Afterschool: In theaters Oct. 2.
Robert is a young American student at an elite East Coast preparatory school who accidentally captures the death of two classmates on camera. Their lives become memorialized as part of an audio-visual document intended to speed up the campus-wide healing process. But instead, the video creates an atmosphere of paranoia and unease among students and teachers.


Visual Acoustics: In theaters Oct. 9.
Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, VISUAL ACOUSTICS celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman, the worlds greatest architectural photographer, whose images brought modern architecture to the American mainstream. Shulman, who passed away this year, captured the work of nearly every major modern and progressive architect since the 1930s including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, John Lautner, and Frank Gehry. His images epitomized the singular beauty of Southern Californias modernist movement and brought its iconic structures to the attention of the general public. This unique film is both a testament to the evolution of modern architecture and a joyful portrait of the magnetic, whip-smart gentleman who chronicled it with his unforgettable images.


La Nana: In theaters Oct. 16.
After 23 years working as housemaid in an upper class Santiago, Chile household, Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) is as much a part of the Valdez family as the wife, husband, and kids she lives with and looks after.

I'm interested to see what everyone thinks about all the self proclaimed HD Floating around out there. The title HD is basically worthless now. Consumer electronics as well as user based video sites have seemingly blurred, no pun intended, the distinction between what is actually High-Definition and what only pretends to be.

Years ago the standards for HD were set by the ATSC. They were 1280x720 and 1920x1080, 720p and 1080p respectively(this also includes 1080i). Everything that was to be considered HD had to be at least 1280x720 Simple enough, right? Not exactly. A few years a friend of mine purchased a TV that was purported to be HD 720p yet its resolution was only 1024x768, which is actually XGA.
See Graph below.


When we researched this we found that it was common for 42 inch 720p plasma televisions to be this resolution. Which really surprised me because I was aware of the ATSC standard. And yes, I'm aware that the image quality difference between 1280 and 1024 at that screen size is negligible, but it's the principle, 1024 fails to meet the standard.
This marked the beginning of an interesting trend. Since, I imagine, the average person is not aware of the vertical resolution specs, the horizontal pixel count is touted more often. Which leads manufacturers to cut corners, for some odd reason, by lowering the pixel count. It doesn't sense to me that lowering the pixel count a little bit would decrease production cost in any way. Or take for instance the Hitachi Ultravision, it boast a 1080 resolution but its actually resolution is closer to 720. It measures in at 1280x1080. Which means it's 720 with extra horizontal resolution. I imagine this was done simply to put that 1080 tag on the case. Little do prospective buyers know that it's actually 640 pixels short of 1080p.
But this is all water under the bridge now, because 1080p is quickly becoming the standard. My gripe is all the pseudo HD floating around the net. Especially YouTube and Vimeo, as well as many others. It's seems customary on these sites to have a button that turns the HD quality video on. However this button is a lie. Anyone who is familiar with HD content knows that when you watch a video on YouTube or Vimeo it's decidedly not HD. Why? Because every video site transcodes and compresses video, so even if you upload 1280x720 what you watch on the site will not be HD. To be clear, I'm not complaining about the video quality on these sites. For streaming video it's excellent. What I'm more concerned about is the mislabeling of HD content, because it could lead to lower standards for picture quality. If the public consciousness becomes conditioned to think that HD video is equal to what we watch on YouTube or stream on Netflix then the incentive to up the ante for HD pq on broadcasts and Bluray could possibly drop. that's it that's my gripe, now on to health care!

...At least in this test shot for the mythic Kevin Smith penned Tim Burton directedSuperman Returns. This looks so crazy that I'd actually be interested in watching it. It would be cool to see a totally bizarre take on such a famous property. Though, it wouldn't have received much love, I'm sure.

What's with the long hair, or, for that matter, the stoner look? And that plastic suit looks ridiculous, but still, I like it. Oh, what might've been. I guess we'll never know. Check out some of Burton's conceptual sketches.


And who else thinks Cage could play Burton in a Burton biopic?

Anyone worried about Team Ninja loosing their penchant for sleaze with the departure of Tomonobu Itagaki can lay their qualms to rest after watching this recent Japan-only TV spot for Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.




This commercial is depressing on a number of levels. Is this really the most creative implementation of the Sixaxis motion controls that the pervs at Tecmo could come up with?

So much for games growing up.

