There hasn’t been a movie since The Sixth Sense that had more potential for disaster than Star Trek: Into Darkness. No, Spock doesn’t see dead people, but that doesn’t take away for the desperate need to avoid that annoying co-worker who loves to talk about the movie he watched this weekend. Kudos to J.J. Abrams for pulling off one of the hardest challenges in Hollywood – making a movie that appeases the long-time faithful while still offering a complete experience to those who aren’t as familiar with the source material. Rotten Tomatoes, the consolidated source of reputable reviews, gave the…

What happens when you combine 15 GoPro cameras, some talented extreme athletes, and a ton of ingenuity? You get The Matrix, only without guns or metallic insects bent on destroying humanity. The fact that the effects aren’t as fluid or smooth as the Hollywood version of the multi-angle cinematography technique commonly referred to as “bullet time” doesn’t take away from the amazing scenes. If anything, it gives it a modern discontinuity that adds even more depth to the mind blowing effects. It starts simply. “Hi, I’m Mark, and this is my GoPro array.” From there, the eyes are treated to some extreme…

There are a lot of ways that Hollywood has changed the way we use the internet. On one side, the internet is an incredible well of knowledge and innovation, a place of creativity, inspiration, and easy communication. There is no question that the internet has, for better or for worse, morphed the way we view ourselves and our place in society. Consequentially, it has also changed entertainment, marketing, and networking. Alongside the innovations of the internet and of new technology are the innovators who use these tools and give them purpose. There is no point in having this technology if no…

We’ve all seen the shots in sci-fi movies where the background was obviously manufactured. Background fill video technology is nothing new with green screens being the predominant type in Hollywood and around the world. What many don’t realize is that many of the television shows that they watch today aren’t filmed on location the way that they appear. Technology has made a film set much easier to create. One simply has to put the moving parts in front of a green screen and everything else can be added seamlessly in a way that nobody could ever recognize. Cost savings are obvious; it’s cheaper to…

The Hollywood hype machine is already anointing this summer as the biggest one in movie history. The Avengers shattered records and it may not even be the biggest blockbuster of the summer if Bane (I mean The Dark Knight Rises) comes out firing. Beneath all of the hoopla surrounding comic book superheroes and recycled sequels, there are some really good movies that geeks and non-geeks alike shouldn’t miss. They don’t have the budgets. Some of them have the actors but many are relatively unknown. They have one thing in common – the likelihood of being solid movies that may get buried beneath the spiderwebs….

The math is pretty straight forward. It was likely the most widely-downloaded camcorder recording of a movie ever. Following the thinking of the MPAA, this dramatically hurts the profits of ailing Hollywood studios because illegal downloads are the worst thing that has come out of the digital age. It stands to reason that they should spend millions on lobbying Washington for strict measures to end piracy and save Hollywood. The virally-popular pirated version of The Avengers (which came out a week before it’s US release) is the reason that the film flopped. Except it didn’t. It has already been…

With the start of summer, the start of blockbuster movie season begins. While the money-making is strong for many summer releases, they often pale in comparison to big game releases. Much of it can be attributed to the prices – a newly released video game costs much more than the price of admission to a movie. Still, there has to be something more to it. Game prices have not gone up as much as movie tickets relatively. Volumes have been increasing. More gamers are born into the world of COD and other franchises every day. Movie watchers, on the other hand, accounts for a steady number of people. The only…

You might think that 2011 will be all about how the amazing the iPad 2 or iPhone 5 will be. However, this is nothing compared to what Hollywood has in store for all of us. The big movie studios are making great strides towards providing consumers with more access to movies and television shows than ever before, and they might actually pull it off this time around. But there is a catch. Ever since the creation of the Internet, the movie studios have been more determined than ever to prevent illegal sharing of their content over the Web. They have gone to extremes — convincing governments to shut down…

Well, I guess it would be only a matter of time before Hollywood got their hands dirty in the virtual world; as if the “real-life” Hollywood world wasn’t fake and scripted enough already. Virtual 3D Hollywood is the new project by GBK, a luxury lifestyle gifting and special events company. The premise is to allow players, that’s you, into the world of glitz and glamor as only Hollywood can deliver. The whole thing looks pretty similar to Second Life, which was fun for like a day if you ask me (call me old-fashioned but I would rather have conversations and deal with drama face to face and not…

We have bestowed technology with the task of improving our lives, and as technology becomes more intertwined with our lives, it becomes a danger to mankind as well. So what happens when technology fails us? Could technology really result in the end of all humanity? If you’ve watched a few Hollywood flicks lately, it might not be too difficult to envision. A popular theme focuses on highlighting the consequences of technology, usually having technology posing all of humanity with a serious problem while our hero is tasked with saving all of us from extinction. But even though Hollywood tends to…