I'm trying to catch up on movies I haven't seen. I've added 5 recently seen films to my 2008 Films list. I added the brief reviews to them as well. The newly added ones are The Day The Earth Stood Still (7), The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (8), Yes Man (8), Valkyrie (9), Seven Pounds (9) and the lemon and new bottom entry on my list, The Spirit (2).
Starz network is developing a brand new Rob Thomas created show called Party Down, starring Veronica Mars' Ryan Hanson & Ken Marino (among others, including Jane Lynch & Lizzy Caplan). With Rob Thomas as show-runner and Marino & Hanson starring, I'll watch it no matter what it's about. Sounds like it has a fun premise anyway, so all the better.
Congrats to USA Network for setting plenty of records for 2008. They are my favorite cable network. I'm a HUGE fan of Psych and Monk, and have become a big fan of new series In Plain Sight.
And since I'm on the TV series topic, here's an exmple of just how bad reality TV has gotten - "Celebrity Rehab Presents Sober House." Seriously, they couldn't pay me to watch this crap. I'm ashamed to be a humanoid. Shame on you, VH1.
I was one of the many who suffered the AT&T Wireless outtage most of the day Sunday.
The RIAA has been denied appeal on the reversal of their only court win, hurray! Granted, they've stopped their carpet bombing personal law suits now (probably due to not being able to actually win any).
Not sure if I'll get another post in before the new year. If not, everybody enjoy your New Year's celebration. In the mean time, I'm gonna have to get myself some Weasel Puke Coffee...
OK, so my posts have been slow lately. Hey, I at least got a review posted for Quantum Of Solace. What more do you want? How about me admitting defeat when it comes to the reviews? Well, then you're in luck. Rather than attempt actual reviews for all the ones that are long overdue, I've begun adding a simple single paragraph review ("reviewlettes?") for ones that are still lacking full reviews. Their brief reviews are contained with their entry on my 2008 Films list. And yes, I know The Dark Knight is missing a brief review. That's because I do actually plan to finally get my full review of that one published.
It's sad to see that Pushing Daisies is on death watch. I suppose there are plenty of puns that can be used with the title of the show. I'm a HUGE fan of the show, and will be sad to see it go. I can't say I'm surprised, though. First, it's a wonderfully odd show, which instantly makes it hard to market (as any TV network will tell you, "same is good"). Add to that the fact that it's made by the folks who brought us Wonderfalls, one of the greatest shows of all time, which was short-lived with a 13 episode run on Fox. But like all insanely brilliant shows that don't live long, one can adopt the viewpoint of "hey, a short run of a fantastic show is still something to enjoy and be proud of." I have my fingers crossed that Daisies can survive. But if not, it was great to get whatever we could from such a great series. If it dies, I just ask that the second (also short) season gets released on Blu-Ray.
And on the topic of series cancellation, NBC has killed My Own Worst Enemy. While following episodes weren't as great as the awesome pilot episode, I did like the series. Not the greatest one on the air or anything, but a fun show. And it made a great companion in the time slot to follow Chuck (which IS one of the best shows on the air).
A new trailer for Joss Whedon's upcoming Dollhouse has hit the web
Could it be? Knight Rider is being retooled yet again? But hey, it sounds like they are correcting many of the problems I had with it once it went to series. I liked the TV movie from earlier this year, but it totally went off the rails when they brought it to series, when it became completely ridiculous and lost focus of what the show should be. Sounds like NBC has figured out their mistakes. I now look forward to seeing what the later half of the season will be like.
And in the good news department regarding cancellations of series, The CW has scrapped plans for their uber-retarded sounding Graysons series.
So, did you have a fun Halloween? This might be the nicest weather Halloween I can remember. The number of trick & treaters to visit my house tripled this year, with a total of 9 (yes, there were only 3 last year).
Coming as a surprise to almost nobody, Circuit City has announced the closure of 155 of their locations, which is just short of 25% of their total locations. Most of the ones in my area are remaining open. One thing is for sure, the company is clearly not doing well pulling out of the tailspin they've been in for a while. This new move is surely just to pull themselves out of their current crisis of being warned of their stock being de-listed because it's been below the requisite $1 level for more than a month. My sympathies go out to the many Circuit City employees who are getting caught in this crossfire, particularly the ones who have suffered through the previous layoff spree the company did a little while back.
Another recent bit of news that isn't too surprising is the announcement by David Tennant that he is leaving his Doctor Who role after 2009's set of TV specials. While my initial reaction is to be sad to see him leave (he's my favorite actor in the role for the entire 10 actor, 45 year history of the show), I'll be interested to see who the next actor will be. The rumors have started flying like crazy, of course, but given the reliability of the UK tabloid press on stuff like this, surely nobody has yet to accurately guess anything.
The newly-transmitting Hubble has sent back this pretty cool shot. You know, when you stop and think about the 400 million light year distance involved in this, it kinda blows your mind (or at least it should).
And speaking of TV, looks like AT&T is adding a new slate of HD channels to the U-Verse line-up. Nothing much that I care about, though.
The Terrance Howard situation with Iron Man 2 continues to get interesting. I also wanna know how he ended up the highest paid cast member of the first (if that's indeed true).
You know, for all the complaints that Microsoft gets for their monopolizing, they don't hold a candel to Apple's continuous propriatorization. It's one of the reasons I will have nothing to do with their technology (probably the primary reason).
With the campaign process in the final stretch this weekend, it was fun to see the SNL skit from yesterday featuring McCain himself, and of course the great Tina Fey as Palin again.
