I think this trailer just melted my brain.

This movie is going to be incredible.

Here’s the link, be sure to watch it over and over again in glorious quicktime at 1080p… Jeez.

My only beef with this trailer is the music. It didn’t work for me. I wanted something more epic and less “rock.” Maybe it’s just me that always wants more John Williams or Kronos Quartet for my movies than cut rate rock bands that’ll make the movie (and the trailer) seem dated a decade from now. “>Remember that terrible song from Spider-Man? Ugh.

But this trailer was ultimately satisfying to me.

I’m DYING for May to come along.

UPDATE: I’m told the music is Nine Inch Nails. For the Record: I am in NO WAY comparing Nine Inch Nails to Nickelback. I just didn’t think this piece of music worked in the trailer as well as an orchestral piece would have.

Lucasfilm has once again given us a sneak peak at the next episode of The Clone Wars. It looks pretty apparent that we’re getting more episodes with Artoo and Threepio, which is fine by me.

From the press blurb:

C-3PO and R2-D2’s adventure continues and they encounter danger at every turn. Forced to escape a Separatist attack in a Y-wing fighter, the droids visit the world of the Patitites, the odd planet Balnab, and the inside of a pirate warship where they are forced to fight in a gladiatorial arena in “Nomad Droids” a new episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, airing at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT Friday, October 14th on Cartoon Network.

And in this second clip, you get so much classic Star Wars it’s ridiculous:

We are giving away 5 copies of Big Bang Theory Season 4 on DVD!

I’ll be honest, I haven’t seen this show and keep getting told it’s amazing by a diverse group of people. I’ll be cracking open season four and giving it a shot.

Here’s the description of this season from Amazon.

This season the Big Bang gang’s romantic universe expands. On the rebound from Penny, Leonard falls into the arms of Raj’s sister Priya. Sheldon gets a girlfriend, or rather a friend who is a girl: Amy, a dour neurobiologist who declares herself besties with Penny. Howard and Bernadette heat up. And so do Raj and Bernadette (at least in Raj’s Bollywood daydream). All in the furtherance of award-winning genius comedy.

This set is being released tomorrow and you can order it on Amazon.

The contest will be open until Friday, October 14th. Winners will be announced on Monday, October 17th.

To enter, all you need to do is shoot us an email at editor (at) bigshinyrobot.com. Make the subject “BAZINGA!” For an extra chance to win, you can go to our facebook page and invite all of your friends to like us. Or you can ask your followers on twitter to follow us @BigShinyRobot. Just be sure to mention in your email that you’ve done it.

And remember: There will be FIVE winners announced!

Good luck.

Remember that infamous apology letterNetflix customers received from CEO Reed Hastings announcing the birth of the Netflix spin-off company, Qwikster? Turns out they were “JK”-ing.

About three weeks ago, Netflix customers received an e-mail that, among other things, announced that Netflix would be splitting into two companies; Netflix would now only be a streaming service and they would spin-off a new company called Qwikster to handle all of the DVD/Blu-ray-by-mail service and expand that service to video games. Reception to this idea was almost universally negative and seemed counter productive. How would this split be a benefit to the consumer? Now instead of one account to manage your DVD mailing and instant streaming queues, we would need two. Two separate accounts with two separate queues, two separate logins, and two separate bills with no connection between them seems like the exact opposite of making a better customer experience.

Before even becoming a functional site, Qwikster has ceased to exist. Netflix has decided to keep both its services under one roof and Reed Hastings has once again issued an apologetic-esque statement on the matter:

“Consumers value the simplicity Netflix has always offered and we respect that,there is a difference between moving quickly — which Netflix has done very well for years — and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case.”

With their consecutive missteps as of late and these ridiculous statements from Reed Hastings I’m seriously beginning to doubt Netflix as a company has any idea what they are doing – something I and the other robots from the Big Shiny Podcast talk about in length in last month’s episode. The idea of splitting you popular, easy to use, convenient DVD mailing and instant streaming site into twoseparate service seems like a step backwards, no matter if that happens now or in the future. Yes, Mr. Hastings, your customers were upset because the idea of splitting Netflix into two companies making a far lesser user experience for your millions of customers was just too progressive for us to handle; it has nothing to do with the fact that it’s just a bad idea, period.

It’s unclear if Netflix will still be expanding its mailing service to include video games. Personally, I think for now Netflix needs to get their feet back underneath them and get back to the basics of offering a DVD-by-mail rental service and a decent streaming service at a reasonable price – hell, go ahead and look into expanding your service to include video games, but keep it all under one roof.

