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Thursday, December 31, 2009
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Sci-fi, Horror and All Things Geek
Everybody's linking to this rather gorgeous footage of a remote controlled Starship Enterprise (circa Star Trek: The Motion Picture) gracefully soaring along at the bottom of a swimming pool. It's absolutely mesmerizing.
But this clip, featuring the USS Voyager encountering the Millennium Falcon in fluidic space, also deserves some attention. They look like two undersea creatures doing an elaborate mating dance.
Dream Wraith is a very clever and genuinely spooky "horror annotation game" produced by two English gents who call themselves the Camcorder Bandits.
What's an "annotation game"? Well, you know when you're watching a Youtube video, and suddenly a little gray square will pop up in the clip, telling you to click it? Annotation games use those pop-ups to create elaborate, interactive little movies.
I think the genre is still fairly new, and nothing I've seen compares to the ambition of Dream Wraiths. Be prepared to spend the next 45 minutes or so frantically clicking around, trying to escape from that damn thing.
Start your Sunday morning off right, with a big helping of scrambled (and NSFW) eggs. In David Commander's 2007 short film Fragile and Fearless, a neurotic little egg lady (voiced by Ish Klein) is ready to crack, when her shrink advises her to grow a thicker shell. But is her new outlook on life a little too eggs-treme?
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Even if you consider yourself a big William Shatner fan, there's no way you've seen everything he's starred in the last few years. According to the IMDB, between 2004-2008, while Shatner was starring on Boston Legal, he found time to squeeze in 15 other credits! He was in everything from Star Trek video games to Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous to the reality show Invasion Iowa. (And that IMDB list is by no means complete!)
But in a career that stretches all the way back to 1951 (the year of his debut as "a crook" in The Butler's Night Off), last year's direct to DVD, CGI kiddie picture Gotta Catch Santa could be one of Shatner's most poorly-chosen roles. From the anemic premise to the animation that would've looked iffy in 1996 to musical numbers that wear out their welcome in 5-second exerpts, Gotta Catch Santa is enough to make you pine for the glory days of Li'l Pimp.
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It's another one of these Pay Per Post deals, where I get paid a couple of bucks for blogging about something. In this case it's a site called TVchannelsfree.com, where you can watch tv online.
Now I haven't tried the site myself, but I am interested in learning more. The big digital TV switchover we were all subjected to some months back has been pretty much entirely a negative thing in our household. Now we're forced to get all of our TV from the one set in the house hooked up to cable, and because Time Warner's service is kind of crappy we lose the TV signal with some regularity. Even when the cable is "working", it often gets pixelated in the middle of a show or it'll black out for a minute or two. (This happened during the series finale of Battlestar Galactica. You would not believe the curses we hollered at Time Warner during that minute of downtime, when we had no idea when or if the signal would come back online.)
I often stay up for a while after my girlfriend goes to bed, and in the old days if I was watching a show in the bedroom and it got late, I would tuck her into bed and then finish watching the show in the living room. Well, gone are the days. Now I either have to keep her up another 20 minutes so I can finish a damn show, or just turn the darn TV off and go sulk in the living room. Time Warner does offer a solution, of course: we can hook up another feed in the living room, for a monthly fee. So, I can pay every month for the last 10 minutes of SNL that I used to see for free.
So, I am actually looking for a service like TVchannelsfree.com, something where I can just watch TV online, on an as-needed basis, without having to pay even more money cash to the dorkwads at Time Warner. It's possible I'll try the service soon. If so, I'll report back on the results.
Dan O'Bannon has passed away. Best known as the screenwriter of the original Alien, he'll always be the hapless Sgt. Pinback to me.
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In this clip from Sesame Street, Jon Stewart struggles with the nuances of the word "practice." It's a cute bit... Although watching Stewart repeatedly fail as he tries to define "practice" kind of makes it seem like he's had a stroke.
USA Today has now graced us with the first picture from the upcoming movie based on Brad Anderson's inexplicably long-running comic strip, Marmaduke.
"We've approached the movie like a John Hughes movie with dogs," director Tom Dey says. "The dog park is like high school for dogs. To make this kind of movie, you really have to understand that it is the dog's world and we just live in it."
That's right. Marmaduke = Ferris. That's an angle that never would've occurred to me. But then, that's why guys like Dey are making that fat Hollywood money. They lack that little glimmer of common sense and decency that prevents you or I from conceiving of such horrors as these.
"Marmaduke is a teenager, and he's trying to find his way in the world," Dey says. "It's a boy-meets-girl story, a coming-of-age and cautionary tale. My job as director is to try to place the audience inside this world."
I don't want to be placed inside that world, Mr. Dey. That world sounds like some sort of freakish hellscape to me, a plane of eternal torment populated by CGI great danes winking at CGI poodles while Yello's Oh Yeah plays on the soundtrack.
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In the 1973 movie The Horror at 37,000 Feet*, William Shatner appears as a bitter, alcoholic ex-priest who offers little comfort to his terrified fellow passengers. There's something genuinely grim about Shatner in this scene. While he became famous for his hammily heroic speechifying on Star Trek, Shatner had an under-used talent for portraying self-pitying cads, too.
(* Not to be confused with the famous Twilight Zone episode, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, also featuring William Shatner.)
From the UK's often-brilliant comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, here's the sad story of Cheesoid, the robot that smells.
As a child, were you inexplicably terrified by corporate logos that appeared at the end of certain TV shows? Cartoon Brew has a post about logo-phobia (I don't know if this phobia has a more official name), including news of The S From Hell, an upcoming documentary about people who were scared witless when the Screen Gems logo would appear at the end of Bewitched reruns.
Wow. I was a sissy kid, and even I didn't freak out about corporate logos. I wish I had known some of these kids when I was six, so I could have had somebody around to make me look tough.
The S From Hell site features a gallery of the most frightening logos of yesteryear. But are you brave enough to enter this tomb of terrifying typography?!
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