• Marti Noxon & Joss Whedon himself show up to the LA Buffy Musical event. Coolness.
• The Smoking Gun has fun pointing out all the times Paris Hilton did drugs, despite her comment to Larry King about not having done so. All the write-up is missing is a comment at the end stating, “and these are just the ones we’ve got on video…”
• Some awesome photos from Atlantis’ recent mission
• So The Daily Show fan base can outsmart most other forms of news watchers.
• The plastic duck armada. This is the first time I’d heard of this, and thought it to be hilarious.
• Some cool camera-on-a-kite photos. An interesting hobby.
• A hilarious airline customer complaint
• Neato. Second season DVD set for Family Ties to get at least some participation from Michael J. Fox.
• Steve Jobs announces an expensive move of giving iPhones to all the Apple employees
• Lots of people must have stuck out their thumbs
• Looks like bringing Firefly & Serenity to the ISS has proven popular. Very cool.
• Few things are as satisfying as a criminal picking the wrong victim
• The RIAA are up to their usual standards
• Parts 1 & 2 of an on set Battlestar Galactica cast discussion panel
• Also, I’ve added a couple more of my old custom made music videos to the videos page on the site. More will be coming soon.

As one of my most anticipated movies of the summer, this film already had an uphill battle to live up to expectations. After more than one viewing, I have come to rather like it. The Die Hard films have been gradually increasing in scope with each entry, and this is no exception. Also with each entry, they inherit more aspects of a disaster film. And while the pitch for the story may sound like a cool idea to drop a character like John McClane into, the execution of the script is a bit of cookie cutter action cliche. It ties together the action set pieces and gives the characters enough interesting interaction to give the cast something to work with. In the end, we get an action movie that is outstanding in parts and adequate in other parts (and a bit too over-the-top in other bits). I’m not sure where I place it amongst the second and third films in order of preference. Perhaps at some time down the line I’ll figure out how I’d rank them. Many fans have been loudly complaining about the fact that this film was made as a PG-13 to a franchise that has always been heavily R rated. Frankly, I’m one of the only fans that’s happy about this. I have no problem with them having to cut back on the language, particularly after Dennis Franz’s insufferably annoying character from Die Hard 2. While there might not be as much gory violence as a couple of the previous films had, it’s not noticeably missing in any way. This film is not short on violence, and the action never feels restrained. Frankly, I think the PG-13 approach was a good move, and possibly helped me like the movie better.

Writing: There’s nothing about the plotting worth particularly noting. It has a few clever moments, but it otherwise by-the-numbers. We get a little bit of interesting character insight, but that’s only helped along by the rich history of the character to draw from over the years. It’s the cast and production that help take up the slack of the shortcomings in the screenplay. Add to that some action sequences that are just too over-the-top (why is it that the dumbest of action scenes often involve highway interchanges?).

Production: Here is a particular strong aspect of the movie. There are some gorgeous action sequences, including some first rate stunt work. Camera work is dynamic and very well done. Sound is aggressive and often interesting in the mix. Director Len Wiseman (of the Underworld films) clearly has a talent for producing slick action scenes. The films themselves are getting progressively better. Some day he’ll get the opportunity to work with a fantastic script and prove what he can really accomplish. One weak point in this film is editing, both in the details and the overall flow. While the pacing may work OK, the film has trouble establishing the passing of time in general or acknowledging the outside world enough as it moves forward past the nice establishing material in the first half of the movie. Then there’s way too many ADR lines slapped over visuals they clearly don’t line up with, including a few lines of dialog squeezed into places they could fit. Not completely amateur, but hardly an editing job worthy of the production level. Overall, it’s the stunt, set design, location and camera teams that deserve the highest praise.

Cast: This film wouldn’t work half as well if it wasn’t John McClane at the center of the action. I love the “blunt instrument” aspect to his character. He’s somebody who can finally put all this action movie martial arts fad crap in its place. When a character gets too showy with all their acrobatics or martial arts, you can count on McClane to use the simple, brutal method to best them. I’ll take a good street fighter in an action movie over somebody doing wire-work idiocy any day of the week. All this is to say that Bruce Willis is the grounding force of the film. He can take the completely ridiculous aspects of the story or production and somehow make them at least entertaining. I don’t mind checking my brain at the door, but it’s often times hard to completely ignore action material that’s too fake. Willis really helps keep me from caring about how goofy much of it is. Justin Long is a fun addition to the mix. He’s another actor brining more to the character than it really deserves. Him and Willis play off each other remarkably well. Timothy Olyphant is an underrated actor, and he gets to imbue his character with a nice sense of intelligence and sociopathic insanity. Mary Elizabeth Winstead does a nice job as McClane’s daughter, Lucy. Having his daughter as a college student is a fun little tidbit for the franchise, nicely acknowledging the age of the characters by this point. She’s come a long way from the little girl seen in the first film. Winstead is a rising star worth keeping an eye on. She’s been very good in her numerous recent films, and has started branching out from her horror genre leading roles to supporting roles in rather high profile productions. I look forward to seeing her get more high profile roles.

Music: Director Len Wiseman brings along composer Marco Beltrami from their previous collaboration on Underworld Evolution. While this isn’t Beltrami’s greatest score, it’s still a very good action score. Beltrami has gotten a surprising number of jobs scoring later entries in a franchise he didn’t previously work on (Terminator 3, Underworld Evolution, Blade II, etc) or doing remakes (The Omen) where he needs to somehow work in style or reference to previous work. He often ends up working in nice little stylistic or thematic references to the original films, but taking them in his own direction. This is no exception. In a handful of moments, Beltrami does nice little musical quotes of the late composer Michael Kamen’s work on the previous Die Hard films. Kamen’s work on the Die Hard films was nothing great or groundbreaking. In fact, the more I listen to the score, the more I can hear of Kamen’s textures and instrumentation from the previous Die Hard films. It’s really quite subtle and detailed.

• Congratulations to Blade Runner, which was released 25 years ago today on June 25, 1982. While the official announcement for the surely ultra-cool DVD set isn’t to be made until Comic-Con a month from now, Australian DVD retailer EzyDVD briefly had the details they knew posted a little while back (as a 5 DVD set!). Don’t count on the fancy packaging being completely accurate for the USA market, cause EzyDVD does tons of Australian fancy packaging exclusives. Still, ignoring the very cool packaging, if their details of the discs themselves are accurate, we’re in for a real treat. That post links to a brief article about Warners doing 4K digital archives of some of their films, and that Blade Runner had already gotten the full 4K digital conversion from it’s original negatives. This new version, and likely even the older cuts, will surely look gorgeous. I droooooool in anticipation. I’d love to see the soon-to-be-announced theatrical run of the 2007 Final Cut version run in DLP cinemas. Gonna be a cool year to be a Blade Runner fan. But hey, why isn’t Tron getting a nice, new 25th Anniversary remaster job this year? 1982 was THE year for sci-fi film geeks. I mean Blade Runner, Tron and Star Trek II?
• Hurray! Dell will now offer an option to not have all the crap software they preload on a machine installed when you purchase a new machine.
• Yikes! Check out this very cool Aurora Borealis as seen from space
• Man kills bear with a log. So naturally, they had to find SOMETHING to ticket him for.
• An interesting recording in and of itself, but Stan Lee?
• And here’s a place marker for the LONG overdue special edition of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair

This is definitely one of those movies that you just have to completely check your brain at the door and go with for simple entertainment purposes.

