08/21/2009 - Avatar Day

A few hours ago, I went to the 15 minute IMAX preview screening of James Cameron's Avatar which has been duly dubbed "Avatar Day". If you've already seen the trailer for Avatar, then you've seen short snippets from most of the extended scenes that were shown.

Avatar Day opens with a sergeant giving a speech to a group of marines while on an alien planet called Pandora. At the close of the speech, we see a young marine in a wheelchair enter the room. The marine is Jake Sully (portrayed by Sam Worthington). The next scene shows Jake being placed in a coffin-like enclosure by a scientist (Sigourney Weaver) who begins a procedure in which she achieves a series of "mind congruences" until the entirety of Jake's consciousness is transferred into a biological avatar know as a Na'vi. Jake then 'wakes up' in his avatar (after a wild camera ride though the insides of a florescent cable), and proceeds to boldly march out the door much to the dismay of those trying to administer medical checks on his new body.

From there we see some scenes featuring Jake in his blue, fourteen foot, Na'vi body wandering the jungles of Pandora. The Na'vi, though they can be grown and used as avatars, also comprise the indigeneous people of Pandora. In one of the scenes, Jake faces off with a raveous ,dinosaur-sized, jungle beast. He tries to shoot it only to have the gun bitten out of his hands by the beast. The detail and animation of the beast is definitely enough to make you believe Jake is in danger. However, the immediate fate of our hero is not shown in this scene. We are then transported to a nightime scene in a beautiful, glowing forest. The forest is full of vivid violets, blues, and purples, all glowing in intense detail surrounding the camera and palpably existing in all depths the eye can percieve. That scene is really the scene that sells the beauty of this movie. In the scene, Jake is trying to fend of some wolf-like creatures when out of the blue (no pun intended) comes what we can assume to be an indigenous Na'vi female. She kills most of the animals and the rest run away.

The final extended scene is of what seems to be a Na'vi coming-of-age ritual. Jake is with the Na'vi female along with other Na'vi on a cliff edge. Before them are some dragon-like creatures, and she tells Jake that he will know which one is right for him because it will try to kill him. After scaring a few off, sure enough, one tries to kill him. He wrestles with it for a while, gets knocked off, resumes the tussle, and becomes victorious by inserting his ponytail into one of the dragon's antennae. Apparently, the Na'vi have part of their brain stem within their pony-tail. They can connect their brain to a dragon with it. Jake thus learns to fly with the dragon by thinking about what he wants to do and the dragon does it. The steroscopic (3D) aspect of the movie was used to great effect in this scene as Jake flies in front of a vast, mountainous landscape.

Overall, the CG was good in the scenes I saw. The Na'vi were well rendered and their animation felt pretty real. Their interaction with real people, though brief, was convincing enough that I didn't cringe while watching it. Cameron was really able to use the 3D vision well by filling the air with little details all the way to the furthest background of each shot. It seems to me that a big part of the experience of watching Avatar will be the environment and its vivid colors and detail. Even if the plot of the film isn't that good, I still think it will be worth watching just for the visual grandeur of it. Granted, much of the graphics didn't look totally photo-realistic, but it was still pleasing to look at.

Personally, I'm pretty excited about this film. Though I don't believe it to be as groundbreaking as some people are portraying it to be, I still think it will be a great watch, worthy of seeing more than once just for the spectacle. I hope Cameron was able to flesh out the battle scenes in this movie because they have the potential to blow you out of your seat if done right. For that matter I hope the whole movie is done right, because even though Avatar Day was pretty good, I wasn't totally blow away by it. The movie could be a bland movie, even with the great spectacle.
Let's hope Cameron finds a good balance and does this thing right!

So, that's my take on 'Avatar Day.' I hope to see you in theaters!

Tranformers 2 Review

My review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is up over at GM4R!

Another Famous Person Has Died

Apparently Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcette, Billy Mays, and Ed McMahon weren't the only celebrities to die recently. Check it out.

