Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Nifty McNiftington's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Friday, July 10th, 2009
4:32 pm	Five Second Movie Reviews 7/3 - 7/10 Going to Vegas last week kept me from writing these. But I won money in Vegas, instead of losing it to a crappy movie, so hooray for me. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs: You know, I honestly can't remember if I saw the second Ice Age movie or not. This third one will be even more forgettable, with the only notable feature being them getting the timeline off by 65 million years. Public Enemies: Pretty looking, but not much story or character. Worth a video rental. Bruno: Sasha Baron Cohen is a dick. I don't get why people want to watch him be an incredible asshole to unsuspecting schmoes while wearing blackface gayface. I thought Borat was just boring, and I don't have the slightest interest in seeing an inferior follow-up. I Love You Beth Cooper: A boring lame knockoff of Judd Apatow movies with no story and an episodic jumble of scenes that don't even stand up on their own. On the bright side, Harry Potter 6 comes out next week. I'm looking forward to that, even though it was my least favorite of the books. The book was 600 pages of nothing happening followed by 50 excellent pages. I think compressing that into a movie will improve it significantly. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
2:20 pm	Facebook Help Since I'm a newbie on Facebook (or at least a newbie when it comes to actually using it), I was hoping some of ye could help me out with something. Does the Facebook newsfeed have something analogous to LJ's default view? I have enough Facebook friends and check it infrequently enough that it's not possible to keep up with everything, so I'm sure I'm missing lots of interesting stuff. But a lot of what takes up space is stuff don't care about that I could easily exclude if Facebook let me. Two things I'm looking for: 1. I want to be able to exclude certain people from my newsfeed. I'm happy to accept the friend requests from my fourth grade teacher or some dude who used to work at the same company as me who I've never actually spoken with. (These are real examples.) But I don't care about what they're doing or have to say, and don't want their crap pushing interesting updates from people I do care about off the bottom of my feed. (Or past my willingness to go back and read older posts.) 2. I want to exclude any notices from certain applications. I don't care about anyone's results on the "What brand of tampon are you?" quiz, or what anyone is doing in Mafia Wars. On the other hand, I don't want to exclude *all* applications, or limit the news feed to real status updates. Sometimes people post interesting pictures, or other application-related things that I do want to see. Since I wouldn't be able to define this in advance, I want a big obvious button to appear in my newsfeed next to each application-related update saying "Never show me updates from this application again." Because so many people use Facebook, it's so customizable, and these seem like pretty obvious features that people would want, I assume there's a reasonably simply way to do them. I'm just hoping some of you Facebook experts can point me to how. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
5:22 pm	Media News Spews All Over Your Screen I Am Number Four "Involves nine alien teens assimilating to high school on Earth after their planet is destroyed by an enemy species. The fourth of the group discovers that the enemy is now after him on Earth." Directed by Michael Bay, and from a soon-to-be-published book written James Frey, who's known for writing a fraudulent memoir and then getting pimp-slapped by Oprah. Put Yourself in Movie Scenes A new game is coming out called YooStar, which lets you insert yourself into famous movie scenes. Kind of like karaoke or Guitar Hero with movies. The system will include a camera, green screen, microphones, and a few clips for $170, with additional clips available for download at $0.99 to $3.99. That seems like an interesting idea, but also pretty pricey. And I don't see how this would have the same replayability as Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Once you've acted in a scene, are you going to want to do it over and over again? (Maybe professional actors would, but Rock Band is fun for a lot of people who aren't professional musicians.) And $3.99 is the price of a new release VOD rental, so that's pretty excessive for a single clip. License to Steal About high-end repo men, who repossess luxury yachts and airplanes and stuff. Sounds like it could be fun. License to Steal: The Reality Show A reality show about the real company that inspired the movie above. From the Executive Producer of Dirty Jobs. Also sounds like it could be fun. Yet Another Remake: An American Werewolf in London The King of Sting "Tells of the author's 20-year exploits canvassing the country posing as an undercover narcotics agent and pocketing money from stings. Glazer and a partner were so adept at conning victims that the Kansas City Police Department hired them to conduct real stings." Classic TV Porn Hustler will release porn movies based on Star Trek, The Cosbys, I Love Lucy, Happy Days, Gilligan's Island, The Partridge Family, and The Brady Bunch, along with current reality shows like Keeping up With the Kardashians and Hell's Kitchen. Yet Another TV Show Remake: Alien Nation This isn't actually a terrible idea. It's being executive produced by Firefly vet Tim Minear, and Sci-Fi Channel did a good job with Battlestar Galactica. On the other hand, it's no longer the Sci-Fi Channel. Now it's the SyFy Channel, which is ridiculous. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
