The Fantastic Sci-fi Camel

2011 Movie Preview... Sort of

2011-01-13T14:28:00.000-06:00

Welcome to a new year everyone (now that we're half a month into it, anyway). If you're wondering where the hell I've been, well, you could say that I had an extended Christmas vacation.

Anyway, I realize that I didn't quite meet my goal for 2010 of seeing every movie which I previewed here, but who cares, right? On to bigger and better things!

I had debated doing the same thing for this year - you know, writing a preview and then seeing each movie on the list - but ultimately someone else beat me to it. IGN recently posted their own movie preview, and after reading through it, I realized that they hit upon every movie that I would have done myself. So, rather than write my own preview, I am going to be lazy and simply refer you to theirs, and I guarantee, right here, right now, that I will NOT be making it a point to see each and every movie on IGN's list. I don't have the stomach nor the wallet for it. So go here, and witness the joy that will be this year in movies. I have never before seen a more promising crop of sci-fi/fantasy/comic book goodness set for 365 days in all my life.

The Bleeding Effect

2010-12-10T19:02:00.000-06:00

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)

2010-12-07T22:36:00.002-06:00

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)

2010-12-03T14:39:00.000-06:00

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)

2010-11-22T21:26:00.000-06:00

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)

2010-11-17T21:38:00.001-06:00

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)

2010-11-13T11:47:00.000-06:00

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)

2010-10-31T01:15:00.001-05:00

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)

2010-10-19T19:22:00.000-05:00

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)

2010-10-03T00:18:00.000-05:00

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)

2010-09-18T11:45:00.000-05:00

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)

2010-09-13T20:39:00.001-05:00

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)

2010-09-08T19:15:00.000-05:00

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)

2010-09-02T21:40:00.000-05:00

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.

Mind. Blown. (Inception Review)

2010-09-01T18:37:00.000-05:00

Go see it. Twice. That's just about all I can say. It's Christopher Nolan's best film to date, and he made The Dark Knight, for goodness' sake. I intend to buy it the second it hits DVD. If it doesn't win some kind of Academy Award (cinematography, best director, screenplay) then clearly no one in Hollywood is going to Heaven.

The best part of the movie? The part that was in 2D - which is to say, all of it. God I hate 3D, and God I loved this movie.

I Am to Be Reviewing You Now, Yes? (Despicable Me Review)

2010-08-31T21:57:00.001-05:00

One very specific aspect of Despicable Me worried me more and more as we inched closer to its release: the ad campaign. I don't mind an excess of trailers shotgun-blasted onto TV stations - in fact, I tend to expect it - but this was something different. Perhaps it was simply the shows I watched, but in the last few episodes of this season's "The Biggest Loser", Jillian Michaels (the show's hard-ass female trainer) shot brief segments in which she talked with Despicable Me's little yellow minions about dieting and exercising while they tripped on treadmills and ate basketballs. What really worried me, though, was Best Buy's little contribution: giving its customers a phone app that would allow them to translate what the little yellow buggers were saying during the film's end credits. First of all, the segment was funny enough just watching their actions and body language, and second, thank you Best Buy for encouraging people to bring their cell phones to the movies. I really appreciate it. The reason this excessive ad campaign worried me so was that I've seen it happen all too often that the more a movie is advertised, the worse it ends up being. In other words, the more money that is spent getting the film's name out there, the less there is to go towards the name itself. From a mathematical perspective, I like to think this makes a lot of sense.

Well, I'm pleased to say that the studios (Illumination Entertainment; distributed by Universal Pictures) made the most out of their $69 million-dollar budget - though, to be fair, I don't honestly know if that includes advertising. Alamo Drafhouse's pre-game show was full of clips from heist movies (including the excellent Wallace and Grommit episode called "The Wrong Trousers") as well as some behind-the-scenes looks at the different actors doing their voicework. I didn't realize what a cast this movie has: Steve Carell (of course), Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Will Arnett, Kristin Wiig (the busy lady who has starred in both MacGruber and How to Train Your Dragon this year), Miranda Cosgrove (known either as know-it-all Summer from School of Rock or Carly from "iCarly", depending on your age), Jemaine from the band/TV show "Flight of the Conchords", and, the big surprise, Julie Andrews. Watching the movie, you'd never know it was half of these people (particularly Russel Brand), but that just goes to show what kind of talent went into the film.

Despicable Me is a cute, if insanely predictable, film about an evil villain named Gru who decides that his next and greatest heist will be to steal the moon. Gru wears a lot of black and speaks with an Old Country accent, like he's from some Eastern European country that came into existence after the dismantling of the USSR. In order to fund his heist, he has to take out a loan from the Bank of Evil (with a sign that says "Formerly Lehman Brothers"), but to do so he has to prove that he'll pull off the heist, even though his shrink ray gun has just been stolen by newcomer Vector (Jason Segel). Gru adopts a trio of girls selling cookies as a way of sneaking into Vector's stronghold to get his gun back. Over the course of the movie, he learns to care for the girls and slowly turns from bad to good. Again, it's fairly predictable in terms of turning Gru from an evil mastermind into a sort of Slovakian hero, but the twists and turns (and jokes) within the all-too-familiar mold are what make the movie.

Gru's bizarre little yellow minions are an absolute riot. They speak as though someone is listening to a cassette tape in fast forward, but every once in a while you can catch a word or two, like when one is sitting bare-assed on the copier and his buddy says "butt" and then giggles hysterically for the rest of the scene. They reminded me of the insane little rabbids from the recent Rayman: Raving Rabbids videogames, only with a lot more yellow.

Overall, though, I always felt like something was just slightly missing. Even now I cannot quite pinpoint it. Despicable Me was fun, and funny, and I'd happily sit through it again. It contained some of the most clever voice-acting I've ever heard, even from the youngest girl (whom you may have heard yell "IT'S SO FLUFFY!!" in the previews). The evil inventions, the badguys' lairs, the opening scene, the plot twist towards the end, everything was rock solid and so well done. And yet... I don't know. In thinking about it now, it may have been that I didn't feel like I really connected to Gru or the girls. Not the movie's fault, I guess, but then again, I shouldn't have felt such a connection with a pull-string cowboy doll or a neurotic clownfish, either, but Pixar pulled it off. Despicable Me is definitely worth seeing, but it's not the best animated film I've seen this year. Heck, it's not even the best I've seen this month.

And 3D is still worthless. Just a new way for the studios to charge half of the ticket over again.

Author's Note

2010-08-14T13:39:00.000-05:00

Never fear, avid readers: I am still here. The past few weeks have been busy. Professor Goodtimes moved out of town to go be a nerd in grad school. Another friend moved across town and needed big strong men to carry her things, so I went and supervised. Mostly, though, I have returned to doing some writing for my book, which means that writing for this site has suffered accordingly. Hopefully someday you'll be able to read what I've been writing these past few weeks, but in the meantime know that I still have some movie (and book) reviews in the works, as well as a review for a certain Nintendo 64 game that's more than worthy of the attention of the Angry Nintendo Nerd.

However, those are going to be on hold for a while because I am going on vacation. If anyone needs me, they'll just have to wait about two weeks. See you on the other side.

It Had Better Be (The Last Airbender Review)

2010-07-29T18:20:00.000-05:00

Nickelodeon's popular TV show "Avatar: The Last Airbender" came a little bit too late for me. I hadn't watched Nickelodeon since "Doug" and "Rugrats" were on, with my affiliation mostly shifting to Cartoon Network upon learning about the existence of "Reboot", "Dragon Ball Z", and "Gundam Wing". Nickelodeon was a kid's channel, and I wasn't a kid anymore. I was in middle school. Nickelodeon wasn't for middle school kids.

I knew about "Avatar: The Last Airbender", of course. Commercials for it aired all the time, and kids with Avatar tee-shirts sprinted joyfully through the local Target store without a care in the world, at least until I moved my shopping cart into their paths and enjoyed a brief but lively "KSSSHHH" sound of metal carts suffering sudden impact. I just wrote "Avatar" off as a silly kid's show trying to pass itself off as an anime. Something about American cartoons emulating the anime style bothered me. "Teen Titans" was the same way. I decided that I would stick with "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Johnny Bravo", thank you very much.

That being said, I was intrigued by the live-action movie's teaser trailer, in which the Airbender stood in a circle of lit candles and bent air around them while a fleet of imposing ships approached outside, but I heard nothing more of the movie until late last year, when James Cameron's Avatar came out. I was extremely confused because I mistook James Cameron's Pocahontas in Space! for the live-action adaptation of "Avatar: The Last Airbender", not knowing that the later had been forced to change its name to simply The Last Airbender to avoid the very confusion I was now experiencing. I would see previews of a movie concerning big blue kitties and futuristic army men and think to myself "that looks WAY different than what I've seen of that Nickelodeon show..." Well, once I got myself straightened out, I started following The Last Airbender, partially because the trailers looked really cool, and partially because my twin sister goes to the tae kwon do studio where the casting crew discovered Noah Ringer, who would go on to play the lead role in the film.

This winter, the TV show's first season popped onto Netflix's instant queue, so my wife and I sat down and watched all 22 episodes, and I must say, it's an excellent show. It follows Katara, a young girl with the ability to manipulate water with specific martial arts movements, and her big brother Sokka. They live in a world where four nations - water, earth, fire, air - once lived together in harmony. But a century ago, the fire nation attacked the other three, wiping out the air nomads. In this world, one person is born amongst one of the nations with the ability to master all four elements - the Avatar. He (or she) becomes a vital player in the world's politics, and for whatever reason, when he dies, he is reborn in the next nation in the cycle (air-water-earth-fire). When the fire nation attacked, the Avatar simply disappeared. Now, 100 years later, Katara and her brother find a member of the air nomads encased in ice, but as they find him, he awakens and breaks out. His name is Aang, last known member of the air nomads, and, conveniently, the long-lost Avatar.

There's so much depth to the TV show that to talk about it here would be a disservice. Having nearly 500 minutes of showtime for the season gives you plenty of time to get to know Aang, Katara, Sokka, and the Asia-inspired world in which they live. These are great characters, and this is a great show for kids, particularly boys. No episode lacks in the action department, yet it still manages to encourage the viewer to treat others with respect, to not judge a book by its cover, and, above all, to advocate peace. Go watch an episode. Check out the behind-the-scenes on how they created the bending movements of each of the four nations. Do whatever you can... except for seeing the movie.

I'll admit that this movie had been my most anticipated film of this entire year. The trailers looked friggen' epic, and I knew how good the plot would be because the show was filled with great characters, subplots, etc. And to top it all off, it was being directed by M. Night Shaymalan, one of my favorite directors. Sure, Lady in the Water was pretty crappy, but for some reason I liked it. I never saw The Happening, but surely it wasn't as bad as everyone said it was. M. Night just had a few off-moments with his past movies. This was something way different. He'd do great.

No.

There's no need for me to list the failings of The Last Airbender here. It's been ripped to shreds already by everyone else, like on GoldenPigsy's blog, or at IGN. My wife and I made the mistake of seeing a 10:30 showing at night, when approximately 0% of the audience would be children, the target audience of the film. I can understand laughing at moments of poor acting, or bad writing, or even bad directing, and believe me, that happened. But the audience that night contained a few happy (read: drunk-out-of-their-minds) people who laughed at the most random points that even I could not understand, and this coming from a guy who had just spent the past few weeks watching - and lampooning - two of the three Twilight movies.

No, instead, what I would like to do is make a list of the reasons I could think of to see this film, short as that list may be. So, here goes:

-The trailers looked amazing.
-Dev Patel (the main dude from Slumdog Millionaire) plays Prince Zuko, the series' most interesting character.
-The girl playing Katara is very cute.
-The girl playing Princess Yue is also very cute.
-The special effects - done by George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic - were incredible.
-The plot didn't steer away from that of the TV show.
-Apa and Momo - the flying byson and lemur, respectively, are both voiced by the guys who did them for the TV show.
-Slow-motion was used well in the fight scenes.
-They did a good job of adapting the "spirit world" to the film, since a live-action version of what's in the TV show would have been downright terrifying.

That's about it. To date, this has been the most disappointing movie of the year. I know I held it to impossible standards, but there you go. I love "Avatar: The Last Airbender", and I love M. Night Shaymalan, but I should have known how poorly the two would mix. If they try for the second and third films, I dearly hope that they get a new director, but from what I've heard in interviews, M. Night sees this as HIS project, so unless the studios take a risk and fire a director with such a well-known name and get someone not as famous, don't expect the sequels to be any better than this.

But you know what disappointed me the most at this movie? Alamo Drafhouse raised its prices. Now it costs as much as any other theater. I should have known at that moment that that night was going to be a crappy night.

A Girl's Choice Between Necrophilia and Bestiality (Eclipse Review)

2010-07-18T21:44:00.004-05:00

In the weeks leading up to the release of Eclipse, my wife and her female coworkers planned to watch Twilight one week, New Moon the next, and then go see Eclipse the following week when it came out, and I decided to join them for each foray into the dark and "exciting" world of Forks, Washington. Save for one of the girls' boyfriends appearing for New Moon, I contained the only Y chromosome in all our viewing parties. Being a psych major and working in a children's research lab, this really wasn't much new to me, though I found it funny that the other boyfriends and such made it a point to have Starcraft LAN parties during these viewings.

Watching Twilight and, to a less extent, New Moon with a group as opposed to alone was kind of like watching an episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000", the brilliant show where a guy and his two robot pals are forced to watch the worst old movies ever made but just end up making fun of it the whole time. Both Twilight films are positively atrocious for more reasons than I could possibly write here. I'll just sum their faults up by saying that the acting was a crime against humanity, the directing embarrassing to watch, and the writing positively painful. Essentially, Bella Swan is a wholly unremarkable girl who moves from Arizona (where her mom lives) to Forks, Washington (where her dad lives) and suddenly becomes the heartthrob of the school for no reason other than that she's new. She takes an interest in Edward, one of five adopted children of the town's doctor, Carlisle Cullen. After a while, she discovers that Edward is a vampire, and they sit and smell each other and adore each other until some outside vampires who dine on humans (the Cullens only eat non-human animals) enter the area and, of course, take after Bella because apparently her smell is intoxicating. There's a chase, a very stupid fight, the kiddos go to prom, and voila! You have Twilight. New Moon is basically the same, only in this one Edward leaves town and Bella instead takes up with Jacob, who is a werewolf. They repair motorcycles together and generally have a good time until Bella goes cliffjumping and then has to go save Edward from being killed in Italy by Dakota Fanning and some other "evil corporation" type vampires. She does, and they go back home to Forks, where Edward asks Bella to marry him. And that's New Moon in an incredibly lame nutshell.

Geez, Twilight and New Moon sound even more ridiculous than I realized.

Well, our viewing group had a great time with these two. Try watching Twilight and New Moon imagining that Bella smells really, really bad. Just try it. And boy did we have a field day when Edward, who can read other peoples' thoughts, can't read Bella's ("It's because she doesn't have any!" we'd yell at the screen, though of course Edward couldn't hear our thoughts, either). Vampires are really fast, but the "speedy running" special effects, as one girl put it, made Edward look more like Sonic the Hedgehog. And don't even get me started on the fact that sunshine doesn't kill vampires; it just makes them sparkly. Or the other fact that werewolves don't require a full moon to transform, but they tend to when angry (HULK HOWL AT MOON!!!) What made this so much better was that, as I mentioned, the whole group sans me was female. It wasn't that the plot was so bad for Twilight and New Moon - I mean, they're no Hunger Games, but I've seen far worse - it's just that they are truly terrible movies. After we watched Twilight, my wife claimed that it was the worst movie she's ever seen in her life. I reminded her that we watched Dune (1984) last year, so she rightfully amended her statement to being the "second-worst movie I've ever seen". The plot could have been anything, but the actors were so incompetent and the direction so worthless that it just didn't matter. You know it's bad when Bella's dad, who's only in a handful of scenes, was voted "most (and possibly only) endearing character" by us.

So our hopes were low for Eclipse, as you can imagine. Alamo Drafhouse's pregame show was mostly full of spoofs, like an SNL digital short involving a girl falling in love with one of the "Franks", a family of violent, green people with zippers across their foreheads, and a Jersey Shore spoof that was just plain stupid but generally involved guys with sparkly abs. The Drafthouse also showed several documentary clips of people who actually do live in Forks and what their lives are like now that the books are so popular. The mailman keeps mail sent to Bella and Edward for tourists to see. The general store occasionally intercoms for "Bella Swan" to come to, say, the kayak department (or wherever a sale is going on). The high school principal receives emails from "parents" explaining that Edward isn't feeling well and won't make it to school today. They were really quite good-natured about it, and I was glad to see that so many of them coped so well. My favorite story was from this elderly Native American guy who was eating at the diner and noticed a young girl staring at him. After he finished eating, he walked over to her and introduced himself as Jacob's grandfather (he even knew the character's name). Totally made her day, and his eyes lit up as he told the story. Very cute.

From the get-go, we knew that Eclipse was a different beast altogether. While the book is told purely from Bella's point of view, the movie borrows scenes from Stephanie Meyer's new book, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, to explain visually what the villains are up to, and it works pretty well. What shocked me about Eclipse, and what made it actually bearable (and in fact, enjoyable) to watch, was that the characters outside of the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle actually got screen-time this time around. The new director (David Slade, bless him) managed to craft an interesting, suspenseful film. The back-stories of some of the other Cullen vampires are revealed, and frankly, ALL of the characters are more interesting than Bella. I'm beginning to suspect that her atrocious acting is mostly her fault but is also at least partially due to the lame character. Bella works alright as a narrator for the books, but you just can't make a film and expect it to have the same internal depth of character that its source material has. It doesn't work. That's why the 1984 Dune movie is the worst film that my wife and I have ever seen: Dune the book is even MORE internal than the relationship-fest of the Twilight Saga. Anyway, this movie proved that the other actors (the Cullen vampires, the werewolves) really do have some acting talent in them. Jackson Rathbone in particular stood out as Jasper, who had all of maybe two lines in the first two movies combined. He gets quite a bit of screen-time in Eclipse, and the movie is all the better for it. Also, the new director must have hired a new makeup department, because the vampires finally look like they didn't just step out of kabuki theater. I know it's a random thing to notice, but it's true: the vampires looked less fake and more what I would think a natural vampire really would look like. I hate myself a little bit for writing that. Damn you first two movies. Damn you.

Really all that you need to know about Eclipse's plot is that someone in Seattle is forming an army of newly-made vampires - called "newborns" - and plans on hunting down the Cullens in Forks. The Cullens, therefore, team up with their hated enemies, the werewolves, in order to fight back. Meanwhile, Bella has chosen Edward but tries to maintain a friendly relationship with Jacob even though she loves him, too. Their triangle wasn't nearly as annoying as it had been in the previous two films, but it was still an annoying weakpoint here (with the exception of one scene involving a tent, which I thought was hilarious). As I guy, I find Bella very difficult to love, but since she is Stephanie Meyer writing herself into her books, naturally these two fire-and-ice suitors fall all over her. I think that's why Eclipse was actually a good movie: it would have worked as a fantasy film if Bella's character didn't even exist. Just cut out the love triangle. Evil vampires are going to attack a small enclave of non-human-eating vampires? Sure, sounds fun!

We all left the theater in shock. Like, jaws-on-the-floor shocked, weakly muttering "I can't believe that was actually a good movie..." in the same way that people probably left the theater of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back muttering "I can't believe that Darth Vader is Luke's father..." I can't pinpoint exactly what it was; I think it's just that so many little things that went wrong in the first two movies suddenly went right in this one. I understand that the Twilight filmmakers are taking a leaf from Harry Potter's (far superior) book and are making Breaking Dawn, the final book in the series, into two movies, and all I can say is that I hope they keep the same director. And Ashley Greene.

No matter what the movie did, though, I could not stop giggling whenever they talked about the "newborn army". They were very careful to explain what a newborn was in this context, sure, but still my mind decided to visualize an army of screaming babies armed with, say, teething rings and pacifiers, and David Wenham narrating lines from 300 about how "terrible in battle" this deadly army was.

What the Heck Does Alignment Mean, Anyway? (Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber Review)

2010-07-14T21:48:00.002-05:00

Welcome to the second edition of "Filling GoldenPigsy's Trough", wherein I review something upon his request. This goes both ways, of course, as I make requests of him for his own blog (check it here, if you dare). Dunno what he calls his segments; but doubtless he'll find my own title positively perfect. My first post of this nature was here, for the Playstation 2's Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. Today's post is, similarly, a review of an old strategy game, so if you don't like the Nintendo 64, then you can stop reading now.

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (released in America on October 7, 2000 for the N64 and March 29, 2010 for the Wii's Virtual Console) has the distinction of being the only game I ever bought using money won from gambling. My brother's father-in-law used to co-own a condo at the race tracks outside of town, so sometimes we'd all go out there to "watch" a NASCAR race (honestly how anyone can sit there and watch dozens of blurry cars turn left for an entire day is beyond me; I'd spend the day playing Army Men games on the N64 and then come out whenever I heard the shouts of rapture that indicated a crash). At one of the races, we started a pot and picked cars, and out of the 20 or so people there, my car got 2nd place, which was good for $50. I instantly went and picked this game up.

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber is a real-time strategy RPG for the Nintendo 64 in which you create squads of 5 guys and send them marching around different maps, wresting town after town from the enemy's grasp until, eventually, you reach the map's enemy stronghold and take down its boss. You beat him, you watch the story unfold, you fine-tune your squads on a world map, you enter another area, and repeat for about forty missions, each of which can take over an hour. Your squad of 5 guys (and/or girls) is arranged on a 3x3 grid. When they engage another squad, you don't control your men directly; rather, they attack based on their stats and location. So, for instance, your knight standing on the front line of the 3x3 grid will attack twice per squad-battle, and your sorceress will attack twice when in the back row, but both will only attack once when their positions are flipped, and those attacks will be much weaker. This forces you to plan ahead and mix and match to create the best squads who can withstand getting surprised from the sides or back as well as the front.

As I mentioned earlier, for each map, you essentially take over town after town until all that's left is the enemy stronghold. Taking over all the other towns before the enemy base isn't necessary, of course - you could just make a bee-line straight for the boss if you really wanted - but, as you'll see, that's not a great idea. To take over a town, all you have to do is knock the enemy squads out of it and then stop your own squad within its walls, but each town has a different "alignment" on a scale of 1-100, and you will "liberate" or "capture" the town depending on whether or not your squad's leader's own alignment is roughly the same as the town's.

Sound confusing? It is, and in fact, Rockman24 didn't even know about alignment the first time he played through. You are allowed up to ten squads out on the field per battle, but what Rockman24 did on his first play-through was use one squad to defend his home base and one super-powerful squad to go out and fight everybody until he sliced his way to the map's boss. Upon beating the game, he and I learned something very important: Ogre Battle 64 contains multiple endings (six, to be exact) depending on your final "chaos level", which is determined by the choices you make during the story segments as well as "liberating" and "capturing" towns. Make good decisions and liberate lots of towns, and you'll be fine. Capture too many and make poor decisions, and your chaos level goes down, as Rockman24's most definitely did. As an added punch to Rockman24's freefalling chaos level number, apparently it also goes down for each town that is still in enemy hands when you defeat the boss. Suddenly, Rockman24's strategy of ripping a hole clean through the enemy lines until reaching the map's boss doesn't sound quite so brilliant, does it?

He got the worst ending possible.

