Ok, ok, so I’m not Iron Man I more closely resemble Gumby. But I did go see the newly released movie on opening night and I’ve been talking about it non stop without posting my thoughts here. Sorry for the delay but without any more waiting here is my review.

Iron Man ROCKS! The End.

So you want more? Ok…
One of my more recent movie reviews was that of another comicbookesque movie, “Jumper” and I was not too impressed (read it here). Compared to Jumper, Iron Man is one of the best movies I’ve seen over the past several months. Iron man has good acting as well as action, the special effects are great, and like all good action movies there is a good sprinkling of humor throughout.

I myself am not a film maker but I think I might be able to do it if I had the time, energy and desire to do so. Therefore take this one criticism with that in mind. Movies are more than just good looking actors and flashy special effects… movies are an art and all good art tells a story of some sort. I felt the story telling in Iron Man was a little on the slow side. The movie is long at 2 1/2 hours but that doesn’t mean it has to feel long. And really it didn’t feel that long except for after the fact when you look at the amount of time spent on the building of Suit 1 and Suit 2. The majority of the movie covers the building of the Iron Man suits. The cool action and butt kicking of Iron Man is really just a small portion of the movie. I went to the movie looking forward to seeing Iron Man do what Iron Man does and I got to see a little of that and it was AWESOME! but in the end I was left wanting for more butt kicking and less, leg bone is connected to the hip bone.

That said I still recommend this movie whole heartedly and I can’t wait to see it again.

I have recently been made aware of some shopping cart software called ashop. I have been interested in selling art through one of my sites for a while but I wasn’t really sure how to go about it. After visiting ashop I found it very easy to work with. They have a couple demo stores in which you can use the store itself and the admin back end. I shopped around the site, added and removed items from the shopping cart and edited items using the administration interface. Everything was really easy.

The site offers lots of helps including tutorial videos that will make setting up your shopping cart software a breeze. You can customize your product fields, accept different currency, and feature best selling and new products.I’m excited to see where I can use this ecommerce software service in the future. Perhaps I might start selling t-shirts.

I just finished reading the graphic novel “Shooting War” by Anthony Lappe & Dan Goldman. The story takes place in the near future of 2011 and is a story about a blogger turned reporter that is embedded with troops in the middle east. I had seen the book on the shelves at Barnes and Nobel but had not purchased it. As I was perusing my local public library last week I came across the book and decided to take it home.

I’m glad I did. The story was very interesting and suspenseful and the art is different than what most people think of when they think graphic novel. There is a melding or meshing of real world photographs and vector drawings done on the computer. I really enjoyed the art and the story and would recommend this book if you are into graphic novels and don’t mind a little adult language and content. I mean it is a book about war so what do you expect.

One of the most interesting things about the book to me was the use of product/corporation advertising. I don’t think that the authors got sponsorships to produce their book. I do believe that they were making a point about how much product placement we have right now in our television and movies, and they have imagined how bad it will be in a few years time when this story is based.

And for all you web savy geeks out there, the authors have put in several web references as the main character is a blogger so he needs to use cool web services. Here a a few that I can remember from the book: Treehugger, Huffington Post, Flickr and youtube. Jimmy (the main character) also uses an apple laptop featuring Apple Quicktime, Google Earth, and FireFox with google images as his default search. This book is full of techie hidden gems just waiting for you to discover along with the great art and story.

Jumper has to be one of my most anticipated movies of 2008 so I was very excited when the wife wanted to go see it on opening night. For an hour and a half I was not too disappointed but the ending was ruined the whole movie.

Hayden Christensen plays the lead, “David Rice”, and acted about as well as he did in Star Wars. Although it almost worked well in this movie because his character was supposed to be clueless. It would have been cheeper to put some pants on a piece of lumber and give it the lead role. I went into the movie thinking this was a single movie not a new franchise of movies. Throughout the entire movie I was extremely frustrated by the lack of backstory and information given. The story is so intriguing and yet all we get to see are the exciting action/special effects scenes (which are totally cool) but I have no why they are happening. At the end of the movie you realize this is just a 2 hour teaser for the next installment.

There is a character that is used to fill us in on the backstory but he isn’t very forth coming with the information and just comes across as a cocky Brit that gets extremely annoyed if he has to share any information about the origins of the Jumpers and those trying to kill the Jumpers.

Then there is small story line about David’s (Christensen) mother that really doesn’t add anything to the movie except lead to a greater story line that can’t be addressed in this movie. I don’t have a problem with franchise movies they can be fun but they do tend to wear thin if the acting and story aren’t great. This is going to be a problem with this series (if it even makes a series). The first movie has to be great for the studios to make a second and so on. This movie could have been great but it wasn’t. Special effects are only effective if they are used to accent/enhance the actors performance. The problem here is that as cool as the special effects were, Hayden Christensen is not a good enough actor to warrant working with these special effects. They were wasted. This movie will do okay in the theater but I doubt it will do well enough for a 2nd installment.

With piss poor acting and a story that has so many loose ends it looks like a curious kitten got a hold of your favorite Christmas sweater, this franchise does not stand a chance. Which in my opinion is too bad because there is a lot of potential in the story. So, sure go see it but, maybe wait until it hits the cheap theater or as a Matinee. The special effects make it a fun theater viewing experience.

Me.dium is a new way to browse the web. This is a website/service and a Firefox/Flock extension. What Me.dium does is gives you a visual representation of your web browsing and if you have friends that are also on Me.dium you can follow each other around the web and surf together. I just found it today and I haven’t spent too much time with it but I could see it being fun. The web has become such a vital and integral part of how we find information and entertainment. This tool helps in finding similar information to what we are looking for and makes it easy to share this information with your friends. This all via a built in chat client… this could be very fun for example while browsing blogs, Digg, or YouTube and sharing the cool stuff you find in real time with your friends.

