It's strange how much one person can make someone enjoy something so far out of there radar. I am a huge fan of Gary V's Wine Library TV a show about totally nerding out on wine. As someone who doesn't drink this fascinates me to no end that i have seen 400+ episodes of this show and never tasted a drop of wine. What i have done is expand my knowledge and grown my outlook and that is something huge for me. I love to learn about new things and share them with friends and family. So i am sharing this with you my vox family. Go give Gary Vaynerchuk a watch and trust me you will be hooked.
This is by far an opinion piece and i hope to open your eyes to some flicks but everyone has different tastes in movies. I tend to lean toward movies with sentimental stories and comedy. Just keep that in mind as we go through. Also these are not really in any certain order.
10. Walk Like A Man: Amazingly funny cast and the outstanding comedic timing and character acting of Howie Mandel makes for a laugh out loud nod to physical comedy of old with a sweet and touching ending. One of my favs as a child.
9. Harriet The Spy: A Nickelodeon film of which may throw some people but i really REALLY enjoyed this movie. A simple tail of friendship, being true to yourself, and standing up for what you believe in. Every young girl should watch this movie. It helps that Michelle Trachtenburg is in this and she is one of my favorite actresses :D.
8. Chairman Of The Board: Yes a Carrot Top movie makes my list. This is pure zanny off the wall comedy at it's best. Carrot Top comes off as a genuine likable guy and the sweet natured Courtney Thorne-Smith makes it even better. But as in most movies he is in Larry Miller takes home the gold as the asshole extrordinaire that only he can play.
7. Little Monsters: Still to this day my favorite movies ever created. Yet another amazing acting job by Howie Mandel who needs an award for underrated career of movies ever created. The man knows comedy and he knows heart. I really wish he could have got his phobia issues straight earlier because he would have been Jim Carrey instead of the guy who hosts deal or no deal.
6. Young Einstein: Yahoo Serious could get my personal nod as most creative human on earth. The man made 3 movies all of which i adore and then disappeared off the face of the earth. This movie made 100 million dollars worldwide yet i bet if you ask ten people they would have never seen it. Awesome nonsensical writing and yahoo is my hero for comedic timing and acting.
5. Kung Pow Enter The Fist: Steve Oedekerk is better known for his "thumb" series of movies but this spoof on bruce lee and kung fu movies is a great use of stupid humor. Stupid humor is a lost art in the days of Scary Movie 12 and Date Movie which forget the fact that a stupid comedy movie has to take itself damn serious to be seen as funny. The whole point is all this stupid stuff happening in the setting of a normal situation and no one besides the viewer thinks anything is wrong. If your out there making a parody film this should be running in your head 24/7.
4. The First 20 Million Is Always the Hardest: Everyone talks about hacking movies like Antitrust and Hackers but when it comes to a cool and fun geek out this is my movie of choice. Anjul Nigam plays one of the most realistic nerd types i have ever seen on film and Rosario Dawson's sex scene is beyond sensual and amazing. Toss in awesome character work by Jake Busey and Ethan Suplee (Of My Name Is Earl fame) and you have one fine spin of the silicon valley startups and the little guy in the garage.
3. Holes: One of the best book to movie adaption in a long while and an amazing cast of awesome child actors anchored by the greatness that is the dry sarcastic humor of Shia LaBeouf. Very funny, lots of heart, and just a great movie for the whole family.
2. Grind: A skateboarding movie made for and by boarders. This movie is what skateboarding is all about. Sleeping in shitty motels in strange towns just to skate there local ramps. Meeting the weird shop owners and trying to scam free stuff. Packing you and your buds into a van and hitting the road hoping to do something cool. As someone who spent more that a year trekking Nebraska with my 2 cousins and 2 other skaters as the film guy this hit damn close to home. Great movie for any boarders out there.
1. Radio Flyer: A story told by a father played by Tom Hanks of him and his bother as kids growing up with an abusive father. The brothers end up building a plane from a radio flyer wagon and junk in order to escape the abuse on the younger brother by there dad. This movie was under the radar central but is almost a lock to make anyone watches it cry like a baby. I have never in my life seen a movie that draws you in and then beats the shit out of you emotionaly then spits you out a better person than this movie. Awesome piece of film.
Toss your thoughts or opinions in the comments.
So as many people know i haven't took the dive into next gen as of yet unless you count the DS. As of right now nothing really appeals to me enough to drop hundreds of my dollars on and then 60 bucks a pop for games. So to the game makers i offer up my ideal console.
