Cereal is Just Cold Milk with Soup

A Week Late Culmination of my Final Projects

2010-05-19T13:41:00.006-04:00

I'm a bit late on the posting but I've been enjoying my first week of summer break by just not thinking about school work entirely but it has been ahwhile since I last updated this and in all honesty there are only so many splatter films you can watch in theaters until they all start looking the same to you. So here are my finals below.

Lip Syncing with Python #1 -- Digital Sausage Tutorials from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

This was my final for Programming for Animators class, we had to make a tool that we wanted to use and then make a video demonstrating the tool without it being a boring voiced walk through, I sort of did a deconstruction of that. What I did for this was make a simple character set based lip syncing interface to make the process of lip syncing in python closer to what I'd do in Flash where I'd switch out the different mouth shapes as symbols. The script worked surprisingly well for me and I was able to get the lip part of this video done in only about 15 minutes, and it looks better than my previous lip sync which took infinitely longer.

Feel free to download the code here and give me any feedback if something in it goes horribly wrong. I wrote the code primarily as a tool for myself to make the lip syncing easier for my senior project next year.

Men in Black Kinetic Typography from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

Likewise, here is my Final for AfterEffects class. This was due a week before all my other finals because it was a Communications Design course instead of Digital Arts so luckily I didn't have to do this in the midst of my other projects but it was a lot of fun regardless. Here I took a 30 second clip from my favorite scene from Men in Black and animated the dialogue in it. Cool! Said scene below...

Chris Cookson Demo Reel (Spring '10) from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.
This is the demo reel I made for pre-production class to send around for internships, check it out in all it's one minute glory.

For film history class, on top of a traditional written final exam, we had to hand in a poster based on one of the films we watched in class. I chose the slapstick Obi-Wan Kinobe vechicle, The Horse's Mouth as the source for the poster. Why not?

...and lastly here is the final render for Character Design class, you've likely seen the concept drawings of her earlier on this blog but here it is completed and with a quasi-dark backstory to it as well.

Hey look, a blog post

2010-04-07T19:12:00.000-04:00

Jumper Crash (Experimental Animation) from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

My midterm for the Programming for Animators class at Pratt Institute animated using mostly Python scripting and then a bit of compositing in AfterEffects at the end. Rob O'Neill was the instructor.

Audio was the track -Jumper- (ID: 168734) from the Newgrounds Audio Portal by user Waterflame.
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/168734

and also here are some things I am working on for character design class

That was my initial sketch, she was based off of an ink blot I found on the now defunct Daily Monster blog when it was asking for user submissions. My idea is that she was a fashion model who sold her right arm to the devil to be granted eternal youth; think of it as District 9 meets The Devil Wears Prada.

and the latest revision of her design so she would look a bit better in 3D...

lastly, here is a rendering of a bust of my head I did in Character Design class; the head is toon shaded while I added in the line art in flash.

as always, be sure to check out both my Vivian blog (where about 60% of my homework time is going towards) and my Twitter for more updates on what I'm doing.

Hey! some of my Ugly Americans stuff is online now...

2010-03-24T00:41:00.005-04:00

Here's a quick art post over here, totally getting mauled by Junior yet picking up and taking 16 credits + an internship on the side instead of my usual jobless 13 credit schedule is taking a bit of a toll on me but HERE IS A LOOK INSIDE THE MADNESS!!

some assignments from AfterEffects class too for good measure

...and here's an adorable movie I starred in, I didn't do any of the editing in or anything but I think it came out quite nicely.

...some more of the shots I did on Ugly Americans are starting to show up on ComedyCentral.com as well.

The shot at the :10 second mark in the season 1 highlight reel with the demon baby pouring whisky down the throats of women, I did the women and my good Pratt buddy and Whale Tales co-writer, April Yim did the demon baby. Also, if you saw the Beautiful World spot for Ugly Americans on Hulu, IGN, Kotaku or during practically any commercial break on Comedy Central, the chances are you got to see the 3/4 fish person walk cycles I did for that. Most of the other shots were inbetweened by the rather awesome aisle of interns...a ton of Pratt people :)

Expect more updates next week however, to see if my MEL scripting midterm and Character Design self-portrait didn't turn out in any way disasterous. If you want more frequent updates from me, follow me on Twitter OR check out the Vivian blog to see how often I can change my mind on an idea over the course of two months.

Just a couple of things

2010-02-18T22:30:00.007-05:00

I just started a new blog for my Pre-Production class, some of the more polished stuff from there will wind up on Cold Milk Soup but most of the rudimentary conceptual pieces will likely go there. It is mostly a log of my progress for my Senior Capstone project but if you are interested in seeing some of my more sketchier work, check it out!

and while we're at it, here is a render of Greg Reaper, still haven't textured him yet (will have that up next week) but I kind of like the way he looks as is right now.

Some Really Early Character Design Stuff!

2010-01-28T17:36:00.006-05:00

The drawings aren't quite perfectly lined up right now for modeling, but I don't think I'm going to be looking at the images directly on an image plane in Maya quite yet, if so I'll probably adjust the drawings a bit.
Anyway, here's the character I'll probably model for my first assignment in Character Design class. He's Gregory Reaper, the 15-year-old son of the Grim Reaper. Is generally a wimpy guy, watches a lot of animé and has a job folding t-shirts at The Gap. When his father gets a cold and has to take a sick day from work, he gives his son the task of arriving to kill an adorable 12-year-old girl. Greg is too nice of a guy to go through with this, so instead he fakes the girl's death, fabric of space and time related hijinks ensue...good times.

Likewise, here's my other character who I'll likely use for my pre-production class. If you have been following this blog you may recognize his design from an earlier post on here (or you can see his progression so far here) and it's one of the ideas I've been thinking of possibly for senior project. I'll have a semester or so to really think on his design so the chances are that he'll go through a few more iterations BUT the Pink Floyd boxers will stay, I will fight to keep them on :P

This unnamed character is a hermit, he lives alone with his spoiled cat (which I think I'll call Vivian) and has been eating a diet of cereal and tuna (which he doubles as cat food) for the past week. His cat hasn't been eating well and he's starting to recollect the time he spent with her. I want to animate his internal monologue like a storybook which becomes more and more like the classic children's book Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. As his story gets more and more sentimental, our main character turns from sympathetic to entirely creepy as we find out that he sang his cat to sleep every night for the last ten years. Ultimately he'll leave the house and put the cat down.

Keep in mind, the idea above is COMPLETELY rough. In the pre-production class we're going to eventually have to start up a production blog for the short, so when I actually settle on an idea, I'll likely move most of the updates to that one.

Had a bit of a busy break, but working on something really awesome

2010-01-16T22:14:00.008-05:00

The only problem with working on a legitimate animated show, is that there is very little you are actually allowed to say about it. Since the beginning of January, I've been coming in a couple of days a week working on some work on the upcoming Comedy Central show, Ugly Americans. The show is looking very funny (am I even allowed to say that) and comes from the same folks who created Adult Swim's Superjail and MTV2's Wonder Showzen among other things; namely the Golden Age shorts which were popular at the Ottawa Animation Festival a few years back.

The clips below come from the pilot episode and are embeddable from Comedy Central's website, they should give a good idea of what to expect from the show when it comes in March. If the thumbnail is any indication, this is probably NSFW...

Surprisingly enough, the show is animated entirely in Macromedia Flash MX (yes, a seven year old version of the program) at very high zoom levels in order to really make amends with the weird line smoothing in Flash, I don't really want to go into specifics beyond that but they treat it more or less like a traditional animation program, very little tweening and rigged animation.

Mostly I've been working on the inbetweens but it is really interesting to overhear the meetings that the staff is having a room or so over and I've been hearing bits and pieces of the show off and on and have laughed quite a bit at some of the lines. The show seems to be pretty deadpan, I'm pretty sure I'd watch it even if I haven't done some work on it.

Apart from that, here are some drawings that I've done over the Fall/Spring semester break at Pratt.

This is a little something for April Yim's Palette Town Project collaboration. I'm working on a full piece as well, but this is mostly just a name card.

and this is a new Header for The Movie Watch. The guy on the right is supposed to be Sherlock Holmes, not sure how clear he actually came out...

This Tuesday I'll be back at Pratt and then the following Monday (after Dr. Martin Luther King Day), I'm supposed to come in with three ideas for my senior project short film. I already have two I'm confident in and one I'm not so sure about. As long as we're on the subject, here is a bit of a sketch I did for one of the ideas a couple of months back which will probably end up looking nothing like the actual short

The last batch of finals and stuff

2009-12-17T10:47:00.007-05:00

Hell week is finally over, here are some of the results. The first is my character animation final, will probably fix the pole vectors on the elbows and make he timing more pose based on the second half of the animation before putting it on my demo reel but I'm really happy with how this one turned out check it out! (the embedding on Facebook is a bit funny if the post is not at the top of the page, click here if the videos aren't loading correctly)

I didn't animate this second one but this is animated from a portion of an interview I did for badass, animator extraordinaire/classmate, Eugene. He did a fantastic job translating my mannerisms on to a morbidly obese rabbit. Also, on a side note, this horrifying story is partially true (exaggerated for comedic effect obviously)...but still, this terrifies me vaguely to this day.

Lastly, here's my final for audio class. It's probably the grittiest thing I've ever done, which is weird considering it was originally just a one off joke. If I were to produce this into an actual film, I'd re-record the voices with a professional microphone and make sure to keep the levels in check but I'm really pleased with how I handled the music in this, check it out.

The chords in this were modified from a certain popular Xbox Live Arcade game...can you guess which one it was?

New Video: Fear and Loathing in Willoughby

2009-12-13T20:46:00.001-05:00

Here's round one of my onslaught of finals, this one for Lighting and Rendering, bask in the glory of an adorable 3D elephant (which has appeared on this blog a few times already)

Fear and Loathing in Willoughby from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

My lighting and rendering final, we were supposed to composite 3D animation with HD footage...this is a video of me finding a pink elephant in my bathroom.

my fifteen minutes are up...

2009-11-27T20:04:00.005-05:00

Over the last couple of weeks I was working on a parody of Twitter to accompany an Onion article, this was what was on their homepage last monday...

Here's the parody of the Fail Whale I made for the page, I'm really happy with how it turned out

you can find the article here and the accommodating website here. It's also doing pretty well on Facebook apparently.

busy, busy, busy (and some older Onion stuff)

2009-11-19T17:53:00.007-05:00

it's getting towards the final few weeks at Pratt and the work load for the final exams are starting to pile up. Can't say the work hasn't been getting to me, but I'm trying my best to keep myself from going too crazy.

This is the Lighting and Rendering Project I've been working on, you can see the concept sketch for it in the last post I made here.

Likewise, I've been working on something really awesome for The Onion over the past few days, probably can't post it here yet but in the mean time, here are some of the other graphic things I've done for them...

This is the Twitter background I made for their page, it was originally a parody of the one CNN has but now it's a bit more subdued. Pretty slick.

Likewise this Twitter background is for an account relating to an iPhone application relating to a popular Onion News Network video and will be in use whenever the application gets approved for the iTunes store.

and this was made for a screenshot for the following Onion article over here. I'm quite fond of the logo I made for it...

Another October Art Post

2009-10-22T18:04:00.007-04:00

Likewise, this is my latest Facebook profile picture, my roommate last year Devin is Mr. Peabody in this because he was a rather significant history buff.

This is another project concept sketch for lighting and rendering, for this I'm thinking of having a bug zapper light the scene with a blue hue.

and here's a little gem from Twitter

October Art Update

2009-10-13T01:17:00.019-04:00

Firstly, here was my entry for Pratt's 24 hour animation competition, Bring Your Own Pixel. It's a little rough in spots but it was able to nab me second place, still unsure what prize it would actually entail but from what I heard its a pick between a WACOM Tablet, a 1 TB HDD and a 20" LCD monitor, all are really awesome prizes.

Requiem in D Cup Major from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

The same week, I also had an assignment due for my character animation class. I'd polish a few more things, and add some titles first before officially putting it on my Vimeo or taking pieces into my future demo reel but it's a fun piece nonetheless. (blogger seems to not want the video to upload, BLECH! I'll find some way to put it up eventually)

Also here are some things that I've been doing for my lighting and rendering class as well, check 'em out, this is the rendering based on the concept sketch I had in my last post.

and while I'm at it, here's some concept art for a compositing project I'll have in that class

and here's a bit of an over saturated rendering of the 3D model I'm making based on the concept art

I've already filmed my video segment for it, but I'd rather post that up here when it's all done.

Some Concept Art and Mountain Dew contest follies

2009-09-25T15:04:00.005-04:00

if you read my Twitter, you may have seen this already but this is the concept art for my lighting and rendering midterm, I'm still modeling the 3D part of it right now but its supposed to be a messy room from the perspective of another cockroach. Its looking pretty rad, I'll post up the final version of it when I'm done and dusted with it.

I just submitted this to Mountain Dew's Can Design challenge, its for the Dewmocracy contest this year and from what I've heard it may be for a new tropical flavor of Dew, so I made my can accordingly.

Likewise, here's a little visual piece I made for my Digital Audio class. It's a time line for the acoustic song "Green Leaves of Summer" which was used in the classic John Wayne spaghetti western film, The Alamo and more recently to open up Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. It may be a good idea to view the larger version of the image while seeing how the music (conveniently embedded above) syncs up to it.

Lastly, this is a little bouncing ball exercise I did as a quick assignment in character animation class. Ideally, I'd add a bit more of an easing in for when it goes off the ramp and I'd have the target crush the ball at the end, maybe work a bit more on the rotation too but I figured I might as well post it up here, why not?

some squirrel doodling

2009-09-07T21:31:00.003-04:00

My character animation teacher wanted us to go to the park and draw a some of the poses that squirrels make, and then make it into a quick little animation using what we had. Here's what I did...

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 7: near the end of summer edition

2009-08-20T10:38:00.008-04:00

My rate of these has gone down lately (I got a job and I have a bit less free time) and this will probably be the last post of this sort this summer which puts the final number of drawings down to just about 40 people. Which is pretty good considering my first post came from an outside request and the rest were just from a flood of comments after I mentioned "if you ask, I'll draw you". While I have skipped a few people, mainly those I haven't really seen since Middle School or something, the majority of the requests up until July have been granted. Here's the latest batch of drawings below.

Marissa suggested a photo including her boyfriend Josh in it as well. She was among one of the many people I met more than two years ago on AIM before ever stepping foot into Pratt and she was one of the few people I already knew that were on the Healthy Choices floor foundation year. She does a lot of paintings and is a Painting major I believe. She also has a couple of tattoos, it could be more but I know she has a Peace symbol on her back and her last name on her hip.

I know Josh really well too, since he's a 3D Animation major in my year and there are only about 20 or so undergrads in my class, I pretty much had every major class with him last year including Intro to Modeling, Rigging and Editing class, I think that was all of them, there could be more, I'm not too sure. I really found his advanced Alien facial rig to be pretty rad, he was great at modeling in Maya too.

Devin and Collin were my roommates last year and were pretty much in all my foundation classes. This strip is a reference to the one time we decided to eat in the separate "dining" area of a local sketchy take-out Chinese restaurant. While the food was the same as their take-out, the prices were about 1.5 times higher than they normally would be and generally the place felt like it was about to fall apart. We did however, enjoy the large fish they had in the place though, its just not worth the price of admission to see them again.

Most of my memories with Devin and Collin came from LCD, 3D design and Drawing class foundation year. Each of those classes lasted about 6 hours long and met over 30 sessions. The most horrifying of the bunch had to be Drawing class which had to be one of the most exhausting classes I've ever taken, the professor came off as a bit strict at first too, but that was mostly because she cared so much about what she was doing. It was great fuel for conversation however and also a great excuse to let off steam playing a lot of Smash Bros. during the 2 hour lunch break between two 3 hour chunks of each class.

Jason is an industrial design major and a friend of Collin's, he used to have a mohawk when I first met him Freshman year and I kind of wish he kept it. Regardless, he was in a fairly cool pixelation video that he made for Beth Warshafsky's 4D design class in like 20 minutes. We weren't in the same class together but we had the same teacher.

Ed Waters has really awesome side burns, I really hope he doesn't shave them off. He's great at Smash Bros. too and is a pretty vocal Nintendo fanboy.

One of the More Decent Shows on Earth

2009-08-15T22:31:00.013-04:00

Lately, I’ve been winning a lot of small things off of Twitter. Starting from the most minor stuff, I got some custom stickers from a graphic designer I was following, followed by three Rock Band songs from Pepsi, a free KFC meal from Oprah an advance copy of Muramasa: The Demon Blade for Wii from Ignition Entertainment and lastly four free tickets to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.

While I don’t consider myself an incredibly lucky person, I feel like all the recent Twitter winnings are more a result from corporations not really understanding the “actual” size of social network websites and trying to bank on the so-called popularity based on all the media hype. While it’s true there are 12 million accounts on Twitter, only five percent of them have over 100 messages written while all the rest are just fairly dead. I’m pretty sure I was only among a handful of people who entered the majority of the given contests.

Which leads me in to this blog post, when I won a set of four forty dollar tickets to the Circus at Coney Island. After writing a fairly negative post on Coney Island, I was auto-followed by their respective Twitter account, I followed back figuring it could help me figure out some cheap-ish things to do on one of those many lazy Sundays. One post in particular, directed me to the “ Be a Circus Supermom” contest; it entailed retweeting a post on the account and then sending them an e-mail with your Twitter username. I half sarcastically entered, only to receive notification that I won tickets a couple of days later.

After gathering together a few friends (all of whom have been drawn on this blog at one point or another) who could make it to Coney Island on a few days notice and working around my work schedule (I wouldn’t really want to bring my laptop to the circus) I was ready to go with my expectations set fairly low for the place. The initial e-mail suggested coming in a bit early to get the tickets from the booth, which was an ample excuse to hang out and to check out the cold dead corpse of what used to be the amusement capital of New York City (there’s a billboard for the dumpy Playland amusement part right by Nathan’s now, for god’s sake).

While it’s unfortunate that Astro Land is no longer the centerpiece of Coney Island, a lot of the carnival themed businesses that surrounded the location still remain in tact. Including picking up. Also, I was surprised to see that many of the rides at Astro Land are still running after being rented out by independent vendors, while I know it will inevitably be taken down, its still comforting in a way as if the apocalypse has been delayed by a couple of years or so despite the entire sleazy post-apocalyptic vibe that Coney Island has ALWAYS had.

So I ate a Corn Dog at Nathan’s and got some Banana soft serve Ice Cream over at the neighboring Denny’s Delight and then went over to the ticket booth. Getting the tickets was fairly painless after a quick flash of my Driver’s license. We arrived a couple of minutes late to the actual 7 o’clock showing but they seemed to keep the opening pretty low key, mostly of a clown whistling and amping up the audience.

Granted, most of the circus came off as pretty low-key, this is the second circus I’ve seen, and it could have easily been just the novelty of seeing it the first time when I was six or something but I found the experience just a bit underhwhelming.

Most of the acrobatics while very impressive where spread out pretty thinly among some underwhelming comedy bits and a few shows that were just completely unimpressive; mainly a troupe of trained dachshunds that could jump over six inch bridges, I’ve seen more impressive stunts at dog shows on Animal Planet. Luckily, all the cool stuff is in the YouTube trailer, including some things, such as Zebras that never actually made it into the show.

My other issue with the circus, was that the entire performance seemed biased towards the center while the left and right sides got the bum-end (literally) of the spectacle. Mainly, then they had a group of trained elephants form a congo line of sorts, they did this trick twice and both of the times I had nothing to really look at besides a few elephant asses forming a pose that may look a bit objectionable in an Animal Planet sense of the word.

My entire disappointment could be more a result of a lack of revenue for the circus, greatly crippling the gimmicky thrills of “The Greatest Show on Earth”, the entire tent was less than a quarter full and the ticket booth seemed relatively vacant thirty minutes before the performance. This could be either a sign of a recession or more a sign of the times, where greater spectacle can be viewed on the internet for free at your own convenience.

Don’t get me wrong, I plenty enjoyed some of the more low-grade thrills such as a man on a foot-long bike run it through a flaming hoop, and I thought the bit with the White Tigers was quite novel but I can’t say had I paid the forty dollars that I would have walked out satisfied and considering the fact that the entire circus thing is dying down, its probably a good idea to take a small child to it because I can’t really imagine the type of entertainment lasting that many more years.

Still, I greatly appreciated the free tickets that they hooked me up with and it made for a great night with my friends, just, if given the choice, I’d probably have more fun spending a few nights at the movies with the figurative amount of money.

Also, I’m working on another Facebook friend post, with ten days until I’m back at Pratt, time is starting to run a bit fast now.

The Lion King of Steaks

2009-07-31T22:06:00.010-04:00

I’ve been slacking on the Facebook friend pictures at the moment, I did one or two more since the last update but I’d rather post them in a batch of five or so than dedicate a post to each drawing individually. Even though its only a few days a week, the Onion has been taking a bit out of me between the train going into New York City and all but apart from that, I’m loving the work they have for me. I was able to get my background used on their Twitter page, so I’m already pretty satisfied, plus the guys I’m working for are all incredibly nice, and I’m not just saying it, I am surprised at just how friendly they come off as. Anyway, here’s a slightly less exciting life related blog post…

When it comes to Broadway, most of my experiences were with the more satirical plays. When it wasn’t rehashing quotes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spam-a-lot consisted of a lot of jabs at traditional Andrew Lloyd Weber, likewise while Avenue Q was not directly a satire, it was definitely a send-up of the coming of age story that often plagues the theater. Now, that I think of it, the only real traditional one I saw was Spring Awakening during Pratt’s 2007 orientation and I have a strong feeling that it was one of those love-it or hate-it kind of things (with my feelings leaning more towards the latter than the former).

So when my Pratt friend April wanted to watch The Lion King on Broadway, I was definitely excited due to the fact that I’ve been watching that DivX file of the Disney film on my Desktop for quite a few months (If that thing wasn’t in the wretched Disney Vault for so long, I’d probably even have the DVD of it) but I didn’t feel like it could outdo the film, not at all, especially given all the limitations of the Broadway format. Looking back however, I feel like the limitations were what made the Broadway adaptation so successful, they had to compensate with extra creative muscle, but I’ll get more into that later.

I got the tickets for the thing about a month and a half in advance and decided to come in at around 1 PM or so to have some time to hang out before the 8 PM show. This involved a run over to some of my favorite places, including familiar spots like Forbidden Planet and what would have been the Virgin Megastore (totally closed down), followed by some Bubble Tea at Saint Alp’s by Astor Place and then a stroll through the delightfully bizarre but all too brief Toy Tokyo.

