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Movies That Your Friends Loved (But You Think Suck)

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:00:51 GMT

We had dinner with my best friend and his family a few weeks ago at his home. He knows I am a bit of a hometheater buff, so he asks if we want to watch a movie. We said sure, what do you have that we haven't seen? After a short discussion he suggests Napoleon Dynamite. "You'll love the humor", he said.

The film came out in 2004 and honestly, I hadn't heard of it. With the possible exception of doctors visits, it was possibly the worst 82 minutes of my life. I get some of the humor but overall, I thought it was a miserable film.

What's on your list?

Maggie Gyllenhall Stars In A Movie About The Invention of the VIBRATOR

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:58:01 GMT

Here's a thread that the former owner of the Spot would have NEVER ALLOWED!!!!

Yes, somebody is a making a movie called "Hysteria" about the invention of the vibrator. YES JIM_S this is true and NO you can't buy tickets early NOR is the trailer on XHamster.com.

It looks pretty out there.

Will you go to see a movie about a vibrator?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/21/maggie-gy...

Thanks for sharing, Maggie.

Not that a movie about the creation of the vibrator needs selling, but Maggie Gyllenhaal certainly came prepared the press conference to promote her film "Hysteria" at the Toronto Film Festival. In the feature, Hugh Dancy stars as Dr. Mortimer Glanville, a doctor who works to cure female "hysteria" -- a catchall term for anything causing women to act out or feel discomfort -- with his inventive "manual massage."

After losing his touch, Dr. Glanville embarks on an adventure in technology, working with his friend to invent an "electric feather duster" that stimulates women and helps to alleviate their alleged madness. If you understand the metaphor.

Gyllenhaal features as the woman who tries to teach Dr. Glanville about what women really want -- and in some sort of cosmic payback, she got her own special treat.

"By the time I finished the movie I'd been sent maybe 15 vibrators by different people in London with vibrator stores," she told reporters, according to Reuters. But while it was fun to laugh about, the film did still have a message she finds important.

"It's about vibrators and women's orgasms, and I don't think people really do talk about it very much, and I do think it does still make us flushed and uncomfortable," Gyllenhaal said.

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Sat, 10 Sep 2011 09:56:06 GMT

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Fri, 09 Sep 2011 23:47:12 GMT
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RealD To Distribute Themed 3D Glasses For ‘The Lion King'

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:06:15 GMT
TWICE reports, Walt Disney Pictures is re-releasing "The Lion King" in 3D, and RealD said it will manufacture Simba-themed 3D glasses to go with the film.

A limited quantity of the glasses are being made, which will be distributed at theaters for free with the purchase of a child's ticket to see "The Lion King" in 3D. They will be distributed exclusively through RealD 3D-equipped theatres in North America beginning Sept. 16, the company said.

The glasses are sealed in individual packaging and are designed to fit children 8 years and younger.

What Was The Last Feature Film You Saw At The Theater?

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 02:55:25 GMT
I RARELY go to the theater as watching movies in my home theater and on various systems is more enjoyable to me.

My last two movies have been Hollywood screenings:

April Showers
- I was the Exec. Producer

Deuce Bigelow Male Gigelo
- Stunning piece of film making.

What movie did you last see? Where did you see it? Was it worth going to the theater to see?

Let us know...

Horrible Bosses

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 15:16:00 GMT
I had fairly low expectations, but was pleasantly surprised. It had some very funny moments, especially Jennifer Anistons character.

It's worth the price of admission if you are looking for a laugh, however I found Charlie Day's character extremely annoying at about the half-way point. It wasn't his acting necessarily, but the way he speaks. It's between a screech and whine and really started to give me a headache.

Madonna movie a flop? What a surprise.

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 23:23:11 GMT

She has already made quite an impact as an actress — few who have sat through her performances will readily forget the experience of seeing Madonna on screen.

Shanghai Surprise was dire, Body Of Evidence was laughable, and Swept Away was such a critical and commercial car crash that many assumed she would have to give up her filmic ambitions out of sheer embarrassment.

