Archive for the ‘Film Stuff’ Category

Win a Kung Fu Panda 2 Goody Bag and Tickets

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

It’s been three years since the awesome Po the Panda hit the silver screen and tried to bring peace to his land in ‘Kung Fu Panda’. Well now he’s back with a double dose of awesomeness.

To celebrate the release of Kung Fu Panda 2 we’ve got a really cool bundle of film merchandise to give away plus 4 tickets to Pandamonium in the Park in July for one lucky winner. For a chance to win just answer this question as a comment below the post:

Giant Panda’s live in the Bamboo forests of which country?


The goody bag includes the following:

3D Movie Guide
Colouring Book
Mini Board Book
Story Activity book with Stickers
The Novel
The Official Handbook
Window Shade
Trampoline
Paper Lantern
Po Towel Door Hanger
Frisbee

Plus a family ticket to Pandamonium in the Park*, a day-long event, organised by Sainsbury’s and DreamWorks Animation, guaranteed to entertain the whole family; you’ll meet Po, the star of the film, enjoy an outdoor concert by the esteemed composers from the movie, Hans Zimmer and John Powell and discover a world of Chinese culture including shows by The Chen brothers who are Chinese Lion Dance Champions and the Shaolin Monks, stilt walkers, Chinese kite fliers, martial art demonstrations, face painters, calligraphers and more. This event is held near Northampton and a family ticket is worth £45**.

kung fu panda 2

Competition ends 20th June 2011. One winner will be picked and notified shortly after this date. Open to UK residents only.
*SAINSBURY’S ‘PANDAMONIUM IN THE PARK’ EVENT at Althorp Estate, Saturday July 9th from 11.30am to 6.30pm. Purchase tickets to the event from Sainsbury’s here: http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/panda
**Family ticket includes 2 adult and 2 child tickets. Travel costs are not included in the prize.

More about the movie: Po fulfilled his dream of becoming dragon warrior and protecting his peaceful homeland in the first movie, so what could possibly go wrong in Kung Fu Panda 2? Villains, that’s what! A fearsome baddie plans to conquer china and rid the world of Kung Fu and it’s down to Po to find inner strength to stop him. In cinemas from June 10th (Cert. PG), the latest movie from DreamWorks features a huge array of celebrity voices including Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu and many more.

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Posted in Competition Stuff, Cool Stuff, Film Stuff, Nice Stuff, Random Stuff | 6 Comments »

Star Wars Augmented Reality on iPhone

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

It was only a matter of time before some addled nerd managed to wrangle TIE fighters into the New York skyline, and boy howdy have they done a good job of it:

Basically, this is from a forthcoming game entitled ‘Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner’ that will be playable on iPhone, using its camera lens to form the backdrop for your intergalactic dogfight. Clever, that. If the New York skyline in the video isn’t cool enough for you, then imagine how it’d look if you aimed your lens at the night sky, or in a forest. Or, y’know, in the bath or something. I don’t know, use your imagination.

Via The Wall. Which is nice, obviously.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Film Stuff, Found on the Interwebs Stuff, Game Stuff, Geek Stuff | 1 Comment »

Win a 32" TV to celebrate 'Brooklyn's Finest' on DVD!

Friday, October 15th, 2010

To celebrate the release of the rather excellent ‘Brooklyn’s Finest’, we’re giving a 32″ TV away – and we’ve also got 10 DVDs of the film as well for some lucky runners up. And if you don’t like the idea of either a huge TV or Richard Gere in serious-mode, then heck, we don’t know what to do with you. Enough rambling, simply read the following po-faced plot synopsis (no spoilers, don’t worry) and answer the question below.

“From the director of Training Day comes Brooklyn’s Finest, a slick urban drama set in the morally ambiguous world of the New York police force. Burned out cop, Eddie (Richard Gere) is just one week away from retirement, whilst drugs officer Sal (Ethan Hawke) is realizing there’s no line he won’t cross to provide a better life for his family.

