Where for art thou, Miley?

3/12/2010 – 11:49 pm

RememberMe Where for art thou, Miley?So we decided to go see the new Miley Cyrus film today. Tim and I are both (not so closeted) Miley fans, so it didn't take much to talk him into going after lunch.

I still can't remember the name of Miley's film, so I looked it up on Fandango on my iPhone, saw the poster and thought that was it. We made it to the theatre with about 10 minutes to spare, stood in line with a bunch of 14 year old girls and felt a little embarrassed about being the only adult males going into the theatre.

We watched all the trailers (who knew there's another Twilight segment coming so soon?) and were doing just fine. Waiting patiently for the movie to start.

It did. It started with a little girl seeing her mom get murdered on a subway platform in NYC back in the 90s. Ouch. That didn't seem quite right, but maybe the filmmakers were trying to show us some backstory before Miley grows up, runs off to the beach, and has a summer fling with hottie mc hot hot.

But noooooo. Twenty minutes in, there's Robert Pattison. I don't remember him being in Miley's new movie. Uh oh. I think we're in the wrong place…

Turns out we weren't in the Miley Cyrus movie at all. Turns out that Miley's movie doesn't come out for several more weeks. D'oh! And yet it felt like such a Miley Cyrus crowd when we sat down in the first place.

We stumbled unwittingly into a unspeakably boring movie about dysfunctional family who's oldest brother committed suicide a few years ago and the middle brother has anger issues and always looks constipated while the father is a really busy lawyer with no time for his kids and the youngest sister is an art savant who lives with the mom who has remarried some guy. The movie really gets rolling when the angry middle brother, played unsparklingly by Robert, gets beat up by a cop whose daughter is hot so he starts dating her and she turns into his girlfriend until she finds out he knew her dad before they started dating and breaks up with him for a few minutes right towards the end but gets back together and everything seems to just be sorting itself out when the horrific twist happens. Queue slo-mo music montage, float a final voice over or two, and then the movie ended.

So I'd warn you about spoilers but the first 9 hours were lifted from the same old formula that was already 50 years old when that chick who played Sabrina The Teenaged Witch did it in that movie with the song by Britney Spears. How can their be spoilers for a movie using this formula?

If I had known anything about this film going in, I most definitely would not have gone. Plus we kept expecting Miley to show up for the first 20 minutes until we were absolutely sure it was the wrong movie.

Sigh.

Still, after 98% of the movie had passed, they threw a twist out there. It was enough of a twist that we talked about it in earnest three or four times this evening after seeing it. They lead up to the twist very well. There are little clues all through the film. But I didn't actually see it coming until about 30 seconds before it arrived. And that's always welcome, even in slow moving painful movies like this one.

So thanks, Hollywood, for abandoning the formula for just a second. It is the only thing that made this film memorable at all. Now don't make me sit through 5000 more of them.

The title of the film we saw was "Remember Me". If we had walked out before the last 5 minutes I would have given it a D-, but those last 5 minutes were really good ones. So I bumped the whole movie up to a C.

By Paul | Posted in seeing | Comments (0)

Why Avatar didn't win

3/12/2010 – 10:58 pm

Back in January, we had Charlie Booker telling us how to make a compelling news report, in the format of, well, a compelling news report (see that post here).

Now we have these guys telling us how to make a compelling Academy Award winning movie trailer, in the format of, well, a compelling Academy Award winning movie trailer.

Catch phrase! Clever.

By Paul | Posted in laughing, seeing | Comments (0)

I love Lauren Bacall

3/10/2010 – 10:07 am

LaurenBacallOnOscar82 I love Lauren BacallDid you see all the dish Lauren Bacall is offering up from just watching the Oscars? I have to say I love her more than ever now.

You can read for yourself everything else she had to say over at her twitter feed (Lauren_Bacall).

And for those of you who don't know who she is, she's been in movies like The Big Sleep, Key Largo, Murder on the Orient Express, The Shootist, and Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King. How can you not love that kind of list? Seriously, her movie and tv list is much bigger than Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King, go check it out.

She also summed up my feelings with this little gem:
LaurenBacallOnOscar82 2 I love Lauren Bacall

By Paul | Posted in waiting | Comments (0)

Yeti in the Jeep

3/4/2010 – 10:25 am

Screen Shot of the Garmin GPSSometimes you find giggles in the most unexpected places…

In the past couple of weeks, Tim and I have been trying out various third party GPS systems for the Jeep. And by various, I mean two. They both seemed adequate at getting us places, but the Garmin is the clear winner.

The Tom Tom had a kludgy interface. I am constantly surprised when any tech company still has interface issues. It seems really simple to me: minimize the number of times a person sitting in the car has to tap the screen to make it go and let the computer do everything it can with no help from the user.

Oddly, the Tom Tom would make you type everything and then it would start directing you with the voice, but the screen wouldn't start updating until you clicked on "DONE". I have no idea why that extra click was in there. Add to that, the "BACK" button inexplicably kept changing sides, so you couldn't just click on it four times in quick succession. You actually had to focus on it and watch where it would appear next in order to back out of the nested menu structure.

Here's a note to Tom Tom: either pay Apple to build a simple interface for you, or at least read the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines and follow them.

The next one we tried, and the one we kept, is the Garmin Nüvi. Not only did they get the whole "BACK" button position right, they used an icon so you don't have to read AND they made it so if you hold it down it skips all the way to the top no matter how deep in the menu system you are. Good move!

