soapbox

At the risk of sleeping on the couch for eternity, I feel it is my sober duty to inform the rest of blogland of this fact… something that many guys have known for years and years: romantic comedies cause nothing but strife and unhappiness. Sure they have helped millions of guys have successful movie-dates and thereby get laid, and sure they have helped millions of women overcome bad breakups while bonding with their girlfriends, but those clever Brits don’t mince words.

</perhaps unfunny gender stereotypes>

Actually, the study is kinda interesting:

Rom-coms have been blamed by relationship experts at Heriot Watt University for promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love….They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner. Many held the view if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them.

Obviously, that’s a working title… but with the release of Apple TV Software Update 2.3 it’s as good a time as any to complain about what Apple *isn’t* doing, which is to create a piece of entertainment hardware that provides exactly what I want.

What I want:
a combination Roku/TiVo/Apple TV-without-needing-to-be-hacked/Blu-Ray player, without any DRM or HDCP nonsense, able to navigate to myp2p.eu and play those streams smoothly without chatter or hiccups.

What is HDCP you ask? Well, if you plan on getting a new Macbook and want to use an external display, read this first:

Just got a new MacBook last week and finally found a mini Display Port -> VGA adapter so i could use my 19” external display. I rented a movie from the iTunes store yesterday and when I tried to play it on my external display, it gave me a warning/error that the display was ‘not an authorized HDCP display’ and it would not play. Plays fine on the small MacBook screen, just nothing external. To make it even worse, i tried all the movies that I have purchased from the iTunes store with the same result… NONE of them will play on anything but the MacBook’s small 13” screen. This is crazy unacceptable.

Woohoo, first movie I’ve gone to see in five months!

When “Casino Royale” came out, it was an amazing thing. A James Bond movie whose plot didn’t require billions of improbable spy gadgets. It had actual acting. And a plot! The main thing about it though was that I, at least, spent a lot of the movie saying “My God, James Bond is just so fucking cool.”

“Quantum of Solace” is really a continuation of “Casino Royale”, it starts minutes after where the first movie ended and, in the end, resolves a few of the questions from the first movie. The action is good, the acting is decent, there’s a bad guy, hot women, everything that you’d expect. The thing missing though is that “James Bond is fucking cool.” vibe. There’s not that much separating JAMES BOND from anyone else. Yeah, he flies a plane, races cars, etc, but any secret agent could do that. I want to see a special secret agent. I want to see him bend luck to his will. I want the amazing to be plausible because of the strength of personality.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I want to win the lottery.

So this story is a week old but it’s been a busy week and I couldn’t be that bothered to post something about Heath Ledger (although Dark Knight is pretty darn good). That said, there’s an entertaining little story about Ledger’s iPod being passed around amongst his friends/castmates.

Whenever we went into the trailer we’d say “Whose iPod is this?” Because it would always be some wacked-out music nobody had ever heard of before. And it was Heath’s. And that iPod has since become a symbol of Heath and his friends pass it around to each other, download the music and then pass it on.

<unfair sarcasm> and really, what is more personal than a bunch of medium-quality compressed music files? </unfair sarcasm>

It may be targeted at early-teen girls, but I rented Penelope this weekend and it was actually really good.

The movie follows the typical romantic comedy path: boy meets girl, something interferes, girl meets other boy, shocking twist, right boy and girl get together.

Penelope came together really well though. All of the actors and actresses did excellent jobs (it says something when Reese Witherspoon isn’t the cutest little pixie in a movie) and the story comes together nicely.

I give it two thumbs up, it’s a movie I’d let my daughter watch.*

*Wow, I’m at that point already?

I would say that the best part about this movie is that you get the comic genius of Jack Black without having to actually see his face, but that’s not fair to the movie.  This film is very well done, both conceptually and technically.  A clean but engaging animation style and several strong performances combine to produce a very fun and funny movie.  

The ‘plot’ is 100% folk tale/fable/etc, but that’s not a bad thing.  In this case predictability allows you to sit back and just enjoy the movie in all of its awesomeness… there were really maybe only two slow spots out of the whole film.  Good stuff.

… and apparently they hate him back: members of Russia’s communist party are calling for a boycott of the Crystal Skull.  The quote is funny: the movie “aims to undermine communist ideology and distort history.”

If anybody thinks that this movie will be taken at all literally, well, good on them.  We went to see it over the weekend, and K summed it up well: “I don’t think that was worth $9.50, but I would have wanted to see it eventually, and if you’re going to see it you might as well see it on the big screen.”

First, the good: it’s entertaining, it has the standard Indy elements, including the requisite bad guy being dissolved/eaten/goo-ified/etc, and has a decent chase scene.  More subtly, Harrison Ford’s age is appropriate, and they did a good job not hiding that fact and instead making it work with the story.

That said, sometimes it seemed like Ford did his own stunts, and the film was discouragingly linear.  Maybe I was hoping for too much? dunno.

Finally, back to the Russian communist boycott (wow, I feel like I’m back in the ’80s), it occurs to me that really filmmakers have very limited options.  The only acceptable baddies are white; you have to be <strong> really</strong> careful if you’re going to use middle-eastern bad guys, I don’t think you could use Japanese bad guys unless it’s a period piece, and similarly Chinese bad guys are off limits unless the movie is set in 19th-century Hong Kong or something.  So, you’re left with cultures, not races, as historical baddies: Nazi Germans (but still white) and Communist Russians (still white).  And I guess even then you’re going to piss people off.