Let Me Show You What I Want for Christmas

Wish your mom knew what you wanted for Christmas? FilmCrave’s new movie wish list feature does just that. Users can easily add movies to their wish list and email it to their mom or anyone else, and voila! She now knows what DVDs you want for the holidays.

The email you send contains links to your personal movie list page. From there they can view your wish list and see changes as you make them. The best part is, each movie on your wish list links to Amazon, making purchasing movies a breeze.

Don’t remember your mom’s email? No way, you’re not that bad of a person! But in case you are, the innovative masterminds that created FilmCrave have made importing your address book easy. When you’re ready to email your list, simply hook up your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or MSN contacts into FilmCrave through the address importer. Go ahead. Send it to everyone on your list and make sure you get every DVD, twice.

This feature isn’t only for the holidays though. Users can send any number of movie lists and reviews to their friends and family. This enables users to instantly share the movie review they just wrote or the movie list they just created.

For those underprivileged soles who haven’t had the pleasure of using FilmCrave: FilmCrave is the only movie social network that fully integrates user interaction with movie reviews, intuitive movie lists, trailers, DVDs and the most innovative movie forum on the planet. FilmCrave is the authority in movie list creation. Because of their comprehensive formula, they’re able to offer compiled “top movie lists” that are based not only on overall member ratings but member created movie lists as well.

Bailout of the Detroit Giants

If you have read my previous post you would see that I oppose bailouts. However this bailout is slightly different to me. This bailout is not 100% because of mismanagement or shady behavior, in many aspects this is because of the credit giants screw ups. If GM could get the credit they need they may be able to sell more cars resulting in more profit. Would that solve all their problems? Not exactly, they still would have faltered because of high gas prices, model lines that are spread too thin and the fact they sold the majority share in their own credit company a few years back.

GM's overseas divisions are also a joke, they have... Opel? Is that it. I guess if you count Hummer as a foreign brand because so many of them are used by our military to invade other countries then they have two. Clearly, they have screwed up time and time again when it came to world wide support.

Now onto Ford. Ford is in a much better spot. They own their own credit company, so no problems offering credit to qualified buyers. They have very strong overseas brands, also they have a lot of collateral they can sell and have sold. Collateral like shares of Mazda, Jaguar and Landrover. They have been selling these off and have amassed enough money to survive a year at the current rate they are blowing through it. This means that if they can improve sales slightly in the next year they can get back on their feet just in time to see the economy grow again. Hooray!

So the big question is: Do we give them 25 million of the 700 million that already being spent? I think that giving money to GM is just going to prolong the enevitable. They should stop making Buick, Pontiac and Dodge and make Chevy and GMC their only two brands. Reduce thier dealers to 1500 to match Toyota (currently GM has 7000 dealers!). This will make them stronger, only if they agree to downsize should they be given money. If they are determined to hemmorage as much money as they are they will fail with or without our help.

Ford is going to likley be able to survive and lending them money may be a safer bet, it may also speed up their recovery. So I am not against helping them get back on their feet. They have proven they can manage their business and it is more the economy that is hurting them.

I have deliberately left out Chrystler. I think they are irrelevant in the scheme of things.

Wasting Money on What?

Alright, now the election is over and smoke has cleared, I ask myself "How much money did we spend and for what?"

The WSJ reports that this election for the White House (not including congress and senate) cost "about $1.6 billion; double the presidential race four years ago." 1.6 BILLION!!

Was the difference between Obama and McCain really worth that much money. If you look at McCain's previous record one would say that the two of them believed in most of the same things. The only area they differed was how to achieve these things. Now, don't get me wrong there are some fundamental differences to them but what would have happened if they spent that money somewhere else.

For instance:

140 million could feed 4 million people in Zimbabwe for a month. 1.6 Billion could probably feed them well for a year.

We could have used that to save 16,000 people's homes from being forclosed.

We could have even used that to send rabies vacinations to poor countries and saved 50,000 lives. (yes, somehow people still die from rabies -- odd huh).

My point it, the money spent on an election is a waste. I realize there is no true way to stop the spending, even finance reform won't curb the spending by private parties, but someday one candidate should say "Instead of givnig me the money to buy ads, I am going to use it for something good" and then that person will get my vote.

Oh yeah, the bailout is a joke too.

Top Horror Movies of All-Time

Here is my top 10 horror movies.

1) The Exorcist
2) Alien
3) Event Horizon
4) Halloween
5) The Descent
6) The Shining
7) 28 Weeks later
8) Nightmare on Elm St.
9) Rosemary's Baby
10) The Thing

Check out FilmCrave's List:
Top Horror Movies

Journey to the Center of the Earth (2/4 stars)

A good kid's adventure movie but haven't we seen enough of Brendan Fraser playing the same character in every movie. I watched this on DVD in 3-d. The 3-d added a bit to the movie but there were scenes that served no purpose other than to add to the 3-d effects. I didn't care for that part of it. There was one point where I actually moved my head to avoid a flying object, but the rest of the movies 3-d effects were hardly that good.

The story was interesting enough, I never saw the original so I don't know how similar it is. But I would say this is a great movie for kids to watch and maybe could even become a classic like the Goonies or Never Ending Story for that age group.

See more Journey to the Center of the Earth reviews

Quarantine (1.5/4 stars) - Movie kinda sucked

Beware of this movie. I admit it, I like the idea of this movie but it just missed the mark for me. I think I may even be generous giving this movie 1.5 stars. First off, as a horror it is complete failure. At no points during this movie did I jump, get tense or feel any emotions for the characters lives. A horror should instill fear in the audience, this just made me want to smack Jennifer Carpenter to get her to shut up. Don't get me wrong, her acting wasn't bad; it was actually really good. But it was too much of a good thing and by the end I didn't want any more of her crying and shaking.

The first person camera angle thing that I loved in Cloverfield, I hated in this movie. The reason it worked in Cloverfield was because the dialog and characters kept it a little light-hearted even when times were going bad. In that movie, you could let off a chuckle at the dialog while you waited for the next event to take place. In Quarantine you just had to wait and try not to get bored.

Another thing that didn't work for this movie was the ending. They left it open with a lot of questions and no resolve. In fact, if you saw the trailer, you have already seen the entire ending. Seriously, WTF. There is no worse way of destroying a movie, than to show the audience the ending before they see the movie.

What worked with this movie was the flesh eating zombie scenes. They were pretty creepy in their own right, but because of the first person camera work they fell short.

My advice, wait until video for this one. Four of us went to the theatre to watch this, none of us ever want to see this one again.

More Quarantine Movie Reviews

Yellowpages Advertising

I have placed a lot of advertising orders through the years. Most of the time the sales people you deal with may be a little aggressive but not to the point where they annoy you. I have recently found the pushiest, yet most unresponsive, advertising company yet.

AT&T Yellowpages

I started dealing with them about 6 weeks ago. I was looking to purchase a print ad in the Kansas City edition as well as an online advertisement. For this I was working with two different ad reps. One for online and one for print (I later found out that the print ad rep was supposed to handle it all).

Online Ad Placement Experience

I was told it was going to take 4 - 6 weeks to get an online search ad up and running. This is horrible, everything else in the online world is nearly instantaneous. After filling out lots of forms, signing contracts and making several phone calls things appeared to be complete. 4 weeks went by. Then I started going through the chain of command to find out what was going on. Finally, one of them helped me out and got the ad up in 24 hours. Except it wasn't my ad. It was a crappy looking banner and listed under the wrong geographic area.

I then actually had quality control call me to ask how everything was going! I told them my troubles and I got a call from my ad rep within minutes. I was assured everything would be fixed. That is where it all stopped. It has been 3 days without her returning a call, email or sending me the form that she promised.

How can a place operate with such bad customer service! The worst part is this may be better than my print ad experience with them.

Print Ad Placement Experience

From the first time I called, I knew this was going to suck. The ad representative was pushy, full of sales cliches and wouldn't send me anything in writing. She called me EVERYDAY! "Josh, I just wanted to get an update..." What the hell, I told her I would call her with any updates.

I just wanted pricing. Instead I kept getting the run around and unclear answers about the cost. She wanted me to advertise in a special issue for extra money, I simply said "Mail me that issue and I will see what it looks like". The next week she calls back and asks for my order. I tell her I never received the issue. She was embarrassed and the next day I got a St. Louis phone book in the mail. The next day she called ask asked for my order. I explained that I live in Kansas City, not St. Louis and it wasn't the "special edition" that she was trying to sell me.

After finally having my calls screened so I wouldn't have to talk to this mega-pushy sales rep. I finally told her I wasn't going to spend my 11k dollars with her this year and told her not to call me. They should have my business, but instead because of how bad the experience was we opted not even to advertise with them.

I hope other people do not have this bad of an experience with them, but if they do I really hope you don't own AT&T stock because you cannot stay in business running this bad of an operation.

Hopefully, my online ad will get online someday :P