The main problem (as with many many movies) is that we have to actually buy into the reality they are selling: the “suspension of disbelief.” In The Island, a company has created an underground bunker to house thousands of clones as “insurance policies.” Let’s say the president needs a liver, for example: if he has a clone, then they take the clone’s liver and dispose of the rest. No problem so far: that’s pretty much Clonus‘ plot, too. The problem is that they’ve created all these blank slate clones and imprinted them with a false past: that the human race was contaminated by some chemical or nuclear attack and that these lucky white-suited folk are the survivors. And, if they are lucky, they will one day go to "The Island."

The plot has the exact same problem that The Truman Show had; namely, when you have complete control over a society, why make them think that there is something better than what they have? If you control their memories, then just implant whatever wackiness you want. Just don’t let them know that there’s anything else other than the environment they live in. And certainly don’t allow them to ever talk to anyone from “the real world.” Or give them keys to the outside.

So we have Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson as "Lincoln Echo Whatever" and "Jordan Hottie Seven" or something. And she’s won "The Lottery." I sorta wished it had been Shirley Jackson’s "The Lottery," because then the movie would have been over pretty quickly. Instead, Lincoln discovers the truth the night before Jordan is to leave, and they escape to the real world. The evil corporation guy (played by Sean Bean, who is always good, no matter what tripe he’s in) sends a group of hardened ex-Delta Force/Seals/Rangers after the two. And, since this is a movie, the two clones with high-school educations and absolutely no combat experience beyond punching each other in some lame product placement future Xbox game manage to elude and kill several of those Delta Force guys.

So, yada yada, they decide that they should see their "real world" counterparts and blow the lid off the whole conspiracy. And they do, after two hours of car chases, motorcycle chases, falling off buildings, dodging bullets, etc. Two hours. No wonder why the DVD didn’t have any deleted scenes on it: Michael Bay put everything in the movie already.

Long story short. If this movie had excised two card chases and three pointless running down corridor scenes, it might have been tolerable. If they had dealt more with the moral consequences of the whole cloning idea, it might have actually have been good. Instead, though, it’s pointless action scene after pointless action scene, and that really isn’t enough for a movie these days.

Technorati Tags: The Island, bad movies, Michael Bay, Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson

I am a mouse whore.

There, I’ve admitted my problem. I should be well on the road to recovery soon. I really am a mouse whore, though: I can’t resist buying a new mouse, even if the old one works perfectly fine. Indeed, I’ve never had a Logitech mouse fail on me (wish I could say the same for Microsoft ones). So when Logitech announces a new mouse, my brain starts producing butt-loads of endorphins, forcing me to find out when where and how I can get said mouse.

The Logitech G5 Laser Mouse is the best mouse I’ve ever used. Recently, at least. It hits all the major things a mouse should really do, while adding a variety of extremely cool new features that I’ll probably never use.

First off, the mouse is extremely light. I’ve been using one of Logitech’s cordless mice (the MX900) and find it to be way to heavy for daily use. I shouldn’t have to try and push my mouse around. The G5, in contrast, glides alone as if nearly weightless (part of that, of course, is that the G5 is a corded mouse). In fact, this mouse is so light, Logitech ships it with a set of weights for you to put into a clip that slides into the mouse, making the weight quite adjustable. It’s such a weird feature, but it works perfectly: want a heavier mouse, you adjust it.

Since this is a gaming mouse, another set of adjustments you can make on the fly is the sensitivity of the mouse’s laser sensor: you can dial the sensitivity up or down. Need fine control in an action game? Want the pointer to fly across the screen? You can fine tune the sensitivity, store it, then recall those settings with the press of a button.

The bad news? Well, I’m not fond of the form factor: it uses the same form factor as some of the other Logitech mice (the 500 series, for example). I wish it used the superior MX1000 form factor: it’s much more comfortable for my hand. The thumb button on the G5 is badly placed: when I hold a mouse, my thumb is near to the bottom of the mouse, yet the thumb button is higher up and uncomfortable to reach. I prefer the old placement of the thumb button on mice from a few years back. The scroll wheel is stiff to use: click it for use as a button takes a lot more effort than it should. It’s got the wheel that allows scrolling right and left as well: cool, but I really haven’t found a good use for that yet (though it should be nice in Photoshop).

Even with those shortcomings, though, I totally recommend this mouse. It’s clearly the best mouse that you can buy, currently. At least until the G7 starts shipping.

I’m also whoring for Amazon.com now: Buy a Logitech G5 Laser Mouse at Amazon.com. You know you want it!