By this point, I had secured my own copy of the game thanks to the only good to ever come from NASCAR racing, so when I played through, I made sure to do things right and liberate all the towns. This is more complicated than you may think. First of all, you have to have squads with alignments across the whole spectrum: a paladin trio with a pair of clerics ("good alignment"), a dark knight with a bunch of mages and a ninja ("bad alignment") and a small but lively host of sword masters and puppeteers ("neutral alignment", and yes I said puppeteers). If you kill a paladin or cleric, your alignment usually goes down, and vice versa for dark knights or bezerkers. If you take out an enemy several levels higher than yourself, alignment goes up, and vice versa for destroying puny weaklings. Your squads' alignment is constantly in flux, so if, say, a holy paladin is blocking your path to a town with a really high alignment, you'll have to plan ahead and send some ninjas or mages

I got a much better ending than Rockman24. Where his chaos level was a solid 2 (making for more than a few poo jokes), mine was closer to 85. On a scale of 1-100, that's a bit of a difference, and all from something that the game never even explains to you.

The storyline itself is typical Japanese insanity. Magnus Gallant is a blue-haired new captain in Southern Palatinus who quickly discovers that the rich are oppressing the poor, so after a few missions he and his buddies (one a hothead named after the Greek hero Diomedes) defect to the Revolutionary Army. When the Revolutionary Army starts to win the war (thanks to you, of course), General Godeslas of the Southern Army, under direction of Sir Baldwin from the Holy Lodis Empire (whom I call Arec with a Kim-Jong Il accent whenever I see him), takes extreme measures and summons forth ogres from the nether realms. Darkness consumes more and more of the land until the only human army left standing is that of Magnus. Or something like that. Mostly, it's just crazy demon stuff that gives the Japanese artists a chance to draw huge ape-like things with hammers. Silly Japanese.

Beyond the main plot, Ogre Battle 64 is rife with countless subplots involving recruitable characters. There are the foreign knights from other Ogre Battle games who will only join you if your chaos level is high enough. There's the father who will only join you if you had found his daughter - a young cleric - during a particular mission. There's a centurion, a rather dishy sorceress, and even a vampire. And then there's the actually relevant subplot involving Prince Yumil, a real pansy of a guy who was childhood friends with Magnus. In true Japanese fashion, this white-haired weeny strives as best as he can to be just like Magnus: strong, brave, charismatic, even though he is patently none of those things. His insecurities drive much of the plot, and even though he is far too whiny for my tastes, his character development is certainly one of the more fascinating elements of the game, psychotic demon-ogres excluded, of course.

Ogre Battle 64 scored high with critics upon its release, but for some reason gamers didn't feel the same way. It didn't sell very well in America, and nowadays I'm quite shocked to see a copy sitting in the local game stores. The Ogre Battle series has several other games available in Japan, but this and Tactics Ogre for the Game Boy Advance are the only two that I know of to hit American shelves. A shame really. They're brilliant games. I would love to see more.

It should say something about Ogre Battle 64 that it is now the only Nintendo 64 game that I still play. Its replay value is incredible. This is due to its high customization: since there is no voice acting (thank goodness), you can name Magnus whatever you want, along with all of your recruits and even your army itself (its default name is the Blue Knights, but I prefer Ass-Kickers). This makes for some highly entertaining "accidents", like when my friend's little brother named Magnus after himself but in all caps, so every time someone referred to Magnus they appeared to be yelling (Sir, may I introduce FRANK Gallant). Coincidentally, Pokemon is much the same way. You can name your little critters whatever the heck you want, so instead of seeing "Go, Pikachu!" at the start of a battle you may see "Go, dammit!" which I think is a much more accurate sentiment. I'm a terrible sucker for being able to name your characters. It anchors you emotionally to your recruits and gives you a reason to keep playing (I just need Jack O'Neill to level up one more time, and then I'll work on raising Darth Vader's alignment before giving T-Pain a few more rounds of training). Making 5-man squads based on your friends or favorite TV shows is a great way to prove to yourself that you have too few of one and watch too much of the other.

So next time you want to name a meteor-throwing mage after Man v. Food's Adam Richmond and pair him up with Aragorn the sword master, Conan the bezerker, SBD the ninja, and Mr. Deathypants the scythe-wielding dark knight, go to a used game store and find Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber, or download it to your Virtual Console on the Nintendo Wii. It's the N64's greatest RPG, and my personal favorite for the entire system. As IGN put in in their recent review of its Virtual Console iteration, Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber "was (and still is) lordly indeed."

A Note on My Failure

2010-07-12T21:47:00.000-05:00

I'm sure the hundreds of thousands of you reading this are wondering where my posts have gone to lately, what my thoughts are on Prince of Persia, A-Team, and Jonah Hex, and how my month of summer classes went.

I guess you could say that all of these are related. My summer class is over and gone now. The joy of taking a course at a community college after having spent the past few years at a state university is that, for my first test, I drove to campus after work, picked up my textbook (last one in stock, whew!), skimmed the first 11 chapters for a few minutes, then went in and got a 100 on my test. This class was stupidly easy, but it did take up a fair amount of my time (that first test aside), giving me less nights on which to see the movies I've dedicated myself to seeing for the sake of this blog. Also, during this time my wife and several of her co-workers (all female, it's worth noting) spent three Tuesdays in a row watching each of the three Twilight movies, thus taking up more nights that would otherwise be spent watching dudes parachute to safety in a CGI tank. Add this to the fact that Jonah Hex was in - and out! - of theaters faster than it takes my 18-pound thundercat to make it to the kitchen upon hearing the food hit her dish, and voila! I have my first trio of missed movies!

I think A-Team, at least, is still in a handful of theaters somewhere in the city, but since I've already missed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Jonah Hex: The Nail in Megan Fox's Career's Coffin, I figure I might as well make a trilogy of my failures and just wait until the three of them hit Netflix in the fall. The way I see it, as long as I watch the movies before the year's end, I still win, so don't you worry: at some point this year, you'll finally learn exactly what I think of these TV show, videogame, and comic book adaptations, respectively. In the meantime, if you need to find me, I'll be busy seeing Inception. And Predators. And Toy Story 3. And Despicable Me. And whatever the hell else comes out this month.

X-Men Meets Alien? (Splice Review)

2010-07-05T19:24:00.000-05:00

Ever wonder what would happen if you turned a guinnea pig inside-out, made it the size of an angry beaver, and gave it a stinger that could come out its mouth?

Neither had I, but apparently someone out there did, as this is basically the first thing you see in what I will admit has probably been the most mis-judged movie on my 2010 preview list thus far: Splice. This is one of those movies that is probably better the less you know about it, so if you have any inclination of seeing Splice, then I suggest that you don't read on beyond the end of this paragraph. For you, I will simply say that I found it to be a surprisingly well-made movie despite Adrien Brody's naked behind.

For those of you NOT interested in seeing Splice (and I suspect that's most of you), here's the rundown. Two scientists - Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) - are experts at splicing genes, and together they develop a new animal out of the DNA of various creatures and plants. From this animal they aim to solve virtually all medicinal problems in farm animals. Naturally, Clive and Elsa wish to extend this research to humans so that they can find cures for cancer and birth defects and all those other fun problems caused by heavy drinking during pregnancy and/or extensive inbreeding. This, however, is quickly shot down by the company funding their research since it would be too similar to cloning, so our rebellious scientists at the NERD compound (seriously, that's its name) take matters into their own hands and splice a human gene with the inside-out guinnea pig monstrosity they had already created. A creature is born, and voila! You have Splice!

The surface plot is simple enough, in the way that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is simple. Doctors create misunderstood monster. Monster makes life difficult for creators. Things don't turn out so well. The end. But Splice, at its heart, isn't at all about Dren (the creature). It's about Elsa, the lady splicer. Never before have I seen a film that so expertly picks apart the psyche of a broken woman. Elsa had a dysfunctional childhood. Her mom was crazy. What makes this movie so brilliant in this respect is that it doesn't explicitly tell you any more than that. There's a line or two said in passing that suggest this, and at one point you see Elsa's childhood room (little more than a flea-ridden mattress on the floor), but that's it. All the rest you gleam from Elsa's actions. Her character was so well-written, and the movie's depiction of her so well-filmed, that I got chills. Her character is so complex, yet perfectly-portrayed, that I could spent pages and pages talking about her, so just take my word for it: in terms of character development, I don't know if I've ever seen a film do a better job. Ever. From the way she dominates her relationships to her adamant stance against having children to her obsession with her work... It got a touch disturbing at times. But such is this movie: complex, psychologically beautiful, and disturbing.

Splice is hard to watch at times. It's sort of a thriller, but not really. This isn't like Alien, where you have a monster slowly picking off castmembers until there's only two or three left. In Splice, the entire cast list is only about six people deep. Splice is more psychological drama than it is science fiction thriller, despite what the trailers would have you believe. I suspect that many pubescent boys went in expecting copious amounts of bloodshed and death. Splice delivers on both, but perhaps not as much as they would have liked. It does, however, present you with a naked female mutant in what may actually be the most bizarre sex scene I've yet encountered (and that includes the ones from MacGruber), so I'm sure their feelings were mixed.

To sum up, Splice is NOT a prederatorial thriller where a dozen hapless scientists are slowly picked off one by one. See this film if you are a psychology major and don't mind some blood, creepily attractive mutant women, or, in a similar vein, Adrien Brody's ass. Do not see this film if you don't appreciate seeing animals die onscreen, small Canadian casts, hopeless endings, crazy people, tense scenes, the birthing process, inside-out guinea pig creatures that look more like flesh pillows than animals, wide-set eyes, transgenders, rape, or if you generally possess a sunny disposition. You might just come out of the whole affair as messed up as Elsa - or, at the very least, (in the words of Prince Humperdink) very put out.

The Kung Fu Kid (The Karate Kid Review)

2010-06-23T21:32:00.001-05:00

Before the 2008 Olympics, my wife studied abroad in Beijing during the months in which the city frantically tried to make itself as presentable and pollutant-free as possible so that athletes would not, as many eventually still did, boycott the Olympics for the sake of their own health. While she was there, I studied abroad in Sydney, which you would think would be close by. Turns out it was something like a 12 hour flight straight north for me to get there, but I did get to visit during my Spring break.

I do not share the love of China that my wife has, even after visiting places like Wangfujing and The Forbidden City, and even after proclaiming my undying love for all things Jackie Chan, but there you have it. China has captivated my wife, and really, it's not hard to see why. So long as the Chinese keep producing insane martial arts experts who like to star in action films, I guess I don't mind them, either.

I'm sad to admit that I have never seen the original The Karate Kid, though I feel like I have, given its pervasiveness in today's culture. There's the "wax on, wax off" reference in one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. There's the "montage" song in Team America. There's even Stan's dad Randy singing the "You're the Best Around" song during his fight with some other dad in South Park's brilliant episode concerning little league baseball. It's just one of those movies where you know all about it without actually having to see it, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or Star Wars: A New Hope. "Wax on, wax off" seems almost as ubiquitous as "I'm not dead yet!" and "Use the force, Luke".

This was definitely a Drafthouse movie: the pre-game show was full of clips from the original Karate Kid as well as nearly a half-dozen clips of old Jackie Chan fight scenes, the only two of which I recognized were from The Legend of Drunken Master and the ridiculous mall scene from Police Story - you know, the one where Jackie jumps off the rail five stories up, grabs a pole, slides down it until it ends with a storey to go, and then freefalls down on top of a little vendor stand in a cloud of dust. As icing on the ocular cake (sounds gross, eh?), a local martial arts studio did a demonstration at the front of the theater before the movie, so we all got to enjoy the sight of an eight-year-old boy swing nunchakus and a ten-year-old girl wailing on one of the adult male teachers. I do love Alamo Drafhouse.

The new Karate Kid actually surprised me in a lot of ways. For one, it's two-and-a-half hours long, quite the ambitious length for a family film. What's truly surprising about that, though, is that it doesn't feel like it's two-and-a-half hours long. The movie draws things out, sure, but it does it surprisingly well. You spend a good chunk of time meeting Dre and his mom and establishing exactly why Dre grows to hate living in Beijing. Then you spend an equally long time watching Dre train under the enigmatic Mr. Han, and then, finally, you get to the final tournament. The buildup feels absolutely appropriate and very well-paced.

Another surprise came from a bit of pessimism on my part. As you know, the movie is called The Karate Kid. But it's based in China, which is patently NOT the birthplace of karate. This would be akin to, say, calling Lord of the Rings science-fiction, or writing a movie about Shakespeare that has him being born somewhere in America rather than Stratford-upon-Avon. My irritation upon hearing that the Karate Kid was to be based in China was considerable, partially because it's just wrong, but mostly because GoldenPigsy has instilled in me a considerable awareness of Hollywood's amazing ability to portray Asia as nothing but being full of acrobats who cry out "ching chow wai!", cannot pronounce their L's, and call their students "grasshopper". Now, while the title is still annoying, the movie itself does make it very clear that the styles shown are kung fu, not karate (Dre actually argues with his mom about this because she calls it karate). I suspect that the filmmakers were afraid to or legally could not call the movie The Kung Fu Kid because of its plot similarities to the original. So, blame the lawyers for the continued dumbing of America with regard to Asia.

Actually, Pigsy, help me with this one: is calling it "kung fu" also slightly incorrect? Kung fu is not an actual style but rather a sort of blanket term for several styles of martial arts... or am I just making that up? Wushu more or less translates to "martial art", if I'm not mistaken, and kung fu is more the philosophy behind different types of martial arts... right? Please tell me I'm right. I'd love to be right on this.

Annoyances aside, I really enjoyed this movie. There's nothing unexpected here - it's your standard "stand up to the schoolyard bullies" story, but it works, and along the way Dre - and through him, the audience - learn about respect, patience, and other virtues that help you become disciplined and wise. All of the actors put in solid performances (even Jaden Smith, who has received considerable criticism from the yahoos on the message boards, though I can't figure out why - jealousy, perhaps, because Lord knows that I wish I could kick something being held over my head), and the soundtrack consistently matched the emotional feel of each scene. The fights were pretty good, especially given that the fighters were almost exclusively somewhere between 12-16 years old, but there were a few random moments of wirework that threw off the realism just enough to shock you back into the theater and remind you that you were watching a movie and not, as it sometimes felt, standing in the movie's audience watching a real martial arts tournament unfold before you.

Easily recommended for anyone except Asian cinema aficionados, but be warned: if you take a child under the age of 12 to this movie, I can personally guarantee that s/he will spend the next several hours punching and kicking his/her way around town. If the child is male, then increase the age range up to about 45 - higher, if he's in exceptional shape.

"The Untold Legend" (Robin Hood Review)

2010-06-21T19:39:00.001-05:00

Robin Hood sounds like it has undergone lots of changes prior to its release this summer. At one point, it was to be a character piece on the Sheriff of Nottingham, painting him in a more sympathetic light while showing Robin as a bit more of a villain. At another point, Russell Crowe was reported to play both Robin AND the Sheriff. At least seven different actresses have been attached to the role of Miriam, and about four different directors as well.

Given all this interesting buzz, the final product could be considered something of a letdown. Robin Hood is a tale about how the legend came to be in the first place. It is, essentially, a prequel to all the other Robin Hood films, even though Russell Crowe is now the oldest guy (at 45) to ever play the merry prince of thieves. It has the good sense of NOT claiming to be historically accurate like King Arthur did. I had to laugh at all the previews, though, where they claim that this is the "untold story" of Robin Hood. I'm sure Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner, and Cary Elwes (just to name a few) would disagree, but in a sense, this made me all the more curious to see the movie, so I guess their advertising worked, if only in a "let's see how bad this is" kind of way.

My wife summed Robin Hood up best when she said, "Basically, take everything you've ever known about Robin Hood and forget it, and you actually have a pretty enjoyable movie!" I am inclined to agree. Robin is a regular old archer in the service of King Richard during the crusades, but events that fall during their return to England force him and some buddies to take matters into their own hands and become more than simple soldiers. Without giving away too much, it's almost like they wrote a script about Crusade-era England & France and THEN decided to change the names to make it a story about Robin Hood.

One problem with Robin Hood is that there's not really anything to help it stand out amongst other period pieces. The plot twists and turns pretty well, and the portrayal of Prince John was especially interesting (though, as IGN's review of Robin Hood pointed out, it felt like he got more screen time than Robin himself), but in the end it's quite the forgettable movie. It's the politics of Gladiator without the arena.

In fact, some of Professor Goodtime's friends have taken to calling this film Gladiator 2, but I disagree. I think Kingdom of Heaven 2: Back in the Habit is more appropriate. Ridley Scott is the director behind this movie. His past credits include both Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, and it shows. In all seriousness, this could have been a sequel to Kingdom of Heaven. It takes place towards the end of King Richard's crusades, and it uses the same crappy action camera that I positively despise - you know, the kind where action scenes look like they're shot by an extra with Parkinson's. Everything is so shaky that you can't tell what's going on. I think that it's supposed to represent the confusion that is a large melee battle, but to me it only represents a director's inability to figure out interesting choreography to display onscreen. Don't see this film if you're expecting exciting, followable action. You'll only be disappointed, just as you probably were in Kingdom of Heaven.

It's also worth noting that Robin Hood had a mammoth "What the hell!?" moment in the final battle. I don't think I can say much more without giving it away, but when you see it, you'll know. What. The. Hell.

I'd recommend a rental - like I said, it isn't actually a bad movie, just not a great one - but if you're looking for some good old "steal from the rich to give to the needy ("he takes a wee percentage" - "but I'm not greedy!") action, you had best stick with the historically-accurate classics: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

Cattastrophy, or Redonkulous? (Shrek Forever After Review)

2010-06-15T21:54:00.000-05:00

Soon after the third Shrek film was released, I heard that Dreamworks had already planned not only a fourth but also a fifth film for the series. I don't recall the details, but the fifth was set to be the last, which seemed odd to me. We Westerners love trilogies, so to end a series with five feels incomplete. Perhaps the filmmakers hoped that perhaps they could come back to revisit the series, say, 10-20 years after the fifth film was released to make a sixth - and "final" - Shrek adventure, but that's purely a guess.

So you can understand my surprise when Shrek Forever After began its advertising campaign as the "final Shrek movie". My guess is that Dreamworks saw how poorly Shrek the Third performed in theaters and guessed (rightly) that the series is getting tired.

The result is a film that manages to redeem the franchise by taking it back to what made it so good originally: the excellent characters. While the first two films built the main characters up into the complex, highly lovable creatures that they are, the third cheapened them severely by throwing them into a lame storyline with even lamer jokes, none of which really had anything to do with the characters themselves. Shrek the Third's plot revolved around securing Artie (King Arthur - what a plot twist!) as the new ruler after Fiona's father passes away. This placed Shrek, Donkey, and Puss - the ones out to find Artie - squarely on the outside of the story. They themselves don't have anything to do with Artie or his destiny. They're just delivery boys, and the film suffered for it. What we ended up with was an unfunny film featuring Shrek that doesn't actually have that much to do with him.

Honestly, Shrek Forever After should be the third and final Shrek film. The ONLY things to carry over from Shrek the Third are that Fiona's father has passed (which is hardly even mentioned), and there are lots of babies running/flying around. That's it. Artie is nowhere to be seen, as if Dreamworks is hoping that you'll just forget that Shrek the Third ever happened. I am pleased to say that Shrek Forever After makes forgetting Shrek the Third entirely possible.

The basic premise of this latest installment is that Shrek suffers through a mid-life crisis amongst the monotony of raising three children and dealing with his celebrity status. He longs for just one day where he could be a solitary ogre again, battling angry pitchfork-wielding peasants and generally scaring the crap out of everyone. When he encounters a seemingly random passer-by, he is given that chance in exchange for one day of his past. The whole thing is a trap, however, and now Shrek must fight for his very existence alongside friends who, in this alternate universe, have never even met him.

The storyline is, obviously, It's a Wonderful Life without Christmas, Jimmy Stewart, or Zuzu's petals, but that's beside the point. This has always been a series about the characters: principally, Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, and Puss-in-Boots. These four - particularly Shrek and Fiona, both of whom seriously lacked their usual star power in their last outing - completely carry the movie, even when other characters feel overdone (Rumpelstiltskin, the villian) or underdone (the other ogres). What would the others be like if Shrek wasn't there? What would Fiona have done if no brave knight on a noble steed had come to rescue her? These are the questions the movie answers. It's nothing original - I mean, who hasn't wondered what the lives of their friends would be like if they'd never been born? - but it provides interesting insight into the four central characters as you see not only what Fiona, Donkey and Puss have become without the titular hero, but how Shrek deals with their transformations.

I still say that Shrek Forever After is nowhere near the level of Shrek 1 or 2, but it's overall a good film. Rent it first, then see if you want to add it to your collection. If nothing else, watch it to try to erase the painful memory of the one that came before it. Don't bother with the 3D, though. I still don't understand what the draw is, but it added nothing to the experience, same as always.

What in the Name of Outworld...

2010-06-11T19:54:00.000-05:00

Recently, IGN.com pointed me in the direction of a strange video on YouTube concerning a Mortal Kombat movie. This struck me as odd, since I figured the MK series all but finished after their latest videogame - Mortal Kombat: Armageddon - did everything it could to put an end to the increasingly insane storyline that is the Mortal Kombat universe. The two movies that were made in 1995 and 1997 varied from mediocre adaptation (the first one) to holy-crap-why-are-my-eyes-disintegrating bad (the second one). Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was so bad, in fact, that I had been sure that no one would ever attempt another.

Apparently I was wrong.

The video (watch it here) isn't so much a trailer as it is an opening sequence, where we see Jax - and who doesn't love Jax? - as a struggling cop in a nasty, beat-down city chatting with a mysterious hand-cuffed prisoner about some different serial killers running amuck. Each killer - I'll let you find out who they are yourself - is a different character from the MK series reinvisioned in what most people are describing as a sort of Batman Begins take on the series. You're treated to a brutal, if not terribly well-coordinated, fight scene, then a revelation of the identity of the prisoner with Jax before the video ends and you're left wondering "when can I see this in theaters?"

Come to find out, the video was made by director Kevin Tancharoen as a sort of bid for the opportunity to make the thing into a full-length film. Judging from the seven minutes that I saw, I'm actually all for it. Look no further than my 2010 movie preview to see that the theaters are being flooded with remakes and reboots right now, but for me at least, there's something different about the Mortal Kombat series. I personally didn't grow up watching The Karate Kid or the A-Team TV series. My generation played Mortal Kombat and watched Power Rangers (which I hear is coming back) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, also rumored to be rebooted in the next few years.

Reboots and remakes are complicated subjects for me. On the one hand, they seem utterly unoriginal, since you're really just taking the same plot and putting a fresh coat of paint on it to make a few bucks (like what Avatar did with Disney's Pocahontas). They feel as though inspired purely by greed and ease of accesibility. "Hey, Remember [insert random 70s or 80s TV show, like Charlie's Angels and A-Team]? People liked that. I bet if we tweak it so that it's young and fresh and relatable to today's audience, they'll totally go for it!" Sequels are just more of the same. "Hey, Shrek did pretty good at the box office. Let's make another one!" You don't have to make up new characters, settings, or plots, and instantly you have thousands of fans familiar with the universe of your movie before it's even made, thereby making them more likely to go out and see it. The skeptic in me really, really hates reboots, remakes, and sequels that aren't necessary to further the plot (good example of necessary sequels: the latter two Lord of the Rings films).

Weirdly, it's the writer in me who actually welcomes reboots and remakes. I enjoy seeing what contemporary writers do with existing material: what audience do they target, how does that affect the feel of the film, how do the characters or settings change - and, if so, why? How does modern technology change the special effects (see Clash of the Titans for your answer there)? How abstract does the director get in his adaptation? The list goes on. I can't help it. Reboots and remakes, though I find them morally unappealing, are simply irrisistable. Guess I'm addicted.

