bobafred

Thanks to Edgemoor for the new tagline (look up).

There’s nothing quite like going out to your car when the temperature is 19-ish degrees and it won’t start. This was the scene last night as I went to get some dinner. Stupid car battery. Luckily my dad had the day off today too so we went and got a new battery and all is now well.

The rest of the day (so far) has consisted of watching the longest movie that I have ever seen, that is if you don’t count the time I watched the entire ‘The Stand’ mini-series straight through in one day (six hours worth, with commercials). Six hours straight? That was like two days after I got laid off from my last job, and I didn’t want to do anything. Cut me some slack.

Yes, that movie is LOTR:ROTK:EE. I don’t want to type the whole thing, you can figure it out. Weighing in at a beefy 4 hours and 30 minutes or so, this is a hella long adventure. I enjoyed the additions to the EE, for the most part, but I can always find something to complain about. Here I go (beware, spoilers to follow):

I liked the fact that they showed the fate of Saruman, I just didn’t like the fate they showed. As far as I remember, Saruman is the root cause of The Scouring of the Shire from the books. His fate in the extended edition is just plain dumb. Oh, and there still is no Scouring of the Shire in the movie, a very important part of the story, IMO. Also, as mentioned over at The Bits, the revealing of the ghost army to the mercenaries on the Corsair ships spoils the reveal later in the movie during The Battle Of The Pelennor Fields (man, I’m such a nerd). This scene was most likely added to the EE as none other than Peter Jackson makes a cameo as one of the mercs.

On the good side, there are some additional scenes with the lovely Miranda Otto as Eowyn that help to enhance her character to that which is portrayed in the books. I was happy to see that they did this for her character as Jackson et al were all too eager to make up a bunch of crap for the Arwen character in the theatrical releases of all these films. There are also the additions of The Mouth of Sauron, the Houses of Healing, and a confrontation between Gandalf and the Witch King which are all nice.

All in all, this version fits in nice with the previous Extended Editions and the DTS track is beautiful. Plus, they all look damn nice on my bookshelf. I really do feel that this would be my favorite of the 3 if the ending followed more closely to the books. Instead, I’m going to have to vote for Fellowship as my favorite. Not exactly sure why, but I’m going to go with it.

In total, I don’t think these movies could have been made any better than they were. With all my bitching aside, these really are as good and as true to the source as possible while still remaining entertaining for the casual movie-going public. Peter Jackson and his fantastic crew really did a fine job.

A quick update on the movies that I am very much looking forward to:

The first non-teaser trailer for Batman Begins is up on the Apple trailer site. Looks pretty amazing. This time around, we go back to the beginning and learn more about what factored into Bruce Wayne becoming the Dark Knight. The early training sessions with Liam Neeson look to be quite good. Not sure how large the part is, but I look for good things from Cillian Murphy (of 28 Days Later fame) as The Scarecrow.

Next up, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise bring us a retelling of the H.G. Wells‘ classic War of the Worlds. The trailer is once again available from Apple. The story has a few previous pretty famous iterations in the form of a fear inducing radio broadcast by Orsen Welles in the 30’s and another movie from the 50’s that many consider to be Sci/Fi classics, both for good reason. With the source writing and various productions, there definitely is a lot to live up to. Hopefully Spielberg and Cruise can get it done.

And finally, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are preparing a remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (ok, so the original movie was called Willy Wonka and the…). The trailer can be seen at Yahoo!. I would pick the Quicktime version, but that’s just me. I have to admit that when I first heard about this remake I was very excited. Burton is the perfect mind to bring Willy Wonka and Co. to life. But, after viewing the trailer I’m a little disappointed. Depp’s Wonka looks really plastic-y and sort of like a drug addict. I should probably read the novel by Roald Dahl, maybe this vision of Wonka is more faithful to the source. I guess Gene Wilder will always be Willy Wonka for me.

Other future projects that I look forward to are The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Ender’s Game. Both of which are also based on some quality writing.

