The Bleeding Effect

In the popular press, it is all the rage right now to try to claim that violent games create violent people.  Sweet, innocent adolescents, they will claim, are suddenly, overnight and without warning, transformed into gun-toting, brass-knuckle-using thugs after five minutes of Halo: Reach.  An hour of WWE Smackdown will send little Johnny scampering to the store, where he will load up on weight gain products and subsequently beat the hell out of his classmates for no reason other than that he played that game.  And all of those trenchcoat-wearing social outcasts who brought Uzies to their schools and used them with extreme prejudice surely had Xboxes hidden away with the latest Grand Theft Auto in the disk drive, still warm from its latest use.  Every single teen in juvenile prison must have played State of Emergency since they could fart.

 

There are so many things wrong with these claims as to make them almost comical.  Why the media or the politicians or whomever are so obsessed with pinning teen violence on videogames is beyond me.  After all, who buys those games for their kids?  Did violent children not exist before the advent of the Nintendo?  And who lets a violent child grow up without ever teaching him more peaceful ways of resolving conflicts?  Playing Dynasty Warriors 6 no more makes me a violent person than it does make me a Three Kingdoms general.  I play violent games all the time, but I was taught the difference between fantasy and reality by my responsible parents, and I have an easy-going attitude to begin with.

 

That being said, I have encountered two unusual and rather specific instances in which playing a game really has impacted my poor little psyche.

 

The first comes from Stuntman: Ignition, a patently un-violent game (at least in the "stabby-stabby blow your brains out" way) in which you drive stunt vehicles around movie sets for faux action films.  Brilliant game, but it has one design flaw.  I hesitate to call it a flaw because it does make it a more challenging game, but I will call it a flaw nonetheless.  You score points by succeeding with stunts, like driving close to an explosion, pulling a 180 turn, driving between two trucks without touching either, etc.  Every stunt you do adds 1 to your score multiplier, and there is a way to string together the entire level so that you have an ungodly multiplier by the end and get a five-star rating: you do "little" stunts between the big ones, like popping wheelies on motorcycles or driving really closely by parked cars, so that your multiplier stays alive (it goes away after just a few seconds) and increases.  This means that you will actually drive out of your way in order to steer close to oncoming traffic, pedestrians, park tables, trees, whatever will count as a "close call" and increase your score.  I got pretty good at this, but unfortunately, it began to transfer into real life.  I remember driving into my apartment parking lot and actually steering to the side just so that I would be driving closer to the parked cars.  I realized what was going on immediately and had to stop playing for a few days.  I call this the Bleeding Effect.

Christmas sale at Wal-Mart!  Outta my way!

I've dubbed it such because of the second instance, which took place just last night.  Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was just released, and as I am a big fan of the series, it naturally sits in my gaming library.  In the Assassin's Creed series, a man named Desmond is hooked into a Matrix-like dentist's chair and relives memories stored in his DNA of his ancestors, like those of a man named Altair from the crusades in 1191.  As he experiences those memories, Desmond slowly acquires his ancestors' assassin talents, something which Desmond's colleagues call The Bleeding Effect. 

 

This latest entry, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, is special because it has a multiplayer component, which I tried for the first time last night.  You and seven other humans are thrown into Renaissance Italy as various characters who look exactly like the rest of the people in the crowd - guard captains, smugglers, doctors, executioners, etc.  Each player is given another player to assassinate, meaning that while you are hunting down one player, someone else is hunting you.  This means that you have to find your target and watch your back at the same time, because at any moment, some random barber may come up behind you and suddenly fancy himself Sweeny Todd.  In my second match, I stalked my target into a square where we both saw one player kill another.  Then my target went up and killed the killer.  I took the opportunity to kill my target while he wiped the blood off his blade, and right after I stabbed him, some jerk came up and killed me!  We all had a good laugh about this (at least, I did), but after I turned off the game, I realized something slightly alarming.  I still felt the anxiety of knowing that a fellow assassin was trailing me and may strike at any moment.  I felt paranoia, even though the only two things behind me were my Christmas tree and a sleeping cat (who, to be fair, could very well attack me at any moment).

I'll show YOU Protestant Reformation!

If psychologists really want to study gamers, then they should look into this.  A violent kid is going to play violent games, but then, so will mild-mannered cornballs like me.  Rage issues are certainly nothing new, but for some reason the media keeps trying to pin the blame on the gaming industry without taking a second glance at the child's home life, whether he's being bullied at school, if he's insecure, whatever.  The media craves the easy explanation.  "If you do x, then y will happen."  But if you've ever been around a human before, you know that we are never so simple.  Why Stuntman: Ignition and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood have impacted my sensitive little brain while the hundreds of other games that I have played haven't made the slightest dent I have absolutely no idea, but at least these two haven't instilled in me a strange desire to kill people while driving away from a raging volcano.

Pigsy's Drunken Demand (Five Element Ninjas Review)

I went back to Dallas recently to see my in-laws because, you know, it's the holiday season, and while I was in town I decided to try and hang out with my three best friends from my junior high and high school days.  It's rare that we all end up in town at once, as one of us lives out of town, one of us lives out of state, one of us seems to have an inordinate fear of leaving home, and the other has no money to travel, so it's usually only the holidays and occasionally the odd summer weekend that finds us all in town at once.  Alas, Rockman works in retail, and we tried to meet up on Black Friday, so Pilgrim, Pigsy and I had to make do without him while he found himself buried under an avalanche of receipts, discarded shopping bags, and crushed dreams.


The problem with this is that Rockman is our group's moral compass.  With him there, we can at least maintain some sense of respectability.  Pigsy and Pilgrim may still tell dirty jokes, but at least Rockman keeps anything more than that from happening.  Without him, though, there is little hope.  As I called Pigsy to tell him that I was on my way with a brand spankin' new Xbox Kinect with which to mess around, he said, a touch too excitedly for comfort, that we should go out and get some liquor, since a boozed-up round of Dance Central naturally sounded like a good idea.  I had my camera with me (for blackmail purposes) and prefer soda to beer anyway, so I said alright.  Unfortunately, I didn't have the right cables to hook up my Xbox 360 to Pigsy's ancient TV, so, after acquiring a twelve-pack of Coca-Cola, a bottle of rum, some kind of beer that Pigsy insisted I try, and an assurance that Rockman would not be joining us for the evening, we returned to Pigsy's humble sty and decided instead to watch an old favorite, Five Element Ninjas, known in America as Chinese Super Ninjas.  I had a beer, Pigsy and Pilgrim loaded up with rum-and-Coke, and away we went.

As Pigsy would later tell me, the problem here is that he loves rum a bit too much.  It is so sweet and tasty, particularly in something like Coke, that before we knew what had happened two-thirds of the bottle was gone, most of it consumed by Pigsy.  After several hours of pausing the movie for a bathroom break or to watch a Youtube video or listen to Pigsy spout philosophical about his personal trainer, we finally finished the movie, but I couldn't have told you a thing about it other than there was a lot of fighting and some dudes wearing copper hats that shot blades out the ends.  The night ended up a wash, and I suspect that Pigsy may have done some serious psychological damage to Pilgrim when, utterly intoxicated, he snapped his fingers in perfect rhythm for at least fifteen straight minutes and repeatedly asked Pilgrim what it meant about God.

While Pilgrim made sure that Pigsy didn't slide headfirst down the stairs to let us out, I snagged the movie and decided to watch it back home, since Pigsy had earlier demanded that I review it as my latest installment of "Pigsy's Gilded Trough Presents" or whatever I feel like calling it this time.  I figured he wouldn't mind me borrowing the DVD for a bit.  He has more kung fu movies than James Bond has one-liners.

