the bloaty review

I’ve felt shortchanged lately because, basically, I ran a website for something that was wanted by a certain audience for about 10 years. My mistake? Not sure,  actually. Inside my own power I did everything I could. The kicker is that this ‘thing’ that eventually popped up as a somewhat despondent reality (according to 346 movie scoop sites out there). But the sad realization is that since I’ve been somewhat versed in this particular subject for ten years- I still feel like I know more than most yet no one will probably listen.

I still feel good about where it’s going though. It’s something that needs to have backflips done for from somebody in the world. But how it came about I can’t help but feel a small gradient of attribution for- which makes me feel great. In the end, I enjoy have having 2% odds of worth in the matter and it actually resulting in a basis of direction. Those are pretty dim numbers, you might say, for something that required, essentially, a decade of my personal life. Task is a very loose term in the way that I gave it my all for three years- it went completely comatose for 5 years or so, and now suddenly it’s a reality.

What’s funny is that I never heard the end of it even whilst it was inactive. Destined screenplay writers, aspiring actors, die hard fans are who I heard from in a time where it seemed like I was the only one that would listen.

-get a passport so i can go to some other country after the elections and feel real smug about it

-review the stick flick ‘tree of life’ as if it were watched on a black and white 13″ panasonic tele

-attempt to quit smoking through means of smoking

-wonder what the fuck is going on in my VT class, and  wonder how many CIT/VT majors would know how to even plug in a keyboard cord into a computer if needed

-write an email to the math sector of my college’s vector unit and let them know that forgetting about math credits from seasoned students (transfer credits) and making them take bonafide bad math courses of their own really puts a bone in my stew

-continue resisting the urge to tell everyone on facebook that they’re all fucking idiots, including the group of people that keep trying to add me with their unfunny josh accounts. you people suck

-deal with customers at my job. oh my god, this one is the fucking worst

Honestly I made this post simply because I was tired of seeing that weird chicks mug on my PC whenever Chrome opened. Forgot her name, but I’ll remember next time to conveniently misplace stupid images out of the article whenever I feel the urge to apply media

Once upon a time I was met with the distinct honor of wasting hours of my night off watching two particularly bad movies:

 gulliver’s travels

This was the least offensive of the two, but I expected more. My girlfriend had wanted to watch it and based on the premise of tales from some old guy like a thousand years ago, I’d figured it’d at least be charming. But sadly, that’s not the case. First off, one of the female leads is Amanda Peet, who ranks on my top 1 actresses to putrify a film. Alas, I know very little about the original stories of Gulliver, but my gut instinct tells me that when coming across the idea of recreating one of the tales for modern day cinema and adding Jack Black as the subject, that there’s probably very little honor to the source material.

The movie is tailored for PG audiences- but in this case we have a striking lack of substance in plot and character development and an overload of iffy digital effects. Did everyone know Jack Black sings and dances like a buffoon? I’d suggest only watching this movie if you are looking to freak autistic children out.

macgruber

I’m not sure where the hell this idea for a movie came from, but the SNL people who made it should be sued over and over again.  MacGruber is supposed to be a MacGyver spoof character on the same plain as the Old Spice Guy, and countless other ‘super badass commercial characters saying awesome things’ types. The problem with MacGruber is that he isn’t funny at all. He isn’t even of those characters that comes off as funny because he’s a douchebag. He doesn’t even come across as a douchebag. He’s just unfunny. What the hell is Ryan Phillipe doing in this movie, anyways? How do you go from Traffic to sticking a chute of celery up your ass in MacGruber? The only thing that made me laugh about this movie was how fat Val Kilmer is now.

The Sugar Land Express is preceded to audiences with a screen informing them that the occurrence is based on true events. Intriguing, considering the experience that follows. A ‘starry’-eyed, up and coming maestro in Steve Spielberg conducts the task for screen- a commanding leading woman, car chase choreography topped by none before, gun play, family-unit dramatics, what isn’t there for audiences? It’s interesting to post a retrospective on what makes TSLE ‘hit’ with viewers, while contrasting the creative liberties used through the direction based on the true-life events.

It’s no secret why the events that unfolded in 1969 rural Texas involving a runaway couple en route to extract their child from a foster home, taking the quiet police state by storm, was seen as a moment of opportunity by Spielberg. However, in actuality, the real-life event lasted only a few hours. This means no overnight scene in the Winnebago, no budding partnerships with the trooper turned hostage, and no gun fights with vigilant city men. A great deal of fudging the reality in Spielberg’s vision indeed. This raises questions in regards to the necessity of showcasing an exaggeration of events in the name of Hollywood success in lieu of offering a faithful auteur perspective of the event. But without such liberties taken, there most likely would not be a film at all.