Writing: Despite the lofty ambition of the production, the writing is going for the goal of hitting every genre mark possible. Sure, the idea behind the central concept is cool and clever. But surrounding that cool idea is every kind of stereotypical character and plot point. All of it is straight out of the Hollywood play book. There’s some clever dialog to be had, and surely a fine assortment of amusements, but they don’t hit all the marks they should, either. And the character of Evan Baxter is obviously changed a bit from Bruce Almighty, being made a nicer, likable character (of course - how else would one make this movie work, and get the new breakaway star fit into the plot).

Production: This is one very expensive comedy. From the sets to the locations, it all smells of money. Then there’s the effects, of which there are plenty. I’m not entirely sure how they pulled off the pitch for this film to the studio. They want to make a quasi-sequel to a movie that was only marginally successful originally, and they won’t a massive load of cash to do it. Were it not for the people directing and producing the film, the studio surely would have been nervous. Well, that and the current success of Steve Carrell.

Cast: Here is a strong suit of the film. Carrell is, of course, great. It’s definitely fun to see him enjoying such success. For this film, he gets to bring a couple of his former Daily Show buddies along for the fun, with appearances by Ed Helms as a reporter and John Stewart as himself in a couple clips of The Daily Show. Morgan Freeman returns as God, again having fun with the role. The fantastic Lauren Graham gets handed the hardest role in the film - the character of the wife who has to somehow try and ground this insane plot. She succeeds as much as I would think possible. Other cast members round out the plot and have fun with it. One of the highlights is surely the music number at the end of the film, where the cast and crew are clearly having a little bit too much fun.

Music: John Debney pulls out all the stops and puts forth a completely unrestrained score, which is fitting for this over-the-top comedy. He plays at the heart strings very obviously, embraces the Biblically epic moments, goes for the jokes, etc. Ironically, this score probably gave him more opportunities for the Biblical epic kind of cue than his genuine Biblical epic film score - The Passion Of The Christ. Overall, a decent score.

This movie was definitely one I was anxiously anticipating. I’d seen the trailers, knew John Cusack was the star, was aware of it being based on a Stephen King story (that I haven’t read) and was getting psyched to see it. First, can I state how refreshing it is to see a horror movie that is more American retro-thriller than the current trends in tired Asian remakes and (admittedly cool) British doomsday epics? Second, it’s nice to see it isn’t a snuff/torture pic, which is becoming a major fad these days, thanks to hack director Eli Roth (enter into evidence the trailer for Captivity that played before 1408). I feel I need to occasionally add a disclaimer about my reviewing horror films, which is the fact that they just don’t work on me on a basic horror level. I’m way too low key. Jump scenes don’t work on me. Torture scenes don’t freak me out. The ones I find most effective are character driven, clever or otherwise entertaining. This stylish flick is enormously entertaining. It kept a little smirk on my face from start to finish. Frankly, that’s one of my favorite personal reactions to watching a movie. I totally loved watching this film.

Writing: As I said, I haven’t read the Stephen King source material, so I can make no comparisons as to how close the story is to that foundation. As such, making wild claims about the movie is difficult. Still, I think it may just be my favorite Stephen King film adaptation, of the horror style genre, anyway - precluding his “prison movies” (Shawshank, Green Mile) or dramas (Hearts in Atlantis, etc). I’m kinda strange in the fact that I dislike most of the popular film adaptations of his material (The Shining, etc). I do like Needful Things, Pet Cemetery and Night Flier. I think his stuff works much better in either mini-series form (Almost too many to list these days) or TV movie/series form. I prefer The Dead Zone TV series to the movie (in a major way). All that is to say that this is one of those rare examples of me really loving a theatrical film based on his material.

Production: There’s tons of cool production set pieces in this film. From the slick cinematography to the clever sets and sound design, it all just pops off the screen. For a movie that is heavily a one set movie, it really knows how to morph and change. The editing is very slick. Actually, it’s darn impressive how much they squeeze in to the 94 minute running time, without at all feeling rushed. By the way, this is one of the first releases I’ve noticed to come out of all the final deals that The Weinstein Company (who produced this film) made over the last few years. It’s produced under the Dimension Films banner (which left Disney/Miramax with them, and is now part of TWC) and distributed by MGM (who’s recent production/distribution changes have finally started to settle down after being bought primarily by Sony). One almost needs a flow chart to figure it all out. This film was directed by Mikael Håfström, who interestingly directed Derailed, which I think was the first film released by the new Weinstein Company studio.

Cast: This is John Cusack’s movie, plain and simple. Any other cast member has but a small, supporting role. That isn’t to say that the supporting actors don’t do a great job, because they do. Cusack, however, is 95% of the performance in the film, much of the time by himself. His casting is pitch-perfect. He brings his typically wry sense of cynical irony to the role, always slightly amused by things - even when he’s having a horror-induced nervous breakdown. Not many actors can pull off such a mix, but he can do it with ease. Despite his overly-high billing, Sam Jackson actually isn’t in much of the film, but what he is in is quite good. Mary McCormack is excellent playing the wife of Cusack’s character. Heck, even the always great Tony Shalhoub gets in one scene as a hectic publishing editor.

Music: So, you wanna know what it’s like in the head of a film score geek? Like many other aspects of film production, my mind is typically analyzing the music score of a film while I’m watching, if I mean to or not. Often times, it’s on a subconscious level, where I’m picking up on bits and pieces of other music scores. I mean, after watching enough movies, reading enough technical trade magazines (Cinefex & American Cinematographer being two of my standard reading materials) and watching countless documentaries and featurettes, it’s impossible to not be aware of what visual effect process is being used, or what cinematography tricks and styles are being utilized. Well, the music scoring process is where my mind really churns away. The way most movies are made today, they are first edited together with a “temp track,” where previous films score cues are used to realize the way the director wants scenes to work. It’s a doubled edged sword, however, in the fact that many times the final film score has what I like to call “temp track leaks,” where a film score fan can tell what original temp track cue was used because the composer ended up either choosing to or being force to copy that temp cue too closely. Well, composer Gabriel Yared actually did a marvelous job at composing a score of rather wide range and style for this film without feeling too on the nose in copying previous source material. I really liked the score a lot. I couldn’t pick out source material exactly, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out there was some Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Herrmann, or other legends of the business that had music used as temp cues. I say all that to state that there was, however, one tiny bit of electronic texture used in some of the score that I knew I recognized, but just couldn’t put my finger on. I knew I was very familiar with the source material - the answer was on the tip of my tongue. So, I drove all the way home struggling to think of what it was. It wasn’t until I got home and slowly started circling my racks of film score CDs that I was finally able to nail it down. I walked around the stacks first narrowing it down by composer, until finally, “Ah ha! It’s gotta be Graeme Revell!” Then, scan along his section of my CDs, “There we go! It’s from Red Planet!” Such a relief finally figuring that out. It’s a great CD that I’ve listened to quite often over the years, and I ended up being slightly annoyed that it took me that long to come up with the answer. Anyway, such is the life of a film score geek…