Pigsy is the expert on all things Asian cinema, so I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but Five Element Ninas is a 1982 film distributed by the famous Shaw Brothers Studio starring Cheng Tien Chi and Lo Mang (a beast of a fellow who, at various times in his life, has had roughly 0% body fat and enough muscle to choke a rhino).  Cheng Tien Chi stars as Tsiau Chin Hau, a man whose martial arts school gets obliterated by Cheng Yun's deadly ninjas, themselves hired by a rival school.  Cheng Yun commands ninjas of the five Chinese elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth), so to exact revenge, Tsiau Chin Hau learns the secrets of the ninja himself and battles the elemental ninjas to the death.

One of the greatest aspects of the film is its clearcut sequence of events.  This is the part where the rival schools duel.  This is the part where the ninjas challenge the good school and completely kick their asses.  This is the part where the good school gets attacked and destroyed.  This is the part where the last surviving good guy learns how to fight against ninjas.  And this is the part of the film where the good guy and his three buddies turn the tables on said ninjas.  Even with the horrendous dubbing, Five Elements Ninjas is easy to follow and highly enjoyable.

Each ninja element takes place in a different location, with a different cheesy low-budget indoor set for each (the seams in the "sky" wallpaper are visible more than once).  The metal ninjas are four men (always four, for each element) dressed head-to-toe in copper-colored ninja suits, complete with wide-brimmed copper hats that, as previously mentioned, shoot blades out at all angles.  The wood ninjas hide in trees.  The water ninjas use wooden tubes for breathing underwater before they pull you down.  The fire ninjas use red smoke and set their swords on fire.  The earth ninjas burrow underground and poke your thighs and nether-regions with long pointy things (much like my wife's favorite battle tactic in Soul Calibur IV - sit back and poke until my guy dies or falls off the stage ad THEN dies).  What's great here is that you get to see how to lose against the ninjas at the beginning of the film and then how to win at the end, so while the "before" and "after" ninja fights take place in the same locations against the same ninjas, they feel like completely different fights.

And what fights they are!  You will see every weapon imaginable in this movie.  Straight swords, curved swords, katanas, spears, axes, daggers, bladed rings, staffs, darts, hooks on chains, tridents, naginatas, poisonous rings, halberds, copper hats, bow-and-arrows, fists, water, fire, Wolverine-claws, foot-claws, stilts, and even a giant kanji sign.  This is one bloody movie.  It is an exercise in the ingenuity of humanity's craft for killing.  You will see more people die in more ways here than just about anywhere else, and no one even uses a gun!

Not only that, but the actors and stuntmen for Five Element Ninjas are immensely talented.  What is so frustrating about action films these days, particularly when extensive hand-to-hand combat is involved, is that the director will film a single punch, then cut the action, then move to a different camera angle and allow the actors to learn the next move, shoot that, cut, repeat.  The mark of a talented film crew and cast is when a series of movements are all shot in one cut.  Watch the beginning of JCVD, for example, or any film by Jackie Chan, to see what I mean.  So many of these old Hong Kong movies are just full of sequences where the actors will swipe at each other with real metal weapons for at least ten seconds before the camera moves to a new shot.  These guys had to have their timing down to such a degree that it is some kind of miracle any of them survived filming.  This is further reason why I hate the "shaky camera" effect so pervasive in Hollywood these days (see: Transformers, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood).  All it does is confuse the viewer and mask the stuntmen's and actors' impotence.

The dubbing of Five Elements Ninjas is comically bad, the kind of quality which films like Kung Pao: Enter the Fist! make it a point to lampoon.  It's not that the actors are so abysmally poor - though they aren't exactly Peter Cullen - it's just that they were directed to not speak whenever their on-screen counterpart is not moving his or her mouth.  This means that you'll get odd

gaps right in the middle of a sentence that no normal English speaker would ever say.  Between that and the oh-so-simple plot, Five Element Ninjas is really meant to be viewed as a martial arts showcase, and it certainly does deliver on that.  I leave you now with a clip showing the initial fights against the metal, wood, and water ninjas, spectacularly kicked off with some shining examples of the English dubbing...

Harry Potter and That Guy (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 Review)

I have a confession to make.  For every Harry Potter film to hit the theaters so far, I've been that guy.  You know that guy.  You know him all too well.  Just before the movie's release, he reads the corresponding book so that he'll know exactly what was changed for the theaters.  He was very pleased with the first two films, horrified with the third, and increasingly annoyed with the fourth, fifth, and sixth.  Yes, I was that douchebag.  I was at my worst with the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where the movie ended on a Cliff's Notes version of an outstanding action sequence that blew me away the first time I read it.  I was the guy who complained about the omission of Hermione's "S.P.E.W." organization in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, even though I didn't even like the subplot in the book.  I was the guy who could taste stomach bile in the back of his throat when the Rastafarian shrunken head first graced the screen on the Knight Bus at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

I thought about seeking therapy.  I thought about boycotting the movies and clinging desperately to the moments of pure awesome found on the pages but not at the local Cinemark.  I reread key scenes, like the huge fight sequence at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and memorized the names of important characters who never made it into the films (here's looking at you, Charlie Weasley!).  I considered personally petitioning Chris Columbus to come back to the helm and right the ship.

Karma came back and gave me a nasty turn by sending me to the hospital with what turned out to be mono literally half an hour after grumbling my way out of the theater of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  It was after that that I started to wonder if maybe being that guy wasn't such a good idea after all.  Upon seeing the first trailers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, my buddy Professor Goodtimes explained to me that he actually hated the first two films and has loved the rest, and he hates it when people compare books to their movie adaptations because you simply cannot compare items from two different forms of media.  I happen to disagree - we got into a few rather heated arguments over this - but it did make me think.  Movies cannot be word-for-word translations of a book.  Books simply have different pacing than a movie.  They can explain in a sentence what would take several minutes of film.  Humorous scenes in a novel can fall horribly flat on the big screen.  Comparisons between a book and its movie counterpart can be interesting studies of media, but they shouldn't make fans feel cheated out of certain superfluous scenes or characters, as I had long felt.

And so it was that, for the first time ever, I did not reread the corresponding book for the corresponding Harry Potter film.  My first steps down the path of redemption had begun.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 picks up right where HP6 left off.  Right from the getgo, HP7.1 is dark.  Very dark.  Dumbledore was killed by Severus Snape.  Harry has learned that Voldemort split his soul into seven pieces, with each piece encapsulated in something called a "Horcrux", which could be any old item like a diary, locket, teddy bear, etc.  The wizarding world is at war.  Hermione "obliterates" all traces of her parents' memory of her to protect them.  The Dursleys are forced to leave their home, and when Harry does the same, he is accompanied by an honor guard of no less than about a dozen major characters (including the hastily-introduced Bill Weasley and his hastily-explained werewolf scratch and his hastily-explained engagement to Fleur, the attractive French girl from the fourth HP film).  They get Harry to the Weasley's house and prepare for the wedding of Bill and Fleur, but all hell breaks loose when the Ministry of Magic is overrun by Voldemort and his Death Eaters, and as the wedding gets crashed, our three heroes escape to London and begin their quest to hunt down the Horcruxes and destroy them.

This film will feel pretty different from the last few because they made the wise choice of splitting the book in half.  Regardless of how I feel about the books, movies 4, 5, and 6 were very fast-paced and rarely, if ever, gave you any down-time to stop and think about what was going on.  Subsequently, HP7.1 may feel slow for some.  Harry, Ron, and Hermione spend the movie away from Hogwarts, their friends, and their families, and while their character development and group dynamic was interesting, it does take a dedicated viewer to really enjoy two-and-a-half hours centered almost exclusively around the three kids.  One of my personal favorite characters in all the films and books is Hogwarts itself.  The school has such a unique personality to it that you come to feel like it is a character in its own right, and its exclusion, while necessary for the plot, is a huge letdown, though of course that's not the movie's fault.

