• Not a good week for the spaceflight community. Following hot on the heals of the news that somebody sabotaged an ISS computer module is the truly tragic news of a fatal accident at Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites location, killing 3. And just to add insult to injury, now there’s news of NASA astronauts being allowed to fly drunk. Good grief.
• Lots of fun stuff coming out of Comic-Con, which started yesterday. The details for the amazing new Blade Runner: The Final Cut release have been confirmed (scroll down for pics and specs on the various releases). Man, that 5 disc set is gonna be so awesome. I’ll definitely have to make the Blu-Ray plunge before then. I think I’ll consider this as my primary motivator now. Another cool thing to come out of Comic-Con is the release of the first teaser for The Dark Knight. Cool, indeed.
• Speaking of cool trailers, we also see the debut of the first trailer for Robert Zemeckis’ motion CGI version of Beowulf. Looks amazing. Here’s hoping that Zemeckis can do a better job with Beowulf than Snyder did with 300 (which I consider to be a movie that has incredible style but not a heck of a lot else). I also can’t wait for Alan Silvestri’s score for Beowulf. Should be interesting to see how Zemeckis can push his fancy CGI process from the first two (impressive) kids movie outtings (Polar Express & Monster House) to this more mature and ambitious subject matter. Zemeckis is a technical wizard when it comes to film making, so I’m sure it’ll be incredible.
• So, Linksys is to be no more. Cisco is dropping their brand name in favor of their own. A mistake, if you ask me.
• Excellent! Val Kilmer is going to be appearing on Numb3rs.
• If any of you are as frequent a user of Google Reader as I am (I use it an insane amount), here’s an awesome Greasemonkey script to be able to read the source page in an iFrame within the reader. VERY nice. Obviously, to use the Greasemonkey script, you need to be running Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension.
• Speaking of Google, here’s the kind of annoying arrogance on their part that truly drives me bonkers. Their stubborn resistance to adding the simplest of sort functions to GMail is completely retarded. Even worse is their constant defense of such a position by avoiding the REAL reason we want the sort function. When are you IDIOTS on Google’s GMail dev team EVER going to figure out that we don’t want the sort function for what you think we want it for. When you’ve got thousands of e-mails in the inbox and you want to do multiple labeling/deleting/whatever, it’s painfully slow and cumbersome to do by having to constantly search for similar rather than just sort by sender, etc. Grouping would be best, but how can we ever expect something as “technologically advanced” as list grouping when you guys can’t even figure out how to let us sort the list? I mean, every e-mail client ever made (that I’ve ever seen) can sort a bloody list of items. So SHUT UP ABOUT THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF LABELS IN GMAIL AND HOW IT ELIMINATES THE NEED FOR SORTING COMPLETELY! YOU GUYS ARE MISSING THE POINT *ENTIRELY*! LABELS HAVE ***NOTHING*** TO DO WITH WHY I WANT A SIMPLE SORTING FUNCTION! There is NO feature I want in GMail more than to do a simple sort of the list. You can take every possible feature I could ever want in the client and put them together, and they STILL wouldn’t be as important to me as a stupid, simple sort function. They constantly keep rolling out the topic of labels whenever anyone ever requests a sort capability… Grrrrrr………
• Ooooh, getting Robert Patrick back as a T-1000 in The Sarah Connor Chronicles would be cooler than getting Arnie to make an appearance. Heck, get him in play as a recurring performer. That would be so cool.
• Did you wish your system administrator a happy SysAdmin Day today? I was thinking of dropping some hints to people, but didn’t.
• Here’s an enviro-friendly argument that’s actually an interesting idea. But as the comments quickly pointed out, the site making this argument is an offender of exactly the same thing.
• So, just when it looked like this show might not suck after all (sorry for the pun), David Greenwalt has changed his mind and left his new producer job on Moonlight.
• You know, people who read way too much into Harry Potter on religious grounds really come off as insane. I can understand taking offense to some pieces of entertainment as related to “Satanism” - witchcraft, wizards, warlocks, etc. But people who put this kind lunatic interpretation into the Harry Potter books/films need to put their helmets on and be given their sign. When you argue Harry Potter to this level of completely lunacy, you’ve lost every ounce of credibility you might have had with me. These are people who have no idea where to draw a line, and they are the ones that give any legitimate voice for such arguments a bad name.
• Have I mentioned how much I loathe Windows Explorer in Vista?

