Craig's Blog : Hollyweird

Video ITunes

craigg75 — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:11:00 GMT

Apple recently announced they are coming out with an iPod that will play videos. Very cool and a long time coming. Once again Apple will lead the way. I know there were pocket video players already in the market but was anyone buying them? Overpriced junk mostly. Apple also announced a new version iTunes, (has Apple copyrighted the letter “i”?) which is the software that interfaces to the iPod. It's also a standalone media player much like Windows Media Player. The new version of iTunes will allow users to download TV shows for $1.99. That is a huge thing. The whole Tivo thing was all about being able to watch a show when the consumer had time to and be able to skip commercials. Now you don't even need to own a Tivo, you can just download it to your new iPod or iTunes player. Plus Apple is coming out with their own media center software for the Macs so you can hook up your Mac to your TV and voila you have Apple's version of Tivo. I find it refreshing that the tv networks are finally starting to embrace a new way of selling their shows, via the internet. So if this new way of watching tv really picks up, and it probably will with the younger crowd, how will advertisers make up for the loss of their captured audience? On a similar thread, the BBC has also started putting their shows on a private bit torrent network. Right now only a select number of users in Britain have access to this network, but we only hope that this will be expanded. The times they are a changin'.

Couch potato season starts

craigg75 — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 17:44:00 GMT

Well football season started last weekend. Our Rams lost their opener to SF. This year will be a repeat of last year, lucky if they hit 8-8. Same strengths and weakenesses. I think it's time for the head coach to go. He's in a rut and can't figure out how to energize the team and give them an edge. The St.Louis favorite ex-QB Kurt Warner starts this year as the Arizona Cardinal starting QB. The Arizona Cardinals are the old St.Louis Cardinal football team. Lot of animosity still exists for St.Louis. However that has changed a little with people rooting for Kurt. His team lost the opener too but hopefully he can make a difference with that beleagored group. I noticed the Cincinnati Bengals won their first game. I have a feeling they finally have a team that can make a playoff run this year. Let's hope so, the people of Cincinnati live and breathe football, they are overdue.

TV's fall season starts too. I noticed a large number of crime related shows this year. Up from last year. I really don't care for them. I tried watching a couple of them but they really play on viewer's dark fantasies. It's not just a mystery murder that gets solved. It usually a perverted sex crime or some really disgusting murder that's highly graphic. Call me a prude but I find all of it to be repulsive that people allow their inner demons to be manipulated by Hollywood. Gross. On a brighter note my favorite series Lost is starting it's second season this month. Can't wait to see what's in the hatch! I decided to stop following ER, the characters and stories are so worn out. I'm also anticipating watching the new season of Everwood and Judging Amy. Good shows even if they are mostly chick flicks. Speaking of chick flicks I picked up the second season of Once and Again on DVD the other day. Great show, not sure why I can relate to it so well. TV is still mostly a vast wasteland, even with cable tv. I find most of the shows I watch are from the BBC that I obtain in several questionable ways ;-) I'd pay for BBC service if it was ever offered in the US.

Spamalot

craigg75 — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 17:05:00 GMT

So the Monty Python spoof on their movie Holy Grail, Spamalot won the Tony for best musical. How does that happen? Wow. In any case it'll never make it to St.Louis I'm sure. Would be fun to go see in any case.

What the bleep do we know?

craigg75 — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 17:53:00 GMT

So Gregg and I finally got around to seeing the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? I give it a 6 out of 10. It's sort of reminded me of some of the jazzed up specials on Nova or Discovery channel when they try to explain something in science that's esoteric. Throw in a little animation and cool special effects and suddenly you have a pretty cool show about quantum mechanics. Not that there is anything wrong with that but it's like only looking at the cool graphic on the physics book cover and going wow look at that, now I understand it. Really the joy is delving into the book and learning it. But quantum physics, consciousness, nature of reality, mysticism is so ripe for special effects and sheeple. The first third of the film dealt with quantum superposition. The second part had an awesome animation sequence to describe how we are basically slaves to the chemicals. A pumping hypothalmus, blobs of cells with neural receptors and emotions and rock music. The last part went off the deep end and added the mystics in with the mix. bah. The movie was about a woman dealing with her disgruntled life with cutaways of interviews with scientists and mystics. So in the end once we've figured out quantum physics, the chemical nature of emotions and all of it's possibilities it's only a short leap to mysticism and the magic wands of how we can change our environment. Mostly the power of positive thinking. It was fun ride though, a worthy bit torrent download if it ever gets out there.