• Coolness. A trailer for Blade Runner: The Final Cut has materialized. One of my favorite films of all time, spruced up with (yes, another) cut of the film and a fancy remastering. It’ll have a limited theatrical run (for which I’ll drive to wherever is necessary to see) then hit DVD (and one or both of the HD disc formats). And Ridley is doing this new DVD edition right. It’ll have all three cuts of the film (the original, the Director’s Cut from the 90’s and this new version) and bunches of extras. If any of Ridley’s recent special edition DVD releases are any indicator, this’ll be contender for DVD of the year. Drooooooooool…
• Brian Ford Sullivan continues his daily reviews of TV pilots. This year, he’s doing one pilot that was picked up and one that wasn’t each day. As always, the reviews are well done, and I’ll be putting a few of them on my watch list. However, I had to be amused reading his review of the pilot for the TV adaptation of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (It’s the bottom half of the page). I kinda cringed when I first heard they were developing one, but I didn’t expect it to be THAT bad. Sadly, I believe him about how bad it is, particularly given his description of events. Morbid curiosity makes me wanna track down a copy. Never mind the fact that there was already an excellent TV series titled Mr. & Mrs. Smith, featuring absolutely fantastic casting of the leads (I’ve got one episode of it in good quality on tape from when it was originally on, but would love to scrounge up some quality copies of the rest of the series).
• YIKES! Check out the “Dalek Cage.” Cool for not only its insanity, but for the Doctor Who reference.
• 17-year-old son turns an armed robber’s plan back against himself. Good for you, kid. I know the police chief has to make the statements he made, but at least the Arby’s management are giving the kid credit. If more people would actually do this, armed robbers might be a little more skittish about trying these things.
• So, OJ Simpson’s “If I Did It” book has leaked online. Curiosity got the best of me, so I hunted it down. Read the first chapter, which is pretty much just OJ & Nicole’s history together (his telling of it, anyway). The scanning job of the book is a bit messed up in random spots, but it’ll surely be an interesting read.
• Fun with highways
• Wow, here’s one set of investigators and university staff that are gonna have to come up with a seriously impressive reason for their secrecy. That’s pretty stupid on their part, in almost every way possible.
• Here’s a fairly disgusting story of what you don’t want to happen on a long, international plane flight you’re on. Then again, the dude they are interviewing seems to be doing nothing more than fishing for a lawsuit with his over dramatized descriptions and accusations.
• And United Airlines had a nifty little glitch yesterday…
• Here’s a funny little warning dialog box
• Let’s see, this weekend’s to-see movie list is… 1408, Evan Almighty & A Mighty Heart (in that order). How many weekends do we get to have more than one high profile movie release with the word “mighty” in it…

• OK, I’ve added the 2007 Film Scores page to the site. The order of entries is still quite tentative, so it’ll be tweaked in the near future.
• Check out this very cool shot of Atlantis’ launch as taken from a WB-57 high orbit observation plane.
• Speaking of launches, I spent more time than I should have (and had to pry myself away) browsing around Aerospaceweb.org. There’s a ton of fascinating stuff on that site. Here’s a couple of ‘em that are worth reading all the way through: The Soviet Buran Space Shuttle, The Nedelin Disaster, Soviet N1 Lunar Rocket, Lost Cosmonaut Rumors.
• Purdue engineers put together an interesting animated recreation of the 9/11 WTC impact.
• Fun Dilbert Blog post today
• Funny how familiar a 100-year-old version of music rights seems.
• An amusing interview with The Daily Show’s hilarious Samantha Bee
• New VLC Player released (0.8.6c)

While still feeling a little bit like X-Men Lite, this second film of the franchise is a major improvement over the lackluster first entry. Like most films of the genre, one must check their rational brain at the door. After the first film, which I gave a thumb down to, this follow-up corrects many of the mistakes the first film made, for me anyway. First, Michael Chiklis’ character no longer has the whiny, self-pity nature that was insufferable in the first. Second, there’s less of Julian McMahon’s flat Victor Von Doom character, and this time out he may still be fairly useless but is a bit more interesting on screen. Third, the script and pacing is tighter with more action and entertainment all around. Fourth, we are introduced to a pretty good new element - Silver Surfer. That character works well enough, but to be honest I found some of the menacing work of Galactus to be more interesting.

Writing: As I said, the script is pretty well put together, with quick pacing and good character interaction. While not the type of script that is going to win any screenplay awards, it holds things together well enough to stage the entertainment around. Dialog is decent, but most of it isn’t all too sharp. The major weak point is the character of General Hager, which is so flat and horribly stereotyped, it makes me flinch every time the character is on screen.

Production: Most of the visual effects are quite well done. The material involving Galactus is particularly cool. Some of the Surfer stuff is cool, some of it isn’t. None of it sticks out as bad, though. Cinematography is dynamic, but again not quite anything to make your jaw drop. Sound design is pretty much the same. Frankly, I think the one department that should get the most praise is the set/production design teams. From buildings to the cool Fantasticar, everything has a nice, sleek vibe.

Cast: Ioan Gruffudd continues to imbue his Mr. Fantastic character with an almost wooden mannerism, which I think is intentional. He definitely lays on the Dudley Do-Right good guy persona, which has an appropriate fit for the role. Jessica Alba gets a chance to show some marked improvement in her role as Susan Storm, and their wedding plans make for a good foil in the story. As I already mentioned, Michael Chicklis’ character of Ben Grimm is vastly improved in this second film. In fact, most of his material is quite good. In particular, his scenes with Johnny Storm are all excellent and entertaining. Speaking of which, Chris Evans gets to have some more fun with the most entertaining character of the franchise. He was one of the only highlights of the first film and he gets to expand on that again. Julian McMahon is still no acting genius as Victor Von Doom, but he’s given a moderate amount of workable material and is kept at arms length for much of the movie so as to not hurt it all too much. Laurence Fishburne and Doug Jones do a good job as the voice and physical performers (respectively) of Silver Surfer. Then there’s poor Andre Braugher, who really needs to fire his agent. In recent years, he’s landed some seriously bad roles in big budget movies. The last role I remember seeing him in was as the captain of the Poseidon, which may have been a small role, but was truly awful. He doesn’t fare much better this time. Seriously dude, fire your agent.

Music: Here’s another franchise highlight, composer John Ottman. Amusingly, Ottman is rapidly joining the ranks of the most prolific composers for high profile superhero films. This is his fourth said genre film, preceded by X-Men 2, Superman Returns and, of course, the first Fantastic 4. He turned in a first rate score to the original Fantastic 4 entry, and his score to this sequel is also up to the task. While neither are as good as his work on Superman Returns, they are quite good. And, should it finally get off the ground, he’ll surely score the next Superman film. And who knows, perhaps another Fantastic 4 as well.

