A Treatise Concerning the 2011 Academy Awards and the Continuing Retrenchment of the Tastes and Values of the Middle-Aged in Cinema Culture

Another year, another Oscars.

I've always been a great fan of the Academy Awards. Maybe it's because I've never felt at ease in the overly-macho, chest-thumping world of the NFL (or maybe it's because my team never wins) but the Oscars have always been my Super Bowl. I buy lots of beer, spread out the chips and salsa, and all my rowdy friends are coming over to try and calculate who will that the most little naked men home with them.

Of course, any film buff will tell you that the Oscars are a sham. Half the time the Academy votes for the wrong film, the other half of the time they vote for an obvious bit of Oscar bait clearly made to inspire the old fogies to accolade it with the title of Best Picture. And then sometimes you get a pretty good movie year chalk full of perfectly fine movies but the whole event is muddled by the oftentimes self-important ceremony of the whole thing.

This year borrowed liberally from the latter two categories, which I suppose ranks it somewhere in the middle of the eighty-three years of Academy Awards.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 96 - Urge Overkill

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

Is Urge Overkill the most obscure act that I've done for this project? The thought struck me when I went to Wikipedia early in the week to do a little research, only to find that only one of their albums actually has its own page. This is the first time I remember this happening; even Mannheim Steamroller had detailed Wikipedia write-ups.

This is strange because apparently, for one brief, Tarantino-fueled moment in the early nineties, Urge Overkill had a burst of fame before that flash in the pan sputtered and died. This strange career arc quickly became more interesting to me than the band's actual music. I had picked Urge Overkill after "Sister Havana" came on Pandora one day and I kinda liked it; I discovered I had another song from the group in my iTunes via the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, and decided to devote a week to the outfit. I thought the band was a bigger deal than it actually was; it turns out these two songs are the only two even semi-hits that the group ever had. 

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Sunday Reading: The Day The Movies Died

Tonight, Hollywood will gather to celebrate the best last year had to offer in cinema. Crazy ballerinas, mumbling cowboys, crackhead boxers, stuttering kings, socially-handicapped billionaires: all will be honored by the industry that bore them, then they’ll compete for a shiny little man.

Don’t be fooled, says Mark Harris writing for GQ, into thinking this is the real Hollywood. Real Hollywood values money above everything else, including naïve “artistic” aspirations, he argues. That doesn’t sound so heinous, at first; it takes money to make art, after all. But it starts to get real depressing when you step back and consider all of the crap Hollywood peddles in pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Harris’ article “The Day The Movies Died” points fingers at the producers of the 1980s (who have since begotten an entire generation of mimics) for prioritizing marketing over the movie itself. From which virus did this particular strain of blockbuster disease spring? Top Gun. Harris writes:

“Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film's real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the "high-concept" blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren't movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.”

That movie-as-product philosophy, the one that demands a film have a slavering audience before the cameras even start rolling, is the impetus for these upcoming train wrecks: Asteroids, the Magic 8-Ball movie, Oliver Stone’s Monopoly nonsense, and much more.

Harris implores Hollywood to greenlight the next Inception, whoever’s making it. He has faith that the American audience who paid good money for Christopher Nolan’s particular flavor of mind-bending action will embrace another with equally high ambitions. However, he has considerably less faith in the industry hell-bent on ignoring Inception’s success so that it can make – what else? – Top Gun 2.

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After the Jump: Thunder Thighs

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us in the iTunes store!


This week! An old lady who eats lots of pizza, a dinosaur with giant thighs, the requisite Charlie Sheen jokes, Sarah Palin on Facebook, and some other stuff!


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Saturday Morning TV: We Dare

We Dare is a new game from Ubisoft. It will be released for the Wii, and a two-player version will be available for the Playstation 3.

According to Ubisoft’s press release, We Dare invites players to “use the controllers in the most unusual ways... and enjoy the unique game play designed specifically for the use of the Wii-mote or the Move controller.” Keyword: ‘enjoy.’

You can watch the confusing* trailer below. Then hit the jump for two of my favorite “We Dare” remixes.

The Original

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Album Review: Radiohead - "The King of Limbs"

Everybody has their own personal favorite Radiohead. Some fans prefer  the band's early guitar-based efforts on The Bends and OK Computer, others prefer the cold sterility of Kid A and Amnesiac, still others like the relative warmth of In Rainbows. (As a caveat to this review, I'm a Kid A man, through and through). This diversity speaks to the band's ability to continually push the envelope, but it also means that a substantial portion of their fan base is going to be inevitably disappointed when a new album comes out that doesn't sound exactly like Your Favorite Radiohead Album. 

Such is the case with The King of Limbs, the newest release from the band. After announcing the album's completion at the beginning of last week, Radiohead opened up preorders for a Saturday release, and then ended up putting it out on Friday just because they felt like it. With only a five day warning and an early release, you might think it would be difficult to work up a lot of hype for the album, but somehow the Internet managed to do it anyway. The release - a subtle, subdued, rhythm-heavy album with barely a guitar to be heard - has been met with decidedly mixed reactions.

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Game Genres Are A Mess, Just Ask The Smithsonian

The “Games As Art” debate is officially over.

You may have thought, “Surely we put that to bed a while ago,” but you’d be wrong. It flares up every few months like a venereal disease, after the release of a particularly “arty” game or when defenders of the “artgame” can’t digest the brazen fratboyness of something like Bulletstorm.

But you don’t have to worry about that anymore. The Smithsonian is curating a videogame exhibit.

According to its website, The Art of Videogames will showcase “the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies.” There’s a likelihood everyone from Mario to Master Chief will wind up in the exhibit, which goes on display in Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian American Art Museum next year.

