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Quick Review: Incredibles 2

November 9, 2018 by The Chad

(Spoiler Alert)

1. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the original, but the sequel strikes me as being very similar. Incredibles 2 did not seem different enough to justify its existence.

2. As one example of the above, the characters start out in the sequel pretty much just like they did in the original. In terms of character growth, the original might as well never have happened, because everyone was reset back to the beginning.

3. The story was standard. The villain reveal was obnoxiously predictable. The only parts I really enjoyed were Mr. Incredible struggling at home with the kids (especially Jack Jack). I could have watched a whole movie about that and skipped all the generic action.

4. A request: can we please, please all agree never to use weaponized hypnosis as a story plot ever again? I can see how hypnosis was mysterious and potentially scary back in, say, the 50s. But it’s 2018 – everyone should know by now that hypnosis cannot make people do things they don’t want to, and it doesn’t immediately (or ever) work by simply slapping swirling images in front of someone. The plot device is so stupid and played out.

5. All that being said, I do like the characters and the world and was mostly able to enjoy the movie. The scenes about family were great. The action and plot were simply bearable.

Filed Under: Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews

The Cabin In the Woods

August 5, 2013 by The Chad

The Cabin In the Woods is one of the most amazing movies I have seen in a long time. It’s like Fight Club, in that you go in expecting one thing but get something totally different – and better.  It’s like The Matrix, in that you desperately want to know what’s going on, and yet you don’t because you’re enjoying the ride so much.

Cabin is a horror movie and a tongue-in-cheek homage to horror movies. It’s scary, but not really. It’s funny, and it’s bizarrely compelling.

It’s best not to know too much about this movie in advance, so just go watch it. Now! 

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: movies, The Cabin In the Woods

Bioshock Inception (Spoilers)

June 25, 2013 by The Chad

Karen and I finally finished watching and playing, respectively, Bioshock Infinite this past weekend. My reaction to the much heralded ending closely mirrored my reaction to the equally “mindblowing” Inception.

**SPOILER ALERT FOR BOTH BIOSHOCK AND INCEPTION**

As the game’s ending unfolded, I experienced all the emotions that I was intended to: confusion as we walked through a sea of multi-dimensional lighthouses, surprise as I learned Elizabeth’s origin, disbelief as multiple Elizabeths confronted Booker, grief as the Elizabeths disappeared one by one, and hope as Booker walked towards the cradle after the credits.

The ending seemed sufficient enough, though I knew I had missed pieces of the puzzle. I immediately hopped on Google and searched for explanations and interpretations. I found plenty of details on what I’d missed or forgotten from earlier in the game. Things snapped into place and made sense, more or less.

But something didn’t quite feel right, and I was reminded of Inception. The movie was jaw dropping and hugely popular, but it, too, lost appeal the more I thought through its mysteries. The reason, I believe, is that these stories were not made correctly. Their purpose is not to tell a story that needs to be told, but rather to shock the audience with some insanely clever twist.

I picture a writer starting out with the question, “How can I surprise the audience?” Then the writing process happens backwards: “What if the hero turns out to be the bad guy all along?!? Then the hero has to sacrifice himself in order to destroy his enemy. Perfect! Now how could that happen? They could be versions of each other from different dimensions. Now we need some way of jumping between dimensions, so let’s create a character who can do that. Of course, we’ll have to limit her powers somehow, otherwise she’d just solve the whole mystery right from the beginning. And there’s all sorts of paradoxes and issues that come up with multi-dimensions, so we’ll introduce some arbitrary rules here and ignore some problems there.”

And so it goes, with the writer bolting on more and more story elements to the chassis that is the surprise ending. The surprise itself is so convoluted that a special world with its own rules is devised to contain it, and even the rules of that world have to be bent and stroked at times to make everything fit snuggly. Remember all the crazy rules in Inception? They were still introducing them well into the movie (“Oh, by the way, if we die in this particular dream, we die for real.”)

