loonyblog.

Apple has posted a trailer for The Notorious Bettie Page, a biopic of the celebrated model from the 50’s. The title role is played by Gretchen Mol, whol is probably best known perhaps for that magazine cover that caused a thousand accidents when put on bus stops (that’s a slight exaggeration, but good lord, I don’t think anyone who drove past that didn’t stop for a second). She’s actually been in a handful of really good movies (assuming you can forget all about The Thirteenth Floor and that dull as dirt movie with Jude Law), and is a regular in the New York theater scene. In any event, she has a really classic look to her, making her a great choice to play Bettie Page. So I’m on board with all of that.

There’s just one minor problem…aside from being nice to look at (and brave, considering the risque nature of many of her photos), has Bettie Page led all that interesting a life? I will confess to not knowing a whole lot about her. I’ve seen the photos, the Olivia paintings, the work of Dave Stevens and so on, but I don’t know much about her life. Wikipedia doesn’t shed a whole lot of light on the subject either…her official biography doesn’t sound terribly interesting, and she denies the accuracy of the salacious unofficial one (plus it got Harlan Ellison mad, and nobody wants that). So who knows if this will be all that interesting a movie.

But hey, if nothing else, just like the original photos, it’ll be nice to look at for a while.

Woo, here’s some interesting news…the Superman Homepage (easily the best site for supernews on the web) has an interview with Ilya Salkind, the producers of Supermans I – III and (ugh) Supergirl, and says that Warner Bros. is working on new special edition versions of all five of that era’s Superman movies. That’s okay I suppose, but what’s exciting is that Salkind believes Richard Donner’s long-lost version of Superman II will see the light of day.

Donner never actually finished Superman II, but he did shoot a lot of footage back when Superman I and II were going to be directly related (with the first one ending in a cliffhanger for the second). Much of that film revolves around Marlon Brando, whose brief appearance in the first film netted him an astronomical amount of money (leading to a financial excuse not to use that footage in the second). So who knows what’s really going to be on the disc.

Personally, I like Superman II. Almost as much as I like the original. But like the first one, it has some really weird moments, most notably that cellophane thing he attacks the Kryptonians with. I never really thought it was that stupid, but I watched the movie again this past week (while on an airplane, of course), and jeez…after that Family Guy episode, I just can’t watch that scene anymore.

In any event, I’ll probably get the re-released Superman set. Actually, no. I’m sure I will. I’m a sucker like that. Heck, I’ll even watch Supergirl again (shudder). I actually have the Anchor Bay special edition release, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch the extended version. It’s awful, but it’s better than Superman IV…that one I haven’t been able to watch since I saw it in theaters back in the 80’s.

I’d like to make a big apology for yoinking the story below earlier this week…the story (about the fire at 575 Broadway, which houses my office) was a rare violation of my own rules for this site, and with all kinds of rumors floating around it was decided that there should be a single, official outlet for information. That has since come out, and you can read it over at IGN. I was out of town all week, adding to the abruptness of the yoinking in question…with no immediate access to a PC, Heather actually wound up modifying the story for me over the phone.

In any event, this actually reminds me that now is a good time to point out a recent addition to the “no comment” list…due to recent (and extremely exciting!) announcements related to my company, I will no longer be commenting on anything related to Irrational Games. This again, is in accordance with the rules…I haven’t talked about Irrational in a very long time, but can now make it formal.

With that out of the way, I now return you to this site’s usual extreme geekery and nonsensical ramblings.

This entry has been pulled. An official statement will come soon.

I was very disappointed to hear that “Imprint”, the episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series directed by Takashi Miike will not be airing. I’ve been watching the series since it started (in HD nonetheless!) and I’m really enjoying it. They’re not all particularly good (this week’s certainly wasn’t), but it’s so nice to get a weekly dose of good old fashioned horror. Complete with all the sex, violence and gore the genre thrives on.

So why isn’t Miike’s episode airing? Apparently it’s too disturbing for television, even Showtime. Here’s the description from the press release announcing the DVD:

Based on the terrifying novel “Bokkee Kyoutee” (Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Co., LTD) by Shimako Iwai, Takashi Miike’s “Imprint,” produced by Kadokawa Pictures USA and filmed at Kadokawa Pictures in Tokyo, Japan, is set amid the corpse-strewn riverbanks of 19th century Japan in this tale of an American journalist (Billy Drago, “The Untouchables” and “Demon Hunter“), hoping to find a love he left behind. The journalist’s hunt leads to a dark island where the only refuge is a brothel. Spending the night with a unique woman (Youki Kudoh, “Memoirs of a Geisha“), he learns the danger of dredging up old ghosts.