Rather than arbitrarily pick a handful of games to include, the Smithsonian compiled a list of 240 games with the help of Past Pixels creator Chris Melissinos. The institute’s since categorized the nominees and has opened up voting to the general public. Each voter selects eighty games from the full list, which is divided up by system and genre.

This is all a wonderful idea, but there’s one problem. The classification of these potential Smithsonian artifacts is bold-faced reminder that videogame genres are severely busted.

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Steph’s Science Corner: Fiber optics

This is my last post for a while, and then I’m off on a sort of spring sabbatical. I’ll be back this summer though, so don’t miss me too much. You can still email me at science@charge-shot.com!

After last week’s post on LEDs, one of my favorite readers inquired about how fiber optic lightning works. Well, I’m a sucker for special requests.

As many of you may have observed, optical fiber technology is used not only to make those glowing, flexible sea-urchins that spice up your party-lighting, it has also become extremely prevalent in the field of information transmission. Cable television, phone, and internet companies have spent the last decade replacing their underground lines with fiber optic cables, and this transition alone is responsible for significant developments in high-speed, high-definition technology. It’s one thing to make a clear, bright picture, it’s another to transmit that gorgeous image to your house over several miles without a loss in clarity. It’s a rough world out there for digital data, and safe, undistorted passage through an underground network is essential. With fiber optics now nearly ubiquitous, phone calls sound more clear, internet speeds are up, and we can get hundreds of high-definition television channels into our home with only the slightest hesitation as we rapidly flip through channels. It’s a pretty hefty amount of information traveling over an impressive distance.

Yet despite our reliance on innovations such as these that make possible our vast, high-speed world of accessible information, I think it’s safe to say and lighting geeks and ravers everywhere probably appreciate this technology far more than the rest of us do. After all, they have some pretty wild stuff.

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The Motorola Xoom and Android 3.0 In Brief

So there's this thing called the iPad.

It happened and people liked it, so people bought it. Other companies saw people buying it and thought "gee, it would be great if people would buy stuff from us too!" That is exactly how it happened!

So now, here we are, a bit over a year after the first iPad's unveiling and (if rumor is to be believed) a matter of days before the second iPad's unveiling, and we're just about to be drenched in the first wave of Google Android tablets. Leading that charge is the Motorola Xoom.

There are a few Android tablets out there already, but the Xoom is the first to run Android 3.0 (codenamed Honeycomb), which is Google's first version of Android designed specifically with tablets in mind, and it's going to become more and more common as the year goes on.

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Art House in the Middle of the Street #5: The 39 Steps

There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

 It's sometimes a pain to love a filmmaker who wasn't always great. Or, perhaps, he was always great, but he didn't always make great films.

Either way, Alfred Hitchcock can be such a pain if you're a completist. Like a great singles artist who makes lousy albums, Hitchcock made some indelible hits and a bunch of crappy album tracks. For every Psycho or Strangers on a Train, there's Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a botched attempt at a screwball comedy completely unrelated to the Pitt/Jolie joint, or Suspicion, a Cary Grant/Joan Fontaine vehicle featuring a heinously bad performance from Fontaine that through some cosmic fluke actually netted her an Oscar.

But these were made when Hitchcock was already working in the American studio system, when he had a talented stable of actors, big budgets, and a likeminded producer in David O. Selznick. What to make of Hitchcock's British output, a period during which he worked under considerably more restrictive conditions? Probably a bunch of barely-realized messes, showcases for potential at best, right? The 39 Steps was released in Britain in 1935, half a decade before Hitchcock made his debut on U.S. shores with Rebecca. I had my sights set low.

Ho boy. I was wrong.

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Bold Statement: I Love Junk Movies

A recent article on The Moki Blog confirms what everyone in the whole world already knew: today’s movies suck. The interactive graph on the site isn’t the most user-friendly, but it does give us the cold, hard facts. Movies released in the last decade (and certainly in the last three years) just aren’t very good anymore. They boiled down their process by stating:

"We looked at the 20 most popular movies each year, for the past 20 years. The key, we think, is to look for movies that some love and some hate, which is the likely profile of a bad movie that's "safely" manufactured for an existing fanbase. In other words, movies that are polarizing."

And I get it. Really, I do. I see that, very clearly, as time goes on movie studios just don’t want to take chances. But I really need to clear the air here. I will, literally, go see any movie in the theater. I will pay full price. I will buy popcorn. I will leave happy, no matter what.

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La-La Land: Your Place for Events This Season

We must be in the middle of Sweeps Month or something, because I can't seem to turn on my TV of a Sunday evening without stumbling on some national broadcast of a highly anticipated annual event. First there was the Golden Globes all those weeks back. Then the Super Bowl. Then the Grammys. And this most recent Sunday, the NBA All-Star Game. And of course we all know what highly-politicized, celebration of the year's best in cinema happens next Sunday…

Living in Los Angeles, it was hard to escape the buzz of All-Star Weekend, the festivities of which took place at Staples Center, the home stadium of All-Star Game MVP Kobe Bryant (and fellow All-Stars Pau Gasol and Blake Griffin). The Staples Center has been playing double and triple duty later, as it was recently home to the aforementioned Grammys in addition to its role as home for the Lakers, Clippers, and Kings, as well as a happening venue for concerts and special events.

Events at the Staples Center are fun. I've been to a single Laker game and a single WWE Event there, and have enjoyed my time thoroughly. The LA Live center surrounding it is shiny and metallic and perpetually seems to have the mall equivalent of new car smell. And despite the havoc wrought by these events on the already legendary LA traffic, it's nice to know that there is never a dearth of culture and excitement in this, the entertainment capitol of the world.

