The Verge - Reviews

‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ review: boldly going back to the future

2013-05-14T22:58:38Z

In 2009 J.J. Abrams reimagined Star Trek, turning Gene Roddenberry’s near-utopian vision into a high-octane summer action ride. Rather than simply creating a prequel, however, Abrams opted to fork the Trek universe with a bit of time travel trickery and some heavy lifting from Leonard Nimoy. The result was a massive hit that set the stage for a new series of adventures unencumbered by more than 45 years of canon.

Now comes Star Trek Into Darkness — but instead of taking advantage of that fresh start, the movie goes in the opposite direction. Leaning on its predecessors to an even greater degree than the 2009 reboot, it’s a film that that can be taken in wildly different ways depending on what the viewer brings to the table. If you loved the 2009 film, you’ll see more of the same wall-to-wall enjoyable summer action. If you have a strong attachment to earlier Trek films, however, you may walk out of the theater very angry.

Darkness opens exactly as you’d hope — with the crew of the Enterprise in the midst of a massive action sequence trying to save a doomed planet. They manage to save the day, of course, because that’s what happens in Trek — but Chris Pine’s headstrong James T. Kirk finds himself quickly reprimanded for violating Starfleet protocol and is stripped of his command. A devastating terrorist bombing on a research facility quickly changes the calculus, however, and after a follow-up assault Kirk is back in command. His mission? Hunt down the fugitive responsible: Benedict Cumberbatch’s John Harrison.

There’s been an intentional veil of mystery around Cumberbatch’s character since the actor was first cast, the popular theory being that he’s actually Khan Noonien Singh, an original series villain who also headlined Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. Harrison’s twists and turns aren’t something I’m going to address here either way — that’s what our spoiler discussion thread is for — but the actor delivers a quietly menacing performance that is perfectly modulated for Darkness. Fans of Sherlock know how watchable Cumberbatch can be, and his cold detachment works better here than the bombast of Eric Bana’s Nero did the first time around. We’re never quite sure if we can take him at his word, even later in the film, and it makes watching him toy with Kirk and Spock (Zachary Quinto) that much more entertaining.

Visually the film is glorious, with director of photography Dan Mindel and production designer Scott Chambliss returning for a second round. The Apple Store look of the Enterprise’s bridge contrasts with the primary colors of the costumes, and Harrison’s all-black ensemble frames him as the classic Western villain. Futuristic San Francisco is a particular standout: part familiar terrain, part utopian dream. The film was partially shot in IMAX — certain scenes go full-screen, a stylistic choice that Christopher Nolan used in The Dark Knight — and was post-converted to 3D. Together the combination makes for a fully immersive ride, drawing the viewer in rather than pushing them away. (And yes, the lens flares pop as their own 3D elements.)

The same high-production sheen transfers to the action sequences. For the most part, this is a tight summer movie spectacle executed efficiently and effortlessly. From some particularly brutal fist fights to the ship-to-ship battles, the film hits every note just right. It’s clear that Abrams is growing into an even more confident action director, and Into Darkness offers some of the best examples of visual dynamism that we’ve seen this year.

'Darkness' glosses over character moments in the midst of battles and explosions

Despite all the flourish in its execution, a distinct lack of stakes undercuts the adrenaline rush of Into Darkness. The film briefly touches on terrorism and how it changes people, but it uses those themes as broad framing devices rather than as an opportunity to add real heft. Several sequences fall victim to videogame syndrome; one was so shameless I kept waiting for a power-up notification to appear on Kirk’s heads-up display.

The result is a movie where nobody ever truly feels in jeopardy — and as a consequence Into Darkness never earns the payoffs it’s reaching for. When Kirk is deprived of his command early on, it feels like a perfunctory first-act speed bump, not a true obstacle to overcome. Unlike the 2009 film, which took care to give each crew member their own story and moment to shine, Into Darkness glosses over characters in the midst of battles and explosions. It begins to feel like the film is counting on the goodwill and familiarity audiences have with Bones, Uhura, Scotty, and Sulu to fill in the gaps.

Which brings us to The Scene. Again, I’m not going to go into spoilers, but there is a pivotal sequence in Star Trek Into Darkness that had the potential to be a gutsy, powerful moment that could have truly surprised audiences. Instead, the filmmakers opted for a carbon copy of a seminal moment of Star Trek lore. And I’m not exaggerating when I say carbon copy; there are specific lines of dialogue, beats, and visual moments recreated verbatim.

Taken simply as a tongue-in-cheek nod — quite common in Abrams’ Trek universe — it’s great. But because it’s also one of the film’s most important moments, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Abrams is using the callback to lend Into Darkness a gravitas it simply doesn’t create on its own. If you know the original scene they’re aping, it feels like a sneering cheat. If you don’t, it’s just another event that happens — one the audience knows will have zero repercussions.

Rebooting the series gave us the opportunity to care about old characters in a new way

While it’s just one moment amongst many, The Scene exemplifies the larger problem with Into Darkness. Rather than striving for surprising reversals and story beats, it’s far too focused on being clever — and while the occasional nudge-nudge wink-wink is fun, that only goes so far. Rebooting the series gave audiences the opportunity to care about old characters in a new way, but the film fails to advance that project. It wouldn’t be so frustrating if the creative team behind the movie wasn’t capable of such incredible work. Abrams’ early television work trafficked almost entirely on character and emotional dynamics; it’s that same touch that gave Super 8 such sparkle and oomph. The fact that it’s missing here is just a wasted opportunity.

In terms of sheer spectacle, there’s no denying that Star Trek Into Darkness delivers. For all the build-up, hype, and hope leading up to the film, it’s just a shame there isn’t a whole lot more.

Star Trek Into Darkness is currently playing internationally. It opens in the US in IMAX theaters the night of May 15th. To discuss the film, spoilers and all, join our discussion in the forums!

Toshiba Kirabook review: finally, a flagship Windows 8 laptop

2013-05-13T15:45:53Z

Typically when I meet with a manufacturer to talk about new products, they're coy about mentioning their competitors. They refer to "our competition," or "other players," or "similar devices." Every company wants me to believe it's the only company on the planet, that any others aren't even worth the lip service.

That's what made my last meeting with Toshiba so odd. While showing me the new Kirabook, the highest-end ultrabook the company has ever made and the first in a new line, the company's product managers and PR reps couldn't stop talking about Apple. They told me "we're lighter than Air," and compared "apples to apples — our apples to Apple's apples." While other manufacturers have raced to the bottom and to the lowest common laptop denominator, they said, Apple has stolen the high end with an enduring focus on quality. Toshiba thinks it can change that.

The Kirabook is designed to be the Windows equivalent of the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, or the Chromebook Pixel: it's uncompromised hardware, a true flagship device for those willing to pay for it. Windows 8 desperately needs that: every ultrabook I've seen makes some sacrifice in the name of a price tag, and it's led to the perception that Windows 8 machines can't be as good as a MacBook. It takes more than a super-high-resolution display to make a great laptop, though. Can Toshiba zig where other manufacturers have zagged, forget the price tag and just build the best Windows laptop ever?

Hardware

Thin is in

The Kirabook's price tag may put it in the MacBook Pro's league, but it actually looks more like the MacBook Air. 2.6 pounds and 0.7 inches thick, the wedge-shaped notebook is a little lighter than the Air and a bit thicker — but the comparable MacBook Pro with Retina display is much thicker and almost two pounds heavier. This silver-and-black notebook is the smallest, thinnest, lightest high-resolution laptop I've ever seen, and that's pretty remarkable.

Toshiba spent a lot of time talking about the AZ91 magnesium alloy it used in the Kirabook, which the company claims is 90 percent stronger than the aluminum used in the Air. I can't vouch for the specific numbers, but the Kirabook certainly feels far sturdier than Apple's laptop. I spend a lot of time holding my Air in one hand by its palmrest as I walk around, and it flexes and creaks while the Kirabook's base stays stays firm. Even the hinge is nice and sturdy, light enough to be opened with one hand but sticky enough to not wobble too much when you tap on the screen.

There is one unnerving exception, however: the lid itself gives and flexes a lot, even under relatively light pressure. It doesn't appear to be a real problem, but I don't like feeling as if I'm going to snap off a chunk whenever I open the Kirabook. The Kirabook at some points reminded me of the Excite 10 LE tablet, which was accompanied by a similar design language had a litany of build quality and design issues. For $1,599 that's almost inexcusable.

Toshiba misses in other parts of the design as well. The shape of the laptop's two parts is most accurately described as "dustpan" — rounded at the bottom where the two parts meet, but more squared at the extremeties. Even the wedge design makes me want to use the Kirabook to scoop things off my floor. It also gives the Kirabook's palmrest sharp edges and corners, and an asymmetrical design that takes away from the otherwise handsome, understated device. Toshiba's so close here, but I still much prefer the look of the MacBook Pro or the Asus Zenbook.

