Movie Addicts. Celeb Dishers. Gamers. We're All Here.

I love IMDb. What I like best is that every visit to the site feels like an entirely new experience. It sorta feels like the information on IMDb is organized the way our brains really work! Most of us do not keep information in great detail in neat little silos or nicely cataloged index cards. We track information more with just a pointer or link to one thing. When we come across that pointer it triggers something in us. As we go deeper through that pointer, we find ourselves being lead to a seemingly random discovery of many more related links or connections.

Take today’s IMDb headlines for example. The movie Beowulf is listed as a Top 5 movie at the box office. I clicked on the movie name, and discovered the director was Robert Zemeckis. Somewhere in my brain a little light bulb went off. Hey, wasn’t this the same director who made a ground-breaking movie with humans and animated characters interacting in a live action setting for the first time? Anyone remember Who Framed Roger Rabbit?? I clicked on the director link to see his filmography. Sure enough, it was there. It came out in 1988 and was a trailblazer!

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The second installment in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings had fundamental problems from the start. As the second part of a three-part story, it covers mainly the plateau level of the narrative arc; the hero’s introduction and rise of action has already happened, and the climax is a long ways off. For this reason, many film goers found it tedious. Is it possible for such a classic story to suffer from sequel-itis?

If it does, it certainly wasn’t J.R.R. Tolkien’s fault. He wrote The Lord of the Rings as one long book, until publishers made him trisect it. As the middle segment of a novel, The Two Towers makes sense: a drop in action is expected as the story plateaus. But can it stand on its own? The author tried his hardest. Fascinating characters like Gollum/Smeagol take the stage, a wonderful metaphor for the evil inside all of us. Frodo and Sam finally find refuge with Faramir, a character made strangely sinister for the film when writers realized there wasn’t enough peril. It all builds towards climax, and though the end drifts off into ambiguity, it would be hard to film the story any other way.

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Well folks, the dust has long since settled on Halloween and our annual appointment with Jigsaw and Amanda and all those many cops out to settle their collective hash has come and gone. It’s not a big spoiler risk to say that our diabolic duo is currently cooling on a matched pair of slabs, so the onus was on Wan and Whannell–big time!–to find a way to keep the franchise going sans its two biggest draws, the villains.

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Building a startup from the ground up is fun. Its also very consuming! For us here at Kwanzoo, it’s been an interesting journey. It all started in the summer of 2006. Yes, it has been that long! More on that later. It has been many twists and turns along the way. In this new series of articles I hope to share our journey with all our friends, old and new.

Kwanzoo is my second startup. Someone once said, a second startup is like watching a movie all over again. You know the plot. You know what’s going to happen next. You can speed through the parts you know well, and focus on what you really enjoyed about the movie. Catch some cool dialog in sharp detail and have a laugh! Catch the little nuances in different scenes, the camera angles, the acting, the background detail. Is a second startup the same way?

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Nearly every shot in the Lord of the Rings films required some kind of special effect, computer animation, or visual trickery. A live-action adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work had not yet been attempted for this very reason - it’s just too fantastic to capture without the use of today’s technology. Director Peter Jackson, however, was not content to merely create a visually pleasing trilogy. He wanted it to be perfect - down to the last detail.

All of the armor, weapons, and costumes were handmade, even those seen only briefly. Each link of every character’s chain mail was forged by hand. Wherever possible, live actors and animals were used in place of CGI. In need of horses for a battle charging sequence, Peter Jackson put out an open casting call to all New Zealand riders and their mounts. For the impossibly large battles, he had a special computer program developed to create realistic troops. Peter Jackson both exhausted and replenished the resources at New Zealand’s Weta Workshop, which has since become the go-to company for models, prosthetics, and computer animation. The amount of money that Jackson poured into their efforts allowed them to expand considerably. When Disney began production on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, they went straight to Weta.

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Let’s Sit Down to a Brimmin’ Bowl of Frosted Tarantino-Wheats!

I’m spectacularly confused by “Kill Bill: Vol. 1″ and “Kill Bill: Vol. 2″. I wish I could tell just exactly what genre Tarantino was going for with it–like a Frosted Mini-Wheat gone horribly awry. There’s too much action to be a drama and way too much drama to be an action film.

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We were sitting around, thinking up ideas for a cool website where we could hang out with friends. It had to be something different - not yet another social networking site! How about a game? But could we keep it friendly, stress-free? A place for everyone, from the truly passionate to the “I’m just here to chill” kind of person. A fun place to hang out?

We had to be different, and a whole lot better! We wanted a cool-sounding name for the site, which also meant something positive. And it came together in a completely unexpected way. We remembered this bit from the movie Jerry Maguire:

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In adapting one of the 20th century’s most beloved novels, Peter Jackson knew he’d have to tread carefully. Much material was cut due to time constraints, but his passionate treatment of the stories and themes has set the precedent for fantasy cinema. Recent and upcoming novel adaptations like Stardust, The Golden Compass, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Seeker inevitably face comparisons with Jackson’s Oscar-winning triumph.

Did You Know…

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Welcome to the Kwanzoo Blog. This is a place to share with you all the fun, excitement and challenge of building the world’s first social trivia game site where you can play trivia with friends, or with our community! We hope you will hang out with us, tell us how we are doing, and share your ideas on what might be cool to add to the site! Kwanzoo brings you a whole new kind of trivia game experience, that is nothing like what you may have seen before!

As you get started, try our unique social movie trivia and social tv trivia experience! Imagine being able to poll the community as you answer questions! How about seeing your ranks change in real-time as you play? Stay a step ahead of your friends by watching how they’re doing!

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