Another instance of shady story-to-screen reenactment falls on how the Texas State Troopers are portrayed throughout. From the beginning, the deplorable processing of law enforcement allows for the progression of the couple across the state in a stolen cruiser- and a police body count that follows them that would make Michael Bay stutter. The repeated bonehead mistakes by the hands of the troopers leads to action sequences that’s a akin to a toddler tossing his hot wheels around without regard. “No one will get killed on my watch,” says the Captain- destruction of property through car chases and gun play achieve another level of treatment however. The Governor may have quietly screamed in his head after seeing the bottom line red of destruction here.

But then what do you have without all the slick eye candy? Goldie Hawn convinces well as the young albeit dimwit mother, quick with a venom tongue throughout. But there is a layer of cultural context and emotions that are ignored and might offer an interesting dramatic element to the movie. Who knows, maybe showing a legal struggle of acquiring the child (before prison breaks and abductions run wild) would tune the audiences right about the whole situation, and offer a more believable experience.

Spielberg’s catalogue of films, later on through the decades, does offer forms of the auteur directing method that began, perhaps, as a seed of promise in TSLE (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan). This conclusion shows that the eclectic and entertainment style of Spielberg went the right direction here with his first theatrical foray.

Amongst the winners announced in the inaugural Gooooogle Science Fair, including three young ladies that studied results in marinade processes that tone down chicken carcinogens, asthma patients in nasty indoor environments, and ovarian cancer immunity to chemo medications, one key presentation went by the wayside.

Our judges said the unifying elements of all three young women were their intellectual curiosity, their tenaciousness and their ambition to use science to find solutions to big problems. They examined complex problems and found both simple solutions that can be implemented by the general public—like changing your cooking habits or removing toxins from your home—as well as more complex solutions that can be addressed in labs by doctors and researchers, such as Shree’s groundbreaking discovery, which could have wider implications for cancer research. Google Blog

The one demonstration, however, that went by the wayside involved an individual dressed in a V For Vendetta mask flashing posters to onlookers that walked by that guessed weight, age, and interests and issuing them ads to various local businesses. To each passer-by’s response, a [mostly] negative or positive reaction was recorded for scientific study. Incidentally, local gym membership sign ups spiked for the week. Public relations for Google and Google Adsense issued no comment.

Microsoft has announced its throwing its jock into the last rings of muddled redundant content distribution networks that it currently doesn’t saturate its mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling consumer base with.

The new music initiative, entitled Xbox Music, will launch with over 11 million songs available, but it’s not clear exactly how users will access the content, or what pricing will be connected to accessing/buying the songs. The announcement comes via a Steve Ballmer talk at the recent Microsoft Partner Conference.

Nevermind the smack in the face to whatever shred of Zune userbase remains, this should finally tip the consumers into shelling out $150 for an upgraded file storage for their systems [nope]. In the mean time, Soulseek NS networks with my system rather well.

Additionally, the XBL TV Network claims to offer your dashboard with ESPN channels and BBC offshoot networks that only seem relevant in third world countries. At this point, MS seems to just want to chide their gamers into leaving their systems on 24/7, which bodes nicely with their history for manufacturing consoles that tend to have a working lifespan of only a few years.

[Global]

The login box to the game realms have been changed to a soundboard of Martin Lawrence from the 2001 comedy, Blue Streak.

“I don’t want to leave these pizzas with Shamoo over there”

In a this day and age, it’s nice to watch a pirate movie that doesn’t involve stylized CGI, big name actors sleepwalking on screen, and plot elements out of a cereal box. No, this isn’t a Pirates of the Caribbean summer romp, it’s a made for TV movie that found the right kind of audience to tell a proper kind of story, and thus we have the TNT movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. A pseudo-documentary describing the late 70s, early 80s power struggle of up-and-coming multi-billion dollar enterprises in Microsoft and Apple, the movie does a fine job with enticing the audiences with the struggles and sacrifices of names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer and the like had to fight through to come out on top of an untapped human revolution.

The movie relates to audiences interested in the history and characters, and does well of telling the story. Some of the major scenes corresponding to key parts of the history however felt forced. The scene that hints to the viewer that the inner-society of the Apple employee culture is starting to crumble is one of these. Upon simply seeing a large albeit harmless food fight in a bar between the two camps in Apple (Apple II camp and Macintosh camp), Steve Wozniak simply puts his foot forward to Jobs and proclaims “I used to tell jokes, this isn’t funny anymore. I’m leaving.” The writing for this interaction, and a few others, was most likely some of the oldest to make it through to the final script among other lines that had been played with and worked on over and over. Slap on the token “Everybody Wants to Rule The World” by Tears for Fears lacing the mood of the scene, the viewer just can’t quite place this scene anywhere other than in a prime-time commercial trailer that TNT would’ve aired over and over again as the two part movie was being premiered on the channel.

