The Last Airbender is an abomination to film making. It makes Matrix Revolutions look like The Godfather. Don’t go see it, tell your friends not to see it — don’t even wait until it comes out on DVD. Don’t waste a moment of your life on this film; you’ll thank me later. I love Avatar I am a huge fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. When I was out of work for a few weeks in 2005, I happened to land on this Nickelodeon cartoon while channel surfing.

James Cameron has made some pretty incredible movies over the past 25 years, and Avatar will end up doing for movies what the iPod did for digital music. Most of the 3D movies I’ve seen in years-past have been very gimmicky. The 3D is overbearing, and the directors seem to think it’s funny to break “The 4th wall.” Avatar is an entirely new approach to bringing 3D into films. Not only did they have to invent new technology to do the 3D film work, but the way that 3D was used in this film did a lot to enrich the experience.

If you’re a fan of Joss Whedon (Firefly, Serenity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Nathan Fillon (Firefly, Serenity), Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser M.D., How I Met Your Mother), musicals, and comedy, you should take the time to check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Doogie, I mean Barney, I mean Neil Patrick Harris plays a fantastic Dr. Horrible, who is trying to get into the “Evil League of Evil!” Nathan Fillon (who played “Captain Mal” on Firefly/Serenity) plays Captain Hammer, the shallow jerk of a superhero who steals the girl (Felicia Day) from Dr.

With all of the recent hoopla about Sony dropping the UMD format (here and here), it’s little wonder why. The reason? This Think Secret posting gives all the explanation we need: Cinemanow bills itself as “the #1 legal movie download store” and sells movies a-la-carte, but for the same price, if not higher, in some cases, than actual DVDs, killing part of the incentive for purchasing a digital download. Why would anyone want to spend more on a movie in a format that is significantly less flexible than a DVD?

Todd Dominey and I have been doing the same things recently — ripping our CD collections to MP3 and ditching the physical albums. I began ditching CD’s for MP3’s back in the [Real] Napster heyday. Back in 1999, I could see it all coming together — I could have all of my music on my computer, burn my own custom CD’s, and not have to carry around jewel cases or CD binders. I liked CD binders because they were nowhere near as bulky as jewel cases and I could organize my music better, but my CD’s always ended up getting scratched to heck.

Every summer, I usually do a write-up of all of the movies I went to go see when I was on vacation. This year, however, I didn’t go on vacation, as this was the summer when my son was born. That, and I’m a contractor right now at my current job, so I don’t get all the benefits that include vacation time. So this year, I’m going to write about the movies that I was able to see any time at all throughout the summer (they were rather sparse), and one of them was already on DVD.

I’ve looked around for shared iCalendars for my favorite TV shows, but haven’t ever been able to find them. So, I’ve decided to do exactly that. Below are links to my shared calendars for the U.S. schedules for the following shows: 24 Alias House Lost Prison Break Smallville Supernatural Veronica Mars These should work with any iCal-enabled applications, such as iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, Mozilla Calendar, Ximian Evolution, and many others. Microsoft Outlook doesn’t yet support the iCal standard.

Well, I can’t resist bragging about this. I called it… for the second year in a row. Last year, the top 32 sang in groups of 8 people per week for 4 weeks, before the group got whittled down to the top 12. In the first group of 8, the first person to sing was Diana Degarmo, and the last was Fantasia Barrino. After hearing them sing (and before I’d heard the other 24 contestants sing), I made the “official” prediction to my friends and family that 4–5 months later, Fantasia would finish #1 and Diana would finish #2.

(You’ll need to be familiar with the TV show “Alias” to understand anything in this post. If you are an Alias fan, please let me know your thoughts on Season 4 thus far.) Earlier today, I started watching the first season of Alias on DVD (again). Starting with the pilot, I found myself simply gripped by the story. Going through the first 8 or 9 episodes, and then comparing them to what we’ve been seeing on Wednesday nights, here are some of the reasons, I believe, that our much-beloved Alias is in trouble (in terms of remaining a good show, rather than being cancelled).

I love going to the movies. Unfortunately, life is usually very busy, so I never really get a chance to go to the theatre as often as I’d like. That, and movies are $10 for general admission. Absolutely ridiculous. So every year, when my wife and I go on a week-long vacation, we usually end up seeing several movies. Last year I posted about the movies I saw, and I’m doing the same thing this year. Collateral This was a “formula” movie.

First off, I don’t watch a lot of TV. The only show I even really care about is Alias. My wife watches Alias, 24, and American Idol. Over the last couple of months, I’ve gotten more and more into American Idol. After the auditions (where we all saw William Hung for the first time), I watched the very first group perform, and Diana DeGarmo and Fantasia Barrino were part of that group. They make up two of the three finalists! I remember saying to my wife and her friend that these two would be in the final three or four, and I was right.

I feel very strongly about supporting bands and musicians. I don’t, however, like supporting the record companies that try to rape them for their own greedy purposes. I came across this blog post over at Jeffrey Veen’s site, and completely agree with it. There’s a lot more that I’d like to write about this, and I’m sure I will someday soon, but until then, I’d like to post a link to this short article: So is this bad? Am I hurting the artists by “stealing” their music?

I’ve been wanting to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Unfortunately, my two-year-old can’t be taken to movies, and it’s pretty tough to find a babysitter on a Saturday night. Luckily for my wife and I, we’ve got a sitter for this weekend, so I think that we’ll go see this. I came across a review this morning for the movie, and it only reinforces my desire to go see it. First of all, it has one of the most realistic depictions of a relationship I have ever seen.

I’ve been as irritated as anything about the RIAA’s tactics and all of the crap that they’re pulling out about filesharing and other such stuff. While reading Scott Andrew this morning, he said something that I’ve felt for quite a long time about the music industry… Maybe the whole industry could stand a bit of downsizing. Reduce costs, help fight media consolidation, help niche markets thrive, produce good stuff instead of slickly packaged garbage aimed at radio. Then we’ll talk about how filesharing is hurting good people.

How many people watched the season premiere of Alias tonight? After having vanished for two years, and awakening to find absolutely everything different, Sydney (Jennifer Garner) tries to make sense of it all in the typical kick-butt way that she does. It’ll be interesting to see where the show goes from here. The show revamped itself for the better twice last season, and it seems to be doing the same thing again this season. The last show that I was interested in was Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, but it got cancelled halfway into it’s fourth season.

I saw five movies while on vacation in San Diego this past week-and-a-half. None of them sucked, but some were better than others. I will devulge some plot information here, so if you don’t want to know, then don’t read this post. Here are their reviews: Finding Nemo This was an excellent flick. The guys over at Pixar have done it again. Finding Nemo is funny, touching, and kinda yanks at those heartstrings from time to time. Ellen DeGeneres does an excellent job as the voice for “Dori”, the short-term-memory lacking fish who accompanies Nemo’s dad along the way.

I came across the Linkin Park website tonight, and stumbled across some audio tracks from their new album, “Meteora”. My favorites (that I’ve heard anyways) are “Faint”, “Somewhere I Belong”, and “Don’t Stay”. I think that those tracks stand out to me for personal reasons. Namely, one particular ex-girlfriend, whose thought makes me want to unleash an adrenaline-fueled fury of primal rage. Anyways, here are sections of lyrics of some of the songs that stand out to me: DON’T STAY