For those that don't want to watch, the face tracking feature of the HP web cam doesn't recognize or track black faces. I hope he took the computer back.

Hope this hasn't been posted, but it's funny as hell.

This guy completely OWNS his sister on Facebook after she gets him grounded!!

Source: http://www.mediatakeout.com/2009/37659-wooooow_a_girl_snitches_on_her_brother_to_their_parents____so_dude_gets_her_back_by_putting_her_business_out_there_on_facebook.html



( The Ultimate Revenge... )

What the rules are for an Amber Alert? Turns out it's different for every state.

To activate the AMBER Alert Notification Plan in Illinois, law enforcement agencies must ensure the following criteria are met:
1. Law enforcement must confirm a child has been abducted.

2. The child must be under the age of 16 or have a proven mental or physical disability.

3. Law enforcement must believe the child is in danger of serious bodily harm or death.

4. There is enough descriptive information about the child, abductor, and/or suspect’s vehicle to believe an immediate broadcast alert will help.

http://www.amberillinois.org

I think there needs to be something in place for missing kids where abduction cannot be proven immediately.

mood: contemplative

The hype has been around for a while but I have finally caught up with the dvd of Colin - the zombie movie allegedly made for £45.
Colin has two major claims to fame. The first, as I stated is that it was made for only £45. I think this may have been a bit of a stretch. Even if everybody involved game their time for free and you dont count the cost of the camera, editing equipment or any other factors which would cost money if you had to buy from scratch, £45 is still a little hard to believe. I dont mean that to be a criticism of the film - its very good - I just doubt the figure they claim as total costs. The fact is that if they spent £4,500 making this film that would still be a massive achievement as it really does hold its own as a feature film and the makers should be proud of it whatever the costs.
The second claim to fame for Colin is probably more interesting. It has been proclaimed as the first film told from the zombie perspective. On a technicality, "I, Zombie" was a film which did this some years before but that had a very different premise as it featured an articulate man who had been infected slowly deterioration into zombie-ness. Colin by Comparison takes a man who rapidly descends into Romero style zombie-ness, and then continues his story. As far as I know it is the first film to do this and it does it very well.
The fact is this home-made film is really very good. It has a tight story and characters you empathise with and there is a good proportion of Hollywood output that cant boast that.


This week I have been mostly reading: The Samurai Film by Alain Silver

music: Spinal Tap - Break Like The Wind

Mexico City assembly legalizes same-sex marriage

By E. EDUARDO CASTILLO
Associated Press Writer
updated 23 minutes ago
Mon., Dec . 21, 2009

MEXICO CITY - Mexico City lawmakers have become the first in Latin America to legalize gay marriage.

City legislators passed the bill 39-20 on Monday with five lawmakers absent.

Gay marriage is currently allowed in only seven countries and some parts of the United States.

Leftist Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard is widely expected to sign the decision into law.

The bill calls for changing the definition of marriage in the city's civic code. Marriage is currently defined as the union of a man and a woman. The new definition will be "the free uniting of two people."

SOURCE

All,

As we press forward through the traditional holiday season it is easy to get caught up in all of the trappings, or become overwhelmed, or become grumpy in an attempt to avoid the whole affair...all perfectly acceptable feelings as far as I'm concerned. Our community has always been an amalgamation of ideas, values and personalities, and I often find it is our greatest strength and asset.

As we round out the year I just wanted to impress upon you how great a year we've had as an organization and what that means to me. For the first time ever we have had all three of our national events come in the black, all while restructuring a lot of the behind-the-scenes work; bringing on new staff in the areas of marketing, event coordinating and volunteer coordinating; taking on the National Poetry Slam entirely in-house; recovering from great financial distress...all during the worst economy most of us have ever seen in our lifetimes.

As an organization comprised of poets, SlamMasters, staff members, volunteers and executives we realized the mission of PSi in Detroit, Berkeley and West Palm Beach through our national events, and regionally through all of our local shows. As a community we have bonded together to make things happen that people said couldn't be done, and seated powerful champions into the ever-growing history of Slam. Collectively we brought poetry into places it has never been, and proved our worth in the heaviest of times. People who sit in our ranks and who have walked our path in the past have graced the White House. Poets we know and love have gone on to great academic achievement, literary success and paved the way for other poets to realize their dreams through our powerful art form. We have lost and loved and fought and at the end of the day, won...together.

These are all things that you should be proud of, that you should be proud to have been a part of. These are things that, without your direct influence at your local shows and PSI’s national-level events, may not have occurred when they did. At this time of year, when there is so much to reflect on in such harsh times, we have this - Slam - to be thankful for. We have our communities and our venues to be thankful for. We have people crafting flyers and emails and online forums to be thankful for. We have organizers and people who work doors and people who pick out door prizes to be thankful for. We have bartenders and waitresses and back-up musicians to be thankful for. And we have poems – thousands and thousands of poems – to be thankful for.

