- Wow, both sides of the isle are getting the axe. Adobe will nix Macromedia Freehand in favor of Illustrator and Adobe GoLive in favor of Dreamweaver. My belove-to-hate Macromedia Fireworks, however, lives for now. Also of note is this article about merging the two massive sites, even though it uses made-up words like “architected.”
- Computers take the mystery out of Mona’s voice and smile. (guest submission from Priceless Work of Art Andrea)
- I’m Level Five, if I do say so myself, with occasional and hopefully rare incidences of Level Four. (guest submission from Dave)
- Another group lays claim to the Holy Land. (guest submission from Dave)
- Robin has two mommies. Hooray for diversity in popular media, but imagine having to explain this one to your 8-year-old reading his first comic book. (guest submission from Secret Identity Rainbow Andrea)
- Spider-Man comes to town, and he’s brought his alien symbiote buddy with him. (guest submission from Fairweather Comic Dork Andrea)
Monthly Archives: May 2006
F for Fake
F for Fake is Orson Welles’ last completed movie: part documentary, part essay, part practical joke. Welles portrays himself much as I would imagine him: a robust raconteur settled in for the long haul at a good restaurant, surrounded by educable pretty young things, eating and telling tall tales with great relish.
The Dork Report for May 30, 2006
- Stock photography cliches. They missed the ubiquitous asian guy with glasses who was everywhere during the dot-com boom.
- Woooooo… creepy. (spotted on Fortean Times)
- More awesome weirdness. (spotted on Fortean Times)
- Gary Trudeau does in the funny pages what should be on the front.
- The first Lost action figure is Charlie pulling a Night of the Hunter. And just as an aside, remember when action figures were poseable?
- Decepticons got they ass kicked, Transformas still old-skool like Coke Classic. (guest submission from Dave)
- A part useful, part nonsense Lost flowchart. (guest submission from Everything is Connected Andrea)
- Picturehouse President Bob Berney tells the Boston Globe: “I don’t think the audience cares how the film is financed or distributed.” Well, duh! But at least somebody from Hollywood apparently gets that.
- The official Snakes on a Plane site launches a new “Snake Kit” feature… but you have to cough up your name, email, and birthdate!
- AppleInsider reports on Adobe Apollo. Good news: Adobe claims it won’t merge Flash Player and Adobe Reader, as originally threatened. Bad news: looks like the corporate concept of Flash as online application development platform prevails still. In other words, it’s being positioned further away from interactive designers (that is to say, me) and even more towards software engineers and programmers.
- Forget Batman vs. Superman or Jesus vs. Elvis, here’s the real contest: Neo vs. Robocop, Clint & Yoda.
- Brian Eno is on the upcoming Roxy Music album after all?
- The head of music at Virgin Megastores is going around telling people vinyl is outselling cds on new releases.
X-Men III: The Last Stand
God help me, but I agree with Harry Knowles’ review. Sometimes you need a fanboy to point out what’s wrong with a movie crafted for fanboys. He picked up on the absurdly sensitive Wolverine, the important Phoenix backstory cursorily related in hammy exposition, and the sudden and arbitrary shifts from day to night. But the worst crime of all is that the movie is actually boring; a mere ninety minutes seemingly stretched to what felt like 2-plus hours.
Also bothering me: why on earth was X-Men III: The Last Stand such a massive hit? Not just the question of general quality, but also the fact that it’s set in a densely self-referential world comprehensible only to dorks that read the comics as kids (cough, cough), or at least to moviegoers who happen to remember the first two installments really well. Perhaps the answer is as simple as it being a holiday weekend with no real competition in theaters, but still, it must have been off-putting and mystifying to mere mortals.
It’s tempting to blame the whole mess on jobbing director Brett Ratner, but if Bryan Singer had still been involved, would the script have been any different?
Shopgirl
Poor Juliet Capulet must choose between Max Fischer and Jorge Festrunk. Shopgirl is let brought down by the implausibility of either.
Mission: Impossible III
A series of disconnected thoughts:
I rue the day Terminator 2 (aka “T2”) came out and was a big hit; now every pre-ordained blockbuster comes abbreviated: ID4, LXG, AVP, X3, and now of course M:I:III.
