Archive for July, 2006
Animated
Everyone loves a Pixar movie. They can just do no wrong. Or can they? I saw Cars tonight and I have to admit to being slightly disappointed. Now, let’s be clear on this, Cars is far and away better than most of the animated fare that makes it onto the cinema screen these days, but as a Pixar movie, it’s lacking that certain something that makes them all so special. Full review, and I promise, on whatinterest soon.
Quick word about the short before hand, One Man Band. It’s nice to see that Pixar are still keeping up the tradition of having these little five minute shorts before the main feature, and this is a particularly good one. They’re never going to top the genius of Knick Knack of course, but this sure is fun.
And with all this Pixar talk, if you haven’t seen it already, go check out the trailer for next years Ratatouille and compare it with the other rat based comedy from Dreamworks, Flushed Away. The Pixar movie is just so much more vibrant, artistic, and original looking it practically jumps out of the screen at you.
Phantom
Since I watched Superman, it seemed only right that I went onto watch Superman 2 as well, being as they were made at the same time and the introduction to Superman introduces the enemies that we don’t actually get to see until the sequel.
Superman 2, for those that don’t remember, is the one where Lois works out who Clark really is, so he gives up his powers so he can live with her. While all that is going on, three criminals from Krypton, imprisoned in the scary glass prison that floats through space (or the Phantom Zone as they call it) are released after Superman throws a nuclear bomb into space and they just happen to be floating on by.
It’s never really explained all that well why Superman has to give up his powers to be with Lois, it seemed like a pretty trite plot device then, and it seems the same now. But it’s all done with such staunt seriousness you do tend to find yourself going along with it. Terence Stamp as General Zod, along with two other Kryptonian criminals are proper adversaries, but Zod doesn’t get the chance to be quite as scary as he is talking to Brando at the start of Superman: The Movie.
The ending is much better than the original movie because it’s not quite as ridiculous as him turning back time, but he does somehow wipe Lois’ memory, a new super power that seems to have been invented purely for use at that moment. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to believe she won’t just work it out again in the future (other than the fact Margot Kidder won’t really be in the next two films because of problems with depression).
I do like the fact he goes back and beats up the bully in the restaurant at the end though, that’s a nice way to close it off. Forget watching parts 3 and 4 and just go straight to Superman Returns, and you have a trilogy of films that will provide nice entertainment for rainy Sunday afternoons for years to come.
Clerks
I really like Kevin Smith movies, and I really like Kevin Smith as well. His DVD, An Evening with Kevin Smith is one of the funniest things you’ll ever see, and he always seems like a genuinely nice guy. Of course he could actually be a prick, but if he is, then he’s a better actor than he would probably admit to.
Today I saw Clerks 2, which I have to admit I was dreading. But you know what, it weren’t half bad. There was no lines of the standout comedy genius that is “in a row?” from the original Clerks, but it was still a lot of fun. It starts out pretty badly, with some terrible wooden acting from just about all involved, but it loosens up a lot, Rosario Dawson is just excellent, and it must go down in history as being the first mainstream movie to have such a prolonged bestiality scene.
Plus there’s a song and dance number in the middle which is guaranteed to put a smile on the face of all but the most hackneyed of viewers.
A full review will be available on whatinterest eventually I’m sure.
Contradict
These have actually been on the web for a while, but I thought it worth drawing attention to them since most of the time I would say that Back to the Future was my favourite film of all time. These are pictures of Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, who was originally cast because Michael J. Fox was unavailable.
The story of Eric in the role has been known for a while, Fox wasn’t able to do it because he was on Family Ties, so they started making the film with Stoltz instead. When it became apparent he just wasn’t working out, they went back and managed to persuade the producers of Family Ties to let Michael do the film, which they did on the understanding that he’d do the whole thing without any time off. But it’s always been thought that just a small part of the film had been completed before they decided to start again, but these photographs contradict that theory completely, most of the production seems to be here, which is crazy when you consider how much they threw away. Was he really that bad? How did they manage to get the studio to allow them to start again?
I have to believe that footage exists of Stoltz in the role, so why not clean it up and release it? If you have most of the film, why not release an alternate version with him in it? It’s certainly something that’s never been before, and I’m sure there’d be a market for it.
Turtles
It’s been a while since I watched any movie trailers I thought were worth writing about, but then two come along at once. The first is the one for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or TMNT as it’s now to be known). When it starts up, there’s an immediate reaction of “oh, so it’s animated then,” which is probably a good thing, rather than the people in suits approach of the past couple of film releases. The next reaction is probably “and it looks pretty good too,” as the art direction and animation is pretty top-notch stuff, as the four Turtles run, jump, somersault and generally be acrobatic across the top of some city buildings. I’ll not mention how the trailer ends so you can enjoy it yourself, but as a teaser, it does enough to make me want to see more. You can view it here.
