Tag: movies

Brothers at War

This looks good.

“Brothers at War is an intimate portrait of an American family during a turbulent time. Jake Rademacher sets out to understand the experience, sacrifice, and motivation of his two brothers serving in Iraq. The film follows Jake’s exploits as he risks everything–including his life–to tell his brothers’ story.
“Often humorous, but sometimes downright lethal, Brothers at War is a remarkable journey where Jake embeds with four combat units in Iraq. Unprecedented access to US and Iraqi combat units take him behind the camouflage curtain with secret reconnaissance troops on the Syrian border, into sniper ‘hide sites’ in the Sunni Triangle, through raging machine gun battles with the Iraqi Army.
“Ultimately, the film follows his brothers home where separations and life-threatening work ripple through their parents, siblings, wives, and children. Brothers at War is a rare look at the bonds and service of our soldiers on the frontlines and the profound effects their service has on the loved ones they leave behind. For more information please visit – www.brothersatwarmovie.com.”
The film is executive produced by Gary Sinise (CSI: New York, “Lt. Dan” in Forrest Gump), who said, “The media took the 15 people of Abu Ghraib and made them the face of the military. This [movie] is a true portrait of our military and their families.”

The Keene Act and You

Remember: together, we can forge a better America.

Movies 2008

Last year set a new record in terms of movie-viewing. I saw 28 movies in the theater, with 10 more viewed on DVD.
Theater:

  • The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything
  • The Bucket List
  • Juno
  • Rambo
  • Fool’s Gold
  • Semi-Pro
  • Jumper
  • Horton Hears A Who
  • Smart People
  • Forgetting Sarah Marshall
  • Baby Mama
  • Iron Man
  • Speed Racer
  • The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
  • Wanted
  • Kung Fu Panda
  • Wall•E (x 2)*
  • Hellboy II: The Golden Army
  • Batman: The Dark Knight (x 3)*
  • War Games (25th anniversary, one night-only showing)
  • Step Brothers
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars (x 2)*
  • Space Chimps
  • Death Race
  • Quantum of Solace
  • Punisher: War Zone
  • Yes Man

* additional viewings not noted in total count
If you observed the multiple viewings, you may have already surmised what my favorite film of 2008 was: Batman: The Dark Knight. Utterly fabulous film. It really captured the grittiness, the criminal ugliness, of the original comic storyline. Batman may be a superhero, but it is his detective skills which serve him just as well against the criminal underworld he fights as anything else.
Batman has always been the non-superhero superhero; by that I mean he doesn’t possess any super powers. He’s simply a man who has trained his body to such a degree that his physical prowess is superior to nearly every opponent he matches up with. His mental prowess is equally strong, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s got his family’s millions to back him up with tools that no one else has.
Batman is the superhero that nearly anyone could be, millions of dollars in backing notwithstanding. That’s what makes the character so great, and so relatable. Like my friend Jeff, I really hope they don’t make a third movie (with Batman Begins being the first). The Dark Knight is such a quintessential Batman film, it would be incredibly difficult to top.
DVD:

  • The Departed
  • Hot Rod
  • Bottle Rocket
  • Heart of Geauxld: The Story of the 2007 LSU Fighting Tigers
  • American Gangster
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark*
  • Eastern Promises
  • 27 Dresses
  • Hellboy
  • Hot Fuzz
  • Casino Royale*
  • Blade Runner: The Final Cut

I didn’t count Raiders and Casino Royale in my DVD total, as they were re-watched in preparation for seeing movies in the theater. I did count Blade Runner as a new selection. The Final Cut is Ridley Scott’s ultimate vision of the film, and I treated it as such, going in with a fresh and open attitude about one of my favorite films.
As for my favorite film viewed on DVD, that’s a tough one. The Departed didn’t live up to any of the hype in my opinion, though I’m looking forward to seeing the Hong Kong original, Infernal Affairs. Likewise, I wasn’t blown away by American Gangster, either. I did enjoy it, but I didn’t think Washington’s or Crowe’s performances were any grander than their previous work.
Hot Rod and Bottle Rocket are among Brent’s favorite movies, and were taken in as an attempt to get to know my friend a little better. I thoroughly enjoyed both. I’m thinking not too many people are going to get Bottle Rocket, but it has an underlying whackiness that may not elicit out-loud laughs, but is very humorous nonetheless.
In the end, I think the DVD favorite goes to Hot Rod. It doesn’t get much better than:
“My safe word will be ‘whiskey’.”
“Why are you saying it like that?”

