Robot Quiz

Okay kids, time now for the robot quiz. Click to enlarge.

We scored 75% on the car quiz, so let’s see if we can top that. Crack open your sexy skulls and let your grey matter drip over these metal bastards like a treacle of truth serum. I have no idea what I just wrote then, but what I want you to do is guess the robots in the comments section (chuck a number up, then your attempt at naming said robot).

Here’s a couple of pictures starring myself and Ozi to help you out. They be clues, kids.

I’ll wait a week or so (no point in giving an exact date, because I never stick to it), then try to guess any vacant spots you guys might have left (there’s a few graphic novel robots I think you won’t get), then give the final score.

Spicy

I was going to put up the Robot Quiz tonight, but it’s quite late in the piece and I just realised I still need to number the silhouettes in Photoshop – so I’ll put it up tomorrow night instead.

If you’re looking to kill 30 seconds, here’s an Old Spice commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. Cheers to Campbell for the link.

Vroom

I’ve had a few guesses sent in for the Car Quiz – Aspen and Lachie gave a few answers, Dowling had an unsettling knowledge of animated TV shows while Ozi had an unnerving knowledge of animated films. Greg chimed in late in the piece, I already had most of his answers, but he gets accolades for providing the solution to number 40 – that fucker was haunting a few of us (and the car wasn’t from Grease, Cobra or Tucker like we first thought). A bunch of people wrote to say they liked the quiz and would send their answers when they had time, but I haven’t heard back. I think this was because a list of 55 cars was a bit of a long haul, so next time I put one of these silhouette quizzes up (and I have about half a dozen more) I will leave the comments open, so that the more enthusiastic readers can have a crack, and the rest can fill in the spaces later.

The Car picture is actually a T-Shirt design from Chop Shop, the creators recommended putting it up on blogs for people to take guesses. I’ll put a few more of these up in the next few weeks (I think we’ll tackle the robots one next). It’s a great t-shirt design, but gets a furrowed brow from me for not including the station wagon from National Lampoon’s Vacation.

I was glad to have you guys send in your answers, because I was stumped on a lot of these. I’m usually good with movie centric quizzes, but I’m a complete dunce when it comes to cars (even though I’m a big fan of movie cars too). If the car had a visual clue I could get it, but I couldn’t spot the cars on shape alone. There was no cheating either, as there are no answers available from the site the design came from.

Visual clues you may, or may not have spotted:

Loud speakers on top of number 6, so that we can tell the neighborhood about the upcoming concert to save the orphanage.

Bull horns on the bonnet of number 10, Confederate flag on the roof of number 12. Both from the same TV Show.

The skis on top of number 37 (though John Cusack only ends up using one of them to win the race).

The jack holding up the back of number 45, so that we can roll back the odometer before Cameron’s dad gets home from work.

Our final score for combined correct answers is 41/55, which gives us a 75% success rate and therefore a “B” rating. That’s not bad, but still not impressive enough to get us high fives from complete strangers on the street. I’ll stick the robot quiz up on Monday.

The car quiz picture is below, and I have set up three sets of remarks in the comments section. The first part is our 41 correct answers, the second part is a further eight I found through extensive net surfing. A combination of sifting through famous car lists, and just plain pure luck (but didn’t include these cars in the grading – we’ll keep that bitch pure using webless memory power alone), and the third part is the remaining five cars I have no idea about. I've given the complete model name of the cars if i could find it, because I know there are a few petrol heads who frequent the site.

Click on the date of this article below to get the picture and comments on the same screen. If you know any of the cars that are still baffling us, please put us out of our fucking misery. Else, just write some random shit if the mood strikes you. This is the first time the comments section has been open in over four months, so go nuts.

Just a touch more film riffing

At the end of the day, quality plays a limited function in the Hollywood machine. It’s not something I’m bitter about, I actually find it kind of interesting. The last two winners of the best picture award (Hurt Locker, and Slumdog Millioniare) came within a hair’s width of being direct to DVD releases – had this happened they wouldn’t have been eligible for Academy Awards in the first place. Meanwhile, no less than 100 critics (as per rotten tomatoes.com) have chimed in to declare Alice in Wonderland a steaming pile of shit – not that your average viewer cares, the film has raked in $208 million in just ten days (to get a better idea of that figure, Back to the Future made $210 million in it’s entire theatrical run).

In recent years, giant plasma and LCD screens have been infiltrating our homes at a phenomenal rate. Surround sound and the invention of Blu-Ray have made the home viewing experience one to rival the cinema, and the percentage of people happy to wait for films to come out on DVD has been growing as a result.

