31/December/2010

It's funny how bad I am at planning things. I'll totally have the site redesign finished to a reasonably functional degree by the end of the year, sure! And here I am, with the redesign still in its planning stages, and a bazillion unfinished projects littered around me.

For instance, this badge of a frighteningly disproportional Spider-Man. I don't know what I planned to do with it, but I swear I planned something.

(no, I wasn't going to wear it)

 

Here's hoping next year will be a little more productive.

 

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30/December/2010

Watched Ultraviolet. In a way it was a lot like your typical anime - an incredible attention-grabbing first twenty minutes, and then the rest of it struggles to compare with the expectations, leaving the viewer with an incomprehensible plot and cookie cutter action scenes. At least there's Milla Jovovich, right?

I can't really say I was disappointed, as to get that reaction I actually need to be invested in the movie, and right from the start I knew the plot was going to be an unintelligible mess. If the first five minutes of the movie are enough for me to decide that I'm just going to pay attention to the action scenes and nothing more, that's pretty bad for both the movie's storytelling and my attention span! I will admit the first twenty minutes of action was pretty freakin' phenomenal - this is how you make a sci-fi action scene, folks! Ridiculously colourful characters dispatching each other in amusingly sparkly manners (they should make a movie where everyone's made of glass just so they can all be destroyed in visually spectacular ways) and abusing gravity devices to drive motorbikes along buildings and walls - that's how you open a movie. It's ridiculous, but it's the kind of ridiculous you can fully embrace as it's not like the story is all that involving.

Well, until the first twenty minutes are up, at least. The film feels like it tries hard to give the movie a heart, having Violet slowly gaining a fondness for some weird clone kid and all that, but everything's just so poorly explained, poorly conveyed or poorly edited that I just couldn't keep track of anything. There's a fair few main characters, but you barely get to know them because the movie seems to have a hard time not focusing on Milla Jovovich (cue obligatory-on-the-internet "who's complaining?" remark). There's some kind of nonsense about humans and non-humans (I think they're meant to be vampires, but that's hardly conveyed well either), but it's summarised rather crudely in the start and that's about all the infodumping you're going to get. In a way the movie just blasts its way through all these events, but at the same time it's got a rather plodding vibe about it. Probably because the movie goes along and all these scenes happen but you've still no idea what the fuck the goal is.

For instance, there's a scene where Violet dies. Yeah! She's shot dead! With a gun! And then after about ten seconds of mild drama and blackouts she's alive again. Her vampire buddy manages to resurrect her, and he's overjoyed, explaining all the trouble he went through, stating that her heart stopped three times. If we were actually shown this supposedly dramatic operation, even through a montage or a cliché hazy "we've got consciousness!" blurry POV shot from her, this would almost have more impact, but given how ridiculous and under-explained the whole movie is you could've cut out the entire getting-shot part and I can barely imagine it would've changed anything.

That's just the primary fault with the movie. There's no attachment to it. There's no danger, there's no drama, it's just a bunch of scenes where things happen. Violet leaves every battle without a scratch, even against impossible odds, and there's never any danger to it. She constantly ends up in incredibly-lopsided Mexican standoffs where the tension is played up, but what for? She murders an entire three-story lobby full of soldiers without a scratch, off-screen. At first I thought "man, we missed out on a great fight!", but then we see her murder three more rooms full of people and there still isn't an ounce of danger to it, and the fight scenes actually begin to feel like padding. It's the film equivalent of watching someone play Doom with god mode on - you see the sights, but you don't embrace the experience. The only injury she sustains is some cuts on her hands from grabbing swords from bad guys, but it feels less like an attempt to show she's still in danger and more like the action girl equivalent of her gasping "oh, my stars - I broke a nail!"

I suppose you could argue I'm viewing the movie the wrong way. It's probably meant to be light-hearted fluff fuelled by the rule of cool, but to me it stopped being interesting after half an hour. It's one thing to watch a movie just for the action, but this blew its load on the (totally awesome) opening gravity-shifting motorcycle chase, and then the rest just doesn't compare, leaving you with boring and trite shootouts and sword fights. If the enemies were actually a threat (or capable of not killing their buddies with every other attack) then it might have been appealing, but basically the movie just turns into a bunch of pretty pictures once you realise there's not much substance left in it. At least it's short. It could have ended at the fifty minute mark if it wanted to, but it obviously thought more danger-lacking fight scenes were what we wanted.

The visuals are pretty neat. It's difficult to talk in detail about them when I basically admit I'd just been watching a sequence of pretty pictures and nothing more.

Huh. I guess I was a bit disappointed with it, huh?

I guess the director's cut or expanded edition (or whatever) might improve it, but I'm hardly going to seek it out voluntarily.

 

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29/December/2010

Who's up for an encore of my "fuck colds" charade?

 

I watched I Am Legend last night, though watching it was an amusing series of minor setbacks. It was being shown on ITV, but I thought, forget ads, let's just watch it on DVD! The DVD wasn't bad at first, but the sound would pop and blank for a few seconds at random moments, and even stranger, the video would cut to earlier parts in the film at totally inappropriate moments. In the midst of Neville searching through the darkened building for his dog, we got a five second glimpse at the earlier scene where he's closing all the shutters. And then it would resume back in the building. We got as far as the second flashback to before-the-infection before we decided, this kind of stinks, so we watched the rest of it on ITV. The ads weren't as frequent or as obtrusive as I had feared.

And then when I went to write up my thoughts on it, I realised my monitor had died. Its status light blinked randomly, but it got no picture or recognition, even though it was very clear the computer was on; you could hear the "bing!" of trying to close unsaved text documents.

So I wrote up my thoughts totally in the dark. I could write and I could save, but I certainly couldn't look at what I was writing. It was actually pretty fun, and there weren't quite as many spelling errors as I thought.

I'll present my thoughts pretty much as I wrote them, minus the wacky formatting and spelling errors. Every instance of me forgetting what I was talking about will be included just for giggles.

 

Watched I Am Legend, the 2007(?) one with Will Smith. I kinda enjoyed it more than I thought, but at the same time didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped.

It really captures Neville's life in a totally empty, lifeless city (well, lifeless besides the deer and antelope and freakin' lions traipsing about, but not much attention is paid to them outside of the opening scene). the guy gets by not too badly, but you know that he's not too far from plunging off the deep end, if he hasn't already. He tries to keep himself sane by engaging in small talk with marionettes he's placed around the video store. He goes on drives with his dog and raids people's apartments for booze and medicine. He's watched movie so many times he can quote scenes from Shrek off the top of his head. The human side of the story is top-notch, and easily on par with the actual book (if not slightly better, because we see more of him as a slightly more sensible human being before he goes nutso). The problem with The Omega Man was that... well, I never remember the actual one-man-in-a-city parts. I just remember him running from vampires with the woman by his side set to offbeat 70s funk music.
Where was I?
Yeah, the human scenes are great, and in a way it's more interesting just seeing him going about his life and trying to see more of his this strange, unseen threat than, well, when the threat actually shows up.

The monsters are... monsters. They're not a new breed of human that will succeed us, they're just monsters. Big meat puppets with stretchy mouths and frighteningly bad CGI. They bound around and they roar like ogres from Lord of the Rings and they just look moronic. Admittedly the final scene where they start scaling the building is pretty creepy, but until then they just look too ridiculous to be frightening. I do kind of exaggerate, but the CGI does just ruin it - it's hard to see them as real threats when they're just so explicitly CGI. When it takes until the climax before the bloody things become even slightly scary (outside of cheapo jump scares, but that's more "oh no i wasn't expecting a loud noise or sudden movement" and less "oh no, these things are actually realistic enough to frighten me") then that's pretty bad. Pity, because when the monsters are just monsters (and the sub-plot of them using traps against him is given no conclusion) then it strips the story of... well, its story.
The bit when Neville is caught by a trap and has to slowly limp back to the car, it's got a really interesting atmosphere. Heck, him and his dog going everywhere and snooping into all these weird places has a really great atmosphere, and when he's attacked by freaky mutant dogs (also rather unconvincing CGI), it's actually almost decent, mostly because they're explicitly monsters.

Um. Thing. Let's start again!

Basically the dogs actually look good, plus since they're dogs you can accept the rather monstrous presentation. When the humans are just monsters it just takes a big dump over the story and what made it interesting. It's also really really heartbreaking seeing him have to kill his dog, especially when you see it as an adorable little puppy during the flashbacks. Will Smith is brilliant at these dramatic scenes, though I will admit the "what are you doing here, Fred??!?!" scene was a bit hilarious. Just a bit, though.
Neville is taken in by a mother and child later on, and it's rather sad seeing just low his social graces have become during his three years of solitude. In the book the guy loses his social graces when trying to rescue a girl, but that's just because he's a hateful ranting beardy guy screaming after her, while socially incompetent Will Smith is still loveable ol' Will Smith. Without his dog you can just see the emptiness in his life when he hasn't got a wagging tail in his passenger seat. Seeing him quote the Shrek scene was strangely upsetting. I almost get the impression if I'm house-bound with this cold for any longer I'd become like that, except I'd probably end up reading aloud the dialogue from Tetris Attack or singing along to the Wing Cap theme in Super Mario 64 or something a lot less poignant.
The ending seemed to come rather abruptly. Only after two scuffles with the beasts we have the climatic showdown, and it's like, wait, the running time is over already? The movie's only 80 minutes. I'm sure The Omega Man was longer, but it was a bit more plodding and had that whole finding-a-cure-and-another-society-of-not-weird-people subplot. Given that the infected are just total monstrous brutes, not even the gift of speech, it's like, what good is that cure going to do? Yes, they look less monstrous, but do they act less monstrous? It seemed a bit early to judge the infected girl solely from her less weird face. I'm sure someone could argue "oh sure there was enough space in that cubby hole for him too!" but I just felt the ending as a whole was hollow. I could get behind a cure in The Omega Man because it was more about the weird cult and their change of habits. In this, they're monsters. In the novel they appeared (emphasis!) to be monsters, but were just guys reacting quite understandably to a murderer in their midst. Admittedly you kind of wonder how well the ending can go at all with these changes - the cure seems farfetched, but considering these monsters to be the successors of mankind is a stretch as well. If we saw more of their society ad culture (if any), I might've been able to accept it, but it's the kind of movie where you just feel it dug itself into a hole, and the only way it could've worked was either a different monster, or just dropping them altogether.
In a way the movie's got a bit of a Left 4 Dead vibe. The lonely city and the monstrous, mostly-brainless "zombies". You do feel they could've adapted the movie into that, if the two were released at the right time. I remember my dad saying (after seeing a campaign of Left 4 Dead) that its zombies were just so much more frightening and believable than that of I Am Legend. I think it helps that Left 4 Dead keeps itself grounded (in "mundane" zombie tropes) until you get the mutations like the Boomer and Tank and all that, whereas I Am Legend the monsters just look fucking ridiculous. I keep thinking of that scene from The Mummy every time they do that stupid stretchy mouth thing.

I'm glad I watched it, but even with its dumb monsters, the ending just undermines the whole thing. It's a good flick, but I don't know how they could have sensibly ended it.

 

The amusing thing is that I'd forgotten I could've used my TV as a monitor. DVI-HDMI cable and all. Doyyyy.

 

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26/December/2010

A box of Ferrero Rocher and a Wallace & Gromit calendar. Y'know, this is probably the one year where I could've done with a pen or some underpants instead. I've got a serious lack of both. (yes, you needed to know that)

So, yeah, Christmas! I haven't seen Jingle All The Way on TV, unfortunately, but I really should just get myself the DVD instead of having to whine that ITV doesn't bother showing it for the umpteenth time. I did catch a few animated flicks, some of which weren't that bad, so, hey, let's summarise my thoughts on those, shall I?

 

Barnyard: You know, I never knew this was an actual movie. I talked briefly about the video game version in a three year old blog entry back when I was ragging on about Play.com; I had no idea it was a licensed game, I just thought it was somebody's bright idea of a shovelware party game. It's actually not that bad! When the humans aren't around, animals get all bipedal and boogie on down, and their farm is protected by a good ol' cow, until he's mauled to death by some coyotes. Cue coming-of-age/duty story where the cow's son (voiced by the main guy from King of Queens) has to take over the leadership role and fend off the coyotes.

