IMO
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Shake It Out - Manchester Orchestra
‘cause i’m done being done with the funerals at least for now
are you tired of being alone, are you tired of...
Summer 2007 I decided to start making a comprehensive list of all the movies I have ever seen. Today the list reached 1000. The only thing more “me” than a list of movies is a collection of stats that describe a list of movies. So here they are.
1000 movies
34 Best Picture Winners
196 Released Before I Was Born
13 Over 3 Hours Long
Total Runtime of 77 days 11 hrs and 21 min
252 Seen Since September 1st, 2009 (the Katie effect)
Now let’s see if I can get to 2000 before I turn 40!
If you’ve ever played the arcade classic Space Invaders, you must have noticed those pesky aliens coming at you notably faster as the game goes on. This wasn’t an intentional part of the game at first, but actually became a core piece of its design. According to an interview with creator Toshihiro Nishikado, the hardware only allowed him to move one Invader every 1/60 second. Functionally, this meant that the set speed of the aliens would get faster as less of them appeared on screen. What audiences perceived as the game speeding up to make it more challenging was actually the game’s inherent slowdown fading as fewer enemies were eating up the game’s hardware restrictions. Now it’s an iconic part of gaming history.
(via 1UP)
This is absolutely amazing to me. It is crazy to think of something so integral to the gameplay of this and future games was a prouct of a hardware limitation. Although I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing a lot lately. Games live firmly within the hardware they are written for and played on.
Guitar Hero and Rock Band owe some of their difficulty the their hardware. No, I’m not talking about the parade of shoddy peripherals, I’m actually referring to the fabled strum limit allegedly introduced as an artifact of the NTSC encoding scheme common to US released games and game consoles. NTSC has a lower input per second limit than the European PAL system and this can get in the way when you are attempting to strum Trogdor, at over 17 notes per second.
What about when you attempt to take a game across not just regions but across generations? Recently there has been an uproar about how poorly the Silent Hill franchise (originally released on Sony’s Playstation 2) was updated for the 2012 release of Silent Hill HD Collection. As the forefather of the survival horror genre, Silent Hill lead with atmosphere. It is the atmosphere that is poorly recrated on the HD “update”. Check out the series of links on this detailed review, specifically the fog wall.
Like the radio, the fog is iconic to Silent Hill and it helps define the game’s aesthetic, but in Collection the fog has been downgraded to an afterthought. Originally the fog served a dual purpose: to establish atmosphere and hide imperfections in the rendering of the game environment. But now it does neither. The fog line is incredibly stark as you are traveling outdoors and at times it looked like a large white wall of fog was racing away from James. It didn’t look natural. In fact, one of the scariest elements of the game has been turned into a cartoonish caricature. To be fair: the mechanics of the fog may act the same way in the original but, unlike Collection, there’s a whole lot of fog in that game to mask the wall. Fog completely fills the screen in the original game, making it extremely difficult to see buildings, monsters and objects not directly in front of you – but now the fog is only a minor inconvenience.
High def upgrades isn’t just for games. Blu-ray is home to hundreds of cleaned up classics. Remastering can reduce grain, improve contrast, and sharpen audio tracks. But is that something we should always want? Many great directors embraced their limitations to provide a rich experience. Would Texas Chainsaw Massacre have the same effect if rendered in full HD?
What about 3D remakes? Or color? Or even sound? The Artist just won the Oscar for best picture without any of these things. I think Ian Malcom put it best when he said “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
The fictional Jurassic Park character is right. And that was just hours before “remakes” tore his new friends into little pieces.
So how did my Hunger Games trade pan out after opening week?
March 21: (25000) @ 331.62 (four week total)
The odds were definitely in The Hunger Games favor this weekend: the big screen adaptation of the immensely popular young adult novel opened to an enormous estimated $155 million, which ranks third all-time behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 ($169.2 million) and The Dark Knight ($158.4 million). Remarkably, it debuted above all of the Twilight movies, and it also topped Alice in Wonderland ($116.1 million) for highest debut ever for a non-sequel.
So I doubled down at the new level
March 25: (32469) @ 418.50
Who’s excited for Friday’s release of the Hunger Games movie! Everyone right? Well if it is indeed everyone I could be in some trouble.
Hollywood Stock Exchange is a website that lets you play with fake money (HSX bucks), betting on the box office success (or failure) of all new releases. I have been playing for a while and betting on the Hunger Games just seemed like the thing to do. I guess I’m some sort of capital noble distanced from the realities of the outer territories right? Either way, here is what I put on.
The Hunger Games security, ticker HGAME, will mark out at a value precisely equal to the number of millions of dollars the movie makes at the domestic (US) box office during its first four weeks in theaters. In the last month speculation has driven the value of the asset up to over 331. So people think this movie is going to absolutely kill it in the US in its first four weeks. I think they are right, but 331 sounds a bit high to me.
So I headed over to boxofficemojo.com and pulled up the list of the highest grossing March releases of all time. Alice and Wonderland tops out the list with total domestic gross of 334M, 293M in its first four weeks. Ok, so if The Hunger Games lands 331M in its first four weeks it will almost certainly be the most successful March release of all time.
Well what if we throw summer and Christmas releases into the mix? Harry Potter 7.2 recently raked it in with 343M through its first four weeks. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen owned summer 2009 with 363M through its first four weeks. In fact scanning the list of all-time highest grossing PG-13 movies it is almost exclusively James Cameron and sequels!