Netflix seems to have a long ways to go in regaining customer trust and confidence and showing that they are a company that can adapt well moving into the future of home entertainment. Lately it just seems they are grasping at straws.

What do you think of this latest move by Netflix? Have you cancelled any Netflix services in light of these missteps by the company? Have you moved on to a competitor? Sound off in the comments below!

I’m not even sure where to start with this one. “Mercy Mission” is a fairy tale like romp starring Artoo and Threepio as a sort of Alice and Dinah (or Dorothy and Toto) who find themselves on a mission to help a planet plagued by earthquakes and end up down a metaphorical rabbit hole, trying to solve the Caterpillar like riddles that will save both races of people caught in the destruction of the quakes.

This episode was a bizarre and delightful fantasy.

It had all of the hallmarks of a classic storybook tale, with Threepio and Artoo as the children trapped in the world no one else knows about or believes in.

The imagery of the episode was decidedly fantastical and it took an entirely humorous bent on an episode. And to be honest, I find breather episodes like this refreshing. The Clone Wars hasn’t much tapped its full potential for these entertaining and whimsical episodes and I’m glad their cutting loose. And there was plenty of great film references here. Aside from the obvious Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz comparisons, this episode had flourishes of Return of the Jedi with the banter between Threepio and the ewok-like creatures who seem to worship him.

One of my favorite moments is when they’re given a riddle by the caterpillar like girl at the end of the labyrinth and are forced to solve it in order to get back to the surface and save the day. Did it seem as obvious to anyone else that the puzzle they were given was reminiscent of The Fifth Element?

Overall, this episode was a breather episode (that was produced for Season 3) that offered little in the way of continuing story lines but was a lot of fun for the kids. Both of my kids adored this episode. It was funny for them and they were just at rapt attention the entire time. It was fun watching with them.

Based on the preview for the upcoming episodes, it looks like we’re getting more adventures of Artoo and Threepio. If nothing else, The Clone Wars crew is showing how it’s done. That Droids show doesn’t have anything on them. Could this be the three episode Droids arc? Who knows.

What I do know is that these whimsical episodes don’t bother me. In fact, I will still go so far as to say that Bombad Jedi might be on my top 5 favorite episodes of the series.

Some might balk at episodes like this, but I would argue that they’re a welcome distraction. They can’t be expected to give us one-note war episodes week after week after week. The wide expanse of the Star Wars universe and the equally expansive nature of the form of an animated television show demands variation and artistic license. It’s great to see them giving it to us.

And one note about the beautiful animation in this episode, particularly during the underground sequences, my 8 year old daughter was so convinced by the tree-like people, she honestly thought they were puppets and kept asking if they were real puppets. To my mind, that seems like high praise for the show.

We’ll be back next week with the episode “Nomad Droids”. You can watch a clip of it on StarWars.Com, but it looks like equal parts Gulliver’s Travels, Willow, and Spies Like Us.

I can’t wait.

The Walking Dead: The Rise of the Governor is the latest of multi-platform installments in the ever-expanding saga of The Walking Dead. It’s a prose novel set in the early days of the zombie outbreak and follows Phillip Blake, his daughter Penny, and his brother Brian. They have a couple of friends with them that they lose along the way and they end up leading into the situation before we meet “The Governor” in the comics in Walking Dead #27.

I’ll be honest, I had a hard time with the beginning of this book only to find myself enjoying it by the middle. The end lost me again, though.

I was rubbed the wrong way first by the writing style. The book is written in 3rd person present tense and it just feels…off. It doesn’t read easily and doesn’t have a whole lot of suspense or finesse to it. I don’t get the impression Kirkman had a hand in the actual writing of this book, more just the story. I’ve known Robert Kirkman to be a better writer than this.

The other thing I was bored with was that the first third of the book plays out like every zombie movie I’ve ever seen and the thing that’s always made The Walking Dead stand out was that it didn’t feel like your average, every day zombie story. Like this one.

Phillip Blake, whom we know as the Governor, is on his way to Atlanta with his daughter and brother and they encounter all of the standard zombie fare. It’s not until they find another group of survivors (a pair of adult women and their father who travelled state fairs as a family musical act) and try to co-exist. The Walking Dead is always at its best when it’s exploring the compelling psychology of survivors and this middle part of the book was by far and away the standout for me.