It's a pretty humdrum story and the characters are never exactly astounding (the best guys are the punk rebel cows who go joyriding and human-tipping), but what makes it appealing is that although there's a few celebrity voices, a lot of the characters are performed by actual voice actors! Rob Paulsen and Cam Clarke (Raphael and Leonardo from the 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Cyborg Ninja and Liquid Snake from Metal Gear Solid, you should know about these guys!) play a double-act of a tone-deaf rooster and a rather manic ferret, and while they're not truly stupendous characters to work with, it's just pretty neat seeing the two of them again.

The art style is kind of strange and very love-it-or-hate-it - the characters all feel rather blocky and plastic-y and only a few actually have fur and texture. It's kind of strange seeing the cows and the wolves on screen together, as the cows are basically big blocks with snouts, whiles the wolves are thin, wiry and have fur; it's like they're wildly different styles. The barnyard creatures and humans all have a slight The Far Side vibe to them, which personally helps excuse some of the weird aesthetic... but it doesn't change the fact that all the cows, male and female, have udders. Awkwaaaard. By the end I was like, okay, maybe they can excuse this when the baby cow is born (with udders in full sight) and calling it a girl... but nope, it's a baby boy.

It's a decent watch (if just because of the decent animation and visual style), but it ends up rather forgettable afterwards. Despite all the advertising emphasising the "party animal" aspect, there's a rather sinister dark edge to it whenever the coyotes are in the spotlight, which I wouldn't surprised if it gave any tykes nightmares. The final battle is played for laughs, but when they fatally wound the cow's dad early on, it really is a bit grim. I'm glad I saw it, but I probably wouldn't bother seeing it if it weren't on TV.

 

Madagascar: It's one of those "wahey I'm a talking animal aren't I just the living end" type films, this time with Ben Stiller. I won't deny that I'm always going to be biased against CGI funny animal flicks, but this was a relatively decent watch. The characters were entertaining, it got some humourous action going on, and it's probably the one thing Sacha Baron Cohen has done that I've liked. I'd dare say I'd be interested in checking out the sequel, and maybe even the video game adaptation, if just to see how mediocre it is! I will say, of all the characters, David Schwimmer as Melman the giraffe didn't really have much of a character to work with. I guess as a neurotic permanently-ill giraffe he didn't do a bad job, but as a main character he doesn't have quite the depth or the role of the other three; and when you're talking about a cartoon about animals making pop culture jokes, that's pretty bad.

I was particularly taken with the animation and art style, especially when contrasting it to Barnyard. Melman had as much character as, I don't know, a plank of giraffe-shaped wood, but the way he was animated was easily the most striking in the movie, I felt. Gloria's attitude carried in her movements were particularly great as well (fat chicks in cartoons! awesome!), and the penguins had some great snappy animation. Even little things like the lion's big blocky fingers and the king lemur's eyes, it really is a fantastic visual style. I think it's easy for some CGI cartoons to just botch up one small element and then render the rest of the style weird looking, but Madagascar nailed its style without a flaw. Even something like giving the characters more detailed eyes could've muddled up the style, but just having black dots works out fine.

Unrelated tangent, but it seems every family-friendly film Ben Stiller's been in has been shown this Christmas. I don't mind Ben Stiller, and would certainly have his face all over Christmas television than, say, that of Matt Lucas. That guy really spoils your appetite, even when Little Britain isn't on.

 

The Ant Bully: I missed the beginning of this, but I'm hardly crying over that. I was thinking of this one a few days ago while looking at the complete list of GameCube games - namely, I was thinking "who actually remembers these movie-licensed games after a year or two? Heck, who even remembers this movie after a year or two?" I just hated the look of this movie when it was being advertised. The main character didn't look appealing, the theme looked like a retread of Antz, and, sorry, but that's just a really dumb name. It's perfectly appropriate given the theme of the story, but it's just not an attractive title, y'know. Maybe it's too literal. It's like calling Over The Hedge "The Animal Food Burglars" or Toy Story "The Toys That Come To Life And Go To A Pizzeria". It just hasn't got a good ring, y'know.

So I guess some kid is turned small by some ant magic and then he accidentally calls an exterminator and after some mild antics they scare away the exterminator by using more size-changing ant magic. It's got a couple of okay setpieces like being chased by the frog, but none of it felt very inspiring, personally. The style of the bugs did look better than that of A Bugs Life and Antz, especially the insects they use as steeds in the final battle, but overall it just felt very humdrum. I commend it for not just being another exercise in pop culture references, and Rob Paulsen appears as a jolly beetle who ends up saving the day, but there really wasn't much of worth in what I saw.

