That sound you just heard was this Dork Reporter having a geekgasm. Damon Albarn & Terry Gilliam have teamed to create a Gorillaz feature film. (no longer online: pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/39801/Damon_Albarns_Resume_Is_Better_Than_Yours)
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The Dork Report for January 3, 2007
If ever a band were known for hating each other, it’s The Police. Despite everything, they’re planning a reunion (no longer online: harpmagazine.com/news/detail.cfm?article=10783) (spotted on Popwatch).
I’m probably one of the last people in the world to see this, but it’s so awesome I must post it nonetheless: Lasse Gjertsen’s short film “Amateur”, on The Wall Street Journal.
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The Dork Report for January 2, 2007
33 new drawings by Dave McKean (no longer online: subterraneanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=gaiman&Category_Code=B&Product_Count=36) for the Mirrormask script book (spotted on Neil Gaiman’s Journal)
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The Dork Report for January 1, 2007
John Siracusa goes to town on .Mac (spotted on Daring Fireball). Yes, it’s expensive, painfully slow, and sometimes unreliable, but I am still totally and utterly wedded to it. I don’t want it dead, I want it fixed.
Lego Digital Designer (no longer online: ldd.lego.com) (spotted on The Unofficial Apple Weblog)
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The Dork Report for December 29, 2006
Gorillaz iTunes exclusives: Feel Good Inc, Dare, Dirty Harry, and El Mañana.
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The Dork Report for December 20, 2006
That nice Pennsylvania boy Trent’s been busy: upcoming New Nine Inch Nails live DVD and studio album. (spotted on Paper Thin Walls [no longer online: paperthinwalls.com/bullhorn/item?id=1205])
Transformers trailer. (guest submission from Andrea)
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M. Night Shyamalan squanders the last of his goodwill in The Lady in the Water
I don’t know where to start with this one. I’ve been a M. Night Shyamalan fan from the very beginning, even when the role was better described as apologist.
Even to a fan, nearly every film comes with a “yeah, but…” disclaimer: The Sixth Sense is an excellent piece of slight-of-hand with some genuine emotion, but let down by an extended montage at the end recapping events recontextualized by the already-clear Big Plot Reveal. Unbreakable, my personal favorite of his, is a remarkably mature character piece on a real-world Superman, but whose comic-book origins probably alienated a mainstream audience that wants its comic book movies clearly signposted by garish costumes and action set pieces. Signs is a perfectly crafted sci-fi thriller that doubles as a wildly funny comedy (an intentional one, I should be clear… more on that later), but the delicious suspense is nearly ruined in the end by the filmmakers’ overconfidence in their shoddy CGI alien.
The backlash started as soon as The Sixth Sense, perhaps in direct correlation with its box office take, with people falling over themselves claiming to have detected the Big Plot Reveal well ahead of time. But The Village marked the moment when the grumbling turned sour. If not nearly as bad as its critical reception, The Village was a disappointment; its promising scenario satirizing the contemporary situation in Bush’s color-coded police state is stifled by a lack of humor uncharacteristic for the director, not to mention an underwhelming twist lacking the emotional punch of The Sixth Sense.
The classic Shyamalan film is a schematicly constructed jigsaw, which in itself is a great pleasure. But in The Lady in the Water, the tail wags the dog to an even greater degree than The Village. Humorless, pretentious, and forehead-slappingly… well, sorry for the cheap shot… stupid.
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The Dork Report for December 18, 2006
50 Lost Movie Classics. Seen: Petulia, Top Secret, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Safe, The Parallax View, Save the Last Dance, Beautiful Girls, Millions. Heard of: The Swimmer, Bamboozled, 3 Women, Breathless. (guest submission from Andrea)
Ahh… a life in the day of Tom Baker. (spotted on Kasterborous [no longer online: kasterborous.com/news.asp?id=878])
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The Dork Report for December 17, 2006
U2 announces Zoo2Live [no longer online: u2.com/highlights/?hid=330], a new live album available exclusively to fan club members. Although it doesn’t say so explicitly, it would seem the audio is taken directly from the same show as the commercially available DVD.
Nine Horses, the latest project from David Sylvian, Steven Jensen and Burnt Friedman, releases their new EP Money for All on Samadhisound in January.
The Criterion Collection uses its new blog, On Five, to announce a new line of DVDs: “Eclipse presents a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed films in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.”
Free Pinky! (passed around work)
What iTunes needs: tagging.
MacHeist‘s bargain-basement pricing on their bundle ($356.74 worth of shareware for $49) has ignited something of a blogwar. A particular sticking point is that aside from the aforementioned bundle, MacHeist gave away several “unlocked” software downloads (free, fully-functional apps, but not registered and thus disallowing upgrades) during an extended build-up to the bundle launch. Even the most cogent analysis of the affair on Daring Fireball fails to take into account one simple fact: what about upgrades? I used my unlocked copy of Voice Candy the other day to record some podcast voiceover audio, and I was prompted to download a new update. If I had done so, I would have kissed goodbye to my freebie and had been forced to pay the registration fee to continue using the program. I suspect most of these unlocked apps have similar built-in upgrade notices and users will be seeing them every time they open them up, basically amounting to free advertising for the developers, reminding users who already have the product sitting on their hard drive that they are not full owners in what they are using, and that they are missing out by not becoming full owners.
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The Dork Report for December 15, 2006
Anime in real life: Princess Mononoke flying thing [no longer online: akihabaranews.com/en/en/news-12983-Kaze+no+Tani+no+Nausicaa…+for+real?.html], Akira motorcycle, Ghost in the Shell female android. (guest submission by Dave)