On the way there, I passed by 99 Miles to Philly, which was a restaurant I’ve always wanted to visit ever since I read a post about it on Philly based animator Bryan Brinkman’s Twitter. Consequently, I wound up eating there for lunch and I can safely say that my “Steak wit Wiz” was definitely on par with the sandwich I’ve had in Philly and it was miles ahead of my own cheese steaks I’d make at home. I think I’ll heat up the cheese whiz a bit more and get even thinner steaks for my consequent attempts. The place was a good deal though, for ten bucks they gave you a sickly foot long greasy cheese steak with some waffle fries and a coke, for a non-chain in New York City, this is a pretty good deal.

Factor in some hanging out in Times Square and a relatively fancy pizza place and it was time for the 8 o’clock showing of Lion King. My initial impressions of the theater were incredibly favorable. They had some of the fancy African wood costumes behind the glass and a few fairly extensive gift shops throughout. Seeing all the merchandise, I should have been disgusted but for some reason I was impressed by the amount of detail and attention they put towards the effort, I could totally understand how the show had legs on Las Vegas whereas efforts like Avenue Q could only strive in New York City.

Our cheaper $60 tickets were literally against the wall in the highest mezzanine so we got a pretty decent view of the crowd going there. I was surprised that only about half the crowd consisted of families, while the rest were just Average Joes and middle-aged tourists going in to take a show. This could be because I was seeing it on a Thursday night and that is less than ideal for most families, especially ones with young children to see it, but I’d like to tell myself its because The Lion King is as synonymous with Broadway as Phantom of the Opera.

Watching Lion King on Broadway was an incredibly nostalgic experience for me, often I’d get chills down my spine, not too different from the chills I got when I first saw WALL-E, from something being so perfect its depressing and from it hitting an emotional chord with me. Especially when this was paired with a room full of people cheering and clapping incredibly loudly at every joke, punch line and dance sequence. Its weird, it was almost comforting to be around so many people that were that taken into the show.

While I’m pretty sure much of the praise for the show has already been said and much better than I possibly could write about it over the past 11 years of its run, I was completely taken away from the imagery, especially the dancers which would represent things as direct as giraffes and elephants, all the way to the more abstract such as blades of grass. The show kept things classy, even by Disney standards and the African art direction never came off as forced as it seemed in the commercials for the play. A lot of the more difficult sequences were pulled off in silhouette or with shadow puppets, while some of the characters were controlled by Avenue Q style puppetry with other objects being portrayed with kites and streamers, further making the play feel like some weird African themed Kabuki theater of sorts.

I was particularly impressed with the set for the show, which was rigged full of steam powered jets and was fully movable with trap doors and a lot of the pieces being on wheels. Absolutely every scene from the Disney movie was pulled off on the set, from the stampede all the way over to the climatic fight sequence off the cliff of Pride Rock. It was all a visual overload of sorts and I feel it goes without saying that the music was incredibly strong as well, like even topping the phenomenal score from Elton John and Hans Zimmer for the feature film.

When it ended the entire packed theater gave the thing a standing ovation, which is something I’ve never seen for a Broadway play. My only real complaint with the thing was that I haven’t seen it earlier, particularly when the thing was new to Broadway. Had I known I’d like the thing this much, I would have put the thing a lot higher on my priorities list.

…and no, I have not sold out to the Disney corporation…but I totally would...

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 6: creepy animé fetish edition

2009-07-15T20:53:00.018-04:00

I thought it was impossible but I've almost caught up with every request I've had on my Facebook album for a drawing. While I have skipped a couple of people, namely the ones that I've never seen since Middle School, I've gotten most of them in and all of the ones in the massive avalanche of comments during the first day I've uploaded it. Here are the next batch of five...

While I've already covered Adam Dreifus earlier, Nikki wanted a drawing but is one of the few college aged students I know without a Facebook account, she also wants to stay relatively anonymous on the internet. Nikki was in practically all my foundation classes in Freshmen year and I virtually hung out with her every day to do homework after that. There was a bit less hanging out in sophomore year, but I've still played 8 hour marathons of Rock Band on occasion and ate an incredibly suspicious looking bacon wrapped torpedo meat product with her when her roommate made it. Nikki is into science, grammar and anatomy too and is an avid comic buff, the comic above is a reference to her creepy obsession with eroguro art. Eroguro stuff is pretty disgusting, I wouldn't recommend doing a Google search for it...

Frances was also in all my foundation classes. One of her movies that she made in her 4D class involved me as a street thug robbing a girl on the street, only to get tackled by a cop. It was possibly the greatest film of all time and it had a huge response in class, if you've been reading this blog for ahwhile, the chances are you've seen it.

James is a painting major at Pratt and was one of my classmates in Animation 101 class and was a fan of Robo-Nader since the first time I mentioned the idea passing him. He does some pretty cool experimental stuff, I wish he had an account on Vimeo or something so I could link you guys to his work, I went to the opening for his paintings at Pratt as well, its all VERY cool.

Ben has a cool last name that rhymes with Ravioli, so that makes him a pretty cool cat in my book. He also knows Griffin Newman a funny guy I met during a summer animation program at Tisch, its weird in a 6 degrees of separation kind of way...

And last but not least, here's Marc Freundlich, he sat at my lunch table in high school every day and would often be the one commandeering the mini-Chess in a Tin matches going on. We'd also play cards occasionally, that is, before the school ruled "card games" as "gambling" and practically outlawed every game of "BS" we'd play...'tis a shame. More recently, Marc went with me to the screenings of Tokyo Gore Police and Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl over the past couple of years, he's obsessed with the New York Asian Film Festival and plans on volunteering at the festival next year so he could get into all fifty of their movies for free.

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 5: attack of the clones

2009-07-07T21:01:00.006-04:00

This batch comes a few days before I get back my Red Ringed Xbox 360 in the mail, its currently in Massachusetts coming back from its three week long pilgrimage to Texas. Which means I had to keep myself busy doing something besides watching a ton of movies (which I did a lot of mind you), this week's batch comes in a slightly more comic style, though there are still a few simple standing ones too.

Lyla starts this batch out, she was one of the few other animation majors (albeit she was a traditional animation major while I was CG) I met at Pratt's accepted student open house. At that time she had purple-ish hair and was way into unicycles. We've hung out a few times and discussed our hatred for the Shrek movies (and this was before Shrek the Third) as well as our love for crude humor and MTV2's short lived sketch comedy series, Wonder Showzen. I also had her in my Animation 101 class where one of our discussions on the ratty old couch in the traditional animation room lead to the inspiration for the piece above.

Daisy was one of the crucial members of Pratt's Super Smash Bros. community last year which started in the smaller Cannoneer dorm and ultimately spread to huge popularity in my Pantas dormitory. The group of players were much more tight-knit in the Can as most of the students played the game on the same TV, while most of the players in Pantas would often hang out in my room or a few other places (like the HDTV in the lobby), I recall. I used to actually skip lunch just to get in 2 hours of Smash Bros. in between classes and I went from 70 hours on my Melee save to 210 hours, while the sequel Super Smash Bros. Brawl reached the 180 hour playtime mark within the couple of months I had to play it at Pratt. Daisy was good with Jigglypuff, so was my roommate...those Jigglypuff players are tricky I tells ya...

Julian was a year younger than me in high school but I got to knew him fairly well between AIM and lunch antics. He's one of the few people that I know apart from myself that still watches Heroes and is a great person to vent all my Tim Kring related frustrations to. He has pretty awesome tastes in movies, games and anime as well and anyone with the guts to set their Google Chat status as "black McLovin" for 10 months is cool in my book. I watched the rather disappointing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with him and played him a few times in Soul Calibur IV as well, he thinks my play style with Sophitia is cheap...I have to agree.

Matt is a fan of my drawings, I'm a fan of my drawings too! how could I possibly deny his request? :)

During the last semester in High School, the administration forced a "senior project" on our grade, while the requirements were nothing more than a scant twenty or thirty slide Powerpoint presentation on ANY subject you can possibly think of with a few slides dedicated to how it ties into what you learned in high school, the very thought of additional work set my entire senior class up in arms.

One of the more intriguing senior projects came from Greg Farenga where he wrote around 30 slides about how its like to drive a truck, which was inspired by all the questions he receives every day when he parks at the school. The Powerpoint served as an FAQ of sorts and had a hilarious Tootsie Pop commercial tone going on throughout. Greg was a very tall guy and the teachers gave him the nickname "Tiny", he was one of the nicest guys I've met in high school which was funny considering that he could have easily been cast as a bully in a John Hughes comedy in the '80s, and I mean this is the most sincere way possible.

Asking the fated question is Marc, he was another person who requested a drawing on Facebook and was in both my Russian History/Economics class senior year as well as the pathetically easy Survey of Computers in my Freshman year. His Xbox Live Gamertag is "ROLF u Got SARS" which often leads to parent related confusion every time they see the notifier when he signs on while I'm watching a movie.

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 4

2009-07-01T21:13:00.005-04:00

The series continues in this McG directed installment featuring, none other than Christian Bale as John Connor...there is no way this could possibly go wrong. Last week I hinted at having a job interview at a certain vegetable related satirical newspaper, well the place was The Onion, I got the web intern job and I'm absolutely ecstatic to start my work there. The current batch of drawings continues below...

In my senior year of high school Paul was in a handful of classes with me, including AP English, Russian History, Economics and Video class, he may have been in more but after two years high school is a bit of a blur. The image above relates to a debate in English class on Death of a Salesman; in the class room I was the only student who felt that the character Happy was selfish for ignoring the needs of his family despite being completely ignored as a child. The class was heated in debate over this issue and the teacher seemed to be enjoying the surprisingly on-topic classroom discussion. Since then, I still had a few opportunities to debate this with Paul. He was in a band called "Punt the Baby" during high school, they broke up...he's probably in a new band now but I doubt the name is nearly as perfect...

Paul was also the guy representing Team X-Blades in my final dumb little High School short, Dragon Ball Zebra Slash Brink 2 which has received such rave reviews on YouTube such as "the gayest video i've ever seen"...I'm honored.

Mike Banom was practically in all of my classes foundation year, save for maybe 4D and the second semester of Art History. He is a drummer which may explain the large arms and a devout fan of blink-182 and Alkaline Trio. At the end of the first semester drawing class we drank some of that weird Mountain Dew Game Fuel, no one else in the class wanted to brave its flavor. He has a sick sense of humor as well so we got along quite fine.

Vikki was in practically all my classes sophomore year and I hung out with both her and her roommate April (you can see her in tons of posts here) quite extensively the second half of last year. Vikki is a huge fan of cute things and has the tendency to let that out in her animations which include the likes of ghosts with orange shaped heads. I'd often abbreviate her name as V-Ken, because I'm incredibly fond of making horrendous nicknames for people and that would probably explain the reason why I have her performing a signature Street Fighter move in the drawing above...

Craig is weird...in a good way. I had him in my Video Editing class and he tends to have a creepy presence that follows him in just about everything he does and I mean this in the most sincere way possible, you can get an idea from seeing his YouTube channel which includes videos of his friends vomiting to the carnival style music of Beetlejuice. With that being said he loves most things related to Tim Burton and has a sick hand at graffiti art.

Rachel is a self-proclaimed "ditzy girl with big boobs", with that in mind, I think I came pretty close with this one. Rachel was one of my floor mates on the "Healthy Choices Floor" at Pratt first year. I've played scrabble with her a couple of times and commented on a couple of her things on Facebook. She is prone to draw characters that she calls "Miltons" who's name comes from the character in Office Space, one of her Milton paintings was featured in an art gallery in Brooklyn, I believe.

Jess was another one of my classmates foundation year and is perhaps even more crass and sarcastic than me; which is a fairly admirable feat I may add. In one of her videos for 4D design class she dressed up as an old lady and danced to Snoop Dogg, Unk's "Walk it Out", or Li'l Wayne, or something, I'm not entirely sure. During the first few days of sophomore year I watched both the Power Rangers movie and one of the direct-to-DVD Little Mermaid prequels with her, it takes a certain level of sarcasm to be able to not just walk-out halfway through.

a slightly long-winded review of Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl

2009-06-27T13:33:00.016-04:00

While I’d hate to break the massive combo of friend drawings I’ve been posting this month, I’ve had an incredibly busy and fun week, which was launched by a surprise interview at an incredibly awesome satirical news publication that I sent my resume to. Whether or not I get the job is a shot in the dark, but at least I got to see the inner workings of the website for one of my all time favorite sources of humor. Plus the place was a few blocks away from Little Italy so I got to chow down on some delicious Italian food and pastries as well as the mass of obscure Japanese video game t-shirts at the Uniqlo store in SoHo.

Apart from that, I went back into New York City the following day to watch Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl at the IFC Center’s New York Asian Film Festival. This is the latest film from Yoshihiro Nishimura who directed Tokyo Gore Police which I saw at the very same film festival the previous year. While the film was made on a significantly smaller budget than Tokyo Gore Police (the director said it was $350,000 but the translator seemed to be having difficulty, so I’m lead to believe it was more along the lines of $3.5 million, or about a third that of Gore Police), this one definitely had more of a plot than straight out social satire.

What set the screening of Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl apart from Tokyo Gore Police was the fact that this was the worldwide premiere of the film and the two directors, as well as a few of the special effects and CG artists were present at the screening and were available for a Q and A before and after the screening. I know Subway Cinema will put a video of the interview up on YouTube and I’ll embed it as soon as it becomes available.

The screening was completely sold out several days before it was scheduled and the line at the IFC Center went all the way to their second floor 45 minutes before the movie began. The crowd consisted of fan boys and man-children of all shapes and sizes (me included). The most interesting thing I observed was a kid around 10 years old who took his mom to the screening, in line he was telling his mother about the toothed vagina in Tokyo Gore Police, referring to it as “alligator legs”, his mother was either really cool or she has no clue what she was getting in to.

Before the screening started, in the New York Asian Film Festival tradition they started with a DVD raffle. While last time they included a lot of obscure Japanese and Korean horror films, this time it was mostly just porno films and an incredibly out of place hospital drama called Vital. Granted, all the porno films had justifiably over the top titles including Grope Train 6, Sex Machine and Naked Rashomon (established humorously as “you’ve all seen Akira Kurosawa’s classic film, but have you seen the naked version?”). All these films were introduced by a overly enthusiastic fast-talking man in a pink Salmon suit, I really wish I could find him on YouTube as whatever I write here will never do him justice. (UPDATE! FOUND THE VIDEO)

Yoshihiro Nishimura gave a brief introduction to the film telling the audience that if they were fans of Tokyo Gore Police that they might be disappointed because this is actually a romantic comedy…set in a high school…with splatter; Following that he said that him and his co-director did not share a brother or “gay couple” relationship like the Cohens or the Wachowskis but instead fought like cats and dogs “or rather vampires and frankensteins” throughout the entire filming. The curator then asked him to explain the ganguro fashion trend in Japan, and then a few minutes and a too soon Michael Jackson joke later, the screening began.

As for the movie itself, it was definitely a lot more refined than his last film Tokyo Gore Police and offered a lot more intentional (or shall I say less satirical) humor making it more into some weird hybrid of an ‘80s John Hughes teen comedy and a low-budget splatter picture from Troma. The plot revolved around a love-triangle at valentine’s day after a boy ate a chocolate containing the severed finger from a foreign exchange girl that had a crush on him. After eating the finger, he turned into a half vampire and the girl who was a full vampire; wanted him to ingest more of her blood to become a full vampire…or she’d kill him. Meanwhile his current girlfriend investigates the relationship and is ultimately killed and then turns into a hyper Frankenstein monster that was engineered from her mad scientist of a father. The plot was non-sense and more a vehicle for the film’s ridiculous humor to come out.

Much in vein of Tokyo Gore Police’s fake advertisements ever present throughout the movie, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl featured several subplots that were only loosely connected to the actual plot. This included a sexy school nurse, janitor and vice principal who where all psychopathic killer scientists of sorts planning a super human experiment (or Frankenstein in this world) composed of body parts from minor characters in the film. Meanwhile, we’re treated to the Chinese director of The Grudge teach a Chinese class while cursing the English adaption of the movie, an Olympic sport afterschool style wrist cutting league and a quasi-racially insensitive Ganguro girl meet-up. It was all great fun leading to a legitimately entertaining final battle between the vampire and Frankenstein girls respectively; All of the this was accentuated by an energetic and catchy J-Pop soundtrack to turn all the offensiveness into boyish charm.

After the screening the directors and his crew of special effects artists leapt on stage to answer a few questions. I’m fairly certain this video will appear online but apparently this was the first time the co-director has seen the completed film and was “surprised to know that he made a movie that was actually, good”. I was able to land a question about breaking into the Japanese gore film scene, which he replied in saying just “find work” and that he was able to assemble a crew of gore hounds by meeting people working on various independent films and for special effects projects.

The last few tidbits they revealed at the Q and A session were that they were working on some short films set in the Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl universe to pad out the special features on the DVD and that there will be new shorts on the special double-dip release of Tokyo Gore Police. He also said that his next film will involve high school girls running over zombies with cars and it will be at the New York Asian Film Festival the following year. I’m already stoked.

There was an after party immediately following the screening but I didn’t actually go to it. It was getting late and I was unsure of the train schedule, plus me and my friends didn’t park a car at the train station and I didn’t want to bother my parents too much if it got any later. However, the movie experience was absolutely awesome and unforgettable and way worth the $13.50 price of admission.

…besides hack Hollywood directors like Michael Bay could learn a thing or two from these low-budget splatter films, they’re able to keep spectacle exciting without throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the screen. Its also worth noting that both Tokyo Gore Police and The Machine Girl will arrive on Netflix streaming (oh yes, there will be streaming...) in the coming weeks. I recommend you check them out.

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 3

2009-06-20T20:10:00.010-04:00

ah, yes, the third part of the Facebook friends project, if its anything like movie trilogies this edition will undoubtedly be a letdown. Unless its like the Star Wars prequel trilogy, then that means this one would be sort of decent in a weird way...

While its true I've drawn an April Yim, in the past she asked for another one in the comments section of my Facebook album and I kind of felt like drawing her in the style of this series anyway.

As someone who hung out a lot in her room working on 3D Animation major stuff with her roommate Vikki (forthcoming, and by that I mean probably in the forth update), I kind of awkwardly learned the rules of the room. Much like Fight Club, there were definitely some rules for the room but most people can't remember far past the first two. The first being take off your shoes on the way in. While I'm unsure of the second rule, I'm pretty sure it was the same as the first; either that or no Asian Gore movies.

If I haven't mentioned it before, both April and Vikki were incredibly awesome company for the second half of Sophomore year and were always down for Philly Cheese Steaks or trips to China Town, IHOP and various Zoo related things. Oh and Castle Crashers, you can't forget about that one.

Ah yes, Eugene Armencha, while he doesn't actually live on campus at Pratt, he's been in practically most my hard classes Sophomore Year. With that being said just about every time Maya caused me to debate lighting my hair on fire (which happened quite frequently) he'd be online with a solution that worked just about every time. Apart from Maya his skills in AfterEffects are insane, he made a fake trailer for his Final in Digital Tech Workshop class (the final was an open assignment, and the class was mostly just Photoshop 101) which looks VERY close to a real movie which is phenomenal considering he did it on no budget at all. Watch it, seriously....

He likes Kubrick films and absurdist humor too, so we get along really well. Plus he's the only person I know of who I can discuss the merits of man boobs for two hours after getting an incredibly weird critique in Storyboarding class (for ahwhile Cloverfeld was morbidly obese and I gave him jiggly breasts, actually, maybe that was just asking for a weird critique in retrospect). I'm also way looking forward to his Whale Nipples III movie that he's working on this summer, I'm pretty sure it will melt my face off.

David Garcia is pretty much the only person from High School that I still routinely hang out with between breaks back home in college. I've known hims since middle school and he's probably responsible for most of the weird links I have on Twitter, StumbleUpon and on my YouTube favorites. I chat with him on AIM a lot and he's one of the few non-Adam Warner related people that wouldn't mind watching horrible movies with me and he's going to go in to NYC with me to watch the oh so awesome looking Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl and the Tokyo Gore Night at the IFC center. Oh, and I also watched Shakespeare on the Sound with him a few times, I guess that's going on right now, I should probably go.

Kevin Teeter was another one of those people on Facebook that I've chatted with long before I've actually come into Pratt. He was Robin for Halloween once, I believe and that takes serious guts...but he pulled it off quite nicely.

Ah yes, Adam Warner and Anthony Tello, I know these guys quite well. Last year, pretty much every time I wasn't hanging out with April and Vikki, I'd be watching a bad horror movie or playing Lego Star Wars, Peggle or Lumines with Adam Warner, who'd often have a Ben and Jerry's pint on hand. He's a writing major at Pratt and he has a very epic DVD collection which contains MANY classics from the IMDb top 250 alongside quite a few from the bottom 100, he has fantastic tastes and despite his recent vegetarianism, I went to a few of the more fastfood-y places on Myrtle with him (see Crown Fried for more information).

As a result of the constant hanging out, he also wound up being the subject in a lot of my Video Editing projects. If you've been following this blog you'd notice he was the star of that zombie movie I did a month or so back. Anthony Tello was an architecture major at Pratt for my first year there but ultimately left to pursue a career in music. After Freshman year I've met up with him several times when he was visiting Pratt and from time to time I'd discuss whatever the latest Pixar movie is with him on AIM. I'm pretty sure I'll see more of him next year as well.

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 2

2009-06-11T21:04:00.007-04:00

The series continues this week, here is the latest batch of drawings, comments, etc.

Connie is a Graphic Design major at Pratt, I met her because she was one of the few other people in my year that had Miyazaki's rather awesome "My Neighbor Totoro" listed under their favorite movies. She'll be rooming with my friends April and Vikki next year both of whom I hung out with every day a month or so into last semester, so she can look forward to my food fiascos this coming fall ^_^

This is Dan, he was my roommate when I did a summer program for animation and video editing at NYU back in High School. He tried to get me to watch the Lord of the Rings films there, I still haven't gotten around to doing that today...oops. He is currently studying computer animation over at RIT and has seen WALL-E in theaters thrice I believe.

Sam was another person I met long before I came to Pratt through AIM and Facebook. He's a Crit. Vis. major and a huge fan of Sierra Grille, he's also a lot taller in person...

Loris is one of my classmates in 3D animation at Pratt virtually in all my classes last year and probably the next one. He comes from France but doesn't have an accent, he's way into architectural modeling and 3D special effects, as well as graffiti. He has an active account on Xbox Live too, that's pretty awesome.

and lastly here's Eggie. I knew him mostly senior year of High School where he was in my art and sociology classes. At the time he was going into the Marines and was a life guard at the YMCA. Glad he made it out fine, especially considering the climate in Iraq a couple of years ago.

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 1

2009-06-06T19:06:00.008-04:00

Outside of Pratt, without any deadlines and the neon glow of an underplayed Xbox 360 its difficult for me to stay motivated without the gun of getting a bad grade held to my head. While I'd like to start a few Maya character design tutorials sometime, I also want to get more comfortable drawing in the more hand drawn, less digital looking style. I'll do one or two a day for the next couple of weeks, I'll post them here every couple of days. Here's the first batch...

