It it quite true that my brother knows much more about sports than I do and that Aaron Sorkin probably does, too. Sorkin scripted the upcoming movie Moneyball, about baseball and sabermetrics (hey, wake up!), which stars Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s also our last Trailers Without Pity episode of the season. We’ll be back in late October with new episodes.
If you get bored the rest of the summer, you could check out the Trailers Without Pityvideo archive/episode guide. Fun times!
We’re down to the last two episodes of Trailers Without Pity for the season (we’re not even sure what the last one will be; we’re still deciding). Our penultimate video for Season Three is this one for the pec-tacular Conan the Barbarian, a remake (or a reimagining? I’m willing to bet it was more making than imagining at work here) of the Arnold early 80s sword and crotch-garb classic.
I’m a sucker for these kinds of movies (or at least mocking these kinds of movies from afar); my favorite episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 remains Cave Dwellers, starring Ator the Juiced. I could watch that a million billion times. The new Conan looks even dumber and more expensive. It’s kind of thrilling, really, how respectably goofy it looks.
'Parking in Motion' app screengrabJust a short note about two stories of mine that ran over the weekend.
The first was a sort-of review/riff on an app called “Parking in Motion.” Parking in downtown Austin keeps getting worse and worse and I think most people in town who have to go there are looking for some sort of silver bullet to avoid $10/per parking lots. The app, it turns out, doesn’t really solve that many problems, but it sure does look nice and may lead the way to something even better.
Of course, the name of the app implies that you might use it while… you know… you’re in motion? I guess? That’s probably not such a hot idea.
Work has been a little weird and a lot of interesting lately. My beat isn’t changing, but some of my day-to-day duties might in terms of what I’m working on for the paper and what we prioritize. I’ll be writing certain kinds of features more regularly, so that’s good since sometimes covering personal tech is a pretty large beast to try to get your arms around all the way.
I’m still trying to get a separate, more personal writing project off the ground and we’re about to finish another season of Trailers Without Pity. Summer, of course, is moving far too quickly for me to keep up and soon it’ll be too late to go toobin’ or to use that Schlitterbahn season pass. So, despite all the stuff I want to write, I’m trying hard not to spend these next few months stuck inside, away from the sun.
Oh my goodness, do my brother and I love monkeys. I mean we LOVE them. We ARE them, in our dreams, I think. Goddamn a banana sounds good right now. I’d settle for a plantain, even. Know where I could score a plantain?
So… cowboys. They are dusty! And aliens. They are often shiny or slick with grossness! Put them together and you have… this movie thing.
Despite the potential of this concept, I wasn’t too thrilled about the initial trailer that ran during the Super Bowl; it feels way too on the nose and like a grim, money-extracting mechanism you install in a movie theater, not unlike an obligatory system software update.
The trailer we ended up looking at for our latest Trailers Without Pity video is a little more lively, but that’s like saying an old, sedentary man barely clinging to life is more sprightly than most zombies. It’s not exactly a useful comparison.
In any case, here’s our video for the Jon Favreau-directed Old West alien invasion movie Cowboys & Aliens.
When we made the list of some of the summer movies we would be covering on Trailers Without Pity, I was alarmed to see so many superhero movies. I didn’t think there was any possible way we’d have much to say about them (and, honestly, I really stopped watching them after Dark Knight. I mean, who’s gonna top that?).
But then I saw the trailer for Green Lantern, which is genuinely weird. And not really in a bad way. This movie has big, glowing green balls for how out there it seems to be. I thought Thor looked nuts, but this looks even stranger.