The editing of the film is nothing amazing, and could have helped the story along much better. Because there are many nuances in the history of the personal computer, it’s tough sometimes for the common viewer to see what exactly is the conflict going on in some acts. Though the ideas are clearly explained in narration, the idea of ‘pirating’ the Xerox company’s mouse and keyboard GUI interface for the early computers seems to miss with the audience.

Early in the movie, we don’t see Steve Jobs much more past a acid-dropping hippie with anger management issues. Yet the viewer is always asked to try to cope with Jobs’ struggles through the narration of Wozniak’s character. How can one feel for the guy that signs a million dollar deal and then leaves his unborn child and hippie girlfriend in the dust? The relationship scenes between Jobs and his girlfriend felt out of place and made you irritated, considering it had nothing to do with the plot other than to make Jobs look like a clod. You feel for the Wozniak character as an individual more than anyone, and yet he is merely the sidekick. The reality of this gets much worse as Apple accrues power and the viewer begins to see the obsessive behaviors be Jobs bestows on the company by belittling employees and alienating shareholders.

Regardless, the design of the film is the great contrasts they paint between the environments of Apple and Microsoft works well. Apple embarks on a clean, antiseptic business culture and layout, while Microsoft found its way running its business out of hotel rooms and faceless business buildings. Anthony Michael Hall does an almost unprecedented and captivating approach as Bill Gates, a character you’re sure couldn’t ever become some kind of onscreen presence. The explosive personality of Steve Jobs is portrayed by Noah Wyle- a great but not outstanding performance. He offers a lot more to the character than the writing of the movie or the historical documents do.

Pirates isn’t quite a polished film but stands out as a made-for-TV film. Its up and down, sometime meandering storytelling is a testament to this, but it goes out to accomplish what it sets out to do.

As you can see, I chose to place errors screens from all three different operating systems as splash images for this report. For Windows, a Blue Screen of Death signified by the lovable mug of Bill Gates himself. As for OSX, the Kernel Panic screen that is more common then some people tend to realize. And of course for Linux, a hardware fault for a distribution of the OS failing to recognize something as simple as the IDE drivers not communicating with a run-of-the-mill hard disk.

The point being, any computer and/or operating system tends to run just as well as the user that is running it. Preferably, I choose Windows for my major work stations simply because I’m familiar to accommodating it to my hardware and making it run exactly how I want it. There is nothing that can’t be done in Windows- most users just tend to not research how and why things aren’t performing like they should. Though my funds have changed vastly from a teenager with a savings account to a college student eating fried cheese, I enjoy fine tuning cutting edge hardware to showcase up-and-coming gaming engines and Windows is the only machine to help me with this.

Interestingly, if I feel for an exercise in pseudo-masochism I would attempt the above with perhaps an installation of Ubuntu or Red Hat, but whatever palatable results wear thin on the functionality side moreso than a triumphant side. Sure I’ve fine tuned a Wine package to play Counter-Strike Source after hours of pain staking driver tweaking, but once I was able to realize I put many man hours into getting a 3D game to run at 15 FPS over getting it to run with ease 80 frames per second on a Windows install with the same hardware, I decided to let by gones be by gones and simply run a Counter Strike Source server for other people to connect to- which quite fittingly produced flip-flopped results.

But let’s not leave out our friend the Apple, everybody’s favorite coffee shop swag paradise. I definitely dig the culture of Apple- they gouge their customers into an a plug-and-play lego interface so they don’t ever have to think twice about ever doing an extra click or two to get simple tasks done. Sarcasm aside, though I respect the quality and reliability of an Apple product, I never could quite figure out why their return customer ratio was so high considering they have a nasty, slap-in-the-face habit of over-saturating [their] market with product upgrades. Just bought that 32GB iphone for $400? Well the joke’s on you, the 64GB just went on sale for $350 and it has a front facing camera. You like that new 3G iPad there, it’s pretty spiffy? Well the second generation iPad with 3G and front facing camera is already owned there by your daughter’s snotty 15 year old friend, whom you can’t really tell is a boy or a girl.

Well that was my fairly cynical point of view of all the major operating systems. It’s all about the money, and though I fairly enjoy computers, I don’t enjoy how college has sucked my bank account dry to the point where I run a Hewlett Packard laptop.

