Boom Baby

I went to a movie premiere a few weeks ago.  Well, it wasn’t necessarily a premiere and it wasn’t necessarily a movie either…  So I’m not sure what I did.  I guess I paid $12 bucks to see a television show before it was broadcast.  They did take it to Sundance, if that means anything…

So what’s the deal? It was the premiere of an ESPN documentary in their 30 for 30 series titled Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks directed by Dan Klores.

What is 30 for 30?  It’s ESPN’s 30th anniversary, and to commemorate the milestone have commissioned 30 documentaries by 30 filmmakers on unique topics.  Only a handful of titles have aired so far, but they’ve been great pieces so far.  I saw one on Jimmy the Greek that was pretty good…  One on how the University of Miami came to actually have a contending football team…  One on Muhammad Ali vs. Larry Holmes…  And a pretty good one on the USFL.  There’s one about the Baltimore Colts marching band, but I haven’t seen that one yet.  So far, they’ve been good topics, and great 2-hour (with commercials) documentaries.

So this film is set to premiere on Sunday March 14th on ESPN with many re-broadcasts soon thereafter.

It’s about a basketball player named Reggie Miller, and the rivalry that sprouted between him and the Knicks and a very specific Knick fan – Spike Lee (yes, the filmmaker).  It also talked about the rivalry known as “the hicks vs. the Knicks” which I was somewhat unaware of back then.

To be honest, I can’t be that subjective about much of this.  Why, because I was a Pacer fan back then…  (I didn’t hate the Knicks…  Just John Starks)

Notice the past tense in my admiration for the Pacers and the NBA?  Yeah.  Because I think the NBA has degenerated into a piece of crap sports league with no leadership among the athletes or the administrators.  It doesn’t help that the Pacers have turned to crap since the departure of Reggie Miller from the team…

But this piece details a fun time for Indianapolis when the Pacers had a good squad, the NBA had great match ups, and the NBA had a good proportion of college graduates.

So you may or may not be interested in this…  It took me back to a time when I liked a sport, had a home team that I respected, and have fond memories of that time in general.  There’s a pretty good amount of comedy in the piece based on what actually happened and some new details.

So I’ll gladly watch it again, and may try and purchase it to have.  Watching Miller score 8 points in under 20 seconds to win a playoff game by two is a thing of beauty.

Mad Men Theme

Mad Men is easily in my top 5 of television shows currently in production. It’s no Lost, and I’m not sure where it stack up against Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother.  Definitely top five for me though…

Something has bugged the he’ll outta me since I first saw the show… I recognized the drum loop used in the theme song, and I couldn’t identify where. It bugged the hell outta me every time we saw the intro…  Until a few days ago when my iTunes on shuffle hit something…

The drum loop that had been in the back of my head was right there…  It’s the same as part of the song Poison from The Prodigy.

Hell, I’ve only found one minor reference to it with a very specific search. Muteboy72 on tumblr posted about it a few weeks ago (here and here).

It had really been gnawing at me for awhile, and now I’m glad I’ve got it figured out.

Since that’s now solved, I guess I can tackle that room-temperature super conductor problem. It’s that or perpetual motion.

Book Review: A Dangerous Man by Charlie Huston

So this was the first book I read 100% on my iPhone. Kinda interesting experience… I’m not sure how much of the formatting was changed to suit the delivery mechanism. I’ll have to give the book a look to see next time I’m at a book store.

So apparently, this is the third book in a series by Huston. Oops…  That explains the numerous references to backstory that seemed oddly brief.

I read it anyway. I needed something to wash the taste of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road out of my mind.

Good? Sometimes. It’s never bad, but not great either.

It’s a work of fiction that is in the crime drama realm that is entertaining, but not astounding.  It’s all first person, and sometimes there’s a little jumping around in time to add an interesting effect to the reader.  I can’t quite tell if you were supposed to like the main character or not.  There are allusions to some things that make it so you’re supposed to be able to go either way as the reader.

If there was a problem with the book, it’s that I didn’t feel terribly invested in it.  I didn’t really care what happened.  There was no character that I rooted for.  Most of the way through the book, I didn’t feel like I cared in any way how it ended – and the story wasn’t good enough to pull me back in.

