I’ll cover the technical aspects up first. The production values are at, or above, the excellent standard set by the TV series. The movie is in widescreen and features 5.1 Dolby Surround. The bad news is that there is no Australian release and one has not been announced as of yet.

As for the movie itself, I believe it could be best described as an episode of Futurama that’s four time longer than usual. Which is fitting seeing as it’s designed to be split up into four distinct episodes. Basically, if you love Futurama you’re going to go gaga over this.

One of the biggest highlights for me was the opening scene where the crew makes thinly veiled references to the show’s cancellation by the Fox Network. Professor Farnsworth explains that everyone was fired two years ago by the executives at the “Box Network”. Seconds later he receives a phonecall telling him that those executives were themselves fired and have been ground up into a product called “Torgo’s Executive Powder” (a product which is used throughout the movie). I think it is this eagerness to get straight to the issue of the cancellation, and subsequent mocking of Fox (common is Groening’s shows), that really give you an idea of what kind of show Futurama is. There isn’t much that is a taboo subject for the writers!

The opening title sequence gets a redoing as well. Characters are now introduced in between shots of the Planet Express Ship flying through New New York. The song was naturally extended for all this and I enjoyed hearing a longer version of it.

For fans of the show there are numerous references to the first four seasons but I won’t go into any of them here and instead let you find them yourself. People who are not fans should find the movie as accessible as any episode but be warned that the plot is a rather involved time travel paradox-fest so people who aren’t usually into sci-fi should probably find an early episode to start with.

Overall, what more can I say but that I loved every minute of Bender’s Big Score and am extremely grateful that we’re getting more Futurama after all this time.

Really, I think the opening title sums it up best:

For more screen captures from the film, go to the Amazon gallery.

The setting for Stardust is mostly set in the magical kingdom of Stormhold, which happens to border a tiny English village, aptly named Wall. The plot of the movie follows the main character, Tristan Thorne, as he journey’s through Stormhold on a quest to bring a piece of a fallen star back to the object of his affections, Victoria, who appears to be the town’s most eligible bachelorette. Along the way he finds and subsequently falls in love with the star, who turns out to be in the form of a human woman, named Yvaine (played by Claire Danes).

I won’t go too much into the plot as you can read a detailed breakdown on the Wikipedia. Suffice it to say there’s not really a lot that should come as a surprise to anyone. Plot, after all, is not the reason anyone goes to see an adventure film.

The cast for the movie is very well assembled. There are plenty of big name actors along with “that guy who is in” types. The male lead Charlie Cox does an excellent job of playing the naive Tristan and the rest of the cast all give solid performances, although the inclusion of Ricky Gervais just didn’t sit right with me since the character served no actual purpose in the movie and Gervais is completely unable to play any character besides David Brent. Ian McKellen serves as an outstanding narrator and is a nice capstone to the cast.

The visuals of the film are of course fantastic, with plenty of beautiful countryside, giant castles, flying ships, magic and all the other things you’d expect from a fantasy setting. I can’t fault any of the special effects and there’s enough swashbuckling action to go along with the romantic and comedy scenes that most people should find something to enjoy.

The running time of the film is quite short for films these days at a little over two hours. It definitely doesn’t feel that long since most of the film is just so much fun to sit through. Stardust has a rating of PG and that’s due only to some mild fight scenes (there’s no blood or gore that I can remember) and some sexual references such as Tristan and Yvaine waking up in bed together (“oh my God – they’re not married!”).

Overall, a great film for everyone with action, adventure, romance and comedy in the vein of classic films such The Princess Bride. I thought it was great and highly recommend it.

1. Not letting the viewer skip or fast forward things

   Especially if those things are useless copyright information (mostly in other languages) or titles for the publisher. I’m trying to decide which I hate more: a 40 second copyright screen or a 2 minute “pirating DVDs is bad” video. The anti-pirating video is annoying and completely useless for most people (“oh … I was fully intending on pirating this DVD that I just bought until I saw this!”) but, on the other hand, the copyright screen is downright boring.

   Copyright information at the end of a show can be quite annoying as well when it’s not skippable. Particularly if it prevents you returning to the menu for several minutes so you can’t watch the next episode. The Dead Like Me DVDs actually prevented me using the stop button! I’m not sure why the DVD specifications would say this is allowed…

2. Long pre-menu intros

   In particular, intros which are exactly the same as the opening credits in the actual show. I’m looking at you Farscape. Movies which show the highlights from the movie itself are pretty bad as well, most of all if they end up containing spoilers!

