Who Am I?

I always like to make a post after finishing a video project (even though I just end up mentioning it on Facebook) because here I can give a little more background before you watch it. So this was for my Video Foundations class and the topic was “Who Are You?”. Basically a chance to talk about your interests and what not in any manner, as long as it’s under three minutes. So I basically just crammed together a bunch of weird stuff with a dopey narration. I wasn’t a big fan of this project and definitely went through a stage where I considered redoing the whole thing… But since that requires a lot of work I just cut out some scenes (about three minutes worth).

I filmed most of this myself (because Paul was being a jerk) so I felt a little limited here but at least it’s done. As is my tradition here is the link

We All Gonna Die!!!

2012

I don’t know how many times writer/director Roland Emmerich feels like he needs to destroy the world but if anything is to be said about 2012 it’s probably the most impressive looking disaster movie of all time. I was really expecting this one to suck balls but shockingly I found 2012 to be jam packed full of amazing effects and surprisingly good acting.

People call Roland Emmerich’s movies “Disaster Porn” and though I’ll admit he certainly goes overboard with effects, I found this chaotic outing had a compelling human side as well. The story follows a diverse ensemble of characters (as Roland’s film’s often do) dealing with that infamous date that the Mayan’s many years ago predicted would be “The End of Days”. This being brought on by solar flares sending neutrinos into the earth’s core, heating it up and causing the the earth’s plates to shift…. Translating to a bunch of giant tidal waves, erupting volcanoes and big ass fissures coming out of the ground. Now I don’t know if any of that makes sense, it probably doesn’t but I’m no scientist and frankly it didn’t bug me at all. I understood why people were all over the scientific inaccuracies of The Day After Tomorrow because global warming is actually something based in science but the “2012 Theory” is bullshit anyways, so who really gives a damn? This film isn’t trying to send some message it was clearly made for entertainment and that’s where it excels.

A lot of critics have been writing this one off as a bloated disaster movie that’s all spectacle and no true substance but I think too many are being blinded by the ridiculous premise. I think if you can just suspend your disbelief you’ll find that Emmerich truly and sincerely attempts to tell a good story in-between all this chaos. It’s not perfect but he always keeps it moving and even at 158 minutes this movie is never boring.

What I’ve always liked about Emmerich’s movies (even his bad ones) is that he almost always has an intriguing ensemble of characters often played by actors I’m quite fond of. You have the family struggling to survive including the always likeable John Cusack and the so-so but not terrible Amanda Peet. This is of course followed by all the government guys including; Danny Glover as the president, Oliver Platt as some douche and Chiwetel Ejiofor as a scientifc advisor and even though they’re all spouting out cliched sappy speeches they do a damn fine job. Oh yes and then you got the oddball characters thrown into the mix like Woody Harrelson as some wacko radio personality and George Segal and Blu Mankuma as jazz musicians on a cruise ship.

It’s an over the top experience but isn’t that what a disaster movie should be? In my opinion 2012 is Emmerich’s best after Independence Day and Stargate. It’s a thrilling, high adrenaline, experience and worth seeing in the theaters if you have about two hours and thirty-eight minutes to kill. It may not be as interesting as Sean’s theories on the end of the world but it’s a close second.

Get Your Chart On

I tweeted about this site a little while ago (hey, it just occurred to me that we don’t have Twitter links anywhere on this blog, let me fix that), but there’s this cool website out there now called Flickchart that I think you movie people out there should investigate.

Flickchart lets you compare two movies. You are presented with two posters, and chose the movie you prefer. This works toward creating your overall movie rankings, with your top 20 films of all time always displayed. You can also rank a year, decade, or genre, but work on that list also influences your overall list too. As anyone who has ever bothered to give star ratings to movies on a site like Facebook or Netflix will tell you, this can get really addictive.

Here, there’s this added level of desperation to help your favorite movies climb the list. You can’t assign a spot to a movie, you just get to keep comparing them. So some interesting stuff happens. For example, Men in Black has been consistently in my top five movies of all time, just because the right film hasn’t come up for comparison.

