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Catching Fire Review
3 min read
I just went to see (literally, I just got back about an hour ago) The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
Short version: I approve of this sequel.
This is one of those rare sequels to a good movie that not only matches the original but surpasses it. If you liked the first movie you will love the Hell out of this one. I'm even told it keeps extremely close to the source material as well, so all you book fans should be pleasantly surprised.
There are a lot of things about this movie that I really liked. One thing I thought was especially well done was how they got across how horrifying and macabre the Hunger Games would actually be for the people actually competing in it. That was one area where I felt the first movie fell a bit short. Even when the games actually start, it feels more like an action/suspense movie than the horror show it would actually be in real life. But in this movie...my God.
I think the first moment when I realized that this movie was hitting exactly the right note was when Katniss and Peeta are watching tv and President Snow announces that the next Hunger Games competitors will be chosen from the current crop of victors. The looks on both their faces said more than a thousand lines of dialogue ever could. It looked like the room was spinning for them.
From there it just builds and builds. I loved the scene with the Jabberjays. I loved the hazards in the arena. And I loved the way all the victors (seriously, all of them) try to pull every trick in the book to get the games canceled before they start. They bust out their best fake tears, their best sob stories, and Peeta (SPOILERS) even tries to claim that he and Katniss have a baby on the way. But my favorite was Johanna, who just straight-up flips her shit on national television and starts cursing out the whole audience. That was mother-fucking brilliant, to use exactly the right expression. She's had all she can standz cuz she can't standz n'more. I love her character and I hope she's still alive for the next movie.
Of course I say "loved" in the sense that they were brilliantly filmed and acted. In reality these scenes are quite difficult to watch (especially the Jabberjays; I was gripping my chair pretty hard during that scene) but that's because they all successfully instill in YOU the emotions that the characters are feeling.
In closing, I encourage everyone reading to go out and see Catching Fire in theaters. This is without a doubt one of the best movie series of this generation, and it deserves every ounce of support.
(But seriously people, don't take young kids to see this movie. I noticed a lot of parents in the theater with children younger than ten years old, WAY too young to be watching a movie as heavy as this one.)
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Diablo III: A newcomer's perspective
5 min read
Full disclosure: I have never played a Diablo game before in my life. I have always been a console gamer so I've never gotten an opportunity to play the first two games in this series. I'm reviewing this game from the perspective of someone totally unfamiliar with this series and this general style of gameplay.
Short version: So far, I'm enjoying the Hell out of it.
Don't get me wrong, Diablo III is FAR from a perfect game. Many of the things I'm accustomed to seeing in a fantasy RPG are not present, and I find their absence rather glaring.
The story for instance is borderline non-existent. By that I mean, you can literally skip every cutscene and every dialogue without affecting your playing experience at all. It's not like in Dragon Age or Skyrim where the story drives the gameplay. It's more like a fighting game where the story only seems to exist as an afterthought or to throw a bone to those players who can't get into a game unless it has some kind of story. Which seems odd to me because the more I learned about the mythology and the history of this world the more interested I became in the story and the characters. The setting seems like rich ground for building a truly epic fantasy RPG experience, but the game basically ignores its own universe. You can skip over all of it and all you'll have missed is a few moments of pretty cutscene graphics and some dialogue. (Did they just need to make extra room on the disk for lots of cool legendary items? Because I checked the Diablo wiki and there's a fucking boatload of cool legendary items, none of which ever seem to spawn for me for some reason, but whatever.)
Speaking of pretty cutscene graphics, this again seems very odd to me. The few pre-rendered cutscenes that do exist are amazingly good, with spectacular visuals and very high if not bleeding-edge quality graphics. But why put so much effort into these cutscenes, which by definition exist only to advance the plot, and then make the plot so utterly unimportant to the gameplay experience?
And yet at the same time, the in-game graphics look almost like something from a past-gen system. Why is that? I wasn't expecting exactly the same graphical quality as in the pre-rendered cutscenes. That difference in quality is pretty much a given for almost any game. But the difference here is so vast that it really stuck out to me. Admittedly this is not a huge deal since graphical quality has never been a great concern of mine. My philosophy on video game graphics has always been "As long as I can clearly tell what I'm looking at and I'm not seeing more than the occasional graphical hiccup, it's good enough." (In fact I've always felt the gaming community really shot itself in the foot back in the 90s and early-2000s by flocking to the games that boasted the best graphics. We spent all kinds of money on games with the best graphics, and then we were shocked, shocked! when gaming companies turned around started cranking out games with great graphics but mediocre-to-bad gameplay.) Anyway, like I said, not a big deal for me that the in-game graphics of Diablo III look rather primitive. I just don't understand why they put so much effort into making the cutscenes amazingly pretty while putting much less into the in-game graphics. It's odd.
Anyway, moving on to the gameplay. The gameplay is good. Not great, but pretty darn good. It's incredibly simplistic, basically amounting to mashing one of the various attack buttons (because you usually settle on one as your favorite) until enemies fall down, and then collect the loot they drop.
It reminds me a lot of the old arcade beat-em-ups like Double Dragon or Battletoads. And...I guess that's the ultimate explanation for all the problems I mentioned above. Double Dragon had no story. Or if it did I never cared enough to pay attention to it. And it never cared about graphics. All I needed to know was that my guy is a big badass and my job is to run around, find some bad guys, and wreck their shit. And that's pretty much this game in a nutshell. Right now I'm playing a female barbarian named Halgerde, and her only job is to run around until she finds some monsters and then HALGERDE SMASH! Halgerde is very good at SMASH! That was her major in barbarian college. (Shut up. I gotta role-play something.)
In the end the game doesn't exactly live up to the pre-release hype. It's not quite as exciting as the commercials made it out to be (though maybe multiplayer adds more dimension, I wouldn't know) and in terms of the story it's rather disappointing. But on the other hand, it's also good, stupid fun. I like running around and hitting monsters with an axe until they die, and then finding more monsters to hit with an axe until they die. It's totally brainless, but who cares?
HALGERDE SMASH!
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Pacific Rim review
5 min read
You know how people always say that a movie with giant robots in it is awesome by definition? This is the first movie I've ever seen where I can honestly say that's true.
Pacific Rim is...a mixed bag of a movie. To be perfectly frank, most of the non-action scenes really aren't that good. The actors do their best (most of them anyway) but the plot is razor-thin and the script is pretty mediocre. In fact in some places it's pretty damn bad.
But, BUT, the actions scenes are SO good that you'll barely notice.
Brief plot summary (spoilers):
Aliens from another dimension open a portal to our Earth (the portal comes out at the bottom of the Pacific ocean, hence the title) and start sending giant monsters through to wipe out humanity. Why giant monsters? WHY NOT?
Conventional weapons prove useless against the monsters so the nations of Earth instead decide to fight the monsters with giant robots. Why giant robots? WHY NOT?
This works out for a while, but eventually the giant robots start losing more fights than they win and the governments of the world decide to scrap the giant robot plan and instead build a giant wall to keep the giant monsters out. Why a giant wall? WHY N-...actually I have no idea why they think this will work. I guess they think the monsters will see the wall and be like "Well, shit. They built a big fuck-off wall. Might as well go home."
Of course the wall completely fails (surprise!) so they go back to the giant robot plan. They call the main character out of retirement and pair him up with a hot Japanese chick to pilot his giant robot again. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the giant robots are piloted by two people at once. The two pilots link their brains together and move as one. I don't know why they wrote the movie this way. It's a contrived and unnecessary detail that adds nothing to the movie. They should have given each pilot their own giant robot to drive around. They could have even kept the brain-linking plot point, just have them linked wirelessly and fighting in tandem. Then you have twice the giant robots. How is this a bad plan?
Anyway, they figure out that the aliens are going to keep sending more and more monsters until it overwhelms them and wipes out humanity, so they decide to send their giant robots down to the bottom of the ocean and drop a big nuclear bomb through the portal to wipe the aliens out first. Why a big nuclear bomb? WHY NOT?
So of course they head down there and fight a couple more giant monsters, a couple other giant robot pilots make a heroic sacrifice, they drop the big bomb down through the portal and the world is saved.