3. Not having a chapter start immediately after the opening titles

   DVDs allow you to jump around so why can’t I use it to skip the minute long opening credits?

4. Interlacing

   Can the world just agree that interlacing is no longer necessary, is a terrible way to format video and move on?

5. Not including a “Play All” option

   Repeatedly stepping through menus to watch each episode of a series gets really old, really fast. Particularly if each episode has its own submenu.

Now, some of these things, I feel, should not be part of the DVD spec at all. Unskippable content? Sure it’s good for the publishing company because they get to have their logo displayed and piss us off with anti-piracy campaigns … but we’ve already paid for the damn discs so why should they care? The ironic thing is that pirated DVDs do not suffer from these problems!

Interlacing is really just a pet peeve of mine. I can understand why it was needed back in the ancient days of television but for (almost) the last decade or so it’s been largely useless, particularly now that we have digital TV … which still allows for interlacing. Except that digital interlacing is downright stupid because the interlaced version of a resolution is roughly the same quality as the non-interlaced version of the resolution below it. For example, 1080i is roughly the same as 720p. Even for shows that are old and were created with TV in mind, surely the production studio can just run the footage through a de-interlacing filter before putting it on the DVD? Since there are multiple kinds of interlacing DVD viewers sometimes can find an optimal one to use. For example, when watching Babylon 5 on PowerDVD enabling de-interlacing creates artefacts on the still shots but not enabling it produces artefacts in motion shots! Am I expected to switch between them manually?

So there you have it, my top 5 annoying things about DVDs. So far.

I am of mixed feelings about this movie. Yes we’ve got the old hands on board (notably Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford) and it’s Indiana Jones, which is totally awesome, but it is 20 years since the last film came out. We’ve seen what can happen when you try to restart a series after so long. *cough*Star Wars*cough*

The plot is quite contrived, as you might expect, but in places it’s just downright stupid. One of the central parts of the movie is that there are pieces of meteorite that project light rays capable of creating an anti-gravity field. We are introduced to this topic by a very scientific talk about how rapidly rotating objects weigh less. Yes, the physicist in me was screaming in agony during this movie. Personally , I don’t know why they bothered to waste our time with some pseudo-science to explain the levitation effect as the only it’s in there is to provide some justification to the (literally) gravity-defying fight scene at the end.

Aside from the stupid story elements, which you can largely ignore, the film doesn’t actually have that much fighting in it. Nor does it have many stunts. The fight scenes that are there seem to alternate between Jackie’s traditional small-scale, hand-to-hand combats and larger military battles. These just weren’t as good as the smaller fights, perhaps because I have higher expectations from those kinds of battles. I should mention that there aren’t many combat scenes compared to the overall length of the movie; for a shorter film there would have been quite a lot.

I think that was one of the main problems I had with The Myth – it just went too long for the content it had. At roughly 2 hours it actually crawls through some areas that could have been mostly left out. His journey through India is mostly useless, although it does get in a nice sword fight and an old-school Jackie Chan fight on a conveyor belt covered in glue. A sticky situation indeed (sorry, I had to say it). Maybe it was due to the length and pacing but I felt that the movie was trying to be a Jackie Chan version of The Mummy and just didn’t succeed. Whilst the fights were funny and entertaining, the stuff in between was mostly boring. The dialogue was poor, there wasn’t any real humour and explanations of the “science” set my teeth on edge.

The movie isn’t actually crap or anything – as I’ve said the traditional zany martial arts action is still there and it’s about as good as previous films. Aside from that there’s not much that’s a positive, but then you don’t exactly see a Jackie Chan film for the in-depth character analysis or anything. If you’re a Jackie fan or action movie buff then you’ll likely enjoy this. If you’re the mood for some escapism or a “throw away” film experience then it’s also a good choice. Otherwise I suggest waiting until you’re with friends and drinking so you can have fun laughing at the silly plot in between the cool fight scenes.

I tend to have mixed feelings about Harry Potter movies at the best of times: as a huge fan of the books it saddens me to see all those hundreds of pages being converted into a shorter than 3 hour movie. I try to look at the movies as highlights from the books but the last few have made that difficult as so much has required modification to make the plot flow.

