about time he got the lead role in a major summer blockbuster. It's easy to be convinced that he's an honest kid who wants to do whatever it takes to serve his country. I was actually a bit worried about how good a job they would do with using special effects to make Evans look tiny as Steve Rogers before he is transformed into the super soldier, but for the most part they do a good job. Yes, there are moments when they get the proportions a bit wrong, but for the effect is mostly convincing enough that you forget Evans isn't actually a 90 pound weakling. Evans actually does such a good job at playing up the more humble aspects of Steve Rogers that after he transforms from scrawny kid to super soldier, it might take you a moment to remember that they used special effects to make Chris Evans look like a little guy, not the other way around. Even after he becomes the super soldier you still feel like he's the innocent kid from the start of the movie, just in a bigger body.

The rest of the cast is pretty top notch as well. There's a lot of well known faces such as Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci and a character played by Tommy Lee Jones who you almost want to see in his own WWII movie. There's also Toby Jones, who you might not recognize by name but have probably seen him in The Mist, Doctor Who or a bunch of other places you won't be able to figure out off the top of your head, and former Band of Brothers cast member Neal McDonough.

I'm not going to go as far as to say that if you only see one movie this summer, this should be it, but if you have found yourself highly selective of what's worth seeing in cinemas this summer, Captain America is well worth the money to see it on the big screen.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

2011-06-28T12:55:00.000-04:00

It seems that the big trend among this summer's blockbusters has been to fix floundering franchises. X-Men: First Class revived a series that was growing weaker with each entry. The simplified plot of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was a much needed antidote to the sprawling story in Pirates 2 & 3. Thankfully, Transformers: Dark of the Moon keeps the trend alive by avoiding becoming the train wreck that was Revenge of the Fallen.

A lot of things went wrong with Revenge of the Fallen. So much, in fact, that everybody from Shia LaBeouf to the executives of Hasboro were apologizing for it. The plot went all over the place. The juvenile humor of the first movie was taken to a new level. Then, of course there were the jive-talking Autobots that everybody involved with the production would probably like to forget. The producers listened to fan complaints and although Dark of the Moon and came back with something on par with the original Transformers.

The premise this time around is that the Apollo missons were really a front to research an alien ship that crashed on the moon. The film kicks off with a strong start, mixing actual footage of the Apollo 11 mission in with scripted scenes, calling to mind parts of Michael Bay's Armageddon. From there, it moves into a conspiracy story where we find out that for years the American and Russian governments have been keeping the crashed ship a secret from everybody, including the Transformers themselves. It's a strong enough premise that it would have worked outside of a Transformers movie, and using it for this movie shows that the producers had more in mind than "big robots fighting for 2 1/2 hours" this time around.

They also came up with a good storyline for Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), albeit a rather topical one. This time around he's a college graduate unable to find a job, driving a beat up old Datsun because his car is out saving the world. On the plus side he has a new girlfriend, played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and yes, she can act. Of course, once he does manage to land a nice, stable 9-5 job, he still manages to work his way to the front lines of the inevitable Autobot-Decepticon battle.

When you watch a Michael Bay movie, you can usually expect it to be about 2 1/2 hours long, and for that last hour to be one big action scene, and Dark of the Moon doesn't buck the trend. Unlike the finale of Revenge of the Fallen, which just felt like they were trying to cram as many explosions and robots into every minute, the climax of Dark of the Moon felt like something along the lines of Saving Private Ryan (you know... with robots). No, Michael Bay won't surprise you with an Oscar-worthy finale, but he does lock you into the battle and keeps the tension high.

There's still a fair amount of juvenile humor in Dark of the Moon, but it's toned down compared to the previous two movies. The overt racial stereotyping is gone, but there are still a few inappropriate sexual references. You'd think somebody at Hasboro would remind Michael Bay that PG-13 rating aside, it's still a movie based on a line of children's toys. The special effects also feel much cleaner than the other movies, so when the robots transform, it doesn't look as much like a big jumbled mechanical mess. However, the Transformers' designs could still use a bit of simplifying, at least for the Decepticons. They still look too complicated and alien, so it's a bit hard to tell the bad guys apart from each other.

Now, I didn't have any intention of seeing this in 3D, but I attended a free showing and didn't find out it was going to be in 3D until they were handing out glasses at the door. This almost prompted me to walk away and pay for a 2D showing, but I decided to stick around anyway.

I know it's a tired out complaint about 3D movies, but it's worth reiterating. It was just way too dim. When you watch a Michael Bay movie, you expect the sound and visuals to be cranked up past 11, but with the 3D glasses on, Bay's bright and brash visuals get seriously undercut. This might be alright if there was some big payoff to having everything in 3D, but there isn't. Aside from a spaceship flying about in the opening scene, there wasn't really any part where it felt like anything was added by seeing it in 3D. The effect was actually hardly noticeable for much of the middle of the movie. In fact, I was actually able to take the glasses off and enjoy parts of the movie without them perfectly fine, which i needed to do because my eyes were wearing out from the dimness. On the plus side, at least it wasn't headache inducing.

Overall, Dark of the Moon was a solid popcorn flick that delivers everything you should expect for a movie coming out for the July 4th weekend. It's fun, ostentatious and is the kind of movie you have to see in theaters at least twice, if only because your home theater system can't give you the fully audio-visual assault this movie calls for. I may not rate it as highly as the original Transformers, but it's definitely up there. If the producers can keep this up, hopefully we'll be seeing more Transformers movies in the future.

X-Men: First Class

2011-06-21T01:02:00.001-04:00

The X-Men movies are good again. Thank God. When the overkill that was X-Men: The Last Stand was followed by lackluster X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the X-Men franchise felt doomed. It seemed that we would have to wait years before the franchise was rebooted.

Thankfully, we only had to wait two years. Not only does X-Men: First Class fix the problems of the last two X-Men movies, it even manages to outshine X2. It's not clear if First Class is meant to be a reboot or just a retcon of the other films (there's more than a few notable changes to the backstory), but either way, it's a welcome direction for the film franchise.

First Class is about the origin of the X-Men team, and how Professor X and Magneto first meet. The story is set in the 60's against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so it should come as no surprise that this film takes itself a bit more seriously at times than the others in the series, especially since this film heavily focuses on the fact that Magneto is a Holocaust survivor. That's not to say that this is a meaner grittier take on X-Men. The grimness of Magneto's story is balanced out by the playfulness of the young recruits to the X-Men who both possess extraordinary powers, and no idea how to properly control them.

While it is a prequel, to the X-Men series, it avoids the pitfall the original X-Men movie fell into of feeling like little more than a prologue to a sequel story. First Class stands on it's own feet with a self contained story that doesn't rely on the audience being familiar with the previous movies, or the characters. The producers also took the bold step of framing it less in the context of a hero story, and more like an espionage thriller with a sci-fi twist.

I was impressed by how well the film developed the film's three main characters, Professor X, Magneto and especially the shape-shifting Mystique. In the other movies, Mystique was heavily featured but her character was never really explored past her being a mutant who hated humans. Here, we get to see her struggle with being comfortable with her naturally deformed appearance, and how it leads her to adopt the mindset of a villain. There's a particularly good scene in which she asks Professor X what he thinks of her as she really is, and the Professor does a poor job of trying to hide his prejudices.

Speaking of villains, Kevin Bacon and January Jones are both fantastic as First Class's villains, Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost. The first time you see Bacon onscreen is as a Nazi scientist tormenting a young Magneto, and reveling in it. Bacon doesn't just let his portrayal rest on Nazi = Evil. Instead, his character evolves into somebody much deeper that puts the X-Men and even world governments into a moral bind. I had some concerns about January Jones because there have been times that I've seen her in Mad Men and other movies where her acting seemed a bit flat. In theory that shouldn't matter since the character, Emma Frost is supposed to be arrogant and indifferent, but Jones does make her character feel rather animated while staying true to her character's nature.

Overall, First Class feels far more balanced than the other X-Men movies, which often tried to cram fan-favorite characters into cameo roles at the expense of sensible plot development. First Class does boast a large roster of mutants, but the filmmakers decided to round out the supporting cast with lesser known (and more expendable) characters like Havoc and Azazel. Unless you're a comics purist who'd be put off by the filmmakers mucking about with the characters' ages (in the comics, most of the characters in the movie are young when Professor X and Magneto are old) you should love X-Men First Class.

Sucker Punch: Review

2011-03-30T00:22:00.001-04:00

I don't often put a lot of stake in professional film reviews, but I had a sense something was up when Sucker Punch couldn't pick out enough positive quotes to make one of those ads where they say how much critics loved it. Still, I was too hyped up about this movie to not see it, so thankfully the poor reviews tempered my expectations.

I wouldn't go as far to say that Sucker Punch was a bad movie, but it was definitely a heavily flawed one. I wanted to like it because I'm a big fan of the director, Zack Snyder. The premise of the movie, in which a cast of hot women go from being damsels in distress to badass heroines, felt like it was something he came up with as a teenager and held off on making until the he earned Warner Brothers enough money that they'd let him do whatever he wanted. I mean that in a good way. It feels like somebody's dream product. The finished product is definitely more mature and polished than some teenage fanboy movie, but it's heart is still visible.

There's not any particular part of the movie that stands out on its own as bad. There's no groan-worthy dialogue or horrendous acting. By no means is the movie at all unwatchable, but the problem with Sucker Punch was that it's a collection of well crafted parts that don't work together as a whole.

There are three aspects to the story, and the first two actually go pretty well together. There's a strong opening and a good follow through. It starts with a young woman, known only as Baby Doll, who gets incarcerated in an asylum after she tries to kill her abusive step-father. Once in the asylum, she takes her mind into a fantasy world where she imagines she's a captive in a brothel, and invents a plan to escape with her fellow captives.

Everything falls apart when the third aspect of the story comes into play, which is made of the big action sequences that are splashed across the trailers and TV spots for this movie. The idea is that Baby Doll needs to acquire several items to make her escape. Her friends try to help her steal the items while Baby Doll dances to distract her captors, and her dancing is apparently something completely mesmerizing.

The audience never sees her dancing though, because once she starts moving her body, Baby Doll goes even deeper into a fantasy where the task at hand becomes some mad-crazy action scene that's symbolic of what they're trying to do. For example, the girls need to steal a lighter, so when Baby Doll starts dancing she imagines that they're stealing fire from a dragon.

I liked the idea of the heroine using an escapist fantasy to deal with the very real horrors before her, but the action scenes, where they're battling robots, monsters and steampunk Nazi zombies, were so out of scope of the rest of the story, they just didn't feel like they belonged in the same movie. It also didn't help that the action scenes were directly tied to Baby Doll's dancing. It made what was supposed to be a metaphor just a bit too literal. The action scenes would have probably made for a great movie on their own, and they were definitely well made, but they just didn't work with the main story.

Also, it was hard to get my mind past the notion that the fantasy world Baby Doll comes up with while in the asylum is unmistakably a very male fantasy. Yes, the women in the fantasy are very much empowered, but it was hard to buy into the idea of a woman fleeing an abusive step-father by imaging herself as an erotic dancer who can take herself to a sci-fi/fantasy world where she and the women are led by a father figure type.

I did at least appreciate that Zack Snyder made nods to the works that inspired parts of the film, without resorting to full-on "borrowing." There's a bit of Walter Mitty, some Brazil thrown in the mix and an unmistakable helping of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Thankfully, Zack Snyder has enough respect for his audience to be up front about the last one, and not try to pull it on the audience like a twist ending we never heard before.

Overall, Sucker Punch is a well crafted movie that should have spent more time in the conception stage before actually going into production. It's easy to see how much worse this movie could have turned out. Tell most directors to make a movie starring chicks with guns and you usually end up with something like the Resident Evil movies. The movie Zack Snyder made could have been a lot better if he hashed out the balance between the various fantasy scenes. I get a sense of the movie that he had in his mind, but it isn't quite the movie that he ended up making.

Although disappointing, it had enough good moments to it that it didn't shake my faith in him as a director, and I'm definitely looking forward to what he can do with his upcoming take on Superman.

Spring Grove Cemetery

2010-11-29T21:47:00.000-05:00

Last January, I had the chance to go down to New Orleans. One of the things I wanted to do was to photograph the historic cemeteries, which are among the city's more defining features. The concierge at our hotel recommended we check out one in the Garden District. However, she failed to mention that it closed to the public at noon. When we arrived at what we thought was a reasonable hour (2 p.m.) we found it closed.

At the time I was disappointed, since the only photos I could get were through the fence. (My friends also pointed out to me that a true traveller would have hopped the fence and gotten the shots he wanted.) When I got back to Cincinnati, it occurred to me that there were plenty of historic cemeteries in town that I hadn't been to yet. I suppose I had adopted the rationale that when you hang out in graveyards in other cities, it's tourism, but when you hang out in local ones, it's being creepy.

In February, after being shut in the house for almost a week due to a snowstorm, I ventured out to Cincinnati's own historic Spring Grove Cemetery when the city started to thaw. The New York Times actually said that if you have 3 days to spend in Cincinnati, Spring Grove is where to start. Below are some of the pictures I took.

All images copyright Allister Sears 2010

Tron Doesn't Look So Good in 3D

2010-10-21T00:19:00.002-04:00

Last weekend I took the opportunity to see Jackass 3D, and was treated to a special 3D trailer for Tron Legacy. As a proper nerd I've been excited of the notion of a sequel to Tron before it was even announced. Now that it's about 2 months away, it's a given that I'll be seeing it opening weekend, but I was on the fence about whether or not I should see it in 3D or regular 2D. After seeing the 3D trailer, the choice was clear.

2D. Definitely seeing it in 2D.

The problem was that it was too dark. One of the most common criticisms of the current crop of 3D movies is that the glasses you have to wear noticeably dims the film. At best, this can be an annoyance, but if you've seen any of the footage of Tron Legacy, you know that the computer world within the film is already pretty dark as it is.

Dark skies. Dark costumes. Dark walls. And anything that isn't dark is a dim shade of blue or orange. So, for two minutes, all I could see were shapes moving about.

Oddly enough, the result looked like the cover for the Art of Tron Legacy book.

Imagine watching an entire movie that looked like that.

It wasn't just the dimness that made it look bad. All the smoke effects and lens flares didn't translate all that well into 3D, and most of the time the 3D effect wasn't even that noticeable.

So, yes I'll be in the theater opening weekend to see it, but in good ol' fashioned 2D.

