The fourth category in the ‘Best Of’ awards is for movie of the year.
This year the usual assortment of big blockbuster sequels arrived but generally received underwhelming responses. Pirates Of The Caribbean and Spiderman 3 both disappointed with convoluted or lackluster story lines and by trying to fit in too many superfluous characters. In contrast other sequels like The Bourne Ultimatum and Die Hard 4 kept audiences enthralled with over the top action scenes and car chases.
This year we were also lucky enough to receive a number of movies with original or wacky story-lines including Sunshine, Stranger Than Fiction, Zodiac, No Land For Old Men and the mind-fucking Inland Empire. Other movies that stood out from the crowd included Hot Fuzz, Eastern Promises and Superbad which all managed to successfully pay homage to previous cult favorites such as Bad Boys, Die Hard, Godfather or American Pie.
While most people chose to download or watch movies at home, there were still a few offerings that benefited from the big screen such as the surprise hit The Transformers. Who would have thought that something based around a 23 yr old cartoon and toy range would have been so popular? The snappy dialog and enthusiastic cast moved things along at a energetic pace while the 40 minute climactic robot battle offered one of the most exciting movie endings of the year. The Zack Synder movie 300 also dilivered plenty of bloodthirsty action but the nonexistant storyline and poor script dissapointed those who were expecting a true sword and sandels epic. While the same could be said for the movie Beowulf it really shone on the IMAX screen in 3D. The breathtaking action scenes, brilliant stop motion SFX and effective 3D effects perfectly showcased what movies are capable of and what we can hopefully expect in the future.
On another note the screen writers guild of America got in a pay dispute with their movie distributors this year. Since script writers don’t receive royalties for their content displayed on the internet they ended up going on strike until the problem is resolved. While this will mainly affect TV shows it will also impact the release of new movie scripts. It will therefore be interesting to see whether this development will affect any movies being released in the next year.
1. 28 Weeks Later: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
2. 300: Zack Synder
3. Beowulf 3D: Robert Zemeckis
4 The Bourne Ultimatum: Paul Greengrass
5. Die Hard 4.0: Len Wiseman
6. Eastern Promises: David Chronenberg
7. Harry Potter :David Yates
8. Hot Fuzz: Edgar Wright
9. The Illusionist: Neil Burger
10. Inland Empire: David Lynch
11.The King Of Kong: Seth Gordon
12. No Land For Old Men: Joel & Ethan Coen
13. Pirates Of The Caribbean: Gore Verbinski
14. The Simpsons: David Silverman
15. Spiderman 3: Sam Raimi
16. Stranger Than Fiction: Mark Forster
17. Sunshine: Danny Boyle
18. Superbad: Greb Mottola
19. Transformers: Michael Bay
20. Zodiac: David Fincher
Well I’ve just arrived in Adelaide after 2 days on the road and initially things didn’t go as planned. This trip was originally planned as a way of collecting all the Craick family together for Christmas in Adelaide. However my uncle and his family from America had to cancel their trip as he ended up losing his green card and had to cancel his plane tickets.
While my other 2 brothers also opted to bail I decided that I would only be sitting on my arse played xbox for the rest of the holidays so I decided to go ahead with the trip.
Following a chaotic Christmas day at my dad and step mums place (I don’t like mingling with people I only meet once a year) we headed off to Adelaide in my dad’s Toyota Prius on Boxing day.
The first day was mainly filled with reading a book and passing through a number of boring country towns but we eventually finished in Horsham. Following a good dinner at the local RSL we all heading off to bed at about 10pm (I don’t think I’ve been to bed at this time before) at the Darlot motor inn, which creepily looked a lot like the Bates hotel. After one of my worst nights sleep ever (brought about by my dads snoring) we headed off on our second leg to Adelaide.
To help pass the time and to tune out my dads idle chit chat I decided to listen to my ipod (plug). However after only about an hour of play it just froze on me. While this had happened to me a couple of times It was usually remedied with a quick hardware reset via a couple of button presses. Unfortunately this solution didn’t fix the problem and I wondered if it might be a problem with the battery. I then plugged it into my new eeepc to try and recharge it, but this only resulted in the ipod emitting an ominous clicking sound from the hardrive. Following a bit of fiddling around I came to the conclusion that my ipod was now stuffed and I would have to send it off for a repair.
My eeepc then preceded to overheat after I inadvertently shoved it in my bag following an improper shutdown. Since the manual had specifically warned transferring the PC while operational it came as no surprise that it was hot enough to fry some bacon & eggs on it after I uncovered it an hour later. I’ve since managed to get it started again and am writing this post on it on hoping that the heat hasn’t done any permanent damage.