Fortunately, the events downtown didn't impact the traffic to LAX, so I was able to make my flight for my surprise, late-notice business trip without any hassle. Unfortunately, said trip is taking up the majority of my time and energy right now, so I'll be back next week in full technicolor and with a full-length post. Continue...

Dig on the Go with Official Minecraft for iOS and Android

If, however irrationally, the barrier to you playing Minecraft has been that it wasn’t on your phone, you no longer have an excuse. Creator Markus Persson told Gamasutra yesterday that his studio Mojang is currently working on an official iPhone/iPad port for the colossal indie hit. Kotaku then reported that an Android version is also in the works.

Minecraft’s success has allowed Persson to gradually expand his team to include folks like Aron Neiminen, who will head up the smartphone port. The larger team enables Persson to develop and then implement features he omitted from Minecraft’s Alpha release. Just yesterday, he tweeted about the team’s plans for a “food meter,” which would presumably require adventuring miners to consume those hams they’ve collected instead of stockpiling them as health items. The iOS/Android version may not see all these updates, however, as Persson’s team is committed to only including features that “make sense” for the platform.

Persson can make big changes like this because Minecraft is still technically in Beta. There’s a chance that – with added goals, a more defined structure and other survival systems – the game plays quite differently six to twelve months from now. When I “reviewed” Minecraft a few months ago, I expressed concerns that “there may come a time when Persson’s creativity sullies Minecraft’s raw potential for fun.”

No word on pricing or anything like that, which leads me to believe it will be a free app that lets you purchase a license for the game through www.minecraft.net like everyone else. Then you will be free to spend your commute mining to your heart’s content.

[via Gamasutra]

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio – One Song, Three Times Edition

Having music from BS, DJ Fire-Black, and Jonathan Araldi all in one week is essentially creating an Audiosurf All-Star Game. It’s asking Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, and John Goodman to host Saturday Night Live simultaneously. It’s bringing on the Black Eyed Peas to sing their hits, then realizing their hits are too old so you have them sing someone else’s hits with said someone’s ex-guitarist, then realizing that you still need the help of an airlifted dancer/club crooner to get the job done.

Actually, it’s much much better than that third one.

I’ve written about BS and DJ Fire-Black a combined six times, and Andrew covered Araldi when he pinch hit for me last November. So yeah, these guys have Audiosurf down.

But what happens when they all tackle the same song? BS recently released “Vision of Life,” and messieurs Fire-Black and Araldi each tried their hands at a remix. Not only is this an All-Star Game, it’s some kind of trance music version of Horse.

Hit the jump to find out who gets H-O first.

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A Decade of Dreck #45: Envy

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

I vividly remember the Envy trailer. My family was at some movie or another in late 2003 and lo and behold, a preview was shown to us for this supposedly delightful offbeat comedy starring a reliable pre-Fockers Ben Stiller and comedy's newest rising star, Jack Black. I had been a disciple of Black's for several years via Tenacious D at that point and ever since School of Rock hit it big, I was incredibly eager for him to follow up with more starring roles in Hollywood (my God, what have I done?!!!).

I can explicitly recall my mother turning to me and saying something along the lines of "That looks so funny!" or "I can't wait to see that!". I suppose the hook for the movie was pretty good at the time, Jack Black invents a spray product that dissolves dog shit: the Vapoorizer. People were damn near rolling in the aisles when that joke came in the trailer, and yes, that's a pretty good joke coming out of nowhere. I mean, dogs poop a lot! Ha ha ha!

But months passed and yet Envy never came out. In those simpler times, I had less of an understanding of how movies are produced. It had never occurred to me that if a film is advertised and isn't released within, oh let's say a calender year, it bodes ill for the quality of said movie. It turns out, Envy had been in the can since 2002 but was kept under wraps because it was so bad. Only Jack Black's rise to stardom coaxed it out from the vaults at Dreamworks, Hobgoblin style. The movie died such an ignoble death at the box office due to the studio's cheap-as-hell promotional campaign (they knew they had a turd on their hands and just wanted a quick buck) and its general likeness to its subject matter that it came and went without my notice.

Therefore, revisiting Envy was something of a quest for me.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 95 - The Strokes

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

Last Monday, when I first put on the Strokes' debut album Is This It, that question mirrored my exact thoughts. 

Perhaps I had let my expectations get the better of me; I remember seeing Is This It place very highly on a lot of "Best of the Decade" lists last January, and in my mind, I already had some sort of idea of what the Strokes would sound like. Is This It barreled by at such a breakneck pace that it seemed slight, almost insubstantial, not at all what I thought the music would be. 

That first disappointment soured my initial judgment, and I expected to be thoroughly annoyed with the Strokes by the end of the week. But instead, the opposite happened. I began to drum my hands on the steering wheel while listening to it in the car, and began to anticipate and completely revel in each guitar riff. Getting used to the Strokes' music was a bit like jumping into cold water - the shock was very offputting at first, but once I got that through my system, I realized that it could be quite invigorating. 

I don't think I'll ever become a huge fan of the "short, fast and simple" aesthetic that the Strokes have appropriated. But listening to the band this week did give me a bit more appreciation of those sort of songs. When the music is so direct in its aims, it's often easy to forget that it still takes a good deal of skill to put together songs that are that blunt. Paradoxically, it must be pretty difficult to play a song that sounds so simple. 

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After the Jump: Baby Alive

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us in the iTunes store!

This one's a wee bit longer than usual. We get a little caught up in discussing TIME's List of 100 Best Toys. Tune in to see if your favorite toy is included (spoiler alert: if it's Lincoln Logs, you may be in for some disappointment). Also included in our somewhat rambly show: Jeopardy's Watson, Charlie Sheen's Cocaine Habits, videogame payola, and much more.

