If, upon learning that there’s an R-rated Christian horror film in theaters, you feel that you just HAVE to experience it for yourself, I very strongly suggest you fight the urge.
I didn’t, and thus had the extreme displeasure of sitting through what is quite possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen — and I saw both MASTER OF DISGUISE and MIMIC while they were in cinemas. The film in question is HOUSE, a low-budget adaptation of Frank Peretti & Ted Dekker’s novel that somehow got released to theaters.
I’ve been trying to write this post for a couple weeks now, intending to summarize the film and give an idea of how truly awful it is, but it’s just too awful. The film depicts a couple going through their own personal Hell, but I think the true intent of the film was to put ME through an hour and a half of Hell. I’m still not certain that Hell is a physical place, but I ain’t takin’ any chances… I almost didn’t survive the screening, so an eternity of that is unfathomable. I’m catching up on back-tithings as we speak.
In any case, lest you’re curious, this movie in no way deserved an R-rating. There’s virtually no blood, no on-screen violence, and it’s about as scary as a Very Special Episode of TV’s BLOSSOM. The producers purportedly fought with the MPAA over the R-rating, but I find that highly suspect. I think instead that they asked Mabel to give it an R so as to trick hapless heathens into seeing it. Just now, while trying to find a copy of the poster of the film, I stumbled across Ted Dekker himself talking about the film, and I find that what he said completely backs up my impressions regarding the theatrical release of this film:
“This is still essentially the same story from the book. It’s the story of four lost souls entering their own hell, mistaking their one hope of rescue as something evil, and in the end either living or dying.
But the marketing has changed. The message is now going out to the millions who would never be caught dead watching a movie like ‘Left Behind,’ no pun intended. “
Indeed, it appears that some well-intentioned zealot put a lot of money into getting this stinker into theaters in order to turn some people’s lives around. I’m all for trying to make people’s lives better, but by tricking them into seeing a horrible movie?
I don’t have much to say lately, but I need to say this:
Google’s Android mobile phone platform is freakin’ AMAZING. T-Mobile’s “G1” handset — which is the first of the commercially available Android phones — is very nearly as awesome a device as is the underlying platform.
Imagine the offspring resultant from a drunken one-night-stand between a Sidekick/Hiptop and an iPhone. That pretty much describes the G1; it is fully touch-enabled and has a wealth of downloadable applications ala iPhone, but boasts the flip-out keyboard and actual navigation buttons which are the hallmark of a Sidekick for those times you don’t feel like looking like a total tool rubbing your fingers all over your phone.
Best yet, you don’t need to deal with any of the iTunes bullcrap that every iPhone owner has to admit to disliking dealing with. If you want to put mp3s (or oggs, w00t!) on it, you simply plug a NORMALUSBCABLE into it and it shows up as a removable drive. Copy your music over and you’re good to go. Same with photos and videos. Software updates come automatically over the air, so no dealing with the endless cycle of backing up and restoring when iTunes makes a mess of things. (Or, if you’re a nerd like me, you can manually download the firmware update and apply it yourself.)
Unlike with iPhone, users can install applications that modify very nearly any aspect of the device, and are not at the whims of Apple as to whether the app will be “allowed” or not. For instance: I have an app installed that can turn on and off features when certain criteria are met. When the GPS finds that I’ve arrived at home, it automatically enables wifi. When I leave it turns it off again to preserve battery. If my battery drops below a certain point I’ve got it set to turn off GPS as well to further save battery. Try doing that with iPhone :).
Want to set an mp3, m4a or ogg file as a ringtone? No problem, support for that is built in.
All-in-all, Android has far exceeded my expectations, and is quite the anti-iPhone platform that I’d envisioned. I highly recommend it.
A few days ago, I got my hands on a pre-release copy of Metallica’s latest album, “Death Magnetic.”
Now, I was once a pretty hardcore Metallica fan; in my youth preferring the “Master of Puppets”-era sound, my taste eventually maturing to find the “Load” sound to be preferable. After that live album they recorded with the SF symphony and Michael Kamen, as well as the all-covers album, I was really excited to hear a new studio album, because the songwriting on the new songs from the symphony show was really fantastic — and the band had never sounded better on the covers album.
Sadly they kind of lost me with the eventual release of “St. Anger.” After a considerable amount of time, I did come to find a couple of the songs on that album tolerable, but my overall disappointment in them not sounding like I expected was kind of a downer.