Somewhat less than the sum of its parts

Hunting the elusive perfect trackpad

It may not be a weird 21:9 ultrabook, but the design here is still unmistakably Toshiba — partly because there are big Toshiba logos on either side of the lid, but mostly because the Kirabook comes with the same keyboard I've seen on countless Toshiba laptops before, strange science-fiction font and all. The not-quite-square keys are a bit shallow, so you never get a satisfying clack as you type, plus the keys themselves are slightly too small — even though they're well spaced out, it just feels cramped. The keys are backlit, and there are lots of function keys for navigating around Windows or changing various settings — it ticks all the boxes, but it's not quite a great typing experience.

The recessed trackpad is big, smooth, and comfortable, but there's some software execution missing. Tapping with two fingers to right-click doesn't work all the time, and pinch-to-zoom and even two-finger scrolling are hit-and-miss as well. Toshiba got the hardware right, and I'm hopeful it can continue to tweak the trackpad's software — someone has to get it right eventually — but I found myself tapping and swiping on the Kirabook's touchscreen more often than normal.

Sound fires out the bottom of the Kirabook, through two speakers on the sloped edge of the laptop's base. Manufacturer partnerships with audio heavyweights are a cliché of laptop marketing at this point, but Toshiba's collaboration with Harman Kardon once again produces a surprisingly good set of speakers here. The Kirabook pumps out loud, impressive audio, with bass response and clarity I wouldn't expect from a notebook this thin. It's still no match for even a decent set of external speakers, but they'll certainly do in a pinch when you're watching movies on the go. And trust me, you're going to want to watch movies on the Kirabook.

Display

A window to the world

Whether you call it Retina or ultra-high-res or something else entirely, the trend is clear: 1080p has been ousted. The Kirabook joins the MacBook Pro and the Chromebook Pixel as the best laptop displays on the market, with a 13.3-inch, 2560 x 1440 screen that looks absolutely fantastic. At 220 pixels per inch, it's right in line with the 15.4-inch screen on the Retina MacBook Pro. Colors are beautiful, viewing angles are solid, and things look unbelievably crisp in such high resolution. Except for the things that don't.

The Kirabook has the same problem Apple encountered with the first MacBook Pro with Retina Display: most Windows apps aren't designed to be seen at such high resolutions. Chrome is effectively unusable, for instance, and most apps don't render text or images properly. I laughed out loud the first time I tried to watch a full-screen YouTube video, and saw the hilariously tiny controls along the bottom of the screen.

Toshiba and Microsoft do everything they can to alleviate the problem: there's a handy tool on the Kirabook for tweaking the display's resolution so things look their best, and most Windows 8 apps look great at full resolution anyway. Most desktop apps look pretty bad, though, whether it's Evernote or Steam or Quicken — icons are too small, pictures too blurry, text too pixelated. I'm not sure they're going to be updated any time soon, either, given that the Kirabook is but one (very expensive) computer in the Windows ecosystem. A lot of websites have been improved as a result of high-res displays on MacBooks, iPads, and elsewhere, but a lot of the web still looks bad on screens this good. This screen is incredible, and watching Netflix on a Windows machine has never been so beautiful, but it shines a harsh light on how low-res Windows still is.

Unless you're willing to wait out a pretty steep development curve, you might want to wait a while before buying a Windows PC with such a high-res display. Not only are there aesthetic costs, but performance takes its toll as well.

The best and worst of Windows, in glorious high resolution

Software and performance

Behind the curtain

3.7 million pixels is a lot for one processor to handle

As a MacBook Air user, I've grown accustomed to performance slowdowns — the occasional spinning wheel or stalled app is the price I apparently have to pay for a light, thin computer. The Kirabook promises to be something more — MacBook Pro power in a MacBook Air body — but it seems that any extra power in the computer is dedicated to pushing the screen's 3.7 million pixels. So for all the extra oomph, you're still left with a solid but imperfect computer.

The base, $1,799.99 Kirabook model (the $1,599.99 model doesn't have a touchscreen, and neither Toshiba nor I think you should buy it) comes with an Intel Core i5 processor, Intel's integrated graphics, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB solid-state hard drive. For $200 more you get a faster Core i7 processor plus Windows 8 Pro, and though I've only tested the higher-end model it certainly seems worth the extra expense. I worry the i5 model wouldn't be up to the task, because it often seems like the Kirabook is bumping up against the ceiling of its performance even with an i7. In normal use, it works perfectly smoothly, but if I was watching a movie, browsing the web, and flipping between Metro and Desktop modes frequently, it would stumble. Not a lot, or often enough to be a problem, but it did stumble. The Kirabook clearly needs all the power it can get, and even now is just quirky enough to give me pause.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display had a lot of the same issues, which makes me think there are currently really only two ways for a computer to manage such a high-resolution display: either provide an excess of horsepower like the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, or use a much simpler operating system like Chrome OS. (There's a chance Intel's upcoming Haswell chips could fix that, though.) Your best option for now is probably the 15-inch Pro and its discrete graphics, but Apple's laptop is somehow even more expensive than the Kirabook.

There's also no performance middle ground with the Kirabook — it's either cool and quiet, or really loud and really warm — and when it gets going, it gets going. The fan whirs loudly, and so aggressively that it makes the laptop's palmrest vibrate pretty intensely. It's really hard to work on a laptop that sounds and feels like it's about to lift out of the stratosphere. That's luckily the exception rather than the rule, and for the most part it's nearly silent and fairly cool. It's also really responsive, booting in about seven seconds and resuming in less than two.

If I'm going to spend $1,600 or more on a computer, I expect there to be perks — excellent customer support is a huge part of what makes Apple's computers great, for instance. Toshiba matches the Genius bar with a dedicated call center in Utah for Kirabook owners, which Toshiba says you'll be able to use to speak to a human 24 hours a day, whether your computer is broken or you just can't figure out how to make the Charms menu appear. (Toshiba even refers to the team in Utah as "our Geniuses.") At the same time, though, Toshiba slathers the Kirabook with bloatware and stickers that make it feel anything but premium. Norton pop-ups abound, and Toshiba installs a number of its own apps along with third-party options like Amazon and Ebay. You do get full versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, which is a nice add-on. Luckily everything is easy enough to remove, and I actually like the "KIRACentral" app that has all your computer's relevant information and support channels in one place. Still, every time Norton (which is mercifully also paid for) tells me my computer is infected or my hands brush the three stickers on the palmrest, I wonder how no-compromise the Kirabook really is.

Battery life, for its part, is at least only slightly-compromise. I got 5 hours and 16 minutes of life on the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of popular websites and high-res images with brightness at 65 percent, and in normal use typically got right around five hours. That's pretty solid ultrabook battery life, and only a hair less than the equivalent MacBook Pro, but it does make clear that all-day battery and high-res screens remain mostly mutually exclusive.

Fitbit Flex review

2013-05-06T14:00:49Z

For a little over a month, I've been getting off my subway one stop early and walking the rest of the way home. I've been playing soccer twice a week, and trying to drink eight glasses of water every day. I've been running more, eating better, but still not sleeping nearly enough.

I've been testing the Fitbit Flex, the first fitness wristband from the company that deserves a lot of credit for popularizing wearable fitness devices in the first place. From its namesake Fitbit Tracker to the newer One and Ultra, the California-based company has typically been known for devices that clip to your shirt or your pants and track your every movement. But every Fitbit user seems to have a tale of a lost or accidentally machine-washed tracker, so the company came out with the Flex. It's a $99 bracelet that purports to help you be more active, eat better, sleep better, and become far more attractive to the opposite sex. (One of those isn't strictly true, but it kind of is.)

But you could fill both your arms with all the available gadgets that claim to do those things. From Jawbone to Nike to Samsung to even a slew of apps for your phone, there are a million and counting ways to track your activity. So what does Fitbit offer that makes it special? Why should you spend $99 on the Flex over an Up or a FuelBand, or a free iPhone app? After lots of exertion in the name of journalism, I think I have an answer.

Hardware

Brains versus beauty

Some people want jewelry — I want something I never notice

Just as Google Glass will only be ubiqutious when it's built into the glasses so many of us already wear, fitness bands need to be totally unobtrusive before they'll catch on with everyday people. In the interim, there are two plausible approaches: make your device beautiful like the Up, which people would wear even if it didn't do anything; or make it as thin, light, and inconspicuous as possible. Fitbit took the latter route, and the Flex is the best effort I've seen yet. Three quarters of the band is just a thin, flexible rubber bracelet that feels like a wristband you'd get at a bar or a nightclub. The teeth on one end go into two of a series of slots on the other, and it holds tight, though you'll leave a mark on your wrist shoving the two mismatched pieces together. The solid matte-colored rubber is cheap and sort of boring, without any of the Up's stylishness, but I went whole days without noticing the Flex was there. That's exactly what I want from this type of device.

