wonkablog

Well, I finally saw Batman last night. I’ll get right to it — I didn’t like it. It just wasn’t anywhere near what I was hoping for at all. It’s not an action movie, it’s an intense psychological thriller. A little long, too.

Don’t get me wrong, the film itself was great, from the acting to the script to the story, but it was a bit too intense for me, plus it just wasn’t anything like Batman Begins, which is what I was really hoping for.

The story was really well done, though.  The Joker was extremely freaky, and had the real feel of a sociopathic killer — someone who was in control of his faculties, but just simply insane.  There were so many rough pulls of moral dilemma in the movie, and I don’t really go for those — at least, not portrayed violently.  I don’t like war movies, either, and I imagine some of them would be kind of like this.  So, the type of movie just wasn’t my taste.

Of course, I really can’t stand the original Batman movie either. In fact, the only ones I really will even watch (as in, a second time) are Batman Returns and Batman Begins. Those were both excellent, and I didn’t like any of the others.

That’s about that. The soundtrack was great, too.

Boy I haven’t had time to write about movies lately.  In fact, tonight I finally went out to go skating, but it started raining when I got there, so I just wandered around and got wet for about 20 minutes, which actually felt pretty nice.  It’s a nice, cool, summer night out.  I couldn’t skate, so I came back here to write about movies.  Rock on.

I just finished watching an old Sherlock Holmes movie today.  I’ve had the entire collection of the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce movies done by Universal from the 1930s or whatever for a long time, but I’ve only seen half of them.  Part of the problem when I go to watch one is I can’t remember which ones I’ve seen and which I haven’t (there’s about twelve total, I think), so instead of going through the trouble of figuring it out, I’ll just watch something else.

This one was The Spider Woman (oops, 1944, not 1930s, ah well), and it was pretty good, comparing them to the other ones.  The movies themselves are actually really toned down compared to the radio drama show starring the two actors, who both do a great job in their roles.  I have about every MP3 of the old time radio show, I think … I’m probably missing a few, and if you can dig them up (I haven’t looked at OTR websites in a long time) they are well worth the effort.  The name of the show was The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the sponsor was Petri Wine.  They sure knew how to do advertising back then, that’s for sure.

This weekend was like the first in a month or so that I’ve had time to myself and didn’t have anything to do.  I have had my Netflix account on hold since I knew I was gonna start moving, and finally activated it the week before, with the 8 at a time plan.  So I got a ton of movies in the mail and got to go through them.  About 5 of them were junk, and didn’t pass the 5-minute test, but the others were cool enough to keep me watching.

One I got to watch was Always.  Now, I should say that I’ve never been a big fan of Spielberg, at all.  Not because I didn’t like his movies, just because he seemed so extremely overrated by everyone else’s opinion, and since his movies always seemed no better or worse than everyone else’s, I’d always watch his with extreme skepticism.  I’ve never seen Always, but I knew the general premise, having seen bits and pieces on TV or whatever.  I gotta say, this one was really good, and it grew on me a bit.  Holly Hunter did a great acting job.  Richard Dreyfuss did alright, though it felt a little static.  I’ve never seen him in a starring role other than What About Bob? so I kept waiting for him to go crazy at any moment.

The movie really dragged on, though.  I remember watching it and thinking my crap a lot has happened, and then I realized it’d only been twenty minutes, and I knew I was in for a long one.  Sheesh, I hate it when that happens.  Never look to see how long a movie is.  The less you know about it before watching it, the less expectations, and therefore, disappointments, you’ll have.

Anyway, I’ve never been terribly impressed with Spielberg’s work, but I had happened to record Jurassic Park at the same time on my Tivo, so I watched that the next day.  Looking back now, I still think it’s a great movie, really well done.  I kept thinking that, for its time, the CGI and animatronics are extremely well done.  You still don’t see movies done that well today on a regular basis.  Universal must have put a lot of cash into that one.  The thing that I realized watching this one, though, was that Spielberg does a great job of capturing on film the human condition on a realistic level when they are in dire situations.  The thing that got me thinking about it was remembering his remake of War of the Worlds.  I remember watching it in the theater, and thinking that this was exactly how I imagined society would react during a huge calamity — bundling together for just survival and a sense of cohesion, but so fragile that they can all easily snap and turn into a mass of of self-preserving hysteria outbursts at any moment.