But I read the book wanting to know how someone could become as vicious and sociopathic as The Governor and how that person would come to power and I really didn’t get that out of this book. The book ends abruptly with a rug-pull in the last couple of chapters that are as ham-fisted and preposterous as an M. Night Shyamalan film and almost feels twice as stupid. The character who eventually turns into the Governor shows nothing in his character whatsoever that he’ll become the person we love to hate in the comics series. It felt cheap and pointless and far below the quality Kirkman has proven himself capable of. (Which is really why I’m not sure he really wrote this book.)

The authors actually do a good job with developing the character’s psychology and then seem to throw it all out the window in the last ten chapters of the book in an attempt to fit it into the comic book continuity.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I’m in LOVE with this series. I read the comic and watch the show religiously.

This should have been a home run instead of a foul ball.

The book comes out Tuesday, October 11th. If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, you’ll want to check it out for yourself, don’t take my opinion for it. You can order it from Amazon and have it the day of release. Check for it at your local comic book stores, too.

I didn’t realize that if you ask most animators to pick a film that is the pinnacle of your art, the most frequent response would be Dumbo.

I haven’t seen this film in twenty or more years and I couldn’t even fathom why it could be their favorite animated film of all time, especially with movies like Alice in Wonderland, Lady and the Tramp, and Sleeping Beauty to pick from.

The Blu-ray of Dumbo arrived and I was dying of curiosity to watch it and see what the film could offer and I was shocked.

Dumbo is a fine film and the animation is fantastic, sure, but I was shocked by the economy and efficiency of storytelling. Dumbo came out in 1941 when animated features (and even color and sound movies) were in their infancy. Learning to tell a story with these new tools wasn’t easy for some, but for Disney it seemed to come naturally.

But this film clocks in at 65 minutes and is so straightforward, touching, funny, and surreal that it’s amazing so much was packed into to so little time. Though, on its surface, Dumbo might seem as a mish-mash of musical numbers and comedy bits to string the narrative together, it’s a brilliant bit of storytelling. You all generally know the story, right? Dumbo is born, he’s different, he has no talents, but he learns that, with the aid of a magic feather, he can fly because of his big ears. He has to learn to believe in himself and fly on his own when he loses the feather. To communicate that story in a manner as efficient as they did is really a marvel.

But all of the things I remembered about the film that haunted me from my childhood, particularly the Dali-esque ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ sequence, all fit so neatly into the movie in a way I didn’t quite understand as a child but as a writer today it blew my mind. There are so many visual flourishes that help tie the story and the longing and the motion together that it’s just…staggering… As you’re watching it, think about all that goes into something as simple as Dumbo holding Timothy’s tail with his trunk… It’s… it means sooooo much in the context of the film and… wow. This film really blew me away all over again.

And the fact that the film, like all of my favorite films, can blend humour, drama, tears, joy, laughter, and surrealism in a way that isn’t distracting or lopsided is impressive.

It’s a lesson storytellers would do well to learn.

As far as the Blu-ray itself, like all Disney Blu-rays, it looks absolutely gorgeous and has special features that document the making of the film and the appreciation that’s grown out of it.

I would have never guessed that Dumbo was a must-own Disney film, but now, with my adult eyes, I can see it for the brilliance that it is. Get it. It’s worth revisiting.

The idea of releasing new movies to Video on Demand services around the same time they are released in theaters is not a new one, but usually we see this with films from smaller studios. Universal wants to test the waters of distributing a new movie to VOD by releasing their November release, Tower Heist, to Comcast’s service – and they want to charge you $60 for the privilege to watch it at home while it’s still in theaters.

This offer is only being made to Comcast customers in Atlanta, GA and Portland, OR so it seems to be a sort of trial thing for Universal to gauge the response. I don’t really understand why they are choosing to do this with a film like Tower Heist and not a bigger release. They don’t really have anything I personally would consider a “big” release for the rest of the year aside from perhaps The Thing remake/sequel coming out on October 14 so this may have been the best option to get a trial in for this year. The other odd thing is that Universal isn’t releasing the film until three weeks after it hits theaters. I understand wanting to give theaters a chance to sell some tickets first, but it seems if you’re going to try something like this out you may as well go for broke and release it in theaters and VOD on the same day.

