I Can't Do It, I Dinna Have The Power (To Autotune)

A lot of Glee fans have been complaining about the back 9 (episodes airing after the incredibly long hiatus) and most of their complaints have been about things the show has always done. Short stories that wrap up by the episode end with a performance finale, pushing characters in the background to showcase others, a lot of whining that makes me wonder if the hiatus made Glee fans somehow expect more from a show than what it was doing currently, just because it was off the air for a long time. It's only in its first season, and it wasn't until today that I realized what was bothering me so much about these issues.

You just don't have the time in 9 episodes to do a huge story arc. There was so much focus on completing a whole story in 13 episodes that it was a singular piece that didn't need any episodes afterwards and could have easily been the whole season ended right there, moving on to the next one. But the hype machine rolls on, and 13 isn't enough.


Let's get serious, no one put this much effort into Hammer since Hammer did it himself.

So what can't you do in 9 episodes that you CAN do with four more episodes like the front 13? For starters, give attention to most of the characters most of the time and their respective plotlines. You have more wiggle room to set the stage and to hype up conclusions you can see coming a mile away that you still bounce in your seat eager to see. Right now things are being created and ended in one or two episodes max, and with 5 episodes left, tell me, what can you do?

Sit back, enjoy the quick fun episodes while they last. If you want the mystical magical "Glee I used to know" then shut the hell up and go back to the dimension you came from where it's a bad show.

I once heard someone say the show jumped the shark. IT'S NOT EVEN IN SEASON 2 YET, GOOD LORD. NERDS. ARG.

Film Review: Mother (2010)

When a person gives you a gift that you didn't know you needed, it's exhilarating. Similarly, when a filmmaker gives you a film that defies all your expectations and takes you to a place that is truly unique, you cannot help but be excited. Bong Joon-ho's new film Mother is just such a film. It follows a widowed mother as she attempts to prove her son's innocence in the murder of a young girl, but this description doesn't do this funny, tense, marvelous film justice. In the hands of a less interesting and less talented filmmaker, this set up might result in a mediocre, cliche-ridden thriller. But Bong Joon-ho is not a conventional filmmaker. He has given us Memories of Murder and 2007's terrific monster movie The Host, and now he has given us Mother.

As the film opens, we see the unnamed mother cutting herbs and watching her son through the doorway of her apothecary. She sells herbal remedies and does unlicensed acupuncture on the side to make ends meet and take care of her forgetful, naïve, and rather simple 27 year-old son Do-joon (Won Bin). He is outside talking with his friend Jin-tae (Jin Ku). She doesn't like him. We will learn more later on. A look of intense focus is on her face as she watches them and inattentively chops her herbs. So focused is she on her son's activities that she cuts herself, just before a car almost hits him. Later, Do-joon drunkenly follows a young girl through a few alleyways and the next morning she is found dead. Do-joon is swiftly arrested after a bit of evidence places him at the scene, but his mother knows he must be innocent. He can't remember what happened to speak in his own defense, so she must prove that someone else committed the murder and framed him. As in the best thrillers, when she starts uncovering the answers, they do little but raise more questions. Never could I predict where this film was going, and each new revelation only made me want more.

As exciting as the filmmaking and storytelling is in this film, it all hinges on the character of the mother, and how believable the performance is. What an asset Kim Hye-ja must be for a filmmaker to rely on. As the mother, she gives a ferocious performance full of intense emotion and deep subtlety. There is never a false moment. Bong Joon-ho lovingly frames her expressive face as she goes between rage, regret, love, fear, despair, and hope with the greatest of ease, and Bong Joon-ho's camera captures every nuance as she moves through the community, unearthing every scrap that could help her in her quest to free her son. She is a force of nature.

Films like this – with their twisty, unpredictable narratives and supremely accomplished craftsmanship – can remind you just how boring so many movies that populate the box office really are. There is no way a movie like this could be produced in Hollywood. It's too hard to package. As Bong Joon-ho's previous films, Mother melds several genres and toys with different elements in each of them. It begins with a lovely and wonderfully surreal shot of Kim Hye-ja dancing in a field, a sad expression on her face. The film that follows this opening shot weaves comedy and suspense masterfully through a beguiling and wildly inventive tale about family and guilt. This weaving does cause the film to meander slightly, but I was never bored and never did my mind wander. It earns every moment, all the way through the marvelous ending. It's an unmissable film from one today's most intriguing filmmakers, already one of the best of the year. With films like Mother already released this year, it is beginning to look like 2010 will be a very exciting year in film.

Film Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

If you are a horror filmmaker, the ultimate opportunity must be to be able craft dreamscapes in which anything can happen and you are limited only by what you can imagine. Think of the possibilities for terrifying and surreal imagery that an imaginative and ambitious horror filmmaker would have open to them in a story like A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's such a shame that, rather than taking advantage of this amazing opportunity, Samuel Bayer and Platinum Dunes productions decided to instead just return to the same boiler room over and over again for this lifeless and dull remake.

