Author: Jason

Movie Round-Up: October 30th, 2009

Reviews

This is going to be the “Small Film Edition” of the Movie Round-Up, mainly because I don’t want to make a post just about the only wide opening this weekend:

Michael Jackson’s This Is It:

Never has there been a film so ominously appropriately titled.  Personally, I’m a big fan of the old MJ.  The Jackson 5, his solo work up to about half of the Dangerous album.  And there is no denying that he was the King of Pop… but he was also the King of Odd.  While it is possible that I might one day see this film if it becomes available for streaming on Netflix, I absolutely won’t be rushing out to the theater to see it.

Now, on to the smaller films opening this week…

Gentleman Broncos:

This one is from the director of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, both are films I found funny but not really worthy of the devotion and cult following they have received.  Gentleman Broncos looks to be cut from a similar cloth and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it when I get a chance to see it.

The House of the Devil:

The only horror film opening on Halloween weekend, sadly its only in three theaters.  But that’s okay, you can see it through Xbox Live and a few other On Demand services.  My main draw to the film, besides it being a horror movie, is that one of the stars is A.J. Bowen, who I know.  I’ve enjoyed his work in The Signal and even Creepshow III, so I’ll probably find the time to watch this one at home if its still available on Xbox.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day:

In 2001, I took a three month contract dig working overnights as a server engineer.  My job was to periodically check the servers and make sure they were doing their job, and if they weren’t I had to fix it.  To the credit of the people who built the servers and software, they rarely weren’t.  This meant I had approximately six to seven hours each night, just me and one other engineer doing nothing.  I spent a lot of time browsing the net and listening to music, we even installed games until they took away our 3D graphics cards.  Since every PC had a DVD-ROM drive, we also watched movies.  Mostly I watched my own movies from home, but one night the other engineer slipped me a burned DVD, written across the white label was “Boondock Saints”.  And thus I was introduced to the original film.  I absolutely adore the film, it is not perfect, nor even in my top ten, but I’ve seen it a couple dozen times and I still enjoy it as much as I did the first time.  It is just so well crafted and the characters are so interesting…  When I heard a sequel was being made, my first reaction was “Yes!” but then I thought about all the sequels that suck and I was worried.  However, I’ve heard enough good news about this one to get me excited again.  It is opening on 65 screens, none of which are in Atlanta.  Hopefully it will go wider… if not, I’ll catch it on DVD where it can join the first film in my movie library.

Para Abnormal

Stuff on the Net

I’m not usually in the habit of linking to individual sites unless its for a game.  However, the wife was searching the Internet for a “spooky desktop” and stumbled upon Para Abnormal by Dave Lowe, a web comic that deals with the paranormal in a Far Side like fashion.  Here is an example:

posted October 15th, 2009 by Dave Lowe
posted October 15th, 2009 by Dave Lowe

Like any comic there are highs and lows, and not every joke will tickle every funny bone, but I got enough laughs out of it that I thought I would share.

Enjoy!

Zombies Ate My Neighbors

Gaming

With Monkey Island getting a remake/update/new episodes, I can only hope that Zombies Ate My Neighbors, another classic LucasArts game, gets the same treatment.  Sadly, I don’t think it will.  However, thanks to Tom Chick, I now know I can get the old game on my Wii.

Zombies Ate My Neighbors - A Classic Game
Zombies Ate My Neighbors - A Classic Game

It is something I suppose… but a man can dream…

Putting Down a Book

Random Thoughts

It is not often that I will actually put down a book for good.  I mean, I have never finished — don’t hold this against me — The Lord of the Rings.  I’ve read Fellowship probably five times and Two Towers three times, but I’ve never read Return of the King.  I just get bored.  I almost didn’t finish The Once and Future King, but I powered through.  Dune was another rough one.   Not too long ago I posted about the First Law Trilogy that I waded through.  There are books that I have put down, a number of them in fact, but I usually go back eventually and finish.  I swear, I will read Return of the King before I die.

But there are rare books that I have put down and never intend to go back to.  Recently I’ve run into two and both of them have to do with the writing itself, not the subject matter.  The first was Working for the Devil by Lilith Saintcrow.  The story itself is something I would be interested in, and I’ve actually heard good things about the series, however, the author decided that her main character’s profession would be called a “necromance”.  Even now my spell checker is telling me that I’ve dropped an “r” off the end.  For whatever reason, she went with this spelling, and it bugs the crap out of me.  It happens just often enough in the text that it pops me out of the story and back into myself where I commence screaming “ER! ER! NecromancER!”  I had a similar problem when reading Dead Witch Walking about that author’s choice to make up her own swear words, but I was able to gloss over that.  For some reason this use of “necromance” is something I just couldn’t get past.