Secondly, the trailer for the new James Bond film, Casino Royale. I wasn’t even aware there was a trailer out for this thing, the online buzz has been pretty non-existent for this thing. What I had heard was that there was going to be some changes to the Bond formula, but you’d never know it from this, looks like Bond to me. Most of the shots seem to be taken from the same action scene, suggesting that not everything was quite in a showable state, but I guess it looks OK. I’m not 100% convinced by Daniel Craig as Bond though, I really think they should have just stuck with Brosnan for another time. You can view this one here.
Tennis
We’ve had the table tennis table at work for a long time now, well over a year, maybe even two, but it’s been sitting unused and unfolded for a while now. But a couple of weeks ago somebody put it up again, and I’ve found myself playing. A lot.
I’ve never really played table tennis before, so despite having now been playing it for two weeks I still haven’t won a single game against all these other people who have actually played it before. I can have moments where it clicks and I start to play quite well, but I’m still losing out because of too many mistakes and being unable to put proper spin on the ball. Practice makes perfect though, and I’m sure I’ll be owning the table before too long.
I also downloaded the Rockstar Present’s Table Tennis demo for Xbox 360 while I was getting Galaga (which is classic of course, but seems to be missing an option to ratchet up the speed, making it almost completely unplayable for me who is used to the arcade hack to make it not so slow) and I wasn’t particularly enamoured with it. The table is so tiny, and your player so big, that it’s difficult to tell really what you’re doing. In a tennis game it’s obvious when the ball goes to the right hand side of the court that’s where you need to be, but in this I never got a good sense of feedback from what I was pressing on the controller to what was appearing on screen. At times it seemed like I could just stand there and do nothing apart from press one button and I would return it, only to have me miss it next time around without any clue as to what was different. It certainly felt nothing like playing the game for real.
I had originally been interested in picking this title up, but not anymore. I will say that it’s absolutely fantastic to be able to download console game demos though, one more area that Microsoft got very right. Let’s hope Nintendo are paying attention when it comes to the Wii.
Ultimately
As promised my full review of Superman Returns is now on whatinterest. I promise to try and get more content on there than I’ve been managing up to now, there’s a lot of things I’d like to review and that’s still the best place for them. There’s also another film site that I’m working on that will ultimately be sharing a lot of the movie review content, so I have twice the reason to get it done.
Roaming
In the hope of better managing our servers when I’m not directly in front of a PC, my work has furnished me with a Nokia E61, the only device I could find that offered push email, a keyboard, SSH, wifi and mobile data connection. So far, I’m quite impressed with the thing. The keyboard is definitely usable despite it’s small size and the operating system is pretty fast, as well as offering plenty of functionality to make it much easier to live with. You’ll be amazed how helpful the ability to copy and paste text can be, and how many devices will neglect to include such an option. The Putty SSH client also works well, even on the tiny screen. And the web-browser, based on Apple’s Safari/KHTML Engine is far better than you expect from a device of this size.
But on the other hand, it’s been a little unstable, freezing or rebooting on me a few times. The structure of the applications in the main menu is also pretty illogical, things being spread out in more places than they need to be and a lot of oddly included items. Also, for a device that has so much connectivity, it doesn’t seem very good at handling them. It’s not smart enough to switch between access points on it’s own, despite allowing you to put connections into groups. So even though I put three different wifi points into one group, it could never work out which one was actually available and would instead just fail. I got a bit of software called SmartRoaming that solves this problem, but it seems ridiculous to have to pay extra for this functionality, and this software just makes the device even more unstable than before.
It’s certainly the best of these style of devices I’ve used, but you wonder how so much of it can seem so good and intuitive, when parts of it feel like they were created without any serious thought.
Pirates
So I saw Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest, and as always a full review of it will eventually be on whatinterest. I say eventually because I haven’t exactly had a good track record recently.
The original movie was a huge surprise simply because you couldn’t believe they’d actually managed to turn a theme park ride into such a good film. It did this mostly by just being a lot of fun, it was just an enjoyable romp. PotC2 has somehow lost this sense of fun, meaning it doesn’t seem quite as enjoyable. It has great action sequences, Davy Jones is produced with some incredible special effects, and the story makes you want to keep watching even when it seems a touch overly long (and will make you come back for the next one), but without the same joy backing it all up, you may walk out feeling slightly disappointed.
