Link Dump

Link Dump

A few interesting links I’ve run into recently:

  • Easy Solutions #1: This is easily the most brilliant yet demented thing I’ve read in a long time. My favorite part is the subtle ways in which the devious story you concoct are supported by longstanding film franchises. For example: “If she questions this flaw in your time travel logic, because you cannot change the past, simply reference Back to the Future.”
  • Eternal Monsters of Filmland: Devin Faraci makes an argument that the current rash of horror movie remakes is not new and is indeed indicative of a modern set of eternal monsters, placing Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddy Kreuger alongside such horror mainstays as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy (this classic trio has literally hundreds of movies to their name, including dozens of remakes and reboots). The big thing holding back the modern trio? Copyright. An interesting idea.
  • KHAAN! The Greatest Syllable Ever Told: This article about a “15-minute meticulously re-spliced creation in a never-ending loop” of William Shatner’s infamous cursing of Star Trek villain Khan features a 2 minute excerpt from the film that is mesmerizing…
  • What does “The Usual Suspects” mean?: The ending of The Usual Suspects is generally a topic of contention in film nerd circles, but this interview with writer Christopher McQuarrie and director Bryan Singer adds a new wrinkle to the debate:

    McQuarrie says only after finishing the film and preparing to do press interviews about it did he and Singer realize they both had completely different conceptions about the plot.

    “I pulled Bryan aside the night before press began and I said, ‘We need to get our stories straight because people are starting to ask what happened and what didn’t,’ ” recalls McQuarrie. “And we got into the biggest argument we’ve ever had in our lives.”

    He continues: “One of us believed that the story was all lies, peppered with little bits of the truth. And the other one believed it was all true, peppered with tiny, little lies. … We each thought we were making a movie that was completely different from what the other one thought.”

    I think I’ve always considered it more of a mostly true, peppered with little lies, but the neat thing is that it probably works either way…

  • 50 Films You Can Wait to See After You’re Dead: Perhaps a bit harsh on Death to Smoochy and The Boondock Saints, but otherwise an interesting list. On the other hand, why subject the dead to such horrors?

That’s all for now…

Link Dump

A few links for your enjoyment:

  • Aliens Board Game: Ok, I admit, this is pretty much the reason I’m doing a link dump tonight instead of something more substantial. Longtime readers know I love this game, so cut me a break…
  • Tank! – I wonder how many people will get the reference.
  • Patrick Duffy Compilation – There are no words.
  • LoadingReadyRun – Watchmen Watching: Who watches the watchers of the Watchmen?
  • Texts From Last Night: It’s like bash.org for people with cell phones.
  • Business Card Fail: This is… awesome? This can’t be real.
  • Kevin Smith Part 1 : Sellling Out And Salty Language: What can I say, I’m a sucker for Kevin Smith interview type stuff, and there are several followups to this one. In addition, I love those Evening With Kevin Smith DVDs and have watched them multiple times (the first set is brilliant, the second is not as much, and the third, well, he spends like 45 minutes answering a question about his dogs, which started to grate at about the 20 minute mark. Anyway, the first Evening is highly recommended if you like Smith’s brand of raunchy humor.)
  • Carousel: Utterly amazing short film by Adam Berg (no credits on IMDB at this time) consisting of “an epic ‘frozen moment’ cops and robbers shootout sequence that included clowns, explosions, a decimated hospital, and plenty of broken glass and bullet casings.” It’s kinda hypnotic… amazing stuff.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more Friday the 13th madness on Sunday…

Link Dump

It’s actually been a few months since a link dump, so here are a few interesting links:

  • Uncomfortable Plot Summaries: This is everywhere lately, but it’s very funny. My favorites include LotR (“Midget destroys stolen property.”) and how every Neil Gaiman movie features pretty much the same plot summary. Actually, these remind me a lot of the classic Rinkworks Movie-A-Minute ultra-condensed movies.
  • Playing Columbine: Interview with Director Danny Ledonne: A followup for my review of Playing Columbine is this interview with the director who is also the one who created the game at the center of the film.
  • Video Game Documentaries: They Keep On Coming: Speaking of Playing Columbine, it seems that video game documentaries in general are becoming more and more common. This post at Spout features a bunch of upcoming documentaries, some of which sound very interesting…
  • The GAF Collection: The folks over at the NeoGAF video game forums have a photoshop thread where people post photoshopped game covers in the style of the Criterion Collection (perhaps continuing a trend from a few months ago). Some great stuff here, including several great covers for Shadow of the Colossus, Flower, and Metal Gear Solid, among many others.
  • DeepLeap: A mildly addictive single player word game (along the lines of a scrabble, but without a board). My high score is only in the 400 range or so, but it’s a lot of fun…
  • Craig Needs a Friend: I’m not sure how to describe this one, but this Craig guy is hilarious, as is his mode of communication.
  • Quadruple Saturn Moon Transit: 4 moons caught crossing the face of Saturn in one photo. Amazing stuff.
  • Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: Clay Shirky’s musings on the current state of the newspaper business. I can’t think of the last time I actually read a newspaper. I remember at one point last year, someone bussed some inner city high-schoolers into my neighborhood and guilted us all into buying a subscription to the Philly Inquirer (apparently, the Inquirer would help pay college tuition for the high schoolers based on how many subscriptions they sold or something). However, I generally found myself grabbing the paper right from my doorstep and placing it in the recycle bin on my way out (i.e. most of the time, it didn’t even make it into my house).

That’s all for now. Coming up on Kaedrin, it seems I haven’t gotten over the whole Six Weeks of Halloween horror movie marathon, so expect to see some more slashers and SWH style posts in the near future (not six weeks worth, but just a few to tide you over for the next half year or so).

Link Dump & Notes

Hooray for link dumps. Everyone likes link dumps! Right? RIGHT?

  • 6th Annual Oscar Liveblogging on Sunday! Yes, I know, the Oscars are a boring, essentially meaningless awards show in which a bunch of self-congratulatory Hollywood insiders pat themselves on the back for making crappy movies. But that’s precisely why I liveblog it – it’s much more interesting that way! I suppose the fact that I get drunk every year helps too (it’s not my fault, really! Have you ever seen those music performances on the Oscars while sober?). It’s also one of those rare occassions where a live event coincides with my blogging schedule, so I feel obligated to oblige. Anyway, feel free to drop by and join in. Previous installments are here: [2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004]
  • What’s the deal with all the fake, retro-style book covers for other media like Movies and Video Games? Not that I don’t love them, but it’s just odd that they just started kinda happening lately… Here are two of my favorites. The Highlander poster is hysterical, while the Mirror’s Edge poster calls to mind the old-style Criterion Collection art.

    Mirrors Edge and Highlander

  • Man in the Box – Star Wars vs. Sports: I’ve always maintained that sports nuts are just as nerdy as star wars geeks (or any other nerdy faction). Seriously, sports nerds are probably better at statistics than most star wars geeks. Of course, I say this as I approach the constitutional amendment phase of my fantasy baseball league.
  • Alternate History Search Results: John Scalzi does a live reading of his story, and it’s pretty funny! It reminded me of Wikihistory, a hilarious story written in the style of an online message board for time travelers.
  • A Dialogue With Sarah, Aged 3: In Which It Is Shown That If Your Dad Is a Chemistry Professor, Asking “Why” Can Be Dangerous: I think that’s pretty self explanatory, but it’s funny too.

That’s all for now, see you on Sunday!

Link Dump: Top 10s and Some Nitpicking

Time is short, so here are a few links to end of the year movie lists and the like. Still not sure when I’ll get to my top 10, but it probably won’t be this week.