Madonna went on to direct a short movie, Filth And Wisdom, in 2008 about three friends with dead-end jobs who dream of better things.

One reviewer noted then: ‘Madonna has been a terrible actor in many, many films and now, fiercely aspirational as ever, she has graduated to being a terrible director.’

But this summer Madonna is presenting herself as the serious film director of her first feature-length offering.

Her new film W.E is finished and will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, and arrive in cinemas later this year. But how good it will be?

Madonna hopes that this project will establish her artistic credibility and give her the success in movies which hasn’t come her way since Evita 15 years ago.

The bad news for her, though, is that the buzz from a top secret test screening in New York last week is not entirely positive. I’m told that the film doesn’t make much sense – and looks more like a Chanel perfume advertisement than an £18 million movie ought to.

Harvey Weinstein — who has bought the distribution rights — was observed looking ‘thunderous’ and ‘sour’ as the preview audience marked their scores on approval index cards.
He is in the process of re-editing the film to try to make it more commercially viable, and says that it won’t be ready to show to critics ‘for several months’.

The opinions of the New Yorkers who saw the film will be taken into account as he seeks to give Madonna a rare hit in the movie business.

He is known as Harvey Scissorhands for his love of cutting films to make them more commercial. As he said in an interview: ‘I’m not cutting for fun, I’m cutting for the s*** to work.’
Madonna, now 52, whose control freakery is legendary, must be hating this part of the process. But, it seems, the film needs it.

‘It’s not a complete embarrassment for Madonna, and some of the sequences are spectacular, but some key elements are never explained,’ said my source at the screening last week.

‘It’s all about a woman, Wally, who is obsessed with Wallis Simpson, but we never find out why she cares about her in the first place.

‘The script is really very so-so. It tries to suggest that Wallis Simpson gave up a lot to be with Edward in 1936, particularly her chance to have children, but the idea is never developed. It’s all about the surface and the styling.
There’s no real narrative, and no heart.’

Another source, who saw the film at an early screening for potential distributors this spring in Berlin, said more simply that it was ‘just terrible’.

It’s a labour of love for Madonna, who has said that she is obsessed by the subject of the love affair between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. She began researching the project while she and Guy Ritchie were still married, and he is supposed to have given her some advice in the early stages.

She asked surviving friends and associates of Simpson, including socialite Nicky Haslam, to help her with information about her.

Her chief collaborator, though, was Alek Keshishian, a long-standing friend who was behind the camera in the documentary In Bed With Madonna. The two wrote the script together.
The film stars Australian actress Abbie Cornish as a New Yorker who becomes fascinated by an auction of the possessions of the
Duchess of Windsor, as Wallis Simpson became known.
Mrs S is played by Andrea Riseborough and Edward by James D’Arcy.

James Fox plays George V and his son Laurence plays Bertie, Edward’s younger brother (later George VI).
As ever when it comes to Madonna, the creative process has been fraught with dramas. Producer David Parfitt, the esteemed safe pair of hands who helped to guide Shakespeare In Love to the screen, appeared to decide that life was too short to work with Madonna not long after starting work on W.E, as did leading casting expert Nina Gold.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2007 5...

Megan Fox: 'Hitler' remarks led to 'Transformers' firing

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:32:27 GMT
Megan Fox was an up and coming starlet with Angelina Jolie's career square in her sights until she inexplicably was not invited to return for the third "Transformers" movie, "Dark of the Moon," after starring in the first two installments.

Rumor had it that Fox was fired because she and director Michael Bay didn't see eye to eye on set. But it looks like there might be a little bit more to the story.

According to Bay, it wasn't the behind-the-scenes drama that got Fox fired, but her comparison of him to Adolf Hitler. And, Bay adds, he wasn't responsible for letting her go. In a new interview with GQ, Bay says it was executive producer Steven Spielberg who had finally had it with Fox.

"She was in a different world, on her BlackBerry," says Bay in the interview. "You gotta stay focused. And you know, the Hitler thing. Steven said, 'Fire her right now.'"