The new Duke Nukem is a turd. It isn’t funny, it contains none of the level exploration of Duke 3D, and the campaign takes the worst of all the eras of gaming evolution that its development life transcended. I watched an hour of game play with it and it was tough to imagine how in God’s graces such a streamlined shooter/action romp still got gold for $60. It was like they were banking on the fact that people were going to be so inevitably underwhelmed that they distanced it far from any kind of worthwhile innovation. Oh yeah, and it continues to steal crummy one-liners from other entertainment franchises. Fuck video games, mostly.

w00p list
---------
no wooooork
jiggering small people at basketball
driving fast in my terrible car

llama list
---------
baja broadband and spotty internet connection
too poor for a macbook pro
apple for being shithead elitsts

w00p list
---------
gaining points from exams (when professor got questions wrong himself)
possibility of harassing school bbq for free food
running car on fumes

llama list
---------
stinky flds folk in film class
car running on fumes
two hours of talking about browser cookies in the IT course

When discussing any film produced and envisioned by the Coen Brothers, there’s nary a discussion that doesn’t involve the provocative cinematography and mood-enticing motifs found laden in their films. Instead of reoccurring jokes and regurgitated script themes, you’ll find that the Coens will use the utmost of brilliant visual and/or writing elements to ferment the story into the resolution they want. Fargo is no exception to the deal, and happens to be one of the most poignant presentations of their catalog.

Fargo isn’t your standard crime caper-gone-awry flick where you feel little compassion for main characters as they bumble through mock-reality setups with minimal interesting payoff (see eg. most any heist film). Fargo’s print on the audience stems from the creation of how hard hitting, blunt, chaotic, plain, painful, of all its characters in the scheme of the story. What zapped me to the realization of parallels between all the main characters is that, though some blinded by greed others by honor, no one really knows what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. From the get-go, the neurotic, and demeanor of Jerry Lundegaard’s initial scheme, to the never-to-be-resolved expressions of Marge Gunderson at the climax, you probably won’t ever understand or find the cold destiny and reality to all involved.

Not even the two cons who are tasked with the venture of a fake kidnapping turned haywire, though played brilliantly by Coen familiars Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, have little to no ambition or hopeful resolution. The posture they exhibit concerning the success of Lundegaards kidnapping of his wife goes out the window in the audience’s first scene with the two alone. When you realize the haphazard nature of what’s going on with the crimes, and who’s actually involved in what’s being done to let them come to evolution, you come to a stark realization that nothing good is going to come out of this for any of these people.

Small things piece together the movement of the film that ferment the experience even more. The motion camera shots make sure only the proper elements get extra treatment- anything else is shot with a static position that puts whoever or whatever is in frame under a microscope. Less we not forget the somewhat exaggerated representation of the bleak and sparse winters of Minnesota and North Dakota, tt’s no wonder people of the region generally detested the movie’s doldrum label that followed the film’s success.

The most interesting and thought provoking character, a sheriff of Brainard, Minnesota, doesn’t even get introduced to the audiences until an hour into the film’s running time. The boost her character gives is unmatched and renews any questions about the direction of the dreary plot. Something dawns in you that, once the grittiness begins, you wonder if there’s any faith in a positive outcome to the conflict. Her character injects the honor and sacrifice you need to see in a dark film like this, regardless of outcome.

Fargo is great because it focuses on the forgiving nature of people, and how twisted it can become just under the right conditions. Somethings never end well, but the message is distinct and the resolution will humble your movie-going career for the rest of its days.

The title of this article refers to the sweeping experience one can’t help but feel when beginning to watch The Hangover Part II.  Not much of a fan of the first flick’s ‘pull a joke from the hat, continue plot’ sub-routine, I decided to humble myself to the recent box office success of the sequel. To no surprise, audiences continue to chug along poor summer sequels, despite hang over.

To an extent, the movie presents itself in what I would consider a more ‘edgier’ plateau of general conflict and negotiation that the first movie was able to charm itself away from due to the generally lax nature of Vegas-stooped summer comedies. In Part II, you find yourself wondering why more of the main characters don’t get shot at, or why they seem to almost contrast themselves so badly from the depressing, unfunny environment that it’s cringing just to see them rattle off the line “I can’t believe it’s happening again!” The eventual scavenger hunt for clues only deludes the movie’s intent of comedic enterprise amongst the ‘Bangkok’ environment.

Stu’s getting married, so that means we can now all witness the predictable rehashings from the first film. Toss in the sub-plot of the groom angling for the affection of his would-be father in law, by midpoint of the story I had stopped caring about ‘why’ and ‘how’ these things were happening to the characters.

The take-it-or-leave-it autistic line reads of Zack Galfinkicaks is present though his character lacks much of the surprising ‘edge’ we enjoyed in the first film.  Truth be told, most of the laughs to be had really only come from the Alan and Chau characters, as believable as they are the writing is throw away. The charisma of Phil is no longer present in this sequel- Bradley Cooper displays the onscreen spunk of a parol officer. Ed Helms continues to quickly lose his geek charisma and kept me wondering just how much screen writers can think they can get away with an anxious character simply yelling the same driveler lines for an hour.

Top it off with tack car chase scenes, fatty guest appearances, bromance homophobia, and abhorrent cultural cliche, and Part II had me guessing when my self-induced roofie state would have me tearing out theater seating and casting it at the screen.