Hasta La Gadget!

Another day, another ignorant article about high definition. This time it’s Peter Bradshaw, film critic for Guardian.co.uk, claiming Humphrey Bogart would have any cameraman approximating a “high definition” effect thrown off the set. Blatantly ignoring the fact that movies of that era were made on 35mm film with more resolution than even 1080p Blu-ray can display, Bradshaw claims that instead of a HDTV, viewers would be better off with a standard definition projector and DVDs. This is all in response to a recent Sky ad campaign (check out the video with Sir Anthony Hopkins dropping in Rutger Hauer’s Blade Runner monologue after the break, plus the original) promoting the broadcaster’s new HD transfers, allowing home viewing of many older films in quality that would be impossible unless you’d seen it the first week in theaters, and with sound that likely surpasses anything available at the time. What someone should explain to Mr. Bradshaw and so many others with this misconception is that HDTV allows us to see the movie closer to the way it was meant to be seen when it was originally mastered, with all the detail that was present. Provided a high quality transfer, there’s plenty of reasons to catch old flicks in a new format, so spread the word.

Continue reading UK film critic doesn’t understand using HDTV to watch old movies, why kids are on his lawn

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

UK film critic doesn’t understand using HDTV to watch old movies, why kids are on his lawn originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Star Trek: The Motion Picture isn’t just a film that should be important to original series fans, but it’s a film that’s influenced media (Star Trek or otherwise) for the next 30 years. Here’s our review.

The plot could be described in one sentence: “The new Enterprise goes out to investigate an alien being that’s threatening to destroy the Earth.” That’s it. But how Roddenberry executed such a simple premise shows why this man was a visionary that George Lucas couldn’t even dream of comparing himself to.

Since it’s been years since you’ve last seen the movie—about 15 years for me—I’ll give a short recap. Admiral Kirk comes back to take command of the Enterprise, a ship that’s spent the last 18 months being retrofitted, in order to intercept a giant gas cloud that demolished three Klingon Warbirds with ease. The film spends the first half of the movie assembling the cast, showing off the Enterprise exterior, and basically letting everyone settle in to their roles. It then spends the entire second half of the movie journeying from the outer edge of the gas cloud into the center. What’s there? The Voyager 6 space probe. (There’s no actual Voyager 6 probe in our reality, in case you’re wondering.)

Turns out V’ger (Voyager 6 with space dirt on its nameplate) was lost after it hit a black hole, which dumped it in the vicinity of a “machine planet”. That planet? The Borg fucking homeworld circa 300 years ago. (The Borg aren’t mentioned by name, but material deemed canon claims Roddenberry designated the species as the Borg.) The Borg fitted V’ger with “advanced” technology and sent it back to Earth to fulfill its mission of relaying information back to its creator.

Kirk manages to stop this thing by connecting V’ger with Voyager 6, recognizing that the now-sentient machine is looking for HUMANS as its creator, and tries to send the proper codes for V’ger to finish its mission instead of killing everyone on Earth. Kirk fails until the handsome Captain Decker, who was demoted to Commander because both he, Kirk and Kirk’s ego couldn’t fit into the same chair, merged with V’ger and created a new advanced life form. The life form explodes into another dimension and the movie ends.

So what the hell is this movie about? Quite a lot of things, but none of these plot lines or themes are satisfactorily concluded. Besides the obvious religious analogies that involve the creator and God and meeting the maker and somehow finding a purpose to life, there are a few weird subplots that all end as abruptly as V’ger does.

There was the Decker/Ilia relationship, which symbolized a man finally being able to “physically” be with a woman—the avowed celibate woman—who tormented him years before by not allowing his photon torpedoes anywhere near her docking bay. Then there’s Spock’s journey to find out the meaning of life, trying to decide whether he’s going to go with Logic or Emotion (big L, big E). A mindmeld with a sentient machine that has the entire knowledge of the universe makes the decision for him, and it’s the latter. No real explanation of this either; Spock just wakes up from swapping minds with a robot to realize that he’s not one.

And of course, there’s the theme of growing old and obsolete. Everyone’s 10 years older than when the series ended, carrying around a little more paunch and a little less muscle. Even Kirk has been replaced by a younger, better looking version of himself. Only by strongarming his way back into the hot seat does he manage to prove that yes, he IS out of touch, and needs someone younger to save his ass repeatedly.

All of this is buried under $49 million of special effects. That’s $139 million in today’s money. In comparison, the similarly effects-laden Star Trek 2009 movie cost $150 million. Both were pretty good LOOKING for their time, with Star Trek 1979 spending (what seemed like) a larger percentage of the film just flying around and looking at stuff. The influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey weighs heavily on the way the movie-makers did things, even 11 years later.

But what’s the point of this movie? Like I said, it was in part a big thank-you to long time fans, as evidenced by old characters popping up to say hello. Nurse (now Dr.) Chapel, played by Roddenberry’s wife, who also was the voice of the computer in TNG and JJ Abram’s Star Trek movie, makes a few appearances. Yeoman Rand, the blonde sexpot from the first season of the series, also pops up in order to screw up a transportation sequence and kill two people. She may hold the record for longest time without a promotion in Star Trek history.

That was half the reason. The other half was because Roddenberry had more to say, and now he had the money to say it with. Gone were the cheap purple sets and cardboard rocks of the ’60s series; in are the clean, sterile lines we’ve seen in many “traditional” space operas of the last 30 years. You may think that the only reason why the movie eschewed the lived-in, half-assed quality of the original was because they finally had money, but you’d only be half right. They also did this for a reason; because space needs orderliness. Why? Because space is fucking scary.

The movie is littered with reasons why space is “the final frontier”. Kirk rushes a jump to warp—normally an everyday occurence in the Star Trek universe—before Scotty says it’s ready and creates a temporal wormhole where the ship almost eats it in a near-hit with an asteroid. The villain is a piece of technology we sent out, basically telling us that even benign actions like the search for information may come back (by way of the Borg) to shoot us up the ass. Transporting, a relatively safe way of traveling, won’t just kill you, it’ll turn you into a disgusting, screaming blob of tissue if there’s just ONE circuit board malfunctioning. Hell, the seductively bald female Lieutenant that V’ger abducts, kills, and machine-clones was doing nothing more than just standing there. In order to combat all the chaos out there, outside your raised shields, you need to make sure your system in here runs with military precision.

The Next Generation, arguably the best iteration of Star Trek, continues the train of thought started by Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There wouldn’t be that without this. No Picard, Data, Riker or Geordi without a movie that basically amounts to as a dealer test drive of the new Enterprise. No more romping around the galaxy having your way with this or that alien. It’s judgement time; time to prove that Humanity actually belongs in space and is capable of handling what’s out there. Encounter at Farpoint, here we come.

So go back and watch the movie again, this time on Blu-ray in the comfort of your own home. Hell, if you’ve put a little bit of money into your home theater it may be better than the actual theater you saw this in in 1979. But this time, watch with the knowledge of the last three decades of Star Trek with you. [Star Trek Movie Collection]

Gizmodo ’79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

Iimage credit Wikipedia, Trekcore

CinemaNow, the company that’s over the years brought streaming content (and often Frisbees) to such varied devices as the Samsung P2, various Dell PCs, and the Xbox 360, has announced that it’s partnering with Fujisoft to deliver flicks to the Nintendo Wii. The service will initially launch in Japan, subjecting our friends to the East to such Paramount Pictures fare as Hotel For Dogs and Madagascar 2: Return of the Sassy Cartoon Animals, but we’re fairly confident that a Stateside launch is in our future. In related news, cult film director Tommy Wiseau is reportedly negotiating with Chintendo to bring his inadvertent comedies to the Vii game platform.

Continue reading CinemaNow launches Wii movie streaming service in Japan

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment

CinemaNow launches Wii movie streaming service in Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Everybody’s getting into the mobile movie sideload business — just ask Samsung — and following an MWC unveiling earlier this year, Sony Ericsson is gearing up to launch movie content starting next month as part of its existing PlayNow Arena service. Direct on-phone downloads over WiFi or 3G would be awesome, but as most of these services tend to operate, PlayNow Arena will require that users select and download movies on their PCs, cable up their phones, and transfer the media the old-fashioned way, at which point they’ll be playable on the device for 90 days. You’ll be able to select from about 15 movies at any given time with content being cycled monthly — ridiculously meager, yes, but when you consider that the service is bundled with certain phones (up to 60 movies a year), it’s hard to pitch a fit. Look for it to launch on the W995 slider in Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK in June; support for Sony Ericsson’s newly-announced Satio and Aino (among others) is expected later in the year.

Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Video

Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow Arena movie download service ready for June launch originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 May 2009 03:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

In the future, if you’re walking around and encounter a Terminator, do not run.

Shout its model name at the top of your lungs “Teee EIGHT HUNDRED!!!” or “MOTO-TERMINATOR!!”, then run. That way the kiddies back in 2009 can Google for the proper toy.

The Terminator franchise has always been inherently ridiculous. We’re talking about killer robots that travel through time—without guns or clothes, of course—to not only destroy John Connor, leader of the Resistance, but take out his mom. (Destroying his mom’s mom, mom’s mom’s mom or anything along these genealogical lines would have been easier, but a bit too far-fetched.)

And that’s exactly my point. Our favorite, ridiculous franchises regularly walk precariously across that deep valley of ludicrousness, but instead of taking its chances on the tight rope like Star Trek did, Terminator Salvation double flips over the chasm on a motorcycle.

We’re talking 20-story robots that can creep up behind you without so much as a peep and supporting characters who nonchalantly demonstrate super heroic bodily feats without anyone ever asking “WTF?”

There are two story lines going on here. One, of John Connor, aka Batman. Seriously, he sounds just like Batman. Actually, he sounds like Batman for only the first few scenes of the film. Later, in scenes that, according to storyboards I saw during my set visit, were added after renegotiating with Bale for a bigger part, he sounds, you know, somewhat well-adjusted. It’s too bad that much of Bale’s own subplot, a yarn in which Connor painstakingly develops a frequency to deactivate Skynet killbots, is ended in unfulfilling resolution.

The other story is of Marcus. NOW THIS PART WILL BE A SPOILER IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE COMMERCIALS. BUT BECAUSE I ASSUME YOU WATCH COMMERCIALS, I’M NOT GOING TO FEEL TOO BAD FOR SAYING IT.

Marcus is a Terminator. Oh my God!

The problem with the movie is that too much of the story is of Marcus. The other problem of the movie is that too much of the story is of Marcus hopping from unexciting chase scene to unexciting chase scene. It’s a two-hour video game linking a series of sequences that have little reason for existence other than McG’s action-packed directing style.

And not action-packed like Charlie’s Angels. It’s a lot more like the so less charming, so less self-aware Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle.

Sure, the sacred tome of Terminator 2 could also be regarded as a montage of chase scenes, but each chase scene forced you to hold your breath. In Terminator Salvation, a giant, Transformers-esque robot chases after a tow truck full of people. Then it deploys motorcycle Terminators. There are several cuts. Then the tow truck spins in such a way that its winch strikes one of the Terminators like a wrecking ball. On a bridge. There is also jet involvement.

Remember in T2, when the good old semi chased that kid on a motorbike? Man that was great.

The thing is, only…2/3 of Terminator Salvation is this depressing. When the Marcus and Connor storylines finally converge in a mad dash to blow Skynet away, the film hones in on what made the original movie and T2 great: The good old-fashioned Terminators, not new merchandizing opportunities or high octane thrill rides.

In this last act, we see Connor properly grown up, exploiting his full potential as a soldier/hacker who strikes the ideal equilibrium of previously mentioned ludicrousness. We see Marcus, while not a character we particularly care about, to be of a particularly interesting and justified existence. (Incidentally, Sam Worthington doesn’t play the role poorly. It’s the script/editing that lets him down.) And there’s a cameo that’s probably worth the price of the ticket alone. Scratch that, it is worth the price of the ticket alone.

Somewhere, deep inside, Terminator Salvation may be a good film. But it’s so unabashedly Hollywood, such a construct of too many artistic styles, storylines, chase scenes, contracts and heavy-handed metaphors—not to mention terrible script writing—that it may have simply forgotten how to be good. Quite simply, it’s just too busy being a movie to be entertaining.

T3 was a lousy film, but at least its fatalistic ending stuck with you. At the end of Terminator Salvation, I left the theater gagging on the world’s most expensive Hallmark card, questioning why I was supposed to give a damn in the first place.

For more on Terminator Salvation, read about our set visit.