New godamn moon

Ok, so this movie I had to watch in two parts, but I did make it through on the first try. It almost lost me at about the 20 minute mark, but I suffered on through it. Now for your viewing pleasure, the first 20 minutes play-by-play, followed by the aftermath review.

Twilight- new moon (play-by-play)

This is a horrible Idea, no idea why I am doing this.

ok, strange dream sequence where Bela is dreaming about being an old woman while edward is still young (WHY THE HELL DO I KNOW THEIR NAMES?!!?!)

ok, awkward "happy birthday" moment.

Her friends are still douchebags. no surprise.

Edward slow-mo walks from his car, like the tool that he is.

Making out in the parking lot. Wtf?!?! she actually moans and is out of breath. Christ.

random Indian guy. Jacob I think is his name. Awkwardly hits on Bela in front of her boyfriend. Classy.

"You give me everything just by breathing" That has got to be the lamest line ever.

Ok, prophetic girl, totally hot, slight upswing to this whole thing.

Class is watching a black and white movie, the girls are going Emo.

Ok, goddamnitt Edward!! You are watching Romeo and Juliet and complaining that he can't commit suicide like most people.

And now he's quoting the movie and everyone is staring at him. What a goddamn douchebag.

Ok, so he apparently needs to killed by vampire elders to commit suicide.

Bela, yet again asks him to turn her, he yet again refuses because he feels like he'll be less of a man if she were suddenly able to defend herself.

Bela gets a papercut, Edward and Jasper flip out, Edward throws Bela across the room, slicing open her goddamn arm. Tiny blood mess turned into huge blood mess. way to go douchebag.

Ok, 20 minutes into this and I can't bear to pay this much attention to it. Stopping play by play now.

**********************
Ok, started up again the next day. Dear god this movie is frustrating. Every so often an actual endearing moment occurs, then they fuck it up.

I will say however that the movie is significantly better in the second half, Edward breaks up with Bela and we get a wonderful half the movie where Edward frigging Cullen is blissfully absent. We instead hang out with Jacob. The indian boy turned werewolf, who also for unknown reasons falls in love with Bela.

So she's been ditched by Edward, has man-meat Jacob hitting on her constantly, and like a self righteous Rube she can't get over Edward. It's seriously the most irritating thing about this movie. You can tell that the film makers did a reasonable job trying to polish the horseshit into a diamond, but it's still shit.

The majority of the character still make no sense, ALL of the stars are people you want to punch in the face, I will say that the characters of the Cullen family and the werewolf tribe were much better written than the two leads. Hell, even Bela's dad had some really well written pieces of dialogue.

So yea, I do not recommend this to anyone, if you are already a fan of the franchise then there is nothing I can do for you. Everyone else, I will say I liked this movie better than the previous Twilight installment, but it's really like asking "would you prefer to have bull shit or cow shit rubbed on your face?" It's mostly a matter of preference, and not really an important one at that.

This movie had less Edward Cullen, which I liked, but more emo Bela, which I didn't like. For me, the tiebreaker was the werewolves. With the exception of emo-boy Jacob, the werewolves are pretty cool.

apologies my readers, it's been awhile.

Ok, I haven't posted since September, so in penance I promise to actually watch the new Twilight film at some point and review it for you all.
There you go, I suffer so you don't have to.

Eventually I will post an article discussing the state of American economics and the job market, but I don't have the brain power for that right now.

So you get a review of a new TV series.

"V"
TV show takes place in present-day, and is just aawful.
Basic premise is that suddenly aliens arrive at earth and claim to be peaceful and such but end up being ruthless conquerors.
Normally the whole "we're here to take over your planet" thing would be revealed later in the series. Nope, Pilot episode, all of the secrets are revealed.
Not only do they reveal it to the audience, they reveal it to the characters too. So now instead of a series about tracking conspiracy, it's a show about a cast of "Cassandra's" (Greek prophet who was doomed to see the future but have no-one believe her).
This is a premise that is tired before the show even gets going. It's like if "X-Files" had been a show about two civilians who knew that aliens existed are were anally probing everyone, but nobody believed them. Seriously, here's the dialogue for the whole series:
Whackjobs: "Dude! There are totally aliens out there!"
Everyone else: "Yea, sure whatever."
Whackjobs: "No seriously! They are out there and they are trying to anally rape us."
Everyone else: "(awkward laugh) yea, no, you need to go away now."
Whackjobs: "They really Do! I have Alien Love-Juice in my anus right now!"
Everyone else: (Calls security, police, FBI, Aliens, goddamn anyone to get these people away from them and locked up in a looney bin)

So yea, Skip "V", it's been done before, and better. This is literally the movie "Species" but with more aliens.

