Foiled again, some more

Well, my masterful plan was foiled... a few weeks back i talked about how i was watching Stargate SG1 from start to finish, in hopes of being right around season 10, when it was released, and I got my copy... Anyways, my copy arrived from Amazon yesterday... and where am I in terms of watching the series?

Yeah, that would be season 5... i'm a few episodes past "Wormhole X-treme" which was the 100th episode... The cleverly name 200th episode "200" falls as episode 6 of season 10... so, that should tell you that I have a ways to go...

I blame the Shield... I borrowed 2 seasons from my brother, and watched those a while back... had i not watched those, i'd be well into season 7... a lot closer to my goal... but alas...

anyways, I watched some of the special features last night, because i haven't yet decided if i'm going to contine through my odyssey of stargate, or if i'm going to skip ahead to season 10...

anyways, I discovered some interesting things:

In the 200th episode, in the scene with invisible O'neill and Teal'c walking down the hallway, they actually had Richard Dean Anderson in a green suit walking next to Teal'c, and they post-processed him out... kind of interesting that the section of the episode was dealing with potential ways of filming a TV show without your lead actor, and they actually had the guy they were hinting at there filming, but he doesn't show up on screen..

oh, and Gary Jones, AKA Chief Master Sergeant Walter Harriman, AKA the Chevron Guy, is hilarious... sadly he does not do any of the director commentaries in this DVD box set... It was always funny to have him and Peter DeLuise (the director) on a commentary, when he was in no way involved with the episode... those commentaries are always good for a laugh, but never really give any good info that you get from other director commentary tracks...

Oh, and here's a picture to continue the tradition of random animal pictures that i find on the internet...

curses, foiled again

anyways, i went to the library yesterday to pick up some books, because i haven't done any reading for pleasure in a while...

i had hoped to pick up the book "I am Legend" to see if the movie that I was pondering about in my last post would hold any semblance of interest for me... but apparently everyone else had the same idea... all the copies were checked out... so I had to move on to plan B...

anyways, I ended up checking out the source material for 2 other movies.... the graphic novel of 300 and "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick (the story that inspired Blade Runner, for those of you not in the know...)

anyways, I haven't started reading the Blade Runner one, so I can't comment on how it compares to the movie. However, I did finish 300, seeing how it was a graphic novel, and really only a few pages long (not really sure how many, but distinctly under 100)... the movie was pretty much a direct adaptation of the comic book/graphic novel... which is pretty much what i expected...

I started to read the latest Stephen King novel last night... in true Stephen King fashion its pretty weird, and i'm still sort of confused as to what is going on... but, whatever, i'll deal...

and my carrots were good today...

and to the mysterious someone who keeps posting about celery: celery is far inferior to carrots (i'm talking about baby carrots, which you don't have to peel)... they are good by themselves, and require no preparation... whereas it seems that the celery you keep talking about requires some sort of preparation, either peanut butter or something or whatever... this is effort... and that's something i'm not ready to commit to... and i'm not a big fan of celery by itself... sorta tastes like water, but requires effort to chew...

Big Frakking Robots that turn into cars and shit...

So, is it immediately obvious what i'm going to talk about?

Anyways, on Saturday, I was feeling particularly unmotivated, so I decided to go see a movie. I was torn between Transformers and the new Harry Potter. In the end I decided on Transformers, seeing as its been out longer, and I'll likely have more of a chance to see the Harry Potter movie at some later date.

Anyways, I got to the theater to check on showtimes at 11:15 AM, and discovered that they had a 11:30 showing.... score one for me...

First off the previews:
Some movie with the Rock... they typical successful but generally heartless man discovers that he has a long lost kid, is reunited, and then learns a valuable lesson... hasn't this movie been done to death yet?
Some sort of post-apocalyptic movie with Will Smith... I Am Legend.... Apparently he's the last guy alive in New York City, and he has a gun and a dog... I'm not really sure what this one's about, but it intrigued me... I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic fiction, so that's probably why... after a quick wikipedia search, it seems it is based on a short story or novel or something, and involves vampires... i'm intrigued...
And I can't remember any of the other previews, aside from the vague feeling that i wanted to punch the kid behind me in the head, since he kept talking and laughing... and being generally annoying...

But I do remember there wasn't one of those annoying "turn off your cell phone" ads, which seems to be a preview, but is interrupted by a ringing cell phone...

And on to the movie...

So, it starts out with some horrendously cheesy monologue by Optimus Prime. Who we don't meet for an absurdly long time...

At this point I was hooked... I love me some bad Sci-Fi... and even more, I love me some giant robots beating the ever-loving tar out of each other...

so, bla bla bla, helicoppter turns into big ass robot... ass kickery... some guys escape and are later attacked by a scorpion-ish robot... in the words of Willem Defoe's character in the Boondock Saints "AND THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!"... and then there's Shia LeBouef (or however you spell it... which is coincedentally the awesomest name in the history of awesomeness... well, not really, but its still pretty cool...) and his zany antics trying to get a car, and pick up the girl wearing the impossibly tiny mini-skirt... hilarity ensues when it turns out that his car is a giant robot-ish thing... that talks by using radio clips...

