I come from Iowa and Minnesota, and I hate both of their flags. Yet, they both have so much potential to be cool. The principal flaw of Iowa's flag is that it has its name written on it (which means that it has failed as a symbol), but also it has writing on a ribbon held within the beak of its bald eagle. The eagle is actually incredibly cool; the writing is not. I love that the flag is designed to look similar to France's flag, actually, and that shows some interesting heritage of the region,
As the athletes of the 31st Olympiad walk into the stadium bearing their nation's flags, I've thought about the elements of good flags, and my attempts to design good flags according to these principles. I do a lot of worldbuilding, which includes designing flags and other symbols for the cultures of my stories. As far as flags go, this is probably my best. It follows every good design principle. It's simple enough that a child can draw it from memory, and even get the exact proportions
In case you couldn't tell by the trailers, there isn't much connecting this movie to the original 1977 movie asides from an invisible green dragon named Elliot and a boy named Pete. If you think about it, there are some other basic similarities, such as a woman who adopts Pete, whose father swears he saw a dragon. But there's no conniving Dr. Terminus, no adorable town named Passamaquoddy (yes, I got that right on my first try), no abusive foster parents, no lighthouse, and no songs. The trai
Most times that I review a movie, I leave the review-ee a generally positive impression of the film. Am I too easy on movies? Am I a suck-up? Actually, no. I'm fairly tough on films, all things considered. The reason why most of my reviews are positive is that I'm good at figuring out which films are worth watching. It's called selective viewership, and we all practice it. Here's an experiment: just watch the poorly put together trailer for
and be honest with yourself. If your reaction was "U
Look at that poster. Doesn't it look fun? As in, everything's-off-the-wall-in-you-face-so-fun-that-it's-insane? I not only wanted to like this movie, but I also had a lot of confidence going in that I was up for a good time. My verdict now that I've seen it? Well...it's okay. It isn't bad, but - look, I'm not going to get too much into the details, but let me explain from the beginning. The movie starts off pretty eccentric, finding fun ways of introducing us to all of these characters. It has
Michael Phelps won, which means that he simultaneously broke three world records: He is the first Olympic swimmer to win the same individual event four times in a row. His individual medal count is now at 15, exceeding Larisa Latynina's record. If you consider the modern Olympics to be an extension of the ancient Olympics, he just exceeded the 12 individual title record held by Leonidas of Rhodes, with 13 individual titles. 24601
I've been writing in my journal as I've been watching the Olympics. Now as a personal rule, I keep even the most mundane entries of my journal a complete secret, but I figured that I'd share this epic poetry that I wrote on more than one occasion throughout its pages: And also this: So you know what's been on my mind lately. I remember writing this entry on August 4, 2012 that an era had ended, because as best as I knew, Michael Phelps had finished his last Olympics. I consider myself very b
The LEGO Movie turned out to be what I wanted it to be, which is good. The problem is, how to I begin to explain what my hopes for this film were? Well first, I certainly wanted something that felt definitive, something that wasn't just a LEGO movie but The LEGO Movie. It fit the part by having a good story that expertly mixed together a dramatic narrative with plenty of comic relief. And trust me, there was plenty of comic relief. There were so many jokes in this movie I would have to watc
Why not? Valentine's Day is a stupid holiday. Always thought so, always will. It wouldn't make a difference if I was in a relationship, because the things I value in a relationship transcend hearts and chocolate (although to be fair to chocolate, it is one of the greatest inventions ever). I mean, to have society try to associate your relationship with such a commercialized event that has seemingly nothing to do with relationships when you two are too busy doing something that's actually im
Shirley Temple Black, best remembered for her collection of movies as an adorable child actress, passed away today. She's actually someone I had been thinking of a lot about lately and was on my list of favorite actresses and someone I always wanted to meet. I will miss her, but I am very happy for the life she led. It was a good life, a happy and fulfilled life. I have faith that she's in a better place now. The main loss is in the hearts of those left behind, that people like me only ever
When you're from Mexico, you're either one or the other, according to Agent Sheldon Sands. Unless you're this guy. When you're Ricardo Mantalblán, you get to be a MexiKHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN! 24601
Just when I thought I couldn't love this film more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC83NA5tAGE I think that this goes to show the standard Disney holds its films to. That it's been tailor-made for 25 different countries and dialects shows that their movies truly are event films. They are universal, and they unite people. Looking back at what Disney himself said about his films, I feel that the company has used their animated movies to continue the spirit of Disney animation, which
May I introduce you to the second-ever "photorealistic" use of computer generated environments put to film, right after Disney's TRON. Made in 1984, it's far from realistic by our standards and doesn't even measure up to the expectations we have for a cheap video game these days, but somehow I would say that the effects have aged well. Part of the reason, I think, is that they don't have that manufactures feel about them, and the look of the film somehow shows that it was lovingly put together
