Review: Tangled

Tangled

Starring
Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi, Donna Murph

Runtime 100 minutes

Tangled is a CGI masterpeice from Disney Studios. It is also their 50th animated feature length movie. Tangled is for all intents a loosely based retelling ot the German fairy tale "Rapunzel" by the Brothers Grimm.

The plot really doesn’t take any chances. The king’s wife is ill. It is known that there is a flower in the kingdom that has great curative properties. So the king sends out to his subjects that the flower must be found. The flower however is jealously hoarded by Gothel who uses it to keep herself young for years. However the flower is found and it is used to cure the queen. It comes to pass that the sovereigns are gifted with a baby girl with shockingly golden hair. Gothel not to be robbed of what she feels is hers alone comes to the child’s bedside to steal the hair from the child, knowing that it must have the same properties as the flower because they were both bright and gold as the sun. Upon cutting a lock the hair changes from golden to brown and loses all magical properties. Seeing this Gothel kidnaps the baby Rapunzel and sequesters her in a tall tower where she never leaves. Gothel never allows her to cut her hair and uses it as she used the flower to stay young.

From here the plot progresses to her meeting a young thief who she bribes into escorting her to the city to see the lights that appear only on her birthday. The thief is pretty much standard Disney fair. A bit of mild bad boy with a good heart. And of course he is being chased and of course he is betrayed and of course she is lead to believe that he cares not for her. Which of course does a 180 in the movie as needed. Of course there are no loose ends, everybody get what they secretly want and the evil people are eliminated in the most bloodless way possible. Happy happy happy.

As much as I would love to trash this movie I can’t. Disney shows that it can still compete and do it strikingly well against the other large animation houses. This feature set a new standard and holds some records in CGI. Rapunzel’s hair has 10,000 separate pieces of animation. The movie holds a record for the largest cgi crowd scene at 3000 different cgi actors. The much talked about Chinese lantern scene contains a stunning 45,000 animated floating lanterns! The lighting as well as the texture mapping are a feast for the eyes.

So all in all the movie may not take any chances, it is endearing in its own right. Plus the added benefit of high quality animation only adds to the enjoyment. Over all I would give the movie an 8 losing only to a plain vanilla plot. The extras are pretty much non existent. Mandy Moore, and Zachary Levi, spend a few moments giving you a run down on what makes the movie special, there are some out takes and that is about it so extras are a 5, which pulls the movie down lower that it deserves so I will give it an overall 7. Remember I am rating a dvd/blu-ray which is supposed to be better for graphics and the amount of data they can cram. That being said the movie is good simplistic fare, but don't waste your time on the extras.

BMU # 277 Online

In Beam Me Up episode 277 we take on Labor Day weekend by doing as little as possible!
This week’s program came out fine though. I start of with y John Anealio doing Summer Glau.

Then for our first story which this week is episode 16 of the ongoing saga of the Dark InSpectre series by Jason Kahn. This week find inspector Garrett following clues and a psychic scream to locations that offer little advantage to our inspector. We find him in the worst of places, knowing even worse things. Things that others would kill to prevent from ever seeing the light of day.

The final story is part four and the conclusion to Keith Latch’s ‘The Stars Fell’. Sophie’s life now smothering unhappiness. With the loss of her entire family has taken away her reason for living or any reason TO live. It had been three weeks since the accident and she had hardly left her bed, but now, something strange had happened, she had been drawn outside by the most unusual occurrence….. The Stars were Falling……

In blog and other articles….from Earth / Sky a short article on the status of Cern antimatter containment, Dan drops in this month’s sky based occurrences, I read off the things to look for from the third to the tenth of September.

In the blog, Located about an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth is the strangest planet….one made of diamonds! ISS Crews NASA and Russian mission control are all holding their collective breathes as technicians try to uncover the cause of the Progress supply ship malfunction. If it can not be uncovered then the ISS will have to be abandoned as there is now no other system ready to lift crew to the station. In what has to be a WTF moment…. Chinese scientists are studying ways to capture an asteroid and bring it into Earth orbit! Why? There’s money in them thar asteroids! Especially metallic based asteroids.
Xnewsman sends in a link to a you-tube video concerning computer banking as predicted in 1969 and you know, they got a lot right! Chat-bots are often used as Web chat support agents to help you solve basic problems. When they are interacting with a person, they seem very strange as they converse in an almost lifelike fashion – but you have got to see what happens when two of these things are hooked up to talk to one another! I play the audio and it is plain rib cracking funny! And finally – Rover Opportunity, in the seventh year of it’s 90 day mission has arrived at the Martian crater Endeavour to help researchers understand ‘compositional differences’ of the rocks surrounding the crater. Crater Endeavour is much larger than the last one visited by Opportunity, which was the Victoria crater.

Opportunity Studying 14 Mile Wide Martian Crater

Rover Opportunity, in the seventh year of it's 90 day mission has arrived at the Martian crater Endeavour. The rover's first mission is to study 'compositional differences' of the rocks surrounding the crater. Differences that the rover has not come across in the seven years on Mars. Opportunity drove about 13 miles from it's last crater of exploration, Victoria to reach Endeavour. Victoria was only about a quarter of the size of Endeavour.

Another point of interest is that Opportunity has driven 20.8 miles since landing on Mars. It has been in operation 30 times longer than it was designed to.

Though some scientist have called the findings in error, Both both rovers made discoveries suggesting a wet environments on ancient Mars.

From the article:

• NASA will launch its next-generation Mars rover, Curiosity, between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011. It will land on Mars in August 2012.

read complete Science Daily article here

Chatbot Weirdness!

Chatbots are often used as Web chat support agents to help you solve basic problems. When they are interacting with a person, they seem eery as they converse in an almost lifelike fashion. Researchers with a bit too much free time on their hands wanted to know what would happen if you connected two Chatbots together so they could talk to one another. The results was something even the researchers has not expected. Watch what happens.

The Future of Banking from the BBC in 1969

Here the BBC from 1969, suggest banking and purchasing in the future. They got a lot right but failed to see how ubiquitous the system could and did become. Mainly because it became so much easier to install in any business environment and also the size and relative cost of the computer equipment needed to keep these type of records.




Thanks to Xnewsman for the article