Trivial Tuesday

There's plenty of M:I:III hype right now. We've got Tom Cruise on every talk show imaginable. Katie Holmes is about to give birth to his thetan love child. Tom's planning to eat the placenta and umbilical cord right there in the delivery room (No, really. I can't make this stuff up. Look here.) J.J. Abrams is directing the movie and has at least three shows on TV right now (Lost, Alias and What About Brian). While Abrams has directed episodes of his various TV shows including directing MI3 castmember Keri Russel in his first TV series, Felicity, he has not directed a feature film before. He has however, written films in the past. In fact, back in the early 1990's when he was still being credited as Jeffrey Abrams, he wrote the screenplay for a sappy drama starring Harrison Ford.

What was that movie, if you can remember?

Play by the rules and impress us all with your knowledge.

Congrats to Invisible Lizard who was close enough to Regarding Henry to win this week's bragging rights.

Sad

Aurora's story has been discussed and talked about in multiple blogs, so I'll not recap here. Details can be found here at the update posted by her sister.

I wish I had a more fitting tribute, that I knew what to say. I wish I knew how to make things better, to take the pain away. I don't. All I know is that there is a void here in the blogging world, and that void cannot possibly compare to the one in lives of every family member, every friend that she had. She brought joy to everyone, even those of us who never met her in person, and she will be greatly missed. I know of no better tribute than that.

To the rest of you out there: Whether you pray or just think about this as you go through your day, remember this family that has lost someone they love. Take care of yourselves. Wear your seatbelts.

Trivial Tuesday

Since the subject of Superman has recently been brought up on this blog and I really don't have the energy to think too hard for tonight's question, I'll stick with that subject.

Richard Donner directed the 1978 Superman starring Gene Hackman and Christopher Reeve. This was followed in 1980 by Superman II, but something wasn't quite right about Lex Luthor. What happened to make Lex not quite the same in Superman II?

No Time for Blogging Dr. Jones

I figure if they can reference Temple of Doom on last night's Simpsons episode, I can too.

I'm sorry I'm not updating much, but I haven't had too much time recently. I've read other blogs and thought that I should comment on that when I have time to write something intelligent, but then I never have time to go back. I'm not sure why I'd want to start making my comments intelligent now, since I never have before.

I enjoy listening to Matisyahu. I don't know how many of you are familiar with him or not, but I bought his album, "Youth," recently and have been playing it a lot since then. Besides, how often do you get to hear music from a Hasidic Jewish reggae artist?

I'm guessing that the person writing this headline either has no proof reading skills or was approximately twelve years old.

There we a few comments on last week's Trivial Tuesday about X3, the departure of Singer and changing expectations. My thoughts on the subject: I would really much rather have Singer helming X3 than Ratner. Singer has shown he has the ability to take these characters and make them people you care about. Ratner has...made the two Rush Hour movies. Characters in X3: I'm not so sure about Angel either, but I guess we'll have to see what they do with him. Then again, I could do without Storm. She has just never been a character I really liked. I have to admit that I'm one of the people who would like to see Gambit in the X movies. I know, I know. A lot of people hate him, but I think he's someone who translates well to the big screen and brings an interesting personality to the mix. Speaking of the mix of personalities, this brings me to the biggest reason I'm disappointed Singer left: X3 takes the ability to balance all the different personalities and not make any one part too large. Singer did that well-even better in the second film than the first. He left to do Superman. I'm sure I'll go see it, but I just can't be excited about a Superman movie. He's too one-dimensional and too close to invulnerable. The movie revolves around one guy instead of a group, and he's too flat of a character to carry everything. I guess we'll see what they do with it, but even Donner's Superman had some of these problems. Excited, nervous, it doesn't matter. I'll be going to see both the Big Blue Boy Scout and X3 as soon as I can when they come out.

Alright, that's all you're getting today folks...

Trivial Tuesday

A new episode of House is on tonight, and since I don't have too many question ideas, I'll use that as my inspiration.

The executive producer of House, Bryan Singer, is best known as a movie director. This summer he has the long, long, long rumored adn oft-declared dead Superman Returns in theaters. He first hit it big with The Usual Suspects, then directed the first two X-Men movies. There is another movie that is often forgotten that Singer directed between The Usual Suspects and X-Men. What is this overlooked film?

Congrats to Serfx who didn't overlook Apt Pupil.

I Have No Witty Title

Ok, this is the point where I admit to you that I've been watching The Next Food Network Star. Some people like American Idol, I happen to like this show. In case you haven't seen it and have no idea what it is, just think of AI only with hosting a cooking show instead of singing. The contestants have to prepare dishes on and off camera, explain what they are doing and go through various challenges. When it gets down to the last few (4, I think), the audience gets to start voting. Really quickly, let's run through the contestants who were remaining before this week's show.

Reggie: This guy is a happy, goofy, rather rotund fellow, and I like that about him. After all, you know the saying, "never trust a skinny cook." He has great energy and really can connect with the audience. He seems to be having problems dealing with the time constraints of working on a show, but has been progressively getting better.