Art of Tron: Legacy image is copyright of it's respective owner and used under fair use.

Supermassive Black Hole

2010-10-05T17:39:00.000-04:00

Muse recently recently held a contest to design a T-shirt to be sold at their shows. Unfortunately, the design I submitted didn't make it to the voting round. It was inspired by "Supermassive Black Hole" from their album Black Holes & Revalations. Here it is for your enjoyment.

Thoughts on the New iPod Line

2010-09-02T00:20:00.002-04:00

It used to be that when Apple announced an update to it's product line, you cursed yourself for having bought the previous model, even if it came out a year ago. After watching Steve Jobs's announcement for the new iPod models, I feel the opposite. I find myself content with the iPods i have, and feel no desire to get new ones, not even that unrealistic sense of needing to have what's new. If anything, I'm worried that if the ones I do have break, I'd be forced to get one of the newer models I'd rather avoid. (Although I still buy CDs, I bought enough songs off iTunes with DRM to feel tethered to the iPod brand.)

I had this problem before when my first generation iPod Shuffle went on the fritz. I bought the Shuffle to have a simple bare bones music player for when I workout. By the time it stopped working correctly the Shuffle was at it's third generation. The line had been upgraded so that the player was the size of a stick of Trident and the buttons had been moved onto the wire of the earphones. Not wanting to be stuck with the basic Apple earbuds, and not caring for any of the other new features, I bought one of the last second generation shuffles which was an improvement over the original without unnecessary bells and whistles.

(On a side note, it turned out my first generation Shuffle wasn't broken at all, but that a bug in a software update messed it up. By the time I realized this I already had a shiny new iPod Shuffle in my hands that I didn't care to take back.)

At least Apple realized that people hated the lack of buttons on the 3rd generation Shuffle, so they brought them back for the 4th generation one. After acknowledging the consumer dissatisfaction with the 3rd generation Shuffle's lack of buttons, surprised when Jobs announced the new Nano would have a touchscreen instead of buttons, making it look less like previous versions of the Nano and more like a jazzed up version of the Shuffle.

I honestly don't see this one going over well. With a display of 1.5 inches, I think the new Nano is just too small. I'm of average size, and sometimes even my bony fingers are too fat for my iPhone to figure out exactly where on the screen I'm pressing. I just don't see how anybody can effectively navigate the menus with such little space to move their fingers.

What also worried me about the announcement was that there was no mention of the iPod Classic. This presumably means one of two things. Apple is fine with the product the way it is, or they plan to drop it soon. Hopefully it's the former. My 30GB Classic is on the verge of maxing out storage space, and there's a spiderweb crack on the glass front. Odds are I'll want to replace it in a year or so and I'd prefer to just get another Classic.

I wouldn't want an iPod touch because as I mentioned, I already have an iPhone. Even though my iPhone can play music, I'd rather have a separate music player. For one thing, I can listen to hours of music without having to worry that I'll have a dead cell phone at the end of the day. On top of that, I'd rather not leave my cell phone in a dock out in the open at a party, just so others can listen to music.

More importantly, I like the clickwheel on the Classic. It lets me operate the iPod completely blind. I can skip ahead to another song or adjust the volume without having to take it out of my pocket to make sure I'm hitting the right part of the screen. Better yet, I can use it while driving. I can change songs or playlists without taking my eyes off the road just as if I were changing the radio station or tracks on a CD. With the Touch, you have to actually look at the screen to know what you're doing. There's no tactile feedback. If you're driving, I doubt a cop will care that you were just changing the song on your iPod and not texting somebody.

Hopefully one of two things happens. Either the Classic sticks around, or if Apple does finally decide to drop it, they bring the clickwheel back to the Nano and up its storage capacity to something around 60GB. Maybe then I'll once again feel the urge to have to get it right away.

Why Scott Pilgrim Shouldn't be Considered a Bob-omb

2010-08-16T19:46:00.005-04:00

Last weekend saw a battle at the box office between movies targeted at three different archetypes. There was the Julia Roberts romance, Eat Pray Love, which was expected to have no competition for its target audience. Then there was The Expendables, the all-star action movie so manly that the ads said it would give you a "mangasm," which went against Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a movie targeted at an audience of nerds and gamers.

Monday morning, Expendables took the top box office spot with Eat Pray Love a respectable second. Scott Pilgrim came in fifth at $10 million, a sixth of its budget. Ordinarily when a movie as heavily promoted as Scott Pilgrim does that bad off the bat, you call it a bomb, but in this case I'd hold off on that title.

Bombs are usually movies that do poorly on opening weekend, never have hope of finding an audience and usually start with the words "a film by M. Night Shyamalan." I don't think this holds true for Scott Pilgrim, (and not just because M. Night didn't taint it with his very name). Instead, I think this is just a sign that the business model that was kicked off by Jaws, where a movie's success is determined entirely by its opening weekend, is moving on.

Scott Pilgrim may not have gotten a lot of viewers, but those that saw it clearly loved it. As I write this, it currently has an 8.3 rating on the IMDB and an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, (compared to Expendables' mere 42%.) That's the response of a movie that gets multiple viewings from its audience. Maybe they all won't go see it again in theaters, but they will rent it, buy it, quote it, dress up like characters from it and overall keep it in the public consciousness for years to come.

That means the money it didn't get from the box office, it can still get from home video sales and rentals, not to mention all that sweet, tasty merchandising money. Sure, some of that money won't show up for years down the road, but look much money Disney is still making from selling Nightmare Before Christmas merchandise. That's a Christmas movie that came out 17 years ago, and people are still buying merchandise from it year round. That's the power of having a true cult classic in your film library.

But if Scott Pilgrim is so loved by its fans, why did it do poorly at the box office? It was a cult classic by design. Almost every frame of the movie is an in-joke for nerds of all types, whether they're gamers, comic fans, film buffs or just Canadian. It never tries to cater to an audience beyond this and shouldn't be faulted for it. Imagine what the Expendables would have looked like if they tried to include a deeply spiritual romantic subplot to try and draw in some of the Eat Pray Love crowd.

In all fairness, the whole premise of the movie doesn't even make sense to a lot of non-nerd types. Many of my friends who heard about the movie couldn't seem to wrap their head around the fact that they never explain how any of the characters suddenly get super powers, (except for the one guy who has telekinesis because he's a vegan.) I can't explain it any more than saying it's like a cartoon and just accept it as is. Oddly enough, these are the same people who accept without question that Scarface somehow gets access to a magic machine gun with a nearly unlimited supply of bullets in a movie supposedly set in the real world.

Based on the word of mouth I've heard on The Expendables, I don't expect to hear much about it in coming years. It sounds like if I really wanted to have a man-tastic cinema experience, I'd be better off watching Die Hard, Total Recall and The Transporter back to back.

As for Scott Pilgrim, sure it might not have done well now, but it will stick around. Ten years down the road you'll see some girl walking out of Hot Topic with Ramona Flowers shirt (Scott Pilgrim's love interest), and she'll clearly be way too young to have seen the movie when it first came out. She'll tell her friends they need to see this great gamer movie that came out a decade ago. The Expendables will be bundled into a Stallone movie boxed set along with Cop Land, and Get Carter, perpetually on sale for $10. We'll see which movie is still making money then.

New Orleans

2010-06-30T20:46:00.005-04:00

Earlier I put up some photos from my trip to New Orleans, most of them being centered around the Sugar Bowl. I figure I might as well put a few up of the things I saw around town before and after the game as well.

Jackson Square at Dusk

The above two shots are of Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, the oldest operating bar in America, lit almost entirely by candlelight. (The exceptions being the restrooms, the piano and a little light by the credit card machine.)

A graveyard in the Garden District.

A view from my hotel room. (As well as a view of the hotel room.)

Time for Self Promotion

2010-05-26T22:06:00.003-04:00

I've recently decided that I should start using this blog to show of my artwork more often. I thought for a while about what piece would be good to demonstrate my creative spirit.

It should be something moving...

It should be something thoughtful...

... Something like a self portrait of me fighting off a hoard of zombies.

A Detailed Thought on the Lost Finale

2010-05-25T10:34:00.005-04:00

I suppose I wouldn’t be a proper nerd without writing more of an in-depth review on the conclusion of Lost, so here goes.

Back in high school, my English teacher explained how the last few chapters of Huckleberry Finn is something that has been constantly debated in the decades since it was written. For those of you who never read the book (or those of you who read it and forgot what happened) the story starts out with the fun and fancy free spirit that ran through it’s prequel, Tom Sawyer. Then the tone shifts to something far more mature as Huck and Jim go down the river. However, the final chapters return to Tom Sawyer’s lighthearted tone.

As my teacher explained it, years went by between when Mark Twain started writing the book and when he finished. What people have debated was how seriously Mark Twain meant for people to take the ending. Was it something he dashed off to put an end to a story that had escaped his control, or was there meant to be something poetic about Huck and Jim reverting to the people they were before their journey began?

Not long after the finale of Lost was over, I sensed a similar debate would start raging among fans of the show. The show raised so many questions but the finale answered so few. So did the producers really know how they wanted the show to end, or did they just come up with something because they told everybody the show would end after six seasons? Also, how much of the show’s mysteries were red herrings and which were simply plotlines the producers forgot or abandoned?

I suppose whether or not you were pleased with the finale depends on whether or not you really cared for the show’s questions to be answered once and for all. Personally, I loved the finale. For a long-format story I invested six years in, I felt the payoff was worth the time spent watching.

Obviously, a lot of the show’s questions went unanswered. Then again, this is a show that had so many questions about it that even the writers of Wired didn’t catch on when some of the answers were given subtly and spread out over the series. (Yes, the polar bears are completely explained over the run of the show.)

I think to answer all of the show’s mysteries would have been a disservice to the fans. What made Lost such a cult hit was the early episodes where we had no idea what was going on, and that fueled our imaginations in a way that most shows simply didn’t.

Think about it. When we talk about TV shows with our friends, it’s usually just a recap of our favorite scenes or lines. At most we talk about whom we think is going to kill or sleep with whom, but we’re never really challenged as viewers. Lost, on the other hand, demanded that its viewers channel their inner Stephen Hawkings.

As viewers, our theories didn’t just involve the characters’ interactions with each other. It involved the very universe in which they existed. We asked ourselves everything from who could be trusted to whether the story was set in the real world or if everybody died and was in some kind of purgatory.

The purgatory theory is especially worth noting because it was a popular one among viewers, and was openly shot down by the producers. For the most part, they were being truthful. The Island wasn’t purgatory, but that’s where the flash-sideways of season six ended up being set.

Instead of a finale that resolves all of the great questions of the Lost universe, we were left with a finale that only resolved their personal storylines. We find out why they were brought there, and what their purpose was. We learn that in some way or another, most of them get happy endings, or at least a chance at redemption, while for others it isn’t so clear.

Quite frankly, I’m fine with that. The best moments of the finale were the ones that reminded you how far the characters had come. After six years it was easy to forget how Charlie went from heroin addict to surrogate father before sacrificing his life, or how Jin and Sun went from being a distant, emotionless couple to being truly in love.

The smoke monster dies, the Island is saved, Rose and Bernard live in peace under the watchful eyes of Ben and Hurley, and Jack dies right where his journey began. Everybody else either dies or escapes the island for good. That’s all I could have asked for. All I cared for was to have the main characters’ plotlines wrapped up. As for all of the other questions, (many of which CollegeHumor.com wrapped up into a nice little video,) they’re things that will keep us talking for years to come.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

I’m sure a lot of the show’s unresolved moments were due to plot threads that the producers chose to abandon mid-series. The fact that the Dharma Initiative dropped a crate of food on the Island suggests that the producers might not have decided that the Dharma Initiative was more or less defunct decades before the story began.

Maybe Juliet’s claim that the nuclear bomb worked is proof that the producers hadn’t decided the flash-sideways story would be set in the afterlife until later in the sixth season. Or, maybe as she was dying she had a vision of the afterlife and mistook what she saw as proof that a parallel world existed where the bomb went off.

My point is that the show left much for us to talk about, whether you were pleased with the finale or not. We’ll never officially know if the producers meant for the Dharma Initiative to be a distraction from the Island’s true mysteries or if they began the show intending for all of the strangeness to be the result of their experiments. We’ll never know what was up with the Egyptian motif, or why the Man in Black’s death released the smoke monster while everybody else just died.

But we’ll still talk about it.

A Brief Thought on the Lost Finale

2010-05-24T01:23:00.005-04:00

First off, if you didn't watch the Lost finale live, don't complain if I spoil anything for you. In this era of DVRing shows and watching them at your convenience, if there's one thing you should watch live, it's the series finale to a continuity heavy show that's been a six year television phenomenon.

That being said, I'm not going to get into too much about my thoughts on the episode right now. There's plenty of time to debate whether it left too many questions unanswered, whether Ben should have gone into the church and if the fate of the world should really rest on unplugging the drain in a pool of electromagnetic water.

Instead all I want to say is that the Smoke Monster clearly never saw Revenge of the Sith. Otherwise he'd have known better than to attack Jack when he had the high ground. I mean, think about how well it turned out for Anakin...

Might "Inception" Hold the Key to Batman 3 Casting?

2010-05-11T13:07:00.003-04:00

Based on the cast list of Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie Inception, it looks like Nolan might be turning into one of those directors who has a family of actors he repeatedly turns to for his movies. Others on this list include Tim Burton, who reliably casts Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, and Wes Anderson who tends to cast some mixture of Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and the Wilson brothers.

Nolan's Pre-Batman films (Following, Memento and Insomnia) all used completely different casts, without any major actors appearing in his other movies. However, The Prestige, his first film to follow Batman Begins had the notable casting choices of Christian Bale and Michael Caine in the lead roles.

Okay so two actors from the movie that took Nolan's career to the next level appeared in his follow up movie. Nothing big about that, but look at the cast list for Inception. Caine is back for a fourth movie with Nolan, as are Batman Begins stars Cillian Murphy and Ken Wantanabe.

Maybe Nolan is starting to turn into a director who likes reusing the same actors in his movies. If that's the case, maybe some of the cast of Inception might turn up as villains in the recently announced third Batman film. I'd rule out Leonardo DiCaprio as being in it just because in his last few movies he's been the lead role.

That leaves three other stand out candidates: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, and Marion Cotillard. I'd rule out Marion Cotillard as a villain simply because she hasn't really been in any action movies that I'm aware of, though she might make a good love interest for Bruce Wayne.

