A long while back i got what turned out to be a worthless box that I thought would forever live in my closet, an AppleTV. I first got it with the hopes of hacking it to play DivX and other media but soon learned that was much harder than I expected. Since I simply hate iTunes and would rather eat glass than be forced to use it the AppleTV was of very little use to me. And yes I knew all this going in and didn’t care, I just wanted to play.

Well Apple finally released the Take 2 update for AppleTV last week. So yesterday afternoon I took advantage of my sick day off and updated my AppleTV to see what the new changes were like. Gone is the pretty scrolling interface of the first AppleTV, instead replaced with an extremely boring, square two column menu system. While this works just fine it looks like shit – very non-Apple if you ask me. But ok, how are the new features? Well the main one I was interested in (and will review here) was renting an HD movie from the iTunes store directly from the device. I’m happy to say this works well and is easy enough. You can browse through the HD movies and once you’ve chosen one you can even watch the trailer if you want. I selected my movie and for $4.99 I rented the HD version (their HD selection sucks right now but should be growing). Once I selected it I had to put in my iTunes ID information (which I should only have to do once). A few minutes after it started downloading it said it was available to view, a nice touch. It of course has the typical DRM shit on it, I can watch it as much as I want for 24 from the moment I start watching it.

So how did it look and sound? Well it sounded great, no pops, cracks or scratches. It also looked very nice, but not “full” HD. I’ve got my AppleTV connected to a 46″ Sharp 1080p LCD and while it looks very good I definitely could see some encoding artifacts and lots of banding in gradient color areas. I’m not sure what real resolution/bitrate it was but it sure wasn’t 1080p. It didn’t look so bad that I was upset, I’d say it looked like a standard DVD upscaled to 1080 – but a very good upscale.

All-in-all a good experience, if they continue to increase the HD selection I will definitely be renting from them again. Now if only it were prettier and if it only had a real remote, gotta get my Harmony 880 programmed to control it, I just know I’m going to break that little thing.

Today is a day of semi-unusual posts for me.  The latest comes in the form of a YouTube clip of the new Star Trek XI teaser trailer.  I will admit to being a pretty big Star Trek fan (no, not an over the top one) and I’m pretty excited to know that the francise didn’t die with Star Trek: Nemesis which I actually really liked (it’s no First Contact but good none the less).  So without further adieu here it is:

Recently we watched In Good Company starring Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace (from That 70′s show and Scarlett Johansson (from The Girl with the Pearl Earing and Lost in Translation). Honestly it was much better than I thought it would be, I found myself laughing out loud quite a bit.

The best thing about the movie is that you love to hate Topher Grace as the young punk kid that takes over Dennis Quaid’s job. Quaid, a succesful add sales VP gets kicked out when the company Grace works for takes over. Quaid is obviously upset but as the professional he is he lives with it. Grace falls on his face initially but does do an ok job with the help of Quaid. That is until he falls for Johansson, Quaid’s daughter.

The plot is pretty simple, the jokes pretty predictable, but the best thing is the ending which isn’t a stupid fairy tale. If you’re in the mood for something lite this is probably a pretty safe bet. You won’t love it but I’m guessing you won’t hate it either.

Last night we saw Frank Miller’s Sin City. Apparently we saw a VERY different movie from all the critics and everyone else because we pretty much hated it.

So if we hated it why even give it a 5/10? Mainly Robert Rodriguez. The look of Sin City is amazing, you really have never seen anything like it. In that sense it reminded me a lot of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (another film that we didn’t really care for). Basically we thought the movie was awful, the acting terrible. Some of the dialog was great (just some) but most of it stunk too. The look of the film really is great, it really does feel like a comic book has come to life (much more so than other comic book movies which really are real life movies based on comics). This movie IS a comic book, and that is very cool.

Again I guess we just didn’t get it or saw a different version of the movie. If you know what we missed please let us know. Basically the plot (or plots) are all over the place. It’s similar to other large ensemble casts like Grand Canyon and Love Actually (although is obviously nothing like those). The thing that made those two films great (or at least really good) is that everything between all the apparently dis-separate groups of characters is that in the end they all tie together wonderfully and you see how they are all related. While they eventually do get tied together in Sin City it’s in a very hap-hazard way that isn’t fluid or believable at all. It just very matter-of-a-fact at the end, like “ok, I guess we’ll tie them together now”.