First let's let sega build the console since there back catalog really fits the style of what this would be. Plus with how this console will be marketed it will be cheap to build and sega could have there own version of the money cow called the Wii. Plus one of my favorite consoles was the dreamcast and that kind of out of the box thinking is just what we need with this bad boy.
The concept for this system is "The Future will be Retro". An entire system based on the idea of 2D games with 3D sprites. Think the new Bionic Commando and Pac-man for 360 Live Arcade or New Super Mario Bros for DS. Adding that slick next gen polish to solid game play and enjoyment of my past. Awesome 2D fighters, amazingly fun platform games, top down shooters, all the stuff that has been shit on since the invention of 3D gaming would return to glory with this console. BTW this system would be 720p HD and the games would look badass on your big flat panel making it a dot better than the Wii.
The games for the system would all be priced at 10-20 dollars undercutting all 3 other systems because these games in this day and age just wouldn't take much to build and we would make sure to have a Wii level ease of creation for new games. No psycho processors etc to overheat and up difficulty to code for. A revamped 2DHD sonic would be our mascot and the first game released with the system. Yup old school buy the console get a game mentality would return. Plus we would work massively hard for 3rd party support but the old school seal of approval would return to make sure even though this system is easy to build for it wouldn't turn in to shovel ware central. Also RPG games would be a big focus of the system bringing in that 2D Japanese RPG fan that died an unhappy death with the SNES which also brings me to....
Online would be awesome. Multiplayer in many games, leader boards for the more arcade style games, voice chat, and everything else we could steal from Live. Also thanks to our XNA style indy development kit we would have $5 virtual console games that would be saved to a hard drive but could also be moved via SD cards to a friends house. These would be your smaller casual gamer and experimental games with a nice mix of just plain ol indy developer games. Our version of XNA would be damn easy to use making development almost as easy as the Unreal Editor so just like the mass of user maps there could be a mass of fun innovative titles. I think this would build a interesting social networking idea around the console that of course would be built in where people could share demos of the games they were working on and also hype there titles.
Media on the system would be handled by the newly part time hire the XBMC team. They would build and maintain a media center like front end for the system fully supported and monitored by Sega. Opera would also be brought in to add a clean browser interface. RSS Steaming would be in as well for watching and listening to podcasts.
The console would start at $200 with games from $10-20 VRConsole games at $5 locked rate. Free demos, free online with broadband service, and free 1-800 based tech support based inside the US. The console would be marketed by both Sega and the firm used by Apple for there commercials.
I really think this re imagining of the retro style for todays gamer really would work. We would bring in girls and casuals like crazy by giving them solid non pandering games. We would have a lock on the 80's nostalgia gamer like myself. The indy developers would flock to us for ease of coding and distribution. I really think this console would fill a niche audience enough that the low price of the console and cheapness to develop it would make it survive. The biggest thing is there is a huge audience of gamer that wants that 80's childhood back where it was all about game play and fun and not about over marketed 3D movies played off as video games.
Ok so in the spirit of taking my happy meds again i bring you yet another fluff piece this time a movie review of the recently released Sydney White starring Amanda Bynes.
Bynes once again dons a familiar role to her recent outings of She's The Man and What a girl wants as the fighter against the popular vote. It makes you wonder what kind of childhood this girl had that almost all of her movies revolve around her being an outcast dork who wins in the end. I am not a psychologist but frued would have a field day with this girl's script choices :). That being said she was born for the role. She is the girl next door who everyone loves and she loves them back genuinely with more heart than could ever be bottled. This is the girl in school who wins prom queen and the math league in the same year. If every girl in the world was like Amanda it would be a better place.
The movie is based loosely around Snow White but placed into a Greek college system. Amanda is trying her best to follow in her mothers footsteps by becoming a Kappa but quickly finds out that is not really what she is about mostly due to the evil witch character aka the head of the Kappa's and pretty much one of the best bitchy characters i have seen in a while. She plays a great ying to Amanda's yang. Amanda soon finds her self living with the 7 dorks (get it) in a run down old house on Greek row called the vortex. All the dorks are very funny and bring a lot of charm to the movie especially if your like them. This movie shows geeks and nerds in some of the most real settings since the days of Freaks & Geeks and Undeclared. I felt i was back in high school with the hallway kids our little group of misfits.