That's Adam, he was my roommate first year of Pratt and I'll room with him again this coming school year. He's a way cool guy and pretty much the only person that could sarcastically sit through both Epic Movie and Date Movie back-to-back on HBO with me. He also digs anime and every show that every 90's kid without cable grew up with (which is cool, because I ALSO never had Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network until I was about 12).

This is Tom...or Kane...I'm actually not sure what to call him anymore, but he was really awesome and I hung out with him quite a lot first year of Pratt. He was the kind of guy who wouldn't mind going to Times Square and eating at Applebees, very spontaneous but in the best way possible. He also had a cool custom built computer with an LED display that read "BAMF" and was quite awesome at Guitar Hero III. He indirectly got me to start this project when he asked me to draw him in the style of my online avatar, sure thing ;)

This is Amanda and Katie Oh riding on an iPhone in space, getting chased by acclaimed independent movie director David Lynch. I've known both Katie and Amanda through Facebook about a half a year before I came to Pratt both are pretty swell people. Amanda is a ginormous fan of David Lynch, and David Lynch is not a huge fan of iPhones apparently

I have a ton of requests on Facebook, Let's see how long I can keep this going ^_^

to be a star, you gotta have Lips...

2009-05-28T18:37:00.002-04:00

or hold the Xbox 360 microphone about three inches away from the speakers

Summer starts

2009-05-17T19:43:00.007-04:00

I’ve been home for almost a week now and this officially marks my halfway point in the hurricane of attending Pratt Institute. I’m not even kidding when I say that I still sign papers with 2007, I have no idea how the past two years were able to go by so fast. I’ve also made the president’s list again for the second time in a row which is both incredibly exciting and a great middle finger to all the strictness and overdramatic nature foundation year.

I’ve loved the past two years and I’ve got to meet the likes of Don Hertzfeldt, PES, Frank Warren from PostSecret and some coked out animator that recently left Dreamworks after being a character designer for Monsters vs. Aliens and storyboard artist for the Nightmare scene in Shrek the Third, though he made a pretty savage short film at CalArts called Son of Satan which was ridiculously awesome. I also got a chance to check out the late days of Astroland at Coney Island and I’ve been to just about every museum in New York that’s worth writing about with the notable exceptions being the Guggenheim and Cloisters.

My summer job at Save the Children has been cut due to the entire economic crisis thing. I’m not really as bummed out about it as a should be, I look at it more as a chance for me to catch up on a lot of Maya tutorials so I can be completely comfortable by the time next year comes around and I’ll have to spend a year and a half on one two minute-ish short film.

I was finally able to visit the new Kinokuniya location in New York City last week as well as the other Japanese book store Book Off. The place totally lived up to the hype, especially in all the cute (but INCREDIBLY OVERPRICED) Studio Ghibli merchandise they had on their bottom floor. I should have taken notes on titles that they had in their horror section for DVDs, they had a lot of horribly awesome looking movies there such as Attack Girls' Swim Team Versus the Undead; which looks like a fantastic thing to look for if it ever shows up on Veoh or something. Though I can’t say I didn’t have an urge to go to the Nintendo World Store immediately after like I did when it was in Rockefeller Center.

That day I also checked out the new Star Trek movie. If you’ve been following my Twitter feed you could probably tell I liked it quite a bit. Looking back on it I wished it had more of a complete plot but at the time I was too captivated by the action scenes, humor and the entire fact that they got Zachary ‘Sylar’ Quinto to play Spock to even notice. The audience I saw it with in Times Square was quite spirited and they did a good job letting me know of every single inside joke that I missed out on in the movie. Apparently there was an R2D2 hidden as a background prop in one scene.

Currently I’m playing a lot of Scene It? Box Office Smash on Xbox Live for both the easy achievements and the chance for me to show off how much of movie buff I am. I’ve also started to catch up on some games I never really had to chance to play when I was up at Pratt, mainly Kameo with a couple of others thrown in for good measure. I started to work on a web comic with April, we have a few really good ideas for it and I’ll let you guys know when we get our first issue up. It involves a whale that solves mysteries in a world that is over ran with literature stereotypes. Its based on a project my friend April started and we’re going to release it in more of a full fledged comic form versus the comic strip thing in most webcomics.

Now, I just need to find a good pair of headphones…

Storyboarding: Cloverfeld

2009-05-07T14:26:00.017-04:00

ah yes, as long as I'm getting around to posting my finals, here is my storyboarding project; Cloverfeld. I'm actually fairly satisfied with how this turned out. If I had more time I would have probably gotten more sound clips for Will Smith and tightened up the timing and a few more of the drawings in the animatic. While its true I have posted some of this already here a couple of months ago, I did a fair amount of tweaking and working from the ground up since then. Check it out...

and yes, for the record, he only wanted at least 25% of the boards colored

have a zombie to tide you over...

2009-05-05T03:36:00.005-04:00

I know its been a long time between posts, but I have rigs and semi-satirical zombie movies to work on. Have this to tide you over before I get back into the full swing...

Zombie-2-Pass from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

From the critically acclaimed producer of Dragonball Zebra Slash Brink 2 comes a coming-of-age story about a neurotic teenager who only just found out he was a zombie...one that likes scrambled eggs and walks around in clown make-up that is...

Blog redesign/rename/art post

2009-03-27T01:56:00.003-04:00

I've decided to change my blog's name from "Cereal is Just Cold Soup with Milk" to "Cereal is Just Cold Milk with Soup" to get it to match up my URL a little better, also when dealing with a non-sensical title I feel the order of the words doesn't really matter. Also here's a quick little higher res version of me on the unicorn, just so you can see it better.

so I wrote an essay on that "Where the Hell is Matt?" video...

2009-03-24T19:06:00.006-04:00

As a side note; yes I know I've posted the video here before but I've still been watching it quite religiously since then and it seemed like the perfect choice for a recent assignment in video editing class. I figured its worth posting here.

Ever since its inception, video has led a double life lying somewhere between the realm of art and entertainment. From the earliest silent films all the way through to the sound era, film has been controlled by a cultural elite. For every visionary there are hundreds of suits and investors backing a film leading it as a financial vehicle. That is not to say art couldn’t have been made under these circumstances, it's just highly unlikely.

Up until very recently, many “art” and “experimental” films were not a far step away from the name driven world of Hollywood. Most conceptual pieces were controlled mainly by artists that have already built up a name for themselves and often contain very little or no entertainment value whatsoever. Factor that with the rules and conventions of continuity invented by the Hollywood system and it’s absolutely impossible for the Average Joe to make a film that’s widely popular without any formal experience or “knowledge” of the rules of cinema. That is until now.

In its earliest 2005-era inception, YouTube allowed ANYONE to upload a video to the Internet that could be viewed by a mass captive audience instantaneously. Due to the limits of a very poor video and mono audio quality, this format has been limited to low-brow videos of people getting hurt or web cam diaries. That is until very recently when YouTube added “High Quality” and “HD” formats to its repertoire as well as the emergence of competing websites such as Vimeo which offer higher bit rates that are ideal for artists.

Fast forward to 2008 when Internet speeds and compression codec’s have finally caught up to make the landscape of the Internet a comparable experience to viewing the film on a DVD or in a theater. In this, the playing ground is finally neutralized and as a result true “art” videos can finally emerge. In the short film, “Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)” we follow Matt Harding on a fourteen month journey around the world in a paltry four minutes. The creator, has never attended college and his only past career was working as a game designer. He only received average grades in high school and by our societal standards; one could call him a “reject”. Most of his world travel was funded by Internet donations and a late sponsorship by Stride Gum, he had no real background in the world of film.

The “Where the Hell is Matt?” video works because it takes a simple premise and blows it up beyond any feasible expectation into the realm of something extraordinary. In each shot we’re presented with text giving us a vague idea of his location along with him performing a “silly” dance in the center of the frame. This captures our interest and is quite humorous perhaps placing it firmly into the entertainment category along with web cam videos like “The Numa Numa Dance” but the joke quickly changes into light-hearted insight while only providing a few details along the way.

In its simplicity and repetition of “man in center of frame, with text set to music” we’re forced to take in the differences of each location. The film also uses this visual structure to set up a clear beginning middle and end. When the short starts, we see Matt quickly telling his cameraman to keep the frame steady and him in the center. We see a few sequential shots of him alone in the frame and then as soon as the music picks up, we see crowds of people run into the shot and dance with him. The effect of this is powerful because no matter how different the locals and the cultures are of the places his dancing, common people would be willing to join him in something that looks like a total joke. The short ends with the clips slowly moving more towards the evening versus the day as we're treated to one last shot of hundreds of people joining him in Seattle, Washington followed by a brief credits sequence which serves as a curtain call to the piece.

The rhythm of these crowds is occasionally broken up with segments that give us a subtle clue as to the story and the setbacks on his journey. We see him awkwardly dancing in a demilitarized zone in North Korea next to a security guard that seems less than pleased as well as a shot of him in a French maid fetish cafe in Tokyo. Pair this with real dancers from Native areas of New Guinea and cultural dancers in India. We even get to see him getting knocked down by a tremendous tidal wave, in Zero Gravity and in front of the orchestra providing the background music for the video.

As talented as many of the artists that create experimental and “surrealist” films are, I feel there is often a reason why these don’t catch on with the general public. In their rejection of convention, they can come off as pretentious and as a result are only really watched by other artists or people who follow the “art” field very closely. The "Where the Hell is Matt?" video quickly became the most viewed clip on YouTube of the year 2008 (keep in mind this was released in the Fall) and received such honors as being featured on NASA's website as well as being named best short film of the year by blogs such as AOL's Cinematical. This film, despite being non-conventional, caught on with audiences in ways few advertisements or short films really could. How many "art" films are able to obtain such widespread success? The reason why I consider video such a tremendous success in the artistic sense is that its able to convey a complicated message without trying to be too “profound” and by definition, isn’t the simplification of complicated issues from the use and manipulation of a few tools what defines art?

I'm a Twit

2009-03-22T22:57:00.008-04:00

I’m a Twitter addict. I didn’t think it was possible. I’m a few months away from a year using it and I’m already starting to spend more hours on it than Facebook. Granted, Facebook is slowly becoming what MySpace was back in 2005 and Twitter what the cleaner and more efficient Facebook was to that.

When my work forced me to join back in June as an excuse for me to check out some social networks, I dragged my feet into Twitter. I didn’t really see how it was that much different than the status updates on Facebook and none of my friends used it. I also didn’t understand how following an organization was any different than the hundreds of RSS feeds I have already tracked on Google Reader. Then I found out about the Twitter Search function and slowly eased my way into the site.

After finding a handful of friends and reading the live search for #Heroes every Monday using TweetGrid.com, I’m become increasingly reliant on the website. Its sort of like the mix between a chat room and a blog, except most of the chat posts are self-contained. While there are some Twitter users that post about mundane topics, when your message is limited to 140 characters its pretty easy to skip over the boring Tweets and read the feeds you directly care about.

With Twitter taking up most of my time, I’ve virtually ended my 4 and a half year addiction to StumbleUpon. I still check from time to time to see what links my friends have sent me, but by now I’m pretty sure I’ve seen everything “good” StumbleUpon has to offer and I’m left mostly with pages crowded with stolen images and 4chan memes. At this point, I’m more interested in seeing what my friends on Twitter “re-tweet” than what the masses as a whole find “funny”.

My only issue with Twitter at the moment is that most of the Twitter clients make my MacBook Pro heat up very quickly. While I’m sure this would be unnoticeable on desktop, I really have to wonder how much processing power these clients use; my Laptop behaves better with Twhirl than it did with TweetDeck but it still gets pretty bad.

On a side note, I just got out of my Spring Break and am pretty ready to take on the other half of this current semester. I’ve gotten a pretty sizeable harddrive and finally the right software to edit those pesky .MTS files that Pratt’s HD cameras generate (Pratt doesn’t really have any program that can swiftly work with HD footage at the moment). Now I only need to see if my computer is fast enough to edit 720p footage. Also, I finished my rigging midterm today (due tomorrow) and played through Halo 3’s single-player campaign as well as about a third through The Simpsons Game, the latter of which is surprisingly good.

if you're on Twitter, make sure to add me. I won't bite...I think.

…and here are some videos I found on YouTube, you know, for good measure.

I've seen this one in Rigging class, I love it a lot.

and this intro for this new show on Revision3 (from former 1UP employees) is surprisingly catchy and well-done

Another post of Cloverfeld concepts

2009-03-15T13:25:00.004-04:00

Here are some more images I came up with for Storyboarding class which is by far my favorite class of this semester. The board is at 56 panels and I'll probably cut it down from there and add a few more scenes to it by the time its due and colored in six or seven weeks. Its at a rough stage now but I'll post up the final boards too.

also here's some more concepts of how its going to look like when all is colored and LINE TOOLED!

also while I'm at it, my buddy April wanted me to make a cartoon picture of her, so here it is complete with a comparison picture too.

I watch too much TV

2009-03-03T14:16:00.003-05:00

To start things out, below is my little montage assignment for Editing class featuring the vocal stylings of Vince Offer of Sham! Wow! fame and special guest appearances from Marvin's Magic, Oxyclean, Set it and Forget It and The Power Juicer.

Also, as long as we're on the topic of advertising, check out these two Japanese fast food ads if you want to see a combination is disgusting and delicious fast food products. I'll probably have that Japanese Pizza Hut "SAUSAGE ROLL" song stuck in my head for ahwhile, they should totally bring that here alongside the inevitable return of Dominos Oreo Pizza.

Yesterday marked my first college snow day, which included tons of Luigi's Pizza and three or four B-horror movies back to back (Demons, Killer Klowns from Outerspace, Bloodsucking Freaks and Ghoulies 2). I still had to return my copy of The Iron Giant to avoid an overly expensive late fee of $12 a day (you can probably buy that movie for $6 at a Costco) but otherwise it was a pretty fun day and I had enough time to finish my Editing assignment and push over my half broken rig that I'm probably going to start over anyway. I also finally got to live out my dream of watching Heroes with a live

Apart from those musings, I've currently been playing a ton of Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection on the Xbox 360 alongside bouts of Castle Crashers and Braid. Its weird how 75% of all my current generation game playing has been downloadable or retro titles off of Xbox Live Arcade or the Wii Shop Channel. Despite consoles now having "teraflops" of processing power and whatever else the marketing executives are trying to throw at us, they seem to be forgetting the reason why most people play games...for fun. With a lot of retro titles there's a certain degree of depth but the titles are simple enough where a non-gamer can pick it up and do relatively well. In one sense, this was the point Nintendo was trying to make with the Wii console but after the console caught on with casual markets most of the Wii titles on store shelves are low-rent rush jobs from hack developers trying to get a quick buck. The most depressing thing about this is that now, even Nintendo is jumping on that bandwagon with titles such as Wii Music and the forthcoming ExciteBots (seriously...). I guess Super Mario Galaxy was awesome and my 180 hours of Super Smash Bros. Brawl made the console worth the price of admission alone, but I want just more simple and fun titles like what Mario Kart Wii was promising to be.

After getting used to spending $8 a pop for a Sega Genesis title on the Wii shop channel (or consequently a slightly more reasonable $5 on XBLA), thirty bucks for fifty Sega Genesis titles seemed like a no brainer to me. Apart from the lack of Sega titles like Gunstar Heroes (which I got on the Wii Shop Channel anyway and its omission is probably foreshadowing its Xbox Marketplace release) the collection is surprisingly solid and polished with enough special features that you are getting a much more refined experience than playing the titles for 10 minutes off of a ROM.

My favorite thing about Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection would be how it handles the Xbox's achievements. While I don't exactly want to say all the achievements are easy, they're all perfectly attainable by just about anyone and they encourage you to play through a lot of the obscure "non-Sonic" Sega titles. Few of the games achievements force you to spend more than 10 or 20 minutes with each Genesis title and it adds a nice little meta game to the title. Alongside each achievement that you unlock, you also get video interviews and some arcade and Master System titles. While, with the notable exception of Space Harrier, none of these arcade titles are really THAT phenomenal, its a nice touch, especially for those who don't really care too much about their GamerScore.

I'm already five or six hours into Castle Crashers which reminds me of what you'd get if you mixed together Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and Golden Axe. Like Crystal Chronicles, this game is painfully boring alone and despite featuring a level system, each incremental stat boost is miniscule enough where a beginner could easily drop in at any stage of the game and catch up pretty quickly. Its a huge time suck and an obvious improvement over the Bahemoth's Alien Hominid, which I played quite a bit of on the Gamecube. Also I picked up Braid with it being reduced to $10 as opposed to $15 last week. Despite the critical acclaim, I could never see myself paying $15 for a game that could be essentially beaten in a day but pair the price reduction with Best Buy's 2 Free Watchmen tickets with purchase of $20 in Microsoft Points and Braid could consider itself bought. I've only just started playing it and my impressions are a lot stronger than they were with the one level demo they had of it on Xbox Live. The game is a lot more surreal than I was expecting and the puzzles are pretty mind bending. I see the real length of the game comes from trying to figure out how to get all the puzzle pieces, which I'm desperately trying to avoid reading the walkthrough to figure out.

That's it for this post, now I'm off to fill out more paperwork for Pratt and get a jump start on my next batch of work for Storyboarding.

a quick little art post

2009-02-25T00:10:00.004-05:00

Here are some concepts for my storyboarding project where we have to come up with an original story of sorts. I'm thinking of doing something about a bright eyed giant monster who dreams of coming to New York City from Tokyo to start his career in stand-up comedy. Ultimately he is a horrible stand-up and winds up destroying New York City instead of setting the comedy scene ablaze but he also becomes the first giant monster to destroy New York City since Godzilla circa 1998...gaining the respect of his peers.

This idea will probably change a lot by the time I actually post the finalized storyboards for it who knows, I may do a different idea at the end.

Rip Van Winkle Storyboard Group Project

2009-02-19T14:45:00.004-05:00

I worked with a few other people on these storyboards. With the exception of a few panels, I drew all the characters for this while the rest of my group handled the backgrounds. Like all group projects, this started out pretty dreadful but I'm quite pleased with the final result, I really wish I could show you guys some of the full shots of the backgrounds my team made, they looked quite good. You should probably view the full sized version of the image, the text may be a bit hard to read but I had to shrink it down considerably to go up on here. It was ready to be printed out at 300 dpi.

Crown Fried

2009-02-15T00:57:00.004-05:00

Here's that movie I made last week for my Video Editing class showing a trip to Crown Fried Chicken, the sketchiest fast food restaurant on all of Myrtle Avenue. Make sure to click the "HD" button on the video or go to the Vimeo page. This is the first thing I shot high def.

if your nice to me, I'll make you a blog layout

2009-02-14T18:49:00.008-05:00

My amount of free time has increased drastically considering most of my intense classes are on Wednesday and Thursday and that there's no "Animation" class of sorts for this semester of Pratt's 3D curriculum. Not saying that rigging and story boarding class are any less of a headache than last semester, just its a lot less time consuming than doing 8-10 seconds of hand drawn animation per week on top of whatever 3D animation assignments I've had.

As a result, I'm able to get to work on the things that I've been holding off for months in the back of my head. The first of which being that I've made a new layout for The Movie Watch. If you've been following my Twitter feed, you'd probably know that I contribute a post or a review every Thursday alongside a few other people. While I loved the editorial content, I felt that the layout was a little too basic (and by that I mean, it used one of Blogger's default layouts) for the site to be taken seriously.

Hopefully with the layout out of the way we'll be able to start a podcast for the site this coming summer. Being on a podcast is pretty much my movie fanboy dream at the moment.

There's my new layout up there. The biggest change was that I added a scoring system to the reviews that are sorted out by tags on Blogger. I'm always cautious about adding a score to a review because I feel that it may force the reader to skip down to the number and miss out on the pros and cons mentioned in the review. In this case, I think it's working pretty well. I wanted a 2 or a 3 out of five to be about what the average movie should get and I'm extremely pleased to see that not every movie was given a four or a five.

My other layout was for Adam Warner's blog "Best Burger on Myrtle". Despite him being a vegetarian this should be a pretty fun blog which will review the food on Myrtle Avenue and record our adventures to the sleaziest restaurants that Brooklyn has to offer.

This new site will launch as soon as I finish my Video Editing project which is a short documentary of sorts on a visit to Crown Fried Chicken; the restaurant with the most health code violations and robberies on Myrtle Avenue. I went during the day, but as you can see in my camera work, I'm as nervous as ever after I saw a man pull down his pants and gesture at his exposed crotch towards my camera...yes, that will probably make its way into the movie.

Apart from that, yesterday I watched about six or seven hours of The Powerpuff Girls from that new complete series box set that Entertainment Weekly mentioned as their DVD pick of the week. I'm actually really surprised how well the series is holding up for me. Even though most of my Powerpuff Girls watching occurred in middle school, I feel as though I missed out on a lot of its sarcastic humor, either that or slight jokes get magnified when your surrounded by others laughing at it. The weird thing about it is the show both functions as a parody of formulaic Saturday Morning Cartoons and as just a fun action cartoon. I have no idea how they were able to pull it off so well.

I've also seen Coraline last week, which was totally worth the entire day's worth of looking for a 3D showing of it that was not sold out. Quality wise, the film landed somewhere between Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas. The writing was certainly better than Corpse Bride but the animation was a lot more rigid, relying more on replacement heads than rubber armature faces yet the visuals never really came off as strong or inventive as Henry Selick's other film The Nightmare Before Christmas or even parts of James and the Giant Peach. Yet as a 3D movie it was absolutely phenomenal and the chances are its one of the strongest 3D glasses movies I've ever seen, either that or IMAX's Deep Sea 3D.

I'll post the Crown Fried Movie up here whenever I get done with it. I'm pretty pleased with how my group project storyboards for Rip Van Winkle are coming. I drew most of the characters for the panels, while three or four were farmed out to a friend of mine. Also the backgrounds are looking quite nice I might add.

Back at Pratt and Superbowl musings

2009-02-02T15:14:00.010-05:00

I've been back from the Christmas break for a two or three weeks now and so far this semester is looking pretty good. Aside from having a Monday class that ends at 9:30 PM (which I wouldn't really have much of a problem with if it didn't interfere with Heroes) things are looking really good. I'm really looking forward to checking out Coraline this upcoming weekend and if My Bloody Valentine 3D was any indication, I'll try and watch EVERY Real-D 3D movie coming out regardless of its inherent quality.

So far, the time back at Pratt has been fairly good. There's a lot of reading and writing for Mass Media and Society but apart from that the schedule is looking pretty solid. My three week break was as relaxing as usual and I got a good excuse go off to Fort Meyers for a week to visit my grandparents. This was my first airplane flight I've taken in 11 years and it was a lot more relaxing than I was expecting. This is probably because I'm used to the hustle and filth of the New York City subway system but apart from the ridiculousness of having to repeatedly take out my Xbox 360, Laptop, iPod and shoes at the gate (damn post 9/11 security) it wasn't really so bad. Most of my time in Florida the temperature was only in the 50s but it was still a good excuse to check out some artificially planted palm trees.

