May 15

Geek Actually Episode 84 – This Is Not The Film You’re Looking For

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hosts: David McVay, Josh Philpott and Nathan Lawrence (and Nicholas ‘The Little Geek’ McVay)

The Geek Actually Podcast, your weekly dose of ‘the week in geek’. This week David McVay and Josh Philpott are joined by tech journalist Nathan Lawrence for a look at the latest in tech and entertainment news and a review of Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe’s latest love affair ‘Robin Hood’. You can find out more about Nathan at chimeralit.com. Keep listening at the end of the show for the audio version of the latest episode of The Little Geek Show with Nicholas McVay, David McVay and guest Josh Philpott. Your show links follow.

Watch us live at geekactually.com/live 12pm Saturdays (AEST UTC +10) Continue reading

May 15

Geek Actually Replay – Geek Actually Episode 84 Live Show

Here is this weeks live video version of The Geek Actually Podcast Episode 84 – This Is Not The Film You’re Looking For. This week David McVay, Josh Philpott and Nathan Lawrence review the new Ridley Scott film ‘Robin Hood’. The audio podcast of this episode can be found on this site or on iTunes. Just a quick note about this episode, We missed the first few minutes of the video feed on the recording. Listen to the audio version to know what you missed.

Almost every week we record the Geek Actually Podcast while feeding it live to Ustream. We record the Ustream feed and it is available go back and watch later if you want. It occurred to me that we should just embed the past shows here so you can find them easily. You never know, you’re listening to that podcast and something visual happens, now you can simply find the show here and watch what happened. Enjoy. (Note: We only started recording the feed as of episode 46, there are no videos of earlier shows.)

May 15

The Little Geek Show Episode 2 – Iron Man 2

Here is the latest episode of Nicholas’ show. This week we are joined by Josh Philpott as Nicholas gives his opinions on Iron Man 2 and debuts his new animated film ‘Super Hero Madness’.

The unabridged audio version of this show can be found at the end of The Geek Actually Podcast (ep84).

May 14

Short Film ‘Pixels’ Being Developed Into a Feature Film

I’m actually not quite sure how to feel about this piece of news but here goes, Patrick Jean’s short film ‘Pixels’ (which you can watch below) is being developed into a feature film by Happy Madison and Sony Pictures. Part of me say congratulations to Patrick Jean, because he deserves all the wealth and fame for his brilliant short film, the other part asks why?

‘Pixels’ is a self contained short film that is visually staggering, but it is short and doesn’t need to be any longer. I just don’t know if I want, or can see, human drama or comedy being inserted into this concept.  If you haven’t watched ‘Pixels’ yet, it is a simple concept; 1980’s era video game characters attack New York. It is a beautiful fusion of CG elements and live background plates all to 8 bit music.

The plan, According to THR, is to make a ‘Ghostbusters’ style film out of it. With Happy Madison involved it is probably planned to be a vehicle for Adam Sandler and that just makes a cold chill run up my spine.

What do you think? Can ‘Pixels’ make a feature film? Watch it and comment below.

May 13

Forgotten Films: The Ruins

Director:
Carter Smith

Writers:
Scott B. Smith (Novel)
Scott B. Smith (Screenplay)

Actors:
Johnathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey, Shaun Ashmore, Joe Anderson

Plot:
A Group of “twenty something” college students on holiday in Mexico travel to an archaeological dig site, upon arrival they are forced onto the ruins and what they find is an ancient evil with a craving for human blood.

Story:
The story is not going to really challenge any of the audience, it is basically a standard horror plot style; establish characters, establish evil and kill off most/all of cast. This movie came out right in the middle of the rise of the Gorno (or torturer porn) films and suffers from what I find most of this genre does, powerful scenes wasted due to a lack luster story. The movie has no major standout moments and the ending is kind of lacklustre. Continue reading

May 13

A Strong Turn Out By Gamers May Have Hurt the R18+ Rating Campaign – WTF!

Only in our strange weird world can a strong turn out in support of something cause it to fail! Okay, fail is a harsh word, but the discussion on the introduction of an R18+ Rating for games seems to have stalled.

According to Federal Homes Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor, more than 86% of the submissions for the public consultation on this issue came from EB Games and the GrowUp Australia campaign and that has skewed the results. They now want to have an even broader consultation of the public because the dominant response only came from ‘interest groups’! Of course it did, gamers are the most interested in this topic and considering that approximately 68% of the population could be considered gamers (according to a report from Interactive Australia in 2009). You could say that the other people weren’t as vocal on this issue because they just don’t care.

If they wanted to introduce a new policy that affected farmers, I would expect that 86% of those submissions would be from farmers or those involved with agriculture. Continue reading