Archive for July, 2008
Intel cuts chip prices. This means cheaper computers for everyone. Interesting lawsuits over Facebook clones. iPhone 3G sold oil. Mac now number three in the race to make the most computers. They passed Acer. One-fifth of all retail spending now online. Total Internet reaches 1.5 billion users. Amazon S3 outage questions the cloud. Computer mouse not dying. CNET harping on email. Carl Icahn saga continues.
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Google buys another contextual ad firm. It’s out of Russia. AMD in the news as the company gets rid of CEO. Symantec screws its distributors. Interesting strategy. Cold fusion results rigged. Psystar selling HQ. PC shipments on the increase. Microsoft online keeps losing money. Web ad business rocky. Sun hopes to do well in Africa. gPhone back in the news. A new worm transcodes MP3’s in an effort to infect PC’s Computer mouse heading for extinction.
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As initially irritated as I was to see that there was going to be a prequel Star Trek movie made… the press that has been coming through the interwebs have successfully gotten me more and more excited for its release.
Now the Trek movie poster has found its way online …. Awesome!
Today marks the release of the quite possibly the best sequel ever made, The Dark Knight, starring [ Christian Bale ], [ Heath Ledger ], [ Aaron Eckhart ], and [ Maggie Gyllenhaal ]. In this updated version of the Batman Story, Batman and Lt. / Commissioner Gordon join forces with Gotham’s new District Attorney, Harvey Dent, to take on a psychotic criminal known as The Joker, who enlists all of the Mob families in Gotham to wreak havoc on the city, and Batman personally. Spoilers abound after the jump.
The movie starts with a bang and keeps rolling almost non-stop for the entire 2 and a half hour runtime. The best part of this movie is the choice in casting.
Heath Ledger provides a portrayal of The Joker that is simply amazing. You truly get the sense of how insane he really is, as he executes his crime without an agenda beyond the sheer joy of chaos, and watching the city burn. There is already rumor that Ledger will be nominated for the Oscar, posthumously, for this role and frankly he deserves it. So many comparisons are being made between Ledger’s Joker and Nicholson’s Joker, and personally I am not sure you can do that. Nicholson’s Joker was certainly more based on the TV series Joker which was more camp then insanity, while Ledger’s was much darker and chilling.
This movie makes us miss Heath all the more, and the movie is dedicated to the memory of Heath Ledger which was awesome, and I would love to see him win the Oscar because had he lived, he certainly would have.
Christian Bale, once again, proves that there is no other person who can adequately play the dark knight. He shows us a convincing depiction of a man who struggles with his place in Gotham. Watching him come to the realization that Harvey Dent is the true hero that Gotham needs, and recognizing that his time has come to an end works in this movie. Seeing the disappointment of the transition of Harvey Dent into Two-Face, and the near pleading case he makes to Harvey to come back from the brink was chilling. Finally, his acceptance that the city needs a scapegoat, someone that they can focus their frustrations on while at the same time he provides the kind of protection that no one else can. Bale is amazing actor, and in this film, he brings all his skill to the screen to dazzle us.
Aaron Eckhart, who until know has had little in the way of memorable roles, skillfully creates a Harvey Dent that we love, trust and eventually fear and pity. Throughout the movie, The Joker creates situations that force Dent to make impossibly difficult moral decisions, and we, as the audience, learn to trust his moral sense and are able to buy into his motto “I believe in Harvey Dent”. As fate transforms Dent into Two-Face, a bitter monster who seeks revenge for the death of Rachel Dawes, we fear and pity him at the same time.
The supporting cast, [ Morgan Freeman ] and [ Michael Caine ], also give a flawless characterization of the only two people that Bruce Wayne is willing to trust. Throughout the movie, both provide a role model for Bruce to latch onto, and keep is moral center true.
The special effects are also amazing for this movie. While providing spectacular eye-candy, they are not so pervasive that they overshadow the human element of the movie. Most amazing, perhaps, is the facial construction of Two-Face. Disturbing, disgusting, emotionally heart wrenching, and certainly not suitable for children.
The Dark Knight, is certainly the best superhero movie ever made, but beyond that, it is also one of the best crime dramas I have ever seen. In this “Comic Book” movie, you forget that is comes from a comic book. It slips past the normal distance that comic movies keep from the audience and engages us from the first scene and doesn’t let go until the end.
