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This trailer looks really good, a bit Harry Potter-ish, but I guess that’s understandable given that it’s directed by the same guy who directed the first two Harry Potter movies. Some decent action scenes and special effects. This could be a cool pre-summer blockbuster, especially for the teen set. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief drops on February 12, 2010.

Not a bad Vampire Diaries episode…a lot of set up for future episodes. I had to admit that I totally called Jeremy’s new friend as being a vampire (no one can be that pushy without wanting something), but I didn’t guess Ben (the bartender) at all. And Bonnie seems to be falling right into that trap! It seems like Damon is not the only one trying to get Katherine out of that tomb. Speaking of Katherine, looks like she had quite a few friends….um, minions, of her own. As the vampire who got staked said to Damon and Stefan, “did you think you were the only ones?” Naughty, naughty.

The part where Stefan did the dance move and the kiss with Elena was awesome! I loved all of the almost bite scenes where Elena is saved right at the last minute, and especially the fact that she fights back after the last attack with a pencil, no less. Stefan is starting to get a little more guts which is cool, and I like that he has Damon guessing. I enjoyed seeing them working together for once, it was a cool dynamic. I really want to find out what is the deal with Alaric – especially now that we know that his wife’s name was Isabelle, which was supposedly Elena’s birth-mother’s name. Like I said, a lot of build-up for future episodes.

So where is this all going? I can only say somewhere good! I cannot wait for next week’s episode when we get a glimpse of Katherine, some fangs, and some real vamp-itude. Sweet!

About three things I was absolutely positive: 1) Edward was a vampire, 2) Edward had fangs, 3) Edward became one hot human that I am totally in love with (yum).

I love the fact that the main vampire’s name is Edward. That was classic. I wonder if it was intentional?

First things first – great movie! Daybreakers was totally deserving of its 65% rating on Rotten Tomatoes! The six second guy was right – no sparkles, just lots of blood, gore, and colored contacts. Oh wait, and humans taking back their right to life. Definitely no shortage of blood and guts here – it’s almost as bad, I mean as good, as Zombieland!

Great concept for a movie especially in a time where books and other media have romanticized and popularized vampires as being sexy, mysterious, and hot. But the question is – do they remain that way in a world where everyone is a vampire? I think not. Ethan Hawke proves that when he makes the transformation back to a human. He is a hot human! Far hotter than he was as a vampire, with cool human hair! The movie does give you some awesome perspective – when everyone’s immortal and has super-strength and super-speed, then being a vampire becomes boring. There’s nothing special there. It also makes you think about what being a vampire actually is – they are parasites who need a host to survive, the host being you, the human. And when you’re being hunted by a locust-like swarm of starving vampires, suddenly they’re not so sexy. They’re fricken scary!

Like Zombieland which portrays a world overtaken by zombies, Daybreakers goes for the world overrun by vampires. Humans in both are the minority. Unlike Zombieland‘s zombies which really only want to find fresh meat, the vampires in Daybreakers are corporate and greedy and driven by capitalism. In the end though, when the human source dries out, those formerly hot vamps become pretty gross mutants, and only really want to find fresh blood. So technically they’re the same. Flesh-eating, blood-sucking predators. Let’s not forget that.

The opening of the film showcases some cool scenes on how life has evolved to support a night lifestyle as opposed to living during the day. There are cool cars with “daytime video driving modes” and community security sunrise alerts. And you buy your coffee with a shot of hemoglobin instead of half-and-half. Toss in a couple of fang-whitening ads and it’s vampire central!

In this vampire nation, Ethan Hawke (Edward) is the chief hematologist for a vampire conglomerate that hunts and “farms” the remaining humans for blood. He is trying to develop a blood substitute before they all starve and turn into deformed, mutated vampires who’ll eat anything, other vampires or themselves included. Edward hooks up with a group of humans and discover that there’s a cure, namely the sun frying a vampire until it shocks the heart back into life. Believable? Sure, it is. And then the fat lady sings big-time because one bite of a re-turned human, and bam! “Humanism” conquers “vampirism.” Talk about the awesome reverse infection concept!