The bracelet itself is actually just a holder — all of the Flex's technology is stored inside a black rectangular box about the size of my pinky toe, which slides into a pocket in the wristband. That makes the bracelets cheap and interchangeable, so you can mix and match among the available Slate, Black, Teal, and Tangerine models as you see fit. It also means Fitbit could make lots of other accessories for the tracker, and I'm betting we'll soon see Flex-compatible shoes, belt clips, necklaces, and much more.

The modular design makes charging a pain since you have to take the tracker out, insert it into Fitbit's odd and proprietary USB cradle, and then put it back in when it's charged — a few times I put the bracelet on without the tracker in it, which left me basically just wearing a rubber band on my wrist. Luckily, Fitbit's estimation of five to seven days of battery life is pretty accurate, so worrying about finding the weird dongle and keeping the Flex charged isn't too much of a concern.

When you're wearing the Flex, there's very little data readily available on the band itself. Double-tapping the translucent plastic strip on the bracelet gives you a rough estimate of how you're doing, with a series of LEDs lighting up your progress in 20 percent increments. (Those dots became deeply disappointing on days when I got to 6PM and saw but one flashing LED.) You'll need your computer or cellphone to really dig into your Fitbit data, and if you're attentive to your Flex there's a lot to see.

Tracking / software

Staying in sync

The Flex collects a lot more than five dots-worth of data, and makes nearly all of it available in web apps or on your Android or iOS device. You can sync your tracker via the USB cable (there's a helper app for Windows and OS X that collects and uploads your data), or directly to your phone via Bluetooth 4.0. It's the latter feature I really loved about the Flex: keeping your data current is so much easier than with the Up, and it hardly ever requires you to take off and put on the device. Plus I could actually open the app, sync the tracker, and walk while seeing the app update my steps in real time, which is utterly pointless but also kind of fun.

Counting steps is still Fitbit's bread and butter

In fact, you really never need to take the Flex off except to charge it for a couple of hours every week. It's waterproof enough to take in the shower, and unnoticeable enough to wear while you type (the tracker sits on top of your wrist, so all that's underneath your arm is a thin strip of rubber). It's even comfortable enough to sleep with, and Fitbit has plenty of features for those moments when you're not so active.

The Flex tracks your sleep much like the Up, though with far less power. You have to manually tell the device when you're going to sleep by tapping incessantly on the Flex until it vibrates (those are actually the instructions), and then remember to disable Sleep Mode when you wake up; it won't shut off when it notices you walking around or even when you turn off your alarm, which is an annoying oversight. It's not nearly as smart as the Up, and Fitbit seems to know that: the Flex's vibrate-your-wrist-to-wake-you alarm clock feature doesn't try to guess when you're sleeping lightly and would wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, like the Up does. It just goes berserk on your arm at the time you set — and for me, especially on lazier mornings when eight more minutes of sleep sounds like a gift from Heaven, that works just fine.

Steps are the core competency of the Flex, as with most other fitness bands – you're given an initial daily goal of 10,000, which you can fine-tune as you gather data and see your own performance. The Flex measures steps about as accurately and consistency as any other device, nearly always within a few steps of what the Up recorded at the same time – and since you can actually open the app and watch it count while you walk, it's not hard to tell how well it's doing. That said, it's not hard to trick the device. I could put on the Flex and just sort of shake my wrist around for a minute, and poof: 200 steps. If you're looking to cheat your way through a "who can be most active" contest with your friends, the Flex is your best weapon, but unless you're really trying to game the system, the system works fine.

Flex only counts your steps for you, but it can store a tremendous amount of other data if you supply it. It can collect your weight automatically if you have an Aria scale, or you can input it manually. Sleep data exists in that half-automatic, half-manual space, but food and activity are completely dependent on your input. It's relatively easy to keep track of either: there's a handy slider for inputting the water you drink and there's a robust database of foods and activities, and all you have to do is pick one and then go about your day. But whether you're biking or running stairs or lifting weights or drinking one brand of coffee or another, there's a surprising amount to keep track of – and if you're not walking or sleeping the Flex doesn't know what you're doing.

If you're the diary-keeping type, it's a cinch, but I found myself frequently forgetting to input a meal or note the time I ran 12 blocks because I was late for a meeting. At that point, it started to feel like all my data was bunk and incomplete, and why not just ditch it all and go back to steps?

I still don't have a good answer to that question, because the Flex (and sadly most of its competitors) doesn't give me one. Steps are obvious: it's good when I take more than I did yesterday, and fewer is bad. There's definitely something to the idea that collecting more data is useful in itself, and I did notice that when I drink more coffee I tend to go to sleep later and not sleep very well (because, well, of course). Fitbit didn't tell me any of that, though — it's just a locker for all my habits and activities, waiting for me to sift through for trends and useful details.

The next step for Fitbit and others is to answer that "so what?" question, and tell me things like, "Hey dude, drink less coffee at night and you'll sleep better," or "You never walk around between 10 and four, maybe you should take a break." That's what Jawbone hopes to solve with the Up Platform, which lets you plug your data into third-party apps that offer such recommendations; Fitbit has something similar, with a few handy apps like Tictrac that take its data, but it's not as robust as what Jawbone offers. Fitbit does offer a few helpful tips, but you'll need a $49.99 / year Premium account before it'll start telling you if your diet is a little out of whack or if you're less active than most people your age. And I want more than just historical trends and basic diet advice. Mint tells me when a new credit card will save me money or when I should stop spending so much money on beer, and I likewise need Fitbit to tell me how to sleep better and be more active.

I know how I am – how do I do better?

Nike's FuelBand cleverly avoids these diminishing returns of data input, which is part of what makes it compelling. Nike doesn't care what you eat, or how well you slept. It doesn't even provide data you understand, like calories or steps — it just has Fuel, the mysterious term for how active your FuelBand determines you are. If you get more of it today than you did yesterday, great; if you don't, you should probably try harder tomorrow. There's a lot more data and a lot more information in what Fitbit collects and provides, but it's ultimately a lot of work to draw more detailed conclusions.

At the very least, I wish my Flex would remind me to input all the data it requires. The Moves app for iOS has a clever integration with Foursquare, and will bug you later with a "Hey, you checked in at TGI Friday's, what'd you eat?" message. The Flex would really benefit from something similar, or a daily push notification gently reminding me to log my food or activity for the day. If I've gone a whole day without adding anything to Fitbit's database, it's probably not because I didn't eat. Or sleep. Or move around.

For its part, the Fitbit app is both simple to use and nice to look at. It's divided into sections — Activity, Weight, Alarm, and so on — and makes it really easy to log or see activity, and track your progress over time. To see your trend lines and pie charts, you'll need to be on fitbit.com, where you get a bigger and better dashboard for all your information. The whole Fitbit ecosystem works far better cross-platform than any of its competitors: you can use iOS or Android (though your phone has to have Bluetooth 4.0, which is far from certain), or just sync through your computer without ever needing your phone at all. Fitbit offers some nifty social features as well, letting you either encourage or compete with your friends in your quests to be more active and healthier.

‘Iron Man 3’ review: Robert Downey Jr. becomes the latest lethal weapon

2013-05-02T16:51:06Z

Iron Man has always been the smartest of Marvel’s film franchises. From the very beginning, it matched Robert Downey Jr.’s effortless charm with a subtle hint of social commentary (Tony Stark is a weapons manufacturer who learns to give back to humanity after an electromagnet is plugged into his chest, after all.) That one-two punch turned what could have been a goofy comic adaptation into a pair of blockbusters that didn’t force the audience to check its brain at the door.

Downey now returns in the highly-anticipated Iron Man 3, with action movie all-star Shane Black taking the helm from Jon Favreau. The film starts off with even grander ambitions than its predecessors, only to jettison them for a superhero riff on the old-school action-comedy — though you may be too wrapped up in the spectacle to notice.

We also have a look at the 4DX experience.

We catch up with Stark in the midst of crisis: he hasn’t quite recovered from the events in The Avengers, and finds himself prone to anxiety attacks. It’s taking a toll on his relationship with Pepper Potts — Gwyneth Paltrow continues to be the grounded heart of the series — and things aren’t made any better by the appearance of The Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley).

At first shown only through a series of terrorist-style video broadcasts, The Mandarin is a mash-up of Western fears. Part al Qaeda, part anarchist, he does one thing extremely well: he hates America. After Stark’s former bodyguard is injured in a Mandarin attack, our hero calls out the mystery man — only to have his Malibu home destroyed in a vicious helicopter assault. The world thinks its superhero savior has been killed, so alone and with nothing more than a broken prototype suit, Stark sets out to find those responsible.

