Cuppacafe

When it comes to playgirl videogames don't look to me, I personally gave them up back when my Atari 2600 was still the hottest game system on the market. Back then, I was just starting out in my writing career, and was getting paid a (relatively) obscene amount of money to play a game then write about it (and keep the game). Well, when I stopped writing about videogames, I literally stopped playing the, as I determined that why should I waste time playing them when I could be working.

Well, a couple of decades later, and I just ran across this little gem called Heavy Rain that (almost) makes me want to buy a game system again. it is an interactive "choose your own adventure movie-cum-game that was developed by the Paris-based Quantic Dream. From what I understand it’s a murder mystery in the film noir genre, that was created using a 2,000-page script, and has a deeply profound and complex plot. Game reviewers from all over are falling all over themselves to praise the game, which was released last week Sony (SNE) for PlayStation 3.

The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel, for example, wrote on Friday, in what was a typical rave review of the “Heavy Rain”:

“In terms of eye-hand coordination or ‘gamer skills,’ Heavy Rain is negligible, even trivial, in its challenge, which will offend twitch fiends. Yet this is no simplistic Choose Your Own Adventure for children. This is a wrenching, often disturbing, almost entirely gripping experience for grown-ups.”

Near as I can determine, it is something wicked-cool, with soul and creativity, unlike most of the shoot-em-up videogames currently available. Needless to say, it still contains gut-wrenching violence, as you try catching a serial killer who drowns young boys in rain water. While there are some who think the game feels too much like a straight-to-DVD movie, it might also be just the kind of change that the weak games market needs to reinvigorate itself.

Here are a couple of (mature-themed) trailers for the game.

Not sure how the game turns out (or even if I'd have enough time to actually play it), but I think that I'd like to see the film version. For more videos, go here.

The Perfessor

Anyone who has either seen the 1977 version of (what was once) Star Wars (and is now Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope), or has seen any of the subsequent DVDs of this classic bit of Sci-Fi space opera will appreciate this bit of silliness.

True, it is a tad long (clocking in at nearly 20 minutes), but it is really well worth it for the true Star Wars Geek.

I urge you t not only watch it all, but, well, sit through the end credits for the cut tag-out at the end.

Yes, this (especially) means you, Walt.

The Perfessor

Recently James Cameron indicated that he was going to write a book based on his blockbuster 3D flick, well, we have happened across the possible film sequel to the CGI-laden event.

Yeah, it starts out slow and a tad predictable, then turns disturbingly funny, so you know we totally liked it ourselves.

The Perfessor

Mark Twain once remarked that there were three kinds of lies, 1) Lies, 2) Damned Lies, and 3) Statistics. So whenever I hear someone (even myself) using numbers to prove their point I shudder a little. Case in point; the other day we pointed out that Avatar had passed Titanic as the biggest blockbuster of all times.

Only not so much.

Boxoffice is arguably more straightforward to report than TV ratings. You have this weekly Top 10 list of returns, you compare each movie to the other movies. TV ratings are a murky swamp where one network's hit is another network's flop and context is not just a factor, but often the entire story.

Yet one respect in which boxoffice reporting is pretty odd -- emphasizing ticket grosses yet rarely mentioning ticket sales. That would be like always reporting how many ad dollars sold off "Lost" and not mentioning the number of viewers that actually watched the show. With everybody reporting how "Avatar" is The Biggest Movie of All Time based on grosses ($1.859 billion and counting), it's important to remember how rising ticket prices skew the returns.

So, if we were to use actual tickets sold, it turns out that Avatar drops to #26. not bad, but still a ways off from the top slot.

The Perfessor

Well folks, last night it became official, Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, eclipsing the previous title-holder, Titanic, by a cool $15.4 million (worldwide; Titanic is still up by $45.8 domestically — but Avatar could potentially do that this weekend.

You can check out the rest of those numbers over at Box Office Mojo, but know this, that in adjusted dollars, the all-time champ is still Gone with the Wind.

The Perfessor

While I’m sure that many of you have already seen this trailer, I couldn’t resist posting it here:

Which, as it turns out, is much better than the trailers I made with my Iron Monger and Hulk Burger King toys...

(scroll down towards the bottom of the post and you see the three or four vids I did.)

The Perfessor

OK, I saw The Book of Eli last week,and well, I loved it, but, as with all films, apparently not everyone shares my opinion. Case in point is this review that compares the plot of Eli with that of Zardoz. The 1970s classic sci-fi film which starred Sean Connery fresh from his role as James Bond.