 

Over The Hedge: I actually watched this one... a year ago? Two years ago? All I know is that I didn't blog about it for some reason. It's not bad either! In fact, I'd probably say it's the best of these flicks. Barnyard is a thin story padded out with amused unrelated scenes, Madagascar is basically a long string of gags, and The Ant Bully... is, well, The Ant Bully. Over The Hedge by comparison has a slightly more filled-out story, a lot more characters (each of which are appealing, unlike others where there's a lot of side characters who just don't really do anything), and just has a better mix of everything.

What, you want me to elaborate? Man, watching three movies in a row has me pooped. Maybe I'll review it the third time I see it.

 

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24/December/2010

Given my status as a rampant Nintendo fanboy, you'd think I'd have talked about Donkey Kong Country Returns by now, right? I haven't even so much as mentioned it since the time it was shown at E3, and the game's been out, what, over two weeks now in the UK? Well, truth is, I only got my copy yesterday! My brother preordered his but even then thanks to the terrific weather we're currently having pretty much all postage has been delayed quite badly, so it took a week to arrive even after its release date. Awesome.

The first thing to be asked when talking about a Donkey Kong Country game is this - is it challenging enough to make you utter increasingly-creative expletives? Yes. Yes it is. Is that a good thing? You bet your bananas it is. It's very relieving to play a game with proper kick-you-in-the-face challenge again. Returns basically takes the tough-as-nails level design of the original trilogy, turns it up several notches, and moulds it into a curveball and expects you to get it on the first shot. This is also why I should be banned from making analogies when I have had barely any sleep. Basically, it's tough!

But tough strictly in the level design: all the extraneous nastiness such as needing to pay cash money just to save your file, or losing all your extra lives and coins whenever you load your save, or the inability to go to a different world without reaching Funky Kong's jet rides... that's all gone. The game is a fair bit kinder outside of the stages, as you can buy extra lives whenever you want, you can buy extra hearts (heck, each Kong has two hit points instead of one!), and if you suck badly enough, you can let the computer just finish the level for you. You could argue that they should've kept it strictly old-school and made the game slap you around the face every five seconds just because it can, but let's face it, when's the last time a game really punished you for getting a game over, or made a big deal of restricting you from saving your file? There's old-fashioned, and then there's obsolete. Yeah, I'm going to miss it, but unless a majority of the gaming market suddenly devolves back into what they were like during the 80s and early 90s, I can't imagine any game using those kinds of tactics again. And I admit I'm not exactly complaining. Have I told you about the time I was stuck for at least three months on the ice world of the first Donkey Kong Country, because I couldn't leave the world and I barely had enough lives to reach a save point? It's a funny story.

But yes, Donkey Kong Country Returns. Fantastic game! And it is a beautiful game! It seems a lot of new retro-style instalments don't feel too obliged to be overly dynamic in their visuals. Mega Man 9 and 10 are still NES-style (though I wouldn't want a dynamic-looking Mega Man game, to be frank), New Super Mario Bros. Wii looks good but was still strictly flat, it never felt like anything but a video game level. And the less said about Sonic 4's rather uninspired visuals, the better (okay, they're not that bad, but like the rest of the game, not much to write home about either). Returns is a fully 3D game from the environments to the characters, and it really brings those levels to life. Barrels frequently blast you into the foreground or background, switches will interact with scenery in the far distance, and the whole world just feels alive. It is admittedly rather extraneous, and quite often they could've ditched those details entirely, but it lends the game so much personality and vibrancy that I think it adds a huge amount to the game's visual charm. Also, who knew Kenji Yamamoto could do David Wise's music justice?

What I probably love most about the game so far is the sheer amount of stuff to do. There's still the four KONG letters to get in each stage, as well as puzzle pieces that unlock music and concept art in the extras menu. There's time trials for each and every stage, and believe me, I'd dare say this is the first time trial in a game that's really pushed my expertise to the max - I haven't yet managed to beat the gold record in any stage, but you must have to have the mapping and timing of the entire stage laid out in your mind, as there's been a couple of instances where I'm mere seconds away from beating it. And although I have not beaten the game yet, there's an extra challenge mode where you play the game again without Diddy Kong (who lends you his jetpack), and with only one heart. That sounds pretty awesome.

