If you need help talking to your kids about...

Star Wars.

Love the Yoda baby hat.

Another of The Ten Worst Sci-Fi Films of All Time (Kunochan.com)

Writer Erik Even is back with the latest installment in his series on the Ten Worst Sci-Fi Films of All Time. Here's a teaser:

Here’s a science fiction story for you: some time after the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, George Lucas was replaced by an untalented clone duplicate.

How else to explain the crap that has come out of Lucasfilm in the intervening years? Christ, this is the man who wrote and directed Star Wars, likely the best science fiction film ever made. Of course that was well before Star Wars became Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope: Special Edition: Guinness Book of World Records’ Film Title with the Most Colons in It Edition.

Read it all here.

WTG Netflix

Thanks for spoiling the whole thing before we even get the disk out of the sleeve.

Caww to Wuhhhship

I have the call to worship portion of the service this morning and I'm practicing while I sip coffee.

Just tell me that this doesn't scream out to be said in the voice of The Impressive Clergyman from The Princess Bride:

"Love rings our bells this morning; grace welcomes us as we draw near."

Which would be, "Wuvvvv... Twuu wuvv is what wings ouw bewws this morning."

I must stop or I'll be laughing. In church.

The Hugos

The Hugo finalists have been announced, and you can find the full list here.

Up for the full-length movie award are five films, each of which I love but for completely different reasons, and I'm glad I'm not going to be one of the ones to pick a winner, because I'd be completely at a loss. They are (in alphabetical order):

    

See what I mean? Argh!

And Kij Johnson's "Spar" is a nominee for the Hugo. She's already won the Nebula with this story. I have read it twice and while I find it amazing, I cannot honestly recommend it; I feel like I need to go through an autoclave a couple of times each time I read it myself, as the ick factor is extremely high. It's a story that I can admire as a piece of writing without saying I actually like it, if that makes any sense. As Kij herself describes it on her website, "This is a very disturbing and sexually explicit story - not for kids!"

Suspension of Disbelief

Erik Evan has compiled a list of The 50 Laws of Science Fiction Physics over on his Kunochan blog. Absolutely worth reading.

Here's a taste:

Doctrine of Hostile Alien Tourism: when technologically advanced spacefaring aliens initiate a war or invasion against the Earth, their first strategic maneuver will be to destroy a number of famous human landmarks, usually ones with no strategic or defensive value.

Everybody's Doing It: My Favorite Movies from 2009

C'mon, it's all the rage! Everyone wants to know what everyone else's favorite movies of the year were. And I'm sure you have been checking this blog at least daily wondering what Maria's favorites were. Wait no longer. Here they are.

Since we hardly go to theaters because of a) being broke and b) having children of too many different ages and interests to go together, I saw exactly 2 movies in the theater this year.


So my top 2 movies were: Star Trek and District 9. I liked STG and I LOVED D9.

Can I count movies I saw this year that didn't come out this year? I can? Oh good. This year I saw Voices of a Distant Star on DVD. I do not do anime. Master K does, and cannot figure out why I am not interested in it. But I Netflixed Voices of a Distant Star on the recommendation of several people whose opinions I respect, and loved it. It's animated, but not anime, if that makes sense. It's a poem of a film, not very long, and while it has a sci-fi setting, it is a poem about two people separated by time and space and what happens to their love. I cried and cried. I give this one a Five Hankie rating.

I re-enjoyed Aliens after a long time away from it. We have the extended version with all the deleted scenes and I don't like it as well, but I can cover my eyes and say lalalalala during those scenes and just let the story unfold as I remember it.


Some others:
Gran Torino Clint Eastwood swearing a lot and showing that he's really soft-hearted in the end.
Let The Right One In A darling baby vampire. In Sweden.
[Rec] FAST ZOMBIES!
The Fall Lee Pace being sexy, tortured and a little twisted.

And in television:
The Wire: The Complete Series (Barry and I went on an all-five-seasons binge during which not much else got accomplished around here)
Flight of the Conchords: The Complete First and Second Seasons (indescribable and hilarious)

I'll post my favorite books from 2009 another day.

Netflix - Now in Cedar Rapids

We were served out of a Netflix distribution center in the Twin Cities for some time, and I loved it because we would get our movies in 1 day after shipment (though it took 2 days for a returned disk to get back there). Then they opened a Des Moines center and everything slowed down to 2 days each way. Go figure. Then things improved, and lately it's usually a day each direction.

I just noticed that my envelopes now have a Cedar Rapids address. It will be interesting to see if the speed continues to hold with this new center. I read an article on the way a Netflix distribution center operates and it's an amazing example of an efficient combination of human and machine (a cyborg, if you will) labor. The slowdown has always come from the postal service.

CORRECTION: HackingNetflix says that center has been around since !!2005!!. So it's not new, it's just new to us. Interesting.

Lightsaber 101

Now tell me it has never occurred to you that maybe it was a bad idea to hand a farmboy a lightsaber in a small room and let him turn it on and wave it around a little.

Movie Recommendations

Two movies we have seen recently on Netflix:

1. The Secret Life of Bees. Kind of chick-flicky, but good story and they did a good job of sticking with the book. Queen Latifah, Sophie Okonedo and Alicia Keys portray the three Boatwright sisters in 1964 South Carolina. Sophie especially was convincing as the sweet but damaged May Boatwright. And that kid that played Michael on The Wire is in here with a very 1960s cut-in part in his hair. Oh, and Dakota Fanning, too. And Paul Bettany being nearly unrecognizeable as a bitter, sweaty good ol' boy. Read the book first. Please.

