Movies

Netroots 1, Weekly Standard 0

Writing for the conservative magazine Weekly Standard, Louis Wittig draws a parallel between the underwhelming box office receipts of Snakes on a Plane and the exaggerated political impact of left-wing blogs: Since Howard Dean's 2004 primary sprint, Web sites such as MyDD, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos have been exalted by as a new and powerful phenomenon, capable of spinning liberal frustration into cash, volunteers, and excitement for Democratic candidates nationwide. The left-wing ... (read more)

2006/08/26

Blogger Wants to Beat Jeremy Coon

Napolean Dynamite producer Jeremy Coon and aspiring filmmaker Rhys Southan attended the same Richardson, Texas, high school that I did (many years later). Because of this coincidence, I found Beat Jeremy Coon, Southan's amusingly bitter blog in which he details his effort to become more famous than Coon before their 10-year reunion in 2007. I originally thought the desire to beat Jeremy Coon was just a gimmick, but a recent interview on his blog suggests otherwise. Southan found Mike Perry, ... (read more)

2006/08/19

'Over the Hedge' Rocks the Suburbs

Took the kids yesterday to see Over the Hedge, an animated comic strip adaptation by DreamWorks about forest creatures who find their home overtaken by a humongous residential community. Computer-animated films are my favorite family movies these days, because even when the story's dull the rendering effects are worth seeing on a giant screen. I didn't notice a single new visual in Over the Hedge comparable to the fur in Monsters Inc. or the expressive human faces in The Incredibles, but ... (read more)

2006/05/25

Sony's Universal Media Disc Format Lays an Egg

Sony PSP games and movies are released on Universal Media Disc format, but the name's a joke. No other devices support the format, Sony won't support burners or third-party efforts to open it up, and Brian Carnell passes along the news that movie studios have now cut back or abandoned UMD releases: It's hard to see why UMD failed.The movies were expensive -- $20 to $25 per movie.The PSP couldn't be connected to a television and there were no standalone UMD players.The failure should make UMD ... (read more)

2006/04/24

The World's Most Beloved Coroner

I chaperoned a field trip this week to a high school production of The Wizard of Oz, which was fun because kids love getting out of school to see plays. This one had winged attack monkeys roaming the audience, the Wicked Witch singing Michael Jackson's "Bad" and a climactic scene involving water guns. At the end, they brought a surprise guest on stage: Meinhardt Raabe, the 90-year-old who played the Coroner in the movie. Raabe, who lives in a retirement community south of Jacksonville, may ... (read more)

2006/04/06

Movie Downloaders Pay a High Price

Six studios have begun selling movie downloads this week on Movielink. Purchased movies can be kept forever for computer viewing and burned to DVD but can't be watched in DVD players. There's also a limit on the number of computers that can view a movie, and the service and site require Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Prices for new movies are higher than DVDs -- Nicolas Cage's The Weather Man sells for $27 on Movielink and $22 on Amazon.Com. So you're getting less convenience at ... (read more)

2006/04/03

The Seminal Moment at the Academy Awards

I watched the Oscars last night even though I haven't seen a single film for which an actor, director or screenwriter was nominated. I have to go all the way down the list to "best achievement in makeup" before reaching a winner that I've seen, the Chronicles of Narnia. I had the same experience with musicians at the Grammys and TV actors at the Emmys. At some point raising young kids and working obsessively have robbed me of all pop culture that isn't aimed at children. I was more excited ... (read more)

2006/03/06

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Wired News is running my story today about the center of the world: the Shamrock "K" Horse Center near Coffeyville, Kansas. Maggie Dew, the geocacher who journeyed to the center and brought back photos, has planted a cache not far from the city at a '60s landmark called Peace Point: Some friends and I had a little shop in downtown Coffeyville called the Hobbit Hole. We had a peace flag in the front window, and it wasn't long before someone decided to lob a brick through it. During the same ... (read more)

2006/02/22

Serenity Doesn't Have a Prayer

Joss Whedon, the creator of the film Serenity and the Firefly TV series that preceded it, offers a correction to an Entertainment Weekly item declaring an end to the franchise: EW is a fine rag, but they do take things out of context. Obviously when I said I had 'closure', what I meant was "I hate Serenity, I hated Firefly, I think my fans are stupid and Nathan Fillion smells like turnips." But EW's always got to put some weird negative spin on it. Geeks love Serenity, a great space western ... (read more)

2006/01/06

The Lion, The Witch and The Arms Dealer

I took the boys last night to see Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Film Franchise We Hope Will Be a Cash Machine Like Harry Potter. The film's a wonderfully realized vision of the book, at least through my hazy recollection of tearing through all seven novels 25 years ago in the Collier boxed set, which I've kept all of these years. But the logic of the C.S. Lewis novel makes less sense than it did when I was a child. I don't care if they're just a bunch of dissident animals ... (read more)

2005/12/22

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