I don't know this for sure, but I would guess I am notorious amongst my long-time associates for nitpicking comic book movies and remakes because I always whine about details in the source material that get omitted or changed unnecessarily in my opinion. Over the years I've mellowed-out a bit and I really try to watch these films with more of an open mind, letting these new visions stand alone and be what they are. Seeing the remake of Total Recall was a challenge however, as the pre-CGI original could stand a visual update but it has so many other intangibles - its wicked 80s-style humor, cartoonish violence, cheesy production values, mind bending plot, and the guts to not cop out at the end - that it was hard to imagine its singularly unique spirit not being lost in an update. I think the result is a very competently-made action movie with an incredible technological upgrade to the original and several flourishes that give it a unique character, but I prefer the original.

The remake's production design borrows liberally from Blade Runner and Minority Report, but those two films to me are easily the gold standard for on-screen depictions of technological progress. Total Recall melds them into what is the most amazing vision of a future Earth I think I've ever seen. There is an extraordinary sense of place and the designs feel real and where they fall short of realism, they at least feel logical. The cast is also a visual upgrade with Colin Farrel, Kate Beckinsale, and Jessica Biel adding a much sleeker veneer to the main characters and onscreen action.

Where the update starts to eke out an identity of its own is in its reframing of the story as a political struggle between the United Federation of Britain and The Colony, replacing the original film's representations of Earth and Mars respectively. I was hesitant about losing Mars as it was so central to the film I love but I have to say that bold steps were taken with this liberty that paid off for me. The most remarkable plot device is "The Fall," a spectacular rendering of a Gravity Train allowing travelers to commute between the UFB and The Colony by falling straight through the center of the Earth. It's a unique idea and, to their credit, the script uses it to maximum effect.

Another plot refinement is the development of the main character, Quaid, as a factory worker with ambitions for moving up in his organization but kept down because of his status as a citizen of the Colony. I appreciated this elaboration on the character as a guy who is trying, but stuck due to circumstances out of his control. I'm less thrilled about the elaboration on everything else. Total Recall appears to take every element of the original and try to double it. This is fine for discerning Quaid's motivations but becomes pure tedium when the film devolves into an incessant litany of action scenes. This was my biggest issue with the film.

It seems to me that director Len Wiseman let his huge budget (reportedly $200 million) serve as an excuse to unleash his inner Micheal Bay. Quite disappointing as his work in Underworld produced some of the most efficiently satisfying action in recent memory and even the implausible excesses of his Live Free or Die Hard have a better sense of when the action reaches the point of diminishing returns. Regardless, the original movie - for all of its mind screwery - was an action film, so I guess it makes sense that the action as well as the visuals are updated to current (over indulgent in my opinion) norms.

Bulletstorms aside, I think this version of Total Recall might have functioned better as a stand-alone film not tethered to a highly regarded classic. Wiseman pays respect by inserting many homages to the original, including the infamous (and beloved) three breasted woman, Mary. The special effect is much more believable now but, strangely enough, her presence isn't. The original Mary was just one of a large number of mutated humans on Mars who were suffering the consequences of being exposed to radiation leaked by cheaply built domes. Martian environmental injustice if you will. There is no such condition in The Colony which essentially means that Mary exists simply because no film named Total Recall could exist without her.

This film could exist without her though, and it could exist without most of the elements brought over from the original. I think baggage from the earlier film hindered what could have been a first-rate production more than it helped. We get the broad strokes of the original plot with a visual update, but we get none of the fun or raw audacity. Thankfully, Total Recall (2012) does bring enough visceral thrill to be worth a look if you're into any sort or Action or Science Fiction. Just prepare to have your eyes and ears more engaged than your mind.

Random Thoughts:

- Bokeem Woodbine, yes, Bokeem Wodbine is in this film.

- Director Len Wiseman loves his wife - co-star Kate Beckingsale. Much of the film seems to be an ode to her brooding feminine strength.

- There is a great bit of misdirection in the updated transit scene.

- I can't say enough about the depiction of the Gravity Train. This is one of those really cool Sci-Fi objects that gives geeks like me chills to see prominently featured in a film.

A Turn of Events

In April of this year, my HTC Touch Pro 2 cell phone developed free will and decided it would only perform tasks it wanted when it wanted and the wishes of its owner - me - would only be worth consideration after prolonged pleading and eventual physical aggressiveness. Its just as well since the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system it was running was getting long in the tooth a while before the hardware itself revolted. I had been thinking of getting a new phone for months and the opportunity finally presented itself.

