Did anyone notice that Banmanuel (Nestor Carbonell’s character on The Tick) was the mayor in the recent ‘Batman: The Dark Knight’ movie? Coincidence, I think not.

Apparently, the new iTunes isn’t as stable as previous releases; I’m betting there’s a new software version that will be made available in the coming days.

I just installed the new iTunes and was listening to some of my music, when I launched a Quicktime movie to watch a “work related movie,” and noticed that the music got all jumpy and sounded like it’s fast forwarding. There were no effects on the movie, but, every time I pressed play to watch more, the music started to become choppy and would instantly clear up when I pause the movie. I tried multiple mp3s to see if one of them was corrupted somehow, but was still receiving the jittery sound. For now, I’ll have to single-task and watch the movie OR listen to music. That’s a touch annoying… oh well…

update… apparently, I’m not the only one with issues…

update #2… The NEW version of iTunes fixes this bug!!!

Aaron, Jenny, Lauren, and I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival a number of weeks back and saw a bunch of their kick ass films ranging from rock climbing, to mocumentaries, to really neat documentaries. By far the best of the movies was a film called “Balancing Point” produced by Sensei Studios. It’s a number of clips where various people balance rocks in a number of interesting ways… you can see a version of it at Sensei Studios (hopefully they pull it back online) or here.

This movie has been in the works for quite some time and should be out later this year. Kevin Smith released the teaser a few weeks back, but it just caught my attention today via Digg.com

To view the release notes and watch the trailor, go here —> http://clerks2.com/?p=53

A NY Times Article puts fort a rather interesting look at why movie companies may not be doing so well this summer: many of the movies just plain suck. It’s an interesting theory that I’ve personally been sympathetic to for many years (not just this summer). After all, who wants to see a remake or re-adaptation of a crappy movie from the 20, 30, or more years ago anyway (Bad News Bears, Herbie fully loaded, etc…)?

Another thing that keeps me personally from going to many movies is price. Why would I want to pay $20 just so that my girlfriend and I can see a movie in the movies that we can eventually rent for $4 at home and have for a few nights? Most are not worth that much money to own let alone see on the big screen.

My suggestions: 1) put more thought into making/producing movies so as to cut out the crap before it gets to market, 2)lower the price and watchers will come, and 3) quit putting annoying TV advertisements at the start of movies. If companies followed those rules, they’d probably find themselves pleasantly surprised at the increased attendances of their films.