More recently I made a stab at reading James Patterson’s The Dangerous Days of Daniel X.  At first, the description of a superhero book sounds like it would be right up my alley.  However, I might have skipped it had I read the red box on the inside back flap of the cover.  It reads:

In the spirit of the most enduring hit movies and books, James Patterson has written this story for readers from ten to a hundred and ten. Special care has been taken with the language and content of The Dangerous Days of Daniel X.

I’ve read a number of Patterson’s books, but mostly his more adult murder mystery stuff.  Going into this book with that mindset I was terribly disappointed and felt like I was being talked down to.  The story itself was interesting enough, but the simplicity of the language intended to be good reading for kids as young as ten just left me with an odd feeling.  I can’t say for sure that I’ve put this book down for good, but I definitely probably won’t pick it up again until I have a ten year old to read it with, either as a bedtime story or something we share and discuss.

So… have you ever put down a book? Why?

Movie Round-Up: October 23rd, 2009

Reviews

Saw VI:

Another October, another Saw film.  I saw the first one and liked it.  I even saw the second.  I’ve yet to see the third, fourth, or fifth, so I clearly can’t see number six in the theater.  Also, I’m not a big fan of the uber-gore torture films.  The only interest I have in the Saw series at this point is the base plot and how they tie together.  I can get that from Wikipedia.

Amelia:

I didn’t get a chance to see a screening of this one, but it interests me in the same way that all movies about historical people do.  The cast looks great, and while I won’t be running off to see this at the theater, I’ll be eagerly awaiting the release on DVD so I can rent it.

Cirque du Freak – The Vampire’s Assistant:

Oh great… another vampire movie.  At least its not Twilight, which I finally saw and thought was awful.  But this movie has potential.  First, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, so you shouldn’t either.  The actors are all hamming it up pretty well, so you should join them as you romp through this tale together.  Its fun, maybe not worth full price, but probably worth a matinee or early bird showing.  I just hope that if the series continues it remains this light and fun.

Astro Boy:

The character has been around for over 50 years, and while I had seen the image now and then I have never read any of the manga or other comics or seen any of the TV shows or movies.  Going in to this film, all I knew was “Astro Boy is a robot.”  So the direction the movie took was quite startling to me.  Toby, the son of Dr. Tenma, is killed in a horrible accident, and the doctor, being a grieving robotics genius, builds himself a replacement son using the latest technology and the boy’s DNA.  Tenma quickly learns that this robot is not actually his son, and that having the boy-bot around is just a painful reminder of his loss.  The boy runs away, then is hunted, and eventually winds up on the surface below… oh, did I forget to mention they all lived in a floating utopia called Metro City?  Yeah, and the world below them is little more than where they dump their garbage, at least that’s what they think.  Astro finds new friends among the surface dwellers, but he won’t be safe for long as the President of Metro City is looking for the power source that is running the boy robot.  I thought the animation of this film was superb, and the voice acting was great, but really it is the story that knocks this movie out of the park.  I found myself at the edge of my seat, drawn in to this world and caring about Astro Boy.  Not since The Iron Giant have I cared so much about a robot, and while Astro Boy isn’t quite up to that level of greatness, it is great film.  Go see it.

The Graveyard Book

Reviews

Quite often, books fall into one of two traps.  The first is “everything happens all at once”, this is because they want to tell a story and they want to tell you all of the story, but they don’t want to drag it out over years, so instead everything happens in a short period of time.  A normal person is suddenly thrown into a mess and over the course of a few days the world is saved.  The second is “all the boring parts too”, this being where in order to tell the whole story they tell you the whole story, years of a character’s life when large chunks of it are irrelevant.

Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is how you tell a long story without falling into either trap.  This is the story of Nobody Owens, a boy who loses his family and grows up in a graveyard.  His tale is told almost as a collection of short stories rather than as one long novel, but there is a common thread throughout and keeps it from being just a collection of shorts.  Like a stone across the water, we skip through Bod’s life as he has encounters and experiences that shape him, all the while hiding from the world and the man who might still be looking to kill him.