So who might Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page play? The most likely choices would be the Riddler and Catwoman. I sense that they're the two villains fans are most expecting to see in the next movie, (them and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin). Also, considering that Nolan has been going for more realistic villains in his movies, their lack of powers also makes them likely choices. (Though, he did do a good realistic interpretation of the immortal Ra's Al Ghul for Batman Begins.)

We probably won't have to wait too long for the villains to be announced. The third Batman movie is scheduled for release in 2012, so casting announcements can't be too far off.

I'm Actually Showing My Photography in Public

2010-04-29T13:40:00.006-04:00

Sorry about the late notice on this one but this Friday, (4/30/10) I'm going to be participating in the UrbanCincy Visual Showcase as part of the Final Friday gallery walk. It goes from 6pm-10pm at 1220 Vine Street, where the A Lucky Step furniture store used to be. It's right across the street from Lavomatic, and two storefronts north of Senate.

Basically after all of the photography I've been doing over the years, I decided I really needed to start showing it to people outside my list of Facebook friends. Randy Simes, editor of UrbanCincy.com put me in contact with Jake Mecklenborg and Jeremy Mosher who are also going to be showcasing their video work and photography.

My work is primarily shots from around the uptown and downtown areas of Cincinnati, all shot in a variety of photography styles, most of them on film. (Yes, film!) The framed prints are for sale at $65 each, but I'll gladly take orders for reprints.

Also, I'd like to offer a special thanks to Mickey DeSilvia at Koji Studios for helping me out with the printing.

So, come on down, enjoy some wine and check out the neighborhood.

Remaking Death at a Funeral

2010-04-13T01:08:00.009-04:00

Too Soon?

I had originally meant to do an article about Frank Oz's 2007 comedy Death at a Funeral on my Overlooked Movies blog. It was a nice simple British farce that had the potential to be the sleeper hit of it's year, but never got the promotional push it needed. Simple premise. The patriarch of a slightly dysfunctional British family passes away. A funeral is held. Antics ensue.

Then I found out they had remade it. Let me restate that. The movie only came out in 2007, and there's a remake.

As much crap as people give studios over remakes, there are admittedly valid reasons for doing it: the movie is old, obscure, foreign or a director wants to re-interpret the original. It takes the right combination of these factors for a remake to work, but a movie being old is usually an important one. Audiences don't mind revisiting the same stories, just as long as the original isn't still fresh in their minds.

Foreign films get a bit more leeway. Sometimes the premise of a movie could be good, but it's so filled with local cultural references that American audiences wouldn't understand them. Or, since foreign movies tend to have a stigma as being "art house" movies, it's sometimes better to remake the movie and market it to a wider audience if a movie's premise is too mainstream to be considered "arty".

It's why there probably would probably be an uproar if a movie like Amelie were to be remade today. It may be almost a decade old, but it still resonates with the art house crowd. At the same time probably nobody raised a fuss when the Spanish horror film [Rec] was remade as Quarantine less than a year after the original's release, because it's the sort of lowbrow horror movie that doesn't work as well mired in subtitles.

While Death at a Funeral is technically a foreign movie, it was still in English. Not only that, but it was made to cater to as wild an audience as possible. Despite being a British movie, none of the actors' accents are too hard to understand for Americans, and there aren't any references that you have to be a BBC America aficionado to get. Hell they even cast American actor Alan Tudyk in a role.

Everybody loves Alan Tudyk.

It's not like the British version was an amateur production either. There might be a weak argument for remaking it so soon if the original was in some way unpolished, but Death at a Funeral was every bit a professional production as any Hollywood movie.

If anything, doing a remake so quickly after the original is like telling the cast and crew, "Good job, but we're going to hire some more famous people to do it better than you did." Actually, there's one exception. They did cast the Peter Dinklage in both films as the father's secret midget lover. So either the producers of the American version really liked his performance in the original or there's only one short person in Hollywood.

There is no reason for remaking an English language movie this soon. It took them 12 years to turn the comedy The Dinner Game into the upcoming film Dinner for Schmucks, and the original was in French. They could have just translated the dialogue directly and pushed it out a year after the original's release, but it got the intermediary time it deserved.

I really hope that the instant remake doesn't catch on as a new trend in Hollywood. The Onion once joked that a bigger budget remake of Mr. & Mrs. Smith was in the works just a year after it's release. Now I can't help but wonder if producers have their eyes on remaking American indie films. Does it really seem that far fetched anymore that some producer might be thinking about making Whip It again, except this time with Miley Cyrus in the lead role?

Some movies need more time to find their audiences than others; a fact that studios seem to overlook in their apparent rush to get two good weeks out of a movie in theaters before it's forgotten until it resurfaces on home video. If this formula was used in the past we probably wouldn't have heard of movies like Shawshank Redemption, a movie that famously didn't become the classic it is today until well after its DVD release. Instead of remaking movies, maybe Hollywood should work on fostering audience the movies that have already been made after they've been released on DVD.

Yes, I now own a Snuggie

2010-03-23T10:49:00.005-04:00

There are occasional moments in your life when you step back and ask yourself, "What the hell am I doing?" Sometimes it's over a major thing, and other times over something minor. Last night I asked myself this question over a minor thing when I found myself sitting in front of my laptop wearing a Snuggie.

I need to explain why I now own a Snuggie. I really do. At no point did I ever watch the infomercial and exclaim aloud, "A blanket with sleeves? By golly I could sure use that!" No, like every sane person in America, I simply wondered to myself, how does this differ from a robe exactly?

Then a few weekends back, the bars at Mt. Adams held it's second annual Snuggie Bar Crawl. I'd seen photos of the year's previous bar crawl, and thought that any opportunity to run around town dressed like a crazy person in a group was not something to be passed up. A friend of mine who'd received a Snuggie as a gag gift a while back was also down for it.

So, I had to buy a Snuggie. I opted for one with a UC Bearcats print all over it, because I figured if I'm going to look crazy, i might as well sport some school pride while I'm at it.

Unfortunately, for various reasons we ended up not doing the bar crawl, so now I had a sleeved blanket on my hands. My initial reaction was to return it, but it struck me as just being one of those things. You know, something that's all the rage for a few years, then twenty years later your kids look at you and ask, "No really, you need to explain why people would buy a Pet Rock, and did you ever own one?"

I decided that someday I will look at my future children and say, "Yes, I too bought a Snuggie, and someday it will be yours."

Okay, actually I thought it'd just be a fun thing to leave around the house. A conversation piece. If a guest came over and complained it was too cold, before turning up the heat, I could throw them the Snuggie. (This might have actually come in handy the year I threw a Superbowl party and realized that no matter how high I turned the main thermostat up, my basement still needed a space heater.)

Once the decision had been made that I would keep the Snuggie, the next logical thing was to try it on. I stood in front of the mirror and decided that yes, I looked like a crazy person. A crazy person who was a Bearcats fan. After that it made sense to see if there was anything about wearing it that felt more comfortable than say, layering up or wearing a robe. So, I sat in front of my computer wearing the thing, meaning to leave it on for a few minutes only.

Then twenty minutes later, I realized I was still wearing it.

Awkward.

It felt like I had somehow legitimized the existence of a perfectly useless product.

Well, twenty minutes wasn't going to be any worse than a half hour more. I decided to use as advertised: on the couch, remote in hand, a snack by my side.

One thing they fail to mention in the ads is that the Snuggie is not meant for walking around in, unless you're Kareem Abdul Jabbar. The fact that it covers your feet may be convenient when you're on the couch, but if you need to walk about, you have no choice but to hike that thing up and trot about like a geisha wearing a backless hospital gown.

I would love to have seen how intoxicated people bar hopping in Mt. Adams managed while wearing them.

Once on the couch it turned out it was comfortable and practical; more comfortable and practical than I should really admit. Then again, I haven't yet subjected it to a true test. A chilly basement in the spring is nothing compared to one in winter.

I guess I'll have to wait another nine months to find out if a thin layer of synthetic fleece around the arms is that much more convenient than reaching over the top of a blanket.

Thoughts on Best Picture

2010-03-05T02:44:00.006-05:00

Seeing how movie-centric my blog has become, I figure I might as well weigh in on this year's entries for Best Picture. So, in my opinion, this year's best picture should be...

Up.

You thought I was going to say Avatar, didn't you. I'll admit, considering how glowing my earlier review was, it seems like it would have been my logical choice. While it was good, I think I was still riding some kind of buzz caused by the 3D IMAX when I wrote that. If it were another year, Avatar probably would have emerged as the clear winner, but this year was such a good year for movies.

Even with the Academy boosting the nominees from five to ten, it still feels like some movies got left out, like The Brothers Bloom or (500) Days of Summer, which is apparently a fictionalized account of why I'm in love with Zooey Deschanel and why she would probably break my heart if I went out with her.

Anyway, I'm getting off track. So why Up and not a record breaking blockbuster like Avatar or a critically acclaimed sleeper hit like The Hurt Locker? Though the special effects of Avatar may have been breakthrough, the premise did feel like old territory. And I'm not saying The Hurt Locker wasn't a fantastic movie either, but the lack of a central storyline did leave my mind disengaged on occasion.

But with Up, that was definitely an original piece of cinema from start to finish. We're talking about a movie about an old man and a little boy dragging a house across South America. I can't even think of what movie you could compare that to.

The film has such a wide range of characters, all of whom are so well developed. Just look at Carl's wife. Her entire life story is told from childhood to death over a five minute montage, and yet she feels as integral a character to the story as everybody else onscreen.

As for the characters that are onscreen for the bulk of the film, you have to give credit to filmmakers that can throw an little boy, an old man, an older villain, a pack of talking dogs and a giant bird together in the same movie and not have it feel like it's geared only towards children.

I'll admit, it's not the greatest animated movie of all time, and some would argue that only a movie that's achieved that status should be the one to be the first cartoon to win best picture. That status probably goes to something like Ratatouille, The Iron Giant or Wall-E, just to name a few recent ones. But best of the year doesn't have to mean best of all time, and I just think it would be nice of the Academy didn't define "Best Picture" as the most intensely dramatic movie with lots of crying and shouting and shooting of guns, but rather as the movie people will still be watching in large numbers a decade down the road.

I should also admit that I haven't seen all of the nominees. I have yet to see The Blind Side, An Education, Precious or Up in the Air. Maybe if I get around to those, one of them will blow me away as being an unmistakably original piece of cinema that should be watched in large numbers ten years down the road.

But for now, my money is on Up.

Ten Random Movies to watch during a Snowpocalypse

2010-02-09T11:00:00.003-05:00

So the weatherman says you're not going anywhere for the next few days. Lo and behold, it turned out he was right. Why not take this opportunity to call up a few friends within walking distance and pop in a movie? To help you figure out what to watch, here's a list of ten movies that have nothing to do with each other aside from the fact that they're easy to enjoy (and may or may not have some snow related elements to them).

Odds are you have a few of them in your collection too. If not, hopefully you're within walking distance of a Blockbuster.

10. Die Hard 2

Yeah. The first one is without question the best, but if you're going to be trapped at home in a snowstorm, why not watch a movie about fighting terrorists in a snowstorm? Just try to look past the fact that it involves a terrorist plot that probably involved months of planning, yet seems entirely reliant upon the fact that there is a blizzard on the day they try to pull it off.

9. Ratatouille

Every time I watch this movie I get a strange compulsion to cook a big fancy meal and knock back a bottle of wine. Maybe you're the same way, maybe not. But if you're not going anywhere for the night, it's a good dinner/movie combo. It would have made an even better dinner/movie/wine combo had Costco decided to go through with it's plans to sell Ratatouille inspired wine.

8. The Saint

A good heist movie is always fun, but this one is a personal favorite of mine. Maybe it's because this one strive to be slightly more epic than the usual heist movie. Instead of just being about a thief pulling off a big job, it's a big job that ultimately involves taking on the Russian mafia. The score for this movie is pretty kick-ass too (if you're into electronica). And if anything, this movie should put your little snowstorm in perspective, reminding you that at least you're not in Russia.

7. The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

This is one of those movies I think everybody saw and everybody loved. It's just a great revenge story that builds up slowly but keeps a good momentum going all the way through with all it's little twists and turns. Jim Caviezel as the Count is a guy you genuinely want to root for, and Guy Pearce is genuinely despicable as the villain. And dude... there's sword fighting!

6. The Wonder Boys

There was a running gag when this movie was released that it was the best reviewed movie of the year that nobody was seeing. I suppose it's because it's also a really hard movie to make a trailer for. The film follows an english professor, played by Michael Douglas, over the course of a weekend as his school hosts a writer's festival. All the problems in his life mash together all at once from his novel he can't seem to finish to the affair he's having with his boss's wife. I'd explain more, but that would just take away from a lot of fun of discovering the film's best moments for yourself.

5. Stardust

Yep. More sword fighting. I suppose I could have just as easily put The Princess Bride in this spot, but you've probably seen that movie to death by now, whereas Stardust is still building it's audience. Also, it's got one thing that The Princess Bride doesn't: a fight scene set to "The Can-Can" featuring Robert DeNiro in drag.

4. Gladiator

I don't know about you, but these days I'm usually too busy to watch any movie that pushes over two hours. I suppose that's what weekends are for, but it does sound a bit anti-social to say you're not going to meet up with friends because you want to watch a two and a half our epic. Hopefully when Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe team up again for Robin Hood it will be at least half as good as this.

3. Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Sure, you can write it off as a chick-flick, but there's a reason why people are still making movies based on a book that's almost 200 years old. It's a story romance story which actually convinces you that the main characters are falling in love, as opposed to just being a few well paid Hollywood actors stuck in some gimmicky plot. This version also manages to be a costume drama without being a "stuffy" costume drama.

If you're only familiar with this story through the mash-up novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, maybe you can try watching this back to back with Shaun of the Dead to put you in familiar territory.

2. Superbad

'Nuff Said.

1. Your Favorite Disney Movie

I think we all have some movie that we thought kicked ass when we were kids then when we watched it years down the road realized it was so bad you almost wanted to apologize to your parents for making them take you to see it. (Personally, I'm still trying to figure out what was going through my mind when I dragged my parents to see Super Mario Bros. on the same weekend that Jurassic Park opened.)

However, I'm willing to bet two things:

That Disney movie you loved when you were young will still be as enjoyable now as it was back then.
You haven't watched it in years.