Ok, so the saving grace could have been the cast, right? Wrong. With a huge cast with the likes of Bruce Willis, Elijah Wood (a surprisingly dark role for him), Mickey Rourke, Brittany Murphy, Michael Madsen, Rutger Hauer, Josh Hartnett, Benicio Del Toro, Powers Boothe, and Jessica Alba you’d think there’d be something redeming with the film, right? Wrong. This once again proves that a lot of big stars does not make a great (or even decent) movie. So what about the plot? Well it’s one of the most brutal movies I’ve ever seen. No, it’s not Kill Bill bloody, but it’s pretty violent. That usually doesn’t bother me, like in Kill Bill where it adds to the film, but here it was just blood for the sake of blood.

Basically the plot is like watching 3 or 4 comics back to back. They are very disconnected and they are just slammed together with no smooth transitions between them. All of a sudden the entire movie shifts into something else and you have no idea why or where it’s going. “What happened to him?”, “What is this now?”, “Where did that go?” were frequent thoughts during the movie. Now I like thinking during a movie, but not a movie like this.

Ok, enough, you get it we hated it. Tell us what we missed. Tell us why we should have liked it. We don’t get what everyone else saw. My recommendation – avoid at ALL COSTS!

This weekend we finally got to see Million Dollar Baby starring Clint Eastwood, Hillary Swank (winner of best actress), and Morgan Freeman (winner of best supporting actor). IT WAS AMAZING.

This is one of those films that really sticks with you long after you see it. It reminded me a lot of The Shawshank Redemption (another of my all-time favorite movies). It’s similar in feel mainly due to Morgan Freeman’s narration during most of the film and just the general type of movie (an outstanding drama).

I really didn’t know what it was about other than female boxing, and boy is that NOT what it’s about. Warning, if you don’t know what it’s about don’t keep reading, I don’t want to spoil it for you…

Yes, it’s about boxing, but it’s really about Hillary Swank’s character breaking free of her past, breaking away from her terrible mother and family (expertly played by Margo Martindale). She connects with Eastwood and finally talks him into training her. They form a very tight bond as he takes her through the boxing ranks.

So you know that Hillary Swank is going to be good. She won best actress right? You don’t realize how good she is until you see the movie. The training she did for the film must have been amazingly hard as she is totally convincing as a boxer (and man is she huge!). But when you finally find out what the film is really about, you really get why she won. In what becomes her last fight her neck is broken after a sucker punch after the bell. This leads to the second half of the movie, dealing with the aftermath and her complete and total paralysis.

Once she realizes there is no going back, no way to repair the damage done she decides she wants to die. Here in lies the controversy. Should someone in that position be allowed to decide when they die? I’m not about to try to answer that (if you know me you probably know what I think). It’s a hugely polarizing issue and I don’t want to start a flame war. Needless to say the way Eastwood deals with it is very powerful.

In short this is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Ever. I’d easily put it in my top 25 movies of all time list, if you haven’t seen it yet RENT IT. You’ll love it!

Friday night we watched Cellular starring Kim Basinger and relative newcomer Chris Evans. It was a lot like the TV show 24 (without Jack Bauer of course). What I mean by that is the story was only so-so (not very well written) but it was very edge of your seat exciting…

Basically Basinger is kidnapped by Jason Statham (from The Italian Job, The Transporter, and Snatch) to find where her husband “hid it”. Basinger says that she doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about, and the stupid Statham leaves her with a phone (even though he smashed it with a sledge hammer she somehow makes it work). She finally gets it to work and gets Evans on his cell phone (ah, there’s where the title comes it…) and asks for his help.

You can guess the rest, Evans goes on a spree trying to help her (which is pretty high energy) and finally hooks up with one of my favorite actors, William H. Macy, to help him save the day. There is one pretty decent plot twist (I won’t spoil it for you) that actually made me give it an extra point in my rating. If you’re in the mood for a good energy movie (without a ton of violence) then you should like this.