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?

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.

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.

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.

These instructions are from this site, but I don’t trust sites to stick around.

1. Make sure Netflix is setup to prefer HTML5. This is in Your Account-> Playback settings.
2. I have the latest nss (has to be equal to or better than 3.17.1)
3. Need Google Chrome (you can PROBABLY do this on Firefox with a similar plugin)
4. Get the User-Agent Switcher.
5. 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
6. 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.
7. Go to Netflix and watch instant videos.
8. 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.

Even Scarlett thought the girl from Frozen was Rapunzel….

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?

I recently saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil after hearing discussion of the main character being a hacker as part of a recurring segment on The Command Line where the podcaster compares characters from literature and movies to hackers (in the original sense of the word).  Watching this 1985 movie in 2011 was a very interesting experience.

***WARNING: there may be spoilers ahead***

Just to get this out of the way: Brazil does not take place in Brazil.  It takes place in some unnamed country full of British speaking people and a couple of people with American accents.  The title of the movie comes from a famous song (in our world as well as the world of the movie) that often has its title shortened to Brazil.  Temporally, the movie takes place “in the future”.  The country depicted in this future is very similar to George Orwell’s 1984, complete with Ministry of Truth-like propaganda posters up all over the place.

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.

As I mentioned yesterday, all went to see Toy Story 3 (in 2D) at a 2230 showing. We mostly had the theatre to ourselves – it was somewhere between one quarter and one half full – great for a movie that hadn’t been out very long. But, we are odd ducks in our hatred of 3D. I thought the movie was the perfect ending to the trilogy. You never know when the entertainment industry is involved and there’s money to be made, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read that the Toy Story franchise is done as far as feature-length movies go. Given the nice, neat close this movie gave to the characters, it’s probably best that way. I’d like to get into some potential spoiler material to explain why I enjoyed the movie so much. I’ll probably go in order along with the movie so you can decide when to jump off if you think it’s too much information.