When I came home that Tuesday night, look what I found laying on my table:
Hmm...a large, present-shaped box. I wonder what's inside...
OMG a Lappy to call my own! In the 4 days I've had it, I loaded up AIM and Firefox and now Lappy seems to have replaced my old Compy desktop. Seriously, that thing is OLD. As in, it had Windows ME when I got it (to y'all that aren't familiar with that one, it makes Vista look like XP, or to the laypeople, instead of freezing or locking up that it did now, any wrong move got me the Blue Screen of Death™). As such, it's a good 50x faster, especially here on Blogger. No more waiting forever to post entries here!
2. Speaking of In 10 Words, my other blog, I spent the last 2 weeks summarizing all 10 movies produced by Pixar, ending with today's entry, Up after seeing it earlier today. My longer-than-10-word summary: It's great, and if you have the chance to, see it in 3D. Sure, some of the colors may be a bit lost, but that factor is minor at best. The breathtaking visuals are made even more awesome by the 3D, especially during any scene in the air (which, for a movie called Up, is about 85% of the movie). The first 15 minutes set up Carl's (Ed Asner) relationship with his late wife Ellie, incredibly sweet and touching and gives ample motivation for Carl to initiate his adventure. There was plenty more heartwarming moments in the movie (many calling back to the initial sequence), along with genuine humor (a lesser movie would've had a field day giving unnecessary bathroom humor from Russel and Dug, but thankfully doesn't happen!), action, charm and heart. Yeah, it's VERY rare these days to use the words "charm" and "heart" to unironically describe an animated movie. Sure, it's not as balls to the wall action and OMG TEH AWESOMENESS like past Pixar flicks like The Incredibles, but it's not trying to be. The pacing just seemed...right. It didn't need 2 hours to tell the story, no real complex twists or annoying characters at all, and it all seemed (gasp) realistic while being immersed in the fantastic.
A friend of my buddy Steve had told him that Up seemed the most outlandish of all of Pixar's movies. A story of an old Widower and plucky Wilderness Explorer lift a house off the ground by balloons to travel to South America to meet a giant Bird and dogs that can talk via special collars is less believable than toys that talk and move when we're not around (three times!), talking ants and bugs that are circus folk battling grasshoppers, Monsters that live in a world powered by the screams and laughter of children, superheroes living in a PG Watchmen world, talking fish swimming the ocean and surviving sharks, bombs, whales and sewer drains, a talking rat that can cook and can control a human by tugging his hair, sentient cars that live in a world populated by other sentient cars, and a robot living in a post-apocalyptic Earth ravaged by pollution & consumerism that travels into space to find a colony of extremely fat humans. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight. If anything, the only plot points that I had thoughts about was Russel's backstory with his parents, and why exactly caused Muntz to put translation collars on his dogs (Speaking of dogs, if you thought Dug was funny, Alpha's voice was the subject of lots of genuine laughs). And these thoughts occurred to me AFTER I left the theater!
For those of you looking for the obligatory Pixar shoutouts: John Ratzenberger appears about 15 minutes into the movie as the Foreman who talks to Carl about moving out of his house. The Pizza Planet Truck is tricky to spot, it can be seen in a tiny form on the ground getting out of a space in a city during the sequence where Russel is dangling from the House via a blanket rope.
3. And then there were the trailers before the flick. Of course, they continued the tradition of showing the teaser to next year's movie, with 2010's finally being Toy Story 3! Sure, it's another sequel...but to Toy Story! But it's a second sequel...but it's following Toy Story 2! Whether that last part elicits a "!" or a "..." will be known on 6/18/10.
Aside from other crap, there was the trailer for G-Force. If you're thinking that it referred to the version known as Battle of The Planets, be prepared to be very, very, very disappointed.
It honestly looks more like a live-action "Chip n Dale's Rescue Rangers" movie, which isn't a bad idea in itself, but by the looks of things, I don't have any high hopes for this. They have a Chip (the Guinea Pig played by Nicholas Cage), a Dale (the one voiced by Tracy Morgan), a Gadget (the Penelope Cruz one, managing to give off some fanservice for the furries out there), a Monterey Jack (the Mole played by Steve Buscemi), even a Zipper (the fly)! And there an special organization that's trying to stop a mad scientist to destroy the world...Yeah, that's Rescue Rangers.
4. Girafarig would've been an unstoppable Pokemon had it been a member of the original 151. It was a Normal/Psychic type, which meant it was immune to Ghost attacks, one of only 2 types it was weak against back then, and Ghost and Bug attack were few as well as being notable for sucking hard. Then there was the absolute broken-ness of Psychic types in the first Generation, it would've been annoying to fight against.
5. People have been asking me "Galileo, what's your next epic?" after I finally completed my "50 Greatest Animated Villains of All Time" countdown back in October. For one thing, I'm already in the middle of writing more entries in my "Soundtracks for Summer" series, but I know you mean if I'm going to write another massive countdown. Well, you'd be right, I'm officially announcing that I've got another countdown in the making: The 50 Greatest Animated Theme Songs. It's a list that's been done a few times, but usually it's in the vein of "Best Theme Songs in all Genres," "Best Anime Themes," "Best [Insert Decade Here] Theme Songs," and the like. 50 is a good, clean, even number, and I can rattle off quite few right now. But in the interest of space an possible spoilerage, I wont. If you have any suggestions for either list, pop me either a comment here or an email at beamingforbunnies@gmail.com
That's some of the stuff that's been going through my head right now that I needed to type down.
6. Oh, by the way, Billy Mays won the "March Madness Infomercial Pitchman" tournament. It's a shame that such an epic match couldn't be blogged. It all came down to him and William Shatner for the Title. Lots of beard were thrown, plenty of slogans were yelled, and words were overacted before Shatner was finally imprisoned on Ceti Alpha V along with the corpse of Ricardo Montalban by Billy. Here's how he celebrated:
