Yay for Netflix

[Beefy]

Colin Farrell just seems like a skeevy gross guy who'd probably cause you to need antibiotics.

He does.  But he's still pretty darn easy on the eyes.

Easy on the eyes.  Hard on the vag.


I want a shirt that says that.

Catchr has one.

[Bennyhana]

Colin Farrell just seems like a skeevy gross guy who'd probably cause you to need antibiotics.

Just the way I like them.

By the way, next time you're complaining about guy troubles, I'm going to quote this back to you.

[Alice]

Colin Farrell just seems like a skeevy gross guy who'd probably cause you to need antibiotics.

Just the way I like them.

By the way, next time you're complaining about guy troubles, I'm going to quote this back to you.

Hey, it's hard to find guys that need antibiotics now that I don't have a roommate to give them herpes anymore. 

(As a surprising note... no real guy trouble to speak of since moving out on my own.  Go figure.)

[dazie]

Bride & Prejudice

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361411/

What a goofy ass movie.  I think I may have to buy it.  I didn't realise it was a musical when I put it in the queue, so the first big "production" was a little odd to watch, but I liked it.  Very colorful, wonderful costumes and settings. 

It stars the former Miss World- Aishwarya Rai.  Possibly the most beautiful woman in the world.  She makes me happy just to look at her.

Another star is Naveen Andrews, who was/is on Lost and starred in "The English Patient" if you ever saw that.

No one ever saw "The English Patient."

I did!  And I read the book.  I liked the book quite a bit more than I liked the movie.

Received "The English Patient" in the mail on Saturday and put it on while I was cleaning house. 

I do like it, but I like the flashback parts better than the "now" parts.

[Beefy]

I watched Night of the Living Dorks.  Yay for Netflix.

[dazie]

I just put Freakazoid and Jonny Quest and the Tick on my Netflix queue.

Yay!

[Gamplayerx]

Johnny Quest?  The ancient cartoon with Hadji?

[dazie]

Yup!

[dazie]

Little Miss Sunshine

Funnier than I thought it would be, I'm sad I waited this long to see it.

[Jessie]

I loved that movie.

[VikingJuice]

I didn't really care for it.  Parts were funny but wildly inappropriate for a kid.  The rest just seemed like a seriously messed up family trying to eek out an existence in a marginally funny way.

[VikingJuice]

Movie update: not all of these are netflix yet

Up in the Air-Clooney was good, many funny moments, kind of sad and not consistent in much of anything.  4/5

Julie and Julia-cute, fluffy, kind of odd at the end, 3/5

State of Play-mediocre suspense thriller, worth a rental if on sale, cable might be a more reasonable price, 2/5

2012-retarded movie physics and badly contrived plot based on fragments of real science spliced into multiple unrealistic end of the world scenarios.  Still, Amanda Peet was nice to look at as usual.  2/5

Next on the holiday list: Avatar and Holmes

[Beefy]

I watched District 9 last night.  Not sure why everyone loved it so much.  It was merely okay.

[dazie]

I didn't really care for it.  Parts were funny but wildly inappropriate for a kid.  The rest just seemed like a seriously messed up family trying to eek out an existence in a marginally funny way.

Overall I agree.  Which is what I expected anyway, and was pleasantly surprised that it was funnier than I expected.  Not one of Toni Colette's best offerings, but I loved Steve Carrell and Paul Dano.  This is pretty much the first of Dano's roles I've seen that hasn't creeped me out, so that's a bonus.

What really got me was the other pageant contestants.  According to imdb, they're actual contestants who supplied their own costumes, makeup artists, hair and routines.  What.  The.  Fuck.  That's some seriously messed up stuff right there.

[VikingJuice]

I watched District 9 last night.  Not sure why everyone loved it so much.  It was merely okay.

Yeah, that strongly underwhelmed.  The creatures looked really good but the plot and subplots were lacking.

[eo000]

I really enjoyed sherlock holmes.

[Jessie]

We're going to see that Friday.