Southwest Airlines Goes WiFi

That's right folks, at right, your looking at the latest and greatest in mobile internet technology. Southwest has launched the first ever satellite-fed WiFi for commercial airliners. What you see in the picture is an antenna that Aerosat Corporation developed. The antenna is able to track and hold a WiFi satellite signal as the airplane pitches, rolls, and yaws (as a satellite antenna has to be pointed exactly at the satellite in order to get the signal properly). It's able to accomplish this using a complex computer tracking program, which was developed over an 18 month period of testing. On a test flight, one of the technicians reported getting 54 Mbps connection speed! Regular broadband gets about 2.1Mbps. Check out this podcast at Southwest for an up-close perspective on the technology!

A Musical Experience

I just bumped into this video not knowing what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised. In this video a pianist and a cellist do a mash up of Coldplay's Viva la Vida

Double Stack!

This past fall, a friend and I would regularly stop at a McDonalds every Tuesday on the way to visit some friends. The biggest attraction to eating there was McDonalds' 99 cent cheeseburgers. They were cheap, and good for a late night snack. Unfortunately, whatever appeal these supposed morsels had was utterly and totally destroyed in our minds after we repeatedly received salty and bitter excuses for food called cheeseburgers. It was time for a change. Change, it seems, came in the form of an off-hand, split second decision, that changed the course of our lives forever. That decision was Wendy's.

We saw it across the traffic circle, that seemingly equal fast food place to McDonalds. Casually, we pulled up to the drive though and discovered that Wendy's offered a similar menu item to the McDonalds 99 cent cheeseburger: the Double Stack. We decided, "Why not," and ordered a couple. With money exchanged, and Double Stack's in our laps, we both opened the wrappings. It was love at fist bite.

Naught is there a burger in existence that radiates such potent flavor. Naught does any other burger rivet the entirety of you attention with one bite. It's so simple, but so elegant. Its just two delicious hamburgers, a few fresh onions, some crispy pickles, a slice of melted cheese, and two buns all topped off by richly flavored ketsup and mustard.

We then began to regularly order four or more each. One time, my friend had seven double stacks in one night. Suffice it to say, we never went back to that McDonalds again. Now, if ever I'm out, and there's a question of what to eat on the fly, I default to Double Stack. In fact, it's now one of my prerogatives in life to open others' eyes to the grandness of the Double Stack. If only people knew, if only people tasted, maybe the giant, McDonalds, would fall. Maybe people wouldn't settle for worst, never mind second best. Maybe people might smile more often.

Please, please try a Double Stack, then tell everyone you know about the experience. It is truly an under-appreciated delicacy. Here's to the Double Stack!

A Sad Day has Occurred.

Danny Gokey has been voted off American Idol. I am continually amazed at the public's ineptitude to at all judge good singing. As I mentioned in my last post on this subject, Allison Iraheta was voted off last week. Allison, Danny, and Adam Lambert are all clearly superior vocalists to Kris Allen, but somehow he managed to make it to the finale with Adam. Allison is a powerhouse, rocker singer, who can really belt it out and sound great. Danny can sing great in a soft voice, in loud voice, in falsetto, and he has excellent control of tone in whatever range or volume he has to sing in. Adam, can hit some of the highest notes I have ever heard anyone hit, and he's perfectly on key. None of this did Kris have. Kris is a competent vocalist who is almost always on key, but there ends his singing ability. All three of the aformentioned are also much more talented than him. I guess I can't blame America, because loyalties easily suprecede objectivity. However, there's one thing lurking in the darkness that no one probably wants to talk about. It's that element that has most likely gotten Kris this far when he probably shouldn't have even been in the top ten. Neither Danny nor Allison have it. That's right, it's girl appeal. Kris is the young, "cute" guy of the bunch, and perhaps for no other reason than that, he has advanced to the finale.

In any case, Danny will be missed. I hope he goes on to have a great career and prove America wrong in voting him off. He was just so on, on everthing he sang (except, of course, that one note last week he sang wrong). He was so balanced. Any range or volume he had to attack, he did it with great control. The one thing I like about him more than Adam is that he didn't scream out every song, but had the reserve and control to be quiet and tender sometimes. Here's to you Danny, an awesome vocalist and one of the best at that!