A good and a bad week.

On Tuesday I went and saw ‘3:10 to Yuma’ and loved it. It had violence, humor and emotional yet manly moments, everything I look for in a Western. Then for some reason I got really depressed and tired on Wednesday. And today I went to see ‘Juno’, a delightful romp through teen pregnancy and adoption. Plus for some reason a torrent I’m downloading has lost data, it was at 38.2% this morning when I had to turn the power off to fumigate the house and now it’s at 37.4%?

You know I don’t think it was a good or a bad week, it was just a week.

I’ve change my theme because while I like the one I was using the fact I couldn’t stop the text from sitting on the picture was really annoying me.

Damn you Foxtel!

For the third time this week the Comedy Channel has shown a repeat of Conan O’Brien from October. Why? Sure it’s on repeats in the US but why can’t we relive great moments from the trip to Chicago such as the Masturbating Bear skydiving, or other moments I can’t think of? (Originally this argument was better formed and longer, then I checked and found it was being repeated in the US as well.)

Another thing that is annoying me about Foxtel is that The Lab with Leo has been back on since last week, but I only found out tonight while looking through the electronic programme guide. This could be my own fault as when I checked last week to see if it was back on, I stupidly was checking the time it USED to be on, a nice respectable time of 5:30pm Brisbane time. The How To Channel however decided Monster House a show were idiots think up stupid impractical renovations for houses and then go through with these stupid impractical renovations, was better served in this time slot, leaving The Lab at 11:30pm Brisbane time, the time when it used to be repeated as the first run time slot.

Yet another annoyance with Foxtel is the advertising. Why does Pay-TV(lets look at the first part of that term, Pay) have ads? I’ve forked over money to see these shows, why do you need advertisers? And why do you seam to show more ads than the Free-To-Air Commercial stations?

P.S. If you know why Foxtel has ads please tell me, I’d like to know. And don’t just tell me it’s because the operating costs are just too high to be run solely on subscription revenue, because if that were the case I fail to see the point in operating in the first place.

I lied.

I’m probably going to go see Cloverfield at some point, probably when I have to be out of the house for 3 hours while the house is being cockroach bombed. The reason for this change of heart is the legal team have told me I can’t call a movie the worst movie of all time just because I’ve seen the trailer.

Speaking of the trailer, the TV spot lists it as being rated M for frightening sequences or something and “Sci Fi Violence”. What the fuck is Sci Fi violence, and how is it different from regular violence? “Oh My God that nice man’s head exploded when the bad man shot him!” is no different to “Oh My God that nice man’s head exploded when Mr alien bad man went ‘BZZT’ with his ray gun!”. The ratings used to be simple, the violence was in varying degrees of violence or animated violence. None of this pointless sub-categorising with “War Violence” or “Battle Violence” or “Sci Fi Violence”

Either way I apologise for lying that I’d avoid Cloverfield like the plague, then turning around and deciding to go see it. As I’m a sad little quote monkey I’m going to end each post with a quote from whatever DVD I watch while writing the post. Tonight it’s “10 Things I Hate About You”(1999) the romantic comedy with Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Allison Janney and a host of other people whose names I can’t be bothered to remember.

“I still maintain he kicked himself in the balls” – Kat

J.J. Abrams is a dropkick Part 3: The future mistakes.

Star Trek XI in the hands of J.J. Abrams and crew, well a sad day indeed, sure it has the guy who plays Sylar in Heroes and Eric Bana and John Cho, but even these fantastically talented people cannot over come the enormous drag factor of J.J. Abrams and crew. I say crew because not only is it J.J. but all the writers and producers are a close net group who have worked with him on the projects I’ve listed above. This means that the production, directing and writing team for Star Trek XI is roughly equivalent to the current Bush administration. Not only is a complete buffoon in charge but he’s decided that the best men for the jobs are his mates, all of which are buffoons of the same calibre as Mr Abrams himself.

Some of the people involved in Star Trek XI have admitted that they haven’t seen an episode of Star Trek. This is not necessarily a bad thing after all, Nicholas Myers had seen practically no Star Trek before he directed The Wrath of Khan and this one was possibly one of the best things to happened to Star Trek. He brought humor and irreverence to Star Trek that saved it after The Motionless Picture. Being involved in Star Trek is no guarantee of success though, look at Voyager and Enterprise, all the people involved in it had been involved in Star Trek since the late 80s or early 90s. That is of course a rant for another day.

Some of the people making Star Trek XI have said that they are huge trekkies, one even to the point of considering the novels canon. Once you consider those canon you might as well consider Star Trek V to be canon. And then to go even further you might as well consider fan-fiction to be canon, I can just imagine it now, “Kirk and Spock’s Love Child: The Movie”. At this point now though I’m just talking shit and rambling, of course some would say this entire article has been rambling shit. But enough about this, lets move on to more pointless reasons to hate J.J. Abrams. He along with Michael Bay represent what is wrong with the American movie industry. They make horribly predictable movies aimed at the 90% of the population who are complete morons. Who think that reading is for pussies, reality television is entertaining, and Halo is the greatest video game series of all time. Oh sure they make money, that is the aim of any business, but this is truly the worst thing about them. It is a sad sad world we live in when geniuses like Joss Wheadon and Mike Judge are for the most part toiling in obscurity, and it’s a miracle that the likes of the Cohen brothers and Wes Anderson are able to continue making movies. Movies that are a beacon of great story telling in an age of “High Concept”, where movies get written and conceptualised so that they can be pitched to a studio executive in a sentence, preferably a short one.

Part of me wants Star Trek XI to be a good movie so that the Star Trek franchise can continue on be it through more movies or a new TV series. But another part of me wants it to fail so that J.J. Abrams can be taken down a peg. Then another part of me also wants the movie to fail so that Star Trek can be put into a kind of hibernation and reawakened when both it and the world are ready again.

