Filed by matt on Sunday, January 4, 2009 at 11:51 am

I’ve seen a few Bay/Bruckheimer films in the past week and I’m struck by how both films just seemed far lamer then I remember. I saw Gone in 60 Seconds and Armageddon not too long after they came out and thought they were fine as popcorn action movies. But watching them again they weren’t near as fun and were far more ridiculous then I remember. I’ve been trying to think what makes those films lose their staying power vs other films that I’m fine with after multiple viewings. It might be that everything is so amped up - all the music and camera moves and everything is very over-dramatic and the first time you see it you’re completely caught up in it and it works. But after you know the resolution you’re not as invested and have more time to notice the clunkiness the next time around. Clearly they make a lot of money so why bother changing but I dunno. There’s plenty of action movies that I like just fine. Doesn’t seem too hard to make one vs the other.  

Filed by matt on Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 9:23 pm

I really really try not to judge things without giving them a fair shake. After finishing with the new South Park though it turns out the tuner was set to NBC and I couldn’t help but watch the last 5 minutes of the new Knight Rider show. It was astoundingly bad. It was so bad that I frankly can’t possibly imagine what could possibly offset the 5 minutes I saw. I may not have wanted to judge but I had no choice. Anyway - really bad.

Filed by Richard on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 6:34 pm

The good one. 

Filed by Richard on Sunday, September 21, 2008 at 11:11 pm

I managed to watch a major awards ceremony without accidentally or stupidly surfing across a web site that gave away the results before I could see them. And because I started watching the Emmy’s as they began, at 7pm, I couldn’t accidentally fast forward ahead, catching a glimpse of a winner when I’m just trying to bypass some ads.

As for the show, much of the hosting fell flat, but who cares. Awards shows are great and I always love them. It was great to see Bryan Cranston win the lead actor award for Breaking Bad; a great show that no one apparently watches. And it was especially great to see Mad Men win Best Drama; what a terrific show.

Filed by matt on Friday, August 22, 2008 at 10:17 pm

I have accomplished something for the first time - I collected all 50 achievements and 1,000 gamerscore from Lego Indiana Jones.

As I have mentioned before I am not motivated by achievements but this did feel pretty good. What set this game apart was that all achievements were, forgive me, achievable. I didn’t have to play through the whole game 5 times or drive every road on the island or kill a member of the design team online. Helping me in my quest was the intertubes with walk-throughs and lists of all the achievements. It would have been more meaningful if I had gotten it all without the assistance but I am at peace with it. I didn’t use any cheat codes to skip anything. I earned it all - just with a map telling me exactly how to get there when I got stuck.

Filed by matt on Friday, August 8, 2008 at 8:43 pm

My wife is nuts for the Olympics the way I’m nuts for Firefly. Which means she wanted to record the local NBC affiliate’s opening ceremony “pre-game” show and we’ve just finished it. I’m now officially burned out on the generic Chinese music they play into and out of commercials and montages. I think they should mix it up. Maybe play some Jonathan Coulton.

Filed by matt on Friday, August 1, 2008 at 11:08 pm

While Richard was getting the vapors over the relative success of The Dark Knight I got caught up on this week’s Daily Shows. As is customary they mocked the mainstream news represented this time by CNN and I saw something that even my cynical nature was astounded by. Apparently they’ve started using extended song clips as bumpers coming into stories as if they’re a morning radio “Zoo” show and crank calls will be coming up just after the break.

Even worse is the attempt to play the “perfect” song for every story so “Rock You Like a Hurricane” leads into a story about a tropical storm brewing in Bermuda. Get it? Cause see the lyrics say hurricane and the tropical storm might become a hurricane… And then the newsreader/anchortron tries to tie the lyrics into the story. “Changes” by David Bowie plays, and is then followed with “Changes in the way people are using their credit cards.” How can you even parody that? It’s caught in its own Escher-like parody loop.

The Daily Show played a number of examples each achieving the same high bar of stupidity. It’s no wonder to me that the Amercan public is so woefully uninformed on the critical issues of the day. They’re being treated like Ralph Wiggum who summed it up with, “It says Choo-choo-choose you and there’s a picture of a train on it!” There sure is Ralph, there sure is.

Filed by Richard on Friday, August 1, 2008 at 4:10 pm

With the tremendous success of the Dark Knight in the movie theaters, blogs and entertainment news outlets are falling all over themselves to anoint the film, in advance, as the soon-to-be most successful film of all time.

Please. The Dark Knight has a fairly giant uphill climb before it even enters the top 25. Can we get serious about how we define success?