Dark Knight Toy Story

[Via Lee on IM.]

“No. I like it in here.”

This is my all-time favorite movie trailer.

Brilliant.

Taking commercialization to the grave

Remember Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? Yes, yes, it’s still the best Trek film. But do you recall the end, when Spock is “buried” by being shot from the Enterprise within a photon torpedo?
Did you ever think, “Man, that would be a cool casket to be buried in!”
Well…

Star Trek Photo Torpedo Casket

Scheduled to be available “mid-2008”, and pricing has not yet been determined.

Taken

Taken is an upcoming film written by Luc Besson and starring Liam Neeson as the dad you don’t want to make mad by hurting his little girl:

Unfortunately, it doesn’t release here in the States until September. Brent, Nathan, this gets a thumbs-up from me.

Little green men

I love the little aliens from the Pizza Planet vending machine in Toy Story. Thanks to my friend Heather, and a long ago giveaway of some kind, I have two of the little guys guarding my favorite Mac, which is a little otherworldly in its own right…

IMG_7077.JPG
Click on the photo to see the entire set.

Macworld Keynote impressions

So the big news in the tech world yesterday was what Steve Jobs talked about during his keynote address at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. The annual technology conference geared toward the Mac OS, and all things Apple, Inc., is often used for the announcement of new products from my favorite fruit company. Yesterday was no exception. Here are some of my thoughts on what was announced:
Time Capsule
If I hadn’t bought an Airport Extreme Base Station last year, to replace a router that died, I’d be buying a new 1 TB–yes, that’s a T, for terabyte–Time Capsule right now. Merging an Airport Extreme Base Station with a “server-grade” hard drive, the Time Capsule allows for wireless backups from all of your Leopard-based Macs via Time Machine. Jobs called it a “back-up applicance”.

Time Capsule photo

Backing up your data is very important, and too few people do it, realizing the value of doing so only when it’s too late. Time Capsule is a dead-simple way, for most people, to ensure their Macs are getting backed up. Plug in and power on the Time Capsule, open up Time Machine on your Mac and point it to the Capsule, and you’re done.
Time Capsule comes in two sizes, the 500 GB version for $299, and the aforementioned 1 TB version for $499. That’s an amazing bargain, a terabyte of storage and a full wired/wireless router for five hundred smackers. As I said, if we didn’t already have the AEBS router, my credit card would have already seen one of these charged to it.
iPhone Update
Today was the 200th day the iPhone had been available for purchase, and Apple’s sold 4 million of them, an average of 20,000 iPhones sold per day. This means that in terms of United States smartphone market share, Apple has nearly 20% of the national smartphone market.
The rumors of a 1.1.3 update to the iPhone proved to be true. The home screen can now be customized, and the Maps application–the underrated killer feature of the iPhone in my humble opinion–is now even more super-powered. The new Location feature in Maps is great. Combining data from Google and Skyhook Wireless, your iPhone can now, without GPS on board, triangulate your position within a couple of blocks. It pulled up my location at home with no problem.
You can, finally, send a SMS message to more than one person, something my lowly Motorola v557 was capable of two years ago. The WebClips functionality is pretty neat; you can create a WebClip from any web page or portion of a web page and pop it on to your home screen, so it’s easy to just go to Google, or The New York Times, or whatever web page you wish, with one touch.
I’ve had quite some fun this afternoon playing with all of this new stuff, and it’s almost like getting a new iPhone for free. All in all, it makes the iPhone an even better communication device.
iTunes Movie Rentals
In addition to buying movies through the iTunes Store, you can now rent them as well. Library movies (viz: older titles) are $2.99, and new releases are $3.99. From the time you click “Rent Movie” in the iTunes Store and it downloads, you have 30 days to watch the movie. From the time you click “Play” on the movie, you have 24 hours to watch it. You can also transfer the movie to another device, such as your iPod or iPhone, and watch it there as well, before your 24 hours or 30 days, depending on where you are when you perform the transfer, are up.
The thirty days requirement is pretty decent, but I find the 24 hours one to be a little restrictive. It should be at least 48 hours, and 72 would be better, with 96 being the ideal.
Going hand-in-hand with the new rental service is an updated Apple TV, or as Jobs put it, “Apple TV Take 2”. Whereas the original Apple TV pretty much required you to have a computer to sync it up with, the new version acts as a stand-alone box. You can rent movies from the iTunes Store in HD through the Apple TV, for only $1 more than the standard resolutions. So library titles go to $3.99 and new releases are $4.99, and no trip to the mailbox or corner Blockbuster is required.
I’m still not convinced that we have a real use for this in our house, given our movie viewing habits. For now, Netflix will continue to suffice, but I’ll be keeping my eyes on the Apple TV, and I’m sure I’ll try out the new rentals even without the new box.
MacBook Air
This had all the buzz, and was the announcement I was most looking forward to. I was ready to pounce on ordering Apple’s new subnotebook, provided it met my personal expectations.
Apple has created the world’s thinnest notebook computer. At its thickest point, the MacBook Air is 0.76 of an inch, and it weighs only three pounds. It comes with a full-size keyboard, a 13.3-inch LED backlit display, and a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Two gigabytes of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, 802.11n wireless networking, Bluetooth, and a built-in iSight camera. A pricey option is to ditch the standard hard drive for a 64 GB solid state drive (viz: no moving parts), and when I say pricey, I do mean pricey: $999 on top of the base $1,799 cost.
You won’t find much in the way of ports on it, either: MagSafe power port, a single USB port, headphone jack, and a micro-DVI port which requires adapters to hook up to external displays. That’s it. The trackpad is larger than on previous MacBook versions, and features multitouch, so you can perform some of those pinch, zoom, and rotate gestures you may have seen with the iPhone.

MacBook Air photo

The downsides to this incredible piece of tech? For me, the hard drive size is the first. I put a 160 GB drive in my four year-old 12-inch PowerBook last year, and have gotten quite used to the extra room it gave me. I’d hate to step back down by half. Only two gigabytes of RAM? And no way to upgrade it? My two year-old iMac is maxed out at 2 GB, and some times I bump against that particular ceiling. I’d really prefer a machine that can handle up to four. The battery is also not replaceable by the user. This might be okay on an iPod or iPhone, but in a full-size computing system devoted to the ultimate road warriors?
Ultimately, I decided this was not the next notebook computer for me. It’s a really awesome system, and if someone were to buy one for me, I wouldn’t hesitate to take it, but that’s not happening. I think I’ll be better served ultimately by a MacBook Pro, and with seven and a half months since the latest edition of those came out, they’re due for a refresh, even a “silent” one like we saw with the Mac Pros last week.
Summation
In the end, it was what I would call a typical Steve Jobs Macworld Expo keynote address. There were the requisite ooohs and aaaahs, Apple’s making some evolutionary gains in all facets of its business, and there was a great new product introduced that has the entire tech world talking. It wasn’t a blow-me-away sort of keynote, as was last year’s with the announcement of the iPhone, but then they can’t all be like that. Still better than anything Bill does on stage.

Proud geek dad moment

This past Saturday, the missus and I took the little phisch to see The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything. The film was released by Universal, and had the studio’s latest audio-visual intro at the beginning, as is the norm for motion pictures. The little phisch leaned over and whispered to me, “Daddy, what music is that?” I told him, and we settled in for a fun time.
That little exchange immediately took my mind back a few weeks before, at the end of 2007, when the missus and I took the little phisch to see Alvin and the Chipmunks. That particular film was released by Twentieth-Century Fox, and its extremely recognizable audio-visual intro rolled at the beginning. Then, the little phisch leaned over and excitedly exclaimed, “Daddy, it’s the Star Wars music!” I smiled broadly, and assured him, that yes, it was indeed “the Star Wars music.”
Amazing how those blaring trumpets and the monolithic wording have become synonymous with Star Wars for him, just as it did for me when I was a boy. To this day, whenever I see or hear that intro, I’m half-expecting the “Star Wars Main Theme” to follow shortly thereafter, or to see “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” centered on the screen.