PlasmaSplasm

OK, so the Oscars were last night. I watched two-thirds of them in my own apartment (that’s right, sans Plasma) and then joined the boys for the rest ’round about the time Pirates won for something. There are two things I would like to address, and then I will leave the rest to the boys (well, probably to Ces since Mike doesn’t give a crap).

1. Jennifer Hudson

I like her very much. In fact, back in the days when I used to watch American Idol, she was my most favoritest ever and I was very pissed when she was voted off (people are idiots). Anyway, it turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to her. And I’m happy for her. Of all the people this could happen to, I’m glad it was her. I do have a problem, however.

First, I will admit something up front. I haven’t yet seen Dreamgirls or Notes on a Scandal. But I really don’t think I have to have had to seen them to know that Cate Blanchett acted circles around the girl. I’m sure Jennifer’s performance was excellent and that she sang very well (feel the salt in the wound, Beyonce?), but the Oscars are not a singing contest; the award is for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Last night, Hollywood just said that American Idol loser, Jennifer Hudson, is a better actress than frickin’ Cate Blanchett. Does anyone not see a problem with this?!

2. The Departed

I didn’t see this movie until Saturday night. I watched it on the Plasma with the Young Theodore (also known as my sister Olivia - see below) while the boys were at a Guitar Hero party (which, apparently, I would have kicked some ass at). Anyway, this was a great movie. I do not like Leonardo DiCaprio and do not understand Scorsese’s infatuation with him. It was mostly for this reason that I put off seeing it for so long. I have to admit, though, Leo was great. Even better, though, was Mark Wahlberg. He frickin’ kicked ass! That is not my point, however; I am here to talk about problems. Here is my problem. As I was watching The Departed, I noticed one thing was very bad: the editing. I don’t profess to be a technical expert at all, but the editing was so bad, it was distracting. Switching from one camera to the other was basically synonymous with splicing more than one take together with no attention to continuity. People would be in different positions, smoking, not-smoking, blowing smoke rings, not blowing smoke rings. Very distracting.

And I have heard the argument for “style” in this editing. If that was the attempt, it just came off very sloppy. The style was not achieved. It was just annoying and distracting and was the one thing that took me out of the movie. The fact that it actually won for “Best” Editing just confirms all of my fears of the Oscars: that uneducated people vote in categories they know zilch about and, instead of opting not to vote in that particular category, just vote for Scorsese because it’s the popular thing to do.

Grr.

Oh that’s right I’M FUCKING SEXY!

Anyway, the Oscars got its ass watched in HD last night, and I wanted to post a few thoughts.

All in all, it was a surprisingly watchable show, Ellen did a great job, the opening was the best they’ve had in years. There was some shittiness, especially with the random, endless montages. Most of them were really boring, but I’m going out on a geek limb to say I was goose bumpy for the foreign film montage. I think it’s because barely any of them are finding their way to HD, and I’m going through a little withdrawal. I used to hang out in the “upcoming programming” list of TCM the way a smart whore hangs out around a comic book convention. Now that standard def makes a difference, I’ve shunned the channel like a bad dog.

Back to the Oscars.

My favorite moment in the telecast was when some presenter referred to the costumes from Curse of the Golden Flower as a “banquet of chinoiserie”. Way to sound like you smell your own farts. Speaking of which, the cloud of “smug” coming from the show this year was beyond anything Clooney’s speech thought it could be. One could argue that “at least they aren’t trying so hard to appease conservatives that they come off even worse than usual *cough*Studio60*cough”. Still, I don’t need the end titles of Inconvenient Truth telling me to pray and recycle to save the environment. Recycling wastes more fuel than tossing everything in a big heap, and every time I sit down to pray, I wake up hours later, disoriented and headachy. So, thanks for the smug fucking advice.

Here’s a long term problem I have with the Oscars. One that could pose a more serious threat than overpopulation. It’s when they retroactively award older stars for people that deserved it more for something else. Do you know why those older stars lost in the first place? Because they were too busy retroactively awarding somebody else, in effect CREATING the problem. It wasn’t too bad this year, but that shit can get out of control. When you look at what Al Pacino won for versus what he’s deserved it for, you get the idea. So, expect Ryan Gosling to get an award in 30 years. And I guarantee you if Peter O’Toole is ever nominated again, he’ll be a surer bet than Mirren was this year. Though that seems more a fantasy than a likelihood.

One last thing. The waves of relief I felt when Anna Nicole Smith wasn’t mentioned in the dead people montage could have capsized 4 Titanics.

As the hardcore HD-DVD enthusiast of the group, I find myself in a strange position. One where I have to change my mind about this entire HD/Blu-Ray format war. Having just gotten an HD cable upgrade after three months of waiting (DirecTV can tenderly suckle my nuts), I’ve been recording movies on their terrible HD DVR. It’s a shitty, spastic piece of machinery, and I miss Tivo (though I would miss $800 plus subscription fees even more). Mike has already covered its aesthetic ugliness, but being the guy who’s been using it the most to record programs, I can say it’s just as fugly on the inside.