Thanks for listening! See you next week!

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Sunday Reading: Choose Your Own Adventure

For decades upon centuries upon millennia, stories have been linear affairs. Our brains like them that way. Thing A happens, which causes thing B, which contributes to thing C, and before you know it you’re at thing Z wondering why the author made D through Y so damn boring.

Around 1980, Choose Your Own Adventure children’s books upended the whole shebang. Okay, so people had been tinkering with storytelling long before then, but interactive entertainment is a relatively new concept – at least as we use the term today. Readers of Choose Your Own Adventure books were given choices at the bottom of each page. Each option led to a different page and on that was the reader’s fate. Turn to page 56 and you’ve escaped! Turn to page 63 and oops, you fell in a pit!

Writing for Slate, Grady Hendrix explores the rise of interactive fiction, tracking it from its Borgesian origins to the stories Edward Packard started crafting with moment-to-moment input from his daughters in the 1970s. Packard eventually took his ideas to Bantam with Raymond Montgomery. There they established the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books.

Hendrix presents an explanation for the books’ early explosion in popularity:

“The books were a hit and, with more than 250 million copies in print, it felt as if everyone read them at some point. In a world before Nintendo DS, where the only games you could play on your own were Merlin or Simon Says, a book like The Cave of Time was a comparatively sophisticated portable entertainment system. And, even better, adults were suckers for kids reading books.”

It’s hard not to see the influence of these stories in the sophisticated interactive entertainments of today. A player explores a world, selects choices from a handful of options, and plays through the consequences to their end. Role-playing games like Fallout or Mass Effect are a strict descendant and inevitable refinement of the formula. More experimental games like Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death go back to the roots of Choose Your Own Adventure, making a game out of the real-time exchange between storyteller and audience.

Go and give Hendrix’s piece a read. The genre’s history is fascinating, and its existence has had far-reaching consequences. And don’t worry, there’s no way to wind up in a pit reading this article.

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Afternoon Snack: Waiting for Godot

“Let’s go.” “We can’t.” “Why not?” We’re waiting for Godot.” “Ah!”

Let the parade of videogame adaptations of classics march on!

Have you ever read or seen Waiting for Godot and thought, “Well, shit, I could do that. Wait for some dude I barely know for eternity? And my friend can wait with me? Piece of cake.”

The comic site VectorBelly’s Waiting for Godot: the Game gives you that opportunity. Set on a barren road with barely a tree for scenery, WfG:tG follows Didi and Gogo as they wait for the eponymous Godot’s arrival. You can walk around, wait, walk around, and wait some more.

Programmer and animator Jeff Rosenthal designed the game for VectorBelly, and I’m impressed by how he adapted Beckett’s famous tragicomedy to a game. The graphics are suitably Atari-like, stressing the simplicity of Beckett’s vision. Just as you start to get bored with nothing happening, the screen declares “Boss Battle,” and you fight…nothing. The boredom itself is the boss battle.

There is a lone cloud on the left side of the sky that tracks your progress. At least I think it’s alone. No word yet on the inclusion of Pozzo and Lucky. I’ve only made it to Level Five.

The most insidious (and sort of genius) thing about Waiting for Godot: the Game is how it pauses itself if you click out of the screen or open another window. Being a 21st-century surfer of the web, I generally keep multiple tabs open at time. I caught myself flitting over to other pages as I waited for Godot to progress. I checked back: the cloud hadn’t moved. The game won’t let you pass time unless you’re actually playing it. Now that’s clever.

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Saturday Morning TV: James Earl Jones’ “Baby Baby Baby”

Yes, Lord Vader, this is Justin Bieber. No, he won’t tell us where the Rebel base is. …can we kill him yet?

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What Is: A Strangely Routine Game of Jeopardy?

On February 14th, in a grotesque mockery of a day devoted to human emotion, two of Jeopardy!'s most renowned contestants faced off against Watson, an IBM computer programmed specifically to play the game. The game show featured two rounds of play over three days, with Watson easily defeating it's carbon-based opponents Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. 

I followed the Watson competition with special interest, because I myself am a former Jeopardy! contestant. (My first appearance in the Teen Tournament aired seven years, to the day, before Watson's). Naturally, I was inclined to root for the human beings, not only in my desire to prevent a full-fledged robot-run dystopia, but also because I felt that Jennings and Rutter were on "my team."

Computerized opponents have been around for a number of years - Deep Blue is the famous chess machine that managed to beat Gary Kasparov. But where chess is a mathematical game set in a closed system, Jeopardy! relies on the contestant to know a myriad of obscure facts, and be able to make quick connections. The show is famous for its use of wordplay, and many of the "answers" are only knowable through deciphering groanworthy puns. Where Deep Blue had been programmed with the rules of chess, Watson had to be programmed to understand the intricacies and ambiguities of the human language. Could this be done? 

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The Dead Island Trailer – Zombies, Fanboys, and Aspirations

Trailers are unavoidable. To market something, you must boil it down to a few minutes of footage, slap a memorable song on it, and upload it to every site that will have you (or the one site to which you signed an exclusive deal).

Games are no exception.

For some games, the mere existence of a trailer suffices. Hundreds or thousands of gamers at a convention will hear a familiar melody or see an iconic font and start screaming about the next game in their favorite franchise. The trailer validates those fans’ particular fanaticism. They’ve trolled message boards comparing their game favorably to others. They’ve inferred titles from domain name registrations. Now a man in a suit (or perhaps a hoodie with a blazer) is showing them a thirty-second movie which makes all that waiting worth it.