It’s a fantastic setup. Taking Stark out of his element allows him to veer away from the swaggering playboy schtick, and sets the stage for a real story of rebirth — culminating, one would assume, in an epic mano-a-mano confrontation. But that’s where the film changes gears. The broken Iron Man suit gets left behind as Stark pounds the pavement the old-fashioned way. He teams up with several partners — first a precocious youngster played by Ty Simpkins, then with Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes. Hints of noir surface as he gets into fights and scrapes along the way, every exchange punctuated with a slightly-meaner version of Stark’s wit.

The Mandarin is a mash-up of Western fears

the ghosts of Murtaugh and Riggs haunt 'Iron Man 3'

It all looks and feels less like a superhero movie and more like an action-comedy from the late 1980s or early ‘90s. A good part of that vibe is no doubt due to Shane Black and his co-writer, Drew Pearce. In case you’re not familiar with Black’s name, he more or less invented the modern action movie. At 23 he sold the script for the original Lethal Weapon, and went on to write movies like The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight. From the style of dialogue to the climax, the ghosts of Murtaugh and Riggs haunt Iron Man 3; the movie even takes place at Christmas time.

While it’s refreshing to see a new take on the material — and Downey is clearly having a blast playing a more sardonic Stark — the change in approach doesn’t always work. The buddy-cop sensibility feels a little out of place for a story about a man striking out on his own, and the film tries a little too hard for laughs at times. It’s a subtle shift, but the first two Iron Man films set a very specific tone and approach, and you can only push that so far before “different” becomes “distracting.”

The action sequences, on the other hand, are a masterclass in execution. From the Malibu attack to the moment when a fleet of Iron Man suits show up ready to tussle, the battles and visual effects are crisp, visceral, and most of all fun. That’s not to say there aren’t stakes — Stark takes a beating in this movie — but the film takes real pleasure in all its aerial acrobatics and suit switcheroos. A mid-air rescue sequence, teased in the trailer above, is simply phenomenal, even if the filmmakers go a step too far while reaching for a joke at the end.

If anything, the biggest problem with Iron Man 3 is the issue of the villain. Make no mistake: Kingsley is one of the best parts of the film. He brings his full weight and gravitas to the role, his voice taking on a strange cadence that’s just hard enough to place to be creepy, and he’s even able to wring some comedic beats from the material when called upon. But the film never really ends up delivering on the promise the initial setup makes, which left me frustrated and wondering what could have been.

Guy Pearce, who plays think tank founder Aldrich Killian, is equal parts slick businessman and angry geek, but the conflict there feels surprisingly hollow as well. His storyline, which involves a new biotechnology called Extremis, attempts to echo the commentary found in the first film, but ultimately falls victim to good old-fashioned movie tropes.

None of this may ultimately matter when audiences sit down in theaters this weekend. There’s great pleasure just in watching Robert Downey Jr. play this role — he’s so good it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re just watching the real Downey riff — and in terms of summer blockbusters even one great performance can be a luxury, much less the assortment you’ll find here. Iron Man 3 is a fun ride that’s executed well, and there’s celebration to be had in that alone. But the original was that rare film that moved beyond the confines of genre to offer all audiences something to love. Iron Man 3 doesn’t quite get there. It’s entertaining, but it feels like something’s missing. Then again, the bar was set pretty high coming in.

Iron Man 3 is currently playing internationally, and opens in the US tomorrow, May 3rd. To talk about the movie, spoilers and all, join our conversation in the forums!

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 review: a netbook by another name

2013-05-02T15:08:58Z

A few years ago, netbooks were small, light, inexpensive, often underpowered computers — and the word quickly became a pejorative term, to be used only with the greatest of disdain as you throw your netbook out the window. Then came ultrabooks — small, light, inexpensive, often underpowered computers that have taken the PC market by storm. The more things change, the more they stay the same. So while Lenovo may call its new IdeaPad Yoga 11 an ultrabook, make no mistake: it's a netbook. This is a bag-sized, two-pound, $599 laptop that runs low-end software on low-end hardware. It does have a handy touchscreen, plus an ultrapliable hinge that turns the laptop into a tablet and a bunch of other things besides, but it's a netbook.

Microsoft may finally have a case to make for the netbook, though. Windows RT runs well on almost any hardware — unlike Windows 7, which crumbled on anything low-end — and between the Windows Store and the latest version of Office there's a burgeoning app ecosystem as well. The Yoga 11 could essentially be a Chromebook with an app store — long battery life, does the basics well, great browser, native apps for all the things you want – and for anyone other than the most powerful of power users that's kind of the dream. I've been waiting for it for a while now.

Hardware

Small packages

11.6-inch laptops are about to have their heyday. As tablet and laptop converge into one, it seems like this is the only size that makes sense for both uses. At 2.8 pounds and nearly two-thirds of an inch thick, the Yoga 11 is still pretty huge for a tablet and a little small for a laptop, but at least you're not stuck trying to use a 10-inch laptop or a 13-inch tablet.

The massive bezel around the Yoga 11's display and keyboard makes me think the device could be considerably smaller, but in fairness there's no real evidence that's the case; at 11.8 inches it's almost exactly as wide as the 11.6-inch MacBook Air. It's not nearly as elegantly designed as the Air, though: Lenovo took a much more rugged approach, from the leathery black palmrest to the soft-touch metallic exterior. It's comfortable without being particularly sleek. There are few decorations anywhere on the device, save for a Lenovo logo in the corner of the lid — once you peel off the Energy Star sticker on the inside, it's about as minimalist a laptop as you'll find. My review unit is a silvery gray on the outside and all black on the inside, but there's an IdeaPad 310-like orange model that is infinitely more eye-catching. Either way, though, it's a simple and understated device.

Pry open the Yoga 11 and you'll be greeted by its 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display. It's a pretty good screen, with solid viewing angles and nice color reproduction, and a blindingly bright maximum setting. It's really nothing special, though, and I continue to look forward to the day that 1366 x 768 displays of any size are a thing of the past. It's okay for a laptop, but when you hold the device close in Tablet mode the relative lack of pixels starts to show. The screen's very responsive to touch and gestures, more so than the 13-inch model — it's a perfectly adequate display, it's just nothing to get particularly excited about. That sums up the Yoga 11's whole aesthetic, actually: good at every turn, almost never exciting or enticing.

On the outside, the Yoga 11 seems more or less like a normal laptop: there's a power button on the front, which is weird, but the two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI jack, and full-size SD card slot are all fairly standard ultrabook fare. So are the two speakers, which blast decent-but-tinny audio out its sides. But the Yoga 11 quickly shows it's something different.

Well-made, but totally without flair

A laptop hinge with superpowers

The first clue is that when you open the Yoga 11's lid, it won't stop you from opening it further and further. And further. Like on the Yoga 13, the hinge can rotate a full 360 degrees, and is designed to be used in four entirely different ways. One is like a regular laptop; another is Stand mode, which uses the face-down keyboard as a base and points the screen toward you. There's also Tablet mode, with the screen folded all the way around and the keys underneath your fingers as you wrap them around the device. Lastly, there's Tent mode, which I can't stop calling Teepee mode, where you stand the device up like an upside-down V. (Lenovo's wild, Martin Campbell-directed commercial shows off how the four modes will help you save the world.) The flexibility seems like a gimmick, but it's great — I wound up using Stand mode to watch movies in bed, and Tent mode became my go-to tablet setup because the Yoga 11 is way too heavy to actually hold for very long.

The keyboard and trackpad on the Yoga 11 appear to have been lifted whole-hog from the 13-inch model, and have even been improved in places. The keyboard has the same concave black keys with the curved "smile" design that I've liked on everything from the Yoga 13 to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, with just the right amount of travel and space — it also still doesn't have a backlight, which frustrates me to no end. Gone is the right-most column of directional buttons (PgUp and the like have been moved to above the arrow keys), which threw the alignment of the keyboard off before; I got used to the Yoga 11 much faster than the Yoga 13, but typed fluidly and fast on both. The trackpad is the same smooth clickpad as on the larger model, and has a few of the same issues with edge gestures and two-finger scrolling, but it's definitely been improved since the 13-inch model came out in November.

The Yoga 11 is by and large just a shrunken version of the Yoga 13, and that's mostly a good thing. But for better, and sadly for worse, it's what's inside the Yoga 11 that's different, and it's what's inside that counts.

Software and performance

The new-look netbook

By far the most disappointing thing about the Yoga 11's hardware is the "Powered by Windows RT" sticker that comes on the palmrest. The sticker comes off easily, but you're still stuck using the low-end version of Microsoft's OS that can't run any of your legacy applications. It can only run the apps available in the Windows Store, which is growing but remains a paltry selection next to what you can do with full-blown Windows 8 or OS X. The one distinct advantage of Windows RT is its bundled version of Office Home and Student 2013. Word's the only Office app I use frequently, so I wound up using the Yoga 11 like the world's most advanced typewriter, but there's a pretty compelling case to be made for an ultraportable laptop with a great keyboard and a copies of Excel and PowerPoint.