Like most summer action blockbusters, M:I:III is at first enjoyably preposterous but quickly becomes exhausting. Although the plot is incredibly complex, it has no throughline to thread it all together; it’s a series of sequences.
M:I:III is capped off with a truly terrible song by Kanye West. Of course it’s hard to top the version by U2’s rhythm section, but the producers could have covered themselves by picking somebody with a little more edge.
Like Michael Jackson, it’s now almost impossible to watch Tom Cruise perform without his public persona coloring everything. On the other hand, he’s nothing if not intense, so perhaps that works in his favor here.
The Dork Report for May 25, 2006
- Star Trek, James Bond, and Harry Potter look out. (guest submission from The Visible Woman Andrea)
- Lost season finale fallout:
- Mainstream press coverage: New York Times, Associated Press, EW’s recap.
- Find a career with the Hanso Foundation.
- Everybody now, Sawyer Sawyer Locke! (guest submission from Follow-the-Dancing-Ball Andrea)
- Dig through a truly astonishing amount of detail and hypotheses in the wiki LostPedia, my new favorite site.
- Hawaii’s like, “Woot!” (guest submission from WTF Andrea)
- Michael Brook’s long-gestating third solo album is due July 18: press release and liner notes & sample track.
- Of all the pressing health issues in the world, scientists are growing rabbit dingle-dongles? (spotted on Fortean Times)
- Trade in your $20 diamond-tipped stylus for a $19,000 laser. (spotted on Fortean Times)
- Legos, baby, you and me make beautiful music together. (spotted on Iconfactory)
The Dork Report for May 24, 2006
- EW asks, is Jon Stewart a symptom or the cure? (guest submission from Likes-a-Little-Salt-in-Her-Pepper Andrea)
- Jamie Hewlett (of Tank Girl and Gorillaz fame) is the London Design Museum’s Designer of the Year. Via the official Gorillaz newsletter, 2D had this to say: “Yeah, he’s definitely a top drawer. I’ve seen some of his pictures and he’s coloured them in really well. He hasn’t even gone over the edges.”
- Also from the Gorillaz newsletter: Murdoc is looking for his roots.
- Finally a good reason to whack your computer upside the head. (guest submission from Dave)
- Lost action figures from McFarlane. Seeing as how there’s already one dead person included, I guess it’s not a hint as to who might die tonight. (guest submission from Batten-Down-the-Hatches Andrea)
- It was so delayed I stopped checking, but sometime in the past two weeks or so, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts Creative Commons remix project went live.
- Speaking of Creative Commons, Pearl Jam have released Life Wasted, a music video for free download & distribution.
- The dork equivalent of a strip tease. (guest submission from Dave)
- Neil Gaiman & Adam Rogers on Superman for Wired (spotted on Boing Boing). For a strikingly personal take on actually writing Superman, see Steven Seagle’s It’s a Bird…
- Want to self-publish a cd or dvd, and have a chunk of change to do it right? Jewelboxing Studio.
The Dork Report for May 23, 2006
- Voltron: Defender of the Universe, awkward addition to your DVD shelf, and social lubricant.
- You must be joking. I’ve seen newspaper ads advertising the glammed-up Felicity version. I predict lots of puzzled consumers.
- Just discovered Cabel Sasser’s (of Panic fame) blog.
- Katamari enthusiasts roll up San Francisco. Man, I ‘m living in the wrong city.
The Dork Report for May 19, 2006
- A well-written rant about photorealistic videogames also holds true as to why Polar Express was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen (yes, I’m still mad about that). (spotten on Kottke.org)
- Katamari Damacy embroidery & pillow on Boing Boing.
- (real-life) Parrots on a Plane. (spotted on Boing Boing)
- More entertaining lunacy from Pat Robertson. Entertaining, that is, if you can pretend there aren’t people out there who believe he speaks for god.
- Ah din’t come from no fish! (but what really interests me is that there’s a journal called The Foot?!) (spotted on Fortean Times)
- People! Relax! It’s a novel. But hey, at least it’s bringing people together.
- Thom Yorke’s new album The Eraser. The cover is gorgeous.
- Dude, WTF? (spotted on Fortean Times)
- Two Lost goodies linked from EW’s wrap-ups: sublymonal.com, a kind of annoying puzzle whose solution seems to involve a lot of waiting, and the official Hanso Foundation site.