• Check out this cool video edit of the plane crash from Lost, pieced together from the bits and pieces of footage throughout the first 3 seasons. My only complaint is that the single best shot of the entire event wasn’t included (of the others looking up and seeing the plane split).
• Perhaps The Sarah Conner Chronicles will actually manage to be great. The third film managed to pull it off, against all expectations. Still, Summer Glau as a terminator. I’ll be watching no matter what.
• I love this music video.
• Blockbuster to back Blu-Ray. Yet another blow against HD-DVD.
• Gary, IN. A place I’ve only driven around in when I’ve overshot something on the highway and need to turn around. It’s truly sad to see the place in such a state, but I certainly believe what I see in these pictures. I’m a Chicago suburbanite, and to see something like Gary after being used to seeing the likes of Chicago so often is a bit startling. Granted, if you drive through some of the right areas of Chicago or nearby Rockford (in particular) you don’t get the greatest vibe, either. Then again, the bad areas of Chicago actually suffer from too MUCH activity. Heck, what’s it matter to me, I don’t even like to go into downtown Chicago…
• Uhhhhhhhhhmmmmmm…….. Whoops?
• Trevor Rabin has been attached to score Get Smart. This isn’t good news. I suppose it isn’t horrible news either, but it’s certainly not a composer that I think would show much promise for the project. I could think of 100 other composers I’d rather see get the job.
• Meanwhile, Michael Giacchino has been officially confirmed as the composer for the JJ Abrams Star Trek film. No surprise there, since Giacchino has scored all of Abrams’ stuff since the beginning of Alias, including M:I3 (also for Paramount). This is great news, though, and good to finally have in official form.
• Ignoring the dated nature of the video, this is still one of the strangest and most laughable videos I’ve seen in a while. I’d swear it was from some variety show like In Living Color or something, but you can bet this puppy is for real, sadly.
• OK, it’s hard to not comment on the fun Paris Hilton topic. I mean, come on, it’s just TOO easy. How can one ignore this quote from last week’s infamous call to Barbara Walters: “I was not eating or sleeping. I was severely depressed and felt as if I was in a cage.” Too many jokes. Must pick one……. Here’s an amusing “reading” of her comments.

OK, so perhaps I’m going through Veronica Mars withdrawal. Fist, my main reason for wanting to see this movie was that it was directed and co-written by Andrew Fleming. His ability to make movies work way more than they should was enough to convince me to want to see this (his 1999 movie, Dick, is one of my favorite comedies). And here he is yet again, making material that should fall flat on its face work almost completely. The only real weakness of the film is some of the obligatory high school based material, of which there is thankfully very little. Ironically, that is one of the key aspects of the movie that Warner Brothers is using in their advertising (trying to attract more of the teen girl audience I suppose). I mean, the biggest downside in seeing this movie was to have to sit through the Lionsgate’s trailer for the horrible looking teen girl flick Bratz (”4Real!”) yet again. Not surprisingly, Nancy Drew is a film that is firing on more intelligent thrusters than one might think from the advertising.

Writing: Many have criticized their choice to have Nancy Drew relocated to Hollywood for the setting of the film, but I think it gives the character a nice noir aspect with a deep enough case to be engaging enough to work on the big screen. The dialog is sharp and the plotting is interesting enough to make things work. It walks the fine line of a serious investigation, a noir thriller and a light and amusing Nancy Drew charmer. It also has an amusing obsession with the word “sleuthing.”

Production: Andrew Fleming adds enough style to make things interesting and fun, but stops short of becoming overly stylized. Costume design is fun, particularly with Nancy herself, giving her a very obvious nostalgic look. Set design is gorgeous, including the well designed home they move in to.

Cast: Here’s a particularly strong aspect of the film. Emma Roberts does a fine job with Nancy Drew. Tate Donovan is charming as her father. The father-daughter vibe of the movie is another thing that brought out the nostalgic Veronica Mars fanboy in me. Supporting roles include some good, relatively unknown actors as well as some great guest casting of talented actors and a hilarious a-list cameo appearance (which I’ll keep secret). Rachel Leigh Cook is very well cast, as is Barry Bostwick. Max Thieriot is a nice fit for Ned Nickerson. And Marshall Bell is very well cast as caretaker Mr. Leshing.

Music: Long-time music supervisor Ralph Sall does his typical music supervision role as well as actually scoring this film. He has done music supervision on most (all?) of Andrew Flemings previous films. His scoring is full of great moments of golden-age music score cues as well as fun action-adventure material. Overall, it’s quite a good score. Song usage is kinda so-so, but thankfully not overly cute or teen pop. Sall turns to a fun classic, Kids In America, for the titles (clearly a favorite of it, as he’s used it previously on projects he’s worked, like Clueless).

All in all, I quite enjoyed this film. More than I expected to, actually. A nice unexpected surprise for this summer movie season.

• Hey, a Buffy convention in Woodfield? I can’t ask for much closer than that. I’m there. Hopefully they’ll line up some cool guests.
• Hey, I think composer Nicholas Hooper may actually be able to pull off scoring Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix. After Patrick Doyle’s disappointing score to Goblet Of Fire, I was hoping that whoever ended up scoring Order Of The Phoenix could get the franchise back to the days of Williams’ brilliant scores. If it turns out even half as good as William’s franchise-best Prisoner Of Azkaban, it’ll be a great score.
• Here’s one show to debut this fall that I’ll be checking out: NBC’s Chuck. For The Futon Critic’s Brian Ford Sullivan to be THAT gleefully positive about a new show is pretty darn rare.
• Here’s a fascinating article on the real causes behind the problems in education for the black students. Professor Ogbu’s finding seems dead-on, in my opinion. I’ve seen countless examples of exactly what he’s describing over the years. The article is a few years old now, but certainly still applies. It’s downright amazing how people not only want to ignore the reason that he points out, but actively attack him for making.
• So, At World’s End is at least doing fantastic in the international markets. Guess the domestic market just didn’t realize how good it was (and the fact that the inferior second film last year tracked better). Cool to see it beat the record.
• This takes the “bring enough for the whole class” to a new level
• A funny list of easily mispronounced domain names
• Cool: A long exposure shot of a commercial airliner landing
• Reviews for Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer & Nancy Drew will be online shortly.

You know, for whatever reason the trailers for this film didn’t do a whole lot for me. But in retrospect, I’m not sure why. Perhaps I was suffering a bit from what I heard most people saying during said trailers, “enough with the penguins already.” And I happen to rather like penguins, so I can get what frustrated everyone else. It was a Hollywood fad that kinda wore people down. And that’s a shame, because I really liked this movie. Frankly, the movie barely needs to even be populated with penguins. It could almost be any animal it wanted to be with a little tweaking here and there. They make the penguins work, though, so it’s well and good enough that penguins are what they used. So, did I like this movie better than Happy Feet? Yeah, definitely. Happy Feet, despite some outstanding moments and elements, was an uneven movie overall that had a number of elements that just didn’t work.

Writing: The strengths of this script are in clever little touches and fantastic dialog. Plotting is extremely basic and by-the-numbers. In fact, almost any casual moviegoer will be way ahead of the plot, knowing precisely where it’s headed. What’s most amazing is that this is one of those extremely rare movies where it’s actually kinda charming the way they set things up so you know precisely where it’s headed. It’s far more about enjoying the characters and dialog along the way.

