TV Madness took a quick hiatus for the Hitchcock Blogathon last week, but we’re back for more character-fighting action today! In the last contest, Buffy proved too much for Michael Westen. Super-spy Westen may have given it his all, but Buffy still defeated him handily. Today, Fox Mulder faces another favorable match-up, given his past dealings with extraterrestrials.
Continue Reading
It’s been a while since I recapped ‘Grimm’ in this blog. While I’ve continued to watch the show and have actually been impressed by the way that it has steadily developed an interesting mythology and grown into a solid hit for NBC, I just haven’t always been able to keep up with it in a timely fashion. Now that the show has brought its first season to a close (and there officially will be a second season), this seems like a good time to check in again and see where we’re at.
Continue Reading
One consequence of my traveling last week is that I’m way behind on my TV watching. In fact, my DVR overran while I was away and deleted some of my oldest recordings. (Guess I’ll never find out what happened in the last half-season of ‘Revenge’ now. Oh well…) Now that I’m back, it’s time to do some catching up. We’ll start today with the season finale (which was very nearly the series finale) of ‘Fringe’.
Continue Reading
Nothing too surprising went on at the box office this weekend. For the third consecutive weekend, ‘The Avengers’ dominated. Not only has the film added another $55 million to its domestic run, it nabbed the worldwide all-time #4 spot with $1.18 billion and the domestic #6 spot with $457 million (which will be bumped up to #4 by next weekend as it passes both the original 1977 ‘Star Wars’ and ‘The Phantom Menace’). The geek shall indeed inherit the Earth.
Continue Reading
While last week wound up being a lot busier around here in The Bonus View than I initially expected (thanks to our staff of regular bloggers and special guests), I was absent for much of the week to attend not one, but three audio-themed conferences. As someone who has always considered himself a videophile much more so than an audiophile, I found this very instructive and educational. My first stop was a two-day visit to Dolby Labs in San Francisco, where I attended a tour and experienced some very interesting product demos from the company. Our site’s Mike Palmer was also present and will write up more coverage of the event for the HDD front page. What I wanted to do here is to focus on the technical side of the new products that Dolby unveiled, and explain what they are and why you should care. The first is a new process that the company calls “Advanced 96k Upsampling.” Sounds intimidating, doesn’t it?
Continue Reading
Adapting a movie out of a children’s board game may seem like a ridiculous proposition, but this week’s release of ‘Battleship’ is not the first such production (remember ‘Clue’), and it probably won’t be the last. In today’s Roundtable, we deliver our own suggestions to Hollywood for the next big board-game-based feature film franchises.
Continue Reading
Of the forty-four sound films that Alfred Hitchcock directed over the course of his five-decade career, fifteen of them (or roughly one-third of his total output) are distinguished by one-word titles. Although I haven’t done a systematic study, I’d guess that’s a far greater ratio than any other director in history. Hitchcock apparently liked such brevity for its dramatic impact. The titles could be both straightforward and ambiguous, and often provided the viewer with a false sense of expectation and security. As we all know with Hitchcock, what you see is not always what you get, and in many cases the Hitchcock experience starts with the title. Most have suspense built in, so even the opening credits begin to set the mood. If, in a reel or two later, Hitchcock veers from the title’s appointed path, the film becomes even more exciting as a result.
Continue Reading
Now that ‘The Avengers’ has quickly crossed the $1 billion mark worldwide, can any of the three wide openers this weekend knock it off the pedestal? There’s a big, dumb and loud action movie based on a board game, an edgy R-rated comedy and a cliché-ridden chick flick. My guess… Nope, none of them can do it.
Continue Reading
I enjoy walking into screenings without knowing anything about the movie I’m about to see, but when I walked into ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’ and discovered which actors star in this ensemble comedy, I wished that I’d stayed home to watch ‘The Grey‘ instead. It’s not usually fair to judge a movie by its cast, but in this case, it’s absolutely accurate and probably worse than you’d imagine.
Continue Reading
I’ve been an unapologetic fan of director Peter Berg for some time now, but today I hang my head in shame for his extreme failure. This old ‘Battleship’ capsizes before it even leaves the dock.
Continue Reading
Comments