RaaD Technology, Movies & News

Here’s the trailer for the new Will Smith movie, Hancock, instead of being the reluctant last man on Earth, he’s the reluctant super human with super powers.

Check out the HD Trailer here, thanks to Apple Trailers or just check it out here. Thanks to Film School Rejects for the poster.

Enjoy

Dany

Listening to the most recent episode of Macbreak Weekly revealed a great program for crossword puzzle lovers, it’s called Black Ink. It allows you to download the free crossword puzzles available all over the net (such as those from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal), if you don’t like solving them on your computer, you can even print them out!

The program has a free 30 day trial and costs $24.95… the only downside is that it’s a Mac only product, it requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later, so I can’t really use it myself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t spread the word.

For all you non-Mac users (myself included), as well as those Mac users who don’t want to ultimately pay $25, check out the American Crossword Tournament page, they have links to a good deal of free online crosswords.

Enjoy

Dany

Powerthirst is for the human on the go, one that wants to be WAY more than human. Do you want all your fat to fall off? Grow the kind of muscle that would make Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mark Mcguire and Barry Bonds tear up in jealousy?!?!?!

Thanks Dan for the linky linky. Enjoy

Dany

I guess this is a Mario Christmas, but I also found a weird Soviet-esque Mario video here.

Enjoy

Dany

I guess this is my Christmas contribution.

I was watching this week’s Meet the Press and couldn’t stop laughing towards the end of the episode, when Tim Russert himself shed light on this skeweringly funny political cartoon.

Merry Christmas

Dany

This looks like the most annoying and aggravating clone of the classic Super Mario Bros.!

Thanks to Dan for presenting me this madness. Enjoy watching the masochism. If you want to try your hand at this craziness, get it here, but consider yourself warned!

Dany

OS Living and Downloadpedia are sites devoted to providing information about all the best open source software programs for all different types of computing. These are great programs to use when you have just bought a new computer and realize you spent all your money on hardware and have no more money to devote to software, it’s also good if you want quality software that has been created and improved by computing enthusiasts, you can also, if brave enough edit the software yourself.

Thanks to Expand open source reach for the above pic.
Enjoy

Dany

This is probably pretty close to the perfect way to tell a political comedy drama, especially when based on a true story. This film was directed by Mike Nichols and written by Aaron Sorkin. These two powerhouses have been creating some of the most interesting and entertaining big and small screen productions over their careers and their partnership (their first joint venture) to bring this movie to the silver screen is no different, this movie was just a joy to watch.

Tom Hanks plays Charlie Wilson and is GREAT in this role, there is a perfect mix of hilarity and surprisingly, of a man who is smarter than the persona
he publicly promotes. I must say, I was extremely young during the early 1980s, I don’t really remember most of the events that the movie talks about and the only things I knew about Charlie Wilson specifically was what I saw from the previews for this movie (I didn’t want to research the history of this until after I saw the movie). So, I was not expecting the glimpses of an extremely smart politician that were presented.

Most of archive footage was very well interspersed into this film, but the very first helicopter scene was a bit jarring and unexpected, mainly for the amount of violence they showed, which was pretty unexpected because of how humorous the film had been up to that point. In the grand scheme of the story, the scene works to bring the audience into the degree of violence going on over seas, but it WAS unexpected. I was watching this film in a NYC theater and when Rudy Giuliani’s name came up during this film, without giving too much away, there was NOTICEABLE laughter from the audience for this.

The other massively enjoyable performance came from Philip Seymour Hoffman. He has played great parts in so many movies and this performance is no different. The scene where he is arguing with his boss may just be THE best scene in the entire movie. Julia Roberts also stars in the film, I am not usually a big fan of hers, but in this role, I didn’t think she was bad… a stellar review of her performance, I know, but at least she didn’t detract from the movie (like she did from Ocean’s Eleven).

I would recommend this movie for almost anyone, it is a really enjoyable film. The only people I would say should avoid this film are those who don’t like politics/history, if this is the case, you would probably be pretty bored not understanding what’s going on.

Thanks to Renee Ashley Baker for the above pic.

Dany

If you haven’t already seen it, check out the Get Smart teaser trailer. You can get the HD version over at Apple trailers.

I like the idea of having Steve Carell star as Maxwell Smart, it looks like a great choice, not to mention Alan Arkin as the Chief, Anne Hathaway, Bill Murray and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

The movie has some big shoes to fill though, the original TV show starring Don Adams was insanely funny and the show was also remade and reimagined in the early 1980’s as one of my favorite cartoons, Inspector Gadget, which incidentally was also voiced by Don Adams as well.

You can watch those original opening themes below for these two Don Adams classics below.

Let me preface this by saying I’m normally not a huge fan of Snoop Dogg… or even most music in general, if the music hasn’t been featured in a major motion picture, then I generally don’t care about it… some have even said that I hate music, but after hearing that Snoop decided to make a 70’s style music video, I thought that was a pretty interesting idea. I must say, seeing all the different 70’s style pimpin beard styles, clothing and rotating beds was a fun few minutes.

Thanks to Diggnation for talking about this story on their latest episode.

Dany

After watching I Am Legend in IMAX, the latest movie starring Will Smith, I realized just how difficult this movie was to pull off. Smith had to carry the entire movie virtually all by himself, he spent a majority of the film only able to interact with a dog, a few assorted manikins and some totally terrible CGI characters. The last movie that tried this was Cast Away with Tom Hanks and I hated that movie, I usually love Tom Hanks, but I was so bored watching him interact with that stupid volleyball!