Production: The movie is setup in straight forward documentary style, playing directly against the kind of slick CGI production of Happy Feet. The animation is actually very impressive, but more for how natural and casual it all feels. That’s not to say that there isn’t any particularly impressive CGI elements to be found, because there are. In particular, the water animation is amazing. The wonderful quality of the animation is just as much how it moves and feels rather than looks. It’s all very subtle and casual.

Cast: Here’s one of the major strong points of the movie. Shia LaBeouf is perfectly fine in the lead role. It’s not a breakout performance or anything, but it gets the job done well. Zooey Deschanel, one of my favorite actresses, is fun as the romantic interest with an amusingly subtle performance. Jon Heder is surprisingly hilarious as Chicken Joe. James Woods is perfectly cast as opportunist manager Reggie Belafonte. But the true highlight of the voice casting is the great Jeff Bridges as Big Z, who is often times channeling his landmark performance as Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski for the role. The movie is certainly amusing up until his character joins in the fun, then it becomes a great romp.

Music: In something of a strange twist, composer Mychael Danna is chosen to score this movie. As somebody who specializes in intimate character dramas, I wonder if they chose him to help ground the documentary feel of the film. Still, Danna’s score is quite good. It is the one area where this movie has an impossible job at trying to be as good or better than Happy Feet, which featured a brilliant score by John Powell. Danna’s work has some nice flair when it needs to and is overall a very good score.

Incidentally, there’s a hilarious write-up at Movieweb that’s worth reading about the amusing “Based on a true story” tagline the film uses.

• Oh man, why is it all the cool things happen in LA? 1982: Greatest Geek Year Ever. A very cool film festival from Friday, July 15 - Sunday, July 17. Sunday’s back-to-back of Tron & Star Trek II is almost enough to make me book a flight. Sounds like they’ll have cool discussion panels to go with it. Whimper, whimper…
• Oooh, another motivator to get me to jump on to the HD bandwagon and get a Blu Ray player/drive - a 2 disc Face/Off: Special Collector’s Edition (release date of 9/11). It’ll be on normal DVD as well (and HD-DVD for that matter).
• With news of a good chunk of the cast being dropped from the show (hardly an unusual thing for the series), Boston Legal is adding John Larroquette to the cast. That’s a cool move, as Larroquette is a perfect fit for the show. Hey, has he played a lawyer since his Night Court days? Also cool to hear that Christian Clemenson is being bumped up to a regular (hardly a surprise to those of us who saw the last couple episodes of this previous season).
• So, will the Saw franchise establish a new pattern - where the odd number films are great and the even ones suck? We’ll find out soon enough…
• If you poke around this site a bit, you’ll notice some changes. I’ve prettied up some of the graphics, made a few things more readable, organized the menus up top and made a number of other tweaks and changes. One of the big additions is the addition of the Videos page. I’ll be encoding and uploading more of them to add to it in the near future.

• RIP: Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert)
• No big shock here, but Veronica Mars is OFFICIALLY canceled. Was 99.9% sure that it was gonna be that way anyway. A feature film jump would be most cool. Might as well continue to follow in Joss Whedon’s footsteps and try for it. Speaking of following in Joss’s footsteps, there’s also word in some of the reports of Rob Thomas in talks with DC Comics about a Veronica Mars comic. I’ll take my Veronica Mars fix in any form he can come up with. And yes, my Veronica Mars write-up is still pending. I wanna spend some time to make it good, and keep having trouble setting aside enough time to finish it off right.
• Interesting. The Dead Zone has moved production from Vancouver to Montreal for the upcoming sixth season. I just picked up the season 5 DVD set and am about to start watching it (I’m current through the end of season 4). As long as they don’t lose Nicole deBoer from the cast (which they didn’t), they can move the production and shake things up as much as they want.
• Safari for Windows is off to a flying start
• A funny use of nested logic in geography
• A depressingly insane story of overzealous families and religion
• And you think toilet water isn’t clean?
• An open letter to parents who bring little kids to horror films (language warning)
• Release info for Numb3rs: Season 3 on DVD. Look forward to any cool extras they include.

• Can you believe this stuff? Frak. When he tosses out his “metaverse” example near the end, it’s impossible to not have your mind blown. That is, if you’re able to wrap your mind around the impact of what this holds. Stuff like Flikr’s social relation and geotagging suddenly becomes primitive. This is a glimpse into the future of the meta world. This is “web 2.0″ on crystal meth. It’s still a bit rough in approach, and needs to be expanded out from the core concept, but what’s there is stunning stuff. And the Seadragon stuff at the beginning, which is the newer of this stuff, thrown into the mix makes things all the more interesting. Say what you want about Microsoft as a whole, but their R&D guys kick out some fascinating stuff - sometimes through taking their own work and seeing an acquisition that would be an ideal mesh with where they are heading. Very cool stuff.
• This is like some bad joke. Fletch Won might actually get made, FINALLY, and they have Joshua Jackson in the lead?!?! OK, so I’ll try to keep an open mind about it. Perhaps it’s a choice that isn’t obvious to most but is actually a surprisingly brilliant choice. Steve Pink may be a good choice for it. Still, it’s hard to imagine this team being a better choice than Kevin Smith writing/directing with Jason Lee starring. That would have been fantastic. Ah well, at least we’ll get another entry, at long last, to one of my favorite comedy franchises.
• For those doubting what the most progressive city on the planet is, it’s clearly Dubai. I’ve seen all this before, but no matter how many times you see this stuff, the jaw continues to hit the floor. These guys are insane.
• This one is WAY too funny: Man arrested at Best Buy for paying with $2 bills.
• Is Steve Jobs smoking something? He thinks he can take over a major browser market share by releasing Safari for Windows? Good grief. I’m a Firefox user. I’m one of them who actually doesn’t hate Internet Explorer. But if I were to switch from Firefox for my primary browser (which is unlikely), it wouldn’t be to Internet Explorer. It would by Opera. It would not, in any form of reality known to myself, be Safari. Good luck, Steve.
• A funny extrapolation of where things are headed… Google Interiors.
• Aw man, there goes my pen…
• Check out the cool trailer for 30 Days of Night. Looks like it could be a promising horror flick.
• What the Earth looks like during a solar eclipse.
• How about pictures of a what a real winter looks like (Russia, of course)
• So, Smallville is adding Supergirl to the mix. I’m only a season and a half behind on the show. Guess I’ll be doing some catching up over the summer.
• And yeah, review for Surf’s Up is still pending. I will say that it was surprisingly good. I liked it better than Happy Feet (it’s actually kinda difficult to compare the two).
• BTW, did I mention how much I liked this weekend’s Doctor Who episode? I did? Well, consider it stated again. Great episode. Actually, watching it a couple more times, it suddenly struck me how much a lot of the episode reminded me of The X-Files at its best.