I have to interject something funny about Netflix here… it thinks I’ll hate every single movie, it’s pretty funny.  Netflix’s guesses for what I’d like are always at least half a star lower than everyone else’s.  My rating system is pretty strict, though, so it makes sense.  I *rarely* give anything five stars, which in my mind is a mind-blowing can watch the movie any time and I never get tired of it, so perfect, no problems kind of movie.  There’s only a small handful of those.  A four would be something that was between that and average.  A three means I’d watch it again, and so anything I don’t like gets two stars.  And since my success rate of finding movies is around 2% or so, Netflix just thinks I hate everything.  Which, technically, I guess I do, but whatever.  I really like the ones I do like, so it all evens out.

One other one I caught recently was I Am Sam.  I’ve been meaning to watch this one for a while.  I’ve always thought Sean Penn was a good actor, but wow he did a good job in this one.  I’ve never seen Michelle Pfeiffer do so well, either.  She seems to be one of those actresses that doesn’t get challenged much, and she really shone in this one.  As far as the story, it really seemed forced to try and make you feel emotional, and so I got tired of that pretty quick.  Plus, I’m tired of seeing that little kid in every movie that’s been out.  How many 8 year olds have already starred in 23 movies or whatever.  Sheesh.  I’m all about movies that find unknowns and give them a chance.  It’s nice watching a movie when you don’t instantly know who the star is because it lets you forget where the story “should” be focusing on, and instead lets you decide for yourself who and what it revolves around.

Which reminds me of another movie that I’ve been meaning to comment on for a long time.  I saw this a long time ago, but it was so stunning.  The Winslow Boy by David Mamet.  This is one of those that so rarely comes along that you watch it, and it so unique and stunning that you are mesmerized and the next time you blink is about an hour later.  That’s exactly what happened with watching this one. I can’t describe it, the style was just really cool, very succinct, quick moving, interesting, about a minor moral struggle that the kid it involved was completely indifferent about anyway, and it was just amazing.  All of David Mamet’s stuff is just that way though.  If you haven’t seen The Spanish Prisoner, go check it out.  I can’t recommend that one enough.  There’s a movie you could spend a long time studying.

Ah, I swear there’s more, but I can’t remember them right now.  Just watched Better Off Dead, a classic 80s flick.  John Cusack has been doing films for a long time, and he’s a great actor.  Good stuff.  What else.

Well, I can’t remember.  I’m sure there’s one I just can’t think of right now.  And for the record, no, I haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet.  Gah, what kind of a Batman fan am I, anyway?  My pillowcase is a Batman one, I kid you not.  He rocks, man.  I gotta go see it — the longer I put it off, the more I’m going to find out about it from other people.  Don’t tell me anything!  Punks.

Okay, this is great. This morning at work we were talking about YouTube videos, and then cell phone ringtones, and we got the awesome idea — let’s make some ringtones from YouTube videos! Sweet!

So I downloaded the incomparable video Charlie the Unicorn, used audacity to cut out the Candy Mountain song, and then uploaded it to my cell phone with Bluetooth using my co-worker’s Mac. Freaking right on.

It’s a mecca of love, the candy cave!

Okay, so if you wanna know the technical details, here’s specifically what I did:

Download the youtube video using youtube-dl:

$ youtube-dl -b -t “http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q5im0Ssyyus”

Extract the audio to WAV format using MPlayer:

$ mplayer charlie_the_unicorn-Q5im0Ssyyus.mp4 -ao pcm:file=candy_mountain.wav

Edit the WAV file with Audacity, select the song portion, and export it to MP3 with a64 kbps bitrate. The start point was 2:26 and it’s 42 seconds in length

$ audacity candy_mountain.wav

And that was it! Instant ringtone goodness. Here’s the MP3.

I just got back from watching Kung Fu Panda. It was awesome. I thought the trailer made it look pretty funny, but it did it no justice.

The animation was absolutely incredible, both in style and design. The fight scenes were pretty intense, too — for a kid’s movie that is — meaning, they actually *fight* and kick butt. Also, it was incredibly hilarious. I was laughing out loud about every 30 seconds.

I’m no good at reviews. I’d recommend going and seeing it though.

Actually, now that I think about it, one thing does come to mind.  The movie was filmed in scope instead of flat, and it added a real cinematic presence.  That is actually really rare for animated films, and A Bug’s Life is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that also has done that recently.

I’ve been watching some Batman recently, and just barely ripped season two on my myth box. I made snapshots of the title screens of every one, and put them in the cartoon gallery.

I absolutely love all the artwork on all the original Batman cartoons. There’s actually a book dedicated to the artwork of the series, called Batman Animated. I’d love to get a copy someday.