For me, it's Aladdin. After this movie came out I wanted my own flying carpet more than anything. (Okay, so I still do). Whatever Disney movie you get nostalgic for, the animation will still look sharp, the voice acting will still sound natural, and you'll probably still find yourself singing along to the songs.

So there's my list. Hopefully it helps. I suppose I should have put this out before this most recent storm hit so you could have ventured out to Blockbuster, or put one of these in your Netflix queue before you got locked in, but I suspect you've got at least one of these movies in your collection already.

This Might Qualify as Irony

2010-01-21T14:48:00.004-05:00

As I mentioned earlier, I was at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, an event that was sponsored in part by AT&T. Early in the game they ran an ad on the JumboTron; it was the one where Luke Wilson tries to download a copy of himself on the Verizon network and on AT&T at the same time.

Suddenly, it struck me that now might be a good time to take a photo on my iPhone and upload it onto Facebook. I'd never really bothered doing the mobile upload thing before, but this seemed like as good occasion as any.

I took out my phone, and this is what I saw.

In case the what's going on here isn't immediately clear, let me spell it out for you:

1. I'm at an even't sponsored by AT&T.

2. My phone is exclusive to AT&T's network.

3. I have just seen an ad touting the superiority of AT&T's network over Verizon.

4. I have no service on my phone.

This wasn't a case of too many people trying to use the system at the same time and calls not getting through, which I realize tends to happen at sporting events. I flat out wasn't getting reception.

As the game went on, my phone finally picked up a signal, but still didn't have 3G service, or EDGE coverage for that matter. (EDGE is the high speed data service that AT&T uses where 3G coverage is not available.)

You'd think that an AT&T sponsored event is the one place in America that you'd be guaranteed complete service. Instead, I got the exact opposite.

My advice to AT&T: Instead of wasting your money suing Verizon, or making ads that argue Verizon's ads are only technically correct but are misleading anyways... fix your damn network.

Bearcats on Holiday

2010-01-06T10:45:00.010-05:00

You wouldn't have known that Cincinnati was expected to lose the Sugar Bowl if you had been to New Orleans last week. Yes, we were all aware that Florida was favored to win. Even I, with my near-complete ignorance of sports rankings, understood that Florida was playing at a level that UC just wasn't at yet, Brian Kelly or no Brian Kelly.

But secretly, we all were expecting to UC to beat the odds. In fact, we were all hoping for a victory so epic that Disney would have been knocking on doors at UC the next day to buy the movie rights, and had you been there, you'd have thought the same thing too.

Cincinnati definitely represented itself down in New Orleans. So many Cincinnatians showed up that on New Year's Eve, everywhere I went, I ran into old classmates, old co-workers and people I knew just from around Clifton. Throughout New Year's Eve, all along that miracle mile known as Bourbon Street, crowds were spontaneously breaking out into UC chants. Meanwhile, Gators fans seemed to sheepishly roam about trying to find a bar where they weren't severely outnumbered.

If the idea of us winning seemed like a nice thought to entertain on New Year's Eve, we expected it to be a reality on game day. At some of the Sugar Bowl events around town, like the pre-game party at the House of Blues, it looked like a Bearcats-only event. Gators fans were becoming more visible around town, but the comment I heard most often out of them was, "No seriously, where are all of our fans?"

I think even the residents of New Orleans were rooting for us. As a hotel employee put it, "More of you showed up, which means more of you brought money into our city." Hard to argue with that rationale.

As the afternoon rolled on, the Bearcats collected at the Marriott where the team was staying. The lobby was eventually unnavigable and by the time the team was boarding the bus, we had overflowed into the street.

When everybody was seated at the Superdome, it was clear how many more Bearcats than Gators showed up to the game. Our student section was completely saturated. I think we filled up about 3/4 of the top level, while the Gators took up less than half. It really looked like we might win this thing after all, (if this was determined by crowd support).

Then kickoff happened, reality set in and I don't want to talk about it.

After the game, I thought it was going to be a bad night. I thought that either the Bearcat fans would hide out in their hotel rooms too embarrassed to go back out, or everywhere we went, Gators fans would be rubbing their victory in our faces.

Instead, there was a sort of mutual respect among fans of the rival teams. We couldn't argue that they played a better game, but they couldn't deny that we made a better showing to support our team, especially considering how much farther we had to travel to get to the game.

On the Front Lines of "Avatar"

2009-12-19T03:11:00.007-05:00

I suspect that a lot of non-fanboys out there have been trying to figure out what's the big deal about James Cameron's new movie Avatar. It's not based on any source material, so it's not like there's a pre-existing fan base. The story doesn't sound like anything terribly original. Natives at in harmony with nature defending their homeland from greedy industrialists has been done before. Then of course there's the abundance of CGI, which has been done before and usually fails to convince audiences that they're not watching a cartoon. So why all the hoopla?

I'll admit that when the movie started, it didn't feel like it was going to be anything truly wondrous for the first few scenes. Aside from an early shot of a crew aboard a spaceship in zero gravity that looked unexpectedly convincing, nothing really held the promise of being a movie like something that hadn't been seen before.

The premise gets laid out for the audience in a fairly bare bones manner. A paraplegic marine named Jake Sully has a twin brother that was supposed to be working on a mining project on the far off world of Pandora. When his brother dies, Sully is recruited to take his place. He is tasked with infiltrating and understanding the planets inhabitants, the Na'vi, using a remotely controlled body made to look like them, (an avatar.) Jake's situation complicates quickly as he becomes deeply immersed in the Na'vi culture using his avatar, while at the same time has orders to convince them to relocate or figure out how to wipe them out. As you might have guessed from the trailer, trouble ensues.

Once Jake takes control of his avatar, that's when the movie gets ahold of you. Jake, and through him the audience, is slowly immersed into the world of Pandora. It starts out as a place that is visually astonishing, and quickly turns into a place you want to actually visit with your own avatar body. This is especially true once the Na'vi take Jake up to the floating mountains and show him how to tame and ride these giant flying sky creatures. It's such an immersive experience that I think it's damn near impossible for any two minute trailer to convey how deep into the characters you'll find yourself.

As you more about the Na'vi culture, you'll begin to empathize with them. The story also puts a unique twist on the inevitable love story aspect of the movie, as Jake falls in love with one of the natives while inhabiting a body that isn't his.

Up until now I've mostly held off on mentioning the effects, and that's because this movie feels like the story was put first and the effects were only necessary to tell a story on the scale it required. The effects will wow you, but you can tell that James Cameron wasn't relying entirely on them in the hopes of winning the audience over. It's the story itself that proves to be the biggest draw in the end.

Obviously, I do have to mention the effects, since they've been getting so much buzz on their own. Some of my friends have expressed wariness over seeing this movie on account of how much of it is CGI. I understand where you're coming from. The Star Wars prequels and the last Indiana Jones movie were filed with scenes done unnecessarily in computer animation that failed to convince viewers that they had been filmed live.

In Avatar, the CGI may not have convinced me that everything I saw was real, but I really can't decide if it's because the CGI hadn't reached a level of true photo-realism, or if it's because the alien world of Pandora was so vibrant and colorfully depicted that my brain just acknowledged it was CGI because clearly nothing so wondrous exists on earth. I'm more inclined to go with the latter, just because at the movie's most emotional parts I found it impossible to picture the actors running around on a blue screen soundstage covered in body suits waiting for some animator to feed their expressions into a computer. In contrast, with the Star Wars prequels, it took effort to actually believe the actors were in the exotic locales their characters were supposed to be in.

In fact there were moments (probably most notable when watching the movie in 3-D) that I felt it wasn't that the effects were lacking, but rather there was a lack of more extraneous stimuli. In some of the scenes where the Na'vi walk through the jungle, everything is so perfectly rendered down to random insects or pollen floating about, that I felt what was missing was the feeling of sticky hot humidity as an audience member.

Even though they're completely CGI characters, the Na'vi feel as real as the actors playing them, so when we see the ten foot tall blue people laugh or grieve, it's not hard to empathize with them. They never come off feeling like the waxwork zombies that seem to populate Robert Zemeckis's recent animated movies like The Polar Express or Beowulf.

In fact, the only disappointment I had with the movie were some of the design choices. I still have difficulty believing that tribal tattoos will make a comeback in the future, and that Papyrus font is used for all the subtitles. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a rather distinctive font often used to convey something "earthy" or "mystical" and has become so over-used that even it's creator thinks it's gone overboard.

But you know what? The film is so damn incredible that I'll forgive these little faux pas. If you're a parent, you pretty much owe it to your kids to take them to this. For me, it brought back memories of the first time I saw Jurassic Park, and how I was actually a bit disappointed that the movie had to end at some point and the adventure would be over.

Now I just hope we don't have to wait another ten years for the next James Cameron movie.

Black Friday Part II

2009-11-25T13:34:00.004-05:00

For obvious reasons, the actual morning part was unpleasant. Since doors opened at 5 a.m. we had to get there at least by 4:30 a.m. to set up, and have another quick pep talk. As a cashier, there wasn't much to set up besides making sure that the register was ready to go and that enough bags were on hand. The other departments might have had to do more, and the managers definitely had to get there earlier. At any rate, the 3 a.m. - 4 a.m. zone is around when it's debatable whether you're better off trying to get a short night's sleep in or just staying up all night. I opted for the short sleep.

On the way to the store, I drove past one of our competitors. This gave me a false sense of security since the crowd in front was nothing more than a half hour's amount of work do deal with.

Then I got to my store. Without exaggeration, I can tell you that the line was at least two football fields long. I admit, I mildly felt like some kind of rock star or celebrity as I walked in. There was a notable rise in the customers' excitement level, since they knew that once the grunts arrived, the show would soon start.

I didn't feel tired. It just felt like I wasn't capable of performing any advanced mental functions. I could do my job well enough, just not any advanced mathematical calculations.

The guard stood at the door, watching the clock for the official countdown of when to open the door. When the time came to do so, I can tell he did so with a bit of hesitation. If it's not a customer who gets trampled to death on black friday, it's usually the employee who opens the door.

The door opened and the customers started flowing in. First they just speed walked, maybe so as not to embarrassingly eager. This lasted long enough for them to get past the security desk, then the full-on ran.

From there, it was like watching that scene from Jurassic Park where Dr. Grant and the kids are in the valley watching the flock of gallimimuses run past before suddenly taking a sharp turn and running in their direction. We had about three minutes from when they walked into the door to when they made it to the registers merchandise in hand.

We were well prepared. All lanes were open. The line was properly corralled. Our managers were on hand at all times to deal with everything from problem customers, to computer errors to just plain running low on change. We only needed to turn around, give a motion and the'd be at hand.

We even had employees whose sole duty was to wait in the wings until one of us had to take a bathroom break or something. We'd make the gesture and be swapped out. It was also the one time we were allowed to keep a coat under our register so that we wouldn't stand out as employees if we had to run to the back. They didn't want us having to deal with the dilemma of having to either brush a customer off onto another employee (which was bad) or not making it back to the register promptly (which was also bad).

The onslaught didn't stop for three hours. Three hours of repetitively making the same gestures of swiping and bagging and trying to sell the same extended warranties on the same products. Thankfully, those practically sold themselves. With computers and video game systems, everybody had heard enough horror stories that they almost expected them to fail but bought them anyway, with the warranty. Cameras and TVs were another story, but nobody got bent out of shape on us not selling warranties those.

Things slowed down around 8am, which was enough time for us to take our breaks. The early morning rush crowd had gone home, so we had some downtime until the second wave. The veterans told us that usually around 10-ish we'd get hit by another mass of customers who wanted to take part in the Black Friday frenzy without the part where they camp out in front of a store all night. This was the group that wanted to enjoy the sale, but didn't care for the ridiculously marked down merchandise.

Sure enough, when ten o'clock hit the crowd surged again. Once again, it was a never-ending stream of people coming through, just as strong as the early morning crowd. This rush only lasted for about two hours. It might have gone on a bit longer than that, but at noon my shift ended and I was able to go home and sleep, slightly perplexed by how I managed to do a full day's work before noon.

The sad part is that it still didn't stop me from going back to the store later that day to take in the sales myself...

Black Friday from Employee Perspective

2009-11-23T22:46:00.004-05:00

Part I: Training

So Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) is almost upon us again. It's the day that many retailers bet on turning a profit for the year. It is also arguably the most apeshit insane day in retail year upon year.

This is a day where people forgo spending a quiet night in with the family to camp out in front of a store all night in the hopes of obtaining cheap electronics. (I should also point out that it's the one night of the year specifically reserved for spending time with family, regardless of religious affiliation.) This is also a day where people have historically died on numerous occasions, often trampled to death by the horde of ravenous shoppers trying to snag a cheap laptop.

So what's it like to actually to work on a Black Friday? I suppose if you work at a store that doesn't sell expensive electronics, it's just a busier than average day. Back in 2004, I worked at a big box retailer over the holidays, and that is ground zero for shopping mayhem.

The first thing I was told when I started the job was that I would be working the Black Friday shift. This wasn't offered as a question. This was made clear as day. If you work here over the holidays, you're working Black Friday. You are not going to grandma's house if she lives out of town. You are not weaseling out of this later. Unless you could definitively produce plane tickets purchased prior to your employment, you were going to be at the store.

To train us for the big day every saturday in November, we had to come in for meetings at 7 or 8 in the morning. First we'd be shown a video to get us hyped up about Black Friday. By hyped up, I mean try to get you to not loathe the fact you might have to get up at 4 a.m. the day after thanksgiving.

On a subtler level, they remind you that when the company makes a big profit, they can afford to keep giving you paychecks.

Eventually, we started doing simulations during the meetings. One department at a time was supposed to assume their normal roles while the rest of us represented the throng of customers demanding cheap merchandise. Ideally, it was to make sure that everybody knew what the sale items were, how to deal with irate customers forty at a time and so on. The side benefit was that we got to therapeutically act out as our worst customers so that we wouldn't snap at them when the real time came.

We'd pretend to be the guy who'd complain that we didn't have any half priced laptops left even though he got there an hour after we opened our doors. The guy who just grabbed random merchandise and just ran for the register. The one who tries to beat an old lady senseless to wrench a digital camera out of her hands. The one insist we're trying to scam him by not honoring a sale price when in reality he grabbed a completely different item than what was listed in the flyer.