Well okay then. This smells like marketing to me. “Too terrifying for TV” just sends my BS detector into overdrive. Still, I’ll be Netflixing it nonetheless. In the meantime, next week’s episode is based on a story by Clive Barker. Unfortunately, with Miike’s off the list, this means next week is the season finale.

Hopefully it’ll get picked up for a second season. I’d love to see episodes directed by guys like Clive Barker, George Romero or Stephen King.

Playing Geometry Wars in 1080i while listening to a playlist consisting of the soundtracks to Wipeout XL, Tempest 2000 and Darwinia really is the mind-blowing experience you’d hope it would be. My score jumped by about 20,000 points as soon as “Digital Terror” started playing. I’d prefer to have an updated Tempest (4k? A man can dream), but until then, this does nicely.

So yes, my 360 finally arrived. I’ve had it for about a day, and I’ve yet to try any actual 360 games on disc…I’ve just been setting it up for media and Live Arcade. So far I’ve got Mutant Storm and Geometry Wars, both of which rock. I’ve got about 30,000 more MS points (I had GameStop credit so I bought a couple of those cards) so if anyone has any other suggestions, post ‘em in the comments.

Incidentally, I know I’ve said this a billion times, but Jeff Minter is god. There have been visualizations before, but nothing (and I mean nothing) comes close to Neon. It’s HD, it’s interactive and it’s fifth generation trip-o-tron technology. Absolutely amazing stuff. If you have it, I recommend testing it with Baba Yetu, the theme music from Civilization IV for a particularly wild light show.

I’ve had a few days to fiddle with iLife ‘06, so I’m ready to pronounce my judgement on iWeb, Apple’s latest addition to the suite. The short version? It’s an Apple 1.0 product. Life iTunes, iMovie, Safari and so many others (although oddly enough, not iPhoto, which was great from day one), this is a solid first generation product that will likely get a whole lot better in iLife ‘07. Read on for more.

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent a nice relaxing chunk of the three day weekend building and painting a Warhammer 40,000 Dreadnought, and I’ve posted a gallery of photos of it (plus a couple of really goofy ones) over on my newly iWeb revamped .Mac site (I still have mixed feelings about it…look for my full review tomorrow).

In any event, I had a great time painting this model. As my first post-Macragge (see here for that) project, it was significantly more complicated, but a lot of fun nonetheless. And much to my surprise, it came out pretty good. I even did things I wasn’t expecting to be able to pull off, like the purity seals and armor scratches and stuff.

But really, this whole post is just so I can post this picture, which cracks me up. I suppose that says something about me, but if you’ve read this site before, you already know what a dork I am.

Look out for Uncle Duke…he smokes!

I went in to get my fabulous hair cut this afternoon (hey, I’m enjoying it while it lasts), and when I walked in, I noticed something very unusual. For some reason, when men get their hair cut, they almost inevitably get the Kubrick face. I swear, it was like walking on to the set of A Clockwork Orange.

As my hair was being cut, I did my best to fight it, but when you’re asked to look down, but still want to see what the person’s doing in the mirror, sure enough, you get the Kubrick face. And at that point you’re completely helpless to do anything but give a wry smile, and that just makes it worse. That probably makes as much sense as a clockwork orange¹, but it’s true.

¹ I mean this as the phrase, not the movie. The movie makes perfect sense, or at least it does after the tenth or fiftieth viewing. 2001 I’m still working on, and I may never truly understand, but I’m in a good place with A Clockwork Orange.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible (and in fact, I didn’t…I had high hopes), but iWeb is actually worse than iPhoto + Homepage for posting photo albums online. I’m shocked. Genuinely shocked.

I can’t figure out any way to make my default .Mac page point to an iWeb site (iWeb now uses “web” as a subfolder on your iDisk instead of “Sites”…who the hell thought that was a good idea?), so here’s my new .Mac page. All the photo albums are currently just archived versions of my old iPhoto ones, because somehow they dropped the ability to make two-column photo albums, and (and this is the worst thing), they’ve made the amount of space given to captions even smaller (and that was my biggest complaint about Homepage already!).

I know Apple’s 1.0 products have a bad history, but I didn’t ask for much…all I want is a simple way to upload photos and make them look nice.

I’ll post more specifics when I’ve had a chance to fiddle with the program a bit more. Maybe I’m just missing the part of the program that doesn’t completely suck (it happens). But my initial impressions are flat out negative.

Update: Okay, it’s not as bad as I originally thought…it is better than Homepage, but in order to make it that way you have to deal with some very non-intuitive stuff. More to come.