Eli Mattson Should Win America’s Got Talent

Edit (10/2): Eli Mattson did not win, Neal Boyd did. Eli Mattson got “Runner Up”

Eli Mattson should win America’s Got Talent. This is not my opinion; this is fact. Well, actually it’s not, but I so firmly support Eli Mattson that I think the rest of the world ought to agree with me. Let’s take a look at his competition:

• Nuttin’ But Stringz: Probably the actual winner of AGT, Nuttin’ But Stringz is a duo-act of violin players. I see the appeal: they’re cool, they’re energetic, and they’re entertaining. My beef with them, though, is that they don’t actually play very good music. They’re plenty talented at playing their songs, but Mozarts they are not.
• Neal E. Boyd: If Eli Mattson loses, Neal Boyd is my second pick. He has a genuine talent for opera singing, and has sounded gorgeous in each performance.
• Donald Braswell: How this man made it to the finals is beyond me. The only thing he has going for him is his mediocre stage presence. Aside from that, he’s just a bad singer and kind of a jerk.
• Queen Emily: Emily’s appeal is more apparent to me than Donald Braswell’s, but I don’t think she’s much of a singer either. She also sings music I don’t like (Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Diana Ross, etc.)

Eli Mattson is different from the above competition in a couple important ways. First, he is far and away the most talented: his voice and piano playing are both flawless every time he’s on stage. Also, despite the fact that he’s had some pretty rough times in his life—as the judges constantly remind us—he himself never plays this up. In contrast, Nuttin’ But Stringz reminds us all the time that they started playing on New York subways, as if this somehow makes them better. Eli Mattson doesn’t need you to feel sorry for him. He knows that he can just get on stage and blow everyone else out of the water.

Prison Break: Season 4

I’m a Prison Break addict. I watched the entire first season in the space of about 72 hours like I was a crack addict and Prison Break was a big heap of really potent crack. It’s a little strange, I think, to be addicted to such a show. Sure, the plot’s action-packed and suspensful, but the scripting is terrible. The cast deserves accolades for not sounding like complete morons onscreen. The drawback to the bad scripting is, no matter how good the actors are, the only way to say some of the lines is in an unrealistically dramatic manner. Example:

[Michael Scofield and Alexander Mahone are talking. For some reason, both are sweating profusely]

Alexander Mahone: I saw it happen

[Long pause in which both characters squint at each other]

Michael Scofield: No… You… Didn’t

[More glaring. Cut to commercial]

Spoilers Beyond This Point

So for the entire episode, the viewer is stuck with this uncomfortable feeling because everything that happens in the show is made out to be really intense. Nevertheless, I was totally psyched for season 4, which aired this past monday. I was pleasantly surprised by the first episode. No, they haven’t gotten better script-writers, and yes, it is still overly dramatic, but I like the new direction of the show. That is, I like the idea that they’ll be breaking into a place instead of out of one.

If you’ve never seen the show, this might seem like a silly and relatively negligible difference. Learned viewers, though, know that this is really the first time in the show that Michael isn’t running away from someone. This time, he’s the hunter. It reminds me, sort of, of a post by Sam Hughes at qntm.org. He suggested a TV show where people pull Ocean’s Eleven-esque heists. In Prison Break they aren’t stealing from a bank, but they are stealing.

Google Chrome

As of quite recently, word of Google’s new browser, Google Chrome, has made its rounds of the internet, inspiring both hype and hatred. What’s so special about Chrome? Well, see for yourself. Don’t bother wondering if Chrome is a good browser; it is. Don’t even bother asking if it’s better than Firefox, because, well, it’s really hard to say, and it’s not even an important question. The real question is whether Google Chrome is going to be successful. How much of the browser market will Google control by the end of this year? 1%? 10%? 50%? Right now it’s hard to say.

