We got the new 2006 version of The Omen in the mail from Netflix today and it raises a question. What is the point of remaking a film shot for shot from a one that was good to start with? If you have nothing new to offer, why bother to spend tens of millions of dollars to re-shoot it? With the new version Battlestar Galactica, the producers took the basic premise of the original, and then expanded and took it in new directions. This new version of The Omen, like the remake of Psycho, a few years back, is a complete replica of the original, with new actors and sets but nothing else new. Between shit like this and all the sequels it’s no wonder Hollywood is going down the tubes and it’s well deserved.

Jules, Max and I went to see Casino Royale this afternoon and it’s definitely the best Ford and Sony commercial yet. Oh yeah and it’s also a really good James Bond movie. The first chase sequence after the opening credits was absolutely amazing, and must be seen to be believed. The whole movie was really good, and Daniel Craig was a great choice to be the new Bond and is probably the best since Connery. Judi Dench looks great for 72 and as usual she put in a great performance as Bond’s boss M.
There was actually a decent story line and character development, with part of the plot here being the beginning of Bond’s career as a “00″ agent. It’s not a great artistic triumph, but it is well crafted and entertaining.

However, it was hard to ignore all the product placement. As always, cars played a prominent part, with recent Bond films featuring a return to their Aston Martin roots after using Lotus and BMWs for several films from the late 70s to early 90s. These days Aston Martin is owned by Ford and the company definitely got their money’s worth in terms of screen time. In addition to the old ‘64 Aston DB5 from the first Bond movies, there was a new custom made DBS, as well as lots of Jaguars, Land Rovers, Ranger Rovers and assorted other Ford brand vehicles. There was also a nicely shot sequence that would make a great commercial for the new European Ford Mondeo. Cell phones and laptops also played an important part in the plot, and the Sony-Erricson and Sony Vaio logos were clearly visible and legible at every opportunity.

In spite of all the logos, if you’re in the mood for a good, entertaining action flick that also has a plot and acting Casino Royale is definitely worth seeing.

Star Wars creator George Lucas has long been accused (rightfully so) of being incapable of writing decent dialog. Some of his dialog has in fact been truly awful especially in the Episode 1,2 & 3 movies. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. Checking Digg this morning, I found the following site. Top 176 Star Wars Lines Improved By Replacing A Word With “Pants”. Just a sample of the improvements avaiable:

Chewie and me got into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.

The Force is strong in my pants.

In his pants you will find a new definition of pain and suffering.

We need to try this with Star Trek lines.

Some years ago a video surfaced on the internet that could probably be considered one of the earliest viral videos. This video became widely known as the MonkeyBoy video. Someone shot it a Microsoft professional developers conference during a speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer. Ballmer has always been known as being rather loud and annoying to put it mildly, but this video plus another one shot at another conference truly put him over the top. The second video, known as the developers, developers video brought new meaning to the word sweat. Now someone has created a mashup of the creature presentation scene from the classic Mel Brookes film Young Frankenstein and the two Ballmer videos. Enjoy!

OK the time has come for long awaited big earthquake that sucks California into the Pacific. At least Hollywood needs to be put out of our misery. They clearly have nothing worthwhile left to offer the world. I was scanning through Digg tonight and what should I find but a story about the trailer for Rocky 6. Yes you read that right Rocky Balboa is back for another round. Now would someone please explain to me why anyone would fund this movie? A quick check of IMDB shows that Sylvester Stallone tuned 60 last week. Why the hell is this guy making another Rocky movie? Worse guess what he is doing next. You got it, Rambo is back. Rambo 4 comes in 2007 Does Hollywood actually have any original ideas? If not then please shut it down.

On a side note, why do we need HDTV to watch the US Poker Championships? Since when is Poker a sport anyway? Why is ESPN showing Poker championships at all, let alone in HD? More evidence that the mainstream media is completely hopeless.

We went to see Al Gore’s global warming movie yesterday, An Inconvenient Truth. The movie was great and really laid out all evidence of global heating. Although I have seen and heard much of this evidence before, seeing it in one place really brings it home. One thing that concerned me going in was that the whole tone was going to be depressing and leave me feeling hopeless. On the contrary the final part of the presentation was a retelling of some of the amazing achievements of humanity to demonstrate what we can do. The point was that we have the capability to change our ways and maybe reverse this process. We just need the will to do it. The whole tone was one of hope rather than despair. Everyone should see this film. It is not perfect but it is very good. As I have said before, the earth will carry on. Species will go extinct and homo sapiens are one of them. Species have always gone extinct in the past and new ones have evolved to take their place. This has happened many times through the history of the planet. The big question is can be maintain the earth’s climate and ecosystems so that we can extend our time here? I believe we can but we need to work at it and change our behavior now.