"The Hitler Thing" refers to comments Fox made in a 1999 Wonderland magazine interview:

"He's like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation," Fox told the magazine. "He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he's a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he's not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he's so awkward, so hopelessly awkward. He has no social skills at all. And it's endearing to watch him."

Fox was replaced by model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley when "Dark of the Moon" hits theaters on June 29.

Update: We've updated this story to reflect the source of the Bay quote as GQ.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zap-meg a...

New technology revs up Pixar's 'Cars 2'

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 12:24:15 GMT

This image, from Pixar's 'Cars 2,' showcases two of the new effects the studio created for the new movie, which opens tomorrow. One is the extremely realistic open water, including the foam and spray, and the other is the reflectivity off of cars like Finn McMissile.

EMERYVILLE, Calif.--We all know what the reflections off cars or the roiling of the ocean are supposed to look like. So if you are tempted to believe that what you'll see in "Cars 2" proves that Pixar has made its first live-action film, think again.
This is the hit-making studio that breaks new technological ground with most of its new films, and "Cars 2," which opens tomorrow, is no exception. Where its technicians applied real physics to the escape of thousands of balloons in "Up," or true lighting effects to the rolling and pitching of plastic garbage bags in "Toy Story 3," Pixar has once again pushed its computing powers to the limit--and gone well beyond them.
With "Cars 2," as the film's director and Disney chief creative officer John Lasseter pointed out at a recent event in San Francisco, the filmmakers invented several new ways to handle common effects, and though innovating for the sake of innovating isn't the studio's style, it seems to come with the territory of making a new Pixar film.
And creating new effects doesn't come cheap. According to Apurva Shah, the supervising technical director on "Cars 2," Pixar had to triple the size and scale of its legendary render farm in order to achieve the computing power its new effects required for the film. But don't expect the studio to rest on its computing laurels for its next movies. Given its penchant for upping the ante with each new project, it's a good bet that even more new Dell render blades will be making their way to Pixar's headquarters here soon.
Water effects
When the team members behind "Cars 2" began working on the film in 2006, they realized that because one of the biggest sequences in the film takes place on and around an ocean-based oil rig, they wanted to step up their approach to animating open water. Already, Pixar had taken the industry in new directions with its underwater effects for "Finding Nemo." But now, Shah said in an interview in his office, the team hoped to improve on the current industry best for an ocean's choppy surface.
With "Nemo," Shah explained, Pixar had come up with a "softer-looking water," but with "Cars 2," the team felt that audiences would be expecting the oil rig sequence to feature edgier, stormier water.

To achieve that, they explored a series of new water systems and ended up applying a mathematical wave model called Tessendorf, Shah said, which allowed for the creation of "more cuspy," sharper sea waves.
This was also important, he said, because the sequence involves a large boat rolling in and out of the high waves, and that required having the seas appear rough as the boat slammed into the water, and the water slammed onto the boat. It was crucial, then, to find the way to show the boats--which are also characters in the film--moving through the water and undulating in it, kicking up surf and foam and a trailing wake, and having it look right. If the effects weren't extremely realistic, Pixar's thinking went, audiences wouldn't buy it.
And then there was one more challenge. With the oil rig scene taking place at night, there would be a lot of lights shining down on the water, and the team needed the illumination effects to look right as well. "Normally, water in films up to now has been treated like a surface," Shah said. "It may have some details, but it's mostly like a 2D surface. We wanted to treat water like volume. So when searchlights penetrate the water, [we gave] you this volumetric feeling."
Similarly, the team had to handle the shadows that would be cast deep into the water from tires floating on the surface.
All of this was more than just a technical achievement. Pixar is known for storytelling and creativity, and Shah said that for the artists on the film, having the technology to make sophisticated water effects served the most important master of all: the story. So in that sequence, the audience sees the search for one of the film's main characters, a car called Finn McMissile--voiced by Michael Caine--and the filmmakers knew that the emotion in the sequence would be aided by moviegoers' eyes not focusing on poor effects. And in this case, that meant inventing the techniques to solve the problem.
"We don't set out to do something new," Shah said. "We look at the [story] boards...and where we feel the existing technology isn't giving us what we need, we try to take it forward...It goes back to, what do we want to put on screen, and what are the tools that are missing."
Reflections
In a film where cars are the main characters and glitz and glamor is provided by the story line and the environment--scenes were set in and around Italian coastal towns and amid the bright lights of Tokyo--it wouldn't do to cut corners for effects that wouldn't make the cars feel real, even if they do talk.