I didn't have to be on the other side of the simulations since I was a cashier. My responsibilities for the day amounted to a bit of a trade off. On the one hand, it would be a never ending onslaught of people. On the other hand, I wouldn't be expected to sell all of the extended warranties, loyalty program memberships, magazine subscriptions that they usually expected to hammer the customer with at a time when they weren't prepared to spend any more money than they already were. At most we'd only have to mention an extended warranty once, per customer, and only if it was for something in the video game console price range or above.

At any rate, it wasn't worth anybody's time for the employees to line up and pretend to be a never-ending slew of fake customers making fake purchases. So, they just reminded us not to mess up.

Of course no amount of training can really get you excited for having to wake up at 4 a.m. on a holiday weekend.

Next: Part II - The actual day

I'll never look at Spider-Girl the same way again.

2009-10-28T00:13:00.008-04:00

Yes, I know. Observations about the increasingly risque nature of women's Halloween costumes is nothing new. There's that famous line from Mean Girls about how Halloween is the one time of the year where women can dress like a total slut and get away with it. Then there's the "Slutty Pumpkin" from the first season of How I Met Your Mother.

So what's there to write about this year? Now women have the option of deciding how prudish or slutty they want to look.

You have to give them credit. It takes a lot of creativity to take a character whose costume us supposed to be a full-body spandex outfit and turn it into the one on the right.

What's that, ladies? You like Spider-Man but prefer the black symbiote suit instead? No problem.

Now, what i'd really like to see is some woman take the one on the center or right and go as "Sexy Venom" for Halloween. I leave it up to you to figure out how to make that work.

Issue 9 vs the Streetcar

2009-10-06T21:24:00.008-04:00

I realize that not everybody has the time to follow every local news issue in depth, so I thought I'd use my little soapbox here to (hopefully) help clarify some confusion on ballot issue 9 and how it relates to the local streetcar debate.

The short version is that Issue 9 is a messy, poorly drafted piece of legislature that may hinder future developments plans for the city, and that you should vote no on Issue 9.

Now for the long version...

I'm aware that a lot of people aren't entirely sold on the idea of streetcars in Cincinnati, and quite frankly I encourage constructive debate on the issue. (By constructive, I mean something more than constantly using "boondoggle" like the world's laziest person filling out a Mad Lib.)

That being said, Issue 9 is not a vote on whether or not we get a streetcar.

The parties that drafted Issue 9 may have done so with the intention of using it to defeat the streetcar, but if it succeeds it would do so in the same manner as using an atom bomb to kill a mosquito. The problem is in the language that was used when drafting the issue is too broad.

As written, it would prevent the city from spending money for "acquisition or improvements or construction for passenger rail transportation" without submitting it to a vote. My understanding is that the intent of that language was to prevent the city from calling the streetcar something else, such as a trolley or tram, to dodge the law if it should pass. The reality of the language is that it has the potential to extend its reach way beyond the streetcar issue.

Some have argued that taken to it's extreme, Issue 9 could prevent the zoo from building a train ride for kids (which would technically be a passenger rail in city limits). More realistically, people are concerned about the effect Issue 9 could have on the proposed inter-city train network.

The project, dubbed the 3C corridor for how it will link Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland by rail, would undoubtedly be affected by Issue 9. This is on top of any other projects to link Cincinnati to other cities by rail. If Issue 9 passes, this will mean that even if the project goes through and trains run from Cleveland as far south as Dayton, the rail lines cannot extend as far as Cincinnati unless it gets submitted to the city for a special vote.

If the the 3C project doesn't have Cincinnati's full cooperation, it can kill the project statewide and many others before we even get a chance to vote on it. Getting federal funding for these projects usually involves demonstrating that if we get the money for it, we're ready to start building it. We'd have a hard time arguing that the 3C project is "shovel ready" if we have to waste precious time putting it to a special vote.

I'll try to write a more detailed entry on the advantages of an improved rail infrastructure, but I'll say a few things in brief. If you ever heard anybody talk about visiting Europe, odds are they've uttered the phrase, "It's so easy to get around there. You can just hop on a train and go wherever." If you ever tried to book a train going anywhere west of the Allegheny Mountains, you'd know this isn't the case in America.

Aside from the congestion it would relieve from our highways, a train system would encourage business between Ohio cities. It'd be easier to get to out of town sporting events or concerts in Cleveland and Columbus. Anybody who has to do business in those cities can be more productive on the ride up and back. (My fellow lawyers, I'm looking in your direction.) Hell, you don't even have to be productive. You can sleep on the ride up.

It's possible that the 3C project could go through without Cincinnati's approval, but that would mean the rail lines would stop somewhere in Kenwood or Sharonville. Great for them. Bad for us. At that point, should we want to get involved, Cincinnati would probably have to put up the funding for the rest of the line by itself, instead of getting federal funding.

There's a lot more reasons to vote against Issue 9. (Not setting a precedent that would lead to the style of government that's been crippling California lately where just about every decision has to go through a special election is another example.)

There's also a good reason why several organizations in town have spoken out against Issue 9, even organizations that expressed reservations about the streetcar. Anybody who reads the Cincinnati Enquirer probably picked up on a distinctively anti-streetcar slant in their articles over the summer. You've probably also noticed a lot of recent articles slanted against Issue 9 as well.

To prevent projects that could help Cincinnati grow, keep jobs in the city and draw in new ones, Vote no on Issue 9.

While I'm ranting... just get out and vote, period. Just because it's not a presidential election year doesn't mean you shouldn't have a say in the government.

There you have it. My two cents with the possibility of a buck fifty to follow.

Michael C. Hall...

2009-08-25T18:22:00.003-04:00

... is mesmerized by his own jazz hands.

Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino's Best Movie Yet

2009-08-25T00:26:00.003-04:00

(But that isn't saying much)

There are a few directors out there who are overrated, and everybody knows it. I'm not talking about ones like Spielberg, Scorcese or Coppola who have made a few memorable films and a few more forgettable ones. I'm talking about ones like Sodeheim or Tarantino who make films that grab the public's attention, but are nowhere near as important as they'd like us to believe. Personally I don't think Quentin Tarantino deserves nearly as much hype as he gets, but I will admit that his new film Inglorious Basterds is at least deserving of some of its hype.

My problem with Tarantino's past efforts is that he's capable of being a good director, but doesn't follow through. His cinematography is good and his musical selection is impeccable, but he's best know for the pop culture savvy dialogue exchanges he writes. The problem is, he's rarely good at uniting all the music, the clever dialogue and the inspired shots to tell a good story. Instead, they just sit there as separate parts of a movie, waiting for somebody to come along and edit them into something nicer.

Maybe it took the complete failure of his last movie Death Proof, (his entry into the double feature Grindhouse,) for him to realize that just because he puts something on screen doesn't mean audiences will clamor for it. Or perhaps it was just by chance that all of his brilliant but disjointed movie making skills happened to work this time around.

Lets take his trademark dialogue for example. In all of his movies, the characters will ramble on for minutes at a time exchanging snappy lines, but its never in a way that moves the plot along. Hell in Death Proof, the whole first hour of the movie is nothing but dialogue exchanges before anything resembling plot development occurs.

In Basterds, this works to his advantage because it creates an almost intolerable level of tension as the heroes and villains toy with each other, waiting for their opponents to make the first move. In the opening scene Col. Landa, the film's main Nazi villain, stops by a French farmer's house. He engages in a friendly banter for a while, making the farmer feel at ease before making it clear he believes the farmer is hiding a Jewish family , and that there will be consequences if he does not reveal their location.

Later in the film, the Basterds, a group of Nazi-terrorizing Jewish American soldiers, masquerade as Nazi officers to rendezvous with a double agent at a bar. The problem is that at the bar they run into a real Nazi who wants to join them for a beer. On the surface they're playing a friendly drinking game together, but under the surface they know that each second they keep talking is another chance they might blow their cover.

Just because it's a period piece, don't think that Tarantino wouldn't work in his trademark music selection as well. For the most part he sticks with instrumental selections that I suspect were all borrowed from Sergio Leone movies, (it wouldn't be a Tarantino movie without an endless string of "homages" i guess). Yet, to build up the tension for the finale, he puts on a Davie Bowie song. Somehow it works.

Now Tarantino has always been good at picking a good cast, even if the movie they're in doesn't end up being all that great. With Basterds, most of the screen time is occupied by European actors for whom this marks their first performance in a major American movie, such as Good Bye Lenin!'s Daniel Bruhl. Others, like Diane Kruger, who has already been in major American releases such as Troy and the National Treasure movies, finally gets to do a role in her native tongue.

Strangely enough, the American actors give the most forgettable performances. Yes, Brad Pitt gets top billing, but he's actually a fairly minor character. When he emerges at the end of the rendezvous in the bar, he's actually off screen for so long I momentarily forgot he was in the movie. And as for Hostel director Eli Roth's performance? Well lets just say he seems as creepy in front of the camera as he is behind it.

So in short, Basterds is an alright movie. It's not really what I'd call an epic, and by no means is it the must see movie of the summer. However, it is a movie worth seeing on the big screen if you decide to see it at all.

G.I. Joe Did Not Suck

2009-08-12T11:18:00.008-04:00

Suprisingly enough, it was actually kind of good.

Don't get me wrong. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra isn't exactly high art. It's not Citizen Cane. It's not The Dark Knight and it sure as hell ain't Saving Private Ryan. At the same time, it never pretends to be, and that's what makes it good. The producers of G.I. Joe set out to make a light and fun summer action movie and that's exactly what they achieved.

I was wary about this movie from the get go. First of all, there was the director: Stephen Sommers. This is the guy responsible for Van Helsing, a mangled attempt at a movie so bad that it made me forget that his previous films, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns were actually enjoyable. (Not great, but enjoyable). Then there was the initial trailer, which showed soldiers in mech suits charging through Paris, and the character Snake Eyes flipping off of cars flying through the air. It looked a bit too Matrix-ish.

However, they picked a good cast. Sienna Miller, Christopher Eccleston and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were all unquestionably good actors beforehand. (All play bad guys incidentally). As for the Joes, Ray Park (a.k.a. The Phantom Menace's Darth Maul,) was a genius casting choice as the mute martial arts expert, Snake Eyes. Yes, Marlon Wayans may have given us White Chicks, Scary Movie and Little Man, but most people forget he was also in Requiem For a Dream and the Cohen Brothers movie The Ladykillers. As for Channing Tatum, I'd never seen one of his movies before, but he had the look about him of somebody who could play Duke without trying to be the archetypical "American Badass."

And believe me, the cast delivered. Joseph Gordon-Levitt clearly was having a ball as Cobra Commander, but more importantly, Byung-hun Lee gave a pretty standout performance as Storm Shadow. He just had a really commanding screen presence that suggests he might be one of those rare actors who can do kick-ass martial arts and act at the same time.

With such a large cast, they actually did a pretty good job of balancing out the characters. Unlike the Transformers movies which introduced a large cast of robots but left most of the action to Bumblebee, Optimus Prime and a pair of outdated black stereotypes, (it's fair to argue that the aliens in The Phantom Menace really aren't flimsy stereotypes, but Transformers was pretty cut and dry,) G.I. Joe seems to give all the characters the amount of screen time they deserve, good and bad guys alike. I didn't walk away thinking things like, "Okay, you introduce Storm Shadow, and he's awesome on screen for a whole five minutes, then he's gone." (If you saw Wolverine: Origins, and you like Deadpool, you know what I'm talking about.)

The special effects may have been a bit too CGI heavy, but I was genuinely surprised that they took the time to craft a decent plot. Come on, Van Helsing was clearly Stephen Sommers telling the crew he wanted to make a movie involving Dracula, Frankenstein and a werewolf, and that they'd figure out the details as they went along, and I was kind of expecting that sort of mentality with this one. Instead the story was one that I'd probably go see even if it didn't feature the G.I. Joe characters. It captures the fun of having cutting edge technology and massive strongholds in exotic locales without letting you dwell on the absurdity of it.

Also, unlike Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen it actually crossed the producers' minds that since this movie is based on a line of children's toys, it might make sense to make the movie family friendly. Yes, people get killed on screen, and yes there is swearing, but at least it's not littered with sex and drug references like those that plagued the Transformers movies.

Overall, I was pleased. It delivered pretty much all that it promised. Odds are I'll probably catch it again in theaters and maybe even buy it on DVD.

Oh and as for that scene in Paris where they're wearing the mech suits (seen in the trailer) it was actually pretty good. I was worried it might be the equivalent of nipples on the Batsuit or James Bond getting an invisible car. Instead it fit the plot well, and thankfully it's the only time in the movie they put those suits on. Also, at the end of the day it is based on a line of action figures, so if it doesn't distract from the plot then go ahead, let the producers throw in extra costumes so the kids will have to buy Accelerator Suit Duke and regular Duke.

An Example of why Cincinnati needs a better mass transit system

2009-07-20T22:36:00.013-04:00

A few years back my boss gave an open invitation to everybody in the group I was working with to go to Boston for a conference. He'd pay for the hotel and conference fee, but we'd pay everything else. It sounded like a good opportunity, but the costs I'd have to pay struck me as a bit much, considering I was a student at the time. There'd be the plane tickets, food expenses, spending money for touristy stuff, car rental and hotel parking fees. The last two struck me as putting a exceptional dent in the wallet. Then a few friends going on the trip assured me I wouldn't need to rent a car. I didn't quite believe them so I checked with some friends living in Boston.

"Yeah, you don't need a car. The subway system is fine here."

I wasn't aware that Boston even had a subway until that point, (if it got mentioned on Boston Legal, I missed it) but I took her word. I arrived in Boston, hopped on the Silver Line and was downtown in minutes. In all fairness, the Silver Line was a bus, not a rail car, but it was a bus that went directly to the transit center on a dedicated roadway (in other words, Silver Line buses were the only vehicles allowed to use that road). From the transit center, it was easy to hop on the subway and go anywhere of interest. I had no problem getting around all weekend, and managed to check out everything from Fenway to Harvard.

I'm pointing this out because the idea of doing this in Cincinnati right now is laughable. If there's a way to get from the airport to downtown Cincinnati without using a car, I'm willing to bet that most people don't know about it, or tell you off the top of their head where it would drop you off.

Whether or not there is a cheap and easy way to get from the airport to downtown Cincinnati, the second problem is getting around. If you don't have a car, your options are to take the cab or bus. Cabs can be a bit pricey and in Cincinnati, most of the time you're better off calling ahead for one than trying to catch one at a taxi stand. I suspect local taxi numbers are not something you're average out of towner is going to consider picking bringing along in advance.

