Mobile Dad

I got a lot of requests to re-post my response of Avatar from my Facebook that I decided to paste it here:

For Michael’s request (a film study review) (SPOILER!!!): Avatar will not break any new ground in story telling. The plot was predictable and linear, a safe bet for a sci-fi movie trying to incorporate a new user experience. There were two philosophical points being made here (beside the obviously corporate/political non-green message).

Point one: Humanity’s lifeless existence and lost souls. When the main character was not in his avatar, Cameron’s human angles (shots) were flat, creating a sense of conformity. The scenery in the human aspect of the movie were devoid of color, monochromatic. A harsh reality that makes up day to day life. When in the avatar, the angles were sweeping from low to high or high to low. The world was rich of color and depth, not real but surreal (to dream). The only color in the human reality were the computer displays around them. Even when looking at Pandora (the avatar’s world) with human eyes (through glass on ships) the world was darken. It was Cameron’s attempt to describe our existence as blind without technology. We cannot see ‘color’ unless a computer tells us otherwise. Cameron tried to flip the dream state as where humanity must be rather than the drones we live awake.

Point two: Feminist strength and equality. Every female character in this movie is portrayed as strong, or stronger, to their male counterparts. The lead scientist played by Sigourney Weaver was headstrong and defiant of male authority while her male team was frightful of their surroundings. The female soldier played by Michelle Rodriguez broke rank when moral judgment conflicted with a soldier’s duty. The Na’vi woman (Neytiri) played by Zoe Saldana was a warrior and hunter (a role not held in many traditional tribal depictions). Even the final scene, the hero was the Na’vi woman saving her lover (typically that is reserved for a man).

Point One and Point Two comes together for the finale. As Sam Worthington’s character, Jake Sully, falls out of his avatar link unit and Neytiri reaches for him, colors become richer around him, fading away the human existence as technology fails. When Neytiri looked upon Jake’s human form, she is stronger, holding a fragile male in her arms (role reversal reflecting a strong feminist point). They both say ‘I can see you’, a portrayal of a vision that is now one.

So as you can see, the story was predictable yet enjoyable. For kids, it depends if you are ok with cursing and alien nudity (subtle). We found no offense with our children and had a great discussion afterward about what I discussed above. What was interesting was that my two little ones were engaged for the length of the movie that pushes to three hours. But they found meaning behind the joyride of the 3D experience.

My home state of Texas is embroiled in  a passionate debate on should creationism be part of the science curriculum in public schools and stand side by side as an alternative to the theory of evolution.  Moral and political objections aside, given that they are thoroughly played out in the public forum already, I tend to look at this argument from another point of view.  Given the desire to treat creationism as a scientific theory, by principle of the scientific method, we will allow the children to challenge the existence of God.  Can the faith-based portion of our society accept such consequences? continue reading…

So I have been using my flip for some time now and my first post on the topic was on how easy the built-in tools were on posting a video on the web. My next project was to use free software on the computer. First up, Windows Movie Maker. Here is what I created:

Movie Maker definitely made it easy to add titles and transitions. I like the drag and drop for the clips and the ability to add multiple tracks for audio. The end result kept the quality at 640×480 which was better than what the built-in Flip tools which was 320×200. What I did not like was the performance. I guess a Pentium 4HT at 3 GHz with 2 GB of RAM was just not enough to handle less than five minutes of AVI video. The application took forever to render the frames or import and worse, would crash midway through edits. Save and save often! My love for Windows has faded over the last couple of years and going back to it every once in awhile just confirms the decision I made to move on to Ubuntu. Next up will be iMovie on the Mac and kdenlive on Ubuntu.

There is a bootleg video from this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego that is showing the first ever preview of Tron 2. And like Giz where I read this first, I too am “wetting myself” so to speak on the eventual release of this film. You see it was Tron and War Games that got me into technology and made me into this feverish gadget hound of today. I will never forget after watching the first Tron over and over as a child in Germany during my father’s military tour how the colors hypnotized me and what the humanization of technology did to my imagination. My friends and I would put cards in our tires and long streamers on our bmx bikes and race down the street cutting each other off until the falls would hurt too much. We then would have Frisbee wars as we threw our discs as hard as we can at each other using other discs to deflect them, yeah that hurt too. Then came the desire to try to create some type of interaction with the only computer I had at the time, the Atari 800. Basic was my friend.

I am looking forward to this movie. Not to re-live my youth, but to introduce an aspect of it to my son and daughter, both who are also smitten to tech because of dear old dad. Yes I am excited.

I complained a lot on why anyone would stream movies over the Internet, especially services that claim to stream true HD (the key here kiddies is TRUE HD). Well, over the last couple of months, I took a very old laptop that had a decent video card and hooked it up to my Sony 52XBR4 set. I have two wireless access points, one upstairs in the master closet and one downstairs in the office to ensure I have no dropouts. I hate to admit but the quality was actually not that bad on the set and there were no buffering issues streaming Netflix movies over a wireless connection on the LCD. I also love the fact that any movie we stopped midway through to watch at another time will start where we last left off. As much as we enjoy the convenience of streaming our movies, I am not sure a Netflix stream would look good blown up to 106″ but I will like to give it a try. It seems I may have the opportunity as there is some talk out there that Netflix may be thinking of giving PS3 owners a disc to fire up the movie stream. I know Sony is about to release their own service so I am curious on how this will all pan out. It may just noise but if it does turn out to be true, I will be first in line to pick up a disc.