Movie Reviews

Ender’s Game – This movie was pretty cool. I’m not sure I can imagine them doing the book much better. Which still means it’s not near as good as the book, but I don’t feel like a movie was going to be able to do much better. It is much shorter, of course, it’s been long enough since I read it that I don’t really remember, but it felt very rushed. Especially the training, especially Ender winning battles up toward the end. I feel like the ending suffers for that story not playing out in more detail. The performances are mostly good. Surprisingly most of the kids are fine. Ender is solid throughout, and then falls apart when it’s most important that he deliver, which was a bummer. Visually the movie is fantastic, and at the end of the day, that was the whole point. They could have borked the entire thing, we all just went to see the battle room and the space battles. Both of those they did extremely well, and made the movie worth it. Odd that they are setting up for the 2nd book. The second book is so different from the first, it’s not even the same category of movie, but it might be cool to see anyway.

Cabaret – Had to go see this because we saw the stage version. It was good, but not great. I actually liked the story of the stage version much better, which was a surprise. The stage version had acting/singing problems, but the way they handled the story was much better. I’ve never seen a Liza Minelli movie, I don’t think I like her voice very much, but that’s just a preference. I really like the music, but that’s a surprisingly small portion of the movie.

The Hangover 3 – Yeah, I know, why did I bother. Like everyone else, I thought the first one was fantastic. I went in ready to hate it and I loved it. The second one was a disaster. This one is also a disaster. There’s some funny stuff, I’m not saying I never laughed. But it’s just so over wrought attempting to shoehorn this ridiculous stuff in, it’s just kind of a bummer.

Oz: The Great and Powerful – Also not good. I like the idea, I like the story, but the execution is pretty bad. The acting isn’t great, the writing is borderline horrible. The visuals are sometimes really beautiful and sometimes trying way too hard and looking super fake. I mean, it’s a fantasy land, it’s not going to look realistic, but it just looks crappy. I liked it more toward the end, mostly because I kind of like the story. But jeez.

World War Z – I was actually pretty impressed with this movie. I’ve never read the book, so I have no source of disappointment there. And everyone bitched so much about how bad it was, I went in not expecting much. So then I kind of liked it. It feels super rushed, and things happen in an awful convenient order. But I enjoyed the ride and the 28 days style zombies are pretty cool.

White House Down – Wow, this is so much like Olympus Has Fallen. I mean, I get it, they are both die hard in the white house. But god damn there was one scene where I convinced myself for about 2 minutes that I had already seen this die hard white house movie because I’ve definitely definitely seen this scene. I was wrong, but jesus.

The Master – I wanted to like this movie, but it was a snoozer. Like all Paul Anderson movies, it’s effing weird. But I figured I’d see a couple of amazing performances from Phoenix and Hoffman and it’d all be worth it. Nope. They do put in some pretty great performances, but the movie is too long by half, and completely absent of compelling story. I know people liked this movie, so I guess it’s just me, but I did not.

Starlet – This is a weird one. It’s about some young chick in LA (I assume, I don’t remember). Doesn’t have much of a life, I think she’s a porn actress. She buys something at a garage sale and then finds a ton of money in it. Not sure what to do, she tries to befriend the old lady who sold it to her, who is a nasty old woman, to judge whether she should give the money back I guess. It sounds pretty horrible, it’s not that bad. It’s a different story, I’m pretty sure no other movie has that plot. It’s nothing great, but it was kind of worth a random Netflix watch.

Arbitrage – This is a strange movie, but it’s decent. A pretty shady business dude makes some spectacularly bad choices and spends the next 2 hours trying to fix them. It’s a little bit unrealistic, like many of these movies where everything has to fall into place in a certain way. But it actually is done decently well. Not super unique or anything, but done well enough.

Event Reviews @ The Temple

Red Baraat – This is kind of a interesting group. They are definitely a fusion kind of band, with a very strong east indian influence. They are kind of a party band, very dancey music with a strong peace & love vibe. They are pretty reminiscent of Cat Empire, which is to their detriment because they are no where near as good. It’s not that they are bad, though. I had a good time, I had fun dancing (if you can call what I do dancing), it was great. But it doesn’t stick with me the way Cat Empire does. And a lot of the music is pretty samey too. So, in the end, a lot of fun, but kind of temporary. Probably wouldn’t go again, but would tell people to go if they want to dance and have fun.

UA Dance Premium Blend – It’s back! My favorite show of the year. This year was pretty cool. Like last year, it’s not *as* good as the first year, but that’s increasingly likely to just be nostalgia. There were 6 things this year. The first was a kind of boring ballet. Partially I just didn’t like the music. It was the rhythmic equivalent of dissonance, just kind of uncomfortable. The dancing was fine. Then came 3 duets, the first two were really good ideas that didn’t pan out. The dancers were fine, the choreography just didn’t work out. The last one was a beautiful modern thing that was very sweet and had some youthful playfulness to it that was wonderful. Then there was a REALLY cool group tap number to swing music. It was fun and interesting and well danced and just awesome. After the break came more ballet, called Tarantella, but it was fantastic. It was crazy impressive. Even though the girl actually fell over at one point, which was sad, the performance was by far the most individually impressive of the evening. Then more ballet, which was well done, better than the first, but nothing like the 2nd. And just a bit overload on the ballet. Last was a really kooky jazz/hip hop thing. Everyone was dressed like some wacky futuristic thing, the music alternated between slow lyric and really loud, club-like, hard hitting stuff. Though that was kind of annoying, the dancing was super cool and a lot of fun to watch. Besides a bit too much ballet, like last year, it was really good.

Cabaret by The Winding Road Theater – This is one of the little shows at the Temple, which is always fun. I’ve never seen any form of Cabaret, so that was all new to me. The musical I think is really good, and I really want to go see the movie and maybe a professional theater company do it. It’s a pretty powerful story, with a striking juxtoposition of hedonism and the coming of the nazis. When they sing the patriotic song and it fades to black, I got chills. This version was pretty good, but not great. The emcee was without question the best part. I guess he was the director too, but he was very very good. I’ll know more when I see the movie, but I saw a clip on youtube and I think I like this emcee way better. The rest of the cast wasn’t great. The older woman and man were good, and the american was pretty good too. All of them had decent voices. The main cabaret girl was a bit dodgy, maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t like her voice at all. The ensemble was hit or miss. A couple of them were pretty good, a couple of them looked really awkward and I could constantly see them thinking about what their next step was. I feel mean saying it, but there was a definite amateur feeling to at least half the cast. But still, for a small show of young actors, not bad. They had a live band, which was fantastic. It would be so easy to have recorded music, and hell I’m sure they made this on a buck fifty, who can afford musicians. But they had them and it was great. Set and production was good too. I’ve since seen the movie version, and I actually prefer this! Not the performances, the acting and singing in this from a lot of folks was still sub par. But the story and layout and everything was actually better in this stage version.

The Nutcracker – I’ve never seen any form of the Nutcracker, so this was a cool treat. It’s christmasey, which is fun, and it’s culturally iconic, so I should have seen it by now! In the end, I didn’t really love it, but I think it just turns out I don’t love Russian ballet. I didn’t use to like any form of ballet, but some of the UA Dance performances have changed my mind. However, I like the dancing (sometimes). Nevertimes do I like all the pomp and circumstance, and there’s a lot of that in this. It’s cool that they can tell a story with just music and mime, no words. But good lord did they go on. I felt like there was only a couple of dances in the first hour. An awful lots of posing and posturing. When they were dancing, it was nice. Only one or two parts that were really amazing, the rest was just good. There were a LOT of kids, which I didn’t expect. They are adorable, you can’t question that, but it also makes it all feel a bit like a school play. Not fair, but true for me. But even though I’m using some lackluster adjectives, I was really happy to go and had a really good time. It was a special experience.

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

Mobster Squad – Huh, I was pretty surprised with this movie. It’s an odd one, it’s kind of a weird mix of a totally valid historical crime drama and… Dick Tracy. And I don’t think that was accidental! The whole vibe of the movie is somewhat comic bookey. Maybe that’s because Sean Penn looked really fake in his make up. Maybe it’s because there was a digital sheen to some of the scenes. I think maybe there were some all green screen environments or something, it looked computerey. But, it kind of worked. The story is somewhat superhuman, even if it is based in reality. Still not an amazing movie or anything, but cool enough.

Zero Dark Thirty – Eh. It’s really hard to come at this movie unbiased. I’m aware of the controversy around the presentation of torture. And I am made uneasy by the torture porn nature of people’s fascination with killing Bin Laden. To the best of my ability to disentangle, it seems to be a well made movie. I’m not exactly sure why it was a best picture kind of movie, but it is done well. Like it or not, the hole lead up, especially toward the end, is exciting and well paced/executed. I wasn’t as impressed with Jessica Chastain as everyone. Besides the fact that there are strong echoes of the girl from Homeland, which I’m sure is unrelated, but not coincidental, it seems like just a good job, not an amazing job. I’m also not sure why she (the character) deserves glorification. You can’t choose the one time an obsessed person succeeded and act like that justifies the behavior. Even assuming you think her quest was worth the cost, both direct and indirect (spending resources on this instead of other things), for every one of her, there’s 1000 other obsessed people who succeed only in ruining their own and other lives. It’s kind of a survivor bias, on pretty dramatic scale.

A Good Day to Die Hard – Yeah, not good, duh. Not really as bad as I expected, to be fair. Not any worse than the last one, actually, I think a little better. I don’t get why people were okay with the last one, every character besides McClane was horrendously obnoxious. At least the couple of main people in this were tolerable. Still not good, but not overtly putrid.

Pain & Gain – This here is not at all what I expected. I thought I was going to be a wacky comedy with lots of explosions. Like Bad Boys, but with less slow mo and more dick jokes. First, I didn’t know it was a true story, which is insane. Second, it’s not all that good. Maybe they were bound to a surreal story, though that’s never stopped anyone when basing a movie on real life. I don’t know, it wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t funny, it was just kind of sad.

Bullet to the Head – So, Sylvester Stallone made a non-campy action movie. It’s not that good. It’s really violent, I was pretty surprised at the viciousness of the fighting. I don’t get how he looks like that, I guess a lot of drugs, but still, jesus. But in the end it’s just a random action movie, nothing much good to say about it.

Movie 43 – This is that weird one that’s basically just a bunch of skits, really really inappropriate or offensive skits. It’s actually pretty funny. I’m not sure I’d call it a movie, it seems more like a web series. I enjoyed it, I laughed a lot, but I wouldn’t have wanted to pay money to see it (netflix doesn’t count). Still, it was pretty funny.

Olympus has Fallen – As advertised, it’s die hard in the white house. It’s not bad, but it’s not good. It’s kind of annoying in its lack of realism, but what would my brain even think that in a movie like this. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but I’d just as soon go watch Die Hard.

