This is somewhat old news. But I feel it necessary to add my voice - my blog - to the legions of other voices out there expressing outrage.

What am I talking about? The worst movie-making decision of all time. New Line Studios, the folks who financed Peter Jackson and gave him the green light to make three of the grandest, greatest films of all time with The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, has opted to go forth and make The Hobbit and a second, yet unnamed “prequel” to The Lord Of The Rings, without him. Without Peter and Fran.

That’s right. They’re making more The Lord Of The Rings without the people who are responsible for making it great.

I don’t like to curse in my blog. Cursing is a sure-fire way to cause certain people to stop reading, and I really like my blog to be accessible to everyone. But this decision by New Line is pushing me to the edge. In the pantheon of collossial movie screw-ups, this ranks #1. Nothing else comes close.

Peter and Fran take time to explain, in an e-mail posted on TheOneRing.Net, why this happened.

The crux of the issue is that Peter and Fran are engaged in a lawsuit with New Line over accounting practices. They want to make these films - they want to be a part of it - but not until the lawsuit is settle by an independent arbitor. They don’t care what the ruling is, they just want it decided by an independent party. Yet, for whatever reason the lawsuit hasn’t been settled and New Line is acting like a child, taking their ball and going home. Or in this case, to another director.

The Lord Of The Rings franchise made billions of dollars. With a “B”. A major reason for that is because of the vision, writing and directing of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. Without them, that trilogy wouldn’t have been nearly as successful. Jackson and Co. attacked that movie with everything they had; all of their heart and soul. That is why those movies succeeded. Because they poured their love for film into it.

This is a no-brainer decision, and yet New Line has managed to screw it up.

Unbelievable.

Finally.

That’s the feeling one gets while watching the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale. Finally. Finally the series has taken the next step. Finally the series has evolved. Finally they’ve got James right. Finally they’ve figured out how to tell a Bond story.

For years, the 007 franchise has been stuck in neutral, bogged down in its own conventions and mythology. It’s a dinosaur, and nowhere was that more evident than the last four or five films. Pierce Brosnan played Bond with such a cavalier attitude that it was hard to take any of the content in those films seriously. Death was joke; danger was just a stage prop, and James was shallow and devoid of human emotions. He was no longer someone we could identify with, or root for.

Enter Daniel Craig.

The first thing to say about Casino Royale is that Daniel Craig might be the best Bond ever (and apparently I’m not the only person who thinks that), for the simple reason that he, along with the writers and director for Casino Royale, have finally distilled Bond down to exactly what Iam Flemming originally intended him to be: a blunt instrument wielded by government agencies. Bond has a license to kill, and this time the movie takes that aspect of his life seriously.

Craig may not have the typical Bond appearance, being blond and having a slightly rougher face (although he does have the muscles), but he’s a great actor and embodies the role the way an actor should. He’s intense, aware and imposing when he has to be, and vulnerable and introspective at other times. He offers a wider range than previous Bonds; part of that is the script writing, but part of it is Daniel Craig as well.

But Craig isn’t the only overhaul here. A lot has changed since the last Bond movie. What makes Casino Royale great is that the producers have finally broken the mold.

For starters, the movie opens in black-and-white with sharp camera angles reminiscent of Orsen Wells and his iconic Citizen Kane. Instantly we realize that this isn’t the same old Bond. The technique is short-lived, but sets the tone for the whole movie: this Bond is going to be different.

It also helps that the dialog for this movie has finally been elevated; gone are the throwaway one-liners that had become tiresome and boring long ago. Instead, we get conversations that sound like they actually might exist if we were eavesdropping on the participants. When there is humor, it’s of a style and type we’ve not seen before in a Bond film (make note of the absolutely great joke James makes while being tortured late in the film - no other Bond dare attempt).

But the dialog isn’t the only change. This Bond is bloodier. For decades, the Bond franchise has been careful not to show too much blood and gore on the screen. When villians die, they disappear in bloodless explosions, like boogymonsters out of a dream. Times change, however, but until now Bond had not caught up. This time we get to see how this secret agent business really works; that it isn’t all glamour and martinis and beautiful women (although to be fair, there are some beautiful women in this film). There’s real danger involved - real killing to be done - and sometimes it’s going to be bloody and brutal. For the first time we get to see James wrestle with the very real emotions involved when a human takes another human’s life.

We also get to see an evolution. This is an “origin” movie. It’s about how James becomes 007, and what he goes through to earn his stripes. At the beginning of the film James is a cocky, self-assured agent-in-training. By the end of the film he’s not only a different agent, but a different man, and the events of the film shape his persona for the future.