Dragon
Today I stood on top of a hill in the shadow of a big dragon, got sand between my toes, wished I’d remembered my sunglasses and had a better tolerance to heat, walked out of a restaurant before eating a thing, had a really great lunch, dealt with bar staff that needed a slap, fell asleep in a car, saw pirates battling at sea, and experienced a man suffer with OCD.
Just a typical day with Andrea really.
Fortress
Nobody can deny that there are a lot of super-realistic team based first person shooters out there. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to open up any PC games magazine without finding a review or preview of at least three a month. Therefore I always found it hard to get excited over Team Fortress 2, the intervening 8 years since it was first a big deal have left the genre so saturated it didn’t seem like it would have a place anymore.
But I should have more faith in Valve.
The video which they released to the public this week is nothing short of amazing, doing a full 180 degree turn away from reality and straight into the waiting arms of an artistic style reminiscent of The Incredibles. There’s no mention of the game for about 7 years, then out of nowhere, without any warning, they come out with this. And best of all, the reaction has been largely positive. Mostly people having the same thoughts as me - thank god it’s not another realistic team based first person shooter. It takes some guts to go in such a different direction as this, and it’s great to see somebody still willing to take some risks. And the fact that it’s going to be included in the Half-Life 2: Episode Two package just makes it even better.
Also included is Portal, which you can also watch the trailer for. It’s a first person puzzle game which will surely have me emptying the contents of my stomach on the keyboard in front of me from motion sickness, but it sure looks fun.
Policy
YouTube has recently revised it’s license, and the blogosphere has gone crazy in the process. To me, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with it, in fact it’s the same license I’d expect to see on a site such as there’s. If you’re uploading your content to a free video hosting service, then they need the ability to distribute it.
“by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide”
A good point to start, you chose to give them your content.
“non-exclusive”
Meaning it’s still yours to go do whatever you want with.
“royalty-free”
So they don’t need to charge you every time they show your video. Which you’d expect, since they’re a video hosting service.
“sublicenseable and transferable license to use”
So they can have the video shown on partner websites, or so blogs can show other peoples videos without getting the original owners permission.
“reproduce”
Backups, multiple servers…
“distribute”
That’s what they do by letting people watch your video.
“prepare derivative works of”
This is an interesting one, but it’s no different from a creative commons license where you say people can create derivative works. So why should it be any different here if you decide to let them do it? Think of uploading to YouTube like tagging your video with the appropriate CC license.
“display and perform”
Obvious this one.
“with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business”
They have to cover themselves in case they are bought, because otherwise their buyer would start with an empty website.
“in any media formats and through any media channels”
So they can show it in more than just Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime. And so that you can access YouTube from your mobile phone etc. But they’d do themselves some favours here by clarifying Internet distribution only, and that your video will only ever be used as a whole and not in part.
None of these are particularly harsh terms and are all pretty standard stuff from a website that handles user submitted content. It’s just more ridiculous privacy scare-mongering. Where are the complaints about other websites that don’t let me pick the license my submitted content can be used under? For example, on Digg all comments and submissions are public domain and could be used for anything, commercial or otherwise. I’m accepting that when I decide to post.
Those that expect free, unlimited bandwidth hosting for themselves singing along to the latest pop tune have to accept in return that there are going to be conditions attached.
Oscillation
With all the heat around here and the suggestion that maybe an ioniser could help my headaches, I finally dropped into Argos to pick up a combined fan/ioniser. Lying in bed with it’s LCD screen slightly lighting up the room, changing it’s speed or switching on the oscillation with the included remote control is just a joy.
Yes, it’s a fan with a remote. I’m that fancy.
Rental
Apple have been trying to get the movie industry to sign distribution deals for their content, much the same as they got the music industry to do. Unfortunately the movie industry is scared of Apple having too much power, because even though they single-handedly grabbed the legal online music distribution market for themselves and brought the record companies huge sales, they’re seen as the bad guys in that deal, and Mr and Mrs Movie Studio don’t want to find themselves beholden.
The movie industry are also morons. Expecting that consumers are going to be willing to pay for their movie collection over and over again on different formats.
The result of all this is the rumour today that the iTunes Movie Store will open offering movie rentals, rather than purchases. So I think it’s fair to say you’ll be paying around $3.99 to download a 500MB file you can then only use once. Sounds great! $8.99 for something DRM free I can keep forever please.
