Aug 5, 2008

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

Mummy 3: Ha, We Got You - GOD DAMMIT!  Fuck me in the face for letting the trailer fool me into thinking this wasn't going to be a horrible fucking mummy movie.  This was even worse than the second one (the first one was alright).  The only redeeming things were great CG on the terra cotta army, good CG on the yetis, and some reasonable fights.  Everything else was fucking horrible.  The plot, what they didn't steal from the Arthur legend or Last Crusade, was dumb.  The dialogue was written, I'm convinced, by a 10 year old child with a learning disability.  The jokes were god awful.  Seriously, a field goal joke from the yetis? SERIOUSLY?!  And hey, how come booby trap makers always make their arrows/darts shoot out in a line running away from the treasure?  Make the arrows start at the other end!  Or, better yet, have them start at both ends and meet in the middle!  And, AND!  I didn't know rachel weisz wasn't in it!  she's the only thing worth looking at when there isn't CG on the screen!  Instead this horrendous woman with her horrendous accent.  When they did her reveal, I seriously thought it was a joke.  I thought the JOKE was that this person pretending to be rachel weisz IN THE STORY was writing books about their adventures and stealing their glory!  I thought, AS A JOKE, that they had her hat covering her face so we could laugh when it was revealed that it's this lady making money off of their lives.  NOPE, not a joke.  Except is is a joke, fuck the audience! haha!

Hancock - Well, this wasn't as bad as everyone seemed to say.  It didn't help that the opening sequence had the worst CG ever since That Movie With Horrible CG.  But then it turns into a decent movie.  Will Smith as a butthole is funny, Jason Bateman is great (though, I gotta say, I think I've got maybe 2 more jason bateman doing jason bateman roles before I'm done).  The second half of the movie was a nice surprise (to me anyway) and I'm glad it wasn't ruined ahead of time.  Over all it was decent, nothing great, but a fun movie to watch once.

The Happening - Ugh, what the hell was up with this movie.  It was just awkward.  The one good thing, it was rather tense at times, I liked that.  And I do appreciate apocolypse everyone-freaks-out type scenarios.  But it was just written so shittily and acted so blandly.  Mark Whalberg was purposefully doing this high school theater bullshit that was so obnoxious.  And here's a good line, Zooey Dechanel: "I don't like to show my emotions either."  Pssst, hey zooey, that's cuz you are a bad actress and don't know how.  I think I remember hearing M Night wanted to make a B movie.  Well, good job, you made a shitty B movie.  Congratulations, what do you win?

21 - Meh, whatevs.  It's an okay movie, I guess.  It's nothing special, it's nothing bad.  Everyone does a fine job, it's just good enough.  The nerdy parts of me resents them taking an awesome real story about these kids and hollywooding it all up.  Everyone's sexy and the plots all twisty and turny and blah blah.  But if you don't know that, it's an okay movie.  Oh, I hate voiceovers, espeically ones that tell you what's right in front of your face.  But whatever, its a fine movie.

Never Back Down - Yeeeeeeeah, this movie sucks nuts.  I know we all knew that from the trailer, but it really does.  It really is just the karate kid + fight club + bad acting/writing = poop on a stick.  The only point of the movie is to be violent and show boobs, and it doesn't even really show boobs.  So that means the only point of the movie is all the fights in the last 20 minutes.  Some are decent, but its not amazing coreography or anything.  So what's the point?  Nothing I guess.  It did have one of my favorite The Bravery songs in the beginning, but all it did was point out how cheesy that song is, doh.

Aug 4, 2008

Video Game Reviews @ The Temple

Kane & Lynch - This game wasn't really as bad as I had heard.  It's by no means fantastic, the story is decent, the acting is pretty decent too.  Aiming with an analog stick is as stupid as ever.  Your teammates are pretty useless, so it doesn't really survive on its gimmick.  I guess its main thing is the multiplayer modes, but that's not really my thing, so I dunno.  Plus, its PSN, so its dramatically underpopulated.  Moral of the story: I gave up after 5 minutes of failing to get into a game.  I got shit to do, I'm an important person!

