muzicman82.net

Minesweeper : The Movie

Stupid, but pretty funny.

Today, I did my monthly laptop drive wipe and reinstalled everything. This was in part due to Adobe software being quite confused about which versions were installed. Oh well, it’s always nice to start fresh, and I can be back up and 100% within a couple hours. Yep, it’s that easy. I think the only thing on my “C:\” drive that I have to remember to back up are my Trillian log files. Everything else is kept on my “D:\” drive for simplicity.

I watched 10 Items or Less, and I must say, it’s very funny and very simple. The movie was shot in 15 days. I recommend watching it.

Well, after a rather longish day of work, I got to go to a free advance screening of Stardust in Philadelphia, PA. I won tickets through Entertainment Weekly. They also gave all guests free soda and popcorn! There wasn’t more than 50 people total. It was a pretty awesome movie if you enjoy fantasy/adventure movies for adults. It’s certainly a nice break from all of the sequels coming out.

Despite the awesomeness of the day, it took an hour and a half to get from New Castle, DE to Philadelphia, PA (35 miles). That was somewhat understandable as it was rush out. However, we left the theater garage at 9:15 PM and got back to New Castle at 11:20 PM. Yeah, two hours. I just got home in time to post this.

My Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection came in today too! So, I’ll be playing with this very soon.

Watch this.

If you’re not familiar with Angry Alien, you need to spend some time on the site to catch up. Amazing.

Transformers is a brilliant movie. If you’re seeing it for reasons other than to see live action robots, lots of crumbling, fighting, action… then I think you’re seeing the wrong movie. Otherwise, you will be entertained.

Here’s a couple lovely facts from IMDB:

• It took approximately 38 hours for the animators Industrial Light & Magic to render one frame of the CGI animation to portray the Transformers. This breaks the record set by Weta Workshop for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), where it took 20 hours to animate a frame of CGI to portray the Ent Treebeard.
• According to one of the CGI artists that created the animated robots at ILM, if you took all the polygons (CGI building blocks) from all the autobots and decepticon models they created at the studio, and strung them end to end, they’d reach to the moon and back and you’d still have enough left over to build the coliseum in Rome two times.

For those of you that don’t know, standard video has 30 still frames every second. High definition video has 60 frames. Think about that for a second.

Oh, and Transformers 2 is in talks… Mmmmm…

I’ve been waiting years for them to finish this movie. I could really care less if it has plot. If there’s action and live action giant robots, it was worth my $9.75.

I’ll post after the movie, I’m sure.

So, on the way to see Knocked Up tonight (which was awesome), the Route 202 Northbound ramp was closed right in front of me… I had to take a detour to get back on course, but it turns out that this accident was the cause of the hold up. Take a look at the photos. It amazes me how easily vehicles become balls of metal after these things happen. I wonder if these things are simply matters of careless driving or if it’s simply because Delaware’s roads are way too congested. I run into one of these serious crashes at least once every week.

Angry Alien has posted March Of The Penguins as reenacted by bunnies in 30 seconds. It’s pretty darn funny, even if you never saw the movie. Watch the other movies too.

I saw the new Transformers trailer before Shrek 3 the other night. If you haven’t seen the trailer, go watch. If you have, watch it again. Who else is excited?!

BTW – I downloaded the 1080p trailer to watch on my laptop… All I can say is that it’s flippin awesome having a screen that can view 1080p natively. The screen is 1920×1200. Wooo! If only I could find the Blu-ray drive for cheap!

So, I recently purchased The Fountain on DVD. I saw it in theaters months ago, but as with any other Darren Aronofsky film, you have to watch it at least twice to wrap your head around it. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, I highly suggest watching the Requiem For A Dream and Pi.

The Fountain is a beautifully crafted film. Even if you don’t understand it, it’s lovely to watch.. and not in the way of plastic looking special effects. While it could easily fall under the sci-fi, drama, romance, and even action genres of film, it’s really how you interpret the film. The movie seamlessly and simultaneously tells the story of three men and three women, each pair from different eras in time. Their stories are different, but the themes are similar if not the same.

The underlying theme of the movie is the concept of death as a passage to life. I think that’s pretty clear. There are also themes of redemption, sacrifice, and suffering present in each of the sub-stories. More interesting to me though, is how much the film says about pure human nature.

If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you watch it. Darren Aronofsky films aren’t for everyone… but if you like this one, I think you’ll like the others. Requiem For A Dream is far more intense, and more visual in a different way. It’s on my (unpublished) list of films everyone must see. Let me know what you think in the comments!