We'll see what becomes of this Mortal Kombat video. Warner Brothers apparently has the rights to another movie, and the director of this YouTube video is buddies with the screenwriter attached to WB's film, so maybe he'll get his wish. I read some of Tancharoen's commentary on the YouTube short, and he sounds like he really has his act together on making a Mortal Kombat film that far surpasses the crap from the 1990s while maintaining the spirit of the games. Were I Ed Boon, I'd pay this director much consideration. Taking something as wildly violent and over-the-top as the Mortal Kombat universe and uppercutting it into the world of realism may actually boost the series into respectability, much as Christopher Nolan did with Batman.

Of course, the debate as to whether or not Mortal Kombat NEEDS a dose of realism is an entirely different beast, and right now, I just don't have the stomach for it. I'm gonna go watch this video instead.

NOTE: Within minutes of writing this, I went on IGN and saw a trailer for a new Mortal Kombat game that looks like it's done in the 2D playing style of Marvel vs. Capcom with the 3D graphics of the past few MK games. How's that for weird timing? Oh wait, E3's going on.

Oh Noes! My Summer!

2010-06-11T17:54:00.000-05:00

Thanks to a long and very uninteresting story that ends with me having been two hours short of officially graduating for some time now, I have enrolled in a summer school course that will last through the end of June.

Because of this, I'll be spending this month primarily reading a textbook, so you probably won't see any book reviews until July, with the exception of one book that I read recently that I just haven't reviewed quite yet. I'm still pretty drained from The Knight and The Wizard, so I've been reading some books (In a Sunburnt Country, by Bill Bryson - known as Down Under internationally - and Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) that are only considered fiction by people who don't believe in traveling or the human brain. Both are excellent, by the way, but since they've nothing to do with sci-fi or fantasy, I don't feel the need to review them on this blog.

Anyway, my focus for the next month will be on the horde of movies I've yet to see/review; namely, Robin Hood, Shrek Forever After, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Splice, A-Team, The Karate Kid, Jonah Hex, Toy Story 3, and Twilight Saga: Eclipse. I'll have my work cut out for me, it would seem.

Also, another quick update for my 2010 movie preview. Red Dawn, which was set to come out November 24, has been pushed back because its studio, MGM, is, shall we say, having some technical difficulties at this time. I haven't heard of a new release date yet, but I think we can safely say that it will be at least 2011 before we get to watch a group of American punks take on Communism.

Stay tuned.

2010 Movie Preview Update

2010-06-08T19:53:00.000-05:00

After writing my 31-movie preview (here!), I decided to take it upon myself to go and see each and every movie on that list. I still stand by that promise to myself, but I can already tell you that it will be impossible for me to see each of those 31 films in 2010, as one has already been pushed back to next year. Also, when I mentioned this preview post to a friend of mine, he thought it stupid that I wrote a preview for the year's movies in May and that I should only write a "Summer preview", and then later a "Fall preview". Perhaps he's right, but the great thing about this blog is that I can do whatever the hell I want and don't appreciate the criticism on something that is purely for my own (and hopefully your) entertainment. If I stumble across any other movies coming out this year that look interesting to me, I'll let you know, don't worry.

For now, though, here are some changes:

-Twilight: Eclipse comes out June 30, not July 2. Now you can sleep at night.

-Vanessa Hudgens' Beastly has been pushed back from July 30 to March 18, 2011. Reports suggest that this is because the other major movie to come out July 30 is Charlie St. Cloud, starring the better half of the High School Musical duo, Zac Efron. Funny how that kind of thing works out.

-I saw a poster for a movie called Alpha and Omega (currently slated for September 17, 2010) and almost previewed it here, but then I saw the trailer and want nothing to do with it. I'll make up for it by seeing The Last Airbender about five times... per theater within twenty miles of my home.

Comedic Genius (UHF Retro-Review!)

2010-06-07T22:41:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago (I am seriously behind here), The Alamo Drafthouse held a special screening of what is perhaps the greatest movie to come out of 1989, Weird Al Yankovic's UHF (its only competitors were trifles like Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Little Mermaid, and When Harry Met Sally). My buddy Professor Goodtime and I somehow managed to snatch up two tickets, which sold out so quickly (three minutes!) that Alamo created a second showing of the event as a matinee. It sold out almost as quickly.

Anyway, the event was at the excellent Paramount Theater in Austin, and was as thus:

-Pre-game show filled with Weird Al music videos, Al TV clips, Weird Al's television debut, and a fake trailer for Weird: The Al Yankovic Story that looked to be in the same vein as Walk the Line and Ray
-A sing-along with Weird Al's top 5 most requested music videos (Eat It, Like a Surgeon, Amish Paradise, I'm Fat, and White n' Nerdy)
-Screening of UHF
-Q&A with the director of UHF/Weird Al's manager, Jay Levey... and Weird Al himself!!
-After-party at a nearby club with kareoke and Twinkie Wiener Sandwiches, Al's famous snack from the movie in which he sliced a Twinkie down the middle, put a hot dog wiener inside, sprayed cheese whiz on top, and dunked the whole thing in milk

Let me just start off by saying that there is no better way to see UHF than with a theater full of the most rabid Weird Al fans in Austin. What made it even better, though, was that the Alamo Drafthouse guys who MC'd the event requested that we "treat it like a real movie" and not sit here and quote the whole thing, which was a huge relief.

What can I say, except that every bit was stinkin' hilarious? The pre-game show was highlighted by some pretty amazing clips from Al TV (originally aired on MTV): specifically, two different clips where Weird Al took two interviews done by MTV of Eminem and Kevin Federline, respectively, and edited himself into them as if he were conducting the interview. Go on YouTube and watch them. Just type in "al tv interviews" and watch the first ones to come up. You won't be disappointed, unless you actually think K-Fed and the guy named for candy-coated chocolate actually have talent outside of making trailer parks look like classy establishments. The interviews are simply brilliant and show off Al's wit as compared to the, em, "turn of phrase" of Eminem and Federline. Some of my other favorite clips involved Al carrying around a hand-held camera to different locations in which some kind of public sign was grammatically incorrect, such as in the first clip, where he stopped on the side of the road near a sign that said something like "Curves Ahead. Drive Slow" and he pasted a little "-ly" on the end of the word "slow". This spoke to the grammar Nazi in me, and I loved the man even more.

The sing-along was equally amazing, partially because the music videos were funny, but mostly because rarely have I felt as in my element as I did while sitting there yelling the lyrics to "White and Nerdy" with two-hundred similarly-minded individuals. This crowd was perhaps best summed up by one slightly overweight, "I'm just starting to get into World of Warcraft" bearded, long-haired guy with glasses - probably a computer programmer - who came in a tee-shirt that had a picture of an octopus on it with ray guns grasped in every tentacle and eight "PEW"s written across the top.

UHF holds a special place in my heart primarily thanks to the band teacher at our school, whom I'll call Mr. Swift. In 5th grade we were required to a take a trimester - that's right, we had trimesters - of art, one of band, and one of choir, and then choose one for the years after that, and two of my best friends - GoldenPigsy and our mad scientist friend we call Pilgrim - took band with this man straight through high school, so I heard plenty of stories. Anyway, on days in which he didn't have anything for his class, or if he was absent or if they had just completed a concert the weekend before, he would play UHF. Every time. This wasn't the UHF that we all know and love, but a heavily-censored version (it was a conservative Christian school) so marred by Mr. Swift's increasingly wrinkled hands that the 97-minute feature could easily be viewed in a single 50-minute class session. Anything that might be deemed inappropriate for children - ironic, I believe, since Weird Al's tastes seem perfect for them - was taken out. Evidently we 5th graders could not be exposed to anything that might slip unnoticed into a PG-rated film.

So in actuality, I couldn't even remember the last time I'd seen the proper movie, but as soon as it started, everything came flooding back into my memory, like when I thought of Pocahontas and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest upon watching Avatar. UHF's story serves mostly as a vehicle for the google of silly clips and scenes for which the movie is known. George (Weird Al) is a creative genius with no outlet for his creativity. He drifts from job to job until, out of the blue, his uncle gives him a run-down TV station to manage. Over the course of the film, the station brings the community together in a celebration of local pride over the big, evil network station and its dastardly manager (played by Kevin McCarthy, who was known to burst out laughing after the conclusion of a scene because his character is just so gosh darn evil). Interspersed between plot scenes are various commercials and clips for the different shows played on UHF channel 62: "Buddha Knows Best", "Druids on Parade", "Leave It to Bigfoot", "Strip Solitare", "Name That Stain", "The Young and the Dyslexic", and everyone's favorite, "Wheel of Fish".

UHF plays almost like a skit show like SNL, with a perfectly lovable underdog story threading between each scene to hold it together. Every character is a standout in their own way, from Weird Al's scatterbrained fantasies, to Kevin McCarthy's outbursts at his son for not getting him a Rolex, to Michael Richards' spastic Stanley Spadowski, to Gedde Wantanabe's perfectly overdone martial arts master. Even George's girlfriend, Teri (Victoria Jackson, an SNL cast member from 1986-1992) worked great in a strange, quiet nerd sort of way. I can't think of any characters who aren't worth watching while they're on-screen. There's so much personality in this cast that even the director, Jay Levey, entered the fray as a gun-toting Gandhi in the movie's trailer for Gandhi 2.

Even if you don't care for the movie, it's hard not to like Weird Al. He's outlasted virtually everyone whom he's parodied. He's funny without being offensive (except for those Al TV interviews, perhaps). Anyone at any age can (and does) appreciate his humor. All ages were represented at this event, without exception. Weird Al is like the Disney of spoof comedy, but without the pretentious bureaucracy or the supremely retarded "Disney Vault". Can you imagine a "Weird Al Vault", where you could only buy different CDs of his when he said you could? There'd be riots in the streets, or at least on message boards, which is just as bad when you're a pasty white man like me.

Did you know that Al personally speaks with every artist whom he spoofs? When he released Amish Paradise (a parody of Coolio's Gangsta Paradise), there was a miscommunication somewhere, and Coolio was not aware of the spoof until its release, and he was less than happy. Ever since this little incident, Al has made sure that everyone is alright with his intentions before he acts on them. But really, the spoofs are hardly ever any kind of attack on the original artist. It's not like Amish Paradise makes fun of Coolio or anything; Weird Al simply took the style of the song and flipped it on its head for his own comedic purposes. Like I said, he's brilliant and funny without being offensive. Most of his songs deal with food, for goodness' sake. That's only offensive if you're a head of cheese.

And he in person was excellent. That wit is present in how he really is when he's just himself. He has literally hundreds of Hawaiian shirts, not only in his massive closet at home but in storage as well. He has a slight lisp when he speaks, which surprised me. As the questions from the (I'm assuming) drunk audience grew more and more ridiculous, so did his answers. He matched the questions blow for blow and always responded with the same level of sincerity as the question. When asked how many Hawaiian shirts he has, he told us. When asked if he'd write a parody for some obscure Alan Parsons Project song, he calmly replied that he's just waiting for it to get popular first. When asked if he planned on writing more songs, he said that he had actually planned on retiring that night, but since the kid asked, Al decided that he would stay in the business and write more songs. I want to be friends with this man.

Thanks for Keeping Austin Weird, Al.

A Throat-Rippin' Good Time (MacGruber Review)

2010-06-01T22:41:00.000-05:00

If I haven't mentioned it before, here I shall again: I live in Austin, TX. Possibly the single best reason to live here (if you don't like the concert scene) is a chain of movie theaters called Alamo Drafthouse. These are movie theaters where each row of seats has before it a long counter, and you order excellent food that's brought right to your seat. One of the best effects of having this kind of setup - for the audience at least - is that, if you aren't hungry, then no worries because you've just saved money: Drafthouse's tickets are cheaper than other theaters since they make most of their money from their delicious food and their large selection of beers.

The REAL reason to go to Alamo, though, is what I call their "pre-game show". For every single movie, they collect all sorts of funny/cheesy/ancient clips from different shows or movies that have something to do with the movie that you're about to watch. For Star Trek, they showed old, hilarious clips from the original TV show that included a fantastic montage of Dr. McCoy's "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a [insert random noun, like escalator]!" For Doom, we enjoyed watching video footage of a really terrible gamer attempting to play the latest Doom game. For Harry Potter, we watched several clips of amateur magicians.

For MacGruber, we were graced with the showing of almost every single MacGruber skit ever shown.

MacGruber is based on a character developed for Saturday Night Live as a spoof of Richard Dean Anderson's popular mulleted MacGyver. Each SNL episode to feature MacGruber contained three episodes roughly a minute in length each, spread throughout the hour. Here's an introductory episode (sorry for the poor quality):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_IxhLL5vQ

Each one began with a super-macho-kickass intro in the style of the Team America theme song, each time with different lyrics that set up the premise for the skit. From there, MacGruber and two buddies - always a guy and a girl - find themselves trapped in a small room with a bomb that has "20 seconds left!!!", as the girl always screams. MacGruber tells them, in a calm, confident manner, to pass him the various objects near them ("Vicki, throw me that rubber band!" "You got it, MacGruber!!"). Soon, though, something goes wrong, like the skit in which MacGruber uses the collected items to make what looks like a Bloody Mary with a stick of celery in the middle, or the one in which he finds out that his estranged son (played by Shia LeBouf in a mullet wig) is gay, and general hilarity ensues until time runs out and, at the end of every single skit, the scene ends with a gigantic explosion.

Thanks to Alamo Drafthouse, we got to see practically every single episode, along with a ridiculous scene from a MacGyver episode in which he uses chocolate bars as a way of plugging up a sulfur leak. I can't recommend this theater company enough. The pre-game show provides you not only with some great entertainment but also some key background knowledge concerning the movie you're about to see. On a few occasions, I've actually enjoyed Alamo's pre-game show more than the movie itself.

The fact that they could make a full-length movie off of something like the MacGruber skits is a testament to the writers, but in fact, the movie's actually pretty good. This is a spoof and a glorious send-up to all of the macho-man movies starring big, muscley men like Ah-nuld and Stevan Segal as well as, obviously, the MacGyver TV series. The plot is pleasantly basic - an evil mastermind (played by a pudgy Val Kilmer) hijacks some big missiles in Russia, so the US military brings MacGruber out of retirement to head a team of experts to take him down.

The movie's full of classic moments from your typical Rambo sort of film: the reluctant hero being pulled from a peaceful existence in some obscure South American village; the military general with complete faith in the hero from long ago (with sixteen purple hearts!); the young lieutenant who is skeptical of the hero; the dramatic return to civilization by the hero long-declared dead (one of the funniest scenes); the assembling of an impressive team of old friends who, when fully collected, walk together in a slow-mo shot in the manner of Armegeddon; the final, hesitant teammate who ends up being the most important; the continued trust in the hero by the general who should, by all accounts, put more than just three people on a mission that could potentially destroy the world; the "I'm going to tell you exactly how I'm going to kill you" scene; and even the overly-done tiger growl added to explosion sound-effects. MacGruber knows its sources, and it exploits them to a degree to which most of today's cinematic spoofs can only dream. Creators of Scary Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, and You Got Served, take note.

That being said, this movie is crude. Just know that going in. I haven't seen so many male butts on screen since Braveheart, and none of them had celery stalks sticking out of their cheeks. This is very much an R-rated film. I heard from a friend that she was at a movie where someone had taken his young son. They walked out halfway through. I was shocked that they'd even stayed that long. But like I said, this is a crude, crude movie. That's not to say that the jokes are cheap; in fact, some of the cleverest moments came from scenes of indescribable vulgarity, but that's just the flavor of the film. It is what it is, and what it is is a film where throats are ripped out, sexual "services" are offered from one man to another, and the villan's name is "Dieter Von Cunth". Yeah.

MacGruber as a character was just as he is in the SNL skits: cocky, confident, and utterly clueless. He's narcissistic. He dresses as though from the 80s. He has a fantastic mullet.

He's the last person I would want on my team.

He has no friggen' idea how to make or disarm a bomb with common, everyday items. Will Forte has this character down, and it shows. Ryan Phillipe does a commendable job as the straight-man to MacGruber, and Kristin Wiig is similarly excellent as Vicki - straight out of the SNL skits! The three of them made for a solid core to the movie, though Val Kilmer's portrayal of the villian was somewhat lacking. I love Kilmer, but something felt a little off. I don't think he cared that much about the role. Then again, he wasn't given much. Bit of comedic potential lost there, but oh well.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed the movie. It's less offensive than anything made by Trey Stone and Matt Parker, but there were plenty of South Park-style moments where I kept thinking "I really should NOT be laughing at this." And yet I did. I did plenty often. But if it makes you uncomfortable to know that this film contained the most absurd sex scene I've ever seen (in its own, special way), or that MacGruber waddles around with his pants around his ankles and a celery stick protruding from his arse (AND he eats it afterward without washing it first), then perhaps you should sit this one out and enjoy the slightly less-offensive skits on SNL.

We're Not Worthy! We're Not Worthy! (Notes on The Knight and The Wizard)

2010-05-27T19:23:00.000-05:00

GoldenPigsy's been waiting for this one for a long time, since before I even had a blog, I expect. Two years ago, I studied abroad in Australia, and Pigsy gave me his copy of Gene Wolfe's The Knight. Being the dutiful, perfect friend that I am, I read it during my time there.

And understood, at most, 2% of what I read.

I got the basic plot down, that a teenaged boy from America writes to his big brother Ben about being transported to another world, one that is actually seven worlds in which humans inhabit the 4th and middle one, called Mythgarthr. After a little while, he gets transported to the 3rd world, Aelfrice, where Queen Disiri turns him into a full-grown, beefy man. He returns to Mythgarthr and begins his quest to find the legendary sword Eterne, for when he finds it, Disiri, whom he loves greatly, has told him that she will see him again.

Mind you, this is a long, dense tale, and what I just told you is pretty much what they write on the back of the book, so clearly my understanding by the end was somewhat limited.

I didn't bother with the sequel, The Wizard, at the time, but for some reason I made sure to buy not only The Wizard but also my own copy of The Knight before returning to the states. I don't know why. I think that using foreign money makes it feel like you aren't spending anything at all. Also, prior to that, I happened across $170 of Australian money on the street (I kid you not; three $50 bills and one $20 fluttered across the sidewalk one night, so I scooped them up, looked around, saw no one crying over lost cash, and took them myself), so really you could say that God wanted me to buy these books. He also apparently wanted me to buy a Nintendo DS game (Hoshigami Remix), some green tea frappachinos from Starbucks, a blanket, some alcohol for my boxed-wine-guzzling friends, and multiple $3 busrides to and from Circular Quay (where the Opera House is), but that's besides the point. That money was meant for The Knight and The Wizard, I am sure. Call it divine intervention.

Now that I have had a bit more experience with reading, I decided to have another go. This is the primary reason for my lack of book reviews lately: I've been reading these two books since I finished Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire a month ago. I've never been a fast reader, but these two books just take a long time. But I finished them both... finally... and can now report to you what I've observed.

Let me start by saying that this is not a proper review. I am not qualified to give these two books the review that they deserve, nor am I sure if I know anyone who is. As I said, these books are dense, and by that I mean that there's more going on than just the plot. In high school, GoldenPigsy and I read Dante's Divine Comedy (which was not, as the title may suggest, a retelling of Jim Carrey's Bruce Almighty starring Dante from Capcom's Devil May Cry game series). Our teachers informed us that Dante's three poems had four layers of meaning, derived from an old way of interpreting Biblical scriptures:

Literal (what happened?)
In the Second Circle of Hell, Dante watches as famous lovers - like Paris and Helen from the Trojan War - are flung about by tempestuous winds.

Allegorical (meaning behind what happened as it relates to us)
The winds whipping the lustful around like ragdolls represent the chaotic nature of desires of the flesh.

Moral/Tropological (what have we learned today?)
It is wrong to give in to temptation, for lust is as unpredictable and temporary as a storm.

Anagogical (meaning behind what happened as it relates to life beyond our world)
Giving in to sinful desires of the flesh will throw your spiritual life into turmoil. (I'm pretty sure I butchered that, but who really understands anagogical interpretation, anyway?)

In other words, for every scene, there are, in a way, four scenes. Think of them as four different-colored lenses through which you read the text, thus putting Dante and other interpretors of Biblical scripture centuries ahead of their time in terms of fashion.

As it turns out, Gene Wolfe converted to Catholicism upon marrying a Catholic woman, and this heavily influenced his writings. The world represented in The Wizard Knight series will illustrate this point in a moment, but first, allow me to talk a bit more about The Knight.

The Knight is a first-person narrative told in the form of an absurdly long letter written by an American teenager, who takes the name Able in this new world, to his older brother Ben. Able rarely takes the time to properly explain what's going on; in fact, you may turn to the next chapter to find him somewhere else completely, without the slightest bit of detail on how he got there. You'll more or less hear about it later, so that by the time you finish both books, you know the full story. You just have to be patient and trust that Able will explain things later whenever you read a section and say "what the hell?" This also includes several little asides and remarks where he'll mention some character whom you haven't even met yet, like if he talked about some type of sword and said, "ah, yes, Pigsy was always the best with those." If you've never met someone named Pigsy, you can understand why this can be a difficult read for the first time through. He writes these things, obviously, after everything has already happened. The difficulty comes with the fact that Able almost expects you to be in the same position as him: having already experienced everything he talks about.

Anyway this is a story about "Sir Able of the High Heart" and his transformation into the knight he always wanted to be. Initially, The Aelf queen Disiri turns him into a large, hunky man physically, but the remainder of the book is all about him being a knight in more than just his muscles. He learns from a knight named Sir Ravd, he fights bandits, he travels on a ship, he takes up service with a duke, and he travels north - towards the land of the Giants - to hold a mountain pass until winter in service of said duke. When he makes a promise, he keeps it. His love is only for Disiri, and he will not be with any other woman. He strives to be just and fair, just as Sir Ravd was.

The first time I read this, I really didn't get Able as a character. It was my own fault; I misread some things and skimmed over others, so I thought Able brutish and unjust, when in fact he is neither. He's a great character, a good model for other knights. Because, you know, we have so many of them around nowadays. The reason I thought him brutish and unjust during my first read-through was mostly because he can be, um, forceful, when situations call for it. Not overly-violent, mind you, but he asserts himself when needed, and to the unaccustomed eye it can look as though he's just throwing his weight around because he can. Let's just say that you don't see a lot of compassion in his actions; he's not meant to be a Christian example, after all. The human world here has a decidedly Norse flair to it, so think Vikings, not Jesus.

The Wizard picks up right where The Knight left off, only several portions of the narrative are Able's telling of another character's - primarily the squire Toug's - adventures separate from Able (that he later hears of from the characters themselves). After the events of The Knight (which I won't spoil for you), Able takes on a certain magical quality that makes him almost literally a god amongst men. All of his friends are busy dealing with the Giants - Lord Beel has been instructed to serve as ambassador to them, and his daughter, Idyn (which I think is a lovely name), is to wed the King of the Giants - and much of the second book is devoted to dealing with these fleshy pillars of anger (they are called the Angrborn, after all). The Wizard maintains the style of The Knight for the most part, but Able is considerably wiser in The Wizard, so there is more discourse on the nature of the worlds and the history behind the different beings Able encounters.

It is the set up of the worlds that I found to be the single most fascinating aspect of the series. Mythgarthr, the world of the humans, is the fourth world in a heirarchy of seven. The world above ours is called Skai, which we see above us in the form of clouds, the sun, the moon, the stars, etc. Below us is Aelfrice, whose sky... is us! Trippy? I thought so. When the Aelfs in Aelfrice look up, they see us. There is no sun, but light is supplied by whatever is in Mythgarthr. Below Aelfrice is Muspel (think of the base of a volcano), where dragons dwell, and below that is Nieflheim/Hel. Take a guess who lives there. So, ascending: Hel, Muspel, Aelfrice, Mythgarthr, Skai, Kleos, Elysion. As you go higher and higher, the beings become more and more perfect, meaning that the uppermost world entirely consists of "The Most High God". This guy, a perfect being, decided in the beginning that he wanted to create something, so he made the second world, Kleos. However, since he was perfect, anything different than him must be by definition imperfect, so while the beings of the second world are near perfection - in fact, they are angels - they are not quite perfect themselves. The excess/unwanted materials from the second world were then used to create the third, Skai, and so on and so forth. Skai is where the Overcyns live, who are, essentially, the Norse gods like Thor and Odin (called here Thunor and the Valfather, respectively).