As for the Superbowl, every year I watch I get more and more disappointed with the advertisements that come with it. While a couple of years ago we've had that Grand Theft Auto parody Coca-Cola ad, there was not a single advertisement I really loved for 2008 and 2009. It would be a stretch to say I enjoyed the creepy Coca-Cola digital avatar spot or the Peter and the Wolf one with the bugs in it. The 3D glasses SOBE and Monsters vs. Aliens promo felt gimmicky at best. Last year's Superbowl, which seemed more content with '80s pop culture references as opposed to actual humor, featured a moderately successful spot from SOBE with Lizards dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller. While far from original especially considering the song's re-emergence as an internet phenomenon, the commercial was a modest success leading SOBE to continue the trend in the 2009 spot. The new spot felt incredibly disjointed first featuring football players dancing to Swan Lake...and uh, eventually one of the ballet dancing football players spilled a bottle of SOBE Life Water eventually leading to a dance sequence set to an original song (which they even had the gall to advertise it being available for a dollar on iTunes) featuring the HILARIOU$! ©HARACTE®$ from Monsters vs. Aliens and SOBE lizards dancing around for another thirty seconds often flanking objects immediately at the camera to emphasize the fact that this indeed, is in 3D. This was all topped off by a football player exclaiming "SOBELIEVE!" and turning into a hideous lizard man. Was that seriously the best they could come up with for $5 million?

As for the movie Monsters vs. Aliens itself, I'm getting more and more mixed feelings about the movie as its release it coming closer. On one hand, Dreamworks Animation crafted a pretty awesome original franchise with Kung-Fu Panda and Over the Hedge and Madagascar Escape 2 Africa were fairly good in my mind, so I'm sure they've learned their lesson from past script disasters...but on the other hand, this movie comes straight from the director of Shark Tale which was easily the worst big budget 3D animated film ever created. I guess JJ Villard did the character design and some storyboarding for it and I was sold on his enthusiasm for this movie when he spoke at Pratt. I'll probably see it because I'm still a sucker for 3D movies but I can't say I'm not just a little disappointed to know that this will steal the 3D cinema heat away from Coraline only weeks after its release. To add insult to injury, Coraline's getting very little promotion to mass audiences, with most of the excitement for it coming from animation geeks, Neil Gaiman cultists and technophiles, I doubt its going to make back its $70 million budget in its theatric release anyway.

I'll have rigging class later today(I'm digging the blog our prof, Sam has for it), so far I've been trying to get all my homework done long before the day its due and its been going pretty well so far. I wouldn't be surprised if I dropped this after I go full force into rigging but I'm happy so far. Oh! and I haven't had soda since I've returned to Pratt. I wonder how long I'll be able to keep it up before the terrors of Mountain Dew's Yellow Food Dye #48 come back to haunt me.

I found this 2004 anti-Kerry commercial hilarious

2009-01-21T16:59:00.002-05:00

YEAH! I mean, what kind of pessimist would talk about the horrors of another economic depression...

I'll write a more lengthy and personal blog post later, that was just too good to keep to myself.

Quick Post of Animation Finals

2008-12-18T21:02:00.004-05:00

Here's my 3D final, the lip sync is maybe like 5 frames off after it got uploaded to Facebook but its mostly there.

and here's Robo-Nader

both of these things will be up on the website pretty shortly.

CJCookson.com...er Number Five is Alive

2008-12-08T23:58:00.005-05:00

In amidst of all my animation finals (both are turning to be quite swell, expect to see them up in the next couple of weeks) I found some time to make use of my CJCookson.com domain name I had for the past couple of years. Sadly my wait to get ChrisCookson.com was trampled after the previous owner died of heart disease and their family sold the domain name to a sleazy link farm. So at the moment, unless I want to fork over eighty bucks to a third world country and get my domain back it will stay CJCookson.com. Besides I'm sure there are a few other more musically and commercially inclined Chris Cooksons that are facing the same dilemma. Looks like our other Chris Cookson friend backed the HD DVD format in the business room...big mistake. Funny, I also backed that same horse a few years ago in fanboy related forum debates...the future is in Digital Destribution anyway.

Anyway, check out my website...

you can also checkout my FeedBurner friendly version of this blog on the site. Not that it makes much of a difference

A quick little animatic of my 2D animation final so far

2008-11-19T01:53:00.003-05:00

This is due in a month, I have about 36 seconds out of 1:52 completed so far. While this is an obvious statement, watching this will spoil the completed project when I put it up at the end of December so look out for that. I'm liking what I have though...

A slightly morbid little choose your own adventure game

2008-11-10T19:24:00.003-05:00

See if you can make it to the end! If you can't see the embedded Flash applet below click here or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://coldmilksoup.blogspot.com/2008/11/slightly-morbid-little-choose-your-own.html

The happiest riot I've ever witnessed

2008-11-07T15:08:00.007-05:00

Over the past couple of weeks I've never really had the time to sit back and really think about all the craziness I've been through over the past month. I haven't actually seen any movies apart from whatever shows up in my mailbox from Netflix or whatever I can find on the newly Mac compatible Watch Instantly feature, but I've still have an incredibly busy month. While my trip through the Greenwich Village Halloween parade was fun and rightfully chaotic (especially when joined by someone half-naked apart from a few Obama signs in our group) and my earlier visit to Blood Manor provided a shortly lived but fun, if not completely overpriced experience. However, the most memorable event in this past month wasn't even planned, it just kind of happened and it was a glorious moment I don't think I'll ever forget.

Throughout the election, I was on the edge of my seat. While Obama was always on top of the numbers, I was afraid that when the more conservative states votes started coming in McCain would slowly creep ahead in the race. After the knee-jerk second term election of Bush in 2004 my confidence in American voters was at an all time low. Pair this in with Obama playing an honest game while the republican party would send smears left and right at Obama (I mean, 12% of our country thought he was muslim apparently including my dad depressingly enough) I thought America would become confused and elect McCain president which would tragically put Sarah Palin an inch away from becoming president.

The news of Obama winning the 2008 election came out of nowhere to me. I remembered telling my mother on the phone that "I think Obama has this election" which was immediately followed by a reply of "Obama has this election" and the text "Obama wins the 2008 presidential election" flashing on NBC. Then immediately two minutes after reading the line the balconies in Willoughby erupted with whistling and chants that carried over to the apartment complex facing Willoughby hall and eventually over into the streets. It was all very surreal and the first time I've ever really seen non-sarcastic nationalism since the response to the 9/11 attacks. It even went as far as the point where people started to sign the National Anthem in Unison off of their balconies, this chaos lasted for about an hour and a half and was about as intense as three New Year's Celebrations at the same time.

All over Brooklyn I could hear cars honking and hear partying that sounded vaguely like wild animals over from the street. Apparently the roads and the sidewalks were blocked off with groups of people hugging and shaking each other's hands out until five in the morning. When cars would pass by, they'd let the car into the group prompting to shake the hand of the driver and getting them to honk their horn. Eventually the police came and ushered the people out of the street onto the sidewalks effectively ending their celebration though I still heard cries of Obama at 6 a.m. from my bed...and I had all the windows shut.

The image on the right I found from a quick search on Flickr for Myrtle avenue after Obama's win. While it was much more chaotic than this, its a pretty good idea of the magnitude of the event. Also remember this was at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday night still absolutely insane.

This is also the first post I'm putting up through Google Documents instead of from the embedded tools on Blogger, we'll see how this works.

Chris Cookson makes art at art school apparently

2008-11-01T16:27:00.010-04:00

I haven't really gotten around to updating this blog as much as I'd want, but at least I've got some pretty pictures out of it.

Chris Cookson is still alive...and blogging

2008-09-28T15:51:00.001-04:00

Lately, I've been pretty bad at updating my blog, most of my free time now is split between doing homework and hanging out with much overlap between the two. When I lean more away from more learning Maya tutorial-esque work I'll probably find some time to post a couple of things here. In the meantime I can go over the countless movies I watched while scribbling my animation homework and my impressions of my first non-foundation month at Pratt.

So far, the first month as a Digital Animation major has been rough but I've learned a ton already. Unlike foundation year, most of the week I only have 2-3 hours of classes a day with the notable exception being Thursdays where I have both my 3D and 2D animation class. In comparison to Foundation year's six hours of class a day plus four hours of liberal arts sandwiched somewhere in-between the week. Factor in an hour of homework per hour of foundation class and your left with maybe 5 or 6 hours of sleep a day. While I'm getting about three times more homework per hour of class than last year, I'm also getting at least 8 hours of sleep. A rarity in college, though I'm sure that's likely to change once my classes get further into the nuts and bolts of Maya.

While this year is not completely void of the inflated egos, pretentiousness and overwrought discussions over common sense which drove me half insane last year, most of the teachers and students I'm in with are in it for the love of the craft which makes the hours or work seem worth it if only to see what other crazy awesome things the rest of the class came up with. I'm also surprised to see how much I'm loving modeling class so far, its a far cry from my 2D and 3D animation classes which are both as awesome as I expected them to be but I never thought I'd enjoy "designing a home for rats" as much as I am now.

My birthday also came around with a subscription to Netflix as the gift. As someone who'd often prowl the forums of Quick Silver Screen for DivX movies to place onto my Xbox 360, Netflix is a huge step up. Pair the DVD shipping with Handbrake or MacTheRipper (my Macbook Pro has trouble buring dual layer DVDs however) and you could potentially get your hands on any movie that you'd ever want to watch more than once. For the few times I was able to find someone with a PC, the Watch Instantly feature on Netflix has been quite awesome. I'd almost install Parallels and Windows XP exclusively to run it but with 120 GBs on my HDD and often with only 10-40 GBs of free space, I don't want to partitian out any more space than I already have. The system is a bit counterintuitive thanks to the MPAA's strict enforcement of DRM but if you install all the right components its a strong feature. I can imagine this being the future of Netflix in 10 years after DVDs and Blu-Ray discs get the shaft in favor of iTunes-esque downloadable content.

I haven't watched a movie in a theater since I came back to Pratt, not for a lack of time thing, there's just little I want to see right now. I guess I kind of wanted to see Burn After Reading and Hamlet 2 but none of them really struck me as something I'd want to go out of my way to see.

The movies that I have seen were the steroid documentary Bigger Stronger Faster, which played out like Bowling For Columbine had the guns been replaced with steroids and anecdotal evidence replaced strictly with scientific facts. While I found its ironic pro-steroid in the context of America's artificial cheat to win culture view a bit jarring, this was a fun documentary in an age where most health documentaries focus on obesity. (4/5)

To me, Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising was a great idea for both him and his fans. Slacker Uprising is easily Moore's weakest film where all the intentions are there but its unsure whether it wants to be a concert film or a movie chronically the response to Fahrenheit 9/11 during the 2004 presidential election. By releasing this film as a free internet download Moore has taken his lemon and made lemonaide. In doing so he avoided the film getting eaten alive by critics (thus ruining his homerun reputation he had since Bowling for Columbine) and was able to get some positive buzz for his movie riding off the wave of Radiohead's In Rainbows internet giveaway. This is also the best way to get the message out to the young Americans that he wants to influence to vote, its really a win/win situation for him. Worth seeing but only because its free. (2/5)

I also rewatched The Lion King a couple of times while I was doing my modeling homework and then once more last night. Its a shame the Disney Vault is keeping me from owning it in my personal collection, this one had the best plot of all the Disney Animated films and had some of the georgious set pieces. I really wish I caught this one when they re-released it in IMAX a four or five years back. I saw this one a lot on VHS as a kid and I believe I even saw it in theaters though all I could remember was the death of Mufasa was incredibly depressing. The version I watched had a notably cleaner look for the IMAX release and an incredibly out of place new musical number for The Morning Report. Disney Animation has still yet to make "another Lion King" with each new movie getting more desperate than the next. I guess the Princess and the Frog looks good. (5/5)

Lastly, I took out a projector and watched the cult 1979 film, The Warriors. This is one of the few movies that I can think of that would really benefit from a video game release. The only thing that really holds up the film is its early 80s style action and dialogue and a few incredibly lame costume designs for the 100 rival gangs, including a gang of mimes. I never could fully get into this movie, for a movie with such a huge premise I felt kind of cheated that we never got to see The Warriors take on more that one gang at once, usually it wouldn't go much further than 2 or 3. With a paperthin plot and a pretty disposable set of characters I wish they would have had more fun with this one. Still I did enjoy a few of the action scenes. (3/5)

Apart from those I've watched the abysmal J-horror remake One Missed Call (1/5) along with the hilariously bad Cobra (2/5) and the throwaway Kurt Russel rom-com Overboard (1/5). Short Circuit didn't really hold up to any of my memories (2/5) and Pee Wee's Big Adventure is every bit as amazing as I remembered it (5/5).

end of summer thoughts and Tropic Thunder

2008-08-29T19:45:00.003-04:00

As August comes to an end, I might as well raise my post count for August to make up for my four posts last July. I'm back at Pratt Institute over this Saturday and classes start either Monday or Tuesday depending on whether or not Pratt recognizes Labor Day as a real holiday. My personal life's been fairly busy over the summer, between getting around to getting that driver's license I pushed aside for two years and a pretty awesome internship at Save the Children working on various web related assets I didn't really have much downtime so going back to Pratt feels more or less like getting back to what I've been doing the entire summer, save for 12 hour work days and five hours of sleep.

I'm spending my past few days off packing my stuff for the big move in on Saturday and enjoying my newly purchased Xbox 360 playing a mix between The Orange Box, Viva Pinata and The Darkness as well as a watching a few DivX files that I was able to snag off of Veoh. For most of August I spent my time playing The Darkness (a steal at $9, pick it up if you haven't) and I'm maybe about four hours into Half-Life 2 from The Orange Box. I never really saw myself enjoying either of those titles as the only FPS games I've really played over the past generation were the Metroid Prime trilogy and arcade style multiplayer titles like Timesplitters 2. The Darkness really never felt like a first person shooter game between the emphasis on your large heart eating tentacles and most of the action sequences being more of a puzzle than an adrenaline rush...it also kind of helped that the cursor's auto-aim made it pretty easy to nail headshots in the single player campaign. Also while the dialogue and voice acting is a bit questionable at times the overarching story is quite good. The Achievements are really easy too, which is a huge plus.

Likewise, I've been having a blast with the first four hours of Half-Life 2. Despite being four years late to the game it really hasn't aged much at all and the graphics on my 1080p television are about on par with most modern Xbox 360 titles and I haven't seen a single title with such an ingenious use of physics for puzzles and its use of the game engine to tell a story as opposed to cutting in and out of cutscenes. On top of that I played through the Internet and critic darling Portal yesterday and while I enjoyed the game's creativity I didn't really see it as the second coming or anything. At the moment I feel the same way about the game as I did when I got around to seeing Napoleon Dynamite a year and a half after the film was in theaters. While I could admire the film for what it was I found it annoying when I could recognize just about every other unfunny line from a hoody I've seen in the mall. A lot of the slick writing that Portal has, was driven into the ground by getting quoted and referenced by internet forums and by the end of the relatively short two hour playtime I found myself doing too many of the same things to solve puzzles and I feel if the game was any longer the concept would run thin. I'm pretty confident the Xbox Live Arcade semi-sequel Portal: Still Alive will get lower than expected reviews.

Onward to movies:

Tropic Thunder - Honestly, I've never really been a huge fan of Ben Stiller. Even when he was at his "best" in There's Something About Mary, he's mostly been exclusively in mediocre films over the past six or seven years and I was caught by surprise when I saw Tropic Thunder's 84% on Rotten Tomatoes. At first I thought it was like Talladega Nights or Blades of Glory where the film received positive press from the tongue-in-cheek celebrity and pop-culture references wrapped around the premise of an incredibly dumb movie. While Tropic Thunder had a lot of those elements the real beauty of it was in how it transcended the celebrity cameo stage and went on to lampoon just about every aspect of Hollywood and the ego-driven Academy Award seeking actors. While Tom Cruise's cameo was a little grating at times, especially when they had him dancing to rap music, this was counterbalanced by both a hilarious and surprisingly well-acted comedy role of Robert Downey Jr.

3/4

The Wackness - Oh god, The Wackness just about represented everything I can't stand about most indie movies, it was a completely pretentious movie that believed it was more original than it actually was with a cliche-ridden story and "editing" that at times felt like an overblown music video. While what was there wasn't really that bad especially with the film crammed with quite a few deliberate references to 1994, it was never particularly any good in any of the scenes. I guess it had Ben Kingsley making out with one of the Olsen twins in one scene, which may make it worth it but the chances are you'd find that scene on YouTube before the film even hits DVD.

2/4

Re-Animator - I caught this screening as a part of The Avon Theatre's Cult Classics summer line-up. Like their screening of The Animation Show they featured some vintage trailers at the beginning which ran maybe 10 minutes too long. Luckily, Re-Animator was a fantastic movie that served functionally as a well-written and directed horror movie as well as a hilarious B-movie due to the special effects not looking nearly as impressive in this CG-ridden effects day and age. Granted, Re-Animator had some black humor sprinkled around the film and the violence was over the top...I'm also sure the film's persistent effort to show Barbara Crampton's breasts did little to make the audience take the film seriously...there was also an evil zombie cat in there too that was killed with a shovel...and a talking severed head. On its own merits, this was a hilarious and well-made B-horror film that should probably have a place in my DVD collection.

3/4

The Pixar Story - Really good documentary, at times it felt almost like a promotional video for Pixar animation studios but with it being cut up into a special feature on the WALL-E DVD it all makes sense. The best part would have to be when they shown an early storyboarded version of Toy Story which under Jeffrey Katzenberg's (now of Shrek producing fame) suggestion was "edgy and adult" which was ultimately panned by Disney. I'd wait for WALL-E to come on DVD to see this again but pretty well made otherwise.

3/4

Singin' in the Rain - I'm not one for classic movies but this one caught me by surprise. Its weird to watch a film that was made in the '50s that is nostalgic of a simpler time. I loved the musical numbers, the direction made each song feel really fresh and I'd never know that the majority of the songs were never written for the movie. Completely awesome and many of the jokes were every bit as funny and snappy as they were in the 1950s, a rarity for a G-rated film.

4/4

Others:

I watched Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden (1.5/4) sadly it wasn't half as good as his earlier documentary Supersize Me and it felt incredibly fabricated. I also loved Clerks 2 (3/4) and Uwe Boll's Postal (0.5/4) was every bit as unwatchably bad as I was expecting but it might just be worth watching just for Uwe Boll's incredibly shameless and hilarious cameo in the film.

Hell froze over, Chris Cookson got an Xbox 360

2008-08-17T20:03:00.005-04:00

Last generation, Microsoft's Xbox left a bad taste in my mouth. Between the thing's massive child killing bulk and hideous industrial design, it looked like something that was trying to hard to appeal to immature 13 year old boys and little else. The console had some of the best games of the last generation with the Halo franchise generating critical acclaim and record breaking sales and Knights of the Old Republic putting Bioware on the map as a Western RPG powerhouse. Ultimately, the console lost Microsoft $4 billion but they wound up in a secure 2nd place position worldwide, pulling ahead of Nintendo's Gamecube despite the Xbox's weak Japanese sales but nowhere near touching the dominance of the Playstation 2 last generation.

Fast forward to this generation, the Wii flew under most analyst and developer's radars and is now the #1 selling console even beating out the Xbox 360 which was out a year longer than the Wii. Sony's Playstation 3 was a sales disaster and the Microsoft Xbox 360 firmly sits in second place. While the Wii's hardware is flying off the shelves the software sales are actually lower than the 360 implying that many might just purchase the Wii system as a tech toy with the packed in Wii Sports demo as opposed to a full-fledged multimedia console. Most of the best selling games are either first party tiles (much like the Gamecube) or the most casual poorly reviewed shovelware titles like Carnival Games and High School Musical: Sing It becoming million sellers. While I could ignore the onslaught of low-budget cash-in titles with Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy being close to perfection but after seeing Nintendo at E3 touting the embarrassing Wii Music as their holiday killer-app and an all too similar looking sequel to Animal Crossing as their "hardcore" title, I felt as though Microsoft's Xbox 360 had more titles coming for Nintendo fanboys than the Wii did.

Over the years Microsoft has been slowly going after my heart between buying out Rare, getting an exclusive karaoke title from the creators of Elite Beat Agents and a three game exclusive trilogy Silicon Knights, the guys who did the cult classic Gamecube title Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Now that Rare's finally back up on its feet with Kameo and Viva Pinata getting rave reviews and a third entry in the Nintendo 64's popular Banjo-Kazooie franchise. With my summer job and all, I actually had enough money to pounce on the Xbox 360 as soon as I saw the 20 GB model for $270 at Circuit City and a copy of Viva Pinata to supplement that Forza Motorspot 2 game that Microsoft kindly handed out at their job recruiting presentation at Pratt Institute. I also picked up The Darkness and the Ratatouille video game off of bargain bin shelves. You can keep track of my various Xbox 360 related antics on the right nav of this blog.

My first surprise with the Xbox 360 came with just how feature rich it was. Even if you took out the entire next-gen game functionality you'd have a product that would rival the Apple TV. The console could play all Quicktime, Windows Media, Xvid and DivX encoded videos off of a burnt DVD/CD, your wireless network or any USB device plugged into one of the systems three USB ports. You can also charge your iPod and stream your songs and playlists to the Xbox and play it instead of the normal background music for any given game. Factor in its easy connectivity to the TiVo-esque Windows Media Center and the fact that its a functional upscaling DVD player and you have a system that rivals whatever you can find on cable TV at any given moment. I mean, if you know how to use BitTorrent and search Veoh properly, there's an endless amount of entertainment you can potentially get on this time. It was a fantastic feeling to tell my family about the Helvetica movie caught a screening of and listened to a Q and A with the respective director at Pratt and be able to watch it within three hours of telling them.

As a Nintendo fanboy I was kind of afraid that the Xbox 360 would mostly only have American first person shooters and action games, not to mention a slew of bratty foul-mouthed 12 year olds on Xbox Live. While both of the statements are still kind of true in my mind, the console is still pretty solid if you just avoid Xbox Live altogether. I remembered how devastated I was when Microsoft bought Rare back in 2002 and I viewed their final Nintendo published game, Star Fox Adventures as the last swan song for the company I also felt that after a number of key members left the studio for Free Radical and Zoonami I didn't think the company could ever return to its former greatness. After playing around four or five hours of Viva Pinata, that couldn't be further from the truth. I remembered laughing when I heard that Microsoft was trying to market the title as the next Pokemon with merchandise and a television series, while those ambitions never really caught on, the game has a deceptively simple concept but it contains a lot of depth. Like its more complicated than Animal Crossing but more linear than Harvest Moon, I'm not exactly sure how well the game could really appeal to kids but its a lot of fun and I feel like it could have been a real hit with the Nintendo audience. Likewise, Xbox Live Arcade has a wonderful selection of Nintendo fanboy friendly indie titles. I'm strongly tempted to pick up Braid, Bionic Commando Rearmed to that swanky downloadable version of the Dreamcast Soul Calibur.

