Jamie's blog

There’s one basic truth about home theater that I can never repeat often enough: It is the union of big-screen television and surround sound. They do not operate in isolation from each other. Instead, successive waves of video technology have affected the way people think about audio for video. read more »

You might think that reviewing - and reading about – one flat panel after another would get boring, if not downright numbing. And it would, if the technology were static. Fee-fie-ho-hum, a new flat panel joins the scrum. read more »

As the third installment of the Ice Age franchise, you’d expect the latest adventures of our odd herd of prehistoric mammal friends - Sid the sloth, Manny and Ellie the wooly mammoths, Diego the saber-toothed tiger, Crash and Eddie the possums, and (off on his own as usual) everyone’s favorite latter-day Coyote, Scrat, the squirrel-rat. Scrat’s role has grown with each entry in the series, and here he gets a love (or rather love-hate) interest in Scrattle, a challenge to his acorn obsession. read more »

War and peace with the Tolstoy family

It’s a good yarn, the final year of Leo Tolstoy. On the one hand, he’s stretched and torn between his fanatical acolytes, and committed to perpetuating his philosophy of peace, abstinence, and anarchism. read more »

It’s a family affair on Dish Network

There is a girl. She does have a hell of a dragon tattoo. But that’s all that’s obvious or predictable in this brilliant tapestry of a thriller. Based on the Millennium trilogy of novels by Stieg Larsson, ostensibly the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is about a fiercely intelligent computer hacker/ researcher, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), and an investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), who is tracking down a decades-old series of murders using very modern techniques. read more »

Toys Really Are Us

Managing to avoid franchise over-kill, Toy Story 3 is more delightful than ever Toy Story 3 s possibly the year's most surprising film. Given the narratives and themes explored so brilliantly by its two predecessors, it's hard to imagine any new ground or fresh ideas that could be tapped into. And yet, thanks to the brilliance of the creative minds at Pixar, what could have been little more than a crass exercise in financially-motivated filmmaking has emerged as the most exciting and touching film since... the last Pixar movie, and one of the year’s best films. read more »

Television is truly a gift of modern science to children. How many of you parents out there agree to this? Because of the numerous channels and programs in TV, many children stick to it almost all their time at home which often leads to the consideration among parents that whether they should forbid their children from watching it or not. Parents often tend to hear advice from others about the dreadful effects that watching television can have on their kids. Very rarely you might have heard about the benefits of allowing your kids to watch television. But, it is true and it is a fact that the many advantages that TV has to offer for kids cannot be overlooked. In this article, we can take a look at some of those advantages that Television can offer for kids: read more »

Video games rock! Just about any teen or pre-teen in the U.S. or anywhere else knows that. What they may not know is that video games have become one of the most insidious and powerful forms of television in the world, and not just among the younger set. read more »

Pork chops keep fallin’ on my head ….

Flint Lockwood has been obsessed with science and inventing since grade school. He lives on an isolated island that has long since lost its vitality when the sardine trade, its major industry, went under. But Flint has a plan that could change all that, with the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator, or, as Flint puts it, FLD SM DFR (flid sim difur) for short. It turns water into food. read more »

With No Power Comes No Responsibility – A Review in High Definition

What if Quentin Tarantino made a faux superhero movie? I ask this rhetorically not to diminish this movie’s off -kilter originality, but to draw a baseline of sensibility and quality in Matthew Vaughn’s explosively funny and explosively violent Kick-Ass.