That being said, this was probably the best Harry Potter film to come out in a long time.  The three kids are those characters, and the rest of the casting is so spot on that you would think Rowling had those very actors in mind when writing their parts.  The special effects are of course as top-notch as can be, and the settings are varied enough to keep your eyes interested while the characters sit around talking about Voldemort's creepy self-soul-mangling.

The only problem I had with HP7.1 - and this is me retaining a little bit of my "that guy" persona - is that it wasn't set up well enough by the previous movies.  There were too many instances of "oh by the way I'm so-and-so and I'm suddenly important", most notably the two-second introduction of Ron's elder brother Bill and his utterly out-of-nowhere engagement with Fleur Delacour AND his encounter with a werewolf at some point in his life that was only bad enough to give him the occasional craving for raw meat.  I understand that the filmmakers didn't want to include the big fight at the end of HP6, as it (SPOILER ALERT!) would have born too close a resemblance to the big fight at the end of HP7, (END SPOILER ALERT!) but the fight at the end of HP6 was a huge part of setting up this all-important wedding, so from a storyteller's perspective, not from an anal HP fan's perspective, that was simply sloppy moviemaking on their part.

Also sloppy was their dealing with Harry's and Ginny's relationship.  Harry knows that he has to leave Hogwarts, track down Voldemort's soul shards, and most likely die in the process, so in the books he forces Ginny away to protect her, even though she was strong/badass enough to never really believe him.  But in this film the two enjoy a nice little makeout session just prior to the wedding, and as Harry spends the rest of the time touring England, he never once mentions her or gives the slightest inclination that he actually cares for her.  Sloppy moviemaking, regardless of what has ever happened in the original material.  From the film I can only assume that Harry doesn't give a grindylow's ass about this girl, which makes me like Harry a bit less.

Mostly, though, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 is nothing more than one enormous setup for Part 2, so go into this one knowing that you will have almost no resolution until next July.  Don't take your kiddos - I am a firm believer that you should be at least Harry's age per film/book before viewing/reading.  The filmmakers have set themselves up for some outlandishly high expectations, and I can only hope that Part 2 delivers.  I hereby solemnly swear, though, that I will NOT attempt to reread the seventh book prior to Part 2's release.  I am that guy, no more.

BONUS!  We saw the movie at Alamo Drafthouse, which, among other things, introduced me to this excellent Youtube video from Tobuscus.  Enjoy, and be sure to check out his other one about TRON: Legacy, which I will almost definitely post in my upcoming review.

Despicable Me...gamind (Megamind Review)

There are certain advantages to going and seeing a lesser movie while the blockbuster of the year is enjoying its opening weekend.  While everyone and their mother (including mine) went out to see Harry Potter 7.1, I snuck quietly past the lines of wand-waving, faux-Latin-screaming children in a way that felt downright criminal and found myself sitting happily with a small crowd inside the building's only theater not designated to a nearly-three-hour tour of England to watch Megamind, the latest from Dreamworks' animation studios.  I'll be honest with you: I wasn't really looking forward to watching Megamind.  In fact, had I not previewed it back in May or whenever the hell that was and made the rash decision to try my darndest to see each and every movie on said list, I don't think I would be seeing it now.  I am happy to report, then, that it exceeded my expectations and in fact is one of the better animated films of this year.

Megamind's biggest flaw is that it came out in the same year as Despicable Me, 2010's other bad-guy-turns-good-animated-film-starring-one-of-Channel 4's-newsteam-from-Anchorman, and a mere two weeks before Harry Potter and the Abandonment of Hogwarts.  Despicable Me and Megamind will naturally draw comparisons to each other, much as A Bug's Life and Antz did oh so long ago or when an excess of disaster movies (most notably Independence Day in 1996, Dante's Peak and Volcano, both of 1997, and Armageddon and Deep Impact in 1998) seemed to follow one after another with a reckless abandon that suggested Hollywood's takeover by overly-hopeful end-times fanatics.  Megamind and Despicable Me do share the same basic shell of a plot: evil mastermind slowly but surely turns to the path of goodness in order to save the day.  Gru of Despicable Me has a heavy foreign accent; Megamind of... Megamind... is from another planet entirely.  Gru has hundreds of pint-sized yellow minions that squeak and mumble in gibberish; Megamind has hundreds of pint-sized flying "brainbots" that beep and whistle in gibberish.  Gru's main henchman is an old scientist voiced by Russell Brand; Megamind's main henchman is a fish in a robot suit voiced by David Cross.

From there, though, the similarities largely end.  If you go through and watch all of Megamind's trailers, about 95% of what you see happens in the first 20 minutes.  The film is kicked off nicely by a shot of Megamind himself falling to his death and thus giving him the excuse to essentially narrate his "life flashing before his eyes" that will, by the end of the movie, lead right back to him falling from hundreds of stories up.  He describes his Superman-style childhood (the idea for the film DID come from the question "What if Lex Luthor beat Superman?"), where his parents tell him he's "destined for ----" (his capsule shuts before he hears the rest).  At the same time, another child from the same system is sent to Earth along with him: Metro Man.  They crashland on Earth - Metro Man sliding through the front doors of a mansion, Megamind plopping down in the exercise yard of a "prison for the gifted" (run, I would imagine, by a bald guy in a wheelchair) - and their lives clash and intersect constantly from there.  Megamind turns to evil not so much because he himself is evil but because circumstances turn him towards it.  His main purpose is to serve as the evil foil to Metro Man's good.  This quick summation of their history together leads straight to the film's catalyst sequence in which Megamind traps Metro Man and blows the superhero to smithereens with a death ray.  The bad guy wins.  Megamind takes over the city and runs rampant through the streets.

And suddenly, Megamind finds he has no purpose.

I won't spoil any more for you (though everything I just said basically IS the trailer), but from here on out, the film takes some great twists and turns that, while you can pretty much guess the end result, keeps you highly entertained and even manages to throw some morals at you that were really quite touching.  Will Ferrel is one of those actors that I simply cannot figure out: in short bursts (like trailers), he can be pretty annoying, and yet I enjoy most of the films in which he stars.  He was certainly the best part of The Other Guys, and Elf, and he would have done the same for Anchorman had Steve Carell never been born.  There are just little things that Ferrel does, little inflections in his voice, or (for live-action films) facial expressions that he slips in, that just work, and it's the same for Megamind, like a running gag in which Megamind constantly mispronounces the city's name (rather than call it "Metro City", he blends the two words into one that rhymes with "velocity").  Let me clarify by saying that this film is anything but gutbustingly funny the whole way through; instead, it's a solid family adventure with clever writing worthy of the titular character's name.  The action sequences had me on the edge of my seat staring wide-eyed just as the trio of small children in the row in front of me (thank you, Gullermo Del Toro, who apparently offered his artistic services for making the action more exciting), and Megamind himself made for an engaging, sympathetic character that I don't feel is too often seen in any film nowadays.  He has a depth to him that I was not expecting, and his growth - not the action scenes, not the humor - was the true highlight of the film.

So go out and give Megamind a shot.  The competition for its main demographic will be spending the next several weeks utterly dominating the box office, so if you want to avoid the ridiculous lines awaiting you at any and all Harry Potter showings, go see this instead, but try to find it in 2D.  My theater was only showing in 3D, and I am dead certain that some scenes - the action scenes at that! - weren't even IN 3D.  Total waste of the extra $3.  I could have used that money to buy a small popcorn, or a single Reece's cup, or about half a fountain drink.  Sheesh.