Then I found the Yeti voice in the picture above and there was no turning back. This is the only GPS I've ever had that makes me smile when its giving directions. "Oot ort ort OOOT Squeeee!" apparently means keep driving in the direction you're going or something.

And, Yes, Rob, it does Squee.

So it wins. We're so keeping the Garmin. It gets us where we want to go and it makes me giggle.

(Read more about the Yeti voice on Garmin's website)

By Paul | Posted in knowing, laughing | Comments (0)

Skinput

3/3/2010 – 10:00 am

Sweet! These folks are exploring ways to use your skin as input for computer devices. One version includes a Pico projector that allows you to play video games on your hand.

The video shows a guy poking at his arm and hands and fingers to play Tetris, to control his iPod, and to navigate through a series of menus on his arm. This is similar to that thing we saw a while back from MIT that projected info about the person standing in front of you onto said person so you could remember important facts about them.

By Paul | Posted in waiting | Comments (2)

My February 2010 Facebook Links

2/28/2010 – 11:58 pm

These are the links that I posted on my Facebook Account during the month of February 2010.

Link Disclaimer: most of the links in this post go to external sites beyond the control of cliffdweller. Please understand that some of them may not yield the exact results over time that the original description on this page outlines.

By Paul | Posted in chronicling | Comments (0)

Cheryl Luce's Site is up!

2/19/2010 – 7:21 am

cheryllucetravel Cheryl Luces Site is up!Here's another site I set up for a friend who wanted to start blogging about her travel groups.

CherylLuceTravel.com

She is using the site to promote the trips that she leads to places all over the world. Last fall she took a group to Africa, this summer she's taking a group to Alaska. And those are just the A's.

The site is all based on the wordrpess theme "Sliding Doors" but took a bit of modification to get it to display things properly. It's still a work in progress, but I think it's looking pretty nice. She's updating it almost daily.

By Paul | Posted in webbing | Comments (0)

Percy Jackson – Way to change the book…

2/13/2010 – 9:44 pm

Medusa Percy Jackson Way to change the book...No spoilers here, but I have to say I liked The Lightning Thief.

OK, one spoiler: it is nothing like the book. Once I got past thinking "that's not what happened in the book," and "why'd they say that, the book said something else," I started really enjoying the movie.

Maybe there are some spoilers here, but not much.

So Percy didn't really go on an assigned quest. He was just going to free his mom from Hades and accidentally found the lightning bolt and had some sort of flying fight with Luke over the top of Manhattan, but it did turn out well.

Oh, and Uma Thurman makes a great Madusa. Those snakes in her hair were extra creepy. Plus they get extra credit for gratuitous use of the iPhone. Bet Steve Jobs didn't see that one coming.

Anyone know if the kid who played Percy is any relation to Ian what's-his-name in The Vampire Diaries?

Anyway, it was a lot of fun. Way different from the book, but the essence was the same. Go see it.

By Paul | Posted in seeing | Comments (1)

The Wolf Man – please just have the franchise put down already.

2/12/2010 – 9:52 pm

Wolfman1941 The Wolf Man please just have the franchise put down already.Arrrooooooooo.

If you're going to howl at the moon, it's probably best to stick with David Naughton or Lon Chaney Jr. The 2010 wolfman story leaves a l-o-t to be desired.

Things missing were the whole beast-within-theme, tortured soul, decent dialog, story line, etc.

Things it had, but only because I had to: an old gypsy woman, the wolf guy's dead brother's wife (a.k.a. the love interest), the creepy old dad (wolfy, I'm your father. it is your destiny…), oh, and a creepy psych ward with a scary german accented crazy doctor who got his comeuppance right before Scotland Yard is forced to shoot up half of London in a beast-chasing sequence that could only be rivaled by Mel Gibson chasing cars on foot in one of those Lethal Weapon movies.

Suck suck suck.

It was pretty. The sets were well done, the transformation into the beast(s) were super cool. The actual beast, no so much. I was reminded of Roddy McDowall in that movie about those apes that had their own planet.

The big fight at the end between Wolverine and Bumble Bee was kind of nice. The burning of the house as the troops marched on Atlanta was ok. The "uh oh I got bit and even though the werewolf monster is dead but at least there can be a sequel if this one makes enough money" was a little predictable.

Lame, predictable, boring. Even the Danny Elfman theme couldn't bring this one up.

Is it just me, or is Hollywood really cranking out the formula these days? When will something come along that rises above that?Isn't it about time?

By Paul | Posted in seeing | Comments (0)

Will Portland learn from the greedy music industry?

2/9/2010 – 3:28 pm

meter Will Portland learn from the greedy music industry?Today Ars Technica is reporting that "Variable download pricing correlated with slower music sales." Remember a year ago when iTunes dropped DRM but allowed the greedy music execs to raise the prices of popular songs? Let's take a look at how that panned out.

Ars says:

As noted by MediaMemo, this slowdown in growth has all happened over the same period of time that the iTunes (and Amazon, and Walmart) pricing changes went into effect.

That's right, after iTunes (and Wal-Mart and Amazon digital downloads) pricing went up, sales went down.

There are a million ways to spin it, but that's the bottom line. The decline in sales just happened to coincide with the price increase.

Like iTunes and the greedy music industry, The City That Works™, Portland, raised it's parking rates about a year ago. I for one stopped going downtown for everything I wanted to do, so my net is that I'm paying Portland less money every year for parking. I wonder if anyone's done a study to see if the higher rates are actually producing higher revenue…

By Paul | Posted in knowing | Comments (0)