One of the trailers we saw before the film was for a new documentary called The U.S. VS John Lennon. I hadn’t heard of this one before but it looks very interesting. It tells the story of the Nixon administration’s battle to have John Lennon deported because of his anti-war activities. It’s such a shame that we don’t we have a John Lennon among us today. Instead we are stuck with the likes of Bill O’Rielly and Anne Coulter. On the other hand, we do have this amazing communications medium of the internet. We have the capacity for millions of us to make our voices heard through blogs, podcasts, music, films and many other mediums. The thing we need to remember is that even in a democracy being in power is a corrupting influence. It has happened to people on all sides of the political spectrum, although corruption seems to bring out a particularly nasty streak in politicians on the right. This film appears to document the lengths that an administration went to silence one outspoken musician. It is a very important story to see in this time of NSA spying on Americans, people being locked up without charges or access to a lawyer, people being picked up from streets of foreign countries and transported to secret prisons for torture and other atrocities. Don’t forget that just because, or maybe especially if they keep bringing up God in their speeches it doesn’t mean that a politician should be trusted to protect your freedoms.

The one thing that makes the United States special is our constitution. Defend the constitution, without that you have no real freedom, and without that security really means nothing.

I recently replaced my Motorola V710 cell phone with a palm Treo 650 smart-phone. The phone came free as a result of a class action settlement with verizon wireless. The timing worked out great because although the v710 worked great for me as a phone, the batteries in both the phone and my palm tungsten T2 were at the point where they would barely hold a charge anymore. So I took the opportunity to replace 2 devices with one. After I got the new phone I remembered a site I heard about some months back shortly after the Ipod with video support came out.

There used to be a concept called public domain. When the copyright on a work expired, that work entered the public domain, so that others could use it and adapt it to create new works. This is how the Walt Disney company made most of there fortune. Movies like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Treasure Planet and the Hunchback of Notre Dame are based on stories that have passed into the public domain. The way intellectual property laws are going these days it is entirely possible that copyright protection may become perpetual and no more works may enter the public domain.

Anyway back to my original point. There are a lot of old movies on which the copyright has expired which are now in the public domain. There is a site called public domain torrents that has a list of almost 800 films and serials that are in the public domain and available for purchase on disk or free download via bit-torrent. If you are not familiar with bittorrent, it is a completely legal open-source technology for peer to peer file sharing. It is being used by many companies for enabling faster, cheaper downloads. It is also used for a lot of trading of copyrighted works but that does not detract from it’s legitimate uses. Azureus is an excellent cross-platform (works on windows, Linux and mac) bit-torrent client. The videos on public domain torrents are available in variety of formats (mp4 and divx) prepared for different hardware platforms, including the ipod, the playstation portable, and various pdas and smart-phones. I currently have Nosferatu, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and the original Little Shop of Horrors (including one of Jack Nicholson’s first film roles) on my 1GB SD flash card.

Of course the treo doesn’t come with software that can play these files but fortunately I found TCPMP. The core pocket media player is an open-source (there’s that term again) project that is available for both Palm OS and Windows Mobile platforms. TCPMP has codec plug-in support for most of the popular audio and video codecs including mp3, ogg, wma, divx, xvid, mpeg1, mpeg4 and many others. On the bright 320×320 screen of the treo these videos look really good. The treo and tcpmp is also great for watching video podcasts like Rocketboom a daily 5 minute video starring Amanda Congdon.

This is a list of
movie prequels that didn’t do quite as well as star wars.

We went to see Charlie and the chocolate factory yesterday and it was one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. Tim Burton is one of my favorite directors and his vision melds perfectly with Roald Dahl’s writing. Dahl’s characters often have a somewhat twisted and even cruel flavor to them unlike so many cartoonish characters you find in kids books. Burton’s surreal and imaginative visual style is the perfect complement. This is up there with Burton’s best work like Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Nightmare Before Christmas, and Beetlejuice. I will definitely be adding this to the dvd collection when it comes out.