06/March/2012

That sounds really awkward. Could you imagine going to a rental store and having a bunch of movie stars lurking about?

Restocking shelves is bad enough, but having to pat Hugh Jackman on the back and tell him that being in Happy Feet wasn't a bad idea sounds like a rough job for any rental store employee.

27/February/2012

"Who are you calling a you-you?"

I have been sleeping terribly these past few days, and feeling like rotten hell to boot. If there's one upside from this, I've been having rather outlandish fanfiction-esque dreams relating to TV shows.

A couple of days ago I had a dream involving Peep Show. Mark, for reasons I can't recall, had to house-sit for someone's bizarre underground pool party pad. This underground pool party pad, for similarly inexplicable reasons, had a tiger cub he also had to look after. Mark got eaten and mauled to death by it in his sleep. ... but instead of his side of the story just ending, Mark was still active as a ghost. Free of the mortal realm, he used his spectral powers for immature pranks such as invading Jeff's house and putting a spider in his underpants drawer.
Meanwhile, Jez was on some mountain trail deep in darkest Africa or something with some other people (inevitably trying to mack on one of the girls), and discovered an ancient booby-trapped temple filled with treasure. While in the midst of impressing the girls with his discovery, ghost Mark showed up and asked him if he could return home and go to the underground pool party pad, because he was worried his wallet would be stolen. Jez didn't seem to notice that Mark was dead.

And just last night I had a bizarre dream involving Hawkeye and Radar from M*A*S*H. The two of them were in Nazi Germany, of all places, and were on a rescue mission to retrieve a dozen baby chicks from a Nazi-operated farm. Where said chicks were being escorted to, I have no idea.

I can only imagine tonight's dream will involve an Apatosaurus joining the cast of Friends. I'll keep you posted.

12/February/2012

It's been a long time since I've talked about Metal Slug, hasn't it?
A couple of days ago a Korean fellow emailed me with some pretty juicy material found in Metal Slug 5 - we're talking unused areas, blocked-off alternate paths and totally unique backgrounds!

Seriously, check this out. Those cogs apparently exist at the bottom of the Mission 5 fight against the elephant tower machines, would you believe it? And if anyone has ever survived my terribly written coverage of the early video previews of the game, you might recognise that screen on the right as appearing in one of the videos as an intro to one of the areas - but in-game you start just past it. It's still there, it's just off-screen, evidently!

Also, here's a sneaky one that I can't believe has eluded me for, what, seven years? Second screen of the first mission. There used to be an alternate path where you would drop down, as indicated by the GEO SCROLL debug option. It is instead patched up by a graphic that overlays the background graphics. The little rascals.

The email linked to the blog where these discoveries were made (and also to a seemingly unrelated fansite, but I figure I may as well link to them for publicity's sake (publicity? what publicity?)), and it's intriguing stuff. The person seems to be using the hack of the game, Metal Slug 5 Plus, and dabbling in value editing with Cheat Engine to get these results. It's fascinating seeing new content get discovered after all these years, and shows that if you're going to find everything inside a game, you're going to need more than just the built-in debug functions.

The person emailing me kindly requested "Please find more please Stage," and seeing stuff like this really piques my interest. Problem is... I don't know how! I get the impression that figuring out what values control the camera is high on the agenda, that way you can view the maps with no limits... but figuring that out looks like it'd be a real hassle. Maybe this post will spark awareness and someone competent will crack the code? Who knows!
Anyway, I figured I wasn't likely to get anywhere with this on my own any time soon, so I might as well share it here.
(it was either this, or sharing some vulgar doodles I apparently made in a drowsy haze. You've been spared, I'll tell you that much.)

31/January/2012

We've got ourselves an update on the Bomberman shrine, and a new General Writing. Don't forget to check the title tags!

Watched Flightplan a couple of days ago. It's a bit like two films wedged together - one is an atmospheric, almost psychological thriller about a crazy lady on a plane who claims to be missing a child, but there's a bunch of evidence that she never had a child on the flight at all - and the last half hour is a very cookie-cutter-if-ridiculous "single mom thwarts impractical terrorist threat" plot. I'd try and wrap my head around how the bad guy actually organised his scheme or what he even wanted, for that matter, but it's the sort of dumb thing that isn't worth wasting time thinking about.

