Undecided

Here’s a list of movies from 2010 that I’d like to see

Daybreakers
The Book of Eli
Legion maybe
The Lightning Thief
Alice in Wonderland
Clash of the Titans
Ironman 2
Robinhood maybe
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time maybe
Eclipse (Twilight)
Socerer’s Apprentice this looks good
Harry Potter 7, part 1 woooo!
Tron: Legacy woooo!

Steven Spielberg was quoted as saying that this “the most evocative and amazing science-fiction movie since Star Wars,” and while I have to be honest and say it isn’t in my top 3 all-time favorite movies, it does make the top 5 as #4 (after I get it on DVD and watch it at home, I’ll decide whether it can inch out #3).

While Cameron has done his best to spin the movie as something that defies catagorization, the truth is, Avatar combines a lot of previous concepts. If he’d done this movie back in the 70s when he first imagined it (leaving aside that he wouldn’t have been able to do it with the kind of effects that made it believable today, let alone with the ability to tell the story as close to his vision as he has) I think a couple of the ideas shown in Avatar would have been fairly revolutionary SciFi material. Today, we’ve seen a lot of these concepts over and over. But that’s ok. Avatar is a lot like Braveheart meets Dances with Wolves.  (Braveheart ranked #5 among the top grossing R rated movies for 1995, approximately 75 million gross national review, with the #1 R rated movie of 1995 pulling down just over 100 million.  Dances with Wolves of course earned several nominations and is considered by many to be an epic story.)  In short, both movies were quite good (although Braveheart cost 72 million to make, so the movie would not have been anything close to a success if you discount the revenue from foreign theatres.) and Avatar is definitely a must see in my book.

Hopefully it will make enough to justify it’s 300 million production budget.

While I don’t want to spoil the story for my friends who keep up with this notebook, I’d like to at least strongly encourage you to go check it out for yourself.  And, when you go see it, make sure you see it in 3D.  I’ve seen the preview clips on my HD TV at home and I saw it in 3D in the theatres.  3D really does a lot to sell the movie.

(And no, despite how much I loved the movie, I will not be picking up the video game… ok, maybe… but most likely not.  I really don’t have time to play MMOs as much as I used to, and my interest in them had waned before I even met my future wife.)

I will, however, be looking forward to checking it out in IMAX 3D after we get through the holidays (2h 40m is a lengthy period to watch again within the same weekend…it’s a huge chunk of my day.)

South Park seems to have taken on my two least favorite celebrities in the world of Hollywood and done it with style (that is, if you think South Park is stylish. 89% of the time, I don’t.)  The Los Angeles Times online posted an article on one of it’s blogs commenting on the South Park episode [NSFW] released earlier this month (I don’t normally watch South Park, so I’ve not seen the episode) but after reading the article and subsequent comments, this is what I’ve come up with.

In it’s usual graphically inappropriate and highly sophomoric humor style, South Park attempts to bring to your attention just what Lucas and Spielberg have done with our beloved Indiana Jones franchise with the latest installment, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull [I don't think that it deserves further advertisement than I'm giving through this entry, so if you want a link to it, please use Google.]  While the author of the LA Times article appears to have poorly reported some of the particulars about the South Park article, he appears to have grasped the essentials where South Park, through a highly controversial euphemism, depicts characatures of Lucas and Spielberg violating the Indiana Jones franchise.

I guess the question is whether the South Park script is more offensive than what Lucas and Spielberg have done to Indiana Jones.  Still, as offensive as the episode is, I cannot help but feel that it effectively dramatizes what I think of the fourth movie and what Lucas/Spielberg did to ‘Indie.’

As if I needed one more reason to hate Lucas (or one more reason to avoid South Park.)

Turns out that when I purchased the Heroes Season 2 Blu-Ray DVD I got jipped.  Heroes Podcast pointed out in one of their regular episodes that NBC decided to put content on the regular DVD that they didn’t put on the Blu-Ray DVD.

I go to say, this makes me leary of purchasing additional BRDVDs in the near future.  And frankly, if I’m not going to buy the BRDVD, I probably just won’t buy.  So instead of getting this fan to buy the same product twice, they’re going to lose out on a sale entirely.

Corporate stupidity at it’s finest.

So what am I missing on the BluRay version that I’m all up-in-arms about?  The Season 3 premiere teaser content.  In retrospect it’s not a huge loss, but when I buy something, I’d like to think that Blu-Ray (or HDDVD) is the same content as the standard definition, only better quality and more of that content…  but when I find out that they intentionally omitted content from the BRDVD version and then charge me approximately 15$ more for less content…  I’m a little miffed.

IO9 has a review of Heroes Season 3, and the fact that the premiere 2 hour episode lost 25% of it’s viewership to shows such as “dancing with the stars” and “csi: miami.”  The language of the review is pretty harshly against NBC, but they make a few good points.

Season 2 looked to be spectacular, if you take in to consideration the plans for the remaining 14 episodes of Season 2 which were abruptly aborted because of the writer’s strike.  That left Tim Kring and the rest of the producers/writers with wrapping up the season gracefully.

In the scheme of things, it might just have been better to have gone ahead with their original plans (spoiler, but not much of one since it’s a “what would have been” look at the original plot) to release the virus and have the remaining 14 episodes to deal with the world wide catastrophe.

Likewise I’m forced to agree with IO9 that the one-hour countdown was too much hype.  As interesting as some of the clips on the countdown were, I found the whole hour to  be very trying.  After an hour of watching the countdown, I was glad I have Tivo…  so that I could watch the real episode later.