I forgot to point out that it comes with a little remote for your steering wheel that worked great. Enjoy my first video review.

Score: 6/10

This film started with the best of intentions, picking up right where 2006’s Casino Royale left off, but immediately shows it’s flaws. The first action sequence, a car chase scene, contains so many “shake the camera really bad” shots that it’s hard to tell what’s going on. This annoying effect continued throughout the movie’s other action sequences. I’m not sure who is directly responsible for placing this “effect” in the movie, but they need to leave Hollywood. Too many films are using this effect in their action sequences, and it doesn’t help in the slightest. I can only assume that director Marc Forster’s inexperience at filming action sequences let this happen. It just doesn’t work at all. But that’s not the only flaw of this film.

The usual Bond intro titles were terrible; I really cannot stand the film’s track “Another Way to Die”. The lyrics are nonsensical (can anyone explain to me what they have to do with the film’s plot?), as is the actual music—I mean, Jack White and Alicia Keys, really? Visually, they decided to use a different person to do the titles, and it really shows. Daniel Kleinman was responsible for the excellent GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day and Casino Royale titles, and none of his talent is visible here.

Plot-wise, the movie tries to throw too many relationship/connections at us and expect us to keep track of it all. My wife, myself, and our friends walked out of the movie asking quite a few questions about the plot, and what happened in general. I won’t dive into the larger problems with the plot (since they’d spoil it for you), but let’s just say that Bond seems to be indestructible in this film, and there are too many “convenient” moments, if that makes any sense. Daniel Craig is excellent as Bond, though, and I think he’s getting settled into the role nicely.

I wonder why they didn’t just hire Martin Campbell again to direct, since he did such a great job with Casino Royale (and GoldenEye.) Maybe he was busy with other projects, I’m not sure. But I would’ve gladly waited longer for Quantum of Solace in order to have a better end product. I am optimistic as to what a third Daniel Craig as Bond film could bring, but at the same time, if this is the direction the series is headed in, I’m not liking it.

I purchased a 2007 Nissan Altima in January of last year, and it's been great. Even though I've driven over a 5-inch high piece of wood and bombed it off of a foot high drop on a dirt road. I felt it was worth paying the "extra" for the technology package. Bluetooth? Check. Navigation? Check. Traffic information? Check.

The Bluetooth works like it's supposed to, although it is hard to hear sometimes. I can't fault the car, because the inside of a car isn't dead quiet like the commercials would lead you to believe. The navigation works well, with some flaws. I've found some aftermarket devices that allow you to override the buttons while driving, but haven't implemented them in my own car yet. Kinda scared to do that, lest I turn my car's wiring into a rat's nest.

But that isn't what this entry is about. I'm talking specifically about the XM NavTraffic feature linked with my navigation system that is supposed to allow for real-time traffic information to be overlaid on your map. It works as advertised, and indeed does show green/orange/red lines next to the road if there is traffic, and little icons if there is an accident or construction.

The problem is, most of the time the data was completely worthless. I don't know if it's on a delayed update or what, but driving up to Riverside, the roads would be all green. I can tell you from personal experience that the I-15 to I-215 to I-60 route is not "all green", especially during morning or afternoon traffic. It got so bad that I eventually started manually setting avoidance areas in my navigation system.

The accident information was also delayed. If I was sitting in traffic caused by an accident, rarely would I see it on my screen. For the times it actually did show on my screen, it leads me to make my second point-- Nissan's navigation system doesn't re-route around bad traffic or accidents!

Sure, there is an option to enable the feature, but it does nothing as far as I can tell. At least on my old Magellan GPS unit, it would announce "re-calculating route due to traffic conditions." Heck, the Magellan unit would sense that I was on a freeway and doing stop-n-go traffic, then automatically route me 5, 10, 15 or 20 miles around the block of freeway. Unacceptable that this feature is not found in a much larger (and more expensive) unit.

So eventually, it just didn't make sense anymore to have XM NavTraffic in my car. Maybe your car interprets XM's data differently (and actually avoids problems), but definitely not in a Nissan Altima.

While I'm complaining, I think I'll point out that it seems the XM audio decoder in my vehicle is not the most current decoder chip utilized by XM (even though it's a 2007 vehicle) -- this leads to lower sound quality. It reminds me of the old Delphi SkyFi XM radio I had my previous cars. I wasn't very happy with the quality at all, until someone over at XM411.com revealed to me that the newer SkyFi2 had an upgraded decoder chip. Sure enough, I bought a SkyFi2 and had a much better sound quality experience. Again, it's a shame that a "new" car doesn't have this upgraded chip.

Anyways, I just thought I'd give everyone a post-mortem on my car. Enjoy.

Heather and I went to see Wall-E on the opening night. I honestly didn’t know what to expect from this movie— I couldn’t think of a single Pixar movie I didn’t like. As a side note, I held off watching Ratatouille for forever because I just didn’t want to be disappointed in Pixar; everyone was telling me Ratatouille sucked. It didn’t.

Anyway, getting back to Wall-E, the film is right in so many ways. The pacing is spot on, and we really get invested emotionally in all of the characters, not just the leads (Wall-E and EVE.) And on top of that, it’s just a great sci-fi story, with a dash of action and a extra spoonful of romance.

The visuals are obviously gorgeous, and Pixar did a great job of defining “the world”. There is live-action (real humans) mixed in with the animation and it doesn’t actually seem that out of place. I’m not spoiling anything, but as an example, there’s a great chain of pictures in the captain’s quarters that starts as a picture of an actual person, and ends with the current captain:

As to why us humans are fat, that gets explained :)

Anyway, it’s a great movie, and I’d say it’s easily one of the best I’ve seen this year. There’s an animated Pixar short in front of it, called “Presto!”, about a magician experiencing some issues with the ol’ rabbit out of a hat trick. The audience was in tears for that, and it just set the stage perfectly for what was to come with Wall-E.

So go see it. Take your girlfriend or wife too, especially. They’ll swoon (multiple times) over Wall-E’s cuteness.

 

Here’s some more Wall-E related images and (ooh!) retro-looking Disneyland-ish posters: