Ovechkin = Jordan?

For all my newly-minted hockey homeys, Galley Friend B.W. sends along this great story about Alex Ovechkin making up insults in order to get himself fired up.

To all of you Jordan obsessives out there, this is candy.

PS3 First Game Review

IGN has the word on PS3's Genji: Days of the Blade. They give it a 6 out of 10.

Election Night

Sure, everyone else is watching politics, but TNT just started rolling the Law & Order episode where Briscoe and Green find the remains of a student radical who was murdered in the '60s by an undercover cop and McCoy is all, "You don't understand--it was a different time!"

And Abby is all, "Yeah, a different time where filthy fucking hippies ruled the earth, Jack. The bastard got what he deserved."

So hot.

Faith Hill = Kanye West

Blog Crush has the video from the CMA's. Just skip to the 35 second mark and watch Faith Hill flip out when Carrie Underwood's name is announced. Someone, somewhere, must have the rest of that footage . . .

Gilbert Arenas: The Assassin

Every once in a while, magazine editors do something so right that you have to stop and doff your hat to them. Washingtonian editors did just that by getting Fred Barnes to do this super-fantastic profile of Gilbert Arenas.

If I was King at a big newspaper, I'd do this sort of cross-specialty assigning all the time, getting my best political writers to occassionally do big sports pieces, my sports writers to do some movie reviews, my movie critics to do some literary criticism, etc. Think of how much fun it is to read Anthony Lane doing Wodehouse or Tony Kornheiser doing real estate or Barnes, here, doing sports.

How Big Was Borat?

Brandon Gray puts it in perspective:

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan packed an estimated $26.4 million from around 1,100 screens at 837 theaters, boasting the highest-grossing wide opening ever for a picture playing at less than 1,100 theaters (The Blair Witch Project did $29.2 million at 1,101 sites). The closest recent comparison in terms of release pattern and style was Fahrenheit 9/11, which started with $23.9 million at 868 venues.

Blair Witch and Fahrenheit 9/11 are pretty amazing company to be in.

In other box office news, The Departed registered a 19 percent decline over last weekend, putting it over the $100M mark.

Secrets

The F-117, the world's first stealth fighter, is being retired. That site is a great resource and if you want a short history of this fruit of the Skunk Works, follow the "F-117 History" link on the left-hand column. It's like a cross between The Right Stuff and The X-Files. For instance, there's this story about one of the first test flights:

Flight test of the Have Blue initially went fairly smoothly, and the fly-by-wire system functioned well. The landing speed was quite high (160 knots), as expected because of the lack of flaps or speed brakes. However, on May 4, 1978, Have Blue prototype number 1001 was landing after a routine test flight when it hit the ground excessively hard, jamming the right main landing gear in a semi-retracted position. Pilot Bill Park pulled the aircraft back into the air, and repeatedly tried to shake the gear back down again. After his third attempt failed, he was ordered to take the aircraft up to 10,000 feet and eject. Park ejected successfully, but he hit his head and was knocked unconscious. Since he was unable to control his parachute during descent or landing, his back was severely injured on impact. He survived, but was forced to retire from flying. The Have Blue aircraft was destroyed in the crash.

It's amazing stuff.

In Praise of Baywatch

This story comes courtesy of Galley Sister MAL, who writes:

My favorite part is where Hasselhoff says "I think the secret of its success was that is was always about saving lives, not taking lives." Hmmm, yes, that was the secret of their success.

Gaming Humor

This is basically like Chris Rock doing a riff on the difference between Japanime RPG games and first-person shooter titles. I know, that sounds weird and esoteric, but it's unbelievably funny if you've ever spent even 10 minutes on a Playstation.

(Language is not safe for work, so put on your headphones.)

TonyHomo.com

Drew Bledsoe's Blog. Not since Harriet Miers has Blogger proved so valuable.

Does this guy have the greatest Halloween costume ever?

Yes.

Courtesy of Galley Friend B.W.

"Brick"--not the movie

But the new Microsoft system update for the Xbox 360.

The fact that Microsoft may have uploaded a buggy system update points out how very different this next generation of game consoles is: The product you buy will change. There will be updates to the software and the hardware over the life of the system. Whereas the Nintendo you bought in 1986 was the same one you would buy in 1988, the system you buy this Christmas will be different from the system you buy in Christmas of 2008. At least the software running the system will change and I suspect that the console makers will be adding bits to the hardware packages--more hard disk space, extra flash or HDMI ports, etc.

This means that (1) new game systems are taking on more and more aspects of PCs; (2) that there may be some incentive to not buy the first iteration of a new systems; and (3) that the life span of the next-gen consoles could be much longer than the life spans of the last couple generations.

Happy Halloween

Pajiba has a list of their Favorite Craptastic Horror Films. It's pretty great.

The Lagging Edge

Have you heard of PCRetro? They sell old and obsolete computers--for less! How do they do it? Volume.

This isn't a joke, mind you. Have you been wishing you could find the old G4 Mac Mini? They've got 'em, for only $499.

How about an old Compaq Deskpro Pentium 3? It's yours for only $39.95! Hurry, while supplies last.

All Hail the Internet

This will make no sense unless you grew up in the Philadelphia area between 1980 and 1983. But if you did, it turns out that there's a StarStuff fan site.

And also a MySpace page.

And also a Youtube gallery.

The Interweb may be lousy for all sorts of reasons, but it make indulging in childhood nostalgia deliciously easy.

PS 3 Wins?

GameDaily constructs what is probably the strongest case to be made for Sony's PS3 prospects. I still don't find it all that convincing.

Bonus: Here's the new PS3 ad. Watch it and tell me if it makes any sense to you. Maybe the problem is that I'm not Japanese.



Extra-Bonus: By comparison, check out this fantastic early Dreamcast ad for Sega's NFL 2K:

Trailer City

What are the two biggest surprises about Smokin' Aces?

(1) That this thing is not directed by Tarantino, and

(2) How much Ben Affleck looks like Freddie Mercury. Why did we never see that before?

Superman Soars!

Alert Gally Readers will recall that WB prexy Alan Horn said last summer that unless Superman Returns topped $200M domestically, there would be no sequel. We now have proof that where there's a will, there's a way:

Last weekend, on its 117th day of release, Superman Returns cracked the $200M mark.

Today, after 121 days in theaters, Superman Returns is sporting a titanic $200,028,903 in domestic box office.

Just how much corporate will did it take to accomplish this feat? For the last few weeks, Superman Returns has been playing in about 300 theaters and averaging--get this:

Between $16 and $277 per theater!

You don't see corporate commitment like that every day.

A Film by Emilio Estevez

The set up to the joke is pretty great: Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Heather Graham, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, Joshua Jackson, David Krumholtz, Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Christian Slater, Sharon Stone, and Elijah Wood walk into a bar . . .


But the punchline seems so lame that it's kind of depressing.

The Departed: Best Picture?

I've been meaning to say something about The Departed for a while now, but I kept putting it off until I could see. I still haven't seen it, but that isn't going to stop me from pointing out its impressive box office run.

The Departed opened to relatively little fanfare--it got good reviews, but the ad push preceeded the release by only about two weeks. Certainly, it's the lowest-profile Scorsese picture in a very, very long time; probably since The Color of Money (if you discount the artsy Kundun). Consequently, it opened to a relatively modest $26M. (Although that's a career-best for Scorsese.)

But if you look at the numbers since then, Departed is showing fantastic legs, with weekend declines of 29.2 percent and 29.3 percent. It's already got $80M in the bank domestically and I suspect it will chug along to at least the $100M mark--and that's before it gets a nomination for Best Picture.

Again--I haven't seen the movie yet--but just from the externalities, The Departed has all the makings of a BP nominee: an artistically ambitious, but popular, movie that succeeds over long period of time and is directed by a revered figure who's been overlooked by the Academy. A movie with that pedigree is a lock for a nomination, even if it stinks.

Keep watching the daily grosses for The Departed. It's been the #1 movie nearly every weekday since its release. That's a sign that, even three weeks out, it's prepared to keep running.