The problem with so many modern horror films is that they don't do what they are supposed to do. They don't give the audience suspense or scares. They aren't frightening or unsettling. They aren't even shocking. They are just time-fillers. One of the chief culprits in this trend of bland horror is Michael Bay's production company Platinum Dunes – the studio to blame for the remakes of Friday the 13^th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Hitcher. They have now brought us A Nightmare on Elm Street, a remake of the Wes Craven semi-classic starring the iconic boogeyman Freddy Krueger. It brings back the boogeyman, but none of the scares, originality, or sense of fun has been translated in this slick remake.

The story is simple enough. Nancy (Rooney Mara), Quentin (Kyle Gallner), Kris (Katie Cassidy), and Jesse (Thomas Dekker) begin sharing the same nightmare in which a man in a hat and striped sweater terrorizes them with a glove fixed with razors. They soon realize when this man named Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley, a talented actor dreadfully wasted here) kills them in their dreams, they die in real life. The conflict, then, is to fight the need to sleep, and if they do fall asleep, avoid being killed by Krueger as he takes over their dreams.

This would be a terrific story in which an imaginative filmmaker could create memorable imagery in surreal dream sequences with which to terrify the audience. But this movie is far too lazy to do that, instead giving us jump scare after jump scare with no genuine thrills at any point in the film. This film commits the greatest sin a horror film can commit: it's not scary or fun. In fact, it's boring.

Horror films can provide fantastic and disturbing imagery, explore the darker side of humanity, or simply be a lot of fun. However, many modern horror films do none of these, particularly the most widely seen films. Films with slow-burning suspense and creepiness that make you double check the locks on your doors like The House of the Devil go unseen while films like this win the weekend box office. It hurts horror as a genre, and Platinum Dunes is one of the worst offenders with their consistently lifeless and stale remakes. They depend on the name recognition and hit all the same beats as the original films – there is not one interesting shot in this film that was not cribbed from the original – without justifying their own existence. To be so beholden to the plots and set pieces of the original films arbitrarily limits the ability of the filmmaker to do something compelling and creative, and leads to lazy exercises like this. They have a terrific boogeyman in Haley's Freddy Krueger, and they had the chance to give the audience truly scary images in the limitless possibilities of the dream world, but they waste it all on some jump scares, and twenty-odd jump scares and a bit of blood and gore do not a horror move make.

Youtube.com is down?

I guess Youtube.com is down i keep getting a

502 Server Error

Strange

Can You Index the Future?

Have you ever been freaked out by those auto completes when doing a Google Search? You start typing and Woah! Google knows what I am looking for… freaky! Ok no its not really that freaky and no they don’t “really” know what you are thinking about looking for, they just know what other people have searched for that looks a little bit like what you are typing. Google cannot tell the future, until now!.. well kinda

Google recently invested in a company called Recorded Future, who attempt to use massive amounts of data to tell the future. This type of prediction technology is handy to people that want to know what the various complex markets are going to do in the future, so that investors and business types can make lots of money, well they can make lots of money if they are correct. The theory is that by analyzing massive amounts of data that is currently available a picture of where things are going will emerge. It is suspected that the predictions will be about as accurate as say a weather report, what I would be interested to know is, is it as accurate as a weather prediction for Boston, or a prediction for Phoenix Arizona.

Win...d Power!

The Daemon would be proud (I suggest you go read Daemon by Suarez). Google again showing their ability to want to do good in the long run has invested $38 million in to Wind Farms built by NextEra. You can read the summary here

I love this idea, I am all for any type of energy production that take emphasis off of coal and gasoline power. While I hope that humans will eventually get to a place where we drastically cut down on the amount of harm we cause by our existence, because honestly I don’t see things slowing down, the only thing we can hope for would be to create new sources of power that keep up with our demands for power but are less harmful than what we have now. Wind Farms may not be the most efficient method, and a lot of people don’t like the way they look, but it is a step in the right direction, and to have this change coming from a massive corporation is well … a breath of fresh air. I am sure there are some good bottom line enhancing, financial reasons for Google’s decision here, but at least they are investing in something semi-long term, which show that they are concerned with the big picture rather than just the here and now.

The conversation about power is a tough one, people are happy to admit that they don’t want to use coal and gasoline as power supplies, but they are either unwilling to make the changes to a less harmful method of power because it will also have drawbacks. At least for the short term everything will have draw backs, wind power kills lots of birds, and people are scared to death of nuclear power. Before we get to a place where a non harmful source of power we need to take the baby steps towards things like Wind Power, and you know what, screw birds.

Does Mega Man Care About the Princess?

I should have posted this last week when this was fresh and hip, but I didn’t so its here now

Mario Crossover Epicness

I only played up to the second stage, but being able to blow up Mario’s enemies with a machine gun is ultra epic.