Justin Cox Presents:

Year in Movies: November

It’s November and that means we’re almost to the end of the Year in Movies run. But lets not get all sentimental just yet. On with the movies. Oh, and this might be one of the best Year in Movies posts yet. I’m just sayin’.

Sunshine Cleaning
This is about two sisters who aren’t really do much with their lives and decide to start a crime scene cleanup business. It’s a quarky movie with some laughs but takes a brief, but very unexpected turn. Wonder what I’m talking about? Just follow the storyline of the youngest sister. There isn’t a lot of character development, or depth for that matter, but it’s entertaining.
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Objectified
This is a documentary on industrial design by the same group that created Helvetica. It’s a fascinating look at what makes up good design and why and a conversation with those who are doing it, including Jonathan Ive who is the lead designer at Apple. If you’re a design nerd, you’ll enjoy this.
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Space Camp
This is one of the best bad movies to come out of the 80′s. It stars a bunch of people, like Kate Capshaw, Kelly Preston, Lea Thompson and a very young Joaquin Phoenix. The premiss is that a group of kids attending space camp end up being launched into space, for real. Why? Well, basically Phoenix’s character, Max, falls in love with a robot, Jinx, who talks to the NASA computers and figures a way to get him on a real launch. I kid you not. But it’s great. Check it out! It has some pretty great 80′s music as well, including a song that landed on my celebrity playlist last year.
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The Blind Side
Going in I thought this was going to be a sappy, tearjerker style movie; I was wrong. It was funny, poignant and an amazing story. If you haven’t seen this yet, go do so. It’s worth the cost to see it in the theater.
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Kind of hard to not like a Charlie Kaufman story and this is no exception. What happens when people in a relationship decide to forget each other? A wicked trip to Jim Carrey’s mind is what. Did I mention Charlie Kaufman wrote it? What more do you need to know?
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Star Trek
I was never a Star Trek fan growing up, though I did enjoy watching episodes of The Next Generation. But that doesn’t really count I guess. Either way, I didn’t really know the difference between a Romulan and a Vulcan before putting in JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot. This was probably a good thing as all of the characters are re-introduced in a very cool story involving time travel and evil aliens. I really liked this movie and it’s well worth checking out.
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Elf
I’m no Will Ferrell fan, but this was actually a funny movie. It’s silly and quirky and has Zooey Deschanel and, get this, was directed by Jon Favreau — yeah, Swingers‘ Jon Favreau. Crazy, right?
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Angels & Demons
While The Da Vinci Code was a horrible adaptation of the book, this was a much better movie. Imagine that, considering this was the better of the two books as well.
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Dogma
Kevin Smith and the story of two renegade angels trying to get back into heaven. Need I say more?
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Year in Movies: October

This whole Year in Movies thing is starting to feel like a chore. But whatever, I’m committed. But it makes me want to move to the new version of my site much sooner. I believe that’s what they call a teaser in the business.

Couples Retreat
Four couples go on a trip to an all inclusive resort for fun in the sun but instead find they have to attend couples therapy sessions. If they didn’t sense a problem before the trip, they do once the therapy begins. Typical Vince Vaughn hijinks ensue. Not bad, but not what I was expecting at all.
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Love Actually
A number of different love stories are told at the same time and they all intertwine somehow. Some are simple, some are complicated, most are pretty cute. Pretty good film.
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Where the Wild Things Are
While the book is for children, the movie is not. It’s more intense than I remember the book being and, well, pretty dark. And someone needs to get Max to therapy because the boy is clearly autistic.
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Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.5

It’s been a few months since I watched season 4.0, but I finally got around to finishing the series. At this point, I’m not really sure what to think.

The destroyed planet Earth that was found at the end of 4.0 really was Earth, the home of the 13th tribe of Cobol and guess what? That thirteenth tribe were Cylons. At least their DNA signature matched that of the Cylon skin jobs. Apparently it’s where the real Final Five came from, some 2000 years ago.

Long story short, the Final Five developed the Cylon race and ended up creating Resurrection technology. So they were the creators of the race… sort of. Anyway, the identity of the final Cylon? Helen Tigh. That’s right, Tigh’s wife has been a Cylon all along. You might be thinking that Tigh killed Helen on New Caprica for helping the Cylons. Well guess what, she woke up on a Cylon Basestar — apparently before Resurrection was destroyed. Anyway, Tigh figures this out through unlocking memories while being on Earth, as do the rest of the Final Five.

Fast forward until the end of the series. Basically the whole thing hinges on Athena and Helo’s baby — remember the whole opera house thing? Anyway, apparently their baby is the key to the future of humanity, but no one really knows why. So Boomer — the bad Number 8 — brings Helen Tigh from the Cylons to the Rebel Cylons in an attempt to make amends for going against her units in the split. The whole thing was basically a sham to steal Athena and Helo’s baby so that they could run tests on it to see how to recreate Resurrection.

Fast forward a bit more and Adama decides to take a volunteer suicide mission to jump Galactica into the Cylon home in a recuse mission for the baby. An epic battle happens that ends with a truce that is broken by Chief Tyrol. In the end Galactica jumps out as the Cylon home blows up. But where did they jump?