Surprising Gem

So I've been watching alot of crap movies lately. Movies that I hope will be good, but never end up being worth a damn. But holy shit, found one that I expected to be terrible but was surprisingly good, and never got much attention when it came out. "It's a boy/girl thing" is a movie about opposite individuals being forced to overcome their differences to become better people and eventually fall in love.

So here's the part that probably scared people away from the theaters: The premise of the movie is that the smartest girl in school "Nell" and the Jock star-quarterback "Woody" are on a field trip to a museum. Woody is misbehaving with his buddy and is forced to partner up with Nell, who is mostly a social outcast. They get into an argument in front of an ancient Aztec statue of the god of trickery. The next morning when they wake up Nell is in Woody's body and Vice-versa.

Ok, so yea, terrible premise, but the rest of the movie is really startlingly good. Like I could not believe how good. The two lead actors are no-names, and are amazing at portraying the opposite gender. The girl had the broad male mannerisms down, she sat like a guy, her facial expressions were very much intune with the male character, it was amazing. The guy did a much more subtle performance, as he changed from a standard "outgoing jock dude" into a insecure, feminine, awkward guy. Even the male actor's vocal intonations changed with the swap. It was quite impressive. So basically, you have a movie about two actors who play themselves and eachother. Seen it done with two of the same gender successfully, this was the first successful cross-gender movie switch I've seen.
The other characters were much less notable, but each had their own personal moment of glory where their character shown through.

Even with the unique performance aside, this is a perfect feel-good movie. Everything happens the way you want it to happen, even if you didn't know you wanted it to happen that way. You know going in that Nell and Woody must get together at some point, but I was honestly expecting some cross-gendered awkward makeout sessions. I was terrified that the writers would be unable to resist this trap, but resist they did, and the results were much better than expected.

I can't imagine most movie fanatics liking this movie, it's too simple, there aren't any big surprises in the plot, but if you just like to sit down and enjoy a movie, I recommend this one. It delivers what you want and doesn't try to pretend to be a more important movie than it is.

An old and a new.

Movie review time. Today you get a twofer.
A new movie "The graduates"
and an old movie "The planet of the apes" (2001 version)

The graduates is a movie that can't decide what it wants to be. For part of the movie it is a celebration of the reckless teenage years very similar to American Pie, for the other half of the movie it turns into a needlessly preachy "You gotta focus ahead, grow up, and stop being so immature" movie. The movie follows a group of male friends, one of whom you discover is gay. Surprisingly it's not THE ONE WHO IS FREAKING OBVIOUSLY GAY! moving on, The four guys are stereotypical to the 9th degree. There is the main character Ben, who is obsessed with the slutty girl who has a boyfriend and ignores his female best friend who is in love with him. His friends are: the stereotypical mouthy italian guy, the cool quiet guy, and the socially awkward guy with a girlfriend.
You of course assume that the cool quiet guy is the gay one for obvious reasons, he defends homosexuality multiple times, dresses well, and ignores all the women in the cast.
But no, it's the awkward guy with the girlfriend. Turns out the reason he hasn't slept with her is that he's secretly gay. wooooo, what a twist. He then tries hitting on the cool quiet guy, who shuts him down and tells him to go back into the closet.

Ben, our protagonist, eventually hooks up with the slutty girl, who is by far the most irritating female character ever written. Every scene that she was in made me want to hurl bricks at the screen. Her boyfriend shows up, he's an uber douche, and we're finally rid of her. Her leaving is the greatest moment in the entire film. He then realizes that he's been treating his female best friend very poorly and spends a crazed night trying to apologize to her. He doesn't end up with her, in fact, the closing scene of the movie is them walking down the beach and discussing how good of friends they are and how they don't want to ruin their friendship by dating.

