The 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver Opening Ceremonies

I am writing this while watching the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, however I won’t post it until the morning.  It will probably take that long to really put my amazement into words.  I love watching the Winter Olympics no matter what, but this year the opening ceremonies are amazing.  This production is amazingly beautiful and it is technically spectacular.

What really takes the cake here are the projections.  Turning the entire stadium into a projection surface was just beautiful.  From the floor of the stadium to every audience member who was given a white poncho it was a truly all inclusive and all encompassing performance.  The integration of imagery and acting and dance  was incredible.  The special effects that gave three-dimensionality to the 2D elements like the whales were beautiful.

Projected Whales with 3D elements like steam from their blowholes

The use of various fabrics and shapes as projection surfaces was pretty wild.  When was the last time you grew trees in the middle of an indoor stadium?  Not only were they trees but totem poles as well.

Fabric "trees" provide an amazing projection surface.

Of course how can we forget that they kicked the whole thing off with one man rapping the floor with his staff and rings of “electricity” emanated out along the floor.

Kicking off the celebration and the amazing effects!

It really amazes me that, given the state of the world today we are still capable of coming together as friends in competition.  Sure there are some countries that seem to still hold grudges against eachother, but they seem to put most of that aside to come and compete in the Olympics.  It is so great that we can come together as a global community, even if it only for sixteen days.  Good luck to all the athletes.

Citius, Altius, Fortius. – Swifter, Higher, Stronger.

Warning this post may contain spoilers!

I have been watching Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse on Fox and personally I have found it to be an interesting and exciting series.  Unfortunately, I feel like it came to an abrupt end much like Whedon’s last series Firefly, at least it was not cut off mid-season.  Thanks to my DVR I got to watch the series finale only a little bit after it was aired.

My first real issue with the series finale was that it was really the second half of a two parter but the first half was never aired in the United States.  The worst thing about this was that there was really no way to know that there was a missing episode.  I had no reason to look it up before watching the Finale and feeling like something was missing.  Thanks to the episode guide on Wikipedia I was able to discover enough info about the missing episode to find it and download it.  I don’t claim to know how the TV networks make decisions, but not airing half of an episode seems like a silly thing to do.  I actually discovered that there are two missing episodes, but the other one, the original pilot, didn’t seem worth going after.

I think that my biggest gripe with the end of the series is that it seemed rushed and forced.  This may be due to the fact that the series may not have been ending on Whedon’s terms since Fox decided to cancel it after the second season.  It seemed like a very odd jump to end up years in the future, very incongruous with the way that we were left in the second to last episode.  I feel like it almost created as many new questions as it answered, the most obvious of these would probably have been answered by the missing episode.

In general I enjoyed the series and I would definitely recommend it.  I hear that the missing episodes exist on the DVD/BluRay releases so that may be a better way to watch.  I always felt like I wanted to see the next episode, and I am kinda bummed out that it is over so soon.

In general I tend to find ways to keep busy. Between work, cooking, eating, skiing in the winter, hiking and camping in the summer it doesn’t really leave that much time. However, it seems that the number of TV commitments that I have continues to grow. Working in theatre, I am usually at work when the primetime shows are on, so having a DVR is kinda handy. Additionally, watching shows on the DVR is so great because you don’t have to watch all the commercials.

The question is, how do you deal with all the shows you want to watch? The list of shows that gets recorded on my DVR is pretty long. I am mostly a Sci-Fi person, so Battlestar Galactica, Stargate and the likes take up lots of my time. Then of course there is Dollhouse, House, Ugly Betty, Mythbusters, Project Runway, Hell’s Kitchen, and the list goes on. Even with some shows having come to an end (like BSG), they are quickly replaced by new shows like Caprica or ABC’s V.

…and how late 2009 tries to kill the A Cappella genre of music.

So I finally have had the chance to start watching NBC’s new show, “The Sing Off” over the past couple nights. I probably wouldn’t have watched it except that my father called me up and told me that his company, VideoLink, shot all the Boston footage of the group from Tufts University, the Beelzebubs. I still have yet to watch the final episode, but it has kinda been a relative love-hate relationship between me and the show, and I am not sure that I would watch it again if they do another season.

Lets start with the fact that this is a show about singing and singing groups. Each episode is two hours long and each group only got maybe two minutes for each song (and they only did one song each in the first episode. You hear more music in an hour of American Idol (once you get through the first couple rounds) than in this show. These a cappella groups worked really hard and some travelled pretty far to get to the show and they are singing a maximum of four minutes each in a two hour show. That would be 32 minutes of singing in 120 minutes of show (if all eight groups performed two songs). What is up with that? We want to watch the show for the music, not the stories and the talking.