• Looks like the box set of Alien Nation TV movies is going to be very cool, with tons of great extras. Great to see some attention given to them.
• So, Manhunt 2 for the Wii is a murder training device? I think they should advertise it that way. Probably boost sales. Good ol’ Jack Thompson is at it, yet again. That guy needs a hobby. A new one, anyway. Perhaps he might want to look into becoming a gamer.
• Poor Pluto… An amusing illustration.
• Good grief, I may have to quickly start watching Stargate Atlantis to catch up to the upcoming fourth season (I’m already some 8 years behind on SG-1). Jewel Staite is joining the cast!
• This weekend’s Doctor Who episode (as aired on BBC in the UK, not lagging way behind on Sci-Fi Channel in the USA) was titled Blink. What a marvelous episode. It’s so perfectly Doctor Who, and a wonderfully inventive episode for a “doubled banked” episode (where The Doctor and Martha are barely in the episode due to the way they schedule this one episode during the simultaneous production of another episode or two). I thoroughly loved this one. It’s one of those where I had a gleefully devious laugh throughout much of it. In particular, this is one of them where you can just picture the effect it’ll have on kids while you are first watching it. It’s brilliantly clever, in an amazingly simple way. And the guest performance of Carey Mulligan is excellent. After the two parter that preceded it, which until now were my favorite of this current season, this is now my favorite of the current season. I look forward to the three final episodes of the season to follow.

This movie will quickly draw comparisons to other genre films. While is does have a good amount of stereotypical genre trappings, it also puts a somewhat different feel and spin on much of the material. One of my primary interests in seeing the film were for the loosely based auto-biographical aspects of the story to Elizabeth Shue and her family. The movie is definitely a successful attempt at a simple and engaging story. It might not be quite as good as We Are Marshall or other recent inspiring sports films centered around tragedy, but it’s definitely a good film to add to the list.

Writing: While the story may be based on the soccer-obsessed Shue family and their loss, many aspects of the story were changed in favor of a different narrative and story, but the same sentiments and emotional tone. Overall, I think they did a good job with it. Some of my favorite aspects of the story are just how hard the lead character of Gracie has to work, not just to break into the team, but to even be good enough to do so. This isn’t some gifted player who knows what she’s doing from the get go. We get to see her fail over and over again, never quite sure enough of herself to know how well she’ll do. And the material between her and father is very well played, with him wanting to believe she can do it but always somewhat unsure. Even right up to the end, we see her not quite up to the challenge. In fact, the movie never implies that she would be anything more than an average player amongst the rest of the team, which is a nicely reserved and realistic approach. In fact, realism seems to be something of an obsession on this film, from the period setting to the flawed and occasionally edgy characteristics of the main character - including a casual but flawed relationship with the best friend character that helps ground it in a non-sensationalistic style.

Production: While there’s not a lot to rave about in terms of production, it is all solid across the board and everything works very well. Nothing seems lacking, and if feels like a very competent crew was put together. Overall, they seem to have been most interested in a sense of reality, by not overplaying anything for style, and it works.

Cast: Carly Shroeder, who I was pretty unfamiliar with previously (other than playing the daughter in Firewall), does a fantastic job in the lead. She pulls off the delicate balance of being capable enough to be good at the sport but not overly tomboy or athletic to make any of it particularly obvious. Her dramatic acting skills are also quite good and really make the character material work, particularly with the rest of her on-screen family. It has to be a bit tougher when you know you’re playing a character that is based not only on a real person, but one who is your producer/co-star. Granted, the character is only loosely based on reality, but you gotta figure it still had some influence on her performance. Speaking of real life characters, we get a couple of the Shue family members on screen. Elizabeth Shue takes to role that is reportedly most like the real life character - that of the mother. She does a good job with it. Dermot Mulroney does a very nice job in the role of the father. The rest of the cast does a fine job.

Music: Mark Isham does a good job with the score. It takes a little bit of similar style approach to Christophe Beck’s score to We Are Marshall, particularly with the use of percussion during games. While it might not be as great as Beck’s We Are Marshall score, it’s quite good.

While not as good as Ocean’s Eleven, this third film in the franchise is a bit better than Ocean’s Twelve. In a summer populated with third entries in film franchises, this one is competitively pretty good. Featuring a great cast and a somewhat well put together plot, it holds together well enough.

Writing: I’ll admit that this franchise is beginning to suffer a bit from one of its key gimmicks, the idea of progressively increasing the cast of characters with each outing. The plot is able to be followed, but much of it comes off as either too convoluted, overly simplified or cheated for time. It does slow down from time to time to give things a chance to relax and breath, which is definitely helpful.

Production: Steeped heavily in retro 60’s filming styles, including fun manual zooms and fun split screens, there’s a great sense of nostalgia all over the film. All this is despite the amount of modern settings and technology. The characters even reminisce a bit about how things have changed, and the audience gets to see said changes in the sharp contrast of old versus new production technique. For instance, while much of the film is shot in stark hand held moves and locked off framing, there is the occasional aerial shot of the gorgeous new Vegas hotel all this takes place in, which is filled with smooth filming and flawless visual effects. It’s a kinda interesting blend.

Cast: There’s no arguing that the strength of this franchise is the wildly diverse and notable cast. All of them are great, but it’s George Clooney & Brad Pitt that are the greatest of the mix. After enough practice in previous films, the two of them have absolutely perfected their rhythm together in scenes. I absolutely love the way the two are always half a sentence in front of each other. That and the way they seem so comfortable around each other that they barely look at each other when they are talking to each other. Matt Damon gets to have some fun with his prosthetic nose, and his downplayed interactions with the rest of the cast is again spot-on. Al Pacino & Ellen Barkin are nice additions to the fun. Great to still see Carl Reiner on screen (he is 85 years old, after all), still doing a great job. David Paymer gets to join the fun as a character with some of my favorite material in the film. Elliot Gould gets to have fun with his usual goofball charm, playing the quasi-father of the gang yet again with ease. The list can go on and on and on - and it does.

Music: David Holmes does a great job again with his retro-electronica styled score. Filled with modern rhythm and approach, it features a great range of classic music textures, like the electric organ.

• The shuttle Atlantis was carrying some particularly cool cargo to the ISS
• A new Ask Al column has been posted. Not as funny as the typical Ask Al column, but good to see him posting more entries (probably needed something to do on the bus while currently on tour)
• Don’t know if this is truly official, but if it is it looks like the new Transformers movie has screwed up at least one thing - the theme song. This version is particularly bad. Here’s one thing the animated movie did far better (it’s not a wonderful version, but it’s far superior to this one). Ick. Ah well, if this is all there is to complain about (fingers crossed), I’m perfectly willing to overlook it.
• Gee, you can barely see the strings. Yeah, right.
• The fine folks at Dark Horse Comics continue to crank out the cool Buffy stuff. In November, they’ll be releasing Buffy: Panel to Panel. They haven’t put out too much info about it yet, but it will be something like their previous Star Wars: Panel to Panel.
• Here’s one star you won’t wanna get too close to.
• Wow, check out the luck this guy in a wheel chair has (other than needing to be in a wheel chair, of course). That’s crazy.
• Review for Gracie is still pending, and reviews for Ocean’s Thirteen and Surf’s Up will be joining it, probably tomorrow.

Congrats to the crew of the shuttle Atlantis, and all the ground crews that make it all happen. The STS-117 shuttle mission lifted off today, and all things looked good. Here’s the video highlights.