But the movie isn't even about those people, it's actually about Ben's older brother, who is a 29 year old layabout who has been attending highschool events ever since he left highschool. He runs into someone he graduated with and he decided that it's time for him to move on with his life, get a job, and settle down with a family. The friend in question of course has the opposite reaction, seeing the brother, he decides to be a douchebag, ignore his wife and kids, take up smoking, heavy drinking, and mushrooms. He then takes over the brother's post of "creepy old-guy douchebag at the highschool parties".

So yea, interesting film, would not recommend it.

Planet of the apes.
Skip it. Watch the original, it atleast makes some sort of sense.
The 2001 version features Marky mark as a near-future astronaut on a star-trek style exploration mission with a bunch of apes. They receive a distress call, so they send an Ape in a space ship. the ape disappears so mark goes to investigate, followed later by his mothership. He ends up on a world run by apes with humans as slaves. The apes have somehow developed into human-ish creatures with a number of strange quirks:
1. They have language and culture, and civilization, yet still maintain their feral mannerisms.
2. They are afraid of water, for no goddamn reason.
3. They still have opposable toes, yet they wear shoes.

It's eventually revealed that the spaceships traveled through time and arrived in reverse order. the mothership arrived first, bringing humans and apes to the world (Yet somehow apes managed to evolve drastically and humans remained exactly the same). Mark arrives a few thousand years later, after everyone he knows is dead, and the ape they sent out first arrives a week after mark.
None of this makes any sense.
Furthermore, the apes while clearly non-language based and non-cultural prior to the crash, somehow have extremely detailed records of the crash and the human population at that time. Oh, and according to the dialogue all of the humans were wiped out, yet we can clearly see them all over the goddamn place.
Then we have the time travel problems.
1. The planet is revealed to be the earth, but that would mean that all human and ape life on earth had been created in this infinite paradox, and have effectively created themselves out of thin air.
2. The dialogue however clearly disproves the paradox when it is revealed that Mark was the one who sent off the distress signal that he received earlier in the movie. This gets rid of one paradox by creating another. How could he send a message to himself that is entirely reliant on a bizarre series of improbable events that would have never happened if he had not received said message? So not only have both species created themselves out of thin air, but the entire catalyst for the events of the movie were pulled from the ether aswell.
This brings us the problem of is history solid or fluid? if it's fluid then he couldn't have possibly sent the message because he hadn't yet traveled through time to send it. in this scenario history can be changed, but cannot move ahead of itself.
If history is solid, then him sending the distress signal is a set event in time, cannot be changed. However, if that were true then the reveal at the end of the movie makes no sense, nor does the rest of the movie. If time cannot be changed than either he's always been living amongst sentient apes (in which case the end makes sense but the beginning doesn't) or they died off well before his time (in which case the beginning makes sense but the end doesn't).

The time traveling in the original movie made far more sense. He discovers that he had traveled forward in time, not to another planet, so when he sees the statue of liberty it proves that he is still on earth, but his race has long since died off, and the apes gained sentience in the meantime.

So yea, if you know anything about temporal mechanics, the remake will make you very, very angry.

The cast (excluding mark) was actually pretty good in the film, but the concept for the film was just too awful to be salvaged.
Final thought: avoid this movie, much like "Lost in space" it's pretty and has pretty girls in it, but watching the film will make you stupider.

Geek-chic

No movie reviews this time, but expect some soon. This time a real topic. The nature of Advertising and "Cool-hunting"

For the last decade or so advertisers have been struggling to stay ahead of the trends, finding and exploiting new trends in their infancy before they have a chance to hit the mainstream on their own.

Let's be honest here, we all know the definition of "Cool". Cool is "What I have but you haven't gotten yet".

By this definition these advertisers have succeeded in keeping themselves "Cool" by all terms. There are of course the regular hit-and-miss campaigns where they get the tip that something is going to be fashionable, but ends up not being. But these can be discounted as a factor of the volume of campaigns in action at any given point.

The major problem that advertisers face is that while there is the percentage of the market that enjoys being spoon-fed new trends as they come in, that is not the entirety of the market. These days it's not even the majority of the market.
The real target audience that they need to be focusing on are the disenfrachised. Those people who have been permanently labeled as "uncool", the geeks.
These people have no interest in designer jeans or top of the line sunglasses. They have their own interests, and being "Cool" isn't one of them.