Doesn't that make a little too much sense, theologically speaking? Gods like Thor and Odin (and, I like to think, Zeus, Hera, Apollo, etc.) are one world above us, with angels above them, and The Most High God above everything. So The Most High God is a god over angels, who are gods over the Valfather & Co, who are gods over humans. This makes us gods to the Aelfs, who are gods to dragons, who are gods to whatever lives in Hel, meaning that, while it's okay in The Knight/Wizard to worship the Valfather and pray to him, the one who deserves the most worship is The Most High God. It's like Gene Wolfe found a way, using Catholic/medieval hierarchies, to toss multiple theologies into one, coherent world, and I think that's bloody brilliant.

I can't say it better than GoldenPigsy did in a recent email, though, so I'll let him further explain:

The levels of the world are a conflation of Neo-Platonic Medieval/Catholic cosmology and Norse myth about the levels of the Yggdrasil tree. Mythgarthr is Midgard. Skai is Asgard. Utgard, the giant's castle, in Norse myth is the name of a realm on the same level as Asgard, but separate from it. Nieflheim in Norse mythology is the roots of the Yggdrasil. Muspell -- this will be no surprise to you -- is the fiery realm of dragons.

The upper two are not variations on Norse myth. Kleos is literally what certain Medieval thinkers thought outer space was: a realm of angels. The highest is simply God and nothing else. The way the worlds are stacked is in keeping with the hierarchical structure that Medieval people applied to practically everything. Divine right of kings ring a bell? You have authority the closer you are to God, and the people beneath you look up to you as a model in order to become more like Him. The peasant looks up to the duke who looks up to the king who looks up to the Pope who looks up to God. The son looks up to the father who looks up to etc. etc. In The Wizard Knight, The Valfather is the model for earthly Kings, for fathers and rulers. Thunor (if I remember right) is the model for Knights and sons and retainers. The King is the model for dukes; the Knight is the model for squires. Michael (lol!) the archangel is the model for the Valfather. Who's the model for Michael?

Yeah. There's a few different valid interpretations of what's going on. There's an adventure/fantasy story here, and it's an awesome one, but there's more to it than that.

Wolfe is brain-melting good. Didn't I tell you so?

Yes, Pigsy, you did (several times), and yes, you were right. One of the most brilliant settings I've encountered in a very long time, one that made me think about my own beliefs and how I view the world.

Because the events were related directly by Able himself, sometimes (read: often) you get the feeling that he misinterpreted what he saw. Certainly it's common to feel as though he didn't tell you everything, but this is apparently part of Wolfe's style: narration told by the main character, who is constantly unreliable. If you're looking for a straight-shooting story, this is not it, but if you want something that will make you think, then check this series out. I never thought I'd be glad to have my brain feel as though it was back in high school English class, but there you go. Oftentimes I felt like I needed a pen and a notepad, and I mean that as a compliment, both to the richness of the books and the skill of dear Mr. Wolfe.

And for the record, I was entirely joking when I suggested that they turn the game Too Human into a videogame version of these books. While Too Human could have done well with the basic setting of The Wizard Knight, it goes without saying that the style of the books could not possibly lend to a videogame. I fear that it would turn into the recent Dante's Inferno game, which seemed to have achieved the setting without too much trouble (but a giant Cleopatra who births badguys out of her breasts? Really?), but utterly botched/didn't care about the spirit of the original poem. It'd be kind of like turning The Hunger Games into a videogame, as well. Can you imagine a videogame that actually requires you to hunt down and kill other teenagers? You'd basically be playing Halo 3, and nobody wants that now, do they?

Too Human, or Too Poorly Written?

2010-05-21T23:57:00.000-05:00

I talk about plot quite often on this blog. In Hollywood, a film can still do well without a good plot if it is well-directed or acted, has great action scenes, or generally contains lots of eye-candy (see: Avatar). For novels, plot is considerably more important, though, again, not strictly a necessity. Instead of being able to fall back on a great actor, director, or visual effects artist, a novelist without a plot can create an interesting setting, or write so well that plot becomes secondary to his or her style.

So what about videogames?

Better yet, why should we even care about the plot of a videogame?

It's an understatement to say that games have come a long way in the past quarter-century. Thirty years ago today, the world met Pac-Man. Twenty-five years ago, North America saw the first Famicom, or Nintendo Entertainment System, along with everyone but John McCain's favorite plumber, Mario. At that time, the pinnacle of electronic home entertainment was an 8-bit man in overalls hopping across platforms as he bounces on the heads of mushroom men and evil turtles. Any background or story pretty much spawned from what you made of the game's pixelated world.

Today's game systems feature increasingly robust online capabilities, so that now anyone can experience the joy of playing Halo 3 (rated M, meaning that you're supposed to be over 18 before you play it) with a horde of prepubescent 11-year-olds who are more concerned with taking their new dirty words for a spin than they are actually playing. The online mode has fundamentally altered the layout of today's gaming community. Now, with every game made, the producers have an important choice to make: do we make a single-player game, or one with lots of multiplayer capabilities? On older systems, when they went with the latter, the result was rarely anything special, and the single-player experience suffered accordingly. If a game tried to be multiplayer-centric, it pretty much had to abandon a single-player mode entirely to be successful (see: Mario Party). It seems like the games I remember playing the most were the rare gems that found that balance between being something that I could play when my friends weren't there and something that I could play when they were, like Star Fox 64, 007: Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and even Super Smash Brothers.

Somewhat ironically, now that the Xbox 360 is around, and its online modes are so good (it comes with a headset that you can talk into!) multiplayer games have undergone a sort of reversal, where now it's actually quite difficult to play one while in the same room as your friends. Splitscreen is so 2003, gosh. Seems like the only games that still do that are Rock Band/Guitar Hero and just about anything on the Nintendo Wii, which shuns online modes in general. This worked out great for myself and my friends, who had the joy of growing up with local multiplayer and then gaining online multiplayer once we split apart for college.

It's hard to generalize about plots in games, since the genres are so varied. Of course RPGs (Role-Playing Games) are going to have better plots than a racing game or a sports game. In fact, when it comes to a sports game, I don't want a plot (ahem Blitz: The League)! Therefore, for the sake of argument, I will be referring to the genres that are technically supposed to have stories to them: RPGs, Action-Adventures, FPSs (First-Person Shooters). As a side-note, though, I recently played a demo of a new racer called Split/Second, and while it didn't exactly have a plot, its premise was simple and brilliant. You're a contestant on a reality show, and during the race you have the opportunity to press a button that will blow things up as your competitors drive past them, thereby potentially destroying their cars and launching you ahead of them in the standings. It was uncomplicated, effective, and intuitive, and I highly recommend it.

So, what would you do if you were told to write a storyline for a videogame?

Would you write a linear plot - like a book/movie - that happened to feature lots of opportunities for battles (some kind of war game, perhaps)? Would you write a detective story with branching plotlines depending on what the gamer uncovers (like the excellent Heavy Rain on the PS3)? Or would you write the flimsiest piece of crap that you could to allow for maximum gaming in the hopes that the game developers have more talent than you do? Do you present your story through in-game cutscenes, rendered cutscenes, text, or dialog that goes on while the gamer plays? Do you hire voice-actors, and if so, should you try to get a big name (like Haley Joel Osment for the Kingdom Hearts games or John Cleese for Fable III) or find the cheapest actors you can (Dynasty Warriors! Just Cause 2!)? If the setting is fictional, how much backstory do you provide?

The list seems endless, and just about every option has been tried, to varying effect. I've seen games with no voice acting but the most wonderful storylines (Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy VI, Skies of Arcadia) and games with voice-acting better than many animated movies (Kingdom Hearts, Bioware games like Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). I've seen games where the world's history is presented to you only in the instruction booklet (this happens more often than you might think), and games where a character walks and talks to you while you still control your own guy (making for some hilarious moments of personal space invasion that, sadly, doesn't even faze the speaker), and games with slick, stylized cutscenes that look more like comic book frames than anything else (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2). A great story can come in just about any form, when it comes to games. It just depends on what the developers have at their disposal.

Believe it or not, I'm writing this post specifically because of one game, one that is somewhat related to the next post that I shall be writing. It's called Too Human (for the Xbox 360, 2008), a hack-n-slash, loot-drop game whose setting is a sort of science-fiction retelling of Norse mythology.

Two quick, unimportant definitions first:

Hack-n-slash: the type of game where you control one guy (Baldur, in this case) who slices his way through hundreds of enemies as he progresses from room to room. You have a health bar that depletes every time you get hit. These games are primarily about the action.

Loot-drop: when the enemies die, they routinely drop new weapons and armor for you to try on or sell.

Yay! Anyway, I knew very little about Norse mythology going into this game. I knew that Thor was the god of thunder (and a great character to play as in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance because everytime you kill something he says "The son of Odin is triumphant!" or some other nonsense), and Loki was the trickster god responsible for Jim Carrey's The Mask, and Odin was important somewhere in there, but that was about it.

The story of this game is presented as if you have been dropped right into the middle of the game. You are given no backstory except through things that character mention off-hand, and with everyone who speaks to you you must figure out who the hell they are on your own. You learn that Baldur's wife or something died at some point, and after a mission or two you learn that some guy named Hod was responsible. For the entire time, the game plays as if you are somehow supposed to know the full backstory already, and believe me, it's frustrating. I realize that game developers probably aren't all that concerned with getting the gamer emotionally invested in their game, but it couldn't hurt to try. Some games do well with less story (like the "sandbox" style Just Cause 2, where I spend more time hijacking helicopters, flying them as high as they'll go, then blowing them up and freefalling for a good five minutes before pulling my chute as close to the ground as I can without giving the landscape a fresh pockmark), but your missions in Too Human are not just to go out and kill mindless monsters; they are directly involved with the game's overall plot, like the mission where your character decides to hunt Hod down and kill him for revenge.

After thoroughly not caring, I went and did a bit of research on Norse mythology, thereby learning much of the backstory on which this game apparently based itself, but even then the game made changes that still elude me. Granted, I've yet to finish the game, so perhaps all will be revealed in time, but there's a subtle difference between evoking mystery and confusion, as I believe I mentioned in a recent post (the one on The Warrior Heir, I think), and the writers for this game don't know the difference.

That, and the gameplay's not very fun, either.

I'm not saying every game has to have a well-told story. That'd be ridiculous, and more often than not all I want to do is plop down in my chair and beat up a few thugs or blow up some expensive-looking machinery or kill 2000 unfortunate Chinese men from the Han dynasty. I'm not even saying that all games in the style of Too Human have to have engaging plots (just look at Blizzard's masterpiece, Diablo II: 95% action, 5% plot, and it's one of the best games I own). I'm just saying that if you're going to make a game as obviously plot-centric as Too Human was, then spend the extra money on hiring writers who give a crap. Hell, I'd have done it for free if they'd have just called me up. I could have written something better. Or, ideally, they'd have remade Too Human as a game version of Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight series, which I shall be reviewing next. Stay tuned if you want to hear what a REAL story based on Norse mythology is like...

Two Heads are Better... (Iron Man 2 Review)

2010-05-16T22:05:00.000-05:00

I'm going to do my best to go see - and subsequently review - as many of the 2010 movies that I previewed as I can. We'll see how well I actually do with that...

For now, however, it's been easy, as I'd been planning on seeing Iron Man 2 with my friends since before I even bothered writing that post. I have a friend who basically IS Iron Man (he and some cohorts designed an iPhone app that can drive a car), and he happened to be in town this weekend, so of course we had to go see it. Before getting into the movie itself, though, I have to say that the latest trailer for The Last Airbender left my wife and me with our jaws on the floor. Ho. Ly. Crap.

I read a blog entry recently about the superhero movies of the past 22 years (I'd give you the link, but it was on IMDb's "hit list", and unfortunately it's gone now and I can't find it. Sorry). Specifically, it pointed out a general trend in superhero flicks ever since the 1978 Superman: a trend away from "world saving" and down to "self-saving". The superheroes of today increasingly no longer face a global threat (oh noes! Lex Luthor is going to destroy the world!) but one of personal strife (oh noes! My daddy doesn't like me!). After seeing Iron Man 2, I can safely say that the series isn't following this trend... so far.

A trend it MAY be following, however, is one that I mentioned in my 2010 movie preview blowout. So far, Marvel movie trilogies follow a pattern: the first movie is pretty good and shows the hero's origins as well as an appearance from some signature villain; the second movie is all out better than the first; the third royally sucks and forces Marvel to either reboot the series (Spider-Man) or resort to spin-offs (X-Men). Read on to see whether I believe that the Iron Man series follows this trend or not.

Now, the first Iron Man had some certain shortcomings to live up to with its sequel. Iron Man was good, particularly for an origin story, but a lot of people felt like the "villain" - Iron Monger - hardly had any screen time, not entirely realizing that the terrorist group of the first film (called the Ten Rings) was actually an adaptation of one of Iron Man's best - though "politically incorrect" - villains: Mandarin, who unleashes mystic powers from ten blingin' rings that he wears. Therefore, Iron Man villains as a whole got quite a bit of screentime, but oh well. I guess the reference was too subtle for most. All this to say, people have been expecting to see more of Whiplash - Iron Man 2's primary villain - than the roughly seven minutes of screentime devoted to Iron Monger.

They got their wish.

Iron Man 2 is more or less an improvement over its predecessor in every way. After a brief prologue, it kicks off six months later, and clearly Tony Stark and his Iron Man suit have become rather popular with the public. Unfortunately, not all is well with Tony. The palatium used in his handy dandy chest-mounted nightlight is slowly killing him, and somehow, he discovers that alcohol helps treat the symptoms, so as time goes on the poisoning gets worse and worse, and so does his alcoholism. The Tony Stark of the comics had a similar bout with booze, yet I don't recall it being a literal way of dealing with problems. Having the alcoholism be a way to fight his own demise (movie) vs. a way to forget his troubles (comics) creates a fundamental shift in how the audience views Tony. What if he attacked the bottle just because of the strain of being himself? Would today's audience sympathize with him as much as they apparently do with the movie version? I don't know, and apparently the filmmakers didn't want to find out, either. I thought it cheapened Tony as a character a little bit; the Tony Stark of the comics is a very deep and at times controversial character (just check out the Civil Wars series of Marvel comics and see if you still love Tony after that), but the filmmakers must not have wanted to make you doubt his heroism. Nice job, Hollywood. Way to fundamentally lighten the character's psychological makeup.

The one great thing about the alcohol issue is that it brings about the introduction of one of my favorite heroes, War Machine. When Tony becomes so involved with alcohol that he can barely stand, his buddy James Rhodes (aka "Rhodey") commandeers a suit and makes a few military adjustments, as you may have noticed from the poster above. The only strange thing, though, is that Don Cheadle plays Rhodey this time round, whereas in the first movie he was played by Terrance Howard. I don't know the reason for the switch - Terrance Howard is still alive, leaving one to assume that he and Marvel didn't see eye to eye concerning money - but I do have to say that I preferred Howard's performance to Cheadle's. The movie even felt the need to make Rhodey's entrance very, VERY obvious. By this I mean that when you first see him, the movie blasts you with obnoxious signs that "this guy walking in is supposed to be Rhodey even though he didn't look like this last time!" Oh well, Cheadle does fine when he's replaced onscreen by the War Machine suit, so I couldn't complain. As for the other actors, everyone does an admirable job for their roles, particularly Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow and Sam Rockwell (I didn't even know he was IN this movie!) as Stark's business rival, Justin Hammer. I'm fairly convinced that Rockwell's one of the most underrated actors of today, at least in terms of actors who occasionally still get to star in huge, mainstream blockbusters. I guess my sentiment's a bit limited, then, but still, I always forget just how good he is.

This was one of the most comic-bookey movies that I've ever seen. The action is more over-the-top (ahem Black Widow), cheeseball lines abound (Nick Fury: "I've got my eye on you... [hold pose for five more seconds]"), and a lot of times the whole thing just feels silly (the entire sequence that leads up to War Machine's debut). I don't mean that in a bad way. It is what it is. But where The Dark Knight feels like a psychological thriller starring a billionaire who just happens to sometimes dress as a giant bat, you are always keenly aware that Iron Man 2 is, first a foremost, a comic book movie. There's a wealth of fan service (none of which I'll ruin for you, save War Machine, who's already been revealed in the trailers and posters), and there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, mostly involving - I'm assuming - some spectacular ad libs from Mr. Robert Downey Jr. You will be entertained in this movie, but I felt the plot a trifle forced at times and serving as little more than an excuse to introduce War Machine and Stark's alcohol problems and also set up not only a third movie but also the upcoming Avengers film. Overall this was a shallow experience, but one of which you will love every minute. Go check it out.

And stay to the end of the credits, please. If you know anything about Marvel comics, you won't be disappointed.

*UPDATE*

So, my wife was kind enough to inform me that I am mistaken on one particular count. Apparently, the dark liquid that Tony drinks for much of the movie is chlorophyll, not alcohol, rendering my argument about Hollywood cheapening the character of Tony Stark more or less useless. Sorry, Hollywood. My bad. You guys still have to work on your character development, though, if you even know what the phrase means.

'Tis but a Scratch (The Warrior Heir Review)

2010-05-14T21:35:00.000-05:00

If you're wondering where my book reviews have disappeared to lately, the simple answer is that I'm in the middle of a two-book series that's so dense it's taking me forever to finish. In the meantime, though, I realized that I never did write a review for a book that I read before Collins' excellent Catching Fire, so I'll do that now.

The Warrior Heir (Chima, 2007) is the first in "The Heir Trilogy". To be honest, it caught my eye almost exclusively because its cover looked interesting in a cheesy-cool kind of way, but who hasn't done that with a book before? The Warrior Heir is written in - what's it called? - third-person omniscient, where the main character is "Jack" and not "I", yet you still know what he's thinking. It occasionally jumps around to other characters as the author sees fit, to give you a fuller story and to try to not confuse you, though, as you'll see, Chima doesn't entirely succeed.

The story primarily follows Jack, a teenager with a rather odd problem. He'd been told all his life that he was born with a heart defect and had to undergo special surgery, so he's always had to take some medicine prescribed to him by a doctor from London, Dr. Longbranch, but one day he forgets to take it, and suddenly he finds that it's as though a haze has been lifted from his body. His senses are sharper, and he's much stronger and faster. As it turns out, he's part of a line of Weir - a secret group containing Wizards (magic missile!), Enchanters (these aren't the droids you were looking for), Soothsayers (look into my crystal ball), Sorcerers (here, I made these special anti-poopstain underwear for you!), and Warriors (um, hyah?). From the title, I bet you can guess which one Jack is.

To put it bluntly, I didn't care for this book. To put it a bit more accurately, I didn't really care one way or the other about this book. I found out that it's Chima's first (I seem to be making it a habit of reading "first" books lately), and boy does it show. Not only is her plot weak, confusing, and meandering, but her editor should be shot. Typos abound, and there were two occasions in which the same thing was said twice - once by a character, once by the narrator. It was sloppy and embarrassing to read.

The characters are alright - Jack's your typical, bland hero who's as clueless as you are. His Aunt Linda's persuasive and highly dominant in all her scenes, and Jack's two best friends - Will and Fitch - show at least a little personality here and there. There's the neighbor with a secret (Snowbeard, as if you'd never guess from his name), and the mentor with a dark past. Not to mention all of your typical "schoolyard" stereotypes.

A good writer can have a clueless protagonist while still keeping the reader interested and aware of what's going on, but when the reader becomes even more confused than the hero, you know you've got a problem. The latter is how I felt with The Warrior Heir. All Weir are born with a stone inside them indicating what kind of Weir they are (wizard, warrior, etc.; you know, like Dungeons & Dragons classes), but Jack was born without one, even though he was technically a Weir. How someone can be Weir without the stone that makes them so, I don't know, and I don't recall Chima ever sufficiently explaining it, but that's what happens here. Even though he was meant to be a Wizard, the most powerful of the Weir, the doctor from London (a Wizard herself) decided to experiment on him by implanting a rare warrior stone while he was a baby. Wizards, you see, hold a tournament every so often to determine which house (Red Roses and White Roses - of the "War of the Roses" from your history book) will hold the most power until the next tournament. Each house brings a Warrior champion, and they fight to the death. Therefore, the Warrior Weirs have pretty much gone extinct, which is why Dr. Longbranch gives Jack medicine to subdue his powers: she doesn't want other Wizards learning of his existence until he's ready to receive training from her and her Rose house (whichever one it is; I don't remember or care).

Maybe it's just that my memory ain't what it once was, and that I'm in the process of reading something somewhat similar that blows this one out of the water, but this book was riddled with plot holes the size of Jasmine, my 18-pound cat who at this very moment is doing that weird kneading thing to the bit of blanket on my feet. Jack and his friends join his successful Aunt Linda in a hunt for a special sword, Eterne - excuse me, Shadowslayer - that helps draw out Jack's powers or something. It's so hard to say, because Jack shows abilities both of the Warrior and of the Wizard, but no one ever tells you which one is which, so when Jack starts shooting fire out of his sword, I actually thought that was him being a Wizard until another Warrior does the same thing later. Anyway, once the plotline with the sword comes to a close, you enter another one that I guess you could call the "training" montage, though during the entire sequence Jack is never given a reason for why he is being trained. He just is, and that should be enough. Turns out, of course, that he's being trained as a Warrior champion for an upcoming tournament, in which he will be pitted against another Warrior in a battle to the death.

It is this last bit that serves as Chima's big mystery for like the whole second half of the book: who is the Red Roses' champion? (now that I say that, I recall that Dr. Longbranch is with the White Roses. Now you can sleep tonight) The problem here is that I called it before it was EVER brought up to be a mystery. I won't ruin it for you, of course, but the twist was so obvious that it just made things boring, like "yes, yes, we KNOW who it is, please Chima, you're killing me, and I wish you'd do the same to your editor." Add in other ultra-typical elements, like the school bully who specifically has it in for Jack, the ex-girlfriend who tries to mess with Jack's emotions, and the "I'm getting so cool and important that I'm forgetting my friends" subplot, and you have one of the most standard - possibly sub-standard - young adult books I've ever read. Again, I can't strictly say that it was a bad book (save for atrocious editing), but it definitely wasn't good.

That being said, my wife read the next two in the series and could not put them down. She more or less felt the same as I did about The Warrior Heir, but from what she says, The Wizard Heir and The Dragon Heir are much, much better, which is good to hear. I like seeing writers improve, and Chima needed it. I'll let you know how the next ones are once I get around to them, but I expect it'll be a while.

But please, don't expect much from the ending. The climactic moment was so out of left field, so impossibly unpredictable, that it was nowhere near the "aha!" moment that I think Chima wanted it to be. I'm trying to think of a sufficiently similar example out there for you, but nothing's coming to mind. I guess... imagine the Helm's Deep sequence of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Remember how it ends? Now imagine that you had NEVER BEFORE been introduced to Gandalf or Eomer and had only vaguely heard mention of the Rohirrim prior to that moment. Would you be a little confused? Would you feel like it was a bit of a cop out on the writer's part? I don't know if I've ever been so disappointed with an action-adventure's finale before. Ugh.

2010 (or What's Left of It) Movie Preview Extravaganza!