A delectable treat:
I've seen Inglorious Basterds twice now. I knew it would be better the second time. This is because Quinton Tarantino makes layered movies that are incredibly rich and satisfying. He strikes me as the kind of man who devours cinema and I think he aims to present something so tasty that it requires a second helping.
As I sat in the theater (both times) I was very aware of the audience behind me and was paying attention to their participation. This movie is as much about what's on screen as it is who's watching it in a Michael Haneke kind of way. We've all seen representations of people sitting in theaters on film. There is also the iconic representation of wide eyed faces lit with flickering light and the warmth of the cinema. This is how this movie made me feel. I could have been Michael Pitt in the Dreamers, Austin O'brien in Last Action Hero, or Audrey Tautou in Amelie. All these fine actors played characters whose eyes devoured the movies they watched. This is an analogy that I'm sure is not lost on the director. There were several scenes in the film which revolved around our main antagonist devouring sumptuous foods (creme and milk). The shots in this movie seem to savor the performances of the actors. Slow push-ins emphatically draw tension even when the scene is happening outside the frame. The scene where Landa devours his strudel, just before we expect him to lay into Shosanna, is a perfect example of this. During the conversation immediately preceding that scene, Zoller introduces Landa to Shosanna in German. The conversation takes place outside the frame and all we see is Shosann's face. She, of course does not speak German, so she is silent but we understand her predicament by the expression on her face. I can attest, one viewing doesn't cut it. It cinema made for cinema lovers.

Christopher Waltz performance as Col. Hans Landa stole the show.

I was expecting a completely different crowd after seeing the trailer, which can be very misleading. I was expecting a bunch of raucous Nazi haters booing and hissing with the ferocity of Hitler himself. It wasn't like that at all. The crowd was calm and actually cringed at the brutality in the film. Which surprised me. I thought for sure that Tarintino's goal was to coax that blood-lust out of his audience only to reveal it as an obvious parallel to the Nazi audience watching the propagandistic hero film. I was expecting my audience to be cheering for brutality against the "evil" Nazis while the Nazi audience cheered for the downfall of American soldiers in their little movie. This would have been the perfect parallel for me to elaborate on for paragraphs, but alas, it didn't happen. The crowd was quit civil. Which makes me wonder if Tarintino, as well as myself, underestimated the movie's audience. Or maybe I had really docile crowds. Either way, this revelation didn't really detract from the movie. It only added another layer to the cake.
If the trailer was truthful about anything it was Tarintino's use of hyperbolic characters that were so "colorful" that they couldn't be seen as anything other than the most broadly painted stereotypes. Aldo Raine's Tennessee accent, the frenchman's dairy farm, Hitler's villianesque cape are all supreme examples of this. But that's what made this movie so lush. It's not a history lesson, it's a re-imagining of the past painted in colors so vivid that it couldn't possibly be boring.

We already know that the director is more than capable of making an awesome revenge flick or two, but is this what we would normally consider a revenge movie? It seems to me that this is the kind of propagandistic retelling of history we would be used to from the opposing side. But why? I guess I'm still a little confused about this one. Is it to blur the distinction between them and us? Evil and good? Was it that deep? I suspect Tarantino didn't want any one to cut that deep into his elaborately structured supremely sweet cake (obviousness aside). I suspect, and I'm guessing he'd say the same, he just wanted to make a kick ass movie. Which it is, and damned tasty too.

P.S. I hope that Shane will chime in in the comments section.

It's been a couple of months now, but funny man Jay Leno is back doing what he does best: Late night comedy. Well, not so late now, I guess. He's on at 10pm instead of his original 11:30pm slot, now taken over by Conan O'Brien.
So you can sit back for an hour, have a few chuckles hopefully, watch your local crappy news, and then prepare yourself for two more hours of late night comedy with Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Fallon. Wow!
Really NBC? 3 hours of this stuff? Let's hope it goes well.
The show itself is basically the same stuff you saw Leno do on the Tonight Show, just a few bits rearranged, and with a new set. Jay hasn't changed, and his brand of not so over the top comedy hasn't changed either, and that's fine with me. I always liked him on the Tonight Show.
You want quirky, watch Conan.
A bit of a surprise, though, came when Jay got a little serious when talking with Kanye "the accoster" West about his VMA incident. I felt like I was watching a shrink talk with his patient.
But overall, solid show. It's very chuckle worthy. And what more could you ask for on free tv entertainment?