Between playing through tons of demos and watching quite a few movie files I had on my harddrive, the Xbox 360 was totally worth it at $270 and if you factor in the price of component cables, its actually $15 cheaper than the Wii at the moment. While the Wii is a great choice for non-gamers, if you already have a nice HDTV and are fairly tech savvy I'd totally recommend taking a second look at the Xbox 360. As it currently stands, its a much better value than the Wii and it offers a much more sophisticated and polished experience for the price. While I still love my Wii quite a lot, in the meantime I'll stick to catching up on all the games I missed out on for the Xbox 360 and wait for the entire "casual" Wii game fad to pass and Nintendo to get back to making titles that require creativity and time to make and not just a marketing budget.

In defense of Beverly Hills Chihuahua

2008-08-17T19:45:00.006-04:00

(note: this was a guest post I did on The Movie Watch a couple of weeks back now that I have another new post coming I figured this was the right time to post this.)

As long as I'm a new contributor on the Movie Watch, I might as well blow any reputation I might have in my first post. Yesterday I read that Ezra said that he'd rather watch the direct-to-DVD sequel to 101 Dalmatians. While I would not expect Beverly Hills Chihuahua to be the next Citizen Kane or anything after seeing the latest trailer it looks far from a throw away family film.

I'll admit it, I was as negative as everyone else when I saw the first poster for this movie. It didn't really show much besides for two chihuahuas, an Aztec temple and a large marquee bragging about the voice roles of George Lopez (ugh) and Drew Barrymore. Many felt it looked like the worst movie of the year, though with films like Meet Dave and The Love Guru (yes, I've seen them) I'd beg to differ. The second punch to this movie's face was the teaser that was attached to WALL-E. This teaser really said little what the movie was actually about and for 90% of the people in the audience it would be the only footage they'd see from the actual movie before its September release. For the seasoned movie viewer the teaser really had nothing to offer besides for poorly animated Chihuahua's playing the drums. With the inevitable pop-culture references as implied by an old DJ BOBO pop song blaring in the background with Chihuahua's singing and dancing behind it. This teaser made the offensive trailer for Madagascar seem tame. The fact that this movie also is helmed by the director of the live-action Scooby-Doo movies and Big Mamma's House didn't do much to win me over on this movie either.

However when I saw that new trailer that was posted by Disney up on YouTube more recently it was a very different movie than the gimmicky dreck I was expecting. The new trailer seemed more like Homeward Bound with a pretty inoffensive and subdued sense of humor. The trailer even did the miraculous job of putting the teaser into perspective making the little prologue about the Aztecs before the opening make a lot more sense. The trailer also had very little CGI apart from the obvious moving lips on the dogs whereas the teaser was completely 3D animated. The other surprise was that there were no pop-culture references in the full trailer either apart from that Scarface line but that's so deeply embedded into our culture I don't know if it even counts. In a world where the trailer for Madagascar Escape 2 Africa was getting an uproarious laugh in the movie theater this is a great thing. Sure, it had its share of lame jokes in the trailer but so do a lot of Disney movies. If you judged Enchanted by its trailer it would look pretty formulaic as well. Disney is concerned first and foremost with families and if showing a gang of chihuahuas playing the bongos was enough to get the kids excited, then it will ultimately be a success.

The new trailer made me develop quite a soft spot for this movie. It reminded me a lot of the movies I've been forced to sit through in elementary school just to get the mangey kids quite for an hour or so. I had no clue at that time what the general fan consensus those movies had. In fact, a lot of the films I fondly remembered received terrible reviews, such as Mouse Hunt whereas Babe was nominated for an Academy Award and I had no idea at the time. I was crushed when I saw Roger Ebert's scathing review of Home Alone when they opened up their review archive to the internet. But at the same time I agreed with a lot of his criticism. He may have missed the point of a simple dumb family movie. Roger Ebert had a point in that it would have more emotional resonance if they showed Kevin as a vulnerable and defenseless kid in the face of criminals, but it would seem entirely out of place among the various slapstick gags that were to follow. If screenwriter John Hughes were to follow Ebert's advice he'd have to retool the film entirely for something that's already become a classic family movie in its current state.

To get things straight I'm still not going to go out of my way to see Beverly Hills Chihuahua, that is unless by some weird miracle it winds up getting a Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, this is definitely something I'd watch on a lazy sunday had it been on Disney Channel or something and in comparison to other non-Disney family dreck like Fly Me to the Moon and Space Chimps this movie's looking pretty promising for its fairly young audience. At the very least prints of Salvador Dali's short film Destino will be screened before all the prints of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, that's worth the price of admission alone or it could make a better stoner film than Pineapple Express, and that's saying a lot.

have you seen Pineapple Express...on Speed (Racer)?

2008-08-09T17:35:00.006-04:00

I've been anticipating Pineapple Express for a really long time, especially after I first saw the Red Band trailer in early 2008 with MIA's Paper Planes featured pretty prominently. I actually almost saw a test screening of this back in February. On my way back from an art history museum visit I hung out in Union Square for a bit and they were handing out free passes to see this the next day outside the movie theater. When I came back the next day for the screening they apparently moved the showing to some weird theater over in Queens and I was really too late to catch any of it. Since then I've watched the trailer a lot more times than I probably should have and imagined the movie to be more about two slackers who get forced into having a purpose who would normally not want one at all.

Did it live up to the hype or my mental image of it? Sort of. Pineapple Express was much like the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie in that it had a lot of funny one-liners but nothing quotable enough to remain in the bowels of High School hallways or annoying people at frat parties. The film was a surprisingly violent mix between Hot Fuzz and Cheech & Chong with a bit of Judd Apatow's signature conversational improvised humor thrown in for good measure. While its not half as good as this year's other Judd Apatow produced comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall it was certainly a funny movie. In comparison to the ultra low-standards of the stoner comedy genre this could have a place as one of the few drug comedy films that I could actually stand.

The reason why the bar is so low for drug movies is that stoners are incredibly easy to please. Pretty much if you show the main characters doing some illegal substance at ANY portion of the movie it would immediately get their seal of approval. I can imagine this film living on in the poster section of an FYE or something because just about every scene has the main characters on some drug or another and for that reason I'm sure it will become a cult druggie classic alongside the terribly overrated Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. My rule on stoner films applies to just about everything, while I could understand how stoners could like films that glorify marijuanna use like How High, the Tenacious D movie and the Harold and Kumar series (amoung others) many stoners also love Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and that's about as strong as an anti-drug movie can get.

Pineapple Express strays from the typical stoner comedy formula by trying to add some heart to its various preaching to the choir related antics. This comes off as half-realized as in one scene you'd see Seth Rogen in tears over his crumbling relationship with his high school aged girlfriend (which was played off as a joke 9 out of 10 times) and in the next they'd have a fight scene which would amount to Spider-man's James Franco getting kicked in the crotch. While this works when it plays off of the buddy-action movie archetype it seems lost when they switch to their action movie satire elements.

Ultimately, Pineapple Express was decent but it has a few very apparent flaws that really hold it back from being a generation defining movie like Seth Rogen and Eric Goldberg's Superbad. As someone who doesn't do drugs and was not under the influence of any substance when watching this movie I found a lot of scenes to be pretty funny, which considering I'm not in the "audience" that this movie really panders to I guess that's the biggest compliment this film can get. If you're a fan of Judd Apatow this film is still worth a look, it's certainly watchable which puts it leagues above the abysmal Drillbit Taylor, just don't go in expecting a cinematic revolution or anything.

2.5/4

Here's a quick run-down of some of the other movies I watched between now and my last blog post...

Hot Rod - I know this film ultimately was a huge failure in both the box office and with critics alike but I always kind of wanted to see this ever since I saw the trailer for it before Transformers. While it didn't look like high art or anything it looked like it had a few funny parts and it had Arrested Development's Will Arnett in there who's proving himself to be a bigger tool than Jason Bateman. This was originally written to be a Will Ferrel and despite not having any of the same writers as your standard Will Ferrel "sports movie" it definitely had the same sense of humor with our protagonist never successfully completing a stunt throughout the entire film. While it was not perfect and I found the movie perhaps a little too silly for its own good, it definitely wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting and was totally worth the 90 minutes or so I spent watching this when I downloaded it off of Veoh.

2/4

A Tale of Two Sisters - After seeing DVDs of this film included as a giveaway before a screening of Tokyo Gore Police at the New York Asian Film Festival I've been extremely interested in seeing this Korean horror flick. Like most successful Asian horror films, this one is getting an Americanized remake in early 2009 and I'm pretty sure the remakes will be more along the lines of The Grudge and The Host than the Ring. What really holds this film together is the terrific performances given by each of the members of the cast which really sold its ghost story premise to me. The scares here are mostly psychological and its commendable for how little gore there is in this movie with it being used to accentuate the scares as opposed to just grossing the audience out.

3/4

Be Kind Rewind - This is one I really wish I saw in theaters, while the actual "sweding" part of this movie was pretty miniscule in relation to the trailer the film here itself was good enough where it didn't really seem to matter. Be Kind Rewind had a great and quirky cast of characters but it still felt incredibly genuine taking place in only one city block. I'm not really a big fan of Michel Gondry but I kind of loved the very light brand of comedy in play where by the ending the movie gets very sentimental and all the humor kind of fades away into obscurity.

3.5/4

Drillbit Taylor - Had this not already been written by Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow I'd deem this as a PG13 watered down imitation of Superbad, the only difference being this one has Owen Wilson playing a body guard of sorts. While I do believe a lot of the awkwardness that made Superbad funny could be re-imagined in the form of a PG13 or made-for-TV movie the problem with this one is that it was still trying to be edgy while holding back from stepping on the few land mines that would guarantee an R-rating. While this was not completely terrible the main cast of kids felt kind of bratty and the bullies were portrayed with about as much depth as an episode of Doug. Owen Wilson was still very funny in this but he really didn't get too much screen time, it felt like they were really just using him to shoehorn ticket sales for an otherwise bland high school comedy film.

1.5/4

Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny - Dear god! If it weren't for the film's occasional catchy musical interludes, I'd be strongly tempted to give this a half a star. While theoretically I'd like this movie it felt more sloppy than it was surreal and it tried just a little too hard to be non-sensical. You'd be better off just listening to a Tenacious D album instead, they're a lot funnier.

1/4

Speed Racer - This was another one that I found the test screener of randomly uploaded onto Vreel. I was in the minority of people who actually was supportive of this movie since the trailer first emerged on the internet. The Wachowski brothers seemed to be making an adaptation of the English dubbed version of the TV series as opposed to a darker re-imagining of it. The real problem with the movie came with the length of the movie, clocking in at 2 and a half hours with most it that being dialogue. Had it been an hour shorter, it would be a lot easier to forgive the film for its flaws and praise it for its awesome race scenes but in the meantime it's simply not worth seeing. Maybe if you could rent it on DVD and skip to all the racing scenes it would be worth it but only if you pay less than a few dollars for it.

1.5/4

The Animation Show 4 rundown

2008-08-02T16:50:00.007-04:00

I've always wanted to see the Animation Show but it was typically too far away for me to ever really have a chance to see it, I caught it on MTV2 once at 2 am and I thought it was pretty neat. This year my local Avon Theatre had a screening of the show tucked away in their Cult Films series for August, I'm typically not a big fan of the place for their overly pretentious attitude, high prices and simply not knowing enough about film to really warrant such an attitude but I figured its better than dropping the $18.50 and two hours of my time to go to New York to see it.

As a huge fan of both Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt I was hoping they'd have more of an influence on the films screened there (both of which surprisingly did not have any films in this year's Animation Show). Its not like Don didn't have any new films in his queue, because he did and it was absolutely fantastic. I don't know why they didn't just top off the show with his short film Everything Will Be OK. I saw it at an ASIFA screening at Pratt and it was easily his deepest film yet if they couldn't fit it in the show's lean 90 minute run time they could have EASILY taken out some of the weaker shorts in the festival.

This year's festival was totally worth seeing but not all the shorts were a home run or anything. Luckily, the bad ones were forgettable enough where you couldn't hold it against the festival and were equally weighted out by some good shorts. Its obvious that they held off their heavy hitters like Bill Plympton until the end, they ended it with a fairly lengthy 3D animated short commissioned by the festival which was pretty cool considering it was from some fairly unknown Polish Animators.

The first real surprise was Angry Unpaid Hooker this crudely animated short didn't really have more than a few drawings in the entire piece but that was what made it all the more endearing. It reminded me a lot of UPN and later Adult Swim's mildly successful series Home Movies where a long string of improvised and frank uncomfortable dialogue made the short funny in the most deadpan sort of the variety (here's a link to the short off of someone's blog). PES's Western Spaghetti was also very good much like his other stop motion short films but its one of those things that I've already seen on YouTube though it was a lot cooler to seen on a theater screen without questionable compression. This Way Up was one of the few CG entries in the Animation Show that I actually liked, there were parts that reminded me a bit of the land of the dead moments of Corpse Bride but overall I was won over by its morbid sense of humor and level of exaggeration that you rarely see in 3D animated shorts. My other favorites included the noire comedy short Key Lime Pie, Bill Plympton's Hot Dog short and the incredibly artsy and meticulously crafted Jeu from the National Film Board of Canada.

Likewise, I found a few of the shorts just offensively bad. The first of which Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker was probably selected for its blend of 3D animation and 2D both of which I felt were kind of lacking, the animation was a little too limited for my tastes especially when up against the smooth frame rate of the computer generated backgrounds, this one was really just tailored for druggies and I didn't really find much artistic value in it maybe if it was a bit shorter. A series of Yompi the Crotch-Biting Sloup stop-motion short films were also sprinkled throughout the show and unless you find the title as the highest level of humor, you won't really get too much out of it. Lastly the French Prof. Nieto Show Ep 1 didn't really feature too much animation in it at the end of the day and really just came off as more prentious than it did funny for me. The rest of the short films were all in the "okay" category with Psychotown, Operator and Blind Spot providing a laugh here and there.

Ultimately the Animation Show had enough solid short films for me to warrant a recommendation and I'll see it again next year if they'd bring it back to Stamford. My theater was only about a third full and compared to the immense lines at New York City's IFC Center I doubt The Avon Theatre would really be a high priority for them. While I don't think I'd spend hours of my time to see it nor would really go out of my way to buy the DVDs from past festivals, it was enough fun with a crowd of people to have a good time.

I also saw a few of my classmates from high school there randomly at the screening. That was kind of rad.

3/4

Good evening Commissioner...WHY SO SERIOUS!!?

2008-07-20T20:58:00.005-04:00

I know I haven't gotten around to my impressions of the Sony E3 Press Conference but I was pretty indifferent towards it and at this point I don't really think it would be worth it for me to really write anything apart from the "I didn't really find anything too captivating or offensive about it" at this point in time. I'd rather write about the several films I've seen over the past month that I've never really gotten around to blogging about because I was still unsure what exactly my impressions were on them...and I also saw The Dark Knight today, a film that I've been following the hype for over the last two years.

As of writing this I'm over in the Cape Cod, without anything beyond a stack of my DVDs and my MacBook Pro without an internet connection. I really wanted to see The Dark Knight on Friday night especially after hearing all the positive buzz from both the critics and a handful of my co-workers that were lucky enough to catch a midnight showing of it. My hype for the Dark Knight started immediately after I saw Batman Begins, at that time I was unfamiliar with the other works of Christopher Nolan and I used bouts of multiple viewings of Memento and The Prestige to pass the time in-between what little details existed for The Dark Knight. I followed the viral websites, between the first e-mail campaign unlocking the first image of the Joker one pixel at a time and the I Believe in Harvey Dent viral websites. I even went to see I Am Legend in IMAX solely to catch the first seven minutes of The Dark Knight. In fact when I first heard of Heath Ledger's death I was devastated not for his Academy Award winning performance in Brokeback Mountain but more because he was the first actor that I really felt "got" the Joker and it would be the last time I'd really see the role achieved so perfectly.

Onward to the geekery:
The Dark Knight - As you could tell from my blurb above, my bar was set ridiculously high for this film. Even more than what I had for Batman Begins and for that it was a culmination of all my Batman: The Animated Series watching as a kid. Luckily, The Dark Knight did not disappoint and it did to Batman Begins what the Empire Strikes Back did to Star Wars. The Dark Knight did more than just apply the "more of the same" formula to the already successful Batman Begins, nor did it give us something totally different, rather it perfected what was introduced in the previous film and gave us an elaborate crime drama that is completely believable and realistic, something that you'd rarely see in a superhero movie.

One of the smartest choices Nolan made in The Dark Knight was the ideal of not giving the Joker an origin story and rather just have him exist. While the Joker implies that he may have had domestic problems, he changes the story of his scar several times throughout the movie. This gives us the portrait of an intelligent psychopath, it was best described in the bank heist scene in the beginning of the film where he was called "a nutjob who painted his face white". Even his walk would have both the grace of a Cirque du Soleil performance mixed in with the clumsiness of Cosmo Kramer. From the Joker however, we're given the story of Harvey Dent's transformation into Two Face where he originally starts as a public and cleaner cut lawyer version of Batman and then becomes a criminal mastermind. Nolan's depiction of Two Face is about as disturbing and grotesque as something can get in a PG13 rated movie, with the revelation of his face after the acid burn being one of the highest points in the movie. While Two Face is given a fair amount of screen time its pretty obvious that they were building him up to be the villain of the next movie much like how they built up Batman's character in the previous film. A quick note to anyone who's going in to watch the film, I was trying to find out whether or not Two Face did or did not have his wisdom teeth, you can see his full jaw and I tried to count how many teeth he had, I couldn't tell sadly :(

The use of 3D animation for Two-Face's burnt face and real-life pyrotechnics for the explosions and stunt doubles was also very commendable. While they weren't able to pull off anything a third as over the top as something you'd see in a Spider-man film, it was also a lot more immersive. For what stunts they did have, you'd see trucks flipping over and buildings blowing up, for all of this the lighting, the camera's focus and the physics were all exactly on the mark which is a refreshing change for someone who's used to looking back and seeing Spider-man immediately transition into 3D animation when swinging around buildings. For the parts when they used 3D effects such as Harvey's face (much comparable to the octopus guy from the Pirates of the Caribbean films) it was not used to recreate an actual human but rather to create something creepy, moving the negative effects with the uncanny valley over in its favor.

The Dark Knight was an incredibly sophisticated film for something of its budget and I'm really surprised they decided to stick to the PG13 rating instead of going for an R. I doubt your average mall going consumer would even have the attention span for this movie, with most of the writing being focused on the drama with an occasional splash of action. It never felt like it held back because it was written around the confines of a PG13 leaving most of the really disturbing stuff offscreen but I wonder how different it would have been had they decided to show a few of the more graphic areas of the film and maybe treated it more EXACTLY like a crime movie and put a few splashes of profanity here and there. I'm not saying the movie needed it but when going for realism, criminals are far from role models and I doubt they'd exist in the 1950s era values of the MPAA. Many reviews compared The Dark Knight to The Godfather Part II and Heath Ledger's performance of The Joker to Hannibal Lector from Silence of the Lambs.

Overall, the Dark Knight is EASILY one of the best movies of the year in a firm second place to WALL-E. While it may not be the typical lighthearted subcomedy superhero film, Batman is not your typical lighthearted superhero. While I don't know if this movie would be too dark for young children, I'd give it a whole-hearted recommendation to anyone else who wouldn't mind sitting through a 2 and a half hour long movie with the occasional action scene thrown in.

4/4

Other movies:
Batman Gotham Knight - Much like what the Animatrix was for The Matrix: Reloaded, Batman Gotham Knight is an Anime adaptation of the Batman Begins universe (Batmanime?). Produced by Bruce Tim and featuring many of the writers and voice actors from Batman The Animated series mixed in with six different anime directors ranging from companies like Studio 4c (the opening short looks very close to Michael Arias's Tekkonkinkreet), Satoshi Kon (Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers) and the guys behind Ghost in a Shell. In theory, this could be liberally the best thing ever. Despite its pedigree, the biggest flaw in this comes from the fact that it tries to have six different self-contained short films that all tell one overarching story. This works, sort of well but ultimately it limits each team into telling a very specific kind of a story. While the dialogue heavy portion from the Ghost in a Shell creators made sense I would have rather had Studio 4c work on something more fluid and action oriented than just three skater teens reminiscing about their previous Batman related experiences. There was also some inconsistency between the teams with some portraying Bruce Wayne as the tough guy that he should be while others shown him as a pretty boy. I guess this is exactly what you'd get if you asked American's to make a Godzilla movie (which happened in 1998), while we'd understand the basic idea of the character we wouldn't really have much reverence for him because he was not a solid part of our popular culture. None of the shorts featured The Joker either, which is a huge disappointment in my mind. To have a Batman movie without the Joker is like a Superman movie without Lex Luther. He would also be the best character for multiple interpretations from the Japanese. Instead we were left with Dead Shot, Killer Croc and The Scarecrow, all are pretty firmly on the B-list of Batman.

The 2-Disc DVD and Blu-Ray releases of this film also include five episodes from Batman: The Animated Series that were hand-picked by Bruce Tim. Pair that with the collectable tin and art book from Best Buy and you have a solid purchase for your average comic book geek and otaku. I can't quite recommend this though because maybe only half of the shorts in the film I'd really consider worth watching while the other ones aren't particularly offensive but they aren't really memorable either. Its worth seeing for the multiple very different interpretations of Batman but they sadly are all very short lived. The anime idea was much better suited for The Matrix.

2.5/4

Wanted - Dear lord! this was one of the most derivative non-comedy movies I've seen in a long time. In fact, me and my friends were laughing pretty consistently throughout the entire movie in the theater. With a very little amount of rewriting this could have become an Edgar Wright style satire movie on the entire hardboiled action genre that was created by the one-two punch of The Matrix and Fight Club. For what it was though, it was a fairly amusing movie that will probably entertain 90% of the beef-heading crowd that would go to see it. You still got to hear Morgan Freeman say a few very awesome four-letter words, there are a lot of fast cars, a few good action scenes and Angelina Jolie shows a lot of skin, which is probably a plus for the celebrity gossip reading monkeys that would probably go out and see this film.

The real problem with Wanted was that it didn't really have much of its own unique vision but rather it was just trying to be exactly like something else. Like you even had a deadpan Ikea obsessed Narrator who joins an underground anti-corporate society where he gets punched in the face and beaten up by his peers. Factor in hundreds of slow-motion shots and bullet time effects and you have something that's trying a bit too hard to be Fight Club with the commercial success of The Matrix and 300. Say what you want about either of those films being overrated, but they at least knew what kind of movie that wanted to make.