After the initial launch, trailers often take on the role of Feature Announcer. For example, fighting games live and die by their character roster. Leading up to the recent launch of Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, Capcom released several trailers, adding one or two new characters each time. The gaming press wasn’t just saying, “Here’s another trailer for this fun-looking game!” Each headline ran more along the lines of “MvC2 to include [new character that maybe you’re excited about]!”

Announcements and features lists aren’t always enough. Publishers looking to pierce through the blogroll din and perhaps even score some time on television aim a bit higher.

The recent trailer for Dead Island aims quite high. Let’s take a look. (Be forewarned, as it’s a game with zombies and there are children involved, some readers may find the imagery disturbing.)*

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Steph’s Science Corner: Why We Love LEDs

These days, you can’t find many pieces of technology without LEDs embedded somewhere in their design. It’s hard to be a functioning member of society without at least recognizing the acronym, even if we know comparatively little about its implication. LED stands for Light Emitting Diode, and most of us are typically used to discussing them in the context of high-definition TVs, though they can also be found in the faces of digital watches and in the invisible emissions of your remote control. They’re low-heat, high-efficiency, and with the advancements that we’ve made in materials science, extremely versatile in the range of colors that they’re capable of emitting.

If you’ve ever looked at one of these tiny bulbs up close, you might have noticed the absence of a traditional piece of metal in the center called a filament. In traditional incandescent bulbs that we use to illuminate rooms, light is generated by pumping electricity through a thin strip of metal – usually tungsten. This metal filament has a resistance to the electricity, so it dissipates electrical energy in the form of heat. Eventually, it gets so white-hot that it glows. But this process wastes a lot of electricity generating all that excess wasted heat that we don’t use. By comparison, LEDs generate minimal heat, because the process by which they produce light particles (photons) is a completely different beast.

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The State of Windows

I write a lot about Apple for this site when I choose to cover the tech beat, and there are plenty of reasons: Apple products are numerically fewer than products from the company's many competitors, making it much easier to talk a little about everything Apple is doing. Apple stuff is often trend-setting, and their products often depart from the established norm. Apple, as a company, retains a sense of showmanship and mystery that makes its every keynote seem a bit like Christmas even when they're talking about routine updates of products that I'll never make enough money to own.

Microsoft's keynotes, on the other hand, play out more like an elementary school assembly where the speaker isn't quite sure what the audience is there to hear. I don't write about them because, most of the time, they're either completely devoid of newsworthy tidbits, or completely boring to the non-technical audience I assume I'm writing for over here.

That doesn't mean I don't use and like some of Microsoft's products - at home, aside from my trusty iPhone and with the exception of an iMac I picked up used mere months ago*, I've always had, used, and generally been happy with lowly Windows PCs. The numbers say that almost 70 percent of Charge Shot!!!'s readership is in the same boat - obviously Microsoft has done something right with its flagship operating system, because most of us haven't stopped using it since the mid-90s. The present, however, is only part of the picture.

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Art House in the Middle of the Street #4: Jules and Jim

There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

I watched François Truffaut's Jules and Jim for the first time with a dude. And not as part of a sophisticated liberal arts kid movie night where we drank wine and ate camembert. It was more, "Yo, I don't feel like doing homework right now. Wanna watch Jules and Jim?" We're both film snobs, so that wasn't an incredibly weird occurence.

I enjoyed my first viewing immensely. The photography, the music, the sheer exuberance of Truffaut's masterpiece was intoxicating. The romance, though, seemed at odds with our particular viewing: two guys drinking skunked Coors Light on my crappy apartment couch aren't the ideal audience for a story about a love so strong it defies the concept of fidelity. I resolved to watch the thing with a girl.

Fast-forward to 2011. New girlfriend, first Valentine's Day, and I need to watch a movie for this feature. Sounds like a job for Jules and Jim.

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Laughing at Valentine’s Day: Natasha Leggero Stand-Up Review

I’ve worked for a few long years in the fine dining industry. I’ll let you in on a tip: there are some nights of the year you just shouldn’t go out to eat at a fancy restaurant. These nights, ironically, are the nights everyone wants to go out to eat: New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Weekend, and Valentine’s Day. Trust me, the service will suck, the food you get may (depending on how unscrupulous a joint you visit) be more expensive than it normally is, and you will be looked at like an amateur. For these reasons my girlfriend and I decided to do something different for the day of love. We went to see stand-up comedy. Natasha Leggero, to be more precise, and, quite frankly, she cracked us the hell up!

I’ve talked about comedy several times before, and I truly think it’s an underrated art form. I listen to far too many comedy podcasts, watch far too many online clips, and am beginning to amass an old comedy record collection. My girlfriend is, decidedly, less interested in stand-up (which is why I surprised her with tickets to the show). I’ve been a fan of Natasha for a bit now (through her stand-up comedy generally and her turn as the voice of Callie Maggotbone on Ugly Americans) and we both knew Leggero’s comedy through her regular stints on the hilarious Chelsea Lately, so I figured this would be the perfect way to do something we would both enjoy. Was it selfish? Maybe a little, but come on, it’s not like I gave my girlfriend a vacuum or a bowling ball!

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Midnight Snack: The Great Gatsby

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since…” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

High school English students rejoice! You needn’t stumble through the labyrinth of misinformation that is CliffNotes anymore. Now you can digest The Great Gatsby in under an hour with this NES adaptation of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

Hurl your hat at demonic butlers and foxy flappers out to ruin the party! Dodge the laser-hot gaze of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg! Collect the gold Gatsby’s left all around New York!

Wait, what?

Actually, Gatsby is a Flash game developed by a small team of talented individuals made to look like a shameless videogame recapitulation of this great American novel. You play as Nick Carraway, who is on a quest to find the elusive Gatsby. It’s an action-platformer in the mold of pretty much every licensed game on the NES (think Duck Tales, the Mickey Games, etc.). There’s even a train level!

