My favorite place on (Google) Earth
Disney has added models and textures for Walt Disney World to Google Earth. While the blog entry describes it as “the second best thing to being there,” it’s a little slow and fuzzy, and it’s more like walking through a papercraft version of the parks and hotels than it is like exploring a new virtual…
Sine intellectus non
Speaking of TV shows: did anybody else understand what the hell was going on with this week’s “Battlestar Galactica?” (Called “Sine Qua Non.”) It felt to me like what would happen if you took all the components of a BSG episode, fed them into a computer: Stand-off at gun-point Apollo makes speech about making tough…
Tales of the Expected
Okay, the “Lost” people are totally making this stuff up as they go along. At least, I hope they are, because if the season finale of season 4 really is what they’ve had planned since the end of season 3, then they’ve been yanking our chains for a year. It’s not that it was bad;…
I’ve come to kill your monstah!
Over three years ago, I wrote on here about a slick app for the Mac called Delicious Library. It’s a database for your books, movies, CDs, and videogames that presents everything by letting you scan through shelves of the covers. The first version got a ton of coverage on the internet, mostly because of its…
Cine Puro
Memorial Day weekend seemed like as good a time as any to make some progress on the Netflix queue, in the form of a style-over-substance double feature. In one of the special features for The Orphanage, executive producer Guillermo del Toro describes a couple of scenes as “pure cinema.” He’s talking about the scenes without…
The Calls Are Coming From Within the Ice Level!
Previously on Spectre Collie, I made the claim that storytelling in “passive” media like books and movies isn’t as passive as people like to think. A well-told story demands that the audience stay actively engaged in the telling, processing what’s come so far and anticipating what happens next. The interesting thing is: this is so…
Indiana Jones and the Appendix of the Forbidden Links
My on-again, off-again mind-meld with Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com seems to be back on again, with her review of Indiana Jones 4. The part she describes best is the first scene where (possible spoiler?) Indy runs into Marion: When he sees her, his face shows what can only be described as pure delight, and it’s…
Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jaded Eye
Watching the new Indiana Jones movie gave me severe diarrhea. Actually, the two events are most likely unrelated, but I wanted to take a cue from the pharmaceutical business and warn of any potential side effects: a small but not insignificant group of viewers reported spending the 15 hours following the movie being frequently and…