300 Happy Feet! (Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole Review)

Sometimes, I just don't know what studio executives are thinking.  When given the idea to turn a children's book series that isn't even very popular into a CG film, when exactly was it that someone said, "Hey, I know just the guy to direct this.  Did you ever see 300?  Zack Snyder would be perfect!"  I have a feeling that these were the same executives who thought that that getting M. Night Shyamalan for this summer's atrocious The Last Airbender would be a stroke of brilliance.  That all being said, Snyder was actually a very good choice for The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole.  I just kept waiting for Soren, the main owl, to scream "THIS! IS! GA'HOOLE!"

The reason that Zack Snyder makes for a surprisingly good director for a children's film is that Legend of the Guardians is unexpectedly dark, and not just because Snyder directed it.  The Legend of the Guardians revolves around Soren, a naive young owl who gets kidnapped and taken to an orphanage/mine where "inferior" owls are brainwashed and used as slaves.  Though he is of the "superior" race of owls, Soren is utterly repulsed, and he wants nothing to do with the place.  He eventually escapes, befriends some unlikely misfits, and goes out in search for the legendary owls of Ga'Hoole so that they can help destroy this mine and the evil owls heading it.  Honestly, I don't know what I would have done if I had to market this film.  For all its cuteness (from the studio that brought you Happy Feet!), it is a tale of kidnapping, brainwashing, and enslavement.  Characters die.  Characters are betrayed.  Scary bats make several screechy appearances.  How could you possibly market this film?

Apparently, you can't.  Legend of the Guardians cost an estimated $100,000,000 to produce, and as of the end of October it had only reached about $128,000,000 in total international gross.  So, while it has made some money, I wouldn't expect Warner Brothers to be thinking about a sequel anytime soon (at least, not while it has the Batman and Harry Potter franchises to squeeze).

I may sound harsh on the studio executives, but I really mean it more as a compliment.  I think they took a risk on this film, and for me and my wife, at the very least, it paid off.  We both thought that this was a lovely movie, and to date it is the prettiest thing I've seen in 3D, making it the third film this year that I would recommend for the format (the former two being Resident Evil: Afterlife and Jackass 3D - how's that for company?).  Feathers ruffle, rain drops smack against the owls with small, individual splashes, and the movement of all the animals never feels over-humanized.  3D seems to suit Snyder's stylistic approach; the surreal qualities of both mesh together into something that is, forgive the cliche, greater than the sum of its parts.

While Legend of the Guardians was incessantly pretty, its plot left something to be desired.  My wife read the first book prior to the film's release and said that she only finished it because it was so short.  There is nothing unusual here - boy gets kidnapped, boy meets evil empire, boy escapes with ragtag friends, boy finds rebels, boy fights evil empire - but it's almost as though the film tried to be both cute and dark at the same time, to a mixed effect.  The protagonists were likeable, the antagonists detestable, but nothing really stood out that didn't have to do with the stunning visuals (the whole movie is worth seeing just for the "flying through the storm" sequence).  It's little wonder that the film scored a 50% on Rotten Tomatoes.  Once you peel yourself away from the gorgeous visuals, you're left with a plot that is so middling, so run-of-the-mill, that you cannot help but feel the slump that inevitably follows.  Hey, that sounds an awful lot like Avatar, doesn't it?  Legend of the Guardians was far prettier, though, and it only cost a third of Avatar's budget, so as far as I'm concerned, the owls beat the blue kitties, hands (wings, paws, whatever) down.

There are 15-20 books in the series (depending on whether or not you count "The Lost Tales" or the "Wolves of the Beyond" trilogy), and the movie covers the first three or so, leaving the studio plenty of room for sequels if it so wishes.  I have no earthly idea what they'll do, but I would not be even remotely surprised if they followed in the path of 2007's super-blah The Golden Compass and simply decided not to try for another.

The Watching Dead (Resident Evil: Afterlife Review)

Quick Author's Note:

If you're wondering where the hell all the posts have gone lately, well, my laptop is broken..  Fried motherboard.  Dude, I got a Dell.  Anyway, while it's getting fixed, I have to do posts by stealing my wife's Mac and writing on that, which I only like to do if she's not around, like right now.  Hopefully I'll get the stupid thing back within the next week.  You'll know when I do by the sudden flood of totally awesome posts.  I suppose it's ironic that I would write this particular post while my laptop is dead...

Now, on with our show.

I've said over and over on this blog that 3D technology in movies has got to be one of the most useless inventions in recent cinema, possibly in ALL of cinema.  It can be entertaining when the film caters to it, like the 3D Muppet show at MGM Studios in Disney World - where Fozzie creates a remote-controlled flying pie that appears to soar out over the audience - but for your typical movie that doesn't involve thirty things flying at your face in every scene, I have yet to see it add anything but $3 to your already-expensive ticket price.  I had thought it dead for years, but James Cameron's Avatar brought about this year's obnoxious revival, and in 2010 alone I have seen more films in 3D than I have in the rest of my life combined.  Avatar was a visual feast for sure, but that was because Cameron and crew had the budget of a small country (around $310,000,000, to be exact) to make their excess of CGI look as real as possible.  Even then, it just looked like expensive CGI.  The 3D only served to help propel the film's earnings past all others that came before it.  I honestly wonder how much it would have made if it hadn't come out in 3D.

 

Would you believe me, then, if I said that Resident Evil: Afterlife is the first movie I've seen where 3D actually added something to the experience?

 

If you're unfamiliar with Resident Evil, then let me sum things up for you.  An evil corporation (Umbrella, named of course after the popular Rihanna song) unleashes a virus upon the world that turns most of the human population into a mass of mindless zombies.  They have also created a sort of prototype-human named Alice (Milla Jovovich), who turns on them and fights for what's left of humanity.  After three films, Alice has taken out several Umbrella compounds, made a few friends (and lost even more), and discovered an Umbrella lab dedicated to creating more of her.

 

This is a film series based on a videogame and made for videogame-players (that is, teenage boys).  There's a lot of death, a lot of action, and a lot of Milla Jovovich, along with a handful of masculine men and other attractive ladies.  In Resident Evil: Afterlife, Alice trails a radio signal to Alaska, where supposedly there lies a zombie-free encmapment of humans.  But when she arrives, all she finds is Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), her friend from the previous film, and Claire is not at all well.  Her mind has been scrambled by an Umbrella machine, but Alice takes her down the coast to Los Angeles anyway.  I forget why, but it doesn't really matter.  There's zombies need killin', and peoples need savin'.  Alice lands her plane spectacularly on the roof of a prison where a few stragglers have taken up residence.  Naturally, things go from bad to worse almost as soon as she arrives, and suddenly it's a race to escape that very few of the living will survive.

 

When I came out of this film, I had the odd realization that I had absolutely no idea what to say for this blog, no opinion whatsoever.  It wasn't a good movie, but it wasn't bad, either.  I was entertained, but only just.  Characters died in remarkably unremarkable fashions.  Zombies popped out and threw/spat things toward the 3D camera.  Horror/thriller films, I am convinced, are the only ones worth seeing in 3D right now.  When the Axman threw his enormous blade at the camera, you felt like ducking, and when zombies sprang out of nowhere and creepy tentacles sprouted from their mouths, you recoiled.  You would anyway, but the 3D added just a little extra to the experience.  But aside from this, I have nothing to say about Resident Evil: Afterlife.  Nothing.  Go see it if you've seen all the others, I guess.  See it if you like zombies, or Milla Jovovich, or Ali Larter.  Don't bother looking for plot or character development, and don't go if you have a squeemish tummy.  I felt terribly profound and full of myself when I said to someone that, as a film, Resident Evil: Afterlife is undead, just like most of the creatures onscreen.  A live movie tells you something, pulls you in, and leaves you feeling different than when you came in.  A dead movie bores you to tears and makes you feel like demanding for your money back.  This film was neither.  It just existed in a kind of entertainment limbo where you find yourself floating through nothingness, neither bored nor enthralled, until the credits roll.  Then you wake up from your trance and leave the theater feeling exactly as you did going in, only your wallet is somehow missing $12.

