Alright, so here’s my review of Avatar. First, I’ll start by saying my expectations for this movie were high. Really high. I wanted epic. I wanted to be awed and I thought there was a good chance of that. Maybe that’s where I went wrong, but I thought (contrary to what seems like popular opinion on the internet) that it was a good movie. It wasn’t great.

I think the CG was really good and impressive. However, regardless of how good the CG was and how far ahead it was from any other CG flick, we’re (in my opinion) still not at the point where you can quite capture the emotion that a human can convey through pure CG. To me, Avatar was a display of the “uncanny valley” in respect to emotion. I’ve seen comparisons between Zoe Saldana’s performance in Star Trek vs Avatar and I’d take the emotion she conveyed in the scene with Spock in the elevator over any scene with her in Avatar.

There were two things that ultimately led me to feel disappointed with Avatar. Character development and not quite nailing it when characters were supposed to be emoting. For a movie that was over 2.5 hours long, I would have liked to know and feel the characters more. Death scenes in Avatar? They were okay. Compare them to the death scenes in a Lord of the Rings. LoTR hands down.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie. I thought it was good. But, it wasn’t great and if it ends up “disrupting the movie industry,” I hope it doesn’t send the message that all people want is eye candy. I see movies primarily for a good story and a great one does that by establishing great characters. I think that’s where Avatar fell short and here’s my vote for more money/time spend on characters and story versus eye candy.

I saw Avatar at the Drafthouse. If you can, I would recommend making the most of its eye candy and seeing it in IMAX. I’ll probably try to catch it in IMAX at some point and see how well I enjoy it then. On a “regular size” digital 3D screen, I didn’t feel as immersed as I was led to believe I would. Again, that’s just me. =)

I am not a fan of the “organic burgers” craze especially when bacon becomes the scape-goat in the latest “hip eateries” that are “healthy burgers.” Tonight, I went to Elevation Burgers which seemed to overly emphasize healthy aspects of, let’s not kid anyone here, unhealthy food. Do I eat a burger to be healthy? No.

Okay, maybe I’m just upset they didn’t have bacon (P.Terry’s, here’s looking at you, too), but Elevation Burgers even emphasized that they had organic butter. People! It’s still freakin’ butter.

I made a new poster for EB that I think they can use in the future if they want to make people think they can lose weight and be healthy by eating burgers.

I love how in the following Windows 7 Launch Party video:

… there is an old white lady, a middle aged one, a white nerdy guy, and then a black guy. And they’re having nice party snacks and installing Windows 7. That’s just lovely.

Sometimes I get in the mood of watching a sad movie or something to make myself feel. Maybe it’s due to living in a fast-paced world, sometimes I want to just chill for a bit and take in life and have some deeper emotions that a rushed one doesn’t allow. I’m glad I do have the luxury to do that, but I find it interesting being introspective and thinking about all the various aspects of myself that need to “recharge” every so often. I like having time to just take in life and how things are going because even though some things aren’t perfect, some things are really frustrating, or some things just aren’t going the way I’d want, life is pretty good overall and I’ve been blessed with more than I deserve.

If someone calls me emo, I will shoot them.

“You part the shadows,
Light of the World.
Destroy the blindness
Peace Eternal.

Take this broken heart,
if it brings You praise,
Take this beaten soul,
shivering hands I will raise.” – Brave Saint Saturn

I’ve always been immensely amused at how horrendous the lyrics are to Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend. Well, Chad played the Mandarin version tonight (I’ve probably heard it before, just didn’t realize it) and I found out that there are a ton of different versions of it in different languages. That’s so horrific it’s awesome.

