The Gimcrack Miscellany

I saw a trailer for an untitled movie at the beginning of a special pre-screening for Transformers and I was utterly amazed. Now I finally know what that film is called: Cloverfield, and I know it comes out very soon: January 18th, 2008. I read up on it at Wikipedia and it looks really good, at least from what little information is available. It has been kept top secret during production and has been spreading like wildfire, becoming instantly viral and earning much of its following over the Internet.

The film is told from the point of view of a group of 5 friends with a handycam, sort of like the Blair Witch Project but with a huge unknown terror in downtown New York instead of a mythical witch in the middle of a forest. One of my favorite methods of storytelling is keeping the reader/viewer/gamer completely in the dark as to what is actually going on around them. This is way more realistic to me and is what it would really be like if some sort of major disaster happened and you were right in the middle of it.

If you know me, you know that I’m a huge fan of the Half Life franchise, which heavily relies on this type of storytelling to captivate you as you play through the games. I’ve also noticed that horror flicks and psychological thrillers that utilize this technique are far scarier and more effective. It seems that as soon as you reveal the true face of the conflict - what or who is behind it - the story loses it’s mystery, thus it loses it’s frightful stranglehold it has on the viewer.

I’m really hoping that this movie is as good as the previews indicate. It’s been a long time since a trailer has captivated me in this way and I’d hate for the movie to be terrible and cause me to have wasted the 5 minutes it took me to write this post, which I’m not even going to read before I press the “Publish” button, so I hope there are no misspellings and I hope it flows nicely and I hope it makes sense and I hope I didn’t repeat any words twice in a row and I hope there are no run-on sentences.

Here is the trailer: in HD

And here is an embedded video which contains a pretty poignant 5 minute clip of the movie. WATCH IT TO THE END!

The request line has been ringing off the hook. My staff has been working after hours to grab as many shots as possible, scouring archives and taking to the streets looking for Belichick appearances. Here are the best two shots they could come up with that matched the requests for Gargamel and General Kael.

The Gargabill

The General Kaelichick

There is really no explanation for these physical anomalies.

There’s this new technology called Silverlight from Microsoft, which basically exists to support fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers. When I installed it in my browser, IE at the time, nothing happened. I was supposed to be seeing this shiny, spinning carousel of Microsoft downloads seen over there →.

I tried installing it within IE7 but nothing happened. I tried again - still nothing. Then I opened Firefox, and let me tell you I had it installed in no time. Basically a browser restart was required, but only Firefox was kind enough to let me know what was going on.

That is not the most troubling part, however. At least it still worked in IE - that is, after I restarted the browser. The reason I was even at this website was to install a program called Visual Web Developer 2008, which is a Microsoft product. I tried to download and install it (this is after I’ve restarted my IE browser and everything’s kosher, mind you) and I only got as far as the screen shows down there ↓.

I thought to myself, maybe it just needs another restart. Nope, it just goes in circles and never installs it. So I switch back to my friend Firefox again and try the same method. Once again it let me know exactly what was going on the whole time. “Do you want to save the file?”. Sure. “Here it is downloaded to your computer. Do you want to open this file?” Yes I do. “Ok, look, now it’s installing. Anything else is your OS’s fault. I’m going back to the Intarwebz, see you in a bit.” Ok buddy, ttyl.

Bottom line is, IE7 was not capable of downloading a simple file from Microsoft’s download page, but Firefox did it painlessly. I’m not just complaining about the evil corporation Microsoft for no reason like a lot of people out there. If you know me, you know I have nothing against them and the majority of products I use on a day to day basis were made by them. But this was truly frustrating and I wanted to vent about it before my anger subsided.

I really enjoyed Casino Royale and let me tell you why. I got really tired of the Pierce Brosnan flicks which got progressively worse and worse. The franchise needed new life, and a new bond was the ticket. It’s sort of like the Batman pictures which started out great but declined rapidly until we were left with a cast of George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, Alicia Silverstone, Uma Thurman, and Ahhhhhnold. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill series and Gattaca, and who can deny that Mr. Schwarzenegger is the best actor on the planet, but the cast was just put together wrong.

And the plot of the Batman films started to become absurd. Which brings me back to the Bond films. Goldeneye was the first Bond film I saw in the theaters, or anywhere for that matter (I was 13 when it came out), and I loved it. But let me just run through this list real quick and see if any of these movies stand out in any way shape or form for you: Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, Die Another Day. If you’re like me, you’re saying to yourself “oh I know what that movie was about, or wait, was it that other movie that was about that, what was the second one about again, have I even see all three of these?” That’s because they suck.

Well Casino Royale doesn’t.

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Week 15 brought us two snow covered games (Jacksonville @ Pittsburg and Buffalo @ Cleveland) that reminded me of what football is all about. I’m glad the Colts are getting a new stadium with a retractable roof that will hopefully get stuck open when it snows so we can have some awesome photos from our games too.

Here are some photos from 2007 week 15 from the NFL.

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