Don LaFontaine, the famous voice behind film trailers such as “The Elephant Man,” “Batman Returns,” and “The Terminator” died yesterday at the age of 68.
With such a distinctive voice, there’s going to be a big, baritone space to fill “in a world…” of television commercials and movie trailers. He will certainly be missed.
Here’s a post that’s terribly late to the game, but just trust that I was cooking all this up in my head as I sat at the hospital with mom and baby reading the Macworld Expo news.
This year’s Macworld Expo keynote wasn’t filled with quite the fanfare as last year’s, but then again, there can’t be a product as rumored about and anticipated as the iPhone was every year, can there?
The Macbook Air is certainly a sexy little number, but it didn’t intrigue me that much. I have a Macbook Pro through work and I just upgraded from a G4 mac mini to a new aluminum iMac about three weeks ago.
What did excite me was the news about Apple TV. I bought one about 6 months ago with the intent of ripping my DVD collection so that all my media was relatively available to watch in the living room without having a huge clutter of music and videos lying around. I got about 10 movies in before I realized what a cumbersome task this was, not to mention that I was going to need to go out and get larger drives to fit all my music and photos along with the 150 or so DVDs that I own. Good thing I started with my top 10 favorite movies!
Since the DVD library idea sort of fell through, I’ve been using the device as a remote jukebox for the living room to listen to as we do housework, etc. That’s been great, but as a whole I began to feel like I wasted some money in terms of the possibilities Apple TV offered versus the reality of its capabilities.
That’s why Steve-o’s announcement of movie rentals via the Apple TV finally made the device useful in my mind. Not only rentals, but HD rentals for $1.00 more. Of course, I’ll need to rent an HD movie to see if it’s worth that extra dollar. Add to that the fact that the device will no longer require that it syncs with iTunes means that I can access all those movies I’ve ripped any time instead of having to go to the basement to sync up any movie that I might want to watch.
Of course, the Apple TV still has a lot of untapped possibility inside even after the announced updates it will receive. I’m also afraid that the next big leap in functionality won’t be offered via a free update since I’m imagining features that will most likely demand a hardware refresh.
Nevertheless, thanks to Apple for making the Apple TV into something I might use more than once a month.
I received one piece of advice from a lot of new parents at work… go see a movie before your baby comes. It’ll be a while before you get to again.
Robin and I don’t get to a lot of movies anyway, but she was really wanting to see Juno, so we decided to go see it last week. This and that got in the way, so we finally got around to it last night.
First things first. Don’t take a woman who is due to give birth any day now to a movie about a pregnant 16 year old. It’s a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. 
Anyway, I have to say that I really liked the film… with one qualification. The first 10-15 minutes of the film did not work for me at all. The script was trying so hard to be weird and quirky that every performance seemed terribly forced. Rainn Wilson’s cameo as a convenience store clerk was incredibly stilted. but it wasn’t his fault, it was his dialogue. It almost seemed like once screenwriter Diablo Cody got a few pages into writing, she got over herself and that’s when the story started to flow.
And once that story started to flow, it was smooth sailing.
I thought the performances of the main characters were outstanding all around. Ellen Page is a fantastic actress. I found her to be terrifying in Hard Candy but found her to be adorable and likeable in this movie. She’s got some range. Michael Cera is great as usual. He is the hands-down king of low-key comedy. I was a little sad that he wasn’t in the movie more than he was.
Jason Bateman was also excellent, and his story arc was the only part of the film that I thought was the least bit predictable.
In the end, it’s a warm story that will touch you, especially if you’re sitting next to a hormonally-drive pregnant woman.
It’s hard to pull of genuine quirk in movies. I might suggest to future directors though that even though it’s perfectly acceptable to study quirkmasters like Wes Anderson and Jared Hess, it might not be the best thing to try to mash their aesthetics together and try to make it your own. It seemed to me like Jason Reitman ended up with a film that looked, sounded, and felt like it should have been called Napoleon Rushmore.
Bottom line, I liked it, and it will go in my DVD collection someday so my son can watch the last film we went to go see before he was born.