You know, I was actually hoping I wouldn't gush about the game so keenly when I haven't even beaten it yet, but here I am. I know I shouldn't really be comparing the two, but I just can't help but feel this is what New Super Mario Bros. Wii should've been, at least in the "stuff you can do" department. Let's face it, after you complete the game and get the Star Coins, that's it, you've done everything. You have all those coins, but you can't actually use them for anything of worth - you can't buy extra levels or different characters or new challenges or anything outside of boring-ass videos. It does at least have a relatively user-friendly unofficial level editing tool, but Donkey Kong Country Returns feels like it knows how to give itself some proper replay value. All NSMB has is just its multi-player (which, admittedly, is still pretty rad).

I was also hoping I wouldn't end up going on a rant about how New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a bit inferior to Returns, either, but here we are.

 

Saw Return of the Living Dead like a week ago (I've kind of held off uploading this blog entry!). It's a great watch! It's horrific, it's monstrous, it's positively pessimistic with no glimpse of hope at all for anyone involved, and yet it's a hoot to watch. What I love the almost light-hearted farcical nature of it; in the film's universe, Dawn of the Dead was based off real events, but they changed enough details in the 'adaptation' to make it legally sound, so characters refer to it a number of times when discussing the undead threat. Problem is, the movie changed how they actually killed the beasts, meaning nobody has any idea how to destroy them. You've got two inept workers and their boss trying to dispose of a manic yellowed corpse, getting into slapstick antics trying to pin the thing down long enough to drive a pickaxe through its head. Then when that doesn't work, they chop its head off, resulting in a headless manic yellowed corpse running about, and even when they think they've taken care of it by cremating it into ashes, that only makes the situation a hundred times worse. It's totally grim, but that whole sequence is almost like something from a Laurel & Hardy film.

It's got plenty of hilarious setpieces when you've got five punks and a no-nonsense business owner trying to keep this zombie apocalypse very hush-hush so he won't get taken to court over it,  but what really shines are the zombies themselves. Not just shuffling, droning, undead masses, they're basically just savage mobs who have enough smarts to vocalise their desire for brains, phone in more victims to be eaten, and operate heavy machinery. And the only apparent means of stopping them are by stuffing them in army-quality industrial barrels. Not exactly the most convenient threat in the world to take care of. If I may be nitpicky (when am I never?), it's not exactly clear what produces more zombies. People who have their brains eaten are dead and stay dead (so the two punks we quite explicitly see munched upon stay dead for the remainder of the film), but zombies who have their brains damaged function just fine. However, the naked punk girl and at least one police officer come back as flesh eating mofos, with no obvious signs of being ravaged by the claws of the undead. What, do zombies just exchange some dead-reviving juices with them or something? And if so, why would they want to? After all, generating more zombies means less brains to go around.

I admit I was a little dubious of watching it as it feels like I've watched nothing but horror movies all year, but I was very glad I saw it. Should I check out the sequel? I get the impression they all kind of blow, which doesn't surprise me, but I'm hardly a man of good taste.

 

No doodle today, partly because of laziness, but mostly because of this.

I can see why no one's made a 100% rip of Mario Clash when this is the terrifying crap they have to look at.

 

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16/December/2010

Ugh. Designing a new layout for the various bits of the site isn't too bad, and I'd dare say it's actually mildly entertaining. Porting old content into the new layout is an entirely joyless affair that makes me want to cry, though. Why did I think this was a good idea?

SITE UPDATES ARE POSTPONED FOR ANOTHER EIGHTEEN MONTHS

Nah, just kidding, but it's probably not far from the truth. It'll probably be sixteen months.

 

As usual, I haven't really been up to much, and what little I have done I've mostly forgotten about. I haven't been watching many movies lately either, and what little I have watched I haven't commented on, so let's try and catch up!

 

Jumper: Rather nice action flick with an intriguing premise. Dude can teleport! Religious fundamentalist Samuel L. Jackson doesn't approve and wants his goose cooked! To go on a (hopefully) minor tirade, one thing that's always bugged me about superheroes is how it's pretty much customary for all the big shots to have lorry-loads of superpowers (insert half-baked Superman jab here), when it's much more fun to have just one ability and see how it can be used in a variety of scenarios. The main character (I can't remember his name, and there's no way in hell I'm going to actually call him Jumper) is still just a regular guy who happens to have used his teleportation power to be a massive bank-robbing dick, so it's not like he has super strength or anything. Yes, he can handle goons with ease, but only because he's good at grabbing people and then using his inertia to ram them into walls or whatever.