Those mighty brains at Hollywood are aware of this, and so have come up with a way to counteract this: bring back 3D.

3D has not only brought back that “Holy shit, we need to see this on the big screen” mentality, but can also crank up the profits as well. On average, a 3D ticket will cost 50% more than a usual ticket – something that has played a huge part in Avatar’s financial windfall. 3D is not yet a valid part of the home theatre experience (though I’m guessing it will be in only a matter of years, if not months). I was quite excited to find a pair of old red and blue 3D glasses in my hire of My Bloody Valentine from Blockbuster last year, only to find the effect blurry at best. In fact, it gave me a head ache, and reminded me of my 3D boob adventure of 2007.

The reintroduction of 3D is probably Hollywood’s biggest fuck you to the cinema goer. It is often added lazily in post production, and you’re usually guaranteed about half a dozen flinching shots (like when a spear or shotgun comes right out of the screen at you) at best. They have to keep these kind of shots to a minimum, because they look kind of stupid in 2D, and that is how the film will be seen in cinemas who can’t support the 3D experience, and how the film will be seen once it is on DVD.

I saw Mosters vs Aliens in 3D, and could count the number of flinch shots on one hand (they included the classic paddle-bat gag). I’ll admit that the experience was fun, but at the end of the day it was just a gimmick, and I winced at the $21.50 price tag. That’s how much it costs for an adult to see a film in 3D in Adelaide (on average), a child’s ticket is $16.50. So for a family of four to see a 3D film, you’re looking at over $70. Fuck me.

At the end of the day, it is a gambit that is paying off for Hollywood and you can expect a wave of 3D films to be hitting the cinemas over the next few years. We’re not just talking animated adventures, but action and even drama films too. There is a 3D version of the Bible in the works, and I wish I was kidding.

While we are on the topic of cinema, I’ll round off this post with a few random Oscar moments from this year’s ceremony. Feel free to stop the youtube clips once you get the gist, they are of horrible quality but were the best I could find on short notice:

Campbell gets a Guernsey:

Each Oscars ceremony pays tribute to a particular genre, and this year it was Horror. Two of the flavourless hags from Twilight presented the montage: Kirsten Stewart (that chick who looks like a boy) and Taylor Lautner (that boy who looks like a chick).



Stewart points out that “..It’s been 37 long years since Horror has had it’s place on this show when the Exorcist picked up two Academy Awards..” . Yet Silence of the Lambs took home five Oscars, including best picture, at the 1991 Academy Awards. I guess that doesn’t count, what with it being a romantic comedy and all.

The Horror montage (including the “well, duh” moment at 0:34, when Hannibal Lecter makes an appearance), is a little hacky (and why is Edward Scissorhands in there?) but it’s nice to see Bruce Campbell at the Oscars, even if it’s just for an Evil Dead 2 clip:




If Kanye West was a crazy middle aged white chick:

Chud.com tell it best.

And finally, Horse Goblin is now the Sherbet Pony:

Sarah Horseica Parker turned up to the Oscars with the worst fake tan I’ve seen outside of Liverpool. The Australian pointed out that she ”..was so enamoured with the Oscars, she came as a bronze statue..”. Devin Faraci wrote that “Sarah Jessica Parker colour coordinated her dress, her hair and her horrific fake tan.”

Horse Goblin has always been a whipping girl for the Shoddy Blog, but now it just feels like I’m kicking a handicapped kid who has fallen out of their wheelchair. I’m bored with this train wreck.

Integrity 1, Smurf Cats 0

Traditionally I’ve always followed the results of the Academy Awards. I find you can’t be a film fan without showing at least a passing interest in the Ceremony.

Like pretty much all award institutions, the ceremony is a garish and, well, kind of wanky affair. The actual winners themselves can raise an eyebrow or two, as politics take precedence over quality in the deciding process. For me it has always been about the after effects of the awards, to see the ripple effect it has on those who win. Many unknown directors, producers, animators and sound technicians have gone on to bigger and brighter things because of the accolades. It seems to be a little more random when it comes to actors though, with winners falling into four separate groups:

Big time careers stay big time: eg Denzel Washington

Floundering careers hit the big time: eg Geoffrey Rush

Floundering careers stay floundering: eg Mira Sorvino, Marisa Tomei

Big time careers flounder (aka the Oscar’s curse): eg Cuba Gooding Jr

I sat through Channel Nine’s entire Oscar telecast last year. The time difference meant that the initial showing was on the Monday morning, but they put a repeat on that night which I sat and watched. My favourite film for that year was The Wrestler, so I wanted to see that do well and for Mickey Rourke to pick up the Oscar for best actor. Slumdog Millionaire was also an excellent film, and I was quite happy for that to reap some rewards (which it did), and had a passing interest in Heath Ledger’s Best Supporting Actor nod.