You've gotta check out this hilarious (and very impressive) editing work to create Robocop vs The Terminator... Here's episode 1, then episode 2, then the trailer for episode 3.
Great. Crank 2 is described by Statham himself as "Most Offensive." If it truly is Crank 1 times 1000, as he says, this sequel will be the worst piece of narrative ever made, of any kind. Surely no worst book, song, movie, painting or sand castles built by a 2 year old could be combined together to be even 1/10 as bad as "Crank 1 times 1000."
And speaking of cool shuttle pictures, I took a high res version of Atlantis & Endeavour on their neighboring launch pads, amazingly accompanied by a rainbow, and made a 1920x1200 resolution widescreen wallpaper from it:
I guess I should congratulate Alicia Keys and Jack White for coming through with the worst title song for a Bond film in the history of the franchise. At this point in the life of the venerable film series, it takes a good amount of effort to be the single best or worst for any aspect of the franchise.
Congratulations go out to Doctor Who Magazine for reaching issue #400. DWM is by far the best genre fan magazine ever published, with a long and proud history. It's one of my favorite magazines to read month after month, and I look forward to 400 more (assuming I live that long).
I mentioned Pushing Daisies winning a creative arts Emmy for composer Jim Dooley's excellent score yesterday, but I forgot to mention that Varese Sarabande is going to be releasing a CD of his wonderful score on October 21.
For years, I suffered through watching Heathers on crappy quality pan & scan VHS. It was the best there was for quite some time. Then came the widescreen laserdisc, and I was very happy. Later there were quite a few DVD releases, all of which were quite nice. They didn't add much when they kept re-releasing it to DVD, but it was still nice to have some quality releases of the film out there. Now we get another big step in the video release history of this film, as it is being released in high def to Blu-Ray. I know that given the source material that this will hardly be any kind of reference quality demo material. Still, I would have never dreamed of ever getting my grubby little paws on Heathers in such quality back in the days of watching the horrid quality VHS. How very.
Cool, there's going to be another 3D Blu-Ray release - Journey To The Center Of The Earth. It's a surprisingly fun movie, and I hope they can get the excellent 3D production quality well represented in the home video format.
Looks like Fox is going to get it right with some very nice sounding Blu-Ray releases of the recent X-Files: I Want To Believe as well as the first X-Files: Fight The Future film. I'm very happy to see them including an isolated score (on I Want To Believe, anyway).
GMail has added one of the cooler and more useful little features to their Labs list - forgotten attachment detector.
As a new U-Verse customer, I've been keeping a close eye on news items about them. After Comcast's bandwidth cap idiocy, people are misinterpreting and reacting wrong to news like this. That minor adjustment in their service statement is nothing like throttling. They're just giving better definition to the way they divide your connection between data and video.
I'll get the many pending movie reviews started tomorrow. Gotta end my posting for today with this. I'm busy doing some rewiring of stuff, to best include the new U-Verse DVR unit.
OK, ladies and gents, I think I'm back on the net for good now. As of this afternoon, I'm an active AT&T U-Verse customer. The rest of the story has been added to the Comcast Sucks page.
Is Google making us stupid? An interesting topic, to be sure. Frankly, when I see what gets posted to YouTube comment threads, I weep for the future of humanity. If I look at enough of them, I just wish a big comet would wipe us off the face of the planet, for the good of the universe as a whole.
Not a big surprise, really, but here's some interesting info on how airports profit from situations that are bad for everyone but them.
Interesting. Burt Rutan has stepped down as president of Scaled Composites. Looks like he's just shifting focus back to the more hands on stuff. Must have gotten tired of some of the political/corporate flack.
I'm going to be a tad more negative than usual in today's ponderings. I'll save today's major rant for the end of this post.
The mind works in strange ways. Randomly browsing the net as I started typing this posting, I was reading an article with the name Edgar in it. Sure, I've seen plenty of things with that name in it, but for some reason my brain made the synaptic connection this time to Electric Dreams. For those of you who don't, like me, have a soft spot for totally 80's movies (and/or Virginia Madsen), you wouldn't understand the Edgar reference. Since my brain made that weird connection, and since my soundtrack CD collection knows few limitations, I went to the rack and grabbed my CD of the (UK import) Electric Dreams soundtrack and tossed it on. It's playing as I type this. I still have a soft spot for "The Duel," which is an undeniably Giorgio Moroder arrangement of music, played as one of the strangest on-screen duets in movie history (YouTube is such a fun thing to be able to find these obscure things to link to when you need them). As I started typing away with the Electric Dreams soundtrack playing, I started wondering to myself when the last time I saw the movie was (and how few other people around the world have played this particular soundtrack in the last, oh, month or so). Then I suddenly started wondering to myself if the movie had ever been released on DVD. I did some quick research to find out that it is one of the ultra-rare films that has yet to get a DVD release (don't get me started on Ridley Scott's 1492: Conquest Of Paradise). Seriously, how the heck is Electric Dreams not on DVD? Guess I'll have to hunt it down on P2P (which is what I consider P2P good for - stuff that I can't actually buy). Incidentally, here's an amusing Electric Dreams anecdote. Back in my days working at a computer store, I made a delivery of a computer to the offices of a big corporate company, and noticed that they named all their printers after famous movie/tv robots/computers. I wandered around the offices a bit and was impressed to see the variety and thoroughness of the names used. Many obvious and many obscure names were used, but I think I was most impressed to see a LaserJet 4p sitting there named Edgar.
