Category: TV & Movies

Vudu – digitally download movies

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There’s a new product called Vudu hitting the market soon. It’s a $400 box that has 5000 ‘movie stubs’ pre-loaded onto it. You hook it to the net (a wired connection is suggested) and, pick your movie and either rent ($2-$4) or buy ($15-20) it. The ‘stub’ will start playing immediately with the rest of the movie downloading in the background, hopefully faster than you’re watching. If you choose the rental option you have 24 hours to watch your film after you’ve paid.

The movies aren’t high def, but the unit is supposed to upscale if you have an HDTV. It is capable of high def movies but they’re still negotiating the rights and expect to ‘turn on’ this feature in the near future. However, the unit has a puny 250 gig hard drive. How many high def movies are going to fit on that? There’s a USB port that’ll eventually let you add an external drive, but that’s going to add to the cost of ownership.

You need a cable modem or better to use it. DSL isn’t fast enough, they say. And remember, they suggest a wired connection, so get ready to run ethernet to the living room…

NY Times article with all the details

The rig uses peer-to-peer with other Vudu users. NY Times seems to consider this to be a “cool feature” but to me it’s a drawback. I don’t need my ISP barking at me because I’m uploading huge files to random strangers. And I know when I use bittorrent (at least) it sucks down every byte of bandwidth. Heaven forbid the (internet) phone should ring because I can’t use Vonage and do a P2P bittorrent transfer at the same time.

NY Times seems really bullish on this product. Me, I’m not seeing it. $400 to pay full price for movies that I could play on any of my existing DVD players? Granted you don’t have to go to the store…but that’s not enough of a boon to offset the drawbacks, at least to me.

How about for you?

The Guild

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When I saw the first episode of The Guild I was tickled but wary… it was very, very funny and I’m scared to say I could relate to it almost too well. But was it a flash in the pan? Well Episode 2 is out, and it’s just as funny.

You can go to YouTube to watch them but I’m going to tempt you here and now…

Episode 1

Episode 2

Good Night, and Good Luck

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I don’t often mention movies in this blog because I’m just not very good at critiquing them. For me, movies are most often an escape. Usually, I’ll watch a movie, like it or not like it, then move on without giving much thought to either the movie or why I felt the way I did about it. There are about a million bloggers better at covering movies than I am, so why bother?

But last night I watched Good Night, and Good Luck, a docudrama directed by George Clooney and starring David Strathairn, George Clooney, and Joseph McCarthy. Strathaim and Clooney played Edward R Murrow and Fred Friendly, respectively, and McCarthy plays himself. The whole film is in black and white; I watched it on blu-ray and it was amazing to watch. It’s weird for me to be saying that about a black and white movie, but seriously it was stunning.

Now most of the people reading blogs weren’t around during the ‘Red Scare’ and I’m no exception, but we’ve heard about the ‘McCarthy Witch Hunts’ and the black lists. We’ve seen the Twilight Zone episodes that were inspired by the paranoia of the day, and we’ve heard how everyone was afraid to speak out for fear of being accused of being a Communist.

We’ve heard about it, but seeing it was a whole ‘nother ballgame. Clooney didn’t cast anyone in the role of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Rather, he used actual footage from the hearings and from McCarthy’s television appearances. Joe McCarthy was brilliant in his role. 🙂 According to the Good Night, and Good Luck page at IMDB, Clooney said that test audiences complained “that the McCarthy character was overacting a bit, not realizing that it was the actual McCarthy through archive footage”. Now I wouldn’t believe everything you read on IMDB, but it’s a believable bit of trivia.

It’s easy to look back in this era and think “That could never happen today.” but of course it could and does, on both grand and micro scales. Well, I’ll hold back on the proselytizing.

But this was a damned fine film, and I urge you to give it a try.

The return of Flash Gordon

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So tonight, Flash Gordon returns to TV (on the SciFi Channel). The chances of it sucking are reasonably high, but I still have to see for myself. The fact that it seems to be using the old Queen ‘anthem’ alone makes its prospects quite grim.

But SciFi does have a knack of making mediocre tv shows that I still enjoy watching. I’m thinking of Eureka and Stargate:Atlantis. I can’t call either of them great TV, but I still get a kick out of them, and in both cases I think its about casting and the ‘family of character’ aspects.

