I was all set to post about how movies often come in pairs. That is, when a movie about a certain subject comes out, a movie that is very, very similar comes out soon after. Well, those professional bloggers beat me to it, further proving that there are no new ideas.
The list laden website Den of Geek compiled a list of its top 10 movie clones. 1998 was an especially good bad year for clones, with two movies about earth destroying asteroids and two computer animated movies about ants. Notably, both movies about mars in 2000 were laughably terrible. I for instances. Chuckled when a biochemist in "Red Planet" listed the four genetic base pairs as "A, G, T, and P". Generally, if two movies are about the same topic, neither can be all that good.
Den of Geek's list does not include all of the clone movies. I've noticed this trend since two Robin Hood movies came to theatres in 1991 and a year later when two Christopher Columbus movies that came out on the 500th anniversary of his most famous discover. Rounding out the biopics, runner Prefontaine also hit the movie clone jackpot in 1997 and then 1998. Now copies are routine, like the two movies about animals in a New York zoo escaping to the wilds of Africa in 2005 and 2006.
It just goes to show that creativity can't be learned but it sure can be borrowed.
Certainly my cheapskatery, a.k.a. frugalness, has been a constant topic of mine. Maybe I am frugal because I lived below the poverty line during a decade of my college and post graduate studies. When you have little spend, you learn how to get by with less. What if everyone was frugal like me, I used to think. Back in June, I ran across an on-line article that asked this very question: What Would Happen IF Everyone Was Frugal? This mental exercise was fun back in June but terribly relevant now. As credit markets collapse, jobs become scarce, and the future becomes undertain, more and more people are becoming frugal just like me! Sure, the economy will take a big hit as people save their pennies and drive their cars until they become scrap metal. Over time, though, we will all benefit from fewer bankruptcies, foreclosures, and disposing of piles of waste produced by our pre-economic metldown consumer driven society.
I wonder though, what if people were more like me in other ways too? Many industries would cease to exist. Say good buy to the alcholic beverages industries . . . and drunk driving accidents. The soda (or pop) industry would implode and with it a sizeable demand for dental work. Coffee and tobacco growers would need to find new crops to plant. Illicit drugs would disappear completely, and morticianers along on the Mexican/Amercian border would have to find new jobs. Green products would become the industry standard. Without early adopters, new consumer technologies will take longer to develop. Sales of used goods would spike. Medical costs would fall some as more and more people would only go to the doctor when they absolutely had to.
There would be massive cultural changes as well. Micheal Bay would stop making movies, no one would see them. The internet would become the primary means of all entertainment and non-internet based entertianment would be at risk of extinctions. Top 40 radio would stop broadcasting. Discs in generally will become a dead media. Comic books would move out of their niche. Videogames would continue their increasing domination of media. The term "literally" would be used in its proper sense. Saturday Night Live would be cancelled and thereafter made reference to in association with something that was meant to be funny, but is not. "That joke was SNL".
I would like to think that the rate of hear disease would fall, as all people would at least try to exercise. Organic and natural foods would supplant foods with chemicals like MSG in them. Sure, cookies would become a staple food but we would all at least try to have a vegatable course at dinner. Kids would spend more time playing outside. Crime would near non-existence, espcially violent crimes. Volunteerism and charitable giving, however, would reach all time lows :(
Does everyone hope that they are good people making the world a better place to live? They would if they were more like me. At least, I hope so.
Live Spaces is a great example of how Microsoft understands the web. A mish-mash of subpar web utilities, Live Spaces is also a difficult to use practice in trial and error. There are easy transition between Live Spaces and some of Microsoft's services, but not all of them. The whole thing is like a sketchy beta relese. Moreover, everything Live Spaces has has been outdone by Google, Facebook, Vox (the home of this blog), the legacy looking LiveJournal, etc. The difference between Microsoft and the owners of these other webstarts can be measured in many billions of dollars. Yet with all of its resources, Microsoft is barely treading water.
What does Live Spaces have going for it? A Halo theme:
So this blog will have no more fewer articles fawning over "Halo 3" or griping about the sorry state of consumer technology. Henceforth, the geekier posts shall be banished to Live Spaces.
Huzaa to unnecessarily duplicative web services!
- a good story.