Technorati Tags: mouse, Logitech, gaming

Last night, I saw Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. And, truly, it should be called “Spielberg’s” because no one else could take an apocalyptic event and make it all about a guy reconciling with his kids. Unfortunately, it’s that famous Spielberg schmaltz that once again torpedoes the movie.

Firstly, the good. The special effects in this movie are top-notch: the alien tripods are equally menacing and fascinating and they seamlessly inhabit the environment. They look believable. Paired with the visuals and equally excellent is the sound of the film. I rarely take notice of sound in a movie, but this one really gave my ears a workout: there’s some great directional sounds that caught my attention. There are some sweeping vistas of the destruction that look marvelous: glowing red fields of vines, bodies floating downriver, etc.

Unfortunately, that’s the end of the good.

I understand Spielberg’s thinking when choosing to focus on a random family: in the 50s version, the movie focused on a scientist on the front lines of the war: we were involved in decisions that were made and the thinking behind them (and, ultimately, how futile their efforts ended up being). Spielberg wants to show the other 99.9% of the people affected: those people who have no idea what’s happening or why. Unfortunately, he chooses a fairly pedestrian story of a man, Ray, (Tom Cruise) who has no idea how to deal with his children. We know this, because he doesn’t know his daughter is allergic to peanuts or that his son, uh, truthfully, the son just seems like a jerk for most of the movie.

The first time the little girl started her high-pitched whining, I knew I really wanted the aliens to win. The second time, I was ready to join them myself. If you want us to care about the characters, you really have to do a little more building up of them first. We get about 15 minutes of Hollywood shorthand telling us that Ray is a rotten father and that his kids have issues. Whee. And since it is a Spielberg movie, we all know where it’ll end.

Yes, Spielberg does toss in some dark bits, but they really don’t affect the characters at all. While holed up in a barn, Ray makes the decision to kill the character played by Tim Robbins in order to save his daughter. So he blindfolds the daughter and tells her to sing a lullaby while he does the dirty business. Then he sits on the stairs for a while and hugs his daughter and all is well. Why even bother with something like that if it makes no difference at all for the character? I guess one could argue that that’s the point where Ray decides he should engage the enemy, rather than run, but that’s really dictated by the abduction of his daughter by one of the tripods than by anything else.

And why bother having Ray meet one of his previously unseen neighbors, only to leave them behind scant seconds later? I suspect something was left on the cutting room floor.

And the explanation that the aliens buried their war machines on Earth millions of years ago just makes no sense without more context: is Earth some sort of “farm” for them? Did they bury machines on Mars, too, and millions of other planets? Talk about preparing: it’s like burying ammo underneath every tree, just in case! And while the visuals are cool, they also make little sense: is our blood fertilizer for their food supply? If so, why vaporize so many at the start of the invasion: is that some sort of pre-fertilizer?

The aliens also appear to be as stupid as the ones in Signs: they walk around without any protection from the environment, drinking water and breathing our air. It would be as if Neil Armstrong went to the moon and decided he didn’t need his helmet or spacesuit and made moon-dust Tang to drink. I’m a little tired of super-advanced alien species who mount amazing invasions only to be brought down by their own stupidity.

And, finally, the nail in the coffin for the movie. Spielberg had a chance to pull this off: as his family travels from New York to Boston to reunite with his ex-wife and her grandparents, he loses his son (who, out of the blue, decides he wants to join the army or something). As Ray and his daughter reach their goal, everyone is there and alive: his ex-wife, the grandparents, the ex-wife’s husband, and, yes, his son (who apparently survives a firebombing that destroys well-armored Army soldiers, but leaves him unharmed).

Now, had Ray gotten to Boston and seen a smoking crater, it would have been more believable and would have made the movie much, much better. But Spielberg can’t seem to give us an ending like that. For him, everything ends up happily, despite a plot and situation that cry out for something darker. The same problem plagues A.I. and Minority Report: movies that cry out for more ambiguous endings than we get.

Still, despite the plot and the characters, the movie was enjoyable, mostly because of the technical things: the special effects, the sound design, etc. I was able to suppress my need to strangle Dakota Fanning for screaming every 10 minutes, which is an accomplishment in itself.

Now, a quick review of my theater experience for this movie. We got there early and got nice seats: the theater had about 20 or so people in it (I guess everyone was seeing Fantastic Four), with no kids or babies. The trailers were forgettable (I think there was one for a new Cameron Crowe movie, and one for Peter Jackson’s Jurassic Pa…, I mean, King Kong, but neither made me want to see the movie.

