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So I finally succumbed to the sweet songs of the succubus and got myself an iPhone. I know I am really late to this party but hey, I like to think that I am fashionably late. My initial impression is that the iPhone is a contradiction made flesh. It is both extremely powerful and polished and yet at the same time amazingly frustrating, it is such a capable device that is at every turn shot down by infuriating software design choices and seemingly completely arbitrary limitations. I swear sometimes that Apple in their never-ending quest to polish their product actually end up polishing the user out of the equation. I wonder if at any point in the ongoing design process someone has just stopped and thought, “What does a user want to be able to do with a device this powerful in their pocket?”. I’m not even going to mention the active punishment that is iTunes on the PC, it’s bad enough that the iPhone doesn’t really have it’s own software like the Nokia suite or SE ones, it just makes do with what is essentially a music store. It’s like getting your ferrari serviced at a bakery. Fuckers.

Well anyway, that leads into my little micro-project which was a set of sexy Team Fortress 2 related backgrounds for the iPhone. So obviously I am not claiming any ownership over the content of these images I have merely cropped them down to the correct size or in a few cases touched them up and extended them to fit the iPhone’s aspect ratio. Basic Photochop Shit. So yeah, as per usual click to embiggen and save the ones you want, then sync them in iTunes or I have put them all in a rar that you can download below.

Download All: TF2Wallpapers

So second of all I went to see Moon with Samo about a week ago and I had to say something about it. I read quite a few reviews extolling it’s virtues quite loudly but I have to be honest, that movie left me a bit.. agitated more than anything. Let me break it down.

What I liked:

• Sam Rockwell. Amazing job, he absolutely nails the cabin fever. Really excellent but I don’t want to spoil the movie so I won’t talk more detail.
• The Atmosphere. Perhaps the biggest success of the movie was this mix of oppressive bleakness and high tension. The second act of the movie is the most effective where you are never really sure how things are going to pan out scene to scene.
• The lack of exploded robots and lasers. This is old school sci-fi, more about character and big ideas than flashy junk.

What I didn’t: (swipe to read spoilers)

• The movie never feels like it achieves its potential. It sets up some seriously interesting potential and then only ever hits like a 6 or 7, never pushes it up. It just feels overly restrained.
• SPOILER: The very ending, the film ends with a radio signal sort of thing you hear from earth and it is a massive cop-out.
• MASSIVE SPOILER: This relates to the first point, they set the movie only like 12 years into the clone cycle, this would have been much more interesting if perhaps it was a hundred years into the future or even more and the earth had changed a huge amount. When he talks to his daughter, they could have made that his great granddaughter or something, I dunno, it just felt un-ambitious. I felt like I wanted so much more out of this movie. After seeing District 9 this year and walking out with an immense feeling of satisfaction, well, I didn’t get that.

I can’t recommend this movie to people, but at the same time I think people should see it. It does some things really well and while they don’t make up for it’s short comings in my opinion those things that it does do well are so rarely seen in modern sci-fi that it is a real pleasure to see them.

That seems to have come out a bit incoherent. Well it’s getting to be quite early in the morning as I find myself tapping this out so please forgive my rambling musings. I will in the next few days post about what I have got set up on my iPhone in the way of apps and the like.

Ciao

I had been holding off from actually watching anything Avatar related, with the toxic ‘meh’ buzz coming off the internet I really wanted to see this IN a cinema at least if not in the full 3D effect. Well, I relented today and watched the HD trailer from Apple.com and I can sort of understand why it’s not affecting people like James Cameron had hoped. The problem is that the 3D is good enough that it doesn’t jump off the screen and make itself apparent but not good enough to actually feel real, there is a decidedly animated feel to the whole experience. Now I am prepared to believe that this is as a result of seeing the film flat, that the 3D effects of the film will lend a life to the experience but unfortunately for Fox and James Cameron, that is an experience almost impossible to communicate in traditional mediums.

Other problems stem from the subject matter, watching the 7pm Project the other night one of the women on the panel said that the teaser did ‘absolutely nothing for her’ and I can completely understand that feeling. The other comment that came out straight away was that it was all very ‘Jar Jar’ which is the other problem, the creature design doesn’t really push any buttons, at least not any positive ones. Having recently watched District 9 and loved the character design and the amazing work that the WETA team did with the Prawns these tall blue people are just a little bit lame, sort of Star Trek Voyager style aliens as opposed to big screen aliens.

Well, that was a bit of a rant and not particularly coherent but I’m sure that when it comes out I will go and see it, it’s everyone else I wonder about. I do worry that the movie doesn’t have what it takes to grab people across genre lines like recent blockbusters like The Dark Knight have been able to. People who get exciting about a James Cameron Sci-Fi will see it, people who like Science Fiction will see it but I’m not sure that anyone else will much care…

Wow, just got back from this movie Kicking my Arse. It is everything one could hope and more, Tarantino at his bloody, talkative and ingenious best. I won’t go into details because this is truly a film you want to see unspoiled and unsullied by opinion but let me just say that this is my new favorite Tarantino film and one of the best war movies in years. Make seeing this in a cinema an absolute priority.

10 Nazi Scalps out of 10