And of course, SciFi has Battlestar. I was *extremely* dubious about BSG before it started to air, and look how amazing that turned out.

So we’ll see.

Murder is so entertaining

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Maybe this is old news, but I just became aware of a new reality show. This show, and I’m not going to give it free publicity by mentioning either the name or the network, sets two teams of ‘normal’ people against each other in a competition to solve a murder case. The twist is that these are real murders. Each show comes “complete with a gruesome recreated crime scene and real crime footage” taken from the closed case files of homicide departments across the U.S.

Oh boy! So if you’ve lost a loved one to a brutal crime, you can at least take some consolation from the fact that the person’s murder will provide entertainment for millions of twisted TV viewers. (Note sarcasm.)

Really, it’s just one step closer to snuff films, isn’t it? But heaven forbid our children catch a glimpse of an exposed breast on TV. Now *that* is cause for great alarm.

Out of the Ashes

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Bronze statue
A bronze statue of a runner, excavated from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.
(Photo by Mark Philbrick, Brigham Young University, courtesy Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy)

Been a while since I covered anything on television, but I caught Out of the Ashes: Recovering the Lost Library of Herculaneum on PBS this afternoon. Fascinating stuff.

Now mind you, I’m no scholar. I thought Herculaneum must be some type of glowing mineral that makes Hercules weak or something. Instead, it’s a city on the Bay of Naples that was covered up along with Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D.

Along the shoreline of Herculaneum was a huge villa, and when it was partially excavated in 1752, 1,800 preserved papyrus scrolls were found. The show is about the attempts that have been made to unroll them. Sadly, many were destroyed before anyone started having real success. In fact, the first few that were found were burned as firewood, as their discoverers thought they were charcoal!

Rolled scroll
A carbonized scroll from Herculaneum; many scrolls were so badly burned and crushed that they have yet to be unrolled or read.
(Photo by Mark Philbrick, Brigham Young University, courtesy Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, Italy)

You can catch the show on PBS, if you’re lucky, or buy it online.

The Washington Post ran an article on using imaging technology to read ancient scrolls (this isn’t specifically about the Herculaneum scrolls, but it’s the same technique being used).

Wired has a story about the scrolls and the group working to restore them: Tales from the Crypt: How a handful of Mormons with an infrared camera unlocked the secrets buried beneath Vesuvius.

And last, the Philodemus Project Home Page has some partial translations of the scrolls. (Philodemus being one of the philsophers who authored some of the scrolls that’ve been translated.)

Seriously…how cool is it that we can read the thoughts of these scribblers of 79 A.D.?

Quote of the day

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And if you think about it, all the major life events happen to people between the ages of 18 and 34.
-Dawn Ostroff, CW’s president of entertainment. (Wired magazine, Oct 2006, page 54)

So all the major life events are behind me! I’m apparently never going to die. Nor will I retire. And being born, first day of school, graduating high school… none of that was major. Of course she did lump graduating from high school in that age bracket. I guess she had trouble and had to repeat a year at some point, poor thing.

What a ditz.

[CW is the new network resulting from the merger between UPN and The WB.]

Blue Gender

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If you look at Amazon.com’s Blue Gender page, you’ll see the fans have given this anime series a 5 star rating (based on 12 reviews).

I just don’t see it.

I’d give Blue Gender perhaps 2 stars and I’d have to be feeling generous when I did it.

But let’s back up a little. Yugi Kaido is put into stasis at the ripe old age of 20-something. When he is awakened, he finds the world is overrun with bug-like (sometimes reptile-like) creatures known as “the blue” and mankind has been all but eradicated on earth. Marlene Angel is a tough-as-nails hard-ass who is responsible for getting Yugi to ‘second earth’ (an orbiting space station). For the first disk or so, Yugi whines (and every other scene uses the ‘quivering eye’ effect to show how much torment he is in) and Marlene orders him around. Very formulaic. They’re fighting in powered mech-suits called shrikes. Bipedal, but on wheels. Very odd…apparently post-apocalyptic earth is really really smooth.

As the series progresses, we learn that Yugi has some special qualities (gasp!) and there are other like him. Others who keep to themselves, act weird, and excel in combat. Hmm, I wonder who the bad guy is going to be? Yeah, everything up to the end of this series can be seen hours before it happens. Hmm, Yugi has “B-Cells” and the creatures are called “Blue”… could there be a connection?!?