1) Inflation Adjustment
To compare box office results across different eras, it’s important to equalize the measuring stick. The fact is that a dollar went a lot further in 1968 than in 2008. Fortunately the holy grail of box office office web site, Box Office Mojo, did this legwork for us. They have a formula based on generally accepted inflation rates, to show how much movies of different eras would have made in current dollars.

The upshot is that the supposed current champ, Titanic, has actually made 908 million dollars domestic in current dollars, not the 600 million typically reported. And Titanic isn’t even in the top five. The Ten Commandments, E.T., The Sound of Music, Star Wars, and Gone with the Wind are all well ahead of Titanic. Gone with the Wind, in fact, made 1.4 BILLION dollars adjusted for inflation. By this standard, the Dark Knight has a very long way to go to catch up. As of today, the Dark Knight’s 350 million dollar haul put it at number 13 on the all-time list. But if you adjust for inflation, that figure drops precipitously to number 94.

2) International Haul
It’s interesting that box office receipts are reported in the news almost exclusively in terms of domestic receipts. Given the incredible weakness of the American dollar, and the growth in the international markets, most of the money a modern movie brings in typically comes for overseas. In the cast of the Dark Knight, this will almost certainly ultimately be the case as well. Yet the domestic market is the sole indicator typically used to measure success.

Look at Titanic again. It brought in an astounding 600 million domestic in 1997 dollars. But it also brought in an incredible 1.2 BILLION additional dollars internationally for a full take of 1.8 billion dollars. This emphasis on the domestic take has the effect of giving the impression that major money makers were actually flops. Consider Troy, the sand and sandals epic of four years ago. It brought in what was considered a weak domestic haul of 133 million. But worldwide the movie brought in half a billion dollars. Yet is is still considered a massive underperformer in many circles. The point is that in the modern marketplace, we should stop talking exclusively about domestic haul and start reporting on the worldwide box office first.

3) Number of tickets sold verus population
If we’re going to adjust box office numbers for inflation, we should also consider just how many butts were put in seats during the theatrical run of the film, and contrast those numbers with the actual domestic population at the time to get a more accurate picture of the relative popularity of the film. (The domestic take also includes Canada, but I’m just going to focus on the US).

the Dark Knight’s current 350 million domestic haul, this means that about 43 million tickets have been sold at about 8 bucks a ticket.

Let’s compare this to 1982, when E.T. ruled the theaters. Adjusted for inflation, E.T. made one billion dollars domestic,with means that about 125 million tickets would have been sold at an inflation adjusted 8 bucks a ticket.

So clearly the E.T. haul is much, much higher than the Dark Knight; it is even more successful when you realize that the US Population in 1982 was only 232 million compared the the current US Population of 303 million. Meaning that there were tickets sold for more than half of the population. The current take for the Dark Knight isn’t even at one ticket sold for every six Americans.

It would be harder to compare to Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and The Ten Commandments, because they had initial “Road Show” releases at significantly higher ticket prices, but the facts are fairly clear: in much smaller markets, these film put many, many more butts in seats than the Dark Knight will ever hope to do.

None of this is meant to particularly rain on the parade of the Dark Knight. The film is doing fantastically well. But if you were to utilize accurate methods of comparison against other tops movies, the Dark Knight is almost certain to end up as an also ran.

Filed by Richard on Monday, July 21, 2008 at 4:42 pm

The Dark Knight is a good movie, with a few great performances, and some fairly perfect psycho-development of the varying lead characters. So why did it leave me cold?

I’m sure I’m not alone in being sick of hearing the Heath Ledger drumbeat; the Oscar talk, the brilliance of his performance, his ascension to the seat at the right-hand of God etc, all based on this performance. Can we STFU about it already? But the thing is, it turns out he is terrific. Incredible actually. He’s pulled off that rare accomplishment of delivering a clearly mannered performance, where it is evident that much work went into the mechanics and cadence of the performance, yet it didn’t seem mannered. At all.

Aaron Eckhart almost matches him in a much different role. As the idealistic, yet pragmatic District Attorney Harvey Dent, he’s thoroughly believable in an unbelievable universe.

Christian Bale is OK as the Bat-Man*; I still have never gotten used to how the various actors playing Bat-Man lower their voice to a growl when they put on the rubber ears. This version seemed especially bad. It seems clear that he’s not doing this to hide his identity because the few people he encounters as Bat-Man that also know Bruce Wayne already know he’s Bat-Man anyway. It comes across a bit as a weak man trying act like a tough man.