Now that your brain is blown away in English, bask in the glory of Girlfriend in:

• Spanish
• Mandarin
• French
• Japanese
• German
• Portuguese
• Italian

“Hey hey you you
我不喜欢你女朋友 [wǒ bù xǐ huān nǐ nǚ péng yǒu]
No way no way
你需要一个新的 [nǐ xū yào yī gè xīn de]

…

Because…

She’s like so whatever
You can do so much better
I think we should get together now
And that’s what everyone’s talking about” -Avril Lavigne

I’ve had this discussion with a couple friends before, and although perhaps a bit disturbing, it’s a fun thought. The basic premise is “if you’re really old, like 105, and you’re about to die, how would you take yourself out?” I believe Viraj’s answer was he wanted to rent a Lamborghini and drive off a cliff at like 100something MPH. Mine? I want to blow up on top of the Round Rock round rock, taking it out with me. I find it immensely humorous to become infamous by taking out a small town landmark/namesake. Anyways, it’s just a make-believe scenario… please don’t have me arrested. =p

Came home from work today to find Oriana watching Stardust at my place. Mom came and picked her up, but I went ahead and finished watching it. I’ve seen it before, but there’s something about it that makes me enjoy it quite a bit. I think it’s probably something to do with slightly overly chipper girls… they get to me, I suppose. =p Although the downside to that is that I know it’s fake… there’s no such thing as overly chipper girls. =( Haha… How cool would it be to have a girl that could blow up witches by supernovaing though (without blowing themselves up, of course)?

Why is it that ketchup packages are so small, particularly relative to, say, mayonnaise ones? How often to people actually use one package? I just don’t understand…

Now that I’ve complained about ketchup, I have realized I don’t have anything else to talk about, which makes this blog post just a bit pointless. Enjoy.

Anyone have any experience with any wifi webcams? Thinking of setting one up in my game room. Or maybe I’ll get a regular webcam, but then I’d have to leave my (probably) Mac Mini on the whole time just for it so that seems like overkill.

We went to the new BV office to preview it on Monday. It seems quite a bit larger! I forgot to bring my camera though and the ones I took on my iPhone are at such a disappointing resolution, I don’t even want to bother with them.

I mentioned this earlier, but I went to the monster shoot at Carolee and Christopher’s. Then, I went to Home Depot and got a ceiling fan for my living room that Mark and Andrew helped install, which turned out to be quite an effort since we had to rewrite some switches. Later, we played a bit of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. That game is so crazy, but oh so awesome.

We had a discussion about comics and super-hero movies. I haven’t been into the comic world much, but apparently both Marvel and DC have severely messed up universes now. DC just loves their ridiculous “multiverses” where they have huge story-arcs that aren’t entertaining at all due to confusing “timelines” just to explain away inconsistencies. I stopped reading when they had their stupid “Infinite Crisis” and came out with characters such as Superboy-Prime. Whose bright idea was it to dilute the Superman character by creating a whole ton of other versions of him and make some of them bad? Superboy-Prime just sounds really lame, too. How in the world is a kid or comic new-comer supposed to get into these plots when you have to have a huge diagram just to know what’s going on?

Marvel, apparently, decided to throw away a bunch of plot as well by just saying “oh, these super heroes? they were actually aliens for the past few years.” Sigh. Oh yeah, and reviving “dead” characters isn’t uncommon in comics, but the recent Captain America one is just ridiculous. That bullet that apparently killed him? Oh yeah, no nevermind, that was actually a special bullet that transported him to another time and place. Oh really, Marvel? That makes a lot of sense. That’s what I see here… yeah, it’s Captain America being transported to another place and time.

Let me treat you to this beauty of story-writing (from Wikipedia):

“Darkseid’s essence attempts to claim the Miracle Machine in a last ditch effort to defeat Superman. However, Superman sang a note at a frequency that countered Darkseid’s own vibrational frequency, shattering his essence.”

Yay! That’s just what everyone wanted Superman to have. Super-song. Here’s another character that had this power (well, kinda):

Sigh. Someone get these comic writers out of their bubble. They need some fresh air to get back to good story-telling rather than coming up with convoluted garbage.

On a WoW-related note, I logged in to finally do my Paladin quest to get Redemption. I checked my /played time and it’s at about 14 hours. Not bad for almost level 44. =)