Movies

My Battle with MGM Over Wargames.Com

For the past three months I've been privately engaged in a time-consuming dispute with Nathan J. Hole, a lawyer representing MGM Studios who claims that Wargames.Com, a domain that I've owned since April 16, 1998, is the rightful property of the film company because it produced the 1983 movie WarGames and registered it as a trademark. I received an e-mail this morning indicating that MGM has filed a legal complaint with the National Arbitration Forum to take the domain name away from me. I ... (read more)

2006/12/18

Can't Stop the Dance? Edit Your Hosts File

I've resisted the urge to use any ad blocking software, since I'm a web publisher who supports my sites through advertising. I finally broke down today because of the dancing people who want to refinance my mortgage. These ads for LowerMyBills.Com bore into your brain like the Ceti eel on The Wrath of Khan. Upon emergence, the eel larva could enter the ear of a larger animal, where it wrapped itself around the cerebral cortex. This caused the host extreme pain and rendered them extremely ... (read more)

2006/12/08

'Red Eye' Flight: Aisle Seat, Window Seat or Terrorist?

The 2005 thriller Red Eye, starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy, has a narrow premise: The guy sitting next to a hotel manager on an overnight flight turns out to be a terrorist who blackmails her into helping facilitate a politician's assassination. I enjoy films that are set up in a way that makes you wonder how they can possibly tell a story. Most of the film takes place between two characters in one aisle of a plane, and it isn't easy for Murphy to menace the poor woman in between ... (read more)

2006/10/31

Rob Lowe, Snow White and the Academy Awards

The infamous opening number to the 1989 Academy Awards, which featured Snow White and Rob Lowe and killed the career of show producer Allen Carr, turned up on YouTube: Seeing this for the first time, I thought the opening was campy, hokey and overdone, but that seemed like the point. You don't line up a dozen dancing tables with lampshade heads and a chorus line of male ushers belting out "whenever you're down in the dumps, try putting on Judy's red pumps" without knowing you're completely over ... (read more)

2006/10/24

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

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