- good actors
- great villains
- great action
- a female character who is more than eye candy
An avid news watcher, I know that when "Iron Man" hit the theaters last spring, it was popular. Unlike most crash-and-burn movies, "Iron Man" stayed popular. It had something called word-of-mouth. I was certainly swayed when ordinary people, i.e. the 99% of the population that does not read comic books, recommended this movie. Of course, having just had a baby, I didn't have to see it. Thank goodness for fast turnarounds on rentals.
The boy who made "Swingers" did good. "Iron Man" is so money. No spoilers here, just a simple recommendation that everyone see it. Some of the content is definitely not suitable for kids, and watching soldiers get cut down in a fictional Afghanistan was extra shocking because my big brother is serving in Iraq. For teens and adults, he violence is worth it. The message of being responsible with your life is done well. This is certianly the highest rated untimely review ever to appear on this blog.
Huzaa to "Iron Man" the movie!
Hardly anyone likes bailing out a failed company. I too would not cry in my sleep if AIG, Fannie and Freddie, and The Big Three automakers all failed. We live in a capitalist world and some other company would replace them eventually. Look at those who support the bailout, however, and you will find a group that consists of the President-Elect, his Republican Opponent, our current Chief Executive and the entire cabinet, an overwhelming majority of economists, and the United Auto Workers Union (UAW). I mention this last group because i feel they are unfair targets of anti-bailout fervor. You see, conservative thinkers WANT American auto-makers to go bankrupt so they can fire all of UAW workers and replace them with lesser paid workers.
What is so bad about unions? Do we not, as citizens, have the right to congregate, to bargain, to contract? What is so bad about getting the best deal you can for your labor? You can believe Bill O'Reilly negotiated the best deal he could with FoxNews. You know Rush Limbaugh rakes in as much revenue as he can for his "talents". How many of George Bush's campaign workers and donors received high paying political appointments? The answer is: as many as Bush could appointment! Why shouldn't autoworkers also get themselves the most money for their labor?
Understandably, most of us non-conservative regular type thinkers do not care much about unions either for the simple fact that most of us do not belong to one. But understand that if union member wages fall, the wages of all comparable workers will fall as well. If you think you're making a pittance now, just check out how much a worker makes in China or India. Unions slow the the race to the bottom, and you can bet your bottom dollar (literally, soon) that there is a deep bottom compared to what we have now.
So You can be against the bailout. That's fine with me. But why pick on the people who actually make our economy run? Not to slight the labors of the workers in the financial markets, who have already been bailed-out, but those office jockeys are just pushing around paper. I should know, as an attorney, pushing around paper is my business. All of us should be grateful for everyone who plays a direct hand in making the products we use, growing the food we eat, teaching the children we so adore, and cleaning up the mess we make before we go home. I say to these conservative economic geniuses: question not why the UAW workers make too much, but instead why The Big Three did not make enough.
After months and months and months of prodding by me, my wife bought an iPhone. Technically, my wife and I bought an iPhone because we are married and our money is in a joint account. But technically it is her iPhone because it has all of her e-mail settings and her applications for posting on LiveJournal. Besides, I owe her. Long ago she was promised a new iPod. She bought one, engraved and all, only to be dissapointed when a week later Apple released the video iPod. Apple kindly lets users return their items when one of their secret upgrades hits like a laser guided smart bomb in the night within 2 weeks of purchase. My wife did return her now obsolete music and pictures only iPod, but never bothered to buy the video iPod in its place. Years later, she buys the iPhone.
The iPhone has been touted as the Jesus phone because it appears to do everything you want with only one device. Ever since the dawn of cell phones, the internet, mp3 players, digital cameras, and touchscreens, mankind has dreamed of creating a Frankenstein device that includes all of these functions and fits in a shirt pocket. So basically our society has been waiting for the iPhone for about five years. Five long years of backwardly using 5 devices or more to live our digital lives.
The fairest way to praise critique my wife's iPhone is to compare it to the device that preceded it, in our house. That device is a Blackberry Curve that I use for work. Both devices are roughly the same size, as shown in these blurry photos taken by my unsteady hand with the other device.
This is the real deal: the iPhone's touchscreen is Godlike in its ease of use. The Blackberry seems like an old arcade toy with its scroll ball and buttons. The button with all the dots on it really doesn't make any sense. What are all those dots anyway? The iPhone says "Slide to Unlock". Seeing that phrase alone is like moving out of an asylum featured in "One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest". Smartphones had been so bad for so long that the original iPhone was so far advanced it seemed like something sent back through time by Captain Picard to save mankind from Romulan invasion. I feel like I live in the future every time I pick up my wife's iphone and flip though the screens. Webpages scroll smoother than on my thumdrive driven laptop. And the iPhone is a kickin' game machine to boot.
