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A blog by Nathan Strum in General

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About this blog

Mostly Atari-related projects, and other ramblings. Home of the Artie the Atari comic strip.

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Minions - Spoiler-free movie review

Okay... I had no plans to see Minions, but when your impossibly adorable niece wants to go see a movie, how can you say "no"? Plus, I went to CalArts with one of the directors. So, we saw Minions. She loved it. For me, not so much. The Minions are fine in small doses as comedy relief, but their incomprehensible gibberish wears pretty thin after a few minutes (much less an entire feature). Also, the plot is really flimsy and contrived, and is just there to hang some jokes off of. Even

Nathan Strum

July 23, 2015

Mad Max: Fury Road - Spoiler-free movie review (plus bonus mini-rant)

From the "Better Late Than Never" department... I'm gradually catching up on some of my summer movies. I may not get to them all, but at a friend's insistence we went to see Mad Max: Fury Road last night. I wasn't sure what to expect going into it. Sure - some of the trailers looked kind of cool, and although The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max 2) is an absolutely excellent film, I never thought Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome was very good, and that was the last film of George Miller's that I'd seen.

Nathan Strum

July 21, 2015

Ant-Man - Spoiler-free movie review

Ant-Man? Really? I thought Marvel was scraping the bottom of a pretty low barrel when they dusted off Guardians of the Galaxy and turned that into a movie... but Ant-Man? Then again... Guardians of the Galaxy turned out pretty well. Oddly enough, so did Ant-Man. Better than Age of Ultron, certainly. And as far as Marvel solo movies go, I'd put this right up there after Iron Man and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The reason it works so well, simply put, are the characters. Paul Ru

Nathan Strum

July 20, 2015

Tomorrowland - Spoiler-free movie review

Okay.... if you read my last review, I was pretty-much done with going to the movies. So, yeah. About that... After that final disappointing trip to the theater, I began to realize something: going to the movies had become a chore. And it had been for quite some time, too. Besides the two trips to see Age of Ultron, I'd been to a string of bad screenings. Dim projection, bad sound, dirty screens, and just really poorly run theaters. Snacks were marginal - flat, diluted soda, stale po

Nathan Strum

June 1, 2015

Avengers: Age of Ultron - Spoiler-free movie review (plus free bonus rant!)

Okay... let's try this again. After my last attempt to see Avengers: Age of Ultron, I was so fed-up with going to the movies, I really had no interest in trying again. But here I am, in a different multiplex, ten minutes away from my second attempt. I'm not holding out much hope, since I've since read several articles that state that movie theater chains intentionally tell their employees not to correctly change over their projectors from 3D to 2D, since it costs time and money and t

Nathan Strum

May 23, 2015

New time, new station!

Another year has come and gone. And no, you didn't collapse into a coma and wake up seven months later (well... for all I know you didn't) - rather, another school year has come and gone. And as usual, the annual screenings of our student films have been taking place (here's the obligatory link to last year's blog entry). The Open Show, where we show all films from the Character Animation Program, took place in the Main Gallery at CalArts at the end of April. Here's a wacky fish-eye phot

Nathan Strum

May 6, 2015

Avengers: Age of Ultron - Spoiler-free-spoiled-movie review

So, I went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron last night. Okay, to be fair - I actually went this morning. Midnight is "technically" morning. I usually don't go in for first-day screenings, but thought it would be fun. It wasn't. I wish I hadn't bothered. Why? Well, it wasn't the audience. There was a good audience there, including some students from the college I work at. So the comic book nerd factor was pretty high. That was good. It wasn't the seating. Even though the

Nathan Strum

May 1, 2015

Real Arcade Play: Achieved!

Yet another mouth to feed: Huge thanks to Albert for hooking me up with this Vectrex! This is a pretty sweet unit - very clean, works great, solid controller, and it included several games and overlays (gotta have the overlays). I've been wanting one of these since, well, since the early 80's when I first saw them in stores. More recently though (like, ten years ago) Alex Herbert sent me copies of a couple of his Vectrex homebrews as a thank-you for work I did on the manual and labe

Nathan Strum

April 17, 2015