brentasmagoria

Apparently I'm not a Wes Anderson fan. However, this was the first Anderson film I've seen. Critics are praising Fantastic Mr. Fox, saying that it's "The best animated film of the year, and maybe the best film, period" as well as "Hilarious! A delightful whirlwind of mayhem and high spirits!"
I guess I saw the wrong movie.
I didn't find Fantastic Mr. Fox particularly engaging at all. In fact, I found it quite boring. I hoped that it would pick up the pace--or at least start a plot--at some time, but soon the credits were rolling. The pacing was sluggish and the "heists" weren't very exciting.

I didn't particularly feel for the characters either; I suppose we were just supposed to accept that they were "fantastic" and go along for the ride, however slow the ride was. One character I did enjoy was Kylie, voiced by Wally Wolodarsky. Kylie was the most interesting of the entire cast of characters, and surprisingly he's supposed to be the bumbling sidekick.
The animation style was interesting. The character models were interesting, and all the characters were fun. Even though the animation style was interesting, everything is rendered monochromatic as it all seems tinted "orange" the color of foxes. In the first scene, Mr. Fox and Mrs. Fox are walking up a hill and Mr. Fox walks down the hill through a patch of wildflowers, which I believe are supposed to be vibrant and colorful. Unfortunately, they're vibrancy is muted by the burnt peach colors strewn across the entire film.
Perhaps reviews are so positive because of the big names involved with this film. George Clooney. Bill Murray. Meryl Streep. Jason Schwartzman. Willem Dafoe. Michael Gambdon. Owen Wilson. And of course, Wes Anderson. Unfortunately, I feel like all of these famous actors are wasted and in some cases not fitting. George Clooney particularly feels like a waste, as I don't think he was fitting for Mr. Fox. Owen Wilson (who I don't particularly like, seeing as he's always monotonous) isn't much more fitting than George Clooney. I did enjoy Bill Murray as Badger, Jason Schwartzman as Ash, and Wally Wolodarsky as Kylie. I also always like seeing Willem Dafoe turn up in movies, so I enjoyed him as the voice of Rat.
Many reviews are talking about the brilliant subtle humor, and exciting and interesting plot and characters. I found it boring and didn't laugh once. I guess the subtle humor sailed over my head and I expect more from films than Wes Anderson delivered in Fantastic Mr. Fox. Maybe I missed something.

1 out of 5 stars. The one is for the interesting animation style, however muted it may be, and for Bill Murray and Wally Wolodarsky.

He sat in the barn. He didn’t particularly like it there, or anywhere for that matter, but it was something to do, somewhere to be.
He contemplated things. Nothing important, he was just fifty-three years old, nothing important to think about at that age, still hadn’t reached his ‘ripeness’ as his mother called it.
His mother. She always said things to him. Not that he listened. “If it’s important, I’ll listen,” he thought to himself today in the barn. The cows were mooing. Moo moo moo. Moo moo moo. Moo. Moo moo. He wondered what they talked about so incessantly. What did cows talk about?
His mother. She always told him that cows were as smart as the rocks she painted and tried to sell at arts and crafts fairs in town; they didn’t have brains, didn’t amount to much. But he didn’t listen. He never listened to his mother.
So here he was in the barn, thinking about nothing particularly important, being nobody particularly important, just existing.
And he liked that. Just being.
Unfortunately this changed when his father showed up an hour early from work, his forehead spewing sweat like patients in an infirmary. Not that he’d ever been to an infirmary. He just sat in his barn all day.
One day his mother tried to send him to school. She rolled him in bubble wrap, stuffed his mouth with packing peanuts, and placed him in a large box with some stamps on it. He was bumped and tumbled all around the town until eventually he returned to his house with “return to sender” scribbled on the box in magic marker.
His mother wasn’t very pleased. Not that he cared. He didn’t care about anything, really. Well, one thing. But there was no way he was going to get that one thing now.
She, his mother, complained about the status the postal system was in and then ran over their mailbox with a tractor.
The mailman wasn’t very pleased with that. He came up and left notices on the door stating that without a mailbox, there was no way he could deliver mail to them. These notices were left each day, replacing what would have been the mail he would deliver. “Why can’t he leave the mail instead of these notices? He has the energy to walk up and leave this notice but not the mail?”
That was his mother. Screaming, every day getting angrier and angrier, until eventually they moved to an apartment complex to escape the neon green notices.
The first thing his mother did was fill their mailbox with concrete and then she cemented the mail slot closed.
She sighed with relief. They’d escaped the postal system.
Too bad the one thing he did care about in life was becoming a mailman.

Don't see it. Ever. Watching just the clips of funny lines of dialogue--"They're eating her and then they're going to eat me! Oh my Gooooddd!"--are funny, but don't ever watch the movie from start to finish.
Absolutely terrible. Worst movie I've ever seen.
0/5

The following is a list of things that are expalined by science, but most likely really are the result of magic. Feel free to comment and contribute more of these.

Airplanes. Thousands of pounds of metal hurtling through the air at many miles an hour with no suspension or support? Must be magic.

The Internet. A constantly expanding galaxy of content and media where anybody can create and display content with only moderate knowledge of computers? A place to share and discuss anything, learn anything, contribute to anything, communicate with anyone? Using just a box with some wires and circuits in it and a monitor made up of plastic and glass? Magic!