Les Misérables – This movie is a bit of a mix. Honestly the whole first 1/3 or so I was kind of not digging it. I don’t love the singing from a lot of the actors, Jackman and Crowe especially. That’s surprising from Jackman, I thought he was a theater guy. But both weren’t  very good. To some extent I just didn’t love the music itself. But there were definitely some pieces that were fantastic. Against my better judgement, Anna Hathaway’s solo was astonishing. Between this and her not completely effing up cat woman, I’m pretty confused. But there were some other songs I liked a lot, the bar song and some of the crowd songs. By the time we finished, I had a pretty favorable impression of the whole thing. I’m very interested to see it live some day, hopefully with some better singers or a different style.

Cloud Atlas – I liked this movie pretty well. It’s pretty confusing, but that’s kind of the plan. I think it’s pretty well executed, and a cool story. Everyone does a good job and the movie looks pretty nice. I liked how it took a while to figure out what came after what and what the implications of each timeline were to the others. I guess the book is more linear in that each time is nested within the story of the previous one. That sounds like a cool structure too, but I was happy the movie was this way.

Our Idiot Brother – Hm, I don’t know. It’s a weird movie, it’s kind of a family drama movie, like any other. They just stick this idiot brother core in the middle of it all. He’s connected to all their shennanigans, but he’s meant to be this sort of innocent/simple person in the middle of all the silliness. It kind of works, gives the movie more than just the sameness of these kinds of movies. It’s sweet and kind of goes like you’d expect. It doesn’t really stand out, but it’s not bad.

Parker – Honestly, I waited too long to write about this one. But I’m going to guess it was Jason Statham beating the shit out of dudes and driving fast. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it, and I’m pretty sure I can’t remember anything about it.

Video Game Reviews @ The Temple

The Walking Dead – I love TWD comic. I’ve been subscribed since the 40s or 50s, I think. It’s a crazy book with some really crazy stuff in it, but it’s very good. The TV show is hit or miss, sometimes it tries to do what the comic does and it doesn’t fit the medium. Some times it steals from the comic and that’s the only reason it’s good. It has moments of brilliance (the first episode still stands out as fantastic), but it is largely just an easier-to-digest version of something else that is better. But still, I've been waiting impatiently for this game to get cheap enough to buy it, felt like forever. It finally did, and it is very good. There are a few hiccups, but otherwise it’s one of the best games I’ve played in quite a while, or at least one of the best experiences. This is an adventure game, mostly text dialogue boxes and clicky events. It’s a tiny bit wonky, not exactly buggy, but a few funky animations or weird edits that are distracting. And there are a few times where the constraints of the game are really annoying. Sometimes you don’t know a decision is going to mean what it means. There were times when I didn’t want to do something, but it was the only choice. I’m yelling to myself that I should just do this instead of that, but that’s not an option. That’s an inherent flaw to these kinds of games. But to be fair it doesn’t happen that often in the main game. It happens a couple times in quick succession in 400 Days, which was more frustrating. But besides those issues, as an experience and a story, the game is fantastic. The main story is really captivating, and plays out with a style reminiscent of the comics. I was completely wrapped up in the characters and some decisions were truly hard. There are moments that are oddly introspective. It’s just a game, none of these people are real, but the good/bad decisions were so much more weighty than silly Mass Effect style morality scales. I’ve not played any game that dealt with moral decisions in such a real and non-quantitative way. You don’t have 5 good points and 10 bad points. You just make a decision, and that has consequences. That, again, can be frustrating when you feel like you were forced to choose between 2 stupid choices. But most of the time it feels real and important. There are also moments that are heartbreaking. The kid in the attic? Man, that got to me pretty good. This game told a story like most games never can, better than a lot of other story-telling media for that matter. I’m super happy I finally played it.

X-Com: Enemy Unknown – Another game I’ve been waiting to go on sale. This one is a lot of fun. It couldn’t be much more different than TWD. It is certainly a game, very light on the story. Aliens attack. Then you kill them. End of story. The game is fun. I was never crazy into the tactical turn based stuff in the good old days. I’m not even sure I ever played an X-Com. I played others, jagged alliance for instance. But it is a lot of fun. I, thank jesus, did not play on ironman. I was actually considering it, but boy that would have been a bad idea. Too much unknown stuff that would have destroyed me. Even going through again, which I may or may not do (maybe I’ll wait for the DLC), I’m not sure I could pull off ironman. So, given that I had the opportunity to reload a mission if I really borked it, the game was great. It looks good and plays well. There’s a good amount of variety in what you can build and use to change up your squad. Though honestly I ran out of time and resources to diversify much, and ended up focusing on stuff I thought worked. But it was still a lot of fun, just not enough for me to sink another 25 hours in without the added content of DLC. So hopefully when that gets cheap in 6 months I’ll come back and play again.

Orcs Must Die 2 – Meh, this was kind of disappointing. I loved the first game. It was cute and funny, but a new kind of game play that was a blast. This one, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to add anything new. I played as the girl, because I liked her charm person spell more than I liked headshots. But besides that the game played out exactly like the last one. Maybe I didn’t explore enough into some of the new traps, but they didn’t seem that interesting. There were new weapons and buffs, but still nothing that cool. I used charm person, wind belt, barricades, dwarves, elves and acid spray. Throw in a spike plate or a freeze vent here and there, but still nothing new. I didn’t have that much fun, I just wanted to get through it. It’s not that they did anything wrong, I guess I just didn’t need more of the same, bummer.

Shank & Shank 2 – These games are side-scrolling beat em ups. It’s pretty violent, that’s kind of its thing. The art is stylized and cool. The two games play very similarly, though the second one is much much improved. I kind of wish I never played the first one, just the second, I think I might have a more favorable impression. Not that the first one was super bad, the second one was just much more polished. Though the games were well done, I wasn’t super into them. I was pretty ready to get done, even though they each only lasted 3 or so hours. Of course you could go back and do trophies and harder modes and getting costumes. I did not.

Aquaria – This is basically Metroid underwater. It’s really well done, actually. It looks nice, has its own aesthetic, is fairly intuitive. So if you are in to the Metroid thing, then it’s pretty good. And doing the whole thing underwater is an interesting gimmick. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up loving it. Partially, the metroid thing is just tiresome. All the back tracking and wandering around trying to see what key I have for what door is boring. Eventually I ended up looking online for walkthroughs because I just didn’t want to spend hours searching every corner until I found the right place. I’m not sure if it’s just me, or if the game is somehow boring, I’m going to assume the former, because I think it was very well done.

Terraria – Not sure how to decide when to review this. I guess now that I’m bored? It’s 2D minecraft. It’s fun, it’s endless, I started building a little community of houses, I started digging deep into the earth, then I got bored. And then the October update just happened to come out, but then I bought a couple games on Steam and haven’t played it since. It’s fun and all, but just like Minecraft I didn’t have the patience to go too far. Maybe I’ll poke my head back in later.

Papers Please – This game is great. You are an inspector at a border checkpoint for some ex-russian bloc type country. Nominally you are just doing your job, checking passports, looking for discrepancies, etc. With each day on the job, there’s an increasing number of rules, required documentation, etc. But you have a family, and rent and food is effing expensive. So maybe you take a bribe here or there to help keep the heat on. Then someone shows up with a sob story, needs to get into the country or some horrible thing will happen, but if you do that, you’ll get punished. And there’s some rebels, you can choose to help them or report them. There’s all these little choices, I guess there’s 20 different endings, I only got about 4. But you certainly get in to it, I got very single minded about my goals. Toward the end, when someone showed up with bad docs and was wasting my time when I could be processing more people (and therefore making more money), I literally said “Well then get the fuck out of my country".” Out loud. Great game.

Box

Pretty freaking cool video of all in-camera effects. I think it’s basically really good timing the robots holding the panels, the camera, and the projectors. But it’s extraordinarily well executed.

Bohemian Gravity

That is awesome. I don’t know enough upper level physics to tell you if it’s right, but it sounds good to me!

Short film: Un Conte

Wow, didn’t expect that.

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

Silver Linings Playbook – This movie is pretty good. Certainly the main two people, all the people really, do a very good job. It is hard to watch. Crazy people are hard to watch. And these people aren’t crazy crazy, but just enough to be super chaotic. It’s actually uncomfortable to listen to, at times, it kind of made it not fun to watch. But, I mean, they are just doing their jobs really well, so I can’t criticize that. The movie does have much too much of a bow on it, that’s kind of lame, but I guess it’s called silver linings playbook, not life is fucked playbook, so okay.

The Zen of Bennett – That’s kind of a weird one. It’s a documentary about Tony Bennett, the making of a new album. It’s not really that interesting. He’s an old man who likes to tell old man stories. Fortunately, he’s led a pretty cool life, so those stories are cool. But I think he’d tell the same number of stories with the same level of interest if he had been a baker his whole life. The movie isn’t very favorable toward him at times, which is weird since he made it. He comes off a stubborn old man in a lot of cases. Sometimes it’s funny, because no one likes John Mayer. Sometimes it just seems like he’s a crotchety old kook. If you really love him, I guess it’s worth seeing just to get some background. But otherwise there’s not much reason.

Mama – I guess people were pretty excited about this. I certainly like Guillermo Del Toro, but of course he just produced (or presented or whatever). It is creepy, I don’t know how many more times we need to see a lady crawling on all fours with her hair in her face. Yeah, the position was super creepy, but still, it’s not so different. I kind of like the plot, it’s a bit different in an kind of interesting way. The ending is pretty dumb. In the end it’s not actively bad like a lot of horror movies are, but it’s not extra either.

The Last Stand – Ha, pretty dumb. If you want to see a bunch of shooting and blood and a few Arnold “I’m so old” jokes, it’s a fine time. It’s nothing beyond that, but then no one expected it to be.

Promised Land – This is the Matt Damon one about fracking. It’s an okay movie, it’s trying to inform us about something they find very important via drama instead of a fact-laden documentary. In that effort, it’s fine, I already don’t like fracking, so I’m on board. What I found so interesting about this movie is how easily I, as a viewer, am manipulated. Matt Damon is clearly the bad guy, he walks into a town, manipulates the holy shit out of them, and gets them to sell their health and their lives and their land to a bunch of bad people. You can argue about how bad he really is – if he truly doesn’t think it’s evil, he’s just doing what he thinks is right, so fine. But the point is, he works for the bad guys, but he’s the protagonist. He’s the handsome leading man. He’s charming and nice. So… I like him. And when the hippy environmentalist shows up, he’s an effing jackass. Screw that guy! But I totally agree with him in real life. But screw him, he’s not the protagonist. This isn’t the anti-hero, this isn’t the charming rogue who works outside the law. This is a straight up bad guy doing bad things that aren’t movie magic, they are real life bad things. But I’m on his side because he’s the famous actor in the leading role. Super weird!