I haven’t posted anything in awhile. Sorry ’bout that. Not too much going on. Let’s see:

I picked up The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – Extended Edition on Tuesday like any good nerd would. Haven’t watched it yet. That will have to wait until the weekend. At an almost incredibly stupid ~250 minutes its more than I can handle after a long (boring) day of work. I look forward to the final chapter in beautiful DTS:ES.

I’m taking next week off to sit around and do nothing. Should be a good time. I am looking to do some stuff with the site. I want to re-code the photo section and there are a few other things that I have in mind. Should keep me out of trouble.

Here are the instructions:

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the “shuffle” command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurrences. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.

Here’s what I gots:

1. Shower (Intro) – Def Squad (El Nino)
2. I’m A Cloud – Boy Hits Car (Boy Hits Car)
3. Inward Singing – Tenacious D (Tenacious D)
4. Michael’s Theme (from The Godfather) – Henry Mancini (Mob Hits II: More Music From The Great Mob Movies)
5. Satellite – P.O.D (Satellite)
6. Girls Own Love – Andrew W.K. (I Get Wet)
7. Deep Inside – Incubus (S.C.I.E.N.C.E.)
8. Suicide Note Pt. II – Pantera (The Great Southern Trendkill) [weird, see below]
9. It Aint Easy – 2Pac (Me Against The World)
10. Bonus Track 1 – Mystikal (Let’s Get Ready)
11. Provider – N.E.R.D. (In Search Of…)

This comes from a total of 969 mp3s. There would be a better chance for more embarrassing music if I were to do this from my work laptop where I have over 1500 songs. A lot of which are totally random tracks that I have collected over the years of borrowing CDs from people at work. Also, I followed step 5 and skipped duplicate artists.

Via bump.
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Staying with the music thing for a moment, today is truly a sad day as Dimebag Darrell of Pantera fame was shot and killed while on stage at a concert in Columbus, OH last night. There were also others wounded and killed, including the gunman. Dimebag was performing with his new band, Damageplan, when the incident occurred. I was shocked to hear this news this morning. Dimebag was a giant in the metal world and will be missed.

Pantera ranks as the band with the most mp3s (56) in my current home playlist.
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Finally, just to let everyone know, since 11/14/2004 I have been using dialog from the original Star Wars trilogy as the titles to my posts. That trend ends today. Carr was the only one that ever noticed. He is the greatest.

Tonight I watched Spider-Man 2, which I recently purchased on DVD along with the original Spider-Man for a mere $25 at Best Buy. Prior to this, I had never seen it and I have to say that it was quite good.

I’m not going to get into the story much, but I will say that I like the Doctor Octopus character better than the Green Goblin from the original. Not really sure why, just do. The scenes with him climbing up the sides of buildings are pretty cool. All of the CG characters look much better this time around. I was always a little disappointed with this from the first movie. Big ups to the computer nerds on this one.

The big action scene that I had heard about before hand was the fight on and in the train. It was pretty incredible visually and sounded great as the train whizzed around. It definitely lived up to what I was expecting. A little bit of cameo trivia here is that one of the passengers on the train is Dan Hicks who played Jake from Evil Dead II. He has like half of a line, but as soon as I saw him I knew it was him. I guess it pays to remain friends with directors that you worked with on really low budget horror films.

And speaking of directors from really low budget horror films, Sam Raimi’s visual style really lends itself to action/adventure type movies like this. There are huge, sweeping camera movements as Spider-Man swoops through the city to save the day that are just great. I’m really glad that Raimi has stepped up as a big time director.

So where does this rank in comic book movies? Pretty high I would say. Its not as good as X2, but definitely better than the first Spider-Man, Hellboy, and at least half of the Batman movies (the first 2 were good).

I think I like comic book movie sequels better than the originals because there is less time spent on meeting the characters and learning their back stories. We know Peter Parker, MJ, Aunt May, etc. We really only need to meet the new villain, Doc Ock here. This gets us to the action sooner and everyone has fun.

I don’t know too much about the Spider-Man universe, but I think I know a possibility for the next film. And if so, I can’t wait because it will introduce one bad ass villain.