As for buses, Metro stops may be plentiful, but they offer little useful information about where the bus actually goes. Your average Metro stop only has a sign indicating listing the route numbers, not destinations. For and out of towner, those signs might as well list the numbers from Lost.

So for people visiting from out of town, it would be exceptionally handy if we had a mass transit system in place that would be easy to use for somebody who doesn't know the area. Ideally, this would be the streetcar system already being proposed.

The main advantage of such a simplified system like the proposed streetcar is that it's easier to maneuver. When giving directions, you only need to tell them to find any station and get off at the right stop. Compare this to a bus system where the first step is finding a bus stop that even a bus going on the route you want it to go on.

And Cincinnati does get a fair amount out of town visitors. With all the corporations based downtown (P&G, First Group, Kroger, Chiquita and Macy's to name a few), they definitely bring in a lot of out of towners. Then there's the conventions, the sports events, concerts and so on. A lot of these groups (especially the business people, I'm sure) would easily take advantage of a system where you never need to get in a car or go to an outside source like the metro website to figure out how to get around.

The Transformers Movies are supposed to be family friendly, right?

2009-06-29T21:19:00.005-04:00

Arguably, everything you need to know about whether you can take your 7 year old to see the Transformers movies is in their rating: PG-13. In other words, if your kid is under 13, keep in mind some parts might not be suitable. But with so much of the marketing being geared towards kids from T-shirts, cartoons, oh and the fact it's based on a long running line of toys a parent could be forgiven for assuming there wouldn't be anything that inappropriate.

For the most part that held true with the first movie. The violence wasn't anything over the top, the swearing was easy to overlook and the sex was almost non-existent. However, halfway through the movie one character blurts out something that brought the theater to a standstill. Sam's mother asks him "Were you masturbating?" when she walks in on him after he was frantically trying to find something for the Autobots just outside his window. I know a handful of parents who had to have THE talk with their children that night, a bit a head of schedule, all due to that one line.

With the sequel, you'd think they'd have learned their lesson. Nope. In fact they do quite the opposite. Among the offenses in Revenge of the Fallen are a pair of Autobot twins that keep calling each other pussies and threaten to bust a cap in each others' asses, dogs humping dogs, robots humping humans, a fleeting but naughty shot up a college freshman's skirt, and a five minute sequence where Sam's mom downs a bag of marijuana brownies and runs around campus stoned off her gourd.

I'd like to hear how non-hippie parents explained to their kids why when Mrs. Witwicky used drugs, she just got really happy, but that it's a bad thing and they should just say no.

Obviously a PG-13 rating is supposed to imply that you might not want to take the kids. For example, the last two James Bond movies were clearly not kid friendly. But when a movie is based on a saturday morning cartoon and a line of toys, I think the expectation that it won't be that bad for kids is certainly justified.

Other filmmakers have at least taken this into consideration, especially with comic book based movies. For example, Batman is a comic that's been written as everything from a campy, kid friendly funnybook to a dark brooding tale of street violence. With The Dark Knight, filmmakers clearly opted for the latter interpretation, but they also knew parents would be taking the family to see it. So, despite the fact that over the course of the movie, people are shot, blown up, sliced open and in once instance, burned alive, this stuff is implied, instead of being seen. In fact, I didn't even realize that the guy got burned alive until the third time I saw it. They probably could have shown some of this stuff onscreen and kept the PG-13 rating, but they clearly understood that just because they could get away with it, doesn't mean they should do it.

Then there's films like Harry Potter and Star Wars, both of which had PG-13 installments in an otherwise PG rated franchise. These movies didn't use the more adult rating to give the films a bawdier twist, but instead it was just a heads up that the story was a bit darker than it was in previous installments.

In addition, parents weren't caught off guard by the level of violence in Dark Knight. Anybody who saw the trailer, or even just Heath Ledger's Joker makeup understood that this was going to be a dark and violent take on the franchise. As for people who saw the Transformers trailer, they just saw big robots fighting, not little robots humping things.

I'm not trying to sound like a prude or anything. I'm all for directors seeing their vision through to the end. I was all for Warner Brothers releasing the unrated version of Eyes Wide Shut because of how awkwardly censored the R-rated version was. When it was announced that Live Free or Die Hard would be PG-13, I was among the masses demanding to know why a film franchise for adults got taken down a notch.

But Transformers? Come on. Keep it family friendly if you want to sell they toys.

Go Bing Yourself

2009-06-11T23:32:00.005-04:00

There's no disputing that as of right now, Google is the supreme ruler of the search engine world. It's very name has been added to the dictionary as a word meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information... on the World Wide Web." (Not to be confused with googol, which is a number that is 1 with 100 zeros after it.) With additional competition from Yahoo and Ask.com, Microsoft decided its LiveSearch needed a bit of revamping in order to rise to the top. So, LiveSearch was renamed Bing, and Microsoft launched a massive promotional campaign for it. Suffice to say, its first attempt was a little... ambitious.

The spot, entitled "Manifesto," essentially implies that if we only had Bing months ago, we would have avoided the global economic crisis. Not surprisingly, this spot didn't last too long before being replaced with the Syndrome spots which show people asking friends and family some innocuous question only to have them go on an uncontrollable stream of consciousness rant.

Microsoft has essentially been flooding TV space with their ads, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, one commercial break on the June 11 Daily Show started with an ad for the Snuggie only to suddenly blaze through two minutes worth of "As Seen on TV" ads in 30 seconds to reveal itself as message by Bing on information overload.

But does it really work better than Google? Over the past week i've been testing it out by using both Bing and Google whenever I had something really random to look up, but before I did that, I did what most people would do. I looked myself up.

I just want to say that while "googling" oneself sounds like a perfectly adequate expression, to "bing" oneself sounds strangely vulgar. That being said, as of this writing, the top three results of a Google search of me are my LinkedIn page, a drawing I submitted to my college art magazine and this here blog.

Bing, on the other hand, brings up a page worth of links to sites for Allister brand garage door openers and other garage door openers made and sold by Sears. So, should any prospective employers or potential stalkers out there (not the same people, I hope) be trying to find any information about me, they're not going to be anywhere near what they're looking for.

As for my other searches? Either there was no noticeable difference, or Bing dropped the ball. When I tried to look up info on the new Zelda game mentioned at E3, Google led me straight to articles about the latest news. Bing's top three results were two articles back from 2008 when another Zelda was not even a rumor but something we hoped for, and Nintendo's official page for the existing Zelda games.

I looked up to see if the 2010 VW Passat was expected to come out any time soon. Google led me straight to an article about how VW planned to give the model a major redesign, but that it wouldn't come out until 2011 or 2012. Bing led me to a lot of articles about the '09 Passat, most of them being about spare parts for sale, but nothing on the release date of the next model.

Most other searches either had Google directing me more towards the information I was looking for, or both sites directing me towards equally quasi-relevant information. It seems that whether Bing is just a rebranding of LiveSearch or it actually uses different technology, I have yet to see it offer anything that vastly improves upon what Google already has to offer. I'll probably check back to it every now and then just like I occasionally check Yahoo or Ask.com if I can't find what I want on Google, but for now I think I'm going to stick with the big G.

The 3D Renaissance So Far

2009-06-08T14:04:00.009-04:00

These days the big marketing gimmick for movies is putting them in 3D. Even though only about 26% of theaters in the country are capable of showing movies in 3D, it seems like every family and horror movie being released in the upcoming months is touting that you can see it in 3D.

Probably the most major difference between today's 3D movies and the ones of old is that they're now shown using glasses with one lens darker than the other, as opposed ones with red and blue lenses (the exception being Robert Rodriguez's Sharkboy and Lavagirl.) Aside from that, filmmakers have tried to assure the viewing public that the current experience is more comfortable and less headache inducing. So, having just seen Disney/Pixar's Up in 3D last weekend, I thought it would be worth giving my take on the rebirth of 3D so far.

Of all the 3D movies released recently, I've only seen four: Beowulf, Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens and Up. So far my overall take on it is "meh." I've seen it done well and I've seen it done badly, but it hasn't yet convinced me that it's the next wave of filmmaking, or that it's worth the $3 premium charged for tickets. Lets look at them one by one:

Beowulf

I'm going to get this out of the way first: Beowulf was a bad movie. Not in that Sam Rami, it's-so-bad-its-good way. This was a slow paced, intellectual musing on that poem we all had to read in English class, trying to masquerade as a big budget epic. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with the source material. Clearly it worked for the film The 13th Warrior, which was content with just being an action movie. It didn't work in Zemeckis's Beowulf because it tried to be a no holds barred spectacle with an all star cast, hyper-realistic CGI animation and of course, 3D. However, the scope of the underlying screenplay didn't offer anything so grand to warrant all of this.

Unfortnately, it wasn't just the storytelling that was bad. The 3D had much to be desired as well. I'll give the filmmakers credit that some scenes looked phenomenal in 3D, such as when Grendel bursts into the great hall with smoke and flame. (I'm writing this, assuming that you at least read Beowulf in ninth grade english,). However, for the bulk of the film, the 3D caused me serious eye strain.

If I had to guess I'd say the filmmakers didn't quite nail down how to accurately convey depth perception in CGI. (Instead, it seems they focused more on accurately depicting a naked Angelina Jolie in CGI.) The result was that personally, my eyes didn't shift naturally from the background to the foreground. In other words, if I saw something in the foreground, I had to actively make my eyes focus on it to see it properly.

This problem was exacerbated by the fact that often the filmmakers opted for the cliched effect of having something onscreen jump out at the audience. I found myself taking off the glasses regularly just so my eyes could get a second or two to rest. After seeing this movie, I thought i'd have sworn off 3D movies entirely.

Coraline

So, despite my experience with Beowulf, I ended up seeing this one in 3D after all. In all fairness, I don't think it was offered in 2D anywhere in Cincinnati anyway. Unlike Beowulf, Coraline was actually a good movie that I would have gone to see in 2D. As a 3D film, it was definitely worth shelling out the extra bucks to see it.

For those of you who haven't seen it, Coraline is about a girl who moves into a new multi-family house that she shares with a few eccentric characters. She then discovers an entrance to a parallel world that is similar to her own execpt everything is strange and surreal.

In Coraline, the 3D effect was more about adding a level of detail to the film than spectacle. It did its job of helping make the viewers feel as if they were actually in the movie without coming off as a gimmick designed to wrangle a few extra bucks out of the viewer.

While the film was filled with fantastic visuals from start to finish, the scenes were the 3D effect stood out the most were often the more subtle ones. For example, in one scene we see Coraline's father sitting in front of the computer, with the image from the screen reflected in his glasses. The reflection looks so genuine that its possible to forget that what you're watching is a 3D effect and not something that is physically in front of you.

Later in the film, Coraline visits her neighbor upstairs in the parallel world. He has a circus of trained mice, and when he first introduces them, they all come out into a tiny circus ring and start hopping in unison. Again, everything from the lighting to the position of the camera makes it appear that there is a tiny troupe of trained mice hopping about, just out of your reach. It looked perfect.

Monsters vs. Aliens and Up

The last two movies on my list I'm going to lump together because they both suffer the same problem. As films, both were great, but as far as 3D goes, the effect was largely unnoticeable.

Where as in Beowulf I found myself taking off the glasses to rest my eyes, in these two movies, i kept taking the glasses off to make sure that I was actually in the 3D showing of the films. There were a few moments in Monsters where the 3D made me feel immersed into the big action sequences, but for most of Monsters and all of Up, the effect was too subtle.

Its a shame because in Up, there were plenty of scenes that should have stood out since most of the movie involved an old man and a kid passing through a lush South American rainforest (while lugging an airborne house and dealing with talking dogs. It's a strange movie.) Unfortunately, for most of the movie I felt that there was no difference between actually watching it in 3D and how I would have seen it in a regular 2D cinema. There was never any moment where I really noticed that there was any depth to what I was seeing. (Physical depth, i mean. Plot-wise, the story was quite deep.)

Upcoming Movies

So what's next for 3D? Well the closest release date is for The Final Destination, keeping alive the tradition of cheap gimmicks to spark interest in unnecessary horror film franchises.

Odds are Disney will re-release The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D once again. Each year I keep telling myself I'll go out and see it, but instead I just end up watching it at home on DVD. I would like to see how this one turned out mainly because it's a 2D movie that was later converted to 3D. If it turns out its good, maybe I'll stop seeing George Lucas's comments about re-releasing the Star Wars movies as threats to butcher the franchise yet again, and more like promises to add something new to a classic.

There's been some buzz about Zemeckis's up coming CGI adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which is rumored to be in 3D. However, it seems like the buzz is more about whether or not everybody will look like CGI wax zombies or if they'll actually look convincing, as opposed to how well the 3D will look.

No, the big buzz has been reserved for James Cameron's Avatar. This is a project he's been working on for the past ten years, and considering that Cameron + sci-fi usually equals a cinema classic, by now people are probably expecting this thing to be the biggest movie of the century. Just to add to the rumors about there being special effect unlike anything ever seen before, you guessed it, it's supposedly going to be in 3D.

If any of the above mentioned films is capable of actually transforming 3D from a novelty to a directorial choice, such as whether or not to shoot in film or black & white, Avatar is probably it. Who knows. Maybe in a year or two Cameron will be on a stage collecting the first Oscar ever given to a 3D sci-fi flick. Or, maybe 3D will go back to just being a theme park attraction.

Grant Morrison Needs to Stop Wriring for Batman

2009-06-04T12:14:00.009-04:00

That, or as a title, "Batman and Robin" never bodes well for the franchise.

I've pretty much been a huge Batman devotee for as long as I can remember. I've witnessed the many different interpretations of the Caped Crusader, and in the ten years I've actually been reading the comic itself, I've been able to identify when the writing has been exceptionally good as opposed to when its just getting by.

I can also put my foot down and say when the writing has just plain gotten bad. As acclaimed a writer Grant Morrison is, his work on Batman has definitely been one of the series low points. When it was first announced he'd be writing for the series, there was much acclaim and hooplah behind it, as he was expected to do drastic and daring things with the series. Unfortunately, I think he kind of went overboard in an attempt to be outlandish.

I'll forgive some of his more controversial decisions, such as making Batman's son a canonical character (He'd only previously been mentioned in the comic Batman: Son of the Demon, and was never heard from since.) But for the most part his run on Batman was strange and usually hard to follow.