Lego Star Wars - So I acutally played 1-3 of this on the PC and loved it.  I don't totally understand why a few people are all of a sudden just now with indiana jones realizing the lego games are great, everyone knew that like 3 years ago!  So I really just rented this to play parts 4-6.  Fortunatley it lets you do that after you beat just one level of the first chapter, which was nice.  It's the type of game that makes you want to 100% it cuz its so much fun to use the differenct characters and their different abilities.  But, I'm old, boring, and busy, so I just beat the main story line and sent it back.  That's not a knock against the game though, it's super fun.

Bladestorm - Hey, Koei knows how to make a game NOT based in ancient china!  whodahtunk! (no that weird japanese version of Dynasty Warriors doesn't count).  The thing with Koei is I love like everything they touch.  I could play DW to death, Dynasty Tactics too I loooooooved on PS2, I played it for weeks.  This game is an interesting method in that it is halfway between Wariors and Tactics, you are in control of an individual squad running aorund the battlefield, but you don't fight as in punch punch kick kick.  It's a fun way to do it, I think.  It's also interesting cuz its set in the 100 years war instead of china.  It's not a bad game, I had fun for a good long while.  But these games have to be fantastic to survive a whole campagin, just cuz it takes for damn ever.  And that just wasn't the case for me.  Maybe I don't care about the 100 years war, but I just got bored long before I was even close to the end of the game.  It's still fun, it's just not play it to death fun.  PS, the voice acting of the tavern keeper is just about the worst I've heard this side of Resident Evil.

Okami - This is a slightly old PS2 game, I think I played a demo once, but I was excited to play it, it looks so cool.  It's got a nice art style, its kind of cell shaded, but all the lines are drawn with a heavy brush, like old timey japanese lettering.  The game mechanic is also cool, its the thing you where you draw brush strokes on the screen to do certain abilities or attacks.  Yet despite both these things, I am monumentally bored.  The inane dialogue doesn't help, its kinda done like katamari damacy where they just make weird noises and it gives you subtitles.  The noises are really obnoxious though, and they go on and on and you can't skip it and it drives me nuts.  And the rest of the game, I dunno, you walk around and fight things and get new powers, but I'm bored.  And then I look at gamefaqs and see that after a few short sessions I'm only 1/7 of the way done, ugh, I don't see me finishing it before it goes back to gamefly!

Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core - This game kind of confuses me!  Confuses me as to why I like it so much!  The fundamental game mechanic is dumb.  It's kind of an action RPG, but unlike a normal FF game, you can only use like 6 of your moves at once... dumb.  And all limit attacks and summons are determined by random.  WHAT?!  Random?  How the hell am I supposed to feel awesome when I summon bahamut down on some mophos head if its random??  Not to mention it makes boss battles feel inconsequential.  I don't pull out all the stops, I don't use my best movies, I fight like normal, boring!  But somehow, I loved this game.  I'm an easy audience, I love FF7, and seeing more of it is great (though that still wasn't enough for silly dirge of cerberus).  The graphics are beautiful, and the CG is amaaaazing.  Just as good as either FF movie, better than any other CG movie.  So nice to look at.  And the story is just more FF silliness, but I like that silliness, and I like these characters, so its great.  I think if it was a full length RPG I wouldn't have had the energy to do it with the silly fight style.  But its a short one (gamefaqs helped me know I was already halfway done when I started getting restless), so it's totally worth it, if you are into it.

Aug 1, 2008

Large Hadron Rap

Hahaha, this is funny.  It's mixed horribly, it sounds like an old macrovision transfer.  But they acutally filmed bits in the LHC, and the lyrics are really clever, and as far as I can tell totally accurate.  It's neat!