Gregg found this interesting site detailing the movie's subject matter -- Forums

4400

craigg75 — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 21:29:00 GMT

I'm not sure if anybody out there in the cable TV ready world have had a chance to catch a new show on USA called The 4400. It's an ok scifi show, I've enjoyed the first 3 episodes so far. A reviewer on imdb.com hated it. Said it was poorly acted with terrible scripts. Well this is a made for cable tv show, which means low budget and scraping the bottom of the barallel for actors and script writers, so I try not to expect much from cable. However I thought the SciFi channel did a wonderful job with their Dune miniseries. Much better than David Lynch and his oversized movie budget could come up with. Anyway the 4400 is about 4400 people who were randomly “taken” by an unknown force starting in 1946 and continued up until today. Then overnight they all return to earth, with no memory of their “abduction” and not second older than when they were taken. However each of them are slowly discovering they have a unique special talent that was added to them. Like one guy could move super fast, another could cause local micro eathquakes, yet another could remove life or restore it by simple touch. Sort of X-men-ish but still it's enough to make a series out of -- each week we discover another of the 4400's powers and how it plays out. Of course the overriding question is “where were they this whole time and what happened to them?”. The Gilligan's Island conudrum, will they ever get off the island. However it does have that weird X-Files feel to it at times. No one has been able to step in and take over that weirdo tv show slot since XFiles exited TV a few years ago.

Ramblings

craigg75 — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 21:04:00 GMT

Well today I got $20 in movie tickets for doing an outstanding job at work. That's nice to be complimented. They have these weekly “communication” meetings that I fail to see any communications being done and this is where you are “recognized“.

Mostly looking at charts and bar graphs of performance and metrics. Boring. Let the anal-ysts deal with that and tell me where I need to work harder in. I'm a grunt I admit it. So I decided a few months ago to just stop going to the meetings. Kind of nice to be in the office for 30 minutes with everyone gone. I can get so much done in those 30 minutes. I feel like the guy in Office Space, “I really only get a good 30 minutes of work done a week”. The interesting part is I still get “recognized“. So I got movie tickets, what show should I take Annette to? Heck I can grab Gregg, not every movie has to be with the girlfriend. Then again she told me long ago it's one of the things she likes to do most. Brownie points and all of that.. Back to what movie. A few good ones are out now, most notably I, Robot. Sure it's a trashing of Asimov's classic just to show off some cgi and Will Smith action vehicle. But it still looks an entertaining movie. Am I breaking a covenant that we as hard core scifi have by seeing this? Well I've never been good at being apart of the group (see above). I might be able to convince Annette to go, Gregg will go in a heartbeat, he'd rather build robots than eat. Then there's the Bourne Supremacy. I saw parts of the Bourne Identity. It was ok, mystery-action flick. Annette really liked it a lot. The other one out there is the Will Ferrell movie Anchorman. I like Ferrell, he was great in Elf. It got good reviews so it's a maybe. Then again it's a good rental down the line. I heard he's going to play Ignatius J. Reilly from the book Confederacy of Dunces.

We'll see if Hollyweird does a fair job with it. It will be the first real chance for Will Ferrell to play a character with depth. All of his other characters have been one dimensional silly ones. Although he's done a great job with them.

