Hipstamatic for iPhone -- Drinking The Electric Kool-Aid

One of the nice things about being an early adopter is ... er, haha, did I just write that with a straight face? I am not an early adopter of anything. I am practically a Luddite sometimes, and furthermore, I am as cheap as they come. So when I'm shelling out money for some cool new toy, even if it's something made by Apple, which owns a big part of my soul, I want to make sure it's worth it.

Which is my way of saying: my mother-in-law had an iPhone for, like, a year before I got one.

Now that I and half of everybody on Planet Earth has an iPhone, I have to admit, I find it pretty indispensible. I use it as a phone, of course, and for checking Twitter and emails and Facebook, keeping track of appointments, staying on top of traffic and weather, recording adorable things that my daughter sings -- the same stuff I would use any old mobile phone for, really.

But I've also used it for blogging and on way more than one occasion, I have entertained Shae with the SpongeBob and More Toast! apps I've downloaded. Hey, a mom has to do what a mom has to do. Desperate times call for desperate measures, etc.

During my unfortunately short-lived (but still intermittently ongoing) Project 365, I sometimes used my iPhone for taking pictures, and as Shae gets bigger and taller and more mobile and much more resistant to getting her picture taken, I have been using it more often to catch some quick pictures. And as much as I love my iPhone, it ... well, it doesn't always take the best pictures. I mean, they're not bad, and if you can get good light and the right angle, some pictures can be quite good.

But, still and all, they're cell phone pictures. And I wanted to find a way to make iPhone pictures look like they're better than your average cell phone pictures, because I really think the iPhone is way better than your average cell phone. I've been searching the Internet for some hints and suggestions, and I settled on Hipstamatic.

Now generally I have two criteria for selecting iPhone apps, regardless of their function: they need to work, and they need to be free or cheap. Hipstamatic is not free -- it's $1.99 for the "standard equipment," and 99¢ for each of four different "HipstaPaks," or add-on upgrades -- but it does work. Your base model includes three "lenses" for different lighting effects, three different kinds of "film" for special processing looks, and a special "flash" for flare effects. It also includes a convenient "shake for random" feature, which will generate a random lens-film-flash combo. Surprise yourself!

I still don't know what I'm doing, but to create a baseline for myself and try to figure out of this is worth the two bucks (before I spent more on additional HipstaPaks), I took essentially the same picture using one kind of film ("Blanko," which just applies a simple white border around the picture), each different lens, and each different flash effect, like so:

This is a plant in my office, a variegated green pothos in a plain gray plastic pot, on top of a standard beige filing cabinet, in front of off-white blinds. The left column is the Kaimal Mark II lens, middle is the John S, and right is the Jimmy, which I appear to have some sort of random trouble with, because every picture with that lens is blurry for some reason. Top row is no flash, center is standard flash, and bottom uses Dreampop, which puts that sort of motor-oil-on-puddles rainbow flare in random places.

Okay, seriously: these are terrible pictures, but that is because I am a terrible photographer. Considering that I had to do nothing but push a button and the app did the rest of the work, I am pretty impressed.

The interface itself is very cute, too: you can see the front of the "camera" to swap out lenses ...

... and use the back to frame your shot.

There is even a little button to "turn on" the "flash," and it makes that "wind-up" noise that old cameras make. It's pretty cool. And when you're done taking pictures you can pull up a "Recent Prints" screen ...

... that shows what combo you used, in case you're an idiot like me who can't tell anything apart yet.

All told, it's pretty cool. I haven't decided yet whether I'll be getting any of the add-ons, but I might. (I probably will.) I also don't know how often I'd use this for pictures of people -- although this would take some kick-ass Facebook profile pics, no doubt -- but for photos of stuff and/or random nature? OH HELL YES.

The cons, as I see them at this point: I am generally not a huge fan of "overprocessed" photos, and there's no way that it can be avoided. This app is pretty much designed to add special effects. There is no way to soften the effects unless you do further post-production. You also can't process pictures you've already taken, so you have to use the app to get any of these effects. However, the makers say they're working on it -- we'll see what happens. Also, this app is only available for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Pros: This thing takes some REALLY COOL PICTURES. But don't just take my word for it ... you can see other great shots here, here, and here.

"Avatar" -- Giant Hippie Smurfs In Space

Oh my God, THIS MOVIE.

Okay, look -- you know how this movie has made bajillions of dollars because everyone in the world has already seen this movie twice, except for like two people? Yeah: we're the two people.

Or at least we were. We finally went to see it yesterday, the day before the frikkin' Oscars, because after I wrote a 2,000-word treatise on my awards predictions, I was overcome with Catholic guilt or something. Like, who does that? Who picks Academy awards winners without actually seeing them?

(Answer: Probably more people than you think.)