On top of that, halfway through Wanted I felt like they were running out of tricks. While its cool to see a car skid into someone with a door open to pick them up, its only fun the first time you see it and when you do it a few more times it felt tired. Even the fairly lame sequence where two bullets collided with each other in midair could have been forgiven had they done it just once, but after four times I couldn't hold in my collective shrug anymore. If they were going to do that, they should have included it in the narrator's intensive training and them make it out to be kind of like swordplay with guns. Factor in a couple of sex scenes that reeked of "Oh, SEX!!! yeah, I've had that" and you have a movie that is only good for 13 year olds who are trying too hard to be "cool" or "edgy" but don't have the capacity to be either of those things.

For what it was, Wanted was a fun movie as long as you lower your expectations for for just a dumb action movie that has a few moments that are kind of fun.

2/4

Hancock - This is NOT a movie I'd want to pay money to see so I'm glad that I saw someone uploaded a handicam version of it onto Veoh, going into it I knew it was going to be terrible but I was hoping it would be more the Wild Wild West kind of terrible and less I, Robot bad. I recognized Jason Bateman was in it, and he's been the biggest tool in Hollywood since Teen Wolf Too and even his good roles in Arrested Development and Juno, they had him play a fairly door matt-esque character. Hancock actually was a really dumb and fun movie for the first 40 minutes but then when decided to try to be a "serious" superhero movie.

Without spoiling too much, Hancock started to add rules to Will Smith's heroism such as a weakness to his invulnerability, only to use them a scene later. While Hancock had a few really funny parts in the beginning and the idea of a Superhero that no one wants is an interesting concept, ultimately Hancock falls apart with a hashed together ending which just served as an excuse for the inevitable Hancock 2.

Though, on the bright side of things, P. Diddy's review of Hancock is funnier and more entertaining than ANYTHING in the movie.

1.5/4

E3 2008 Impressions: Nintendo

2008-07-15T20:21:00.004-04:00

With Microsoft's press conference being done and dusted we were left with whatever Nintendo or Sony had up their sleeves at this coming E3. I never even watched Sony or Microsoft's presentations last year, I mostly only just caught up on the big announcements with my handy RSS reader. All I could really remember from Nintendo's conference last year was the immense feeling of disappointment after seeing their real big guns just amounted to the announcement of the Wii Wheel and Wii Zapper peripherals both of which amounted to really cheap hunk's of plastic that simply just hold the Wii remote in place, apart from maybe a couple of hours of experimenting with both respectably I preferred the typical nunchuk and Wii remote combo, or in the case of the Wii Wheel using the Classic Controller for Mario Kart. While they did show Wii Fit (which I have no interest in buying) which turned out to be quite a huge seller and announce dates for Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros. Brawl (the latter of which was delayed by a good three and a half months) I really didn't have that much to look forward to. This year, I've felt a lot of the same things with the notable exception being that I still have no idea what Nintendo's big blockbuster game of this holiday season will be.

Nintendo's Press Conference:
The Good:

Animal Crossing: City Folk looks like everything I was really hoping for, this wasn't a flooring announcement or anything but if its half as addictive as its Gamecube and Nintendo DS counterparts this looks like it will be quite fun, the City gives off kind of a Harvest Moon vibe to me but it fixes a lot of what was wrong with the random events in the prior installments. I'm also really glad to see that they finally put their foot down and made online play a big deal for this one, hopefully by then we would have something better than the friend code system for this.
The surprise announcement of the Wii Speak accessory for Animal Crossing was sort of a mixed blessing for me. I liked the idea of a Microphone that can pick up every voice in the room but why didn't they release this for Super Smash Bros. Brawl? that game is far more suited for voice chat than Animal Crossing, and will this wind up like the voice chat in Pokemon Pearl and Metroid Prime Hunters where you could only chat to registered friend code friends. If that's the case, then it would be barely worth it.
Of the three third-party titles that Nintendo highlighted, the clear winner was Call of Duty: World at War. From the brief clip it probably had some of the best third party graphics on the Wii and its one of the few times I was proven right when a developer stated that "they developed the Wii version from the ground up and that its not a PS2-port" where I'd actually believe them.
The WiiMotionPlus accessory looks like everything the Wii remote concept was promised to be at Tokyo Game Show back in 2005. I was impressed by the amount of precision the device had and I'm excited to see how some third parties will approach the accessory. I really wish this kind of thing was a mandatory update on all future Wii remotes and an add-on for all existing ones. No developer would want to touch it if its sold separately.
Luckily the WiiMotionPlus will be bundled with Wii Sports Resort much like how a Wii remote was bundled with the mediocre Wii Play. This one shows a lot of promise, especially with the new 1:1 sword fighting minigame that Wii owners were practically begging for since they first saw the controller. I wasn't impressed with how much the frisbee minigame relied on the sensor bar during the live demo but I'm sure these issues can all be addressed by its Spring '09 release date.
The drum kit in Wii Music looked really intuitive, especially using the Wii Balance Board as a kickpad.
There was a new trailer for MadWorld which showed off more of the gameplay though nothing much was really revealed from it.
The Japanese GBA cult title Rhythm Tengoku is coming to the United States in form of the Nintendo DS game Rhythm Heaven. The title looked like a combination of the quirky random microgames from WarioWare with all the fun of those oh so popular rhythm games. Elite Beat Agents proved that the Nintendo DS is an excellent system for games that would allow you to tap on the screen, this will probably be pretty awesome.
They announced that there would be a new Grand Theft Auto game on the Nintendo DS, but it could easily just turn out to be another Grand Theft Auto Advance and play like the archaic top-down Grand Theft Auto games. If it plays like a GTA III era title, then I'm pretty interested.

The Bad:

Why did they devote 10 minutes of precious E3 time to the terrible looking Shaun White snowboarding game from Ubisoft? its bad enough seeing those poor graphics blown up on a large screen but was it really necessary to hear a boring 5 minute story about someone breaking their wrist snowboarding to lead into this? I'd stick to my SSX Blur for the Wii...I could at least stay on my board for that one (the people demoing this either really sucked or the game was poorly made, I'm leaning more towards the poorly made part).
Wii Speak will be sold separately from Animal Crossing for $29.99. With such little support I don't think anyone would want this thing, it kind of reminds me of the Broadband adaptor on the Gamecube which ultimately was really only used for a couple of Phantasy Star games and LAN features for Mario Kart and Kirby Air Ride. The broadband port was so useless that it would later be the basis for the Gameboy Player attachment for the Gamecube.
There's nothing there to convince me that the new Star Wars: Clone Wars game is really anything more than uninspired shovelware. The gameplay didn't look that much different than the already disappointing looking Wii version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and does anyone even care about the Rayman Raving Rabbids franchise anymore? I think by now most hardcore Wii owners are far tired of minigame collections, just give us a real Rayman game already.
Wii Music was one of those things where I was initially very excited after seeing the drum kit and all but my enthusiasm was pretty much gone as soon as Shigeru Miyamoto came on stage and explained that it's impossible to lose in Wii Music and it pretty much amounts to miming playing an instrument with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk while the game does 90% of the work for you. I can't really see this having any lasting value and I broke out laughing seeing four people waggling their Wii remotes on stage with a forced smile on their face. I'm really not feeling this one.

OVERALL RATING: 2.0/4
While far from a mess, Nintendo's press conference totally ignored the demands of the "hardcore" Wii audience (and by that I mean, people who play the Wii for more than a couple of weekends) and was focused mostly on corporate bragging and gimmicks. While Animal Crossing was a satisfying announcement, the title is FAR from a traditional game and I would have much rather had at least a teaser for a real Zelda title or something. I'm a huge Nintendo fanboy and this conference just left me with lukewarm feelings.

E3 2008 Impressions: Microsoft

2008-07-14T22:28:00.007-04:00

E3 at one time was the Superbowl of games, with stampedes of eager college students and press running in to soak in as many of the new holiday season titles that they could in a meager three or four days. Last year, they scaled down the size of E3 considerably inviting a fraction as many people and moving the date of the expo from May to July. Instead of cramming all the developers into a sweaty hanger, they instead opted for a hotel driven display where the press would have to get on a bus to go between different titles. This lead to a fairly disappointing expo with most of the games on display just being rehashed demos that most of the press members already played in some form at other public events. While there were some surprises like the announcement of the Balance Board accessory for the now unspeakably popular Wii Fit, most of the announcements just amounted to corporate gloating and confirmations of titles most people already new existed.

Fast forward to 2008, this year the scaled down E3 seemed to be taken a bit more seriously as a press outing. With announcements of Microsoft's Xbox 360 price drop and their Avatars leaking out through the internet and Nintendo's official confirmation of a new Animal Crossing game and a mysterious and ambitious Wii MotionPlus accessory this E3 is clearly a whole new animal than we've seen last year. The first conference up was Microsoft's, which I was checking up on the live-blogging and Twitter feeds at work every time I had one of those 30 second breaks waiting for computer related frustrations. As soon as I got home, I watched IGN's prerecorded coverage of the event and was both impressed and disappointed at what Microsoft had to offer.

The Good:

Fallout 3 looks really violent and really awesome. I haven't actually played any of the other titles in the Fallout series but I immediately appreciated its subtle 1950's bomb scare style humor and its use of nuclear zombies and severed limbs. While its a multiplatform release (with the exception of my poor neglected Wii), the Xbox 360 version looked pretty solid.
As a fanboy of both the American Elite Beat Agents and the Japanese Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! franchises, I was pleased to see iNiS was developing the karaoke title Lips. While on one hand it looked like a washed up version of Singstar, I'm pretty excited for what's to come with the motion sensitive microphone, even if its for some Guitar Hero-style titling gimmick. I'm a sucker for Karaoke, it was a blast at Pratt and its my favorite aspect of Rock Band by far.
Resident Evil 5 is shaping up to be the same kind of faux-zombie killing fun that I played to death on my Gamecube and Wii's Resident Evil 4.
Portal: Still Alive sounds really cool, I like the idea of it being a downloadable title from the start this time but I'm not too fond of that Xbox Live Arcade exclusivity. It was born to be a PC game.
I thought Gears of War was pretty rad from what little I played of it, Gears of War 2 looks just as fun.
The original Banjo-Kazooie is coming to Xbox Live Arcade, that's pretty sweet. Here's hoping for some graphical updates to it.
The Avatars while being a blatant rip-off of Nintendo's Miis, seem to be a lot more open to third party usage in titles. I've also been kind of a Mii addict so whatever this brings, it gives me a small reason to be excited.
The Netflix partnership for streaming movies to your Xbox 360 is a fantastic feature and a great kick in the face to Apple TV. Not digging the exclusivity though.
The Square-Enix announcements really came as no surprise to me but I'm pleased to know that the RPG-starved Xbox will at least be getting some non-KOTOR style RPGs. Final Fantasy XIII makes sense with the Unreal Engine being designed for cross-platform support, not too excited for The Last Remnant or Star Ocean though.

The Bad:

Microsoft seemed unsure of whether or not it wanted to appeal to the "hardcore" crowd (and by that I mean the immature teens and frat boys who play the Halo games) or the "casual" middle-aged Wii crowd. They opened with the "this conference may be tough to stomach" line with the "hyper violent" (and I put that in quotes for a reason) line-up for the rest of 2008 and 2009 but then they went on to introduce a new Wii Channel and Windows Media Center-esque GUI for the Xbox 360 and the introduction of Xbox Live Avatars which look like blander versions of Miis. Microsoft isn't fooling anyone with this.

I don't think anyone will use the Xbox Live Primetime service for longer than a week. The live-game show idea is novel but game shows are more of a passive experience brought together by the liveliness of the host and a few especially smart or dumb contestants, without there being a human presense it just seems kind of lame.

Resident Evil 5 looked a little "too" close to Resident Evil 4. While RE4 was one of the best games I've played of all last generation, its really disheartening to see the zombies animate in the same exact way to each play they were shot. While I'm sure they were technically superior to the three year old Gamecube game, the graphics weren't nearly as impressive to me. It wouldn't take much work to port this thing down to the Wii so why can't Capcom take a hint from the fantastic sales of the shovelware Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles and give us a real Resident Evil game?

I'm a bit disappointed to see Mega Man 9 is also coming out to the Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, I saw the WiiWare release of it as a kind of love letter to Nintendo fanboys. I'll still buy it though.

Microsoft really shouldn't brag about sales of third party titles being stronger than that of the Wii and PS3 versions combined. Most of the ones they were touting were First Person Shooter titles where the Xbox 360 version is the one that the development team is primarily concerned with, of course the Wii version's going to sell poorly, 9 out of 10 times its a hashed together port of the perfunctory PS2 version.

NetFlix shouldn't be "exclusively" on the Xbox 360. With the popularity of services like Hulu and the not-so popularity of Joost we really just need to be able to access these from a television hooked up console to really escalate these services beyond the unwatchable realms of a PC-screen. Why not open it up for a PS3/PSP firmware update or a Wii channel? then everyone wins.

OVERALL RATING: 2.5/4
Most of Microsoft's big announcements have already been leaked out onto the internet weeks before they presented it. While their hardcore titles were every bit as awesome as I expected they really fell on their face with their new casual branding. I'd almost say it was a great press conference but I was mostly met with indifference on this one.

A whole Lot of Red, White and Blue, not so much

2008-07-04T14:47:00.009-04:00

After loving The Machine Girl so much, I became a lot more open to Japanese horror films. So it came at no surprise that I sarcastically entered a contest to win tickets for Tokyo Gore Police on Twitch Film...and I won. With the New York Asian Film festival occurring at the IFC Center in New York City I knew I absolutely couldn't turn down a chance to be in with all the Kung-Fu movie buffs in New York City. Upon reaching there I was not disappointed. Despite the IFC center being located on the seediest sex shop ridden area on this side of Greenwich Village I knew I was at the right place when the girl working at the table was trying to buy my Forbidden Planet shirt off of me, of course I'd never sell off an awesome piece of '50s nostalgia but considering how the average person only notices that shirt is either the Comic Book store of the same name or the film where Robby the Robot came from, I was fairly impressed.

I was surprised by the crowd at the festival. While there were a few of the stereotypical 18 to 20-something comic book geeks and a couple of fellow Pratt students more than half of the crowd consisted of middle-aged hipster couples most seemed to be every bit as excited for the non-stop gore and graphic violence as the youngest ones in the crowd. The man immediately in front of me in line was a grey-haired man going to see Tokyo Gore Police alone. While he was not really in touch with the Internet hype for this flick, he clearly was a connoisseur of trashy Asian cinema mentioning several different directors that I never heard of and how he has a place that sells cheap kung-fu DVDs right next to his apartment. I asked him what he thought of the Machine Girl, he told me it was "okay" but "the gore was not as ridiculous as BLANK but if you want the gore to go alongside a good plot see BLANK but then again BLANK had a five minute cameo of Quentin Tarantino in the beginning". This was one of the few times in my life as a film geek that I felt totally inadequate compared to the amount of fanboyism that surrounded me.

The crowd here reminded me of what you'd see at a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture show. Before the screening of Tokyo Gore Police started, the event curator gave a brief synopsis of the film explaining that "it has gore...a lot of gore...and police but they are a gritty kind of police that we're not used to...and a plot somewhat like Robocop and Starship Troopers". Posters were handed out to a crowd of excited hands as they geared up for their giveaways. They collected e-mail addresses on forms in a cardboard box for a raffle that according to the form "has really great prizes and really terrible ones". The first thing they raffled off was a NYAFF branded bag full of schlocky DVDs and Japanese beer. When they announced the winner was Stanley Glick everyone recognized his name and cheered. They apparently recognized him as the cult blogger from Asian Cine Fest. Afterwards, winners could pick from one of three DVDs. The first being A Tale of Two Sisters which the curator said was now a piece of nostalgia being that Tartan Asia Extreme recently closed their doors a week ago, this was followed immediately by a loud booing from the audience. I could only recognize them as the label that crowded up my local Blockbuster's foreign section and the label on the relatively awesome film Oldboy. This was followed up with fanfare when they pulled out Shogun Assassin 5 (the first Shogun Assassin movie inspired the popular film Kill Bill) and the Korean horror flick Phone. The two other winners included a bubbly middle-aged woman who waited in line for 3 hours (!) to see Tokyo Gore Police and a young blogger that went by the name ZombieAssassin9099 which lead to a huge laugh from the audience. The director then said there would be random trailers for some of their other 27 festival films afterwards. They played the trailers for Fine, Totally, Fine which looked like what would be a chick flick with absurdist interludes and Strawberry Shortcakes which looked like a Japanese take on Sex and the City.

Onward to this week's film geekery:
Tokyo Gore Police - when I came in to this film I was expecting some sort of self-parody over the top gore film along the lines of The Machine Girl, especially after seeing the ridiculous trailer for it. Tokyo Gore Police however played off more as a straight out comedy film with random interludes of public service announcements, comedy vignettes and recruitment advertisements for the graphic but noble Tokyo Gore Police squad. While these segments were all really funny, they constructed a bleak vision of the future where violence is accepted as the cultural norm and where the violent exploits of the police are followed like the WWE and a spunky blond haired Emergency Announcer that seems more MTV than local government.

But rest assured, Tokyo Gore Police didn't take itself too seriously. The plot revolved around a genetic researcher who was trying to figure out what genes created a serial killer in order to find a way to eliminate the possibility of a killer altogether. Long story short, his research was a failure and he injected himself with the genes of Charles Manson. From then on he was capturing innocent locals and inserted a key shaped brain tumor into the heads of his victims changing them into crazy zombies with regrowing hideous limbs. If your trying to make sense out of the plot your missing the entire point of the movie. It really just seemed like an excuse to have ridiculous scenes such as a Geisha dressed assassin basking with an umbrella in a rain of crimson blood, a living chair made out of the organs of a person, a guy who shot severed hands of fists and middle fingers out of a rocket launcher and a man who after getting his legs severed would propel himself in mid-air with blood fountains and would fly out with his katana for an action scene. There were a couple of other noteworthy scenes but I'll end it there to keep in the element of surprise and to maintain my blog's relatively G-rating.

Tokyo Gore Police clocked in at about 2 hours which seems a bit long for a gore film but among a crowd of hecklers and cheery-eyed inner children it definitely didn't feel like it. Tokyo Gore Police really did a stellar job switching between some great cinematography, and fights and flat out comedy. There's really nothing else like it, I suppose it would be what you'd get if you asked the guys at Monty Python to make an action movie but the themes from Robocop really set it apart from seeming like random humor just for the sake of random humor. On top of that, the special effects in here were surprisingly good. The buckets of fake blood and corn syrup all had the right color and consistency while the key shaped brain tumors looked every bit like brain tumors. If you watch the NSFW five-minute trailer you'll have a good idea of what to expect.

Media Blasters is currently looking for a theatrical release of Tokyo Gore Police under their Tokyo Shock label. I remember reading that between The Meatball Machine, The Machine Girl and Toyko Gore Police we're experiencing a renaissance in Asian slasher movies. While I have not seen The Meatball Machine (yet) if the quality of The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police is any indication I have to totally agree with this statement. The DVD release of Tokyo Gore Police will be out around the holiday season, making it the perfect gift for the cult movie buff in all of us. I'll definitely be picking this one up.

Adventures in Geekery: WALL-E WAS FREAKIN' AMAZING EDITION

2008-06-28T13:33:00.013-04:00

I must have been looking forward to Wall-E for the better part of a year and a half now. Its really interesting how with every Pixar movie when you first hear their wildly creative idea you know next to nothing on how they'll flesh it out into a full-length movie but every single time they deliver in spades, I mean, even Cars their only lame looking movie turned out a LOT better than it looked. With Wall-E for half of the time I was hyped up for it all I knew was that it would largely be without dialogue and was loosely based off of the Charlie Chaplin film City Lights. Pair that with the fact that Andrew Stanton is an animation god to me between his screenwriting on the Toy Story movies and writing/directing Finding Nemo (which to many is the best Pixar film) and I'd have enough reason to be really excited for this. I felt a little uneasy about the early marketing for Wall-E with half the teaser devoted to ranking Wall-E up there with Pixar's other classics and their Superbowl Ad playing off of the character recognition of Buzz and Woody. I guess that's what it took to really sell Wall-E as a character, most of the advertising now just highlights just how enticing this little robot is.

Onward to movies I saw this week:

Wall-E - I caught a late showing of this yesterday and the theater was only about a quarter full. This is a bit disappointing for me especially after the entertaining but cinematically disappointing Kung Fu Panda is raking in big money at the box offiice. Unlike Kung Fu Panda, Wall-E is a movie that could care less about marketability, merchandising and big name stars as voice actors in fact with the exception of the obligatory John Ratzenberger voice role the strongest star power the movie has going for it is Ben Burtt of Star Wars fame's work on the sound effects for the movie. Of Course, any movie that would portray the owner of Buy-N-Large as the president of the world back five hundred years ago would want anything less than to be labeled as a corporate money grab.

As someone who kept up on every screenshot and every second that got released for this movie, I'd have to say that my expectations were ridiculously high for this movie and I was probably more hyped up for it than even Ratatouille (and I bought the Art book for that one before I saw it) and it was up there with The Dark Knight when it came to my most anticipated films of the year. Luckily Wall-E delivered every single expectation I had for it and then some, like every joke in the movie contributed to the story in some way and there was a ton of subtlety in the animation in others.

Comparisons to Sylvain Chomet's 2003 animated film The Triplets of Belleville would be inevitable. Both Wall-E and Belleville featured next to no dialogue and humans portrayed as amorphous blobs and Wal-mart shoppers. What's interesting is that unlike the Triplets of Belleville which just felt sour and artificial to me, Wall-E was largely entertaining even outside of its social commentary. Even though Wall-E blamed the end of the world on the Buy-N-Large corporation the humans were shown as good natured beings with the real villain really being their over reliance on technology. It was a bittersweet message for a film with such a depressing and dark opening scene. One could also compare the feelings of isolation to the first half or so of last year's I Am Legend especially comparing Wall-E's cockroach to Will Smith's German Shepard though apart from that Wall-E is a WAY better film than I Am Legend was, even at its best parts.

Wall-E is easily my favorite movie of the year so far and its every bit as strong as Finding Nemo and Ratatoille before it. I'm not sure yet whether or not I'd rank it as high as the original Toy Story quite yet but really its hard to rank Pixar movies because they are all amazing in their own unique ways. See it, see it twice, and whatever you do don't see Wanted, you'll be glad you did.

Air Guitar Nation - I picked this one up from the library because I'm a sucker for serious documentaries about ridiculous subjects. This one felt a lot like a lighter less dramatic version of The King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters. While it certainly had a lot of funny moments, it ran a bit too long for my tastes and it was only about an 80 minute movie to begin with. Its worth seeing solely for the energetic performances and its surprisingly good licensed soundtrack. Good but not worth repeated viewings.