The action scenes were great. A bunch of times I literally jumped out of my seat, heart in my mouth. I absolutely LOVED Willem Dafoe’s character. He had some great one-liners that made me laugh out loud.

When Ethan Hawke asks him how it felt to be in the sun when he got re-turned, he replies “I felt like a goddamn piece of fried chicken!”

Or how about when Ethan asks him whether they are safe, and Dafoe says, “Being safe in a world full of vampires is like bare-backing a five dollar whore.”

Hilarious! His dry delivery was perfect and a nice complement to some of the more graphic horror-driven scenes, like staked exploding vampires. Blech.

Daybreakers was a pleasant surprise. Kudos for a low-budget, under-the-radar film that takes back some of the vampire “chutzpah.” This “Team Edward” has fangs, blood, and takes the “hot human” back to the forefront. It erases some of the cheesy romanticism and brings back some of the thriller/horror feel to this genre, and that’s good.

I give Daybreakers 3 and a half out of 5 stars.

The Apple iPad has officially been announced, a device that straddles the middle ground between smartphones and laptops. It’s a 9.7 inch tablet-style device with a multi-touch screen, pretty much a bigger version than the iTouch, that accommodates email, ebooks, photos, games, music, video, web surfing. Steve Jobs calls it “way better than a laptop, way better than a phone.” Looks like a “big and tall” version of the iTouch with a price tag of $499-$699 depending on the size.

Still, could it be that the unicorn is just another horse? Jury’s still out.

Twentieth Century Fox announced yesterday that Avatar now holds the record for highest box-office grossing movie of all time, standing at $1.859 billion and beating it’s sister film, Titanic at $1.843 billion. It was to be expected but a still, a noteworthy moment nonetheless.

According to the Hollywood Insider, the film’s amazing performance in 3D accounts for 80% of the film’s domestic box-office gross. That’s not surprising considering the cost of a ticket (or IMAX ticket) these days. So for now, Titantic still probably holds the record for number of people actually going to see the film.

Rumors abound! Those Apple reps sure know how to keep a secret – not even a leak…for the highly anticipated mystery “product launch” of the Apple Tablet (iPad?) on January 27th, 2010. We are waiting with bated breath to see if the Apple Tablet does indeed sweep away the competition, the Kindles and the Nooks and all fifteen of the Sony Editions. Or will it fall short, being “unfashionably” late to the party as it were, and out-dressed by all its counterparts? See my last post on whether the Kindle is the new black.

All shall be revealed on Wednesday as to whether traditional white may be the new black after all. Stay tuned hopefuls.

I wasn’t kidding when I said I was going to go back to playing FFII in my last post about Final Fantasy: The Crystal Bearers. Actually I was…and then I clicked on it, and well that was the end of that. Seriously FFII is a classic. I don’t know why newer games (in the FF dynasty) with so much technology at their fingertips just seem to get bogged down in it. Take the Crystal Bearers for example…graphics are overdone, gameplay feels sluggish, and it’s just boring. I’d take the Sylph cave in Final Fantasy II as a side quest any day over the inane “design your own garden” in Crystal Bearers!

In FFII, the graphics aren’t great, but the gameplay definitely is. 18 hours later and memories of the “Big Whale” revisited, I have beaten Zeromus and loved every minute of it, even those dastardly “EvilWalls” and the “Behemoths.”

Rydia is still my favorite player, and I still think that Rosa looks like an anime version of Jennifer Aniston. Oh, yea and Cecil is still paladin hot!

I definitely didn’t get as worked up as I did the last few times I played it, but it was still challenging, especially that Odin fight where I kept getting cleaved. Definitely as fun as I remembered! FFIII, here I come!

In the NY Times today, there was another interesting article, “On Kindle’s List, the Best Sellers Don’t Necessarily Need to Sell.” This time it was about best-selling books on the Kindle, only the kicker was that these books are free. Yes, you read that right – they are free. According to the article, “more than half of the best-selling e-books for the Kindle are available at no charge.”