There’s less action in this film, but it doesn’t hurt the end result, and actually helps the movie overall. Most of the film revolves around a poker matchup, a sport that has seen a recent spike in interest in the US, so most viewers will probably be able to connection with the poker action and stakes at some level. That is not to say the movie is devoid of any real action, however. When the action arrives, it is excellent. Early in the film we are treated to one of the great chase scenes in recent filmmaking history, and for once it doesn’t involve automobiles.

What I’m talking about is Parkour, also known as free-running. It is a sport described as:

A physical discipline of French origin in which the participant — called a traceur — attempts to pass obstacles in the fastest and most direct manner possible, using skills such as jumping, vaulting and climbing, or the more specific parkour moves.

This is truly a unique and interesting chase scene. We’ve seen chase scenes on foot before in movies (the footrace in Point Break comes to mind), but never like this. The man James chases in the movie is none other than Sebastien Foucan, one of the co-founders of the Parkour sport. What he does in the film is amazing, and takes an ordinary scene and elevates it.

Later in the movie we also witness an incredible car accident that his simple and brief, yet extremely effective. Unlike previous Bond movies, this time around the filmmakers don’t try to spend every moment of screen time cramming explosions and special effects down our throats. Instead, the film is very cerebral and deliberate, which makes the action scenes, when they arrive, all the more potent.

Even the villian, this time around, is better. For a while there is seemed like the producers had run out of good villians for the Bond franchise, reduced to casting Jonathan Pryce as a Bill Gates type mogul in Tomorrow Never Dies, perhaps the worst Bond villian of all time. This time around we get more than one villian, with more than one motivation. Villians are rarely “just evil”, and here we get to see layers of opponents for James to deal with, with varying degrees of deception involved. The whole thing adds dimension to the Bond franchise - something it has sorely lacked in recent years.

Finally, while Judi Dench returns as “M”, the comedic talent of “Q” is gone. And honestly, it’s a good thing. I had thought I’d miss Q and all of his gadgets and gizmos, but this film is much more serious and introspective, and the slapstick aspect of Q just wouldn’t have fit in.

In all honesty, I’m actually amazed at the filmmakers for the way they’ve focused the vision for this film and not allowed any extraneous distractions - despite the prior conventions and lore of the Bond franchise - to interfere. This is a Bond film with vision and purpose, and the makers stay true to their intentions with the movie, all the way until the final frame. This is a more serious, thoughtful Bond. It’s better, in every aspect.

If this is what we can expect of future Bond films, we’re all in for a major treat.

There are three steps to every magic trick, The first is called The Pledge; the magician shows you something ordinary. The second is called The Turn, where the magician makes the ordinary object disappear. But making something disapear is easy, thats why there is a third act called The Prestige, where you bring the ordinary something back. Now, your looking for the secret, but you won’t find it.

-Cutter

So begins The Prestige, a story about rival magicians in late 19th century London. Michael Caine plays Cutter, an inventor of gadgets and devices that magicians employ in their acts. He’s caught in the middle of a rivalry between Alfred Borden (Christian Bayle) and Robert Angier(Hugh Jackman), two magicians driven to one-up each other. There’s a history between these two men that I won’t reveal here, but it’s sufficient to say that one of them has reason to really dislike the other, and that leads to an obsession that drives much of the film.

The film works, but not for the reasons we might orginally have been lead to believe. Nolan works the movie much like Cutter’s description of the magic trick that opens the film. In fact, he’s worked us before we’ve even set down in the theater. The trailers and previews for The Prestige hint that Alfred may be in possession of “real magic”, the he can do things other magicians only pretend to do, and we’re lead to believe that Robert spends his obsession trying to figure out how he does it.

But the truth of the film is much different. In reality, the film is much more logical than we give it credit. It is no less interesting, but surprising. Like a good magic trick, the truth is more simple, plain and obvious than the fiction we let ourselves believe when we wish to be fooled by magic.

There’s a scene in the film when Robert explains a “bullet catch” trick to his young wife Sarah. Basically, he tips the barrel of the handgun so that the bullet falls into his hand before he hands the weapon to an audience member. When the person “shoots” him, he’s already got the bullet in his hand. After seeing the trick Sarah remarks something to the effect of, “It’s really rather obvious once you know how it works.” That, in a nutshell, is The Prestige. The trailer alone is enough to keep us thinking illogically, but if you follow the clues Nolan gives you the answers are revealed long before the movie reveals them to us.