  • The 2008 Top Tens – Movie City News collects and aggregates 286 top 10 lists, ranking the movies by number of list mentions and a weighted version that considers how high on each list a given movie was ranked. The top 5 movies on the list are WALL-E, The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk and The Wrestler. Not a bad list, though at most, only two of those will be appearing on my list. One nitpicky frustration – why on earth did they put all the data in images? It makes it a lot more difficult to find a movie you want to know about.
  • The 19 Best Movies That You Didn’t See in 2008: An interesting list of the underdistributed, sometimes underrated films of last year. Except for Speed Racer, which was horrible. Honestly though, this year’s list isn’t as good as last year’s list, which I take as just another sign that 2008 was not a particularly good year for movies.
  • jim’s ten best favorite movies of 2008: the movie – Jim Emerson’s top ten is presented in the form of an 8 minute montage of clips from his favorite movies. I was able to name 4 of them (probably because I haven’t seen the other 6, and I have to say, I didn’t see anything in his clips that indicated that I was missing anything). Kind of a stereotypical critic’s list… but I’m greatly looking forward to his 2nd annual Exploding Head Awards (that’s a link to last year’s awards – he hasn’t posted this year’s yet).
  • Speaking of Jim Emerson, he’s been doing some spectacular nit picking (don’t miss Part 2) on The Dark Knight, particularly with the first sequence in the film which culminates with a school bus merging with other school busses. If you still haven’t seen The Dark Knight, don’t read his posts! They will put you in the wrong frame of mind to watch the movie (or any movie, for that matter – at least, any movie you’re watching for the first time). Now, these are nitpicks, but I do believe that Emerson has a point. I love the movie, and I’m sure regular readers wouldn’t be surprised that it will be my top movie of the year, but it isn’t perfect. There are several sequences that cheat in one way or another, whether it be through editing or awkward camera angles or any other number of filmmaking tricks. Emerson’s argument boils down to a question of whether the filmmaking tricks employed in TDK impair suspension of disbelief. I would say that when I view a movie, I have a certain sense of moviegoing goodwill. When I watch a movie, I want it to be good, I want to be sucked in and immersed in the world a film creates. But sometimes there are things that happen in a movie that are simply unbelievable. These movies knock you out of the movie’s world and force you to recognize that you’re actually sitting in a theater (or on a couch, or whatever). These moments work against my moviegoing goodwill. Usually a single moment won’t do it – it’s a culmination of things. After a while, my goodwill runs out and the movie simply can’t recover. The Dark Knight obviously grated on Emerson. He found himself wondering about all the details of the various things that were being presented to him. He claims this was a sorta unconscious effect. He knew he didn’t like the movie, but couldn’t explain why until he’d seen the movie a few more times on DVD/BR, where he could really dig into it. That’s when he started noticing all of the shots or edits that worked against his suspension of disbelief. Now, I didn’t have that problem. Indeed, I’ve seen the movie 5 times since it came out, and while a couple of things jumped out at me during my first and second viewing, I didn’t really start to think about it until the 5th viewing, at which point some of the imperfections became more clear. But even then, it wasn’t enough to ruin my moviegoing goodwill. Even reading Emerson’s well thought out objections, I find that I can see his point without granting that it ruins the movie or the suspension of disbelief that is required to watch it. I’m interested by this sort of thing, because I think people like the movies they like for less rational reasons than we’re willing to admit. There are a lot of great movies that I can nitpick to death, but still love anyway. So when I find myself trying to explain why I dislike a movie with something like “Well he fired 8 shots out of that there revolver! You can’t do that!” or “…giant humanoid robots really don’t make any sense” I think what I’m really trying to say is that the movie did not pull me in and immerse me in it’s own world. The frustrating thing about this is that I think this can be dependant on mood. Context matters, and there are certainly times when I’m muchmore willing to suspend disbelief than I would normally be… and vice versa. Well, I’ve babbled on long enough, so I’ll just leave it at that for now.

Didn’t mean to get off on that tangent there. That last subject is perhaps something I’d like to revisit at some point, but it will not be tonight…

Link Dump

For obvious reasons, time is a little short these days, so here are a few links I’ve found interesting lately:

  • Still Life – This is a rather creepy short film directed by Jon Knautz. It has a very Twilight Zoney type of feel, and a rather dark ending, but it’s quite compelling. Knautz went on to make Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer… alas, that film, while containing a certain charm for the horror aficionado, isn’t quite as good as this short.
  • Zero Punctuation: Assassin’s Creed: I’ve seen some of Yahtzee’s video game reviews before, but while they are certainly entertaining to watch, I’ve never quite known whether or not they were actually useful. It can be a lot of fun to watch someone lay the smackdown on stupid games, and Yahtzee certainly has a knack for doing that (plus he has a British accent, and us Americans apparently love to hear Brits rip into stuf), but you never really know how representative of the actual game it really is. Well, after spending a lot of time playing around with Assassin’s Creed this week, I have to say that Yahtzee’s review is dead on, and hilarious to boot.
  • A Batman Conversation: It’s sad and in poor taste, but I bet some variant of this conversation happened quite frequently about a year ago.
  • MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits: Look! I’m only like 2 months behind the curve on this one! MGK posts a bunch of parodies of book covers from famous SF and fantasy authors (I particularly enjoyed the Asimov, Heinlein, and even the Zahn one).
  • Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008: Self-explanatory, but there are some pretty cool pics in here…
  • Books as Games: I realize most of my readers also read Shamus, but still, this faux-review of Snow Crash if it were created as a video game before it became a book but in the present day (it, uh, makes more sense in his post) is pretty cool.
  • “Sacred Cow Slayings” Rumored at Sony… Is PlayStation In Jeopardy?: It figures… I finally get off my butt and buy a PS3 and then rumors start appearing that Sony is about to can the program. I don’t think it will happen, but this news is obviously not comforting…
  • Keanu Reeves wants to make a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop. No comment.