At the core this movie is another good guys win in the end movie but it's packed full of charm and humor to the point you just don't notice. This movie does what it wants to do very well and that is retelling a fairy tale in a modern setting. It's going to be very hard to beat this for my DVD of the year. This movie was right up my alley.
5 Stars. At the very least give it a rental. You owe yourself that much.
I have a confession. I LOVE Hannah Montana the tv show. There i said it. Suddenly i feel a large amount of eyes on me and rumblings about my sexual orientation. Sad isn't it. Just by my mere mention of they enjoyment of a "Kid's Show" i gain all kinds of labels and teasing. This kind of stuff depresses me deeply.
A good number of the people reading this were born in or around the 80's. The great age of television marketed toward kids. Remember Thundercats, MASK, Gi-Joe, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, etc. Damn straight you do. Let's go a bit farther. How about Power Rangers, X-men, Spiderman, Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, now we are pushing into the era most people my age would stop watching these "Kids shows" and move on to more serious fair like 90210 and things dealing with adult themes like sex, drugs, and violence. Some reason i wasn't breed to enjoy these things in there sensationalized Hollywood way. I hate horror movies and the recent trend of super violent almost snuff like films makes me want to puke. I enjoy comedy, a good story, and yes maybe even some crying. Damn more questions about my sexuality...i guess i haven't made my point yet.
Kid's Shows to me are the last beacon of hope that there is still some creativity left in this world and it isn't all about the hard rock, hard cock, same ol same ol style of tv and movies today. There are exceptions to my rules. I enjoy Heroes a more dramatic series but anyone who doesn't enjoy heroes is a blind, jaded idiot....sorry fanboy talking. I also enjoy some more adult themed comedy such as Big Bang Theory, Ugly Betty, 30 Rock, Reaper, and Chuck so it's not like i am totally glued to my kids fair. That being said my favorite show to watch right now boarders on Hannah Montana and Camp Lazlo. The first you more than likely know the second is a excellent cartoon done by the guy who wrote the critically acclaimed Rocco's Modern Life for Nickelodeon. A show for pre-teen girls and a cartoon about a monkey at a summer camp!!! WTF is wrong with me....Not a damn thing :D.
Hannah Montana is a great show along side iCarly because both open sitcoms up with a unjaded, pre-nirvana, pre-emo, pre-i hate everything about life mentality that has left the world in a haze of depressing dramas and overly sarcastic sitcoms meant for this hipster audience that thinks it's to cool for everything. They are just funny. Pure innocence humor. Sit down have a laugh and be entertained. Take 30 minutes away from your hectic everything sucks life and sit down to laugh and have a good time. That is what kid's shows and cartoons are for me. They are a release for this jaded hipster bullshit that is shoved down my throat by everyone my age who listened to too many Pearl Jam albums in the 90's and now thinks their life sucks and worse than that they think they are better than everyone else and that there opinion that the 1970's cover band Jackoff Unicorns is the only piece of media worth enjoy because everything else is a lie. FUCK YOU PEOPLE. If you want to hate something hate something important. No one gives a shit if you don't like anything popular because you think that is what is cool.
It's people like me who sit down daily to watch something that makes us happy with 0 care as to what people think about them and what they are watching that shall someday save the world. It's not about being cool, it's not about impressing anyone, it's about being true to yourself and standing up for what you believe no matter how many vox comments you get for saying it. People that hate everything are to busy thinking there shit doesn't stink to actually stand up and make a real difference in this world. Get out of your melodramatic hipster bullshit and grow up with the rest of us. Yeah i said it. My 26 year old cartoon watching ass is calling you out for being a petty, immature, childish dickhead who is to busy worrying about if they should like the new Modest Mouse CD to realize the world is going to shit around them.
In the end kiddos is not about what you like or don't. It's about not wasting your time worrying about what other people like and think about you for liking something. Way to much of our time is used dealing with this bullshit that could be going else where. I leave you with a quote of mine..
"It's easy to sit back and watch things happen. It's a lot harder to stand up and make them not happen."
This rant is dedicated to one of the greatest American's of all time Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a man who dared to buck the system and be a little bit different and by doing so issued in more positive changes than i could ever list here. I wonder what would have happened if instead of his speaking gigs Dr. King decided to instead stay home and complain about the new Miles Davis album...
Ok i have a more serious "deep thought" post coming soon but i am in a light mood so it's time for a fluffy post of just random things i am enjoying.
