Brian’s Exploratory Christmas Endeavor 2016: 5/25
This was actually the first Christmas special I watched this year. Days behind on trying to write about each of these films, I scrambled to remember what all I’ve seen, and decided to cheat a little by going straight for the TV shows (read: short and easy to catch up writing on).
Continue reading “Bojack Horseman Christmas Special (Sabrina’s Christmas Wish)”Brian’s Exploratory Christmas Endeavor 2016: 4/25
I don’t know why I’m disappointed. I didn’t have expectations going in. Netflix estimated this as a 2 out of 5 for me. They weren’t far off.
Marry Me For Christmas is as slow, trite, predictable and insipid a Christmas movie as anyone could conjure up. I didn’t realize when I started it up that it was a made-for-TV movie, which pretty much explains all this. Even the soundtrack just sort of plods along, jingling here and there to remind you of its presence.
Continue reading “Marry Me For Christmas”Brian’s Exploratory Christmas Endeavor 2016: 3/25
I made a trip recently with some friends down to one of our local comic shops, which sits just a few doors down from a used media store: games, TV, books, movies, toys and so on. And there I found a rack of suggested Christmas viewing. I picked up a few DVDs of films I hadn’t seen, of which one was Elf-Man, directed by Ethan Wiley and starring Jason “Wee Man” Acuña of Jackass fame. I picked up the box, had a laugh, showed it to my friends, then said I didn’t have the guts to buy it. Then I saw the sticker price of $2.99, remembered the spirit of my Annual Exploratory Christmas Endeavor, and decided, “why the hell not”.
Continue reading “Elf-Man”Brian’s Exploratory Christmas Endeavor 2016: 2/25
This was the longest 23 minutes of my life.
Since I was a little boy, the production values of Power Rangers have vastly improved, and the almost sickeningly wholesome messages in the show are still there, which is good for the kids. Nothing that’s wrong with this kids’ TV special has to do with the Power Rangers gimmick itself or even bad writing; rather, it turns into a clip show for some reason to fill out the greatest part of its runtime, and some of those clips are just montages of seemingly disjointed clips from the show with no real relation to each other, or to the theme of this episode which is supposedly about Christmas.
Continue reading “Power Rangers Megaforce: The RoboKnight Before Christmas”Brian’s Exploratory Christmas Endeavor 2016: 1/25
Last year my goal was to watch at least one Christmas movie or special per day for the entirety of December leading up to Christmas, and I did. It tired me out. But I’ve had a year to rest and I’m going in for Round 2. It nearly slipped my mind since a combination of Ohio’s unpredictable weather and, ya know, climate change, make each December less wintery than the one which preceded it. We’ve gotten to mostly cold weather here at the Dayton Upstairs Recording Studio, but so far not a single fleck of snowfall.
Yesterday I looked at The Night Before, the 2015 comedy directed by Jonathan Levine, a man I’ve never heard of before. It stars Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie as a band of friends who annually reunite for Christmas shenanigans in a tradition born of Gordon-Levitt’s character’s parents dying years before.
Continue reading “The Night Before”I dropped some serious fliff today. Expect the show to return soon. We have big plans.
Oh, goodness.
So, to start with, we thought the computer was back to good. I ran some cleaning software, freed up memory and storage, cleared caches, the whole shebang short of reformatting the computer (something I’d done less than a year ago). We sat down to record. We were going to let you know about our big new plans for the show, as well as record the final episode of the 2-movie-rivalry format. It worked really well, for about 42 minutes.
Then it broke, and hard.
I was lucky to find out that the .AIF files still existed in the project folder, and after converting them with Audacity, I expect to be able to return them to GarageBand and hopefully stitch together the Episode That Almost Was. We’re more than a little disappointed though, that it didn’t just work. Unfortunately, it seems at this point that we’re truly going to have to replace the hardware in order to bring the show back up to speed. And I will be doing that, but I won’t have the funds to do it until around late-September.
We want to thank everyone who has been paying attention to the show, and asking us about new episodes. Your continued interest is what keeps our hearts in it. That and our love for hearing our own voices and opinions.
Hopefully we’ll have The Episode That Almost Was cut together and released soon, and within the next two months get the funds necessary to purchase a new computer.
We’ll keep you posted.
I’ve been using some Mac clean-up software (probably should’ve thought to do that months ago) and so far, GarageBand hasn’t thrown any hissy fits in my tests. We may be safe to do the show again. We can’t wait to share with you all what big ideas we’ve had of late for the show’s future. The next chapter is going to be super exciting.
Sorry, folks. The computer isn’t behaving right and until we get it worked out there won’t be any new episodes. We did, however, make this video when we tried our damnedest to record the newest episode (a month ago…sorry for the late post).
It may take a while to figure out how to doll the site up just right to fit the art, but thanks to our friend Joe, we’ve finally got cover art we can be proud of. Expect to see it on your podcast device of choice soon.
Candid Podcast Network 