The case gets even stronger as you enter about hour nine of using the Yoga 11. This device's battery life is just ridiculous: I consistently got more than 12 hours of consecutive, intensive use before the battery gave up the ghost. I streamed YouTube videos for 12 hours, and worked for entire days without ever getting the battery into the red; one nice byproduct of the Yoga 11's limited capabilities is that it kind of feels like it runs forever. It even charges quickly, so with about 30 minutes of being plugged in you'll get at least two full days of use.

That's why I really hope Google's paying attention to the Yoga 11. Lenovo and Microsoft figured out how to squeeze incredible battery life out of these low-powered specs, a feat that has somehow eluded Google and its partners as they've built Chromebooks. If the Yoga 11 were a Chromebook and still lasted this long, I bet it'd be cheaper, and I bet I'd buy one. But I digress.

I'd love to give Lenovo credit for limiting the Yoga 11's functionality and maximizing its performance, but other than the battery life there's nothing "maximum" here. The Yoga 11 is powered by an Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset like the one inside the Surface RT, and it's still not up to its task. Swiping and tapping through the tiles of the Windows UI is fast enough, but almost everything else is head-bangingly laggy. Apps take 10 seconds or more to load, are far too prone to crashing, and just always feel a beat behind. Even Word couldn't keep up, constantly an instant behind me as I typed. The machine felt fast and fresh whenever I booted it up, but by the time I had a couple of apps open it felt downright sluggish.

There are upsides to Windows RT, though. Like the fact that the Yoga 11 boots in only a few seconds, and resumes from sleep basically instantly. It runs cool and quiet, unless you're playing games. From a performance standpoint it's really more like a tablet — quiet, cool, but basic. It works well enough for watching movies (though the lower-res screen hampers that a bit), and when using a tablet it's actually nice to have a bit of extra real estate for drawing or reading — but there's still just so much it can't do, and so much more it can't do well.

One other nice byproduct of Windows RT is that there's no way for manufacturers to put annoying Norton pop-ups or invasive bloatware onto a device. All they can do is add extra apps, which Lenovo does relatively sparingly on the Yoga 11. You get Evernote, OneNote, Ebay, and a couple of others — they're all pretty unintrusive, and are easy to remove anyway. Other than that and the handful of Office apps, you're just getting a clean version of Windows RT.

Not much different than a tablet and a dock

‘Byzantium’ review: do we really need another vampire movie?

2013-04-29T18:00:03Z

As a concept, vampires are wearing thin. Twilight and its attendant social phenomenon all but destroyed the creature’s mysterious charm — whatever you think of the books, it’s become impossible to avoid jokes about sparkling vampires playing baseball. But 20 years after his seminal Interview with the Vampire, filmmaker Neil Jordan has returned with the quieter Byzantium, based on a play by Moira Buffini. It’s hardly a retread of Interview or a by-the-numbers horror film, but it fails to answer the basic and required question: why do we need another vampire movie?

While Interview swept across centuries and continents with a cast of forceful characters, Byzantium takes place mostly in a single English city, following the lives of former teen prostitute Clara (Gemma Arterton) and her orphanage-raised daughter Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan). Both are vampires or "sucreants," made not through a bite but on a mysterious island with a stone hut that can bestow immortality on visitors.

The film alternates between their present — where they drift through towns, hunted by a mysterious group of fellow vampires — and the events that led to their transformation two centuries ago. Clara earns money as an intermittent exotic dancer or brothel madam, while Eleanor writes and discards the story of her life over and over, struggling to find someone she can trust to share it with. Eventually she befriends Frank, a teenage boy with leukemia, and their relationship predictably threatens to break the bond between Eleanor and Clara.

There are a number of undeniably beautiful moments — particularly the transformation scenes themselves, set against the rocky desolation of the island. While the characters speak in that stilted voice that’s meant to indicate they’re from the past, Arterton and Ronan have real chemistry as a frustrated and isolated mother and daughter — and Jonny Lee Miller sneers and spits entertainingly as Ruthven, the syphilitic villain who forces Clara into prostitution. Plot-wise, though, the film falls down when it attempts to build a lore behind its vampires.

They can pass almost flawlessly as human, but they’ll never quite be human

The basic question of what the two protagonists are is handled well. As usual for a film about mythical creatures, Byzantium is selective about its vampire traits, but it does so in a concerted effort to make Clara and Eleanor hard to distinguish from ordinary people. Sunlight has no effect, and they have neither otherworldly grace nor pointy teeth. Besides unusual strength and resilience, the only real tell that the pair are vampires — as opposed to deluded killers who believe they’re hundreds of years old — is a single sharp, hard thumbnail that grows when they’re about to feed, taking the place of fangs. They can pass almost flawlessly as human, but they’ll never quite be human.

It’s disappointing that the movie doesn’t play up this ambiguity further, especially as Eleanor starts trying to reveal her secret to others, because it’s Byzantium’s only really interesting contribution to the vampire mythos. We’ve had several takes on the pain of murder-fueled immortality — including Interview with the Vampire — and on vampires as wish fulfillment, but Clara and Eleanor are relatively normal humans who simply do not change. Eleanor describes herself as existing outside time, an apt description: the two seem frozen in place, doomed to live for hundreds of years without ever escaping who they were as teenagers. When they out themselves as vampires, people don’t even believe them.

The flip side of this is that Clara and Eleanor also come off as shallow and one-dimensional. Each has a sort of guiding code to her vampirism: Clara wants to punish men who exploit their power, while Eleanor gives peace to the nearly dead. But it’s a fine line between archetype and stereotype, and the two are at times a walking virgin / whore complex. Clara is meant to come off as a pragmatic woman who doesn’t know any life but sex work, but the camera’s constant focus on her body turns her into just another object and the movie into just another story about vampire strippers. On a broader scale, there’s an ugliness in seeing yet another example of female characters being overwhelmingly defined by their sexuality.

'Byzantium' is a vampire movie that might actually have worked better without the vampires

Even this, though, is better than the attempt to introduce a brotherhood of vampires whose "pointed nails of justice" seem used exclusively to hunt down Clara and Eleanor for the crime of being female vampires. It’s not really clear why they exist, and though the film tries to set up a sympathetic relationship between Clara and one of their hunters, it falls flat — in part because he’s spent the rest of the movie turning a blind eye to how badly everyone else has treated her. The brotherhood’s presence pushes Byzantium into a shaky middle ground between tragedy and action movie. While it’s fairly fast-paced and has its share of well-constructed fights and chases, these don’t quite fit with what feels overall like an attempt to give vampires a semi-realistic, or at least solidly dramatic, treatment.

Byzantium is a vampire movie that might actually have worked better without the vampires. Without a series of tired associations to invoke, the filmmakers could have created a new background for their ideas, breaking free from horror cliche. I’m putting out a call right now: somebody, make me a movie about immortal teenagers who don’t drink blood. And maybe leave out the strippers this time around.

BlackBerry Q10 review: revenge of the keyboard

2013-04-29T16:00:02Z

I feel like we’ve been here before.

In any discussion about BlackBerry, “The Bold is the one you really want” is a line you could’ve used at practically any point in the last five years. And so it is again: When the full-touch Z10 started hitting retail earlier this year to mediocre reviews, you couldn’t help but think, “This isn’t BlackBerry’s wheelhouse. The Bold is the one I really want.”

Of course, it’s not actually called the Bold this time around, but the Q10 is the spiritual successor to BlackBerry’s flagship line of portrait QWERTY phones. Make no mistake, this is BlackBerry’s bread and butter—no one can lay a more authentic claim to the portrait QWERTY form factor than these guys can. (Arguably, that’s because no one else is really trying to make a good portrait QWERTY phone, but that’s another matter entirely.)

And like I said, I feel like we’ve been here before, because this is the part of the review where I tell you that the smartphone landscape has changed, that no one actually wants portrait QWERTY anymore, that full-touch is the only way to go. It’s the part where I say that the Q10 is trying to be the best of a dead and irrelevant breed, while the Z10 does little to make up the massive amount of ground that BlackBerry has lost to the iPhones, the Galaxy S4s, and the Ones of the world. It’s the exact same thing I could’ve told you two years ago when we were talking about the Touch, the Curve, and the Bold.

So has the story changed this time around? Who is the Q10 for? And is it seriously worth a look? Let’s find out.

This is BlackBerry's bread and butter

The Z10 was panned, in part, for its crushingly boring design. It’s practically the antithesis of design, really—an unornamented matte black plastic box, thrown together as an afterthought. The Q10 is undeniably a chip off the same block, but it works better this time around: the four straight rows of physical keys, separated by satin metal lines, do an admirable job of breaking up the monotony.