Athena and Helo’s baby had been drawing pictures — small dots on a page — for awhile. Starbuck (who by the way found her crashed Viper and her body on Earth so has no idea who she really is) discovered that the pictures she was drawing were really musical notes that just so happened to be the notes for the song that activated the Final Five at the end of season 3.0 (which is an awesome song by the way). Anyway, not knowing what that meant she assigned numbers to the notes trying to see if there was some deeper meaning in them. Well, turns out it was the jump coordinates to… well, Earth. But Earth as we know it, not the destroyed one they found at the end of season 4.0.

So, in the end, the fleet found Earth after all. But here’s the kicker: it was earth 150,000 years ago at the dawn of civilization. So they all decided to spread out around the world and create population centers. They got rid of their technology and decided to start from scratch. But here’s what I don’t get: after spending a few years trying to build a new community when they finally get a place to call home they split up and live in seclusion? I mean, Adama took the president off to bury her and then lived on a hill by himself. His son decided to go off and explore the planet alone. Tyrol wanted to be alone. Helo, Athena and their child presumably went off by themselves. Even stranger, Dr. Cottle volunteers for the suicide mission, but Adama won’t let him participate because “the fleet can’t afford to loose a doctor.” Um, they why spread people all over the world once the mission is complete? Why the sudden break in community? I didn’t get it.

Fast forward another 150,000 years to present day Earth. Apparently the vision of 6 that Giaus had been seeing the whole time — and the vision of Giaus 6 had been seeing — were really angels sent to help guide their way. The remains of Helo and Athena’s baby were just discovered and she was being called the mother of civilization. But why? It never explained why she was important. And speaking of angels, apparently that’s what Starbuck has been since returning from Earth, seemingly out of nowhere.

Overall the series was pretty great, but it seemed to be pretty downhill from the amazing finale to season 3.0. After the shocking discovery of Earth at the end of 4.0, everything seemed very forced — almost as if the writers had written themselves into a corner they couldn’t quite figure out how to get out of. There were a lot of leaps made in season 4.5 that, given the pace of the series to that point, seemed to be very out of place. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but how could they not end with some sort of awesome Adama led “so say we all” speech about creating the new humanity? Again, spreading out all over the world? Come on…

Year in Movies: September

Yada, yada yada. Year in Movies. Here goes.

Watchmen
Having read the book this film was almost identical to every frame in the pages. It takes a cue from Sin City in that regard. But Watchmen was pretty great and the musical selections were awesome. The only oddity: the ending was changed. I didn’t care for that too much.
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Up
This movie is fantastic. Sad in the right places, hilarious in others. Best movie I’ve seen in a while. If you haven’t seen it, you need to go do so right now. Do it. Go.
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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
This movie is so messed up it’s not even funny. It’s part one in Chan-wook Park’s ‘revenge trilogy’ where Old Boy is part two. Given that Old Boy is amazing — all but extremely twisted — I should have known what I was getting myself into. Unlike part two in his series, Park waited about 100 minutes to get to the exciting part and instead focused on building the story and making everyone want to tear their eyes out. That’s all I got.
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Ong-Bak
Brutally violent muay Tai action yet somewhat comical dialogue. Worth your time.
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Valkyrie
Pretty good story about how some Nazi’s tried to kill Hitler. Tom Cruise was still Tom Cruise though.
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9
Pretty cool little story about creatures created to save the world, after mankind destroys it. I liked the twins the best.
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Across the Universe
Someone made a movie based on the music of the Beatles. How amazing is that? And to top it off, the movie is awesome.
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Having trouble sending MMS on the iPhone?

If you’ve done everything you can to update your phone with today’s new MMS carrier settings on AT&T crappy network, but I still getting message send failures, then you’re solution might lie with AT&T. After updating my phone this afternoon I had been unable to send or receive picture messages. I wasn’t even getting viewmymessage.com notes anymore. Everything on my phone seemed to be working fine. MMS was turned on, I could attach pictures, but nothing actually went through.

After three calls into AT&T I finally got to talk to a technical support specialist who figured out the problem. Apparently if you had an original 1st Gen iPhone on an original 2G plan and have since upgraded to a 3G or 3GS, like I did, then AT&T (most likely) didn’t actually update your account. In my case, the original IMEI settings for the first iPhone were still listed in my account. So on AT&T’s end it figured I wasn’t capable of handling MMS and shut everything down before it passed to/from my phone. Once he corrected that setting for the 3GS, everything sent to me so far today started flying through. Looks like if you’re having issues, you have to call AT&T and have them fix the IMEI settings on your account.

Note that the customer service representative who first answers the call will not have the ability to correct these settings. You’ll need to ask for a Technical Support Specialist who can make these correction. It’s also advised that you call from a different phone then the iPhone in question as my agent had me reset the phone to make sure the new settings took and then sent me a message to make sure it was actually working.

It was a bit of a hassle, but now it’s working. Hopefully this saves some people some frustration.