What If... (The Expendables Review)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Governator Not Included (Predators Review)

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

 

But I digress.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best line: Aim for the bushes.

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

Generic Game Title 64 (Quest 64 Review)

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

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

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

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

The glimmering metropolis.

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

UFC totally stole this octagon idea.

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

Welcome to Quest 64.

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

This is one suck game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See!  Look at those eyes!

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

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

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

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