Ahlschwede Blog

First Photo of Sandman

A reminder that there will be a new Spider-Man movie in... 2007(!) The first photo of  Thomas Haden Church as Sandman has been posted online.

Link: Spider-Man @ Sony Pictures

Serenity and Dr. Who DVDs

Serenity, the movie based on the short lived Firefly television series, will be released on DVD December 20th. I saw the movie twice in theatres and I'm not exactly itching to see it again, but the DVD extra, Future History: The Story of Earth That Was sounds interesting.

The new Dr. Who series, only available on the BBC in the UK before now, is getting a European DVD release on November 21st. The discs are region 2, so you'll need non-standard equipment to play them in the US. From what I've heard the series is excellent.

Link: Serenity in December
Link: Dr. Who Series 1 on Amazon.co.uk

If The Doom Movie Opens and Nobody Notices, Does it Make a Sound?

Watching "Doom" is like visiting Vegas and never leaving your hotel room.

:: rogerebert.com :: Doom

A story over at Evil Avatar, reminded me that the Doom movie is opening today. I decided to go check out it's Metacritic score: 33! That's where I found the Ebert quote above, he gave it 1 star out of 5. I'm really wondering why they bothered with the movie at all. Did they decide that the Doom 3 game had deflated the franchise enough that they just had to take what they can get?

Even The Rock, who can usually be counted on to enliven any scenario, seems bored by the laughably feeble script

New York Daily News - Movie Reviews - Elizabeth Weitzman: 'Doom'

I was noticing that it hasn't garnered a mention on most of the sites that usually talk about games. Slashdot is quiet, Penny Arcade is talking about Shadow Of The Colossus, the sequel to Ico. Even id Software, developer of the Doom game, has given the October 6th announcement of a new Wolfenstein game top billing over news about the movie. I think this is one to put on the permanent skip list.

Batman Beyond Trailer Foolishness

Somewhere at Big Spaceship or Warner Brothers  there is an idiot. I just went to the Batman Begins website and downloaded the nicest version of the trailer I could find. "Click here to download a high resolution Windows Media version of the Trailer (PC Only)" it said. "Oh", I'm thinking, "maybe it uses some of the fancy compression that Microsoft developed for High Definition DVDs."

No. When I unzip the file it's name is trailer_super2_drm.wmv --- drm? Digital Rights Management? When I double click the file I get this message "A security upgrade is required to play this file, do you want to download this upgrade?" --- I just upgraded Windows Media player last week! 
So, it's not Windows Only because Windows offers some features that let you provide a better experience - it's Windows Only because you don't trust your customers to view high resolution advertising without some sort of extra security in place? Idiots.

The Return of the Birthday

For our birthday yesterday, John and I went with a group of our friends to the opening night midnight showing of The Return of the King. We showed up at around 9:30 to wait in the giant line for seats, ended up sitting in the theatre for an hour and a half while we waited for the three and a half hour movie to start, but when it was over it seemed like it all went too fast. The movie was excellent, but you didn't need me to tell you that.

John and I both took vacation days at work so we could sleep off the effects of the long night, and enjoy the rest of our birthday in leisure.

Spider-Man 2 Trailer

The first Spider-Man 2 trailer is now online, and it looks pretty cool. Spider-Man 2 features Doctor Octopus as the film's villain - which is great to see because though the Green Goblin (villain from the first Spider-Man movie) was certainly one of Spider-Man's most dangerous opponents in the comic books, Doc Ock reappeared in the comics much more and is the character I would identify as Spider-Man's arch-nemesis. (In my mind, Doctor Octopus :: Spider-Man as Joker :: Batman)

Interesting thing about this trailer is that the vast majority of high-profile movie trailers these days are available from Apple computer's Quicktime Movie Trailers site. This one, however is being hosted by Yahoo and isn't being served in the Quicktime format, it's being served as a Flash file.

Quicktime is the most venerable of movie formats on the web, it's been used for presenting movies on the Internet for as long as I can remember. Now Flash is moving into that space. Both Quicktime and Flash use versions of the Sorenson compression algorithm for video, but to my understanding the version in Quicktime is optimized for quality and the version in Flash is optimized for a small file size. In fact, Apple was so upset by the inclusion of this technology into Flash that they sued Sorenson for licensing the technology to Macromedia (the company that makes Flash) when it appeared in Flash Player version 6 (which appeared publicly in March 2002).

Right now Apple has an advantage when studios decide what format use for their trailers because Quicktime is the de facto standard for movie trailers, but it will be interesting to see if Flash catches on for this purpose. To my mind Flash has a long-term edge, because of player ubiquity - according to a study funded by Macromedia the Flash player that plays videos is installed on about 90% of computers while Quicktime is only installed on about 40% of computers.

UPDATE 12/18/2003: The Quicktime version of the trailer is now online.

Return of the King Trailer

Someone anonymously emailed a Return of the King trailer (Right click and select Save Target As... to save this 5.6MB Flash 6 file) to a Christoper Lee fan site. [via TotalFark]