1:17 pm	Breaking News: Michael Jackson is Still Dead Dear CNN, I get that a lot of people care about Michael Jackson. Personally I think of him as that weird dude who performed some decent songs in the 80s and may or may not have been a child molestor, but I understand that he was more than that to many of your audience. However, you do not need to send out breaking news alerts to tell me that his coffin arrived at the memorial service, that the memorial started, or for each time a family member says nice things about him. I think I can fairly accurately predict that he will continue to be dead for the entire service and beyond. Unless that changes and he starts doing the zombie moonwalk, you do not need to repeatedly alert me to the fact that there's a memorial service happening at the memorial service. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
12:52 pm	Confession I like Asher Roth's latest album a lot more than Eminem's. I'm just that white. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
11:42 am	Vegas Elicia and I (and neotony) will be in Vegas Thursday evening to Saturday evening. We don't have specific plans, except for gamblin', drinking, debauchery, and probably seeing a show on Thursday night. If you'll be in town then (I'm looking at you, Free Minds people) and are interested in debauching with us, let me know. On a related note, Firefox's spellchecker recognizes debauching as a word, which is odd because I thought I just made that up. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
10:24 am	Bad Idea McGee I know it's only Monday, but I just saw the worst idea I've seen all week. I was getting coffee at 7-11, and the dude in front of me was buying a can of Bud Light mixed with Clamato. Seriously. Anheiser Busch sells that, and people buy it. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
10:36 pm	Waste Lots of Time With Flickchart Today I discovered an interesting website called Flickchart. It repeatedly asks you to pick which you prefer between two movies (you can skip ones you haven't seen), and uses that to compile a listing of your favorite movies. And I think after you use it enough, it will start spitting out recommendations based on neural net processing. It's entertaining, and it's easy to lose a lot of time on it. "Oh, I'll just rank one more movie..." One downside is that it does take a while to learn. Since it uses binary choices, it doesn't really know the difference between "This movie is awesome" and "This movie is marginally less terrible than the other choice." If a movie just happens to be paired with dreadful alternatives two or three times, Flickchart gets really confused. I'm sure it will get better eventually, but after 281 picks, it thinks my number 2, 3, and 7 movies of all time are True Lies, The Fifth Element, and Mission Impossible. I like those movies well enough, but I don't think I'd put any of them in my top 50. Number 5 and 8 are The Godfather 2 and The Return of the King, two movies that I think are horribly overrated and wouldn't say I like at all. And number 11 is Face/Off. WTF? Meanwhile, Star Wars, my actual favorite movie, is currently ranked at number 79. That's below Star Wars Episodes 1 and 2, both of which sucked out loud. (It lists my number 1 movie as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. That's not a horrible choice - I'd definitely put that in my top 10 or 15. And #4 is The Princess Bride, which I would list as number 3, behind Raiders of the Lost Ark.) The site's currently in beta, but instead of using an invite code you can go to the super-secret registration link here. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
11:38 am	A solution to the financial crisis If only he had sold that book to the government... (Comment on this)
Friday, June 26th, 2009
1:44 pm	Media News In Your Trousers Lots of people spooge over 24 minutes of Avatar footage It's been 12 years since James Cameron has made a movie, and he personally has a better track record than Pixar. You better believe I'm excited about this. Hollywood people are shocked and appalled that Transformers 2 contains a minor criticism of Obama I haven't seen Transformers 2 yet, and plan to wait for video, so I can't confirm if this is true. But it amuses me that after approximately seventeen-brazilian movies, TV shows, plays, comic books, toys, breakfast cereals, etc. insulted George W. Bush over the last 10 years, it's considered completely stunning for a movie to criticize the President when he's a Democrat. Oscars to have 10 best picture nominees This is a desperate attempt to make the Oscars more relevant, as they keep nominating movies nobody has seen or cares about. So maybe if there are more nominees, there's a better chance the audience will find a reason to give a crap. Of course this ignores the root problems: That Hollywood has stopped