As to the end… well, it’s one of those horribly unsatisfying anime endings that make very little sense. Yugi sees a plant growing and says “I see!” and we’re supposed to understand what that means. I’m being a little vague so as not to totally spoil things, but suffice to say that the ending of Evangelion is as clear as can be compared to this work.

Even that would be ok if the characters, and in particular Yugi, were even vaguely likeable. But you’ll hate this guy from the first disk to the last. He screams constantly at the beginning, giving away their location to the bugs…er, the blue. And when he isn’t screaming he’s whining. Then he turns ito a homcidal maniac for a while, screaming for new reasons, and you’ll hate him then. Eventually he returns to something close to normal, but still… this guy is Mr. Empathy. Someone, in the midst of a killing spree, comes at Yugi with a gun, lifts it, points it at his face… and a third person bursts in and shoots the gunman. Does Yugi say “Wow, thanks for saving my life!”? No, instead he screams “What the hell is wrong with you!? You didn’t have to kill him!!!” This happens approximately 253 times during the series (ok, I exaggerate a bit). When another homicidal maniac tries to kill off the last remaining humans and is killed in the process, Yugi laments “Why did he have to die?” And so on and so forth.
Continue reading “Blue Gender”

Anime Boston 2006

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So last weekend I had my first anime expo experience. I told a friend about it in an email and she urged me to do a DC post about it, so here goes nothing. This is a slight re-rewrite of that email so its even more informal than what I generally write her.

Also remember, I was an anime expo virgin. So be gentle with me.

First of all, the registration line was crazy long. Next year, pre-register. I bet I was in line for 30-40 minutes to get in. And y’know it was a great people-watching opportunity. Lots and lots of people were in costumes of all kinds. There were women dressed in scanty outfits and guys dressed like Cloud, and there were people dressed like Moogies (? the things that LuLu carried around in FF X) and nuns and black wizards and there were moms and dads sheperding a couple of kids and looking around with an expression of shock on their faces. I think they were the most fun… just watching mom staring slack-jawed while her 12 or 13 year old kid and his/her friend were as comfortable as can be.

The vibe was….fucking beautiful. I’ve done the Rennfaire thing, and that’s pretty fun, but this was amazing. There were big girls dressed as Rikku (? the young blonde from FF X?) and fat guys dressed as warriors and they were just as accepted as the hot girls and buff boys that really had the bodies to look like those characters. No one was judging anyone on terms of body size. Instead it was all about enthusiastic encouargement and praise over each other’s costumes, and very polite requests to take a picture, with a pleasant “Thank you” after the person posed. The guys with huge swords… yeah they compared their sword sizes 🙂 but without any arrogance or testosterone. It was so nice. So fucking nice. I spent most of my time in the “Dealer room” and on display were figures of big monsters and heros from various anime and all kinds of scantily clad anime girls, and the fans, boys and girls both, examined everything carefully, with no expression of condemnation about the big boobs and stuff. It was just all part of the culture and accepted. Guys were buying 6 foot high posters of some impossibly proportioned hottie and people would be like “Whoa, that’s cool!”

I guess I didn’t realize until right now that the whole sex thing was part of what was so special. For once I was in a group of people where sex was at least as accepted as violence, and maybe more so. There was more sex than gore on display. And by sex I mean, y’know, big boobies and short skirts flying up to show panties. Or shirtless men, or the whole gay-boy thing… not deep penetration or ejaculating peni…

Anyway I bought t-shirts and an ‘action figure.’ It was some teen-aged looking waif with big boobs and a tiny string bikini top. A limited edition I guess. The salesman said “You a big Tenge fan?” and I was like “A what?” LOL He rolled his eyes and I said “She just caught my eye!” and it was a big chuckle for him, even though I think he would’ve preferred the piece to go to a die-hard fan.

Next year I think I’ll get a hotel room and stay over night. There was a lot more to see and on Saturday night was “The Masquerade” which I gather to be 1 part costume ball and 1 part stage show where all the cosplayers put on skits and get judged. Sounds like a fun thing to hang around for, but I didn’t fancy driving home from Boston after it ended at 10 pm. And I shudder to think what the parking fee would’ve been!

Anyway, if an anime convention comes to your town, and if you have an ounce of whimsy or playfulness in your heart, I urge you to go and check out the scene. You don’t have to be an anime fan to get a kick out of what goes on at these things!