Resembles
I watched the original Superman movie at the weekend, and was surprised to see just how much the new one resembles it. Unless you’re an expert on the original, you probably wouldn’t have noticed, but there’s so much of the new one that runs in parallel. They both have Lois in flight based accidents (helicopter in the original, plane in the new one) which each end with the same line from Superman that flying is statistically still the safest way to fly. They both have police shoot-outs, they both have Superman and Lois flying over the city, they both have Lex Luthor explaining why land is the most important asset, with identical lines. They even both have an assistant that ends up sympathetic to Superman’s plight.
It holds pretty well, and the introduction of General Zod and crew at the start, who ultimately wouldn’t be seen again until Superman 2, hints at a group of foes who can actually be a formidable force against Superman, unlike Lex himself. The prison that they were put in scared me as a child, as did Lois getting trapped in the car during the earthquake, and I can see why.
It’s worth checking out if it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, especially if you’re planning to or have already seen the Return.
Condensed
Two more musical collections this weekend, one based on the music from Consolevania which I’ve actually had for a while but finally condensed into single CD form, and one containing the best tracks I’ve found so far in all the music I got from Mark as well as a few more recent hits.
Track listing for Consolevania is here, and track listing for Who The Hell is here.
Suse
I like to abuse my laptop by installing new versions of Linux on there, and today I grabbed a copy of OpenSuse and filled it up.
The installation sequence is really overly complex. I went for the network install, which required finding a list of mirrors on the web and manually typing it into the installer, rather than it having a built in list downloaded from somewhere, and even finding how to type it in was not very intuitive. This kept failing mid-download, so I got the full DVD instead which went much better. The installer isn’t bad, but the partitioning system, while gaining points for automatically resizing my Windows drive, was again far too complicated for the average user.
First impressions after installation are much better. Things are a very nice blue instead of horrible Ubuntu brown, and there’s a nice set of default settings on almost every application I’ve used, right down to the pre-selected plugins in Gaim. There’s an over-abundance of software in the menus though, if you’re aiming this at the general user they don’t need a choice of three web-browsers or two RSS readers. They probably don’t even know what an RSS reader is, so instead pick one and go with it. This has been a problem with Linux distros since day one, too much choice.
It’s pretty fast in normal use, and the fonts, often a bug bear of mine, render reasonably well also. I’m not hugely impressed by the packaging and update system, it’s very slow and finding dependencies and installing new software in comparison to Debian APT, and it even refused to install updates one time because it couldn’t resolve all the necessary packages properly.
Linux is coming along, and there’s definitely a lot to like in this distro, much like Ubuntu makes a good showing. But neither of them have quite got a handle on it yet, meaning it’s still relegated to third place in the desktop OS choice wars.
Superman
I’ve been looking forward to Superman ever since it was announced that Bryan Singer was going to be doing it. I trust him, The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men movies are great, and House is one of my favourite TV shows, so I had to guess that he has his head screwed on straight.
My full review will go up on whatinterest in the next few days, but the gist of it is that Superman Returns is at times an awesome movie, and at other times not the movie it should be. So many missed opportunities present themselves it’s difficult to throw your full support behind it. Singer has since come out and said that the first movie is to reintroduce you to the characters and have you care about them while the second will contain all the “crazy, scary, sci-fi shit.” Let’s hope that comes true.
Flash
I’ve been thinking I’d quite like to learn Flash, so I took a look on Amazon today to see how much it costs. I was shocked to learn it costs an absolutely incredible £555. How can there be so many Flash powered websites when it costs this much for the software? You could buy an entire computer for that price. Maybe even two. Has every Flash user simply ripped it off? If that’s the case, can you blame them?
Certainly it’ll be a cold day in hell before I pay that much for a single bit of software. I guess I’ll not be learning it after all.
Milk
When I was a kid I always drank milk from a plastic cup. And I mean a tall plastic beaker, not the kind of things a baby drinks from with the three holes in the top. After those cups were thrown in the bin, probably due to the germ warfare that was no doubt taking place on ten year old plastic, I’ve never really been able to drink milk since. Milk from a glass just tastes all wrong. It’s a bit how Irn-Bru or Coke tastes best from a glass bottle and would probably taste really odd if you drank it from a plastic cup. The glass adds something to the flavour of the liquid.
It is with this in mind that Andrea furnished me with two big plastic cups and as an extra bonus, Nesquik Magic Straws. These really are marvels of modern engineering, and a fine example of where human resources are being directed in times of war, poverty and famine. Use one of these straws to drink your normal every day milk and sit astonished as it is flavoured as strawberry (or chocolate) before your very taste buds.
The straw is really filled with little balls of flavour that the milk passes through, but it’s much more fun to believe that they really are just magic.
