Leigh and I went and saw the new War of the Worlds movie tonight. Despite Tom Cruise’s recent antics in the media, I found him enjoyable in the film. Ah hell, who’m I kidding? I find Tom’s antics enjoyable as well, albeit for reasons that are morally reprehensible.
My only advice to those who are going to see the film would be to resist the urge to over-analyze the logic of the plot, because logic plays absolutely no part in the film. Truthfully, I don’t think Spielberg has any interest at all in logic. But that’s okay, because he has the ability to masterfully direct a big-budget B-movie, which pretty much defines War of the Worlds.
I’ve briefly scanned some (nerd qualifier alert!) movie forums tonight, and a lot of people are complaining about how this couldn’t have happened, or why the aliens should have done that or shouldn’t have done this. This movie holds up to those types of questions about as well as Independence Day does, so don’t ask’em.
If you’ve heard all about the old broadcasts by Orson Welles but have never heard them, well today’s your lucky day. If you have RealPlayer you can go to this site and stream the whole broadcast. If you don’t have realplayer and you end up downloading it from the previous link heed this advice: don’t let realplayer configure anything. When it asks you to choose between letting realplayer choose associations automatically or you doing it manually, you choose manually. Realplayer will set itself up to be the default player for everything. When you configure it only associate realplayer with realplayer files, e.g. .ram files.
If you don’t want to mess with realplayer (and I wouldn’t blame you…realplayer is more intrusive than our present administration) you can go to this page and download the War of the Worlds broadcast in mp3. There is a caveat to this one as well: the guy’s site is really slow, so set it to download right before you go to bed. He will also let you download every broadcast that the Mercury Theater ever recorded in mp3 if you have a Bittorrent client. First, download the torrent client. Then go back to that guys web page and download the torrent file. That file will open up the actual download, which could take a while. FYI- I don’t really like the original bittorrent client, so I use the Burst client. But use whatever you want.
And for all of those that are about to cry copyright infringement, just hold on. By law the broadcasts should be in the public domain. Some folks on the net have tried to get some of the broadcast taken down by way of threats, but no one has been able to prove legal ownership of them.
UPDATE: The torrent version is the fastest download by far, and it’s the one that contains all the broadcasts by the Mercury Theater Company. Streaming via realplayer beats them all, but you have to use realplayer.