The Q10 also features a nice chamfer and a gentle curve between the front, side, and back, giving it far greater "holdability" than the Z10—it feels good. The back of the Q10 has a matte, three-dimensional carbon fiber look that is classier than it sounds; it has less texture than the Z10’s rear, but the soft-touch finish still has plenty of grip.

It doesn’t have the "precious object" presence of an HTC One or an iPhone 5—but in some respect, I think BlackBerry basically nailed the look and feel of the Q10, which is remarkable considering its forgettable Z10 bloodline. This is more or less exactly what I would expect a modern portrait QWERTY phone to look like: a touchscreen that is neither too big nor too small, a perfectly sized keyboard (more on that in a bit), and an understated, business-appropriate look interspersed with high-end detail.

It's what I expect a modern portrait QWERTY phone to look like

The Q10’s 720 x 720 AMOLED display is good, but not great. It’s a bit warm—whites come through as very, very light yellows—and the maximum brightness is surprisingly low (this really shows when holding it up next to the Z10, which is much brighter at full tilt). Touch responsiveness was fine, though I would’ve liked a "glove mode"—since it was introduced on the Nokia Lumia 920 and recently featured on the Galaxy S4, it’s something I’d like to see become standard this year, particularly since I live in an area of the country with a real winter.

I had one annoyance brought about by BlackBerry 10’s reliance on gestures: you need to swipe up from the bottom to bring up the multitasking screen and "go home." That’s totally fine on the Z10, where you’ve got a big bezel beneath the display on which to start your swipe, but on the Q10, that means you need to basically swipe up from the keyboard. It just feels weird, like BlackBerry didn’t consider the notion of a physical keyboard when it designed that gesture. I also found myself occasionally swiping up to scroll a menu or web page and inadvertently bringing up the multitasking display—likewise, that isn’t an issue either on the Z10 where the bottom of the screen is much lower relative to your thumb.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s talk about the keyboard," you’re thinking. Or, at least, that’s what you’re likely thinking if you’re a BlackBerry diehard who patiently held fast through the Z10 launch to get your hands on the hardware this company is known for.

I’m happy to report that I think this keyboard is going to satisfy BlackBerry loyalists. I don’t pretend to be a hardcore portrait QWERTY user, but I’ve used my fair share of Curves and Bolds through the years, and there’s no sign with the Q10 that BlackBerry has forgotten its roots. The keys are "Bold-style"—that is, there’s no space between them, but each one has a distinct ridge that guides your angled thumb in the right direction—and they run literally edge-to-edge, so you’re taking maximum advantage of the phone’s roughly 2.6-inch width. They’re clicky, they feel great, and they’re somehow magically designed to minimize mistyping with fat thumbs, though BlackBerry 10’s auto-correction functionality can bail you out when you do fumble.

One oddity is that the Q10’s rows of keys are straight across, not slightly curved as on virtually every other phone BlackBerry has made. BlackBerry claims this was done because the Q10 lacks the cluster of controls between the keyboard and display, giving them the opportunity to align the keys with the square screen. Regardless of the reason, it didn’t seem to have any impact on my speed or accuracy.

There are a handful of tweaks here, though, that weren’t present on the Z10 at launch, thanks partly to the fact that the Q10 includes a new build (version 10.1) out of the box. Most notable might be the addition of "actions" to universal search, which—as the name suggests—allow you to trigger specific actions by typing into the phone’s search screen. (Old webOS users might remember this as "Quick Actions" in Just Type.) It’s a shout-out to the BlackBerry mantra of getting to work as soon as you start typing on the home screen.

Third-party apps can plug into these actions, but the Q10 supports a handful out of the box. For instance, I can type "Tweet this is a test" and it’ll shoot out "This is a test" from the Twitter account I have linked to the phone. "Note shopping list" will file a new note in the Remember app with the title "shopping list." Typing "email" followed by a contact name will start a new email to that contact (or you can simply type "email" to start a new blank email). It also works for BBM, the phone app, and others. It reminds me a bit of Alfred, the Mac app that lets you set up actions using short textual commands—the difference is, I don’t want to be typing on my phone if I can avoid it.

The Q10 feels faster than the Z10, side by side

Don’t get me wrong, I get the appeal of these actions for users who live and die by the Q10’s keyboard—and there will be many of those users, I’m sure—but I didn’t really see the advantage, personally. I was never able to convince myself that I was saving much (if any) time by typing out what I want to do on the phone rather than simply tapping the app and executing the command on the screen. (For what it’s worth, BlackBerry will be delivering actions to the Z10 as well once the 10.1 update starts rolling out.)

In a way, these actions feel like one of the fundamental rifts between the full-touch and keyboard philosophies of mobile computing: how do you want to get things done? If you’re willing to take the time to learn the Q10’s full list of keyboard shortcuts, you’ll no doubt shoot around the operating system a little bit faster, but I can’t imagine recommending this to anyone who isn’t already using a phone with a physical keyboard. If you’re already a fast and effective typist on a full-touch phone, the perceived advantage of the Q10’s form factor quickly evaporates, even taking actions and shortcuts into consideration.

More generally, when they're side by side, the Q10 feels faster than the Z10—scrolling is notably smoother, for instance. I don’t know whether we have 10.1 to thank for that or the fact that the Q10 simply has fewer pixels that it needs to manage, but it’s an improvement.

I would be willing to bet that the average BlackBerry user spends more time on voice calls than other users, and that makes sound quality even more important than usual. The Q10 is in a good place here: the earpiece is plenty clear (though I can always use one more notch of volume for extremely noisy environments), and the loudspeaker—a big meshed slot on the bottom of the phone—has a boomy quality that might be second only to the hilariously loud HTC One. Callers told me that they didn’t hear a peep of background noise when I was in a Starbucks filled with people and music.

The camera hardware in the Q10 is identical to that of the Z10, and so performance seems to be roughly the same—in daylight, I was able to produce images that were just fine, though colors were muted (less so on the phone’s vibrant AMOLED display than on my laptop’s LCD). Time Shift, which takes a burst of shots to choose from and lets you replace the faces of people who are blinking or frowning, is present on the Q10, but I’d argue slightly less useful than on the Z10: you need to make decisions about which shot to choose and which faces to use on a much smaller screen, and you can’t zoom the shot (detected faces are automatically magnified, but you can’t zoom in on other areas of the image). Frustratingly, it’s a one-time decision; you can’t go back to an old Time Shift image and change your mind.

BlackBerry 10.1 also adds support for HDR. I was impressed with how fast the phone seemed to snap HDR shots, but in practice, it didn’t make much of a difference for HDR’s notorious ghosting—I was actually getting giant ghosts on images of completely stationary objects, possibly because the camera is spending more time snapping photos than the shutter sound and UI lead you to believe, so you inadvertently start to move the camera before it’s actually done doing its work.

Our Q10’s review kit came with a nifty, extremely compact external battery charger powered by Micro USB, but you’ll probably only need to juice up that second cell if you’re putting in an inordinately long day (and night) away from a wall outlet. In my testing I had no issue making it through a full day of use in and around AT&T’s LTE network; in fact, there was a moment early in the afternoon where just a tiny sliver of the battery meter was missing after several hours of intermittent calling, texting, and browsing. On balance, it seems to do noticeably better than the Z10, which makes sense: it’s a smaller screen paired with a bigger battery (2,100 mAh versus the Z10’s 1,800 mAh).

Running with scissors: the director of 'RoboCop' and 'Showgirls' bets on his fans and loses

2013-04-27T19:00:05Z

Debuting his latest film at Tribeca, director Paul Verhoeven took the stage on an almost apologetic note. “I hope that you enjoy it, and will accept the moral choices I made while making the movie.” Coming from a man best known for the supercharged sex and violence of RoboCop, Total Recall, and Showgirls, it’s downright bewildering.

If he’s cautious, it’s because he just took a big risk and got burned. His latest movie, Tricked, was conceived as “the first user-generated film,” in the words of his producer. It would be a story guided entirely by the audience. Verhoeven began by filming a five-minute script (the first episode), put it online, and asked the audience to write scripts for the next five minutes. All the filmmakers had to do was choose the best one and get filming. The final product is something of a double feature: first, a 50-minute documentary about the process, then the 40-minute short they actually shot.

Starting out, the crew is all smiles. Verhoeven talks about how inspiring it is to plunge into the unknown, how that leap has inspired all his best work. The actors are nervous, but excited. How do you play a character if you don’t know where they’re going? How will their humble ship of a film navigate the surging ocean of creativity they’re about to set loose?

