A new trailer for the upcoming Harry Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” has been released onto the Internet. Watch it:
I am really excited about this film because it was my favorite book in the Harry Potter series.
This film was originally schedules to be released in November of this year but was pushed back to early summer 2009. I heard some early reviews from people who received advanced screenings of the film and none of them had anything good to say. Hopefully Warner Bros. will use the extra time they gave themselves to listen to the reviews and make some changes. I really don’t want my favorite book of the series turned into my most disliked movie of the series.
What do you think of the trailer? Did you notice the extra scenes they added that weren’t in the book (Example: the Weasley’s home, The Burrow, on fire after an attack by the Death Eaters)? Let’s hope additional scenes didn’t come at the cost of important ones.
Frisky Dingo Season 2 will be released on DVD on January 9, 2009. I am eagerly awaiting its release, but most of you have probably never heard of it.
This animated comedy from the creators of Sealab 2021 airs on Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. The show follows the villain Killface and the hero Awesome-X (aka Xander Crews). Killface wants to destroy the world but is having problems marketing his plan. Meanwhile, Awesome-X (whose real identity is billionaire tycoon Xander Crews) has defeated all the super-villains in town but doesn’t feel like retiring. Crews learns of Killface and tries to use him to keep his Awesome-X persona alive.
Here are some memorable moments from the villain Killface to give you an idea of what the show is like:
I have learned from BabarsHouse.com that the DVD will have special features unlike the previous season. Here are some details:
Also, the DVD is now confirmed to have bonus features. 7030 gave me the details on one of them which is a completely brand new short that was made to tie in with the upcoming Xtacles spin-off series. The back cover also shows 13 episodes instead of 12. It’s most likely counting the Xtacles short as an episode, but since it’s also listed separately under the bonus features, I’m double checking it and will update when I hear back.
On an interesting side note, Amazon.com recommended the movie “Teeth” based on my interest in Frisky Dingo Season 2. Can anyone explain the correlation to me? Here’s the proof:
Zack and I switched to DirecTV about a year ago and had a terrible experience with it. Because we live in an apartment, we had to acquire a large bucket and fill it with cement to support the poll that the satellite dish is attached to. Then we learned after we signed up that we were locked into a 2 year contract that we already wanted out of.
The bucket is filled with 100 pounds of cement but that isn’t enough to stop a small breeze from knocking the dish out of alignment and leaving us without TV. One day, the wind knocked the satellite over, but thankfully it didn’t break our balcony’s glass sliding doors or fall off the balcony 11 stories.
All our anger at the dish aside, DirecTV’s programming is very diverse, offering a wide variety of stations, a lot of which are offered in High Definition. The only stations unavailable in HD through DirecTV are local stations (Fox, ABC, NBC, CW, etc.). There is a way to view them in HD but you must buy an extra HD antenna.
All that is going to change on October 8, when DirecTV will begin offering local channels in HD without the assistance of an antenna. You can learn more about this on DirecTV’s website.
I may complain a lot about DirecTV, but I still feel they are a lot better than Time Warner Cable, whose customer service and HD offerings leave little to the imagination. And if you like NBC programming (offered on WDTN-Channel 2) then you might want to switch to DirecTV since it seems like Time Warner might stop offering the channel to its viewers.
The return of ‘The Office’ was everything I wanted it to be. Jim finally proposes to Pam and all is right with the world. I was afraid that when he decided not to propose during Tobey’s going-away party that they would somehow break up. But my fears were for naught as Jim got down on his knee and asked Pam to marry him at a rainy rest stop not-so-halfway between New York and Scranton.
Watch the proposal:
The rest of the episode was great too but that moment was a long time coming.
Okay, so good moments aside, what is the deal with Pam’s college friend? Are they going to turn that into a ‘thing’? And what is up with her taking ceramics and what sounded like a Biology class? I thought she was just there for a 3 month quick course in graphic design. Maybe the writers just didn’t think about that. Or maybe they know very little about graphic design, which was evident by Pam’s Typography teacher’s joke that didn’t make sense about the font Zapf Chancery.