This audience is one of focused attention, they very often have a couple hobbies that they spend alot of their time on, but are otherwise your normal every-day wage-slaves. These hobbies serve as their sanctuary from the real world. Many of them get into RPG's of one kind or another, a literal escape from reality as they stop portraying themselves and portray someone else.

To get this audience the advertiser needs to accomplish two things:
1. He must become the geek. This market is very good at smelling phonies, If you've never played dungeons and dragons, you have no chance of marketing your product to them. They might buy it anyways for reasons of neccessity or convience, but they won't seek out your brand of sunglasses just because you claim to be in their hobby. You have to prove it to them.
2. He must accept the geek. This market tends to shy away from standing up for their hobby in the real world. While they don't expect to be cool, they don't want further social rejection. To gain their support, you need to support them. Be willing to alienate your "Cool-seeking" audience for the approval of the geeks. You can't expect to gain both audiences, you have to pick and choose.

This is not even really theory at this point, it's proven fact. A number of people have managed to gain quite a following through this method. Two notable examples are Felicia Day and Joss Whedon. Day has taken the MMORPG crowd and turned them into her own personal cult by casting off her standard Hollywood actor persona and accepting her videogame loving persona. It's not even clear if she is even an active videogame player, I know she plays Dungeons and Dragons once a week (Her twitter tells me so), but no hard evidence has been displayed that she is an active videogame player. Because she doesn't need to be. She's proven that she's atleast knowledgable about the subject, and has embraced it fully. And so, her fans have embraced her and anything she wants to sell us.
Joss Whedon is an amazing example. He doesn't need to divulge too much personal information about himself, his writing speaks for itself. It shows that he is into conspiracy theories, Sci-fi, westerns, vampires, werewolves, demons, etc. Even musicals are represented in his work. Whedon's shows are like a mecca for those who love that genre, so while he might not have his hands on the entirety of the audience, the audience he does have is intensely devoted.

The most amusing thing about this whole phenom is that advertisers are not sure what to do about this. For decades they have been trying to sell us an image of what they think we want to be. Now we have an audience who already knows who they want to be, they just need people to sell them things that they want to have. Some marketing for this audience would be simple to write. Want to sell more Pepsi? Show 20-something people playing whatever the latest videogame is and drinking Pepsi while they play. Others would be much more difficult. It'd be hard to convince this audience to buy a Gucci purse for a ridiculous price. However, offer them a Gucci gaming bag for a more reasonable price and they're in. You might have to compete with the $15 target bag that suits their needs just aswell. You can't sell them something that they can get just as good, for cheaper.

Goddamnitt Sam Raimi

So it's just been leaked. Sam Raimi is going to direct the World of Warcraft Movie.

Goddamnit.

Didn't you get the memo?

You are no longer allowed to ruin things we love.

There are 11 million WoW addicts in the world, and you are very likely going to disappoint all of them.

God-Fucking-Damnitt.

Transformers & Child Actors

So I missed a week so you get two reviews.
Transformers: Revenge of the fallen.
Liked it, but I also liked the first one. It fufills the Michael Bay explosions quota but still managed to have something resembling a plot.
Some things to look for:
Super-Saiyan Optimus Prime
Angry ancient robot scottish man
RCx3
Wheelie

Some things to piss you off:
Characters not being named (Ratchet who?)
Sam being an emo bastard
Sam's parent's being retarded
Characters disappearing
The "Twins" super annoying for most of the film

If you liked the first one you will like this one. Don't go in expecting it to be anything but a Michael special effects action film.

Dickie Roberts: Former child star
I was surprised by this one. I threw it on expecting crap (It is david spade afterall) and was pleasantly surprised.
Especially considering the recent celebrity deaths, I think most viewers would find this movie rather topical and even slightly uplifting. If you hate children this is not the film for you as they are featured heavily in the story. But also surprisingly someone managed to write children in a less than retarded way. Usually writers seem to have forgotten what it was like to be a kid, and most dialogue of children in movies just sounds like a dumbed down version of what an adult would say. The kids in this movie were very well written, they clearly behave like kids, but they were actually much more believable than David Spade.