Well, according to this reviewer, the two films share the same plot:

This is the same basic plot in Book of Eli, with some startling changes that I'll go into below. With Eli, we've got our contemporary high-wattage action star (Denzel Washington) moving through a world whose rules make as much sense as an LSD trip. He's been given a message from God that he must protect a precious book, and he's on a quest to deliver the book to a mysterious land.

Personally, I don’t see it, but I am willing to allow for this (ludicrous) suggestion, but only because I so dearly loved Zardoz, and well, as you can see from my review, I also enjoyed the Book of Eli as well.

My suggestion, See Eli, then rent Zardoz and make your own comparison.

Me, I’ve still got an unfinished bottle of Jack around here.

The Perfessor

I just read an article about the top 10 most anticipated films of 2010, While I agree with most of the choices, I have to say that (for me) the single most anticipated film of this year is the following:

The Expendables
Release Dates: August 13 (US), TBD (UK & AU)

No, this isn't a remake of the obscure Vietnam War film. The Expendables is a tribute to every cheesy action movie the '80s ever gave birth to. The plot, such as it is, sees a team of trigger-happy soldiers sent to oust a South American dictator. In true B-movie fashion, a few good men and a lot of explosions are all that's necessary to fight off hordes of faceless bad guys.

The premise may be simple, but the casting is where things get really interesting. Sylvester Stallone directs and stars in The Expendables. Joining him are a Who's Who of action movie giants, including Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Micky Rourke, Bruce Willis, and even the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. How could you not want to see a movie with those names attached? If you need a testosterone boost this summer, we bet The Expendables will send you to the emergency room with a serious overdose.

You had me at “...a tribute to every cheesy action movie the '80s ever gave birth to”

The Perfessor

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies, everyone wants to take a swipe at James Cameron. yeah, yeah he has produced a couple of the biggest and most beloved movies of all times (Titanic, and Aliens), and has debuted Avatar this year which immediately shot to the top of the charts, but, well, it seems that everyone wants to dethrone the king of the world.

First, you get folks knocking the simplistic nature of the story itself (saying that it is simply fancy CGI laid over an old story) then you have, well nothing short of the Vatican itself calling it “bland”

The

...official Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano gave it the thumbs down in a review which, among other things, faulted Cameron's storytelling as "bland."

"By concentrating on the creation of Pandora's fantasy world he tells the story without any deeper exploration," the Vatican paper said.

L'Osservatore also lamented that "there is plenty of stupefying, enchanting technology, but few genuine human emotions."

Talk about harsh.

Still, while we certainly love comparing divergent movies to find similarities, even we were hysterical when we read this:

Yep, it’s tough to be the King

The Perfessor

We all know that one of the tried and true ways of selling your product is to get it endorsed by a big name celebrity. Everyone does it, and (I’m reasonably certain) that it works; or — to be more specific — it seems to work well enough for ad agencies to keep doing it.

Still, there is something to be said for when a cultural event occurs that causes registered on our collective psyche and we (lemmings that we are), gravitate in a particular direction because of what we have witnessed. Some examples of this include when Kirk Douglas appeared on-screen without a T-shirt and men stopped wearing T-shirts; When President Kennedy appeared in public without a hat, sales of men’s hats disappeared overnight.

While both of those were the results of unintended consequences. That is to say, no one necessarily really wanted those results, they just happened. Whereas, Ray-Ban got their Wayfarer sunglasses placed on Tom Cruises’ (very pretty) mug in Risky Business, and every male that saw that film went out to buy a pair so he could be that cool.

Well, Weatherproof was hoping to capture similar lightning in a bottle when they erected a billboard in Times Square of President Obama wearing one of their coats and the tag-line “A Leader in Style.”

...Wednesday, the pictured billboard in New York’s Times Square went up, showing a picture of President Obama wearing a Weatherproof coat during a recent trip to China. The picture had been licensed from the Associated Press. The ad didn’t say anything indicating that Obama endorsed the product; It carried only a tagline reading “A Leader in Style.”

But the billboard clearly got the attention of those at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Various outlets reported that the White House called Weatherproof to ask that they take the billboard down.

“The White House has a longstanding policy disapproving of the use of the president’s name and likeness for commercial purposes,” said White House spokesman Ben LaBolt in a written statement.

Weatherproof pulled the ad down on request from the White House, but one has to ask, who was right, and did Weatherproof have to do that, well, this clip comes from the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog, and they did inquire about the legalities of the issue from a lawyer, (William Coats, a partner in White & Case’s IP department out in Palo Alto) who (as lawyers are wont to do) argued both sides of the issue before finally stating that while Weatherproof pulled the ad, it certainly got a lot of mileage out of it. “If you’d asked me 24 hours ago who Weatherproof was, I’d have had no idea,” he said. “Now, here we are talking about it.”