Meanwhile, Clarence “Tango” Butler (Don Cheadle) has been undercover so long that he feels a closer allegiance to infamous drug dealer Caz (Wesley Snipes) than he does to the force.

All three cops find themselves hurtling towards the same crime scene on one fatal night in this tense, edge of your seat thriller.”

And the question…

Who plays Eddie?

1. Don Cheadle
2. Ethan Hawk
3. Richard Gere

Of course, the real question should be ‘why on earth is Wesley Snipes playing someone called ‘Caz’?', but that’s by-the-by. Hang on, Ethan Hawke plays someone called ‘Sal’ as well – what’s going on in this film?! Send your answers to marketing@iwantoneofthose.com to be in with a chance by November 14th and good luck!

Posted in Competition Stuff, Cool Stuff, Film Stuff, Geek Stuff | 25 Comments »

Star Destroyer Umbrella

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Star Wars-related paraphernalia is by no means new (much to the delight of George Lucas’ bank balance), but this incredible design has, shockingly, yet to join the galaxy of merchandise. It is, as you can see, an umbrella fashioned to look like an Imperial Star Destroyer.

The potential manufacturers/designers behind the idea maintain that this will work as well as a normal umbrella, but of course has the distinct advantage of being unbelievably cool. Certainly a lot cooler than George Lucas, anyhow. Honestly, anyone who thinks it’s OK to have his haircut beamed in from 1938 and then extol the virtues of futuristic design and digital technology needs to have a serious think about style.

Rain, may you fall upon the forest moon of Endor, the ice planet Hoth and the dual-sunned wastelands of Tatooine until the funding for this product becomes available.

Via some brainiacs at One More Gadget.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Design Stuff, Film Stuff, Found on the Interwebs Stuff, Geek Stuff | 1 Comment »

The Empire Strikes Back Trailer 'Premake'

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Some incredible nerd-ery for you today. A band of brainy sorts have compiled a whole host of archive sci-fi footage and turned it into a surprisingly convincing false trailer for what The Empire Strikes Back (officially the world’s best sequel) might have looked like had it been released in the kitsch sci-fi style of the 50s.

So what other modern-day Hollywood classics would benefit from the Premake treatment? Off the top of my head, I’d go for ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’, ‘The War Of The Worlds’, ‘Planet Of The Apes’ and ‘Godzilla’. Hang on…

Via Geekologie. Well done chaps.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Film Stuff, Funny Stuff, Geek Stuff, YouTube Stuff | No Comments »

Realistic Movie Robots

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Reading this news story over at the BBC makes for quite a panicky Monday morning’s reading, that’s for sure. In essence, it says that robot technology, such as it is at the moment, could potentially be very dangerous to humans if we were to allow machines to help us around the house. Some German science people conducted some experiments designed to test ‘safety limits’ on a robot arm only to discover that, unsurprisingly, it could still inflict serious injury when equipped with knives and other stabbing weapons.

Now, the article doesn’t really go into enough detail at this point. They’ve said that the victims of this controlled robot arm attack were a silicone lump, a dead pig and, rather alarmingly, the arm of a human volunteer. We assume they were already long-gone…

Still, all this combined with having watched the rather rubbish ‘I, Robot’ on Friday night makes me wonder exactly what robots will be like in the future. Furthermore, it made me wonder which films have successfully (more than ‘I, Robot’, anyway) made convincing attempts at depicting what the logical extrapolation of a robot arm cutting through a dead pig would be. One thing’s for sure – while the plot of ‘I, Robot’ is entertaining enough, having a zillion poorly rendered robots jump onto Will Smith’s moving car from 50 feet away and run alongside it in an attempt to kill him while he coolly shouts things like “now I’m maaaad!” certainly isn’t. God I hate ‘I, Robot’…

Anyway, off the top of my head, I’ve come up with the following better examples of realistic robots that might chop your arm off in years to come:

Replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner:

ED-209 in Robocop (minus the blood… and the hilarious final line: “Someone wanna call a paramedic?”):

And finally, the great Woody Allen gets some tailoring advice:

What other examples can you find?