I keep resizing these images to 360×270, which is 50% the original size, and of course is more than large enough for my TV, but on the website, it sure seems a bit lacking sometimes. Next time I think I’ll leave them at the original dimensions. I also think I should probably get a flickr account and put them up there, so that they just don’t sit on my obscure little website for people to randomly find.

Great stuff.

I really hate going to the video stores these days.  There’s a Hollywood Video a few blocks from my house that I go to anytime I get the urge to watch a movie *right now* that I don’t have at home.  There’s actually a long list of movies I like, but won’t buy for various reasons, which I won’t really get into.  Anyway, I always have these coupons so I go to Hollywood.  That, and I’m not a big fan of Blockbuster.  The problem is, every stinking time I go to the video store to rent something, I have about a 10% success rate.

My first problem is that I can never find what I want.  The organization there is completely outmoded.  In an online social world, thankfully things are easily tagged with multiple categories.  In the video store, there’s a few select genres you have to browse through, so you have to decide which genre most describes the movie you’re looking for.  It’s always rough when it’s a sci-fi / adventure / drama flick because it could be anywhere.

Not only that, but of course there’s only one copy of the movie.  And if you can’t find it on the shelf, you’re out of luck.  Why do they even store them on the shelves anymore?  If you go to a used CD store, what they will usually do is have a huge wall of all the discs behind the counter.  You can browse through the jewel cases and read the inline notes and stuff and when you’re ready to check out, you just take the empty case to the front and they find the disc for you.   That’s what we need at the video store.   Most of the time I know what I’m looking for, so I should just be able to ask them for it at the counter instead of digging through the miscategorized and unordered shelves of hundreds of cases crammed together.

Then of course it gets even worse, since they are sorted alphabetically somewhat, so you pretty much have to scan the entire section of the letter you’re looking for because it could literally be anywhere.

Another big beef I have is that these guys have obviously never heard of the concept of the Long Tail, because they never stack the sleepers anywhere.  I have really odd tastes, so I’m generally way off my rocker going to the video store anyway, because it’s an adventure in hopelessness finding something to watch if I don’t already have something in mind.  And since I usually can’t find the movie I was looking for in the first place, I’m stuck just aimlessly browsing.  Which brings me to the next point.

For those people looking for something to watch, you have only one option of browsing the possible titles, and that’s by visually examining the cover of every box.  Once you find one that looks like it might be interesting, then you can read the back cover and see if the movie sounds interesting.  This approach is completely missing out, because there are a lot of ways to browse movies.  You’re basically ignoring the two other ways that people can quickly perceive and gather information: audibly and literally.

One great thing I totally love about Netflix is that it’s simple to quickly browse a lot of movies by popping up a short description about what the movie is like.  I can just hover my mouse over the cover and it will display a little window with a summary in a few short paragraphs.  If it looks interesting, I’ll just add it to my queue.  And there’s another thing the stores are missing out on — let users have a freaking queue!  Or a list of movies they’d find interesting.  Setup little kiosks and let them create accounts (which they should already have if they are renting anyway) and they can add what they want.  It’d be just like the library (blimey!) you can put a movie on reserve and when they get it in, you can come pick it up.

As far as the other ways to browse movies, I have great ideas.  I love watching trailers because they give you a quick, entertaining three-minute glimpse at the synopsis of the movie.  You can quickly determine from watching a trailer if it’s something that would suit you or not.  Setup some computers in the store and have trailers from every freaking movie you can find, so that the people can find some suggestions.

As far as literally, I meant in the terms of reading what a movie is about.  Sure the store has these little booklets that they hand out for free, but they are always about the latest movie that came out.  It’s generally a step in the right direction, except for the fact that probably nobody cares about them.  Who wants to read about how some critic thought that “Snow Dogs 3″ was greater than air freshener.

When I worked box office at the movie theater, one of my co-workers would print out weekly the summaries of each movie that was playing.  When we had someone come up that wasn’t sure what to watch, we would hand them that sheet so they could quickly look over what the movies were about.  Sometimes a short title just isn’t gonna give you enough insight into what the movie is about.

Anyway, I would rawk at running my own video store, I’d revolutionize the whole process.  Maybe I should.

Okay, now this is something I wasn’t expecting. Warner Bros. is releasing season one of Justice League on Blu-ray. Wow.

I’d been planning on *eventually* getting a Blu-ray player anyway, but I’ve been pretty indifferent about the decision, or when. Actually, the real thing that’s holding me back right now is that I can’t natively rip them on Linux right now (play back, yes, but that’s an entirely different matter). There’s no way I’m firing up my Windows box just to get some 1080p goodness on my harddrive. I’m a sucker for automation.