Adventures in Geekery: Wii Homebrew and Panda edition

2008-06-21T13:39:00.019-04:00

Yes, its true. Yesterday I decided to get rid of a couple of those AMC Silver tickets I had lying in my wallet and I went to see Kung Fu Panda. For those who follow my blog, you'd know I had less than favorable impressions of the movie. I had incredibly bad vibes after Dreamworks ran a PowerPoint presentation for Digital Arts students at Pratt, and the incredibly derivative looking trailer didn't help. I don't think there's ever been an American Martial Arts movie in the past 20 years that hasn't used the song "Kung Fu Fighting" somewhere in the trailer, and that "Battle Without Honor Or Humanity" track from Kill Bill has been used in every possible ironic sense since it first appeared in a film. Luckily, it was mostly void of the pop culture snarkiness and cheap gags that's a mainstay in most Dreamworks Animation movies but it still wasn't half of what I'd consider Pixar-quality.

Onward to the geekery:
Kung Fu Panda - to start things off, this movie gave off an incredibly great first impression with this 2-D animated opening from James Baxter Animation, who also worked on the opening 10 minutes or so of Enchanted. It looked absolutely incredible on the digital projection with details like a really subtle paper parchment texture showing through. It would be interesting to see if the film would be any different if they tried to make the entire thing in this style, or at least created some sort of cell-shading filter to mimic this simplicity with the control of 3D animation. When the actual movie started, I was fairly satisfied with the amount of squash and stretch they were able to pull off with the animation in this. They started using it in Madagascar but it was really pronounced in this movie. The lighting in this was quite good as well, with a fearless choice to go with red and blue lights in some of the scenes, its great to see Dreamworks finally playing around with the limitless amount of freedom CG gives them for their movie.

In a lot of ways Kung Fu Panda reminded me a lot of Over the Hedge in that it was a step above the Shrek movies and really entertaining, but not anything I'd go out of my way to see again. Like Over the Hedge's decision to have Bruce Willis play a cuddly raccoon and Avril Lavigne voice an angsty teen possum, it had a needlessly star studded cast which really only needed Jack Black at the end of the day. Some of the questionable choices included Knocked Up's Seth Rogan voicing a praying mantis, who only had a couple of snarky one-liners and an excuse to get his signature laugh somewhere into the movie. Angelina Jolie played a moderately big role as a cuddly tiger but she appeared alongside Jack Black in the Dreamworks's horrible Shark Tale movie, maybe Dreamworks is running out of marquee actors to pick from. It also had Lucy Liu and Jackie Chan in there, but only to collect a paycheck, all I can remember is that they played a Snake and a Baboon respectably and they said maybe two or three lines. You'd think they could have put a little money aside and gone with Saturday morning cartoon voice actors for those minor roles and put a little money towards the writing, which was easily the weakest thing in this movie.

While I remember at Pratt, Dreamworks touted this as an animator driven project and that's what really saved this movie in my mind. It seemed like they just let the animators have fun let it be through slapstick gags or a few ridiculously awesome action sequences that seemed a little out of place for the rest of the movie. The real problem with this movie was the fact that all the sequences that were supposed to convince us that Po (Jack Black) was not the dragon warrior were just played off as slapstick gags. I really wish there was just one scene, where you could legitimately see Jack Black get his ass handed to him and just get a look of desperation on his face. Yes, I know this is a "family movie" but they did it in a Bug's Life and it was EASILY the strongest moment in the entire movie. Instead, the scenes when Jack Black actually did give up we really had little reason to actually believe him where in most of the shows he had a "smile on his face" and it looked like he was having fun in the midst of those slapstick gags. While Kung Fu Panda had its share of flaws, you could certainly do a LOT worse when it comes to 3D animated movies.

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro - the funny thing about Hayao Miyazaki is that even when you think you've seen all his films already, there's always one that you missed. I saw this at the library in the children's section and I was apparently the only one who's taken it out ever since they first got it a few months ago. I think this one was made before Studio Ghibli even existed and its quite odd because it still has a lot of the staples of a Miyazaki film (like flight, bad guys who are actually good) but it also has a humor and sensibility that I didn't know Miyazaki even had. I found this one pretty entertaining but I really feel like Miyazaki's style really evolved around the time they released My Neighbor Totoro, his early stuff like this and Nausicaa was good but they were fairly flawed. Only worth it if you haven't seen some of his more recent stuff yet.

OTHER GEEKERY!!!

This week I also installed the Homebrew Channel on my Wii, after hearing that the latest update will disable the Twilight Hack I figured that now was my only real chance to do it. I installed the hack mainly just so I could back up my 160 hours of data in Brawl. While my warranty expired last February (it was a launch Wii, extended for registering) I figured if my Wii ever bites the dust which I feel its getting pretty close to, I want to have a way to back up the titles that the Wii OS wouldn't let me like Mario Kart Wii, Brawl and Guitar Hero III.

Getting the Homebrew channel wasn't nearly as user friendly as I imagined it. After checking where my Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess disc was manufactured and reformatting an SD card with a very specific tree of folders. It seemed needlessly tense. Especially when I ran the Twilight Hack and this MS-DOS like bios started up and told me if my Wii doesn't work anymore that its no one's fault but my own. It was all a very nerve-wracking process and I doubt really anyone outside of maybe a half of a percent of Wii owners would ever want to go through it.

After installing the channel, it all ran kind of fine. The start-up logo for the channel was quite cool, it would be nice if you could access the Wii menu with through the Wii's bios from there and there's no way to get back to the channel's menu within any actual applications. Most of the homebrew apps were pretty much unplayable, this included a soundless version of Duck Hunt which was done much better in a Flash game before it and a version of Tetris with a fair bit of slow-down. The SNES emulator on the other hand worked without a hitch and supported the classic controller. As someone who's dropped more money than I'd like to think on Virtual Console downloads, this was quite novel. I spent most of the mod from there on playing EarthBound, which I'm actually enjoying quite a lot.

I might try to see Shakespeare on the Sound one of these days too...before it ends fairly momentarily.

Wordle changes your del.ico.us tags into a piece of art

2008-06-19T18:36:00.004-04:00

I can't endorse this site enough, its really REALLY cool

I want MGS4 almost as much as I don't want a PS3

2008-06-16T18:10:00.032-04:00

If there's a theme of the video game releases of 2008, it is that they are all just delayed big budget blockbuster titles that were supposed to come out in 2007. I can't really blame the companies for delaying the titles, Super Mario Galaxy, The Orange Box, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Halo 3 were all released within four months of each other. Had it been any other year, any of those titles could have easily taken Game of the Year from just about any game publication. The slew of delayed AAA titles released this year included Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. These delayed titles, thanks to some added development time are some of the strongest games of this generation with Grand Theft Auto IV getting reviews as strong as Super Mario Galaxy (though I'd take Super Mario Galaxy or Legend of Zelda over GTA any day) and Super Smash Bros. Brawl is second to only Nintendo's top tier Mario and Zelda franchises when it comes for the best rated Wii release ever.

The rest of 2008 is really hard to judge for especially before most of the big holiday guns are revealed at this year's souped down E3. Prince of Persia and Soulcalibur IV highlight the multi-platform releases and I'm sure Guitar Hero: World Tour will sell a lot for imitating Rock Band but I doubt it will really be anything spectacular. The PC is getting Spore which is Will Wright's much delayed follow up to Sim City and The Sims franchises. While the Xbox 360 is getting Gears of War 2, Too Human (a title that went in and out of development hell for the past 10 years) and the third entry of the Nintendo 64's popular Banjo-Kazooie franchise. The PS3 has the way cool looking LittleBigPlanet and a sequel to Insomniac's Resistance franchise. Not much has been announced for the Wii yet apart from Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (which I'm hoping is as good as its Gamecube counterpart) and De Blob shows promise, I'm sure Nintendo has an ace up its sleeve for Christmas at this coming E3 convention.

With Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots released only a few days ago, I'm feeling a stronger and stronger temptation to get a PS3. The fact that Wal-mart is also offering a $100 gift card with all PS3s including the MGS4 Bundle and the ability to play Blu-Ray discs helps a lot too. While I know that there is a chance that MGS4 could very well be ported to the Xbox 360 by the end of the year much like how Resident Evil 4, Killer7 and Viewtiful Joe were ported to the PS2 despite being touted as Gamecube exclusives for most of their development. If anything, the PS3 version will still be better than anything they could release on the Xbox 360 because the game was designed around the 60 GBs available on a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc and I really can't see them cramming that onto a few DVDs without a ridiculous amount of compression. On top of that, millions of dollars were spent from both Sony and Konami for them to make the game's engine optimized for the PS3 and I doubt Sony will ever let Konami let go of it. Besides, I really REALLY want LittleBigPlanet and you can't really discount the multi-platform games like Oblivion, The Orange Box (which is fine with the new patch), Assassin's Creed, the sequel to Beyond Good and Evil and that way cool looking Prince of Persia game coming out. I'm not really all that interested in the frat boy mentality of most of the Xbox 360 exclusives anyway and most of the Japanese titles I want are out on either the Wii (which I have and love) or the PS3.

So far, I watched the first three hours of Metal Gear Solid 4 played on a live-stream off of Giant Bomb. As someone who's only really played Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes on Gamecube and just watched his brother play through MGS2 and 3, I'm actually pretty excited for this one. They seemed to lighten up the intensity of the stealth mechanic with new ways to hide, new melee attacks and a slightly more liberal cone of vision. On top of that, the game adopted a lot of the gameplay elements from Gears of War making it a fairly competent action game if you want to totally ditch the stealth element altogether. I heard they have better unlockables and hidden weapons if you play it killing as few people as possible though which is great reward for the purists of the series.

If your reading this in my blog, here are a couple of clips from the game so you can see what I'm talking about...

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/35102.html

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/18828

The cutscenes did drag on a bit much though. It would be generous if I said half the footage I saw was gameplay and the other half was either a cut scene or a codec conversation. Fortunately, what I saw of the cutscenes looked REALLY good. The direction of the tension and action looked every bit as awesome as the trailers shown at the past few Tokyo Game Show and E3 conventions and the themes of the war economy in a not too distant future hit a little closer to home than any other entry in the series. Did I mention that aging Solid Snake was one of the smartest moves made in this one, while each Metal Gear Solid game is famous for having an "edge of your seat torture" scene of sorts putting a 70 year old version of Snake through the bowels of war makes the entire game feel almost like a torture scene for him...and yes, that is a good thing.

Will I buy a PS3 within the next two months solely for this game? probably not, but its really hard to resist...

just felt like posting rube goldberg devices

2008-06-14T13:30:00.004-04:00

I found this today on StumbleUpon and its one of the best Rube Goldberg machines I've seen in ahwhile, but then it also made me think of all the videos I've seen. Here are some that stuck out in my mind as particularly memorable examples.

I found this one over on Alton Brown's blog about a year ago. I believe this commercial won Honda a design achievement award. When I first saw this I thought some parts of it were 3D animated but in fact, it was just an incredibly elaborate reaction with an incredibly high budget for filming. The budget takes away some of the fun of a rube goldberg machine but you still cannot deny the charm in this video.

This one was commissioned for two Swiss artists Peter Fischli & David Weiss, the actual chain reaction goes on for about thirty minutes but as you can see from the four minute sample on the internet, its some pretty elaborate stuff and I remember hearing that they went under a fair bit of scrutiny from the person who commissioned it up until the actual device was done.

The best argument against Dewmocracy is a five minute conversation with the average Mountain Dew drinker.

2008-06-13T20:19:00.009-04:00

Its not summer without a new spin-off flavor of Mountain Dew. I remember back in 2001 hoarding as much Mountain Dew: Code Red as the words "limited edition" made me fear the flavor's inevitable demise. Luckily the flavor returned the following summer as a permanent addition to the Mountain Dew family. 2003 marked the release of Mountain Dew Livewire which was Mountain Dew's answer to the caffeinated Sunkist orange soda, didn't really taste all that much different either they sort of brought this flavor back but only in 20oz bottles in select areas, sadly the NYC area is not one of them. Other subsequent limited edition flavors included Mountain Dew: Pitch Black which tasted like really bad cough medicine and Mountain Dew: Pitch Black II which tasted exactly the same, only this time with a "sour bite" covering up the hideous taste of the last one. While I don't exactly miss this flavor, I still have a few cans of Pitch Black II lying around. Apart from that they recently released the Game Fuel flavor to coincide with the release of the game Halo 3 which didn't really taste all that different than Code Red and infact did not really have that much more caffeine either, I still kind of dug it though. With the exception of the short lasting MDX energy drink experiment, I felt like limited edition Mountain Dew flavors were simply just a thing of the past...

UNTIL NOW!!!

Last winter the Pepsi company launched a new website called DEWMOCRACY!! The site would allow Mountain Dew drinkers to create a new Mountain Dew flavor based off of any color they could think of with an accompanying name. While my Battery Acid and Rusty Nail flavors were not accepted, this summer they just launched three new limited edition flavors, Revolution, Voltage and Supernova. With the titles being as non-descriptive as possible your Mountain Dew drinker was only trusting the Pepsi company to articulate the flavors based off of the colors they like, seems more like a dictatorship if you ask me. Onward to the flavors!

Mountain Dew: Voltage - The first flavor I'll mention is also the most popular one currently on the Dewmocracy website. Voltage tastes surprisingly close to the commercial failure Pepsi Blue flavor which consequently was resurrected in a Mountain Dew slurpee flavor. Or you can say it tastes like a blue non-diet version of that Fresca soda that is popular with the soccer moms across the country. Voltage is described elegantly on Wikipedia as "A blue colored raspberry-citrus and ginseng flavored Dew" which I suppose is about as accurate as the marketing material can describe. Its a decent flavor but I'm unsure as to how is winning on the online voting by such a large margin.

Mountain Dew: Revolution - this one is a "A translucent blue-colored, wild berry fruit and ginseng flavored Dew." All the new Dewmocracy flavors seem to be pushing the "ginseng" aspect of the flavor. While ginseng has not really been proven to actually give a surge of energy or anything, its been popular ever since Red Bull became a huge overpriced phenomena. This one tastes very similar to the Voltage flavor but is more of a subdued flavor, I couldn't really say it tasted like too much of anything, the sugary taste overrode any citrus-y flavor I could derive. This one is the weakest of the three flavors in my mind.

Mountain Dew: Supernova - This one is marginally my favorite, with a "A pink colored strawberry, melon, lime, and ginseng flavored Dew." To me, it tastes more like a grape soda riddled up with caffeine. Its kind of like a more refined version of the original Pitch Black flavor, and I don't mean that as a bad thing. I'm not really big on any of the flavors to be honest but this one would be my favorite I guess. I really can't see any of these flavors lasting more than a year when they inevitably pick the winner to grace store shelves. It might share the same fate as Mountain Dew Livewire if anything.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL OF THE MOUNTAIN DEW RELATED SUMMER CRAZINESS!

THERE ARE NOW MOUNTAIN DEW FLAVORED DORITOS TORTILLA CHIPS!! Its one of the flavors for the new Doritos Quest flavors that you can now find at your local gas stations and other trashy eateries. While I have not yet had the privilege to experience this flavor I can only imagine it tasting amazingly terrible. Kind of like the hamburger flavored Doritos from last year.

Adventures in Geekery: Not Many Films Edition

2008-06-08T23:00:00.018-04:00

This past week, I haven't really seen that many films. There's a part of me that wants to see Kung Fu Panda after I saw it got an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the best rated Pacific Data Images film since Shrek 2 (which I never really thought too highly of). I'll probably see it next week when I'm away where the movie tickets are cheaper. I don't really want to pay $11.75 to see another formulaic pop culture heavy film with snarky talking animals spewing whatever kind of crude and sexual references that could fall under the PG rating. According to Dreamwork Animation's Powerpoint presentation at Pratt, that was their "winning formula" that they discovered after making the first Shrek movie. While I can't really speak down on the company, for the concept art they've shown was top-notch and if animator blogs are any indication, there are some smart and extremely talented people working there. I just feel like the upper management is more concerned with making a movie marketable to corporate America than opposed to a timeless and artful movie that sells itself for its merits and creativity (a vital aspect that most of their 3D films lack).

Onwards to movies!
Beowulf - Just when I thought I was finished talking about uninspired 3D animated films, I haven't mentioned that I took out Beowulf from my local library. This latest film from Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, as well as that Forest Gump Oscar grab) takes the boring literary epic poem and translates it into a generic beef-headed action movie. The film uses a more large scale version of the motion capturing that Zemeckis incorporated into the Polar Express and Monster House which he served as a producer on. The main noticeable difference here is that Robert also attached small cameras over the eyes of the actors as a feeble attempt to avoid the doll faced world of the uncanny valley. While its cool to see the pupils of a virtual Anthony Hopkins dilate, it still doesn't come off as believable as they still bear the weight and rubbery texture of corpses. They should have went for a more stylized approach like they did in Monster House, where I could at least pay attention to the dialogue without getting freaked out by the hideous zombie animation.

The actual Beowulf film was a letdown for me as well. Most of it followed our aggressive titular hero in a series of violent trials against mythical creatures and long overblown dialogue sequences. I'm unsure how the film managed to get a PG13 rating from the MPAA. The over the top blood in the movie is reminiscent of an M-rated video game (I'd say God of War but that would give this movie too much credit) and it features what is supposed to be a naked Angelina Jolie (but it was really just Angelina Jolie's head plastered onto the body of the model of a 19 year old woman) that leaves very little to the imagination. I keep on getting reminded of some of the antics revealed in the independent documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated where big name studios would pretty much pay off the MPAA for the coveted mall friendly PG13 rating leaving most low-budget indie movies with R and NC17 ratings that they probably don't deserve. Maybe it was the terrible animation that really saved it from getting the R-rating at the end of the day. The violence looks so fake that its hard to take seriously and the animation is too wooden and soulless for the film to possibly be erotic. This reminded me of The Animatrix's Final Flight of the Osiris short film where the uncanny valley helps cross the narrow line between sexy and repulsive.

The movie somehow was able to garner a respectable 70% on Rotten Tomatoes but I feel that is largely in part to the fact that they screened the stereoscopic IMAX 3D version of the movie to the critics. I mean, I saw the infamously bad Open Season in IMAX 3D and didn't mind it due to the novelty of seeing 3D animation rendered for glasses. In fact, I felt kind of robbed watching it in "2D" on DVD. I'm sure when its more of a mainstay, it would be less impressive but for now I feel it will inflate the critical reception of movies that don't deserve it.

The Machine Girl - While I've already made a blog post about how awesome the trailer for this movie was, I finally saw it in its full length and I'm happy to say that it lived up to every ridiculously high (and by that I mean low) expectation I had for it. If you've seen the trailer, you'd already know what to hope for as the movie pretty much has the same exact pacing and amount of action as the trailer, just imagine it was extended to 90 minutes. The film seemed like what would happen if you gave a hyped up 12 year old $5 million and asked him to make Kill Bill and what your left with is a plot with about as much depth of a Power Rangers episode and a non-stop onslaught of over the top and anatomically impossible violence. Unlike Beowulf, The Machine Girl understands the immaturity in its exaggerated violence and instead of trying to convince the audience that its a serious movie, it plays off this fact and just tries to give you a good time. While it may not be a fulfilling movie experience to watch alone, it makes for excellent riffing material if you can get a bunch of sarcastic friends together in a room to watch it.

Rocky Balboa - I was surprised at how much I liked this film. Having only seen the original Rocky movie from 1976, I was afraid I would have been lost because I haven't seen any of the four sequels that followed. Thankfully, Rocky Balboa was as much as a sequel as it was a remake, where its plot was self-contained enough to entertain a new generation that hasn't experienced a Rocky movie but it had ample references and appearances of the characters from the past Rocky films to please the longtime fans. In that respect I'd consider it the perfect family movie. Pretty much anyone can grasp the story of a retired boxer who goes in for one last fight but the fact that it was a Rocky movie gives something for parents to be excited about as well. There was very little action in it surprisingly, with most of the film just building up to the final fight in the last fifteen minutes. What it did have was corny dialogue and an innocent sense of humor that was harmless enough that you can't help but really celebrate this movie.

With the underwhelming Gamestop "Game Days" sale, I also picked up a couple of video games that I would have never picked up at full price...

video game geekery:
Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games - This is one of those titles that I pounced on as soon as I saw it for $30. While I'm against the idea of a minigame compilation released for the Wii at full price, the shallow ten hours or so of messing around and the value as a party game make me a lot more open to a budget price tag. Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games falls somewhere in between Wii Sports and Track and Field in my mind. At times, the game is pretty easy and straightforward ideal for the typical middle aged Wii consumer and young children but then at random intervals the game becomes needlessly convoluted and difficult. The amount of precision and patience with the unforgiving difficulty of these minigames harkens back to the difficulty of most NES games, and often on these games the controls more rely on button presses than on motion, making it kind of difficult to explain to the "non-gamer" this was marketed towards. The novelty of seeing both Mario and Sonic on the screen at the same time was handled much better in Super Smash Bros. Brawl with this game putting more attention on the Olympic Games in Beijing than the idea of two rival mascots finally appearing together in the same title, very little of the aesthetic and catchy music from the two franchises is actually implemented into the game, which is a bit of a disappointment to me. At the price though, the game itself was pretty fun and if you could overlook some of the apparent shortcomings you have a fairly solid and deep collection of minigames.

Octomania - I'll admit it, I mostly picked up this game for its overtly Japanese intro movie and its horrendously bad voice acting. This game makes it no secret that it was supervised by the creator of Puyo Pop, which I consider the best puzzle game second to only Panel de Pon (known here as Tetris Attack or Puzzle League) and Tetris. While you probably haven't heard of Puyo Pop, the game has been released to the United States under the names of Kirby's Avalance on the SNES and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on the Sega Genesis. More recently though the game has made appearances here in its original Japanese form in a Gameboy Advance remake and its sequel Puyo Pop Fever which appeared on the Gamecube and Nintendo DS systems. Between that and the fact that games like Puzzle Fighter and Dr. Mario have an uncanny resemblance to the title, you've likely played something that was derived from Puyo Pop. Octomania follows the same basic structure where you'd often be facing against an AI where you'd compete to get big combos and ultimately drop useless tiles on the opponent to the point where they'd lose the game, or vice versa. These are sandwiched between cutesy voice acted "story" sequences as each opponent gets progressively harder.

While its not as addictive as the aforementioned Puyo Pop its fun enough to warrant the $15 purchase. The game also supports Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection multiplayer but the game's so obscure that its next to impossible to find a stranger to play it with and your better off exchanging friend codes with someone you know from the internet. Its worth noting that the game is just about unplayable with the default control scheme which requires you to use the Wii's IR based cursor to switch over tiles, its not precise enough to really get that far into the game. You can toggle to a more comfortable NES style horizontal configuration with the minus button on the remote or through the options area of the main menu.

Octomania was localized and published by Conspiracy Entertainment. This was the same company that brought us Ninjabread Man and Anubis II, both of which were some of the absolute worst games to ever grace the Wii. While both of those titles were developed by the British based Data Design Interactive, I have to commemorate Conspiracy for finally bringing over a solid and fun game to the Wii instead of cramming up the shelves with cheap budget cash-in titles that take advantage of mothers and casual consumers that just don't know any better. Sadly I don't think this is really a trend, there's still a sequel to Ninjabread Man coming out...

schlocky asian horror movie, now on DVD

2008-06-03T20:32:00.008-04:00

I'm pretty sure that if you were using the internet at any time during the month of December you would have seen this ridiculously beautiful trailer for The Machine Girl. It seems to tackle the typical themes of extreme Asian cinema including a desire for revenge like in the critically praised Old Boy and the "low budget be damned" approach to gory special effects like in the midnight B-movie classic Killer Snakes.

