Starting with Zero

Dead Space 2.

2011-02-14T12:48:00.003-06:00

Dead Space 2 is no tiptoe through the tulips. Fans of the original game will be more than ready for the experience that awaits them, but people new to the series should really prepare themselves for an intense, disturbing, protracted, but addictive, campaign through some very unpleasant environments and even more unpleasant enemies. The story tends to get muddled after a little while but the characters are sharply drawn and well acted, and the series' trademark visual and audio design really dazzles, even if some of the things you have to look at are stomach-turning.

I might as well get the bad stuff out of the way first, because there's really not much that drags this game down and the rest of it is pretty fantastic. The enemies and environments you encounter in this game are some of the most disturbing, disgusting, nightmare-inducing that you'll probably ever encounter. For new initiates, the enemies are all reanimated corpses that have been disfigured and contorted into horrendous abominations of their previous forms, and they all scream out at you with vaguely human voices that just takes the effect overboard. They are ugly, unnerving creatures that come at you incessantly, sometimes in excessive numbers, throughout the whole game. There's a certain catharsis you experience from disposing of these creatures, but the combat starts to grind on a little bit, especially towards the end game, when they start dropping out of the ceiling every other minute. I can definitely say there's a point at which they stop being horrifying they simply become aggravating and a little tedious. While I can't say it ever felt "fun" dealing with them, I was strangely addicted to the experience.

The addiction carries over from the first game, which I think is a much scarier and tense experience. The setting was much more claustrophobic and unnerving, and the desperation of having to repair the ship caught in a downward spiral while dealing with the Necromorph infestation kept you glued to the game. When you made it to the end, you breathe a sigh of relief as you’ve survived the horror and finally made it to safety. Sadly, a lot of this did not make the transition to the second game, and we’re left with a much more straightforward, action-oriented game where the levels are more start-to-finish type experiences than venturing out and returning to relative safety. The new setting is a huge space station called The Sprawl that contains all the living environments of a functioning city, but they’ve been overrun by a Necromorph infestation. Some of the levels, including an insane asylum, an old gloomy church, and a morgue, sounded pretty good on paper but they seemed to fall a little flat to me because of a lack of imagination or innovation. The game also takes a few cheap shots at the player and require you to trudge your way through a blood-splattered children’s school (complete with disembodied baby cries and creepy children’s music), but there are also a few neat surprises and twists in store that take you places where you’d least expect it. As before, abandoned text and well-acted audio logs chronicle the station’s descent into chaos and give more weight to the bloodstains and makeshift last-stand barricades you encounter on your journey.

The story conveyed in the text and audio logs, the mission objectives that unfold, as well as the handful of NPC’s you encounter, starts out strong but starts to lose its draw about halfway through the game and it devolves into a series of mundane errands like realigning a solar array, repairing an abandoned drill, etc. There is one errand that stands out which, to avoid spoilers, will please fans of the first game immensely. Then along the way you learn that a second Marker, the monolith responsible for all the unpleasantry in the first game, has been constructed on the station and through some obscure and not very scary hallucinations, you are drawn into a quest to track it down and destroy it. Unitology also makes a big appearance in the game, sparking a lot of controversy over its similarities to Scientology, but it doesn’t factor into the storyline as much as you’d think it would. For example, you never once meet a living Unitology member, and most of the subject matter is contained in museum exhibits and a few scattered audio logs of demented church members early on in the game, and then are never revisited later. There is a still-human antagonist that again tries to hault your progress, but he’s nowhere near as satisfying an enemy as Dr. Mercer was in the first game.