The big question on everyone’s mind was, “can they transfer the essence of The Simpsons from the TV screen to the theater screen?” The answer is a resounding yes. The amusing thing about it is that they kept it very true to the series, in terms of story and style. While it can’t help but recycle a few themes from the show (I mean really, the show has been on 18 years and over 400 episodes - what are the chances of them not having to do that?), it’s still a great entry to the franchise. I saw the movie in digital projection with great audio/video quality, and with a sold out audience that was a perfect audience - totally into the movie and along for the ride, but not annoying in any way (a rarity). From start to finish, the movie is a lot of fun, chock full of good laughs. It deviously likes to poke fun at itself, including some subtle and hilarious digs at the TV network, and the very idea of going to the theater and paying to see this movie while the TV series is still running (in a brilliant opening sequence).

Writing: I didn’t notice how many writers were credited on screen, but you can be sure there were at least a dozen contributing writers to this thing, for as long as the feature film has been kicking around and the number of constant writers the show has. I imagine there’s been a jar of “movie ideas” where writers tossed jokes and ideas that they wanted to save for a special occasion. The jokes just keep on coming in this movie, and most of them are quite clever. They do a good job at not only taking a common type of joke and making it work, but adding a new punch at the end of it (for instance, Bart’s skateboard ride). They also have fun with one of their typical styles - taking a funny joke and making it funnier by obsessing over it. The Spider Pig material is just such an example - the Spider Pig theme song in particular. It’s also one of the few franchises around that can do physical comedy (typically injury) frequently and always make it funny. The plot is fairly simple and obvious, which actually works in favor of the film, as it’s kinda a joke in and of itself. Overall, a very fun and clever script. It’s impressive just how many regular characters they managed to cram in, too.

Production: Though they spruced up much of the animation and ambition, this movie feels VERY much like the TV series in look and style. It borrows a bit of the more flashy animation style of the sister series, Futurama (which I actually prefer a bit to The Simpsons). One thing that I loved is not only their use of full scope widescreen, but the way they play with it (I love movies that change their aspect ratio for dramatic effect). They also play with other bits to sneak in some extra jokes, like Ralph’s hilarious bit standing in the 0 of the 20th Century Fox logo at the beginning singing along with the theme. I always picture the writers room of this show/movie as a bunch of guys sitting around, tossing out ideas and trying to figure out how to make it better than the person who came up with it to begin with. Or, them just tossing out totally random ideas and the rest latching onto it as brilliant - like stupid little jokes of Ralph singing along with the studio logo theme. For as much as the show makes fun of Fox on a regular basis (a network that deserves every last bit of it), they also pull it off in a way that’s lovingly joking. Besides, the amount of money that The Simpsons have made Fox (the network and the studio) is so astronomical that they can get away with whatever they want.

Cast: What in the world can I possibly say about the cast? These people know their jobs and characters inside, outside, upside, downside, diagonalside, invertedside and sidelessly. Their comedic timing has been sharpened to absolute perfection. By this point, they couldn’t possibly be any better at it, and this is no exception.

Music: Hans Zimmer and his gang at Remote Control Productions take over the reigns from mainstay series composer Alf Clausen. While it’s a bit sad, nostalgically, for Clausen to not get to do it, it makes a bit of sense to hand it over to somebody else. If for no other reason, almost everything about this movie is being done by all the same people that do the series, and giving over a foundational piece like the music score to somebody who’s used to working on a bigger scale helps give it that little extra flourish. Zimmer has collaborated a number of times with producer James Brooks, so he was a natural choice for the job. I suppose Danny Elfman would have been the ideal choice, but Zimmer was a fine alternative. He does an excellent job at both making the score feel like and extension of Clausen’s work over the decades on the show but also a bit different. It’s got a bit of a bigger orchestra at work, and walks the line of scale and comedy quite well. It’s one of those great scores for people who don’t like Zimmer’s common action music style to appreciate. Zimmer is a more talented composer than most people give credit, and it’s these departure from the norms where he truly gets to shine. If for no other reason than that hilarious and fantastic Spider Pig choral arrangement (and the hilarious “American Idiot: Funeral Arrangement” bit).

The end credits contain a cute sequel setup. I sure hope they continue to do more of them.