Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Movies”
Podcasts I'm Listening to In 2024
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
Is All About that Bass a net positive message?
This isn’t the first time I mention this song on here. But I’ve been thinking about the lyrics a lot recently as it continues to play on the radio at the gym. A conversation on twitter yesterday with @AprilTara spurred me to put my thoughts on the blog. At first blush, the lyrics seem to be a positive antidote to the rampant Photoshopping and fat-shaming we’ve been railing about in vain for at least two decades:
Marx Brothers
Watching Marx Brothers A Day At The Races with my two year old. She likes it. But asked me, “Daddy, why doesn’t that man talk?”
Why isn't it @donald_faison ?
Yesterday I saw the new Star Wars trailer. I told my wife I was disappointed that if they were going to have a black Storm Trooper, they didn’t pick Donald Faison. His Storm Trooper on the Robot Chicken Star Wars specials is my favorite part of the specials. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to have this sentiment.
Other thoughts:
- I’ve seen images from the trailer along with the quote from Spaceballs (which did have black storm troopers) “We ain’t found shit”
- So are Storm Troopers no longer Fett clones? Or is he just dressed as a trooper like Han and Luke did in Ep 4?
Mascots and Bowdlerization
As I read with my daughter I realize I had forgotten a large part of The Car in the Hat. Also watching the old Disney shorts with my daughter. Both Mickey Mouse and the Cat in the Hat were often jerks before they became mascots for their companies. Now they are goodie two shoes.
Boo from Monsters, Inc
Now that I have a two year old I realize that Boo’s drawings are way too advanced for a kid who can’t even speak in full sentences.
A thought while in the pool today
I’d love to see either (or both?) Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith take on an updated film adaptation of Catch-22. The dialog is so important in the book and those guys are masters of dialog.
Watching Netflix on Fedora 20
These instructions are from this site, but I don’t trust sites to stick around.
- Make sure Netflix is setup to prefer HTML5. This is in Your Account-> Playback settings.
- I have the latest nss (has to be equal to or better than 3.17.1)
- Need Google Chrome (you can PROBABLY do this on Firefox with a similar plugin)
- Get the User-Agent Switcher.
- Fill it in with:
- Name: Netflix Linux
- String: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2114.2 Safari/537.36
- Group: (is filled in automatically)
- Append?: Select ‘Replace’
- Flag: IE
- Click on Permanent Spoof list and put netflix.com in the domain (and select the rule you just made from the drop-box). Then click the add button.
- Go to Netflix and watch instant videos.
- And it works! So linux is perfectly capable, but apparently it’s not supported. I guess I can understand not wanting to support the infinite versions of Linux, but why not Ubuntu or Fedora? Maybe it’s coming? That’d be great.
I’ll later check if if it works on Ubuntu, too, with with this method.
Disney Princess Culture Part 1
[caption id=“attachment_6143” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] lil kids - CC licensed by jepoycamboy[/caption]
I titled this Part 1 because I am sure I’ll have to revisit this topic in the future. Scarlett is only 1 and she barely cares for television, much less Disney animated films. However, if you don’t think about the future, it has a way of surprising you and finding you unprepared. Of course, as a kid, I loved the Disney cartoons. It was only in the last ten years or so that I came across any articles critical of Disney and how it might be corrupting our daughters. There’s always going to be some degree of hate towards the creators of mass media because we are powerless against them. They’re able to use emotions and psychology to affect us (or those around us) and bypass our rational thinking. Try telling some kid back in the late 90s he can’t have a Power Rangers toy because it promotes violence. He doesn’t know or care about that. He just wants to have one of the rainbow of action figures to play with his friends. Mass media is everywhere and the only way to keep it from affecting your kids is to lock them in the basement - they’ll see it on TV, movies, radio or from friends, teachers, and family members. And Hinds over at The Atlantic recounts how he was unable to keep his daughters from learning about the princesses, despite his best efforts. Interestingly enough, Hinds doesn’t really dwell much on why he’d want to do this to his daughters - it’s considered to be assumed knowledge - of COURSE people want to keep their kids away from Disney Princess Culture. But why?
How Best to Rip and Manage Your Own (legally purchased) DVDs to create your own Netflix Instant
I had two reasons for starting this project:
- my wife and I like to collect Disney movies from our youth. These movies are most likely to be watched by kids and kids are likely to damage DVDs. I’ve heard lots of anecdotes on the net from parents who are on their fourth purchase of the same movie. That’s just silly! Also, Disney’s always putting their movies “back in the vault” so if your kid messes up one of THOSE movies, you could be SOL for up to a decade
- Let me tell you a story of how ridiculous things have gotten in my house thanks to Netflix Instant. My wife owns all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. However, she does not watch these DVDs. She watches it on Netflix Instant. Why? Because it’s easier for her to go on Netflix and find the episode she wants than to try and remember what season has what episode and go get that, take it out of its case, and put it in the DVD player.