Destination Moon – This is an ooooooold scifi movie based on a Heinlein book. It’s by no means a good movie by modern standards. It’s goofily acted and cornily produced and the effects are all laughably out of date. But it is interesting to see people imagining going to the moon, 20 years before we went to the moon. Some things they were pretty smart about, some things were pretty silly. It’s kind of like a cool little time capsule to see what we thought the future was going to be like, 65 years ago.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation – You know what, this isn’t that bad. I didn’t like the first one, it was too corny and not enough good action. This one seems to have tipped that scale in the right direction. It’s still corny, but Channing Tatum dies right away, so that helps. And the action isn’t half bad. The ninjas-on-the-cliff scene that everyone saw in the trailers is neat (thought not as neat as it was built up to be). A lot of the other actioney moments are pretty decent. It’s by no means amazing, but given that I thought it would be intolerable, I was pretty happy.

Identity Thief – Meh. It’s funny enough. I don’t really like the comedies that go so extreme. I know it’s just a silly movie, but it takes me out of it once they are doing things that are just insane and make no sense and would never happen. And I don’t love Melissa McCarthy as much as everyone does. She’s kind of like Chris Farrell. Funny, but mostly just wacky and kind of slapsticky and waka-waka. Not really my kind of humor. So, there were some funny moments, for sure, but I didn’t think it was that good.

Event Reviews @ The Temple

The Cat Empire – Yay! We went last year, thinking it might be our only chance, and now they are back! This time we took a trip to San Diego to see them. WAY better than LA. The venue was smaller, more like the Rialto. Way fewer assholes too. So that made the whole thing more enjoyable. The band was awesome as always. The new music is all very good (they didn’t play the couple of songs I really don’t like, fortunately). Similar, but still very impressive, extended instrumentation breaks as last year. These guys are crazy talented. So much fun.

Short Film - Initium

Time related, echoes of Super Meat Boy, pretty cool.

Video Game Reviews @ The Temple

Shadowrun Returns – I was pretty freaking excited for this game, I have to say. I kickstarted it pretty early (I even kickstarted Shadowrun Online, I’m ambivalent about that one, mostly because I just can’t get into MMORPGs). I loved the 16bit games, especially SNES. Besides, Shadowrun was always my favorite pen & paper setting. I never got to play it much, sadly, but I read a ton of the books, and I just loved the mix of tech and magic. So my impression of this game is no doubt boosted by my love of the context. If I can be objective, I think it’s fair to say the game is limited in scope. Fair enough, it’s a small group with (albeit very successful) kickstarted funding. The game is super linear. I encountered precisely one side quest, which is a bummer for a world that’s built all around doing jobs for a bunch of people. The remaining optional quests are just extra clicks in the environment you are in. So, there’s not a lot to do in that sense, and I blasted through the main game in 14 hours. On the flip side, there’s a ton of building blocks. I played a mage/shaman (naturally), but I might actually go back and give it a shot as a cyber’d out samurai or a rigger. Deckers were borderline useless in the main story (only two real quests). But one of the selling points here is that you can build your own campaigns. Not that I would, but other people are already on it. One group is trying to rebuild the 16bit game. One group is supposedly making a 100+ hour campaign! Not only does that make my nerd heart soar with glee, but also gives hope that the less-used things like deckers will have a chance to shine. The tools are all there. The blocks for making an interactive story are there. The combat system, while nothing unique or life changing, completely supports the system and the fun. Really loved the game, was so excited to get back to it. Really looking forward for the user-generated stuff.

FTL – This game is pretty dang cool. You control a spaceship, flying through many dangers to get back to your fleet and stop the big bad. But you don’t move the ship around, it’s not an action game, you are controlling the crew of the ship – running around repairing systems as they break, or augmenting systems to improve them. You can control the power shunted to the systems, giving priority (assuming you don’t have enough) to whatever you want – life support, sensors, engines, weapons, shields, etc. The only way you control a battle is by choosing when and where to fire weapons, trying to take down an enemy’s systems strategically. You don’t move the ship around or anything. It’s a lot of fun, if you are a micromanaging type. It’s also ridiculously hard. Like jesus hard. Like I was never able to beat it. I had a lot of fun playing it, trying to get the couple of extra ships available and get some achievements. But I could not beat the damn thing, even the one time I tried on easy mode. Eventually I was over it, but I did put 22 hours in. 22 hours and I didn’t win! Still fun though, maybe I’ll get back to it and finally try to beat it, seems unlikely though.

Rage – Mega meh. This is basically just a pretty version of Borderlands. Except borderlands isn’t ugly, it’s just stylized. This is the prettiest game Id can make, which is quite pretty, but it is 100% unnecessary. The story is a mix of Borderlands and Fallout. The weapons are the same as an FPS, the vehicle is the same as Borderlands. The 16 hours it took me to get through it were plodding and I almost didn’t make it, I’m glad it’s not any longer. Yet despite that 16 hours, the scope felt extremely limited. Just two cities, and it all looks the same. It’s not that they did anything super wrong with the game, it just did absolutely nothing that hasn’t been done. Actually, they did one thing horribly wrong: the lack of effective auto-save in 2012 is just ridiculous. I should never lose 45 minutes of playing because you only save when I leave a city and I forgot to hit F5, that’s just bananapants.

Saint’s Row: The Third – This is my first saint’s row game, I feel like I get the gist. It’s pretty fun. It’s just GTA with a couple layers of ridonculous polish on top. But it’s a lot of fun, pretty cartoony, over the top, goofy action. But I played it for 40 hours, I even did all the damn side missions and fully owned the map. Pretty fun time.

Crysis/Crysis Warhead – Just now getting around to playing Crysis, yikes. In the game’s defense, being 5 years old, it still looks pretty dang good. Maybe not as good as the newest games (which I don’t have anyway), but way better than anything else half a decade past. I mean, I have almost the best mobile GPU you could buy a couple years ago, and I still couldn’t max the AA and stuff, pretty crazy. As far as game play: pretty average. The powersuit thing is neat, but I never use strength, definitely never use speed. I’m just invisible when I feel like being sneaky, until I get bored with the kind of lame detection mechanics and I rambo through the rest of the level with shields. All the stealth is completely ineffective with the aliens anyway, the game is more fun with the Koreans. The weapons are good, but not so different as to be memorable. Warhead is a stand-alone expansion, it’s really just more missions. Different character, same powers, same guns, except the last BA gun is different. Otherwise, just some extra of the same. It’s not a bad game, it’s pretty, the gameplay just wasn’t super interesting.

LA Noire – This game is both amazing and meh. What they were trying to do, and did, technologically, was pretty impressive. The facial animation and acting and all that was better than any game I’ve seen (granted, I’m always a bit behind on games). The actual graphical quality left a bit to be desired, but that’s okay. The game play is interesting, hunting around for clues, interviewing subjects, etc. But, it turns out, being a cop is super fucking boring. I stopped playing the game halfway through after getting distracted with my Ouya. I made myself go back and finish it out. I don’t know if the plot didn’t catch me, or I’m just turning into a player who only wants to shoot things. It’s certainly a good game, I just didn’t have a blast.

Short films

A couple of sad but very well done ones:

Top Floor – Pretty sad

Unsaid – Crazy sad

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

Star Trek 2 – Second verse, same as the first. Good scifi action movie. Not a Star Trek movie. Bright lights, beautiful effects, running, jumping, climbing trees. But there’s no heart to it. Well, there is, but it’s all stolen. Can’t say anything spoilerey, but everything truly good and startrekey about the movie was stolen (if reversed). The rest was just fun action. And it was fun, and if it was Space Voyage, I would have reported a good, generic time. It’s a bit of a bummer that it has to be star trek. All that being said, I think it’s better than the first one. I was looking back at my comments there, I had forgotten how insultingly bad the jokes were in the first one. This one mostly did better than that. However it also wasn’t as good as the first one at it’s best (read: simon pegg). So, meh, fun action movie, that’s all, I guess. Also: Kronos to Earth in 5.6 seconds flat? Hand delivery of items you can instantly teleport across the galaxy? You suck at your job.

Jack Reacher – This was not at all what I thought. I expected an actioney, mission impossible, beat em up, kind of movie. It’s really more of a thriller, a murder mystery. And a pretty decent one at that. It’s not revolutionary or anything. But it sets up a good story, Cruise is a decent hero, things play out in an interesting way – with changes, but not with stupid twists for the sake of it. Pretty decent.

Man of Steel – Pretty good. Not great, not worth getting excited over, but good enough. Superman is and always has been a tough sell. It’s hard to make superman interesting, you have to gimp him, or make someone as powerful, or tie up lois lane. The really cool Superman stories do something different, though I’m no superman scholar, so maybe I’m wrong. This doesn’t do anything great with him, plot wise. It tries to focus on his humanity, which is a decent tactic. I like how it deals with history, it doesn’t front-load all the backstory. The super fights are pretty great. A little bit of the gumby effect when the CG actors are fighting each other, but for the most part pretty cool and not something we’ve seen before. The movie is too long by a mile. The krypton stuff is completely unnecessary (unless it’s a big shoutout to comic book fans, I wouldn’t know), there’s one too many fights, and you could trim 20 minutes just by some aggressive editing. It’s missing some charm, I would say, it’s a lot of action without enough heart. But that’s partially due to superman’s alien-ness, I guess. Maybe the next movie will have more. It’s good enough, in the end, better than star trek 2.

Flight – Yeesh, don’t watch this one before a plane trip. It’s a pretty good movie. It’s basically a pilot who is very good, but also a complete fuck up. That doesn’t sound super interesting, and at times it isn’t, but Denzel Washington is a pretty convincing fuck up. Pretty good.

Hansel & Gretel – Yikes. I didn’t expect this to be good, but yikes. There’s really nothing to recommend about this. You’d at least think there’s some cool fights or effects, but even those are lame. Everything else (story, acting) aren’t good. Just totally unnecessary. Also, pro tip: if you don’t insist on putting your gun on your shoulder like a bad ass every second, you might have more time to aim and actually hit something.

Bedknobs & Broomsticks – Ha, pretty cute. The idea is a woman in WWII England enrolls in Witch Correspondence College. Just that concept is awesomely silly. Past that it’s kind of a mary poppins kind of movie: some singing, a nice old lady, some kids, some dancing, some animation. Fun, nice music, really cute.

Argo – This is a pretty good movie. It’s the one about the CIA extraction of americans out of Iran after the revolution. Pretty crazy story that it’s true. Of course, turns out things didn’t happen quite so dramatically in-the-nick-of-time in real life, big surprise. I wish movies would be okay with what really happened. But it’s pretty good otherwise.