I am thankful for all of you. And I am proud of you, and I cannot wait to see what you do next year.

Your president,
Scott Woods
Columbus, Ohio

Have you done any Christmas shopping this year?

To be honest I'm not sure if this should be taken in context or not. The dutch don't have the history we have with blackface or slavery, and have made modifications to the story to make it more acceptable, ( Black Peter's are boys who were saved by St. Nick and chsoe to help him, rather than being demons that were enslaved by him) but the fact that this is still a tradition, to dress in black face leaves me with a constant cringe. What do you think ? Article: http://www.megafriday.com/2009/12/did-you-know-santa-claus-had-black.html

This is karnythia's son's cousin. She may have run away, but we don't know that for sure. The police are treating her as a runaway so there is no Amber Alert. If you have seen this girl and have any information please contact the Chicago police at (312)747-8274. Or if you are just willing to spread the link, please feel free to do so. She's a kid and we're worried about her. Thank you.

http://karnythia.livejournal.com/1448046.html
She has been found. Thanks.

mood: hopeful

Do y'all lock your doors to your homes/apartments?

I got into an interesting discussion with someone in another community about this. I grew up in cities, mainly New York, so the thought of leaving my door unlocked is laughable. She, however, can't imagine locking her door - she says she's always lived in "safe neighborhoods" and that the neighbors who locked their doors always seemed less than friendly, and that locking her door is more trouble than it's worth.

My mom always told me that the folk who thought they lived in 'safe neighborhoods' are always the first ones to go on record as saying "We never thought this could happen in our safe all-white town!" but I mean is this a cultural thing that I just don't get? How many of y'all live in small towns and don't lock your doors?

I know there has been a few recent post regarding these two but I dont believe it was nothing to do with this mag.

What timing: President Obama and Tiger Woods will appear together on the cover of the January 2010 issue of Golf Digest. It could be the most politically charged Golf Digest cover ever. Tiger is dealing with a swirl of rumors and media scrutiny after crashing his car at 2:30 a.m., his wife bashing his SUV’s window and his countless whoring.

Obama is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and trying to pass a health care bill, plus other missteps and complaints of receiving the noble peace prize. The outside cover says "10 tips Obama can take from Tiger", on the inside is a spread of players explaining “What the president can learn from the world's best golfer.” LOL Michelle will do more then bust his windows, this shit is gonna hit the fan an adulterous and a radical.

http://www.golfdigest.com/magazine/2010/01/toc


ETA: on a shallow note, here is a link to Tigers Woods Wife Outrun Game

Rules: Help Tiger escape his angry wife
by guiding his SUV through obstacles,
if you run into to many obsticles she
will catch you and whoop your ass.

http://www.break.com/games/tiger-woods-wife-outrun.html

tags: obama

This is my son's cousin. She may have run away, but we don't know that for sure. The police are treating her as a runaway so there is no Amber Alert. If you have seen this girl and have any information please contact the Chicago police at (312)747-8274. Or if you are just willing to spread the link, please feel free to do so. She's a kid and we're worried about her. Thank you.

ETA: We found her. She's okay.

Here is a trend in movies that I hate I feel like talking about to cap off the weekend: I hate when movies strangle themselves.

"Strangling" is when a movie introduces elements that it forcibly resolves to its detriment.  Example: every thing that was introduced in, oh I don't know, Avatar, had to find its way back into the movie later in some way, even when no one cared or it didn't help the story.  The old village tale, Michelle Rodriguez's entire character...you get the idea.  It's like if a coin showed up in someone's pocket it was going to get used later to deflect an energy beam that would destroy a tank and save the day. 

A lot of movies do this nowadays because they think audiences are stupid.  Many audiences are and cry when they don't get the whole story, even if it would make the movie worse.  We've simply been conditioned to want to know it all, and now, dammit, now.   And you can tell this kind of movie from its trailer with some practice.  When you see the trailer and you pretty much know not only what the film is about but how it's going to end, there is every likelihood that it's a film that's tied everything together too much, that strangled the magic out of the film.

