Movie Reviews

Hobbit 2 – This movie is much like the first one, which is to say it’s much like the first 4. It’s good, I like it a lot and have a lot of fun. It has the same flaws the Hobbit had, and the same strengths. I can imagine how people are sick of this by now, but I sure do love the fighty fighty staby staby. I know people say there’s a lot of walking, and… there’s a lot of walking. The CGI, exactly like the first one, is at times brilliant and at times shockingly bad. Like, I just learned photoshop this weekend bad. I have a theory that it’s 3D’s fault. The stupid characters just stand out too much from their environment and it looks way fake and I wonder if that’s because they are being pieced into layers so that 3D can be all 3Dey. But, I haven’t seen them in 2D, so I don’t know for sure, maybe they suck there too. Yet there’s plenty of things that look incredible, I really don’t know why some are one and some are the other. Anyway, it’s exactly what you expect, but if you can’t get enough of middle earth characters and creatures battling, then it’s great.

Pacific Rim – What can I say, it’s transformers vs. godzilla, just like everyone said it was. And that’s pretty great. I had heard that the movie was kind of bad, sans the awesome battles. It’s not particularly good or anything, but it’s not bad. I’ve certainly seen much worse acting, dialog, and plot in movies that got much less hate. It’s just good enough to serve the rest, which is pretty bad ass fights between giant things. Pretty cool.

Oblivion – I actually liked this movie quite a bit. It’s got a very pretty style that combines the white sheen of an apple store with the wasteland of a fallout game, but the parallel works. The story is cool, it tries to twist and turn, but you generally stay one step ahead of it. It kind of falls apart at the end, you really can’t think too hard about that part. But it’s still a cool movie.

Now You See Me – I’m of two minds about this movie. On the one hand, it’s a lot of fun. It’s very funny, it’s a good ride, all that good movie stuff. On the other hand, overly complex movies can never be satisfying to me. It’s just too much to believe that all these intricate things planned a lifetime in advance could possibly work out in just the right order to make just the right conclusion. You really have to turn your brain off to buy that any of this is happening. But while you are there, it’s very entertaining. Also, that main guy was an asshole. Just because you are a clever asshole doesn’t make you not an asshole. And you have to work a lot harder to make your bad guy unlikeable before you can let your star be such a flaming asshole.

Rise of the Guardians – This movie isn’t that great. The first half is kind of a bear to get through, honestly didn’t laugh very often. The second half is better, maybe pushed forward by the story I don’t know. It seemed to get funnier. But still, pretty low on the list of cartoon comedies.

Stand-up Guys – This was a surprise. I thought it was that movie where all the old gangsters get together and do stupid things and say I’m too old for this shit a lot. Turns out, not that movie. Instead it’s Al Pacino and Christopher Walken as old gangsters who do stupid things and are too old, but it’s actually good. Al Pacino is just out of prison and they have a night of frivolity. I really thought it would be corny and dumb, and there’s some dumbness sure, but I actually like the relationship between the guys. Not an amazing movie or anything, but decent.

An Adventure in Space and Time – I’m not positive this counts as a movie, but we’ve watched so much Doctor Who lately, I felt like it anyway. This is a biopic about the creation of the show and the first doctor. We’ve only watched the 2005+ version, so I didn’t know anything about the origin. The movie is very cool. In the end, it’s very touching. There’s some interesting parallels between William Hartnell and the fictional Doctor too, like everyone leaving and him just moving forward. The movie is pretty well done. With the exception of a couple bad moments, it’s written and acted well. Then again, I’m a bit biased because I like the subject matter so much.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Well, this movie isn’t really for me, to be fair. It’s a teenager movie about teenagers, for teenagers. In that context, I think it’s probably a pretty good one. I will always be annoyed with the story about the kid who doesn’t have any friends who… has friends. Or the kid who can’t get a girl who… gets a girl. Those stories are very fake to me, yes they happen, but it seems to me it doesn’t speak to the people for whom it doesn’t happen. But I guess the other version of the story is not very uplifting. So, okay, it’s a teenager movie, and one in which the kid gets things he wants. With that, it’s pretty good and I think it does everything it wants to do.

Monsters University – This movie is very fun. It, like the last couple Pixar movies, is just fun. It’s not amazing like the best of Pixar. It’s not even as good as the first Monsters. But it is funny, it is cute, it is sweet. It’s an above average animated movie. Just a below average Pixar movie (although, that average is dropping).

Europa Report – I actually liked this quite a bit. It’s basically a found footage movie, but not horrible, which is kind of amazing. The conceit is a manned mission to Europa goes awry and Earth loses contact. Then they find all the footage from the mission and we see what happened. So the whole movie is cameras in and around the spacecraft, which is just enough to tell the story, just enough to hide the unknown. The stuff that goes wrong is drawn out, they bounce around in time a little bit to help. For a presumably low budget movie, they do very well by confining their scope. Pretty good.

Moneyball – I liked this movie. Granted, it’s about math and statistics succeeding, that’s kind of appealing to me. But it’s well done as well. It’s not fancy, it’s a pretty straightforward movie. But everyone does a good job and it’s a cool story. So I liked it. Not having much to say makes it seems like I don’t care, but it’s one of the better movies on this list.

Elysium – Another dystopian/utopian future movie. Seems like there’s a lot of these lately. I liked this okay. I guess I had heard such bad things I had pretty low expectations. The first 20 minutes are pretty dumb with the over the top and ridiculously implausible political allegory. But the rest of the movie does what it’s trying to do. I liked District 9 a lot more, to be sure, even though it was also pretty on the nose with the allegory. This one turns in to a video game about halfway through, which is actually pretty badass. Some of the violence is kind of insane, but it’s cool.