I must be very old-fashioned for saying this, but the guy wasn't a particularly ideal superhero. This is highlighted, of course, during the first glimpse of his adult life when he sees footage of a flooding in a foreign country, and rather than doing a thing about it, he decides to score himself a bit of booty in a local bar. A true hero to identify with! Of course, most superheroes need some kind of push to get them into tackling crime and helping the little man; Peter Parker had his callous attitude result in the death of his Uncle Ben, Bruce Wayne had his parents shot by some random punk (or did they retcon that?) and, uh, I think Clark Kent's adoptive parents decide that superhero-ing is the best their supernaturally gifted adoptive son can give to the world, I guess. The hero of Jumper is just this guy nobody respects who only turns his life around after leaving his deadbeat dad and robbing a few hundred banks. Not exactly straight-arrow material.

None of the characters were particularly likeable, and I was actually more interested in learning more about the former-bully now-drunkard guy who the main guy slams around in prison at one point, as the main guy certainly wasn't intriguing outside of his special power. I will say Hayden Christenden didn't do a bad job as the main guy, though that probably doesn't say much since I've never exactly held much respect for the actor (that's what being a Star Wars nerd does to you!). Petty nags aside (pfft, like the story and characters mean anything!), it was a fun and entertaining flick, and it might be worth checking out the original novel.

 

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb: I wasn't really too sure what to think of this, to be quite honest. I was only aware of its many homages, such as the bomb dropping sequence, Strangelove's evil hand and "mein fuhrer, I can valk!", as well as repeated references to it as the one of the greatest war/comedy films of all time. I had no expectations, but, if I may sound utterly blasphemous to any movie buff in the audience, I was almost under the impression it was going to be a straight-up comedy. Instead it's mostly the kind of dark satire where you're unsure whether or not to laugh, as although the stuff is ridiculous, it never feels that far off from what people would've been seriously thinking during the Cold War.

You've got clear-as-day comedy like the gung-ho military fellow in the War Room who's constantly trying to pin some kind of ridiculous plot on the Russian ambassador, and then you've got... other kinds of humour. Such as the off-his-nut General Ripper slowly going crazy and paranoid, detailing to Peter Sellers his belief that the Communists are contaminating the American's bodily fluids, a conspiracy he cooked up after a bout of sexual intercourse that didn't exactly blast off. The man plays the whole thing so straight, like a real paranoid rant in a military film that it's hard to know in what light you're meant to take it. And then, in between all this, you've got the very tense scenes of the bomber plane making an attack on the Russian target containing a bomb that'll basically wipe out all life on Earth. It's a big clash of contrasting moods that give the film a very strange ambiance.

So, yeah, I'm clearly not the man to speak about the movie's themes with any degree of sensibility. I will say that, as always with Kubrick's work, it has some absolutely fantastic camera work, and the whole thing, despite its strange clashing of themes and atmosphere, runs very nicely. I'll basically summarise with the tail end of a conversation about it with RQ87.

 

 

Contrary to your first assumption, this fellow is actually discussing the various ways to eat a gumball.

 

---

11/December/2010

Yikes, how many weeks has it been without a new blog entry? I didn't exactly mean to give the impression I'd died or gone textually mute or something, but I didn't exactly have anything worth saying, either.

Regarding site updates... keep dreaming, I guess! I just haven't really had the time to make any proper original content, as most of what I've got for future updates is stuff like reviews for Games I Own and so on. I've spent more time worrying about a future redesign than content, actually; I admit my train of thought is "I'm hardly going to be updating the site much in future, so it may as well look nice while it stagnates." It's a harsh thing to say, but I won't deny it's what I'm thinking! I could probably have worded it in a more polite manner, but I think I lost that talent years ago.

If it means anything, I am working on a mildly secret project that might be ready by Christmas if all goes well, but I don't want to get your hopes up.