I must confess that my wavering fidelity to the Touch Pro 2 predated even Windows Mobile wearing out its welcome. The sexy device catching my eye was the HTC Evo, a large screen brandishing android-powered seductress not only attracting me with her formidable hardware and software assets but also the distinction of being the first high-speed 4G phone on the market. As a 10-plus year Sprint customer, I was a little shocked at the fact that my carrier which, less than 24 months previous, was lagging the smartphone market badly had picked itself up and was now offering some of the most compelling handsets around - sans the iPhone of course but I had no interest in that device to begin with.

Once it was clear that my phone situation was critical, I went to the Sprint store with visions of Android dancing in my head. As I was looking for an extended battery pack in the accessories section I happened to spy a carrying case for a phone called the HTC Arrive. What caught my eye about the Arrive was that, according to the picture on the package, it was running Windows Phone 7-, the recently-released ground-up rewrite of Windows Mobile. I had read a few WP7 reviews at launch, but had never seen it in person. Also, I didn't recall seeing any WP7 phones in the Sprint lineup before which made it a non-starter as I was not interested in switching carriers.

Curious, I asked a salesperson if they had an Arrive in stock and she walked me to the darkest, most remote section of the store where the handset was displayed. After blowing off a thick cloud of dust (I jest), I started playing with the phone and was immediately spellbound.

I read about the phone's Metro user interface in reviews but, despite the positive assessments ascribed it, the pictures didn't look very compelling. Monochrome squares and rectangles on a screen - big freakin' deal. However, once I actually saw - no, felt - the thing in action I was utterly amazed. The user interface on my Windows Mobile 6.5 device had devolved into a handheld slideshow so I figured just about anything would be an improvement, but what I was seeing in WP7 was by far the most responsive user interface I had ever seen. Seriously, liquid is the only adjective that I feel does it any justice.

As I continued to poke around the phone, it became clearer and clearer that I was not going to walk away with the EVO. The Arrive had everything I cared about plus it came in a more manageable size with a hardware keyboard. After about 10 minutes of toying with it, I decided to purchase the phone.

The first month or so with the Touch Pro 2 was great but over time the phone performed worse and worse - like a handheld Windows 95. For that reason, I decided to wait a while before I wrote my impressions on Windows Phone 7. Now, after 6+ months of ownership - and the last 2 months running the 7.5 "Mango" update - I think I have a good feel for the ups and downs of the OS and feel comfortable sharing my thoughts. Please note that this isn't intended to be anything other than my views on WP7 and WP7 alone so my perspective is that of a new user, not somebody trying to exhaustively compare the WP7 OS with any other platform.

The Good

For me, WP7's greatest asset is the User Interface. The fact that it is fast and responsive gets a lot of press -rightfully - but just as compelling is the fact that it represents a fresh take on how the user interacts with the device. Before WP7 most phones were glorified app launchers that presented users with a grid of equally sized icons representing all of the device's installed applications. WP7 has an application list that essentially does this, but the default view is the "Start Screen" implemented as a customizable list of tiles that can represent applications but also other objects such as contacts (single and groups), documents, or even specific pages in applications.

For example, my start screen has all of the important stuff - phone, email accounts, messaging application, calendar and weather - but it also has a shortcut to a playlist in the phone media player application, the scratch notepad in my online OneNote notebook, a link to my cloud-based document repository, a group of contacts for my close friends, and a link to the Foursquare app page for one of my favorite (and most hotly contested for mayor) restaurants.

Taking it a step further, the tiles are not just static icons. For example, the icon for my close friends displays recent social network updates from anyone in the group and highlights if anyone from the group has made an attempt to contact me. There is also a "Me" tile that lets me know if anyone has mentioned me on twitter or responded to a Facebook post, or tagged me in a picture or... whatever. Obviously only so much info can be placed in a 1-inch or so square tile so tapping the tile gets you into the full detail of the notification(s).

The examples I just mentioned are really byproducts of one of the other unique features of the phone: tight social networking integration. WP7 allows you to connect several social networks - MSN, Linked In, Twitter, and Facebook - and aggregate your contacts across them all. So if I have friends that I have connections to through my personal address book, Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In, I can connect them in under one contact entry which will show me all of the messages I've received from the contacts as well as their recent Twitter / Facebook status updates and pictures. It's a really convenient way to keeping track of not only what a person is up to, but also the communication history between myself and that person.

