Ever since I started using Last.fm, I’ve been looking for similar services for other forms of media I intake. Goodreads was an excellent find, providing a lot of similar features geared toward books. It’s fun to integrate “what I’m doing” type lists into my website, but more than that the two services have generated some interesting data on what I like the most. They’ve also led me to new artists and authors I’ve enjoyed, primarily by allowing me to see what my friends have been up to.

I’d been casually looking for a similar service applied to movies. My friend found Flixter a few years back, but the site design was too much like MySpace (think garish multicolor backgrounds). Recently, I noticed XBMC had a plugin for a service called trakt.tv that scrobbles the movies and TV shows you watch in XBMC to the site, Last.fm style.

It’s still in the early stages, so there aren’t a lot of integrations to other services, and you can only add watched items manually or through XBMC. However, I’ve been pleased with it so far: The site is very simple, listing what you’ve watched and enploying a binary love/hate rating system. While it would be a lot more useful to a wider audience if it could submit from non-XBMC players, it’s certainly the best service of its kind I’ve seen so far with a lot of potential.

My friend Jeff first introduced me to Scott Pilgrim when we were still in Maryland. Jerks that we are, we moved before the movie came out. It seemed like a good film to invite my fellow first year MD/PhD students to come see with me, but it turned out they were in Canada, Japan, and Thailand, or in other words not California. “It’s okay,” I thought, “we’ll try again when the DVD comes out.”

That was November, and this week we got the delinquents (and a few others) together and finally made it happen.  I don’t know if everybody connected with the movie’s geek cultural humor, but I think they enjoyed themselves regardless.

Scott Pilgrim is a movie that does a good job bridging mediums. It stylistically incorporates the effects, comments, and abrupt transitions that made the comic book so quirky and unique. The fight scenes and integration of comic book-style sound effects into the live action were particular highlights. They also included Knives’ “Chau down” line, one of my favorites in the whole series.

In addition to the myriad video game references, the environment of the movie has a lot of neat little nods to the plot, one of the most obvious of which is the appearance of numbers as Scott fights his way through the evil exes. The first time I saw the movie I didn’t think to start looking for them until I saw the giant four in the club where he fights the fourth ex. The second time I remembered to start looking for them at three (Todd has a three on his shirt, is in a three-piece band, violated vegan code three times), and this time I started at two (Lucas Lee has two Ls making up his logo, there’s a two on the car and trailer, he has the help of stunt doubles) so I still haven’t seen anything for one. I also haven’t noticed anything for seven, but I may just not be counting fast enough.

While it has nothing to do with the movie, thanks to our friend Matt, our party featured ice cubes shaped like brains. This is now on the must-have list for the ice tray category of my geek kitchen collection, along with pi symbols and Lego bricks. Of course, when I have the money to stock up on stuff like this I’ll probably also have a fridge that can make its own ice. These are the problems I must face.

Chicken pot pie has a lot going for it. When you’ve got creamy chicken and vegetables inside a warm flaky crust, what’s not to like? Peas, as it turns out. They’re all but universally included in pot pie. Couple that with peas’ number two spot on my allergy ranking and pot pie winds up on the unsafe list. Over the weekend, Rachel got our date night off to a tasty start by making pot pie sans peas. She even cut the steam vents with the letters M and R.

We’ve both been wanting to see Black Swan since we heard Natalie Portman was starring in a “psychological thriller,” even before there was any of the buzz about Mila Kunis. We made our way to the Krikorian, one of the only movie theaters in the area (and one of the silly ones that insists on using MovieTickets.com instead of Fandango for online sales), spent six bucks on popcorn, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

My experience with Tchaikovsky and Swan Lake goes all the way back to my family’s extensive collection of cassette tapes, listened and relistened to on the long car rides we had to pretty much everywhere. Between the dramatization of the ballet and the historical fiction adventure of a couple of kids meeting Tchaikovsky while he was writing The Nutcracker, I learned to appreciate the Russian composer (Note: This is what Mark and I did instead of playing GameBoy). Tchaikovsky had a big impact on our culture, not just music. In addition to helping expose the Western world to Russian music, the guy helped write The Nutcracker into the Christmas season.

Without spoiling too much of the movie, which I recommend seeing, I enjoyed the way the musical themes from the ballet score were woven into the soundtrack. There was also some great layered storytelling going on as Nina’s life refelected the nested story she was learning to tell, played out the story she was learning how to play. Natalie Portman acted wonderfully – I hope she gets the academy award for it.