However, unlike a movie such as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, The Prestige doesn’t rely on its “reveal” at the end to carry it. Instead, the movie is much more about the story - the journey from point A to point B. While there are twists and turns - misdirection and “magic” tricks - the core of the film is a story about obsession and love, and what people will do when driven by their passions. The magic is a backdrop, albiet an interesting one.

Oh, and then there’s Nikolas Tesla. His presence in the film is rare, but his wake is necessary and adds the extra dimension to the film that it needs for the final 45 minutes. I can’t reveal what he does or provides for the movie without revealing the secrets of the film itself, but it is Tesla’s “device” that makes the second half of the movie work.

A final note: David Julyan does the score for the film and he’s very, very good. While watching the movie I thought the score sounded as well-placed as the one for The Descent, my favorite movie this summer. Julyan has a knack for figuring out exactly what a scene needs musically, and then doing no more than that. In this era of overblown scores that dominate the eardrums I find Julyan’s sparse, haunting themes to be the perfect counterpoint. Nolan has a good thing going with him, and I hope he starts lending his musical abilities to other filmmakers as well.

It’s difficult for me to put my finger on what exactly I liked about this movie, because with 45 minutes left to go I had it all figured out. But it wasn’t the reveal that made the movie work - it was watching Nolan walk us through the story that was so enchanting. M. Night Shyamalan has relied on his twists to carry his filmmaking from good to great. Nolan shows with The Prestige that he doesn’t need the twists to carry his films, he just needs an interesting enough vehicle to show us what a good storyteller he is.

As a software developer, I’m keenly aware of code re-use, and its cousin, feature re-use. I try to follow good Object Oriented patterns and design my solutions to maximize code re-use, and I expect other developers to do the same. Especially in video games. When a successful feature is implemented in a game that is good, I expect other games in the same genre follow suite. Some people calling this “stealing”, but I call it “being smart”. When something works, you use it.

For instance, “tabbed browsing” is such a nice feature in web browsers that even Microsoft has finally caught on and included it in Internet Explorer 7. So while they aren’t exactly re-using code, they are implementing a feature from other browsers, and that is the essense of code re-use.

So when I see a sequel to a successful video game, I expect a certain amount of code re-use, or feature re-use, to occur. I expect successful features and functions of the previous game, or similiar games, to make the transition to the sequel in whole.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is the sequel to the original Neverwinter Nights, a successful, if not completely accurate or enjoyable, roleplaying game based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset. I say not completely accurate or enjoyable because for most people, myself included, it never lived up to the level of gameplay like other D&D titles, such as Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale or The Temple of Elemental Evil.

I had two big gripes about the original Neverwinter Nights. First, you could only control one main character and a “sidekick”, which significantly limited your options. After playing games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, where you were allowed to control a full party of six different and unique characters with varying classes, skills and abilities, Neverwinter Nights was a significant letdown in the “party development” department. Part of what made Baldur’s Gate so memorable was listening to Minsc converse with his hampster or dealing with Jahera and her meddling harper friends. Plus, with six compansion of varying classes and skills, you could approach difficult combat situations with a variety of tactics. If one approach didn’t work, there was usually another way to win. In short, more companions meant more fun.

The other big problem I had with the original game was that the outdoor environments looked bad; they were blockly and unrealistic, and thus destroyed immersion. One of the main concepts behind Neverwinter Nights was to provide a construction kit for players to create their own adventures. The developers opted for a very easy-to-use world creation system, and because of that, everything in the game world was created with a square “tile” that displayed some part of the environment. This worked great for dungeons and interior portions of the game world that are naturally square and flat, as it made those environments quick and easy to create. Unfortunately, outdoor environments looked blocky and unrealistic.

The basic problem was that the square tile system was too simple; you couldn’t create rolling hills or organic looking forests or swamps. Everything was created flat, with cliff-type “mountain walls” and “ramps” allowing you to navigate from lower to higher ground. It was, without a doubt, the dumbest thing I’ve seen in any video game terrain-wise. Couple that with the release of Dungeon Siege around the same time, which also provided it’s own construction set yet managed to do so without creating a single fake-looking “wall” or completely “flat” outdoor surface, and it made the Neverwinter Nights design decision look like an even bigger blunder.

With that said, much of Neverwinter Nights was done well. The Quickbar was amazingly customizable, allowing you to place anything on it, from spells and weapons to potions and even commands for your henchman. The graphics possessed absolutely silky-smooth animations and camera movement, and the spellcasting effects were superb. It was ripe for a sequel to address the shortfalls, but keep the primary features in-tact.

So here we have it: Neverwinter Nights 2. How does it stack up?