If my blog post about MadWorld is any indication, I'm a big fan of weapons for limbs. The film seems reminiscent of Robert Rodriguez's entry to last year's Grindhouse, Planet Terror. That is, without a shared $60 million budget with Quentin Tarantino which was used to digitally remove Rose McGowan's leg and add a machine gun to it in every shot. If it were truly a "grindhouse" experience, it would look a lot clumsier. That is unless the point of the film was to take low budget plot and honor it with cutting edge special effects. If the trailer is any indication The Machine Girl should have the same over the top violence, except with less CG and more rubber prosthetics and hoses for gore.

Today the film was quietly released on DVD and is being sold at the fairly reasonable price of $12.99 at Target and Best Buy locations, and I heard on imdb that its $11.99 at Walmart. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the audience for this would just snag it off of BitTorrent but then again I paid upwards of thirteen bucks to see Teeth at an indie playhouse in NYC and I only saw that movie just for the novelty of its obscure premise. I have certainly done worse before.

perhaps the coolest Wii game I never knew existed

2008-06-02T21:20:00.008-04:00

Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy from Joystiq.com on Vimeo
I only just noticed this awesome title today on Giant Bomb and I'm already pretty excited. Its release is only a week away and this is the first word I heard of it. While the narration of the trailer is pretty lame, I'm pretty excited to see what kind of creations the community is able to come up with for this title. With another "me-too" shoot-'em-up released just about every week for the Virtual Console on the Wii Shop Channel and an already overcrowding amount on the new WiiWare service in only the first month, its great to be able to potentially access a ton of great schmups (that's short for shoot 'em up :P) without having to fork over $6-$10 in Wii Points Cards. It will also allow for bullet patterns a la the underground Gamecube now XBLA title Ikaruga.

Another plus, is that it will come with the cult indie PC titles TUMIKI Fighters, rRootage, Gunroar, and Torus Trooper right out of the box. While the games are already available online for the PC as a free download (and trust me, I was addicted to Torus Trooper last year), they'll feel much more at home playing on a console. Especially, holding the Wii remote horizontally, NES style. I'd almost say its worth the price of admission alone for those titles.

Sadly, a game like this is only as strong as the community that supports it and with Majesco's track record with Psychonauts and Advent Rising, I wouldn't be surprised if this title wouldn't last more than a few months on store shelves...only to be replaced with another flock of low-grade PS2 ports and casual minigame compilations.

adventures in film geekery: long overdue edition

2008-05-27T09:36:00.014-04:00

As long as I don't have to send my laptop back to Apple yet, I might as well post my ramblings on my movie adventures over the past week. The most obvious ones being Indiana Jones and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I saw back-to-back.

When I arrived at the theater pretty much every screening of Indiana Jones was sold out and my theater recently opened up a new showing from 30 minutes ago. They kind of pushed me into seeing it saying that after the trailers and those newfangled advertisements they play before movies now that I'd only miss the first five or so minutes. So I reluctantly went to the screening aware of the way cool David Fincher trailer I was missing and the clever opening they had with the Paramount Logo. I came in just a little bit before Cate Blanchett appeared.

Afterwards, I figured if they pushed me to miss the first few minutes (and this is missing the first minutes of INDIANA JONES, I've been waiting for this movie for like a year) that I'd have every right to sit through the credits and watch the trailers and first few minutes that I missed. During the wait between films which was around twenty minutes or so I noticed a few telltale signs that I probably wasn't going to see Indiana Jones. The first was the fact that they changed the aspect ratio from the more cinematic 2.35 : 1 to the more commercially viable 1.85 : 1. The second was that throughout the entire wait only a couple of dates showed up. Lastly, the trailers were all for films in the early summer, like June/July and on top of that they showed the Red Band trailer for Pineapple Express, something that I feel would be a bit too obscene for the family friendly Indiana Jones crowd. Sure enough after the trailer for the Judd Apatow produced Seth Rogan comedy, the opening credits for the Judd Apatow produced Jason Segel comedy, Forgetting Sarah Marshall showed up. Had it been any other movie, I would have totally left but I REALLY wanted to see this one and I felt that this would probably be my last chance to see it. Also anything with a controversial ad campaign that offended everyone named Sarah Marshall in New York City is cool in my book.

Onward to the movies I saw over the past week:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - I had mixed feelings towards this one. When the movie was actually rolling I was having a blast. Like I was never really blown away by anything and most of the film seemed just to be "remaking" the signature moments of the other films with a plot that is more of an excuse just for Indy to beat up some Soviets. Surprisingly I didn't really mind Shia Labeouf too much. The only reason I don't really like him is that I will ALWAYS associate him with that kid who was on Even Stevens and his role in Holes didn't really do much to erase that Disney Channel slave image I had of him.

The movie really fell apart for me in that it was made in 2008 and not in like 1992 or something. I wasn't really too pleased when I saw a man getting covered in some pretty fake looking 3D animated ants and when they were climbing down into a CG tomb that was ready to collapse. I felt that these touches were a little unnecessary and I'd rather have them limit the amount of CG in favor of prosthetic and plaster props. At least when those look fake they try to hide it a bit more as opposed to rubbing it in your face. When used sparingly I can be fooled by CG but when there's too much of it I can't help but feel the aftertaste of it, and I really doubt there will ever be a time when I can see CG and find it completely believable.

There were also quite a few Science Fiction elements in Indiana Jones which were thankfully only in a few minutes of the movie but it kind of ruins the essence of Indiana Jones for me. I guess it wasn't really a bad movie or anything, it just wasn't the next logical step in the series.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall - I actually enjoyed this one a lot more than Indiana Jones. It weighed a bit more on the drama side than most of the comedies in the Apatow camp but this was a good thing. The film played out like your typical romantic comedy except it switched the genders of the characters, making it a lot funnier than the standard throwaway comedy you'd see on TBS at 2 in the morning. While the plot was pretty obvious and it didn't really traverse any new ground, it didn't really need to. The heart was there and that puts it above 90% of the unfunny Ben Stiller romantic comedies in the past ten years.

Live Free or Die Hard - I'm really glad I saw the Unrated version of this on the DVD, it was every bit the profanity-laden popcorn film I was expecting. Its a shame it was edited down to a PG-13 by Fox, especially during the same year when R-rated films like 300 were raking in huge box office numbers. The DVD was a worthy apology but I guess I can't really argue with their decision to edit it down to a PG-13, its the kind of film that skewers more towards hyped up 12 year olds than people who are old enough to think during movies. I think the story involved "hackers" or something, but their portrayal of technology was pretty laughable. They refreshingly had a lot of actual stunts and pyrotechnics versus CG animation, when they went for CG it looked terrible but I could forgive it for mostly holding back on it. Not an incredibly smart film but a lot of stuff blows up and you get to see Justin Long (the Mac from the Mac vs. PC ads) getting shot in the knee, which is worth the price of admission alone. Also, Kevin Smith's cameo role was pretty awesome.

Fargo - I was surprised at how close this movie was to No Country for Old Men, replace the desert with snow and the similarities in style were pretty stunning. The only other films from the Coen brothers that I have seen apart from the aforemented films above were The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou? the latter of the two I didn't really like that much. I really loved Steve Buscemi's character in this, especially after seeing Ghost World. He pretty much played the same thing, except a bit more of a psychopathic killer. I held off on watching this for ahwhile because its one of my grandpa's favorite movies and every week he was telling me to watch it on TV. I kind of wish I listened to him earlier, this movie was pretty rockin'.

Forbidden Planet - I've seen this movie on Turner Classic Movies a few times and at Pratt I practically lived at the aforementioned comic book store of the same name. I picked up the 50th Anniversary Edition at the Virgin Megastore on their $10 bin, I've been holding off on buying this DVD and now I missed out on the cool tin it was packaged in but I suppose I'd rather save $20 then get some pretty cool nerd enviable bonuses. The movie is surprisingly watchable to this day and it only feels derivative because it was so influential back in 1956. There are scenes in Star Wars that have literally taken the same exact camera angle from shots in Forbidden Planet and Robby the Robot bears a strong resemblance to C-3PO. For a 50th edition DVD the special features are fairly light, they've included all of the film Invisible Boy which also starred Robby the Robot but that one is barely worth watching, the only other real feature of note is a special on the 1950s that was lifted directly from Turner Classic Movies. The interviews with George Lucas, James Cameron and Steven Speilberg are welcome however.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - I haven't been keeping up with the Harry Potter films and I picked up the latest one from my library to see if I have been missing anything. For someone who hasn't seen a Harry Potter film in the past six years, this movie does very little to pick up the pieces. Either that or Harry's much awesomer than I remembered and he'll totally make out with with an Asian girl after only talking to her for three minutes. It would be helpful if the movie tried a little harder to be more self-contained, it took about the 50 minute mark for the movie to get onto its actual plot and leave from picking up the pieces of the last two movies I saw. The special effects were nice, but that's about the only thing I could wrap my head around.

Ghost World - I kind of couldn't stand Art School Confidential even though it was based off of Daniel Clowes's experience at Pratt Institute. The other collaboration between Clowes and Terry Zwigoff was actually pretty decent. Not as amazing as the reviews suggested but the deadpan humor kind of worked in this. It also featured Scarlett Johansson back when she was a mangy teen and not an overblown sex symbol, which was pretty surreal. I was not a big fan of the ending of this movie but at least it wasn't a third as self absorbed as Art School Confidential.

Chicago - Overblown in my opinion, I don't really see how it won as many Academy Awards as it did. I hope it was a slow year or something. Just most of the musical sequences and choreography seemed kind of the same to me and the plot seemed to be just an excuse to have more cabaret sequences. The Hairspray film from last year was a thousand times better and that didn't even get a Golden Globe. Go figure...

Cloverfield - I remembered last year I was really caught up in the hype and ARG marketing campaign behind it but by the time I actually came out I became kind of apathetic. I watched it on DVD when the hype settled down and for a movie of its budget with relatively unknown talent, I thought it was pretty good and they were able to pull off some pretty believable CG considering. I really liked the idea of using older footage on the tape to serve as both a beginning and an end to the film but I felt it went a little overboard with the shakey camera. I kind of wish they did not show the monster at the end either, it was more exciting only seeing pieces of its obscured body and making a mental image of it. This was a fun movie for how unique it was but I feel if that Cloverfield sequel is still coming out, the idea will run pretty thin. I mean, it got old here after its relatively short runtime of about 80 minutes.

Flushed Away - I liked a lot of the Aardman style humor that was still evident in this but I did not really like all the pop culture references that seemed to be thrown in there at the last minute. The plot seemed kind of thrown together and the lavish life at the beginning was pretty useless and seemed like more of an excuse to get a toilet joke in there. While not half as dreadful as most CG Dreamworks movies, it left a bit to be desired. I know Dreamworks ended their contract with Aardman after this film was such a financial disaster. Its a real shame. The Wallace and Gromit movie was the closest Dreamworks will EVER get to an Academy Award for one of their Animated Features. They just got lucky with Shrek, Monsters Inc. deserved it way more.

The Fountain - Takes repeated viewings to really understand, has some clever cinematography though. Also the fact that the sap from the tree at the end was just Alka-Seltzer kind of ruined it for me. I can't really watch that scene without bursting into laughter.

FUN FACT!!: The fate of R. Kelly's recent court trial relies on the believabilty of the terrible Marlon and Shawn Wayans Comedy film, Little Man. Good luck with that one...

so I got my laptop back

2008-05-25T17:38:00.007-04:00

I just picked up my MacBook from the Apple Store and they said that "after running it through 24 hours of intensive testing that they found nothing wrong with it" but when I got it back the battery was only at 84% which means that they only ran it off the battery for about 20 minutes or so. This happened to me before with the Apple Store, two weeks before my laptop went into a total coma I went over to the Apple Store and they said it was "totally fine" then two weeks later I was taking notes during Art History class and then I got the spinning rainbow pinwheel of death for 20 minutes and was unable to turn off the computer without taking out the battery. Sure enough, after that I was really only able to back up my files by running the computer in safe mode and even then it couldn't handle more than 2 GB at a time without crashing.

That time I went in and they said it was only a "defective harddrive and battery" and replaced it a couple of days later. This would be a minor set-back if I didn't have to spend two hours on the subway a couple of weeks before finals to get my MacBook "repaired" (though they didn't actually fix anything). At least now when my MacBook inevitably explodes on me, I won't be wasting any valuable time...I think anyway.

UPDATE: It made the sound again after I used my laptop for only 40 minutes and I caught it on iMovie with my iSight camera (one of the many great features of my Mac :-/). I feel like kind of a jerk in the video but it gets the point across. I think its the sound of the fan hitting something...

UPDATE 2: They'll send me an empty box (filled with empty promises :P) and I'll get my beloved MacBook back come Friday. We'll see how this all pans out.

These Mario stages play themselves...to music!

2008-05-24T21:55:00.010-04:00

The Apple Store has my laptop at the moment and it just doesn't seem right to blog on any other computer so I'll keep this one fairly short, I've just seen Indiana Jones and Forgetting Sarah Marshall in theaters. Expect a more elaborate post on that whenever my laptop comes back from the land of Apple. My laptop started to make a scary mechanical jingling noise over from the fan but it would not make the sound when the laptop was off (but it would in sleep mode), they've had it for the last couple of days now.

I've seen a fair bit of movies from my library too. So in the meantime I'll post this really cool custom level of Super Mario World that syncs to some pretty sweet music. I've seen a couple of ones in the past but none were of this length.

The Haruhi Suzumiya chime in the last video reminded me a bit of this slightly less impressive Mario level that I've seen about a year ago. Still fairly cool.

UPDATE: I found one with lyrics...check it out

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's aptly titled cinematic disaster

2008-05-21T14:39:00.005-04:00

I broke out in laughter when I read this news, it appears that the next cinematic disaster from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (the two of the six Scary Movie writers that brought us the unwatchable Date Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans) will be called Disaster Movie. The aptly titled film will supposedly parody There Will Be Blood and the Sex and the City Movie. For some reason I feel as though they have not seen There Will Be Blood and the closest thing they could come up with to humor would be something related to that wildly popular I Drink Your Milkshake scene at the end of the film.

I have actually seen two of their three movies on HBO one late night and they were even worse than their respective trailers. They have the uncanny ability to crack out a few jokes every minute but keep them consistently unfunny, most of the extent of their humor relied on pop culture references that would be far from cutting edge seven years ago and scatological humor where half of the time it seemed as though they threw it into their script at the last minute or just added a couple of sound effects in their post department. While Disaster Movie sounds as terrible as their past movies, it at least sounds marginally better than their upcoming PG-13 rated parody of Superbad. Ack!

I'm sure the humor in the title Disaster Movie goes well over the heads of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer...

adventures in film geekery may 12-17th

2008-05-17T15:56:00.008-04:00

With the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian opening this week and Indiana Jones opening the next, I decided to skip out on Narnia and save up my energy and money on Indiana Jones (despite the lukewarm reception its earning in the early buzz). Here are my thoughts on some of the news from the past week in movie land.

Apparently, Uwe Boll may not need a million signatures on the Stop Uwe Boll Petition to stop making movies. His latest film, Postal will not be screened at any movie theater in the United States and will go directly to DVD. This is fantastic news, as Uwe Boll's terrible video game adaptations not only lose money from the German government (look it up) but they are also one of the many factors that keeps video games from being considered an art form. While Postal was not necessarily a great game to begin with, he also has a Far Cry movie coming down the pipeline. Boll believes that theaters are afraid to show his film due to the controversial subject matter, which is partially true. I'd say its too soon for a 9/11 comedy movie but there's barely any humor that could be found in such a tragedy, it would be like making a comedy film about the JFK assassination, doing so is only distasteful. I'm sure the fact that Uwe Boll's last film, In The Name of the King a Dungeon Siege Tale lost $50 million worldwide doesn't help either. [link]
Despite Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf being contractually attached to a possible three new Indiana Jones films, George Lucas recently announced that he may make a fifth Indiana Jones movie possibly five or six years from now. I guess this is good news, even though George Lucas hasn't really made a good film since The Empire Strikes Back (which he didn't even direct) he's still gained immortality in my mind just for the strength of those two films. I feel as if Lucas is just stuck in a creative rut and is making films anyway "for the fans" with a total lack of inspiration. The five year break should be enough for him to get his head together. [link]
The first images from Sylvain Chomet's (The Triplet's of Belleville) next film The Illusionist (not the Ed Norton one) have emerged on the internet. I'm fairly excited for this one because he's using an old script from Jacques Tati as the baseline for the film. Tati's style is actually very compatible with Chomet's subtle animation and working off of Tati's script I'm sure he'll be able to get a story 10 times better than that of Triplets of Belleville. I'm also kind of entrigued to see how modern audiences would react to a fifty year old script animated with 21st century technology. [link]
A Goosebumps movie is coming out. I was looking over the Monster Blood books lately and their plots are fairly laughable. This movie will at least be awesomely bad. [link]
The character designs for Bolt are looking a bit generic. This wouldn't really be that bad of a statement if it was not assembled from the ashes of American Dog, a 3D animated project from Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch) where he was abruptly fired. The early footage from it was looking quite good. [link]
Jon Favreau may not be directing Iron Man 2...not cool. [link]
Mike Judge is considering a live-action Beavis and Butt-head movie. The notion of an animated series being adapted into a live-action film would normally make me cringe but I feel that Mike Judge's dead pan humor does not really take too much advantage of animation in the first place and it translated really well to Office Space (which was based off of an animated short he made anyway). [link]
Michael Moore's next film will be called Fahrenheit 9/12. September 12th is my birthday so that's as good a reason as any to want to have that on my DVD shelf. [link]
On the note of video game film adaptations, Paul Thomas Anderson (director of There Will Be Blood) may direct the inevitable Metal Gear Solid movie. This all sounds pretty promising but I guess I felt the same way when they announced that Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) would direct the Silent Hill film, which turned out pretty terrible. [link]

Onto the movies I watched on DVD this week...

The Orphanage (El Orfanato) - I picked this one out because I always cautiously wanted to see this one. The trailer reminded me a bit of the 1976 version of The Omen and typically creepy little kids make for great horror flicks. It also was "presented" by Guillermo Del Toro (the Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy guy) which is a decent reason to be excited. I found it pretty comendable how the film refrained from using gore apart from pivotal moments when it would be actually scary. While I don't mind torture horror flicks like Hostel, after ahwhile all the gore begins to lose meaning and it just becomes more of a popcorn flick than a horror movie. I was not too sure about the ending. It seemed a little too fairytalish while the rest of the movie had a art house meets low budget 70s horror-esque vibe.

Marie Antoinette - this was one I always wanted to see but never wanted to put any money down on. I really enjoyed the style of Lost in Translation so I was interested to see where Sophia Coppola's style went wrong in this movie. Surprisingly I really enjoyed the change of pace in the bubblegum and punk rock coated approach Coppola took in this historical biopic, I just wish more of the film radiated that tone and not a few overdrawn out montages that just felt a little out of place. The run time was a bit longer than the film deserved too.

Groundhog Day - this one is often stated as one of the best comedy movies of all time, with an incredibly high rating on IMDB and a place in the Library of Congress. I'd actually have to agree with this. I was afraid that the unique concept would run thin but instead it played off of the repetitious concept and threw it through every possible scenario. Bill Murray was fantastic in this too, very funny but also very serious at times too.

Akeelah and the Bee - I typically like to avoid anything that has to do with the overpriced marketing based empire known as Starbucks Coffee and Lionsgate has been responsible for some of the worst horror movies of all time. However, this drama was quite good. I felt a bit cheated by the ending but it was able to compete with the fantastic documentary Spellbound in my mind and that's a pretty amazing achievement in its own right.

the blue blur goes for a walk

2008-05-16T19:33:00.004-04:00

I always find it hilarious how defensive Sega is on their Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. I sure hope the video posted below is a glitch and not the actual Havok physics engine they backed the game on, where the bad guys would have ragdoll physics. With that being said I can fully understand why Sega wants to completely ignore the 2006 next generation entry of the Sonic franchise in their hype for the upcoming Sonic Unleashed. I almost find it pathetic that the biggest addition in this year's entry to the series is the fact that the game will switch to 2D style side scrolling during the fast moments of the game and then switch back to 3D.

Its as if they're starting to give up on the notion of making a 3D Sonic game and just giving the fans what they want. I guess this would make sense, the only good Sonic games in the past 10 years were 2D style games on the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS, all of which weren't developed by Sonic Team. Its almost as if the Tokyo based Dimps team knows Sonic better than Sonic Team themselves. We'll find out soon enough since the Wii version of Sonic Unleashed will be handled by Dimps while the Xbox 360/PS3/PS2 ones will be from Sonic Team. The fact that they have yet to unveil the new "unleashed" werewolf gameplay aspect of the game is just a bit unnerving to say the least.

tetris is officially gangsta

2008-05-16T14:48:00.004-04:00

I saw this the other day on TV and I couldn't help but feel warm and fuzzy over the very concept of rapping to the "Tetris theme". While there is one part of me that wishes one of the rappers was not wearing a NES controller jacket because the NES version did not feature the Russian folk song Korobeiniki but rather classical tunes from the Nutcracker, I can still forgive them for the remix being fairly awesome. Unlike other nerd culture with rap clashes such as Kanye West and Busta Rhymes rapping over Daft Punk songs, I actually liked this...sort of.

Tetris by DaCaV5

MadWorld looks beautifully distasteful

2008-05-15T20:20:00.010-04:00

The trailer for this game leaked onto video sharing websites a couple of days ago but was removed fairly quickly by SEGA's request. Now that the four game contract with Platinum Games has been officially unveiled the trailer is now here to stay on the world of YouTube. The team is composed mostly of former staff members of Capcom's Clover Studio which created Okami on the PS2 and more recently Wii as well as the Viewtiful Joe series and God Hand.

The game apparently follows a man with a chainsaw for an arm who is caught up in a twisted game show. Over the top violence, an obnoxious TV announcer and some level of hilarity will ensue. The plot seems reminiscent of the first Manhunt game and the visual style and humor seems to be a mix of No More Heroes and Sin City (probably more along the lines of the film, Renaissance, but that's barely worth mentioning) and I believe one of the writers of Killer7 is working on the plot of the game too.

The game is due out in the first quarter of '09 (around the same time No More Heroes came out) and will be out on the Wii. Here's hoping it will deliver better chainsaw thrills than the port of the already underwhelming Scarface game...

in case of a shark attack

2008-05-15T10:13:00.001-04:00

I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw this in Yahoo! News. I almost feel sorry for the poor old shark.