Apparently it IS all about the buzz

The Perfessor

I came across this 23:00 minute clip of uber-geek Star Wars fanboy playing with their technology. It proves to me that nearly anybody can come up with a wicked-cool visuals and a boring script to build the next Star Wars franchise. You can watch (sound required), but be prepared that it is not exciting by any stretch of the imagination, and it is slow to start (nearly three minutes in to get to the “action”), oh, and it plays out more like a training video than anything else, but the visuals are kinda cool, especially when you realize that it is not a professionally-done video, but just a buncha fanboy-geeks playing at their PCs.

Here is a link to the full vid, while this link brings you to a Youtube list of sequential smaller vids.

Like I said, this stuff is nice to look at, but, well, sometimes a little hard to take, as it is all visual and no story.

The Perfessor

OK, I just happened across this, and well, I normally don't advocate buying bootlegs, but in this case I'm going to have to make an exception.

Seriously, sign me up!

The Perfessor

So, well, all of the early reports are in, and while everyone is totally on board with how fabulous the films looks, they are saying that the story leaves something to be desired.

Still, then there is this, from The Legal Profession Blog...

Cameron and Merchant-Ivory to Remake Remains

Stung by criticism that Avatar is "all effects" with pedestrian plot and dialogue, James Cameron announced today that he is joining forces with the Merchant-Ivory team on a 3-D remake of The Remains of the Day. In the new version, with a script to be written by Cameron and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Stevens, the repressed butler of the original, will become an android in service to Darth Darlington on a space station near Alpha Centauri, and like the original, struggling with an emerging consciousness. Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, will play a computer generated Stevens, with a voice-over to be provided by Anthony Hopkins. Helena Bonham Carter will reprise her Planet of the Apes tour de force, taking over the Emma Thompson role as Miss Kenton, a primate hired as housekeeper for Darth Darlington, to be played by Ian McKellen.

The film will culminate in a typically Cameron-esque action sequence, with Stevens being subjected to the Turing test by the Klingons, Romulans, and Federation representatives who have gathered at Darlington Station to discuss the impending galactic war between the forces of foundationalism and those of post-modern indeterminacy. Daniel Dennett, Roger Penrose, and Stanley Fish have been retained as script advisors.

Sets are currently being constructed in New Zealand, with the opening anticipated for summer, 2011.

[This parody was brought to you by Jeff Lipshaw, and has nothing to do with law, except that it represents one form of procrastination from grading, and reflects one habitual over-thinker's reaction to some of the over-thinking that has gone on with respect to a sci-fi movie, which the over-thinker happened to love.]

Don’t you just love it when lawyers have a sense of humor?

The Perfessor

No, that will come later (I saw it opening weekend, and yes I totally loved it. Yes it is a simple story (Pocahontas gone Dances with Wolves, meets Star Wars, only with a better story and way-better CGI; but I’ll talk more about this later, in another post). Now I want to talk about how well received the film was on opening weekend.

Avatar takes $242m globally in first weekend

Hollywood’s heavy investment in 3D has passed its biggest test yet, analysts and cinema executives said on Monday, as they tallied the takings from Avatar, James Cameron’s 3D epic.

Imax and RealD, two companies behind rival projection technologies, said they accounted for a disproportionate share of Avatar’s $242m of opening weekend sales.

Fox, the News Corp-owned studio, raised its early box office estimates, showing that Avatar beat records for either a “non-sequel” or an adaptation [of a book], with US box office sales of $77m even as northeastern states were battered by heavy snow.

Strong international sales lifted the global total to $242m, $10m more than originally estimated.

(New Moon only took in 140.7 million on it’s opening weekend), so I'm guessing there are more overweight, bearded, balding geeks than there are teenage girls. Either that or it was simply a better film.

The Perfessor

OK, now that may sound a tad harsh, but this was my reaction when I learned that a producer from Uruguay who created and then uploaded a short film of his to YouTube in November of 2009 was offered a $30m (£18.6m) contract to make a Hollywood film.

Fede Alvarez's short film "Ataque de Panico!" (Panic Attack!) featured giant robots invading and destroying Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.

At first I was “wicked cool” but then I watch the five minute clip clip, and thought, “Wow! Have I already seen this film!” Well, you watch it, and then I’ll continue:

So, here’s what I got out of this. A film producer from Uruguay rips off the plot from War of the Worlds, changes the slow-moving tripods to slow-moving robots, throws in the fighting airships from Independence Day, spices it a bit with a Spielbergain opening (with the little kid), gives it a downbeat, bummer ending, like the Dawn of the Dead films, and winds up with a $30 million contract?

While I’m happy for the guy and all, something clearly just isn't right about all this, as it so clearly ripped off from several high-profile films.

The Perfessor