The thinking behind this stems from more unknown authors who want to create some buzz about their work – offer the e-book Kindle version for free a month before hard-copy release or perhaps create a fan-base for secondary title releases. The goal is to get readers to try out new authors, and get them hooked for future publications (that aren’t free).

Although the CEO of Hachette disagrees – “it is illogical to give away books for free.” Then again, his clients include James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer who only have a to sneeze into a book and people will buy it. Not so much for other less familiar writers who need to drum up some interest against such incredible competition. Trust me, I’m one of them.

Let’s be realistic though. Not every new author wants to give away free books. After all, it’s their blood, sweat and tears. But if something like this in a promotional vein means generating buzz…then it starts to develop a little bit of a silver lining. Word-of-mouth these days, especially with the internet and the flux of social media like Facebook and Twitter, has become viral. So why not leverage the visibility? I would.

On the personal front, one of the literary agents I had the pleasure of meeting was Richard Curtis, founder of E-Reads. Well-known and highly respected in the fields of literary agenting and publishing, Mr. Curtis had it down pat. The world of books is evolving and he’s right there with it.

According to the NY Times article, e-books represent about 5% of the book market. And that is a growing number. Just ask Amazon who refuses to release actual sales figures for Kindle sales (theory is they’re going for market share and not for profit). Either way, it’s an upticking trend. Take a look at an article about their projected earnings from MarketWatch for the fourth quarter – not too shabby!

The trick is to stay ahead of the curve. With handheld gadgets like the iPhone or iPod Touch or the PSP becoming more popular, this is where the curve is heading. I’d predict that more and more people, myself included, will capitulate at some point and pick up a Kindle. I haven’t yet – I’ve always been a big fan of actually touching the pages of a book and reading actual print. But I’m on a PC every single day so maybe in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be a convert.

See this article in the Larchmont Loop.

And the Vampire Diaries are BACK! Damon and his sexy smart mouth are BACK!! Let me open this post with a very “Damonesque” line – “It’s not like we all hang out together at the vamp bar and grill.”

Gotta love this guy even though he is a stone cold killer. Talk about breaking your ex-girlfriend’s heart, um, I mean literally ripping it out of her chest! Well I guess she did try to kill him.

Elena still totally melodramatic so that hasn’t changed much. And Stefan, our dark knight in shining armor, who announces with a brooding frown that he saved her from her parents’ accident and has been watching her ever since. Stalk much, Stefan? Only thing I really didn’t like so much was the contrived bombshell “Elena, you were adopted” to explain why she looks so much like Katherine. Just felt too predictable for me.

I also thought Elena drinking herself into oblivion…oh wait, her tolerance level was that of a 300 pound man…but anyway I thought it was going to end up into something a little more fun. Boo.

Still I just think about Damon and I can’t help a little smile. “Vampires can’t procreate but we like to try.” Hilarious.

Can’t wait to see what Alaric’s planning! Looks like Damon is in for some big trouble…

So this morning I shook my head in amazement at the article in the NY Times: You Saw What in ‘Avatar’? Pass Those Glasses! Wow, activists have to find anything these days to protest, don’t they? Or as the author in this article says, many groups have just jumped onto the bandwagon to “project their issues” onto Avatar, from feminists to the Vatican to the Editor in Chief of io9.com, Ms. Newitz, who calls Avatar “the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare.” What!?

It’s a film, people, and yes it may echo popular themes and politics and social evolution, but it doesn’t mean that everyone has to jump on a bandwagon protesting ridiculous things like whether the male Na’vi are bigger than female Na’vi or whether someone is smoking a cigarette. One, take a look at your human male friends – for the most part, they are “stronger and more muscular than their female counterparts.” And two, guess what happens to the scientist smoking the cigarette – um, she dies.