It was with that disappointment in mind that I hesitantly decided to give “Death Magnetic” listen. I’m really glad I did, because over the last couple days I’ve found the album to be really fantastic. Nobody is more surprised than me at that fact. Many of the songs have really catchy grooves and riffs, really earworming themselves into my head.
I’ve picked my three favorite of the songs from the album and popped them into my Opentape installation (which I’ve been adding features to) for your listening pleasure. It’s with hope that other disheartened fans — and perhaps some newcomers as well — might give the album the fair chance it really deserves.
Oh, and please don’t go linking to this. I just want to share some great music with my friends and promote the album — not get sued by Metallica :) If you like what you hear, the album comes out on Sept. 12th.
M. Night Shyamalan has made a number of good films. One of which, I’m betting you’ve never seen.
This unknown film is called Wide Awake, and a quick google search for reviews will turn up a number of people waxing rhapsodic about how wonderful this film is, and how sad it is that no one has ever heard of it, let alone seen it. The film was made pre-The Sixth Sense, and when that movie exploded, video copies of Wide Awake were re-released with a big blurb about how this film is from the creator of The Sixth Sense, but that didn’t really help. And why didn’t it help? Because this is the cover of said film:
Would you pick that film up off the shelf at your local video shop? Neither would I. The trouble is, this cover completely misleads the viewer about the content, tone, and POINT of the movie. Yes, Rosie O’Donnell is in the film, (And, I have to admit that she’s actually darn good in it as well) but she is not the focal character of the film. Yes, there was something in there about baseball, but once again: that has nothing to do with the film. What looks like a cheeseball Rosie O’Donnell comedy is, in actuality, a remarkably wonderful film about a young boy coming to terms with the things he believes. It is incredibly touching, and everyone in the film gives stellar performances. Dennis Leary is particularly good in it. Sure, there are some funny moments, but to call the film a comedy would be greatly under-selling it.
I think whoever designed that cover did us film viewers a great disservice — not to mention doing a disservice to M. Night himself; in my opinion this is the best of his films, and it’s a shame he hasn’t been paid its worth. In an effort to try to encourage other people to see this fine film, I decided to make a better cover for it. Now, I’m neither a marketer nor a designer, but seeing this cover on a shelf would make me pick it up. Hopefully it’ll do the same for you:
Bonus points to anyone who prints it out and tapes it onto the disc at their local rental shop.
(This poster contains Creative Commons-licensed material from kadj, frankloohuis, and danwk71 and is licensed under a Creative Commons “do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t make money” license, because that’s how some of its parts are licensed.)
After several months of being told by people that I trust that it’s a really funny show, and also several months of me explaining just why the jokes aren’t funny (my rebuttals sounded hilarious even to me), I decided that perhaps as a geek myself, I may just be too close to the subject matter to see it objectively. After all, I DO carry a man-purse, I DO have conversations about fiction as if they were real, I DO have difficulty with OCD things like always sitting in the same spot, and I do exhibit most of the social awkwardness that the characters on the show do. I began to wonder if it would be possible to:
a) objectively view the show with all those things in mind
and
b) find it funny?
It was with this in mind that D and I sat down to once-and-for-all determine whether the show does, in fact, suck ass as much as it seemed to upon viewing the pilot. We’ve now watched every episode, and I’m here to report to you that… I was wrong. I actually like that show quite a bit. (I stand by my review of the pilot, though, it’s still terrible.)
I’m not sure you realize how much it pains me to not only think this way, but to also publish the thoughts on the internet, but it’s completely true. Viewed outside the context of a show that I thought should be trying to APPEAL to geeks, it does an excellent job of making FUN OF geeks in a way that geeks like me can totally appreciate. It’s funny because it’s TRUE. You just have to get past being insulted by it. One of my biggest complaints was that it doesn’t accurately reflect geek culture, but now I see that it actually does. Sure, some things are exaggerated, but it’s very funny, appealing to the primarily non-geek viewers are much as it can to the geek ones.
I hereby have to revoke my completely negative criticism of this show and apologize to the people involved with it. <i>The Big Bang Theory</i> does have quite a bit of exceptionally funny stuff in it, and would be what I would call a “perfect show” if they’d just get rid of that damned laugh track. Despite the laugh track, I have to say I like it quite a lot, putting it just a bit under <i>The IT Crowd</i> on my “shows that I actually like” graph.
I didn’t, and thus had the extreme displeasure of sitting through what is quite possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen — and I saw both 