What took the first game to extraordinary levels for me was an abundance of well designed gameplay systems and technology that made the game a lot of fun to play, and they’re thankfully all present in the second game too. The design of the game incorporates all the HUD elements into the back of the player’s suit, so that there’s no overlaid information displays.. your life meter is a column of light along the spine of your suit, the ammo counters for weapons are all projected as holograms off to the side, inventory screens and text logs all project from your helmet and your character appears to be viewing them as you do. The game does not pause when accessing these screens, so there’s an ever-present feeling of vulnerability that’s hanging over your head. Also returning is the rather genius system for upgrading your weapons, which require the use of rare and expensive components which can also be used to unlock certain doors, so you have to ration out what weapons need to be bumped up as well as carry a spare one with you in case you find a locked door later in the level. Then there’s the awesome zero-gravity sequences that are appropriately disorienting and complex to maneuver, vacuum areas that require you to act quickly so you don’t run out of air, and a few straightforward environmental puzzles. There’s even kenesis powers which allow you to pick up and move large objects easily, and stasis which can slow down uncontrollable objects (and enemies) to solve other puzzles. There’s just a huge variety of gameplay involved in the game, making it one of the most interesting and mechanically satisfying games to play. Finally, the genius objective locator system returns, which helpfully displays the path to your next objective with a beam of light that trails along the floor.

All this technology is backed up by superb graphics and sound design, some of the best you’ll experience today. Graphically, it’s everything you’d expect from a modern AAA game, with beautiful textures, complex models, and realistic lighting effects that make the already foreboding levels even more dreadful. The visual design takes a lot of cues from the Aliens film series, giving the space station a very “blue collar,” well-worn scifi look. Characters are well designed and animated, and again takes a cue from the Aliens series where movement of an alien creature can sometimes be just as effective as their appearance in conveying danger. Sound design is also a crucial part of a horror game, and Dead Space 2’s never disappoints... there’s clanging of malfunctioning machinery, crumbling rock falling in the mines, zapping sounds of electrical short circuits, buzzing of flickering overhead lights, and of course those godawful screams of the Necromorphs as they sneak up behind you for the kill. When you enter a vacuum, there’s a really neat muffling effect that drowns out the sound and makes you feel isolated and cut off. Then there’s the shrill musical cues when a monster jumps out at you, causing you to whip the camera around to find the new threat.

Which brings me to what I think is the biggest improvement over the previous game, which is a much tighter control scheme. Most of the buttons and actions are the same, but they’ve really tightened up the camera movement so that it’s easily two to three times faster. This ironically makes the game a lot less claustrophobic and scary, because you feel more in control than before. I still think the game is better for it, because the first one tended to feel clumsy during intense fights and now it feels a lot more manageable (which could be explained by Isaac being less experienced in combat in the first game than he is in the second game),. Which is a good thing, because there’s many, many more enemies in the second game and some more difficult fights to survive. There’s still an emphasis on hoarding ammo and health packs and being judicious with shot placing, but with every enemy dropping at least some kind of loot you’ll eventually amass quite a bit of inventory (often too much to carry, so you must decide what to drop, based on how far away the nearest store is), or enough credits to buy any deficient supplies in the stores that conveniently appear typically at the beginnings and halfway points of levels.

The store placement is another improvement. Whereas before the stores and upgrade benches were placed more or less in the “lobby” of the current level (which also served as sort of a “safe zone” for each one), they’re scattered more organically throughout this game in places where you might expect them to be. The map system, which I never used in the first game due to it being to cumbersome to navigate in 3D, has been replaced with a more intuitive waypoint system that incorporates with the smartly-designed objective locator system. New weapons, like the javelin gun are a welcome addition, but I found myself using the old standbys like the pulse rifle and line gun the most often. New RIG suits are also on tap, which all add different perks and advantages, although there’s a definite progression to follow, where later suits have more inventory slots and better armor, but some give you stuff like store discounts and damage buffs on certain weapons. There are also a handful of new necromorph types that change up the action a little, and make for some interesting new fights that are well conceived.

All in all, the game is an improvement, with a new story and settings that don’t quite measure up to the first game, but the mechanics of the gameplay have been really polished up. Stuff that didn’t work before has been reworked, and the tighter controls make the game a lot more responsive and satisfying to play. It still looks great and sounds even greater, and delivers the scares despite being a more straightforward action game. New players will enjoy it, but it’s a real treat for returning fans to see how much this great series has evolved after only two games.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

2010-11-17T13:54:00.003-06:00

I've been a fan of the Castlevania series in almost every one of its incarnations. While I think the high points of the series were Super Castlevania IV and Rondo of Blood / Dracula X, I also thoroughly enjoyed the "Metroidvania" entries, especially the first one, Symphony of the Night. Just about every entry, even from the beginning with the first NES game, has been what I think a higher class of action/adventure game, with superior, moodier soundtracks, much more detailed and atmospheric graphics, uncompromising in its difficulty and challenge, and larger in its scope.