The Blackberry Curve itself is a response to the iPhone. RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, added a pretty cool multimedia player and decent camera to its boring smartphone. But these are just add-ons. The Blackberry has like 64 MB of storage, a.k.a. a laughable amount of storage. You can add a micro SD card, which I did, but it fits under the battery in some kind of mouse trap like holster. Everything about the Blackberry seems like an afterthought, i.e. a thought that came up after the iPhone. To be really fair, RIM has released updated models like the BlackBerry Bold and the Blackberry Storm. But the Bold has the same old scroll wheel and the Storm is like the iPhone with its big screen but the same bland Blackberry software.
The big draw of a Blackberry over an iPhone is the actual keyboard. The Blackberry is easer to get carpal tunnel syndrome on than the iPhone. Here I thought my bony fingers would come in handy, but even I had trouble hitting the keys. Seriously though, its a phone. messages work best. It's also a phone so I guess you could just call people and talk to them instead.
Huzaa to Apple, maker of the Jesus phone!
Thinking back to the 1980s, there were a lot of great action movies. In an age before computer graphics (except "Tron" and the "Last Starfighter", like they even count), stunts and explosions had to be real. These ancient action films were more humanizing, because the danger was real. These movies brought me into the action. They made me root for the hero and hate the villain. None did this better than "Die Hard".
If there were a hall of fame of classic action films, "Die Hard" should be number one. It has a regular looking guy, no, scratch that, a little balding guy going up agaisnt European hit men armed with automatic weapons and anti-tank missiles. And the hero doesn't even have shoes. We watch him get beat up, blown up, shot, cut up with glass, and berated by the authorities that should be helping him. The villains are savvy and smart, which makes their comeupance all the more satisfying. It doesn't get any better than this. (A staple phrase from the 1980s).
So the action continues in the third sequal to this movie, "Live Free or Die Hard"? 20 years later we have computer graphics and internet inspired plotlines. This update gives us the hero jumping on fighter jets, launching police cars, blowing up stuff with fire extinguishers, driving through elevators, wait a minute, what? It definitely gets better than this.
While the first "Die Hard" was ingenously filmed in an office building turned prison turned maze of death, the latest sequel has the hero driving from all over the east coast. And instead of blowing up said office building as a snide dissing of the worship of corporate excess that pervaded the 1980s, the sequel takes down every institution that we take for granted yet reminding us that the internet is still cool. I was also annoyed by the resilience of the bad guys. Sure, the hero takes a licking and keeps on ticking (another stape phrase from the 1980s), but do we need to see the same bad guys keep coming back. Who needs more bad guys when you have two unkillable kungfu experts?
Perhaps the most telling moment in the sequel is the use of social hacking to jumpstart a car. The cell phone network has been destroyed by hackers and the hero is unable to warn the FBI about an attack on a power plant. He has to steal a car and starts fiddling with the wires. His hacker buddy, the Mac from the I'm a Mac commercial has a better idea. He triggers the air bag and then convinces the On-Star rep that she needs to start the car so he can get his dad to a hospital. That plan has a huge problem, On-Star uses the cell phone network, which is down. Also, why do movies try to impress us the acting abilities of its characters? All of the characters are played by actors, who are necessarily already good actors.
Sigh, perhaps a timely showing would have been more exciting. When the audience is cheering and the screen is as tall as my house, every movie seems better. Alas, on my standard definition TV, "Live Free or Die Hard" was neither alive, free, dead, or hard.
To give my wife and baby a break from a screaming, wiggling toddler, I often taken little man out with me. We go to the playground, the grocery store, and now that the weather is frigid, the mall play center. Often we just walk around the block or play in the backyard. He has no qualms about playing in the dark which is good because night hits us at 5:00 these days.
One time I was walking with him and he was holding my hand. I thought about how fast he's growing and how I should savor these moments, because someday he won't want me holding his hand. Until then . .
And of course I love to have our big baby girl with us, but she has a special relationship with Mom that I just can't replicate (if you know what I'm getting at.) So baby girl excursions are family events.