producing movies of substance that are worthwhile for audiences to see, and that the Academy is a bunch of pretentious douches that has contempt for movies that anyone would enjoy. Buried Ryan Reynolds gets buried alive. But it's about the Iraq war, which means it's pretty much guaranteed to be terrible. Yet Another Totally Unnecessary Sequel: Hitman 2</> Yet Another Videogame Movie: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune: The Exact Same Movie as National Treasure, only with mutant Nazis Michael Jackson scene removed from Bruno The scene in question involves Sascha Baron Cohen being a dick to LaToya Jackson and asking uncomfortable questions about her brother. I don't really have a comment on this decision, except to point out this one ridiculous quote from the article: "the studio clearly wanted to avoid even the perception of poor taste at any cost." If they wanted to avoid the perception of poor taste, they probably shouldn't be releasing a Bruno movie. Relatedly, I can't wait for this obnoxious piece of crap to come out. Not because I have the slightest interest in seeing it, but because that means I'll soon stop seeing all the annoying commercials, billboards, promotional stunts, etc. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
12:51 pm	Five-Second Movie Reviews 6/26/09 Away We Go: Look how quirky and dysfunctional we are! Get it? We're quirky and dysfunctional, and we're going to beat you over the head with it and not bother with a plot. In fact, we're so quirky and dysfunctional that we're smug at how our quirkiness and dysfunctionality makes us superior to any sane decent human being. My Sister's Keeper: A depressing melodrama that, shockingly enough, is depressing and melodramatic. Transformers 2: An incoherent attempt to cash in on the first movie that contains absolutely nothing to offer anyone who's already seen the first movie. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
12:04 pm	I'm amused that I read/posted about this at work Study Finds Working At Work Improves Productivity WASHINGTON, DC—According to a groundbreaking new study by the Department of Labor, working—the physical act of engaging in a productive job-related activity—may greatly increase the amount of work accomplished during the workday, especially when compared with the more common practices of wasting time and not working. "Our findings are astounding: By simply sitting down and doing work, employees can dramatically increase their output of goods and services," said Deputy Undersecretary of Labor Charlotte Ponticelli, who authored the report. "In fact, 'working' may revolutionize the way people work." Perhaps even more shocking, the study reveals that not working significantly decreases worker productivity, sometimes even resulting in no work getting done at all. Similar findings were reported in the areas of avoiding work, putting off work, complaining about work instead of actually working, pretending to work, and fucking around. "Fucking around is in fact detrimental to the work process," the study reads in part. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
7:47 pm	Twitter McGeezax I'm now on twitter. If you know my last name, follow me at stevem[my last name]. If you don't know my last name, I guess you should cry at missing out on my bon mots. (Comment on this)
7:14 pm	Media News McFooington Once Upon a Time "Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty must join together to go in search of their missing husbands, the Charming Brothers, and save the kingdom in the process." Boo U. "The story line centers on a ghost who is bad at his job and must return to ghost school." Yet Another Remake: Footloose One Less Plot-Free Movie: Moneyball gets scrapped Michael Bay whines about Paramount's marketing He's upset that Paramount failed to make Transformers 2 a big event. Because that's entirely the fault of Paramount's marketing department, and has nothing to do with the fact that the movies a big steaming turd of a retread that has nothing to offer. Go Mutants "set in a high school where all of the tropes from classic 1950s alien invasion movies came true. Years later, the children of those mutant creatures have assimilated among the other kids." Facebook: The Movie: Directed by David Fincher This isn't as stupid as it sounds at first. It's actually about the founding of Facebook. I could see that as a decent movie, along the lines of The Pirates of Silicon Valley. According to Slashfilm, this is an adaptation of an upcoming Ben Mezrich book. Mezrich wrote Bringing Down the House, which was adapted into the inferior movie 21. (The book wasn't related to the Queen Latifah movie of the same name.) (10 Comments |Comment on this)
7:09 pm	Hey look, a friend of mine has a script moving into production I was reading through media news stories, writing up my round-up, when I saw a story about a movie called Unpopular. I thought to myself, "Huh, my friend Kenny was working on a script with that title back in film school." Then I read a little further in the article, and saw that it was in fact Kenny's script. Kenny had already had the most success of anyone I knew in the three years since film school, having written a couple episodes of a short-lived cable TV series. But setting up a feature film that's actually moving into production is a big step beyond that, so that's awesome for him. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