The exceptions, I always thought, were the 3D entries. They always seemed to fall short of the Castlevania standard, and seemed to slip into mediocrity as soon as it made the transition. This latest game, Lords of Shadow, I think is an exception to that rule and tries very, very hard to reach for the grand sweeping design of classic Castlevania games, and mostly achieves it, I think.

The game has been billed as a "reboot" of the Castlevania franchise and appears to take the path of an origin story, which I'm typically not a huge fan of, and I feel is often a necessary inconvenience. So as is typical of an origin story, I enjoyed the characters of this game: Gabriel Belmont (presumably the first of the clan) is a troubled hero, bent on revenging his wife's death and hopes to bring her back to life with a mystical artifact called the God Mask. This story isn't typical Castlevania lore, but you can excuse it as part of an origin story. We do deal with lots of typical Castlevania bestiary like werewolves, zombies, vampires, goblins, trolls, animated skeletons, and suits of armor, but the setting is what throws it off for me most of the time. There's a tour through a vampire castle, for example, but it is just a short stop along the path of a much longer journey that includes swamps, mountain cliffsides, enchanted forests, deep caverns, deserted wastelands, and ancient city ruins. While the Castle levels are mostly great and well realized (albeit a little non traditional, because it provides the game's obligatory ice and snow level), it's over quickly and there's easily a third more of the game left to get through.

While the gameplay mechanics of a castlevania game aren't what you would call unique or original, Lords of Shadow definitely flies in the face of any kind of originality and borrows HEAVILY from just about every popular action genre on the market. The core of the game is a combo-heavy beat-em-up with fixed camera angles, straight out of God of War/Dante's Inferno, complete with contextual quicktimer events and finishing moves. You also use experience points to purchase new combos and moves, which is typical fare for this genre. One little changeup is the magic system, which is pretty simple: activate light magic to regain health during battle, and activate dark magic to increase attack power. Both are surprisingly effective in battle, considering the ubiquitous health fountains are scattered pretty sparingly throughout the game, and some of the larger beasts require quit a bit of flailing to kill unless you turn on the dark magic to increase your hit power. Your health and magic levels are all, of course, upgradeable by collecting colored gems. Again, straight of of GoW.

Then there are puzzles, which are also very similar to God of War. It usually involves manipulating some kind of ancient mechanism to unlock a door or open a new path. Some are ingenious (including a neat little memorization puzzle that takes place in, of all things, a music box), while others are just plain tedious and based on little more than trial and error. There's even a minigame that's like a scaled-down version of chess but more frustrating to play due to some confusing magic rules. The worst is the second to last level, which contains two of the more tedious mechanism puzzles, followed by an entire level full of Lost Woods - style portals and enemies that can kill you in two hits. If you die, you have to start over from the beginning. It's a cheap, tiresome note on which to end the game.

If that's not enough variety for you, there are also three titan battles that are straight out of Shadow of the Colossus. These fight scenes come out of nowhere and seem to have little bearing on the story other than being yet another obstacle to overcome. While they're mostly enjoyable to play, they feel nothing like a Castlevania game and feel very tacked-on, like the developers thought they needed one more feature in this game.

Finally there's the ever-present platforming puzzles, which are a lift right out of the Uncharted games. While the mechanic feels mostly good and predictable, they're much less inventive than Uncharted ever was, and end up mostly being tedious. One highlight, though, is the inclusing of rapelling and swinging with your primary whip/chain weapon, which is a nice nod to Castlevania IV. Then there's the obligatory Clocktower level in the vampire castle, which ends up being a rather genious level-long platforming puzzle consisting of turning gears and levers that feels right at home in the Castlevania universe.