As for the Vatican freaking out about a fictional alien species that deify the spirit of the earth (Eywa), come on! “It gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature?” Really? I just saw it as a message – protect the earth’s amazing ecology, it sustains humanity. But I’m not going to go light a candle and hope that a Seed of Eywa drops on top of me! Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within talk about a similar earth spirit, Gaia. It’s not new, and it’s not going to make people stop going to church. I think I need to insert the definition of the word fiction (yes, click on it). I’m betting that the Vatican were pretty pissed about Philip Pullman’s, The Golden Compass and the evil, controlling Magisterium, and to make things even more convoluted, those people had their “daemon” souls *gasp* on the outside of their bodies!

To Ms. Newitz, who also wrote, “humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress,” until a white man “switches side at the last minute [....] becoming it’s savior.” Hello! In almost any sci-fi or fantasy film, there’s always going to be an oppressor or a hero. It’s what makes people connect with movies – the age-old theme of good versus evil. Why does it have to be a “white” issue??? It’s a capitalist issue. It’s a greed issue. It’s a human issue. Get over the white guilt garbage.

The article also comments on claims that Avatar copied story plot/elements from other movies. Well, duh. In entertainment, almost everything has been done before! Just because there’s a scene in Fern Gully with the bulldozer’s killing the fairies’ forest, it doesn’t mean that James Cameron copied that film. I could name five films right now that have similar elements from other movies.

Anyway I’ll get off my soapbox now. I just get aggravated when people can’t just make connections and take the good out of something, as opposed to finding every possible negative thing and just ripping something down. Does Avatar have themes that parallel social/cultural phenomenon? Of course, it does. It has to for its viewers to connect with it, whether it’s something as simple as a romantic theme or as complex as an “imperialist” metaphor. Everything is left wide open to human interpretation, mine included. So I guess if someone wants to get pissed off about the male avatars having more muscles, well to each his own.

I’m gonna start my own issue that none of the Na’vi are over-weight. They are all anorexic. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

It’s the beginning of award season and last night at the Golden Globes, Avatar picked up two awards. One for Best Director (congrats Mr. Cameron!) and one for Best Drama. It was pretty neat when James Cameron thanked his actors and support team in the Na’vi language, saying “I see you” or “oél ngáti kámeie.”

Avatar has currently box-officed $1.6 billion, just $200,000 short of James Cameron’s reigning box-office champ, Titanic. The man is a legend!

Back to editing (see my last post on Slice and Dice Time). My new question is how and when do I know that enough is enough? Do I err on the side of caution or on the side of just-delete-it? I am finding myself in a curious spot, and my question is, can one actually over-edit?

Self-editing sucks because it’s like staring at yourself in the mirror and deciding which pieces of yourself to cut off or erase. So you start with the relatively painless things like a couple finger-nails, maybe an eyelash or two. But what about when you get to more major amputation? Like an ear or a knee, or even worse, an actual limb? I repeat. It sucks.

For the ‘literalists,’ my example above is an analogy. I’m not really cutting parts of myself. But that’s what editing feels like to me. Shakespeare knew what he was talking about in Hamlet, or in my case, the pain of editing versus the uncertainty of selling to a publisher. So I guess the moral of this post is, editing may be bad, but not getting published would be far worse.

Daybreakers has been out for a week but I have yet to see it. This vampire movie takes a new approach to the vampire-mania across the nation – it portrays a world where vampires are the majority and humans are the minority, hunted and farmed for blood. Enter power, corruption, and politics. Nix teen-angst, sparkles, and cool vampire hair. Oh wait, the cool vampire hair is still there. Like blood, I guess you can’t have a vampire flick without it. At least this one has fangs.

The reviews from Rotten Tomatoes look decent, at 66%, which in the Rotten Tomato world is pretty darn good. And I heard the 6 Second Review guy this morning say that he’s in because the vampires don’t sparkle. Classic.

Check out those 6 seconds here.

Maybe I’ll get a look at it this weekend. For now, here’ s the trailer if you haven’t seen it.

