Ponderings For 2008-12-14

Posted Dec 14 2008

  • Friday’s Christmas movie viewing was National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Saturday’s was a double feature of Die Hard and Die Hard 2. Today’s viewing was The Family Stone.
  • A non-Christmas movie I tossed on today is Executive Decision, an underrated action/thriller film directed by the talented Stuart Baird with a fantastic Jerry Goldsmith score. I think it’s the first movie I recall noticing Halle Berry in back in the day (when I saw her in next few films that followed it was always, “hey, that’s the woman from Executive Decision). It’s interesting going back and putting on older DVD discs, particularly on the newer HD equipment. This is one of the earliest of DVD’s that were made, and might actually be the oldest one in my collection that has yet to be re-issued and/or released in high def (since other early Warner Bros DVD’s that had yet to get upgraded, like Eraser and Blade Runner have finally seen better versions released recently). Executive Decision is alarming low in quality, though. Many of my LaserDiscs probably look better on this HD projector than this DVD does. It was actually a surprisingly weak quality transfer on the disc, even though I knew it was a very old DVD. Oh, another fun trivial fact I noticed while watching the movie – the name of the airline on the hijacked 747 is Oceanic Airlines. This would later become infamous as the airline for the crashed plane in Lost (Oceanic flight 815). Interestingly, the plane they repainted to shoot all the footage for in Executive Decision had previously been hijacked in 1988. I love that Wikipedia pages like this one exist, and with such detail.
  • RIP: KB Toys
  • Neato. Star Trek is going to get an IMAX release.
  • What do you know? Apparently my life could actually serve a purpose after all.
  • Check out this striking photo. It’ll take your brain a few seconds to realize what it’s really looking at.
  • Speaking of photos, here’s a collection of National Geographic’s 10 most popular ones for the year.
  • Wanna see just how bad and scary local TV commercials can be?
  • And don’t forget, the new Battlestar webisodes have begun.
  • You know, you just don’t see enough front loader trick competitions.

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