The Gotham of the Dark Knight is just a bit more grounded in reality than the Gotham of Batman Begins, with its myriad monorails floating  hundreds of feet in the air and plumbed through and between buildings. For the most part this makes for a better film experience.

The film does an extremely nuanced and effective job of developing the stories of Bruce Wayne/Bat-Man, Harvey Dent/Two-Face, Commissionar Gordon, and the Joker. For the Joker, there is no back story; and as snippets of the movie purport to tell the origins of his madness, we gradually learn they are all lies. The Joker is just a madman; there is no explanation. How refreshing.

Knowing that Harvey Dent was to become Two-Face, I spent much of the too-long movie wondering “when does he burn his face and become the villain that we know and love?”. It’s a good thing though that the transformation came so late in the movie, because for once the origin story IS the story; it took me to the end of the film to realize it. Most comic book movies seem to follow the same tired formula; the first third features highly compressed origin stories of the heroes and villains, the second third sets up the conflict, and the final third has the giant battle. But with the Dark Knight, the conflict is all about morality in an immoral world, and how sometimes there is no right choice to make.  When Dent makes the choice to become Two-Face it’s entirely understandable and his anger and villainy is almost defensible. He WAS the white knight and he played by the rules. And he was destroyed because of it.

Of course the complexity of this morality play is undercut by a presentation that seems at times to revel in fairly random and reckless killing of innocents and villains alike, yet at other times the entirety of the movie hinges on specific moral decisions by decent people and criminals alike to protect the lives of their fellow man, even at the expense of their own. When these moments arrived, it felt a bit like the final reel of a different movie had been spliced in accidentally; when did the lives of people suddenly start to matter?

Iron Man set the standard of comic book adaptations. You walked out of the theater jazzed, planning to see the movie again. With the Dark Knight you walk out impressed by many of the performances and the reach of the story line and character development, but ambivalent about the overall film because of it’s tonal inconsistencies.

*I’ve always preferred the original DC comic naming convention of “the Bat-Man” over the name “Batman.” It seems so retro, yet modern.

Filed by Richard on Sunday, July 20, 2008 at 10:32 am

I love Al Gore. I’m a HUGE supporter of him and a big believer in his efforts to highlight the effects of climate change.

I also cringed at the the successful efforts in the 2000 election to paint him as a serial credit-taker (”I invented the internet” etc.), when it was clear that he was not, in fact guilty, of taking the credit he had been accused of.

So it pained me to watch Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw this morning, with Al Gore as a guest. In the recorded introduction Brokaw said of Gore “he has since focused on his environmental crusade, winning an Oscar for his documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ as well as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.”

Umm… Newsflash to Brokaw at NBC news: Davis Guggenheim won the Documentary Feature Oscar for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which featured Gore. Gore didn’t win the award any more than Robert McNamara won the Oscar for “The Fog of War” (directed by Errol Morris and featuring McNamara).

So at this point in the show, I’m just disappointed in NBC and Brokaw for their poor fact-checking.

Then, Brokaw introduced Gore live. “Nobel laureate, Oscar winner. Crusader for conservation of energy…” While Brokaw was saying this, the camera was focused on Gore. He bowed his head down slightly like an elder statesmen to acknowledge the credits that Brokaw was extending his way… but he doesn’t bother to correct Brokaw when he described his “Oscar win.”

Ugh. This is very disappointing; This isn’t even nuanced. Gore did not win the Oscar. He could have quickly corrected Brokaw and moved on, but he didn’t bother.

I can see why NBC and Brokaw made the mistake: Do a quick Google search on “Al Gore” and “won the Oscar” or “Oscar winner” and you’ll get about 100,000 pages returned. do the same for Davis Guggenheim and you’ll get less than 10,000 pages.

But come on Al! Brokaw was speaking right to you on national TV. You had an obligation to correct the guy! Stop giving ammunition to your critics.

Full text and clip of Guggenheim’s acceptance speech at the Oscars (he invited Gore on stage to also say a few words).

Download the Meet the Press Podcast from iTunes (the offending parts are all in the first two minutes).

Filed by matt on Saturday, July 19, 2008 at 9:26 am

Joss Whedon is the man. Joss Whedon has created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity and now Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a supervillain musical.

Seems Joss got frustrated during the writers strike and decided to try and launch a project entirely on his own. Or as he puts it, with the help of everyone he’s ever worked with or is related to. The result is reachable through that image on the side. It’s free through midnight on July 20th, then goes to iTunes, then off to DVD release where hopefully the money rolls in.

