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.

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.

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…

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.

Hey gang, well I have to wake up excruciatingly early tomorrow but before I hit the hay, how about I post a link to a video project I did for school? For our first video in my video foundations class (thus far we’ve only done photography) we were supposed to do a video that we believe captures the spirit of silent filmmaker George Melies. Mainly were supposed to concentrate on his use of pioneering visual effects. So I decided to use a bunch of reverse effects due to the fact that it’s visually intriguing and humorous. I think my video kind of strayed from being anything similar to a Melies short but it’s good enough and it’s only about a million times better than anyone else’s video. I don’t want to be a jerk but that’s just the truth.

For a year or so I’ve been telling Sean that someday I’d make a video where I eat a sandwich in reverse and I guess this it. So here’s a link to my video “The Backwards Man.”

Still finishing up my “Top Terrors of 2000s” list which is taking a little longer than I anticipated but I’d still say it was a successful Halloween themed week. I hope everyone else enjoyed this spooky time of the year and will continue to enjoy the crisp autumn season as I do. So How about I leave with you a link to a creepy classic Slaughter Man. It’s more than just an urban legend… It’s an “Urband” legend.