What If... (The Expendables Review)

You've grown up making these kinds of "what ifs" all your life.  "What if there was a Lord of the Rings-Star Wars crossover?"  "What if the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fought the X-Men?"  "What if every major action star EVER made a movie together?"  Well, I'm still waiting on the first two (though Eregon comes uncomfortably close on the former), but the third "what if" has finally been answered, and The Expendables is the result.

My jaw was somewhere below sea level the first time I saw a trailer for this thing.  Stalone.  Statham.  Li.  Couture.  Austin.  Willis.  Crews.  Rourke.  A cameo from the Governator!!  OMG WANT.

The plot is delightfully simple.  The "Expendables" is a group of mercenaries who get contacted to take out a tyranical dictator in South America.  With a movie like this, you don't need a terribly complicated plot.  Just give all of those guys the biggest weapons you can find and let them loose, and that's pretty much what happens.  There are some twists, sure - some greedy American buttholes have a hand in the country's corruption - but mostly it's nothing more than action and some odd character development.

Stalone actually wrote and directed this thing himself, so I have to commend him for getting so many action stars together for his project.  I understand that Segal had to back out due to conflicts, and I'd have liked to have seen Van Damme, but maybe next time.  I am not sure if I really get Stalone's sense of writing, though.  I swear, practically ALL of the banter between the heroes went completely over my head.  It sounded to me like they were all sharing some inside jokes or referencing their old movies, but it would be nice if the audience was clued in to some of them, too.  At least it made the group look sufficiently buddy-buddy.  That's what surprised me: the six Expendables didn't act like six individual stars.  They meshed together in a way that causes me to hope that Stalone goes on to write some more action flicks.  Sure, Stalone and Statham are clearly the "main" Expendables, but everyone gets good screentime, particularly a philosophical Rourke.

The action is fun and fast-paced.  One scene involving a dock got IGN's summer movie award for "best explosion", and I must agree.  Each hero has a specialty - Statham uses knives, Li uses fists, Crews uses the most ridiculous shotgun I have ever seen in my life - so you get a plesant variety of viewing experiences.  The finale in particular felt as though you were watching half a dozen separate action movies, each one starring one of the heroes as they run around destroying an entire army of nameless minions.  These are guys who know their business: if you want some dependable, old-school ass-kicking, then look no further.

There's really not much else to be said about The Expendables.  It's as solid a guy movie as there's been this year.  Add it to the list of movies I made in my Predators review if you want to create the ultimate man night of movies.  It's simple, it's explosive, and the entire thing is worth seeing just for the Schwarzenegger cameo.  Don't miss it.

Me vs. The Critics (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Review)

Don't believe a word the critics say.  At least not if you fall within the generations currently about 20-35 years old.

My parents are old.  Both now qualify for senior citizen discounts at the local cinemas and all-you-can eat buffets.  And they would hate this movie if they were confused enough to actually go and see it.  On the flipside, they loved Something's Gotta Give.  I watched it with them once, and while I didn't quite hate it, it was, and will always be, a movie for old people, and I found it boring, just as they would probably find Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to be spastic, random, and downright weird.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World has not done well in theaters.  Total in its two months of release, it has only made about $31,000,000, or roughly half its budget.  It is, frankly, a movie with a very specific target audience.  Luckily for me (and you, reader), I fall right square in the bullseye.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a film about a 23-year-old bum "between jobs" who lives with a flagrantly gay roommate (played brilliantly by that scene-stealing Kulkin kid who always wet the bed in Home Alone), plays in a band who calles themselves Sex Bob-omb, and is dating a 17-year-old Chinese high-schooler.  He is, essentially, something of a loser.  But when he meets Ramona, a girl with dyed hair and a slick pair of roller blades, his whole life flips upside-down.  In order to date Ramona, you see, Scott has to defeat her seven evil exes.

What makes this movie so brilliant is its comic book style.  Sound effect words pop up over characters like the Adam West Batman film of the 60's.  Scenes are cut together like a comic strip.  And, miraculously, none of it felt overdone, as would have been so easy to do.  You honestly feel like you're watching a comic come to life before you (in fact, a few stills from the real Scott Pilgrim graphic novel do make an appearance).  Combine that with the excess of videogame jokes (their band IS called Sex Bob-omb), clever dialogue, and fantastic characters, and you have yourself what is, in my opinion, probably the best representation of millenial nerd culture to date.  Seriously.  This film was made for me.  It was like the filmmakers followed me around, observed my self-depricating humor, my love of poking fun at Canada for no good reason, my obsession with videogames, and, honestly, my desire to become the hero for the girl, rolled everything into a coherent plot, and made me pay $9.00 to see it.  And I can't thank them enough for it.

There are too many little jokes and references to even try counting in this film.  The Legend of Zelda theme makes a appearance.  Scott scores a 64-hit combo on one of the evil exes (complete with a small hit-counter displayed on-screen).  A man yells "Kaaaaaaay Oooooohhhhh!" when Scott blasts an ex.  And don't even get me started on Ex number 3 (played by former Man of Steel Brandon Routh!) or any single bit of the final fight and its aftermath.  I realized, after a good chunk of the movie had passed, that I was grinning from ear to ear.  For no reason.  The film was just that much fun.  I must have looked completely insane.

 

As previously mentioned, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is based on a series of graphic novels that came out between August of 2004 and July of 2010, and for the most part, the movie does a fine job of condensing the 6 graphic novels into a single two-hour movie.  The first volume in particular practically makes the transition verbatim into live-action.  The graphic novels obviously gain significantly more time to develop characters, hilarious subplots, and a far more insane final fight than witnessed in the movie, but so it goes.  Sometimes certain points that are absolutely amazing in one form would be God-awful in another, and I for one am glad that the movie made the various adjustments that it did.  While having Scott and the final ex disappear into Subspace, where the ex transforms into a gigantic Super-Saiyan monster, seemed a perfect finale in paper form, I really can't imagine how they would have pulled it off on-screen and not lose half their audience.  A fifty-foot Jason Schwartzman would have just been silly.

 

I could go on for hours about this one.  It may very well be my favorite movie of the year.  If you have any love of the video game culture, if you secretly wish that you could bash in the faces of your lover's exes, if you want to see what a comic book would really look like in live-action, and if you simply love all things Michael Cera, then please, see this movie.  Check out the graphic novels.  Buy the Xbox Live Arcade game.  Listen to the soundtrack.  Do what you can to give this movie the loving attention it so deserves.

Ancient Egypt is... Interesting? (The Red Pyramid Review)

While I impatiently wait for Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Last Olympian to come out in paperback, Rick Riordan has not been so idle.  In fact, he has started not one, but two new series!  One of them appears to be a continuation of the Percy Jackson series starring different kids, but the other is entirely new, called The Kane Chronicles, and its first entry is called The Red Pyramid.

Where Percy Jackson & The Olympians dealt primarily in Greek mythology, The Kane Chronicles does the same for Egyptian.  Carter and Sadie Kane are the brother-and-sister duo who take turns narrating, and they are about as wildly different as you could ever imagine.  Carter grew up with his dad traveling from dig site to dig site, museum to museum, while Sadie grew up in England with her grandparents following the death of their mother some years ago.  At the start of the novel, their dad takes them both to a museum in London, where he performs a ritual of magic on the Rosetta Stone, which promptly explodes and unleashes five of ancient Egypt's biggest dieties.  Thus begins a whirlwind of gods and magic, with Carter and Sadie right in the middle of it all.

