If you were planning on seeing Michael Jackson's final performance in theaters, you might want to head down to the box office ASAP...

Tickets for the two-week only This Is It movie are selling fast, as posted on the official MJ facebook page.

Here's a clip from the film...

If you haven't heard about Paranormal Activity yet there's probably a reason. It's a small horror film from 2007 and it's recently received a very small release. It was written and directed by Oren Peli, an Israeli-born video game designer, who was formally untrained. The movie was made for only 11 grand which is pretty amazing the movie has grossed to date around 84,000 dollars. But it has a growing underground following and with the demand feature, which allows you to demand a screening for you city, you'll likely only be able to see it by doing its marketing for it. This is a pretty interesting business model from Paramount and I really hope it's successful.

As for the movie, I'm curious to see if it will be anything like the Blair Witch Project, which had a similar stylistic and marketing vibe.
***Spoiler***
The trailer gives quite a bit away. So don't watch it if you want to wait for it in theaters.

SSIV Rumors are all but confirmed. Destructoid recently pointed out that there was an odd website which looked very Street Fighteresque. The website has "the New Warrior" in its title I wonder what that could mean. We'll have more info soon, as it is to be expected that more details will come in around 4am.
Is that T. Hawk on the screen?
More to come...
Edit: Adam pointed me to these on the Neogaf forum.
More to still to come...




Here are he un-confirmed glorious details!

* The previously leaked characters are all said to be in the game. Dee Jay, T. Hawk, Dudley, Ibuki, Makoto, Adon, Cody and Guy. The new characters are rumored to be: o Hakan - An Arabic grappler obsessed with oil. o Juri - Evil Asian girl fighter working for Seth. * All characters will have two Ultras. They will both be available at one time, not selectable like with Third Strike's Super Arts. The commands to execute your Ultras do not overlap.
o It sounds like the characters from Third Strike are set up with their prior Super Arts. They had three in that game, so one will be their Super and the other two their Ultras.
o Gen has four Ultras because of his two fighting styles. One of these is said to be an Air Ultra.
o All characters still have one Super, except Sakura who apparently has a Shinkuu Hadoken (Super Fireball) as well.
* Some characters will have Air Ultras.
* The Bonus Stages will be returning.
* This will be an exclusive arcade release at least for a few months.
* An official announcement is said to be coming at the Tokyo Game Show and on the Japanese Street Fighter 4 blog soon.
* Expect the return of the many familiar Supers, and a few new ones like Metsu Shoryuken. You'll see the return of Chun-Li's Kikosho (Super Fireball), Gouken's Denjin, Sagat's Tiger Cannon (Super Fireball).
* Ibuki has a run command.
* Guile has his Sonic Hurricane move from Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
* Dudley has his Chain combos from Third Strike, plus one additional Chain combo.
* Cody is the only character with an Alpha Counter and he still has his knife. He supposedly needs his knife to perform one of his Ultras.
* Rufus can cancel-break the last hit of his Spectacle Romance, or the launch kick of Space Opera Symphony.
* Guy has his Chain combos.
* Makoto has her Tanden Renki Super from Third Strike.
* Zangief is said to have a 720 degree motion Air Ultra called the Siberian Blizzard.
* The game takes place one year after Street Fighter 4.
* Dudley was searching for his car in Third Strike, in this game he's searching for a rose.
* T. Hawk's storyline involves him protecting Juni or Juli.
* Dhalsim's new Ultra is called the Yoga Shangri'la.
* There's a new gameplay system called Tadan Saving, the phrase implies a multi-hitting or multiple-level Focus Attack.
* The console characters are all said to be added to the upcoming arcade release, with the possible exceptions of Seth and Gouken.

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.