2010-05-04T20:03:00.000-05:00

As I bear witness to more and more trailers, I am beginning to realize just what an excellent year for movies this shall be. Remember 2008? That summer was excellent (Iron Man, Horton Hears a Who!, Cloverfield, WALL-E, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Hellboy 2, Tropic Thunder, Speed Racer, and of course The Dark Knight), but 2009? Pitiful. Seems all I remember were Up and Star Trek, which were both absolutely incredible, but far outnumbered. Now, to be fair, I was in the middle of wedding planning at that point, so I didn't go and see a whole lot, but it didn't seem like there was much worth seeing.

The reason is simple. The good old Writer's Strike from a few years back took its full toll on 2009, when movies that would have been written during the strike would theoretically come out. My guess is that this is why Avatar came out in 2009: writing clearly wasn't a necessity for ole' Jimmy Cameron.

So, I decided that, to help keep track of all the excellence (or perhaps not) that's set to release this year, I've crafted this handy-dandy preview for the movies of 2010 that generally fall under my interests. I'm sad to say that The Back-Up Plan didn't make the cut, nor did the new Cats & Dogs movie. You'll just have to see for yourself what does. Note that I'm not going to include movies that are already out, like Clash of the Titans, Date Night, or How to Train Your Dragon. That'd just be silly. This is a preview, after all.

Iron Man 2

Release Date: May 7th
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Mickey Rourke, Gwyneth Paltrow
Premise: Tony Stark is back with his Iron Man suit, now known to the world for who he is. But has his public unveiling backfired, with the military and the government after his technology?
Reason to Watch: The first one was pretty good, and Marvel movies tend to follow a trend where the first one is good, the second one is incredible, and the third sucks.
Reason to Avoid: Replacing Terrance Howard with Don Cheadle? C'mon, guys.

Robin Hood

Release Date: May 14

Starring: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett
Premise: Reboot alert! Do I really have to say what this is going to be about?

Reason to Watch: Russell Crowe has this habit of rocking every movie he does.

Reason to Avoid: Might take itself too seriously. Also, who decided that they should turn Marion into Xena: Warrior Princess?

Shrek Forever After

Release Date: May 21

Starring: Mike Meyers, Cameron Diaz, Eddie Murphy
Premise: It's It's a Wonderful Life meets Shrek, in which our green hero gets to see what his world would be like if he'd never existed.

Reason to Watch: It's the final chapter in what has overall been a pretty good series of animated movies, and it appears as though they've laid off the pop culture references in favor of a plot.

Reason to Avoid: It'd have been better if they'd written Shrek into a world in which Shrek 3 never existed.

MacGruber

Release Date: May 21

Starring: Will Forte, Val Kilmer
Premise: Ex-special ops MacGruber must return to what he does best to stop his arch-nemesis from blowing up Washington.

Reason to Watch: The trailer looks promising, and this has always been a semi-amusing recurring character of SNL.

Reason to Avoid: The trailer lists it as "the best SNL sketch movie since Wayne's World". I love Wayne's World, but that's little comfort.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Release Date: May 28

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arteron, Ben Kingsley
Premise: The Prince of Persia must stop an evil Vizier from potentially destroying the world.

Reason to Watch: The videogame was awesome.

Reason to Avoid: Ben Kingsley enjoys picking crap, and why are white people playing Persians?

Splice

Release Date: June 4

Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chaneac
Premise: Since cloning is illegal, scientists decide to see where the line is drawn by making a mutant human.

Reason to Watch: We don't have enough good sci-fi thrillers these days.

Reason to Avoid: Mutant humans (not including X-Men) haven't been very popular since Total Recall.

The A-Team

Release Date: June 11

Starring: Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley
Premise: Reboot alert! Four veterans who were wrongly accused of a crime must clear their names and find the true culprits.

Reason to Watch: Hollywood's reboot of a classic TV show.

Reason to Avoid: There should be a cap on the number of reboots that Hollywood's allowed to do per year. Also, no Mr. T, lest he makes a surprise cameo.

The Karate Kid

Release Date: June 11

Starring: Jackie Chan, Jayden Smith, Taraji P. Henson
Premise: Reboot alert! When his mother moves to China with him, Dre learns to defend himself from a wushu master.

Reason to Watch: Jackie Chan and Jayden Smith are each excellent to watch, in my opinion.

Reason to Avoid: Many, many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Karate is NOT Chinese. Good lord. That's like making a movie about the Civil War and calling the North (or South) "Redcoats".

Toy Story 3

Release Date: June 18

Starring: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen
Premise: Andy's off to college, so Woody, Buzz and the gang are off to a toy's equivalent of a retirement home: a preschool.

Reason to Watch: The first two were awesome. The cast is stellar.

Reason to Avoid: None. This is made by Pixar; they can do no wrong.

Jonah Hex

Release Date: June 18

Starring: Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich
Premise: When a man's family is killed and his face seriously scarred, supernatural things begin to happen around him as he seeks out revenge.

Reason to Watch: Interesting concept; John Malcovich with mutton chops.

Reason to Avoid: Thousands. It's changed directors several times. The hole in Josh Brolin's cheek is unsettling, though nowhere near so much as Megan Fox's horrific butchering of a Southern accent. Looks to be DC's version of Ghost Rider: good concept, poor execution, horrid female lead.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Release Date: July 2

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner
Premise: Bella is caught between Edward and Jacob while a vampire army plans to exact revenge on our young heroine.

Reason to Watch: I understand why this series is popular. Really, I do. I was a psychology major, and I would LOVE to run a study that examines the differences between Twilight fans and the rest of the world. Also, this one should be the most male-friendly, what with the possibility of some fighting and all.

Reason to Avoid: Among other reasons, the next movie down comes out the same weekend.

The Last Airbender

Release Date: July 2

Starring: Noah Ringer, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone
Premise: In a war between the Fire Nation and the nations of Earth, Air and Water, one young boy, the long-awaited Avatar, may be the only hope for peace.

Reason to Watch: Based upon one of the best cartoon series I've seen in a long time, and it's guaranteed to have awesome special effects as well as interesting views on spirituality.

Reason to Avoid: M. Night Shyamalan's past few movies haven't been so hot, but at least he didn't write this one. Oh wait, yes he did. Uh oh.

Despicable Me

Release Date: July 9

Starring: Steve Carrel, Miranda Cosgrove, Kristen Wiig
Premise: A trio of adorable children befriend Gru, a would-be supervillian who begins to think that stealing the moon may not be the best idea after all.

Reason to Watch: Still hard to say, but this seems like your classic, heart-warming tale about an eccentric super-villian succumbing to the cuteness and love of adorable children.

Reason to Avoid: Hard to say. Russell Brand is in this movie, does that count? It does for me.

Predators

Release Date: July 9

Starring: Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace
Premise: Reboot alert! A group of elite fighters find themselves stranded on a planet with the deadliest hunters known to man.

Reason to Watch: Adrien Brody as a special ops gunman? What the crap? Is there nothing this man can't do?

Reason to Avoid: The Predator movies are not usually known for their quality. Also, Topher Grace is in this movie. He's not usually known for his quality, either.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Release Date: July 16

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Jay Baruchel, Monica Bellucci
Premise: A sorcerer recruits a boy unaware of his powers to fight his arch-nemesis.

Reason to Watch: Nic Cage is awesome in all he does, even when it's clear he's not even acting. Special effects look good. Plot's classic and good for younger audiences.

Reason to Avoid: Comes out the same weekend as the next movie down. Also, Nic Cage's movies lately haven't been so hot (except for Kick-Ass).

Inception

Release Date: July 16

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Ellen Page
Premise: A company creates a dreamworld made from one man's mind, then infiltrate it to steal his idea.

Reason to Watch: This looks seriously awesome. Plot sounds weird as hell, but just check out the trailer. Psychological thriller of the year, I guarantee it. Oh, and it's directed by Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento)

Reason to Avoid: Any that seem to exist are probably just illusions from your own dreamworld.

Dinner for Schmucks

Release Date: July 23

Starring: Steve Carrel, Paul Rudd, Stephanie Szostak
Premise: (Sorry for the poor picture) Remake alert! Tim's company holds a monthly event called "dinner for idiots", in which the employee who shows up with the biggest doof wins certain benefits. He believes he has found a winner in Barry (Carrel).

Reason to Watch: Paul Rudd and Steve Carrel could have starred in Catwoman and it would have been awesome.

Reason to Avoid: Haven't seen any ratings yet, but these two have a habit of starring in R movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and I Love You, Man, which are both great, but don't appeal to everybody.

Ramona and Beezus

Release Date: July 23

Starring: Joey King, Selena Gomez, Bridget Moynahan
Premise: Ramona Quimby's always causing trouble for her older sister, Beezus.

Reason to Watch: Anyone who's a fan of the books should totally dig this adaptation. The girl they got for Ramona looks perfect.

Reason to Avoid: No special effects in a family movie? Who DOES that nowadays? Hopefully America won't be so shallow.

Beastly

Release Date: July 30

Starring: Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Hudgens, Mary-Kate Olsen
Premise: Semi-reboot alert! A modern-day retelling of the classic Beauty and the Beast fairytale.

Reason to Watch: Interesting look for the "beast", and I'm curious to see how they make the old tale modern.

Reason to Avoid: Vanessa Hudgens.

The Other Guys

Release Date: August 6

Starring: Will Ferrel, Mark Wahlberg
Premise: (Sorry for the poor picture) A pair of New York detectives seek to be just like their idols... only things don't go exactly how they intended.

Reason to Watch: Will Ferrel and Mark Wahlberg could be a potentially brilliant comedic pairing.

Reason to Avoid: Ferrel's gotten a bit stale lately.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Release Date: August 13

Starring: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin
Premise: In order to win the heart of Ramona, Scott Pilgrim must defeat her Seven Evil Exes.

Reason to Watch: The comic book-style effects might just be zany enough to be awesome, and what teenage boy doesn't want to prove himself to his girlfriend by destroying her jerk exes?

Reason to Avoid: Like Will Ferrel, Michael Cera keeps on playing the same character over and over and over and over...

The Expendables

Release Date: August 13

Starring: Every B-movie action star EVER... plus Jet Li, minus Jean Claude Van Dam
Premise: A team of kick-ass mercenaries blows stuff up. Does the plot really matter?

Reason to Watch: See category labeled "Starring".

Reason to Avoid: See category labeled "Starring".

Centurion

Release Date: August 27 (limited)

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko
Premise: After the Roman Ninth Legion almost gets wiped out by Celts, the survivors cross into Celt territory... I'm guessing to extract revenge.

Reason to Watch: Haven't seen a lot of sword-and-sandal lately...

Reason to Avoid: The last sword-and-sandal movie I saw was Clash of the Titans.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Release Date: September 10

Starring: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller
Premise: (Sorry for the bad picture) As the T-Virus continues to spread, Alice and Claire make for Los Angeles, a supposed safe haven.

Reason to Watch: Milla Jovovich. Also, a little bit of zombie-killing never hurt anyone.

Reason to Avoid: The first three were each a bit of a gorefest. Also, once a series reaches its 4th, it's often best to, you know, stop (See: Shrek Forever After).

The Eagle of the Ninth

Release Date: September 25

Starring: Channing Tatum, Jamie Bell, Donald Sutherland
Premise: (Sorry for the bad picture) A band of intrepid soldiers embark on a quest to steal back their plotline from Centurion.

Reason to Watch: Um, Donald Sutherland?

Reason to Avoid: Come on, this movie's about the SAME group of soldiers that Centurion's about! That just seems criminal.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole

Release Date: September 25

Starring: Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham
Premise: Soren's always listened to tales of the Owls of Ga'Hoole, famed warriors from long ago. Now he may get the chance to follow in their... wingbeats?

Reason to Watch: Visuals look fan-friggen-tastic. Directed by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen).

Reason to Avoid: As someone on IMDb put it, this may be this year's Golden Compass. God I hope not.

MegaMind

Release Date: November 5

Starring: Will Ferrel, Jonah Hill, Brad Pitt
Premise: When MegaMind, a supervillian, finally kills the hero, he grows bored and decides to build a new one. But when the new hero turns evil, MegaMind must turn hero to stop him.

Reason to Watch: Solid cast; Ferrel's MegaMind might just be eccentric enough to work.

Reason to Avoid: The Incredibles will probably be better.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I

Release Date: November 19

Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson Rupert Grint
Premise: Harry, Ron and Hermione seek out a way to finally defeat Lord Voldemort, once and for all.

Reason to Watch: The Potter story is all about love, and good triumphing over evil. If nothing else, this should set up for a killer Part II movie next summer. Also, this one's in 3D!

Reason to Avoid: Nitpicking fans of the books have a lot to complain about in previous Potter outtings.

Red Dawn

Release Date: November 24
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Isabel Lucas, Josh Hutcherson
Premise: Reboot alert! A group of teens defend their town from invading Russians... AND Chinese.
Reason to Watch: Russians and Chinese make for great badguys, AND they both love red, so the title makes sense.
Reason to Avoid: It sounds like they're just making the same movie again, only adding China. Hmm, sounds like The Karate Kid. Weird.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Release Date: December 10

Starring: Ben Barnes, Skandar Keynes, Georgie Henley
Premise: (Note: poster-picture is fan-made) Two of the Pevensie children return to Narnia to travel with Prince Caspian to the edge of the world.

Reason to Watch: This was arguably one of the best of the seven Chronicles of Narnia novels.

Reason to Avoid: Not a fan of Christian symbolism? You probably don't like the Chronicles of Narnia movies or books, then.

TRON Legacy

Release Date: December 17

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde
Premise: Almost-reboot alert! The son of Flynn from the first movie rediscovers the game machine in which his father has been trapped for the past 20 years.

Reason to Watch: Cool special effects, potentially huge sentimental value.

Reason to Avoid: You'd think there should be a limit to how much time is allowed to pass between a movie and its sequel.

So, there you have it. 31 movies of potential awesomeness. A whopping 7 are reboots (8 if you count Eagle of the Ninth as being a reboot of Centurion), 8 are sequels, and 7 are adaptations. Perhaps my taste is just in things that I've heard of already, so selection bias may be responsible there. Whatever the case, this looks to be a killer year. Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, and Kick-Ass were all excellent and made up for Clash of the Titans. If 75% of the above-previewed movies are as good as those three, 2010 will be little short of epic. Can't wait.

His Power Level is.... OVER 9000!!!!!!!! (Disgaea Review)

2010-05-02T17:52:00.000-05:00

If you know me, you should be shocked that I've yet to review a videogame on this blog. Well, your troubles are over, mister, because that's what I'm here to do.

I am a big fan of videogames. Have been ever since I sat in my big brother's room and watched him play Tecmo Bowl. My parents had a suburban with a TV mounted in the back of the center console, and my dad was clever enough to rig up a VCR under one of the back seats and a Nintendo Entertainment System under the other, so for long car rides we played a lot of Baseball All Stars and RC Pro AM and the occasional Legend of Zelda, though I was worthless at that one. I've gotten better and would wager that, in my prime, there was no finer Biggoron swordsman in all the world when it came to Ocarina of Time. When my childhood best friend moved in next door and we got to know each other, I discovered that he and his older brother had a whole closetful of games at their disposal, and I was hardly seen in my own home again until my parents, who missed me dearly, were distraught enough to buy a Super Nintendo for my "first grade graduation". They'd gotten it from a friend, so it came with about fifteen games, among them F-Zero and Star Fox, which quickly became two of my favorites. It's sad to see that neither franchise has transitioned onto the newest consoles, but oh well. Not everyone's so lucky as Mario.

In many ways, games have come a long way since then. Near-photorealism is upon us (just look at the racing games out there nowadays). Gone are the days of text-based dialog. Everyone's voice-acted nowadays, for better or worse (better = Kingdom Hearts; worse = Just Cause 2, or any of the Dynasty Warriors games). Soundtracks have become so well-composed that you can buy them in stores (though just last night I encountered a band dedicated to making electric-guitar versions of 8-bit game themes from the late 80's and early 90's, so the classics live on!).

In many other ways, though, games have perhaps NOT come very far. As mentioned before, sometimes the voice acting is so bad that you wish you just turn it off completely (but you can't. Ever.) Storylines have become much more complex thanks to dramatic increases in memory to allow for longer games (see: any Bioware game, like Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, or Jade Empire), yet oftentimes the storylines, simply put, are utterly worthless. Depending on the game, you may end up "playing a movie", where you find that overly-long cinematic cut scenes take up more of your time than gameplay (see: Xenosaga), or you may find yourself playing through a game whose story is so convoluted that you don't have the slightest idea why you're doing things in the first place (see: Too Human, which I shall be discussing further in a later post). Many games nowadays have become so shallow in their stories that it's embarrassing to me as a writer.

And don't even get me started on game-movie tie-ins. Just don't.

One of my favorite genres is strategy, specifically grid-based Strategy-RPGs first made famous (as far as I know) by Final Fantasy: Tactics. This basically involves having about 8 characters spread out over a map separated into a grid a bit like chess. The characters move one at a time, depending on their speed stat, and you go around taking out the enemy until there's none left on the board. You win, you move on to the next map after some story, and you repeat, with character customization going on in-between battles. If it sounds simple, it isn't. Final Fantasy: Tactics featured 20 different classes for your non-storyline characters, and each one offers a completely different way of playing: warriors, archers, black mages, white mages, or the oddball calculator, just to name a few. These games in this genre are deep, time-consuming, and have a reputation (to me, anyway) as having some of the best storylines around.

Enter Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.

From what I understand, Disgaea first arrived in Japan for the PlayStation 2 in 2001, then in the US two years later, while I was in high school. I don't know how exactly I became aware of it, but somehow or another I picked it up. What followed was possibly the closest experience to taking drugs that I've ever experienced. My grades slipped because I had to keep playing. I didn't see my friends. I definitely didn't see my parents. My cat started spending more time in the gameroom with me, leaving me to suspect that my parents hired him to make sure I didn't die of exhaustion from playing too much, like that Korean guy did with World of Warcraft a few years ago.

My total playtime for Disgaea? 142 hours, 35 minutes and 35 seconds. That's not including the combined 148 hours, 55 minutes and 7 seconds I've spent on the two sequels, or the 111 hours, 44 minutes and 43 seconds on Makai Kingdom, the spiritual spin-off made by the same company.

Total time spent on Nippon Ichi's Strategy-RPG drugs? 403 hours, 15 minutes and 25 seconds.

That's almost 17 straight days. I kept waiting for my friends to stage an intervention. Had they done so, I may have reclaimed two weeks of my life.

And I would have been worse off for it.

Disgaea: Hour of Darkness stars Laharl, the son of the Overlord of the Netherworld. He awakens to find that his father has died (from choking on a pretzel, as you later find out), and that Laharl has been asleep in his coffin for two years. His vassal, Etna, has woken him because other overlords have begun to fight for his father's throne, and it's up to him to claim it for himself. What follows is a multi-chapter story about your typical anti-hero as he tries, in vain, to act like a big tough demon. He meets an "angel assassin" in the form of Flonne, your typical Japanese young girl who is all innocence, to the point where she doesn't even know what an assassin really is. Their relationship provides the majority of the character development, as Flonne strives to teach Larharl what love and goodness are and he tries to ignore her and continue his masculine, hilarious path towards domination.

Aside from the surprisingly poignant moments concerning love and its ability to turn demons and angels into friends, it's the humor that really pushes the story along. This is one of those games that knows it's a game, kind of like how Deadpool of the X-men universe knows that he's in a comic and often comments on it. One of the "overlords" you fight is this super-effeminate man who's so overconfident yet so impotent that Laharl renames him "Mid-boss", since there's no way that he could be the boss of the whole chapter and must therefore be a mid-chapter miniboss. Also, Etna has a horde of slaves at her disposal: an army of demonic penguins called Prinnies.

I love these guys. They speak in high-pitched voices and call everyone "Dood!" as they pull bombs and knives from their goofy little fannypacks. They are human souls sent to the Netherworld for their sins. They are lazy, overworked, and utterly expendable.

Other sources of humor come from a cameo by overacting Power Rangers (one of whom speaks as though reading deadpan from cue cards) and a zombie who wields the ultimate power-up: a horse wiener. Seriously. When Laharl finds out that this zombie wields a horse wiener, he almost runs for it because he's so scared. Disgaea's sense of humor is kooky and wacky in the way that only a Japanese game can be. Just check out the item list I provided at the end of this post if you still aren't convinced.

That's all well and good, but what's the gameplay like? This is a videogame, after all.

Simply put, it plays similarly to what I described up top about Final Fantasy: Tactics. You use about 6 or 8 characters on a grid-style map, only this time you choose all of your characters' actions at once, let them fly, then let the computer take a turn. This allows you to set up combos between your characters, and chains where several of your guys attack the same enemy in a row. This makes your attacks do more and more damage as the chain increases, forcing you to strategize which of your characters will attack in what order so as to unload the most damage.

To make this even more complex, strewn about the maps are geo panels, which are colored squares with different effects like "experience + 50%", or "attack - 50%", or "invulnerability". This throws a huge monkey wrench into the mix, for you may come across a map where multiple enemies are lounging behind a solid line of geo panels that say "no crossing" or something like that, meaning that you have to find some way to circumnavigate the panels in order to get to them, even if it means throwing your team to the right side of the map where a bunch of badguys lie in wait, perched on "attack +100%" panels for the sole purpose of making your life a living hell. The game becomes one huge puzzle where you not only have to pit your spatial skills against the computer but also your mathematical skills. Despite the sometimes juvenile humor, this is a thinking man's game, and I'm not even going to go into what it takes to set off a "color chain". Just believe me when I say that I've spent thirty minutes at a time without moving a single character or taking a single action. This is chess on the most bizarre of steroids.

I saw a poster recently. It was one of those "inspirational" posters that have become so immensely popular on lolcats-style websites like Failblog or, of course, VeryDemotivational.com. It said "Disgaea: Like getting your degree in statistics, but with anime characters and demon penguins", and I think that pretty much sums things up. This game, and its sequels and spin-offs, is all about numbers. Where most Strategy-RPGs have a level-cap of, say, 100, Disgaea allows you to level up all the way to 9999.

That's right. Level 9999.

None of this sissy level 100 crap. By the time your character has attained level 9999, he's probably doing so much damage that the game can't even show the numbers in the bottom-left-hand corner like it usually does, but must resort to something like "2113923k" or more, depending on how insane you are.

Your character classes have better versions of themselves to unlock, and your characters can "reincarnate", which means that they start over at level 1, but their base stats will be higher depending on how many levels they have stored up from reincarnating multiple times. This means that your goal is not to just get your guys up to level 9999. Your goal is to level him up as much as you can, reincarnate him, and repeat until you've built up thousands of levels so that your base stats rock (for instance, if your base attack stat is 40, say, instead of 20, this means that as your guy levels up, his attack power will be twice as high).

Then, to top it all off, there's the Item World. Items are every bit as complex as your own characters. Weapons, armor, and accessories like the above-mentioned horse wiener often contain "specialists", which are little inhabitants who increase the capabilities of your items in various ways (raising its attack, defense, poison resistance, etc.). If you wish for a more powerful version of your sword, say, you can go inside it, where you can find its specialists and "subdue" them, which makes them twice as powerful AND allows you to move them from one item to another. Every item is its own dungeon.

Now you see where those 17 days went.

The further down into your items you go, the stronger they get. Regular items have a level cap of 40 or 60 (I can't remember), while rare items have a higher cap, and "legendary" items have a cap of 100. If you can make it all the way to the 100th floor inside that item, you will face a boss who wields the item of the next-highest rank over your own (so if you are inside the 2nd-best sword, for instance, the boss on the 100th floor will be using the 1st-best sword, which is in fact the only way to obtain the very, very best weapons). With each level that you descend, the enemies get tougher, and leaving prematurely requires that you use a Mr. Gency Exit, of which you don't get a terribly large amount. Thankfully, you can leave after every 10th floor without a penalty, and you can always go back inside after having left. You just have to be able to survive ten floors in a row, ending with a boss battle. Good luck with that when you're down in the furthest reaches and the enemies are perhaps dozens of levels higher than your allies.