J.J. Abrams is a dropkick

J.J. Abrams, is there anything this guy can’t fuck up? His movies don’t even make good trailers. I was at the cinema today and saw a trailer for… something.

It started off at a going away party for some dropkick named Rob or Ron or whatever, with all his dropkick friends saying how they’ll miss him. Then a loud bang/rumble, which a news report thinks might be some sort of earthquake, shakes the apartment. To see what’s going on some of the dropkicks decide to go up to the roof, which is the first thing I think of when in an earthquake. On the roof they see a large fireball in the distance moving through New York, throwing large pieces of debris into nearby buildings. They then run down onto the street and see a very large piece of debris coming towards them which lands in the street and is shown to be the head of the statue of liberty. The trailer then ended, it showed “2008″ then flashed the credits. The only other title cards that appeared were “From Producer J.J. Abrams” and the “Bad Robot Productions” logo. Because of this I have no idea what the hell the name of this movie is, not that I would really want to know, other than to avoid it like the plague.

The entire fiasco was made worse by the fact that the trailer was comprised of footage shot to appear as camcorder footage of the party. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a multimedia student or because I have taste but I detest footage shoot in this style. Another nitpick with it is that when the statue of liberty’s head lands on the street, it looks too small, about the size of two or three small cars. Now to be fair I’ve never been to New York, yet alone taken a tour of the statue of liberty to see it up close, so it may actually be that size. This still doesn’t excuse that it just looks small.

I finally checked Wikipedia and the movie is called Cloverfield. It turns out the entire movie is shot to look like someone found a camcorder and watched the tape. Apparently when the statue of liberty’s head lands in the street, people get out their camera phones and take pictures, the director says this was done because this is the modern norm continuous self documentation of our lives. And once again this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you do WHEN NEW YORK IS BEING TORN TO PEICES!

The film is based on J.J. Abrams feeling that King King is “addorable” and that we need a city destroying monster who is “insane and intense” something he realised while in a toy store in Tokyo. Which is perfectly fine, I’m sure a Tokyo toy store is a great place to get wacky ideas, if I ever go I’m sure that I’d be able to come up with some brilliant ideas, ideas that can be sold to clients for cash. Not ideas that involve reviving a genre that is basically dead outside of Japan. After all the last city destroying monster film I saw was the modern American Godzilla, which was good for some laughs and mildly entertaining, until they did the usual Hollywood thing and left the door open for a sequel… and then made an animated series.

Coming soon: Part 2, the past mistakes of J.J. Abrams

Oh How Clichéd

I’m depressed. It’s the Christmas season and I’m depressed. That is such a cliché that it pisses me off, and then depresses me even further. I don’t even know why I’m depressed, I think I’m bored and my brain has decided to turn off ‘happy’ in order to give it something to do.

But hey enough about that.

…I got nothing.

Maybe I should get a hobby. Something fun, time consuming, cheap and I’m able to do. I think I’ll start actively tearing apart ‘bullshit’, just taking it and shredding it, it and whom ever created it. Then after I’m done with that, I’ll take them aside, and teach them how to ‘bullshit’ correctly. Now I have been doing this already in day to day life, but I think now I’ll go out and seek ‘bullshit’ out and tear it apart.

On a side note, what’s up with the WordPress admin bar thingy? On the right hand side it says “Howdy, Aaron. [Sign Out, My Profile]“. I mean christ it makes me feel like even my own blog* doesn’t want me around.

*Personally I hate the word blog, but what else can you say? Internet thought page? Website?

Why I don’t want an iPhone

Calling the iPhone crap in my last post may have been a bit harsh. It’s not that it’s crap, it’s just… it’s like if you dressed a simpleton with stumps for hands up in a tweed suit and lab coat, just cause it looks like a scientist, doesn’t mean it can turn the bunsen burner on, or distil the water to bring to boil by waving it over said burner. Sure it looks nice with its coverflow and chrome, but it DOESN’T EVEN HAVE COPY PASTE FUNCTIONALITY!

For most of my life I’ve had a love hate relationship with Apple, due to some issues that I won’t bother going into. I also have a tendency to go against the views of the dominant person/group where I am. At school surrounded by hardcore PC people most of which were also artists, I would tell them just how great a Mac would be for them. Yet while getting a diploma of multimedia, the teacher was a hardcore Mac cultist, and I would insult him, and he would insult me, we were very alike really, although he liked Macs, was from Melbourne and was into skateboarding, and I liked PCs, am from Sydney and detest skateboarding and skateboarders.

I think Steve Jobs is to blame for my negative feelings towards Apple, him and his bloody Reality Distortion Field, even I got caught in it while watching the WWDC 2007 keynote, thankfully iTunes and Safari for Windows came along and blasted me back out to safety. I miss the old caddy you had to use for CDs on Macs.

Also the iPhone could be costing AU$750-1000 when it finally get released, and I just don’t use my mobile that much to warrant that much expense. I’m sad, pathetic have few friends, why would I need such a fantastic device that’s just so easy to use to contact them, hell my cheap shitty Telstra pre-paid that I’ve had for 2-3 years died(not so much died as Telstra were being shitty and my credit was disappearing like a week after I recharged it) in October and I haven’t replaced it because well I need to decided whether I want to spend $149 on a phone that I kinda want, $129 on a phone I kinda want, or $59 on a phone I don’t want but hey I need a phone. Maybe iTunes is a reason, I don’t want my phone to be controlled by a glorified spreadsheet program with a bar on the left with a folder tree system thingy in it.

Whatever the reason I just don’t want an iPhone, and as this rant has gone on for 439 words so far, hasn’t really said what I wanted it to say, and gone off on some tangents, I think I’ll finish it up now.