My beef with the first two thirds of the movie is that, well, there's not a lot of mystery you can milk from a missing girl on a plane. Someone looks for her, Jodie Foster rants to someone, rinse and repeat. The movie is like 70% Jodie Foster bitching at people. When the movie finally starts suggesting that maybe the kid wasn't there, it's almost intriguing...? And then it decides, nah, let's not go with that angle, it might actually turn the story on its head - and it turns out the air marshal was the bad guy! Admittedly it does get a bit more engaging, if just because stuff happens that isn't Jodie running up and down the aisle harping at people about why aren't they doing this, that and the other.
It's hard to emphasise the contrast in mood. The way the opening part of the movie is shot, at least to a tired and addled mind like mine, it felt very ethereal and arty, so the possible twist that there was no child at all and Jodie Foster be crazy felt like it would've started a dive into crazy self-examining art film. Which would've been interesting. Then it's like someone went, "that's not what I want in a movie! I want AMERICA SAVES THE DAY" and the totally illogical terrorist scheme was shoved in. Maybe it is logical and I'm just too tired to comprehend. Point is, it felt pretty different, almost as if I had come in and rewritten the script. Low quality and no accounting for taste and everything. Now that would've been a twist!

(I honestly have no idea what I'm typing at the moment. Sleep would be nice.)

19/January/2012

Watched Monster House. Well, uh, it was nice to finally watch it, but it did nothing for me. Mind you, the fact one of the writers apologised for it might have skewed my first impression.

There's a grumpy old dude who don't like kids! One kid, DJ, spies on the house and notices that toys lost on the lawn are never seen again. After accidentally giving the old man a heart attack, he notices weird, freaky stuff going on, including people going missing. He and his friends investigate.
If that doesn't sound interesting, about an hour in we discover that the house is actually an angry woman's soul. And the house has got, like, a digestive system. Does that sound cool? To me, it's cool! It's a pity we only learn it an hour into the film.

That's my major beef with the movie - it just takes a long time for it to really get interesting. I don't think it helps that I watched Disturbia a while back that covered the "spooky neighbour does spooky shit" genre in a more engaging movie (okay, Monster House is a kids' film, but would it be too much for me to say that it should still aim to be engaging despite of that?), but while Monster House has a house with a giant prehensile rug that swallows people and junk, it takes nearly an hour for the characters to actually enter the house... and that's when things get interesting!
Until then, the kids witness several things get eaten and make a couple of attempts to investigate, but on the whole it felt slow-paced and uninteresting. There's a few okay jokes, but none of the characters were appealing. At least, none of the main characters. After they enter the house, they discover that the crotchety old man had married a circus fat lady who had been harassed by people all her life, and while being pestered by trick-or-treaters had an accident and was killed, and her angry soul is manifested in the house. The old man has since tried his best to keep her soothed and to protect people from falling victim to her, well, eating them. It's pretty far-out, and it's a really, really interesting angle to take. But like I said, it's not mentioned at all until the final half hour, and it's absolutely criminal to keep such an interesting plot twist away from the audience for so long. There's only so long you can hold a mystery, especially when the initial house-eating-people just isn't executed that well.
And, really, what's the moral? Don't take fat chicks into your home because when they die they'll manifest into your house and use it to eat people? It doesn't really have the time to establish the old guy's wife as a character - it shows he was sympathetic to her by giving her a proper home away from the circus, but there's only a couple of scenes, if that, where she comes across as amiable. The rest of the time she's getting violent at people harassing her (which you could say means being harassed by folks was a big part of her life, but that's just a Freudian excuse, it doesn't tell us anything about her personality). It seems to suggest that if the old guy chose not to extend a hand of sympathy, the whole malevolent house thing could've been avoided. So, don't help anyone, because there's a possibility when they die they'll come back from the dead and you'll have to spend the remainder of your life keeping them at bay. You broke it, you bought it.