If you've read the Percy Jackson series, The Red Pyramid should feel quite familiar.  The kids narrate in much the same way as Percy Jackson, and many of the peripheral characters are just as zany, like their uncle's baboon who only eats things that end in -o (Cheetos, cherios, burritos), or Phillip, the huge albino crocodile who guards their house.  Riordan's ability to take myths thousands of years old and paint them in a new and relevant way continues to shine through with his take on Egypt.  I'm proud/embarrassed to say that I knew quite a lot about Greek myth and was able to pick out more or less everything Riordan threw at the readers in Percy Jackson, but my entire knowledge base of Egyptian myth comes from "Stargate-SG1" and The Mummy, so you could say that I was a touch limited.  I can't speak for Riordan's accuracy in his myth retellings, but the explanations he gives are easy to understand, make perfect sense within the context of the story, and are terribly interesting, particularly in the way that he deals with conflicting myths and times when brothers and sisters are sometimes husband-wife, or even mother-son.  Only Riordan could make that so unconfusing.

The Red Pyramid keeps the same blistering pace of the Percy Jackson novels.  The kids hardly spend more than a chapter in one location before being chased elsewhere, barely managing to escape before the goddess of scorpions, just to name one, turns them into afternoon snacks.  It is The Red Pyramid's fast pace that makes it so suitable for today's ADHD, gotta-have-it-now generation of kids, but adults may find it a little too fast.  I admit that my reading preferences do match that of a 12-year-old boy, but even I sometimes wished that things would slow down a little.  It's not that there isn't character development - the two kids in particular are well-thought out and fun to follow - but sometimes it just felt like there was a little connection missing.  Percy Jackson had the same problem, like the characters moved too fast for me to truly see them.

Where The Red Pyramid shines is its portrayal of magic.  Again, my knowledge of Egyptian myth is about as limited as my knowledge of Hungarian folk dances, but I'm assuming that Riordan has done his homework and created a brand of magic as close to that of ancient Egypt as possible.  Have you ever noticed that this is what young adult fiction novels do?  Your typical teenager (Carter/Sadie, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Eregon, even Luke Skywalker) is thrown into a new and magical world and subsequently spends the majority of the first book (at least) learning all about that new world while at the same time stopping some kind of destructive force.  Well, The Red Pyramid follows that same old formula, but the world created here is one of my favorites that I've ever encountered.  If you think that Egypt is dead, or that myths about Osiris or Anubis are irrelevant to today's world, check this book out.  I dare say you may think differently when you finish.

I can't wait for the next in the series.  You had better hurry up, Rick Riordan.  Your books are addicting.

*Governator Not Included (Predators Review)

I had pretty low expectations going into Predators.  I'm sorry to say that I have never seen the original Predator film, though I feel like I know a surprising amount about it.  The Governator goes into the jungle with a bunch of commando buddies and watches as one by one they are picked off by some kind of invisible hunting animal that turns out to be an alien.  It's funny how you can just know these things about a pop culture item.  Imagine if that extended to everyday life: you meet a person and can instantly tell them that you thought their escapades in Padre last summer were funny but a little tasteless, but you'd love to have their recipe for that bean-and-chorizo casserole they made for Thanksgiving two years ago.  Wouldn't that be fun?  Or terrifying?

 

But I digress.

 

By the time I got around to seeing Predators (as in, only about two weeks after it came out), it had already whittled down to only showing at a single theater in town.  The theater in question is located far south, on the side of the interstate where stopping to ask for directions is a great way to get yourself mugged.  This only lowered my expectations further, which, ironically, probably helped the movie.

 

Predators begins by showing a drowsy Adrien Brody waking up to find that he is inexplicably skydiving.  What a way to start a movie, eh?  He fumbles around with the pack on his back, swearing and cursing and tumbling, until finally he pulls the cord mere seconds before crashing through the jungle canopy and smacking hard into the ground below.  He comes across seven others (eight if you count the poor bastard whose chute didn't open) who seem to have experienced a similar fit of amnesiatic thrill-seeking.  No one has any idea of how they got here, and even less of an idea of where "here" is.  It doesn't take the characters - and yourself - very long to realize just how politically correct their little ragtag band of misfit heroes is, and soon, Adrien Brody makes the key realization of the film: all of the humans, with one exception, are the predators of their society.  There's an African fellow (R.U.F. - death squad from Sierra Leone), South American (Los Zetas cartel enforcer), a Russian (Spetznatz Alpha Group), an Asian (Yakuza in the Dawokei), an American (Death Row inmate), an Israeli (Israeli Defense Force - and the film's ONLY woman!), an American doctor (the exception to the "predator" theory, unless you are a wallet), and Adrien Brody, who is hinted to be some kind of American black-ops.  This is why the film is called Predators (plural) and not Predator 3 (singular).  In this film, everyone is a hunter, not just the aliens.  I thought this was pretty nifty myself.  But then, I am easily impressed.  Oh, and for the record, this film is a follow-up to to Predator and Predator 2, not Alien v. Predator.

 

A few scenes into the movie, the band of merry travelers ran across a dry riverbed, and with a start I realized that I knew the place myself.  As it turns out, 20th Century Fox worke with Troublemaker Studios, which is Robert Rodriguez' studio based right here in Austin.  The scene I recognized was a local park a few miles out of town.  This made me very excited (again, I am easily impressed).  Aside from obvious things like the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben, it's not often that I see something on screen that I've seen in person.  It made me feel like, had I timed things right, I could have made a surprise cameo.

 

Though the script did not exactly call for the widest range of emotions, everyone involved was cast well and did their jobs serviceably, if a bit stereotypically.  The Russian carries an enormous gatling gun (fun side fact: the gun he uses is actually American; the film crew couldn't find the Russian model that they wanted).  The convict talks about how he wants to get back home so he can snort some cocaine and rape a few women.  The African starts sentences with "in my culture" and "in my land".  The South American is Danny Trejo.  And so on.  You never do learn a whole lot about anyone's backgrounds, but each character definitely had his or her own flavor; if you saw a line of dialogue written down, you'd be able to tell which character spoke it, which I think is the mark of some decent writing.

 

One of the surprising characters is a human who has survived several of these "prey drops" before, played rather well by Laurence Fishbourne (aka Morpheus from The Matrix, or, alternatively, Dr. Larabee, Akeela's mentor from Akeela and the Bee).  This is a man driven positively bonkers by the reality he faces.  Ever imagined Morpheus giggling and holding a whispered conversation with an invisible friend?  Neither had I, yet Predators fulfilled that unknwon dream.  And for that, of course, I am truly thankful.

 

But this isn't a movie about character development.  It's about character removal, and boy does it do that well.  One or two of the deaths range on the level of Mortal Kombat in terms of visual creativity.  Every single character - human and alien alike - has at least one trademark scene where they are featured, which I think is sorely lacking in movies like this nowadays.  Whether it's a spectacular death, or a heroic stand (or both), or whatever, everyone gets their moment, and I loved that.  However, there was one "feature" scene that I did not agree with.  I won't tell you if he survives it or not, but it features the Yakuza guy, so those of you who have seen the movie should know which one I'm talking about.  It did make me laugh a bit, but it was completely out of place with the rest of the film.  It was almost like Quentin Tarantino guest-directed for one scene: I kinda liked it, but, again, it felt out of place, like the scene was spliced in from a different movie (since Adrien Brody starred in Splice earlier this year, I felt like I just HAD to use that word somewhere).

 

Predators was surprisingly fun and engaging.  You won't be bored, yet the action isn't cheap or canned.  The characters were interesting, and the twists here and there were unexpected but sensible.  Rent this when it hits DVD and watch it as part of a movie marathon featuring the likes of Predator, Conan the Barbarian, Bloodsport, and all those other 80's and 90's films that came out back when the size of the lead's arm was more impressive than the size of his vocabulary.  They should make more movies like Predators: explosive, bloody, simple, and fun.