He started off with a tale about impostor Batmen running around town, one of whom shoots the Joker. This was followed by the aforementioned "Batman & Son" storyline (yes, thats what he chose to call it) promising that when Joker did return it would be something radical.

And here's where it started to get weird... I mean really weird. First, when he did bring back the Joker, it was in the form of a prose issue. Lots of text, few pictures and poor typography made it hard to read. And, it wasn't even anything exciting. Just the Joker musing on his many different incarnations. Then there was the Batmen of All Nations storyline, where vigilantes across the world, inspired by Batman all meet on an island only to get taken out one by one, Agatha Christie style. Behind it all was a mysterious group known as the Black Glove, intent on taking out Batman. It sounds simple, except the man behind the group is supposedly Thomas Wayne, you know, the guy whose death drove Bruce Wayne to become Batman.

All of this was meant to lead up to Morrison's coup de grace, Batman R.I.P., which was slated to be THE definitive Batman story of the decade. Instead it was among the worst.

I read every damn issue of Batman R.I.P. and I still have no idea what went on. First, he introduces a character named Jezebel Jet, who exists only for Batman to fall in love with her, reveal his identity and consider giving up crime fighting. If she wasn't introduced for this storyline, she sure as hell was an obscure character, making her an odd choice for Batman to reveal his identity to out of all the women he's been involved with.

But what really irked me was that none of the issues seemed to flow into each other. I felt as if I'd been missing issues, since the story jumped from point to point so much. Hell, halfway through most of the issues it seemed like one random thing was happening after another.

Then there's the fact that despite the name, Morrison never actually killed Batman in the R.I.P. storyline. It looked like initially he chose to have Batman die in a helicopter crash, only for him to turn up hooked up to some sort of virtual reality machine or something. I'm not sure Morrison ever really explained how he got there or how he got out, but at any rate the real death of Batman didn't even happen in a Batman title.

He saved that for the equally convoluted Final Crisis, which had absolutely nothing to do with the events of R.I.P.. (He dies from Darkseid's eye lasers. What he was doing fighting Darkseid, I don't know, because that all involved stuff from Final Crisis.)

That being said, I decided to give him another shot with his new series Batman & Robin. I honestly don't see myself picking this up past the first issue. To start with, it looks like it's going to spiral out of control pretty quickly. I didn't really warm up to the idea of a flying Batmobile or having Bruce Wayne's son Damien take on the role of Robin. The last time such an obnoxious character was picked to be Robin, fans called in and voted to have him killed off. Violently.

Considering that the teaser page at the back of the issue promises more of the strangeness that plagued R.I.P. such as multiple Batmen, and the characther claiming to be Thomas Wayne, I'm going to hold off on it. And better yet, I won't be without my Batman fix either.

Paul Dini is going to be writing two Batman titles: a solo book and one devoted to the women of Gotham. Dini deserves alot more acknolwedgement than he's been given for his work on Batman. While Morrison was making the franchise wierd and unapproachable, Dini kept things pretty level. At the same time Morrison was working on the main Batman title, Dini was at work on Detective Comics. For most of his run, he stuck with one shot issues that were loosley tied together. He also opted to do his own thing, independent of Morrison.

For example, when Morrison was trying to build up excitement about what he would do with the Joker after writing him getting shot in the face, Dini wrote a one shot story about the Joker kidnapping Robin that didn't even acknowledge anything Morrison had written.

And when Morrison was writing Batman as losing his mind, Dini paid this lip service and wrote a straightforward Batman story. In fact, Dini's contribution to the RIP storyline was better than Morrison's, as Dini chose to write a sequel to Jeph Loeb's acclaimed storyline "Hush" where Hush tries to get his revenge on Batman by literally stealing Catwoman's heart. It was engaging, easy to follow, and showed that good writing capable of drawing new readers in doesn't have to be in the form of massive event stories.

Here's hoping that Morrison's run on Batman ends soon. Now that the death of Bruce Wayne is out of the way, I won't feel as obligated to read his work to know what's going on in the Batman universe, and at least I'll have Dini's work to keep me going until (inevitably) some writer brings back Bruce Wayne. Hopefully it won't be Morrison.

Why I'm making a point of seeing The Hangover on opening weekend

2009-06-03T10:55:00.003-04:00

Honestly, The Hangover isn't really the sort of movie that I'd break down the doors at the theater to see. Sure, it looks funny, but it doesn't look so funny that I'd feel inclined to pay $10 to see it in theaters instead of $5 to watch it at home. Why then is it on my to-do list for next week? It's because I suspect that every "bro" from here to L.A. is going to be quoting every line of that movie so often that I won't actually have to see it to know what happens.

Like I said, I do want to see it eventually. The problem is that hearing it in drunken quotation form pretty much kills the humor, because you already know the jokes before they're coming. This already happened with me and Old School. I missed it in theaters because I was studying abroad when it came out, and when it came out on video nobody insisted that it be on the top of my must-see movie list (apparently because they all presumed I'd seen it already). I'd caught bits and pieces over the years, but by the time I finally sat down to watch it in its entirety, pretty much every thing that would have been funny because it caught me off guard had already been ruined.

The band's rendition of "Total Eclipse of the Heart"? I'd already heard so many people do that one at karaoke I'd almost forgotten that it's not supposed to have "fuck" every other word. The streaking? Blue dying? Heard it all months in advance.

So this time around, I'm getting in on the ground floor and seeing Hangover before everybody else decides to quote lines from it to cover up a lack of original wit. Now here's just hoping all the best lines weren't in the trailer.

Overlooked Movies: Little Nemo

2009-06-02T12:18:00.005-04:00

So one thing I decided I’d do when I started this blog was to shed some light on movies that never really made it into the public consciousness, despite being thoughtfully crafted, and just plain enjoyable to watch. Today, I thought I’d cover the anime film Little Nemo, seeing as how I finally got to watch it over the weekend. If you want to see a trailer for it, click here.

Odds are that if you remember this film at all, it’s probably in the form of a half remembered advertisement you saw as a kid for one of those “non-Disney” cartoons we all shied away from. It never did get what one would call a major release, and even in the days of where old anime classics experienced a revival on DVD as anime became more popular in America, this film never got caught up in the hubbub.

For those unfamiliar with the character, Little Nemo began as a comic strip created by Winsor McCay in the early 20^th century. The strip chronicled Nemo’s journeys through a fantastical realm known as Slumberland, and each strip usually ended with him waking up and falling out of bed. The strip was also notable for it’s brilliant colors and surrealistic imagery. Generally, they took up an entire page of the comic pages. (On a side note, supposedly one of the reasons Bill Waterson retired from writing Calvin & Hobbes was because he wanted to draw his comic in the style of Little Nemo, but newspapers wanted something smaller and with panels that could be more easily rearranged.)

The movie was produced by Japanese anime studio Tokyo Movie Shinsha, but was largely worked on by American talents such as Ray Bradbury, Chris Columbus (famous for Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter movies) and the Sherman Brothers, who previously worked on music for several Disney films. Despite being made in 1989, it didn’t make its way stateside until 1992. Strangely enough, the video game adaptation made its way stateside before that.

As for the plot of the movie, I’m going to be honest. It’s not exactly Disney. Even when Disney was in its pre-Little Mermaid slump, it was putting out stuff with more character development than this. The story is pretty simple. One night Nemo is visited in his bed by the personal entourage of Morpheus, the King of Dreams. The king requests that he comes to Slumberland to be his daughter’s playmate. He doesn’t explore Slumberland too long before a mischievous character named Flip accidentally gets Nemo to unleash an evil known as the Nightmare, and naturally Nemo’s the one who has to stop it.

I say it’s a simple story because there’s never really any motivation given for the characters actions. Morpheus’s invitation to Nemo is completely arbitrary (not to mention the level of responsibility he gets entrusted with) and there’s no reason given for why Flip creates the amount of havoc he does, other than it helps move the story along.

What the film lacks in story, it certainly makes up in style. The film manages to effortlessly toe the line of depicting a world that is strange and surreal, without confusing the viewer. The world in which the story is set frequently transforms into something completely different in a way that perfectly mimics the non sequitur nature of dreams. For example, the opening sequence has Nemo wake up in his bed, discovering he can fly it out the window. He flies around the city, but suddenly finds himself among unfamiliar ruins, hounded by a speeding train.

Even the non-surreal visuals are incredible. Slumberland, as depicted in the movie, is a world that resembles the most extravagant palaces of Europe if they were the size of entire cities. Then there’s the animation itself. Like many anime movies, everything is drawn with such fluid detail that even the way smoke is animated, it seems to have character.

Despite it’s simple story, the whole package is overall pretty enjoyable. I suspect that had I seen it as a kid, this movie would have been something I watched over and over. Although it’s clearly targeted for younger audiences, this movie is a good example of how to make a family film parents can enjoy that doesn’t involve slyly sneaking in “adult” references, or tries to hock some product to kids. Aside from a scene halfway through the movie where the Nightmare breaks into Slumberland, it’s as family friendly as one could ask for. Granted that scene in question is a bit freaky and I’m sure it would have given me bad dreams as a kid. In fact, I think they cut it out of the initial American release, but it’s not that bad.

Unfortunately, Little Nemo is still a bit hard to find, so unless you use Netflix, Blockbuster.com, or your local library has a good inter-library loan system, it’s going to be a hard one to track down. On the plus side, it’s pretty cheap to buy, as Amazon.com has it listed for about $8. Yes, that’s twice the cost of a rental, but if you’re an anime fan or a parent looking for a quality family film, it’s worth owning.

Hopefully in upcoming years this movie will gain some level of notoriety and be easier to find.

Good Bye to The Sound Cincinnati... sort of

2009-05-27T23:00:00.005-04:00

The Best Station in Town Gets Harder to Listen To

Out of all the music stations in Cincinnati, the only one that could get me to turn off the iPod and listen to something live was The Sound. Sadly, this past weekend it stopped broadcasting on analogue radio and is now only available on HD radio and online.

Alternative radio in Cincinnati never really seemed to find a home. Back in the day 107.1 used to be the station to listen to if you wanted a break from top 40. It played a good mix of alternative rock and was pretty much the place to go if you wanted to hear about up and coming bands. It seemed like a solid kick in the mouth when it turned into Kiss FM and played yet more top 40. The only plus side was that unlike Q102, Kiss's top 40 didn't drop out any instance of "rap" that might appear in a song.

Since this happened just as I was leaving for college, it took me four years to discover that alt-rock was still alive in Cincinnati, except now it was on 97.3. I'd gotten used to that when one day I turned on my radio and heard country music. It honestly took me a few songs to realize that they weren't playing a few "country sounding" rock songs but full on country.

Fortunately, it wasn't too hard to learn that it the alt rock was now on 94.9, which was now called "The Sound," since the station had a pretty big TV and billboard ad campaign announcing the move. On the other hand, their logo didn't really do much do suggest what kind of music they played. Previous alt-rock stations had an "edgy" look to them, whereas The Sound looked like it was a smooth jazz/adult contemporary station. Observe.

Anyway, I'd gotten used to it on 94.9 when once again I tune in one afternoon and find them playing something that was not alt-rock. This time it was NASCAR racing. Apparently in a less publicized move, the station owners had decided to switch it back over to 97.3. This time, I had to rely on word of mouth to find out where it'd gone.

Then this past weekend, same thing happened again. I turn on the radio, and it's playing country. This time it was blatantly country, not the bluegrass/rock sort of stuff that kind of toes the line. I had to fiddle around on the internet to find out what happened this time. I'd hoped it just changed to another frequency, but as you can see on the above graphic, it now moved to HD radio...

You can see my frustration here. NOBODY has HD radio. When I had to replace my car radio a few months back, new radios were only "HD ready" meaning that you could get an HD radio unit easily added, but you couldn't pick up HD stations as-is. Right now I'm shopping for a new car (yeah, I know. I probably should have held off on getting the radio since presumably the car would come with a new one). Among the features cars advertise are built in satellite radio, bluetooth and an auxiliary jack to listen to your MP3 player on. I have yet to see one that touts the fact it comes with HD radio.

So basically, this means that unless I'm sitting down at a computer, I can't listen to it, which is problematic because pretty much the only time I am listening to radio is when I'm in my car. Hopefully another station will pick up the slack and broadcast alt-rock on a frequency I can pick up in the greater Cincinnati area. Until then it looks like I'm sticking to my iPod, with the occasional foray onto NPR, WEBN and Q102.

The Strange Canon T1i Rollout

2009-05-20T01:21:00.006-04:00

Maybe it's because aside from video game systems or anything made by Apple, I'm not used to buying gadgets the moment they hit the market. So, I was a bit thrown by the launch of Canon's T1i Digital SLR camera because I had absolutely no idea when and where I would be able to get my hands on it.

As a bit of backstory, at some point over the last few months I had arbitrarily decided it was time to get a digital SLR. I'd previously been content with my digital point and shoot camera as well as the variety of analogue cameras I own, but I decided that on occasion it would be nice to have a camera that I could use inconspicuously in low light without making people pose for a flash. Also, I liked the idea of not always having to be picky about what I shot, so as not to waste film.

After a bit of research I had initially decided on the Canon Rebel XSi, but in one of those strokes of luck I saw an ad for the T1i before I'd gone out and gotten the XSi, and was spared the grief frequently suffered by iPod buyers where they buy the current generation iPod only to have Apple announce days later, out of nowhere that a way more kickass model was about to hit the stores tomorrow.

Now when it comes to electronics, I'm used to two kinds of product launches. The first, i'll call the video game method. This is where a company announces months in advance that a new product will be coming out, on the theory that you will plan your next few months on being able to camp out at the electronics store to be the first to get it, (which tends to happen most with video game systems). The second method I'll call the Apple method, where as described above, the company waits till the product is days away from hitting shelves before announcing it so as not to undercut sales of the existing product line.

Canon opted for neither of these, instead going for a rather vague release date for the T1i. When I first saw the T1i advertised, it was during the Kentucky Derby, which I assumed meant that Canon either had it in stores already, or had a particular date in mind so that I could eagerly be waiting outside of Best Buy, drooling with anticipation on said date. Instead the website merely stated that it would be available in early May. I scoured various websites and blogs, and nobody could offer a more specific date. Best Buy listed the camera only as being available for pre-order but didn't say when it would ship. Amazon.com didn't even have a direct listing for it for weeks, but just listings for third party shops who presumably also didn't have it in stock but were taking pre-orders.

