Rocky Balboa - The Early Years: Part III

Ahh, Clubber Lang. Now there’s a name that inspires boxing excellence. Rocky III unsurpisingly follows on from where Rocky II left off (you can read my review of that here and the original here) and in a brief montage covers the next three years. I was immediately worried as Stallone looks a lot different even though it was released just three years later (1982) and Rocky does adverts and public appearances which he couldn’t do in the second film.

However it’s not that bad, Stallone still knows his character and Rocky is a more mature family man, but still stupid in his own way. About to retire, taking part in exhibition shows against wrestlers (Hulk Hogan on good form as Thunderlips) and raising a family, up and coming boxer Clubber Lang (Mr T) challenges him to a final fight which he can’t resist. This is when the problems start for Rocky and for the film. Rocky loses the fight, Mickey dies and he feels a waste. What follows in surprisingly short time is his rematch and the predictable conclusion.

I liked some bits, such as the fact Rocky trains in a flash gym and Lang in a basic gym - a reversal from when Rocky fought Apollo. The introduction of Apollo as a friend rather than foe is interesting and fun, it’s just I prefered Rocky when he was broke and struggling to cope. Now he’s in a suit and a little bit smug. And Stallone has pumped himself up from filming Rambo and looks too perfect. Even Paulie cleans himself up. There’s too much boxing and too little character development. I enjoyed the match with Hulk Hogan more than the boxing proper, it’s even more realistic.

It’s a decent film and the introduction of the Eye of the Tiger gets you going, but it’s not a patch of the previous outings.

Now for the Cold War of Rocky IV…

Rocky Balboa - The Early Years: Part II

Released in 1979, Rocky II begins where the last one ended, in fact you get the last five minutes of the original and then it continues with Rocky being taken to hospital. There, despite whispering to Rocky at the end of the fight he doesn’t want a rematch, Apollo taunts him saying he wants to fight him again. So the scene is set for the film - or is it? Actually there’s a lot to get out the way first. Again, I can’t quite believe this is the same actor as the one that starred in Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot! Stallone is brilliant, just watch the scene where he proposes to Adrian. The wedding is great too. When Rocky kisses the bride you expect cheering and music, instead the camera pans up to reveal the only guests are Paulie, Micky, the money lender Tony Gazzo and Adrian’s boss from the pet shop.

Rocky is brain damaged after the fight and is happy with Adrian, with a new house and playing stick ball with kids in the street. This is juxtaposed with his awkwardness at the advertising shoot where he’d rather be somewhere else. He wants to box but gives it up for his wife and imminent baby, however he finds getting a regular job hard and after taunts from Apollo Creed, gets drawn back into a rematch.

It’s strange that the actual proper boxing training and fight takes up such a small part of the film, but it’s better for it. I’m not expert at the pugilistic arts but something tells me that’s not proper boxing. Rocky is supposedly fighting right-handed (he’s a south paw) to confuse Apollo but from what I can tell he basically gets punched in the face for 15 rounds. Mickey’s slightly risky strategy of reverting him to south paw in the last round is followed by a couple of decent left hooks and some more falling over from the both of them.

The fighting is just silly, fun, but unrealistic, I much preferred the earlier scenes. Rocky’s such a well written character, I enjoyed him speaking to his turtles, telling jokes to Adrian and trying to read much more than the boxing. Saying that I couldn’t help but cheer at the end.

A very slight rehash of the original film, Rocky II is almost as good as the first. Not sure what they can do next, oh, I know, get Mr T in on the act…

Rocky Balboa - The Early Years: Part I

With the release of Rocky Balboa in the UK on 19 January, I thought I’d take a look at the five preceding films. Yes, believe it or not, Rocky Balboa is the sixth.

Seems like a lot doesn’t it? Well the original was released in 1976 and won the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Film editing as well as seven other nominations including two for Sylvester Stallone as writer and actor. So it must be a good film?

Well it is, but it’s not as good as I remember. Don’t get me wrong, Sly is fantastic in it, the story seems predictable but isn’t, the supporting actors are great and it has a gritty, realistic feel which is lacking from the later ‘Rockys’. It’s just that it’s a product of it’s time. Admittedly I was watching it on VHS so the picture quality was poor, but it’s more the pacing than the picture. It was a lot slower than I remember and I found myself crying out for the training montage (see below for the video). It’s probably the best bit in the film (apart from the end), when he jumps up those last steps with ease you can’t help but smile. [Read more]

Will the Hogfather be happy this Christmas?

Maybe.

On Monday night I was at the Curzon Mayfair in London at the premiere of Hogfather. For those who don’t know, Hogfather was the 20th Discworld book by British fantasy author Terry Pratchett (he’s written more than 30 now), and satellite channel Sky One has made a two-part film to be shown at Christmas in the UK.