For me the most remarkable thing about the OS is how it tries to de-emphasize the app orientation that has become par for the smartphone course. I'm sure part of the reason is the fact that, while the growth of the app store is brisk, the WP7 platform is vastly outgunned by app marketplaces of its competitors who bring hundreds of thousands of apps to the table. (Having said that, I can't help but be amused hearing Apple enthusiasts try to belittle the high quality WP7 OS because of its lack of apps when those same people used to - and still - try to marginalize the importance of the sheer number of apps when it comes to Mac OSX.) Whatever the reason, I think the idea of making the OS more of a focal point than the apps has paid off, on social networking at least, as I very rarely use the Facebook or Twitter apps. I simply go to the "Me" tile, select "post an update" and choose which networks I want to receive the message. If I want to see updates from others,  I either go to a single contact, a contact group, or my full contact list and swipe to the "What's New" tab. Pretty slick stuff.

There are literally hundreds of cool features on the phone but you can read about those elsewhere. A few more things I like are: the ability to "try" any paid app in the app store, the Bing "Local Scout" which detects the neighborhood you're in and displays all sorts of destinations for activity in the vicinity, the way the media player can show pictures of the artist you're listening to on the phone lock screen, the fact that the phone integrates SMS, Facebook chat, and MSN chat into its messaging application, and the way that the contact list and contract group live tiles will cycle through pictures of people contained within.

The Bad

I'm sure you can tell I like Windows Phone 7 a lot, but it's not without problems. My biggest problem is the fact that the social media integration is confined to the providers Microsoft has built connectors for. Twitter and Linked In didn't become available til the 7.5 update and there are plenty of other useful networks that could be integrated e.g. Hi5, MySpace (I know, but they still have millions of users), or Google+ (ha!). This wouldn't be as annoying if I didn't know as a developer that Microsoft is very good a designing provider models for plug in functionality. There is no good reason for disallowing alternate functionality in the search and map apps either. Yes I know Google is nonplussed about the idea, but since most of their APIs are open that hole can be filled by third parties. Hopefully this problem can be rectified in the future.

A related issue is that the phone synchronization only works through the Zune desktop media player application. In some ways I don't mind this because the Zune software is one slick bit of kit (every bit as slick as WP7 in fact), but the problem is that the Zune player is a media application and media constitutes the least important data on my phone. For me, the phone is a life management tool with its ability to aggregate disparate contact lists and calendars into one cohesive whole and I would like a way to leverage that in an environment other than my phone - namely the computer I sync it with. As it stands, the phone is the only place where I can see all of this information in one location. I don't think there is any reason why the phone data can't be synced with a desktop client. Since Windows has built-in calendar and address book programs that can be default repositories it's ridiculous to me that I have to consult my phone every time I want to add something to a calendar in fear of having a cross-calendar conflict. Even a manual dump would be nice.

Next, the WP7 User Interface, as awesome as it is, can be a liability as well. Most basically, many of the apps use a "panorama" interface where the UI is spread along a single "page" with the phone only displaying one part of the page at a time. Here is an example:

It creates a pretty dramatic effect when using an application, but it's also a fairly novel concept which I imagine raises the cost of development due to the variation in user experience from the other mobile operating systems. It's not a deal breaker, but it can certainly slow adoption and, at this point in the game for Microsoft, uptake is priority one. I admit this is a pretty picky issue.

I talked earlier about how responsive and smooth the phone operates, well sometimes it is a little too responsive. There have been plenty of times where I have barely grazed a button and the phone zipped back to a previous page or launched an application. This could be due to hardware and/or software sensitivity issues but it also appears to be an artifact of software design as one app in particular (the Google Voice client) does it way more often than others.

Conclusion

I don't regret ditching the EVO for the Arrive. I know I've spent this whole write up talking about software and I think that's a good thing. The hardware itself gets out of my way and let's me get things done. What higher compliment I can give?

I have turned into a big fan of WP7. When it was first released there were a number of complaints about the OS being very slick but half-baked. My phone shipped with the first point release - NoDo it was called - and whatever came with that update was apparently enough to satisfy me. With the 7.5 Mango release the phone improved dramatically and even has a few market-leading features.

