REVIEW: Friday the 13th: The Remix

So, I got to see Friday the 13th on my 36th birthday last Saturday because the Friday the 13th showing of Friday the 13th was sold out. I did start to feel a bit mortal that day knowing that in my lifetime I have lived through twelve Friday the 13th films, and now with Hills Have Eyes, last House on the Left, and coming soon... A Nightmare on Elm Street all being remade I guess I might be at the top of the hill and about to go down age wise.

Watching Marcus Nispel's remake of Friday the 13th was fun but also somewhat of a missed opportunity in my mind. I am a big Friday fan, so I knew going in they were going to cram Parts 1-3 into one film. That's no biggie, but they crammed 1 and 2 in before the opening credits were done! So there was no buildup really of Jason and why he and his Mom had such a tight relationship. It was all crammed into a fast cutting music video style open. Lame. The slower methodical way of previous Fridays has been replaced with shaky cam. I have no problem with shaky cam mind you, but when it's done poorly it reeks of "hey guess what I can't figure out how to frame?" There is a lot of that here. And as a result it takes away from Jason's creepiness. By far the best scene in the film is when Jason shows up in a long shot as a girl is trying to swim to safety. It's a very eerie shot that actually works in full on broad daylight. And the kill of her under the dock is also the best kill. If only the rest of the film was as good as the lake sequence.




Derek Mears I think plays Jason and he is fine, but I longed for the days of Kane Hodder who played Jason in 7-10. That dude had it down. The rest of the cast shows up at a cabin, gets naked and gets dispatched but I was just really disappointed they didn't do the great 80's Camp counseler thing. (oh and all the actors look like Abercrombie and Finch models or on Gossip Girl) I think if your going to rebuild a legend, then do it in it's natural environment. I remember going to camp in the summer and the first thing we would do is start telling stories to girls about how Jason was out there and how he was coming for us. There is NONE of that kind of campfire-eque fun here. In fact you may as well just called it Friday the 13th Part 12, cause its in present day so if just forget the fact he finds the hockey mask in this one, it's as if life went on at Camp Crystal Lake.



Keep in mind I liked director Nispel's Texas Chainsaw remake, which was also shot in Austin, TX as is this one. But come on dude, maybe its because I'm from Texas but for me this was the most distracting thing about the movie to me. I would have titled it Jason Takes Tejas. Most of the other movies had a kind of East Coast Vermont feel to them. This is summertime dead tree Texas. I kept waiting for him to team up with Leatherface. (maybe that's the plan) But I never in my mind saw Jason in Texas, he lived on the East coast and ended up in New York!

Something popped in my mind though after it was over, The director of the TCM prequel TCM: The Beginning. I think its Jonathan Liebesman was originally attached to this, and he should of stayed on board instead Nispel. TCM: The Beginning is a utter brutal film, and this one is just a fun ride. Nispel just plain does not get the joke here. I had high hopes for my hommie Mr. Voorhees, but alas he has been dissed in another crappy remake. I guess as a fun slasher movie its not bad, but my hopes were higher for something that could have really setup an interesting new franchise. Instead there is really nowhere to go with a sequel without starting over yet again. Or maybe I'm just old.

V: The Redux

V was my favorite show as a kid. I loved me the hell out of some V. I was obsessed with it. I used to pretend I was Queen lizard leader herself, Diana's half lizard half earthling son working for the Resistance. Did I mention how much I loved this show, and that Diana actress, Jane Badler (pic above) and her sister are my Facebook friends?

Now for years series creator Kenneth Johnson has been trying to get a new mini-series or movie made to conclude the thing and start a new deal. But ABC has taken over and signed a deal for a new version by one of the guys behind the Terminator show and The 4400 series. I have mixed feelings about it, because this will be a "reboot" or "re-imagining" of the original. I've read the synopsis and it does nothing for me. It sounds quite boring. But now is a good time for V to come back. With the terrorism scare and crappy economy, people are scared for what's next. Lizard aliens attacking the earth would be the last thing we want to deal with, but could the rallying call America needs.

Click HERE to read the full story thanks to The Movie Blog...

