July, 17, 2004 archives

part of north hollywood was renamed to toluca woods. a rose by any other name would still be in the valley. i’ve wondered why north hollywood doesn’t rename itself back to lankershim, though. glomming on to the hollywood brand is just so tacky, much like the proliferation of toluca-based neighborhood names. (via franklin avenue.)

i have some day-by-day notes on my laptop about the various sessions i attended, which i may post later. but overall, it was a good mid-sized conference, although i only really hung out along the edges, and didn’t take advantage of all of the things going on (partly because i didn’t spring for the all-access badge, and partly because i didn’t spend any time in the exhibitor suites).

and i find it extremely amusing that the conference grab-bag of promotional items included an adult film and a christian film.

a year ago, i stumbled across the martin lawrence gallery at universal citywalk, and at the venetian, i also stumbled into a gallery, which had lithographs by tom everhart that are based on the peanuts characters, and are absolutely amazing. i really liked the squeeze the day suite, although all of the pieces they had on display were fantastic.

i, robot is the blockbuster of the week, and it isn’t any more than just an average summer action movie, really. i’m not a huge asimov fan, and i don’t believe that i’ve read any of the books in his robot series, so any good things derived from his stories (or bad things done to his stories) weren’t really a big factor in how i thought about the film. of course, the story was not really originally inspired by the book of the same name, but rather it was a script that was adapted to the book as it was developed.

i think roger ebert really nailed it in his review, although i would be a little more harsh about the predictability of the plot. there’s really nothing new in this film.