On the surface, Chrome doesn’t feel much different from our beloved Firefox 3. Sure, it looks a little funny (and very blue), but it handles much the way any normal browser does. It has a phishing/malware blacklist, just like Firefox, a download manager, tabbed browsing, and a “smart” address bar that does everything under the sun.

Chrome does sport a couple features that set it ahead of Firefox: multiprocessing for tabs, a super-quick Javascript virtual machine, and a task manager. So are people going to be leaping out of their chairs to download Google Chrome? Or will it sputter and die because Firefox is “good enough” for most people? I managed to convert my mother from IE7 to Firefox 3 not by telling her how much better Firefox is, but by telling her that you don’t have to put up with any crap in Firefox. That is, she was converted not because Firefox is so good, but because it doesn’t suck.

So I feel like much of Google’s potential market for Chrome is already taken and unwilling to make a change. Why should someone want to change from one perfectly good browser to another that they’ve never used before? Multiprocessing might seem neat to us techies, but to average Joe it’s not that important.

In light of this, we have to wonder how much effort Google will spend advertising their browser. Harry McCracken asks a good question:

Just how hard will Google push Chrome on the Google homepage? Like no other company on earth, Google has an opportunity to get hundreds of millions of people using its browser in a relatively short amount of time. You gotta think that it’ll use the Google homepage to drum up interest. But will it check to see if you’re using IE, Firefox, or another browser and attempt to convince you to switch?

Currently, the Google homepage displays nothing at all related to Chrome (Edit: Nevermind, it’s up there now – 9/03). Of course, hype has done a significant amount of advertising for them (sounds hypocritical, but I’m a Google fanboy, so I don’t mind).

I’d love to report on Chrome’s performance in the Acid2 and Acid3 tests, but they’re either down or operating very slowly right now, perhaps because everyone thinks like I do. Edit: Chrome seems to pass Acid2 and scores a 79/100 on Acid3.

Chrome Acid2 Screenshot

Chrome Acid3 Screenshot

Speed Racer

The Wachowski brothers’ film Speed Racer has received, in general, negative reviews. It has a 36% at Rotten Tomatoes, a 37/100 at Metacritic, and a 6.5/10 at IMDb. Most critics’ beef with the film is summed-up succinctly by Carina Choco for the LA Times:

The fakeness of it all overwhelms, dampening any real excitement. It’s hard to care about characters so stiff and one-dimensional they out-cartoon the cartoon originals, and it’s hard to watch them bop around like avatars in a flat, airless, digital world.

Most critics, as demonstrated above, felt that while the endless color-orgasms were neat, they either detracted from the film, or weren’t sufficient to make up for the bizarre and frenetic plot. I, however, disagree with “most critics.”

Dude I'm like tripping so hard, dude

If we approach Speed Racer not as a hideously expensive ($120,000,000) avant-garde film or an unintelligible children’s film, but rather as a film adaptation of an anime/manga series, then it takes on a new light. If you’ve ever watched an anime show, you’ll know that a 6 year-old boy and a chimpanzee stealing candy from a futuristic private jet is perfectly normal. If you’ve never watched anime, though, you’ll probably be pretty confused.

Once I started thinking about the film in this way, I realized that it’s actually excellent. Yes, the characters are shallow and one-dimensional; yes, the overabundance of brightly-colored special effects makes you think someone slipped LSD into your soda; yes, what the fuck is that monkey even in the movie for? But, I realized, these are all elements of typical anime shows. What the Wachowski brothers have managed to do is adapt what is essentially a cartoon to live-action film, while retaining the original spirit of that cartoon.

Seriously... A monkey?

I have seen other film adaptations of anime, but they were all pretty terrible (see, or rather, don’t see Death Note). Speed Racer deserves credit for being the first live-action anime movie that doesn’t make its audience vomit.

In any case, the acting is fine, and the special effects—though monstrously expensive—are absolutely stunning. Go watch Speed Racer, keep an open mind, and enjoy it like 36% of the world did.