I read up on the Oscar telecast the following day, and realised that I missed a lot of interesting moments (Ben Stiller’s last minute idea to do a mock Joaquin Phoneix presentation, acrobat Philippe Petit accepting his award and then balancing it on his chin to name a few) because of Channel Nine’s truncated approach to the Ceremony. Nine had chucked their Oscars repeat on at the late time slot of 9:30pm, obviously considering Monday night too precious to waste on such frivolous garbage as the Academy Awards, and filled the earlier time slots with Two and a Half Men reruns (as usual). Because of the late airing, it meant they had to ditch at least 90 minutes of the show, and as such lose about half a dozen award presentations in the process.

To be fair, the Academy Awards is a very long haul, and Nine had rightfully decided that your average viewer couldn’t be fucked sitting through four hours of this stuff. I decided to give most of the ceremony a miss this year – one thing I had learnt from the 2009 telecast was that you could sit through two and a half hours of shitty jokes and boring dance numbers, only to miss decent stuff that hit the cutting room floor.

I was actually at a barbecue on the Monday of the Oscars (it was a public holiday here in South Australia), and got my fix of Oscar updates by checking the web site every hour or so, a much simpler form of intel. A lot of my barbecue peers found my interest in the Oscars to be quite amusing, and more than a few declared my interest an obsession. The irony being that my update process consisted of hitting the refresh button on the list of winners page a total of three times for the entire afternoon, while my detractors would soon be clocking up ten hours a week on their fantasy teams once the football season starts at the end of the month (those crazy cats).

I guess it was also the wrong crowd for Oscars interest. This was a meeting of school friends, many of who had been breeding like rabbits in the last few years. I shit you not, there were hundreds of kids and babies crawling around the backyard of this social gathering. (I found a baby chewing on a clothes peg at one point, and yanked it out of it’s mouth before it choked. True Story.) Cinema excursions were few and far between for this crowd, and even then it would be for the latest Ice Age or Madagascar sequel to keep the rug rats happy. Why would they care about this year’s line up of nominees?

The Oscars has always had a bit of a stigma surrounding it. Pretty much everybody has their own story of watching their preferred film of the year lose out at the Oscars, get the sulks up, and have turned their backs on the ceremony ever since.

For me, the Oscars has always trod the tight rope between reputable and complete horseshit. As far as Awards ceremonies go, you have the bullshit at one end (the Blockbuster and MTV awards), the prestige at the other end (Cannes and Sundance), and the Oscars floating somewhere in between.

On a personal note, this Oscars was going to be the decider of whether I continued to follow the awards in future years, or whether I would declare the institution a pile of shit. Like so many others who have turned their backs on the most famous of awards ceremonies, it was down to the best picture award.

The interest in the Academy Awards has been slowly dwindling over the last few years, as the older generation dies out and the younger one takes centre stage, and viewing figures have been on a sliding demise. The I-pod generation can’t be fucked with a four hour ceremony, a fact that doesn’t really surprise anybody, and so the Academy Awards have tried to counter this problem with various measures. One such “measure” they installed last year, and continued this year, is to put the spotlight on popular younger actors, such as the High School Musical and Twilight kids. Actors who should not be within several hundred miles of the Academy Awards (I’m looking at you Miley Fucking Cyrus) are taking to the stage to present awards.

A more extreme measure was to expand on the most popular of the awards: best film. Many of the awards of the night are surrounded by disinterest (Best Costume Design goes to that Victorian Era period piece nobody saw, and there is ALWAYS a Victorian Era film at these awards) or just plain confusion (Best-Sound-Editing-What-Now?). To counteract this, they have taken the number of Best Film Nominees and doubled it to the kind of stupid figure of ten.

The silly thing here, is that they threw ten titles out there, and then declared it a race between just two films: Avatar and The Hurt Locker. This was a marketing strategy to garner interest, as fans were divided in a David and Goliath battle between the most profitable Oscar nominee of all time, and the least profitable. That the two directors were once married to each other only helped fan the flames of interest.

It was a shame that the main drawcard had come to this show down, as a few very good films fell to the way side in the process such asDistrict 9 and Inglourious Basterds (Up is also a fantastic film, but I think we are still a few years off Pixar taking home best picture nod - that got best Animated Feature anyway). However, it was the Avatar vs Hurt Locker affair that made this the deciding Oscars ceremony for me. It was a style vs substance battle, and if style won, I would declare the Oscars a ”load of shit” and not bother with the 2011 ones – my passing interest would devolve into no interest at all.

