Tag: featured

  • Trailers Without Pity: Knight and Day

    Trailers w/o Pity presents...

    (This was previously posted on the old Terribly Happy site. The movie is in theaters this week.)

    We made a list recently of our next six Trailers Without Pity movies, a task we’d neglected until we had exhausted our last 12-week-old list. We gazed upon the list of summer bonanzas — action, comedy, super-hero drama (check, check, check) — among them, we had this odd-duck movie with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. It’s due out in just a month and except for a few commercials, this movie has almost no buzz.

    The press site: barren of even a smattering of images that might flesh out our idea of this movie.

    Tell me if you can figure this trailer out. While I’m sure the production values will be high and the movie will be professional in its format output, I don’t know if I see a movie that humans want to consume in there. Maybe I’m off and this will made $100 million+ in its first week, but my gut, the one that also likes gourmet donuts, tells me this will not come to pass.

    If there is buzz on this movie, it’s anti-buzz, the kind that comes from a flying attention-hungry vampire insect, one that is not striped in black and yellow, but in the very colors whose lack of pigment cause you to turn away, bored.

    Knight and Day, folks:

  • Trailers Without Pity: Toy Story 3

    (posted previously on the old version of Terribly Happy)

    How could we resist the computer-generated siren call of a Pixar movie as a Trailers Without Pity? (Well, all right, we didn’t do one for Up, but how were we supposed to know how good it would be?)

    We learned our lesson and will never underestimate Pixar again, at least until they jump the shark with Cars 2.

    Here’s our Trailers Without Pity for Toy Story 3 which we very much liked.

  • Cup

    It’s been a few weeks, but yesterday I was on NPR’s All Things Considered with a segment about how the World Cup is affecting Internet traffic, how to watch it online or on your phone and the debut of 3-D TV sports on ESPN.

    report-itThe audio of the segment is here and you can see the blog post I wrote to go with it on the All Tech blog.

    Apart from the fact that I don’t follow World Cup too much (especially now that they allow a million bees in the stadium), there was another little curveball with this segment: I was chosen as the guinea pig for an experiment.  We did my half of the segment not in the KUT studio like we usually do, but with an app called “Report-IT” on my iPhone.

    The app was able to connect to their ISDN line and apparently the sound was pretty good.  The only thing I notice in hearing it back is that the room I was in sounds very echo-filled, but that’s the room’s acoustics, not the app’s fault. I could have switched to a sound-proofed room in my work building (yes, we have one), but the Wi-Fi connection I was using didn’t reach that far and when we tried it with 3G, the quality dropped considerably and there was too much lag.

    The best part was talking to Michele Norris while an engineer instructed me to move the phone to different positions around my mouth. “Now hold it upside-down and away from you at a 45-degree angle, like you’re talking across the top of the surface of the phone.”

    These guys know audio.  It’s incredible how well they know what works and what doesn’t.

    Not sure if I’ll be back on a regular schedule on NPR, but at least for this week I got to feel a little bit like a radio pioneer. (Or “test subject” or “guinea pig.” I’m fine with any of those.)

  • This.. is CNN

    CNN

    A few months ago, I got an e-mail asking if I’d like to write some tech columns for CNN.com. After making sure it was cool with my employers, I wrote two, the first of which appeared on CNN’s Web site yesterday. It’s about my belief (which I still believe despite a bunch of nay-saying comments) that smart phones and other touch-screen Internet devices will eventually replace our remote controls.

    (I wish I’d taken a screen grab of CNN’s front page yesterday; it was featured there with a little image and headline near news of the oil spill and the NBA Finals.)

    So, apparently, CNN is making a big push into online tech coverage. They have a very active tech blog and are publishing a large number of freelance pieces, guest columns and other pieces on their redesigned tech section.

    They did ask me for a mug shot, but I had no idea it would run so large up at the top of the story. I mean, it’s cool and all, having my gigantic face up on the Web where America can easily access it and mock, but very few dudes in the tech world can pull that off with anything approaching aplomb.

    OK, only one guy can pull it off. He’s Pete Cashmore and we all have a crush on him.

    Look at this guy:

    Are you kidding me?

    Even the background is beautiful and hip and cool! No fair.

    Anyway, my second column should appear next week, I think. They haven’t asked me to write anything beyond that, so we’ll see what happens.

  • Trailers Without Pity: Inception

    Inception

    We’ve been big Christopher Nolan fans since Memento and damned if we weren’t blown away by Dark Knight, so it’s not hard to get worked up over his new summer movie, Inception. It features Leonardo DiCaprio and more stars than I care to name and looks pretty fantastic.

    Our Trailers Without Pity for Inception concludes that it will probably be amazing if it doesn’t get too far up its own dream colon.  I mean, it has to be. Have you seen the other movies that are out this summer? It’s like navigating a yard full of poop where a St. Bernard lives.

    You can view it here on the TWOP site or below if the embedded video works for you.

    The video just went up and we’re already working on the next one, for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

  • 5 Al Gore Pick-Up Lines

    “My lockbox is well-stocked with condoms and booze.”

    “I helped invent the Internet, so it seems strange that I don’t have your e-mail address.”

    “You’re so pretty I bet I can get you on Current TV.”

    “You make my ice caps melt.”

    “Was your daddy a carbon-emitting smokestack? Because you’re taking my breath away.”

    Add your own in the comments!