The game's saving grace, and the one that pushes it from being just a middling, derivative action game, is the graphics and sound design. This is easily one of the best looking games of the current generation, with incredibly detailed graphics, beautiful lighting effects, rich textures, fluid motion-captured animation, and intricate character designs. The soundtrack, which has little touches of the Castlevania IV themes here and there, is beautiful and dramatic, and at times addicting. They're nowhere near as infectious as the original Castlevania themes like Vampire Killer, Bloody Tears, or Wicked Child, but they're remarkable in their own way.

In the end, Lords of Shadow is the definitive mixed bag. Audiovisually it's a great game, with amazing graphics and sound. The origin story isn't much like a typical Castlevania story, but it is enjoyable on its own merits and, to avoid spoilers, we get back on track with Vampire hunting when the end game epilogue rolls around. The level designs are impressive and nuanced, but again they don't mesh with the Castlevania universe very much. The gameplay mechanics are derivative at best, but they're still mostly fun, aside from a few tedious mechanism and platforming puzzles. I had fun with this game, and I'm excited about more Castlevania games in this format. The developers are obviously very talented, and with perhaps a little more focus, they can bring the true Castlevania "feel" back home in this latest incarnation. For now though, this game may not feel a lot like Castlevania but it's still a fun playthrough with enough unlockables and replay value to warrant a buy.

Metroid: Other M.

2010-10-08T16:58:00.001-05:00

Because there's so much that Metroid: Other M gets right, it disappoints more than it should in the areas that it fumbles.

Let's start with what it gets right. You get a strong sense that this game was made by big fans of the Metroid series, especially Super Metroid: the green text recaps of your progress when you load a saved game; the return of several creatures from the classic Metroid bestiary like geemers, skrees, and wavers; the revisit of numerous musical cues, sound effects, and generally nostalgic audio texture; the reuse of familiar level designs (Sector 1 is the spitting image of Brinstar from Super Metroid, and Sector 3 is a more industrial take on Norfair, with its more mechanical sections reminding me of the Phazon Mines of Metroid Prime); and the return to a more "linear" level design that (usually) makes backtracking a little less confusing.

Obviously, the third person perspective gameplay is a return to the series' roots and away from the first-person reimaging of Metroid exploration that we saw in the Prime trilogy. The nostalgic change is further emphasized by the way you control Samus... you hold the Wiimote sideways like an old NES controller and use the plus button to move her around, button 1 for firing, button 2 for jumping, etc. It doesn't completely shrug off the 1st person innovations though, because the game rather sublimely blends the best parts of the first person gameplay from Prime into this game, and allows you to shift to first person perspective on demand for more precise targeting. The method of switching to first person mode, accomplished by shifting the remote in your hands to point at the screen like a traditional Wii game, is intuitive and genius in its simplicity. Also, the morph ball sequences and puzzles, while nowhere near on par with the virtuoso morph ball puzzles from Prime, definitely pay homage to them and make for some satisfyingly quirky gameplay that never ceases to amuse. By doing this, the game creators simultaneously acknowledge the greatness of the Metroid Prime contributions, and give chance for us to see Samus herself in action while you play (probably the part I missed the most when I was playing the Prime games).

While the levels definitely look and sound the part of a Metroid map, they're all a bit on the short side and a little disappointing in scope and creativity. It's hard to top Retro Studios's work in designing the levels in Prime, but even in comparison to the levels in Super Metroid these seem to fizzle. It seems like each level has maybe one or two interesting sequences and gameplay mechanics but the rest is a samey corridor crawl that doesn't quite cut it by today's standards. In context with the story I guess it makes sense... the premise is the whole game takes place on a giant spaceship with three artificial habitats created, a la Metroid Fusion, so each one isn't vast and sprawling like the Prime levels, or even the levels in Super Metroid. But nonetheless it still gives you more of a sense of playing a GameBoy or DS game instead of a full-sized Wii game. The labyrinthian levels of the previous metroid games were a halmark of the series, but in this game they feel pint-sized, like you're playing "Metroid Lite". The boss battles are also a little disappointing.. they used to be huge, set-piece type events in previous games that required skill, precision, imagination, and preseverence to finish. Here they're simplistic and very few and far between. The Ridley fight, especially, is disappointing in both difficulty and design, which is unfortunate because it was one of the many highlights of Metroid Prime.