The story and pacing can be a bit hokey, but I could have suffered less if the look of the film wasn't so... unsightly. The visual style was very hit and miss for me. It's only afterwards I discovered it uses the same motion capture tech as The Polar Express... and I guess it's not quite as freaky as what I've seen of that film, but it just seems out of place. The character design is more cartoony than that film, but it still comes across as a lot more realistically-styled than a lot of other CGI kids' flicks. Characters have hair that looks 'sculpted,' like you'd see on a clay model or a marionette (think Gerry Anderson's productions), and I suppose the rest of the character design aims for that look... but it just looks horrifying. Characters look blank, lifeless and ugly, and more often than not look like animated corpses.
A few side characters actually managed to look decent, like the two cops, DJ's dad and the old guy, but the fact that mere side characters have the most appealing designs in the film... I don't know what you'd call that. Poor decision making? It's something John K. mentioned on his blog somewhere, but it irks me that 'heroic' characters or protagonists have to look 'pretty', or at the very least generic. The kids are ugly, but not a good kind of ugly - the bland and obnoxious kind of ugly. If they were "full ugly" with big noses and exaggerated features it could be appealing, but having to look at their gormless faces for the 90 minute duration bugged me to no end.

But you know what looks really terrific and is animated brilliantly? The house. When the kids enter the house, that's when the movie really comes to life - it's dark, it's creepy, it's dripping with atmospheric, and most importantly, it's creative. It's a strange alien environment for the kids to explore, and it felt like a lot more of the movie could've been spent in there. And when it comes to life... man! That animation! One thing I love about stop-motion animation is that when it comes to animating giant freaky monsters, the stiff, unnatural animation plays in its favour so well. This is the first time I've seen CGI animation capture that vibe near perfectly. The house, using giant trees for legs, moves and articulates in a suitably monstrous fashion, and has a fantastic design. They should've just made the movie about the house. No, I mean, literally. The everyday doings of the giant man-eating lady-house.

I'm the sort of person who likes to watch a film and come away having learnt something, be it how to tell a good story or visual storytelling or whatever, even things like "what not to do" - particularly in animated films. I'm not sure what I can learn after having watched Monster House. If a CGI movie is going to be motion-captured, just have everyone wear bags over their heads? Those bloody zombie faces, man. I'd like to live the remainder of my life without having to see stuff like that.

If anything, I'm tempted to see how awful the video game adaptation is.

(I'm kind of disgusted I wrote so much on a kids' movie. Not even a good kids' movie!)

07/January/2012

I spent New Years Eve watching the 2009 Sherlock Holmes with the folks, and just so happened to get invited to see the sequel with my uncle on New Years Day. I can't really say much, it's about what you'd expect if you saw the first one - the same kind of romping around, the same kind of banter. Not bad, not fantastic, just on par with the first one. If you didn't like the first one, it won't change your mind.

I was looking forward to seeing Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes, but I was a bit disappointed - partly because Mycroft doesn't have much screen time and doesn't actually do much (true to the character, I suppose), and partly because, well, it's hard to actually see Stephen Fry as a character. I can suspend my disbelief for everyone else - Robert Downey Jr. is Sherlock Holmes! Jude Law is Dr. Watson! Stephen Fry is... Stephen Fry wearing a hat, or Stephen Fry in period dress or something. It probably didn't help I'd already seen him in the recent BBC Christmas production of The Borrowers (it was alright, nothing memorable - it's funny that Hugh Laurie was in the 1997 film version. Get them both in the same version and that'd be a good show!) where he played the villain of sorts; he wasn't a truly evil guy or anything, he just plays a dude who gets so worked up in his quest to have some credibility, but you can't see him as an antagonist 'cause he's Stephen Fry! He's like a big gay teddy bear with lovely hair.
Mind you, in stuff like Blackadder Goes Forth and his cameo in The Thin Blue Line, I can actually see him as a character. I think it helps that he's ludicrously over the top in those shows, and he was sporting a quilt of fake facial hair. Pop a 'stache on him and make him shout a lot and I might actually see him as a character. Otherwise I just expect him to talk soothingly at length or berate Alan Davies.

