I recorded THX 1138 a few days ago and watched it tonight. You may or may not know that THX 1138 was George Lucas’s first feature film.

It’s a weird film. It’s science fiction but nowhere near as compelling as Star Wars. It’s a slow-moving tale of a dystopia where people work slavishly and are drugged to keep them happy and productive. Love and sex are outlawed. It’s very reminiscent of 1984, Brave New World, etc. Somehow it just really struggled to hold my attention.

It’s really strange to think that the man who made this film is the same man who conceived of Jar Jar Binks.

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Just got finished watching this on DVD. It’s essentially the story of two obnoxious horndog teenage boys trying to get it on with everything that moves - girlfriends, family, themselves. The obnoxiousness and sex made it sort of like a Spanish language version of “Kids” (which in my book is not a good thing) and the bizarre little narrations that introduced the characters was reminiscent of “Amelie” (although “Amelie” was a much more intriguing movie). The DVD also had a bonus short movie called “Me La Debes” (”You Owe Me One”), which also achieved a high debauchery density factor, but was a bit more clever (or maybe I just liked it better because it was short?)

Links

• IMDb
• Amazon

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Rented “I Heart Huckabees” from Blockbuster tonight. Had I not been on my laptop, blogging and messing around with Flickr, I think I would’ve passed out. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t a philosophy major, but I just didn’t get this “existential comedy”. Or maybe it’s because I lost interest within 10 minutes and was too busy on the laptop to pay attention. It’s certainly an innovative and different kind of movie. Just because I found it excruciating doesn’t mean that you won’t like it.

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Watched “Orange County” last night. It’s the story of a bright OC kid, Shaun (Colin Hanks), whose dream is to escape the OC and attend Stanford. Jack Black is the druggy brother but is not quite as outrageous as Jack Black usually is. Exceedingly average. Not bad, not good, just average.

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My friends showed me this last night. Nicole and I don’t watch enough movies for it to make sense for us, but it’s an interesting idea. MovieBeam is a spin-off from Disney that is offering a set-top box that downloads movies over analog NTSC bandwidth and lets you “rent” them for around the price that you’d pay at the video store.

The MovieBeam receiver comes with 100 movies already stored inside. Every week, up to 10 movies are replaced with new movies. So you’ll always have 100 movies — a combination of major new releases and popular favorites — ready for viewing anytime.

MovieBeam web site

Apparently it downloads movies using Dotcast’s datacasting technology which makes use of plentiful spare bandwidth in analog NTSC television channels. Apparently there is a ton of bandwidth available, much more so than your DSL or cable modem - it’s just that it’s inherently multicast; not on-demand. However in the case of movies, most of what people want are a small number of new releases, and so there is no need for on-demand, because you can predict what they will demand and thus high-bandwidth, multicast makes total sense.

My wife and I, we watch a lot more TV shows than movies, so TiVo makes a lot more sense for us than this. But this is an interesting idea nonetheless.

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I saw “Finding Neverland” on Friday. I had apprehensions about a movie about Peter Pan, but it wasn’t bad. It was a little on the sappy/predictable side, but pretty interesting to watch. Johnny Depp plays Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie and manages to pull off a Scottish accent. Kate Winslet is the matriarch of a family that he befriends. The family (especially her young boys) serves as an inspiration for his newest play while others look on suspiciously as a grown man associates with children (as I watched, I saw parallels with Michael Jackson). Dustin Hoffman has a minor role as a cranky theatre owner.

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