Ars Technica is one of my favorite technology sites and they have seen fit to re-review the Sony PS3 18 months after their initial review. This is a fascinating review which may persuade even non-gamers that the PS3 is a device worthy of a place in their home theatre. In any event, check out the article here. There are many noteworthy reasons that I have discussed previously on my MediaFix site as well as several new ones and you deserve to take a good hard look at all of the reasons why your home as a whole will benefit by having one. I have told Robert that I will be getting one as soon as I feel the time is right…and this article is the best sell for the unit yet! Again, don’t think of the PS3 as a gaming console…it is, but in the whole picture, gaming is only a part (some say a SMALL part) of what this unit does and I am inclined to agree. The only thing that the PS3 does not do that I would like to see is incorporate a DVR…and the neat thing is that it probably will in the future with very little effort on the part of the user. I highly encourage you read this article.

Bob Anderson, who played the young George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, has died of cancer. He was 75. Growing up in Hollywood with Tinseltown relatives, he first appeared onscreen as a baby, the AP reports. At 7, he acted with Shirley Temple and in 1945 appeared in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But his most famous role was the outgoing, altruistic Georgie Bailey who grows up to be James Stewart in the popular classic.

Let’s get the big question out of the way first: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a very good movie, but not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. More important, however, is that the newest Indiana Jones adventure IS a great movie watching experience.

Everything about the movie successfully furthers the Indy story and fits right in alongside it’s predecessors with just the right amount of “tips of the hat” to those earlier adventures without coming across as a nostalgia festival. Ford is as comfortable in the role he created almost 30 years ago, you really have to remind yourself several times during the film that the man is over 60 years old now.

Having seen the previous films during their opening weekends as a child and young adult, it was a particularly special night for me as I was accompanied this time around not by a group of my testosterone-driven “guy buddies” but by my own children. Robert, Beth and Hailey all made the trip at midnight on a Wednesday night to be with me as I relived my childhood for a couple of hours, perhaps my last time with Indiana Jones, and it could not have been more appropriate or special to spend a wonderful evening with all of them.

There will be many opportunities to rewatch this film in the years to come, but no viewing will have the impact and joy for me the way this one did. Indiana Jones is alive and well these many, many years later and he most certainly will live happily ever after. That is the way our childhood heroes and their stories should all turn out.

From Trekmovie.com

Alexander Courage, who wrote the original Star Trek title theme as well as the scores for numerous television shows and movies, died May 15 in Pacific Palisades, California at the age of 88. The Emmy winning and Oscar-nominated composer had over 90 film and television credits and at least one other TV theme (Judd for the Defense), but he was best known for the exotic, bongo-driven siren song he wrote for the original Star Trek TV series.

Written at what was the peak of artistry for television music in the mid-1960s, a period when film composers like Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann would routinely move back and forth between major motion pictures and episodic television, Courage’s Star Trek theme stands out as unique. Originally performed by an electric violin, the theme was later arranged for female soprano. “What I based the whole thing on in a way, was an old Hebredean tune from the outer islands of Scotland,” Courage said when I interviewed him in 1996. “Because I wanted something that had a long, long feel to it, and I wanted to put it over a fast-moving accompaniment to get the adventure and the speed and so forth, so there was an old song called ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon,’ and when I was a kid I would hear it on the radio and they used to play a double time accompaniment to it, while this thing was singing over the top, so that’s what I really wanted to do, I wanted to make all of the scales go way out, and I wanted the intervals to be long, and I wanted to have a kind of exotic feel to it.”

Courage’s long-line melody was in fact so exotic that it rarely found its way into the musical underscore of the series—the exceptions were some background source “space radio” cues heard in the episodes “Court Martial” and “The Conscience of the King.” Joseph Mullendore’s score for the latter episode also sampled the melody at certain points. But it was the opening brass fanfare (heard after William Shatner’s narration speaks the words “Space: the final frontier…”) that became the most familiar element of the theme, and the show’s producers specifically requested that composers quote the fanfare and employ variations of it during any “flyby” shot of the Enterprise in space, meaning that the melody would appear in various guises numerous times in any Trek episode. Later it was adapted to open the follow-up series Star Trek – The Next Generation in the same way. Courage himself did the most direct adaptation of the full title theme on the Jerry Goldsmith-scored Star Trek – The Motion Picture in 1979, when he was asked by Goldsmith to write several “Captain’s Log” cues using a subdued take on the melody. After that, virtually all of the Star Trek films from The Wrath of Khan through Star Trek Nemesis opened with Courage’s bold fanfare, which Variety writer and TV music authority Jon Burlingame once stated was more familiar to Americans than Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

TrekMovie.com is sad to announce that another member of the original Star Trek family has passed away. Robert Justman, a producer on both Star Trek The Original Series and Star Trek The Next Generation died at his home in Los Angeles Wednesday from complications due to Parkinson’s disease; Justman was 81.

Rob- To put this into perspective, Justman was one of the perhaps 10 most important behind the camera influences in all of STAR TREK, having been there when the show was originally conceived in 1965, serving at a producer at the launch of The Next Generation and finally as an adviser on Deep Space Nine’s Trials and Tribble-ations episode. Justman wrote one of the finest accounts of the making of the show in a book called INSIDE STAR TREK. Justman will be missed here in WalleyWorld.