Before anybody gets shitty with me, I want to point out that I think Avatar is a good film. I saw it during the Christmas holidays with a bunch of relatives, and found it to be an engaging experience. Although it was almost three hours long, I was happy to sit and watch the adventure on screen.

Yes, Avatar is a “good” film, but it is not a “great” one. When I start to point out Avatar’s faults in conversation, everybody stares at me like I broke into a child’s birthday party and took a shit on the cake, but I’m not trying to be a spoilsport on this one. If Avatar is going to be thrown into the ring for the “Best Movie” accolades, then I feel that my hand has been forced and that all cards should be shown.

As I pointed out in my Golden Goose series (a set if posts I one day hope to finish), I’ve never been a fan of films high on budget and low on substance. Avatar sure is a pretty thing, but the story and characters are decidedly lacking.

The overall story feels like something you would find in a notebook, one belonging to a 14 year old girl who has just discovered the joys of recycling and environmental awareness. In between the puffy Unicorn stickers and “I Heart Zac Efron” scrawling, lies the highly unoriginal (South Park best sums it up: Dances with Smurfs) love story set in an alien world. The horribly nasty corporate scum (“Fuck it, let’s blow up that giant tree and kill those pesky aliens”) fight the honourable blue cat people (who can plug their hair into the trees and animals to connect with them spiritually, sorry but that’s fucking dumb), who in turn team up with a few stupidly heroic humans (for absolutely no reason at all, Michelle Rodriguez’s soldier character, who has had next to no contact with the Na’vi, decides to go on a suicide mission against her own unit to help the aliens).

This all happens because the humans want a precious mineral called “unobtainium” (I wish I was kidding, but that’s what’s it called), located under the Na’vi’s home.

Throw in a wooden performance by Sam Worthington (there’s a reason this guy only get’s action film roles), and a host of forgettable paper-thin characters and predictable plot points, and what you have is a colourful, yet ultimately empty experience.

There is the argument that because of the spectacularly ground breaking effects, the film doesn’t need a well thought out plot or character arcs. However, it is possible to have an effects driven film without forsaking story and character development (off the top of my head: The Empire Strikes Back, Starship Troopers, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy...). Besides, Avatar’s effects are a decent step in CGI development, but they are not the huge leap we were promised; the best quote I read on the effects was by the critic Devin Faraci ”I was whelmed by the effects”. Not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed. Just ‘whelmed”.

I feel like I might have lost a few of you kids, so to reiterate: Avatar is a fun, visually exciting film. But it has an unoriginal plot, with weak characters and phoned in performances. Just because you and your silly-ass friends enjoyed it, doesn’t mean it should win an Oscar for best film. It would be like giving the fourth place runner in the 100 metre sprint the gold medal, because he had the best sneakers.


On the other side of the coin, we have The Hurt Locker. It wasn’t my favourite film of last year (I’ll post my top 15 of 2009 in a few weeks), but it is still an exceptional accomplishment. A tight script, with tense scenes and incredible performances shot on a low budget – it’s everything Avatar is not.

Avatar is like having a birthday at McDonalds with all of your friends, while Hurt Locker is hunting down an incredible restaurant in a back alley to dine with the person you love. I can see why one of these experiences is going to be more popular to your average Joe. You just can’t tell me it’s the more rewarding of the two.

It’s all down to the Substance vs Style question (The Australian was a little kinder with their explanation, calling it a showdown between “the experience” and “the story”). Avatar is certainly an accomplishment, and it deserves to make a shitload of money. It just doesn’t deserve to be named the best film of the year. It would be like a hunk of Styrofoam winning a cake contest, because it had incredible icing and the biggest candles. Had the Academy bought into all of the hype and awarded Avatar the Oscar for best film, then style would have won over substance, and the Oscars would no longer hold any more weight with me.

As it happens, The Hurt Locker won. My Academy Awards interest survives for another year, and I’ll be tuning in come March 2011.

Car Quiz

Stumbled across this picture while surfing for famous cars on the net (click to enlarge it), and thought it would make a decent quiz for the Shoddy Blog. 55 silhouettes of famous cars from movies, TV and a few computer games. Let’s see if we guess them all, email me if you know some of the answers (beefabeef@yahoo.com). To help you along, here are a few clues starring Dowling and myself, and even Lachie in the last one.

Mum took away Che’s Atari. Viva La Revolution!

Gay marriage legalized in Hazard County

Rolling in our five point Oh, with our rag top down, so our hair can blow

”Get in the car Marty, I’ve got Candy!”

”Uh oh...lost the race...shouldn’t have stopped for that spit roast!”

I’ll post a running update once the answers start coming in.