Okay, so it’s been a while since I’ve reviewed any movies, and Burn After Reading is by no means the freshest dump in the litter box, but sheeeeeeesh does it stink! It was so awful I just had to write.

The thing is, I don’t get it.  If you review the plot, on paper at least, it sounds like it should be funny.  There’s quite a bit there to chuckle over if you think about it.  It’s definitely a black comedy, but it’s also clearly a comedy.  It should have entertained.

And then there’s the cast.  How can you go wrong with this cast?  This isn’t some hodge-podge of losers here.  This is a cast of real seasoned actors, many of whom I’d normally enjoy watching a movie of.  Not to mention the eye candy of George Clooney and Brad Pitt which in itself should count for something.

So how did it all fall so horribly flat?!

That, my dear readers, is the mystery of Burn After Reading.  It’s a movie full of potential energy, but that never becomes kinetic.  It fails to grab you.  Somehow it fails to even make you smile.  It’s only as you sit there struggling not to walk away from it because you’ve already invested an hour in this steaming turd that you even contemplate just how good it could have been.  If only…

So, my dear friends, I give you this advice.  If you haven’t seen Burn After Reading yet, please don’t.  If you want my advice: burn before viewing.  Trust me on this.  I just watched it for free on HBO, and I want my money back!

How does it rate?  I can only give it one beat-up broken-down limp-dicked sex chair out of five.

And you’d think a movie that could even have a reference like that come from it should be funny.

But you’d be wrong.  Horribly wrong.

So the wife and I recently rented Knowing.  You know, that one with Nicolas Cage finding a code that predicts all sorts of bad events, yada yada yada.

On one hand, it was a fairly entertaining movie until it gets near the ending.

On the other hand, it’s kind of a “comfort food” movie because the plot is about three steps behind your ability to figure out what’s going on.  There really are no surprises.  It’s all laid out for you like a cartoon of little candies leading up to a box with a string on it.  You can see it coming.  You know it’s coming.  It’s really pretty basic.  But somehow, you still get caught up in it.  Which can be good … or can be a real let down, depending on how interesting that plot may be.

Knowing had an okay plot.

I’ve seen worse.

All-in-all, because I like Nicolas Cage, and because even though I respect all religions and people’s rights to worship whatever I always get a special little kick out of things that twist Christianity’s tail, I was set to like the movie.  And I generally enjoyed the movie all the way through … until the end.

The end … just WTF!?!?!

Don’t get me wrong.  I can grasp it.  That’s not the problem.  The problem is, the movie basically seems like the writer thought of the end and worked backwards to the beginning to write it.  Which might work in some cases, but in this one, didn’t.

I really don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it.  Maybe you’ll even enjoy it in spite of the ending.  But when you get to the end, I want you to do some math.  Count how many.  Now, multiply that by the at least 50 years there’s been to do something.  And think about the potentials of the technology involved when you do that math.

And then, when you’ve done that math, ask yourself, was that really an ending that makes any sense whatsoever?  Call me crazy, but seems to me like more could have easily been done, changing the entire outcome.  And would have been done, given the morality involved.

But, whatever.

So maybe you’ll like Knowing.  Or maybe you won’t.  Or maybe, like me, you’ll like about 95% of Knowing, only really really REALLY think the ending sucks eggs.  Not because it’s a theoretically bad way to end it, but because it just doesn’t make any sense why it would have ended that way given every factor put into the plot.

Ah well.

To borrow a line from GI Joe, Knowing is half the battle.

So you’re a gamer. You’ve probably seen them all, and mostly probably cringed. Every so often, some Hollywood nutjob thinks that it’d be a great idea to take a video game and turn it into a movie. You remember Doom, don’t you?  Let’s face it, most of these projects just really really suck.  What translates well to one medium often completely fails to work on another.

But, on rare occasion, there are marginal successes.  So maybe the idea isn’t as completely bad as it sounds.  Maybe.

But it’s quite simple really.  Blu-Ray disks hold a lot of data.  Enough so that some folks think it really wouldn’t be complicated to both make a game and a movie based on the game (or maybe a movie and a game based on the movie) and sell them both on a single disk for the Playstation 3.  I guess with as many bad games based on movies, there’s a definite market for it.

And, let’s face it, you’re never going to have this kind of opportunity on a Nintendo Wii or a Microsoft Xbox 360.  So I can see Sony pushing any advantage for the PS3 that they can find.

Still, I have to say, I really can’t see myself buying too many of these disks … if any.  It just rarely works out and in today’s economy I certainly have better uses for what little money I’m still clutching desperately onto.

So I finally bit on the lure and tried out that new streaming video TV/movie service, Hulu. The basics?  You can watch lots of TV and movies, for free, from your computer.

The concept isn’t exactly new.  However, Hulu does have a decent selection of random stuff.  If for some reason TV just isn’t doing it for you, maybe you can find something on Hulu.  Or if, like in my case, Comcast’s OnDemand for some strange reason doesn’t carry some pretty common channels that you’d think they would (like in my area, CW, Fox, ABC, etc.) and you missed a show (because networks compete just a little too much) then you possibly can catch up.

Hulu is free*, as in no fees, but forced commercial breaks.  I can live with that.

