According to Colwell

Okay, first go-round with upgrading the blog didn’t go very smoothly, but the good folks at eboundhost.com got the blog upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2. This means I should be able to have the picture of Saturn’s moon Epimetheus appear in a “lightbox” using the lightbox plugin. Let’s see. Clicking on the picture should blow it up.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI

Hooray! It worked! Mostly, anyway. Still some issues on my end with the upload, but still pretty cool.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of this movie which features another fine performance by Will Smith and an impressive rendering of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan. And I can let slide my standard zombie complaint that applies to this movie as well as every other zombie movie I’ve seen: if they’re so bestial and so damn hungry, why don’t they eat each other? Zombie meat not good enough for them? Anyway, I was ultimately disappointed by the ending which had an overtly anti-science theme and an implied anti-evolution message while having a savior appear because God sent her. Smith’s ultimate act also seemed totally unnecessary. Nothing was gained by him not getting in the safe with Anna and Ethan.

So. Beowulf, the medieval epic poem written in a precursor to English in the 10th century has been brought to the screen by Robert Zemeckis with a cutting-edge technology. Eschewing the combination of the live action and computer generated imagery that marks most science fiction and fantasy movies these days, Zemeckis uses the motion capture technique first showcased in Final Fantasy and The Polar Express where actors performances are captured, digitized, and repainted in the purely digital realm of the rest of the movie. The juxtaposition of 21st century moviemaking technology against a 10th century poem is not as odd as it might seem given the fantastical nature Beowulf’s exploits in the poem. Beowulf’s epic battles against sea monsters and destruction of the creature Grendel defy realistic depiction. But then again, so does The Lord of the Rings, and they did pretty well using real actors. The most interesting aspect to me of the motion-capture animated actors in Beowulf is how immediately obvious it is that they are not images of real people. If you look at a still frame image of Beowulf, it is difficult if not impossible to identify any particular aspect of the images of the people that is not a perfect representation of a human. However, the faces are clearly not human faces. It says something about the remarkable ability of the human mind to identify real human faces and not be fooled by what appear to be perfect simulacra. The characters move jerkily and their contact with each other and with props does not have the heft of real people. I find it distracting and prefer to see actors rather than digital conversions of their performances.

So, after all that, how is the movie? It’s entertaining and has a lot of cool-looking stuff, though it’s not emotionally engaging at all.

Here we are, at the Panera in Orlando near UCF checking e-mail because our DSL modem got fried by the daily lightning storm within the first hour. Another should arrive tomorrow. The weekend was spent unpacking a tiny fraction of an unreasonably large number of boxes. Movie reviews of Live Free or Die Hard (liked it: a guilty pleasure), Ratatouille (liked it surprisingly much), and Transformers (um, whatever) coming shortly. Unfortunately too many things to do with unpacking and with finishing a proposal due this Thursday to post much more at the moment. I feel like we’re just now getting plugged back into the world after two weeks in a strange sort of limbo.

Today is the first day of our last week in Boulder before making the cross-country trek to Orlando for my new job at the University of Central Florida’s Physics Department. With two dogs and a cat making the trip with us, we’re going on the road. Internet connectivity may be sparse for the next 10-12 days.

Trying to find a way to stop the hundreds of ridiculously long and ridiculously obvious spam comments hitting this blog every day, I put the e-mail address of the offending spammer in my blog’s WordPress “blacklist”. For reasons I don’t understand, this resulted in all comments getting nuked. So, if on the off chance you posted a comment in the last week or so, I’m afraid it’s lost to the ether. I’ve removed the blacklist and will try to figure out another way to get rid of the flood of insurance company spam comments.

The different look for the blog is so I can have the pages links arranged across the top rather than along the side. This is something I’ve been procrastinating on for a while, but have wanted to do so I can put some of my essays on-line outside of the blog chronology. I’d like to try to get my trademark UV image of the rings in the banner at the top, but that is also a matter of procrastination. If you see it there, either I figured out how to do it with this Word Press theme or reverted to the old theme. In the meantime I started the Essays page with one I wrote a year ago after meeting Kate Winslet. Having just seen her most recent movie, Little Children (review to appear shortly), it seemed like as good a time as any to post it. Many of my other essays are either obscene, profane, or both, so I’m not sure I want those on-line.

Posts will be sparse for the next couple of weeks while I’m on travel in Florida.