Building a Home Media Player Part 1

Every once in a while on the blog here the subject of DVD and Blu-ray comes up. And usually I discuss the greatness of picture quality with those formats. And right now physical media is still the dominant way to watch movies and other forms of entertainment without quality loss. However, if you have cable and satellite you are all quite familiar with on-demand services and pay-per-view and the greatness of DVR's and Tivo's. I love my DirecTv DVRs unconditionally. They ARE the greatest things ever. The best thing about them to me is not just the ease of use but they got rid of all those pesky space taking VHS tapes, DVD discs, and bulky VCRs. I am a proponent of ditching the physical world of media all together and the convergence of the internet/tv/HD Discs etc. We should be able to come home one day, turn on our TV, check our email, go to a website and watch whatever TV Show, Movie, Sports, or Video game we want. All in one deal. Getting there is the problem now. There are too many cooks in the kitchen.

A few months ago I was talking to my brother-in-law Art, and he like me, is a great tech nut himself. Although he was late to the DVR/Tivo party, he dove in head first and hacked the thing to include a bigger hard drive to have endless recording capabilities. I'm sure many of you have iTunes, and as soon as you buy a CD (if anyone still does that) and you put it on your iTunes to build your library. As for myself I don't have any physical CD's laying around taking up countless bookshelves. They are nicely sitting on a hard drive (with a backup). They can played through out the house wireless on a network in any room. Well we wanted to do that with our DVD collections.



So in essence it's itunes for movies. But you ask, isn't that called AppleTV. Sort of. You see AppleTV only plays AppleTV files. I want all my video formats to play, not just Apple encoded stuff. So the concept is the same as ATV, without all the rules and DRM BS. So I discovered this awesome thing by Western Digital called The Western Digital HD Media Player. It plays EVERYTHING know to man.

Music - MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA
Photo - JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG
Video -MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264),
MTS, TP, TS

I think the only thing it does not play that I could find was VC-1 which was the codec for HD-DVD's. Oh well...



And it fits in the palm of your hand for 99 bux. However before you throw down the plastic, keep in mind you have to provide a flash drive or hard drive with content on it for it to play stuff. So until I get a really good 1TB hard drive, I'm going to use a 32GB flash drive i got at Frys for about 40 bucks. It has 2 usb slots for multiple drives.

So now I have this player, how do you get your DVDs and other crap on it? Easy, but it takes a bit of planning, experimenting and time to convert you DVDs. All your other stuff like Windows media files, AVI's or home movies you might have on a hard drive, just transfer them to the drive you want to use with the Media Player and you are good to go.



No for DVD's... I'm a Mac person, but this program is available for PC peeps too. It's called Handbrake, and it's free! Handbrake will rip your DVD's and then compress them into tiny files that look almost identical to your original DVD. For instance say I have a copy of Iron Man. Let's say the Standard Def DVD is about 7GB. Handbrake will create a mp4 file of the same movie in a 1GB file. How is this possible you ask? Well the greatness of h.264 compression. DVD's are creeping up on 15 years old now. And the tech in them is MPEG2 compression. Handbrake uses h.264 to rearrange that ancient stuff into a similar file but h.264 uses much less space than 90's MPEG2. It ditches a lot of useless 90's compression info. This is the same stuff Apple uses for Quicktime and Apple TV and ipod and iphone movies. So its not that new either.



Now that I've got my DVD compressed into a tiny file, I was concerned about menus, audio commentaries, and other bonus features on the DVD. To my knowledge there is not a way yet to get the menu structure and all that stuff working, but in Handbrake there is something called .MKV files that act as a container for those MP4 files. So now I can compress the movie, multiple audio streams and subtitles all in the same container (MKV). And once played back, on the HD Media player I can select this audio stream or another one. Same with subs or chapter stops. (Although I have yet to get the chapter stops to work on all titles....)



The HD media player has HDMI out so it supports full 1080P output. the menus on the screen are very similar to a PS3 or Sony menu layout. It's pretty simple. You can create folders to sort TV shows and movies and personal home movies. So what does this all mean? It means you can now throw your own movies, and home movies, you tubes, email videos all on your portable hard drive or Flash sticks, and boom you have all your videos ready to go, just like a tivo would. And best of all this saves shelve space if you don't want to have all those pesky discs laying all over the place. You don't have go get the disc load it, wait for FBI warnings, trailers, ads, etc. It builds your library as you want it. So think of this as a giant ipod for your videos.

Now you're probably thinking but hey what about Blu-ray discs. Oh it goes there, but I have yet to get a Blu-Ray computer drive for that. But Art has, and he has done it, and the results are amazing. So that will be my Part 2 of this article. Stay tuned!