Am I not updating because I'm busy? I wouldn't quite call myself busy, but I have got my hands in a lot of pies at the moment. I'm redesigning the site (which I wouldn't expect to be ready for a while), there's that secret project (which, if all goes well, may be an ongoing thing!), I'm very slowly learning a bit of Python, a few accomplices and I are going to be working on a radio production through January and February, and there's probably other projects I'm forgetting. I have no intention of abandoning the site (I still like it, after all!), but I will admit I'd like to dedicate more time to being productive in other ventures, y'know.

I'm sure words like this would mean more if I'd actually made a good update in the last four months.

 

In slightly less frivolous news, the Transformers community have gotten their hands on an early draft of the 1986 Transformers movie script, written in Spring 1985 by Ron Friedman (the man behind the totally ludicrous 90s Iron Man cartoon)! There was an even earlier script being auctioned that they missed out on, sadly, but it went for something like $2500 to $3000, so it's not like they didn't try. RQ87 and I spent last night reading it and commenting on it, and... it's interesting! There's some wildly different stuff taking place, especially during the attack on Autobot City, and the stint on Quintessa features all the same elements but used in different manners, though a lot of it is close enough to the final revision.

It's hard to exactly pinpoint the tone of the script. I mean, people remember the movie as dark because a huge amount of the 1984 cast are killed callously yet casually, but there's still nonsense like Wheelie's presence and everyone dancing to Weird Al. This early draft has gruesome deaths galore (Ironhide and Ratchet are melted together; Gears and Windcharger are bombed to pieces with their body parts raining down on Blaster; Megatron is violently shattered by a falling statue; Sharkticon heads are exploded en masse... need I go on?) and due to spending more time at Autobot City after the opening battle, the attitude feels a little more bleak. And then, completely contrasting this, we've got Unicron (or Ingestor as he's called) making straw slurping noises when consuming energy, the Dinobots acting like Beavis & Butthead, and lots and lots of weirdness. I know the finished movie has tons of mood whiplash, but holy crap.

Most interestingly, "Life Sparks" play an important role in the story. The Matrix is totally absent, so Magnus becomes leader after Optimus gives him his Life Spark (which is described as a tiny ghostly image of whoever the spark belonged to), Galvatron steals it from him at Ingestor's command (at least, I presume he commands it - the dialogue is often so terribly written I just tuned it out, especially when half of Ingestor's speeches are just him going "aaaaaahh!!" for no good reason), Hot Rod becomes Rodimus after winning it back, and then Optimus' spark uses the last of its energy to destroy Ingestor. Rather than Megatron and the other Decepticons' bodies being used to make Galvatron and his homies, Megatron's Life Spark and those of ancient Decepticons stored in the Hall of Heroes (where Starscream's coronation takes place) are merely given new bodies and names. I'm very thankful they changed it, as not only is it incredibly silly to think of a tiny ghostly Megatron crying about his demise to Unicron, but it's just a bit hamfisted that Prime's spark is the only thing capable of beating Ingestor. Also it's just... weird. It's really creepy imagining Megatron being crushed until he's splintering into a thousand pieces, and seeing a tinier ghost version of him contained inside his torso. The dudes can't even die in peace, they've got to float around for a bit before they dissipate into nothingness. What a really miserable existence.

It's an interesting and imaginative script, but it ain't perfect, and aside from nice little extras like seeing more of the 1984 Autobots (Wheeljack and Sunstreaker survive!) I think the finished product is better overall. I get the impression Friedman is a good guy for ideas, but not so good at actually writing them; a lot of the action scenes come across as hard to follow, and a lot of his dialogue is just plain bad - I don't think Optimus Prime says a single memorable line! There's also the fact everyone referring to Arcee as a weak ol' fembot, and not much is done to try and disprove that (does she actually do anything in this script?), and Daniel's presence is never explained at all; Spike isn't in this so there's not even the relation to justify his existence, and it's just really weird having a young little kid tagging along into deep space and all. Then again, this is the only participation Friedman had in the Transformers series as far as I'm aware, so I guess one can try and excuse the faults. It's not like this version was actually used for the finished film or anything.

To a non-Transformers fan there'll literally be nothing but nonsensical nonsense that's not even a good read (I still think the first Super Mario Bros. movie draft is good to read on its own), but to a follower of the series I'd say it's worth checking out for the curiosity value.

 

No doodle today. Sorry, bro.

 

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