That magic is key.  It's what keeps us going back to a film, keeps us talking about what made it cool.  It's the stuff we want to see more of but the film only gives so much and we're left writing the story in our heads the rest of the day.  You'll see what I mean when I give you this list of things in cool movies you don't know what they mean (or you can't prove its meaning) and made it a richer, better experience for all involved:

- The cause of the destruction in The Road
- What some of the ghosts in The Sixth Sense were saying
- What the Blair Witch looks like
- What the Oracle told anyone else in Morpheus's crew in The Matrix
- The cause of the scar on John Connor's face in The Terminator
- Much of The Hangover
- Why the aliens crashed on Earth in District 9; what was wrong with the ones on the ship; what happened to their leaders; why South Africa...pretty much the whole of District 9
- What Abe from Hellboy is
- What the demon looked like in Paranormal Activity (a movie I didn't like, but appreciated this much of)
- How Rorshach's mask works in Watchmen
- Whether or not Max is bad or genuinely disturbed in Where the Wild Things Are
- Much of Dark City until the last act, but even then...who knows?
- What planet the Alien alien comes from and what it must be like

This stuff is magic, things that, left to their own worlds, can leave wonder in an audience.  Kill the voice overs, don't shoot that back story about their mom...leave us something to take home.

tags: movies

Since we're talking movies anyway, how about The Road?

I needed to wash Avatar off of me, so I went to see what is probably the anti-thesis to Avatar: less than two hours, cheap by comparison, muscular acting, and largely devoid of cliche. It's a film based on the 2006 Pulitzer winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, which means I would probably never read it but I would go see a movie of it in a heartbeat. The story, such as it is, is about a man (Viggo Mortensen) who wanders a post-apocalyptic America with his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) trying to avoid cannibals, find food without resorting to said cannibalism (the high road!) and make it to the coast, where things are hopefully better.

Because I like this movie and want some of you to go see it, I won't give you any spoilers. The movie is extremely well-made, leveling strong senses of dread, fear and hopelessness with little more than acting to pull it off. Sure, there are some scenes of end-of-the-world carnage, but it's all static and dead. In most of the scenes the only thing moving are the two lead actors, and that is most of the scenes of this film. They shot some of this on New Orelans Katrina land and at Mt. Saint Helens. Desolate, son.

If you aren't into character studies like this (which is an interesting kind of film to make with a cast of unnamed characters), you might find the film kind of boring. It's not, but I must slap the wrist of the filmmakers for cutting out some of the more horrific scenes. I know they shot some of them - they admit they shot some of them - but they cut some of them because they thought it would be heavy and redundant. I assure you that while it might have been horrific, it would not have been redundant. Without that horror, there is some punch missing here. You don't need to leave it ALL up to the imagination of the audience. Give us a little juice. McCarthy did, and if it was good enough for an Oprah Book of the Month (c) selection, it's good enough for your already R-rated film.

I liked this movie a lot. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, but I would recommend it for everyone that I think reads books or that enjoys a little thinking in their films (as opposed to the friend who gushed over Avatar who I now have to scratch out of my phone book).

By the way: you could have made 15 The Roads with the money it took to make Avatar.

tags: movies, reviews

Quadruplets admitted to Yale

I hope they can put together the funding -- maybe a bulk discount? Buy three get the fourth one free? These kids sound amazing.

EDIT: I AM STUPID AND DID NOT SCROLL, FREE POST OR WHATEVER

Brittany Murphy died early this morning after she went into full cardiac arrest and could not be revived, multiple sources tell TMZ.

She was 32.

A 911 call was made at 8:00 AM from a home in Los Angeles that is listed as belonging to her husband, Simon Monjack, the Los Angeles City Fire Department tells TMZ.

We're told Murphy was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

Murphy starred in such films as "Clueless," "8 Mile," and "Don't Say a Word."

Story developing ...

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/tag/brittany+murphy/#ixzz0aG6XwwUB

1. Can I also mention the 3D glasses?

I didn't want to see this in 3D, but based on the times it was showing at the theater I was willing to go to, I got stuck watching this in 3D. I'm not sure why this cinematic option has made a comeback, but it really takes away more than it offers. If you wear glasses, then you have to wear these things on top of your glasses, and they barely fit. So you're uncomfortable. Also, the lenses are dark. So you’re seeing the film with a tint. So all of the color and detail that went into the film is cut in half by 3D glasses. The difference in lighting is staggering.

Also, the ticket costs $3 more for half the experience. Even going by myself it's more than I wanted to spend on a movie I wasn't sure I was going to like. Fortunately I had to sit next to three very talky white girls, so I never felt alone (and I point out their race only to illustrate the point that everyone talks during movies, not just black folks. White folks just use "inside voices", black folks obviously use "outside voices" and mullatos must use "trapped in the cat door voices").

2. You want a drinking game? Take a shot every time there's something in this film that was already done in another film that didn't take $300 million dollars to make, wasn't blue and wasn't by James Cameron. You'll be drunk in fifteen minutes.