• The big news for the week is that Jericho has actually been picked back up by CBS! The “nuts campaign” actually worked. It’s so rare for these fan campaigns to work, particularly AFTER a show has been officially not picked up by the upfront announcements. Even more interesting is that the official announcement of the (recently rumored) pickup came in the form of a letter from CBS network president, Nina Tassler, to the fans directly. Her fanboy points just went up a staggering amount. Take that, Dawn Ostroff. I’m extremely happy that the show has been picked back up, and still have trouble convincing myself to believe it. Thankfully, this show won’t have been left as a show canceled right at the point of a major cliffhanger. So, thank you CBS, for actually listening to your viewers. Yes, we know that you have to justify this with an audience increase, and us fans will try to validate your renewal of the show by doing what we can to get those numbers up. Perhaps you won’t make such a staggeringly boneheaded mistake as you did with that gaping hiatus you put the show on for months (and then acted all shocked with the ratings bottomed out of the show when it eventually returned). Sometimes, I just don’t get the programming choices that the major networks make. I mean, I’d understand things done for their own greedy interest, but moves like that don’t make sense for anyone involved.
• Along with that renewal news, there’s official word on the details for the season 1 DVD set for Jericho.
• Hey, what’s this, I posted a new “top list” entry on the site? Yup, that’s something else I’m trying to kick back in gear. Hopefully, more of those to come.
• My review for Gracie should show up at some point tomorrow, btw.
• You know, I really don’t care if this is a true story or not (and I’d be pretty sure it is). That’s one of the funniest things I’ve heard in a while. For that to have been mistaken that way in LA, of all places, is too funny.
• Looks like Atlantis might manage a launch on Friday. Here’s hoping for a glitch-free, successful launch. Atlantis is the shuttle that I got to see launch while down in Florida back in 2001 for mission STS-98.
• A nice interview with Summer Glau about her upcoming Sarah Conner Chronicles role.
• Here’s a funny write-up about the recent NASA chief press comment science nerd controvery
• Try out this cool and surreal “picture”
• How NOT to use a PowerPoint
• The Onion’s hilarious new revelation about the new Harry Potter book

This is a list of the shows/composers, currently in production, that feature my favorite music scoring work.

1. Battlestar Galactica - Bear McCreary
   Bear McCreary, who was the secondary composer for the Battlestar mini-series (and was all of 23 years old at the time), landed himself a gig that surely must have him pinching himself for such good fortune. Primary composer Richard Gibbs decided to leave the show after the mini-series was picked up as a series and worked briefly on the first handful of episodes while transitioning the work to McCreary. The producers put a lot of faith in McCreary, who was not only very young to be taking on such a high profile task, but was doing scoring unlike anything that had been done on TV before. With an approach that is NOTHING like Stu Phillips’ fantastic work on the 1978 original (despite the occasional wink towards Phillips’ original theme - used in the new show as a “Colonial Anthem”), McCreary constantly turns the approach to scoring television (or film for that matter) on its head. Blending something of a world-mix with all manner of thematic and chamber orchestra textures, ethereal beauty and wildly unrestrained percussion, his work is absolutely some of the best scoring TV has seen in a very long time, in my opinion. There have been score CD releases for each season (with the 3rd season score pending in the next month or two). Like almost everything about this utterly fantastic series, it takes a wildly different approach from the original source material inspiration and works amazingly, against all odds.
2. Doctor Who - Murray Gold
   Resurrected from the ashes, into a major success, Doctor Who is back with style. I was a fan ever since childhood, so I was anxious when I heard about the rebirth of the venerable series (now 44 years old). As I watched the first episode, it took a bit for me to adjust to Murray Gold’s scoring approach. It didn’t take me too long to figure out that he was doing amazing work. Ranging from a bit of rock-n-roll to amazing beauty and staggering action cues, he breathes an incredible amount of life, heart and action into the energetic adventure series. So great is his music, it was featured in a wonderful concert performance last fall for an annual charity drive that the Doctor Who production supports. Gold’s scoring is at its best when it breaks the mold and goes in a direction nobody expects. Case in point is his “Doomsday” theme - one of my favorite music cues written for either film or TV in years. Gold also contributes the occasional song to the series, which are also very good. His work from the first 2 years on the revived series is featured on a fantastic CD.
3. Lost - Michael Giacchino
   Though his work on Lost doesn’t have the freedom to be as aggressive as his stunning work on JJ Abrams’ previous series, Alias, it is still some excellent work. Alias gave him the opportunity to really go nuts in the scoring, and he turned out some of TV’s greatest scoring on that series. For Lost, things are more lyrical and restrained, but often times very beautiful. Like Alias, Lost has a score CD release for each of the first two seasons. I fear that his fantastic scores from the third through fifth seasons of Alias won’t likely see a release, but hopefully his work on the most recent third and on future seasons of Lost will see release.
4. Boston Legal - Danny Lux
   Danny Lux is a TV composer who has worked on a heck of a lot of notable shows, and is one of those workhorse composers; a jack of all trades. His work is pretty much completely unrepresented on CD or the likes, and he has a pretty low profile in the scoring fan community. But I can’t help but be impressed by the stuff he cranks out from time to time - particularly for David E. Kelley shows. The music in Boston Legal is as out-there and strangely-fragmented as the show itself, not to mention being appropriately over-the-top. It’s almost the kind of music that should be annoying, but by some miracle it manages to walk that line and work brilliantly.
5. Monk - Jeff Beal
   Still to this day, I think it was a mistake to have dropped Jeff Beal’s delightful main title theme to this show for Randy Newman’s stereotypically bouncy song. Beal constantly turns in charming and delightful scoring work for this quirky mystery comedy series. Like Monk himself, the score is warm and charming, but very much off-center. Beal has been a rising star in TV scoring work in recent years. His work from the earlier episodes of the show was released on a nice score CD.
   
6. 30 Rock - Jeff Richmond
   One of the single most goofball and daffy aspects of this hilarious series is Jeff Richmond’s offbeat and delightfully bouncy music. Richmond is writer/producer/star Tina Fey’s husband, so it’s no mystery how he got the assignment. All things being equal, it was a great choice, since he does such fun work on the show. It’s one of the aspects of the show that helps place it firmly in the world of farce.
7. Smallville - Mark Snow
   I couldn’t possibly make a list of TV scoring work and not include Mark Snow somewhere in it. His work on Smallville may not be as original or groundbreaking as some of his previous work (like the one that made him famous - The X-Files), but it’s still solid stuff. Getting to balance character and family sensibilities with lofty Americana and superhero action, Snow gets to play around quite a bit with this show.
8. CSI - John M. Keane
   While his work in recent seasons has been more subtle and lower key, Keane has contributed plenty of nice work to this excellent series. It’s consistently better than the scoring work for the two spin-off shows. Then again, so are the song selections. Keane’s best work on the show was done in the first season, some of which is represented on the early soundtrack CD for the show.

There’s a number of other current shows that do a very respectable job in the music score department, but they don’t quite single themselves out in my mind as particularly groundbreaking or worth special attention. Such honorable mentions go to the likes of Medium, Supernatural and the procedurals like Numb3rs, Bones, etc.