1. New episodes of Hannah Montana. The episode with Dolly Parton and Vickie Lawrence was freaking hilarious. Most under rated show on tv with people outside it's core audience and the subject of my more serious post coming soon.
2. Playing Sims 2 Castaway for the PS2. Really fun Lost In Blue style game that is actually somewhat deep with a heaping dose of Sims tongue in cheek humor. I have beat all the challenges and still are collection and playing building up my volcano side mansion.
3. Watching my archives of Drawn Together and Chris Angel's Mindfreak. Both are awesome shows for much different reasons. Chris Angel is the best straight style magician out there today unlike his trickless generation buddy David Blane. Just amazing close up magic work which is something i am a huge fan of and the creepy goth/steampunk style he has makes it even better. Drawn Together is what South Park should be. Unapologetic crass awesomeness of free speech and creativity.
4. Mapping out my new network that will be moved into my new house later this year. 802.11n, 10/1000, printer, and network attached redundant storage via drobo and droboshare. All mac ready since the entire house will be mac only.
5. As part of that network mapping i a cleaning up my video archive with both hard drive and DVD backup versions. Over 200 DVDs so far and close to 700GB of media. Next addition will be Make: Weekend Projects since Bre is leaving and i am not sure if the show will stay around.
So that is what i am doing and enjoying. How about you?
2007: Apple is doing very well right now and i really don't see that going down anytime soon. Every slip Microsoft makes apple kicks them in the balls.
Time Capsule: Interesting idea as long as you have not invested in a new router or NAS system. Cut 50 bucks of each size and i would be happier.
iTunes: Movie rentals is a great idea. They have a long way to hit the 75,000 videos from Netflix but it will grow. This and Blu-ray are how you will be watching movies going forward.
AppleTV Take 2: Free Upgrade = Awesome and the features make it look really appealing. I am loyal to Netflix and my eyeTV setup for now but the hooks are in me. Add a few thousand more movies and i will own one. The price drop for new is also mucho awesome.
iPhone/Touch Update: I bet the gearlive guys are laughing there ass off at the idiot flamers right now :). Neat stuff added but the $20 premium on the touch software is depressing. Bad call Apple.
Fox Guy: Finally a suit who isn't a brain dead dumbshit. Seemed lively and fun and happy to be there. The portable file on there DVDs is a freaking awesome perk imho. See what we do and make it legally available. LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS!!!!!!!!!!!1
MacBook Air: Damn....This thing is nerdgasim worthy sexy. I agree with Andy/Merlin from MBW in that i wish it was a bit smaller screen size. Not something i will be buying as i see it more as a show off system but it is a damn fine piece of engineering.
Overall: My favorite item would be the new rev of AppleTV and Rentals. This is where my money could go in the future. I was sad about the lack of the tiny MacBook screen wise. I would give the Keynote a B-. Not super great but there is some good stuff that could bloom huge in the future for apple.
BTW....Randy Newman is out of his fucking mind....and i love him for it.
As you may or may not know i consider myself a bit of a Apple Front Row hacker. I love making this lovely piece of software from apple do things it's not suppose to do. An early example that was featured partly in a episode of Hak5 and also available via the wiki is voice activated front row and getting it on older G4 based systems. My new little trick comes from MacOSXHints and that is how to add a bunch of external drives with video on them and have them show up in Front Row.
What i am using:
- Tiger 10.4.11
- WD MyBook USB Hard Drives
- Random 4 port USB Hub
Step 1: Go into finder and hit the key combo Shift-Command-G (Go To Folder Command) and type in /Volumes.
Step 2: While holding down Command-Option drag the Volumes folder into the movies folder. This essentially makes a short cut to the folder which holds all your external and internal devices like drives, CD-Roms, Thumb Drives, etc.
Step 3: Chain up your USB devices into the Hub in my case about 1TB worth of drives holding anal retentively foldered video files collected over the past few years all in high quality iPod format. (I am a sick man)
Step 4: Open Front Row and go to Videos/Movies/Volumes and you will see your newly added external drives all mounted and ready to play with.
Real World Uses:
- DVD server using handbreak to rip movies onto external drives in high quality quicktime/mp4 format.
- Media Center addition for large stores of video content.
- You get the point.
This method along side a MacMini is the basis of Alice Mach 2 my media center setup years in the making. More on Alice and a textfile of this document for sharing with friends will be available via www.sxe13.com/RL soon.
