Iron Man – Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark. He’s an asshole billionaire weapons maker womanizer. When he gets abducted by terrorists, he builds a massive iron suit to escape. After escaping he decides to start taking matters into his own hands regarding revenge on the people that captured him. Also starring Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jeff Bridges. Directed by Jon Favreau.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall – from producer Judd Apatow. Jason Segal gets dumped by his actress girlfriend played by Kristen Bell. To get over it, he goes to Hawaii where he runs into his ex with her new musician boyfriend played by Russell Brand. So he starts trying to get her off his mind by hanging with hotel employee Mila Kunis.

Chapter 27 – On December 8th 1980, Mark David Chapman killed ex-Beatle John Lennon. Jared Leto plays Chapman, a disturbed fan who kills his hero. Based on true events showing the mental and physical breakdown of an angry man.

That is the both the question and the challenge all rolled into one. We’ve been sitting on GFGames #4 all summer long, and the last two podcasts I’ve claimed “it’s coming.” The truth is, I haven’t really touched it much at all, but as fate would have it, I’m off all this week (long, long story). Tomorrow begins the challenge, can I possibly get GFG#4 finished in time for the next podcast? I’m thinking so. GFG#4, or as it will be called, Le Tragedie, might end up being our shortest GFG entry to date, and a lot of it seems pretty simple and straight forward (I’ll also reveal that there will be zero dialogue in this one). I no doubt have my work cut out for me, but what else am I going to do all week long?

So yeah, I think I’m up to the challenge. Be on the look out for random live streams of yours truly doing work on the project throughout the whole week. Oh yeah, and since I’m off all week, I’m determined to update the Nerdlog at least once a day. Who knows, maybe you’ll even get multiple updates a day. Wouldn’t that be special? Now if only I were getting paid to do all this stuff…. that’d be nice.

GO HERE FOR THE LIVE STREAM!

Now this was out of left field. Nintendo’s WiiWare service has seen about as much junk as actual retail Wii titles. The only difference is that there really aren’t many home grown Nintendo games on WiiWare to help even the playing field. Well that may have changed today as Nintendo released a game called Art Style: Orbient to the service. Orbient is actually a Wii version of a Japan only title called Orbital that was released on the Gameboy Advance under Nintendo’s “Bit Generations.” Bit Generations was a series of experimental titles that were released along with the Gameboy Micro in an effort to help prolong the GBA’s life while the DS was in the middle of breaking all sorts of records. It was a bit of a failed experiment, but I heard that the simple titles were always really fun, though I haven’t actually played them myself.

What is interesting about Orbient is the “Art Style” banner attached to the game. I guess this is Nintendo’s answer to Sony and Q-Games’ PixelJunk series that resides on PSN. It would be great if Nintendo had a bunch more of these interesting projects in the pipeline in order to help strengthen the WiiWare brand. Sure stuff like Mega Man 9 is fantastic, and the new WiiWare Bomberman that released today seems cool too, but original content that’s actually worth playing is what will help build their struggling service.

I haven’t downloaded Orbient, but it seems to be getting some strong word of mouth already, and for the 600 point price tag it’s at least positioned to move. It doesn’t seem like its for everyone, but maybe once I come down from my Mega Man 9 high (and you know, start working again) I’ll check it out. Anyway, thought this was worth posting about since it was kind of out of the blue (I’m usually up on this stuff).

Bad news Frank fans… he’s gonna be absent this month. Great News Manfre fans… The General Johnny Manfre will be joining the podcast crew this month. This Saturday, Octobre de 4th, at our normal time of 8PMish EST. As always, you can catch us LIVE on our UStream Page and bear witness… you can chat with us live and join in on the fun. We always embed the video feed and chat room here at the Nerdlog, but for whatever reason UStream doesn’t allow you to log into your account from here. So unless you want to be known as lame-ass ‘ustreamer-6539×32′ you’d better go make an account and log in.

See you there!

