Krellion’s Geek Journal – 8/21/2009
Welcome to this week’s entry of my Geek Journal!
First, I’d like to apologize about the lack of a post for last week. I was out of town the entire week for training, had minimal access to the Internet, and didn’t get back until late Friday evening, where I was too tired to put something together. ^^;;
Now that I got the above out of the way, onward to this week’s post!
Over the past week, I managed to catch several movies:
G.I. Joe – I have to echo Donnie on this: It was a lot of fun to watch. To add upon what he mentioned, I want to point out that some of the technology seen in the film is very closely based on real-life technology: Scarlett’s cloaking outfit mimics developing tech where a camera (many really small ones in her case) records an image of whatever is behind the object to be cloaked, allowing said image to be displayed on the front of the object and thus rendering the object as see-through or invisible. Nano-technology plays a large part of the plot of the film, though the kind seen in the film (nano robots) is still several years away. The enhanced power suits themselves may still be a ways away, but some of the technology they contain has already been seen: the military has been actively developing a heads-up display of sorts to allow real-time information to be fed to soldiers and pilots in the field, allowing them to know the status of their allies or see around corners or through cockpit floors and walls.
District 9 – I think the thing I liked best about this film is how realistic most things were portrayed, and I’m not talking about the CG (though that was really well done). The story is very close to how I think we would react after the initial excitement of “beings from another world” wears off. We’d grow used to/bored with them and start treating them the way we treat ourselves. Of course, things probably would have been different if the aliens weren’t as weak when they were found; they would’ve owned us. 
Ponyo – After seeing the above two movies this past Saturday, I decided to take in something a little lighter on Sunday and this was perfect. Hayao Miyazaki’s latest animated film is loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid“, and after debating on seeing it dubbed, I found that Disney did a really good job with the dub (as they have done for the other Miyazaki films), especially with the number of well known actors/actresses they had do the voices; however, I am interested in how the dub compares to the original Japanese. The movie itself was very cute and fun; I found myself (and the rest of the audience) laughing at Ponyo’s antics, and it was amusing to hear gasps as Sōsuke (who is five years old) make use of matches to light a candle. I’m sure the parents were also wondering about his mother leaving him and Ponyo alone at home during a heavy storm. ^^
RiffTrax Live! – This was a special event that occurred last night (Thursday) that was put on by the ex-MST3K guys at RiffTrax. They debuted their new (live) RiffTraxed short film “Flying Stewardess”, had Jonathan Coulton perform a couple of his songs, and then presented their RiffTrax version of Plan 9 from Outer Space live. Overall, the experience was a lot of fun, once we got past the technical difficulties the theater I was at had (we didn’t start watching the “live” broadcast until an hour and twenty minutes into it; we did get to see it from the beginning thanks to the theater recording it with a DVR). I really should have volunteered to take a look at things. ^^ I should also look into picking up some of the RiffTrax tracks sometime.
I’ll close out this post with a plea to all the cable channels that have HD versions available: Please stop stretching your SD content on your HD channel! I like having what I watch in the proper aspect ratio! If people are that pissy about making full use of their widescreen TV, let them do the stretching themselves! A lot of the channels do their stretching differently as well: Science Channel does a partial zoom of their content so that it isn’t warped, but the top and bottom is cut off slightly (not too bad, but still annoying), the History Channel does a straight stretch of the content so that it fills then entire width of the screen (easy to re-compress it back to the proper aspect), and TNT does a “special” stretch that causes the sides of the content to be stretched more than the middle (no real way of properly fixing this >_<). Again, please do away with the stretching! Or even better, start producing everything in proper widescreen! (I know we’re getting close to that!)
That’s it for this week!
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