No, the website is not perfect and you will tend to keep getting the same comparisons over and over, but it’s really addictive and a great time-waster. And I really wanted to get us up to six posts this week.

11-10-09

I’m sure everyone is still recovering from the massive release of Robo Jockeys on Tuesday, but I figured I should probably mention the massive video game release that also happened to hop on what has been dubbed National SLXP Day.

So a little bit of history: Two years ago a game called Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out and was a huge success. The Call of Duty franchise had always been a special one, the first game was pretty huge in its time and CoD2 is probably the best WWII FPS ever. But Call of Duty 3 was developed by another company. The fourth game was a return for the original series developer, Infinity Ward, who obviously hated the third game, because they called the new one IF3. Anyway, CoD4 was a huge success and totally revolutionized the online experience for modern FPS games along with an incredible (albeit short) single player campaign.

Last year, a game called Call of Duty: World at War came out. Not an Infinity Ward game. It took the series back to WWII, and even added a zombie multiplayer mode and a character voiced by Kiefer Southerland. I guess Infinity Ward was not about this, because they announced their new game, scheduled for 2009, was dropping the Call of Duty branding. Good for ’em.

Now as hype continued to build for this big release, the very dynamic of the holiday gaming season changed. Countless big releases moved to early next year to get out of the way of this juggernaut. Indeed, it seems that only Left 4 Dead 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2 have the balls to stand up to this momentous release. And now that it’s out, it sounds like Modern Warfare 2 has not disappointed.

Sales are definitely in the millions. Midnight launches everywhere were packed (and this was a Monday night, mind you). The reviews have been very generous. In a year full of great games, this looks to be on the way to a huge sales lead. They released three different editions: the standard game, the Hardened Edition, which comes with like an art book and an XBLA version of CoD, and the Prestige Edition which is the Hardened Edition with a pair of fucking night-vision goggles. And they’re all selling. Certainly 11/10/09 is a date that will be remembered in gaming history.

As for me? I’ll remember it for SLXP. Mainly because my birthday is in a week and its bad form to buy yourself something so close to that. But also because in a hurry to be verbally abused by the jackasses on Xbox Live quite yet. That’s another thing I forgot to mention, a couple weeks ago Infinity Ward put out some trailer video starring some pitcher from the Phillies. It was topical and seemed fine, except at the ending they put up a card that said Fight Against Grenade Spamming. F.A.G.S. What a dumb thing to do. I sincerely hope someone got fired. Can you imagine if that card had a slur for any other group? This is all kinds of fucked up.

In conclusion: Modern Warfare 2 is probably really good and is going to make a lot of money.

This is the Ballad of the Robo Jockeys

I’m happy to announce that I’ve gone as far as I’m going to go with Robo Jockeys and that the album is now available at the SLXP website.

Read this later, download it now.

Robo Jockeys is a first-of-its-kind technopera. It tells a complex story of war and peace, love and hate. It all starts with Thelonious, leader of all of mankind, and the revolt of the world’s robot workforce. Work in the legendary heroes the Robo Jockeys, and you’ve got a whale of a tale, to say the least.

Ultimately I didn’t get to live up to my initial ambition, but I’m still very much satisfied with what I’ve got here. It would be really embarrassing for my roommates or really anyone to see my recording vocals, so that slowed down the process. Since I had the core story recorded already, I figured there was no point in making you guys wait anymore.

I think it’s definitely the best SLXP album yet, although still not quite on par with the greatness that is Fat Sherman. In fact, I heard that SLXP is thinking about giving it up soon…

Postergate

Hey how about a fun post with no particular relevance to anything current? I remember back in September when Sean made a post on his blog of movies with similar posters. When I saw that it triggered my memory back to when I saw this dvd of a Stephen Dorff movie. At first I thought it was the Bourne Identity until I realized it just looked strikingly similar. That got me to thinking about other movie posters and dvds with similar designs, why does that happen? Is it to trick someone into buying the crappy straight to dvd movie? “Well it looks like Bourne Identity maybe it’s as good as Bourne Identity“. It’s not easy tracking these down but here are a few I’ve seen over the years and a couple of others I just discovered.