From the initial domestic drama, contributors throw in alien landings and murderous yakuza

Then, as anyone familiar with the internet would expect, things go wrong. They get lots of submissions–over 35,000 scripts, with 12 teams producing video mockups on YouTube – but none of them exactly work. “I figured there would only be one or two great ones,” Verhoeven muses, but it’s a mess of conflicting ideas. From the initial domestic drama, contributors throw in alien landings and murderous yakuza. In a Q&A after the Tribeca screening, Verhoeven described one writer who submitted extended sadomasochistic sex scenes for every episode. How do you make a movie out of that?

As Verhoeven apologetically explains halfway through the documentary section, things like tone and structure are very important in screenwriting. When you give your script up to the crowd, you lose control of it. No one could copy the style of the initial draft, or guide it to any kind of climax or conclusion. The film students who had studied story structure rejected Verhoeven’s idea as an insult to writers, and he was left with a jumble of contradictions. Finally, he called in a genuine screenwriter to sort through the chaos, to cull the best ideas and write whatever needed to be written in between. Verhoeven estimates about 70 percent of the final script came from the audience, but it was well-massaged enough to be nearly unrecognizable.

The tonal problems are hard to shake, veering from corporate drama to sex farce

The result is a strange hybrid. The crowd had some great ideas, including a scissor-stabbing climax that's too good to spoil. Even the S&M obsessive got in on the fun, contributing an unexpected breast-flashing scene that establishes the film's offbeat sexuality early on. Of course, it's a more interesting moment when it's not followed by five minutes of implausible sex, but that's what editors are for.

As a whole, Tricked still has its problems. The first half of the double feature drags on, and moment to moment it’s never quite as interesting as the process it’s trying to show. The second half of the feature is stronger, but the tonal problems are hard to shake, veering from corporate drama to sex farce as the story progresses.

This is minor Verhoeven, destined to be a blip in his filmography between Black Book and whatever he takes on next. But as a tale of crowdsourcing gone wrong, it could be much more enduring. As Verhoeven put it in the Q&A, “It was much, much harder than I thought.” By now, he’s learned his lesson: the crowds aren’t always as wise as you hope they’ll be.

'Lil Bub & Friendz' review: internet cat culture doesn't need rock stars

2013-04-25T18:15:04Z

As much as I love the vague category that is “internet culture,” most of it was born to die. The memes get stale, the blogs taper off, the videos that were once hypnotic become insufferable. But Lil Bub, the permanent kitten who has attracted a massive internet following over the past year, will live forever in a documentary. Lil Bub & Friendz is a definitive take on internet cat fandom, a love letter to anyone who’s stayed up late browsing YouTube for kittens falling down slides or riding Roombas. Maybe, though, a love letter is the last thing we really need.

Lil Bub is so cute as to be mildly unsettling — a tiny cat with a protruding tongue and stubby legs, she’s an uncanny combination of virtually every trait we associate with adorable baby animals. When Bub’s owner Mike Bridavsky carried her into the theater at Tribeca, there was a collective gasp, an instinctive response to look into her giant eyes. Put her in a movie and fill the remainder with the cream of YouTube’s cat crop, and you’ve shut down any attempt at rational thought. How could anyone possibly dislike this? I thought while watching a cat sociologist wearing a cat shirt talk about YouTube cat videos while a nearby cat burrowed into a bag of treats. A mother cat is hugging a baby kitten. Grumpy Cat is rolling around on the carpet. Lil Bub is hissing at a lion. LIL BUB IS HISSING AT A LION.

The movie is about giving these rock stars a mythology

The Vice Media-produced Lil Bub & Friendz moves quickly through a vast swath of material. Though they nominally follow the life of Bub and her owner, documentarians Andy Capper and Juliette Eisner often cut away to tangentially related segments. They touch on a few of the efforts to take internet culture offline, from those of “meme manager” Ben Lashes to an Internet Cat Video Film Festival held in Minneapolis, and famous felines like Grumpy Cat or Nyan Cat get quick profiles. There are a few nods to cat videos as a social phenomenon, including conversations with an “expert” and discussions with fans. Generally speaking, it’s a profile of what the filmmakers consider “the new rock stars,” the memetic icons whose images proliferate endlessly online, as accidental success either fades away or turns into a concerted publicity effort. Bub’s promoter also manages indie rockers like Sufjan Stevens and Xiu Xiu, and she apparently moves more T-shirts than any of them.

At its core, the movie is about giving these rock stars a mythology. Along with the film’s YouTube footage and taped interviews, Lil Bub appears in her own miniature music videos, descending from space or presiding over a fiery hellscape to the strains of heavy metal. In more traditional documentary segments, she makes appearances to an adoring public, or visits a wildlife shelter to make a donation — hence the lion. Where musicians have tormented pasts or addictions to fuel their work, Bub has something arguably much sadder: she’s kittenish precisely because of a plethora of deformities, from a shortened, toothless jaw that leaves her tongue perpetually visible to twisted legs that make it almost impossible for her to walk. While she appears surprisingly fit, Bridavsky recounts periodic health problems that make her future seem grim: the film’s tone is hopeful, but it still implies things could get much worse down the line.

It’s easy to wonder if Bub was bred for helpless cuteness, but her deformities are apparently accidental: she was the runt of a rescued litter, and it’s a bit hard to argue that she’s being hurt by her internet fame. Bub seems to have about the best life a cat in her position could wish for, and Bridavsky says her income helped lift him out of financial woes that almost certainly would have hurt her quality of life. That said, I can’t help but feel like I’m enjoying an animal’s suffering, even if there’s really no way to make it better.

Bridavsky himself appears genuinely inseparable from Bub — he took to Tumblr after the Tribeca premiere, posting health updates to reassure fans. Bub owes much of her success to heavy exposure in BuzzFeed, Vice, and others, and she’s been heavily promoted, but her early fame seems due more to luck than a concerted effort by Bridavsky. Everyone featured in the documentary, including some who are described with the frighteningly cynical term “cat entrepreneur,” seem driven mostly by the simple urge to share their adorable pets with others. They’re selling a thing that brings people real enjoyment, even if it’s unclear how much anybody really makes from it. As I left the theater, though, I realized I was somehow very sad.

There’s something depressing about seeing the ephemeral world of memes pinned down like a butterfly collection

I’m not worried about viral videos “selling out.” But there’s something depressing about seeing the fundamentally ephemeral world of memes pinned down like a butterfly collection, or about turning momentary fads into massive aggrandizing narratives and endless promotions. During my many wasted hours in college, I used to scroll through 4chan’s /b/ board, watching ideas pop up, flourish for a few minutes or hours, and die, never to be seen again. It was lovely. Does everything new and interesting need to be made permanent, to evolve into a media empire? Even the rock star metaphor is worrying: I don’t want a Lil Bub / Grumpy Cat supergroup to be releasing compilation albums in ten years.

At the beginning of the film, somebody describes cat videos as “like porn for people who don’t want porn.” There’s a similar hint of guilt after watching Lil Bub & Friendz: the vague shame of being completely overloaded with something you enjoy, only to worry you’ve ruined it in the process. This is, without a doubt, the cutest movie I have ever seen. But maybe some stories are better left as YouTube clips.

Not ready for Prime time: almost all of Amazon's new shows are terrible

2013-04-24T19:52:53Z

Amazon released pilot episodes for its 14 new shows last Friday, and asked for feedback from viewers to determine which Originals to pick up for full-season runs. Then earlier this week, the company announced that together the pilots were Amazon's most-watched shows over the weekend, and touted the fact that 80 percent of reviewers gave the shows 4- or 5-star ratings. Excited about the possibility of more high quality, made-for-streaming series like Netflix’s House of Cards, I sat down to watch all of Amazon’s new shows to see if the company’s first original content is worthy of an audience.

With two possible exceptions, it’s not.

Of the 14 pilots, six are made for children — I’m not exactly the target audience, so I didn’t bother to sample those. The other eight are half-hour comedies, which all come with "this show is intended for adult audiences" warning labels.

Familiar faces, familiar shows, familiar jokes

Amazon seems to have followed a similar formula for its six live-action pilots: cast a recognizable star, replicate a successful theme, expand on popular brands, and, when in doubt, make the show about the internet. Alpha House has John Goodman and politics; Browsers has Bebe Neuwirth and a Huffington Post copycat; Onion News Network has Jeffrey Tambor and The Onion; Those Who Can’t emulates the stupid humor of Workaholics; Zombieland has, well, Zombieland and zombies; and Betas has Ed Begley, Jr. plus a tech startup. Amazon’s two animated comedies, Dark Minions and Supanatural, also take cues from already popular animated series like Archer, The Cleveland Show, and even American Dad. It’s neither a surprising nor unique formula, but it doesn’t quite work for Amazon.