[swolt]

I was very disappointed in Avatar. I thought it looked way too much like a cartoon and the plot was just stupid. Plus:

[spoiler]Last year Sam Worthington played a half-terminator half-human sent to infiltrate a group of rag-tag rebels. In Avatar Sam Worthington plays a half-alien half-human sent to infiltrate a group of primitive natives. They could have at least used a different actor.
The plot was basically Fern Gully and Dances with Wolves rolled into one, with a little bit of Aliens in there for good measure.
The only thing original about this movie was the 10 foot tall cats having sex with six-legged horses. I walked out feeling like I had sat through a 3 hour furry porn.
The image of Sigourney Weaver as a giant cat will give me nightmares.
The "awesome battle scene at the end that will make you OMG! all over yourself" was very blah to me. Sure it was nice, but not as grand as I had heard.
The real life 3D was very nice and made it seem like you were there. That was the best part. But the CGI 3D looked something you see in a ride at Disneyworld. It was pretty, but you knew you were looking at something that isn't real.
Not a horrible movie, but I don't see it again.[/spoiler]

[ReBurn]

I watched District 9 last night.  Not sure why everyone loved it so much.  It was merely okay.

Yeah, that strongly underwhelmed.  The creatures looked really good but the plot and subplots were lacking.

I mostly like that it was documentary-style for a good chunk of the movie. It wasn't super-awesome. But I liked it. And the Blu-ray has much higher picture quality than I thought it would have.

Looking forward to the Zombieland DVD release.

[Infobahn]

I joined Netflix again.  I bought a Roku, and wanted to start up again.

[Beefy]

I just added Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! to my queue.

Being able to receive moves like this is still my favorite thing about Netflix.

[VikingJuice]

Watched Avatar last night.  It was exceptional in so many ways.

Much of what Swolt described about it is a pretty accurate depiction but my reaction to it was very different.

The infiltration narrative with the same actor doing basically the same role from T-3 didn't bother me a bit.  I've never seen Fern Gully or Dances With Costner but I can estimate what their plots were roughly about having seen Avatar now. 

And while yes, it definitely borrows from existing stories, the fact is, parts of those stories borrow from actual history and actual human behavior in regards to acquisition of desired resources and the arrogant and emotionally detached disregard for indigenous life.  It is perfectly parallel to how we treat the planet we live on and the various non-white people who live there.  Regardless of how many other movies have handled the subject matter, the ugly history is what it always was and that still comes through loud and clear in the film and likely will in future films that handle the same subject matter.

Sure, it was heavy handed at times but it doesn't significantly diminish the merit of the message about Eurocentric behaviors during colonial efforts (check your history books if you're not sure what I mean there).  It's even analogous now to how we currently are trying to carve inroads and establish footholds to places in the middle east today.

The battle scene at the end and much of the movie raises the bar for digital effects but not necessarily in the ways most movie fans would think.  As a viewer, many things in SW were busier looking and was more awe inspiring.  The final scene itself was very strong in terms of action but that's not quite what film buffs are talking about when they say it was super. 

Instead, just like in most of the rest of the movie, it's the little things in the CG world that separate good from great.  In terms of CG, this whole movie was a giant leap forward in imagery.

When CG (computer graphics) first came onto the scene it was often with the use of blue screen (and later green screen) and then the images were shot over the blue screen allowing the film maker to render another image in the border around the actor or figure.  Then that image was superimposed on the actual film background.  In the early years, the borders were awful and if you ever saw the original Star Wars, this problem was in full effect in the original printings during the Tie Fighter Death Star battle of Yavin IV where the Tie shots were a composition of moving shaded rectangles framing the Tie fighters themselves across your screen.

Years later, CG made big leaps, in some cases with James Cameron in The Abyss and the moving water.  Parts of it looked really good.  But in those fully CG shots, thee major problems emerged:  Texture, borders between the CG shot and the actual background, and then realistic physics of CG images.  These three issues have bothered me in CG film for the better part of 2 decades.

Borders have long been an issue between a CG shot and the actual filmed background and how the fake image was layered over the top of the film image.  Too many times, the un-natural blending of the borders gave it away and diminished the effect of the CG shot.  When Lucas started making the newer SW movies, he struggled a lot with these issues as well and his only solution, was to shoot farther back so the images were fuzzy on the borders and you wouldn't notice because they weren't main characters or the main action in the shot.  His other solution was to shoot in extreme close up on some shots so that you still didn't notice the borders but would focus on the central screen image.  In EPI, the shots with Watto (the junk dealer on Tatooine) with his beard moving and extreme detail were very well done and this again represented a leap in the technology.  But that same technology didn't compensate well with the shortcomings on border imaging.