This game is a strategy-RPG-lover's dream. There is so much to do that you're never left with an empty checklist. You're always leveling up, or finding better items, so you are always telling yourself "just one more" until you find that it's 1:30 in the morning and you have a paper due tomorrow that you haven't even started. The story and characters are irreverent, but they have soul and I promise you will care for them by journey's end. The 2D sprites don't look so good on today's TVs, but you don't play Strategy-RPGs for their graphics. Maybe that's why, in today's world of so much flash and so little substance (here's lookin' at you, Avatar), Strategy-RPGs seem to have so little market.

I will leave you with a brief list of some of my favorite weapons and their hilarious one-line descriptions. Please note that these are actually from Disgaea 2, as I have misplaced my Disgaea 1 strategy guide and don't want to bother scouring the internet for the information.

GLOVE WEAPONS

Double Slap - Sorry baby! Why you make me do that?
Playful Punch - Ow ow ow OUCH! It's not funny anymore!
Father's Fist - I'm not angry. I'm just upset. Now come here.
Slap Back - Cook your own dinner from now on!
7 Year Kill - Not bad, but I wish it worked faster.
Star Shatter - Finally, a way to punch the sun.

SWORDS

Lazy Sword - Buy a better sword later.
Broadsword - It's broad! It's a sword! It's a Broadsword!
Bastard Sword - A real jerk at times, but gets the job done.
Katzbalger - Cool, but don't use this on your cat.

SPEARS

Ashigaru - Your standard, stabby spear.
Beckdoraban - Whatever it means, the name sounds strong.
Trident - Basically an oversized fork.
Bone Spear - Good, but it could gain a few pounds.
Benkei's Glaive - Useful when guarding bridges.
Halberd - Cuts, jabs, spins, and makes julienne fries!
Elder Spear - Complains to younger spears.
Singularity - You'll never find another quite like it.
Gungnir - Like a small dog, returns when thrown.
Holy Longinus - The Godkiller. How is that holy?

BOWS

Toy Bow - You've gotta be kidding.
Elven Bow - A famous elf used it to return a lost ring.
Assassin Bow - Best if shot from a grassy knoll.
Demon Bow - Made in Hell by underpaid, overworked imps.
Angel Bow - Made in Heaven by underworked wimps.
Forest Bow - Ironic, because it's made of dead trees.
Platinum Bow - Has sold over 1,000,000 copies.
Soul Eater - Beware its strange foot fetish.
Evil Hunter - When evil's afoot, shoot it in the leg.
Lovely Cupid - Girly love energize! Maximum limit reached!
[NOTE: That's the best bow in the game...]

GUNS

Trumpet - Make sure to put your lips on the right end.
Godfather - It'll make you an offer you can't refuse.
Spray Gun - Works best on oversized insects.
Intoccabile - It means Untouchable, so hands off!

AXES

Gang Axe - Come here and let me axe you a question!
Primitive Axe - Inspired by a giant monolith.
Dwarven Axe - They're fun to toss, but you'll get in trouble.
Kill All - No, really. It kills all.
Serial Axe - Snap, crackle, pop! You're dead.
Master Axe - This is for you, the master of axing.
Emperor's Axe - Used by Czars to keep the proletariat in line.
Diabolic Axe - Overlords and axes - like chicken and waffles!

STAVES

Magician Wand - Will not help pull rabbits out of hats.
Cardinal Staff - Hit 70 home runs with this.
Druid Staff - *Stonehenge not included.
Force Staff - You won't need a target computer anymore.
Chief's Staff - Great for slap shots.
Crimson Wand - Can it... BE any more red?
Omniscient Rod - Sees you when you're sleeping. How creepy.

With No Power Comes No Responsibility (Kick-Ass Review)

2010-04-27T19:32:00.000-05:00

Kick-Ass' premise is deceptively simple: why is it that no one in the real world dresses up like a superhero and fights crime? This is the question that Dave, your average high-school boy, asks at the movie's onset. It's a fair question: haven't you ever thought of buying/making your own costume and then going out and taking on criminals? I know I have. This is precisely what Dave does, though it doesn't exactly turn out as he thought. Before long, Dave - or "Kick-Ass" - gets swept up in a much bigger plot involving crime lords and a lot of blood.

I was hooked on this movie from the moment I saw the first trailer, and I'm happy to say that I wasn't disappointed. There's really nothing special about Dave, as he himself clearly points out, aside from the superpower of being "invisible to girls". He's just your average high-school guy who, I'll be honest, reminded me a little too much of myself at that tender young age. When he finally dons his wetsuit - excuse me, costume - he admits that really all it took was some optimism and naivete. His actions over the course of this movie speak volumes: he has no "defining moment" of superhero origin, where his parents are murdered by criminals and he sets out to avenge them, no girlfriend raped and murdered by thugs in some dark alley, nothing. And with no powers to encourage him, there really is no reason for him to become Kick-Ass. Yet he does. He goes out and risks his life for people he's never met just because it's the right thing to do and he's willing to take a stand. He was a fantastic character, and well-played, too. The only other thing I'd ever seen Aaron Johnson in was Shanghai Knights, where he played Charlie Chaplin as a boy, but that hardly counts, as he was 13 and it was a minor role (and not a terribly good movie, though it kills me to say that). I hope to see him in more.

As the above poster may suggest, there are other "superheros" involved in the world of Kick-Ass, and it is with them that things get really interesting. The first time you see Hit Girl and Big Daddy, the latter - Hit Girl's father - is all smiles and encouragement as he pulls a pistol from his belt and shoots his 11-year-old daughter in the chest, blowing a hole in her pink down coat and sending a few feathers into the air for amusing effect. Don't worry - she's wearing a bulletproof vest, and her considerate father was merely showing her what it felt like to get shot in order to prepare her for the real thing.

Nic Cage's performance as Big Daddy was far more endearing than I expected it to be. He always calls Mindy - aka Hit Girl - "Child" with an odd southern accent, and he wears this big dopey grin to match his innocent eyes and his "I clearly used to be a cop" mustache. But when he wears his Batman-like costume, he speaks to everyone but Mindy like Adam West's campy version of Batman from the 1960's. Hearing Nic Cage impersonate Adam West alone made the movie worth watching. Ironically, if you, you know, remove the weaponry and death from the equation, Big Daddy's interactions with his daughter are the perfect example of a great dad. You can tell that they love and trust each other deeply. Big Daddy does everything he can to teach and protect Hit Girl, while the latter struggles to learn what it means to do things on her own, outside of the training room. They listen to each other, and they do the best that they can to bring out the most in each other. It was touching, really, until the next scene finds Hit Girl running men through with a double-bladed glaive.

Hit Girl, meanwhile, was expertly played, given that the actress turned 13 this year. From her character comes the majority of the critisism for the movie, though I think that some people can't live without getting in a fuss over something. She's an adorable 11-year-old girl who enjoys wearing pink... and slicing people to ribbons with sharp, pointy objects. The first time you see her in her superhero costume, she calls the merry band of druggies in the room "cunts", from which spawned a whole host of controversy that I just don't feel makes much sense. The actress has stated in interviews that she would NEVER say those kinds of things outside of the set, to the point where she won't even say the name of the movie in public but just refers to it as "the film" or "Kick-Butt". So if she's not psychologically disturbed by playing such a character, whom are the critics trying to protect by attacking her character? Their kids? If these people are taking their kids to go see Kick-Ass, then a few colorful remarks by a young actress are bound to be the least of their problems. That leaves, then, the adult audience, who hears the same language - and more! - from almost every other character in the movie, but are these groups concerned about adult men saying such terrible things? Who knows. I doubt very much that they do. I'm surprised that no one's accused these critics of being sexist. That'd be funny: throw critics at those critics and see what happens. I bet they'd start reenacting scenes from Kick-Ass.

Ever since we saw Star Trek last year (and found it to be fantastic), I've been conscious of an observation by my then-fiancee:sStrong female characters, and the curious lack thereof. In Star Trek, Uhura and Spock's mom were pretty much the only women present for more than five seconds, and while both of them brought a lot to the film, in the end it was all about Kirk and Spock. This is all too common in action/superhero flicks, with notable exceptions like Kill Bill and perhaps even The Fantastic Four. Women are usually just there for romance, but seeing as how Hit Girl is only 11, that element gets taken clean out, leaving only a strong-willed girl with more depth than you may initially think. This is a good thing, since the romance of the movie was not particularly exciting or, I thought, well drawn-out. I'm not saying Kick-Ass' love interest wasn't a good character, or their interactions poor, but after a certain scene, she becomes pretty useless, while Hit Girl takes the spotlight more and more.

Mark Strong, meanwhile, has found a niche in playing rough, dark badguys with a certain flair of humor. You may have seen him before as Septimus in Stardust, or the evil Lord Blackwood in the recent Sherlock Holmes. And Christopher Mintz-Plasse (aka McLovin from Superbad) plays his usual, dorky-type character, though of course he does it well. That role was all but made for him.

I could go on, but you get the idea. This is a movie made for anyone who loved Kill Bill. It's the kind where you find yourself laughing because you've just realized that you're watching an 11-year-old girl in a school uniform and purple wig slicing off the leg of a huge hoodlum. More than most superhero movies I've seen in quite a while, you feel as though the people behind the masks really are people, with their own personal struggles to face outside of the plot's central badguy. But if you don't want to see what a man looks like when placed in a massive microwave (a combination of Nickelodeon's "Inside-Out Boy" and an overturned bowl of pasta sauce, as it turns out), then you may want to skip this one. The blood and gore is as over-the-top as it was in Kill Bill, so take that how you will. I, meanwhile, will be heading down to the local comics store to check out the original source for this movie.

Hungry? Why Wait? (Catching Fire Review)

2010-04-24T17:59:00.000-05:00

I waited as long as I could. Really. After reading The Hunger Games, I immediately went out and bought the sequel, Catching Fire, before I realized that this may not be the best idea. The Hunger Games was really, really good (in case you didn't read my review). It was the first in a trilogy about a young woman, Katniss, who lives in a world where twelve oppressed districts are ruled by the Capitol. Each year, the districts must hold a "reaping", where one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 are chosen to compete in the Hunger Games, an annual "celebration" held by the Capitol to remind the districts of who's in charge. See, several years ago, the districts rose up against the Capitol in rebellion, but they lost. Now the Capitol holds all the wealth, all the power, while the twelve districts all but starve in the most miserable conditions one can imagine. Anyway, twenty-four teens are chosen for the Hunger Games. They are thrown into a large arena. The last one surviving is declared the victor.

Sound depressing? I suppose it is. The Hunger Games was an emotional ride filled with small gems of happiness amongst an onslaught of pain and misery. Twenty-four teenagers are thrown against their will (except for the "Careers", but that's another story) into this arena. Twenty-three must die while their parents and friends are forced to watch the highlights, as if this was some football game being covered on SportsCenter. That any glimpses of humanity could be found within such a dark world is remarkable, yet the story that Suzanne Collins has unraveled here is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

So, why did I not want to read Catching Fire yet? Well, the third and final book of the trilogy's not out and won't be until August, that's why. I thought perhaps I could hold out until at least July before reading Catching Fire, but I cracked. Call it weakness. Now that I've finished it, things are just as I feared. I have to try to keep myself together and not go crazy from anticipation. If The Hunger Games was really, really good, then somehow, Catching Fire was even better.

For some reason, when I started reading this series I thought that this was Suzanne Collins' first book series to write, but I was quite wrong. She's been writing since 1991, and has even written for some Nickelodeon shows like the excellent Clarissa Explains It All. Eventually, she tried her hand at novels with the five-part The Underground Chronicles series before tackling The Hunger Games. As a budding writer, this came as something of a relief, for if this had been her first book series, I may have cried. It just wouldn't have been fair for someone to be so good so early on in their career.

I'm going to be as spoiler-free as possible, but I won't hide the fact that your narrator, Katniss, survives the first book and is once again your eyes and ears.

Over the course of this book, I finally figured out why this series does such an absurdly good job of taking hold of your heartstrings and slinging them around like some mad spinster. The books are in first-person. This puts you right in the action and, if the author's good enough (which Suzanne Collins is), will trick your brain into seeing the events of the books more as memories than a fictional story. What keeps your brain even more actively involved in the story is that Katniss narrates in the present (as in, "she hunts for food", not "she hunted for food"). It may sound strange, but it works disturbingly well.

Catching Fire picks up right where The Hunger Games left off. Let's just say that "unrest" is the name of the game here, as the events of the first book have set things in motion that might not be able to be stopped, and Katniss is right in the middle of it all. What amazes me about this series is that Katniss is a very intelligent girl, yet often times her sound reasoning leads her to assume things that are incorrect, so that when something counter to her expectations happens, not only can you instantly see why her assumptions were incorrect, but the surprises manage to be genuine without being cheap. Plot twists abound, yet never did I once think "what the hell?" A few twists actually garnered an audible "oh no!" or a "craaaaap" from me, and I rarely, if ever, speak with my books. Oh, and darn it all, but this one had a moment that made me cry, too. I'd say that reading from a girl's point of view has turned me into one, but that'd be sexist and rude, so I won't.

To be honest, I don't have much else to say about Catching Fire without spoiling things. Katniss and the characters around her are deep and fascinating and constantly full of surprises. This book will keep you glued to the edge of your seat for the entire ride. You will not be able to put it down, and you will not, as I must, be able to wait until the final book hits the shelves this fall. Please do not miss these books.

YELL AT IT! (How to Train Your Dragon Review)

2010-04-21T22:35:00.000-05:00

I bet I know what you're thinking. "Hey, I really liked that movie. Hiccup was perfectly voiced by Jay Baruchel in a wonderfully dry, humorous manner, and Toothless the dragon acted like a weird but lovable combination of my neighbor's cat and Stitch from that Disney movie. But his eyes! Toothless' eyes were SO emotive! The dynamic between Hiccup and Toothless was so powerful that neither of them had to speak a word in order to communicate. I went home and downloaded the soundtrack as soon as I could because it was so amazing, and boy were there some funny moments!"

I completely agree with you, but I'm actually here to review the book, not the movie. Go see the movie though. Please. Not including Pixar films, it's the best non-live-action thing I've seen since... well... Shrek 2 at least, and probably earlier than that.

That being said, the book is something entirely different than the movie, which can only be described as a "loose" interpretation, looser than (I'm assuming) the Dante's Inferno videogame version of the old poem written by some Italian man suffering a mid-life crisis. I'm not saying for a moment that How to Train Your Dragon - the book! - is bad. In fact, it's quite good, but don't expect anything even remotely resembling the movie, which to me was a CGI version of what Eregon should have been and in every way wasn't.

Sorry, had to get my weekly dig at the Inheritance Cycle there. Whew, glad that's over.

So what's the HTTYD book like, exactly? Well, for starters, I suspect that it was written with, say, 10-11 year-old boys in mind. The narration is simple and straightforward, and it is lightly funny, though rarely at a level higher than that grasped by a prepubescent male. Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III is the young son of Stoick the Vast, who is the leader of the Hairy Hooligan tribe of Viking warriors. Hiccup is not like the other Vikings, who are aggressive and loud and generally enjoy killing things and/or throwing them a great distance. No, Hiccup is small, and thoughtful, and is the only Viking around who has read enough books to have learned Dragonese. Dragons in this world are dog-sized pets captured and trained to serve primarily as food-gatherers, not mounts. Vikings are instructed that the louder you yell at your dragon, the better it obeys. When Hiccup and the other boys go out to the caves to capture their dragons, he winds up with Toothless, a tiny, "terrier-sized" dragon of the most common variety. Now Hiccup has just a few months to train the whiny, singularly uncooperative Toothless for the initiation ceremony, or he'll be expelled from the Viking tribe forever.

This was, first and foremost, an enjoyable book. Many of the adult Vikings (most prominently the boys' trainer, Gobber) have more dialog set in ALL CAPS than not, since they are always yelling. Given the target audience, there aren't as many poop jokes as you may think, but there are some (and let's face it: boys don't really grow up when it comes to this subject. I giggled my pants off during these scenes). On at least every other page there is an adolescent-style sketch of a character, or a scene or item or something, as though Hiccup himself drew on the pages to give you a better idea of what his friends really looked like. The scenes go quickly, and it is an incredibly fast read. I must have finished it in about three hours, tops. As it turns out, this book is part of a seven-part series that chronicle the life of Hiccup, a great hero in the fictional history of these Vikings. I had no idea.

It has all your typical young fiction elements: teachers who don't understand, bullies, unorthodox friends who stick out even more than the protagonist, oblivious parents, happy endings. It's predictable, but not cliche. You can tell the writer had fun with it because you'll have fun reading it. I recently learned that the writer is British, which doesn't at all surprise me. They have a certain wit about them when they write. Try reading something by Neil Gaiman, like Stardust, which, much like this current story, involves an absolutely fantastic movie and a pretty good but incredibly different book.

I'd have enjoyed HTTYD more were I only 10 or 11, or even up to perhaps 14. That's pretty much the age group for whom I'd recommend it. It's lighthearted, and the ending is indeed satisfying, but where the movie touched me deeply (one IMDb reviewer says that it won the "Heartland Truly Moving Picture Award" in Indianapolis, and I believe it), the book just sort of skims the surface. I would still recommend reading it because of its British humor and fun story, but if you're looking for a moving, human experience, stick with the movie. I don't know if I'll ever read any of the other books in the seven-part series (the other books have titles like How to be a Pirate, or How to Speak Dragonese, in case you were wondering), but I'll let you know if I do.

Speaking of how to speak Dragonese, that was definitely my favorite part of the book. At one point it offers a few key phrases, so that you, too, will be able to tell your dragon "No poo-ing inside the house, please" (Nee-ah crappa inna di hoosus, pishyou) or "my mother does not like to be bitten on the bottom" (Mi mama no likeit yum-yum on di bum), or my personal favorite, "let's try that again" (Doit a wummortime). This was only topped, perhaps, by Hiccup's mother's name - Valhallarama - and the fact that her bra is eventually used as a weapon.

Oh. My. Gods. (Clash of the Titans, 2010 Review)

2010-04-11T21:08:00.000-05:00

In case it hasn't yet become painfully obvious on this blog, I really like stories dealing with Greek mythology. Ever since we studied them in 5th grade, and I had to dress up as Hermes (so I made little wings for my sandals, tied a bedsheet around me, and brought my awesome White Power Ranger Staff weapon to school as my "caduceus"), I've just been hooked. As I've said before, I would have practically majored in mythology if I could have.

Let's begin with the briefest mythological lesson I can manage.

Hesiod was the first to actually record a form of creation myth involving our Olympian friends. According to him, there was Chaos, from whom came Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros, who caused couplings to happen. Eventually, Gaia popped out Ouranos (or Uranus) and had many children with him: the twelve Titans, and also the Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires (or the "Hundred-Handers"). Kronos (or Chronus) was the youngest Titan. Long story short, the Titans rose up against their oppressive father Ouranos and took control. Kronos mated with his sister Rhea, and together they produced half of the Olympian gods: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Kronos knew that his children may rise against him as he did his own father, so he ate them all, but Rhea hid Zeus away until he was old enough to fight back. A huge war ensued, but with the help of the Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires, the Olympians beat the Titans. Kronos was cut up into little tiny pieces and thrown into Tartarus (since he can't technically die). Zeus then split power between he and his two brothers: he claimed the sky, Poseidon claimed the sea and earth, and Hades claimed the underworld. The creation of man mythos changes depending on the source: sometimes Zeus made them, sometimes "the gods", and sometimes Prometheus, the son of a Titan who allied with the Olympians (and who famously gave humans fire, for which he was punished in Prometheus Bound by having a bird fly by and eat his liver everyday).

Now, take all of that information... and throw it away. Watch Clash of the Titans (1981) with the sound off. Write a screenplay, and voila! You have a new Clash of the Titans epic to end all epics.

As Professor Goodtime says, "Barf sandwich".

For the sake of time, I'm not going to go into how either movie deviates from the general myth of Perseus and Argos. There just isn't enough time, and I'm fairly convinced that the makers of the new Clash used the 1981 movie as their sole source of historical accuracy, so there's really little point.

From the outset of Clash of the Titans (2010), you know that either the writers have never actually heard of Greek mythology or they just somehow felt that they were skilled enough to justify completely changing 3,000-year-old tales. I'm guessing the latter. They begin the movie by explaining that the Titans ruled the world, but then that Zeus, Poseidon and Hades showed up and decided to battle them (which sounds less like succession mythology and more like Pokemon). The Olympian trio started to lose, but then Hades did a bit of black magic and sacrificed part of his own self to create a Titan of his own: the Kraken. This new weapon was then used to defeat the Titans. After victory, Zeus claimed the sky as his domain. Poseidon claimed the sea (Hollywood never realizes that Poseidon isn't called "The Earthshaker" because he goes clubbing on Friday nights), and Hades was tricked into becoming Lord of the Underworld, where he sits by himself for thousands of years, quietly plotting revenge against his brothers.

Now, I've never before said the full phrase from which we get "WTF", but it almost escaped my lips when I saw this opening segment.

From here you are introduced to Perseus, the hero of the story. With his parents supposedly dead, he gets taken in by a kind fisherman and his wife. Through the fisherman you're introduced to one of the main focuses of the plot: that Man is dissatisfied with the gods and doesn't feel that he needs them anymore. "One day," the fisherman says, "somebody's got to make a stand. One day, somebody's got to say... 'enough'."

I almost stood and said "enough" to the movie right there. To my everlasting shame, I kept watching.

Perseus grows into a man, and one day he and his family witness a group of soldiers ripping down a massive statue of Zeus. For some reason, this causes Hades to appear and wipe out all of the soldiers before sending some kind of Dragonball Z energy blast towards Perseus' fishing ship. His family dies, but he lives, naturally sustaining a severe hatred of the gods (by the way, the movie never properly explains, in my opinion, why humans hate the gods so much. They just do). Other soldiers appear and take him to Argos, where Queen Cassiopeia is busy claiming that the gods are useless ("The gods need us! They need our prayers! What do we need the gods for?" she says). Eventually she announces that her daughter, Andromeda, is better-looking than the gods themselves (though, strangely, she's not better-looking than the Andromeda from 1981), and again, Hades appears - why does HE care about a queen's vanity? - and says that if Andromeda isn't sacrificed to the Kraken in ten days, the big ugly monster will destroy Argos (and so will the Kraken, hey! a-boom-tsh!). Because it's important to the plot, Perseus wanders into the throne room just in time to witness this, and when Hades sees our hero, he tells the demigod of his true parentage: Zeus is Perseus' father. The king sends Perseus out to kill the Kraken, and we're on our way to more lessons in Greek heresy.

Argos becomes vaguely divided between those who wish to sacrifice Andromeda and those who wish to believe in Perseus, but you never get a clear sense that the city even knows who Perseus is, so I actually spent a large portion of the movie wondering "does this entire city want to die before sacrificing their princess?" The character of Andromeda was so underworked in this movie that I couldn't give a flying fart (to paraphrase a coworker) whether she lived or died. Perseus ventures out to save her, sure, but for NO REASON WHATSOEVER. There's no love interest there, no hopes that he himself will one day marry her and become king like in the old version. Perseus as a character pretty much represents Clash's version of Man in general: confused, muddled, angry and bitter for no clear reason, doing things that make no sense, utterly compassionless.