I watched Stardust on the 5th. It's alright. Fantasy fairy tale thing about a fallen star girl being hounded by a witch seeking eternal youth; a king-to-be seeking eternal life; and a shop boy who just wants a present for his would-be girlfriend. It's charming as heck to describe, but the movie kinda seemed a bit lacking. It's decent enough, but it ends up encouraging comparisons to The Princess Bride, and I think that movie wins out. It's more quotable, it's got more memorable scenes, and the characters were a lot more interesting to watch. Stardust has big-name actors, but they're nothing but a bunch of pretty faces to me. I know nada about them.
[i think one of my beefs was that it only seemed 'a bit' whimsical. it It didn't try and make itself dripping with whimsy, nor did it aim to aim for a full-on comic fantasy experience.
I was thinking if one of my beefs was that it didn't take the 'full step' towards something - it only seemed 'a bit' whimsical. It only seemed 'a bit' humourous. I wonder if it tried to make itself a full-on comic fairy tale, or just drenched itself in whimsy that you'd still be mopping whimsy from the carpet weeks lately that it might have left a better impact... I don't know. It just felt like something was missing.

Mind you, given the three main focuses, the story got spread a bit thin. The film is two hours long; it doesn't drag, per se, but it doesn't feel like it deserves the two hours. It doesn't move at a terrific pace. I lost interest in the witches about a third of the way through their arc, and the fairy tale love story between the kid and the star did nothing for me.
Admittedly Mark Strong wasn't too engrossing as the resident evil king-to-be either, but his side of things was intriguing - there's a big feud between him and his brothers about who gets to claim kingship, and his family has consistently sabotaged each other every time there's a king position up for grabs. Two of the brothers are killed before they even leave the castle, and all the siblings that are dead still show up as ghosts to comment on the action, complete with a physical representation of how they died - one has an axe in his skull, one has a burnt face, one is naked because he got killed in the bath, and so on. That's quirky! In fact, focusing a whole movie on something oddball like that could be really, really fun. Instead it's just one element in a film bursting with stuff, and given how the film takes itself slightly seriously, the ghost stuff feels a bit out of place... y'know, despite dandy pirates who harvest lightning on flying boats with nets and other outlandish concepts.

I rented Darksiders for a week... and I think I only got about three or four hours play out of it. I only beat the first dungeon! When I first played it I was genuinely falling asleep - the combat felt like a poor man's Devil May Cry and the opening half hour just seemed to emphasise how crummy it was in comparison. The combat picks up one you get more weapons and tools, and instead ends up like a blend of DMC's mass brawls and the quirky item usage from Zelda. The game as a whole practically is a Zelda game with Devil's combat system. Given how little time I got to play it I can't really give a good judgment, but it did seem like an intriguing game; the first dungeon was a real meaty piece of work, and I've been pleasantly surprised with the combat - Tiamat was a tough cookie! That's more than I can honestly say for any Zelda game I've played.
One of my main reasons I'm interested in checking out the game is the art style. Okay, it's post-apocalyptic, dark and gritty and all that, but I really like the style - you got these freaky monsters and then there's these cool wraith-like dudes and all the rough-and-tumble fellas are just so damn chunky, they're like beefy bricks with more bricks for arms. Very Warcraftian.

Today's observation: I've just realised that the icon for Miner Dig Deep on the Xbox 360 is meant to be a pickaxe and a helmet.

No, I'm serious, for the longest time I thought the yellow shape was some sort of yellow cheese wedge shape of some sort, representing an abstract creature or something. I... I don't know why. Mind you, I still can't see it as a helmet. I mean, with art that sloppy, it could be anything. It could be a lemon with a six-pack crooning a pickaxe. Should the world ever produce muscle-bound lemons capable of laying some Barry Manilow on sentient digging utensils, I think we can rest easy by letting them inherit the earth. Humans ain't got a patch on that.