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:

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.

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:

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.

Rent comes out tomorrow! Ever since I saw the play in NYC I thought about what it would be like as a movie. Tomorrow I’ll get to find out and I’ll let you all know what I thought.

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.

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.