After you beat Gatsby (or die so many times at the hands of sewer gators that you finally decide to get upset by the epic departures from the novel and quit), be sure to head over to the game’s About page. The developers have cooked up a hilarious little mythos around the game that includes some outstanding artwork. The crass, flimsy relationship to the novel is a wonderful little jab at the storied history of bad licensed games.

Did I mention that it’s also fun?

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The 2011 Grammys: Where the Points Don't Matter

I don't go to many live music shows. In fact, I think I've been to just three concerts in the past four years - and two of them were Rush. Going to see live music just isn't my "thing" - in the same way that going to live baseball games IS my "thing." So, naturally, I was excited about Sunday night's Grammy Awards telecast, as it afforded me the opportunity to see some live (on tape) performances from some of the biggest names and most important players in the music industry.

The Grammys have long ceased to be an "awards show" in any significant way. The "honor" of receiving a Grammy inspires more lampoon than praise nowadays. The award categories themselves are so confused as to basically not mean anything anymore (as expertly spoofed by Dave Letterman in a mid-broadcast "Top 10"). And the the format of the show reflects this opinion, focusing on the big performances, while sneaking in an awards presentation right before the commercial break.

That being said, the Grammy Awards themselves can have cultural implications, such as when Esperanza Spalding's win over Justin Bieber in the "Best New Artist" category sparked a spree of Wiki-crime from fans crazed with the Bieber-fiever. (I guess synchronizing the release of his big movie with the Grammys didn't help his award chances.) However, the Grammys are and have been about the performances, some of which I saw, and will relate here.

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio–French Metal Somethingorother Edition

When I think of French music, I think of accordions, pianos, and opera. I think of Edith Piaf, and on rare occasions I think of French rap. Rock and roll – or more specifically Metal with a capital Metal – is not on my shortlist of French musical styles.

This means I’m woefully unprepared for David TMX. Mr. TMX, or David Grousset, makes French rock with his buddies Thomas Boncour, Fred Juszczak, and Aurélien Salvucci. All of this week’s tracks are taken from his new album Renaissance.

Hit the jump for some of the craziest stuff I’ve ever heard come out of France.

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Ghosts of Charge Shot!!! Past: Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs”

Arcade Fire surprised a whole host of Gaga and Eminem (perhaps even Bieber) fans last night by taking the Grammy for Best Album of the Year.

Their obscurity relative to Top 40 heavy hitters is well-known, and bewildered reactions to the coup are being expertly documented on a “Who Is Arcade Fire?” Tumblr. This all despite being the biggest indie act going right now. They even appeared on Saturday Night Live last November – though I suppose that’s just as much a reflection of the current state of America’s favorite weekly sketch show run by a Canadian.

So just in case you’re one of those people who wondering why music fans won’t shut up about a burning Chuck E. Cheese, here’s Chris’s review of their Grammy-winning album The Suburbs.

For Arcade Fire neophytes, Chris puts The Suburbs in context, charting the evolution of the band from their previous albums Funeral and Neon Bible:

“The Suburbs, due out next week, avoids the anthemic emotional affirmations of Funeral while also side-stepping the overwrought political sentimentalities of Neon Bible. It's a mess of contradictions - uplifting and despairing, a cry for present action and a nostalgic look at bygone times, a touch of childlike wonder mixed with mature cynicism.”

Enjoy!

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A Decade of Dreck #44: Son Of The Mask

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

Jim Carrey: everybody likes him, right? Perhaps that would both explain the existence as well as the colossal failures of the cottage industry of sequels to his films made without his participation. Dumb and Dumber(er), Ace Ventura (Jr.), Bruce/Evan Almighty, and of course, today's horror- Son of the Mask.

Carrey's rubber-faced slapstick stylings and general likability have propelled him through a successful career making comedy tentpoles, and he's even managed to make a couple serious dramas that aren't half bad (well, not all of them). But there must be some sort of secret society devoted to making Jim Carrey movies without Jim Carrey because they keep getting made; none of them have been good and none of them have done well.

I'm not sure if the original Mask was a good movie. I was only seven years old when it was released, but I do have fond memories of it. Carrey's style of comedy was perfectly suited for the story of a man who basically becomes a Looney Tune, and as a lifelong Looney Tunes fan that suited me just fine. The general consensus on the internet is that Mask I was pretty good movie. Of course, it doesn't matter how good a movie is; not even Citizen Kane warranted a sequel eleven years after the fact.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 94 - The Kinks

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

Rock music embraces iconoclasm. From its birth in the 1950s, the overriding message has always been "out with the old and in with the new." Rock musicians are constantly pushing forward, trying to do something different, reinventing the genre, embracing youth and energy and vigor and newness. So I was surprised to discover that a sizable portion of the Kinks' output in the 1960s was thematically conservative.

1968 was one year after the famed Summer of Love. There was a feeling of change in the air, with youth uprisings from New York to Paris to Prague. And on November 22, 1968 (the exact day that the Beatles released their White Album), the Kinks came out with The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, an album that offered a sentimental look back at pre-war Britain. It's hard to imagine a piece of rock music more out of sync with the times. 

On Village Green, the Kinks mourn the loss of steam trains, rural village life, pastoral scenery and childhood friends. But to dismiss it as mere nostalgia would be too easy. On the album, the Kinks evoke the innocence of childhood, the melancholy of an adult life gone awry, the bittersweet taste that comes from looking at old pictures and playing "remember when." The album is homesick for childhood and the perceived Edenic quality of small town British life, while simultaneously acknowledging that a return is all but impossible. 

