MichaelandChrissy.com

Happy New Year to all of our friends and family!  Let us know your New Year’s resolutions so that we can make fun of you for skipping out on them in a month!  I’ve resolved to lose that last ten pounds and to resume learning Japanese, so wish me luck.  Chrissy has resolved not to resolve anymore.

I stopped going out on New Year’s Eve years ago, once I figured out that I didn’t like the bar scene.  Chrissy is the same way, so we’ve spent several of the last ten or so years sleeping through the countdown (only to be woken up by small arms fire just after midnight).  Sure signs of getting old…

We decided to stay up for the New Year tonight though.  Felice is going to hang out with us.  I finally got my Sony Blu-Ray player set up and working with the surround sound so that we can watch movies while we wait.  We’ve got “The Happening“, which I’ve wanted to see for a while, and “Eagle Eye” in HD.

We’ve got a few bottles of wine, including a bottle of Inniskillin Ice Wine (2006) to uncork at midnight, and a chocolate cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory.  Chrissy also made several dozen of her chocolate-chip cookies (so much for losing that ten pounds).  It should be a fun night!

I love to watch anime while feeding Gavin at night.  It’s the perfect time for a guilty pleasure.  With an exhausted Chrissy asleep by 8 PM, it was usually just me and Gavin up at ten, midnight, and later for feedings.  He would need a bottle roughly every two or three hours.  What else can you do while feeding the baby but watch TV?  I had a lot of anime coming through my Netflix queue, and I would intermittently watch an hour or two a night while taking care of Gavin.

Netflix has a really good selection of anime.  I watched the entire multi-disc series of Black Lagoon (12 eps), RoD The TV (26 eps), Hellsing (13 eps), Haibane-Renmei (13 eps), and Noir (26 eps) during Gavin’s first few months.  I sometimes watched whole movies, including Vexille, Blue Gender, and MD Geist.  There’s also some good anime on cable nowadays.  I’ve been watching weekly episodes of Hellgirl, Gunslinger Girl and Gundam 00 on my DVR lately.  I really enjoy anime, but I don’t think I’ll get to watch as much anymore.

The problem is that Gavin is almost sleeping through the night.  Now that the night-time feedings are dwindling, I have a lot less time for anime.  Once I went back to work after paternal leave, Chrissy took over weekday nightly feedings.  That left me with nights between 8 PM and midnight, and weekends.  Viewings were further curtailed as Gavin has required fewer bottles (and slept longer) in the last few weeks, but it’ll be a lot harder to find downtime for cartoons soon.  I suppose that I could just wake up at 2 AM to watch anime (without the feeding part), but I really like sleep too…

I’ve been reading the Watchmen comic books, since there’s a movie coming out soon.  I saw the trailer during “The Dark Knight” last weekend, and had no idea who any of the characters were. Apparently, I took a hit to my geek cred because I’ve never read the series, which collectively is regarded as one of the best graphic novels ever.  Time Magazine even recognized it as one of the “100 Best English-Language Novels”.  Not bad for a comic book!

I’m about three issues into the twelve, and it’s an interesting story.  Watchmen may have been the first title to delve into the human flaws that exist in people, especially costumed avengers (a common practice among today’s anti-heroes in comics).   If masked adventurers protected the public, wouldn’t it be possible that one or two would be alcoholics or sociopathic killers?  Watchmen goes into these details, across two generations of heroes, while contrasting them against the changing times of America over the decades.

I especially like the metafiction that accompanies each chapter.   The first three end with printed excerpts from the memoirs of the first “Nite Owl”, previously retired. His book, “Under the Hood“, is a tell-all of the personal lives of his crime-fighting group, the “Minutemen”, which disbanded in 1947.  He describes his childhood and upbringing, then his break into crime-fighting outside of the law.  This helps to flesh out the character beyond the confines of the plot of the comic.

“Under the Hood“, fictional in real life but non-fictional in the Watchmen universe, also outlines how the political climate of America changed over time.  It goes from loving costumed heroes in the 40’s to loathing them as vigilantes in the 50’s, how it loops back again to the point where new crime-fighters appear in the 60’s.  And then back again when declining public sentiment causes the government to outlaw them in 1977.  Oh, and America won the Vietnam war and Nixon served five terms as president.

Now that I’m caught up on the back story, I’m looking forward to seeing the Watchmen movie when it comes out in March of 2009.  I’m also looking forward to finishing the series.  I’ve always enjoyed comic books, so I’m surprised that I’ve never read this one.  Probably because it was a DC title and the characters were not included in an ongoing canon (that would make them easy for me to skip).  Similar to “300″, I’d like to see how they adapt this comic to the big screen, and by that I mean IMAX.