(end summary)
All in all, I liked this movie. Not a lot, but enough that I'm glad I saw it and I feel I got my money's worth. As others have said, it's basically a huge love letter to Japanese giant monster movies and giant robot animes. And fuck me, when it comes to the giant monsters and giant robots they actually got it right. The simple fact that they didn't fuck it up is a not-insignificant accomplishment. This could so easily have gone terribly wrong, but it didn't. And I think we have Guillermo del Toro to thank for that. Whatever else you might say about Guillermo del Toro, the man GETS giant robot and giant monster movies. He understands probably better than any other person in Hollywood what makes a good giant [thing] movie. The movie isn't perfect. Basically any scene without a giant robot or giant monster in it stinks out loud. And I don't mean bad like "why are we watching this instead of watching giant robots fighting giant monsters?" I mean they are objectively bad. Sometimes painful to watch, even. But the fight scenes are good enough to make you not care too much.
Also, there's something else that jumped right out at me. Something I haven't seen any other reviewer comment on. The romance subplot. Or the total lack thereof. There is no romance subplot in this movie. That shocked the shit out of me. There was every opportunity to have a romance subplot. Handsome male lead gets paired up with hot young Japanese chick to pilot giant robot. They've got stuff in common, they work well together, Hell they've been inside each other (that is, they've been in each other's brains). As soon as this woman showed up I thought "Well, crap. We all know where this is going. Get ready for lots of tired, unnecessary scenes rehashing every movie romance cliche imaginable."
And yet...NOT ONCE do they hook up. They don't even kiss. I waited the whole movie expecting another tedious romance subplot and it never happened. Hallelujah.
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Bioshock: Infinite
2 min read
Just started this game a few days ago. I'm not sure yet how I feel about it. A LOT about this game is different from the previous ones.
The Bad:
I'm not too happy about the remapped controls. I think Bioshock 1 & 2 had a really great control scheme and I think changing it was a bad idea. It's not a big change, but it's just different enough to be annoying. I also think the "message" of this game is a lot more ham-fisted than the first two. Bioshock was 2K's big critique of Objectivism and Bioshock 2 was 2K's big critique of Collectivism. Both were insightful and thought-provoking in their own way. Bioshock: Infinite is 2K's big critique of Evangelical Christianity, but instead of feeling intelligent and deep, this just seems like a crude caricature. I haven't gotten terribly far yet so maybe the game will surprise me, but so far it's making me grind my teeth.
The Good:
I like the fact that we've finally split away from Rapture and Andrew Ryan. I didn't think I was gonna like it, but I do. I'll miss the Big Daddies and the Splicers but I think 2K had just about plumbed the depths of what Rapture had to offer in terms of story. I'm glad they let Rapture go out on a (relatively) high note and moved on to something new. I also like the fact that we actually get to see the new city of Columbia before everything went to shit. And I especially like the mystery of who, and what, Elizabeth really is.
The Bad:
I'm not too happy about the remapped controls. I think Bioshock 1 & 2 had a really great control scheme and I think changing it was a bad idea. It's not a big change, but it's just different enough to be annoying. I also think the "message" of this game is a lot more ham-fisted than the first two. Bioshock was 2K's big critique of Objectivism and Bioshock 2 was 2K's big critique of Collectivism. Both were insightful and thought-provoking in their own way. Bioshock: Infinite is 2K's big critique of Evangelical Christianity, but instead of feeling intelligent and deep, this just seems like a crude caricature. I haven't gotten terribly far yet so maybe the game will surprise me, but so far it's making me grind my teeth.
The Good:
I like the fact that we've finally split away from Rapture and Andrew Ryan. I didn't think I was gonna like it, but I do. I'll miss the Big Daddies and the Splicers but I think 2K had just about plumbed the depths of what Rapture had to offer in terms of story. I'm glad they let Rapture go out on a (relatively) high note and moved on to something new. I also like the fact that we actually get to see the new city of Columbia before everything went to shit. And I especially like the mystery of who, and what, Elizabeth really is.