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After the Jump: Robot StumbleUpon

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Another week, another show: this week, we're talking about cherpumple cake, the robot Internet, cockfighting, snowdays, prepaid gift cards, the end of Guitar Hero, and more!

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Sunday Reading: Why I Hate The Grammys

Slate’s Bill Wyman hates the Grammys. Despite this, I’m sure he will be watching tonight’s ceremonies – for vindication, if nothing else.

Wyman’s vitriol stems from the existence of a secret committee appointed by the recording industry to engineer the voting process for the benefit of, well, the recording industry. According to Wyman’s digging, this Secret Society of Musical Super Villains can override nominations in the four biggest categories, installing songs or acts they believe better represent the industry. It’s a dishonest ratings grab, argues Wyman:

“The process is harmful in other ways, too. It induces cynicism in the membership and among the artists—or would, if the process weren't kept so under wraps. It's particularly unfair to those artists who, nominated by their fellows in the business, are unilaterally eliminated from the lineup by the committee.

And, finally, of course, the motivations for the procedure are plain: Sticking some controversial and megapopular names in the top categories to increase ratings for the group's annual TV show/cash cow.”

Combine this with other problems – such as the discrepancy between the members’ voting and the larger critical community, the bloated number of categories, or the likelihood of big names trouncing more deserving artists in smaller categories – and you’ve got one hot mess of an awards show.

That doesn’t mean people won’t watch. Just don’t expect to have a good time if you’re watching at Bill Wyman’s house.

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Saturday Morning TV: Harry Baals

Need I say more?*

*I could have also said “HARry IndiANa Harry IndiANa Harry INdiANa Harry InDIana.”

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Don't Believe the Hype: Your Guide to the 2011 Oscar Backlash

It's Oscar season! For all you film buffs out there, that means that informed viewers are making spirited defenses of their favorite movies, highlighting all the good cinema that's come out in the past year. Right? 

Wrong. Actually, it means that heavy-duty smear campaigns are underway. It's pretty likely that your favorite movie of 2010 (yes, that one) has a fair amount of detractors, and at least one piece about how it doesn't deserve to win Best Picture for some minor reason.

This is nothing new - smear campaigns are just as much of an Oscar tradition as drunk awards presenters or unfunny hosts. Remember when 2008's eventual winner, Slumdog Millionaire, was slammed because many of its child actors were found to be still living in poverty? Or last year's winner, The Hurt Locker, had troubles during the award season - its producer was found breaking Academy rules by campaigning against Avatar, and was banned from attending the awards ceremony. 

As those two movies show, smear campaigns often have little effect on the eventual outcome. Rather, one can usually identify the film with the most scandal surrounding it as the frontrunner. Keeping that in mind, what sort of controversies are currently raging this year? Jump ahead to find out (and beware of spoilers):

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Enslaved, Oddity of the West

Consider the curious case of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

Fact: it’s a third-person action game from developer Ninja Theory – the people behind the PS3 success Heavenly Sword.

Fact: it’s based on the Chinese novel Journey to the West, which served as the primary inspiration for Akira Toriyama’s Dragonball series.

Fact: it is bursting with Andy Serkis.

At face value, these don’t seem like negatives. And in practice, they aren’t negatives. Yet the market seems confused by Enslaved.

Sobering fact: Enslaved has sold roughly 500,000 copies to date, a disappointing number for a large publisher like Namco Bandai. 

Why didn’t it click? I have no idea. But it is danger of being completely passed by. This I simply cannot abide.

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Steph’s Science Corner: The Raw Milk Debate

Send suggestions to science@charge-shot.com!

Public health has been a contentious topic in society since the era of mankind began. Issues such as what we eat, how we treat and prevent disease, and how to increase our lifespan take up more of our attention and occupy more of our news than nearly any other subject of public interest. It is as hotly contested, as violently inflammatory, and as cut-throat as any political, moral, or religious debate in today’s culture.

One of the most divisive topics in current public discourse concerns the body’s most essential need: food. Because eating is a staple of our existence, it ties in moral judgment, social responsibility, and personal freedom. Making the matter even more contentious, food science suffers from the weakness of being not just a science, but interdisciplinary. That means that not only does it bear the doubts, shortcomings, and restrictions of scientific investigation, but it covers a spread of experts from many different fields with vastly different priorities including biology, medicine, and agriculture.

Recently leading the charge in the battlefield of food science is the raw movement – the idea that cooking certain foods compromises their value. The argument asserts that heating destroys naturally-occurring nutrients, eliminating the good stuff with the bad. With vegetables, the matter is straightforward. Eating raw plant matter, if washed, is safe and often preferable. Animal by-products, however, are far more dangerous. Advocates have recently been emerging that reject the traditional treatment processes for milk (the kind we typically buy in the grocery store), preferring instead to drink – and hotly defending the advantages of – raw milk. In other words, milk that comes straight from the cow’s udder.

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Detroit In Peril, Needs RoboCop

When the Great Recession laid waste to the American economy, no city was considered a bigger victim than Detroit. The home of the nation’s auto industry suffered greatly as car manufacturer after car manufacturer flew their CEOs on expensive jets to Capitol Hill to beg for money. Even though economists and politicians alike claim we’ve weathered the worst of the storm, things aren’t all hunky-dory in Detroit yet.

They still need RoboCop.

According to an article in the Detroit Free Press, a Twitter user contacted Detroit Mayor Dave Bing (no relation to Chandler, I’m told) to suggest using tax dollars for a statue commemorating Peter Weller’s turn as a cyber-lawman. Bing swiftly dismissed the idea on his Twitter, not knowing that the user intended it as a joke.

