I spoke about Dr. Strangelove yesterday, but today another movie of that sort is on called Fail Safe. Now, this is actually a remake of a movie in the 60’s of the same name, and is essentially a serious version of Dr. Strangelove. The interesting thing about the remake however is that the network that made it had it be shown live on TV (this was in 2000). I hate that you can’t buy it on DVD though, except for some region 2 version on Amazon.uk, which doesn’t even make sense as it was make here.

Ah, the moment I’ve been waiting for: another edition of Movie Expose! Anyway, today I’m looking at the similarities between a movie that I loved, The Ring, and another movie based off a Japanese Horror movie, The Grudge. These have been slightly overdiscussed in forums and by word of mouth a lot since the trailer came out, but it really is striking how similar they are. I will now show you three pictures (each one containing a picture from the trailer of The Grudge on top, and from The Ring on the bottom). Some of these aren’t complete copies, but it’s more the sheer number of times that fairly similar things occur that bothers me.

Some direct similarities here. 

It may be harder to see it here, so I will explain what was happening in the trailer. On top, we have Sarah Michelle Gellar on the right, and a oval mirror on the left. In both mirrors, we have a young girl (that’s what it looks like anyway) that will be shown below. You can clearly see that the same shot angle was taken, and then just the idea behind it.

Two evil people, or they the same? I can’t tell! 

Now we have the two bad people in the movies. This might be clearer in motion, but simply the design of the two characters is quite similar. Long black hair, both crawling on the floor in a similar fashion, the arms even look somewhat the same. When I first saw the trailer for The Grudge, I honestly thought that it was for the sequel to The Ring (which is coming out in 2005, by the way).

Not so much direct similarity here, but more of the overall style. 

Not directly similar, but you have two close ups on an eye reflecting something (neither eye is human, though from The Ring it is actually a horse, and I’m not sure what it is in The Grudge).

Well, there you have it. This may just be some Japanese thing (though I don’t think Samara, the girl in The Ring, was shown like this in the original Japanese version, so that doesn’t work), but I think that someone should sue. This really is turning into a movie blog, isn’t it?

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At the time I started this post on Thursday night, I had started to watch Dr. Strangelove on TCM. But instead of the movie, I saw Vice President candidate John Edwards commenting on the loads of unprotected nuclear material in Russia (which I agree needs to be given more attention), but I just want to watch the movie, not hear another staged political advertisement. Anyway, Dr. Strangelove is an excellent movie, and it has Peter Sellers in it, which if you’ve read my profile, you would know I tend to like movies with him in it.

I’m definitely not a camp person. I wish I were, I’ve tried it, but it just never… clicked with me. OK, a more appropriate phrase would be that the experience I did have mortified me from all camps for quite a long time. So, for those of you it applies to, do you like camps? If so, tell me what camp you like and if you tell me why you like it, I might just post it here (so in other words, don’t send me anything you wouldn’t want to blogging community to read).

Right at this very moment I am watching the 3rd Debate for the Presidential election, and will now be providing “live” commentary on it. I apologize if none of this makes sense - it did would if you were watching the debate while you were reading it. I wonder what the candidates are really saying when they greet each other.

I loved the first question: the accusation of Kerry being “Wishy-Washy”. That’s such a great word. “The world is more dangerous today because the President did not make the right judgments”. I personally think the world is more dangerous when the candidates tell us “strait up” what we need to know. And how many times has Kerry’s now famous “Global Test” quote been said? Bush is actually doing much better during this debate, there haven’t been any long silences yet.

Apparently the International Criminal Court is now “In”. I can’t tell if Kerry just said “If Push came to Shove” or “If Bush came to Shove”. I love tabs in Firefox. “That answer almost made me want to scowl” -Bush. I’m remembering that quote. Wow, Bush just cut off Charles Gibson. Crap, Kerry is starting to repeat things from last Thursday. It’s going to be a long night. Oh man, Bush also said the EXACT same thing like 20 times on Thursday.

Bush is taking a leaf out of Cheney’s book tonight - he’s bringing some statistics into the game. Oh, Bush just dissed Canada. Kerry just made a plug at his website, has that ever been done during a debate before? I think that all debates should be more like this. They’ve been covering a lot more ground. “Frivolous law suits” -Bush. I think he just quoted the play at my school (seriously). I think that these people should do some of the improve games we do in Theater, they would be awesome at some of them.

Yay! It’s the return of the “wealthiest one percent” line! That’s the only thing that I remember from the 2000 debates. Oh, go Charles Gibson, he just busted Kerry and Bush on saying nothing related to the question. Kerry also essentially just called the people in attendance not rich. I would take that as a compliment, but I can see how that could be interpreted in a negative way. Bush on Kerry: “He’s got a record”. Sorry, I thought it was funny. It would be awesome to read one of those questions - a close up on CNN - I envy you people.

Yeah, Kerry just commented on the Red Sox. Not being a baseball fan, I have no idea what’s going on with them, or really who they are aside from a baseball team, but CNN was talking about them before the debate started. This format of debate actually reminds me of stand up on Comedy Central. Hey, I just wrote 666 words! I like how Charles Gibson is adding his comments as well.

I own a timber company? *laughter* That’s news to me. *laughter* Need some wood? *laughter* -Bush

To Bush: How would you fill a vacancy on the supreme court? “I’m not telling!” Bush needs to do a comedy show after his Presidency - I’d watch him.

Kerry did a really good job completely avoiding the question about tax dollars not going to fund abortion, other than “I respect your opinion”. He was very kind to the woman asking the question though. But at least Bush told us completely where he stood.