Something that irked me towards the end was that no one called out Jim for being soaking wet when they were weighing themselves on the giant scale. I was really expecting them to force him to take his clothes off. Part of me even thought they might all take their clothes off to trick the scale. Oh well, ‘The Office’ isn’t really about people being naked all the time unlike other shows (‘Grey’s Anatomy’).
I thought this was a great premiere and I can only hope the entire season is this good. Though, really, when has ‘The Office’ ever let us down?
What did you think about ‘The Office’ season 5 premiere? Did you get teary eyed when Jim proposed? Did you laugh out loud at Dwight hammering fruits into the vending machine? Were you shocked at the return of Ryan, the ‘fired-guy’?
I have been eagerly awaiting the release of ‘Star Wars: The Force Unleashed’ for a long time. I knew I had to play the Wii version of the game so as to take advantage of the motion controls. I wanted to be able to control my character’s lightsaber moves with a swing of the remote control (Wiimote). I knew it wouldn’t be perfect, but I guess I should have lowered my expectations several more notches.
The controls for this game do involve movement from the Wiimote, but they are combined with button presses and joystick toggling. There are SO MANY different Force powers you can wield, but no one could possibly remember all the different controls necessary to conjure them all. The Wiimote movements aren’t really registered verbatim by the character. When you swing the Wiimote, the character swings his lightsaber, but it doesn’t mimic the movement you made which makes it hard to duel a second player (a feature that only the Wii version offers).
Cosmetically, this game has a lot of problems as well. The graphics are just very poor. Nothing is smoothly rendered and there are a lot of bugs. Now, I know the Wii doesn’t have the ability to have great graphics in its games. It is one of the big faults of the Wii system. So I might be impressed by the game graphic-wise if I could see it on another system like the Xbox360 which can render games in 1080p resolution.
The story line takes place between Star Wars Episodes III and IV and follows an apprentice of Darth Vader. Sounds cool, right? Well it is and it isn’t. First, he doesn’t act like someone who was raised by a Dark Lord of the Sith. Someone raised by Vader would be cold, angry, tough and reserved. Instead, he just comes across indifferent and talkative. Second, there really doesn’t feel as if there is any mystery about him, even though there is. We see him as a young boy and then we see him as an adult. We have no idea what happened to him growing up and the game obviously doesn’t think that is important. Third, he creates the Rebel Alliance. I really don’t see the founders of the Rebellion getting behind some young guy just because he knows how to use the Force. But then again, they did that with Luke Skywalker.
I found the game easy at some points and extremely difficult at others. A group of 4 Stormtroopers with shock staff killed me 5 times in a row but I beat Darth Vader and the Emperor without dying once. That doesn’t really even out.
Overall I still enjoyed the game. Though my review was pretty much all negative, I would still play it again. One of the cool features of the game is that when you complete it and sit through the credits, it saves all the outfits (you can change the apprentice’s clothes), lightsaber hilts, lightsaber crystals and Force powers that you’ve unlocked and allows you to use them all the next time you play so you won’t have to worry about collecting them all over again. Hopefully the next time I play the game I will be able to learn the controls for other Force powers so I can really experience the Force Unleashed.
Have you played ‘Star War: The Force Unleashed’? What did you think of it?
I find it hard to understand how a TV show about people with super-human powers can be so frustrating. I was very disappointed by season 2 of ‘Heroes’ and it looks as if this one will be a let down as well.
Let’s start with the Peter Petrelli from the future. He travels to the past to stop his brother Nathan from telling the world about their superpowers. Of course by doing so he changes the future and makes things worse. But why didn’t he know that would happen? As a time traveler, didn’t he realize that any changes made in the past affect the future? Has he never seen ‘Back to the Future?’ In the future, why is he just running away from what appears to be an angry mob? Why doesn’t he just teleport, fly, turn invisible?