Other than having a couple minor problems with this film, I thought it was great. Kevin Costner isn’t an actor for which I have a particular liking. He’s simply average in a number of movies, or poor in a handful, but he does have some standout work that helps redeem those other, lesser films and performances. This is one of those great standout performances from him. The movie is both a standard psychological thriller and a unique one at the same time. While it takes many of the twists and turns of a genre film, it presents it in a very interesting way, with particularly great characters and ideas in the mix. I’ll mention the couple things in the movie I had a problem with at the end of the review, to avoid spoilers.

Writing: As something of a first person narrative, the writing on this film contains some fascinating moments of detached insight. Personally, I find serial killer movies that feature the killer in an introspective framework rather fascinating. This one does it in a way that’s not only a great way for the killer to analyze himself on screen for the audience, but also acts as a rather unique method for his madness. Then there’s the cool family aspect of it all, which is sprinkled in quite interestingly.

Production: Filming and editing is done in standard psychological thriller form, which isn’t a criticism in particularly. It’s solid with nothing to really complain about. Cinematography, sound, sets, locations, costumes - all of it is up to the task. This isn’t a movie that’s gonna knock your socks of in that regard - it’s more about narrative and performance.

Cast: Like I said, Costner is quite good as Mr. Brooks. For most of the movie, he’s cool and collected, and Costner makes all that work very well. But what really shines are the moments where he gives in to his darker side. Speaking of which, I must praise William Hurt’s performance. His little “devil-on-the-shoulder” mannerisms are great, and so much fun to watch. Demi Moore is surprisingly good in a fairly unusual role - which is given an unusual dimension for such a character. Her performance is excellent, and I do wish she’d get more high profile roles. She was the one saving grace of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and was particularly good in Bobby. Dane Cook is well cast - though I think Ryan Reynolds might have been a slightly better fit (Cook always reminds me of a second-choice Reynolds substitute actor). Danielle Panabaker, an actress who continues to impress, slips in a rather sly and interesting performance. The rest of the supporting cast is populated with a talented cast, from Marg Helgenberger to Lindsay Crouse to Reiko Aylesworth.

Music: Ramin Djawadi has done some decent work on TV shows like Prison Break, and has had an association with Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control cadre of composers in the past. His score shows some of that influence, with a bit of Clint Mansell’s style mixed in. The score is mildly stylish and pretty effective. Not a best score of the year candidate, but perfectly solid.

OK, here’s the couple complaints. Spoilers ahead. One of the scenes I didn’t like, despite the cool sound mixing work in it, was the big shootout sequence with Demi Moore’s character and the convict hunting her down. They could have ended the shootout after the first 30 seconds, but instead they ramp it up into this big, ridiculous action sequence like something from a John Woo film. It’s a huge misstep of a sequence for the film, and I heard a couple other people making fun of it after the film was over, so I wasn’t the only one. It could have easily been edited down to a workable scene. The other is a small thing, but it annoyed me none-the-less. I’m perfectly fine with movies taking liberties with the use of computers and information for ease of plotting. Films and TV have been doing it for SO long, and almost always in a manner so completely unrealistic, that I’ve grown rather used to it. But this movie contains such a scene (Brooks pulling up Detective Atwood’s records and history) and makes the mistake of having his character deliver a really poor piece of exposition about just how easy it was. I don’t recall the exact wording, but it made me cringe.

• Woo hoo! The Veronica Mars season 3 DVD set will include the trailer that was put together to try and sell the FBI-based forth season, which sadly wasn’t picked up. And yeah, my Veronica Mars send-off is still pending.
• So the on-again off-again rumor of the upcoming season 4 of Battlestar Galactica being the last is now officially confirmed. Frankly, and this may come as a bit of a surprise, I think it’s a good thing. Perhaps I would have liked them to do one more season than that, but I think it’s a very good thing for a show to know it is ending long in advance of when it happens - particularly a show as serialized as Battlestar. This will give them a definitive target for the ending they’ve had in mind. Who knows, perhaps the franchise can continue on in other forms. Lost also recently decided on when they would end, and that will help them stay on target, story-wise.
• Dane Cook: The Lost Pilots? While this collections seems a bit dubious, it’s the kind of thing I’d like to see more of. Find a common theme to string together a collection of pilots that weren’t picked up. There’s plenty of cool series pilots to choose from that the networks never picked up.
• The funny origin for the leak of the newest AACS decryption key
• Moonlight, the vampire detective series that CBS is launching this fall, not only sounds like an Angel rip-off, but it now going to be helmed by Angel’s David Greenwalt? Weird. Perhaps it’ll be worth watching, after all.
• Check out these cool clouds
• Microsoft is getting set to launch their very cool “Surface” system
• I’ve been doing more visual/functional tweaking of this site. Also added some book reading functionality to the right side panel. I’ll be filling the details into that system a bit more soon.

I’m gonna have to be a bit unfair to this movie for a few reasons, at least for now. I plan on catching it a second time to help figure out what my real opinion is. First, the midnight, sold-out screening I went to had a moderately good audience overall (who were really loving the film), but a couple really annoying couples that were, of course, sitting right next to me and right behind me. Second, the audio level was seriously weak (my guess: the analog audio track was being used with the digital track having glitched out completely). I know I missed a good third of the dialog due to it being so weak and the audience laughing so loud and often. Third, there were a number of picture jumps in the film, like bad splices (on opening day, no less). Lastly, I think writer/director Judd Apatow’s films and shows work better on multiple viewings. The movie is a very R rated film, never shying away from the outlandish and extreme. Where other films would stop short, this one has no inhibitions. While that serves the humor many times, it also backfires a bit as well. Sometimes, the crass level of humor seems to be there only for shock value, and that falls flat. Still, it is very often hilarious.

Writing: Character arcs are pretty well written, if not a little bit stereotypical. Still, for a movie that is primarily going for laughs, it’s nice to see them actually writing character and story at all in this day and age (take note, you hacks that made Scary Movie 1 & 2, Date Movie, Epic Movie, White Chicks, Little Man, etc).

Production: There’s nothing to take note of in particular for production quality in the film. Cinematography is as absolutely plain as possible, feeling even less cinematic than Apatow’s previous (and superior) film, The 40 Year Old Virgin. Locations and settings are completely average as well. I guess it helps sell the reality of the characters a bit.

Cast: Here’s the real strength of the film. It’s impossible to go wrong with Katherine Heigl. Seth Rogan also works very well, and has to go through the widest character arc. It’s great to see Leslie Mann getting a main role these days, even if it is her husband that’s the writer/director. But in my estimation the greatest piece of casting is Paul Rudd as the brother-in-law. Rudd is always great (and seems to be a regular player for Apatow), and some of his timing and crazier moments in this movie are hilarious. The main four character really play off each other very well, in all combinations. Then there’s the numerous supporting players, ranging from How I Met Your Mother’s Jason Segel to the great Harold Ramis (in a hilariously cast role as Rogen’s father). The one completely wasted actor is Alan Tudyk, who’s one of the funniest actors in the business, that is given some fairly lame material to work with.

Music: Loudon Wainwright III is not a film composer by trade, and his music for this film doesn’t feel like it was actually written to be a film score. It feels a bit tracked in - a “needle dropped” score, to put it in old-school scoring terminology. It’s harmless enough, but feel very underwhelming and a bit lame in spots.