I couldn't even talk Ric into seeing this one with me. I'm not sure why I really wanted to see it, but then again, I run out to see Nickelodeon movies some times, so why try to make sense out of my movie tastes?

Anyway, I thought it was probably safest to see this at the cheap theater, just in case, so I had to go see it by myself. Thanks, dear! The highlight of the audience was an older man who looked like stalker potential but ended up falling asleep halfway through the movie and snoring through about 1/4 of the story. Other than that, I've actually been having better luck with audiences at the cheap theater than those at regular ones lately!

Jumper is about a teenager who lives alone with his father and has a crush on a girl at school. He gives her a snowglobe with the Eiffel Tower in it because she wants to travel. When another guy sees it and makes fun of him, throwing the globe onto an ice-covered river, it's not hard to guess that our hero will go after it. When he does, he falls through the ice, and instead of dying, he instinctively teleports himself to his local library. Several years later, after he has honed his talent, he's being tracked by people called Palladins, who think that all Jumpers should die (for religious reasons, of course). He pops back to his home town to pick up the girl he loved, and they fly to Rome, where the adventure begins, including the discovery that there are others of his kind.

The movie stars Hayden Christensen, who shows here as well as in other movies (see: Shattered Glass) that it really was George Lucas's fault that he came across so poorly in Attack of the Clones (say what you will about Revenge of the Sith - I liked it). Jumper doesn't give Christensen much of an acting challenge, but he's at ease in this role, and makes the preposterous plot not seem so preposterous, which I think takes talent. His co-star is Rachel Bilson, who does the best she can with the character she's given - a girl who doesn't seem to question very much when the boy who disappeared under the ice shows up 8 years later with no explanation of how he lived.

The movie obviously has a bit of ridiculousness and some flaws. One bit of ridiculousness is that one of David's favorite places to relax is on a lawn chair on top of the Sphinx. Uhh, that's pretty obvious, with so many tourists around, don't you think? The movie also has a lot of narration at the beginning, but none of it is necessary at all, and it would have been a better movie without it.

But despite the little things, Jumper has a little bit of something to it. The jumping itself is pretty cool. The sound and visual effects are good. The locations are all over the place and interesting (I got to re-live my honeymoon a bit in the Rome sequence). The idea of jumping is well-developed, including wormholes and the idea that a jumper can take people or items with him when he jumps. David's relationship with his father and the story of his mother are more than I would have expected out of a movie like this.

It's a movie that had the potential to be much better, but ended up being pretty good anyway. I'm not saying that it's taking home any prizes, but I had a fun time, and am not sorry that I made a point of going out to see it. It's probably better than some of the blockbusters I'll end up seeing this summer.

While I'm not a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails' music, I love the way the last several albums have been distributed. I blogged about the exciting viral marketing campaign for Year Zero, but I haven't mentioned the far more significant news of the two releases that followed it.

You may have heard that earlier this year Nine Inch Nails (or Trent Reznor--I'll be using the two more or less interchangeably) released Ghosts I-IV for free on the internet. Following Radiohead's pay-what-you-want album, this release received much less attention in the press, even though Trent Reznor gave fans higher-quality audio files through his cooperation with bit torrent clients.

It may have been easy to overlook Ghosts I-IV because it didn't feel like a traditional album: it's a collection of instrumental pieces that probably wouldn't have been at all successful if released in a traditional medium.

But this past week Nine Inch Nails announced yet another release, and this time it's a more traditional, 10-track album with vocals and everything. Once again, it's given to everyone for free online, and in multiple high-quality formats.

All of this is pretty exciting, coming from a successful, high-profile artist. Yet I think the biggest news about this album is a detail that most people have overlooked. Both Ghosts I-IV and The Slip are released under a Creative Commons License. In other words, fans can not only download the music for free, but they can also freely distribute it, perform it, sample it, remix it, or incorporate it into any other work (This American Life has used music from Ghosts in two of their shows). The only conditions are that the original artist is credited and that the derived work is noncommercial and released with a similar license.

To understand the significance of this, consider what has been happening in our culture with music recently. In an attempt to reign in filesharing and to increase profits, music distributors have been claiming stringent control over what is done with music after it has been purchased. Fans are told they are not free to copy music for their own personal use or even rip CDs to an mp3 player. Coffee shops are getting in trouble for playing music in their stores without permission. There is talk of charging radio stations for each song they play.

While the mainstream music distributors are pushing toward greater limits on what consumers do with music, Trent Reznor has come along and given permission to not only download his albums, but to use them for any non-commercial purpose, completely free of charge.

So while Radiohead gets the big headlines for a one-time free album download (and they'll always be my personal favorite band), Nine Inch Nails deserves the real credit for leading the way to a whole new way of distributing and licensing music.

Good News

Congrats are in order to Kyle who welcomed the second addition to his family on Tuesday, Evangeline Mae.

Evangeline: from the Greek euangelion (εὐαγγέλιον), meaning "Good News"

This is Evangeline Mae, born May 6, 2008 at 8:10 a.m. She weighed 7 pounds, 3 ounces.

We are calling her Eva.

Her mom and dad are very excited...

...and so is her brother.

- D I N O * R U N -

I'm just happy I finally found a flash game that isn't blocked at work. The name says it all here. You're a dinosaur and you run. The 8-bit graphics are fantastic.