As it turns out, as of this weekend Rachel and I have been married for two years and seven months. How about that, eh?

Setting up XBMC
I decided to go with XBMC (release 10, Dharma), the dominant player for homebrew HTPC setups – and for good reason. It’s got a slick interface that it pads with data and images retrieved from fan-curated databases of movies and TV shows. While you can use a live installation to run it without an operating system, I opted to install it on Windows 7 so I could easily transfer files to the computer over my network. While you can access a full-featured administrator account on the computer, I set up the computer to automatically boot into a special XBMC account that has XBMC replacing the normal Explorer shell. The visual part of Windows doesn’t load at all unless explorer.exe is explicitly run, and I don’t even have to use additional software – just the Group Policy Editor in Windows (the link has step-by-step instructions for doing this yourself).

Customization
I decided to use the popular Aeon65 skin instead of the default Confluence, largely because of the gorgeous horizontal menu configurations. I have a wireless keyboard functioning as an advanced remote (and for working with the computer when necessary), but my phone is quickly becoming my primary remote, with the official XBMC remote app controlling my setup over WiFi from anywhere in the house. The official instructions for setting this up were a bit out of date; this tutorial has updated steps and screenshots using newer versions of everything. I also made sure I set up Zoe to get a static IP address from the router so my phone would always know where to look for her.

XBMC in action
I went through and took a few screenshots of my setup in action. Thus far XBMC has been superb at picking out the correct information and images for my TV shows and movies, with a bit less robust results for music. I’m able to do a slick visual browse through my various media types, with icons in the bottom for the format, studio, and resolution. I can also get detailed info on the film or show, including cast members (you can also search your media by actor or studio). Fanart and posters help make everything look visually pleasing and well put-together, and the best part is that it does all this automatically – none of the time-consuming curation I’ve grown accustomed to with my iTunes music library. There are a few outstanding issues: I’m like to get movies in a series with unique names (i.e. Harry Potter) to appear sequentially instead of alphabetically, I want to see it correctly remove musical artists only featured in compilation albums from the browsing list, and I want to see if there’s a way to get all the album art I’ve painstakingly added to my iTunes library into the XBMC database (or find a database with more artwork than Last.fm). All in all I’ve been quite impressed with how this has worked out, and while it took a bit of learning, it’s made viewing media at my house much cooler and easier to use. Now I just need a surround sound system, and maybe a bigger screen…

Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen Avatar or because my eyes don’t quite work together, but I’m not convinced that 3D adds anything to a movie presentation. To me, it feels like a gimmick, a new technology the entertainment industry decided would be the next big thing, not an organic response to customer demand or a natural progression of technology. I mean, how many people go to a movie and say, “Wow, this is decent, but it would be really fantastic if it was in 3D?”

Contrast this with digital theaters (sometimes branded as “IMAX”). This is more of a natural improvement, transitioning from crackly analog film to clear digital video and multichannel sound. Perhaps in a few years I’ll be eating my words, but 3D seems like nothing more than an excuse to charge extra for tickets and sucker people into buying new home entertainment products. It’s not even the goofy glasses or narrow viewing angle – these are things that will improve with time. I think even real, holographic 3D would be a different, parallel medium to 2D films, mirroring the relationship films have with books or videos have with pictures

In talking about the recent Prince of Persia movie (also panned), the author describes the movie as being “uncannily silly in premise and narrative function” primarily because it’s based off a video game franchise. It seems to be taken as axiomatic that a movie based on a video game will be poor, that while plenty of movies both good and bad have been based on musicals and comics, the story of a video game doesn’t contain the elements that make for quality filmmaking.

I don’t want to believe this is true, but looking at the examples we have to-date, they’re right. Think about how many train wrecks of movies have been based on video games, and how many of them are on Uwe Boll’s filmography. Is there even one good movie that’s been based on a video game?

I think that in recent years, games have really been coming into their own as a means of storytelling, producing the kind of excellent stories that can survive  the transition to film. Even so, when I hear that an incredible game like Mass Effect has a film adaptation in development, I can’t help but wince.

By the way, is this really what an official movie casting call looks like? That poster seems like it should be on a community bulletin board encouraging people to volunteer at the next picnic. You’d think Paramount Pictures could hire a professional designer instead of mocking it up in Microsoft Word.