I actually like the idea of studios putting new releases out on VOD as an additional option for seeing these films. I actually enjoy the theater-going experience for the most part, but I could see myself and a group of friends getting together and chipping in to order a new release like this to watch it in the comfort of our homes – much like people already do with say UFC Pay-Per-View events. $60 doesn’t seem unreasonable for a gathering of people, but I couldn’t see myself hanging out with my girlfriend on a Friday night and dropping that kind of cash just to watch a movie.

Some movie theaters though already aren’t sharing the same outlook. Cinemark has already released a statement saying that if Universal does release Tower Heist on demand, they will not be screening it in their theaters. While I highly doubt this film will be a hit, Cinemark could be choosing to set a precedent now to intimidate Universal from doing this with some of their bigger films they have coming out next year like The Bourne Legacy.

So would you drop $60 to watch a new release film at home on demand, in particularly Tower Heist? Sound off in the comments below!

UPDATE: Walking Dead is now streaming!!!!  GET IT HERE!!!!

Netflix is in a world of hurt, but this move will show whether they are more like Rick Grimes and his survivors or the multitudinous zombie fodder.  Starting today (not yet showing up on my Roku Box, but if you click here it shows streaming availability is “coming soon”–we’ll keep you updated) you should be able to watch everyone’s favorite zombie series, and just in time for both the beginning of the second season (please don’t suck) and Halloween. This will be the beginning of a more permanent deal with AMC, The Sundance Channel, and a few other cable netlets to stream AMC networks’ content, all of which is a win for us, the viewers.

This comes on the heels of Netflix’s incredibly popular (at least in my house and among my friends) streaming of AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad, so Walking Dead makes a logical next step. It also comes on the heels of month after month of self-inflicted wounds, resulting stock slides, emailed apologies paired with other dubious business decisions, and further stock slides for Netflix.

In fact, this could help stop their bleeding, as the question on everyone’s mind has to be “Is there a future in Netflix’s business model?”  They key is to continue to offer new and quality content to increase your subscriber base. Unfortunately, you probably need to leverage your stock price to be able to make big deals with the likes of AMC, HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc. Betting on The Walking Dead to help? In these priceless words of wisdom from Robocop:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85cL1HisrNc

I’d buy that for a dollar!

So, thank you Netflix.  And thank you for also offering some AMAZING genre films to make my Halloween extra spooky. Currently in my instant queue: Nosferatu (the original and possibly creepiest vampire movie ever), John Carpenter’s The Thing, Dead Snow, The Crazies, Trick r Treat, The Excorcist, Let Me In/Let the Right One In, all of the old MGM Monster movies, including Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, a bunch of vintage Vincent Price and Hitchcock, and on the lighter side: Hellboy, My Name is Bruce, Weird Science, Arsenic and Old Lace (the funniest movie about mass murder ever), Murder by Death, and Alec Baldwin as The Shadow. . . . wait, that wasn’t intended to be a comedy?

What I’m saying is this– you know how Netflix has all of those deals where you can get a trial month?  October should be that month for you, if for nothing else than Walking Dead.

Anyway, I’m going to continue to pound away at a few more episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which just came to streaming Oct 1, and eagerly await the arrival of The Walking Dead to my instant queue.

Thanks Netflix.   “>Thatflix

Ticelli Bot is back with a look at Sony’s new “Long Live Play” commercial:

This new commercial from Sony’s “Long Live Play” Campaign is the best gaming commercial I’ve ever seen. Seriously. The characters look fantastic. I mean, if only this place existed, then I could fulfill my lifelong dream of playing chess against a sack person….

Being an avid PS3 gamer, I feel obligated to list the characters in the commercial to the best of my ability.

We’ve got:
82nd Airborn Soldier– Medal of Honor: Airbourne
Nathan Drake – Uncharted
Lightning – Final Fantasy XIII
Cole MacGrath – Infamous
Issac Clarke – Dead Space
Lt. Simon “Ghost” Riley – Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 2
Agent 47 – Hitman
Sweet Tooth – Twisted Metal
Baseball Player – MLB: The Show?
Solid Snake – Metal Gear Solid
Chell – Portal
Sackboy (Sackthing) – LittleBigPlanet
Kratos/Athena – God of War
Paul Phoenix – Tekken
Football Guy – FOOTBALL!!!!
Little Sister – Bioshock
Ezio Auditore– Assassin’s Creed 2 +
Ratchet – Ratchet and Clank
Rico/Hellghast– Killzone 3
Chimera – Resistance

Feel free to add and I may have missed.

Ticelli Bot majors in Computer Science and Communications and spends his non-school time watching and making movies, hiking, playing video games, and reading comics.