As quality goes, it’s not so good.  The default quality setting is, of course, crap.  Let’s face it.  You’re using a computer to access Hulu.  You’re going to see every pixel in horrible detail as your monitor’s resolution is a lot higher.  Hulu’s “Std-Res” is basically worse than watching standard definition TV on your computer.  It’s only 360p, which is just 360 vertical pixels.  (The NTSC standard used by analog televisions in North America has 525 vertical pixels.)  Worse than that however is the usual bad streaming that you get where movement is jerky at best.  The framerate that you’re getting is not equal to TV.

You can however change the setting to “Hi-Res”, which is actually a pretty big fib.  It’s not anything near TV’s HD, which is 720 or 1080 vertical pixels.  Hulu’s “Hi-Res” is only 480p, a mere 480 vertical pixels.  So Hulu’s “Hi-Res” is not high resolution at all.  It doesn’t even reach the quality level of digital TV’s standard-definition.  But it’s at least slightly better than their “standard” resolution of 360p.  In theory.  In practice however, Hulu’s other problem comes into play heavily: bad buffering.

Yeah, Hulu had enough trouble keeping your buffer filled on their low quality setting.  On occasion you get pauses or jerky play.  Kick it up to their higher quality setting and you’re just begging for trouble.  The servers aren’t serving fast enough and the software isn’t buffering enough when it has the chance to in order to fix the server lags.  It gets really nasty when you kick it up to “Hi-Res”*.  (Keeping in mind that it really isn’t a high resolution by anyone’s standards except Hulu’s.)

Still, it’s free.  What do you expect for free?

(And before anyone goes trying to say I just have a crappy internet connection, I’m on Comcast’s high speed cable internet.  I have all of the bandwidth in the world for this.  It’s not my end that’s being sluggish.  It’s most definitely Hulu’s servers.)

So on your computer, it’s an effort some times, but Hulu can be swallowed … if for some reason you really need to watch a missed show or something.

So the next obvious thing to try, of course, was get Hulu out of my computer room and into my living room where I have a large widescreen TV to watch shows on and a comfy couch to sit on.  I know that in theory the Playstation 3 has an internet browser.  And I’ve got to say, unless you’re a gluton for punishment, don’t even try it!  Really.  The PS3 and Hulu just do not mix.

So it goes like this:  You struggle to input the URL into the PS3’s address bar, fighting that stupid fake keyboard with your controller.  You get to Hulu.  And wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Apparently the PS3’s web browser basically won’t do anything at all while any little bit of a page is loading.  And Hulu loads a lot.

Worse, you’re trying to type in a search query, again fighting the stupid fake keyboard with your controller.  During your fight, Hulu switches their advertisement to something else.  The PS3’s browser actually clears what you’ve managed to type so far, forcing you to try all over again.  And so it becomes a game.  Can you type your search keywords in faster than Hulu changes something on the page?  It’s not easy with a controller running a fake keyboard.

But okay, so say you try to outsmart the bad design by browsing manually through channels and genres and such.  So sorry, but didn’t I already mention that the PS3’s web browser freezes up whenever there’s the slightest change in the web page?  Scrolling, apparently, makes new items visible, which requires more loading.  Somehow.  Which means just trying to see everything in the list brings everything to a lock-up for freaking ever while the PS3 jerks itself.  During that time, nothing works.  You can move the pointer around, but clicking doesn’t work, scrolling doesn’t work, etc.  You get the idea.

So after fighting this all for twenty minutes, you finally find something to watch.  The browser, by the way, has been stuck on the “Standard size” setting which is basically only using a standard definition TV’s amount of space.  Why?  I don’t know.  Apparently Sony couldn’t be bothered to determine which type of TV output you have and use space accordingly.  You know, like any other computer in the world would do, just use maximum use of the resolution it’s set to.  So you do this manually by switching the web browser’s mode to “Maximum size” by hitting the triangle button to bring up the settings, then go to View -> Maximum size so that you can take advantage of the fact that you have a widescreen TV.  You start your show.  You set Hulu to display the show “full screen” which should make the video take up the entire screen.  And I’ll be damned if the PS3 doesn’t take that “full screen” request as an opportunity to revert the browser back to a space-wasting TV’s fullscreen resolution size with black bars encapsulating your video.  Nerf!  And sure enough, once the “full screen” video is over and the web browser goes back to normal mode, it’s reverted right back to the “Standard size” view setting, making it quite clear that it didn’t stay on the “Maximum size” setting that you specifically set it to.

Basically there’s just no getting around it.  The Sony Playstation 3 has a crap-awful web browser.  It’s bad.  Really really bad.  And what’s worse, a lot of it’s badness is really brought out by trying to innocently use Hulu on your PS3.

Sony, you have a lot of work to do…

(And before you mention that it’s a problem that has been fixed, I just updated the PS3’s firmware this morning to the latest.  And I double-checked that I still have over 50GB of free space and have a good solid signal to my wireless router.)

But still, by themselves, Hulu isn’t all that bad.  It just needs higher resolutions and either better servers or better buffering.  And the PS3 is great for playing games, watching Blu-Ray and DVD movies, playing CDs, and such.

Just don’t try mixing them together.  Not until Sony works out a lot of kinks in the Playstation 3’s incredibly bad internet browser.  Just use Hulu on your computer.  It’s not ideal, but it’s better than the alternative.

Batman.  Who doesn’t love Batman?

I know.  Why oh why didn’t I go see this one in the theaters?  Well, I don’t know.  As in, I don’t even know where the local theater is.  I’m just not digging the local scene.  So I didn’t see it … until now.  The Dark Knight.  What can I say?

Meh.

Warning: If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t read this blog yet.

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