So if it looks like Metroid and sounds like Metroid, and even plays like Metroid, what's not to like? Basically, everything that Team Ninja took liberties with. Front and center is the story, which is woefully bad and poorly written. It's chock full of schmaltzy flashbacks to Samus's early days and tiresome soliloquies about Samus's relationship to Adam Malkovich, her former superior officer, with whom she has a curious and disturbing father-daughter type relationship. There's also a lot of business with the Galactic Federation developing bio-weapons, creating artificial intelligence to control them, and a massive coverup when things go haywire.. it's stuff that would have made more sense in a Metal Gear Solid game but is just perplexing and needlessly complex here.

The disappointing story and plot filler gets presented in a series of protracted cutscenes, which are very nicely animated and tastefully directed, but the voice acting is so poor that it ruins them. Samus's voice acting is especially stilted and awkward; the first time we get to hear Samus speak is a huge disappointment. Adam's voice acting isn't much better, and is mostly void of any emotion or emphasis. It's the same problem that the Star Wars prequels had, in which the story is taken too reverentially and seriously, and it's hard for the player to empathize with any character in the game.

Samus's strange subservient relationship to Adam leads into probably the dumbest mechanic in the game, that of "approving" Samus's various weapons and abilities. The story goes that Samus is following Adam's orders and he has to authorize the use of various weapons in interest of preserving the ship's systems. But it stops making any sort of sense very quickly, when Samus has to quickly run through a lava-filled cavern without the Varia suit enabled (a sequence that resulted in several of deaths as I played through), only to have Adam tell me I could have my Varia suit back while I was fighting a couple firebats. To think that he would have allowed Samus to die in the lava cavern simply because he didn't approve of her using any kind of heat protection is preposterous. There are numerous other examples of this throughout the game, where having a particular upgrade would have had little or no impact on the environment, but it serves as an artificial barrier that requires you to backtrack later in the game to advance the story or pick up items. The game takes one of the great touchstones of the series, searching for items and using them to explore deeper areas of the game, and turns it into a demeaning obstacle course while your superior sits and watches, approving bite-sized upgrades if you do well.

It all leads up to a confusing and lackluster finale (including a frustrating final boss fight that doesn't tell you when you are allowed to use a power bomb to finish the enemy off) that leaves you a little empty-feeling by the time the credits start rolling. Thankfully, once the game is finished, you are allowed to return to the ship to retrieve "one last thing that was left behind", and this is where the game slips back into very familiar territory, and feels like a sweet little bit of fanservice. You are allowed to go back into every part of the ship and retrieve any missile and energy tank upgrades that you might have missed before (indeed, even some of the upgrades were not even reachable without power bombs, which you don't receive till the last boss fight). One particular upgrade is an eye-wink to diehard fans... the last possible pickup you can get before you leave is a missle tank, which takes you up to a full count of 80, but you receive it after you fight the last enemy of the game. Plus, the last sequence in the game even gives you a percentage count per area on your item collection rate, so purists can keep track of how much left there is to go before you get the full 100%. This, combined with one last, terrific boss fight from a surprise returning enemy in a previous game, gives Metroid fans a nice warm fuzzy feeling before you set the game down.

That last post-game wrapup section is a relief, because a lot of what comes before it is jarring, disappointing, and just lame in general. Great game mechanics, beautiful art direction and sound design, and solid but stunted level design round out the good parts of Metroid: Other M. Campy and groan-inducing dialog, silly plot developments, and that darned weapon approval system unfortunately drags the whole lot down a few notches. Then, the game rebounds with a brilliant post-credit curtain call that left me mostly satisfied with this latest Metroid outing, but more than anything I want to go back and replay the universally superior Metroid Prime games. And wait to see what, if anything, Team Ninja might do in the next game to make up for all their mistakes here. In the end, you really need to play this game if you're a Metroid die-hard, but just about everyone else can probably give it a pass.