In my neverending quest to completely pimp out my MythVideo gallery display, I’ve started taking screenshots of the title screens as the gallery view for individual shows.  For the cartoons, they are really gorgeous stuff, especially the older ones when animation really rocked.

So, I started setting up a page to display the covers.  Right now there’s not much, since I don’t have very many titles ripped on my box right now.  Also, the snapshots are really small because I’m displaying them on my TV and so I don’t really need a large size.  I’ll probably go back and resnap them for a proper web display.

Okay, I’m really tired, so here’s the link with the full description.  Enjoy.

I noticed that Woot today has refurbished HD Tivos for a nice price.  I’d recommend picking one up, if you have been waiting for a good opportunity.   I actually just bought a brand new one last week from Amazon, and I barely got it all setup just yesterday.  It’s been pretty cool, so far, though I still haven’t decided if its worth the extra cost in service fees.

The picture on the Tivo is absolutely gorgeous.  It outputs in every HD and standard format, 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i and can display the recorded or live shows either in its native format or force them to another one.  Don’t ask me how that one works.

The interesting thing is that I had to go to Comcast’s office and pick up a CableCARD for it to pick up the encrypted digital channels.  The first time I went, they gave me a single-stream card.  The way it works is that there are two types of CableCARDs, a single-stream or a multi-stream.  The Tivo HD box has two slots for cards, so you can either use one multi or two single cards.  So, I had to go back to Comcast and pick up a multi-stream one instead, so that I could watch TV on both tuners.

The dual HD tuners is one thing that I already like above my old Series 2 Tivo.  Both of the tuners are in HD, while my Series 2 Tivo had one digital tuner and one analog tuner.  That shouldn’t matter, but some shows, when recorded on the analog tuner, the audio would drop out of one channel, so I’d get mono sound on the left channel only.  Kind of odd.  Now though, I can record two HD streams at once, and I must say, it is very nice.

I’m also on a promotional plan for Comcast right now.  Even though I think all their prices suck, this one was the best I’d seen so  I didn’t want to pass it up.  I’ve got the basic cable for $24 a month for 6 months.  With that I get somewhere around 20 HD channels aside from the local stations.  I can’t remember all of them off the top of my head, though I know there’s stuff like two Discovery stations, TLC, USA, Universal and TNT.  Having all those channels is pretty dangerous, since I’m actually trying to watch *less* TV, not more, and the whole thing has had an interesting side effect — with the HD picture being so gorgeous, every show you watch is just so visually appealing that I want to see it, despite how crappy the actual content is.  So far, it hasn’t mattered what’s on TV, I’m just mesmerized by how nice it looks.  I don’t think that will wear off soon, either.  I was watching American Idol last night and I just kept watching the picture more than the show itself.  :)  It’s kinda hard to get used to.   And to think that I’m still only getting 720p as my best input so far.  I still have yet to see any true 1080p signals.   I wish the stupid prices on the Blu-Ray players would come down.

The Tivo itself is nice, as always.  One thing that really surprised me was that the menus were exactly the same as my Series 2.  Since the HD Tivo is a Series 3, I’d have expected it to be a little different, but the only changes were the additional menu items for HD TVs, and that’s it.  Even the remote is the same, with the only difference being that there is an Aspect button.

I do like the A/V connections on the box, though.  It has both HDMI and Component out for video, as well as SPDIF out for Dolby Digital.  Right now I’m just using the Component output, since the box came with free component cables (I thought that was a nice touch, certainly wasn’t expecting that) and also because I don’t have any free HDMI cables right now.  There is also a port for eSATA if you want some external storage.  I haven’t read up on it, but I assume any old harddrive would work with that.  Then of course there’s the standard Ethernet and phone line jacks, as well as 2 USB slots, then the normal RCA outputs for audio and video.

The only thing I hate about the Tivo is the service fees.  $12.95 a month.  Of course, I hate service fees of any kind.  One thing I’m curious about is I wonder if my Tivo would pick up my local HD channels if I didn’t have the digital package with Comcast.  My HDTV picks them up just fine since they are unencrypted, it’s just that I don’t have any way to record them.  Well, I’ve got my PCHDTV card which I have *never* gotten to work, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.  I guess I won’t be able to find out what the HD Tivo can do until I cancel the service.  I do know, though, that it didn’t pick up any HD channels at all without the CableCARD in there, which also seemed odd.  Chances are that it won’t work unless I’m paying Comcast the big bucks.