James Cameron also contributed again to CG with Titanic.  He managed to get a lot of the movie physics right with the ice, with the water on most of the long shots of the boat cutting through the Atlantic Ocean.  Where he failed was in the the CG people on the boat.  On MANY of his sweeping panoramic shots, the people walking on the decks of the boat were moving but their gate wasn't natural and their overall motion was very jerky, short cycled and repeated over and over.  So the figure walked like a puppet with limited range of motion and stunted flow. Then, they'd shoot about 6 to 10 of those figures with those stunted movements and then layer the image across the screen with one pocket completely duplicating in full the original there by appearing to double the amount of people on screen moving.  If you look at a glance and then focus on the full shot including the boat and the horizon, you don't notice. If you focus on the deck and the people, you notice quickly. 

Later, other military epics struggled with these same issues.  Any wide sweeping shots with thousands of people basically had one, two or maybe three layers of human movement images, then re-layered all across the screen making it appear to be an epic battle scene.  SW, Gladiator, The Mummy, 300 and many others did this technique.  The epic boat scene where the Greeks show up in Troy with Brad Pitt suffered the exact same downfall.

Many movies tried to do the up close shots that Lucas with did Watto to overcome some of these CG technological deficits but couldn't pull it off because of the issue of skin texture.  So many movies would shoot CG images really close and then suffer from the fact that the skin looked like plastic or rubber or both.  Then they got the idea to layer it so that you use some real skin from film and then liberally use the CG to extend the image or enhance it.  This then created faces that looked real on the eyes and mouth and then plastic on the nose, cheek and other parts.

Yes, I realize this is long winded and sounds more like a treatise on CG rather than the movie Avatar, but bare with me and I'll be done soon.  To wrap this up, this new movie manages to overcome many of the CG problems I've cited above.

The movie image borders are hidden so well, you can't tell the difference (much) between real images and CG images.  The blending was very strong.  Not perfect, but very strong.

The texture of images looked very real at times too.  I didn't see many shots where there were glaring discrepancies.  The up close shots looked as good as the far back shots in most cases.  Some of the jungle creatures looked a little too shiny, a little too sleek on their skin, and this is still a shortcoming.  But the Navi people looked really really good.  From the toes to the faces, to the pores on their faces and noses, to the beads of sweat on their faces, to the finger dexterity and manipulations around weaponry and the flexing during movements, these shots looked nearly flawless (notice I didn't say perfect).

And the physics were vastly improved.  Movement shots weren't replicated multiple times and instead, each creature or craft in big shots moved independently as if run by a separate program.  And then their movements were so much more natural than just about anything ever done before.  The creature movements were very fluid in most cases.  A few of the "horse" shots were a little jerky as were a few of the "bird" shots.  But the Navi people looked astoundingly fluid and natural in their movements.  The battle scenes looked natural and realistic without many violations of movie physics.  One water scene does come to mind where the Navi female lead is drinking water that collects out of these gorgeous purple plants.  The water pouring down the leaf toward the edge didn't flow right but the water coming out did. 

This whole movie raises the bar considerably for quality CG imagery for all filmmakers everywhere.  It isn't visually perfect, but it's DAMN GOOD and it will astound you with the new world it creates.

Aside from being heavy handed and from portraying the Eurocentric, Corporate Military types (think old school military industrial complex from the 60s literature) as this monolithic/completely inhuman consumption/destruction machines, the film is very strong. 

Good science fiction, in it's best cases, takes you to a new world that you've never seen, takes you on an adventure that you've never had quite the same way, and teaches you (or reminds you) of a subtle lesson on something essential to the human condition or exposes something for you to think about in terms of assessing human values of right and wrong, good and evil, your actions and your consequences, and asks you to re-examine your previous position to see if you still agree.  Gene Roddenberry, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and others like Robert Heinlein all understood this and to a pretty strong degree, so too does James Cameron.  For all his personal douchey qualities as a man, he's becoming a pretty good storyteller.

[Jessie]

tl;dr.

[Gamplayerx]

What's a roku?

[Infobahn]

http://www.roku.com/

It is a streaming media player ($99) that uses your internet connection to connect to Netflix, Amazon on Demand and other media sources.  Boxee is another one that is good, and connects to Netflix and Amazon.

I love mine.  It is great if your cable/satellite doesn't have on-demand. 

I know some people that have canceled cable/satellite to watch over air and online.