Well, NWN2 looks, at least on the surface, like a sequel should. The same logo, the same artwork, the same box packaging - even the voice over dialog available during the character creation process is the same (so at least we’ve reused some audio files). And the two major problems from the original have been addressed.

First, outdoor environments are no longer constructed with sqare tiles. Instead, they have been replaced with a three-dimensional mesh system that allows for a much more organic and realistic outdoor environment. By pushing and pulling the mesh around, you can create the many uneven undulations necessary to mimic an outdoor environment, like a valley or hillside. Obviously the ease-of-use that came with the old system is gone as well (this is not nearly as simple as selecting and placing a tile), but I think the end result is well worth it. The outdoor environments look much better.

The party size gripe has also been addressed to some degree. You can now control up to three companions in addition to your own character, giving you a total party size of four. This improves combat significantly, since you now have more options available at your disposal.

However, it’s still disappointing compared to games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Four companions is somewhat limiting compared to six, forcing you to make hard choices about who to include and who to leave behind when progressing through the game. In a game like Baldur’s Gate, you might include a less capable character, such as a storytelling bard, just to experience the dialog interactions with other characters in your party, or to open up a sub-quest associated with that character. But in Neverwinter Nights 2, with only four total party members, everyone needs to pull their weight. The storytelling bard has to go.

So Neverwinter Nights addresses the two big issues. That means it’s a hit, right?

Well, not entirely. While the game looks like a worthy sequel, there are also some problems that shouldn’t exist, and those problems are dragging the game down.

For instance, in the previous version of Neverwinter Nights, if you wanted your character to be able to easily switch between using a ranged weapon (bow) and dual-wielding swords (or a sword and shield combo), you could stack your two swords on the same hotbar item, and they would “cross-over”, showing both weapons at the same time. Thus, you could swap to the swords with one button click. That sort of functionality doesn’t exist in NWN2, and its absence is somewhat of a head-scratcher considering it exists in the previous game.

The same thing can be said of the “Action Bar”, which is fairly ineffective in NWN2. Knights Of The Old Republic, and its sequel had very well-done “Action Bars”. These bars allowed you to queue up as many as four actions for every character, and those actions could be anything, from healing to special abilities (the Neverwinter Nights equivalent of a “spell”) or even specialized melee attacks. The inclusion of this feature made those two games much more enjoyable to play given their real-time, fast-paced combat implementations. You could pause the game, cycle through the characters in your party, and issue them four commands at a time. This saved you from having to pause the game frequently to issue individual commands to characters to ensure they’re doing the right thing.

Neverwinter Nights 2 has an action bar, but unfortunately it doesn’t allow you to queue up anything other than spells. There’s no way to queue up melee attacks or ranged weapon attacks; there’s no way to tell your archer to shoot three different targets in the next three rounds, spreading the damage around. Consequently, your characters must rely on rather simplistic Artificial Intelligence to do the right thing, or you have to take manual control of your characters via “Puppet Mode”, which turns combat into a laborous affair of micromanagement.

In addition to the poorly realized “Action Bar”, there’s also the equally ineffective “Mode Bar”. Characters can obtain certain abilties via their class or skill selection and those abilities can be toggled through the Mode Bar. One such useful skill is “Defensive Casting”. Defensive Casting allows your character to cast spells in melee combat without automatically causing enemies to initiate an “Attack of Opportunity”. With a simple Concentration check, you can cast a spell without your enemies getting a free swing at you. For a character like mine, a Fighter/Mage with aspirations of becoming an Eldritch Knight, the vast majority of my spellcasting is done in combat (I’m half Fighter after all). I would like to be able to stick my character in “Defensive Casting” mode and just leave it at that. But no, it doesn’t work that way in Neverwinter Nights 2. Instead of being able to turn on Defensive Casting mode and always cast your spells that way, your character continually drops out of Defensive Casting mode for no apparent reason.

Another frustrating “bug” with the mode bar is that modes which shouldn’t have any conflict with each other apparently are mutually exclusive. For instance, you can’t enter “Power Attack” melee mode and “Defensive Casting” spellcasting mode at the same time. When you compare this method to the way Knights Of The Old Republic handled Power Attacks (by letting you determine individual melee attacks as being Power Attacks, and queuing them up in the Action Bar), the Neverwinter Nights 2 method seems stupid and inferior.

The gripes don’t stop though. Remember the super-customizable Quickbar from the original Neverwinter Nights? Well, it’s still here, but severely neutered. You can’t assign party commands to it (like “Guard Me”), nor can you put class specific abilities on it (like a druid’s “Wildshape”). And, as previously mentioned, the whole dual-wield quick-swap is shot too.