So, I still haven’t decided if I’m gonna keep this thing or not.  The picture is absolutely amazing, and it’s really nice to be able to finally (and easily) record HD channels.  TNT has Without a Trace and Cold Case in HD, and it’s a great treat to watch Discovery Theater as well.  I’m just not sure if it’s worth all the extra cost or not.  We’ll see, I guess.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but never got around to it. Usually when I write comments on a film, it’s because I think I have a full post that I can write about it. There’s not much of that that comes by, but there is a lot that I wouldn’t mind dropping a sentence or two summary on what I think of the thing in passing, either in jest or admiration. Besides, there’s so much stuff that I do watch at a time, that I couldn’t possibly write a lot about all of them. So, here’s what I’ve been up to recently.

Jumper

Not at all what I thought it was going to be … I was imagining a futuristic sci-fi thriller or something, instead of this. I’d label it as typical Twenieth Century Fox film fare — lots of sensationalism, not much depth. An interesting movie, certainly an original idea, but nothing more than a popcorn movie that I’d probably never go out of my way to watch again.

I only saw it because I wanted to go out and see something in the theater and I was having a hard time deciding between this and Juno. If I was going to pay box office prices, I figured I’d wait on Juno since it should hit the dollar theaters pretty soon here. And I hadn’t watched any trailers on Jumper, and I love sci-fi action flicks, so I thought I’d have fun with this one. It wasn’t too bad. I’d give it 3 stars.

The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit

This one is also from Netflix, and it scores in the category of “Disney movies I never managed to catch on TV growing up for some reason.” Believe it or not, there’s very few that slipped through the cracks. The reason should have been obvious — I hate *any* movie where animals are anywhere near the star attraction (No, I haven’t seen Ratatouille either, and I have no plans on seeing it). I forced myself to sit through this for about 30 minutes before giving up, closure be screwed. It’s got a horse. It’s going to be about riding horses. I’m bored. Why did I rent this. Next.

Conan the Destroyer

Another one from my queue (I have 5 out at a time), I’ve been watching this on and off for about three weeks now .. partly because I keep losing the disc and partly because I can’t watch 10 minutes of it without getting a little tired of it. This is one of those movies that I swear I’ve seen before but I can’t remember when or where (which, actually, is odd). Parts of it I remember too, and parts I don’t, so I assume I must have just seen it on TV or something. So far it’s okay. I think the thief is annoying.

Tom Thumb

I really, really thought that this one was going to be good. Oh, man, was I off. All I can remember is sitting through that first dance scene with Tom Thumb and the toys thinking to myself, “How long is this going to last?”, finally fast forwarding after patiently sitting through about 5 minutes of it, only to see 15 more of it go by (I’m totally not kidding).

As far as art direction goes, it was visually really pretty and appealing. It would be a really good movie for someone who is maybe 3 years old or younger, but for anyone else, it is going to be a real chore watching this thing. The movie is good, the story is nice, but it drags on much, much too slowly. And I’m the type who enjoys old, slow, 50s movies, too. That’s saying something.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

This movie was so bad that I can’t even remember any of it now. At least I sat through the whole thing. This is one of those where you go in there knowing its gonna be sucky and having zero expectations and *still* coming out disappointed. Wow.

Martian Child

This movie deserves a post of its own, and it will get one some day. 5 stars. Awesome. Go see it!

Oliver Twist

When I saw it in the theater it blew me away. I wanted to watch more dramas after Martian Child so popped this in, and it didn’t hit me nearly as hard this time around. I still feel for the poor kid, though.

The Family Man

Looking for more human relationship drama after watching Martian Child, I went and rented this one at Hollywood. Each time I see this movie, the less attractive it becomes to me. The first time I saw it it really blew me away, but every time since it’s just been an interesting story. Nicolas Cage, though, is an amazing actor, given the right story (Matchstick Men).

Pete’s Dragon

I randomly picked this one out of my collection the other day looking for something to watch. I haven’t seen the movie in probably 20 years, and before then I imagine I’ve only seen it once. I don’t like movies with “are they gonna make it!?” climaxes at the end, and this has one of those, which adds to why I haven’t watched it since. I’m still only halfway through it, but it’s just has hard now to sit through as it was so long ago. I can’t really pinpoint the reason … I imagine it’s because it’s one of those films that tries to be many things at once to many audiences and it just doesn’t really pan out for anyone. I do love the soundtrack, though. I get a kick out of it.

That’s about all I can remember off the top of my head. I’ve been completely knocked off my feet since Thursday because of the flu, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in bed watching TV. And when it comes down to either watching reruns of Mythbusters or a movie, the answer is pretty obvious. The facial hair on those two hosts really freaks me out.