This image, from Pixars Cars 2, showcases the reflectivity effects that the studio created for the new film. Here, we see Lightning McQueen reflecting the lights of Tokyo.

For one, Shah said, designing the shading and reflections for the cars was a factor of the idea that while humans have skin, cars have "these beautiful clear-coat paint jobs with reflections that bring out their lines."
In the original "Cars," Pixar used the latest technology for the shading and reflections, but with "Cars 2," the artists had new tools at their disposal. One of the main steps forward was being able to design the "paint" to appear to have "suspended metal flakes that give you sheen and sparkle," Shah explained. In the first "Cars," such flakes wouldn't have worked, he said, as they'd have gotten lost.
But too, the technology used for the reflections was upgraded for the new movie, giving the cars "really beautiful broad sheens we weren't able to get before," Shah said. And that was important since Finn McMissile and other cars in the movie have very high-end paint jobs that needed to explode on the screen.
"We came up with a different mathematical representation for them that does a much better job even when it becomes finer," Shah said.
Gatling gun physics
The average person may not know what the physics are for bullets fired from a Gatling gun, but they would likely be able to feel it if such a sequence wasn't done properly.
Shah explained that another part of "Cars 2" featured just such a scene--a cacophony of bullets, tracers, smoke, bullets colliding with objects, and more. And in order to get it to look right on screen, Shah and his team turned once again to physics.
Recalling the work Pixar did with balloons on "Up," Shah said the scene ended up requiring some video game references. The approach, he explained, came from the idea of a real-time shooting game, in which a player pulls out a gun and shoots in whatever direction they choose. That requires a good physics engine to determine what happens. "So we created our own little [virtual] world so we could do that," he said.
To be sure, the filmmakers were able to go into the sequence and "finesse" certain elements, but in general, Shah said, the results showcase what Pixar was able to create by letting physics loose on the bullets and what they hit. It was, he said, the collision of multiple simulations at once: Rigid body dynamics involving the bullets flying from the gun; volumetrics with the gun's smoke; and more. The actual bullet holes in the wall was a "cheat," he said, involving adding a second surface to the wall. But the scene features the bullets going just where the physics engine said they should, apart from any specific human direction.
Render farm
One of the keys to Pixar's ability to do what it does is the giant, powerful render farm located in its main headquarters building here. This is serious computing power, and on "Cars 2," it required an average of 11.5 hours to render each frame.
But some sequences were especially complex, particularly those involving ray tracing--which involves simulating light hitting surfaces, essentially "trying to simulate photons." And as a result, a huge amount of computing power was needed to process frames that took as much as 80 or 90 hours to render, Shah said. And that meant that the studio "bulked up our render farm."
He said that Pixar had to triple its size, and today, the render farm features 12,500 cores on Dell render blades. As well, the file servers, network backbone, and every other piece of the computing puzzle was boosted in order to handle the making of "Cars 2."
But Pixar's next films are sure to tax even that computing infrastructure, Shah said. Those movies will benefit from the scaling out done for "Cars 2," but the next projects will surely offer up their own creative challenges that could force the studio to expand the render farm yet again. Shah said things like human characters and their skin, hair, and cloth are sure to stretch even today's farm to its limits.
For the time being though, Pixar feels "Cars 2" is the state of the art. Yet, because the point of all the technology is to make things feel real, the studio whole-heartedly hopes audiences never notice it at all.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20068109 -52/new-...