So can somebody be too respectful of others? Can you lose yourself, your identity trying to play nice? I guess that depends on your definition of respect. To me the after you get rid of the god voodoo stuff from the 10 commandents, all it comes down to is respect those around you, the golden rule, pure and simple. Moses

was a great marketer for religion. He couldn't offer the jews just 5 or 11 commandments, he needed a good round number like 10. Sounds more holy and perfect. God doesn't work with prime numbers... Anyway I obviously have issues with respect, I don't respect too many people. My dad use to say you can't respect anyone unless you first learn to respect yourself. A good internal question, need to call a few private methods of this current instantiation of Craig. My friend Gregg says he's been instantiated 11 times in his life. My instatiation count is lower, I think I'm in my 5th instationation right now. I just hope I don't have a memory leak and get garbage collected...

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

craigg75 — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 19:30:00 GMT

Annette and I saw the latest Jim Carey movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last weekend. It was ok, not bad and not good, just average. Annette thought it stunk, but she's not a big fan of Jim Carey and came in with that pre-judgement. He played a real shy guy without any of his usual wackiness though. I found a new appreciation for Kate Winslet. Something extremely attractive about her in that movie. For all you Kirsten Dunst fans there's a great scene of her jumping up and down on a bed in her underwear. Anyway the plot of the movie is Carey's character and girlfriend (Winslet) erase their memories of their shared but stormy relationship. Jim Carey backs out in process and we discover how memory works. Nothing new really. Anyway the question obviously is would you erase a part of your memory if you could? In the words of Captain Kirk “Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. There the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain.“ I think most people agree with Kirk there. I think there is one thing I'd like erased from me. My memory of the movie The Fly with Jeff Goldblum. That movie still haunts me. Left me with some serious creeps way down deep. It serves no purpose other than to turn my stomach whenever I see Jeff Goldblum. But like roadkill or Doritoes I can't stop watching it when it comes on tv (f*ck you Ted Turner for showing that movie all the time). I'm drawn in by it's total “grossness“. At every turn I keep thinking, this movie can't get any more gross and then Jeff Goldblum barfs up acid to dissolve his food. Not only did he pull his ear off, he's stores it in a cabinet with all his other lost body parts. Ahhh!!!!

Almost Cat In the Hat

craigg75 — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 13:55:00 GMT

Sunday I took Kenzie with me to see Cat In The Hat at the movie theater. The company I'm contracted to, Anheuser-Busch, rented out the one of the theaters as a holiday gift of sorts for it's employees and contractors and their families. The movie they picked was the “family friendly“ movie Cat In The Hat. It was a lot of fun, got to meet the families of those I work with. They had free pizza, brownies, cookies, popcorn, soda, etc. Kenzie ate a ton. She said this is just like being at home. The kicker (and there's always a kicker with free things right?) was they had assigned seating at the theater. They stuck Kenzie and I all the way in the front on the far right. Ever try to watch a movie from there? Obviously you can't. I suppose they gave the employees the better seats. So Kenzie frowned and I agreed. I called mom to find out what else was playing at the theater and we snuck out and watch Eddie Murphy's latest Haunted Mansion. Kind of a dumb film, scared Kenzie in a few places. But we had fun none the less. Another fun memory with Craig for her to remember :)

Battlestar Galactica ... please R.I.P.

craigg75 — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 14:06:00 GMT

So the SciFi channel is going to bring back Battlestar Galactica to TV. I never cared for the first incarnation that much. It was definitely one of the many children that the Star Wars movies gave birth to. The writing in the show was what I found silly, even at 15 years old. My beef about bringing back a campy scifi show is that why can't they (who are owned by CBS) bring on some fresh, original stories to TV? There's plenty of scifi classics out there in books just waiting to be brought to life on tv. I guess real scifi just doesn't sell unless you include vampires, wizards and magic potions in with it. Fantasy sells these days. I'm not naive either, I know tv shows are about selling commercials and demographics and Neilson ratings. If you're going to plunk down a good chunk of change you want some guarantee that there will some ROI. Baby boomer shows are the best bet it seems these days to make that happen. So if we want to see any “new“ movies we get to watch reruns like Cat In The Hat with Mike Myers or The Six Million Dollar Man with Jim Carey. Doesn't anyone in Hollyweird have any balls anymore to try something new and original? I guess this is why I never see movies anymore and have lost faith in Hollyweird. See you at the foreign film festival!