anyways, some more bla bla bla, and then they show the pentagon... which looks almost nothing like the pentagon that I saw the one time i went there for work (the inside, at least)... looks like the guys i was meeting with got royally screwed in the decorating budget... anyways there's the secretary of defense, who is likely played by someone famous, but i'm more amused that he pronounces robot as ro-butt, rather than the proper ro-bought... and then there are a whole bunch of young adult analyst people, who apparently do all of the pentagon's computer work... never mind the fact that the Pentagon is the head of the DoD, and when I was there, it seemed that about 75% or more of the people were wearing military uniforms... but then again, i seemed to be in the poorly decorated section...

and there's the attractive Australian analyst woman (you got to figure that shit related to the transformers is at least at a NOFORN classification, which leads one to wonder why an australian would be working on it... but I'm a Swiss citizen, so I guess that shoots that theory out the window... (now is she attractive because of her looks or because of her accent... who knows...) anyways she enlists the help of Antwon Mitchell from Season 4 of the Shield, whose prison stay seems to have made him significantly nerdier and a lot less ruthless and badass...
further hijinks ensue...

and then the rest of the Autobots show up...

And that's where life starts to get interesting for our intrepid characters...

But I won't ruin the movie for you...

Needless to say, a large budget movie about Big ass robots that beat the snot out of each other... how can you go wrong...

Don't go in there expecting high cinema and amazing dialogue or whatever... Go expecting some over the top CGI characters beating each other up...

My only complaint is the tendency for the camera to shake during the fight scenes... made it a little disorienting figuring out who was fighting who... the black transformer fighting the dark gray transformer made it kind of difficult to figure out who was who...

that and i didn't bother to figure out their names... so someone would say something about Jazz fighting Starscream, or somesuch, and I'd have no idea who they were talking about... but it didn't matter who the robots were and what they transformed into, as the movie was about, as mentioned previously, giant robots beating the tar out of each other... who was beating who, didn't really matter all that much...

the final fight with Optimus Prime and Megatron was easy enough to figure out... and bumblebee, because he's all yellow and shit...

anyways, I'd highly recommend this movie... not the most realistic, or best movie ever, but still very enjoyable...

and my carrots were good today...

Oh, and they apparently kept the same voice for Optimus Prime as in the cartoons... which apparently is important to fanboys out there, but not to me...

i'm back

so i finally bought some carrots, so i decided to post again...

carrots were good today...

so, now who's going to buy the new harry potter book? and then read it and let me borrow it? or am i gonna have to go and sit in a bookstore for a few hours and read it like i did last time?

oops

oh, and carrots again... and they were good...

The Shield

Well, now i finally have something i feel motivated to talk about...

Its TV related, and its not Stargate (surprise surprise)... Can you guess what it is?

If you can't you should possibly get your eyes checked, since its the title of this post...

Anyways, thanks to my brother, I just finished watching seasons 3 and 4 of the FX cop TV show The Shield. (I saw seasons 1 and 2 a long time ago, so i won't be talking about them)

Anyways, its a show about a group of cops in the fictional Los Angeles district of Farmington.

Anyways, I'm sure that you can read synopses and stuff about the show on the internet, so I won't rehash the plot or talk about any of the characters...

Anyways, what sort of intrigued me about the show is the visual style. Instead of very clean and refined camera work, such as one might see in shows as Stargate SG1 (see, I had to reference it...) The Shield is mainly filmed on handheld cameras, providing very jerky action and stuff... While that seems like it might be annoying, it actually works well for the show... actually the problems i have are when the style changes... most of the time, the film has very jerky motions as a result of the handheld style, and it seems very grainy and gritty and dark... however, at certain times, the picture becomes rather bright and clear... (look at the scene where Vic goes and visits Shane and Mara and their kid for the first time for what i'm talking about). Certain moments just sort of stand out in that respect...

another thing i like about the show is the framing... note that i have absolutely no film background, so all my terminology is either made up by me, or what i learned from listening to the directors commentaries on my SG1 DVDs (and there we go again)... What I mean by this, is most shows have the actors face perfectly framed in the field of view during close ups... however, in the shield this is not always so... for example, one scene i was watching had only half of the actors face in the frame, and that went in and out of focus during the closeup...

Generally not your standard TV show, in terms of plot and execution, but well worth a watch...

Now I just need to convince my brother to get the next season on DVD, so I can nab it and watch it...

Oh, and by the way, there is an actor named Walton Goggins... how cool is that?

yay?

well, its thursday, which means its almost friday...

and now i wish i had something else to say....

I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy fourth of july.

And in celebration of that holiday, i'm going to go ahead and not fix the news... it was broken already... or at least chipped... all i did was nudge it a little, and here we are... i suspect you all will deal with it...

anyways, in a glorious return to form, i must now report that the carrots i had today for lunch were quite good... they seem to be the same type of carrot that i had earlier, and probably complained about then (i.e. the wet kind)... but i guess that keeps them fresh or whatever...

and seriously, the new scion is ugly... i saw when i was driving in to work yesterday, and was motivated to post that... and due to my general level of motivation, you should know that actually means something...

DAN, YOU JERK!

You broke the news!

Fix it! Fix it now!

Breaking News

Well, I have some astounding news...

Apparently they redesigned the Scion xB... you know the boxy car that almost pulled off the "so ugly its cute" look?

well, they've redesigned it, and it looks worse... that's pretty impressive...