Anyway following all these technical difficulties I eventually arrived in boring bright Adelaide and am actually having a rather relaxing time. What’s not to like? Drinking coopers and eating my curly (some Scottish thing) during my second Christmas day dinner for the holidays. This hot weather is also going to be great for watching Australia hopefully thrash India in the test cricket.
Merry Christmas to all the hundredpennies crew and loyal listeners that have tuned into the podcast and read our posts.
Hope you have a great day and hopefully you don’t receive too many dodgy presents.
I’ll be in Adelaide till the 30th, but i’ll t ry and sneak in some posts while i’m on the road.
Cheers and all the best!
Published on
December 25, 2007 in
Podcast.
Our very first Christmas episode! Gav, Fu and Stu sit on the couch in front of the fireplace sipping on Shit Blokes soaking in everything that is Christmas.This week some of the things we talk about include:
- Best of 2007
- iPods
- Rayman Raving Rabbids 2
- Scene It
- Gavin’s XBOX dies
- HundredPennies Christmas gift guide
- Eee PC
- Ten HD
- The Ultimate Hoodie (link)
- Where did Episode 16 go…?
Have a very save and enjoyable holiday season and we look forward to entertaining you with our dribble in the new year!
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The fourth catagory in the ‘Best Of’ awards is for the gadget/hardware of the year.
Before I begin I have to admit that i’m rather biased in this area as I’ve recently brought myself a new Asus eeepc laptop. For those that are unaware it’s basically the smallest and cheapest laptop on the market weighing in just under a 1 Kg and only costing $500. I’m actually writing up this post on my eeepc at the moment and I’ll give a proper review of it in a later post but at the moment I would say that this is my gadget of the year.
Other contenders for this award would have to include everything in the new ipod range (bar the shitty shuffle). In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last year Apple announced their new lineup of ipod products in September. Obviously the biggest product was the iphone which is still set to come out in Australia but the rumours are that it will be released through Telstra. I have seen an imported one in action and must say they look pretty sweet and come close to toppling the Blackberry off it’s podium as being the #1 multimedia phone.
The other major addition in the Apple lineup was the multifunction iTouch, which offers a touch screen (duh) and a WiFi connection that allows you to surf the net and peruse the itunes store. Unfortunately the slow web browser and inclusion of only 16Gb of space probably limits this model from being the definitive ipod model. Apple also updated the classic range (80Gb or 160Gb) and the ipod Nano (4Gb, 8Gb) with new looks and the ability to play videos. As I stated in my review the 80Gb version is definitely a fine gadget if you don’t need WiFi.
This year other tech releases revolved around the world of HD movies. As the Blueray and HD war heated up a whole range of DVD players were release from Pioneer (blue), Toshiba (HD) and Sony (blue).Until a winner is decided its hard to tell which format to choose but thankfully Samsung and LG both offer players that allow playback of both HD and Blueray discs. While must people wont won’t fork out for these expensive players ($900 – ~$1600) the Playstation 3 is the cheapest option on the market with its built in Blueray reader.
A worldwide shortage of PS3 consoles caused an inlflux of ridiculous priced units on eBay (Avrg $1000) and pushed the Australian release date back to March. The initial steep price of $830 (20Gb) or $999 (60Gb) and the lackluster range of release titles ended up making it the lowest selling console in the 3rd quarter period with only ~27k units sold compared to ~40k for the xbox360 and ~6k for the wii . While the PS3′s price has since dropped to $700 it also discarded a couple of USB ports, its memory card reader, it’s ability to play PS2 games and they also stripped back the hard drive to 40Gb. While the PS3 obviously has a lot of ground to make up it will be interesting how it will preform in the coming year.
I also have to briefly mention another couple of gadgets that I know my friends have been getting good milage out. These include the professional snowball microphone which Count Knuckles has been using for the hundredpennies podcast and the Belkin N1 vision 4 port wireless router which gets points for its futuristic innovative display and ipod looking asthetics.
If there’s any other gadgets that have caught your attention send me a comment.
1. Asus: eeePC
2. Apple: iPhone
3. Apple: iTouch
4. Apple: iPod Nano
5. Apple: iPod
Classic
6. Playstation 3
7. Samsung: BD-UP5000 HD/Blueray combo drive
8. Blue: Snowball USB microphone
9. Belkin: N1 vision 4 port wireless router
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