I’ll bet you anything that this one wasn’t a coincidence. Who the hell would want to see an espionage thriller with Stephen Dorff? If it wasn’t for that cover I bet it would never get rented but confuse people and that’s money in the bank. Similar colors a target in the middle. Actually the movie poster for Bourne (I used the dvd cover) also has a girl running behind Matt Damon, hmm interesting.

I’m not sure how this one went down. At first glance you’d be like “Another straight to dvd movie ripping off a more popular movie” but this I’ll Believe You thing came out first. About a year beforehand with a theatrical limited release, yet their dvds are like clones… Is somebody ripping someone off? Either way you can’t deny their similarity in the various boxes with actors heads, conspiracy?

I think this one was purely an accident. Who gives a shit about Sphere? That movie sucked so I doubt this other crappy looking flick attempted to copy it. Though you have to admit it’s amusing how similar they turned out. Both feature three actors heads in a placement with a crescent shape dividing them between some sort of sci-fi image, out of this world.

Maybe this one is stretching it a little but I always thought these looked similar. A silhouette in a blue aura surrounded by black? I think there’s something going on here.

I think this one is my favorite, it’s like a complete knockoff down to every detail. Is Gone in Sixty Seconds even that good of a movie? Are they really trying to bring in that crowd, fool people into thinking this is some kind of sequel or is in any way related? You can’t make that stuff up.

That’s all folks, at least that’s all I could think of/find at the moment. If anyone likes this than perhaps I’ll do another one sometime, if I can find more knockoffs which I probably can, Otteni out.

Man In The Mirror

This Is It

After hearing that they were going to release a film chronicling Michael Jackson’s ill-fated “This Is It” rehearsals, I was a little skeptical about the intentions of such a release. At the surface it seems that This Is It could’ve been seen as essentially a shameless way of cashing in on the recent death of “The King Of Pop”. However, I think this film works superbly as a showcase for Jackson’s undeniable talent as an entertainer, as well as a consummate professional.

The film consists of various rehearsal performances that were taken by a small camera crew as Jackson was preparing for what was going to be his grand “comeback” tour. As well as capturing some great performances we are also able to see Jackson’s interactions with the dancers, the musicians, and director Kenny Ortega. Also, interspersed in the film are a few interviews with the people involved with the show at the time of the rehearsals. These are easily the weakest parts of the film considering they do little more than show the dancers and musicians talking about how great Michael Jackson is, but luckily those are kept to a minimum.

This Is It never really lets us get that close to Michael Jackson, and it doesn’t really give us too much more insight in to Jackson personally, but that’s OK because what really makes this an intriguing film is being able to see Jackson truly thrive on the stage, the place I think he always felt most comfortable. His dancing is just absolutely electric, he shows no signs of illness and it’s absolutely mesmerizing to see what he was able to do with his body even at 50 years old. His singing is also pretty great, even though MJ mentions a few times in the film that he should be saving his voice and not project as much, but from most of the performances you wouldn’t be able to tell that he wasn’t giving it his all.

I also found the whole backstage aspect of the film to be pretty interesting too, as we’re able to see what went into what was going to be a very extravagant concert. Being able to see the way Jackson worked meticulously with his back-up band as well as the dancers also really gives us an idea of his attention to detail as a performer. And despite the fact that Michael Jackson remains a kind of mysterious figure throughout the film, This Is It really gives us a striking depiction of why he was so successful and why he left such an impact on pop culture.

I know they were billing this movie as playing “for two weeks only” when it was first released, but I think it’s going to be running a little longer in theaters. So if you’re a fan of Jackson’s work I would recommend getting out there and seeing This Is It, it stands as a very respectful and at the same time thrilling tribute to one of the great American entertainers of all-time.