Taken 2 – Well, that wasn’t really necessary. It’s not bad or anything, just not needed. There was something super cool about seeing Liam Neeson being all bad ass. But the second time it just feels normal. Without the coolness, it’s just a kind of run of the mill action movie. A couple cool tricks or scenes, but normal otherwise.

Skyfall – This too is more of the same. I guess it gets a pass because that’s what all the Bond movies are. Different bad guy, different setting, different girl, but same general attitude (at least for the past 3). Still entertaining to watch though.

Lincoln – Jeez is that good. I didn’t expect it to be that good. I know everyone said it was good, and I loved the Goodwin book, but it seemed like they could do only so much in 2 hours. But wow did Daniel Day-Lewis show me otherwise. Everyone else is good, setting is good, directing is good, but it’s all about him. He nails that quiet power that Lincoln was supposed to be known for. It was really really impressive.

Warm Bodies – This didn’t look good. Then everyone acted like it was good? But no, it’s not very good. It was supposed to be funny and self-aware, so as not to be another undead romance (that’s actually a thing now? wow). It is kind of self-aware, but it’s still stuck in the trappings of the genre. And it’s not all that funny. I’m not saying it was twilight, not that I can compare without having seen it, but it wasn’t anything particularly good either.

Temple Grandin – This was a pretty amazing story, which I had never heard before. A woman with autism gets interested in cattle management and makes some pretty big changes in the industry. The movie is about how she manages her life with autism, and also how it gave her a perspective into animals that guided her work. The movie felt a bit forced to me, all the aha moments were pretty blunt, I can’t imagine they were really that way. But I get it, they had to make a movie. Claire Danes does a good job, I guess, it’s hard to distinguish between doing an impression and acting when I don’t know the original person at all. The animals stuff is a bit tough, makes me guilty for not being vegan. But it’s a good movie.

Cargo

Pretty powerful for a short little film.

Evolution of Get Lucky

Daft Punk’s song set in various decades, pretty cool.

Book Reviews @ The Temple

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – I am of two minds about this book. Real quick: it’s 50ish years in the future, a VR version of WoW/Eve/the matrix dominates entertainment. The guy who made it is a child of the 80s, dies, and leaves the entirety of the game/company to the first person to solve a game inside his game. The book is hand crafted for nerds who grew up in the 80s, like me, with no end of references to our favorite things. On the one hand, I love this book. The basic story is great, the world is awesome. I listened to almost nothing else until I got through it, it was a page turner, if that makes any sense for an audiobook. On the other hand, two things really really annoy me about the book. First, it’s about a teenager, with obnoxious teenager problems. I can’t say that it’s poorly written, it’s a perfectly accurate representation of a nerdy 18 year old (I should know). But nerdy 18 year olds, 18 year olds of all breeds in fact, are annoying. They say annoying things, do annoying things, and prioritize particularly poorly. This is all portrayed very accurately (and acted perfectly by Wil Wheaton), but at the end of the day it’s still annoying. It’s hard to get into a book when the main character is annoying and doesn’t make very smart choices. Secondly, the book is essentially a 16 hour hipster diatribe. It’s great to glorify the 80s, for those of us from then. Monty Python, old computer games, Wargames, D&D, all that stuff, great. But the book really goes out of its way to dig up the most obscure stuff it can find. And all the experts are mega annoying about knowing all the old cool shit and if you don’t know it you are totally lame. Again, expertly written as people like that really are. But still annoying. It’s a funny pair of criticisms – he’s very good at writing obnoxious people. But it definitely made some parts of the book hard to get through. But, I can’t deny how quickly I read it, how excited I was to hear what happened next. In the end, it was a great story and I had a great time.

Stalking the Nightmare by Harlan Ellison – This is a book of short stories by one of the most prolific scifi writers that I’ve never read. It’s very good, with lots of good ideas in it. Ellison is perhaps the most cantankerous misanthropic scifi writer I’ve ever read. This is at times endearing, but mostly annoying. I generally dislike misanthropes, they have to try way too hard to be above, below, or beyond your crap. They are basically angry hipsters. But the two notable exceptions are Carlin and Spider Jerusalem. Putting those two together is pretty weird, but they are examples of an archetype. Ellison is kind of the same, less likeable, but with some awesome ideas. Stephen King does an intro for the book where, I guess, he is trying to channel Ellison. It is among the worst things I’ve ever read: obnoxious, gratuitous and pointless. It almost prevented me from reading the book, but I’m glad it didn’t. I really enjoyed the variety in the book (scifi, fantasy, real life anecdotes and stories that don’t fit in any of those). I want to read something else by him to see if he’s someone I should investigate more.

Event Reviews @ The Temple

Fela – This is a musical about a musician from Nigeria who was apparently big news in the 70s and 80s. He fused a lot of kinds of music – jazz, african, funk – to create “afrobeat”. He was also very political in Nigeria and that earned him a whole bunch of trouble. The musical is set as if it’s the final performance in his club, the Shrine, where he kind of tells the history of the music, his political struggles, and his relationship with his mother. The music is fantastic, you can’t help but love it. The musical is pretty well layed out. Everything is done with african accents, which is troublesome for my american ears. I understood probably 75% of what he said in the first half (it’s really a one man show, acting wise, everyone else sings or dances or plays music), which was enough to get by. The second half was harder and I really lost most of the story. But I got the gist, I guess, and it was enough to be very enjoyable.

Lila Downs – So I guess this lady is pretty famous, in the right circles. I’d never heard of her, but she was great. I peg her as a mariachi singer, though the musical background isn’t particularly mariachi-ish. But that could just be me being unfamiliar with other types of mexican singing. Her voice is fantastic. It’s breathy and “smokey”, which is not something I usually like on female singers, but with this kind of music it fits really well. She has a pretty good range, she can sing very low very well. She tries to go high, but I found that really bad. Not only did she wobble on some notes, it just didn’t sound good. Technically she got most of it, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. But that’s really the only negative thing. The 5 piece band (guitar, bass, drums, trombone, sax, and occasionally accordions) were all great. It was a lot of fun, really glad we went.

Tony Bennett – Maaaaan, Tony got old. This is the second time I’ve seen him, my oh-so-trustworthy memory tells me that it was much better last time. I still love him, and I still love the music, but he just can’t sing anymore. He can get through short notes fine, and his voice is still iconic, but every single (every single) long note ended badly. Either off-key, a warble, a fade-out, whatever. Really kind of a bummer, because he’s such a likeable guy and the music is so good. He still made it fun, he talk/sings, which was always part of his style anyway, to get around actual singing, I think. But in a completely non-objective way, laying on the grass, staring at the sky and listening to Tony, even old not-so-good Tony, is a fine way to spend a couple hours.

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

Beasts of the Southern Wild – This movie is pretty special, for a number of reasons. First of all, the idea that everyone in this movie is an amateur is astonishing. I did not imagine for a single moment that the actors in this movie were first timers. A few movies have tried this – Act of Valor comes to mind as a particularly bad example – and it’s often not a good idea. But these people were amazing. The girl, everyone knows now has received a lot of recognition. The father too, though, is amazing. Toeing the fine line between ignorant, drunk, basically abusive father and passionate, devoted father is so well done. The movie is made well too, and I guess from a first time director, it’s quite pretty to look at. It does fail (technically) in one regard, this thing with the aurochs. They claim in the extras that they didn’t want to have digital aurochs because there’s no computers in this world. I don’t know if that’s true, or if computer effects are just expensive, but in either case their solution doesn’t work. The aurochs are obviously pigs with fur coats and hats on, and their insertion into scenes with humans is pretty bad and distracting. Their place in the movie is a bit odd, I’m tempted to say they aren’t necessary. Mostly because to me this movie is about people living on the wrong side of the levees in Louisiana, but of course, to them it’s not the wrong side. What is amazing to me about this movie is that it showed me, more clearly than I imagined possible, the mind of people living that life. We hear about people in situations like that: too stubborn to leave their homes, too ignorant to know their lives could be better, unable to see that things could be any other way. And all of that is true. But this movie allowed me to, very briefly and shallowly, put myself in their context. The father just wants his daughter to be strong enough to survive. It does not occur to him that she could survive by going somewhere else. So he teaches her to be tough through means that are the very definition of emotional, and occasionally physical, abuse. You don’t leave though, because that’s your home, and no person, or storm, or disease can change that. That is tragic, and beautiful, but so sad. It doesn’t excuse anything, if you hit your kid or are permanently drunk, you are bad at your one job, and you don’t deserve to have it. But if I’d never seen anything else, I’m sure I’d act the same way, sad as that makes me. So I want to say the aurochs are not necessary to tell that story. I guess the author sees them as a destructive force, symbolic of the changes that will destroy our lives, the way we thought they should be. Though I may be wrong, I also saw them as analogs to us. The aurochs were supposedly creatures that ruled the earth, but were overcome by the ice age. I kind of see them as people, fighting against the dying of the light, so to speak. Too strong and stubborn and stupid to give up as their world is taken from them. Maybe that’s not what they meant, but it’s part of what I saw, and it was pretty powerful for me.

Iron Man 3 – This movie is very funny, but it’s not much of a superhero movie. On the plus side, it’s actually hilarious. I laughed more in this than I do in a lot of comedies. The snarkiness of Tony Stark, the robot butler, Happy, they are all pretty good. On the flip side, the iron man parts aren’t that interesting. There’s not a lot of them, to start with. The people who like this movie seem to see that as a bonus, but I could do with more iron man in my iron man movie. The general layout of things is okay, but the movie is just really really dumb in parts. The Mandarin – dumb, Tony’s primary obstacle – dumb, the stuff with Pepper at the end – dumb, Tony’s final choices – dumb. Some of it just plot holes, some of it pretty eye-rolley. So, the movie is okay, if you really really don’t pay attention to anything and just go in for the laughs, it’s good enough.

The Campaign – Pretty funny. Nothing different than what you saw in the previews, probably the funniest parts are in the previews. By no means the funniest movie in any recent amount of time. But if you want to see some jackassery from Farrell & Galifanakis, you’ll certainly get it and it’ll be funny.

Wreck-It Ralph – So good! Borderline awesome. The intellectual part of my brain recognizes that this is fundamentally a standard animated movie. Same old humor, same old goals, villains, heroes, challenges, ups and downs. But the rest of my brain, the part that loves everything about this movie, that part had a good time. This is not a movie that was cynically shat out by people who have never played a video game who want money from people who did or do. The makers clearly have a love for that stuff, and they share that, and it’s awesome.

