Blogging 01-24-06

Welcome to New Release Tuesday--the happiest day of the week! Well, besides Friday, of course. Ok, and Saturday. Sunday too. Ok, ok, let's just say that New Release Tuesday is an apology for Mondays.

For those who don't know, every Tuesday is the day that all the new CDs and DVD movies are release from the big studios and record labels. So if you have been waiting for weeks (months) to see something, today is the day that you can finally find relief. When I managed a Blockbuster Video store back in the late 90s, today was very busy trying to get all those new movies on the wall for all the movie hounds who would be showing up to grab the latest----that they could have seen in the theaters six months prior. Whatever.

For me today it's the release of Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride", and P.O.D.'s new CD "Testify".

The CD is one that was on my Christmas list in early November, until they announced a delay and it wouldn't be out till now, in late January. The movie is one that I was going to see with my daughter on her 15th birthday last October. We were going to have a daddy-daughter movie marathon. I was going to take her into a multiplex first thing in the morning, and we were going to watch as many movies back to back that we could. I think we figured out that we would have been able to see like 8 movies and get home past midnight. But money got tight and her friends started planning a surprise party that I thought she would really enjoy (and she did), so the plan got scrapped.

The one movie for that day that she really wanted to see and turned down several offers from her friends to go see it because she wanted to wait and see it with her dad, was Corpse Bride. Tim Burton is a favorite we share. When you meet young Kitten she's all sweetness and light, but there is a little Goth streak deep down inside her. It's something we share. But it's a Burton brand of Goth. Not so much death and despair. But more, "it's-an-ugly-world-but-you-can-still-find-joy" kind of Goth. Sort of. Something like that.

Today is also the day that Disney officially acquires Pixar. Ironicly, or perhaps not so much, on the anniversary of the original Macintosh announcement during the 1984 Superbowl. This means Steven Jobs will be the primary shareholder in Disney stock and a board member. And John Lasseter, head of Pixer and director of Toy Story among others, would be positioned as a head creative adviser at Disney. This is a triumphant return for him as he left Disney some years ago for creative differences, if I understand it correctly.

I don't know how I would like Jobs personally, he seems to be a pretty hard guy to be around, but it looks like he's about to make history again. He blasted the personal computer revolution onto the world with the Apple computer, revolutionized it with the Graphic User Interface (mouse and windows) environment, came back and saved Apple with the iMac and iPod, is hailed as saving the music industry by bringing legal music downloads to the mainstream, and looks like he could be set to save Disney animation and bring it into it's third golden age. Not to mention what content deal he'll be able to leverage from the inside for the burgeoning iTunes Music Store video business.

Quite a day.

But it's not all serendipity. I failed to mention when I was talking about the MacWorld announcements that there was a distinct lack of anything about any Pepsi/iTunes bottle cap promotion for this Superbowl. No caps. Dude. Bummer. Dang it, man. Don't these people realize there are people looking forward to that action all year long. What is their problem!? Ok. I'm over it. (crap)

In related, sort of, movie news, this weekend we tried to see if the little Bear would enjoy a Godzilla movie in any other form besides the Mathew Broderic computer animation version. In other words, would he be ok watching a rubber suit Godzilla or would he see that as a fraud. So we're in the video store and we see this movie with Godzilla all over the cover called "Final Wars". Cool, mission accomplished. We grab stuff for us, too and head out.

I want to pop those Japanese filmmakers in the head. Here's a page from film making 101. If you have a movie that boasts a certain headline expectation, you might want to deliver on that a loooooong time before the last 20 minutes of a 2 hour movie!!!! That's how long it took for Godzilla to actually appear. Of course, Bear was not interested in all the other stuff going on in that movie. So somewhere during that evening, we had the idea that we could calm this disappointment by pulling up pics of Godzilla on Google images.

It worked like a charm. Electricity shot through his body as he poured his wide eyes over this never ending cornucopia of Godzillia photos. For the next hour his vocabulary was reduced to two words---"this one!"---as he went from one picture to the other with his sister doing the clicking for him.

But now we've created a monster of our own. No homework can be done, no email can be checked without a little face appearing at your elbow pointing and screaming for Godzilla. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

But I did just received my first flirtatious email from my wife here at work. This year just keeps getting better and better.