1:43 pm	Transformers 2 Massawyrm, my favorite movie reviewer who's not me, loathed the new Transformers movie. He said there are two characters who are worse than Jar Jar Binks, if such a thing is even possible. Note that he gave a glowing review to the first movie, and likes Michael Bay films for what they are. Personally, I thought Transformers was the third best movie of 2007, and delivered on all that I was hoping for. But I'm not remotely excited about the sequel. The first movie showed me something I had never seen before: Giant robots beating the crap out of each other. But now I've already seen that. What is the sequel going to add? According to Massawyrm, nothing. Oddly enough, I am somewhat excited about Harry Potter 6, even though I thought that was the worst of the books. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
1:04 pm	Better Off Ted Just a reminder that Better Off Ted, the best show on TV that none of you are watching, and by far the best show to air new episodes over the summer, returns with new episodes tomorrow night. Here's a review of tomorrow's episode. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
12:31 pm	Bad Movie McGeezax Remember Victoria Jackson, the ditzy blonde actress that was on Saturday Night Live in the late 80s/early 90s? Remember Year One, the awful movie that came out yesterday? (Hopefully you've forgotten the latter.) Well Year One was so bad, it made Victoria Jackson cry. Literally. And this is someone who appeared in a Larry the Cable Guy special. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 19th, 2009
12:59 pm	Five-Second Movie Reviews 6/19/09 [Where boffo reviews films he hasn't seen, so you don't have to.] The Proposal: Sandra Bullock is so painfully unpleasant and obnoxious in this movie that I can't imagine why anyone would want to spend 90 minutes watching her. I was irritated after only 30 seconds of a preview. Why should we care about a romance between a raging bitch and a pathetic pushover man-whore? Year One: Jack Black and Michael Cera are two of the least competent actors working in Hollywood today. They're only capable of playing themselves, and they aren't even good at that. Jack Black just runs around saying, "Look at me! I'm Jack Black! I'm the funniest guy in the world! I'm so funny that I don't even have to bother being funny!" While Michael Cera runs around saying, "Look at me! I'm Michael Cera. I'm awkward? Get it? Well you better, because that's all I do." And this movie will have a Meet the Spartans level of awful non-story and non-jokes, and mainly consist of two people who are way less funny than they think they are wallowing in poop and dumb costumes. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
7:51 pm	Media News All Up In Your Grill Yet Another Remake: The Incredible Mr. Limpet Because we really need an updated talking fish move. Yet Another Obscure Graphic Novel Adaptation: Lunch Lady About "a mild-mannered school cafeteria server who secretly dishes out helpings of justice as she and her assistant investigate wrongdoings." John Carter of Mars The first live-action movie from Pixar. (Or at least the creative people behind Pixar.) The book is pretty dull, but Pixar's earned the benefit of the doubt. Honey Pot "It's an action comedy about what happens when a bunch of hot funny women get their 'Bourne' on," said Meriwether. "It's like 'He's Just Not That Into You,' except if he's not into you, you might have to kill him." The writer seems way too pleased with herself, and I notice that there's no real details on the story. Which makes me suspicious. Online Casino: The Movie From the writer of Rounders, which was a good movie. But I don't see how cinematic it would be to watch a bunch of dudes sitting at their computers. Family History Described as National Treasure meets Back to the Future. "It's an adventure about a family on a treasure hunt through time." I get the sense that it has a sense of fun, which I approve of. But I'm also skeptical about the time travel aspect. boffo's Law of Time Travel Stories states that time travel movies only work if the rules of time travel are very restrictive (Terminator, 12 Monkeys), the Time Machine is broken or missing through most of the story (Back to the Future 1 and 3), or the movie is so silly that the audience isn't thinking about logic (Bill & Ted). This is because time travel inherently doesn't make sense, so time travel movies only work to the extant that they prevent the audience from thinking about it. I'm skeptical that this movie will be able to avoid that pitfall. Sean Penn pulls out of Three Stooges movie Yet Another Remake: Red Dawn This seems weird to me, just because I can't imagine that modern Hollywood would produce a movie where Communists (or whatever the hell you call Russia these days) are the villains. Christopher Nolan hasn't agreed to do Batman 3 That's bad news, because The Dark Knight was the best superhero movie ever made, and quite possibly the best movie of the last five years. So I would hope that Nolan would return. If he doesn't, I worry the movie may end up being more like Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin Run Around in Gay Bondage Gear. (2 Comments |Comment on this)