Django Unchained – Pretty good. Pretty much exactly what you think it is. Some pretty violent violence, though not as bad as he’s done before. As per usual, the dialogue is really the star of the show. Christoph Waltz and Quentin Tarantino were made for each other. I love the crap that he writes down, and I love the way that he says it. It’s what made Inglorious Basterds great, and it’s what makes this movie great. Everyone else does a fine job, both Jamie Fox and even moreso Leonardo Dicaprio are great, but nothing is as good as when Waltz is putting on a show. Tarantino does stick to his tropes and it is pretty over bearing at times. The spaghetti western, hero standing in the doorway, triumphant music crap is too heavy handed for me. Plus the damn thing is quite a bit too long. But it’s still pretty good.

Man With the Iron Fists – Take equal parts Kill Bill (with even more kung fu trappings), mortal kombat, dynasty warriors, and ____, with very bad writing, average directing, but good choreography, and you have this movie. I understand the movie is trying to emulate some of the kung fu tropes, but the dialogue is pretty awful. The general structure is completely as you expect, but nothing wrong with that, it’s really the words that kill it. The only one who really pulls off his part is Russell Crowe, he had decent lines. The rest weren’t great actors, and weren’t given much to go on. But I didn’t come to the movie for the dialogue, I came for the punching, and that is good. RZA tries to get fancy too often with his directing and ruins it (all those split screens, and some really really clumsy zoomins/slowmos of some action). But most of the time it’s fun, with some cool weapons/powers and a bunch of blood. Can’t argue too much with that.

We Bought A Zoo – This movie is actually nice. It’s nothing unusual, nothing fancy. A man has lost his wife, and his kids have lost their mom. They are lost, and so arrives the macguffin – buy a zoo! That part’s a bit hard for me, since I don’t like zoos. I  can’t really be charmed by all these animals in cages. No need to jump into that argument, but it does remove what is perhaps supposed to be the cute hook for this movie. But still, the movie does what it wants to do, and tells a fairly honest story.

ParaNorman – Cute animated movie. Better than Frankenweenie, I think, but that’s largely due to the fact that Tim Burton is doing his burtoney thing so dang often. It’s fun, it’s charming, it’s nothing better than any other animated movie, but that’s still entertaining.

Hotel Transylvania – Same thing as the last one, fun, funny, cute, that’s it. Except for the part where someone can be standing in a shadow and staring at the light source that is creating the shadow. Really annoyed by that. But the rest of it is fine.

Dredd – Meh. People seemed to like this, and be surprised that they did. I didn’t really, and am not surprised. They bust into a building and fight their way to the top.  Like The Raid, except without the insanely cool hand-to-hand fighting. Instead it has super violent slow-mo bullet-drive action. That stuff is decent, not badly done, but not super compelling either.

Premium Rush – Also meh. Didn’t seem like a movie about a bike messenger could be that good. Spoiler alert – it’s not. It’s not exactly bad, no one screws up. It’s just a random “uh crap I’m stuck in this crazy situation with murderers through no fault of my own. Also, I’m on a bike” It tries to romanticize the bike messenger culture, which is mostly obnoxious. And the “biker vision” thing, while a worthy concept, doesn’t work out. But bike messengers are so up their own butt about their little subculture, they probably think it’s great, so maybe it’s just for them.

Cosmopolis – Super meh. It’s kind of an interesting concept, but it’s not an interesting movie. It mostly jumps between boring, surreal, and non-sensical. Some cool moments, and probably a fan of the movie would tell me it’s supposed to be all those things. But for me, it’s just not that good.

End of Watch – This one is good. On the face of it, it’s just another cop movie. It’s trying to connect somehow the modern world – social media, youtube – and the found footage type movie (not the mystery or anything, just the “raw” footage), which isn’t super necessary to anything. But it feels very real. Some very flawed men who do have a vision for their lives. But not so flawed that they are pointless like so many “bad cop” movies. And it doesn’t really beat you over the head with it. Just a well done movie, in the end.

Carriers – Not sure how this got to the top of the queue. It’s a movie from a few years ago about people getting along in a post-pandemic type world. I can’t say that there’s anything particularly bad about it. Acting is fine, dialogue is fine. But it also didn’t really add much to the genre, so it ended up kind of boring.

Maker vs. Marker

Pretty cool.

Lil Dicky - Ex-boyfriend

I find this guy’s rap voice really annoying, but the lyrics are hilarious.

Smooth McGroove video game a capella

So Guile is pretty cool. Zelda is great. Aerith makes me tear up. But pulling off all the off-beat stuff in Castlevania is freaking amazing.

Luke’s Change

Making fun of the 9/11 wackos, this pretends to make a case for the destruction of the Death Star being an inside job. It’s not laugh out loud funny, but it’s very clever.

The Promise

Hilarious short film.

Event Reviews @ The Temple

March Fourth – I saw this approximately 300 years ago, so details are going to be a little slim. It’s a wacky show, it’s kind of a circus. There’s people on stilts, twirlers, dancers, hula hooping, etc. The music is kind of just party music. Not club music, exactly, but dancey party music. It’s basically drum corps instruments: brass and percussion, and I can listen to that all day and love it, so that was great, a lot of fun. They also dress like a marching band, but some sort of wacky colorful goofy marching band. All the chicks have fishnets or have some how sexified their uniform. The dudes have wacky additions like a pharaoh hat or a sombrero. Mostly it’s all silly and not cool, but in keeping with the fun theme. The physical stuff is pretty well done, all the stilt walking and such is cool. They do acrobatic stuff while on stilts, flipping girls around and such, that’s pretty neat. At one point a stilts dude holds a metal pole while a girl pole dances on it. While kind of dopey, that’s pretty damn impressive to pull off. All in all, it was a pretty fun show. Not for everyone, for sure, but even I was in the middle doing their dorky dance moves to the “everybody dances now” song. Lots of fun.

Soledad Barrio/Noche Flamenca – This is some straight up classic flamenco stuff. Nothing surprising, but very well done. I’m not the biggest flamenco fan, the dance by itself can be a little boring for me, kind of like tap. Include the singers and the guitar and the clapping, and things get a lot better. It’s still far from my favorite dance form, but it’s still very cool. These people are very good at what they do. The dude is kind of obnoxious, with all his prancing and posing. I don’t think it’s his fault, I think that’s probably just how dudes dance flamenco, but it’s not for me. The women, especially the lead, were very very good. Cool show.

Chick Corea & Gary Burton – So, funny story. We saw this on accident. Turns out when you tell the person at the box office when you are buying 10 sets of tickets for various shows that you want “Barton”, meaning Aszure Barton the dancer, you might accidentally get Gary Burton, some jazz dude. So, that happened. Kind of a bummer, because not one of us had any interest in seeing jazz. I guess this Chick Corea guy is pretty famous and respected. I have no problem believing that, he’s good at what he does. Gary Burton does this xylophone thing and was very very good at it. But, it’s jazz. Jazz is boring. Here’s the only two pieces of evidence I need to know that jazz is boring: 1) They covered a Beatles song and made it 10 times as long as the original and 10 times less cool. 2) At least 3 times Chick Corea had trouble flipping the page on his music. The flow of the song did not seem to suffer in any way. So, jazz is boring. They are good at it, but I don’t like it. On the plus side, we got to see the Fox Theater for the first time, which was awesome.

Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet – I’ve never really been into ballet, but little bits of it sneak into other things I like and are making me start to like it, maybe. This is a little bit closer to a real ballet, though still not that. It came in two halves. The first was well danced, but a little boring. The music was just sleepy. The dancers did a good job, they were beautiful, but the music made it boring.  The second half was better – it was pieces of Sheherazade, which I don’t know anything about. But the music was much more energetic, much more interesting. The dancing followed suit – incorporating a lot of african/tribal type movements in addition to the modern/jazz stuff. It was by no means my favorite dance performance, but it was very cool.

Premium Blend – I love this show. I have to say, as with last year, I think this year is maybe a step down, but it is still fantastic. The dancing is just as cool, and the choreography is just as good. The problem is a lack of variety in the styles of dancing. This version had too much ballet, I’m afraid, almost every sequence including quite a bit of ballet. Last year had that amazing tap number. This year could have used some hip hop, or ballroom, or something. I guess it’s just not what this school does. But that’s the end of the critiques, the rest is great. The opening sequence was an excerpt from a ballet called Jewels. I’m told that this is still not a proper ballet, but it’s way closer than anything I’ve seen so far. Very prancy, tight tights. Kind of weird, really, my feeling that I won’t like real ballet if I ever see it. But there were parts of this that were pretty cool. Then came a super cheesy one called Songs of Sanctuary. The music was some new agey Orinoco Flow type stuff. The dancing was correspondingly a little dorky, a bit too much self-touching and reaching for the sky. But past that, it was very good. The lighting was dramatic and the dancers (all women) were excellent. Next was a rat pack send up called Rats. This was 4 guys, and it was very charming. The dancing was a bit feminine, which was kind of weird. But the personalities were strong and entertaining. One song in particular was fantastic as the guys (I think) used real (or real-ish) sign language to dance along to a song. After the break was a long broadway/ballet piece about the beach, which was a lot of fun and well put together. Next was a really awesome number called Styx. It was a bit over the top, and I could see some people not being in to it. It was very electronic, kind of 80s, driving music. Everyone ran around with staves basically doing some jazz kind of dancing. It was very aggressive, a tiny bit ridiculous, but otherwise totally cool. Last up was a very silly thing called Hijinks, supposedly inspired by slap stick sitcoms. It was goofy, ballet-less (which was nice), had some nice partnering, and was fun. Overall, great show, I continue to love the creativity they cram into this.

MOMIX Botanica – This show was SO COOL. It was kind of more show show than dance show, but the dancers certainly had to perform. There was a lot of visual effects, people looking like flowers or animals. Cool stuff with glow in the dark hands and feet dancing around making shapes. Some really beautiful visuals – a woman laying on a mirror so you could see her and her reflection as she moved, a woman in a ginormous spinny dress that looked like a flower when she spun. Really really creative, really really cool, really beautiful. And supported by some fantastically powerful dancers. Really awesome all around, maybe my favorite dance show this year.

The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields – These are a famous classical group, I guess. They are very good, though. I think they might be my favorite classical performance I’ve ever seen. I’ve waited too long to write this, so I forgot what they played. I think the first section was a Cello thing with some fancy cello lady, pretty cool. Then I think it was some Haydn piano-featuring piece, which I thought was very very boring. Then some Bach, then some more Haydn, both of which were very good. The end in particular was very cute – the artists all walked off the stage individually or in pairs, until just two violinists remained. In addition to being cute, it allowed you to hear the music be deconstructed as the parts left, it was cool.