After Argos, Perseus faces more or less the same challenges that he faced in 1981, but with a few bizarre twists, most notably Io and the Djinn. Io was a name I recognized from myth but couldn't quite remember off the top of my head. In the movie she's a sort of guardian angel character cursed with immortality for little explainable reason who follows Perseus around (for NO explainable reason) and generally acts as a catalyst when the other characters can't figure out what to do themselves. She is, in other words, the lazy writer's dream. When Perseus and crew (he travels with a merry band of Argos marines whose sole purpose is to show you how the movie's monsters can kill people) would otherwise be clueless as to their next move, Io provides divine knowledge out of nowhere and keeps them moving. It's supremely lazy writing, for the hero never has to figure out anything on his own. Really, Io is the writer's guardian angel more than she is Perseus'.

As it turns out, Io in mythology was a woman with whom Zeus tried to, eh, forcibly mate, but she was a priestess of Hera, who subsequently turned her into a white cow. Where the filmmakers made the jump from "raped white cow" to "guardian angel love interest" I don't quite know. I half expected Perseus to call his Pegasus "Icarus" after that.

And the Djinn? They're the weirdos on the left in the picture up top. I'm pretty sure a Djinn is actually a spirit in Middle-Eastern mythology (where we get the word "genie"), but for some reason they show up here as mystic shamans who slowly replace parts of themselves with tree bark or something. They'd almost have been worth watching if they'd all been played by Robin Williams.

Why the hell either of these new characters are here is beyond me. They were two of the bigger "WTF" moments of the movie, but hey, the Djinn's glowing blue eyes looked cool, and Io provided the requisite warrior woman / eye candy, and isn't that what matters most?

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the Kraken is part of Norse mythology, not Greek. It was a big ugly sea squid who wrecked ships (one of the few things that second Pirates of the Carribean movie got right), not a city-killing, Pokemon-battling turtle with a severe tentacle problem like it is in this movie.

I don't normally comment on this kind of thing, but it's much more than the plot that bothers me about this movie: it's the sentiment. Men are angry and bitter and have no love of the gods. They constantly mock the gods, and Perseus in particular has this obsession of "being a man", even though he's a demigod and thus only half-man (perhaps he was compensating?). The gods send him gifts, like an Ancient Greek lightsaber and a cool flying horse, yet he refuses to use any of them because he wants to complete his quest "as a man". It's annoying, it's cheesy, and it completely falls apart by the end of the movie when Perseus, while still claiming to be doing the quest "as a man", finally relents and uses these godly gifts. It's like the writers wrote the whole movie with this "I can do this without the gods' help" theme, only to find that the Kraken really can't be defeated in a showy manner without these cool-looking and extra-handy gifts of the gods. The writers said, "Oh, crap" and, rather than retool the script, kept it in and just allowed Perseus to temporarily go back on everything he stands for in order to win. If that doesn't say something about today's culture, I don't know what does.

I'm fairly convinced that Hollywood doesn't know Greek myth from Christian verse. The only gods who have the slightest bit of relevance in this movie are Zeus (aka God) and Hades (aka Satan), even though Hermes and Athena were two prominent figures in the actual Perseus/Argos myth. Hollywood doesn't understand that Greek myths had nothing to do with "good vs. evil", but I suppose that Hollywood's not completely through with showing its pictures in black and white yet. Zeus acts like the Christian God does in the Flood story of Genesis (which itself, curiously, is a take on flood myths from other cultures that don't include Greek). Zeus decides that humans need to be punished for their unwillingness to worship him unless Perseus can save the day.

Why Hades is always portrayed as "evil" is easy to see: he's the God of the Dead. He rules the underworld. Satan rules Hell. Therefore, Hades = Satan, right? Perhaps when viewed through a Judeo-Christian lens, but that's completely not the character he was to the Greeks. ALL humans went to the underworld when they died - even the good ones - so Hades was, in effect, the God of Hell and Heaven. He punished the bad, but he also rewarded the good. Think of him more as a judge than a demon. In many ways, he was the kindest and most fair of all the gods, particularly between the "big three" of Zeus, Poseidon, and himself. The Greeks attributed thunder storms to Zeus and earthquakes and tsunamis to Poseidon; therefore, they had the tempestuous personalities to match. But Hades? He was usually pretty chill.

In this movie he's bent on expanding his kingdom to include the Earth, but I don't think that's how Death would really act. Other filmmakers did the same thing to the Percy Jackson movie, though in the Lightning Thief book Hades was tired, and passive, and didn't want to have to deal with the constant flow of soul-traffic headed his way. War was a strain on Hades; disasters were a nightmare. This is the same view that Markus Zusak took in his excellent novel The Book Thief, wherein Death (the narrator) is a tired old thing who only manages to stay sane in his depressing job by observing colors. Brilliant book. You should read it. So should Hollywood.

But they won't.

They're too comfortable with the simplicity of the good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, Harry Potter vs. Voldemort (did I mention that the guy who plays Voldemort, Ralph Fiennes, plays Hades here? He does so brilliantly, I must admit; his voice feels old and whispery, like he himself is on the verge of death. The poor guy's becoming type-cast as modern-day Satans). Hollywood doesn't understand Greek mythology and its chaotic nature, the way gods turn on each other and each other's children, the way that there was never intended to be a strictly "evil" or "good" god, or the way that heroes were heroes because they did supernatural feats with the gods' help. That doesn't make sense to Hollywood, I guess. Their wars can only have two sides, black vs. white, and you aren't allowed to cheer for both. Maybe someday they'll begin to see colors, like Death in The Book Thief.

When I came out of this movie, I tried to think of something optimistic to say for my review. The best that I came up with was "it's the best movie I've ever seen in which Sam Worthington plays a reluctant hero who spends 3/4ths of the final battle sequence astride a winged beast", as a playful jab at Avatar, a movie of which I am not especially fond, to say the least. But as soon as I thought that, I realized a terrible, terrible truth. It wasn't right. I didn't really think that. It forced me to say something which I NEVER thought I'd say. Avatar was better. Oh, gods, now I have to go wash my hands and burn my keyboard. Ugh.

Oh, and this movie employs the "shaky cam" effect in all of its action scenes. This can be done well (see: the Bourne movies), but usually, as is the case with this movie, it's a sad, sorry gimmick that serves two functions: covering up the actors' inability to do coordinated fight scenes, and making the viewer too dizzy and sick to care. Watching it in 3D - and apparently it wasn't filmed for that medium - only makes it worse. If you MUST see this movie, see it in 2D, or better yet, wait until it's out on video and RiffTrax has had a chance to thoroughly mock it.

A Quick Note on Percy Jackson & The Olympians

2010-04-11T20:40:00.000-05:00

Just in case you're wondering where the reviews are for the other Percy Jackson books (and you know you are), here's the deal. I finished the third one (The Titan's Curse) and am almost done with the fourth (The Battle of the Labyrinth). I will probably wait until the fifth and last (The Last Olympian) hits paperback, since all my others are paperback and I'm OCD enough to want a complete, unified set. As far as reviews go, I'm not going to do proper reviews of the rest of the books but will probably do a series review upon completion.

This is mostly due to redundancy: I pretty much have the same things to say for these books as I did Book 2. They're funny, they're terribly clever, they're inventive, and they impress me to no end in terms of bringing the old myths into modern settings. The characters (namely Percy and Annabeth, but certainly the others as well) mature tremendously and have become compelling personalities in their own rights. The Titan's Curse is probably my least favorite so far, but that's like saying Finding Nemo is my least favorite Pixar movie. They're all very, very good - even the "least impressive" one.

Don't miss out on this series. You'd be doing yourself a terrible disservice.

The Fantasy Title Generator Game!

2010-04-06T20:37:00.000-05:00

As he writes on his own blog, GoldenPigsy and I have been friends for an uncomfortably long time - more than half our lives. Ours is indeed a love-hate relationship; we enjoy giving each other a hard time for no real good reason except perhaps to see the other's reaction (for instance, I once told him that Ozzy Osbourne sucks, just to see what he'd say, even though I'm a big fan of the Prince of Darkness myself). Knowing that the other guy doesn't really hate you opens up endless possibilities for taunting and good-natured (usually) mayhem, like throwing Lemonheads at each others' cars through the sunroof while driving. You know, really stupid crap like that.

To a large extent, it was GoldenPigsy's blog that revived this one. I enjoyed reading his reviews so much that I thought "hey, I want to do that, too!" So I did. And here we are.

Anyway, GoldenPigsy and I decided to do a bit of cross-over between our blogs. He suggested a little game, and I agreed.

The Rules:
- You have 15 points.
- Words from tier one are one point; from tier two, two points; from tier three, three points. Proper names are tier four, and take up four points.
- Only five points can be used per title.
- “the,” “of,” "a," and “and” are all free words.
- You must use all fifteen points.
- You must write a short synopsis for the books you come up with.

Tier 4:
Any sort of proper name (i.e. Odin, Thor, Hogar, Conan, or anything you make up)

Tier 3:
God(s)
Queen
King
Lord
Dragon
Sword
Ring
Talisman
Quest

Tier 2:
Legend
Tale
Assassin
Wolf
Shadow
Fire
Ice
Mage
Thief
Lightning
Thunder
Blade
Fox
Curse
Valkyrie
Medusa
Knight
Wizard

Tier 1:
Gold (or golden)
Black
Moon
Lance
Blood
Divinity
Radiance (or Radiant)
Pool
Goblin
Invincible
Devil
Consort
Crown
Iron
Steel
Tower
Light
Song
Truth (or True)
Sacred
Virile
Wind
Stone
Dark
Power
Fact
Scimitar
Sun
Stars
Couch
Virago
White
Ruby
Jewel

My entries:
Song of the Wolf Mage (-5):

Myrrean, a local farmboy, longs to someday join the kingdom's Wolf Guard, an elite unit in the army whose job is to protect the king. But when real wolves begin to attack the nation's towns in organized, efficient packs, Myrrean's world is turned upside-down. He begins to have disturbing visions in his dreams, until he realizes the awful truth: he is the one controlling the wolves in their attacks. Now, Myrrean must battle against his own nightmares, lest he destroy the very king he so dearly wishes to protect!

The Thunder Knight (-4):

Frederick is not your typical applicant for knighthood in the Hyperian realm. For one, he is an orphan peasant, and only nobles (and merchants with enough coin) are permitted to command. For another, he weighs nearly twenty stone. When he becomes the laughing stock of the Hyperian army, Frederick's true father reveals himself: Zeus, Lord of the Sky. As Frederick's demi-god powers begin to manifest, the realm comes under attack by strange, watery creatures immune to sword and spear, and Frederick's newfound storm powers may be the kingdom's only hope...

Medusa's Pool (-3):

When a brand new recreational complex opens up down the street, Amaya is positively stoked. But strange, unexplainable disappearances by many of the town's children begin to point to the same source: Emm's Rec Centre. Now, Amaya must solve the mystery of the disappearing children before it's too late, but the truth may just be too horrifying to be real...

Wind in the Devil's Tower (-3):

This offbeat comedic adventure stars Lucy, stepdaughter to the Lord of Hell himself. Hundreds of miles below the Earth's surface, Satan reigns supreme. But trouble is never too far away, as Lucy and her misfit family of demons, demi-gods and dictators have discovered. An army of would-be heroes is knocking on Hell's doors, but will Lucy and her family be able to whip their horde of tortured souls together in time to stop the onslaught of light?

I believe that adds up to fifteen points. If not, well, I majored in Psychology, not Math. Feel free to pass the game along to your friends, or play it yourself! If you do, be sure to add a word of your own to the list above. I added "quest" (tier 3). GoldenPigsy added Virago (tier 1), the little minx.

A Paltry Inheritance (Eregon, Eldest, and Brisingr Reviews)

2010-03-31T12:52:00.000-05:00

I started writing my first book when I was sixteen. Seems like ages ago now, both in years and maturity. More has happened to me since then than I could possibly describe. Suffice to say, nowadays my writing is almost as different from its old self as I am.

So it was with a certain degree of understanding that I took to Christopher Paolini's The Inheritance Cycle series, in which he, by means of his parents, self-published the first book, Eregon, when he was but 19 years old. In this I truly do have to commend him. He took Eregon around to over a hundred local libraries and schools and spoke about writing while simultaneously providing copies of his book, and eventually, a major publisher took it up, and away he went. The second book, Eldest, came out three years later (2005), and Brisingr was another 3 years after that (2008), meaning that odds are good that the fourth and final book in the series will arrive sometime in the Fall of 2011, though that's purely a guess.

So what is The Inheritance Cycle about, exactly? A young farmboy, Eregon, discovers a dragon egg in the forest near his home and soon must flee the soldiers of the evil King Galbatorix, who have burned down his farm and killed his uncle. He is led to a secret base of rebels by the old storyteller Brom, who, as it turns out, was actually a Dragon Rider himself before Galbatorix and the "Foresworn" killed his dragon and practically ALL of the other Riders in existence. During his journey, Eregon must learn magic and what it means to be a rider if he wants to have any chance of toppling the evil king, for he is the last of the free Riders, and if he falls, King Galbatorix will surely take over the world and enslave all humanity (and elvenkind and dwarvenkind and probably hobbits, too, though as of the end of the third book I haven't technically heard the word "hobbit" mentioned).

Does this sound a little familiar? Let me put it this way: I very nearly called this post "Star Wars: Attack of the Cloned Plotline". Just change around a few names (Eregon-Luke, Galbatorix-Emperor Palpatine, Dragon Rider-Jedi, Brom-Obi-Wan) and you're good to go. And is it really such a coincidence that Paolini has released all of his books so far 3 years apart... just like the Star Wars movies?

Inheritance Episode IV: A New Hope

I made the great mistake of purchasing the audio book version of Eregon, for at the time I frequently drove between Dallas, my hometown, and Austin, my college town, which is 3 hours and 15 minutes south along I35, and while I love my music selection, I needed something a bit more stimulating to keep me awake for the drive. So it was in Waco, Temple, Troy (minus the horses), Hillsboro, Belton, and my personal favorite, Waxahachie, that I first heard Paolini's initial foray into the wide world of novels. I say that buying the audio book was a mistake for two reasons: 1) it was much more expensive than the book, and 2) the narrator was pretty atrocious. His "voice" for Saphira, Eregon's dragon, is a baritone impression of Yoda, and his voice for Solembum - a werecat whose purpose still eludes me - actually IS an impression of Yoda. Thinking about it still makes me cringe, and I understand that the audio tape for Eldest wasn't any better.

As for the book itself, it's a mixed bag. Eregon is a young adult adventure of middling quality, full of lengthy history lessons of the world of Alagasia and very, very predictable stereotypes. I don't entirely mean that as a bad thing; it is what it is. This is a story written by a young man not yet old enough to drink; the advantage here is that he is close to the same age as his inexperienced protagonist; the disadvantage is the very same fact. You get the sense that Paolini not only was influnced by J.R.R. Tolkien but wanted to be him, but, as he was only 19 and had never before written a full novel, there was no chance in hell that he would fully pull it off, But believe me, he tried. There are random moments of poetics that don't flow as smoothly as they should; I understand the usefulness of a well-placed simile or metaphor, but when every single tear or body of water is described as a "diamond" or "pearl" or some other crystalline entity, the imagery falters. His attempts at lyrical brilliance just fall short; frankly, each and every passage that contains one would have been better without it.

I really mean it when I say that these books are the plot of Star Wars plopped down, like fresh buffalo chips, into the Lord of the Rings universe. Alagasia may as well be called Middle-earth (for instance, Middle-earth has the Haradrim Desert. Alagasia? The Hadarac Desert). The Dragon Riders even carried special swords with blades to match the color of their dragon, which sounds suspiciously like lightsabers to me (especially when you have a blue dragon, as Eregon does). Dragon Riders can use magic, which is a huge focal point for the entire series, and this is a good thing, because Paolini's magical concepts are generally far better than his plot.

Inheritance Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

It's clear in these books that the actual storyline of The Inheritance Cycle is little more than a vehicle for Paolini's imagination: the use and history of magic, dozens of pointless legends and tales of old, and an endless stream of rituals. Characters constantly talk Eregon's ear off, which is okay for him, because he's "always asking questions", as Brom puts it, but it wears on you quickly.

Eldest picks up right after the finale of Eregon, during which the rebel base (Farthen-Dur, which I call Yavin IV) comes under attack by Urgals (Uruk-Hai from LOTR). The good guys won, of course, though at considerable cost. But when one of the primary leaders suddenly gets whacked hardly five pages into the book, things begin to change (that particular scene reminded me of the second Mortal Kombat movie, where Johnny Cage gets his neck broken by Shao Kahn about 3 minutes in. Hated it then, and I hated this, too).

Eldest is easily the weakest of the series (though, optimist that I am, I'm hopeful about Book 4). In Eldest, you receive chapters from the point of view of two other characters, Roran - Eregon's cousin - and Nasuada - the leader of the Varden (aka Rebel Alliance). This was a good move on Paolini's part, partially because certain plot points wouldn't have made sense without their views, and partially because Eregon's plotline in Eldest is, shall we say, less than exciting. He leaves the Varden and journeys to the Elves to train with an old, hidden Dragon and his Rider, Yoda. Actually, it's Oromis, but you get the idea. Meanwhile Roran, his characterless love interest Katrina, and their village come under attack by the Empire, while Nasuada experiences the difficulties of leadership. I was disappointed to learn that Roran never got encased in carbonite, meaning that Paolini only has one book left to make his Star Wars analogy complete.

It's hard to say much about plot because there is so little of it after the end of Eregon. Where Eregon spent most of its time in human cities, Eldest is almost entirely set in Dwarven and Elven lands, and believe me, Eregon makes it a point to learn as much as he can, whether you want to hear it or not. Human cities didn't require pages and pages of history and explanation. Dwarven and Elven cities, apparently, did. A fundamental shift happens between Eregon and Eldest; it's as if Paolini changed sub-genres of fantasy from young-adult adventure to... I don't know, exactly. Young-adult high fantasy, perhaps, only I feel like that gives it too much credit. For some reason, characters begin to speak in a more eloquent manner than they did in Eregon. This is particularly obvious with the Carvahall villagers and Roran, who all speak as though written by a 15-year-old told to imitate Shakespeare without over-using "thou" and "thee" and other lovely relics from the English language's past. But then, out of nowhere, you get one of the most mind-boggling moments I've yet experienced in a book, where one villager, when told that they must use a few barges as a means of escape, exclaims, "Barges! We don't want no stinking barges!" I wish I were joking.

Anyway, the first half of Eldest is pretty painful. Eregon takes over 250 pages to reach the Elves and begin his training with Yoda Rider, and Roran uses that time to get pissed off at everybody and receive similar sentiments before, out of nowhere, dishing out a stirring speech that rouses the entire village into action. The second half picks up only slightly, with Eregon training (you'll learn more about magic than you ever wanted) and Roran fleeing to the Varden with 300 villagers in tow.

Though the two protagonists had always been as brothers to each other, the circumstances of Eldest begin to push them wider and wider apart on the morality scale, as Eregon becomes a vegetarian with the Elves while Roran - oh noes! - has to kill a few innocent guards in a town to ensure the survival of his own. The separation here is predictable, but not terribly played out.

The biggest problem with Eldest, though, is its romance, or, to be more technically accurate, its lack thereof. For reasons unknown, Eregon continually pursues Arwen - excuse me, Arya - even though the elf makes it abundantly clear that she wants nothing to do with him romantically. What baffled me was that Paolini never gives me, as the reader, a good reason to care for Arya myself. Sure she can kick ass, and I've little doubt that she's very pretty, but I just can't figure out why Eregon would care so much for her. I just don't see it. Roran has the same problem: he is utterly obsessed with Katrina (though thankfully she loves him back, unlike Arya), but the reader is given absolutely no reason to feel the same way. It's like the author just expects us to love these women because his characters do and leaves it at that. Katrina does nothing but fuel Roran's actions and look pretty; when she finally gets kidnapped (as we all knew she would) I was actually relieved because I knew that now the plot was going to do something. Sure enough, Roran & company packed up and left town in practically the next chapter.

I wouldn't exactly have so much of a problem with this if it didn't play such an integral part of the narrative: Roran thinks of nothing but Katrina and the number of men he's killed (he literally keeps count until he kills so many that he loses track). His obsession with Katrina is later remarked as legendary by other characters, but without Katrina herself showing some personality, he may as well be obsessed over a dog, or a basketball, that the Empire has taken from him. Perhaps Paolini meant for him to be a sort of kickass, rugged, manly man like so many action heroes of the 1980's. The author tries to play him gruff, but when he still speaks and thinks with this awkward high-fantasy attempt at speech that has a tendency to go on for paragraphs at a time, "gruff" ceases to be an apt term, if it ever was to begin with. If Roran's meant to be an ideal of manliness, then culture as we know it may be in for some rough times.

Inheritance Episode VI: Return of the Dragon Riders... Part 1

I debated whether to continue reading the series after Eldest, which concluded with a plot twist so irritating, so utterly jaw-dropping, that I actually recall muttering, "Seriously? Seriously" when I read it. Let's just say that for all of Eldest I feared a "Luke, I am your father" moment, for you know so little about Eregon's proper parentage all this time, and here at the end of Eldest: The Empire Strikes Back, I got it. I can't particularly tell you why I bothered to read Brisingr. Maybe it was because my wife owns it and hasn't read it yet (making this practically the first book EVER that I've read before her).

Mercifully, Brisingr isn't as bad as Eldest, which is kind of like saying that dying by falling off a cliff doesn't sound as bad as drowning in a sewer. In Brisingr, both Eregon and Nasuada (who, aside from Saphira, seems to be the only female character worth reading about) are almost perpetually bogged down in politics, meaning that while you aren't treated to quite so many pointless legends and myths, you are instead forced to slog through endless debates by people who have the uncanny ability to make their points in at least three different ways before letting someone else speak. Maybe it's a cultural thing in Alagasia. Believe me, though, the legends and myths are still there. I've never encountered a book series with so many characters who love the sounds of their own voices before, and I've read all of the Song of Fire and Ice books to date. Everyone discusses every possible course of action before taking it, but the only one who really sees any sort of direct fighting is Roran, and even then he suffers through some mindnumbingly predictable plotlines, mostly in the form of "here's your new leader, Roran. He's a jerk, and he'll invariably order you to do something that will get everyone killed, so you'll have to choose between insubordination and death." "Cake or death," I can hear Eddie Izzard saying. "Um, cake please." Roran's scene of insubordination involves an action sequence so unbelievable that, again, I very nearly put the book down and gave up on the whole affair. It affirmed my suspicion that the author views Roran as some kind of ubermench.

Or, as my friend who wishes to be known as "Professor Goodtimes" sometimes refers to himself as, the "manliest of all mans".

Essentially, Roran kills so many people that he fights atop a hill of corpses that grows and grows until all enemies are defeated. In all, he slays something like 197 (one of the other soldiers in his troop aparently had nothing better to do but sit there and count the number of morons who aparently didn't know how to shoot a friggen bow). It was stupid and amazingly unbelievable, and this is from a guy who plays Dynasty Warriors religiously.

The best part of the book actually came from a few chapters told from a whole new point of view, which I won't spoil for those of you who wish to go against my will and read these books anyway. Those of you who fit in this category, though, beware: there is a chapter, called "Mind Over Metal", which captures the very essence of what I'm trying to tell you about Paolini's writing. In it, Eregon forges a sword. That's the whole chapter. He forges a sword. That doesn't sound too bad, you say? Try this: the chapter is 16 pages long. That's about 6000 words, or 3 full-length essays for your average university. As I read, I kept waiting for the punchline, for something relevant to happen, but it never came. When I finally finished the chapter, I felt like I'd been mugged. Paolini had just stolen 16 pages-worth of my life, and I wanted them back, but there's no way. I can't turn back time and undo this atrocity on my life that Paolini has caused. I read somewhere that the chapter was inspired by something called The Craft of the Japanese Sword. I say it was inspired by the little-known book - written by Paolini, I shouldn't wonder - called How to Lose Your Audience.