"Jingle bells, Batman smells! Robin laid an egg! The Batmobile lost a wheel..." These lyrics and and Adam West were the first impression I ever had of Batman growing up. I do remember the movie series that started with Michael Keaton and the animated series, which was ironically the most serious of these incarnations of the character, but my real indroduction to Batman was through the Adam West television show. The character was fun and I never tried to take him too seriously, so Batman Beg
To my surprise, this movie was made in 2004, and I really though it was made sooner than that because it feels like it's always been around, like it had always been a classic. Surprisingly, not a lot of people regard it as such and it doesn't get the credit it deserves. There are a lot of great sports movies, but this is perhaps my favorite. A little while back I gave strong acclaim to Rocky, which turned out to not really be a sports film, even though it had a sport in it. Before I saw it,
Before I watched this movie, I made a point of not seeing a single trailer. I walked out of the theatres and changed the channel whenever a trailer for The Desolation of Smaug came up. Therefore, I can respect anyone who doesn't want spoilers for this film and I will try to avoid them as much as possible, even though there are things in here that I would love to talk about specifically. The first part of this review will consist of general impressions on how the film felt, and the second part
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihVPxjno3Yw The greatest man anyone can ever encounter is his father, and let us pray that our fathers are good men. In these men rest the foundations of every future adult. For no one was this sacred duty more important than Jonathan Kent, and few could have qualified for the tremendous task at hand for him and his wife, Martha. His son was no ordinary boy, who would grow up to become no mere man. There are good fathers and bad fathers, terrible fathe
I just got done watching the second half last night, and really all I have to comment on are Clara and The Name of the Doctor. On Clara, she doesn't have much life to her and I wish that she was a bit more of a handful like she was in Asylum of the Daleks. Otherwise, she was just kind of there. On The Name of the Doctor...All I have to say is that the ending was -- WHAM!!! Yeah, it hit me like that. I've seen a fair number of twists on the show, but all of them had a certain character to t
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNsHRUVwKwg Recently I wrote a letter to a friend describing my walk with Christ, and I had a few confessions that I was afraid would lose me my friendship, since my life isn't always rosy. At risk of being preachy, I also expressed my encouragements as well, and I wanted to tell her of an inspiring figure for me whose character I think she's growing into. Victor Hugo spent around seventy pages of his epic Les Miserables going into strenuous detail on t
Mulan was one of the first movies I ever saw in the theatres, and to this day remains one of the most rewarding big-screen experiences of my life. This film was made to be larger than life. Is it the animation, the music, the deep and rich colors, the epic backgrounds? I don't know, but if I were to narrow it down to one thing, I would have to say that, next to some key moments in the Star Wars saga and the opening to The Lion King, seeing the Huns charge down the mountain slope was the most
For their 53rd canon movie, Disney managed to produce a really cool film. This film instantly hit home with me and will from now on hold a special place in my heart. How do I describe this film in words? There's hardly anything I can say without giving anything away, and you literally don't have to know anything about this movie beforehand to know that it's worth seeing. If you haven't seen it yet, you're missing out on a cool experience that you will regret down the road. This is Disney at
Argo earned the respect of my difficult to please uncle and for that I wasn't surprised to hear that it won an Academy Award. Now that I've seen it, I don't understand it. The movie didn't stand out to me and didn't draw me in, nor did I get invested at all in what was happening. It felt small and trivial, and the end didn't have me cheering. The Academy Award it won for film editing seems completely wrong, since there's nothing special about it whatsoever. In fact, I didn't like the editin
Unfortunately, I had a long series of posts on the old archives that I had used to keep track of some of my writing ideas. I didn't have MS Word at the time (and still don't), so the old "Writer's Topic" was where I found an excuse to write down notes, and I had never bothered to save them. That is truly unfortunate, since I don't remember most of the things I had written down and I had a wealth of story outline. It's truly worse than having lost the first draft to a 100k word long story.
When I was about eight or nine years old, I picked up a book called The Andalite Chronicles. I had seen similar books with teenagers turning into animals lining the library shelves. That was before the library burned down, but I always remembered those images. It was exactly the kind of thing to catch a little boy's attention. I didn't know what the stories were about, or what the pitch was, and what the implication was that they could turn into animals. Personally, I didn't even expect the
The general word on this film is that it is not as good as the first one, which I will agree with, although I will defend it by saying that it isn't necessarily bad. I think that the main fault is that he's mainly motivated by survival in this film, whereas in the first one his motivation was far more archetypal and hit a primal nerve in the audiences. He normally would have been too brutal of a main character, but it made sense because his daughter was kidnapped. This time, since he's the on
