Greater Satellites

After browsing some more news over the course of today, I stumbled across more manliness. The top 64 Manliest Movies to date. I’d like the officially state that I am behind most of the movies on this list. Here’s list and the ones I’ve watched: (more…)

I think popularity with blogs is commensurate with amount of comment spam. As of late, I’ve had quite a bit of comment spam. It builds up during my long periods of being away, then when I finally return I just empty it out in one feel swoop. I think hooking my blog up with the Akismet plugin is in order this weekend.

Other than working a lot, my 17 month anniversary with Jackie, the government jackin’ me for $1500 in taxes, and not updating this blog — only a few things have been going on that are noteworthy:

I have to be purposefully vague with this in case certain people read this blog, but I’ve set the wheels in motion for making money on a one-time effort that could prove to be quite fruitful. We’re talking one-time payments for services that range from $500 to $5000. Those are pretty substantial chunks of change and not something I would mind making, even if it was just once or twice a month. On a related note, I’ll be redesigning four pretty huge sites in my life: this one, dark driving, B7M (I’ll be vague on this one for the time being), and IntuitSolutions.

Where I used to be stressed about designs for these majors in my life. I’m going to sit down and just do whatever comes naturally for me. If that means that Greater Satellites is a black site with white text and no images, so be it. At least it’s done for the time being and I can expand upon it later. I’ve come to realize, more and more, that content is king, and it’s time I get some bangin content in my corner.

On a semi-related note, I’m thinking about starting a blog solely dedicated to reviewing all the horror movies I’ve ever watched. I talked to a few people here at work and everyone seems to be crazily on board, so there might be more on that soon. Should be pretty cool.

Finally, my five point plan for taking back the web and interacting with others who might like what I have to offer:

1. Finish the design of this damn site. It will serve as the hub for everything else I’m about to talk about
2. Get some new videos filmed for YouTube. The fans demand more!
3. Start posting to del.icio.us once again
4. Sign up for Twitter for unbelievably fast and easy interaction. Shorter than blogs, longer than away messages.
5. Start borrowing my love’s wonderful camera and loading up my Flickr account with interesting things I see from day to day

Assuming everything pans out, I should have all sorts of interesting contacts across the interwebs in no time flat. Next task: seeing the light of day!

If you got the vague reference in the title of this post, then no doubt you were like me for the past six months in following all of the viral marketing for a little piece of film released yesterday called Cloverfield. My initial review and impressions are as follows (warning: SPOILERS):

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Well, I’m having a bit of trouble sleeping, so I decided to blog about the weekend while it’s still fresh in my mind. I’m hoping that I just get so little sleep that I actualize a different persona. I think I’d call that person Tyler. Totally random, I know.

Friday began like most other days, with the sun rising in the east. I was up at the (relatively) early hour of 11am, beginning some design and data input work for my current (kinda) employer. Simulatenously, I began creating some new site mock-ups that I intend to use in future portfolio screenings for prospective employers. Jon and I discussed it yesterday a bit: It’s imperative to stand out among the crowd of sometimes thirty or more potential job candidates. Other than making a fantastic impression as far personality and work ethic goes, it’s as equally important to have a solid, diverse, and ultimately unique body of work on your side. Anyone could fiddle around with Frontpage (eck!) or Dreamweaver (bleh!) and have a halfway decent site up and running withing a few hours. A good designer should not only break you out of the slippery slope of template-ism, but also afford you a presence on these vast interwebs among your peers and competitors…

But I digress.

Point being that I sent out quite a few more applications on Friday with some updated template work. I’m excited to hear back from, well, any of them. As the day wound down, I started cleaning my room a bit and doing some laundry. How very home ec of me. When all of the very mundane chores I set out to do were finished, I decided to pop on a movie. In this case, it was the very awful Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers on the new epitome-of-awesome FEARnet channel. I remember watching that movie when I was much younger and getting a kick out of the gratuitous amounts of nudity and violence (but mostly the nudity… c’mon, I was 12!). It was such a terrible plot, but I appreciate and watch most horror movies, regardless of quality. Eventually Jackie showed up and she, Denise, and I hung out, had some drinks, and half-watched Darkness Falls. We had a good time hanging out and shooting the shit. It was an exceptional, indoors-y type night.

