Brick Background And Movies

First off a big shout out to my new stalker visitor. She's Trouble (seriously, that's her nickname). But after talking with her a bit yesterday, it occurred to me that people relatively new to the blog probably had no idea what was going on in the video from yesterday. So I figure a bit of background is in order.

At our house there was a brick in the backyard. Quinn would often run around to the back to check on the brick and see that it was still there. Scott made a comment about what a nice picture of the brick it was. So a couple days later when everyone but me went to Richmond, I posted a picture of the brick for Quinn. This elicited another comment, this time from John about how he was glad the brick was still there. Well, from there I decided to do a brick adventure with photos. I think around that time I also posted comments on Scott and Barry's blogs as if they came from the brick.

From there the next time everyone went to Richmond I realized I needed to do something with the brick, and decided to take it to the next level and have him star in a film. So to be honest, this time I was kind of hurting for something to do with the brick since where do you take it after the movie? So I decided to do another movie, and this time have some Barbies surrounding brick to show everyone he's a player. After emailing with Barry, I realized I really should have put some bling bling on the brick instead of just having him there in the middle of the screen. Bling would have been a good touch I think (hindsight is 20/20 and all that jazz). Just having the brick and the dancing Barbies wouldn't have made much of a video, hence the addition of a new character at the end (one could say he was the break out character on the blog for this past month). And props to KennyG, since he provided me with the Barry White music (which I hear was in his CD player upstairs, hmmmm). And that pretty much brings us up to date. Now I have to start thinking about what I'm going to do the next time or whether I should just have the tradition end on this one.

I did hear from Ginger that Catherine apparently absolutely loved the latest brick video due to the inclusion of the Barbie / Princess dolls (evidently she watched it 28 times according to Ginger). So from that point of view, I'm glad it worked out since I think I managed to entertain the kids and everyone else. Oh yea, while I'm mentioning the people in Richmond, I'll send Happy Birthday wishes out to Grammy from everyone up here (that's just the brick and me at this point).

Since Ginger and the kids have been in Richmond, aside from the video, I haven't really accomplished much except watching TV / movies. I think I have less than 1 week of Daily Show / Colbert Reports now. And I'm current on all my other shows, and I've watched a ton of movies recently. Reviews of movies I've recently watched below, I will avoid spoilers or providing information about the movie where possible.

I watched Signs last week. It's another movie by M. Night Shyamalan. I'm conflicted about this movie. I don't want to spoil it, but there are aspects of the overall plot that just don't feel realistic. However, having said that, I did like the characters and the actual filming. The one thing I found refreshing about this was since it was a Shyamalan movie, I kept expecting the elephant in the room to not be an elephant in the room (let's face it, a lot of his movies rely on a twist ending). So from that point of view, I kept expecting a twist thinking the movie couldn't possibly go where it appeared to be heading, but then there it went. The ending / resolution of the 'crisis' is incredibly contrived and completely unrealistic (although there's not much about the crisis that really seemed realistic except for perhaps the media aspect of it). Discounting the plot point aspect, I actually liked the movie. And there were a lot of little comedy relief type scenes that helped the movie (which I'm not positive those scenes were intended as comic relief scenes, but they work).

Next up, Ultraviolet. My feeling after watching this was "I was robbed." The trailers make it look like this cool Matrix type movie. There are a lot of attempts at Matrix type scenes, but they never seem to come across as being well done. From the intro they really want you to believe that this was somehow inspired from a manga or comic book, but to my knowledge it isn't based on anything of the sort (and I would know). It feels like a futuristic Sin City since it's obvious just about everything is green screened. Colors are over accentuated and soft focus on up close shots seem to be used a lot. However, unlike Sin City, this movie isn't good. It's just bad. The movie tries to live on special effects alone, but they're not well done or just plain stupid. You can't even get a feel for suspense since in the movie since every time we think there's a problem they introduce a new technology that you've never heard of (flat space, gravity leveler) to allow an escape. And the scene that wins for sheer stupidity is where they surround a person inside of a circle with everyone in the circle pointing a gun at the center. That's just tactical incompetence in action. These are just my opinions, but before you watch this, think of the children.

After that I watched a movie with Ginger (one from her Netflix queue) called Rumor Has It.... In this movie Jennifer Aniston plays a character who learns her family may have been the inspiration for The Graduate. To be honest, I'm not sure how to classify this movie. Comedy? Maybe, the majority of the laugh out loud lines were uttered by the character playing Jennifer's fiance in the movie. Possibly it's a drama? I don't know. It's a Rob Reiner film, so it's executed well and the dialogue is crisp and sharp. I really liked the first 45 minutes, then for the next half hour the movie went off into la la land for a while. It eventually returns to reality and finishes up with an ending I didn't particularly like. Overall, a fun movie though despite the fact that it has Kevin Costner in it.

At this point I needed to whet my animated appetite and I got Steamboy. I got this based on a recommendation by a friend at work (who, in their defense, hadn't seen it, but thought it looked good). It's suppose to have occurred in the 1860s, so all the technology is ancient in today's terms, but way too advanced for anything that from that timeframe. Didn't really like this movie. I can't fault the art. The art is very nice and well done. The story, well, that I didn't care for as much. It feels like ultimately the message for the movie is 'technology is a tool and whether it's good or bad depends on how it gets used'. This is underscored by they fact that there are two factions competing to show one another up using technology which eventually just devolves into all out war with the city they're in paying the price for their hubris.

Finally, tonight I watched MirrorMask. Now this was a fun movie. In the first fifteen minutes or so I didn't think I was going to like it due to the obvious low production budget, but that changes pretty quick. I shouldn't be surprised I liked it. The story and screenplay were written by Neil Gaiman, who is a fairly famous author and has written one of the better received literary comic books called Sandman (a book about Dream, one of the seven Endless). This is the story of a teenage girl (Helena) on a trip through a fantasy realm. To elaborate, this fantasy realm doesn't have Elves and Orcs, but rather flying books, cats with human faces and flying fish. I can't really describe much more of it without giving away some plot points, so I won't. I will say this movie (in my opinion) is worth watching. In fact, I may even try and buy it at some point in the future. This movie is obviously a green screen movie, but here the plot, dialogue and characters drive the movie instead of the special effects, and the CGI is there to augment the story and provide a look at the bizarre land in which Helena finds herself.