Hulk Hogan
My movie weekend continued today with me finally seeing The Incredible Hulk. While I was actually one of the few people who enjoyed the Ang Lee version, I was excited when I heard they’d be making a “do over” type movie with Edward Norton. Despite the low Tomato Meter scores from “real critics” (a lower overall score than Indy 4? /facepalm), I tend to agree with the real people scores and found the movie to be quite entertaining.
I liked the, previously on the Hulk, style origin recap which gives a bit of a nod to the TV series origin. Finding a way to get Bill Bixby into the movie = win. Norton, as usual, was excellent. The CGI and action sequences were well done (halved-car boxing gloves ftw). And there is no better way to end it than with a cameo by Tony Stark.
I think my only real gripe is that I’ll take the Sam Elliott played, General Ross over the William Hurt one any day.
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Missed Target
Just got back from seeing the new Get Smart movie and while Steve Carell is great and probably the perfect actor for the role of Maxwell Smart, the movie was just “meh” for me. There were funny jokes, but I think just about all of them were given away in the previews. Hell, the one that wasn’t given away in the previews was given away right before the movie started as a “turn off your cell phone” announcement.
I don’t have an extensive knowledge of the original series, but I think there was a character introduced at the end of the movie that I can only assume was from the old show. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet…not that those people would be reading this, but anyway… If they do a sequel and keep the same actor for this character, I might be forced to see it.
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Windows Media Player
OK, so I think I was finally successful in my quest of ripping a DVD to a format that the Xbox would play and that also supported 5.1 audio (the audio is actually what was causing me the most grief). A friend of mine had come across an app someone wrote called avi.NET, which while it works flawlessly for him, totally didn’t work for me. I then stumbled upon a 2 year old app called DVD-WMV and w00t, I got something that works.
There were a few quirks to the app I had to get adjusted to, and I also had to deal with the fact that this particular DVD appears to have a history of having audio sync issues, but overall, I’m quite happy with the results. The app does everything from decrypting the DVD, demuxing the audio, fixing the audio sync (expect in this case, I used ASFbin to manually resync the audio afterwards), to finally encoding with Windows Media Encoder. An added benefit of doing this with wmv is that they seem to stream better from a network computer to the Xbox wirelessly where previously trying to stream transcoded divx/xvid movies just wouldn’t play over wireless.
Posted in Media
Nacho Libre
So I watched Nacho Libre for probably the 30th time today and to quote Beetlejuice, “It keeps getting funnier, every single time I see it”.
What’s odd is that the first time I saw it, it left me a bit disappointed, perhaps I was expecting too much of it (I am a huge Jack Black fan) or more than likely was not expecting what it ended up being. My kids are also JB fans, specifically my son. Well, he loved it and as a result, I had to watch the thing over and over again (DVR’s ftw). After the first couple of viewing’s, I found myself laughing more and more at pretty much everything Jack said with his, to quote yet another movie, “outrageous accent”.
The movie actually reminds me of a Wes Anderson movie in a lot of ways.
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