The Golden Compass - Dakota Blue Richards journeys to a parallel universe to save her best friend whom she believes has been kidnapped by a secret organization. She carries a golden compass that the baddies like Nicole Kidman want to take from her. Also there are many creatures like armored polar bears.

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly – the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby who was an editor of Elle magainze. He suffered a massive stroke and became almost totally paralyzed. He was able to blink his left eye and through that and his speech therapist, wrote his memoirs.

27 Dresses - Katherine Heigl is a bridesmaid 27 times for her friends and family. She is still waiting on finding her own man to spend her life with. Her most recent struggle is her sister (Malin Akerman) marrying the man she is in love with (Edward Burns). But James Marsden (Cyclops) comes along and becomes her friend.

That’s right its that time again. Saturday night (May 3rd) around 8PM EST we’ll be recording Shamoozal Radio Podcast #15 while streaming that shit live on ustream.tv. Sadly, Frank “The Ganklin” Summers will not be joining us that night as he has a prior engagement. Don’t fret however, we’ll be joined by special guest cast member Johnny THE GENERAL Manf. So mark your iCal and tune in for a good time!

I put some quality time into some Mario Kart: Wii tonight (about an hour) and have to say I love it. I opened up the Star Cup on 50cc, and did around three or four races online. Like the DS version, online is no frills, but it works and I had zero lag. The game played like a champ while I raced against thirteen people in the US.

The problem I noticed with the wheel attachment is that you need to hold it almost parallel to your body for it to fully pick up your turns. If its on an angle (as if you are resting it in your lap), the remote is not reading the full tilt like you think it is. Once I held it out some from my body, I felt like the turns were going much more accurately. However, I think I might be switching up to the classic controller. I just feel more comfortable playing Mario Kart with a more traditional controller. More after the jump…

The graphics look nice and clean, but certainly nothing amazing. Yeah yeah I know…its a Wii and can’t do the hi-rez whizz bang we expect from this gen of consoles, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to look nice. MK: Wii has a low poly count, but moves at a crisp frame rate and sports a nice bit of visual polish. The music isn’t all too super either, but MK is all about controls and insane races to the finish line. I’ve only played a handful of races so far, but have already had a few moments of madly dashing across the finish line…and I’m still only on 50cc!

Image stolen from someone who stole it from IGN

Okay, so after all the drama about registration servers, multiple IDs, and whatever other negative nonsense the internet could drum up… the time has finally arrived. Metal Gear Online has opened its beta doors here in the U.S. to anyone who pre-ordered the game. After watching some hot cylon-on-cylon action I fired up the PS3 and jumped in for a little friday night preview of how I’m going to be spending the next two weeks.

My game of choice was Team Deathmatch tonight. I was pleased to see that Konami has given us the option of doing Matchmaking or a pretty robust server browser. Because its getting late and I’m officially two and three-quarter sheets to the wind I opted to go with the matchmaking option. The system had me in a game in under a minute which was nice because I was kind of expecting a long wait.

With only a small idea of what I was supposed to do, I was dropped into a 6 vs 6 match on the training map. The first thing you’ll notice is the game has a slower paced feel, similar to many tactical shooters, and yet its not quite the same at all. You have the option of hiding behind cover and popping out to have a shootout, or you can sneak up on your opponents and use a CQC attack to knock them out or kill them.

Production on the next short is moving a little slow, but as you all know Plum is set to return after a year long hiatus. I figured now that Plum’s new look is nearly nailed down, why not show her off and get some feedback?

I have always pictured Plum being on the punk side, but when I did her original design I guess I made things a little too simple, and a lot of those ideas never really came across. I think of all the redesigns, she is without a doubt the most drastic in the change department. In fact, she almost looks like a completely different person, but I thought it was okay to take her this far since she was only in two of the previous shorts.

One problem I had with the original design is that she looked like a 14 year old girl, when in reality Plum should be in her early 20s. The first thing that needed to be fixed is her over sized head, and I took her face and pushed it in a bit. I tried to retain a similar shape for her face, but for her hair I decided I wanted a bit more of a wild hair style. Her hair has been kept in its head band, but now things are a little more loose. Instead of having her hair pulled back in a ponytail, it is now cut to a certain length. Her pants have been turned into rolled up jeans, boots replaced with sneakers, and I’ve given her wrist bands around both wrists. I took her shirt and decided to give her a tank top, but I still wanted to keep a layer underneath of that. She also has a few piercings in her ears, along with a second belt that falls to the side.

I remember the first time I saw this sketch from Mr. Show. It blew my mind as it re-creates a low budget promotional video complete with bad editing, stilted dialog, and terribly forced acting selling a “house of the future” with talking furniture. Bob and David turn in some really good awkward moments in this one. I think my favorite is the weird noise Bob makes right after David’s characters thanks him for showing him the house. Its ridiculous.

A surrogate mother comedy.
A stoners on the run flick.
A secret sex club.
Lets get down to it boppers. FRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDAY!

Two of the funnier comedy actresses around today.

Baby Mama – Tina Fey is a single woman who wants to have a baby…. But she isn’t able to. So she hires a surrogate mother to carry her baby. The surrogate is Amy Poehler and she turns out to be a crazy woman. The story is also written by Tina, Amy, and…. Sigourney Weaver?!

Trying to capitalize on the cult success of the first.

This clip was originally on the laser disc release of “The Lion King”, but has also been included on the more recent release of the DVD. This particular transfer is from the laser disc which is probably not the best, so at times the image is a tad blown out. However, its still a really great example of all the work and planning that goes into animation. This clip is a progression reel for the “Elephant Graveyard” sequence, and is inter cut with various stages from storyboard, rough animation, to clean up, there are a few shots with final ink and paint. There’s some really nice character animation in here with Simba and the hyenas, and I particularly like the layouts as we track the cubs as they fall through an elephant spine and then as they run through the ravine to the dead end.

Cloverfield - a dude’s going away party turns into complete MAYHEM when they witness a monster attack on New York City. The movie is filmed from the point of view of a handheld camera being carried around by one of the dudes from the party. From producer JJ Abrams.

The Orphanage – from producer Guillermo del Toro comes the story of a woman brining her family back to her childhood home where she starts an orphanage. Eventually her son starts communicating with an invisible friend who begins to haunt them.

Charlie Wilson’s War - a Texas Congressman (Tom Hanks) and his various allies in the CIA collaborate on a covert mission in order to provide weapons to Afghanistan during their war with the Soviet Union. Julia Roberts and Phillip Seymour Hoffman also star.

For whatever reason, people seem to be shocked when they find out that I still buy and play NES games on a regular basis. Perhaps I really am just stuck in the past, or maybe I just like the simple pick up and play nature of most NES titles. Or maybe I just enjoy damn good games.

Back in the day, a company called Sunsoft made some of the best licensed and original titles for the NES. If you grew up in the NES era chances are you loved Blaster Master and Batman, and were frustrated by the likes of Festers’ Quest. Sunsoft released a game called Journey to Silius sometime in 1990. Somehow this one flew under my radar, and of all the great (and terrible) NES games I played during that time, I never played this one.

Knowing this one will likely never see a Virtual Console release, I sought to own it and nabbed it off eBay for a couple of dollars. Well it arrived a few days ago and I’ve had a chance to play it a handful of times, and each time has been met with a smile on my face.

At first I was kind of upset that I missed out on this one. Then I thought about it, and once in a while I find myself saying “I wish developers still made awesome NES games.” Being that I never played this game, I kind of felt like that wish had come true.