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Showing posts from April, 2015

The To-Do List for 2015

This is a flashback to a piece I wrote last year, when it was announced Power Laces were being developed:   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11332252/Nikes-Back-to-the-Future-trainers-coming-soon.html  We're only six months away society! Hurry up dammit!        So Power Laces are gonna be a thing! And they’re gonna be a thing next year! That’s good of you Nike, great job but it may be a little late. The rest of the world is still frightfully behind.        In case you’re under the impression I have some kind of inside knowledge of the inner workings of the international footwear industry, you’d be right but that’s not important. What is important is that Nike is putting us one step (get it!) closer to the excellent world of the future depicted in Back to the Future Part II .  Robert Zemeckis’ 1989 sequel to the greatest time travel movie of all time saw Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to the futuristic world of 2015. One of the features of that no doubt shining er

What’s the Deal with Movie Trailers?

My god we’ve had a lot of movie trailers lately! In the past week and a bit we’ve gotten new trailers for Ant-Man , Terminator Genesis (I refuse to spell it their way, don’t let a dyslexic guy come up with your title Paramount!), Star Wars: The Force Awakens , Batman v. Superman , and Fantastic Four . We’ve had more trailers released than movies and you can be sure if they were compiled together for cinematic release, Movie Trailers: The Movie would do better at the box office than The Longest Ride . It feels too much and begs the question, are we being oversaturated with movie trailers? Yes. Yes we are. But aside from that, the responses to these trailers spark more interesting questions. Star Wars: The Force Awakens was met with almost universal acclaim, Terminator Genesis was met with almost universal derision, and the rest I mentioned were equally met with love and hate for debate by internet commenters without anything better to do. Why is there so much reaction and opinion

Clinton FTW...?

“Hillary Clinton’s running for President!” “Yes we know, what else is new?” “No it’s official now!” “Oh…okay.” That’s pretty much the universal reaction to the news that Hillary Clinton has thrown her hat into the ring. Putting aside the fact this was the worst kept secret in Washington, she intends to run for President a year from now. She announced it with a video that pretty much panders to the left wing in a fairly obvious way. It starts with a lot of different people from all walks of life looking forward to new changes in their lives and then Hillary shows up announcing her candidacy and that she wants to be the people’s champion to move America forward. The ad features people from at least three racial minorities, a gay and lesbian couple, an expectant couple, a young single mother, a woman on the verge of retiring, parents and children, siblings, hammering home the idea that she represents all Americans regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or social status. There’s a

Well We WERE Overdue for an Oil Spill

Last Wednesday there was a massive oil spill into English Bay in Vancouver. Naturally this has made a lot of environmentalists angry, a lot of oil barons angry, and a select few in the West Coast fisheries industry strangely turned on. You may recall BC Premier Christie Clark criticized the federal government for the delay in containing the oil and cleaning up the spill. She thinks the responsibility should pass to the provincial government rather than the federally controlled Coast Guard, the members of which were presumably locked in an intense game of Battleship at the time of the spill. It took six hours to quell the leak during which time the spill got worse and twelve hours to notify the city –assuming incorrectly that those on the Vancouver Bayfront would look out their windows every hour or so. This annoyed Clark as well as the mayor of Vancouver who pointed fingers at both her and the federal government. Nevertheless by the weekend most of the oil was cleaned and Clark’s co

Are Westerns Dead?

               Is the Western genre dead? I’m not talking about so-called “contemporary westerns” like No Country for Old Men which incorporate common themes in a modern setting, but the gunslinger westerns, lawmen, cattle rustlers, showdowns all set in a roughly thirty year period in the American West. For a long time westerns were the popcorn films of Hollywood before they were gradually replaced by action movies and superhero franchises (of course if some of those westerns had a cinematic universe like Marvel, maybe we wouldn’t be asking this question). But now they’re really rare, the few times they’re attempted result in shlock adaptations like Wild Wild West , Cowboys vs. Aliens , and The Lone Ranger . There have been a few good ones like the remakes of 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit , but they seem to pass unnoticed. Most of us probably don’t know or haven’t seen enough to consider any of them favourite movies. Hell before I started working on this the only westerns I really enjo