That “slice and dice” title doesn’t mean me or someone else, thank goodness. But it does mean that I have finally heard back from my agent after about four weeks on the manuscript (see last post – Nonstop Manuscript Editing). So basically what we are looking at is another round of editing before we go out for final submission. My agent calls it “literary liposuction” – trimming the fat.

I must admit that editing is probably one of the hardest parts of this whole process, after writing the novel of course. I mean you’ve gotten to this point after enormous amounts of self-editing and professional editing and all-other-kinds of editing, and guess what, it still doesn’t end. I keep telling myself that it’s for the good of the book even despite the tiny little question niggling around in my head – am I selling out? If you don’t know what I mean by that, check out my post on Teen Fiction for Dummies.

A friend of mine says what I am going through is the classic Ben Affleck/Matt Damon conundrum (except with books not movies) – it’s the difference between making a movie that you want to make (the art film) and making the movie that everybody else wants you to make (the safe commercial film).

Excerpt from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back:-

Ben Affleck: You’re like a child. What’ve I been telling you? You gotta do the safe picture. Then you can do the art picture. But then sometimes you gotta do the payback picture because your friend says you owe him.
[They both take a beat and look at the camera]
Ben Affleck: And sometimes, you have to go back to the well.
Matt Damon: And sometimes, you do Reindeer Games.

So the moral of the story is if you don’t want Reindeer Games, at the end of the day especially for a first time author, you have to do the “safe” picture – which metaphorically-speaking means, “do whatever the heck they tell you.” When you’re John Grisham, you can write the alphabet for all anyone cares.

Lesson learned. I’m off to edit.

So I only have one question. Can you fall in love with an actor after he did a certain movie to such an extent that his voice undermines you even before he proves that he’s a good guy in some other movie?

OMG. Sam Worthington, I love you. And maybe, it’s totally because of Avatar, but oh man, wow. I wasn’t even watching Christian Bale (who by the way, let’s face it, is totally awesome!), I was all into the half-man, half-machine character, Marcus Wright…my boy, Sam Worthington, as in Jake Sully from Avatar.

Nothing new here in this installment of man versus machine, only this time it’s really about John Connor trying to save himself from being annihilated. Oh wait, that was what the other three were about. My bad. I meant this time was about John Connor trying to save the teenage boy whom he would eventually send back to the past to save his mother from the first terminator (bad Arnold), and who turns out to be his dad. Yep, if you think about that too much, you may just go crazy. Anyway, so in T4, he does end up saving his future dad, and Marcus Wright (half-man, half-machine) ends up saving him with his own heart, after ripping his chip out from the back of his head and telling the Skynet mother computer, “Watch me!” Bad-ass hybrid? Yes, please!

Great special effects, and some pretty neat action sequences. It would have been nice for them to use Marcus Wright’s character a little more to show how John Connor starts to trust the machines – at least enough to send them back in time (good Arnold) to protect himself and his mother. This wasn’t very obvious even though Marcus Wright does save his prophetic butt! I also loved the little girl who didn’t speak – totally awesome when she hands John Connor the remote detonator for the Skynet facility!!

I also wasn’t too sure about Christian Bale’s choice for a girlfriend. I kept thinking in my head that his mother (Sarah Connor) would beat that girl to the ground, but  maybe that’s just me being cynical. I thought that a more suitable girlfriend for John Connor would have been Blair. But at least she got a piece of the mandroid/mancandy, Marcus Wright. Yum-O!

Fine, I admit it. I am totally biased. Now I need to go watch Avatar on my iPod. Again. Woohoo!

Let me start by saying – I do not believe in actual vampires, as in ‘your-neighbor-is-a-vampire’ or ‘go-out-and-date’ a vampire. I love to read about them and write about them because they are interesting, and as Ms. Laurence agrees, mysterious, talented and sexy. But to me, they are fictional and only become real in my head/imagination/dreams. So this book wouldn’t necessarily be something I would run out and purchase. I reviewed it because I reviewed a similar book written from a male perspective, and I thought it’d be an interesting comparison (the other book was a gift).