Nate: Bald ex-model who loves showing off his classical culinary training almost as much as he loves himself. He knows exactly what he's doing when he's cooking, but he makes me want to be sick. Last week, when he was criticized for being nasty to a person who he thought was interviewing him on live TV, he agreed with them and gave the most horrific fake smile I have ever seen. Besides, why would the Food Network need an annoyingly arrogant, condescending chef? They already have Sara Moulton.

Carissa: She seems to think that she is the greatest thing to happen to cooking since fire. Fortunately, when she stops doing interviews and starts doing cooking segments, she turns her personality around and manages to be energetic and friendly. Now if she could just get the hang of preparing for cooking on set rather than in a normal kitchen she could turn in dishes that are actually cooked, and she'd have a chance to do pretty well.

Guy: He has a couple problems, the biggest of which is that he tends to speak almost entirely in jargon. Actually, this is really the only problem. The frosted hair and always wearing shorts are just his personality and they work for him. He has a lot of energy, he has a lot of personality and his dishes look great. If he tones down the jargon and slows down just enough to make himself easy for a home cook to follow, this competition is his.

Andy: The stuff he makes looks great. He seems like a really nice guy. The problem is that when he gets on camera, he has no personality. Zero. If he can find some sort of energy, he can end up being one of the last two or three. If not, he could be gone next week.

Evette: There was pretty much no doubt that she was going to be the one to go this week. Her food never looked good, she never actually showed much of the actual cooking or preparation in her segments. She also didn't take criticism well at all. She seemed to think that the reasons people critiqued anything she did was because they didn't "get" her style, when in fact she was lucky not to have been the first one eliminated. The thing that did keep her around for this long was that she has a great on-camera personality that helped counter some of the other shortcomings.

This week, the contestants were split into groups and had to perform a segment where they worked together to prepare two dishes. The two teams of men did pretty well, working together and sharing both camera time and duties. The team of two women, on the other hand, was awful. They didn't work well together, they talked about not liking some of the things they were making, and they ended up moving to opposite ends of their work area almost immediately as if it were two separate shows. The second challenge for the week had to do with multi-tasking. Each contestant was given 45 minutes to prepare for a 7-minute segment about preparing two appetizers (their own recipes, but selected by the judges). Pretty much everyone had a hard time with this, other than Guy, who never has a problem moving quickly. Nathan didn't even manage to plate his food and Evette decided that she didn't have enough time, so she would only do one. This unfortunately really defeats the purpose of trying to show that you can multi-task. In the end, Evette had to go, leaving only 5 contestants.

I enjoy this show, but I do have one final thought and that is about the host. Marc Summers. I really wish someone would call him out on a couple of things. First of all, you'd have a hard time convincing me hasn't had some serious plastic surgery. He looks like he's one nose job away from going the full Michael Jackson route. More importantly, let's not forget this is the dude from Double Dare. At some point during this show, someone needs to have the guts to tell him they'll take the physical challenge instead.

Until later...

The Homer Effect

I read this morning that the top movie in theaters this weekend was Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. It took in an estimated $70.5 million. That's an awful lot of money. What I wonder is how much of that was due to people going to see it because they found out that the Simpsons teaser was attached.

Let me explain what I mean:

I saw the first Ice Age at the theater. It was amusing in an unimpressive kind of way. I was actually pretty surprised to find out that they were making a sequel, and didn't really care if I saw it. Sure, maybe it's worth picking up at Blockbuster or from Netflix, but I'm not going to rush out to the theater to see it. No one that I had talked to really seemed that excited about this film. Then on Friday it was released, and everything changed.

Suddenly, people were going to see it and there was this buzz about it all over the internet. The problem was that no one was talking about how great the movie itself was, instead they were talking about things that happened before it even started. As soon as people started coming back and saying, "Hey I went to see Ice Age and there was a trailer for the Simpsons movie," the word spread like a rhinovirus at preschool. People who didn't care about seeing the movie read this and started thinking about going. "Sure, I don't care about Ice Age, but going to the movies is fun even when the movie is only so-so and I have to see if this is really there." Then the second batch of reports started coming in, "I had to go see if it was there, and there really was a teaser for the Simpsons movie." Now there was confirmation, and there were people who were definitely going only because of the trailer.

Did I go see it? No, but that doesn't mean I didn't think about it. In fact, it really came down to just simply not having the time to go when the only reason was that I wanted to see this trailer. As it turns out, it was on during last night's new episode of the Simpsons, so there really wasn't much of a need to rush out.

In reality, this is a great example of viral/word of mouth advertising. The Simpsons has been on for 17 years and people have been waiting for and talking about a movie for at least the last ten. The movie was one of those projects that has been discussed, but that everyone assumes will never really happen. Then all of the sudden, there is a trailer in theaters advertising the release date of July, 2007. The word spread, people acted on it, and I guess we'll have to wait until next weekend's box office numbers to see how Ice Age does on it's own without the buzz surrounding the previews. Maybe the movie is good enough to keep people coming in, or maybe we'll find out that it received a sizeable bump from a clever advertising tie-in.

Until later...