For most of the movie, the experience was good, but about a third of the way through the movie, an older couple came in and sat near us. And didn’t stop talking until the end credits rolled. They didn’t talk all the time, but enough to be annoying. It certainly wasn’t as bad as my Spider-Man 2 experience (imagine two busloads of 12-16 year olds), but you’d think older folks would be better about not talking.

With a working unit, the connection and setup was quite painless (though I knew what to expect this time through). The SlingPlayer is rather nice: it asks what type of device you hooked up (in my case, an old Series 1 Tivo) and it provides a set of controls appropriate to the device.

Video quality is good (considering I’m streaming via a 802.11b wireless bridge: I might try my G bridge if I can get it working reliably). You get options for optimizing the stream (for Low, Medium or High action, as well as even more precise controls for the tweakers). I’m currently using a Medium Action encoding and it seems to be just fine: I can see some compression artifacts, but nothing I didn’t expect.

So far, I’m pleased. Rough start, but good end.

Original post follows:

Well that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

This evening, I ran out and picked up a Slingbox, a media distribution tool. The idea is that you hook the Slingbox up to your cable/satellite box, your Tivo, or even your DVD player, and it can stream the video to any computer with Windows XP installed. So, for example, I could hook it up to my Tivo and watch an episode of Justice League I might have recorded and control the playback from my PC. It basically acts like a pass-through box: the Tivo hooks up to it, then it hooks up to your television. There’s an ethernet port on the back that connects you to your home network and streams the video. By punching a hole or two in your firewall, you can also connect to it remotely and watch shows from any network-connected Windows XP computer.

So, I picked up a Slingbox at CompUSA and connected it to my Tivo. Things were going somewhat fine: the packaging looks cool, but it’s one of those origami-like boxes: getting the thing out took longer than hooking it up. One big plus is that it comes with all the cables you need to get it in place: normally, I end up having to make a trip for cables for half the things I buy, so it was a nice surprise to have it all in the box.

Had some difficulty with the wireless ethernet bridge I had, so I cannibalized one I had elsewhere. Took about 15 minutes to get everything in place. Then I went upstairs to my PC and downloaded and installed the software. Pretty painless: it downloaded new firmware into the Slingbox, configured the video, then voila, it was streaming the video signal. Only one problem: the sound was non-existent. I could get sound by cranking up my speaker volume, but then normal Windows sounds were deafening. The video quality wasn’t too bad, though, considering I was using an 802.11b wireless bridge for it. There was some compression artifacts, but nothing I couldn’t live with. But sound is also sorta important. So back downstairs to take a look.

The Slingbox itself looks like a giant silver candy bar, and the cables all plug into clearly marked places on the back. However, the build quality is a little suspect; downstairs, it wasn’t doing a great pass-through job to the television: jostle the Slingbox and watch the signal appear and disappear. Eventually, there was no way I could get an image on either the TV or the PC. I attempted using the composite connection, rather than S-video, but with no joy. Reluctantly, I repackaged the device.

Tomorrow, I think I’ll exchange it for a different unit and see if I’m just unlucky.

Some other people have had better luck:

• Live Digitally’s Review
• Slingbox 411
• SlingBox, Comes Out Slinging

Comic books rarely make me cry. This one did bring a few bittersweet tears to my jaded eyes. And it did it by being smart, by sticking with strong characterizations, and by using genuine emotion. It’s one of those comics that does in a few pages what other comics never do.

The critics of the old Giffen Justice League always bring up that the team was played for laughs, when it really wasn’t (usually such critics have never read the series completely). Sure, some of the characterizations were funny, and some of the plots outlandish (but, I mean, you’ve got characters inspired by insects and ones that can burst into green flames, so what’s really outlandish?) but Giffen mixed in a lot of excellent drama along the way. This issue is a lot like those heavier moments. But it starts light and funny, like most of this story arc.

The Superbuddies are still trapped in Hell, with only Power Girl and Guy Gardner standing between them the internal damnation of careers in fast food delivery. As PG and Guy finally find their lost teammates, new wrinkles appear: Ice, the formerly alive JL member, has shown up and Guy and Fire are not willing to let her stay in Hell. There’s also some dialogue that implies Fire was supposed to be the one in Hell, not Ice. Because of the error, a deal is made: Ice can return with them to the land of the living, as long as no one looks to see if she is still walking behind them on their ascent (yep, it’s the Orpheus deal). There’s also a subplot about the Demon getting to keep Mary Marvel, but it appears to just be a red herring and is resolved quickly.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, because it really is sorta perfect, though it takes a while to realize it. You expect certain characters to act certain ways, but they don’t, and you realize that the way they did act IS really how they would act. I’m being a little vague here, but trust me, it’s very very good stuff. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this comic renews my faith in the medium.