The people at Lucasarts responsible for the Hi-Def Monkey Island remake have been very busy.

Take a gander at their new game Lucidity for XBLA that is scheduled for release within a months time.

The Playstation 3 is billed as the most powerful gaming system ever created. Sure game developers could harness the power of the Cell to craft graphics that look marginally better than the competition, but if the Wii has taught us anything it's that people don't want amazingly slick 3D visuals anymore. That dream died in 2000 when Sega pulled the plug on the Dreamcast. The future of gaming is not about polygons, normal-mapping, and procedural animations. No. We're going back to basics.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the future of video games.



A localized version of 3D Dot Game Heroes for the Playstation 3 has yet to be announced but I'm sure that Atlus and Ignition are currently slogging it out in a bidding war to bring this title stateside.

Since I had nothing to do today, I decided to follow Apple's "It's only rock and Roll" event. First off, it was good seeing Steve Jobs back and in seemingly good health thanks to the liver of a mid 20s car accident victim. It seemed to me that the focus this year was price cutting. The entry price on an Ipod Touch is now 200 bucks. Roughly 30 dollars cheaper than yesterday. Out of all the Ipods the Nano got the biggest upgrade which included a camera and a speaker. The new OS was also released today which includes much more integration with Itunes and the ability to change application via a computer.
But the real shocker was the fact that Apple is so aggressively pursuing the video game market.

With graphs like these Jobs is certainly trying to make a statement about the other handhelds.

They showed of a couple of their games like an fps called Nova which looks a lot like Halo and a rhythm game called Riddim Ribbon.
They also showed off Assassin's Creed which looks more like a side-scroller than the open world we're used to with this game. Points off Apple, for going for the console audience, you have a unique device play to its strengths like the Nintendo does with the Wii.
So, Apple wants a piece of the pie? They already have the install base, now they just need the games. More to come.
Pics Via Engadget

You should know by now, if you follow my blog, how much I'm into movie posters. It's interesting to see artists represent a whole movie with a single image. Check out some of these really neat Polish movie posters at guardian. Some of them are down right terrifying. The Eyes Wide Shut poster hits the nail on the head if you ask me. It's eerie and unsettling.

Here's a picture of Viggo Mortensen looking gruff and sporting a thick neck beard. There's nothing special about that. What is special about this photo is that it's the new poster for the movie The Road, which releases on Oct.16. The movie, based on the Cormack McCarthy written post-apocalyptic tail, which you can see a trailer for here, has already recieved a few negative nods. But I'll try and stay optimistic about this one considering the source material is so highly revered.
The poster seems rather bland and familiar. The lead standing upright and angled diagonally across the page.


Fantastic Mr. Fox also has a new poster, which looks awesome.

The Fourth Kind: In theaters Nov.6.
In 1972, a scale of measurement was established for alien encounters. When a UFO is sighted, it is called an encounter of the first kind. When evidence is collected, it is known as an encounter of the second kind. When contact is made with extraterrestrials, it is the third kind. The next level, abduction, is the fourth kind. This encounter has been the most difficult to document…until now. Structured unlike any film before it, The Fourth Kind is a provocative thriller set in modern-day Nome, Alaska, where—mysteriously since the 1960s—a disproportionate number of the population has been reported missing every year. Despite multiple FBI investigations of the region, the truth has never been discovered. Here in this remote region, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) began videotaping sessions with traumatized patients and unwittingly discovered some of the most disturbing evidence of alien abduction ever documented. Using never-before-seen archival footage that is integrated into the film, The Fourth Kind exposes the terrified revelations of multiple witnesses. Their accounts of being visited by alien figures all share disturbingly identical details, the validity of which is investigated throughout the film.

My take: They're not giving us a lot with the trailer though it's thoroughly intriguing. I love alien films so hopefully this will make up for the X-files movie(s).



Cloud 9: In theaters Aug. 11.
Cloud 9 is the groundbreaking and lyrical story of a 67-year old married woman who rediscovers passion and her sexuality when she falls in love with a 76-year old man. Cloud 9 won an Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and the Best Director and Best Actress prizes at this year’s German Film Awards.

My take: This movie is already receiving lots of critical acclaim and treads unfamiliar waters which are both reasons to bet this one will be good.