Yet, I'll probably read Book 4 when it comes out. It's like watching a train wreck, or a soap opera, or Catwoman. I know it's terrible, but I just can't help myself. Read these books only if you really, REALLY have nothing better to do and have somehow read every single other book in the store, even Moby Dick and those crapfest prequel novels to the Dragon Age videogames. I won't say that the books of The Inheritance Cycle are some of the worst books that I've ever read, nor even that they are the worst fantasy novels (the winner there goes to this vampire... thing... that I encountered back in 2004. I promise I'm not talking about Twilight; it's just that I don't remember the name and probably burned the book after I read it). But know that if you're looking for, oh I don't know, plot, then try something else. Anything.

Oh, and the character Angela the Herbalist should be shot. Immediately. She's an "eccentric" person who talks to Eregon at considerable length about her theory that toads (or frogs; I can't remember/care which) don't actually exist. You constantly look for some semblance of truth in the random things she says, but I really don't think it's there. I think most of what she says is the author's meager attempt at humor, like the "We don't want no stinking barges!" line (which is on page 413 of the 2005 Knopf hardback, if you don't believe me). I hated her so much that I actually had a hard time being around a friend of mine named Angela for fear that I would take my anger out on her.

Homer, Meet Rick Riordan. (Percy Jackson & The Olympians: Sea of Monsters Review)

2010-03-28T21:49:00.000-05:00

I realize that my previous post was also about Percy Jackson, and that it was unbearably long. Well, sorry 'bout that, but here's another. I promise that it won't be near as long, as there's not a movie to accompany this one. I'm going to assume that you've either read The Lightning Thief, seen the movie, read my previous post, or just don't care about a few plot spoilers. M'kay?

Anyway, the timeline of these books so far is a bit of a reverse-Harry Potter, in that the action takes place over the summer, while the school year tends to be quiet. Sea of Monsters (hereafter known as SoM, for my sake) kicks off on the last day of school, after a school year in which Percy has pretty much had no monster problems. Half-Bloods, you understand, give off a scent (a plot point to which I can relate), and monsters are drawn to it like crazy, but for some reason no one's bothered him... until now. Long story short, some monsters attack during a dodgeball game, in which they use explosive bronze balls to try to kill Percy.

See, this is precisely why I love this series. A group of cyclopes try to kill Percy by playing dodgeball. Even better? Part of Percy's ultimate plan of escape involves luring the monsters into lobbing one of the cannonballs at the doorway that leads to the boys' locker room, where the cannonball mixes with the "build-up of gas" in there (another plot point to which I can heartily relate) to cause a particularly large explosion. It's childish, it's hilarious, and it works. I can't imagine how obsessed I would have been with this series had it come out when I was half my current age. Heck, I love it now, and I'm in my mid-twenties.

There are some definite changes from The Lightning Thief to this book. One of Percy's best friends is roaming the world on a quest, but never fear, for there is a replacement. I had been curious about something during the first book, and I had wondered if Riordan would actually tackle the fact that Poseidon often sired monsters, such as the cyclopes, and boy did Riordan answer that with this book. Here you meet Tyson, Percy's new bunkmate in the Poseidon cabin. Tyson is a cyclops, but he's the "gentle giant" type, so it's alright. However, he is technically a monster, so this doesn't go over so well with the other campers. Ever had a friend who got picked on all the time, or didn't quite "fit in"? The Tyson storyline nails this home and gave Percy the opportunity to be a jerk or a hero in a whole new way. The centaur-teacher Chiron, meanwhile, has been fired because the camp has come under attack so many times recently (the gods blame him for poisoning the tree/demi-god who protects the borders), and for some inexplicable reason, he has been replaced with Tantalus. This is the guy who got so pissed off at the gods, he killed his own children, invited the gods over for dinner, and served them up some Junior Pie. For that, he has to spend eternity ever out of reach of food and water, and Riordan plays that up perfectly here. Tantalus is nasty, he hates the good guys and loves the badguys, and he generally makes life as hard as possible for Percy. Now that I look back on it, I have a firm believe that Matt Stone and Trey Parker had this guy in mind when they wrote the "Scott Tenorman Must Die!" episode of South Park.

Otherwise, the book follows a fairly similar pattern to its predecessor. Percy and friends leave for a quest to find some way to restore their camp before it dies and seriously lessens the gods' chances at combating the looming threat from the Titans. Kronos' minions, meanwhile, actively seek out support as they prepare a way for Kronos to escape Tartarus. Each chapter is dedicated to a different mini-adventure that usually involves monsters/people from the old Greek myths coming back in modern form. I was impressed at how well Riordan places his myth references while maintaining a perfectly coherent plotline throughout the whole book. You never once feel as though things have strayed off-course, or that any references are forced. To make things even better, this book is funnier than the first. This is the first series since Inheritance where I can remember laughing out loud (though in Inheritance it was always at points that weren't supposed to be funny). Maybe I'm just immature - in fact, I know I'm immature - but gosh darnit this series just makes me happy.

I'm pretty sure that Riordan kept Homer's The Odessey near him at all times while writing this one. SoM particularly focuses on the creatures and events from Odysseus' 10-year journey home, and to excellent effect. If Odysseus faced it, it's probably in here. "But!" you may say, "Didn't Odysseus sail through the Mediterranean?" Yes, you are quite right, but this series keeps up a lovely little plot device that I guess you could call the "Flame of the West", which started in Greece, moved to Rome, and eventually ended up in America. The Sea of Monsters used to sit smack in the middle of the Mediterranean, this is true, but now - you guessed it! - it's the Bermuda Triangle. All of the myths shift location to match the soul of the West, and right now, at least in Percy's world, that's America. What kinds of dangers await our hero in the Sea of Monsters, you may ask? Let's just say that one of the main monsters in store for Percy bears a fiery hatred for Nobody. If you know what the hell I'm talking about, then we should be friends.

What surprised me the most, though, is how well the main characters are fleshed out. I mean, I rather expected everyone but Percy to be a bit static and unchanging while Percy grows around them, but SoM proved me soundly wrong, and I'm the happier for it. Annabeth in particular reveals so much more of her soul than she did in The Lightning Thief, so that by the end of SoM you feel as though you know her as well as you do Percy, even though you spend the entire time in Percy's head. That's a pretty impressive feat, if you ask me. Even Tyson, the simple-but-loyal cyclops half-brother to Percy, shows some charming, if slightly predictable, moments of intelligence, bravery, and growth.

From what I understand, The Lightning Thief was Rick Riordan's first published book. Pretty darn good, if you ask me, though I would mostly just recommend that one to kids closer to Percy's age (12, not 11, as I erroneously reported in my last post). Mr. Riordan grew tremendously as a writer between books. Percy remains the same narrator, but he's funnier, the plot is better, and the characters are more well-rounded. SoM is all-out better than TLT, to the point where I would actually recommend this to anyone, not just kids. Riordan's already gotten to the point where you don't have to be of the same age and maturity level of the main character to appreciate what he's going through. That takes skill beyond that of many writers, particularly the author of the next series that I shall be reviewing, but I'll get to him later. Don't miss out on this series. I've already gone out and bought the third, The Titan's Curse. Percy Jackson & The Olympians has everything you could ask for: good writing, plot twists you didn't see coming, great characters, familiar setting, hilarious and clever narration, bravery, loyalty, courage, heart, cunning, swordplay, monsters, and, most importantly, love. I know that sounds cliche, and it most certainly is, but it's true. I'm hooked to these characters and must know what happens to them next. I can't wait to plough through The Titan's Curse.

Oh, and Hermes is totally my favorite god to show up so far. When you see the modern version of his caduceus, you'll know what I mean.

A Note on Books and the Movies Spawned from Them (Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief Review)

2010-03-22T13:40:00.001-05:00

My opinion of movies based on books has changed over the years. I believe the first movie I ever saw that was based off a book that I had read beforehand was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone. Perhaps that was not the best first example, for it remains the most literal, straightforward adaptation that I have ever seen. There were pretty much no extra scenes added, and hardly anything was omitted from the book. I even went back and skimmed through the book after seeing the movie and found a huge portion of exact lines scattered throughout the pages. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was much the same way, though since the book was longer than the first there were a few more omissions. By now I had begun to establish a sort of status quo for movies that were based on books: the movie adaptations were meant to be as direct and literal as possible. All the filmmaker had to do was make the book his/her screenplay, and s/he was good to go.

But then the director, Chris Columbus, left the Harry Potter movies to go off and do who knows what (write and produce Christmas with the Kranks, apparently), so they got someone else. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban had long been my favorite book of the series, so I was anxious to see it on the big screen, but from the moment the movie started I knew that disappointment was in store. This new director (Alfonso Cuaron) decided to steer away from the literal translation of the books and spice things up a bit. New scenes were added. New characters were added (what the crap was the deal with the Jamaican shrunken head?). Key plot points in the book were treated as arbitrary or left out entirely. Soon after, they announced that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a mammoth of a book that was rumored to be made into two movies, was now going to be condensed into a single film. With each of the movies since then, I've been one of those annoying people in the theaters who nitpicks every little detail that's different between the book and movie. There were scenes that I was glad got left out of the movie, and still I complained about them.

I think part of the problem was that I made it a point to re-read each book before its respective movie came out, so the details were fresh on my mind. With each scene that I read, I would think "Ooo, I wonder how they're going to show this in the movie," or "Oh, I bet this'll look cool". When those scenes failed to show, then, I felt cheated, as if the filmmakers had somehow promised these things to me and then denied them at the last moment. It is to them that I must apologize.

I'm not sure what changed my mind. Perhaps I started to read more. Perhaps I saw a perfect example of a literal adaptation that simply did not work as a movie (I'm looking at you, Dune). Perhaps I just grew up. A big moment came when I read The Count of Monte Christo after having seen the movie. In case you haven't experienced both book and movie yourself (though you should), the two are wildly different after a certain point, so different that it almost becomes a new story entirely. And that blew my mind.

Enter Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief (by Rick Riordan, 2005). I had hardly heard of the book series prior to seeing the first poster and trailer for the movie, but immediately I began to hear of fans complaining. I couldn't understand why; the trailer looked pretty cool. I had already decided that I wanted to go see it, and see it I did. Allow me, then, to give a brief review of the movie.

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief is a PG film about a boy of around 17 years named - you guessed it! - Percy Jackson. From the first time you see him you know that he's not entirely normal, as your introduction to Percy is a shot of him sitting peacefully at the bottom of the pool for a duration of time that surely would have killed me. When he finally surfaces, his goofy friend Grover (hilariously played by Brandon T. Jackson, the "What do you mean 'you people'?" guy from Tropic Thunder) comments that Percy stayed under for over 7 minutes! Anyway, Percy runs into a bit of trouble at his school when one of his teachers turns into a nasty, flying Fury and tries to kill him (don't know about you, but I'm pretty confident that a few of my teachers were Furies), and he has to flee with his buddy Grover and his mom, Sally. They're attacked along the way, and after his mother is taken by a monster, Percy arrives at Camp Half-Blood, where he learns that his father is actually Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea (and technically the earth as well, but it doesn't seem like the movie OR the book go into that little detail). The subtitle "The Lightning Thief" comes from the fact that someone has stolen Zeus' master bolt, and somehow Percy is the primary suspect. It is up to him, Grover, and Annabeth, a daughter of Athena who seems suspiciously similar to Hermione Granger, to find the true culprit behind the theft before Zeus and Poseidon come to blows in what would become World War III.

Let me start off with 3 general comments.

1) The cast is supurb. Really, every character was well-cast, and no actors felt out-of-place (though Uma Thurman's Medusa was a little over-the-top). The kid playing Percy (you'd have seen him in 3:10 to Yuma, if you were smart enough to have seen that movie) was likable and fresh. The girl playing Annabeth looked exactly how you would expect the daughter of Clear-Eyed Athena to look), Sean Bean as Zeus was fun, and Pierce Brosnan as Chiron, Percy's centaur-teacher, was just rugged enough to pull it off.

2) This was your standard "Heroic Journey" plotline. Percy's normal world is threatened; he must go forth to try to fix it, and along the way he discovers more about himself.

And 3) Though it is rated PG, there are some parts that feel very, very mature, mostly in terms of sexual content. If you are a parent and your child wants to see this movie, just know that, while there's nothing specifically implied or shown, there's a lot of underlying tension there, such as Grover's constant desire to seek out and be around beautiful women (he's a satyr, though, so you can hardly blame him).

This brings me to an important point. Remember earlier when I said that fans of the books were angry with the movie? Here's one of the biggest reasons: In the movie, Percy and friends are about 17, but in the books? They're only 11 or 12. That 6-year difference is huge. Much of the movie involves traveling across the country, for instance, so a 17-year-old is going to have a much easier time (since he can drive) than an 11-year-old. This is a 6th grader vs. a junior in high school. Developmentally, there's such a gap there that 11-year-old Percy and 17-year-old Percy may as well be two completely different characters. Why the filmmakers made this change escapes me, though I have heard rumors that they were trying to avoid looking too much like Harry Potter - not a poor sentiment, I suppose, but terrible execution, since Harry is 16/17 in the latest movies. The filmmakers must have thought that it was still 2001 outside.

Not knowing all of that during the movie, I can easily say that it was an enjoyable experience. The three kids (and I use that term loosely, as the guy playing Grover turned 26 shortly after the release of the movie) were extremely likable, the quest was not only interesting but understandable (Percy is trying to clear his name as well as save his mother, who was taken hostage by Hades), and the special effects added some nice flash that one would expect from a movie about a camp for the modern-day Heracles. With a movie like this, it'd have been easy for the filmmakers to simply bank on the hopes that fans of fantasy and of the book would come out in droves to see it regardless of the reviews, but I feel like they honestly did their best to keep the film engaging. You find yourself wanting Percy to succeed and set things straight. You want the true thief to be found out and brought to justice. You experience Percy's and Annabeth's pain at being ignored by their Olympian parents; you wonder, as they do, "couldn't Poseidon/Athena spare even a moment to talk to their child?". Despite the parents being gods, there's a human connection there; how many real-life children who were abandoned by one or both parents have felt the same?

After seeing the movie, I went out and read the book. It's told in 1st-person by Percy, an 11-year-old with a great, if adolescent, sense of humor (the first chapter is called "I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-algebra Teacher"). The shell of the plot remains more or less the same as the movie, but everything that fills it in is largely, if not entirely, different. Where the movie has three primary "events" during the journey that lead up to the climax, the book has at least half a dozen. I wouldn't call the writing great, but it's really fun and funny, and Percy has a great knowledge of Greek mythology, making this series, if nothing else, a fantastic introduction to Greek myth for youngsters. The myths are explained well and incoporated so seamlessly into the narrative that readers should be able to recall a significant portion of the myths just by thinking of Percy's adventure. And, since the kids are only in 6th grade, there's no sexual tension to be found. It's very kid-friendly, but I as an adult (ha, that's a good one) still thoroughly enjoyed it. Perhaps my favorite thing is seeing how the Olympians have adapted to today's society - you certainly won't find them in togas in the book. In particular, Dionysus (god of wine), as the disgruntled, demoted-from-Olympus head of Camp Half-Blood was brilliant, being forced to drink Diet Coke instead of alcohol and generally bearing ill-will towards this job that he's been forced to do as punishment for his own excess. Very funny, yet still, somehow, very kid-friendly. How the author managed to pull off a kid-friendly alcoholic god is beyond me, but there you go.

I can certainly understand why fans of the book could be disappointed by the movie, as the latter is a Hollywood-ized, loosely-based adaptation that easily missed the point of the book. I know I would have loved to have seen the disgruntled, tiger-print-shirt-wearing Dionysus or the Harley-riding Ares come to life on the big screen, and yet I'm not disappointed. I can still see them, written there on those pages for me to visit whenever I wish. What works in books often simply does not work on the big screen, and vice versa. The Lightning Thief movie would have been a pretty terrible book, but as a movie it was tons of fun. I happily recommend both, but for completely different reasons. Where the book should cater mostly to middle-schoolers and kids (and immature adults such as myself who seem to have a passion for young-adult fiction), the movie can appeal to pretty much anyone who wants a family-friendly version of the upcoming Clash of the Titans remake.

Been a While, Eh? (Hunger Games review)

2010-03-17T22:19:00.000-05:00

Check out the date of the previous (and by that I mean first) post. Big gap, wouldn't you say? Like the space between the front teeth of Sara from CSI. Well, here's the deal. I came to the conclusion almost immediately after making the first post that I'm trying to write a book, and I don't really get a lot of time to do so. Therefore, the time that I can spend writing should probably go towards said book. Not expecting anyone to read this. I would like for people to read my book. Simple, utilitarian calculation. Write what more people will read. Not too complicated.

I'll admit, I don't know what brought me back to the blog. I think it's because I've been reading more, and I'd like the opportunity to review some of these books. I think it's also because I'm tired of writing my book, and I need something else to do for a little while. Any college student who has lived on a diet of Wheat Thins, raisins and ramen for months on end should be able to sympathize with my desire for a bit of variety.

Writers, inventors, engineers, artists: ever come up with a potentially great idea, only to find it staring at you from a bookshelf or YouTube video or museum wall? I was blessed with one such experience recently. I can't really complain - it was one of the best books I've read in a long, long time - but there's still a certain level of disappointment, a wish that you could have been born just a little bit earlier so that you could beat out this other creative person. But no matter. The joy from the experience of reading this book far outweighed my disappointment that someone else had brought my idea to life in a manner far superior to anything I could hope to accomplish right now.

What I discovered was a book entitled The Hunger Games. By "discovered", of course, I mean it was recommended to me by a friend. I don't exactly get a lot of reading time these days, so when someone recommends a book to me, I can be hesitant, as my pile of "to be read" books is quickly ascending. But the individual in question is one whom I trust very greatly in matters of creativity - he's the Gandalf to my Frodo, in that regard, the Obi-Wan to my Luke - so when he said that it was probably the best thing he's read since Harry Potter, I had to listen. "Use the force, Luke"? Try, "Read this book, Camel."

And man, I'm glad I did.

The Hunger Games (by Suzanne Collins, 2008) is told in 1st-person, which has always been hit-or-miss for me. It stars Katniss Everdeen (as good a name as I've ever heard), a 16-year-old girl whose no-nonsense attitude shapes the narrative into an easy-to-follow adventure full of far more turns than I expected. It's young-adult fiction; however, its subject matter is anything but adolescent. It's set in a country called Panem, which is made up of twelve districts controlled by the Capitol, an overbearing, oppressive entity that keeps each of the districts separate from each other with all manner of strict guidelines because the districts rebelled a long time ago. There were 13 then. When the Capitol quelled the rebellion, District 13 was completely destroyed, as an example to the others ("Who's unlucky now?" I can hear the president - played by Ah-nold - quip as he punches the button with the label "FIRE ZE MISSLES"). But since that apparently wasn't enough, the Capitol created the Hunger Games, an annual event in which a boy and a girl (between 12-18 years old) are randomly picked from each district and thrown into a massive arena. There, the 24 teens fight to the death until only one remains. The Games are televised, and all of the districts are required to watch as their children slaughter each other. As an added dig, the districts have to treat the Hunger Games like a celebration. I don't know about you, but watching my 12-year-old son get impaled by some 18-year-old punk from another district doesn't sound like a moment worth celebrating.

I have to commend Suzanne Collins for even believing that such subject matter would make for good young-adult fiction in the first place. It's a hard, dismal book, and you wouldn't expect there to be much love. You wouldn't expect Katniss to show much tenderness, and you wouldn't expect there to be many twists and turns once the 24 "tributes", as they are called, enter the arena. You would, of course, be wrong. I don't know if I'd call myself sentimental when it comes to stories - I cried in Cast Away when Tom Hanks lost Wilson, but I consider that to be a fluke, a momentary flash of weakness on my part brought about by the raging hormones of my adolescence - but one particular moment of The Hunger Games caught me off-guard - during a break at work, for goodness' sake! - and brought tears to my eyes. Collins' writing, her style as much as her subject matter, is what caught me. I can honestly say that I don't recall how things were worded, whether or not she used lots of adverbs or prepositional phrases or whatever, because the way she wrote was truly enchanting. Truly. It flowed so well and spent just enough time on each detail that for the entire book I felt as though I was imaging the scenes, not reading them. And since it was in 1st-person, I felt like it became my story. It was about me. Nevermind the fact that Katniss is a girl, and I am not (the knowledge that my brain so easily imagined itself as female is a bit unsettling, but I'll let it slide for now). When someone nearby talked to me, or one of the cats (particularly Jasmine, the 18-lb Thundercat) jumped into my lap, it was as though I was being shaken from an out-of-body experience. The effect was jarring; I haven't felt so heartbroken to leave a fictional world since last I read the Harry Potter series, which was a while ago now.

I loved every second of it.

The narrative is simple; some may come out of a scene saying "wait i want to hear more about this detail or this person or this setting piece!" I did, too, until some little light turned on in the empty cavern reserved for my brain, and a tiny voice, like that of the red alien from Space Jam (pre-NBA powers, naturally) told me that that was the point. "Use your imagination!" it squeaked. Then a deeper voice told me to just wait for the movie (2011, woohoo!). Red-alien-voice said, "That's what you said about The Golden Compass!"

Touche.

Point being, if you want to exercise your imagination, read this book. It gives you the outlines and the paint. You just have to color in the lines.

I just picked up the second in the trilogy. The bad news? Book 3 won't come out 'til August, 2010. I may be in trouble.

As a completely unnecessary sidenote, I couldn't help but laugh every time District 9 was mentioned. I'm sorry, I just couldn't help it. I kept imagining that the two teens from District 9 looked suspiciously like the crawfish aliens from the movie of the same name, and that they would be lured into a trap by a well-placed can of cat food, only to be blown apart by a strange lightning-gun. Call me immature and ridiculous. You'd be precisely correct.

Let's Start Things Off...

2009-08-16T15:15:00.001-05:00

As the title of this post (and the lack of any previous post) suggests, this is the first posting on this blog, so I figured that I had better start things off by explaining what exactly this blog is, so get ready because it's a doozy.

This is a blog about very little.

In my eagerness to break into the writing business, it eventually occurred to me that, hey, I'm not getting very much experience now that I've graduated and am now perpetually stuck behind a desk in a windowless room with the world's largest, slowest clock. So I decided that I had better start writing something. Now don't worry; I don't expect anyone to actually read this garbage. This is, after all, a blog about very little, if not nothing.

Now that I've stated that again, allow me to say what this blog actually is about, or rather, what it will contain (for I have already established the reason for this futility). This blog is a series of light, casual reviews of whatever bit of media I happen upon - namely, movies, videogames, books, TV shows, and perhaps the occasional music CD (or MP3 or whatever format proves itself popular in the moment).

WARNING: I am a nerd (defined, depending on the source, as either a "stupid, irritating, ineffectual, or unattractive person" or an "intelligent but single-minded person obsessed with a nonsocial hobby or pursuit"... In this context, I at least hope that the latter is more accurate). Most of the reviews posted are, as the blog title may suggest, somehow to do with sci-fi (not SyFy, as the Sci-Fi channel has now taken to calling itself) and fantasy, so if you don't at least in some capacity love Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, you may as well stop reading now. That's what I enjoy, so if you don't then I just don't see the point in keeping up this charade, do you?

I can't say how often I will be updating this site; there are, after all, only so many reviews that a person can take, but I'll do what I can. Hopefully you'll stay tuned, but even if you only pop in every once in a while, I'll be thrilled to have you. Just please don't think worse of me if I at some point in my ramblings take a shot at the Jonas Brothers.

Party on.