Avatar.

2009-12-19T00:10:00.015-06:00

Let me start by saying that if you enjoy movies on any level at all, you should probably go see "Avatar" because on a technical level it an astounding achievement that raises the bar for cinematic craft and provides an experience that is unique entertainment; it is most likely nothing like you have ever seen on the big screen. The story is equally strong and captivating, and together they fashion an experience that will stick with you for a long time after it's over, and it will reward repeated viewings with its meticulous design and abundance of detail.

The good majority of this film is digitally created, but the state-of-the-art technology and methods used to create it that are so much more advanced than anything that has come before propels it far above the achieved realism of any other movie I've seen. It obsoletes previous movies and sets a new standard. The digitally created characters inexplicably sidestep the Uncanny Valley and behave just like real actors, and in the case of Sam Worthington's and Sigourney Weaver's digital counterparts, even resemble and mimic their real life mannerisms. It's a remarkable effect, and one that quickly suspends disbelief even within the first few scenes. Later scenes simply serve to solidify the belief that these are real creatures and not just digital constructs. The same goes for all the environments, from a vertigo-inducing shot of a massive spaceship's cavernous interior to the multiple, multiple sequences on the planet involving lush jungles, steep cliffsides, and precarious treetops. Everything just looks so real and naturally occuring, with an abundance of minute details like wondrously imaginative alien wildlife and incredibly diverse plantlife that really draw you into the scenery. Then, effective use of 3D draws you in even further and gives the visuals amazing depth and proportion... foreground materials seem to jump out from the screen so that you could reach out and touch them, and background scenery seems to disappear far into the distance beyond the screen. The vibrance, realism, nuances, and spectacles simply defy adequate description; it has to be seen to be believed.

Lots of attention to detail and effort have been put into the story and characters as well, so this isn't just an all style, no substance affair. The plot tells the story of a peaceful, forest-dwelling race on an alien planet that lives in harmony with the plants and animals. Lots of effort is spent showing the relationship between the hunter-gatherers, their prey, and their homeworld in a "circle of life" type concept in which all living things share a life force and energy that is constantly reused and held in balance by a "mother nature" entity that seems to be alive at a biological level. Sigourney Weaver's character, Grace Augustine, supervises a scientific team that studies the indigenous N'avi people and their remarkable connection to their world, and interacts with them through the use of "Avatars", biologically-engineered genetic replicas of the N'avi that the human researchers can control through a telepathic link. It's broad, sweeping science fiction that reaches so far, strives for so much grand scope and achieves it; this is a story that sparks your own imagination and simultaneously draws parallels to your own experience; it makes you look first outward at what might be possible, and then inward at what already is.

The story is further given a green slant by the arrival of heavily armed soldiers from Earth, which we learn is has been presumably run dry of all natural resources. The soldiers, along with massive war machines and excavation equipment, lay waste to entire regions of the planet in search of a precious ore, sloppily called "Unobtainium" (one of the film's few weak decisions). The obvious implication is drawing a parallel with the environmental and anti-war movements, but at times feels a little ham-fisted and preachy. A massive company, in a very Cameron-esque plot element straight out of "Aliens", contracts with the military to clear out the locals and their land to reach the precious ore, and in an interesting twist, we find ourselves siding with the aliens this time around and against the human invaders. Cameron's decision to look at the classic conflict of human imperialists versus hostile natives through the other perspective is fascinating and refreshing. In many ways, this is "Aliens" told from the other side.