Kathleen Battle – This was very not good. The idea is a famous (I guess) opera singer comes and sings spirituals. Sounds like a cool idea, right? Well, maybe not, but it at least had a shot. But hooboy did it not work. I cannot imagine a style more inappropriately suited to spirituals than opera. The most ornate, aristocratic form of music western art has to offer, paired with honest, painful, joyful, burdened music born of the realest suffering and faith. The fanciness of operatic singing, with its runs and high notes and showing off, is unbelievable out of place with the content of the music. It was such a mismatch, it was borderline offensive. Now, granted, I have no right or position to be offended. I have zero connection to gospel music, and zero connection to its history. But jeez did this all seemed misplaced. I can imagine how upset people would be if a white opera singer lady co-opted this music for some crazy fusion.  I’m sure it came out of good intensions, but someone should have seen that it was a horrible choice immediately and stopped it.

Limon Dance Company – These guys were pretty good. Probably my least favorite of the dance shows we’ve seen, but not bad or anything. The first section I didn’t like very much. It used some Chopin music, I guess, Hungarian dances type stuff. I though the choreography was super boring. The dancers were just okay. Really wasn’t into it. The second one was better. I don’t remember the name of the type of dance/music, but it was basically a court dance from some 16th century king’s castle. I felt very much like I was watching an extended sequence of The Tudors. This was (kind of) playing off of Othello, I guess. A moor, his wife, his lying friend, and another lady. Murder, betrayal, all that good stuff. The outfits were very ornate, cool, but the women’s dance form was often lost in their dress. Nothing was spectacular about it, but it was neat. The third act was the best – a latin inspired mishmash of activity. The best music and the best choreography by far, and some very good execution. Overall, good show, but way down on my list.

Beetlejuice Minecraft Roller Coster

I have no words.

Top Secret Drum Crops

Jesus christ, these are the best drummers I’ve ever seen. If you get bored (first of all, you’re wrong), fast forward to the last minute, it’s amazing.

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

Total Recall (2012) – To be fair, this is a good enough action movie. There’s nothing wrong with running around and shooting and jumping and all that. On the flip side, I can’t think of one thing it does better than the first one. Yes the first one is corny and dated, but I didn’t have more fun with this one than that one. The dated quality of the first one does not prevent me from enjoying it as an action scifi movie. So what’s the point? Not sure.

Pitch Perfect – I had heard this movie was pretty good, but the previews looked pretty dumb. The previews were right. It’s exactly Bring It On, except for singing instead of cheerleading. They even stole the “cheer-ocracy” thing, except instead the put “aca” (as in a capella” in front of everything. Everything about it is pretty bad. Similar to a Step It Up movie, except that at least has great dancing. The singing in this is just okay, some Glee cover crap. There’s a couple funny moments, but the funny character has as many really bad moments (unfunny, or just offensive) as good ones. Pretty dumb over all.

Frankenweenie – This movie is exactly what you think. It’s cute enough, mildly funny, sometimes sweet. The character design is very creepy and kind of funny – it’s surprising how kooky they look, yet it’s exactly what you’d expect from Tim Burton. There’s not much else to say, if you want to see Tim Burton being Tim Burtoney, go watch it.

The Tree of Life – BORing. Like wow boring. It is so painfully slow and artsy. The whole first 30 minutes are more abstract images and nature documentary than they are movie. And the rest of it is just massively boring. I kind of get what they are going for, but yeesh. 

21 Jump Street – This is a decent amount of fun. It’s stupid and goofy, but I laughed. There’s not much to say about it, shocked that Channing Tatum was decent? Cool cameo at the end? That’s about it, fun though.

Dark Shadows – This movie is pretty much exactly what you think. That’s exactly what I said for Franeknweenie – the connection? Tim Burton. Johnny Depp acts awkward for a couple of hours. Helena Bonham Carter is her normal self, which I could do without. It’s kind of morbid, kind of sweet, and very odd. I liked it well enough, the concept was certainly different (except for the burton-ey stuff).

Seven Psychopaths – I liked this, I wanted to really like it, but it didn’t quite work that well. It kind of has a british gangster movie feel, which I like. The mix of made up story and real life is mostly fun, but sometimes cumbersome. But it’s a cool story, everyone does a good job, it’s a good time.

V/H/S – I like the idea of this movie, which is several little vignettes, about a murderer or a demon or whatever. That seems kind of cool, and enables the movie to get away with the found footage bullshit a little easier, since there’s a new reason why people would actually be holding a camera instead of running the fuck away every 20 minutes. But in the end it’s not that interesting. There was no connecting thread, just a bunch of completely random stories. And the stories in themselves aren’t good enough to stand alone as an anthology. So in the end it’s just a random horror movie, except it’s like 5 little random horror movies in a row.

Human Centipede 2 – Jesus, that was dumb. I saw the first one at the Loft as sort of an event. That one was ridiculous too, but for some reason it didn’t seem so bad. It was over the top, as disgusting as humanly possible just to do it, but in a really stupid way, it seemed like it was at least trying to do something. This one is very much just torture porn, and it’s just disgusting in a way I can’t quite describe. I don’t know why the two are different, I guess the first one was a new idea, and as disgusting and useless as it was, at least it had that going for it. This is nothing but a rehash of the idea, except now it has to increase the amount of disgusting ideas by an order of magnitude just to be more crazy. Dumb.

Hellraiser – The thing about seeing a cheesy 80s movie for the first time in 2013 is it don’t look so good. It’s got all the 80s corniness without any lingering nostalgia. It’s pretty gory, with some pretty good (all things considered) practical effects. Still 80 times better than some shitty horror movie from today with its digital blood. I can see why it would have been pretty popular when it came out, it has all the stuff it should have for this kind of movie. Kind of silly to watch nowadays though.

Stake Land – A perfectly reasonable reaction to this movie is that it’s massively boring. It’s a vampire movie, but also kind of a "The Road” kind of movie. A lot of traveling and talking and narration. The acting isn’t very good either, so that didn’t help. For much of the movie I thought that’s all it was, and that it was pretty lacking in fighting for a vampire fighting movie. For a while in the middle I started to think it was better than that. There was actually something kind of interesting about these people traveling, trying to find a way. But then it turned out to be boring after all. Nothing really noteworthy happened, eventually the story kept going and that was it.

Shining Through – This is an older one, early 90s, about spies in WW II. There’s a lot of things I like about the movie. Melanie Griffith is not one of them. I’ve never liked her, her voice is obnoxious, she’s always putting on this fake sexy bullshit act that’s really annoying. But everything else about the movie is actually pretty good. It’s a cool little story about going undercover in nazi germany. It’s all pretty well done and thrilling. The end is kind of lame, but it’s good otherwise.

Battle Royale – I heard about this when Hunger Games got all popular, but just now got to watching it. It’s pretty cool. I’m trying to decide if I legitimately think it’s much better than Hunger Games, or if that’s just my latent hipster who would much rather not like the cool thing. I can compare the two in these ways: HG has all the slick futuristic dystopian thing down much more overtly. For better or worse, they delight in showing you the extravagance of the ruling class, BR doesn’t do any of that. HG also has the whole audience participation/manipulation thing, and that’s a cool additional element. BR is much more brutal, and much darker in general. Though the heroes in both don’t want to be part of the killing, and the bad guys in both do, the violence is much more violent in BR. There seems to me to be more variety in character motivation in BR, but that could be more forgetting the details in HG. The ending to both movies is kind of lame. In the end HG seems a bit watered down, a bit too pretty. BR seems much grittier and I like it better that way, but I’m probably just trying to be cool.

Savages – Yikes. I’m only 5 minutes in, but the narration writing is killing me. She actually just said “war-gasms.” No really. [time passes] Okay, movie over. Wow, that was bad. Like, wow bad. I don’t remember that actresses name, but she did a monumentally bad job. In her defense, the writing on the narration was among the worst I’ve heard in a for reals no shit movie in a long time. The story isn’t as cool as they pitched it in the trailers, too much lame machination, not enough shooty shooty bang bang. Pretty bad.

Haywire – This movie is actually decent. It’s Stephen Soderbergh, which is iffy. And it’s him featuring a non-traditional actor, which is super iffy. Last time it was Sasha Grey, and that was bad. This is some MMA chick, and it’s not bad. She’s not asked to do much acting, that’s probably a good thing. And she’s good at all the punching and stuff. It’s kind of a normal spy-gone-rogue or spy-betrayed-by-employer movie, but it’s paced very differently. At times it’s a bit annoying, overly artsy. But all in all it’s pretty cool and tense, without being crazy high pitched.

Wild Target – Uh, okay. This is a weird one. It’s about an assassin, who ends up protecting his target instead of killing her. It’s very… British. It’s very awkward and stilted. The assassin is very odd, nothing in the movie really makes sense. The girl is annoying. I mean, she’s supposed to be, but she is. It’s not exactly a bad movie, but it’s not a movie for me either.

Jeff Who Lives At Home – Another weird movie. It’s okay, in the end. It’s just about two brothers, life isn’t exactly what they want it to be. Stuff happens, they both find a bit of purpose in their lives (transient as it is, for one of them), and everyone has a warm fuzzy feeling. I wouldn’t really call it good, I guess, but if you are feeling like the warm fuzzies, it’ll do.

Time Traveller – This is a random movie on netflix that didn’t pan out all that well. It’s a japanese movie about a girl who goes back in time to try to do something for her mom that’s not totally clear. The time travel aspect is what seemed interesting, but it was just kind of a random movie about a girl falling for a guy. There’s not much more to it than that. It’s not poorly done or anything, there’s just not much else there.

Rampart – Meh, Woody Harrelson is a crooked cop. Doesn’t really introduce anything new to the crooked cop movie genre. He does bad things, other things happen, he has to decide how he wants to be, blah blah.

Good Neighbors – This is kind of neat, although it could certainly be a lot better. It’s just a few people who live in an apartment building in I don’t know what town. There’s a serial killer in town, and everyone in the building is kind of a wacko for various reasons. The movie stays almost entirely confined to the building, which is kind of cool. The story is kind of ridiculous, I guess, and every character is pretty unlikeable. But for some reason I still thought it was good enough.

Video Game High School – So, first I was shocked that someone gave Freddie Wong a movie. Then I googled and saw that it was a kickstarter, that makes more sense I guess. It’s not very good. His youtube movies are fun enough for 5 minutes. And for 5 minutes on youtube, they look great. The effects in this aren’t great, but they are okay. The writing and acting are particularly bad, though. The story is silly, which would be okay if the rest of it was really cool, but it’s not. It’s just a long youtube movie, in the end. And that’s not usually an appealing thing.

Jim – Very forgettable, I’m really not sure what happened. It’s trying to be clever, connecting some dude trying to have a kid from his wife’s frozen embryos and some future thing. I didn’t really get it, wasn’t cool to me.

Paper War

Very clever little short movie about two 2D sketches fighting over a girl.