As far as reading it on the iPhone, I found that to be fine.  It didn’t hurt my eyes, and it was very easy to leave and come back to any point in the book.  I’ll really like the iPad if it has the same app (it was recently acquired by Amazon, so we’ll see if they do anything to it).

So, I know that’s not much of a review.  I’ve downloaded the other two books from this series (they’re all available for free download right now on the Stanza iPhone app).  I love free, but I wonder if it’s a “you get what you pay for” kinda deal.  I’m not sure if I’m gonna read them now or if I’m gonna go dig around and do something like re-read the Jack Ryan books or some other good standby that I know I’ll like and enjoy.

That’s what I want right now in my free time. Not the annoyance of The Road, and not the antipathy of A Dangerous Man.  I need something that can engage me in those rare times I have to read a few pages.

Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I don’t remember the when or who, but I remember hearing good things about The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I saw it on the Costco book tables and decided to give it a shot since I was in need of something to read.

I’d seem the movie trailers, but knew nothing more about the plot than it was a post apocalyptic story about a man and a boy.

Now that I read it cover to cover I’m going to make a proclamation about this book… Don’t bother with the book because watching a few minute trailer is more fulfilling than reading these pages.

So with that out of the way, what’s good with the book? Only a few things that come to mind.

The best is the dreary picture painted of the now deserted American landscape. It sticks in your mind.

The best thing for me is what others wouldn’t consider a major thing: as a reader you never really know what the circumstances of the apocalypse really are. My imagination seems to think that there’s a good chance of not knowing the big WHY, and I can’t recall a similar piece to a post apocalypse book or film that I’ve put to memory. McCarthy resisted using that as a politicized plot device that most others can’t resist using to make a statement.

The Road mostly disappointed on two areas: the characters and the writing.  Aren’t those kinda important when writing a book?

The characters were bad in my opinion because an elimination of society would produce a different kind of person. The father or man (no names were used in the writing of this novel) is a romantic figure in that he instills so many social norms of our society in the boy or son. Social norms only become so through reinforcement from people and forces external to a father / son relationship. Without reinforcement, the notions of regret, shame, and overall morality are not instilled over the same period of time. The product for me was a pair of characters that felt like someone was trying to write something play on current sympathies at the downfall of realism.

The biggest problem was the writing style. I sensed something was wrong pretty quick when I saw that there were certain contractions not following convention – but not in a uniform manner.  Maybe there was a rhyme or reason to it, but it’s not apparent to me or the other people I know who’ve read it.  Then the prose just began to go farther and farther into this “look what vocabulary I can use” kind of feel. Let’s take this single sentence as one example.

The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.

I read that and immediately wondered “who the hell writes like that?”  I’d hope someone took note that it’s not good for a reader to wonder why bother going on reading a book you just bought and are only 1/6th of the way through it… Now I wish I stopped there and got it out of my house. I should have read another one of my wife’s vampire novels laying around for a more fulfilling experience.

take the glasses off

Back a few weeks ago when I reviewed Avatar, I knew it was a big deal to a lot of people.  I didn’t think it was that big of a deal though.  It is, after all, just a movie.

Then I hear some things here and there…  And then it wins a few big Golden Globes…  Now I become annoyed, and hence I blog.

So the award thing is pretty annoying.  I just hope the academy awards don’t turn out the same.

What’s really been a wonder for me is the effect the movie seems to be having on some…  The people who feel “depressed” because our world is just so boring in comparison to Pandora (I’m not making this up)…

My response to this?  Get an F***ing life.  If that’s the way you feel, then you haven’t seen the world you’re inhabiting.

Seriously…  I’ve done a fair amount of traveling, but not that much.  From what I’ve seen and know is out there, our world is just as amazing in it’s splendor, and a billion times more amazing in it’s realism.

Avatar: behind the glasses

So last week, I braved the cold and crowds to go and see Avatar at one of the newer megaplexes.

My expectations were a mix of high and low.  I had very low expectations from the previews I have been catching for the past year.  The higher expectations are form the reviews extolling both the effects and the overall awesomeness of the movie.

2-Cent review up front: I’m glad I saw it in the theater, but it underperformed for me.  So let’s get into it.

The Production

There are a few things unknown about the movie.  I can’t find specific amount of the film that was CG.  Some accounts claim that 100% of the film is computer genera generated.  Other have said that it’s actually in the order of 80% of the film that is CG.  I’m not sure.  The other guessing game that’s going on is the final budget of the film.  The consensus of what I’ve been gathering is that it’s somewhere in the 300 to 500 million dollar range.