3. And before someboy gets on their high horse to joust with my high horse to make the point that it's just a popcorn movie, consider this: Hollywood is in the worst economic lurch in the history of film. Production companies - the people who determine what films get made - are closing left and right or firing so much staff that they can't greenlight anything. Half of the CEOs in Hollywood have been fired or turned around in the last six months...HALF. Thanks to the gestation period of making a film, the industry is still reeling from the hiatus of the writers' strike only to be hit with economic armageddeon. Movies that have name actors in them are being cancelled. People are leaving the film industry and going to TV, not to make good art, but to survive.

What does this mean to people who aren't actors (ie. us)? This means that the only types of films Hollywood will be releasing are sequels to previously well-performing films regardless of quality (yay...another Transformers film. Whoopee.) and cheap comedies (yay...another riff on relationships by Rudd and Rogan. Whoopee). You think The Road is depressing? Find an interview with its director and see what depressing really is.

What does this have to do with Avatar? At a conservative $300 million Avatar cost twice as much as all three Lord of the Rings films. You know what else you could make with $300 million?

- 2 The Dark Knights
- 3 The Departeds
- 4 Inglorious Basterds
- 4 Surrogates (talk about avatars!)
- 5 The Matrixs
- 6 Sweeney Todds (I don't even like musicals and I liked this)
- 6 Changelings
- 8 Burn After Readings
- 9 Sevens
- 10 Million Dollar Babys
- 10 9s
- 12 Mystic Rivers
- 15 Silence of the Lambs
- 30 Dogmas

All of these films are better than Avatar.  Think about the cool scenes, the awesome dialgoue, the powerful effects...then think about Ava-fucking-tar. I would want to see more of all of these types of films (done right, not done like the clones that did indeed follow some of them). It takes an enormous amount of hubris to commit a dying industry to an enterprise like this, especially when that enterprise is wack. Cameron is a dick. He could have made any film he wanted, but opted to make a film that clogs up the coffers for anywhere from 3-4 huge budget films to 30 or more low budget films.

tags: movies

I find it impossible to spoil a movie that essentially reveals itself in a 30-second trailer, but for the crybabies out there: spoilers follow.

If Cameron did one thing in this movie that is worth noting besides spend 300 million dollars on it that one thing would be that he has made the most realistic-looking cartoon to date.

That's it. It revolutionizes movies in no other way than the CGI is extremely well done, to the point of really fine-tuned interaction with actors and the human eye. But that's it. No original plot, no serious acting, no engrossing theme, no new points to share...nothing. It is Dances With Wolves mixed with a dash of The Smurfs. The movie so blatantly relies on Dances With Wolves Cameron should be getting sued for stealing someone's story...AGAIN.*

I cannot express enough how gut-wrenchingly predictable this movie is. The dialogue is stock. The character types are stock. The casting is stock. The story arcs are stock. You have seen this movie a dozen times in the last year. It may have taken Cameron ten years to "make" this film, but it only took him ten minutes to come up with the story. He just watched Dances With Wolves, cribbed some military styles from thirty year old anime, flipped through a few issues of Heavy Metal for design notes, and shit this story out. No one dies that you don't see coming in the first twenty minutes, no one says one surprising thing, and generally the movie comes off hackneyed and boring. I already know the female alien is going to fall for the human-pretending to be an alien and that she's going to be the princess of the tribe and that the human-pretending-to-be-an-alien is going to fight against the humans who come to run the docile Native Americans off of the their oil-rich plains. You get the idea. You had the idea before you even saw the commercial. The idea came rushing back to you when you saw the 30-second trailer. You farted this idea yesterday.

How evil is this movie? This movie is Tyra Banks: a perfectly-constructed beauty designed from the follicle to entice, only to discover that all of her insides are vapid and base and empty and downright stupid. And just like having to spend two months with Tyra might start off awesome (sexually anyway. I mean really, how else?), eventually you want more. And sitting through two hours and forty minutes - TWO HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES - of this movie is like sitting across a dinner table from Tyra Banks after a couple of weeks and realizing this woman doesn't read books, doesn't know anyone who would tell her no, and has been making you do all the work in the sack so she doesn't mess up her hair...and you have a month and a half to go. The movie is a mannequin. It's too long to be dumb fun, too predictable to be good, and too empty to watch more than once no matter how impressed you are by the effects. You could skip this film entirely and get everything you might like out of it when it's on DVD. You can even use it to judge the intelligence and value systems of your friends. In fact, I encourage you to do so; it might save you some money on Christmas gifts.

So skip it.

* - Any day-one nerd already knows what I'm referring to.

tags: movies, reviews