Putting that hatred aside, I noticed with excitement (wetness) that HBO was airing Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back. I recorded them, expecting the recording to be slightly better than the DVD. Well, I’m bad at describing, so let me show you two images to illustrate the difference in what I saw:

DVD

HBO HD

As you can see, HBO HD is the winner. Unless you love to fuck pigs.

The truth is, for all the idiotic hoops DirecTV has made me jump through, I’m finding the experience of recording a movie in HD and leaving it on the hard drive of the DVR much more satisfying than paying $30 for the similar image quality with minimal bonus features. Also, I’m finding movies on TV that I doubt will be put on an HD disc anytime soon. Along with the good Star Wars movies I mentioned, I also have Pulp Fiction, Back to the Future, and The Andromeda Strain on there. Where are the HD discs of those?

The point of all this is that the limited HD-DVD selection has run dry rather quickly. We’re scraping into the dirt underneath the barrel at this point. Hulk? Sleepy Hollow? I get the feeling that our Netflix pile is going to be yawned at and ignored for a little while. At least until Children of Men (I’m excited just thinking about the eye-popping menu Universal is dreaming up for that one).

I think discs may not be the next step in how people watch media in their homes. Movies go from theaters to cable faster than it used to take them to go from theaters to VHS, anyway. I’m guessing that between now and the image cubes of the future, the winning “format” in this ridiculous “war” is going to be the DVR. If I can stand using a total piece of DirecTV trash to watch movies, then imagine the day when the high definition DVR is perfected and not more expensive than the TV you’re using it with (yes, Tivo, I’m calling you an asshole, too). On that day, Blu-ray or HD-DVD will make a cartoonish gulping noise in anticipation of being buried next to the fetid corpses of DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD.

Our new HD TV setup has its up and its downs, but I want to take a moment and address an issue I have with the basic form and esthetic of the DVR/ receiver itself.

The HR20700 DirecTV Plus HD DVR is the ugliest piece of . . . consumer electronics I have ever had in my home.

It easily beats out my old CD to Minidisc recorder in level of ugliness, and that thing was a huge eyesore.

I AM THE KING OF UGLY!

The LED lights on the front display are ubiquitous, useless and brighter than the sun.

At any one time, while watching a show that’s been recorded, there can be sixteen LED lights that are shining on the front of the machine. God forbid that we actually be recording something too, because then there will be anywhere between sixteen and eighteen lights.

They are far too bright.

“But how bright could they be? You’re sitting four feet away from a fifty inch plasma screen tv!”

They’re so bright that they actually distract from the image on the screen. The worst are the 14 or so bright blue LEDs that form a circle in the center of the unit. I could read a book in an otherwise pitch black room with these lights.

Something must be done. If I can’t find an option in the very hard-to-follow- menu system that turns off the display lights, then I’m taping an UNO card over the front of the machine. Won’t that be a beautiful sight.

Every single straight to video Marvel movie sucks.

Most recent, in the sucking, was “Iron Man”, the straight to video tale of a man who defeats robots from Japanese cereal ads by blasting them with his fist lasers.

A man builds a super suit. How can you screw that up? How can you make that boring?

By making “Iron Man”.

This movie was so boring it doesn’t even deserve a picture posting.

While it wasn’t in HD, it was also just a really bad, cheap, lazy cartoon. Half the movie was covered in computer generated after effects fog, to distract from how cheap the animation was. When a character moved the image would often break up into hundreds of tiny horizontal lines for a moment, which is an amazing combination of irritating, cheap and annoying.

Avoid every Marvel straight to video release, because they’re boring, but especially Iron Man.

Mike

We noticed that one could download the original Star Trek episode where they meet Khan the other day, and got VERY excited.

First on the download:

We’ve been looking through the Microsoft movie/tv/music video download center for a while, but nothing has really grabbed our interest. Most everything costs $2 to download, and you can’t watch it on anything else after you buy it. You can watch it off your Xbox as much as you want, but not on your Apple laptop, iPhone, iPod or PSP.

The episode, titled “Space Seed”-which I will not refer to it as again- piqued our interest, for three reasons:

1. I love Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan the major motion picture. It’s an awesome flick, which I loved before I had gotten into Star Trek at all.
2. Paramount has gone back to all the original episodes and redone all the spaceships with snazzy computer graphics.
3. They’ve also cleaned up the original prints and put them into HD, which Microsoft was offering for download.

HD Star Trek with Khan for $2 on my Xbox? Sold.

The episode looked great, none of the usual degradation that you get from a video being broadcast in syndication for the millionth time. One reason I’ve never really bothered to sit through any of the old episodes is because they look goofy AND bad. The effects, acting and sets are bizarre and don’t pull you in at all, and having it be blurry and over played made it too hard to stand. This new definition made it far easier to get over some of the other low budget elements of the show.

I would give the image an 8/10 plasmas, because I remember what it looked like before.

As for the content of the show (plot, characters, story): totally worth every penny. Interesting plot, often funny (both intentionally and not) and the best ending line leading into a movie I’ve ever heard. 8/10 splasms.

Here is a link where one may learn everything they may want about Khan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh

We also downloaded the low defintion Comedy Central stand up show of Mitch Hedberg.

Mitch is amazingly funny, and should have had nothing to do with the shitty Comedy Central presentation, but it’s a nice little thing to be able to show people who’ve never seen him before. 8/10 splasms.

If you had four bucks to spend on the MS Xbox download service, Khan-Trek and Hedberg are some candidates I would highly recommend. Trek was 50 minutes, I think Mitch was 20 or 30.

Here is a youtube AUDIO of a live Mitch Hedberg show in Chicago. It is a special thing to have posted here, because I am from and love Chicago, and it is the first youtube video I have seen that does not put useless image to interesting audio.

Graaarh! Hulk long and boring!!

I watched Hulk in HD today, while sorting through my old mail and reading magazines, among other things. I feel like I’ve just finished a two and a half hour tour of an art museum I wasn’t interested in. Why is this movie so long? More importantly, why is the ending so unbelievably terrible?

They obviously wanted Hulk to face off with some bad guy, so they try to turn his Dad into the Absorbing Man, except he turns into clouds and a lake. Which Hulk…fights. Or something. Yeah. I think they fight. But there’s an explosion. So Hulk ends up in Panama? Just trying to figure this movie out is like huffing paint and then attempting a crossword puzzle.

Either way, the only scene that made me look up from what I was doing for more than a minute was the part of the movie where Hulk skips around the desert, thrashing helicopters and tanks. In other words, the only part of the Hulk movie where Hulk smashes things that shoot at him (which you don’t need an hour and a half of explanations to get to). Which brings me to a list.

Things a Hulk movie should not have:

Anything this stupid.

A central performance so ridiculous it borders on self-parody.

A random ending (that feels like a screenwriting program for action movies spit it out) involving guerillas stealing medicine.

Long, boring establishing scenes about people’s families that end up being tossed out the window in favor of the item above.

The HD Disc looks stellar. Which is nice, as I found myself counting the hair follicles in Eric Bana’s 5 o’clock shadow for a number of scenes (did I mention the movie was boring?) However, I’m docking it a couple of points because Universal has had the EXACT SAME MENU for ALL of their HD releases. It’s infuriating to see such a lack of imagination from the only film company exclusively backing HD-DVD. Here’s a video of the menus they do. I warn you in advance. This video is so boring you might lose some brain cells.

And that’s for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas! Every scene in that movie could be the basis for a trippy, insane menu. Instead we get something as sterile as a middle school homecoming dance. Lazy bastards.

3/10 splasms
7/10 plasmas

I think there are a couple subtle Calorie Mate ads hidden in the background of this recent scene from 24:

Also: that girl at the end says something about Jack drinking grasshopper cum. What will they think of next?

I’m taking a break from posting about the TV. For the safety of everyone who reads this page.

We live near a Japanese supermarket that has almost exclusively things you would only find in a Tokyo grocery store. For fun, I will occasionally buy something weird and different to try. In many cases they are things I’ve heard about (pocky), and sometimes the name of the product is so strange it compells me to buy it (Bubble Man II soft drink).

On Monday, I bought this:

Having seen it featured in Metal Gear Solid (yeah, fuck you, I’m a huge nerd) I thought it might be interesting.

Imagine my surprise when I open the package and see that Calorie Mate looks identical to Walker’s shortbread, pictured here.

“Hooray!” I think, being a huge fan of deliciously buttery shortbread cookies.

Then I catch a whiff of it. And it smells like Death’s turds.

Seriously, the odor eminating from the package was like rancid cheese made from cat milk mixed with the unwashed laundry of a submarine officer. So what do I do next? Take a bite, of course! Upon reflection, taking a bite was stupid. Because the smell accurately advertised the taste (except it didn’t mention how disgustingly sweet it would be).

At this point Mike demanded to smell it. I told him, with tears in my eyes (the body’s natural reaction when ingesting turds) that he was my friend and that I strongly felt he should not smell it. Anyway, he and Brooke smelled it and now they both know that my mouth will never be clean again.

My next thought was “who the fuck eats this that isn’t a video game character?” The answer shocked and horrified me. One of my heroes eats it.

Jack Bauer.

“But Cesare,” you say “it just looks like he’s just having a colonoscopy while he’s on the phone. There’s no proof he actually eats it.” To which I say “Oh yeah? What about this?”

This all leads me to a theory. I think the reason Jack Bauer is so good at interrogating terrorists is not because of his training in torture. I think bad guys crack and tell him what he wants to know because he has a secret deadly weapon. The deadliest weapon.

His breath.