The CG

The CG is amazing.  The CG is overpowering at times.  The CG is the film.  Without the CG, there is no movie.  The thing is that this is a fictional imagination of an alien environment that is quite fantastical.  I feel that it was kinda taken a few steps too far just for the sake of being visually stunning.

Sure, what reference does anyone have for how an alien land looks and has evolved – but so much is vibrant, different manners of locomotion, glow in the dark, and even interactive in manners that feel too imagined.

The 3D

With amazing CG, this was also developed to showcase how amazing CG could be utilizing 3D to take the theater experience to a new level.  I think it was definitely an experience, but I’m not sure if it’s something I want to become a trend.

There have been widespread accounts of viewers feeling vertigo or motion sick because of the 3D experience.  It’s basically something that can’t be overcome in scenes showing depth of field in a movie given how the human eye works.  I’ll try and quickly explain. Notice how in movies there are things in focus, and things not in focus? That is generally intentional. But when showing large environments akin to mountain ranges and such forcing a focal point on the human brain goes against how we are used to taking a scene in.  Humans look around and their eye focus on different depths and uses relative sizes and shapes to interpret an environment.  The 3D environment created in Avatar only allows the user to see what the director wants you to see in focus.  If your eye wanders in any of the large scenes and tries to focus on the background to gain perspective, you can’t overcome the simulated lens blur forced onto you.  Hence the motion sickness.

The Story

This is by far the weakest link of Avater.  It felt…  Too easy…  Too idealistic…  and mostly, too convenient.  It was way to easy to see this trying to be an apology from a white man to the Native Americans.  Or maybe it was an apology from an insanely rich white man to the natural resources squandered from corporate humankind.

My big thing was that for a world full of so many glowing, savage, primitive creatures and gravity resistant mountains – an intelligent bi-ped with a complex culture with no written language seems more than just a little implausible and way out of place.

The Overall Experience

First off, if I’m going to pay $3 for 3D glasses, I’m going to keep them.  That’s more than nickel and dimming.

As I said in my snap review, I’m glad I saw it in the theater.  Despite it being an amazing showcase of entertainment technology, there are limitations in how the technology is currently understood as well as a story lacking in many ways.  If you’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over so many years to make a film, I would hope for something much, much better.

It’s a shoe in for a lot of effects awards.  Maybe some sound or editing awards (I don’t think it’s worthy).  I’ll be damned if this gets any acting, cinematography or best picture awards.

If you’re into effects and the progression of entertainment technology, then you have to go see this in 3D while it’s in the theater.  If you’re more into story and good movie making, you don’t need to go see this in 3D, or even a theater.  If you’re feeling guilty at the treatment of indigenous cultures, then just buy a copy of Dances with Wolves – because Costner needs the money more than James Cameron.

All thumbs for my ears

I’m going to try something. It’s not mind blowing in the least. But, I’m gonna try writing a blog post on my iPhone just to see how easy or hard it is. This is a test of both the wordpress app and if it’s something I’ll even consider doing from time to time.

What shall I blog about you ask? I’m frankly not sure. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work to rearrange our office at home. While that in itself isn’t exciting, it has given me time to catch up on a bunch of podcasts.

What’s come from these podcasts? Not much. I know Ford is throwing a bunch of money to advertise the Sync system. Got to listen to a UK podcast talk about the virtues of using css sprites to supply an entire page of seemingly unique images from a singular image.

The best things have come from some random searchings that have led to one music purchase last week, and a likely one tomorrow. Last week was the new Cinematics album that I’ve been pining for. I’m still digesting it. As their last album is probably in my top five, it’s got a lot to live up to for me. The new one I may pick up is an album by The XX. I gave it a listen a few times recently, and I’d have probably have got it tonight if I were sitting at the MacPro and not typing with my thumbs on the iPhone.

I also need to look into the new Porcupine Tree.

But I have been wondering recently as to why I’ve gotten so picky about my music and books. I used to just take in everything I could, but now I feel like I put so much thought into it.

But, I’m gonna end the post here as my hand is getting tired. Here’s to the prospect of some new music.