Alpha House

Four United States senators live together in a house and comedy ensues, except it rarely does. Goodman leads a cast of recognizable faces through a relatively unremarkable 25 minutes of television. Bill Murray – yes, the Bill Murray – cameos in the opening scene to set up the plot for the entire episode: his character, a corrupt senator, is turning himself in to the Department of Justice and, thus, can no longer occupy the… Alpha House.

The rest of the episode focuses on the three remaining senators as they both attempt to find a new roommate and try to make themselves appealing to voters for their reelection campaigns. The jokes revolve around campaign donations, Republican stereotypes (the four senators are all members of the GOP), filibuster techniques, and political opponents, but they frequently fail to land. In a world of rich political dramas and comedies like The West Wing, House of Cards, and Veep, Alpha House features pretty visuals, solid acting, a cameo by Stephen Colbert, and a fatal flaw: it’s just not that funny.

Browsers

This show offers a second warning label: "the following program contains musical numbers." Unlike in Glee or Smash, however, the musical numbers in Browsers are entirely pointless. There’s no facade of a high school chorus or a Broadway musical — the show’s creators simply liked the idea that these characters break out into song sometimes. The songs are meant to be funny, but they add neither quality humor nor entertainment value to the show. One of the songs concerns a girl’s skills at finding viral videos, and it's about as bad as you’d expect it to be.

Browsers is set at a Huffington Post-type website, which hires four interns and plans to fire one in a very Alpha House-like move (only in this show no one ends up leaving). The show makes jokes about unpaid interns, content-aggregating, overachievers, office sex, and more. Bebe Neuwirth, famous for her role in Cheers and as a veteran of the theatre, plays an Arianna Huffington-like hard-ass boss. While she’s funny, sings well, and is probably the only high point of the show, the pilot doesn’t work because the four interns just aren’t that likable. In fact, the only character worth watching was Nuewirth’s. Otherwise, it’s mostly just silly puns and jokes about the internet that seem like they were written by people that don’t fully understand it.

Onion News Empire

Picture The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s idealistic drama about covering the news with virtue, and then swap in stories that would be on The Onion, with jokes as ridiculous and over-the-top as Sorkin’s writing is smart. That’s Onion News Empire. While The Onion’s satirical news is clever and timely, this show’s jokes lack the real-world context that make the former so great. The show’s visual style even equals that of The Newsroom, which gives it credibility as a strong satire. Adding to that credibility is a strong, funny cast, lead by Arrested Development’s Jeffrey Tambor. But the premise of The Onion’s newsroom as a real place, with real people covering "real" news, just didn’t leave me laughing, and the show’s lack of real-world context removes the best part of The Onion’s humor. The show might actually work well on Adult Swim near other stupid-comedy, high-quality shows like Childrens Hospital, but alone it misses.

Those Who Can’t

Those Who Can’t is Amazon’s answer to Workaholics, following three guys as they fail to be good teachers. One, a PE coach, gets hit with a ball by a student mid-way through a lecture about the value of dodgeball in real life — the show opens with this scene, and I stopped watching after all of 27 seconds before realizing I had to give it another go for journalistic reasons. Another protagonist, a Spanish teacher, corrects his class’ pronunciations to "the Queen’s Spanish." The third, a history teacher, locks his classroom door and raises the heat in an attempt at making the classroom feel like a coal mine, and then doesn’t let a girl leave to go the bathroom.

Each Those Who Can’t joke seeks that rare breed of stupid comedy that’s both clever and funny at the same time, but few succeed. Workaholics works because its characters work in a field where what they do doesn’t matter, and the audience is meant to want them to suck at their jobs. But in Those Who Can’t, the humor of the show relies not only on how idiotic they are, but how easily students can take advantage of them. Neither the premise that a teacher would allow students to nail them with balls during PE, nor that a teacher wouldn’t know how to count down to one properly, makes me laugh. It smacks of a knockoff, without either the context or execution that make Workaholics successful.

Zombieland

"Hey, a lot of people like that Zombieland movie and that Walking Dead show. We should totally make a zombie show! Let’s see if we can get the guys who made the movie to make it into a TV show!" That's presumably how Zombieland, the TV show, happened, and it's exactly what the show is. Zombies eating humans does provide some shockingly solid humor, and the show uses the movie's funny narrator-and-graphics structure to explain the rules of surviving a post-apocalyptic universe, but it can't match the movie's effects — Zombieland's explosions look like they were made in the Action Movie FX iPhone app. And yet again, the show is filled with stupid humor, an odd but recurring theme among all of Amazon’s shows.

The characters here are surprisingly likable, but unfortunately, there’s not much else there besides an attempt to capitalize on a popular trend. You're better off re-watching The Walking Dead or Zombieland, the movie. They’re both better than this.

Betas

Amazon might actually have a winner in Betas, about a startup in Silicon Valley. As unoriginal as the story sounds, no one’s yet made a TV series about a startup — not counting the reality show on Bravo, at least, and this is a far better show anyway. The lead character, Trey, is clearly based on Mark Zuckerberg, or at least the version Jesse Eisenberg played in The Social Network — he seems to switch between charming, socially inept, clever, and rude a bit too much during the episode, but he’s likable enough. Equally so is his quirky programmer counterpart Nash, who is perpetually nervous and insecure about the team’s app. We observe as the two fight about the app’s readiness, as the sometimes-charming lead attempts to woo a woman in a bar, and as they pitch to an investor played wonderfully by Ed Begley, Jr.

Surprisingly, Betas is the first scripted show about a startup, and it's also Amazon's best

The somewhat disappointing subplot of the show revolves around two of their colleagues, a chubby, awkward coder and an older creepy man with an unclear role on the team, who provide most of the requisite dumb humor – like an entire scene devoted to dick pics. The humor didn’t necessarily make me laugh out loud, but it was clever, and I'm sort of hooked. That’s partly because this story hasn’t been told well on television yet, and a technology startup is an interesting and rich setting for a series, but it’s mainly because the show is just smarter and more intriguing than the rest of Amazon’s pilots.

Dark Minions

The interesting thing about Dark Minions isn’t the show itself, but that in order to save time and money, the majority of the show is just a series of sketches with dialogue. (The main character, Mel, explains before the show begins that if Dark Minions gets picked up for a full season, it’ll all be high-quality stop-motion animation.) The pilot takes place in the distant future, and follows two mediocre humans working for an evil, intergalactic empire. The plot is rather unimportant, however: the show is mainly a collection of college-age humor about working for an evil boss, space, marijuana use, and so forth — think Archer in space. There’s a planet called "Kav Dick-and-Balls," which is pretty indicative of what to expect from Dark Minions' universe.

Supanatural

Supanatural revolves around two sassy (too sassy for the "er" in supernatural, apparently) modern-age mercenaries hired to defend our planet. It's a running stream of pop culture puns about Instagram, The Wire, and more, right from the the opener — a bit revolving around Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. One of the leads, Lucretia, touches the skull and her hair immediately zaps up in perm-like fashion. "Hold still, I gotta Instagram this," her comrade Hezbah says. "Hold still real quick." We learn in the next scene that the Pope hired the pair to take the skull. Yes, the Pope. And, yes, I laughed. In fact, I laughed more watching Supanatural than any of Amazon’s other pilots, though that’s pretty faint praise. Is the humor clever? Not really. But the mix of over-the-top sci-fi and pop culture references, combined with endless sauciness from the two leads, did keep me chuckling enough to want to watch more.

Wrap-up

Some of Amazon’s pilots might work on regular broadcast or cable TV, but the company can’t rely on already successful lead-ins or that you’ll just turn on the television and flip to its channel. Amazon needs to convince viewers that its content is worth actively seeking out and paying for. (Maybe on that upcoming set-top box.)

Netflix has House of Cards, Arrested Development, and the buzz of being the first company of its kind to stream high-quality, high-value content. The company analyzed user data, brought on big names with big money, and confidently offered a slate of content fine-tuned to its subscribers. Amazon adopted the same strategy, only less so: medium names, medium money. But with their last step, Amazon and Netflix are playing totally different games. Where Netflix is selling select gourmet snacks, Amazon is asking their subscribers to taste samples and choose which flavor will the be the next Lay’s potato chip. And none of the flavors even compare to Netflix’s snacks.

Netflix and Hulu took time to get original content right, too

In fairness, Netflix didn’t immediately get it right either. Its first original series, Lilyhammer, about a mobster in witness protection, still hasn’t caught on. And let’s not forget about Hulu, which has been trying with original content for a few years now without much success. But both companies’ first attempts – Battleground, a smart, political mockumentary about a senatorial campaign, and Lilyhammer – were far better than the majority of Amazon’s current crop.

The appeal of Amazon’s model is easy to understand: studios would save hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, by only producing content with guaranteed audiences and not wasting money on producing multiple episodes of unpopular shows. But perhaps the experiment would offer better results if any of the pilots were truly worth watching.