Computers. Computers have come a long way since the late 70s and early 80s. They started off big enough to make a whale quit Weight Watchers, and have gotten so much more powerful and so much smaller. How? How can this be in only 20 years? Magic. They work by magic, and were made better by more magic.

Television. Sending audio and video to millions of television sets worldwide in an instant through the air or through wires? Magic, magic, and MORE magic! I bet that the dinosaurs are rolling in their graves (or in the museums) because they missed out on this.

The Creation of the Universe and Everything on it. Magic.

The Brain. What ISN’T the brain capable of doing? Making an enchilada in less than two minutes? Nope, that’s what microwaves do, you say. Actually, who created the microwave? What did they use the most to make it? Metal? Nope. Their BRAIN! Brains are the most magical thing of all and even if “science” can explain how all of the above things do what they do, the brain is responsible for all of it. Brains (and the humans they reside in) are the most magical of all things. Period.

~Brent

So, a very long time ago it seems, I started the Ask Brent feature. Here's the first issue!

The first question comes from Maggie, who writes, "WHEN?"
I'm not quite sure what this is asking, about, but I assure you that if you just remain patient, you will get to whenever it is you are asking about.

The next email came from a mbgpsodderq, who writes, "ymv5nS". He (or she) also tried to link me to a website, presumably their personal site. I was honored when I first received this, as I assumed that his (or her) strange gibberish was meant to represent the phrase "link exchange". Unfortunately, when I went to visit the website to obtain enough information about it to write a brief article encouraging visitors to take a look at this person's site, I was greeted with an error message. Apparently typing in random strings of letters and hyperlinking them to another random string of letters doesn't really constitute a URL.

Next is a message from alex, who writes to me, "e6oQY7 fkjgh62vDfulv0s5FvSa". This one took longer to decipher than mbgpsodderg's email. Finally, I decided that it was a keygen, but being the fine upstanding gentleman that I am (and not knowing what piece of software it unlocked) I courteously declined.

My next two messages were from a hzkmbmkg and the infamous xqclglm who both had similar emails to mbgpsodderg, with similar approaches and results. The only difference were the body of their emails which read "KQOvsf" and "V1mnJx" respectively.

I also received an email from anonymous, who wrote, "free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza free pizza!

please."

My response is a resounding, "No" because I do not have pizza and if I did I wouldn't share it with you. (At least I don't think I would, but that's only because I don't know your identity, as you seem to prefer being called anonymous.)

My last email is from a Will G. who sent in a wonderful picture made with my colorful dots Flash game.

Here's the image:

To write to me, and get featured in a new issue of Ask Brent! please use the contact form.

Special thanks to everybody who contacted me!

~Brent

So, Google has a new web browser which is supposed to crush Internet Explorer by reinventing and improving upon it. I don't use Internet Explorer, I use Mozilla Firefox, so it was hard for me to switch to Chrome, because I think Firefox is a great little browser. However, I am mostly using Chrome now, and I'm liking it.

There are a lot of things I like about Google Chrome. It has a tab function just like most web browsers these days, but in Chrome, each tab is run by a separate process, which means if one crashes, it doesn't kill your whole browser. What an excellent idea! It also has this awesome homepage that has hyper linked screen shots of the web pages you visit most often. It also shows your most recently added bookmarks on this page. Once again, a cool idea. They've also incorporated the URL bar and the search bar into one bar. So you type in a search at the top bar, and it also will show you related websites with those terms in them. Another cool feature. It even lets you change what search system you use (if for some reason you don't use Google).
I'd say overall Chrome is a 9/10, with Firefox being an 8.5/10 and Internet Explorer being a 7/10. I really like Chrome and I think everybody should take a look at it, it's got some stuff to iron out, but it's still a pretty cool package.

~Brent

Note: Since the day of this review of I have seen The Dark Knight two more times. Yes: it's that good.
Excellent. I went into the theater really excited, but also a little nervous; even the hype had hype. Everybody was saying, "Believe the hype! Ledger's amazing!" And it's true. Heath Ledger is the star of the show. Not that everyone else involved are bad. This production is excellent, everything is filmed well, acted superiorly, the whole experience is wonderful. The plot moves at a nice pace, and I never found myself saying, "This is a long movie." I'm not going to write anything about the plot itself, though, because I don't want to give anything away, and there's a lot to give away, with all the twists and turns.

Imagine this:
A little boy, 6-ish walks into a deli with his mother. His mother orders sandwiches for them and also orders two medium drinks: a combo that saves them $2.58. As the mother goes to pick a table, she hands both cups to her son, so that he may go and get their drinks. The little lad approaches the soda machine, where an elderly man with a long beard is standing with a cane. The little boy, wanting to be polite, smiles at the man, and then proceeds to get his and his mother's drinks--a Sprite and Lipton Raspberry Iced Tea, respectively. As the Little boy reaches up to get more ice for his mother's tea, the old man picks up the boy by the back of the neck and

slams him into the soda machine, showering the boy with diet cola. As the little boy screams, the old man slides him back and forth, back and forth, the boy's face deploying each and every soda and soaking him with a shower of fizz and liquid. Onlookers, appalled at the old man's cruelty, rush up to help the struggling, soggy, boy. The old man tosses the boy behind him and picks up some of the onlookers, repeating his crazed attack. The police come and arrest the man, and Keith, the deli's custodian, is stuck cleaning up the sticky beverages and ice splashed and sprawled in a rainbow on the floor.

This scene must and will get made. Hopefully soon.

~Brent