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My 5 Most Hated Internet Memes
3 min read
As a member of the internet generation, I of course have an appreciation for meme humor. I still laugh at lolcat pictures and I've always felt the Chuck Norris Facts were hilarious (though I prefer the lesser known Bruce Campbell Facts).
However, as much as I enjoy internet memes there are some that I just can't stand:
1. O RLY?
I just...don't understand this one. I mean, I get the idea. It's an owl. The owl is making a surprised face (sort of). And it's captioned with a poorly spelled surprised phrase. ...How is this funny exactly? At least with lolcat pictures there's some sort of joke being told (well, most of the time). But here it's just an owl. An owl making a weird face.
...How is this funny?
2. Gangnam Style
To those of you who like this stupid song, let me ask you this one question: How many of you actually know what the song is about? Unless they happen to be Korean, I have a feeling very few of the people who like this "song" know anything about it, other than the fact that it features a chubby Korean guy doing a silly dance in silly places while wearing silly clothes.
3. Double Rainbow
Jesus Christ, people. It's a sloppy drunk guy reacting to a perfectly natural phenomenon that you've probably all seen before. Seriously, this is not some miraculous new discovery. Double rainbows have been described as far back as Ancient Greece.
4. Keep Calm and Carry On
What bugs me about these signs is that the people who wear them or display them rarely seem to have any understanding of the history behind them. Lately I've developed a habit of stopping people who like to show off this sign on a t-shirt or a tote bag and asking them where it comes from. A disturbing number of them had no idea where it comes from and were just wearing it because it's trendy. But the most common answer I've been given is that the British put up these posters to keep people's spirits up when the Nazis were bombing Britain during WWII. This is, in fact, false. The KCaCO posters were actually made in the event the Nazis bombed Britain with poison gas or high explosives (the WMDs of their day) or in the event of a full-scale German invasion (the idea was that it would boost British morale without seeming too defiant, so the invading Germans might agree to leave them up). But because neither of those things happened the posters were never displayed during the War. It's not the sign itself that bothers me, it's the fact that it's ceased to be a cultural and historical artifact and become a piece of vapid pop art. And I hate pop art.
5. "The cake is a lie"
Yes, we get it. You played Portal. Now shut the Hell up.
However, as much as I enjoy internet memes there are some that I just can't stand:
1. O RLY?
I just...don't understand this one. I mean, I get the idea. It's an owl. The owl is making a surprised face (sort of). And it's captioned with a poorly spelled surprised phrase. ...How is this funny exactly? At least with lolcat pictures there's some sort of joke being told (well, most of the time). But here it's just an owl. An owl making a weird face.
...How is this funny?
2. Gangnam Style
To those of you who like this stupid song, let me ask you this one question: How many of you actually know what the song is about? Unless they happen to be Korean, I have a feeling very few of the people who like this "song" know anything about it, other than the fact that it features a chubby Korean guy doing a silly dance in silly places while wearing silly clothes.
3. Double Rainbow
Jesus Christ, people. It's a sloppy drunk guy reacting to a perfectly natural phenomenon that you've probably all seen before. Seriously, this is not some miraculous new discovery. Double rainbows have been described as far back as Ancient Greece.
4. Keep Calm and Carry On
What bugs me about these signs is that the people who wear them or display them rarely seem to have any understanding of the history behind them. Lately I've developed a habit of stopping people who like to show off this sign on a t-shirt or a tote bag and asking them where it comes from. A disturbing number of them had no idea where it comes from and were just wearing it because it's trendy. But the most common answer I've been given is that the British put up these posters to keep people's spirits up when the Nazis were bombing Britain during WWII. This is, in fact, false. The KCaCO posters were actually made in the event the Nazis bombed Britain with poison gas or high explosives (the WMDs of their day) or in the event of a full-scale German invasion (the idea was that it would boost British morale without seeming too defiant, so the invading Germans might agree to leave them up). But because neither of those things happened the posters were never displayed during the War. It's not the sign itself that bothers me, it's the fact that it's ceased to be a cultural and historical artifact and become a piece of vapid pop art. And I hate pop art.
5. "The cake is a lie"
Yes, we get it. You played Portal. Now shut the Hell up.
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