2. Taken, where Liam Neeson tears most of France apart in an effort to recover his 17-year-old daughter from slave traffickers. Considering that this sort of thing actually happens, and as parents of an 18-year-old, it made our hair stand on end to see the setup: Spoiled, naive American girls, indulgent parents who tiptoe around trying not to stifle the independence of their children, throw in some lying to Dad and whaddya get? A huge, heartbreaking mess. Reminds me of both Frantic (Harrison Ford was trying to rescue his wife in that one) and Target (this time it was Gene Hackman). A little too much typical action-movie people-jumping-off-tall-buildings-and-not-getting-hurt, plus an evil/fat/ugly sheik who just doesn't fit in with the rest of the story at all, but still, I recommend it.

Not following the right news websites

Okay so we thought our XBox was broken, and the router has been misbehaving lately so we thought maybe it had decided not to do what it was supposed to, and also we worried that something had gotten unplugged and we fussed and we checked and we jiggled connections and said "what did you DO??" to each other over and over until FINALLY... Barry noticed the little box on the screen that said XBox Live will be down for maintenance on Tuesday, for as long as 24 hours.

Finally.

Duh.

And THEN when I Googled of course everyone else in the developing or developed world knew this already. Because, you know, they read their news.

Back we go into our cave.

BTW, Microsoft's 24 hours is just about up. And I wanna stream some Netflix.

Toy Story 3 Trailer - Oh boy!

I can hardly wait. :o)

Zombie Instructional Videos

This one is okay...

What To Do In A Zombie Attack


... but my fave will probably always be this one, from Fido (not embeddable, so you will have to follow the link). I love Fido. It and Shaun of the Dead take turns being my favorite zombie movie.

Esquire previews "The Road" - the movie, that is, not the book

though thankfully the reviewer is quite familiar with the book. Otherwise there would be no point. In fact, I think there should be a test before anyone is allowed in to see the film, to make sure they read the book first.

I fear for this movie. I want to love it, and from all I have seen, it sounds as though they did a marvelous job of translating the book into a visual thing, but I'm still afraid. I don't want it ruined.

Esquire review

The Onion on J.J. Abrams' New Trek

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Movie Recommendations

Watch: The Visitor. Wonderful in many ways.

Don't Bother: Australia. I didn't even get all the way through it.

Watchmen?? Oh yah, it's great. (What is it again?)

Count me as one of those idiots who
1) has never read Watchmen, and
2) can't wait to see the movie anyway.

At least I am not a poser, I admit I know nothing about it (though I do know Dr. Manhattan is not a chick). My son, on the other hand, is one of those who tries to make it sound like he has a clue what it's all about, though he has never actually even seen the graphic novel. Heh.

Cuttin' the Cables

Well, not literally. We have cable TV (the very basic broadcast channels, not even CNN), cable Internet and cable telephone service. Here in the boonies, there is no TV signal to speak of, so if you don't have cable TV, you don't have TV. All told it's about $120 a month. I just called up and canceled our basic broadcast TV service which will save about $25 a month. We watch everything online anyway, or we stream it through Netflix. (Master K is currently working his way through all the seasons of Red Dwarf.) When we all counted up how much time we actually watch television, it was not $25 a month's worth of TV time. And when President Obama preempted Chuck last night, it was the last straw.

Just chipping away here and there at the budget, trying to identify what really enriches our lives and what doesn't. We need the cable Internet for my work, and even now that we are past the introductory special on cable telephone, it is still saving us money.

Crossing Over: A movie for my must-see list

Showing the Love for Netflix

We joined Netflix in December of 2005. We have suspended our membership twice, I believe; in fact, I think we out-and-out canceled it the first time during a family budget crunch and when we went back a few months later, we were amazed to find that they had saved our queue and we were able to jump right in again. We have been very pleased with our membership, though depending on how busy we are and how tight funds are, we have bounced up and down in different membership levels. Netflix was how we found Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica, and now we're working our way through The Wire.

Netflix will have its 10th birthday this September. With the addition of streaming video to the computer, it became an even better value; with the addition of streaming to our XBOX, and thus to our flat-screen TV, it has become a really remarkable deal for this family. We still get disks, but most of our watching is Watch Instantly on our TV. We have a few shares - like, maybe, 3 - of Netflix stock, and it has stayed steady and high through all this Wall Street mess. Part of what we think makes Netflix work so well is the customer service. We send our disks to the nearest center which is in Des Moines. They get our disks overnight, ship them right out the same day, and then it takes 2 days for the disk to get back to us. If we get a bad disk, we just click a few buttons on the website and they send us a replacement immediately without a fuss. We have misplaced a disk twice, and each time, they said they would not make us pay for the disk this time. (Each disk was eventually found and returned.)

Here are two interesting articles I'd like to show you:
How Netflix Got Started: Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings tells Fortune how he got the idea for the DVD-by-mail service that now has more than eight million customers Interesting how the initial response rate to the free trial was 80%! How many startup companies can say that?
Netflix: Streamers Rent Fewer DVDs That's true for us, certainly. We are on the 2-at-a-time-unlimited plan. Sometimes we'd like to have more disks available, but we don't really need them, and there's plenty else to watch on Stream Instantly.