I know The Hunger Games has a huge following (Katie and I have our tickets for Friday night) but 331 million is going to be a tough mountain to climb.
All that being said, tune back in for what will inevitably be a rage filled post when this thing cracks 400M in a blink. Because after all, what the hell do I know.
What do you think? Are you going to see it in the next month? Will it crack 331 million in it’s first four weeks in the US?
Leon: The Professional
During the filming of final scenes which involved dozens of police cars, a robber from a nearby store encountered the movie set by accident and surrendered himself to a bunch of uniformed extras
Is that the coolest piece of movie trivia or what!
![I’m getting bonus pts on my final grade!
Fall 2010 Katie introduced me to HSX.com, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, where you can use $2,000,000 in fake money to buy and sell movie stocks, making bets on how they will do in the box office. A little under a year ago I found a public league on the website with the following description
“Top 5 players in this league will earn Bonus Mark for their final grades.”
I immediately knew I had to crack the top 5, not so I could get these mythical “bonus points” but so that I could deny them from some pimple-faced high-schooler who, you know, is actually in the class.
Well my day has come! And my victim has a name (or at least a handle). So suck it nath! Enjoy your B+. Hope this means you don’t get into college. Victory is mine!
[side note] Yes this league was created in February of 2011 and its members have probably already received their final grades. But a man can dream right?](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzel6zbZBl1qaye2uo1_1280.jpg)
I’m getting bonus pts on my final grade!
Fall 2010 Katie introduced me to HSX.com, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, where you can use $2,000,000 in fake money to buy and sell movie stocks, making bets on how they will do in the box office. A little under a year ago I found a public league on the website with the following description
“Top 5 players in this league will earn Bonus Mark for their final grades.”
I immediately knew I had to crack the top 5, not so I could get these mythical “bonus points” but so that I could deny them from some pimple-faced high-schooler who, you know, is actually in the class.
Well my day has come! And my victim has a name (or at least a handle). So suck it nath! Enjoy your B+. Hope this means you don’t get into college. Victory is mine!
[side note] Yes this league was created in February of 2011 and its members have probably already received their final grades. But a man can dream right?
Oscar Best Picture Nominees
The Help
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The Descendants
The Artist
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse
full list should be posted soon at oscars.org
There is no spoon. Meet actor Rowan Witt, age 23. Now don’t you feel old.
Katie and I are watching The Matrix DVD commentary right now. Lost of interesting insights.
- Roughly 20% of all frames were digitally altered which was an enormous proportion at the time.
- Shooting in Sydney proved difficult when they needed to find derelict neighborhoods and alleys. Apparently the city just doesn’t have slums or run down neighborhoods in the same way that most American and British cities do. The city is just too nice!
- The Helicopter crash was just about the only scene in which a small scale model was used.
- The lobby scene took about ten days to shoot (for about 3:00 of film) and all the columns, all the explosions, all the stunts are real. Only about two stuntmen shots were used in the entire scene.
- Carrie-Ann Moss was only given one take to land her off the wall cartwheel (with the help of some wire work) because it took about 6-8 hours to reset any one of the columns.
This list is not meant to be a comprehensive review, it will only include things I have experienced in the last year and my decision will be completely dependent on MY experience . Finally entries need not be released/debuted in 2011. All that matters is that I enjoyed them this last year.
The first entry is my winner. The runners-up are roughly ordered but less thought was given after the number one slot.
Single Player Video Game
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Portal 2
Dragon Age Origins
Batman Arkham City
Online Multiplayer Video Game
Gears of War 3
Modern Warfare 3
Offline Multiplayer Video Game
Portal 2
Gears of War 3
Video Game Achievement
100% FC Half of All 670 On-Disc Guitar Hero Songs
MW3 Triple and Double Collateral Kill Feed
Live Music Experience
Foo Fighters in the rain @ Lollapalooza (1:17)
Avenged Sevenfold @ Welcome to the Family Tour
The Valient Thorr @ The Congress
The fan behind me @ The Honda Civic Tour
Band
Avenged Sevenfold
Bullet For My Valentine
Foo Fighters
Song
Avenged Sevenfold - Lost
Foo Fighters - Walk
Marilyn Manson - This is the New Shit
The Lonely Island - Jack Sparrow
Restaurant
Next (Childhood)
Palo (Disney Dream)
Benjyehuda
Pro Sports Moment
I cheer Patriots, Red Sox, Spurs. Its been a tough year.
Movie - Drama/Action
Drive
Gone Baby Gone
Primer
Movie - Comedy
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Bridesmaids
Movie - Horror
Paranormal Activity 3
Rosemary’s Baby
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Television Show
Parks and Recreation
Breaking Bad
The League
Web Site
Spotify
Goodreads
Google+
Personal Experience
On July 3rd I married my wife, Katie. Best thing I’ve ever done.
for kquizzo
Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Jason Kunkel
If this music didnt automatically play in your head, then you’re probably not old enough.
(via cordisbored)
so apparently this exists
I am not embedding or direct linking the this new trailer because I believe it gives away way too much.
The previously released theatrical teaser, combined with the cast and direction, should be more than enough to get you to go see it. I don’t demand that everyone read the book first, but I do think it would be a shame to watch this new trailer before either reading the book or seeing the full movie itself when it comes out this Christmas. But for those of you who have read the book or seen the Swedish version of the movie, here is the link to the new extended trailer [link].