Discworld is a fantasy land that lives of the back of a giant turtle swimming its way through the universe. Basically an allegory and satire of our world, each book comments on different topics such as newspapers, wars, the postal system etc. They’re witty, convincing and plain brilliant. Hogfather is about Santa Claus or Father Christmas if you prefer.

The story revolves around the fact that the Hogfather has gone missing after an assassin is hired to kill him. In response Death (yes, Death) dons a red suit and white beard and with the help of his butler Alfred, the Death of Rats and his grand-daughter Susan, he sets out to ensure all the children’s wishes come true.

The premiere was actually only for the first part of this four-hour adaption, but it gave enough away to get a feel of what the whole thing will be like. I can’t really spoil anything for anyone who’s read the book as it’s as faithful as it can be, but I won’t for people who haven’t either. While characters may differ from your imagination as in all films adapted from books, the film creates a wonderful version of Discworld. The opening sequence in particular is brilliant at setting the scene for new and old viewers alike. The humour that shines through in the book comes through and actors such as David Jason as Alfred with Death and the cameo by watchman Nobby Nobbs (a bit better looking than I imagined).

David Warner as Lord Downey of the Assassin’s Guild, Joss Ackland as Mustrum Ridcully the wizard and others relish their roles. However there are a few negatives. The pace is slow, I’m hoping this will pick up in the second half though as maybe they’ve done a too faithful adaption of the book and could have missed some bits out. And then there’s the voices of the Auditors. Never have I heard such ridiculous voices. They remind me of the Vogons from the BBC adaptation of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Mister Teatime (Marc Warren) - oh dear. He looks great with the black eyeball and blank stare but I just couldn’t be scared by someone with a baby’s voice. It just didn’t work for me.

However to save the day there’s Death (Sir Ian Richardson) and Susan (Michelle Dockery). As Death and Albert try to replace the Hogfather they provide some great humour and as a skelton Death is realised brilliantly. However it’s Susan who’s the star of the show. Trying to escape her destiny she deals with bogeymen like they’re a fact of life and at the end of the first part rushes to the Hogfather’s castle of bones and finds the God of Hangovers. I really can’t see anyone else in the part, she’s excellent.

The scenery is beautiful and with only a £6million budget the special effects are decent and some of the sets outstanding - Death’s house for instance. It’s screened in a few weeks over here and despite a few reservations I’m really looking forward to the second part.

The scoop from the pre-show Q&A was that director Vadim Jean is working on a screenplay of another Pratchett book with Terry himself adding “it might have a Rincewind feel”.

Photos can be found here.

Photos from the Premiere of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather

Some early pictures from Monday 27th’s premiere of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather. Click on the thumbnail for a larger picture. Also a review of the first part will follow shortly, to be informed of when this is up, please either subscribe to updates by email (at the bottom of this post) or to the RSS feed.

More can be found in the gallery here (click View Slideshow).

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Hogging the limelight

So here they are. My tickets to the premiere of Hogfather, the Terry Pratchett two-part film on Sky One this Christmas. I previously wrote about it here. It’s on Monday night at the Curzon Mayfair in London at 6pm if you want to come and cheer the cast. Technically I’m going to the 9.30pm showing so will miss them because I’ll be in the pub.

Don’t worry, I’ll drag myself away, take some pictures and get a review up as soon as I can.

4 more easy steps to getting your videos online

In a previous post looking at 4 easy steps to getting your videos online, I looked at 4 of the major players in the online video sharing market - YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe and Soapbox. In this post I’m going to look at some other sites that I missed out, and try to spend less time on the sign-up process. Unlike the previous sites, most of these sites are not general video sharing sites, but a mixture of an attempt to create custom “channels” where a user can create an online presence with a series of videos or episodes, or social networking sites, with video at their core.

Revver, Blip, Brightcove, MyHeavy and Vimeo have all been mentioned to me as alternatives, so let’s spend some time taking a look.

Step 1: Find your video

For ease of comparison I once again chose the short (13 seconds, 3.5MB) video of the Amalfi Coast, between Positano and Amalfi.

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Step 2: Create an account

What initially seemed easy, turned out to be a little less straightforward. Because of the revenue sharing opportunities that Revver are developing there was a fair bit more information they needed from you, such as paypal information, agreement to various distribution options, and your address. There were further optional questions too. I would prefer they asked me those questions later.

Incredibly easy and took less than 10 seconds.

A relatively lengthly sign-up process, requiring an address and phone number.

Easy, with optional entries for your cellphone or Instant Messenger ID for future updates.