Another Link Dump

I try not to make a habit of just throwing up a bunch of links, but when time grows short, it’s difficult to give certain subjects the thought and attention they deserve. I’ve started a couple of posts, but they’re both turning out to be monsters. One is a review of Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Anathem, which I finished this week and have been thinking about a lot. It might take me a bit to sort through it all. The other is a discussion of ratings systems for movies – a subject that seems relatively simple at first, but which grew more complicated the more I thought about it. Unfortunately, I was traveling for most of this weekend, so I didn’t have much time to devote to either of these ideas… and this week promises to be busy as well. In the mean time, here are a few things I’ve run across lately that are worth watching or reading:

  • The Website is Down: This is a hysterical 10 minute video that featues a bunch of supposedly true stories from tech support hell. Supposedly a sequel is in the works, but this one is pretty funny in itself.
  • The Last Lecture: Ostensibly a talk about achieving your childhood dreams, this talk wound up being much more (the childhood dreams angle is what he’d call a “head fake”). It’s actually quite heartbreaking when I think about it. The talk is given by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specialized in Virtual Reality. He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer about a year before he gave this talk, but during the presentation, he is extremely upbeat and humorous, choosing instead to focus on his message rather than his medical situation. He died this past summer, which is why watching this video now is a bit heartbreaking. It’s a long video, but it’s well worth a watch.
  • Authors @ Google: Neal Stephenson: While promoting Anathem, Neal Stephenson stopped off at Google for a Q&A that turns out to be quite interesting (as usual)… Another long video, but interesting if you’re a Stephenson fan.
  • The Dukes: A new indie heist movie? Why have I not heard of this until now? It sounds great though… Consider this near the top of the list I posted about the holiday movie season. Hopefully, I’ll find some time to go see it this week…
  • Crosstalk: The state of horror cinema: Noel Murray and Scott Tobias of the Onion A.V. Club discuss the state of horror cinema as of October 2006. Things haven’t changed too much, but I’ve been thinking a bit about the state of modern American horror films (another potential post that I haven’t spent enough time thinking about and researching), so I found this discussion interesting.

So there’s at least two and a half hours of compelling video content there as well as some light reading. Light posting will probably continue through Wednesday’s post (which I believe will be a recap of a ridiculous discussion I had with my friend Roy at a discussion board – let’s just say it involves aliens and breakdancing)… Next Sunday’s post may be a bit light as well, but we’ll see. That’s all for now.

Link Dump

It’s been a little while since the last link dump, so let’s see what’s queued up in my del.icio.us account:

  • <a href="Saw V“>Saw V hit theaters this Halloween and seems poised to make the Saw franchise the top-grossing horror franchise of all time (in unadjusted dollars). I have to admit that I lost interest towards the beginning of Saw III, but I don’t really get the hatred this series seems to have garnered by critics and horror fans. I think Dellamorte over at CHUD brought up an excellent point a few weeks ago:

    IF YOU GREW UP IN THE 1980’S YOU CAN’T COMPLAIN ABOUT THE SAW FRANCHISE: If you think the Saw films are shit, but have a soft spot for Friday the 13th Part V: The New Blood, or any Nightmare on Elm Street sequel past the third film, or pretty much any of the Halloween sequels, then you can’t suggest that the rapid-fire sequels that have been born of the 21st Century deserve to be ridiculed any more than the rapid-fire releases of the 80’s.

    Exactly. I actually thought the first Saw was a pretty good movie. The sequels seem to be repetitious and unoriginal, but so what? Weren’t most of the the 80s horror movies (especially slashers) repetitious and unoriginal? And didn’t they get the same sort of curt dismissal as the current crop of remakes and “torture porn” films? To me, part of the joy of horror movies is that even when they’re bad, they’re good. Sure, that won’t work for everybody, but some movies aren’t made for everybody. The other movie series Dellamorte mentions in his post is the High School Musical series, which I have absolutely no interest in… and that’s ok. The only thing that does bother me a bit about the Saw series is that studios seem to have ceded Halloween to the series instead of trying to challenge it with new and interesting movies like Trick ‘r Treat (or so I’ve heard, because I can’t find this thing anywhere!) There’s probably a lot to be said about the state of modern American horror movies, but I don’t think it’s as clear-cut or simplistic as this sort of discussion usually tends to play out. I suppose the studios are still focused on remakes and reboots, but there are still plenty of interesting American efforts going on (it would perhaps be nice if those movies didn’t have so much trouble getting made or distributed though). This seems like fodder for a longer post…

  • A Cartoon-off between XKCD and the New Yorker. Hilarious. I think the New Yorker cartoonist really gave XKCD a run for his money, though it should be noted that XKCD was deprived of one of the key components of its success (the alt tag!)
  • PG Porn – James Gunn, who directed the excellent horror flick, Slither, recently started this series of short films that are basically porn films without the sex. Basically, some typical porn plotline starts up, complete with bad dialogue and stilted acting, then something horrible happens. The first episode, titled Nailing Your Wife, stars Nathan Fillion (of Firefly/Serenity and I suppose I should also mention Dr. Horrible fame) and real-life porn-star Aria Giovanni. It’s kinda twisted, but darkly funny. Amusingly, it seems to have caused something of a controversy because some people can’t comprehend black comedy.
  • I know it’s after the election and all, but this politics by way of D&D post is hilarious, and of course, the Obama/McCain danceoff is amazing.

That’s all for now.

Link to Someone New

Just another set of blogs I have never linked to before. Enjoy.

That’s all for now.

Link Dump and Quick Hits

Just a few links that have caught my interest lately.

  • Denise Jones, Super Booker by John Scalzi: The idea of superheroes and the legal system has been done before, from Watchmen to The Incredibles, but Scalzi takes it a step further here in this short story. It basically takes the form of an interview, and is quite funny:

    Q: So you’re saying that if Chicago were attacked by a sewer monster or something, the mayor would have to go through you to get help from ArachnoLad.

    A: No, Chicago keeps ArachnoLad on a retainer. The Evening Stalker, too. Most large cities have one or two super beings under contract.

    Heh. Also amusing is the story behind the story, which apparently took 13 minutes from completion to publication. Speaking of Scalzi, I’ll probably be writing some reviews of his novels at some point in the near future, including his latest, Zoe’s Tale (which I just finished and liked, though perhaps not as much as his other novels).

  • They’re Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson: Another short story. It’s been floating around the web for a long time, but it’s brilliant, so if you haven’t read it, check it out.
  • Kids: Neptunus Lex has a conversation with one of his daughter’s friends. The highpoint is when they talk about Top Gun. Heh.
  • Like everyone else, I’ve been messing around with Google’s new browser Chrome. It’s nice and everything, but I’m not sure it will catch on, and I don’t know if Google even really cares if it does. They built the browser on top of Webkit (which is the same open source rendering engine that powers Safari, which is itself based off of the KHTML engine that powers Konqueror), and their biggest development push seems to be with their Javascript interpreter (named V8). Indeed, after playing around on some Ajax heavy sites, it does appear to make web applications run a lot faster. I suspect Google just got sick of folks saying that Gmail was slow or that Google Apps are buggy, so they wanted to drive other browsers to improve their Javascript capabilities. So by creating a new browser, Google is hoping to spark a new competition based around Javascript interpreters. Or, since Chrome is open source, why not just incorporate their JS code into other browsers (I’m sure it’s not that easy, but still)? Oh, and sure, Chrome has lots of other dohickeys that are neat – the multiprocessing thing is cool, as is incognito and a bunch of other features. But none of those things is really unique or gives Chrome the leg up on other browsers. To me, their biggest selling point is the fast JS interpreting. If Chrome becomes popular or if other browsers take the hint and improve their JS implementations, the end result is that things get a little easier for web app developers, who no longer have to worry about slow, unresponsive browsers and can shoot for the moon.