If I can go off on a quick tangent - the movie studios might read #2 wrongfully conclude (as I’ve seen WB do before) that this means they should keep their stuff off of Netflix instant. No, what it means is that people want the convenience of Netflix Instant with the movies they buy. We would NEVER go look for a CD to play music anymore. It’s all on our computers in Amarok or iTunes or Rhythmbox and we can easily search for an artist or a song and not have to worry about what CD it’s on. This is what people want in their homes! Yet the movie studios have killed every company that’s tried to do it. Well, no wonder people are using Netflix vs buying movies nowadays! Sheesh! OK, rant over.
Subtitle
After this blog post it shouldn’t be a surprise that I was quite annoyed at the United Artists AFI edition of the movie, “ Fiddler on the Roof”. I was watching it for the third time a couple weeks ago and, as is our habit, I turned on subtitles. Neither Danielle and I are deaf, but we often turn on subtitles to make sure we can understand everyone in the movie. Sometimes they have accents that are hard to decipher and sometimes they’re blocked out by ambient noise in the movie or in the real world.
Big Buck Bunny has been Released to the net!
Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.
Here’s the Blender Institute’s latest movie. It’s much, much better than Elephants Dream. Check it out!
An Open Letter to Netflix
I am not an unreasonable man and I full understand your need to focus on making your “watch now” feature debut available exclusively to Windows users. After all, they do make up about 90% of computer users. However, I do have some problems with this as a long time plan.
First of all, it does require me to use Internet Explorer. This is extremely shortsighted. What about those of us who use Firefox? My wife was excited about “watch now” until she found out that IE was required and said, “f&ck that!” So you should open up this service to other browsers.
Dilbert Movie
Looks like, mentioned a couple of times in this post that there will be a Dilbert movie. This one seems to hint that it will be a live movie rather than a cartoon. I think that would be a horrible idea. Cartoon/newspaper comics make lousy movies - see The Flintstones movies and The Dennis the Menace movie. I was excited with the first and disappointed with the second one. However, he seems to mention in the first one that he doesn’t think it’s actually going to get made. (That, IMHO, would be a good idea)
and the Oscar goes to....
The Departed - for best picture.
I stayed up, so I figured I’d blog it. The movie also won Scorcese his first Oscar.
IF you like/love Star Wars, you MUST see this!
A group has redone the entire Star Wars Episode 4 in ascii art. You can see the javascript version of Star Wars Ascii Art here. Or, if you don’t have javascript, just telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl.
The website is a better experience because it comes in a little faster and you can fast forward and skip around. These are some ridiculously talented guys.
May the force be with them.
Bollywood Fight Club!
Want to crack up? Want to see the movie sure to be so cheesy it MUST be watched, then check out Fight Club: Members Only. A Bollywood remake of the Ed Norton and Brad Pitt movie.
Superman is back
As you doubtless know, the Superman franchise is coming back. After a false start in the 90s where Superman was going to go crazy (inspiring the song Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down), they are actually working on this one. It’s supposed to fit in the timeline after Superman II with Christopher Reeves and is titled Superman Returns. While reading an article about the upcoming movie in the June 2006 issue of Wired Magazine, a side panel titled “The Myth of Superman”, reminded me of one of my favorite monologues in Kill Bill Vol. 2. First what Niel Gaiman and Adam Rogers say in their article:
First Impression: Theora
On the face of things, Theora seems to be a better codec simply based upon the fact that the OGG file is 50 MB compared to the 185 MB MPEG file. I still have to do some tests to see if this comes at the cost of worse quality in the picture or sound, but if it’s equivalent, then OGG is clearly the best format for storing DVDs. Not only is it free (and allegedly taggable via metadata), but it’s also smaller in file size.
Free Video
To encode your video in a free codec (ie not proprietary), use Theora from Xiph.org. This codec is still in ALPHA stage (as in, not even beta!) so don’t use it for mission critical stuff just yet. However, xine and mplayer already play the codec. If you try to convert an avi to theora (using ffmpeg2theora) the audio will be out of sync with the video. So either encode the original video as an mpeg or type in the following:
Rent Movie Review
The movie was great and a faithful adaptation of the play. There were only a few differences I didn’t like as much.
--------------- Warning: Spoiler ——————— A lot of the smaller singing parts were converted into speaking parts and that kinda ruined some parts for me. For example, when Angel saves Tom Collins and they sing, it’s a little more evident that they like each other. This isn’t really revealed until later. Also, some of the dialogue isn’t as effective when spoken when compared to singing.
So long and thanks for all the fish
Friday I went to go see Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as you may recall. I was quite excited about seeing it as I had read one of the five books and watched the old BBC adaptation. The movie certainly started off very well with an entertaining opening sequence, but I was left quite dissapointed. Why? At first I couldn’t really articulate what it was about the movie that was lacking. There wasn’t anything specifically wrong with it, but then more and more things came to mind and I realized why I didn’t like it.
One more day!
Just one more day until two key things occur:
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes out and Daniel’s girlfriend comes up to Ithaca.
I’m really excited about the movie because it’s been getting some awesome reviews and I think that it is a wonderful and smartly funny story. Douglas Adams is awesome.
I’m happy that Ash is coming up because that makes my brother so happy. Anything that makes my family happy is awesome. I know he misses her a lot so I hope she arrives on time and they have have a good week together.