Excited About Abrams

I checked out my old movie new haunts after a long break from keeping up with them and came up with more interesting movies than interesting tech news, so let's start with that. J.J. Abrams' current projects have me pretty pumped. First of all, there's Lost. ABC put up the trailer for the new season of Lost, and I think it's pretty cool. I guess that the whole rescue operation gets pretty complicated (I loved the flash forward in the season finale last season). They've been putting some interesting deleted scenes, too. They're interesting and fun to check out, but I haven't yet found anything extremely important. The other cool Abrams project going on right now is Cloverfield, and Yahoo Movies put up a new clip from it (an extension of the teaser trailer). I didn't see the theatrical trailer until now and I like it. I'm pretty sure now that it's not a terrorist attack or an earthquake but actually a monster attack. Its his take on a Godzilla-like movie I guess, but told from a shaky cam. This style of cinematography surely isn't new, but could make for a pretty neat thriller. I don't expect a Blair Witch Project, I expect something that will actually put us in the shoes of genuinely scared people during a slightly more realistic portrayal of an attack on New York City. I'm still more interested in the attack on Gotham City, of course, and this poster will be in my room someday:



Speaking of superheroes though, the Hellboy 2 trailer is pretty sweet, too. Guillermo del Toro is just so awesome at dark fantasy and I was never that interested in the first movie but I like how this one looks so I may have to go ahead and rent Hellboy sometime.

There's more trailers to talk about though. Apple has the trailer for The Signal in HD and it's an interesting horror movie. I like horror movies that don't focus on gore but are more along the lines of a psychological thriller. What's much cooler about it though is that there are 3 directors portraying a signal that tells people to kill and focuses on their fears and such to get them to wreak havoc. I'd say it's a movie to keep an eye on. The other trailer I thought was worthwhile was for Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but only because Kristen Bell is awesome (I wish I bought the Veronica Mars Season 2 DVDs back when it was $15 on Amazon because it's back to $40 now). It's just a romantic comedy about a guy trying to get over his ex, who's a TV star, and it includes Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, and Mila Kunis as well, though I'm still skeptical. I think it could be funny, but I can't justify running out and seeing it until I've seen reviews because the trailer just didn't grab me. Plus, the main actor is the writer (Jason Segel).

Then again, I was wrong to think bad things about Walk Hard because Moriarty is pretty vocal in his recommendation of it. I can tell from his impressions that it'll be hit or miss with most people because of how off the wall and obscure it can be, but color me intrigued.

While I'm on movies, Gizmodo is still pushing DVD as being better than Blu-ray or HD-DVD, and I agree. The DRM, the lack of content, and the price are pretty big deterrents, but there's also the fact that you need a pretty big HD TV to tell the difference and so it's just not worthwhile yet.

Wired has a good list of the top 10 startups worth watching, and I definitely agree on a few of them. It kind of goes without saying that BitTorrent is hot because torrents are so popular. Powerset is a great one because semantic web is such a fascinating field and so I definitely think that there's a bright future in natural language search. Then there's 37Signals, whose Basecamp project management application is well-known among programmers as is Ruby on Rails. You can see the article for more, but those aer just my top 3 from that list.

Remember that whole Fake Steve Jobs being sued thing from last post? Yeah, that was a joke. I guess I'm just stupid for having not seen it coming, but it was just a big satire, though plenty of people commented on his blog and fell for it, so I'm not alone (though the ThinkSecret settlement was real). Also real is the Philips LivingColor Lamp, which is a cool lamp with a wireless remote that allows you to adjust the color settings on this really bright but subtle (and small) lamp. I would totally get that lamp if for nothing else but to help out at theme parties.