You may recall my review of The Vampire Seduction Handbook (if not, click on the link). Well this book, How to Catch and Keep a Vampire: a Step by Step Guide to Loving the Bad and the Beautiful, may very well be the yin to that book’s yang.

A couple things to note: 1) It is written by a female unlike the very male perspective in The Vampire Seduction Handbook. 2) It covers a lot of the same stuff – dating, biting, blood-drinking, romance, sex, conversion, etc. 3) It covers new stuff like good versus bad versus evil vampires. 4) The format is similar – a how-to guide with little stories and anecdotes dispersed throughout. 5) How to Catch and Keep a Vampire definitely takes itself more seriously than The Vampire Seduction Handbook.

So on to my review. I read this book in about an hour and a half, and as always, first the good things. I really enjoyed the “Case Study” stories. I did get quite engrossed in them and wanted more. But I expect that this has to do with me personally, as I indicated above, I’m more of a fictional believer in vampires. Like the VSH, I did find myself skipping over the parts that weren’t as interesting to get to the parts that were. The book was easy to read and the pace flowed fairly well. There were many areas that were clever and witty, where I had an internal laugh at certain similarities with things I’ve thought myself. I liked the fact that the author kept me hooked with the story of the evil vampire, Dr. Steven Grey at key points throughout the book – I wanted to find out what happened (which you do, on the next to the last page).

Now for the not-so-good things. I didn’t get the feeling that this book was written from a tongue-in-cheek perspective. So my brain couldn’t really enjoy it very much because I was unable to connect with the apparent “seriousness” of its how-to information. I have to say, I almost stopped reading at the “Top Ten Vampire Pick-up Lines” page. It almost killed me, and not in a good way. While the VSH was funny – excerpt from my review:  “The Vampire Seduction Handbook is a fun, interesting read that doesn’t take itself too seriously (and neither should any readers looking for non-fiction – it clearly says “humor” on the back jacket, so step back, breathe, and run a sanity check before you run out and do something clearly irrational like trying to entrap a vampire lover),” How to Catch and Keep a Vampire felt more like an actual guide which unfortunately made it seem too implausible to be enjoyable for me.

Ok, so now I feel like I need to explain myself – I love the idea of vampires, their sexy mystery, the danger, etc., etc. If I had to explain it more succinctly, it would be like vampire “beer-goggles” – you know where it’s all in the moment and you’re lost and it’s hot, terrifying, amazing? Well, when I read a how-to guide that tricks my brain into thinking “practical application” of something that clearly isn’t real, well then the beer goggles come off, and it’s become a “coyote-ugly” morning. Ok, maybe not too succinct, but suffice it to say that it’s likely I just want to stay in my fantasy-world – the fictional and glorious world of books and movies where anything is possible – for the very reason that it’s called Urban Fantasy, because it’s not real. Strip something of its mystery and it tends to lose its magnetism. In my world, not everything has to be real, to be real, if that makes any sense.

So overall, it was an interesting read, more so if you’re actually after a practical “how-to” guide. If you want to fish, you buy a fishing guide. If you want to catch a vampire, you get this one. Like I said, I quite liked the little stories of the author’s “interaction” with vampires and would probably enjoy reading more on those subjects, if not to satisfy my very real desire for escapism as opposed to the realist, non-believer in me that says – if vampires were real, I’d probably be one. Then again, people haven’t seen God and they believe in him, so who am I to say that other things don’t exist. But that my friends, is a discussion for another time (not to mention for someone far more theologically qualified than I am).  I would rate How to Catch and Keep a Vampire 3 out of 5 stars.