The Dark Knight is not a just a simple tale of good and evil. Batman poses a more complex puzzle than usual: The citizens of Gotham City struggle with despising Batman, calling him a vigilante and blaming him for the deaths of policemen and others, while at the same time realizing that without him the city would fall into even more chaos. And the Joker is more than just a villain. He’s a master manipulator who has no agenda other then chaos and the creation of moral dilemmas for his enemies.
This movie clearly defines what potential the comic genre of movies has and creates a model for all other comic movies to follow.
Run, don’t walk, to see this movie.
Microsoft’s huge revenue gain and increased profits push the stock lower. Maybe the company should figure out why. Microsoft is doing something wrong. I know what. Xbox360 best of show at E3. Who is NebuAd? They are talking to Congress whoever they are. Psystar goes back into business despite what Apple does. Tivo to put YouTube vids on TV. Wowie. EU going after Intel. White LED’s getting better.
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Looks like Microsoft may want to buy AOL now. Perhaps this is another attempt to screw Yahoo. Apple demands recall of Psystar. Apple drops cost of manufacturing for iPhone 3G. Dish Network Echostar IX should add more HD to the system. 400GB 2.5-inch drive for notebooks coming from Toshiba. AOL Spammer jailed. Calculations indicate he got one minute behind bars for each piece of junk mail sent out.
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Microsoft is actually after a patent from Yahoo. Viacom and Google decide to mask 12TB of data if Viacom actually cares. E3 the main news source. Everyone trying to get into the act. I’m distressed by GTA going on the DS machine. I don’t like the idea. Kidney stones in the news. An IT guy in San Francisco locked down a database to prevent police snooping. How common is this possibility? Ton of PR about Intel rolling out new Centrino.
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Blackberry and Palm release new phones. Apple says it bought 1 million iPhones already. EU to regulate SMS roaming charges. Netflix looks like it is going on the Xbox360. It may never work out if the Net clogs up as predicted by at least one study. Load expected to be 100X worse. Icahn and Ballmer on Yahoo deal. But it’s not their company. Yahoo will reject any offer. Xbox360 to go to 60GB. IBM reveals 8-core Power 7 chip.
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Apple iPhone 3G makes all the news. Big deal. Comcast getting grief from the FCC over throttling BitTorrent. Microsoft decides to get in bed with Carl Icahn. Great partner or bad idea? Xbox360 down to $299. Look for that vibrating controller too. Misleading solar panel article floating around. Apple MobileMe cloud craps out. That’s just peachy, yes? Konami sues Viacom over theft of intellectual property.
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Superman is faster then a speeding bullet, can leap tall buildings in a single bound and is the man of steel, but give him some kryptonite and he gets a little whiny and all the bad guys take over.
Today is the long awaited day that we finally get the iPhone 3G in hand, and currently it has been available for a total of 3 .5 hours on the east coast, and not even an hour on the west coast, and what has at&t done. They have killed the buzz. They have handed the iPhone a big block of kryptonite in the form of activation servers that can not handle the load… SHOCKING.
Remember this post [ Buy your iPhone3G online? Apple and at&t say no way! ]. In that post I reminisced back to last year when the at&t activation servers went down, because they couldn’t handle the load. I don’t want to say I told you so, especially since everyone told you so. No one should be surprised that at&t is too inept to have learned its lesson last year. No one should be shocked that iPhone sales will ONCE AGAIN be halted due to a carrier that can’t seem to pull its activation servers out of their corporates asses.
What we should be shocked by is that Steve Jobs allowed this to happen… again. Do you think that Superman would continue to partner up with Lex Luther after he had given him a big block of kryptonite? NO! So, Steve, what the hell are you doing?
You have created a worldwide race of lemmings willing to stand in line for days for a PHONE… that in itself is a masterpiece of marketing. You have proven that your company is the leader in creating fan boys. Yet, for some reason (money) you insist on forcing us to use a carrier that is so useless and so inept that it may single-handedly be the death of the iPhone.
The next big dissapointment for the lucky few that did get the 3G iPhone activated, will be the limited and frustratingly bad 3G network that at&t has, that will likely crumble under the weight of the new iPhone users.