Saturday I sat around twiddling my thumbs for a majority of the day. I worked out a bit, sent out some more applications/proposals to local companies/businesses, and got some reading done. Kathy and Rich ended up stopping by around 7:30pm to hang out and relax. I like that my room is accepted as a decent place to chill, makes me feel good about the coziness factor of my house. Anyway, Jackie came by around 10pm and introductions were made all around. We got sucked into watching a pretty good portion of The Island, which is pretty decent sci-fi movie in this author’s humble opinion. Kathy and Rich bounced away around midnight, which is precisely when the J and I rolled our hungry selves over to Wawa for some sustenance. Upon return, we commenced the watching of Office Space, which my lady had never seen before. I know, I know, it’s crazy, but she iiked it right out of the gate. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to watch it all because she was feeling tired and it was getting late. Great times, all around though.

Today (technically yesterday) I woke up way late in the afternoon and did some reading. “What were you reading, dawg?” you may inquire, to which I respond “Only one of the best comic series I’ve read in a long fucking time, my friend, and that comic series is Marvel’s Civil War.” It’s a cross-over comic, so you get to see all of Marvel’s big names (read: Spider Man, X-Men, Captain America, Iron Man (douche), Fantastic 4, Avengers, etc) all at once. The artwork is really well done and it’s pretty fuckin epic. It’s definitely worth a look for fans of the Marvel Universe. Just as an aside, here’s another comic that I am totally psyched about.

Sunday is my new bowling day. From 6pm to 9pm I’m a possible and probable Brunswick-sanctioned substitute for a Friends & Family league up at the Brunswick Zone on Street Road. Today was my first day subbing on my dad’s team. I sucked pretty bad on my first game, only scoring a paltry 109, but my second game was a nice recovery with a 156, and the third and final game rang in to tune of 148, I believe, leaving me with the respectable average of 138. I had a lot of fun with my family, extended family, and the lady. I’ll be up there every Sunday until May or something (it’s a long God damn season). Got back ’round 10:30, ate a little, drank a little iced tea, read some news, caught a couple more of my comics, and that pretty much brings us to current.

I watch a lot of movies, I know.

I believe that it’s written somewhere in the Bible that when we see something that is wrong or evil, it is our duty to be angered and speak out against it. This is what’s known as Righteous Indignation. I believe Righteous Indignation is also a rock and/or roll band from England, but for the purposes of the following let’s regard the former as truth and the latter as bullshit.

Fact: Andrew Gormley is a huge nerd.
Fact: Andrew Gormley plays video games as a leisure activity.
Fact: Andrew Gormley has an eye for film, an ear for stories, and a heart that’s pure and true.

Now that the facts are established, allow me preface by expressing my deep affinity for video games. I’ve had almost every mainstream console there was to have since Atari, with the exception of Xbox. Currently hooked up to my TV is a PS2, a Gamecube, and an SNES cleverly tucked out of sight. I play video games with substance (read: RPGs, action, adventure) and appreciate a good story just as much as the next guy. Just like with many movies, some video games try to cover up their plot hole-ridden scripts with fancy graphics and insane amounts of eye candy. Fortunately, as with movies, it’s easy to spot a game that’s sub-par and avoid it. Here are some examples of games that have excellent story lines: Final Fantasy (series), Resident Evil (series), Silent Hill (series), Max Payne*, Metal Gear Solid* (series), Bloodrayne, Doom (series… ok, not really a great story, but fun as hell), Alone In The Dark (series), and Mario (series). A lot of you who don’t share my proclivity towards video games may recognize some of those titles instantly because they all share one thing in common: Some asshole writer/director couldn’t come up with a story of his own so he decided to rape and pillage the oft-immensely entertaining stories of these select games and make movie adaptations which receive ratings ranging from “horrible” to “almost watchable”. I think I’ve successfully set the mood of the piece as well as established my thesis (take that Mr. Oliver! You English teaching, B- giving bitchbastard!).

Due to some erratic and volatile mixture of boredom, exhaustion, and sheer lassitude last night, I ended up watching the movie Doom for the first and definitely last time. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud during some parts, which in and of itself is funny because the mood the director was trying to establish was, most likely, deadpan. I’ve played many flavors of the Doom games and believe me, there are many of them. All of the titles had stories that, while not being exactly plausible due to the futuristic nature, were entertaining and moved the story along at a reasonably fast pace. With the exception of one scene in this movie (which, ironically, was the scene that paid homage to the game via a first person perspective) it was a total disaster. First, the “creatures” looked to be lifted from every other alien movie ever made. Namely, Alien. Second, those infected with the “alien virus” turned into… What’s the word I’m grasping for? Ah yes, ZOMBIES. There were no zombies in the Doom games. Every game took place on Mars or one of its moons (Phobos and Deimos, thank ya muchly). Why would one feel the need to write zombies AND aliens into a movie? The two ideas individually don’t make any fucking sense, combining them just makes it more absurd. While they’re at it, they should just make a movie about Alien Vs. Predator… wait a God damn minute…