So far Avatar has grossed over $1.4 billion dollars worldwide at the box-office making it the 2nd highest grossing film ever. Guess what was number 1? Yep, another James Cameron epic – Titanic, standing at $1.8 billion. Avatar enters its fourth week of being in theaters (initially released on December 18, 2009). The domestic US total was just over $374 million at the box office. A lot of the money on the US side stems from the film being shown in IMAX and the publicity that went along with that. Compared to actual tickets sold for Titanic in 1997, the cost of an IMAX ticket is $16 versus around $7 back then. Fox estimates that 14% of Avatar’s business stems from IMAX 3D showings. I would say that’s probably pretty accurate considering that I saw it twice in IMAX 3D at $16 each time, and yes, I’m probably also going to buy the DVD. I have no doubt that Avatar will go on to beat Titanic as highest grossing film ever.

Sources: BusinessWeek.com, Comingsoon.net

So for those of you who were completely stuck like I was and had to depend on your gamer 19 year old brother to rescue you because nowhere on the internet, not Gamespot, not IGN, not Gamepro, said how to put the stupid fire out on the wagon (you know where you’re accompanying Ilia with the sick Zoran prince and the weird old lady who winks at Link way too suggestively all the time) while you’re being chased by thugs and bombed by birds AND trying to manipulate a horse that randomly draws to a halt for no reason!? Yep, that sequence.

So I thought I’d do a quick post with some straight up instructions. Gallop right up to the wagon and when you see the downward-pointing red arrow, lock on with Z and then release your gale boomerang. Repeat if necessary. It will put the fire right out. Then swing your wii-mote away to slice and dice those thugs, or use your bow and arrow. With the birds, may sure to take them out as they drop bombs which DIVERT the horse and wagon into a continuous loop. Keep in mind you have to do this twice – there are two diversion areas. So basically if you’re like me, you’d pretty much go around in about fifteen circles before saying…wait a gosh-darn minute! Anyway, knock off the birds – same with the wagon, get close to them and when you see the arrow above them, lock on with Z and press B to fire the arrow. It will dispatch them and get you to Kakariko Village where you need to go to meet the Zoran Queen for your underwater gear.

BTW, not sure if anyone had any issues with the actual the game disc for Twilight Princess. I had to return mine because it was super slow and went to a white screen going from screen to screen. Not good. Bought it on Amazon and they were pretty great about the exchange. New game works great.

So here it is, the second trailer for the new film from Tim Burton releasing on March 5, 2010 in 3D in select theaters – Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. That one looks like it’s going to be a real trip. Avatar in 3D was a cinematic experience. Alice in Wonderland in 3D on the other hand may require some intense mind-soothing therapy post viewing. I’m pretty sure from seeing the trailer below that it will be wild…as in ‘eating-the-mushrooms-you’re-never-supposed-to-eat’ wild. This film may not be for the faint-hearted nor people with easily upended stomachs. Wicked! I can’t wait!

I went to the Museum of Modern Art today to see the Tim Burton exhibit, and it was pretty extraordinary. The exhibit showcases over 700 of his works over his lifetime, most of it private stuff, including cartoons, drawings, poems, films, puppets, paintings, costumes – you name it, it’s there. The exhibit runs the gambit showcasing the creative genius of a very unique, influential artist of our time.

It was completely sold out for Monday, so go early, but I managed to talk my way in luckily toward the end of the day (MoMA closes at 5:30pm). It was amazing! Apart from seeing a ton of his talented work including numerous drawings, sculptures of black paper heads with rows of sharp white teeth and googly eyes, and popular wax figures from the more well-known Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands, it was pretty awesome to see some of the unpublished, never-before-seen drawings he did as a child on pieces of notebook paper. And yes, he was just as insane even from then. It was neat to see some of the poems and captions he wrote to go along with his drawings, some quite hilarious. Gotta love “Stain Boy” and the boy with nails in his eyes with its accompanying poem – “too bad you can’t see the Christmas tree because you’ve got nails in your eyes” (I’m paraphrasing from memory here). Talented but oh so freaky.

The Tim Burton exhibit runs from: November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010 at MoMA, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019.

Tim Burton’s new film Alice in Wonderland also drops on March 5, 2010. Can’t wait!