This book was a fantastic read, and perfect for the month of October and the Halloween season.  I enjoyed it thoroughly and can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t.

Movie Round-Up: October 16th, 2009

Reviews

Where The Wild Things Are:

Lots of people are familiar with the children’s book by Maurice Sendak and so there was much excitement and anticipation surrounding this movie.  The first thing you should do is remember how little story there is in the book.  In case you have forgotten, its about a boy who throws a tantrum and is sent to bed without dinner who then goes on a magical adventure with the Wild Things where they make him king and have a rumpus until the boy decides to go home, and after returning he finds dinner waiting for him.  It really isn’t the sort of thing you’d expect to be made into a full blown hour and a half movie.  Considering what little there is in the source material, Spike Jonze does a pretty fantastic job of turning it into a movie.  He does capture the style of the art, the Wild Things themselves, and the island they call home.  But the story here, which much expands upon the ten sentences of the original, is about a boy who may or may not have behavioral problems.  For sure he does based on his lashing out (wrecking his sister’s room and biting his mother), and we are only given peaks at the possible causes (a sister who doesn’t want him around, a single mother who works hard and is dating) but nothing concrete is ever said.  When Max runs off into the world of the Wild Things its obvious, to me at least, that each of the Things is an aspect of Max’s own personality, his feelings.  They play, they fight, they talk, and Max does eventually come home and his mom feeds him dinner.  I would caution people who want to take their kids to see this.  Go early when your kid has energy, because when I saw this at 6pm, the movie just wasn’t colorful or exciting enough to hold the attention of the fifty or so kids in attendance.  It makes for a good “art house” style film, but I think most kids are going to be bored.

The Stepfather:

Yeah… this movie isn’t exactly going to be breaking any new ground.  Guy is a psychopath who likes to marry women with kids, then kill them.  New step son gets suspicious.  Stuff happens.  You’ve seen this movie before and you will see this movie again.  Why?  Because it is fun!  But fun as it is, it is also not really worth $10 to see.  Wait for DVD.

Paranormal Activity:

If maniacal family members and overt scares aren’t your thing, consider going to see a late showing of Paranormal Activity instead.  I’m not going to blow smoke here.  This is not the scariest movie ever made, and anyone who has told you otherwise is lying to you.  However, the style and production of the film lend it to a level of creepiness that might get to you if you are the sort of person who is afraid of the dark.  It is a slow building film, similar to The Blair Witch Project, but in my opinion much better (and less shaky camera).  If you haven’t heard anything about this movie, don’t go looking, just go see it… this is one case where knowing nothing makes the movie better.

Black Dynamite:

Years ago, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka parodied the 70’s blaxploitation films by bringing it into the (then) modern era and poking fun at the common elements most of them shared.  Black Dynamite does the same, but with a decidedly different approach.  The production values make the film look more like a lost 70’s film, and their skewering of the genre is as much aimed at the construction of those films (the screenplay, the acting, the sets, the use of stock footage) as it is the tropes they all shared.  I honestly have not laughed this much or this hard at the theater in a long time.  If you can handle the language, sex and 70’s as well as the absurdities of the plot, this movie is well worth the price of admission.

Law Abiding Citizen:

The only release this week I haven’t seen a screening of is the one I want to see the most.  Gerard Butler plays a guy who feels his justice was undermined by the DA (Jamie Foxx) who offered one of the men who killed his family a deal.  It turns out he isn’t just any regular schmo but some super black ops type mega spy assassin dude who is going to get his revenge on the men who did the crime and the system that didn’t punish them to his satisfaction.  I may have mentioned before that I think I’d pay to listen to Gerard Butler read a phone book… damn I’d kill to have that accent.  Plus, I generally like every movie he’s done.  And hey, I saw the preview, stuff blows up, and there’s nothin’ wrong with that.

After The Climax

Gaming

bort.rose.150I recently finished reading a book that had a good thirty or more pages after the climactic fight scene.  It shook out the ramifications of the fight over a few encounters on a couple different days and let you know the status of all the people involved who had survived and even gave a hint at the direction future books might take without actually dangling a cliffhanger on the reader.  Movies are often like this too.  The climax hits and then you get anywhere from five to twenty minutes of tying up the story and letting you know what the climax means to the world this story has inhabited.