Who Were Those Guys, Again? (The Other Guys Review)

I'm still trying to catch up with my movies.  I saw this one over a month ago, so forgive me if the review's a little vague.  I can't remember much about The Other Guys aside from some yelling, a suicide jump, and Derek Jeter.  That should tell you something about the film right there.

The Other Guys is one of those films whose trailers and posters are funnier than the film itself.  Will Farrell and Mark Wahlberg star as Gamble and Hoitz, two desk-bound cops working under the shadow of the city's superstar policemen, Danson and Highsmith (played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, respectively).  Farrell is content and safe doing paperwork all day, but Wahlberg, pissy to a degree only attainable through some sort of freak male menapause, longs to get out and bust heads like their heros.  So when their chance unexpectedly hits, the unlikely pair must get out there and save the day.

Sound familiar?  It's supposed to.  The Other Guys is a satire of all things "buddy cop movie", and it does get a few chuckles, mostly from Farrell's deadpan analysis of the utterly ridiculous, like when Wahlberg, clearly excited by some plot point or another, explains that the rush of being a cop in the field "gives you a tingling feeling in your balls", to which Farrell matter-of-factly observes, "Are you sure you don't just have testicular cancer?"  Farrell's performance, with a few exceptions, carried practically all of the laughs for the film.

Wahlberg, meanwhile, just looked frustrated.  I haven't seen him in very much (The Departed, The Italian Job, Planet of the Apes), but I heard he was atrocious in both The Happening and The Lovely Bones, and, sadly, The Other Guys is no exception.  You would think it'd be hard to mess up being the straight guy of a buddy cop duo, but Marky Mark pulled it off.  His only two redeeming moments were when you learned about why he's not allowed to do fieldwork (but that was the writing, not the actor) and the way he reacts to Farrell's wife, played by Eva Mendes (again, mostly the writing).  He had no volume control.  He would suddenly and violently leap from a calm, inside-voice to YELLING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS LIKE THE SCRIPT WAS WRITTEN IN ALL-CAPS.  I believe this was done for humor, and the first time or two it wasn't quite unfunny, but when this happened every few minutes for two straight hours, it became painful.  If anyone out there finds yelling hilarious, then football season just started back up.  Go out to a game and knock yourself out.

One of the film's best surprises, though, was the pair's police captain, played by none other than Michael Keaton.  I'm pleased to see the man making such a comeback this year (he previously provided the voice for the hilarious Ken doll in Toy Story 3).  There's nothing like seeing a balding police captain doubling as a floor manager for Bed Bath & Beyond ("Alright everybody, we have a serial killer making hits around 1st and King street - oh, sorry!  Wrong job.  Um, well, if any of you live in that area...  be careful.) while constantly saying lines that turn out to be the names of TLC songs, like when he tells Farrell and Wahlberg, as a means of getting them to stop pursuing the film's main case, "Don't go chasing waterfalls."  Very random, but surprisingly funny.  I dearly hope that Keaton once again becomes a staple of American cinema.  He has surprisingly good comedic timing for a man who once starred in Multiplicity.  But then again, he also played Beetlejuice.  What an odd assortment of characters Michael Keaton has played over the course of his life, eh?

The film's most confusing moment, however, came in its credits.  See, the plot has to do with some big business financial shenanigans that I won't go into, but for the entirety of the credits, an army of notes, diagrams, pie charts, bar graphs, etc. played behind the listings for Best Boy and Key Grip explaining how much money CEOs make nowadays in relation to their workers, how much the banks got in the recent bailout, and so on.  For a movie all about satire, providing a laundry list of true, unfunny facts seemed completely out of place.  Perhaps they wanted to make you laugh at how much more your boss makes than you do, but I assure you I wasn't laughing.  Very unnecessary.  Leave that kind of thing to Michael Moore, if you must, and then let Trey Parker and Matt Stone make a fat, hot-dog-eating puppet version of him and blow him up in Team America: World Police.

For the most part, though, I thought the movie very ho-hum.  One of the film's funniest moments - when the crimefighting duo are near a building that explodes, and Farrell, while writhing on the ground clutching his ears, yells about how he can't believe how the macho guys in the movies can always walk away with explosions behind them - was played so often in the trailers that, when it finally happened in the real movie, it wasn't funny anymore.  That's not the filmmakers' fault, of course, but I always hate it when trailers for comedies (and action movies, for that matter - *cough*LastAirbender*cough*) show all the best parts.  The plot was predictable, and it was supposed to be, but the film's humor wasn't enough to keep me entertained, nor was the action very interesting.  And somebody, please, tell Mark Wahlberg that yelling does not equal funny unless it's the book How to Train Your Dragon and your target audience is a bunch of 10-year-old boys.

Best line: Aim for the bushes.

I leave you now with a video that played during Alamo Drafhouse's always-excellent pregame-show, which also included several police training videos that had to be from the 60's or before.  Enjoy!

Generic Game Title 64 (Quest 64 Review)

Every so often, games come along that stick with you for years after playing them.  I still remember stomping and smashing my way through Blast Corps on the Nintendo 64, getting carsick from playing RC Pro AM on the NES in my dad's Suburban, watching my older brother destroy the 49ers in Tecmo Super Bowl.  Those of us in our twenties are the first generation to have grown up with home entertainment consoles.  That's a strange thought that, I believe, is all too often taken for granted.  The gaming industry has grown up with us, from the infantile NES, to the adolescent Nintendo 64, to the gawky, awkward Gamecube, and now the college-aged, sleek, modern Nintendo Wii.  Yep, our generation can be summed up by the Nintendo company.  Each console became a stage in life, and each game a particular memory within that stage.  Some people remember falling off their bikes and breaking their arms in the third grade.  I remember the first time I played Star Fox.  It's about as lame as it sounds, but there you are.  For better or worse, we have a generation of Americans with shared memories.  There.  That makes it sound at least a little cooler.  Like a twisted sci-fi thriller starring Keanu Reeves or... something...  Aaaaaand it's lame again.  Crap.

Not all of those memories were good, mind you, and the Nintendo 64 in particular seemed to excel at creating moments of my life which I'd rather forget.  The N64, mind you, was Nintendo's first major foray into the wide world of 3D.  Super Mario 64 led the charge, which boded well for the system, but things didn't go so smoothly after that.  I mentioned Blast Corps above for a reason.  It looked like fun - I mean, what young boy doesn't want a videogame in which your sole objective is to destroy buildings so that a runaway nuke-carrying truck doesn't run into something and blow up the world? - but it was so utterly pointless.  When you beat the game (on the moon, mind you), the nuke goes off anyway.  You put in all that work just to fail.  Sure, you could argue that at least it didn't blow up on the Earth, but you'd just be kidding yourself.  You failed.  The game-makers are laughing at you.

Similarly, the makers of Superman 64 must be laughing somewhere.  I'd swear there's a special place in Hell just for them.  If you've never played it, and I hope you haven't, then check out SeanBaby's review here.  Be warned: he has a potty mouth, though no amount of foul language can compare to the stink that was that game.

But possibly the most vivid memory I have of checking out a game that utterly sucked was the potentially-awesome Quest 64.  You play as a young mage named Brian with mastery over the four elements - earth, water, wind, fire.  The old master of the magical monestary begins the game by speaking to you about your father's disappearance; so, naturally, you must go out in search of him.  What begins, then, is one of the strangest and most potentially frustrating experiences of your life.

The glimmering metropolis.

