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.