As the audience, we follow the story and try to accept the rules handed to us, arbitrary though they are. And in the end, it all pays off: we’re left with a brain-melting revelation which suddenly changes everything we thought we knew. Well, everything we thought we knew about the contrived world we were presented with.

And that’s the hollowness that I leave these types of stories with. I’ve been entertained, but I’ve learned nothing of consequence. I can now intelligently discuss whether or not Leonardo DiCaprio’s character was, in fact, still dreaming at the end, but I will not live my life differently because of the story.

This type of story telling is like a magic show. You watch the performer, knowing something amazing will happen, and it does. You’re entertained briefly, and you might even spend some time trying to figure out how the trick worked. In the end, however, you walk out of the theater knowing it was all B.S., and you move on with your life.

There’s nothing wrong with hollow entertainment. I partake in it all the time without writing overly long blog posts about it. What bothers me is when people hold up games like Bioshock Infinite and movies like Inception (read any other Christopher Nolan movie) as deep, meaningful, and provocative. It’s akin to people holding up Criss Angel as some special being because he can levitate.

By all means, let’s enjoy the experience, but let’s also keep in mind that we are watching a trick – a piece of entertainment – which works only in a specific, forced situation. Instead of crowning such media as “mindblowing,” “visionary,” and “a real mind f#@k,” let’s all just pick our jaws up off the floor, thank the performers for a good time, and move on with our lives.

Sorry ladies, the show’s over.

 

Filed Under: Pop Culture, Reviews Tagged With: Bioshock Infinite, Christopher Nolan, Inception

Playing With Lytro

April 7, 2012 by The Chad

The Lytro is here, and my company has one!  I’ve been playing around with it for the last few days, and I must admit it’s an interesting toy.

In case you’ve been living under a photography rock, the Lytro is a whole new concept in taking pictures.  Instead of capturing a 2-D plane of light, the Lytro captures “the light field” (I think combining a light field, a black hole, and a popsicle stick is how you make a lightsaber, so this is pretty advanced stuff!).  This allows it to capture 3D images, the end result of which is that you can choose your focus point after snapping the picture rather than before.

It’s easier to just show you.  Click on the photo below to play with the focus.

 

There, you see what I mean?  Isn’t that cool?

The stylings of the Lytro, its interface, and even the box it’s packed in are very reminiscent of Apple (steal from the best!).  The unique shape of the camera is key to making people see it as something truly new.  If it looked like any other point-and-shoot, I don’t think this would get nearly as much attention.  Unfortunately, that shape is a bit awkward both for shooting and for carrying around.

The camera’s interface is quite simple, offering just a few buttons and a touch screen.  Sadly, the screen is much too small, meaning you have to download the images to your computer before you can enjoy them.  Zoom is controlled by rubbing your finger along a ridge on top of the device.  Unfortunately, the zoom control is located right where I naturally want to put my finger, resulting in a lot of accidental zooms.

So, what do you do with the Lytro?  I see three options:

  1. Take normal pictures, knowing that you can be sloppy and fix the focus later.  The workflow would be to shoot, focus, then save to JPG and do whatever you normally do with JPGs.
  2. Take creative depth-of-field pictures, and share them like I’ve done above.  You have to be creative because it’s difficult to put something of interest in both the foreground and background.
  3. Convert the images to full 3-D.  Yes, this is possible, though I don’t have the glasses or 3-D display to confirm this. 

The biggest limiting factor right now is the image quality.  Like early digital cameras, the resolution and clarity just aren’t there yet.  Click Luckie’s butt to see a full-res JPG export.  It’s 1080×1080 (the equivalent of only a 4”x4” print), and you can see that the image is very noisy.

That being said, the Lytro is a fun toy and another creative tool for people to play with.  The technology has a lot of potential, and I’m sure we’ll see this advance quickly.

Though professional photographers may despise it (“Oh great, let’s take even more skill out of shooting!”), the light field camera is the (still somewhat distant) future of photography.

 

More: 

  • My Lytro photo gallery
  • The official Lytro photo gallery
  • Lytro online

 

Filed Under: Photography, Reviews, Technology Tagged With: Lytro

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