We went to an 11:00 AM, non-3D showing at the googleplex near my parents'. Since the movie's been out for a little while, and since it was before lunch on a Saturday, I figured it wouldn't be too crowded, and I was right (but just in case, we did order our tickets via Fandango beforehand). Still, there were at least two dozen or so in our theater. Just enough people for me to feel like I was offending someone when I opened the backs of snacks I snuck in via my mom-bag. (Chex Mix and some Target-brand licorice bites, if you're keeping score at home.)

Are you sensing that I am sort of stalling here? Beating around the bush a bit? Trying to build suspense via exposition, when maybe good storytelling would suffice? Concerned that I am including stuff that I don't necessarily need to, just because I can? Yeah, "Avatar" was kind of like that, too.

Here is the good news: I didn't hate this movie. Certainly it was better than "Showgirls," and not nearly as boring as "Castaway." It's probably not even fair to say I disliked it, although I will be honest and tell you that I will probably never see it again, because parts of it kind of infuriated me to the point where it ruined the rest of it. And those parts? Were mostly the talking.

Peter Travers once said that James Cameron, the mastermind behind "Avatar," had "a poet's eyes and tin ears," and that is so evident here. The world of Pandora is the stuff that dreams are made of, breathtakingly beautiful, all lush and colorful and bioluminescent, so vivid even in 2-D that it is practically tactile, the CGI so perfectly rendered that you can almost hear the forest sighing. I could write all day about what you see on the screen, and that still would not be sufficient. About the pretty pictures, you can believe the hype.

But if only that attention to detail had been spent on the story and the dialogue -- this is a $300 million movie with a $30 script. People just don't talk and act like that, not even on alien planets with harsh and toxic atmospheres. And the absolute wretchedness of the storytelling is worse because the stories have already been told, and told better, in "Pocahontas" and "Dances with Wolves" and "Braveheart" and "FernGully."

I feel bad for some of the actors in this movie -- it must be hard to have to compete for attention with giant hippie Smurfs in space, some of whom look kind of like you, as well as invisible pterodactyls, futuristic Rock-Em-Sock-Em robots, and what is possibly the world's clunkiest dialogue. The repeated tagline is "I see you," which is supposed to mean not just "I see that you are standing there," or "I see you looking at my mostly-naked blue plastic boobs," but also "I see inside of you, deep down into your soul, into your deepest darkest thoughts, which are about touching my mostly-naked blue plastic boobs and also 'making the bond' if you know what I am saying."

And everybody does, because the long lingering glances and caressing shots of the female alien's behind are not exactly subtle, Mr. Best Director Nominee.

Sigourney Weaver is mostly her usual bad-ass self as a scientist who takes no shit from humans but still deals gently and peacefully with the natives. She owes some of her career to James Cameron -- she got her first Oscar nomination for "Aliens," which he directed -- but she deserves better than this. Wes Studi and CCH Pounder are excellent as the elders of  the Na'vi, even though they are completely unrecognizable when rendered in CGI. No one else particularly impressed me, and Sam Worthington's mysteriously disappearing-and-reappearing Australian accent was downright distracting.

I wouldn't say this was a waste of my time, not completely: I am still trying to wrap my head around all the awesomeness that I saw in the theater. My mind boggles at what this might have looked like in 3-D (although I don't want to test the limits of my motion sickness tolerance). Some of the scenes entered into "uncanny valley" territory for me, although I think that is kind of a good thing -- the more realistic the better, right? Rumor has it that there are already sequels in the works, and I'm sure they'll make truckloads of money, too. Props are definitely due for the look of Pandora.

Just please hope for a story editor before the next one, okay?

Feedback

It's Oscar Sunday, and every since I wrote my 2,000-word treatise on this year's Oscar nominees, plus my rant about DWTS, I've been thinking about movies and TV and my college diploma that sits on the wall in the office, collecting dust and keeping the plaster from falling down. Short version of the story is this: I was lucky enough to get a degree in something that I was passionate about, something that I still actually care deeply about (you would, too, if you had a 3-year-old who loves watching movies and TV shows), so I decided: oh, what the heck. This is the Internet, and I HAAAAVE THE POOOOOWERRRRR!

Sorry ... He-Man moment. Anyway.

The gist is: I have opinions. Let me share them with you. Of course, they're MY opinions, so you'll get your usual amount of snark and whatnot. Maybe I'll get lucky and someone will want to pay me for my opinions -- if that ever becomes the case, I'll let you know. Unless otherwise stated, I paid for whatever I review here (movies, TV shows, books, games, random interesting foodstuffs, maybe even restaurants if any of the new places around me ever have a wait of under 2 hours) with my own money.

Oh, and in case you were ever wondering, I am inspired by some really great writers and reviewers, and while I aspire to be like them someday, I don't pretend that I am at their level, so if you ever want to check out any professionals, here are some recommendations:

• Roger Ebert
• Peter Travers
• Bob Mondello
• David Edelstein

I also read NPR's Monkey See blog and also what is happening at Television Without Pity. I won't lie -- TWoP has been a revelation to me (it's where I learned the word "snark," for example).

So ... that's that. I'm going to start with reviews of "Avatar" and "The Blind Side," so that should be fun! Keep checking back.