Well, Detroit certainly doesn’t think it’s a joke. Not willing to take the Mayor’s “No” for an answer, citizens of the Motor City are mobilizing to raise money for a RoboCop statue. John Leonard is one of a handful leading the charge (join the cause here) and with good reason, as he told the Free Press:

“RoboCop is something that people have a really strong emotional connection to. This really is going to happen.”

I hope you’re right, John, or else you better starting cracking on that Terminator statue for LA.

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Game Review - Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

There are two genres that have made out particularly well on the Nintendo DS: puzzle games, and text-heavy adventure games. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective combines a little of column A with a little of column B - it could best be described as a supernatural murder-mystery with logic puzzles.

You see, in Ghost Trick, you're a newly-made ghost, and you have to figure out who you were and why you died. Most of the people who can help you answer these questions are a bit death-prone themselves, though, so it's lucky for you that you can use your ghostly powers to travel back in time to four minutes before a person died to try to avert their death and alter fate. Oh, and also, you can only talk to people if they are or have previously been dead, which often leads to situations in which the ghost of the dead person you're trying to save is looking over your shoulder and cheering you on.

If any of the above piques your interest (and, honestly, how could it not?), Ghost Trick may be up your alley.

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TV Review: The Chicago Code

"You think you can change how things get done in Chicago?!"

That wasn't the first line of Monday night's premiere of decently-ballyhooed new cop drama The Chicago Code, but it pretty well sums up my feelings about the episode: big ideas, clumsy follow-through.

If you've been paying attention, The Chicago Code is writer-producer Shawn Ryan's latest stab at his own cop show after serving as the showrunner for a couple of shows he didn't create (Fox's Lie to Me, FX's criminally cancelled Terriers). Code follows the efforts of police superintendent Teresa Colvin (Jennifer Beals) and Jarek Wysocki (Jason Clarke) as she tries to rid her city of the corruption that became its hallmark again after Michael Jordan stopped being a thing. When she can't get alderman Ronin Gibbons (frequent Spike Lee collaborator Delroy Lindo) to agree to authorizing funds for a special corruption task force, she decides to form one of her own, with officer Wysocki and his new partner Caleb Evers (Matt Lauria) as basically its only members.

Naturally, she runs afoul of just about everyone in the city, including the lazy cop who uttered the above line after she demoted him. She couldn't outright fire the guy, so she made him the commander of broom handling in a new station, which I thought was a nice touch. It was a moment of subtlety, though, in what was oftentimes an overwrought, clumsily-executed hour of television.

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Comic-Con Sold Out in Three Hours! Cue Whining.

San Diego Comic-Con 2011 is, effectively, sold out. It happened fast. It made people angry. Such is life in the genre universe. HDR first reported that the convention, held from July 21^st to the 24^th, sold out of Four Day Passes on Friday in a little under three hours. We’re talking thousands of tickets. We’re not even talking press passes.

Apparently the ticket vendor for the event was overwhelmed multiple times during the few hours the passes were available. That’s not surprising, but it did annoy a large group of people who considered their day wasted because they couldn’t get their passes. Technical failures aside, the reasons for the sell out are multitudinous and varied, but they are definitely worth talking about.

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Super Bowl Commercials 2011: A Tremendous Display of Blatant Capitalism!

"You know, I think I'm paying more attention to the commercials than to the actual game. I need to reverse that."

This was a comment I overheard during Super Bowl XLV. And while this is never the scenario a football fan envisions during their sport's biggest broadcast of the year, I can't say I could find fault with his initial reaction. At the time, the game was looking like it would turn into a blowout (a situation that was thankfully rectified later on) and each 30-second spot was garnering laughter and cheers from the audience.

Which is to be expected. When a company is shelling out up to $100,000 per second of airtime, the marketing folks had better have what it takes to steal the show. Many of these companies brought their A-Games, saturating the screen with arrangements of color and light and sound designed to stimulate the highest possible desire to buy their products.

I, for one, enjoyed watching some of the higher-echelon commercials, but they didn't inspire in me a desire to buy - they only inspired in me a desire to blog about commercials. Who would have thought the blogosphere would provide us with the tools to undermine the advertising age?

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio – Bored With Happiness Edition

Have you ever burned out on happiness? Or been around a person so damn pleasant it made you unpleasant?

That’s kind of how I feel about some of this week’s music. Issey is a Japanese techno artist with a Facebook page. (We have one of those, too!) His stuff borders on manic, which makes it a good place to start when searching for upbeat, traffic-generating tunes. Because you can never have enough polar opposites, there’s also a chill sitar piece from Migel Konstantin. Can I just say that his picture is awesome?

How much happiness can I weather before it puts me in a foul mood? Find out after the jump.

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A Decade of Dreck #43: Johnson Family Vacation

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

A middle class family with two teenage kids goes on a road trip for bonding, a husband and wife's marriage is put to the test, wacky relatives jeopardize the adventure, all while dad tries to keep everyone together.

You may think that I just descried the comedy classic National Lampoon's Vacation, but little do you know that I was in fact summarizing 2004's Johnson Family Vacation. Don't worry, it's an easy mistake to make, considering that they are in fact the same movie.

At this time, I'll go ahead and get the old "You should be able to sue Cedric the Entertainer for false advertising because he is in fact, not entertaining" joke out of the way: You should be able to sue Cedric the Entertainer for false advertising because he is in fact, not entertaining.

Cedric stars as Nate Johnson, father of three (including Lil' Bow Wow and Beyoncé's sister) and not-so-happily married husband of Vanessa Williams. The time has come to load the family into the new car and head to Missouri for a family reunion, but wouldn't you know it? The car has been pimped! Oh no! What's next? Run-ins with oddball locals across the southwestern United States? Oh, really? I never would have guessed. Hopefully, we'll all learn how much we really love each other along the way.

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