I think what has surprised me most about my experience with the phone is how my personal preference for dealing with technology has changed. The Windows Phone 7 experience is very cloud oriented with most information being pulled from remote sources so the phone itself has little outside of media files and a few documents saved locally. What local information is saved is either retrieved by syncing with a computer or the cloud, but the file system is not directly inaccessible. Not long ago I would have scoffed at the idea of not directly accessing the data on my phone, but now all I care about is being able to get at it when I need it. I'm wondering if I've changed or if the file access use cases have finally gotten to the point where direct access to the data store has been made less relevant to the experience of interacting with the data itself.

Probably both.

Whatever the case might be, at six blissful crash-free months (yes, zero crashes) in, I'm a believer.

A few months ago my dad and stepmother (parents) celebrated their 17th anniversary. Normally they engage in some manner of globetrotting to mark the occasion but this year they hung out here in the ATL and I was able to share in the celebration. Among many other things, we saw a couple of movies: Transformers Dark of the Moon and Captain America The First Avenger. I wrote reviews almost immediately afterward but, inexplicably, never posted them so here goes.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 3 out of 5

I really enjoyed the first Transformers movie but I never got around to seeing the second one. Normally that would keep me from seeing the third installment but, really, how much could it matter? Plus, big time big money franchises like this don't make hundreds of millions of dollars by alienating potentially new viewers unless they are The Matrix or Harry Potter.

Overall the film was decent. I really loved the first 20 minutes or so where the writers did an awesome job of turning the 1969 moon landing into a conspiracy theory of galactic proportions - going as far as to get a cameo from Buzz Aldrin. How freakin' cool is that? Anyhow, as the modern day part of the story gets going the film takes on the 2001: A Space Odyssey-like trait (work with me here) of the human characters having considerably less "personality" than the machines. Shia LeBouf spends most of the film being a whiny loser and his new girlfriend (like his old girlfriend) is clearly only around as eye candy, though they do manage to drag the film out another 30 minutes or so with a subplot attempting to justify her existence.

And I guess that's the thing. Transformers 3 in many ways is an exercise in tedium due to director Micheal Bay's obsession with eye candy. Whether it's hot women, hot cars, hot set designs, or hot CGI effects, when you walk out of this film you will have seen them all in glorious excess. Running time wise, the over-the-top climax where my beloved Chicago serves as ground zero for an apocalyptic machine-on-machine showdown is like a movie unto itself. It's like editing for Micheal Bay only means stitching shots together as the final cut shows little regard for efficiency or rhythm.

Despite the tremendous weight, I still had a good time with the film. The special effects achievements are a sight to behold and the hyper-kinetic editing from the first film is thankfully gone so there is no question where the film's $200 million budget went. It ain't high cinema, but you knew that. It is, however, the type of large scale otherworldy escapism that embodies much of the reason why people go to the movies in the summer.

Captain America: The First Avenger 3 out of 5

Batman. Spiderman. Iron Man. All characters I grew up with as an avid comic book reader. Captain America, not so much. My only real connection to Captain America was as my 4th preferred character in the Marvel vs. Capcom video games of the late 90s. I only say this to relieve you of any worry about this turning into the type of nitpickery I frequently resort to when watching modern movies based on characters from my childhood.

The charm of Captain America is in its cheesy depiction of the propaganda-driven recruitment tactics employed by the US during World War II. The political front of warfare is well presented by the fact that the US Army is able to create a single super soldier capable of extraordinary feats (this would be Steve Rodgers AKA Captain America) and instead of having him fight the enemy, he is immediately put in front of gawking audiences to hawk war bonds. Eventually, Cap brings his show to real troops and the grunts are much more interested in prancing T&A than watching him punch out caricatures of Hitler.

Inevitably fate intervenes and Captain Rogers presses himself into duty for the sake of busting out several hundred POWs held by Nazi forces. Mr. USA naturally succeeds and from this group he puts together a rag tag - and, like the Captain, seemingly anachronistic - supporting cast to help him execute his exploits going forward.

At its best, Captain America is a cautionary tale about the perils of power. Steve Rodgers is selected to become the first super soldier because, as a good-natured yet scrawny guy who was always pushed around, he understood the consequences of power gone awry. This underdog theme is why the Captain America origin story works well as homage to prime American mythology. It worked for me not so much because of nostalgia but the bevy of quality performances - lead and supporting. While not nearly the spectacle of Transformers 3, Captain America: The First Avenger makes up for its lack of glitz with great performances and an engaging style.