That brings me to another problem with this show. The characters never use their powers often enough. It is a show about people with super-human abilities but it comes off more like a soap opera on steroids. Especially with the revelation that Nathan and Peter’s mother is also the mother of the main villain Sylar. So now the two most powerful characters, Peter who is good and Sylar who is bad, are brothers!? How very Cain and Abel of the creators of the show.
Then there’s Mohinder, one of the characters I like the least on the show. I really only know a handful of people that like him at all. I think the writers finally realized the world’s dislike of Mohinder but instead of killing him off, they try to make him interesting by giving him superpowers. It wasn’t the lack of powers that made me hate the character. Ando has no powers and I think he is a very fun sidekick for Hiro. No, what makes Mohinder awful is his choices. Shooting Noah, injecting himself with that serum to give himself abilities, promising things he can’t actually follow up on, working for the bad guys. He just needs to go away and stop messing things up.
When they “killed” Nikki in the season 2 finale, I don’t think anyone actually thought she was dead. She was just too bad ass to be killed by a simple explosion. Season 3 plops her into the role of advisor for the New York governor. There is no explanation for how she got there. Then you start to think that she has amnesia. But wait, her superpower is different too. Then figment-of-Nathan’s-imagination-Linderman tells Nathan that she is not Nikki Saunders. This only leads me to believe that she is Nikki’s twin sister Jessica, who Nikki thought died a long time ago. This could mean that the Nikki character is truly dead, but has anyone managed to stay dead on this show?
This season appears to be following the all-too-familiar formula of the past two seasons: Hiro looks into the future and sees the end of the world, there is a quest for missing pieces of a puzzle, all the different characters play a role in a coming apocalypse, they band together to stop something bad, Sylar gets away. Hopefully they will break the mold, but the premiere wasn’t very promising.
What did you think of the ‘Heroes’ season 3 premiere? Was is what you expected? What do you hope to see happen this season?
I must say I wasn’t impressed with the beginning of this episode. The finale ended with the standard cliffhanger-proposal ending. It was something you would expect from a finale. But the season 4 premiere of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ felt like any other mid-season episode.
We could tell from last season’s finale that Barney’s lingering feelings for Robin would probably surface in season 4. Little did we know that it would surface so soon. I think the creators regretted giving Barney that dose of humanity last season and wanted to resolve it quickly in the premiere before it consumed the entire season. I guess they remembered that the show is supposed to be through Ted’s eye’s and not his friends’. Now, granted, they did leave his feelings up in the air by the end of the episode, but I think they are sweeping it under the rug for now so they can focus the show on Ted and his engagement to Stella. Don’t be surprised if Barney’s feeling resurface near the end of this season, however.
Moving on, the Ted / Stella / Marshall plot line was thin in the beginning of the episode but it really picked up for me when Stella told Ted she had never seen Star Wars, Ted’s favorite movie of all time. Marshall knew that if she didn’t like the movie, then she wasn’t the right woman for Ted. This was a very close-to-home story for me since I am a huge Star Wars fan and have dated and been friends with many people who have never seen the film, nor ever care to. That should have been the first sign that those people were not meant to be a part of my life, but I blindly ignored it, just like Ted. Now, Ted isn’t really ignoring it. Stella watched the movie and lied to him, telling him that she loved it, but Ted should have been able to see through the lie, but was blinded by his need for her to love it. Marshall, of course, saw right through the deception but decided not to tell Ted after talking to Stella.
Now I am not saying that I can’t be friends with people who don’t like Star Wars, but it makes it hard. I just don’t think I could understand a person who couldn’t get any fun out of a fantastical tale from a galaxy far, far away.
Coming soon: My review of the ‘Heroes’ season 3 premiere
Movies & TV blog is about two things. No second guesses, people.
Tony Black and Zack McGhee have been together for over 2 years. They spend altogether too much time watching movies, TV and glued to their computers. This blog combines all three at once, thereby gaining them maximum efficiency.
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This trailer doesn’t look half bad. I’m rather excited to see this film now. Though you