This is what the future looks like. Creative people putting out content outside of the established production system. Of course the trick is that were it not for the established production system where he made Buffy and all that no one would know who Joss Whedon is. So really the future is how someone like Joss does it without needing the production system to exist at all. But this is an important step.

Also, it’s got Nathan Fillion with a hammer sticker on his chest. If I were at comic-con next week I would so have that shirt.

Filed by Richard on Thursday, July 17, 2008 at 7:58 pm

FIOS has come to the Huffman household. Three Verizon techs showed up today and installed the FIOS fiber optic network right into my house. No more Comcast!

Apparently there were three techs because the lead tech was training the other two techs; Verizon is clearly gearing up for a LOT of installations. Comcast should be checking their diapers right now.

I thought it was funny that one of the techs lived right near me, and therefore has received the same onslaught of material from Comcast in their efforts to badmouth Verizon. He pointed out to me something that I didn’t realize; when Comcast refers to their new “burst speed” of 12 mbs, apparently that means that they cannot maintain that speed consistently because of the limitation of their network. They don’t want to be sued for not consistently maintaining that speed, apparently, so they came up with a name (”burst”) that would allow them to claim the speed, without actually having to deliver it all the time. read more »

Filed by matt on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 8:33 pm

Here’s my iPhone story.

I preface this by saying I do not have the first iPhone. In advance of the iPhone 3G announcement I was convinced they would be for sale the same day it was announced and I was prepared to pick one up on the way home. Unfortunately there was almost a month to wait and it just made me want it more. I am not a profligate spender - I am a cheapass and I hate collecting stuff so this was not idle gimme gimme gimme. This was well-considered gimme gimme gimme.

The big unknown was how popular it was going to be on release day and how long each activation would take. When the first one came out you could walk right in that afternoon and pick one up feeling vaguely superiors o the people who waited in line just that morning. Activation was handled at home and there were some random delays but nothing too tragic. And then a whole mess of iPhones were either hacked or bought and whisked out of the country. So now it’s mandatory in-store activation.

I prepared for the big day by calling AT&T the week before and made sure I was upgrade eligible and that the corporate discount my wife put on our account wouldn’t be an issue. They said no problem on either front. According to their website, there were only 2 AT&T stores within 25 miles of my house selling the item. The closest Apple store is in a mall and not that convenient. I have a job and a life so that whole waiting in line overnight thing wasn’t going to happen.

read more »

Filed by Richard on Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 12:54 pm

Yet another edition of the Heisman Award-winning podcast featuring the soothing, dulcet tones of Matt and Richard.

 

 Mustard 81 [55:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Filed by Richard on Friday, July 11, 2008 at 5:36 pm

My ears are ringing right now; actually my right ear is ringing. I just saw Hellboy II at my favorite local theater, the Alderwood Mall 16plex, and the projectionist screwed up the sound to such a degree that it both ruined the movie and possibly caused damage to my ears (well not really, but it WAS pretty awful).

Essentially the theater turned up the right channel to earbleed levels. I knew something was up when the trailer for the Mummy III came up (which I’ve seen in theaters at least three times so far), and the funny line that Brendan Fraser says while in a plane about to crash — “why am I laughing?”) was completely drowned out by the effect sounds. I sat through the opening credits of Hellboy to see if it would change; and it didn’t. So I went out to talk to an attendant; he followed me back in and listened for a while while I went back to my seat. I was hopeful that something would change, but nothing did.

It’s odd watching a movie where the ambient channels of the soundtrack are louder than the prime dialogue; in scenes where Hellboy is walking through a crowded street, you distinctly hear the background dialogue of the extras over the voice of Hellboy. Certain music cues that are intended to blend into the background are out there front and center. And the dialogue all sounds like it’s coming from the next theater.

And to top it off, they hadn’t turned on the Air Conditioning; and the theater was just this side of too hot; probably about 78 to 80 degrees. Bleh.

The predecessor to this theater was the late, non-lamented Grand Cinemas Alderwood. During the long slide towards closure, the theater was incapable of screening any films without screwups. The last 13 times I attended a movie there, SOMETHING was wrong, from images spilling onto the curtain, to out of sync tracks, to continual problems with focus. (Which of course prompts any rational person to wonder why I kept going back; I simply have no answer to that).

The Grand Cinemas Alderwood was a great theater once. The Alderwood Mall 16Plex is currently a great theater. I just hope the experience today isn’t part of the same trend that ruined it’s older brother.

Oh, and Hellboy II? Great movie.