Games aren’t often like that.  Many games practically end with the climax.  Boss monster dies, “You win!!” flashes on the screen and the credits roll.  Other times, games slide in a movie ending, a pre-rendered cut scene that ties up the story and maybe lets you know what the climax means to the world the game took place in.  But that is sort of a cop-out.  That isn’t really a game ending, its a movie ending tacked on to a game.

This months Round Table tasks us…

How can the denouement be incorporated into gameplay? In literary forms, it is most often the events that take place after the plot’s climax that form your lasting opinion of the story. A well constructed denouement acts almost as a payoff, where protagonists and antagonists alike realize and adjust to the consequences of their actions. Serial media often ignored the denouement in favor of the cliffhanger, in order to entice viewers to return. Television has further diluted the denouement by turning it into a quick resolution that tidily fits into the time after the final commercial break.

But the denouement is most neglected in video games where it is often relegated to a short congratulatory cut scene, or at most–a slide show of consequences. This month’s topic challenges you to explore how the denouement can be expressed as gameplay.

So, how can the denouement be expressed through game play?

The simplest answer is just to continue the game mechanics into an interactive version of the cut scene.  If the game included NPCs throughout that you would talk to or exchange items with, continue that.  After the fight, put the player back in the game and make them take the sword they took off the demon lord back to the town and see it destroyed (try, of course, to avoid cramming in another boss battle or cliffhanger by making a town elder or someone grab the sword and fight you or run off with it).

A slight twist on that is to leave the actual end of the game up to the player.  Maybe during the game several people expressed interest in the sword, either for destroying or using, and let the player take it to whom he thinks deserves it most, let them pick the ending they want to see.  After the final boss battle, let the player go finish up some quests or other elements that give them story pieces concerning their actions and the other characters in the game world.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance did this in a way.  The game could be completed without actually winning every level and side quest, and one level in particular required you to choose between two characters which one to save.  While the end of the game was nothing more than a series of cut scenes, it was a series that was built on the actions you did or did not take throughout the game.  The denouement of the game changed depending on the player’s performance.  The only failure here is that during the playing of the game, the player has no idea that this denouement will happen, they just play through so the choices they make don’t have the weight they might because the player isn’t really aware those choices are going to matter.

In the future, I’d love to see more games go at least as far as Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, but would really love it to see them go further and let me explore and control the end of the game a bit more.  The worst thing I think that could happen is to have a single player game climax and then roll into an MMO where you’ll meet up with other players who experienced the same single player game, where each of you was the hero and fought alone against the same bad guy boss.  That, in my opinion, would just render the entire single player game story irrelevant.  I suppose that’s why I tend to dislike most MMO tutorials.

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Thirty-five and One Thousand

Random Thoughts

35… Well, I haven’t had a midlife crisis yet, so I’ve got that going for me…

Today is my birthday… again… so, lets look back at “Thirty-four” and see how I did.

I got my work ethic back, I suppose.  I have a new job, though it did take a few too many months to get one (Thanks Economy! You suck!), and I enjoy it.  I’m back to working for a small company, so gone are all the retarded hour long meetings where nothing gets done but settling on who to blame for why nothing got done from the previous meeting.  We have projects, we do them, and then they are done.  Ahh… the sweet life.

Over the past year, I got myself under two hundred pounds, which is pretty nice.  But I’ve kinda plateaued.  I just haven’t found anything yet to motivate me to take it further.  Wii Fit Plus showed up on the doorstep this week and it promises to fix the major issue I had with the original, that of having to stop between every exercise, so we will see how that goes.  I’m also still struggling with getting my diet under control.  The main issue is that I’m hungry all the time, and I need to learn to ignore it.

And as for projects around the house… yep… still need doing, but again, I’m not going anywhere.

I did try the NaNoWriMo as well as Script Frenzy, but I finished neither.  The attempts, however, were important and should lead to better participation this time around.

That explains “Thirty-five”, now for the “One Thousand”.

This marks my one thousandth entry on this blog.  Kinda neat that it happened today.  Do you believe in signs or omens?  Sometimes I think I do, and sometimes I don’t… but I can’t help but wonder if this means something.  Its not exactly a pile of mashed potatoes that looks like the Devil’s Tower, but it is what it is.

Anyway.  This is my thirty-fifth birthday.  This is my one thousandth post.  Enjoy!