Netflix has a star-based ratings system that goes from one to five, one being that you hated a particular movie, and five being that you loved that movie.  That sounds pretty straightforward, but it’s very subjective.  I doubt that most people put a lot of thought into this.  They see a good movie that kept them entertained for an hour while they enjoyed their popcorn, and immediately throw five stars at it. Will they even remember the plot tomorrow?  No?  Then don’t give it five stars!  They should give it three stars, to show that they enjoyed it, but it didn’t change their life.

Here is how Netflix suggests that you rate movies:

1. Hated it
2. Didn’t like it
3. Liked it
4. Really liked it
5. Loved it

That’s all well and good, but I am more objective in my ratings system.  Granted, whether or not I liked a movie is entirely subjective to me, but I try to rate each movie on the same scale.  Few titles will get five stars from me.  To get five stars, I would want to own that movie.  Keep in mind that I have a small, very particular, DVD collection made up of movies that have moved me.  I rarely watch the same movie twice.  No time for that.  I’d have to really like a movie to see it a second time, even on DVD.

Here is how I judge Netflix movies:

1. Shouldn’t be watched by anyone, ever
2. Didn’t enjoy it
3. Enjoyed it, might remember the plot tomorrow
4. Would recommend it to friends, might watch a second time
5. Near and dear to me, would buy it for my own DVD collection

While grading students in my class at Indiana University, I asked my mentor professor if it was normal to give “A”s to everyone in class.  He told me that grades should ideally be distributed in a bell curve, with a few students getting As at the bottom of the curve, more getting Bs as you go up, the majority getting Cs at the top of the curve, then back down the curve to Ds, and just a few getting Fs at the bottom again.  The ratio of As to Fs should be relatively equal, as should the ratio of Bs to Ds.  There are benefits to this type of grading system, but there are also shortcomings.

I don’t generally grade this way in my classes (most people get As, with a few slackers getting Bs, and the one kid who never shows up gets an F).  However, I think that the bell curve distribution is useful to keep in mind while rating movies.  You can’t quote every movie word-for-word (five stars), and you won’t walk out of every movie in disgust (one star).  In fact, the majority of the movies that I’ve rated on Netflix have gotten three stars.  Unrealistic movie ratings would throw off the curve.  I wish that more people would adopt a more solid method for rating on Netflix.

The theater got pretty full at the “Death Note” live-action movie, since it was limited-release and only had two showings. I was surprised at how friendly and talkative everyone in the audience was.  I had a nice conversation concerning Japanese horror cinema with the couple in front of me. They were 15.  The entire audience was mostly teens, but some had brought their parents with them.  The parents that weren’t in attendance were all waiting outside in their cars.  I noticed a lot of cars running in the parking lot, with older faces scanning the crowd coming out of the theater.

So the question becomes: Am I too old to be there?  I’ve always loved 80’s cartoons, especially Transformers, because that’s what I watched when I was 12.  I discovered anime in college, and I’ve seen a lot of Japanese animation and J-Horror videos since then.  I dig giant robots.  But I’ve never interacted with the fan base, as I do with Transformers.  I really like anime, but I didn’t know that the core audience is too young to drive yet.  Technically, I’m old enough to be their father. It makes me think twice about attending an anime convention, but maybe I’m just being silly?

I don’t get this impression when I go to Botcon, since it’s full of other adult enthusiasts.  I suppose that I shouldn’t let it bother me.  I’ve currently got the last five episodes of “Blood Plus“, four episodes of “Death Note”, and three episodes of “Witchblade” on my DVR, waiting for my spare time.  Netflix is shipping me “Appleseed: Ex Machina” today, and there are several other sets in my queue.  I guess that if I’m not too old to play with my toys, then it’s OK if I watch Japanese cartoons every now and then. 

I went to see the Death Note live-action movie on Tuesday night. It was pretty good, and followed the storyline of the animated series closely (skipping over bits to cut down on run time). The CGI was used sparingly, which is not surprising for a Japanese release. The special effects were mostly used for the scenes with “Ryuk“, the God of Death, but there was also the ubiquitous follow the flying bullet shot. The movie emphasized Light’s utter ruthlessness more than the anime.  If you thought that Light could be a sociopathic murdering genius, then the movie confirms your suspicions.

The movie didn’t cover nearly as much of the story as I thought it would, only up until episode 9, since the end of the movie saw the first meeting between “Light Yagami” and “L“.  I think that the sequel will need to follow the manga (comic book) version of the story instead of the anime.  First, the anime has way too many episodes to cover them nine as a time.  Second, the manga has a final confrontation between L’s group and Light, whereas the anime goes on after L is defeated. One of them is going to have to die in the sequel, so I’m betting that the manga version will play out.