I can see the boredom oozing from the audiences eyes during the closing statements. I think that the two candidates were trying to confuse us by Bush wearing a blue tie and Kerry wearing a red one. Very dramatic closing statement by the way Bush.

Ah, the debates over and the room is now filled with Kodak disposables. Oh, CNN is now reporting that Martha Stewart is now at Camp Cupcake in West Virginia (the prison). That’s depressing. Sorry if this was incredibly boring. Goodbye everyone,

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The frequent commenter Simon has won the Avogadro’s number contest. I now noticed a flaw in the contest, as the number I had gotten was 6.022570E23, while the one Simon entered (which is technically also right, it has changed as measurements have gotten more accurate) was 6.02214199E23. My sister Amanda also got the correct answer, as well as his full name (Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro). Both are considered right to me, so congratulations Simon and Amanda, you may now live forever in fame on today’s post! This is not just science blog however, so on the rest of the post.

After discussing this over with myself, I have decided that most of the funny quote’s I have from my English teacher are quite inappropriate, and I’m afraid that I must restrict myself from posting them. Sorry! Trust me, they had to be really bad for me not to post them, and this is a family blog, so no.

Now, I’m kind of cheating with this point - I read it on another blog about a year ago, but it’s very interesting. In the 80’s, it was “nine-teen eighty…”. In the 90’s, it was “nine-teen ninety…”. But now that we’re in the all powerful SECOND MILLENNIUM! we have to call it “two-thousand…”. When are we going to start calling it “twenty oh-four” and so on? While on the subject, today in English someone brought up the point about what do we call the 00’s of a century? Well, I have the answer for you all. The “Oughts” is what people in the 1900’s called them, and I think we should be retro and call it that as well.

I’m bringing back the link of the day for one more post. We all know Lycos - the evil website with a terrible search engine and way to many ads, but we keep going back because of the cool logo. Well, for the past five years or so, they have had weekly lists of top searches and daily commentary of pop culture based on search activity. Google has something like it too (the Zeitgeist), but they don’t have the commentary, which is the best part. Lycos has switched writers on us though, now it’s some “Dean” guy who refuses to give his last name, though I have reason to believe that is starts with a T. Whatever, go here. You might have to refresh it once after it stops loading though.

Sorry, this post was really lame, but I’ve had amounts of homework the likes of which I’ve never seen over the past couple days.

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Just when I thought that my English teacher couldn’t get any more weird, he started to review sentence structure with us. Whenever any teacher does this, they almost always just give you sentence after sentence of examples (which I hate, but that’s not the point), so they must come up with dozens of sentences. My teacher went beyond creative with this, and not in a very good way either. There were so many good ones that I’ve decided to break it up into a quote of the day type thing. Today’s quote:

“If you spank me, I will comply.”

Does this scare anyone else? I mean, this is not the kind of thing a teacher should be saying! A lot of the sentences seemed to deal with vampires as well - I think he was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (one of his favorite shows. And I quote - “Sexy babes kicking butt, What’s not to love?”) while writing them.

Yesterday, I watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It was almost two hours long, which was refreshing amidst all of the 90 minute movies out right now. Anyway, the story was about a pilot, a newspaper reporter, and various other characters trying to understand the plot to kill a bunch of scientists. The whole thing was very clearly comic-book like, it reminded me of old children’s animation (like say, a dotted line moving across a map kind of thing). Of course, the intriguing thing about this movie is that the actors were just acting on a green screen. The entire background was either photos or computer generated, it might have been some of both, I couldn’t tell. The slightly blurred look of it threw me off in the beginning, but by the end I completely forgot it wasn’t real, it looked so good. It surprised me that Angelina Jolie got top billing over Giovanni Ribisi though, she was barely in it! And just how many movies has Jude Law been in lately? Let me see, I Heart Huckabees, The Aviator, Alfie, Closer, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and of course Sky Captain!

Anyone that emails me with Avogadro’s number to 7 sig figs gets their name posted in everlasting glory in an upcoming post! Good luck,

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My birthday party (although about 45 days late) on Friday was so fun! I have to say though that I never want to attempt to order and pay for 7 people at once in a pizza place with a slightly confusing line with the building more crowded than the cross of BT and GT hallways at my school. But after we got back to my house, we watched some episodes from Season 4 The Simpsons for an hour on DVD (I just got the box set). Then we watched a few more. After that we watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Then we watched another episode of The Simpsons. We stayed up for another couple hours, and watched a few more episodes before going to bed. Despite the fact that I’m now experiencing extreme cabin fever (it happens to me whenever I watch that much TV straight), I had a lot of fun. Plus, people finally got to hear my “weird trance music”.

Anyway, has anyone else noticed the absurdly rapid release of TV show box sets recently? It used to be that only Star Trek and anime were released as DVD’s, and were all priced so high that only people that very few people ever bought them. Then some smart person realized that people would buy any show they liked as long as it was relatively cheap, and thus the release of practically every daytime drama known to man. Unfortunately it works flawlessly. And due to the fact that I personally would rather watch something on TV than on DVD (I would think it to be the opposite, but it’s not), they aren’t taking away from the popularity of the TV show. The problem is that all the hits like The West Wing, Star Trek and The Simpsons are already coming out - that is to say, in a few years all of the shows the networks are making a killing off of right now will be in a sense used up. Sure, people will still buy them, but a good deal of the money will have been spent. What will they do when everyone owns the entire series? At least with TV, the network is still making money from advertisers, but once they sell the DVD’s, that’s it. Well, in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy my cheap episodes.

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