Order of the Phoenix is, in itself, not a great movie. The story has been compressed so much that the action tends to move rapidly between scenes without much sinking in or creating much of an emotional impact. Things which took months in story-time and quite a while to read are glossed over in minutes. Whilst this sometimes works, I think in Phoenix some more needed to be done to create a cohesive whole. Some things which were explained at length in the book were actually omitted in the movie, which in a couple cases rendered things incomprehensible.

Example: The climatic scenes of the story feature Harry being tricked by Voldemort into retrieving a prophecy from the Department of Mysteries. This is the same in both mediums. What is not the same is that the movie never actually explains why Voldemort wanted the prophecy in the first place. Lucius Malfoy is telling Harry that the prophecy will tell him why his parents were killed, why he has his scar, etc. This makes it seem as though the Death Eaters already know what the prophecy is. In the book this is not the case as Voldemort had only heard part of the prophecy, which is why he wanted to hear the rest.

Stylistically, the movie continues on from the last one in that it’s more of a basic presentation. By this I mean the movies don’t have the wonder and spectacle of the first two (directed by Chris Columbus) nor the luscious visuals of the third (directed by Alfonso Cuarón). I think the Phoenix presentation does follow the tone of the book fairly accurately, which is good. The fight scene at the end is very impressive and the special effects throughout are great as always. I do wish the Weasley twins’ fantastic flight from Hogwarts was done a bit better: it just didn’t seem to be all that impressive.

The film does add some nice things, in particular the fleeting looks of disappointment on Ginny’s face as Harry stumbles through his relationship with Cho. Something I think all fans of the series would have been delighted to see as it foreshadows the next movie. Although I should say that the movie never explicitly has Ginny going out with Michael Corner but the two are seen sitting next to each other in what is to become the first DA meeting.

Overall, I did like the movie and it does fly by so quick that even the “boring” bits don’t upset your viewing too much. Perhaps my greatest problem with the film is not the fault of the film at all: I had read the book again the day before I saw the movie so everything was fresh in my mind and begging for comparison. Oh well, I just wonder how they’re going to go with the next one!

First of all, this will only work on a UNIX-like system that is capable of running shell scripts. Linux, BSDs and Mac OS X should work. Windows might work with Cygwin or the like. You will also need to have ffmpeg available with XviD and MP3 support (for final rendering), as well as the formats used by Flash videos (all of these should be built-in already but some Linux distros – like Ubuntu – don’t include MP3 for legal reasons).

The script will require the URL of the video and there’s two ways to get it. The first is from your browser’s location bar – the thing you type www.chnorton.com.au into every day. The second way is from the YouTube page itself, the URL should be located to the right of the video, as shown below:

The script that we are going to use looks like this (lines marked with » are wrapped and should be entered as one line in your text editor):

#!/bin/bash
base_url="http://youtube.com/get_video.php?"
url=$1
video_name=$2

rm /tmp/y.flv
rm /tmp/y1
exit

If you’re familiar with bash coding then this should be fairly easy to work out. What the script is doing is:

1. Specify the interpreter for this script (bash in this case).
2. Set the base URL to retrieve videos.
3. Get the URL for the specific video we want and the name of the new video file from the command line options.
4. Download the HTML page for the URL.
5. Extract the URL for the actual video by looking for “player2.swf” in the HTML.
6. Download this video.
7. Use ffmpeg to convert the file into a 320×240 MPEG4 (XviD) video using variable bit rate, muxed with 22kHz, 56 bit MP3 audio.
8. Clean up.

Put the above code into a file, you can name it whatever you like. I’m going to call mine dlyt for download youtube. Remember to set the executable permissions for the script with

chmod a+x dlyt

You then call the script in the following way:

dlyt url name

For example: dlyt 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TYzRanykbQ' 'Soundwave'

NOTES:

1. You do not need to include quotation marks around the URL, but I do anyway.
2. If the name of the video is more than one word (ie. there’s a space in the name) then you do need quotation marks – either " or ‘.
3. The extension .avi is automatically placed on the end of the video. There is no need to include it in the name.

There you have it. Not bad for 10 lines of shell code eh? You can of course clean up the code to your liking or make it more robust. You could also look into the ffmpeg documentation and change the codecs and formats used to your tastes. You might prefer to use Theora and Vorbis audio inside an Ogg container for instance.