With regard to the CGI characters, I think it was said best by the guys on the latest Filmspotting podcast, when they reviewed this film: “Anytime you put CG characters next to real ones,” it totally takes me out of the film, “thinking how bad they look.” CGI can look absolutely amazing when used to create landscapes, scenery and completely alien monsters, but CG humanoid characters never look right. Recently, in Beowulf, the scenery, Grendel and the Dragon look absolutely flawless as CG, but whenever characters moved or tried to yell, things just didn’t look natural. The non-character CG work in this film, creating a lonely, overgrown forest of New York City, a city known for being one of the busiest and hectic cities on the planet, it was a stunning sight which was a joy to watch.

The first two thirds of this film were absolutely riveting, I was TOTALLY with Will Smith act his way through the empty city, even with the completely unbelievable CG zombies (on that note, can we please go back to the slow moving zombies? I’m really getting tired of the whole faster than a blinking eye zombie.) Without giving too much away, I thought the juxtaposition of the very first minute of the film was great, it was easily one of the best parts of this movie. I was surprised though with the last third of the movie though, I didn’t realize going into this movie that it was only going to be 100 minutes, I thought that last third of the movie was too rushed and would have been better served if it had been stretched a bit longer and the film had ended up around two hours long.

I must say though, I thoroughly enjoyed this film and would recommend that it be seen, especially if you could catch the IMAX version. On a side note, if you can get to an IMAX screening of this film, get there early because one of the previews they are showing with this movie is a 6-minute prologue for the new Batman movie: The Dark Knight and I must say, I AM IN! The instant I find a link to this content, that isn’t a bootleg copy, I will post it myself! I remember not being very excited about Batman Begins, I ended up waiting until it made it to DVD before seeing it, but boy was I wrong with that expectation.
Thanks to Wost Previews for the above picture.

Dany

I don’t really know how to react to the story of the Human Treeman, it looks absolutely creepy and fake, but I had to pass it along. I checked Snopes to see if it was a hoax and saw nothing about it, so it has a chance of being real. If it’s real, it’s pretty sick.

Thanks to Kevin and Alex over at Diggnation for their latest episode which had this crazy story.

Dany

The world is going crazy, w00t become Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2007, but this clip, which is an official ad for PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (Yes, you read this correctly) tops anything I’ve seen so far! Chuck Norris facts used to just be the domain of internet geeks like me along with Mr. T and Vin Diesel facts, but now, the Chuck Norris Facts have exploded to the surface of mainstream news and politics!

If there is one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that the internet is having more and more influence on mainstream culture and this campaign video for the US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION is the best example EVER!

OK, I have told many people this already, but I predict that Mike Huckabee will WIN the Iowa Caucus. My friends know how I feel about this upcoming election, but this is BIG news!

Thanks to the Buzz Report for finding this absolutely brain melting video.

Dany

Nintendo has in the past tried to skew toward the young children/family games market and the Wii isn’t all that different from this model. Nintendo has tried to expand to bring in the more casual gamers with the Wii by focusing more on making games that are FUN, instead of creating HD games with amazing graphics (which is the market both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3).

This has brought a lot more women and families to the Wii, but Nuts (a British men’s magazine) has found a way to promote themselves by utilizing the Wii. They created a series of videos of women playing some of the Wii’s most popular games… topless.

This was a great marketing ploy to get men (some women too, but probably mostly men) onto the Nuts site. Thanks to Diggnation for uncovering (sure, pun intended) these clips on their latest episode.

Dany

Are you pissed that NBC has pulled its videos off of both iTunes and Youtube BEFORE their big Hulu venture has been fully released to the public? Well, OpenHulu is a project that has been working to embed every video that has been placed onto Hulu, but will allow ALL to access these files. That’s right, no private beta to lock you out anymore. You still get the ads and all current shows are truncated to only allow viewing of the latest 5 episodes, since the content is direct from the source, but at least most shows are already posted.

Thanks to Lifehacker for finding and broadcasting this info. Also, don’t forget that you can get all the same content at AOL Video’s Hulu channel, I know I keep forgetting about it.

Dany

Film Racing is a contest that seems to have started around the idea of getting people to get off their butts and just start creating films, no matter how much or little money they had. They started out by having contests where entrants were tasked with creating a 3 minute (max length) film in a 12 hour time span. Now, they have a Film Racing Grand Prix where you have 100 hours to put together a 4 minute movie. Each film team is given a theme and a surprise element they need to use in their film.

This is an extremely interesting concept, you can go here to see some examples of films that have already been submitted.

Thanks to BoingBoingTV for spreading the good word about this contest. The film above is called Eggsistence and was created in <12 hours, their theme was “a fortune” and their surprise element was they needed to use an “egg.”

Dany

Above is the originally video I saw about the home made ~$7,000 x-wing launch, but a few days later, I found a second video that offered the TRUTH as to what made the x-wing go boom. I’ve put THAT video below.

Dany

The highly anticipated film by J.J. Abrams, which was initially only known as 1-18-08, has released a far more extensive trailer and we now know the film is titled Cloverfield. It looks (from all the gunfire and shadow shots) and sounds like some combination of monsters, both Godzilla big and Alien small (and hungry) has attacked New York City.

Take some time and get a looksy at the HD trailer from Apple trailers by clicking here. or just watch it from youtube above.

Dany