Video Game Reviews @ The Temple

Arkham City – This game is awesome, but it is exactly the game you imagine it to be. It has everything Arkham Asylum had, and more. Better fighting, better voice talent, better graphics, better environment, better everything. And I ate it up, I couldn’t get enough while playing it. Upon reflection, I’m not left with a lot. It’s a bit of an empty experience, because it just wasn’t as amazingly different as the first one was, compared to other action games. But I still had a blast playing it.

Uncharted 3 – The story here is actually much like Batman. The game is beautiful. There is not a thing wrong with it (well, melee combat is pretty awful, especially coming off Arkham City). The story telling, the acting, the animation, it’s all fantastic. But, Uncharted 2 was pretty damn fantastic. Is this better? Probably. There’s a couple scenes in here that are really stand out cinematic coolness. But Uncharted 2 was a huge step forward. This is a minor step from there. So I’m again left with “that was a lot of fun, but didn’t blow my mind”

Red Dead Revolution – Yeah, I’m that far behind. In my defense, I was halfway through this game a year and a half ago when I got my new computer. I kind of never made it back to the PS3 until the first two games dragged me in. So I finally put in the time to finish this. It is an awesome game. Again, kind of like the first two, it is a bit of a slight evolution. Really, it’s just GTA in the old west. But GTA is awesome and I haven’t played it for a few years, and the old west is awesome, and I’ve never played a really stand out western game. So this was awesome. Acting and story is all great. Combat is as lame as GTA games always are on analog sticks, but the slow mo mode makes it bearable. The other reason I hadn’t gotten back to this is because On The Media, those assholes, ruined the ending for me like a year ago. Kind of made it hard to get invested. But still a great game.

Heavy Rain – This game was great. I beat it in 3 sittings, the last one being an epic (for me) 6 hour session. I got it as a gift, but then went and bought a Move just to play with it. I’m not sure that was a super economical decision, but it was fun. Just using the minority report heads up display briefly with the FBI agent was worth it. Some of the icons are damn confusing, but I got used to it eventually. It’s still not nearly as natural as the controller I’ve been using for 10 years, but fun. Doing things like opening drawers and picking things up mimics the natural motion in really cool ways. It’s extraordinarily mundane sometimes (brushing teeth, cooking eggs), but it’s cool. Then again, it’s sometimes hard to tell what a given action is supposed to do. Does flip left mean I open the door, or grab the seatbelt? Well, fuck me I picked the wrong one and now I’m outside the car again. More than once I did the wrong thing because there was n0 information that told me which thing was which. The game is essentially a really good serial killer movie, except you get to act out all the parts. It’s like the Killing, except not super boring. There are quite a few problems, technical problems. There’s lots of overlapping models (people in walls), once a guy got frozen falling backward in the air, matrix style. Though the individual acting was good, it was plain that they didn’t record the lines together, the flow of a lot of conversations is off. That’s probably because the conversations can go so many ways depending on what you’ve done, but it’s still very stilted. I wanted to do the whole game without reloading. I think it’s structured that you can “lose” and that’s just how the story plays out, which is very cool. Twice in the middle I reloaded because the game was being crap. Once because I had no way to know that flip this way meant run away and leave the girl to die instead of save her. And once because the wand wasn’t responding. But that corrupted me, and I reloaded in the very end to beat the bad guy instead of getting beaten. That makes me feel kind of lame, but I wanted a halfway decent ending! I had already screwed up twice throughout and let bad things happen to two major characters. Overall, I had a blast with this, I’m actually considering running through it again just to see a different ending. The fact that so many things can happen so many ways. The way the story can do that is just awesome. But, I’m lazy, and it won’t happen. But just the fact that I considered it is saying something!

Resistance 3 – This is a pretty good, if fundamentally average, shooter. The guns are fun, a lot of fun. Old school game where you can carry 50 guns at once, that’s fun too. Playing a shooter on a controller is not fun, of course. The story is just whatever. There are some decent set pieces, but nothing super memorable. It’s got a nice variety of enemies, big, small, varied attacks, that’s all good. It seems like a completely acceptable shooter if you are into scifi shooters.

Hotline Miami – Pretty cool game. It’s a retro 80s thing. Pixel sprites, cool ass 8 bit music with an 80s flair. It’s a top down…. beatemup/shooter. You run around a small level, punching, slashing, or shooting bad guys until they are all dead. The plot is thin as thin can be, you are getting anonymous calls to go to some place for some mundane reason (deliver a package, meet a date), but you just kill everyone there. The controls are kind of annoying, it might actually be more suited for a controller. You move with WASD, and aim with the mouse. But you move so quick (and the enemies move even quicker) its often impossible to track with the mouse. So you do a lot of corner shooting so that you get the guy before he gets you. It’s pretty fun though. Massively bloody, though in a kind of cartoony pixelated way. But you are ripping heads off left and right. It’s short, I went through it in two sessions, but it was fun. That music was so cool too.

Dragon Age: Origins – Here I am way behind again. I have #2 too, but it’ll take me a while to get to that, I need a break. I actually didn’t think this was as good as everyone else in the world, I enjoyed it, but I got bored, a lot. I stopped playing it to play and beat every other game on this list. It’s just so freaking long, and not that captivating. It could be that I’ve changed, I used to love this classic RPG stuff. I loved KOTOR (and kind of KOTOR 2). I loved All first 4 elder scrolls (still haven’t played skyrim). I obviously loved the JRPGs growing up. So… why don’t I love this? I like it, the characters are pretty well developed, the fighting is done well, the world has an okay (kind of limited) amount of space and variety. The ability to make some different choices with people that can affect who is in your party is pretty cool. It just didn’t drag me in, for whatever reason, but it’s still very good. I had a lady character, which is basically unheard of for me, I figured I’d give it a shot. A lady elf mage, which was cool. Of course, then I made her romantic with another lady, for some reason I’m not quite modern enough to romance a dude as a lady, kind of silly. In the end, and I guess this is spoilers if you actually waited as long as me to play this game, I chose to be the one to kill the archdemon. Seemed more in character to me, for some reason. All the stuff in the epilogue based on what you did in the game is cool.Sadly, that means I can’t play as my character in the DLC, which I’ve just started. I tried starting a dwarf warrior character, but that was not fun. I think you really need a mage, two actually, in your group. Two fighters was a nightmare of poultice use and dying. The fighter abilities aren’t as fun to use either. So I booted that and created…. another lady human mage! But this one is blonde, so… totally different. The DLC was kind of bad, mostly due to bugs. Awakenings have a good extension of a story, but was ridiculously buggy: broken quests, crashes left and right, really annoying. It was good enough though. Then there’s a DLC for: playing as the darkspawn during the last battle, leilana’s history, a golem thing, and hunting down morrigan. The last battle one was cool. Leilana’s was boring. The last battle in the golem one is too hard, and I don’t have enough time to prepare in the hour long campaign, or patience to try enough tactics to win. And I didn’t even play the morrigan one because I didn’t let morrigan do her bad thing in Origins, so it’s silly to hunt her down, plus I’m super bored with this game.

Malaria (a short film)

Holy crap. I know I post a lot of things not everyone would be into, but this is honestly the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. The “animation” is just genius. The only thing that bummed me out is I don’t speak spanish (or maybe portuguese, he’s brazilian) so I had to read the subtitles, which meant I wasn’t appreciating the visuals. But still, awesome.

Xilent–Boss Wave

Cool music video.

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

The Hobbit – Loved it. It’s not perfect by any means, and not as good as the LotR movies, which had a great deal more epic-ness to them. I don’t know why people think it’s too long, I was never bored. The characters are mostly great, the fighting is always great, the CGI is fantastic most of the time, with a couple pretty shitty exceptions. I’m thinking particularly when they are all standing on top of a little rock after being saved from something, it looked really lame. The only really bad thing about the movie was the humor. There was some charming subtle humor, and that was good. But there was MUCH more obnoxious, over-acted, over-the-top, corny humor. A lot of awful one liners and pathetic slapstick stuff, I really really didn’t like it. Oh, and Radagast was a completely waste of time (and the worst of the physical humor, what is he, dick van dyke?). But let’s not dwell on that, because the rest of it was awesome.

Wrath of the Titans – Not bad, not great. Better than the last one, definitely. The fighting is a bit more interesting, though still not that amazing. The CGI is way better, it’s pretty great throughout. With the GLARING exception of anytime the pegasus showed up. That honestly looked like college freshman level animation, it was really really bad. Nothing particularly memorable otherwise, but an okay movie.

The Bourne Legacy – I’ve never been a huge Bourne person. I like them fine, the quick style fighting is a welcome addition to the genre, but all the conspiracy/mystery stuff was boring and over wrought. So now we have a Bourne movie without all the mystery, just fighting. I’m kind of okay with that. It’s not as slick as the previous movies, to be sure. Probably that’s on purpose. In the end it’s a fine action movie, nothing wrong with it, but nothing super memorable either.

Brave – This is a very fun, very sweet, very pretty movie. If it was a Disney movie, I’d say it was one of the best in quite a while. It is not special, though, in the way Pixar movies have been. It didn’t have that extra magic that those moments in Up and Wall-E (and others) had. But it’s still very nice.

Ruby Sparks – This is a pretty cute movie. It’s painfully hip and cool, but otherwise very enjoyable. The conceit of it is pretty disturbing, and fortunately they are not afraid to push it to it’s logical extreme. Sadly they do puss out in the end with a completely non-sensical (and/or completely non-sustainable) ending. But everything else about the movie is pretty good.

Lawless – This seemed cool in the ads, but good lord was I bored. I just couldn’t give a shit about anything that happened in it. I’m getting the same feeling about Justified lately. Maybe I just can’t get into that southern gangster (20s or modern) style.

Backbeat – This is about the “5th Beatle” who isn’t the producer, but this guy Stu Sutcliffe who was with them in the very early days. I didn’t know any of this history, so that was cool. The acting isn’t very good, the accents are kind of awful. But the music is great. And seeing the story is cool.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – Man, why does reality have to ruin great internet ideas? Besides giving us some axe-wielding action, which isn’t something we’ve really seen before, this movie brings absolutely nothing to the table. No story, no acting, no writing, and no non-axe action to care about. I have the book too, but I really don’t want to read it now.

The Amazing Spider-Man – I don’t know. Some parts of it are good. I agree with everyone, the quippy jumping kind of obnoxious spiderman is done much more true to the source in this one. Yes, Andrew Garfield is too cool to be a nerd, so that’s out of place. But he is at least a bit of a nerd in real life, so that helps. The movie does most of the things it is supposed to, but maybe I’m spiderman’d out, or maybe it’s just not compelling. I’m glad he’s around, I hope with everyone else he gets folded into the greater Marvel movie universe. That would be the movie’s largest contribution, probably.