My third and final gripe is actually applicable to all movie adaptations of video games, and that is: You can’t expect, regardless of how well you write, direct, or act, to illicit the same responses you get playing video games from watching a movie. Final Fantasy games, for instance, can take anywhere from 40 to 100 hours to complete. The Resident Evil series averages anywhere from 4 to 12 hours depending on the difficulty and the skill level of the player. The same 4 to 12 timeframe goes for the Silent Hill games as well. My point is that you can’t expect to chop hours and hours of story, keep the best parts, add and subtract characters/plot elements as you see fit, and repackage it as something that will be incredible because the truth is that it’s merely a hollow shell of what it once was. Not only are you losing the control element that you possess when playing the games, you’re losing a majority of the story and all of the things that made it such a great experience in the first place. It’s easy to be inspired by what you see in games, but it’s a whole different story trying to interpret and adapt the game to a nice, neat, two hour time frame so the studios and audiences are kept happy.

That’s the end of the well-formed rant, but I had some other things to say that were more of random musings and can’t really be extrapolated to more than a few sentences:

• Not all video game movies are horrible. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children was a fantastic video game movie done entirely in CGI. The catch is that it would only make sense to those who actually played and understood the intricacies of the original, Final Fantasy VII.
• I admire Paul W. S. Anderson (writer/director of the Resident Evil movies, as well as Mortal Kombat) because he actually plays the games and has a pretty decent knowledge of the backstories, which is more than can be said about some of these other clowns. However, I still stand behind my position that he raped the Resident Evil series and took bits and pieces that he liked and threw away the rest. Oh yeah, the main character of the movies, Alice, (coincidentally played by his hot fiance) has never appeared in nor was mentioned in ANY of the Resident Evil games.
• Silent Hill wasn’t a bad movie. It just wasn’t as good as the games.
• Super Mario Brothers was, without a doubt, THE WORST VIDEO GAME MOVIE EVER MADE. There’s no debating this, it’s actually carved on the back of the second tablet containing the latter five commandments.

That’s about everything. I’m hoping the next Resident Evil movie will be better and God help them if they fuck up the Max Payne series, those games are the shit.

* - These movies are currently in production. I have no bias against them because I know nothing about them… yet.

So I’ve noticed that since the dawn of 2006, I’ve written in this blog approximately 19 times (not including this one). That’s like one blog every two and a half weeks. UNACCEPTABLE! Compare that with 78 posts in 2005 and you can see how much of a slacker I really am. Either way, I hope I can get this up to the mid 50s by December 31st by doing an incredible amount of writing and actually doing things that are worthy of writing about. I’ve also decided to be as crazy honest as I can be from here on out. I’ve always been honest, but I’ve also been vague (see: post titled “I Can See Clearly Now…”). I know what I’m talking about, but sometimes I glaze over situations so much that they’re practically indecipherable to the normal human being. I’m not sure how many people read this and it’s probably better off that way. If I know you, then you’re on my radar, and my radar is used to launch surface-to-air missiles made of words and descriptions.

In unrelated news, Denise and I just got done watching Click with Adam Sandler. It was a surprisingly good movie, and this is coming from someone who really hasn’t really liked an Adam Sandler movie since Happy Gilmore. The tell is that Christopher Walken is in it and he generally only attaches his names to quality scripts. He did a great job, as well. It’s seems to be a biopic that closely rivals our situation with our dad, so maybe the relatability makes it a better movie for me. Either way, check it out. It might end up being Adam Sandler’s last funny movie.

Speaking of movies, I’ve been banging out scripts and ideas left and right recently. I’ve told a few people some of my ideas for feedback purposes and responses range from mild intrigue to complete obessesion, so that’s dandy. Thus far the “crime” script I’ve been working on for a few months now is finally coming together. The “dark dramedy” (drama+comedy), as I’ve dubbed it, is still in its formative stages but has a premise that’s primed for the silver screen. We’ll be filming some great new stuff over the coming weekends and I hope I get to see some new faces on the script as well as some of the veteran players. Exciting times.