Eagle Eye – Shia LeBouf & Michelle Monaghan get caught up in an FBI investigation but are receiving calls from a mysterious woman who knows their every move. They must team up to find out who the woman is while evading an FBI investigator (Billy Bob Thornton). Directed by DJ Caruso (Disturbia).

Miracle At St. Anna – after a postal worker commits murder, an investigation takes place which has the suspect telling the story of his time at a Tuscan Village during World War II. His all-black infantry came across a rare and mysterious aritifact. Written and Directed by Spike Lee.

Sex and the City – Set four years after the television show ended, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis are up to their old antics in New York City. Meanwhile Parker is getting ready for her marriage to Mr. Big.

Leatherheads – Directed by and starring George Clooney comes the story of a 1920s football team owned by Clooney’s over the hill yet still cocky character. They recruit a young college star (John Krasinski) and both of the big stars fall for the same chick (Renee Zellwegger).

Deception – A lonely accountant (Ewan McGregor) is introduced into a crazy sex club by his new lawyer friend (Hugh Jackman). But when one of the women of the club (Michelle Williams) disappears, Ewan is blamed and must prove his innocence.

Tonight, I had the pleasure of attending an interview with animation master, Richard Williams, by animation filmmaker and historian, John Canemaker, at The Museam of Modern Art in NYC. Williams is better known for his role as the Animation Director on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” as well as his extensive commercial work through the 70’s and 80’s. After the debacle that became of his personal feature film, “The Theif and the Cobler”, Williams shifted gears in the mid 90’s to play the part of a teacher. He spent much of his life studying animation and learning directly from the best that ever graced paper with pencil such as Ken Harris, Grim Natwick, and Milt Kahl to name a few. His touring “Master Class” sessions from that time period were said to have been highly engaging and enlightening.

Williams took that information and distilled it into perhaps one of the single greatest books on animation, The Animator’s Survival Kit. It is a wealth of technical information, and is superbly illustrated by Richard himself explaining the theories of what makes animation tick. For anyone interested in learning more about animation, I can’t reccomend it enough.

The interview was peppered here and there with clips of Williams’s past work. He would set them up and give a few words about what it was like while working with so-and-so and then the clip would roll. One of the most interesting things shown was the first theatrical cut done by Williams himself of “Theif and the Cobbler”. He explained that he stumbled across this reel while going through his video archives, and that we were the second grouop of people to have seen it publicly.The first group to have that honor was this past weekend up in Ottawa.

Lakeview Terrace – an interracial couple (Patrick Wilson & Kerry Washington) move next door to a respected LAPD officer (Samuel L Jackson) who will stop at nothing to force them to move out of his neighborhood.

My Best Friend’s Girl – Dane Cook is TANK, a guy who is hired to date an ex-girlfriend in order for her to reconsider leaving the guy in the first place. When Jason Biggs hires him, his obnoxious behavior has the opposite affect on Biggs’ ex played by Kate Hudson.

We’re Metallica fans here at Shamoozal, well most of us are anyway. Even though we don’t all see eye to eye on the particulars, I think we all agree that Metallica has rocked pretty hard over their career with varying degrees of success. So rather than have us write separate reviews of the new Metallica album ‘Death Magnetic’ we decided to join forces like Devestator and give you the Shamoozal Mega-Review^TM.

So sit back, throw on your copy of Death Magnetic and enjoy the celebration of all things Metallica…

John Manfre

I just got the phone call that Joe “Gravedigger” Moscariello, and his wife (and my sister!), Shannon, just gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Quinn. As you all know, Joe is our sound engineer who handles all of our sound duties, from the podcasts to the shorts, with the utmost professionalism, and Shannon is the voice of “Plum”.  Shannon was expected to deliver more towards the end of the month, but the docs said that she was moving along a bit early. Today she went into the hospital because she was having contractions, and while the delivery went on for almost 10 hours, from what I hear everything went well.

I can’t be there right now to help celebrate, so I’m gonna go pop open a good ol’ Yuengling for you guys. Congrats to Shannon and Joe, and welcome baby Quinn!