Shortsighted ESPN

So I was watching Sports Center yesterday, and they were going over the fact that Jimmie Johnson had just won his fourth consecutive NASCAR championship, how great that feat is, and that he should be considered in the category of most dominant athlete of the decade.

I’m not looking to take anything away from the feat, because it is definitely a feat.  Congrats to him.  I just have to make the point of a major omission in the athlete debate posed by ESPN.

The ESPN pundits brought up three other athletes to consider against Johnson as the most dominant athlete of the decade.  The other athletes were Tiger Woods, Rodger Federrer, and Michael Phelpes.

But if you’re going to consider Johnson among that class based on dominant performance within this decade, you’ve disqualified Johnson based on another athlete omitted from consideration – Michael Schumacher.  Despite the fact that I do not like Mr. Schumacher aside from his Top Gear appearances, he won 5 consecutive championships in the biggest auto racing league in the world (F1) with a higher win ratio per start and being the highest paid athlete (no one’s come close since in terms of income from a single source).  And that was only in the half of this decade that he was active.

Sure, I’m not a fan of NASCAR.  I think NASCAR is to auto racing as the MLS is to professional soccer.  There’s an entire world of sports out there in the world that ESPN can forget on occasion.  When they do in such comparisons, they look pretty damn stupid.

looking for a good read

So, it’s been a few weeks since I finished by last volley of books.  I read the newest Dan Brown book as well as the book series that the HBO show True Blood is based on.

The Brown book was typical, somewhat disappointing, and also a bit going back on foundations of previous works. It was typical and disappointing in that it was so formulaic based on the previous books from the girl to the villain to the drawn out feeling… It seemed disappointing in that the big reveal was at odds with supposed “facts” presented in DaVinci Code.  I’ll leave it at that in case you haven’t read it yet.  If you liked reading his other stuff, then you’ll at least get a good yarn out of it.  I was just hoping for something better.

The Charlaine Harris books (sometimes referred to as the Sookie Stackhouse Novels) are quick reads that build off an interesting premise that vampires are real and reveal themselves after a synthetic blood is made available.  This single premise is pretty interesting in some implications explored, but the books are too fantastical with too much being made up to take the novelty away from the initial premise of the books.  Much like the Twilight series of books, it’s written too much from a fantastical female perspective.  But they are quick reads with little bits of originality.  The show is much better largely thanks to a character that isn’t even really in the books (Lafayette)…

So anyway…  I need some reading now.  I’m not sure if I’ll re-read some old standby, or seek out something new.  I’m not really feeling the non-fiction, or else I’d trudge on a few other books I’ve been working on.  Send suggestions my way, or whatever…

the poker in the…

Like so many, I like poker.

I don’t play online poker. I’ve never played (non-video) poker in a casino. I do play in a semi-regular game, but it’s not that regular.  I’ve been a poker fan ever since I saw Rounders in college. I’ve been a religious watcher of the World Series of Poker for the past handful of years.  In terms of the Main Event, this year feels like a great tournament with a few things that kinda ruined it at least for me.

If you don’t know…  The World series is a yearly event in Las Vegas of a bunch of different poker tournaments which culminate in one of two events: The Main Event and the H.O.R.S.E. tournament.  While the H.O.R.S.E. tournament is more about overall poker skill the Main Event is the bigger tournament with the biggest payout…  And that’s what I’m focusing on here.

To be able to milk broadcast revenue, the main event is aired in two hour blocks every week for a few months.  But the tournament isn’t actually played like this.  So there isn’t a month gap between the winner being crowned, they run the tournament until the final table which is then restarted and broadcast soon thereafter.

So anyway, I felt the main even (based on watching the broadcast) was great.  That is up until about a month before the final table.  From there a confluence of three events that made it extremely, extremely annoying.

The first was that about a month before the final table, an advertisement by a poker website made it public that a professional endorser of their company had made the final table.  This is extremely poor form that takes a lot of suspense out of the next many weeks of broadcast.

The second was that the day before the broadcast, SI.cnn.com put a detail about the Main Event winner that basically tells you who wins… So great.  I knew who was going to win as well as who wasn’t going to win.  Again, poor form.

The last was kinda an afterthought in that the broadcast bled over into another time slot and my DVR didn’t get all of it.  Thanks ESPN / Dish Network for getting your listings correct.

It was just a fitting ending for a bad production.

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