Oh, and finally, another huge problem that players are complaining about on the message boards: the view angles suck. Players are complaining about the camera, but it’s not the camera that is broken (it uses the same mechanics as the predicessor). What’s wrong with Neverwinter Nights 2 is that buildings and other structures don’t “disappear” when you rotate the camera around the game world. Your view is constantly being obstructed by walls and roofs that don’t properly turn opaque, and rafters in ceilings that don’t disappear. There is a lot of clipping that is missing from the game engine and it makes the world much harder to navigate and the game much harder to enjoy.

What’s odd about these flaws is that the solutions to them already exist, either in the first Neverwinter Nights game, or in contemporary roleplaying games (Knights Of The Old Republic, for instance). Playing Neverwinter Nights 2 is like surfing the web in Internet Explorer 6. There are other web browsers out there and they have better features, so why doesn’t Neverwinter Nights 2 have them as well?

That said, Neverwinter Nights 2 succeeds more than it fails. It’s fun; the story is bigger, the voice acting is considerably better (and there’s lots of it), and there are more levels. There’s more prestige classes this time around as well and the game world is a bit more open-ended.

If Obsidian, the makers behind the game, can iron out the bugs and implement the features that players have come to expect from this genre of game, then Neverwinter Nights 2 could elevate itself to rare status. I don’t think it will make anyone forget Baldur’s Gate or Baldur’s Gate 2 anytime soon, but with the proper patching it could be a much better game than the first Neverwinter Nights, and that’s all you can ever ask of a sequel.

My father-in-law just lost all his major channels (ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS) on DISH Network. This is not a glitch.

I hopped online to see what the scoop was, and ran across this article and this article. It turns out that U.S. District Judge William P. Dimitrouleas of Florida has issued an injuction against EchoStar, the company that owns DISH Network.

For years, DISH Network and its competitor, DirectTV, have been beaming the four major networks across the U.S. to subscribers who normally wouldn’t receive them. This is called Distant Network Signal, or DNS.

For instance, I receive feeds from New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta and my semi-local station. This provides me with a lot of choice when it comes to viewing network television shows. Under normal circumstances, if I were only receiving my local network stations, I might have to make a choice between watching one show or another on a given timeslot for a given night. As a consumer, that really sucks, especially in the current age of Digitial Video Recorders, like the TiVo.

As a consumer who receives multiple network feeds, I can program my TiVo to record CSI in one timezone in Thursday nights, and Grey’s Anatomy at a different time on the same night. Normally those shows would compete head-to-head in the same timeslot, but with multiple network feeds and a good DVR, I don’t have to deal with that problem.

This is apparently a bad thing in the mind of the local affiliates because they are worried that subscribers will watch the beamed-in network feeds and not the local feeds.

Umm… Do any of you local affiliate losers realize why people have multiple network feeds? If not, please reread the first part of this post.

If I didn’t care about television, I’d just get receive my local network feeds and call it good. I subscribe to DNS because I do care about television, and I want to watch as much of the good shows as I can. I don’t want to make a choice between CSI and Grey’s Anatomy - I want them both. That means that not only am I watching the DNS feeds, I’m watching the local feeds. I’m watching it all.

You are taking away my options FOX (it is the FOX affiliates that are responsible for the injunction, since they didn’t want to go along with a $100 million settlement. Typical FOX. First they give Bill O’Reilly a television show, then they pull this shit). And what’s really bad about this is that you’re taking away my options without thinking first. If you realized that those of us with DNS channels are watching a lot of television, including the local television, would you still make this decision? Isn’t it better if you provide people with more hooks to get them seated in front of the TV? Don’t you understand how channel surfing works?

To me, this situation is really about consumer choice. It’s the year 2006 and we should be focusing our efforts on providing consumers with more choices, not less. This isn’t the stone age of television anymore. But to hear the FOX affiliates tell it, they’d rather you be limited to Al Jazeera with a FOX logo slapped on it. What’s next? Big Brother telling me to stretch further during the morning calisthenics routine?

I’m tired of corporations and people with small brains deciding that reducing my choices as a consumer is a good thing. DirectTV already has a monopoly on NFL Sunday Ticket, and now they’re going to get a monopoly on DNS channels as well (because woudn’t you know it, DirectTV’s DNS service isn’t affected by the injunction).

This sort of corporate fornication is about all I can take. I’ve emailed my senators and congressmen. You should too. Because the next thing you know, it won’t just be your channel choices they’ve taken away.