Case de mi Padre – Holy shit. I absolutely always finish movies. Even if they are god awful, I finish them because I have a disease. But I didn’t finish this one. So bad, not funny, not anything. If it was in english and I could ignore it while I played a game, I might have let it play. But having to read the horribleness was just too much. Jeez.

Machine Gun Preacher – Eh, I guess this movie was fine. I guess it’s a true story about some deadbeat who turns his life around and becomes a preacher, then goes to africa to help some kids, and ends up killing some dudes (with a machine gun, I guess). If it wasn’t true, it’d be less interesting. But it’s done pretty well.

The New Daughter – This is a horror-ish movie where Kevin Costner moves to some house with his kids and crazy stuff starts happening. It’s a lot better than I thought it’d be. That’s probably giving it more credit than it would otherwise get, but it’s decent enough. It’s not really spooky or anything, but it has a little bit of thrills.

Indie Game: The movie – This is pretty cool. It’s neat to hear the backstory on these games that I’ve played. It also makes perfectly clear that some of these guys are raving assholes. The Super Meat Boy guy is pretty cool. The Braid guy is kind of a douche. The Fez guy seems like a horrendously obnoxious person. Hard to say, I guess, they could edit the worst moments here and the best moments here. I’ve been pretty obnoxious at times in my life, after all. Besides that, interesting to see some of the business & the behind the scenes.

Act of Valor – Jeez, this seemed like it would be totally bad ass, right? The baddest of assest moments were shown in the trailer. The thing where the guy shoots the guy and the guy catches the guy as he falls. That’s as cool as it gets, so don’t expect more. I guess they used real military guys, so the acting isn’t very good. But it’s not all their fault, some of the writing is pretty bad too. By the way, FPS was lame in Doom, it’s still lame, sorry.

Mirror Mirror – What the fuck, why is this good? Remember when the two Snow White trailers came out and one looked god awful and one looked pretty cool despite Kristen Stewart? What happened to that? The Huntsman movie was pretty crappy, and this movie is pretty fun! I mean, it’s not genius or anything, and Julia Roberts is mega-annoying. But at least she’s SUPPOSED to be annoying. And the visuals are fantastic, the story is fun, the heroine is sympathetic, and the humor is humorous. Huntsman was none of those things, and had barely any action to show instead. I’m confused.

Ted – It’s pretty funny. It’s true that the funniest parts of the movie are in the trailer. But there’s, let’s say, an equal number of just as funny parts throughout the rest of the movie. And them a bunch of kind of funny parts. It’s not laugh my balls off funny, I don’t need to see it again like a really hilarious movie. But it was certainly fun to watch.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World – Welllll, I guess it’s good. The problem is that it’s really stupid. Not just the fact that something is going to happen to the Earth that engulfs the entire planet in fire. I guess that’s possible, but I’m thinking of something that big hit us, there wouldn’t be much to light on fire, but maybe I’m wrong. No, the real stupid part is where the 25 year old falls in love with the 45 year old and they are perfect for each other. It’s sweet, I guess, but it just seems so dumb. If you accept the fact that you make a great couple for 2 weeks, cool. But pretending like you were always meant for each other when you couldn’t be more different is just goofy. I suppose I’m taking it all too seriously, but the end really did kind of cause involuntary guffaws. But, ignoring all that, it was fun to watch.

Trek Nation – Documentary made by Gene Roddenberry’s son, I thought it was pretty good. It’s true that Eugene (the son) is very annoying. He really should have ctrl+f’d “I wanted to learn what kind of man my dad was” and deleted all but one. I think that would have cut 10 minutes from the movie. But besides his awkward, most often unnecessary narration, the movie is cool. I didn’t know much about Roddenberry, so hearing it all was really neat. Probably nothing here for a non trekkie, but for me it was cool.

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

The Hobbit – Loved it. It’s not perfect by any means, and not as good as the LotR movies, which had a great deal more epic-ness to them. I don’t know why people think it’s too long, I was never bored. The characters are mostly great, the fighting is always great, the CGI is fantastic most of the time, with a couple pretty shitty exceptions. I’m thinking particularly when they are all standing on top of a little rock after being saved from something, it looked really lame. The only really bad thing about the movie was the humor. There was some charming subtle humor, and that was good. But there was MUCH more obnoxious, over-acted, over-the-top, corny humor. A lot of awful one liners and pathetic slapstick stuff, I really really didn’t like it. Oh, and Radagast was a completely waste of time (and the worst of the physical humor, what is he, dick van dyke?). But let’s not dwell on that, because the rest of it was awesome.

Wrath of the Titans – Not bad, not great. Better than the last one, definitely. The fighting is a bit more interesting, though still not that amazing. The CGI is way better, it’s pretty great throughout. With the GLARING exception of anytime the pegasus showed up. That honestly looked like college freshman level animation, it was really really bad. Nothing particularly memorable otherwise, but an okay movie.

The Bourne Legacy – I’ve never been a huge Bourne person. I like them fine, the quick style fighting is a welcome addition to the genre, but all the conspiracy/mystery stuff was boring and over wrought. So now we have a Bourne movie without all the mystery, just fighting. I’m kind of okay with that. It’s not as slick as the previous movies, to be sure. Probably that’s on purpose. In the end it’s a fine action movie, nothing wrong with it, but nothing super memorable either.

Brave – This is a very fun, very sweet, very pretty movie. If it was a Disney movie, I’d say it was one of the best in quite a while. It is not special, though, in the way Pixar movies have been. It didn’t have that extra magic that those moments in Up and Wall-E (and others) had. But it’s still very nice.

Ruby Sparks – This is a pretty cute movie. It’s painfully hip and cool, but otherwise very enjoyable. The conceit of it is pretty disturbing, and fortunately they are not afraid to push it to it’s logical extreme. Sadly they do puss out in the end with a completely non-sensical (and/or completely non-sustainable) ending. But everything else about the movie is pretty good.

Lawless – This seemed cool in the ads, but good lord was I bored. I just couldn’t give a shit about anything that happened in it. I’m getting the same feeling about Justified lately. Maybe I just can’t get into that southern gangster (20s or modern) style.

Backbeat – This is about the “5th Beatle” who isn’t the producer, but this guy Stu Sutcliffe who was with them in the very early days. I didn’t know any of this history, so that was cool. The acting isn’t very good, the accents are kind of awful. But the music is great. And seeing the story is cool.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – Man, why does reality have to ruin great internet ideas? Besides giving us some axe-wielding action, which isn’t something we’ve really seen before, this movie brings absolutely nothing to the table. No story, no acting, no writing, and no non-axe action to care about. I have the book too, but I really don’t want to read it now.

The Amazing Spider-Man – I don’t know. Some parts of it are good. I agree with everyone, the quippy jumping kind of obnoxious spiderman is done much more true to the source in this one. Yes, Andrew Garfield is too cool to be a nerd, so that’s out of place. But he is at least a bit of a nerd in real life, so that helps. The movie does most of the things it is supposed to, but maybe I’m spiderman’d out, or maybe it’s just not compelling. I’m glad he’s around, I hope with everyone else he gets folded into the greater Marvel movie universe. That would be the movie’s largest contribution, probably.

Case de mi Padre – Holy shit. I absolutely always finish movies. Even if they are god awful, I finish them because I have a disease. But I didn’t finish this one. So bad, not funny, not anything. If it was in english and I could ignore it while I played a game, I might have let it play. But having to read the horribleness was just too much. Jeez.

Machine Gun Preacher – Eh, I guess this movie was fine. I guess it’s a true story about some deadbeat who turns his life around and becomes a preacher, then goes to africa to help some kids, and ends up killing some dudes (with a machine gun, I guess). If it wasn’t true, it’d be less interesting. But it’s done pretty well.

The New Daughter – This is a horror-ish movie where Kevin Costner moves to some house with his kids and crazy stuff starts happening. It’s a lot better than I thought it’d be. That’s probably giving it more credit than it would otherwise get, but it’s decent enough. It’s not really spooky or anything, but it has a little bit of thrills.

Indie Game: The movie – This is pretty cool. It’s neat to hear the backstory on these games that I’ve played. It also makes perfectly clear that some of these guys are raving assholes. The Super Meat Boy guy is pretty cool. The Braid guy is kind of a douche. The Fez guy seems like a horrendously obnoxious person. Hard to say, I guess, they could edit the worst moments here and the best moments here. I’ve been pretty obnoxious at times in my life, after all. Besides that, interesting to see some of the business & the behind the scenes.

Act of Valor – Jeez, this seemed like it would be totally bad ass, right? The baddest of assest moments were shown in the trailer. The thing where the guy shoots the guy and the guy catches the guy as he falls. That’s as cool as it gets, so don’t expect more. I guess they used real military guys, so the acting isn’t very good. But it’s not all their fault, some of the writing is pretty bad too. By the way, FPS was lame in Doom, it’s still lame, sorry.

Mirror Mirror – What the fuck, why is this good? Remember when the two Snow White trailers came out and one looked god awful and one looked pretty cool despite Kristen Stewart? What happened to that? The Huntsman movie was pretty crappy, and this movie is pretty fun! I mean, it’s not genius or anything, and Julia Roberts is mega-annoying. But at least she’s SUPPOSED to be annoying. And the visuals are fantastic, the story is fun, the heroine is sympathetic, and the humor is humorous. Huntsman was none of those things, and had barely any action to show instead. I’m confused.

Ted – It’s pretty funny. It’s true that the funniest parts of the movie are in the trailer. But there’s, let’s say, an equal number of just as funny parts throughout the rest of the movie. And them a bunch of kind of funny parts. It’s not laugh my balls off funny, I don’t need to see it again like a really hilarious movie. But it was certainly fun to watch.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World – Welllll, I guess it’s good. The problem is that it’s really stupid. Not just the fact that something is going to happen to the Earth that engulfs the entire planet in fire. I guess that’s possible, but I’m thinking of something that big hit us, there wouldn’t be much to light on fire, but maybe I’m wrong. No, the real stupid part is where the 25 year old falls in love with the 45 year old and they are perfect for each other. It’s sweet, I guess, but it just seems so dumb. If you accept the fact that you make a great couple for 2 weeks, cool. But pretending like you were always meant for each other when you couldn’t be more different is just goofy. I suppose I’m taking it all too seriously, but the end really did kind of cause involuntary guffaws. But, ignoring all that, it was fun to watch.

Trek Nation – Documentary made by Gene Roddenberry’s son, I thought it was pretty good. It’s true that Eugene (the son) is very annoying. He really should have ctrl+f’d “I wanted to learn what kind of man my dad was” and deleted all but one. I think that would have cut 10 minutes from the movie. But besides his awkward, most often unnecessary narration, the movie is cool. I didn’t know much about Roddenberry, so hearing it all was really neat. Probably nothing here for a non trekkie, but for me it was cool.