Granted, digital SLRs aren't the sort of products that hoards of customers will be beating down the door for, and I was already sold on getting the T1i when it was announced, so there wasn't any danger of me getting a Nikon just because the T1i wasn't available yet. Still, for a product that was being as heavily promoted as the T1i, and generating so much buzz among photographers, it seemed that a clear release date would have helped generate a good amount of buzz for Canon.

After all, what sold me on the T1i was the fact that it had features that were normally found on higher end professional models available at a consumer price, such as the ability to shoot 1080p video and a 3 inch monitor with a resolution so clear, I didn't even believe it was possible on something so small.

Had I known exactly when it would have been out, I might have gotten it on day one. But since it sort of just trickled into stores, I don't feel such an urgency for it. I mean I have every intention of buying one, but the fervor has died down, so I feel more like I'll get it in my own time.

9 vs. Nine

2009-05-15T12:28:00.002-04:00

Today on Quicktime I came across the trailer for the new Rob Marshall film, Nine. From what I can tell of the two minutes of footage provided, it looks like it should be a welcome addition to the winter movie season. Not to mention it is refreshing to see musicals that are something more than just a rock band's greatest hits CD acted, and it's nice to see something that has more energy than recent bland adaptations such as Sweeney Tood or Rent.

Just one small problem, since last summer trailers have been running for a joint project between Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov, (director of Nightwatch and Wanted), called 9. This one revolves around some sort of dolls roaming around a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

There's nothing to stop two people from using the same name for their movie. David Cronenberg and Paul Haggis both released movies called Crash, (one was about sex and car wrecks, the other about the way peoples lives intersect with others). Then there's Gladiator, a title shared by the Russell Crowe Roman epic and a Cuba Gooding Jr. film that people always think is going to be the Russell Crowe movie when they see it in their onscreen cable guide.

However, these movies were released years apart from their fellow namesakes so when it comes to promoting it, there isn't much confusion. On the other hand, 9 and Nine are both being released within months of each other.

So is anybody going to budge? Usually somebody does. In 1998, Alex Proyas' film Dark City was forced to go through several name changes according to the bottom of this article. First, producers of the film Mad City complained it sounded too similar to their movie, so it was changed to Dark World, then Spielberg told them to change it because it sounded too similar to Lost World, so it got changed to Dark Empire, until somebody (George Lucas, supposedly) told them to change it. Of course by this time Mad City bombed and was forgotten, so the name went back to the first choice.

This is also the case with new James Cameron movie Avatar, the cinematic piece of vaporware that he's been talking about making for years and is now apparently actually getting underway. He apparently told the producers of the film adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender to simply shorten the title down to The Last Airbender to avoid confusion, even though the latter is a popular Nickelodeon series that debuted in 2005... long before Cameron's movie was due to hit screens.

As for the two "Nines," it isn't clear who'd have more clout. The Rob Marshall musical is based on an Broadway musical (albeit a somewhat obscure one) so for marketing purposes it only makes sense to keep the original name. However, it's also possible this film might be aimed more towards the art house crowd and therefore not get a wide release.

There's no question that Tim Burton's movie is getting a wide release, and as I said before it's been promoted since last year. This one was based on a short film by Shane Acker (who is also directing the full length remake) so it too has a claim to it's title. On the other hand, it hasn't necessarily been ingrained in the public consciousness that the Burton-produced movie is actually called 9 since the trailer flashes the title briefly before showing it's release date, 9-9-09. So it's possible that it can undergo a name change without confusing audiences. After all, the original trailer for Cloverfield never gave the title, just the release date of 1-18-08 (I know, it's lame that I can actually remember that).

Who knows? Maybe neither will budge, but if not I can see a lot of confusion happening here. It's easy to see somebody going to the ticket booth and asking to see "nine," and instead of getting the bleak CGI film they expected, they find themselves in a colorful live action musical. We won't know until they come out.

... The Large Format Kindle

2009-05-06T16:13:00.001-04:00

For the first time, an e-reader seems practical

Today, Amazon unveiled its new Kindle DX, which boasts a screen twice as large as the original model. Now there finally seems to be a reason to consider buying one, although for me it comes about a year too late.

I always thought the original Kindle, (and most e-readers for that matter) to be pointless. On average, people who read books tend to be cultish individuals. They revel in the fact that while other people just wait for the movie to come out, they took the time to read the book before it was popular. More importantly, they like the tangible nature of the book itself. They can easily spend hours just browsing Barnes and Noble flipping through books making a mental checklist of things they'd like to read tonight and things they'll come back for later. They also like the idea of passing books on to others to read. I don't know what DRM restrictions are on e-books, but at the very least if loaning your copy of Angels & Demons to a friend involves that friend having a $400 piece of equipment, you can bet there will be few takers.

While I still don't think the DX will appeal to the average book buyer, (and at some point in the future, i'll probably rant about why I don't think authors should back it,) it should at least cater towards the average student. A larger screen makes it easier to read something as lengthy as a textbook. This allows it to tap into the same hook that made the iPod so popular: portability.

Prior to the existence of the MP3 player, we all had to carry around a big CD wallet if we wanted access to whatever song we felt like listening to, but lets face it, we all liked the idea of being able to listen to any song on demand. When it comes to reading novels, that demand isn't there. Novels are read one at a time. At most you might take three with you, and that's if you're going on a long vacation at a resort where there isn't much to do. People don't need to carry their entire library with them so they can look up their favorite scenes from Harry Potter on a whim, (okay maybe some people do).

Textbooks are another story. They're big, heavy and we do have to carry them all at once. Back in law school, I did most of my studying in the library partially because it meant I wouldn't have to lug my books to and from school. One book was heavy enough. Try to take home two and it was like asking to have back problems later in life. So when it comes to academics, there is a massive demand to have an entire library of books at your disposal.

Sure getting a DX would have meant giving up the tactile feel of the pages or the joy of giddily highlighting "important" passages (which sometimes ended up being entire pages). But if it meant I could carry all my books in something the size of my laptop I would have jumped on it in an instant.

Of course the obvious problem is that students usually try to save as much money as possible, primarily by buying used textbooks and selling back their old ones. With an e-textbook, that's not going to be an option. I can't see bookstores buying back and selling old book files, and even if they did, you can bet IP lawyers everywhere would try to put a stop to that right away.

I still don't think that the Kindle or any other e-reader is going to ever take the world by storm in the way that the iPod did for music, but with this new model it might finally start to trickle down from the early adopters.

... the mini-IMAX

2009-05-05T00:28:00.001-04:00

and how apparently IMAX is boldly experimenting with brand dilution

I think that most people associate the brand name IMAX with one thing alone: a really big-ass movie screen. When I say big-ass I mean it envelops your entire field of vision. This is they way they show it on their website. It's so big, you're supposed to write it all in capital letters. Every IMAX i've ever been to has been has held true to this formula, until now. Recently IMAX has decided to slap its brand name on much smaller sized screens.

Previously, the only movies I'd ever seen in IMAX before were documentaries at museums. I'd never really felt compelled to pay the extra money to see a hollywood movie on an obscenely large screen. My friends who have been to see movies in IMAX before have described it as not being any better, just bigger. The one exception was my cousin who saw Speed Racer in IMAX (an underrated movie, I might ad) who pointed out that it's such a visual spectacle, that seeing it in such a large format only makes it better.

Recently the AMC at Newport on the Levee added an IMAX to its lineup, so I figured I'd try it out since I had been meaning to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3D, but hadn't gotten around to it. It cost about $15 for one ticket, but I figured for something that promised complete immersion into the movie, it was worth it this one time.

I had assumed that what they did was just re-open the IMAX theatre that was built when Newport first opened up and that had closed shortly after. (At the time, it was primarily showing the sort of documentaries you see at museums). Instead, I was directed upstairs where the rest of the cinemas were. Now I was assuming that they had remodeled one of the existing theatre houses so that it now contained a supermassive movie screen. I walked into the door marked IMAX and was treated with... a completely ordinary sized screen. Granted it was the biggest screen at the AMC, but as best I could tell it was the exact same size as it was before they put the name IMAX on the door. They just charged more for you to get in. In fact, I think the old Lowes that used to be off Montgomery Road in Kenwood might have had larger screens.

As I took my seat, fuming about the fact that I had dropped $15 to see a movie on what was clearly not an IMAX, I remembered this article on the IMDB about how IMAX was announcing plans to expand by turning existing theatres into IMAXes. According to the article, owners of the old IMAX theatres were upset because they feared the brand would be weakened if people walked into a theatre expecting a 4800 square foot screen, and instead got half of that. IMAX's co-CEO argued that the brand IMAX refers to the whole theatre experience, not just a big screen.

Nope, I'm with the theatre owners. Like I said before, IMAX to me means one thing alone: a really big-ass screen. Since there's no brand distinction between the old massive IMAXes and these new mini-IMAXes, I expect a lot of people are going to be up in arms when they walk in and see a screen that is completely ordinary. And considering that we're in a recession I doubt there are many people who are going to $5 extra per ticket for a sound system that's only noticeably better if you're a complete cinephile.

I also don't see people taking the effort to call ahead to find out if their local cinema has one of the big IMAXes or one of the baby ones. This is assuming of course that they even know these new downsized IMAXes exist out there. What I do see happening is a lot of people shelling out the extra money to see the first wave of summer blockbusters, realizing they've been had and not going back.

... Terminator Salvation's PG-13 Rating

2009-04-28T12:25:00.001-04:00

Why Terminator Salvation probably won't suffer from a PG-13 Rating

A few years back there was a massive public outcry (in fanboy terms at least) when the fourth Die Hard movie was given a PG-13 rating. Yet with the latest Terminator movie getting a PG-13 rating as well, the public seems relatively indifferent. So why do fanboys feel let down by one R-rated franchise going family friendly but not care about another one?

1. "Yippie Kay-yay Motherfucker"

These three words pretty much define the reason why people loved the Die Hard movies. They were brash, violent and over the top. The franchise's main draw may have been that it allowed viewers to vicariously live out the fantasy of being an average joe turned action hero, but just as much of a draw was the violence and the language. The best moments of the series were always when somebody got killed in an unnecessary manner or when characters snapped clever lines of dialogue back and forth that were littered with f-bombs.

When word got out about Live Free or Die Hard's PG-13 rating, viewers automatically knew what to expect: considerably less violence and pretty much no swearing. In fact, most of my friends were strangely fixated on whether or not McClane would even get to say his catch phrase, since the MPAA only occasionally lets the word "fuck" be uttered when kids are present in the audience, and in those cases the movie gets away with it once.

Predictably, the result was what everybody expected. We all ended up paying ten bucks to see what felt like the "edited for cable" version on the silver screen. While they did manage to get the catch-phrase in as something other than, "Yippie kay-yay Mr. Falcon," (watch it on cable and you'll know what I mean,) it still felt neutered.

But the violence and swearing was never really a defining aspect of the Terminator Movies. People were drawn more by the fighting robots, constant explosions and endless supply of ammunition being spent. Sure, when you put all of those things together in a movie its inevitably going to result in lots of violent onscreen deaths, but depicting those deaths in an over-the-top manner was never something that enhanced or hindered the movie. No, what really makes a Terminator movie is a big scary robot holding a machine gun while an ominous drum beats in the background. Based on the trailers, it looks like we'll see plenty of that, so that's one thing to not worry about.

2. Its a different movie anyway

Salvation has a drastically different premise from the three previous Terminator movies. Instead of the astonishingly well executed B-movie premise of people being stalked by a killer robot, it's a tale of all of humanity fighting for its survival. Salvation is almost a spin-off movie in the way other franchises such as X-Men have been spun off with Wolverine, except instead of showing a character's origin, we see his ending. More importantly the focus in this film is entirely on John Connor instead of Schwarzenegger's Terminator.

Since the story is going in a new direction, its foreseeable that if more sequels get made, the movies featuring the Older John Connor could have a fan base independent of the Schwarzenegger movies. This would be like how some people love the original Star Wars Trilogy but hate the prequels because the story shifted from being an episodic pulp space-western to a character study of Anakin Skywalker. With a new focus to the story, it seems more acceptable to change the tone of it as well. A viewer seems less likely to compare it to the previous movies and will instead judge it on its own merits simply because all the changes make it seem like a brand new franchise.

On the other hand, Live Free or Die Hard was supposed to be entirely along the same lines as its predecessors. Granted, it did maintain the same level of outrageousness in some aspects as the first three movies. For example, there was the scene where McClane takes out a helicopter in the air using a car. Unfortunately, by taking out all the language and violence, it ended up feeling like a much tamer movie than the other Die Hards, which it should rightfully be compared to.

3. It faces some stiff competition this summer

Okay, clearly this was the main reason why Die Hard 4 and Terminator 4 got the PG-13 rating, and on this one I'll let Die Hard slide. Since video piracy is running a bit rampant these days, and people are leaning more toward waiting until movies come out on video to see them, filmmakers have an incentive to draw as many potential viewers as they can to the theaters. By taking away the restriction that one have a parent or legal guardian present with them in the theatre, scores of bored teenagers can see the movie whenever they want with their friends, instead of waiting for their parents to take them... or trying to sneak past the ushers.

Considering that there are at least three other eagerly awaited big budget sci-fi movies this summer, (Wolverine, Star Trek and Transformers,) one of which also features big-ass killer robots, its understandable that producers wouldn't want to bet the farm entirely on the over-17 demographic.

Hopefully Terminator Salvation ends up meeting expectations and doesn't leave us feeling like something was missing because the violence was toned down. But in the event that it does end up feeling a little weak, at least we have the promise of an unrated director's cut when it gets released on video.

... starting a blog

2009-04-24T16:40:00.000-04:00

Okay, so basically this post is just a starter post so that I can mentally get the ball rolling on this. So why have I decided to join the millions of others out there who feel the need to constantly share their thoughts with the world? Personally, I just feel the need to rant and rave about stuff every now and then. Usually it's along the lines of things I feel are being overrated, or things that never seemed to get the acknowledgement they deserve.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to be putting up here, but most likely it's going to review entertainment generally. I'm largely a cinephile, so odds are it's going to be lots of movie reviews, but I will probably end up talking about all kinds of products, and since i studied marketing in undergrad, advertising as well.

At any rate, if you're reading this it's probably because you're either a friend of mine or you stumbled across this looking for something to keep you occupied during some down time at work. At any rate, I hope you enjoy.