They say sign up only takes 10 seconds, but they’re wrong. It takes about 8. Nice and easy.

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Step 3: Upload the video

Using a flash based interface this gave a nice progress indicator. I was unsure if I could leave to browse around the site, so I tried it and although I lost the progress indicator it soon appeared in my dashboard. [Incidentally, I really liked the dashboard on Revver, which shows your earnings, message inbox and so on]. Adding the usual title, description and keywords, there was also a selection for audience using the American ratings classification, PG-13, NC-17 etc. Revver then makes you wait in order for their Video Patrol team to review the video.

A nice visual editor for the description box made a nice change, with the ability to add images and HTML if you wish. You could also upload your own thumbnail image, choose a copyright license, content rating (bespoke), and some optional fields regarding distribution. Despite all the options I found it to be simple and intuitive. Uploading once again gives a progress bar, with an indication of transfer rate. It also suggests some other features of the site, which for a newbie was quite interesting (such as the ability to upload via FTP and directly from Windows Movie Maker) but I doubt of much use for a regular user. However after clicking on one of these I then hit a problem - where was the video I uploaded? Honestly I couldn’t find it, it seems that navigating away from the page interrupts the upload. I ended up re-uploading the same video, waiting until it had been uploaded and then using the options I was then presented with.

Brightcove is more of a corporate solution where branding and photos (as well as videos) can be uploaded, called “Assets”. Like vPod, Brightcove attempts to enable businesses and individuals to create their own personal TV channels. Upload requires either a Quick Upload plugin or a separate piece of software called Publishpod, which is quite odd as they whole site is Flash based and an uploader could have easily been built in. Videos have to already be in Flash format, or Windows Media Video for Pay Media downloads. As this meant that I could no longer compare this site to other sites, I didn’t upload the video and didn’t continue with Brightcove. Not rated.

[Update: I received the following info in an email from Brightcove: "...the Publishpod can be used to both encode videos from various formats into Flash and upload files to your account. Only the Quick Upload plugin requires the videos to be previously encoded." However the Publishpod still requires a separate download and install which no other site requires.]

This was as easy as any of the other sites, although I was forced to select a category which, although may fit with the overall themes of the site, none of them fit with my test video. A pop-up window shows the progress of the upload, allowing you to continue to use the site and upload another video if you want. Closing the window aborts the upload. Nice and simple.

Very simple like the others, a progress bar informs you of the, er, progress. Vimeo has a weekly limit of 30MBs for videos which may be too constraining for a lot of people. A nice big “watch it” link appears to avoid confusion. The video appears in it’s native format to begin with (.avi through Windows Media Player), but is converted to flash in the background.

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Step 4: View the video

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Overall

Pros: Nice interface. Probably the best video quality in this test.
Cons: A long wait to see video online, although may have been due to uploading problems.

Pros: Integrated video blogging platform, choice of video formats.
Cons: A few too many options and no warning on interrupting uploads so a person with a small brain like me has problems.

Pros: Fast Flash interface, plenty of options.
Cons: Less of a video sharing site and more of a social networking site. Low video quality.

Pros: Quick to join, easy to upload and available immediately.
Cons: Low video quality - arguably worse than MyHeavy.

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Final thoughts

Go here for a comparison of the video quality of all 8 video sharing sites from this article and the previous article.

Video quality was overall much poorer that the 4 big sites. Several sites took too long to process/approve the video. Previously Metacafe users decided not to approve my video (I got an email to say it was too boring, I must have missed that in the t&c’s….), and although that was later rectified I wonder whether reviewing solutions like this are scaleable if a site gets truly popular? Blip did a nice job of trying to integrate video publishing, blogging and various other tools such as del.ico.us and Flickr. Their video was available immediately (after I figured out the upload “problem”), in flash format or the original source (.avi) and in the latter the quality was the same as source (which I imagine it should be!). MyHeavy attempts to be more of a social networking site and to some degree succeeds, although I’m no expert.

All the sites had some small niggle with them (such as the adding of keywords where there seems to be no standard for how to enter these - do you separate them with a space or a comma? Use quotation marks for phrases? Are you allowed 3, 5 or unlimited keywords?), but these are probably personal and subjective.

Other sites such as Eyespot and Daily Motion confirms that at the moment there seems no stopping the rise of online video sharing sites, there is a wealth to choose from. Which one to choose is probably based on what you need it for. YouTube is the most popular (and will probably stay so with the merge with Google Video), but also one with the most “competition”. Revver and Metacafe allow you to share revenue if that is what you want, MyHeavy and Blip are more integrated social networking sites, and Soapbox has the highest video quality (in my opinion), but is only a small marketplace at the moment. Please, let me know your thoughts.

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