Nathan Alter lives in Albuquerque with his wife and kids. He currently develops in C#/.NET, but is learning all the time and has enjoyed computers since programming in Basic on an Atari 400 as a teenager. He started blogging in 1999.
I was watching an old Orson Welles movie from 1958 called Touch of Evil. It featured the famous Mexican actor, Charlton Heston.
That reminds me of a funny thing I see…towns where the official town name pronunciation is incorrect.
In case you were wondering what would happen if a Godzilla movie were filmed as an extremely long business meeting, Shin Godzilla answers that question.
I just watched Grave of the Fireflies. You might start watching it thinking it’s a another cheerful Studio Ghibli movie and then find that it’s the most depressing movie ever.
I recently watched the old Western, “Shane” on Netflix. I’d like to find a video clip where someone edited together all 358 times the kid in the movie said “Shane!”
We saw The Hobbit 3D High Framerate version. I enjoyed the movie and was amused to see that Radagast was played by a former Doctor Who (Sylvester McCoy). Also had Guy of Gisborne from BBC Robin Hood with a big dwarf nose. Anyway, aside from being 3D, the 48 frames per second version was odd to see. I think I’m a bit prejudiced against it in up-close dialog scenes. It looked unnaturally smooth and cheap for a movie, like some kind of TV show. Maybe this is the same kind of situation when people claim that records sound better than CDs (which I always thought was pretty silly). However, in fast-moving action scenes, it really helped. You know how sometimes in a movie, the frame rate is so slow that you can’t really tell what’s going on sometimes? Well, that didn’t happen here. But there was also a scene where it made the special effects look fast and toy-like. We’ll see if they do it for the next Hobbit movies, or if the criticism was too much. (They’re splitting it into 3 movies.) Either this will catch on and people in the future will laugh at the 24 frame per second movies of the past or it will come to nothing Also, maybe they’ll learn to do it better and how to do the effects and lighting better for 48 frames per second. I mean, this was the first try.
I was watching a Hindi movie and it seemed like it had a reasonable budget. But then the audio would sometimes distort…especially when they were singing. It’s like they blasted all the levels until the sound was distorted. From what I was reading, this is a weird style thing. Why would you destroy the songs in your musical with this wacky sound effect?
I was recently watching Wraith of Khan on Netflix. Someone needs to build a USB version of the metal cylinder controls that Khan used to activate the Genesis device. It’d just be hilarious to have to twist those knobs in in all kind of computing situations. Sending a scathing email? Before sending it, Gmail would detect the words of anger and make you twist the knobs from largest to smallest while saying, “to the last, I will grapple with thee.”
When I googled “Can you say tortilla?”, I thought I’d find amusing conversations about Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Sadly, it was actually people discussing how to pronounce “tortilla”.