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Design Stuff, Film Stuff, Funny Stuff, Geek Stuff, Random Stuff, YouTube Stuff | 2 Comments »

Crocheted Star Wars Characters

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Does it get any cuter than this? We’re guessing not – just look at these adorable little harbingers of inter-planetary warfare and sketchy mysticism!

They come via the exceptional talents of Lucy Ravenscar (whose blog you can find here), and if ever there were a rival to these little cuties, it’s this band of crocheted characters. If you visit her blog there are some more pictures to have a look at, some of which are even cuter than these. I bet she gets inundated with requests from children of the 70s to make them for their kids. Heck, you don’t even need kids to enjoy these, look:

chewie

ewok

trooper

group

Via Wired.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Cute Stuff, Design Stuff, Film Stuff, Geek Stuff, Kids Stuff, Random Stuff | No Comments »

Unbelievable Star Wars Lego Fight

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Lego = great.

Star Wars = great.

Lego X Star Wars = great squared.

I’m no mathematician, but that’s a fact. With that in mind, why not geek out for a Friday afternoon and marvel at this incredible Lego animation?

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Film Stuff, YouTube Stuff | 1 Comment »

Why didn't it take off? #3 – Betamax

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Everyone of a certain age (why do I get the feeling that soon all of these posts are going to begin with that phrase?) will be familiar with the epic sales and popularity battle that dominated the home entertainment explosion of the 1980s. It was either trusty VHS, with its superior recording time that eventually trounced the, frankly, inferior Betamax system.

Even though the tapes themselves were smaller and sleeker (manufacturers apparently were given the size of a paperback book as a guideline), the Betamax couldn’t compete with the might of VHS for a number of reasons. Sony’s pre-cursor to the Betamax format was the Umatic – a format that allowed 1 hour of recording time. “Wow,” consumers must have enthused, “that’s two whole episodes of ‘Only Fools & Horses on one cassette!”, while Sony failed to realise that one of the major pitfalls of such a small capacity was that it wouldn’t allow room for a Hollywood movie.

Marketing genius

JVC, the main manufacturers of VHS, succeeded in realising and quite cleverly kick-started the video rental business. No longer were forgotten classics only viewable on wet Sunday afternoons at the Odeon – you could get hold of them and watch them from your sofa. It strikes a resemblance to one of our own most important entertainment movements of the last five years or so, the notion of catch-up TV. Even though it was possible to record TV broadcasts via VHS, it has never been so easy to actually view them as it is now.

So VHS royally tanned the hide of its home entertainment rivals. Well done, VHS! But what about the Betamax? Bizarrely, since its demise, its place in public consciousness has recently become one of affectionate nostalgia. Wall-E watches his copy of ‘Hello Dolly’ on Betamax, the Mighty Boosh memorably created a monster out of spools of Betamax tape, and even Dr. Who is in on the act, happily destroying Maureen Lipman by erasing her off one. So even if it didn’t take off, the Betamax format obviously still has a place in the hearts of those who admit to being of that certain age.

It’s progressed to the point whereby people are actively trying to save and revive the format as it is threatened with total obsolescence. The slightly unhinged very sane folk at savebetamax.org need your support!

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Film Stuff, Funny Stuff, TV Stuff | 3 Comments »

Have a sneaky peek at the IWOOT Christmas Ad

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Like it or not, the festive season is well and truly sneaking up on us. The weather’s turned, the IWOOT Christmas catalogue is out (perfect loo-reading, if you’ve got one) and, best of all, our telly ad is almost ready to fill up HD screens across the nation! So, just for you, we’ve got the whole thing here ready to enjoy: 

Ah, doesn’t it make you feel warm inside? Come back later for the special ‘making-of’ video, where you can see the furrowed brows and inestimable professionalism of everyone involved.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Film Stuff, IWOOT Stuff, TV Stuff | 3 Comments »