You can also use this to see other Me.dium users that are browsing the same page as you are. I’m sure there are many more uses than I can see so far but it does look interesting. Check it out and if you sign up (it’s free like all good web 2.0) add me and we can try this thing out.

start here http://me.dum.com/about for more information.

Blogged with Flock

This weekend I was able to catch a couple movies I’ve been wanting to see for a while. One just came out but I’ve been excited to see it and the other was just released on DVD and I had missed it in the theaters.

My wife and I went and saw “Sweeney Todd” in the theater. And I was really kind of let down. It seemed like a typical Tim Burton film. There was little to know creative license taken with this musical. For me the bar was set with “Moulin Rouge” and few have even come close to that status. There was so much potential for this film to exceed my expectations, but none of the opportunities were capitalized on. Burton teased with some of those ideas in the opening credits but nothing seemed fully realized. I think that a much more stylized look and approach would have added greatly to the movie. I feel this is needed because the movie is rather long and the music isn’t all that great. The performances were well done and their voices were pretty good but the songs/music were just so so. I lost interest very soon into the film and without any visual interest I was just bored by the end.

We also rented the film “Eastern Promises” this weekend and all I have to say is WOW! This film was great. This is a mafia movie but not like any other Mafia movie I’ve ever seen. It was shot well, the acting was phenomenal and the gritty realism made you think that this could have really happened. I hate it when a movie is so over the top or the dialogue is so bad that you can’t imagine the story actually happening. The movie is rated R and for good reason but I do still recommend this film to any adults that like good movies.

For all you music lovers out there I’d like to introduce you to a new beta software that may make finding new music easier. The software is “Songbird” and you can get it over at http://www.songbirdnest.com.

Songbird is a mash-up of sorts, it is built on the mozilla/firefox browser, a built-in RSS Feed reader, and a media player. Here is an example of how it works:

So you have found a website or blog that reviews new music and has links to mp3’s to listen to and you want to be able to grab these songs automatically without having to click on each link individually. On a mac you could do this with an automator workflow but with Songbird you can download only the ones you want or all an listen to them right there. If it’s a blog you can subscribe to the feed in Songbird and download the songs automatically as the feed gets updated.

I’ve just spent a little time with this application and I’m sure it does more than I know about and the fact that it is still in beta means it will only get better with time. I’ve been working on a automator workflow that will take the downloaded songs and import them into itunes automatically, tag them with “new music” (or something), add them to a playlist and have it sync to my ipod. But I’m still working on that part. I can’t seem to get the songs into itunes automatically. I have run the workflow on selected files currently.

Anyway, check out Songbird and let me know what you think.

Let me preface this by saying, I am not a parent yet (Lord willing we will be someday). But I view parenting as a 24hr a day active endeavor. There has been a good sized uproar about the movie “The Golden Compass” by the “Christian” community. People are being warned to not take their children to see this movie. The movie might suck and be not worth seeing, as it appears this movie may be, according to several reviews I’ve read. In my opinion that may be one of the few reasons to not see the movie. Not because the movie propagates ideas you do not agree with.

It is my understanding that the movie is based on a trilogy of books that I have not read either but the author has a sharp distaste for God and the church. Depending on his understanding and experience with Christians I could see how a negative idea is a reasonable response. But that does not mean that the books or the movie are inappropriate for our children. I am of the opinion that experiencing things we don’t agree with helps us view the world from another perspective and can help solidify the things we do believe. This opens up some great teaching moments for parents and an opportunity to have a great discussion with their kids. Why as a parent would you want to hide from an opportunity like that? Again I am not a parent but parenting is a beautiful thing and watching and helping children form their own worldview is a exciting and frightening experience to be apart of.

I’m going to go see the movie as soon as I can so that I may have a better understanding of this whole deal.

Last night was the David Bazan show at the Neurolux. Good Show, Good Show! I have only been a fan of David Bazan or his previous band “Pedro the Lion” for about 2 years. But have known of him for about 10. I must say he is a great songwriter and he has an awesome voice.

This show was good. I think he would have been better with a band but it was interested to see him by himself with only an electric guitar. He played several new songs and several older more familiar songs. He even played a Christmas song.

But I would have to say that the opening act (didn’t catch his name) was the highlight for me. This guy was amazing. His voice was like a combination of “Band of Horses” and “Devendra Banhart“. I loved it although I was very tired and could have fallen asleep at any moment.

A couple weeks ago my wife and I decided to go see the new political/war drama “Lions for Lambs”. I was a little leery at first because of how most movies seem to have an agenda. I thought that this movie would be all about how bad the war is and how we should be getting our troops out. Most of these ideas came from the fact that the movie stars both Tom Cruise and Robert Redford.

I don’t have a problem with people expressing their opinions but right now we don’t have a shortage of hollywood types sharing their so called expert opinions. To my surprise this movie was very unbiassed. Most if not all the sides of the issue are represented and are given the same weight in the story. No one opinion seems to be overtly pushy.

I think all adults should see this movie, it is very helpful in seeing other points of view on this issue. In the United States we are not very good listeners. People seem to have their opinions and don’t care about how anyone else see’s the world. That behavior hurts us internally as a country and on the world stage. Other country’s see us as a snotty teen ager that thinks they know all there is to know.

Learn to listen to each other. Learn to respect each other. You don’t know everything and you never will. If nothing else sit in a theatre and watch this movie and have them show you all the differing points of view. Having an open mind isn’t going to hurt you.