The Horse Boy: In theaters Sep. 11.
An intensely personal yet epic spiritual journey, The Horse Boy follows one Texas couple and their autistic son as they trek on horseback through Outer Mongolia in a desperate attempt to treat his condition with shamanic healing. When two-year-old Rowan was diagnosed with autism, Rupert Isaacson and his wife Kristin Neff sought the best possible medical care for their son—but traditional therapies had little effect. Then they discovered that Rowan has a profound affinity for animals—particularly horses—and the family set off on a quest for a possible cure….The Horse Boy is part travel adventure, part insight into shamanic tradition and part intimate look at the autistic mind. In telling one family’s extraordinary story, the film gives voice to the thousands who display amazing courage and creativity everyday in the battle against this mysterious and heartbreaking epidemic and insight into how, in life’s darkest moments, one can find the gateway to joy and wonder.

My Take: It's too early to tell but I will see this for sure. It's based on the book The Horse Boy: A Father's Quest to Heal His Son. I'll interested to see how the movie interacts with the source material were they made concurrently?

HD, 1080p, 240hz, what's next? 3D? Well, actually, yes. Sony announced Wednesday plans to blanket the globe with 3D televisions by the end of 2010 rendering millions of HD television, including yours, boring and flat. Don't think you need a 3d TV? Consider this, Sony is moving aggressively to establish 3D multimedia across many different platforms, including but not limited to their Vaio series, the PS3 game console and of course Blu ray movies which means that something you'll want will be offered in 3D. Of course the situation is messy right now and there aren't any standards as of yet which is very reminiscent of the early days of HD, but if Sony has their way it'll only be a year or so before you start to feel ashamed of your boring 2D television.

From Ft.com
Mr Stringer (Sony's Chief Executive) is expected to tell the audience: “Today, 3D is clearly on its way to the mass market through technology, distribution and content.

“As with high definition a few years back, there are a variety of issues yet to be addressed. But the 3D train is on the track, and we at Sony are ready to drive it home.”
Dig deep because it aint gonna be cheap.

I'll make this quick, because I've written about it before. Recently, I was listening to a favorite movie podcast of mine, which I won't name because I think they do awesome work and I'm not really trying to start a net beef. Anyway, during this podcast they decide to semi re-kindle that Games-as-Art debate. They were, and I hope this is not giving too much away, talking about, and I'm paraphrasing here, how Bioshock is the one of the only games that comes close to becoming an art form, or for that matter proving that games can be art at all. They've talked about this before and I sense no condescension at all. For the most part they're fairly respectful. That being said, i realized something as they were discussing the merits of the game and its artistic qualifications. Underneath all their layers of argument stood what formed the very foundation of their whole thesis.

A game is art so long as it resembles artistic cinema.

What was your most magical special FX movie moment? For me, it was seeing the Brachiosouras for the first time in Jurrassic Park. It gave me chills. Still does. As a child, I remember wanting to capture my amazement at that seen in put it in a bottle. It was truly magical. Maybe because it was so new at the time. Unfortunately, we're all pretty used to rubbery CG and grand vistas now. And the time where we could truly suspend our disbelief and be amazed has passed, and in its place a more critical or, for that matter, cynical mindset has surfaced. Remember how awesome Davy Jones digital makeup from the last two Pirates of the Caribbean movies looked? Or maybe you took for granted its groundbreaking technology(Which was probably the goal of the film makers). We're so accustomed to all the dazzle that we barely even notice it at all. Although, I did get a bit tingly when I saw the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Will the breath of fresh air, for effects, be 3D film making? Who knows? But until then why don't we look back on 100 years of special effects. VIA Gizmodo

Movies included are:

* 1900 - The Enchanted Drawing
* 1903 - The Great Train Robbery
* 1923 - The Ten Commandments (Silent)
* 1927 - Sunrise
* 1933 - King Kong
* 1939 - The Wizard of Oz
* 1940 - The Thief of Baghdad
* 1954 - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
* 1956 - Forbidden Planet
* 1963 - Jason and the Argonauts
* 1964 - Mary Poppins
* 1977 - Star Wars
* 1982 - Tron
* 1985 - Back to the Future
* 1988 - Who Framed Roger Rabbit
* 1989 - The Abyss
* 1991 - Terminator 2: Judgment Day
* 1992 - The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
* 1993 - Jurassic Park
* 2004 - Spider-Man 2
* 2005 - King Kong
* 2006 - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
* 2007 - Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
* 2007 - The Golden Compass
* 2008 - The Spiderwick Chronicles
* 2008 - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button