She’s Crushed – Yikes. I only watched this because Keith from KATG is in it. It’s…. really bad. Not even like enjoyably bad, just bad bad. To some extent it’s just because it’s an amateur movie, which means it doesn’t look as good, isn’t filmed as well. The sound is bad, which is interesting, I don’t know that I’ve noticed that before, it kind of seemed muddled. Even if all that was kind of forgivable, the movie is just dumb otherwise.

Despicable Me 2 – I didn’t think this was very good. I seem to remember liking the first one, at least a little. This I thought was pretty bland. I laughed out loud now and again, but not that often. And since it wasn’t really a redemption story (well, kind of for the one guy), it didn’t have the sweetness of the first one. So, meh.

The Wolverine – Granted, after the shitshow that was the first one, anything is going to look good, but this was decent. I wasn’t super in to it, but I feel like it did everything it was trying to do. Some decently cool fighting. Wolverine actually uses his claws as weapons instead of glorified scissors. The claws still look pretty bad. I don’t understand how in a movie with this much special effects the claws still look like roger rabbit. But that’s mostly when he’s posing (which, to be fair, is about 20% of the movie). In action they look fine and are used healthily (well, unhealthily, but you know what I mean). Still not an amazing movie by any stretch, but kind of on par with the mid-range non-fox marvel movies. The trailer tag was pretty bad ass though.

Video Game Reviews

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons – This game is very good. It’s short, Steam tells me 3 hours, but it packs a punch. You play two brothers out on a quest to get medicine for their dad. The mechanical hook is that you control both boys at once, one with each analog stick. That’s interesting and different, and then you do a lot of running around and platforming and puzzle solving. The game is beautiful. The character models and animation are just okay, but the environments are beautiful. You are encouraged to literally sit on a bench now and again and watch the scenery, which I did every time. There’s no words, they speak kind of a simlish thing, but you are never confused about what’s going on. The game is most reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus, to me. Which is a bit unfair, because SotC is one of my top games ever, so it’s not nice to compare to that. It doesn’t have nearly the sense of awe or scale that SotC did, but it certainly has a very human, very heartbreaking element to it that most games don’t have the ability or will to pull off.

Rogue Legacy – I’m not done with this, but it’s hard to say when you are done with a rogue-like. Presumably there is an end if I can get good enough to beat all the bosses. But I’m not sure that will ever happen (I never beat FTL, after all), so I have to write something sometime. Basically you are a dude exploring a castle, killing monsters, getting gold (to upgrade your stats/abilities/equipment), etc. It’s a roguelike in that the castle resets everytime you die and go back in (although you can pay a dude a % of your money to keep it the same). It’s not as harsh as most RLs, because you don’t loose all your upgrades. Your character does die, and the cute thing is that the next one you play is a descendent of the last one. It’s very fun, very addicting. It’s not special, it isn’t anything as powerful as Brothers. But I have put a few hours into it already and I’m sure I’ll put more before I either beat it or get bored.

Fallout: New Vegas – Alright, released literally 3 years ago, right on schedule! Well, I loved Fallout 3. This is basically the exact same game, near as I can remember. But it’s been long enough that that’s fun. It’s pretty buggy, I don’t know what Bethesda’s freaking problem is. But no bug was game ending, so I guess that’s enough. The world is huge, I put in 55 hours and I didn’t even visit every location, maybe.. 2/3 of them? Certainly didn’t do all the quests. I guess I was ready to be done by the end, but I liked it. I was an NCR guy all the way through, then all of a sudden decided I didn’t trust anyone else to run the Strip. That was kind of fun. Pretty cool over all. Only downside is I’m in no mood to play Skyrim, which finally went on sale on Steam. I’ll have to wait a couple weeks I guess.

Bioshock: Infinite – So, this game is good, but I don’t quite get the game-of-the-year caliber love. It was a pretty slow start, to be honest, I had trouble getting in to the game. I like the bioshock games. I know people love the world-building in the first one. And it was extremely impressive to be sure. But Rapture never wrapped me up like it did a lot of people, it was cool, but didn’t blow my mind. This is kind of the same, except with out some of the awe and novelty of the first one. The game play is much like it ever was, which is to say much like System Shock ever was. The powers are different than before, and some are kind of interesting. I think I’m getting noticeably worse at FPSs, by the way. I’ve never been great, but I could keep up in TF2, usually near the top of a random sampling of players, but not able to compete with anyone who played regularly. But now, I feel slower, with worse aim and worse, I don’t know, situational awareness? Not surprising, I don’t play games nearly as much and they aren’t often FPSs, but still kind of sad. Anyway, the game picks up part way through, by the end I was in to the story, the ending is actually pretty good. Overall, an above average, but not truly outstanding game.

Red Faction: Armageddon – This game is pretty fun. I don’t think anyone thinks it’s amazing, red faction has always been about destroying stuff and this lets you do that. I don’t know how many times you have to tear apart a building piece by piece until it’s not fun, but I didn’t get to that number. The story is just whatever, you are kind of an anti hero who has to defend a bunch of people, many of whom are dicks, from aliens or monsters. But there’s some cool guns and a big mech and a smashy hammer. Fun stuff.

PixelJunk Shooter – I never got around to this one on PS3, wasn’t worth $15 to me I guess. I never played Racers or Monsters, I think, but I did like Eden quite a bit. This one is fun. It’s kind of a more actioney Where’s My Water, which is funny. It’s pretty easy, there’s never really anywhere that is particularly challenging, but that’s okay for a cheap fun game. Good way to spend a few hours.

Stormtrooper Twerking

1) That’s hilarious

2) Jesus, that’s actually good choreography and dancing.

The Awareness

Super good short film.

If you are in a shell

Really powerful little video.

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.