To be fair, I can't say that I ever read the instruction booklet.  Only morons did that (side note: nowadays, I always read instruction booklets, at least for interesting things like games).  Regardless, the game offers approximately zero help on how to play, leaving you to devlop your own sense of the combat system... once you spend fifteen to twenty minutes just making your way out of the monestary.  You descend multiple staircases and scamper through countless hallways with equally countless doors - all leading to utterly pointless tiny rooms that 95% of the time don't even have a person inside, let alone a helpful treasure chest - before finally blinding yourself in the afternoon sun.  Then, you spend another fifteen to twenty minutes figuring out how to get down from the hill upon which sits your monestary before running through a town as utterly pointless as all those rooms from before, and then, finally, you are out in the open.  Check out this video of a Speed Demon beginning the game.  Even the fastest player out there still takes a solid four-and-a-half just to get out of town.

UFC totally stole this octagon idea.

Within two seconds, you enter combat with a pair of bunnies.  Combat takes place inside a magical octagon.  Each character - Brian, Bunny 1, Bunny 2 - acts individually within a small circle of available movement.  Each of the N64's yellow C buttons corresponds to one of the four elements of magic, and you can call upon any of them to aid you in battle.  The problem here is that they all start at level 0, and without any kind of guide on how to play the game, and the fact that I could never figure out how to use the stupid things, I took all of this to mean that you did not yet have any of those abilities, so I spent a good three turns just getting my guy close enough to said rabbits to smack them with my feeble cane while they pelted me from afar with wind magic.  By the time I won, I was already half-dead, and these bunnies were the most basic enemies in the game.  I took a few steps in retreat to heal myself at the inn, but before I could even go that far, a trio of wolves found me, and I was dead within a turn.

Welcome to Quest 64.

I recently reacquired this game at the local non-GameStop game store that specializes in games and consoles older than the cast of High School Musical.  I was determined to see if Quest 64 was still as legendarily bad as I recall, or if I was just being a retarded youngster who couldn't even figure out the basics of the game.  Well, I'm pleased to report that it's just about as mystifying as it was back then.  I did discover that you can use your elemental magic from the get-go, but the way you use the magic is anything but intuitive.  And, even when you use said magic, you can miss, or it doesn't do a lot of damage.  I was able to get further down the road this time, but the encounters are so damn frequent that I still had to turn back around and rest at the inn a number of times before I finially made my way to the next spot.

This is one suck game.

I understand that it wasn't poorly received back in the day.  I'll allow that the graphics weren't the worst to escape 1998, but they certainly haven't aged well.  The combat was interesting in theory, but then, so is Communism.  The story is nonexistent, and the setting is so generic that the world's actually called Celtland.  There are probably guys out there who loved this game as a child for whatever mysterious reason, and honestly that's okay.  I myself profess a love of Dynasty Warriors that I cannot sufficiently explain.  But for me, the memory of this game is about as painful as the memory I have of the time I sprained the arches of both of my feet at the same time while leaping into a swimming pool and quite suddenly finding a hidden underwater shelf.  Much like the thought of that ill-fated jump, the idea of this game just makes my muscles tense.  If you find yourself inside a use-game store, as you should if you fancy yourself a true connoisseur of games, avoid this one.  Save yourself the pain.

How to Train Your Sorcerer (The Sorcerer's Apprentice Review)

My initial apprehension with this movie stemmed mostly from the fact that it seemed based purely off of the famous scene from Fantasia in which Mickey puts on a sorcerer's hat and makes the mops and brooms do all the cleaning.  I felt like Disney making a movie loosely based off of one of its own works was, well, weird, but it had Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel, so I figured it couldn't be that bad.  And the more I saw of its previews, the better it looked, until finally my wife and I went to see it.

What can I say, other than it ranks in the top three of my favorite movies so far this year?

Jay Baruchel plays Dave, a guy who gets swept up in a battle of mages spanning a millenia.  As a child, he stumbles upon Balthazar (Nicolas Cage), an eccentric antique shop owner who presents him with a strange artifact that, when it activates in Dave's presence, reveals Dave to be, essentially, the heir of Merlin himself.  But when Dave accidentally unleashes Horvath (Alfred Molina) from his magical prison, Balthazar traps both himself and Horvath within a jar for ten years, at which point both reappear, and one sets out to train Dave while the other seeks to kill him.  It's your typical zero-to-hero plotline seen a million times, but gosh darnit, it's one of my favorites.

What made the film so appealing was the character of Dave.  This is the second film this year in which Jay Baruchel plays a kind of nerdy antithesis to your usual muscle-bound hero (the first being Dreamworks' truly brilliant How to Train Your Dragon, which comes to DVD and Blu-Ray mid-October, so get ready).  This is the kind of hero to whom I relate without question - brainy and clever without being the type of over-exaggerated character who trips over his lab coat and always wears tape on his glasses.  Dave is a teaching assistant/grad student (I think; it wasn't completely clear) for a physics class, where he meets the girl on whom he had an enormous crush around the time when he first found his magic ring ten years ago.  He even has his own lab, where he plays around with tesla coils in a manner not all that unlike what the band Arc Attack did on America's Got Talent this past season (Watch them here.  It's freaking awesome).  Something about Jay Baruchel's voice just works.  He has this sarcastic, self-depricating sound to him, like he's been told all his life by guys bigger and stronger than him that he's a tiny little nothing, that makes him both hilarious and completely relateable all at once.

The other aspect of The Sorcerer's Apprentice that hooked me was its use of magic.  In explaining magic to Dave, Balthazar uses science as a way to describe the forces at work behind his ability to, say, set a parking ticket aflame from across the street.  I spent half the movie oooing and awwwing at the special effects and the other half geeking out over their explainations.

I have to say, this role actually suited Nicolas Cage better than I ever would have thought.  Remember the face of the sorcerer in the Fantasia segment? 

His eyes tell everything about him; they are more of his character than the whole rest of him combined.  Nic Cage's performance here is largely the same, and I don't mean that in a bad way.  He has this far-off, distracted look that suits his 1500-year-old character perfectly.  There's also a weariness to him that may not have been acted or intentional, but it was perfect. 

See!  Look at those eyes!

And Alfred Molina as the bad guy?  Splendid.  He can do no wrong.  Just watch Spider-Man 2 if you don't believe me.  He's the guy with four mechanical tentacles sprouting from his back.  Even Horvath's own evil apprentice, a sort of David-Blaine-meets-Billy-Idol sort of guy (played by Toby Kebbell), fit right in and made for an amusing foil to Molina's uptight character.

There were only two real downsides, but both can be overlooked if you're feeling particularly forgiving.  The first is the writing.  While it wasn't terrible, many of the lines felt generic or just lame.  It was a testament to all three of the primary actors that any of their dialogue didn't sound utterly absurd, like when Balthazar tells Dave, "I have been searching all over the world for you.  You're going to be a force for good and a very important sorcerer.  But for now, you're my apprentice."  Only Nicolas Cage's lightly-amused tone could have pulled that off.  The second was Monica Bellucci and her love triangle with Balthazar and Horvath.  Actually, the love triangle subplot was fine, but her acting was awful.  It was like the director just said "here, look pretty and think about toasters while Nic puts this necklace on you."  She had "paycheck" written all over her face in every scene, or whatever the word for "paycheck" is in French.  Chèque de paie, I shouldn't wonder.  They always just take English words and screw around with the spelling, like mon chat for "my cat".  Everyone should just learn English and be done with it.

J'appelle la capacité à parler l'anglais!!!

Anyway, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is way better than most of the critics have painted it.  It's not especially original or well-written, but it doesn't take itself too seriously, it's well-acted (by the characters who have more than five minutes of screentime) and it has lots of heart.  The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and the kid who starts the movie as a zero ends it as a hero.  It's my wife's favorite film so far this year, so see it for her.  She's too cute to refuse.