Everybody in the world saw the new ”Iron Man” movie before I did, and it was unanimously decided that it was great.  Normally, I wouldn’t go to see a movie at a theater, because I hate theaters, but I was persuaded by the chorus of excellent reviews from my peers.  And it turns out that we were both right: Iron Man is a great movie, and there is no reason good enough to attend a movie theater. 

I’ve been watching this anime called “Death Note” for a while now, and I really like it. It’s about this college student, Light Yagami, who suddenly finds a way to kill people only by writing their names in a notebook. He’s a certified genius, so his master plan is to use the notebook to wipe out all criminals, thus creating a Utopia in Japan, with himself as the ruler. The notebook is actually a Death Note, which are normally carried by “Gods of Death” in the spirit-world. Once Light activates the Death Note, he inherits himself a God of Death, “Ryuk”, who walks him through the myriad rules associated with the Death Note. The plot actually gets pretty deep, and there are lots of twists and turns along the way.

What I didn’t know is that there was a live-action Death Note movie made in Japan in 2006. This would seem like the kind of thing that would go straight to video here in the States, but it turns out that it is making a limited run at select theaters. I watched the movie trailer online and it looks like they might be able to pull it off. I believe that this one will be a set-up for “Death Note 2″, giving this one a cliffhanger ending, but I’m still interested to see how closely the movie follows the anime. Luckily, the limited run is in English, and it sounds like the voice actors from the American version of the TV show did the dubbing. It will be at the Showplace 12 in Schererville on Tuesday and Wednesday only, so I think that I’ll be going.

Even though the “Stargate: SG1″ series ended last year in its tenth season, the franchise is not yet dead.  MGM is bringing back the cast from Season 10 for two direct-to-video movies.  The first, “The Ark of Truth“, is due out in March of this year, and will show how the Ori are finally defeated.  Early reviews from leaked preview copies say that the pacing is too fast and the ending is lame.  Let’s hope that the editing team has time to clean it up before March. 

The second movie, “Continuum” will be a stand-alone entity.  Hopefully, this will be the finale that Stargate deserves, wrapping up the older storylines and putting a cap on the show.  I’m not sure if we’ll see any of these on the Sci-Fi Channel, but I wouldn’t doubt it.   It would be a fitting close for SG1.  At least we won’t be losing Amanda Tapping for a while, since she’s still making small appearances on “Stargate: Atlantis”.

I was really looking forward to seeing the new AVP movie, “requiem”.  I saw the “Red Band” trailer on the Internet, and the sequel seemed to have everything that the first movie lacked (a budget, creative killing, and an “R” rating).  Well, before I ran out to put money down, I wanted to read the reviews to see if it was worth the wait for the sequel.  Apparently, it wasn’t, so I didn’t bother to see it. 

However, while browsing for film reviews, I ran into news of an old “Predator” 3 script.  Some people hailed it as the perfect Predator film, bringing back both Schaefer (Schwarzenegger from “Predator”) and Harrigan (Glover from “Predator 2″) to fight a whole horde of Predators.  “Well, this must surely kick ass,” thought I, and immediately went out to find that script.  I found out that there were four of them out there, but only the last one was available for download.  I’ve enjoyed the Predator franchise in all its forms over the years, so I figured that there must have been some gross tragedy of justice that a third Predator film was scrapped over the appalling AvP movies. 

I read the script.  It was 109 pages of awful.  I can barely put into words how awful.  But I’ll try: if you ate the script for “Predator” (the first one), “Aliens” (the second one) and “ID4″, washed it down with Castor oil, and then vomited it all up into another script, you would then have made yourself Predator 3.  I kid you not.  The script takes the beginning of Predator, relocated to the jungles of Iraq (I didn’t know they had rainforests in Iraq), then mixes in the tail end of Aliens with a Predator King and his army of minions, and wraps up with an ending torn directly from ID4.   To wit, all the world’s governments vote to create a single Air Force to defeat the Predator mother ship, but not before the Predators storm the Pentagon in order to kidnap the leading man’s girlfriend (they missed her in Iraq, so she’s important or something).  The dialog is, at best, 1980’s one-liners straight out of “Commando”, and at worst, it’s wholesale straight-to-Sci-Fi-channel line butchery. 

To be fair, the script that I downloaded was not the only script to be offered up to Hollywood.  The others are listed on the download page as well.  The first script listed on the site sounded promising, but would end up being “Starship Troopers 2″ all over again.  The second one, “Deadlier of the Species”, sounds better, but Schwarzenegger would never star in another Predator film (hey, Stallone did another “Rambo”, so who knows?).  Lastly, anything done by Robert Rodriguez would be awesome, but he said in 2004 that his treatment, “Predators”, was given the red-light due to budget constraints.  I guess we’ll never see another Predator movie.