First of all, Paranormal Activity is excellent. Rather than subscribing to standard horror movie fare featuring a hot chick and CGI models of ugly things, this low-budget film leaves just about everything to the imagination. For somebody whose imagination threatens to fission into a separate entity altogether, that makes for an actually suspenseful movie. Your mileage may vary, but judging from the Tomatometer, chances are you’ll agree they made some great decisions. Turns out your multimillion dollar budget doesn’t make a good movie, good filmmaking makes a good movie. Whowouldathunkit?

Rachel and I also hung out with some of our friends to play poker and Guitar Hero/Rock Band. In poker, Rachel ended up playing for somebody who had to leave, meaning that of the last three players two of them were named “Castello.” In retrospect, we could have worked out some kind of betting collusion to garner lots of moneys from Player 3, but instead he won and I got second. As a household, we’re up $5. Go us!

I ended up singing not one, but two songs. The first was Still Alive from the Portal game, which I said was the only song in all of the games I would risk singing. The rest of the party insisted did not exist as a playable song, so naturally, I had to locate and download it to prove them all wrong. Go ahead and bypass the “easy” bit and look at the “100%.” I’m making a note here: BIG SUCCESS.

Somewhere amid all of this I noticed that a certain song with which I have a very special relationship was in one of the newer games: You Give Love a Bad Name. I blame Rich and his compulsion to put it on repeat for as long as his car’s tires are on the Jersey turnpike. I’m sure the remaining party guests blamed him as well.

One last thing: Health care reform is finally moving along so be sure and show your support for something that will actually help American citizens receive superior, more affordable health care. It’s important to ensure that this goal remains intact through the final stages of approval.

After watching this I’m further convinced that the majority of Hollywood “writers” aren’t there because they have any particular semblance of talent, but due some series of unfortunate accidents that places them in a position to mutilate otherwise healthy media. Clearly my “nine” movie should have been of the district variety.

Last night, after we were settled into the soporific embrace of our bed, Rachel realized that July 15th is in fact this week.  Despite the fact that once settled into bed, Rachel becomes determined not to leave it for anything, she sprang from the covers as if electrified and scampered off to the office. I listened in confusion for a few minutes before hearing the sounds of her waking up the computer and connecting to Skype to organize a movie outing this weekend with our unsleeping friends.

Again, moments from sleep, Rachel left the bed, ran to the computer, and connected to Skype so she could get people to go see the new Harry Potter movie with us, leaving me in the bedroom with an emotional blend of incredulousness and amusement. Have I ever said I love my wife?

Update: I was thinking second-to-last, and wrote seventh. I know it’s the sixth book, honest!

Simply putting effort into something is not sufficient reason to reap any kind of external reward, especially financial compensation. Most of us have had an experience where we worked hard on something but received little to no acknowledgment from others. A personal example: As a kid, my family was part of an organic food co-op that involved delivery and pickup of the food from our garage on certain months. A few days before one of these pickups, I had learned how to make origami rabbits from Highlights magazine. In preparation, I proceeded to make dozes of these rabbits on neon-colored paper and set them out on a table for our visitors. They could have one of their own for only 25 cents!

Needless to say, I didn’t get many customers. Aside from making a kid feel better, why would anybody want a simple paper rabbit? Even if somebody did, it would be easy enough for them to figure out how to make one of their own. At the end of the day, one person, a mother, gave me a few dollars and took all of them, giving them to her young daughter to play with in the backseat. The key here is that it wasn’t the effort I put into making the rabbits that gave them value, it was how much value the customer perceieved they had. To most of the potential customers, the rabbits were useless pieces of garishly-colored paper, but to one, it was an inexpensive way to entertain her child during the drive home.

What artists produce has no value whatsoever, except what a potential customer assigns to it. The artist Vincent van Gogh was hardly wealthy during his lifetime; his work didn’t achieve global renown until twenty years after his death. Now, his original works have fetched some of the highest prices of all time. What we are currently facing is the devaluation of media that can be digitized. As a “product,” why would I want to pay for CDs or DVDs when I could get an indistinguishable copy for free from others? It just doesn’t make sense; yet, ignorant artists and disillusioned executives insist that the financing of their sybarite lifestyle is somehow a “right.”

There are a number of ways to leverage the power of people-to-people (P2) networking to make money from creative efforts that myself and others have discussed previously. Yet the bottom line is this: artists today stand in the same place as everybody else: if you are trying to make money for working, you need to provide something for which others will be willing to pay. If you are simply doing something you love, by all means enjoy it – but don’t expect to get paid.