Tag: trailer

The Dark Is Rising sequence is a set of 5 books1 written by Susan Cooper between 1965 and 1977. It is without question my favorite series of books from when I was younger and it is also now being made into a movie. More acurately, the second book in the series is being made into a movie. When I heard about this, I tracked down the trailer on the official website2. After watching the trailer, my initial reaction was disappointment. It appears the story has undergone some substantial rewrites. As an additional bad choice by the producers, they’ve cast an American as Will Stanton2 and Ian McShane as Merriman Lyon. While I am an American myself; casting an American as the lead in a profoundly British story is hugely inappropriate. I really wish the producers of the movie had taken a note from the Harry Potter movies and limited their casting to the U.K. Also the reason I object to Ian McShane is I still think of him as Lovejoy and I think I’ll have great difficultly in taking him seriously in this movie. On the bright side, they did cast Christopher Eccleston as the Rider and I have no doubt about his ability to play that role.

So I am looking forward to seeing this and hopefully it won’t suck like the trailer.

1 Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King and Silver on a Tree
2 I’d give you a direct link to the trailer, but they built their site entirely in flash so there’s no way for me to do so. Apple now has the trailer for The Dark is Rising on their movie trailers page.
3 The main character of the book.

I used to love playing video games and would waste entire days doing nothing else, but over the last couple of years I’ve started slipping away from that hobby. The expense of keeping my computer updated to handle the latest games combined with the pain I’d get in my wrists just kind of killed the fun. Particularly since I wasn’t seeing a lot of new games to keep up my interest. Well, if the game behind this trailer plays anywhere close to as good as it looks; then I’ll be back to burning the midnight oil to lay waste to the enemy. *grin*

You see, one of my all-time favorite video games was the original Team Fortress mod for Half-Life. The class choices, mayhem and fun were an unbeatable combination1. Then as other mods were developed further; Valve announced they were going to go all out on making TF2. This was 5 years ago and was the last we heard from Valve about it. At least the last we heard until this month when they released the official trailer for TF2. The new character models are wicked cool and oddly enough something about the trailer reminds me of No One Lives Forever (another great video game).

Just wow! I cannot think of any better description of how cool this trailer looks. Go on, hit the link and watch it yourself!

1 At least I’ve always thought so, but others have preferred that POS called Counter-Strike.

The next Marvel Comics movie, the Fantastic Four is due out 1 July 2005 and their official website went live sometime today. Apple has a trailer up for the movie and as I expected it looks like crap. What makes me doubly annoyed is that the choose to use one of the coolest super villians of the Marvel universe1 but it appears they’ve “modernized” him. One of the cool things about him was that instead of using his superscience to make a perfectly human looking mask; it had those old-school rivets & cast-iron look to it. From the brief glimpse of him that we get during the trailer, it appears they’ve taken away all the rivets and completely smooth over the metal of his mask. Ah well, I’ll probably still end up going to see it (or at least renting it at some point). After all, it wouldn’t be fair to completely lamblast it without watching it once. 😀

1 Who? Why that would be Dr. Doom of course! *sheesh* That was a silly question.

This evening after work Ariesna and I headed up to the World Theater in Cedar Rapids to attend an early Halloween Party.

Err… that’s not strictly true. We’d heard from AWelkin about said party being a mascarade and that it would start off by showing Shaun of the Dead. This is a British horror/zombie flick that was released here in the US not all that long ago and it had looked mighty funny, going by the trailers. Having now seen the movie, I can safely …. but that’s getting a head of myself.

We were running a bit behind schedule when we left (movie scheduled to start at 5:30, left house at 5:10, drive is ~30minutes) but we hurried along as best we could. Narrowly avoiding getting lost in downtown CR, I had to drive around the block a couple of times to find a place to park. We hurry inside –the time is now 6:00– and there’s no sign of a movie screen or a movie playing. We stumble around a bit confused when AWelkin waves us over. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones running behind schedule. *shrug* So we sit and chat1 until nearly 7 o’clock!

Finally the movie started and it was flippin’ fan-tas-tic! Sure, some bits had crude langauge and there was a bit of excessive gore but overall; 4.95 stars out of 5. Definitely, a must see and leaps & bounds better than the last movie we saw together.

1 Well, we tried to anyway but they were blasting annoying music at a near deafening level at us.