Amusingly, the film contains a lot of Cameron trademarks and allusions to his previous work. To the Cameron initiate this is inconsequential, but for Cameron fans like myself that enjoyed "Aliens", "Abyss", and "Titanic," it's great fun to see Cameron leave his fingerprints all over the little details and quirks in this movie. For one, Cameron really enjoys futuristic military hardware that's got a layer of grease and some dents on it. The hoverships are the spiritual successor to the Dropships in Aliens, as are the bipedal tanks the spiritual successor to the PowerLoaders. The mothership they arrive on, complete with cryotube sleep chambers necessary for sublight space travel, resembles the sprawling design of the Nostromo and Sulaco in its function-over-form design. The mining and excavating equipment also hearkens to the space-age blue collar equipment seen in the original "Alien" film and "The Abyss". Then we have the revisited theme of a megalomaniacal company asserting their power over an alien species and exploiting them for their own profit. Even the project foreman, Parker Selfridge, is a direct lift from the Carter Burke character from Aliens. Michelle Rodriguez plays Aliens' Vasquez role, here she's named Trudy Chacon but she's the same tough female marine, albeit a little more one-dimensional this time around. Sigourney Weaver is right at home in Cameron's world as well, and fans will be amused to learn that Michael Biehn was originally signed on to play Colonel Quaritch, the military commander assigned to the project, before Stephen Lang stepped in (interestingly enough, Lang turns in a very entertaining performance and gives you a hint of what a real-life Sarge character might be like in a more faithful "Doom" movie adaptation). Cameron's touch can even be found in the imaginative character name choices, like Jake Sully, Grace Augustine, Trudy Chacon, Parker Selfridge, and Miles Quaritch.

In the end, though, the human story in "Avatar" is what draws the audience in after they've been dazzled by the special effects and technical achievements. Sam Worthington turns in a powerful performance as Jake Sully, a parapalegic marine who is given the chance to walk again by enrolling in the Avatar program, wherein he controls one of the towering, graceful N'avi replicas. His assignment is first to act as security to Augustine's research team, but secretly to spy on the N'avi and report weaknesses to Quaritch in hopes that they can more easily persuade them to leave, or if necessary, exploit weaknesses during their forced relocation. He successfully penetrates the N'avi society and gradually becomes one of their own, learning new values of honoring the wildlife as a whole and the customs of the society, and eventually falling in love with his guide to this new life, the surprisingly captivating Neytiri, the daughter of the tribe's patriarch. As Jake slowly becomes accepted in this new life, and learns the awesome power of the bond between the N'avi and their homeworld, he effectively drops his human militaristic side and stages a rebellion, leading the N'avi against the marines in a spectacular battle sequence that carries more weight than most third-act shootouts because of everything that has come before. The awesome scope of the story and characters makes this battle immediately important to the audience, and we have so much invested in the characters that every seesaw in the fight is exhilarating.

And exhilarating is a good description for the movie as a whole. There's just so much movie here: the far-flung science fiction imagination; the incredible realism of the digital characters and the sensory feast of visuals from an alien planet that has been meticulously realized and executed; characters that are simultaneously archetypes and fully-fleshed out characters that engage the audience; a story that encompasses environmentalism and pacifism, imperialism and industrialism, and draws a human thread through the whole that teaches human strength, achievement, and redemption of trust; and technical and storytelling greatness that draws it all together in just the right proportions to make the movie more than the sum of its parts. "Avatar" is a sublime narrative, and an awesome achivement in filmmaking craft.

Left 4 Dead 2.

2009-11-19T11:41:00.001-06:00

Valve continues their unorthodox naming convention first explored with Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Episode 2, and published a followup to the original Left 4 Dead, almost one year to the day later and called it Left 4 Dead 2. This is a full-priced game, and the screenshots led me to believe that this was basically the same game but with more content, a la the Madden and Tiger Woods games with their annual full-priced updates, however there's enough new twists and reworkings of the original formula to actually make this a worthwhile game, especially if you get in on a four-pack with three other people, which brings the price down to a much more enticing $35.

I was a big fan of the original Left 4 Dead, mainly by association with a strong circle of gaming friends who really dived into it and played it heavily. We had regular weekly matches online set up that started out as co-op campaigns that quickly ran out of free slots, so we graduated to versus play for a several months, occasionally mixing it up with an ad-hoc survival or co-op map during the rest of the week if enough people were online at the time. The game provided I would estimate about 8-9 months of solid entertainment, which is pretty remarkable, considering the relatively small amount of content (4 original campaigns, 2 of which had versus capability for half of that time). The gameplay was compelling, the teamwork was tense and vital to your success, the weapons were sublimely balanced, the levels were cleverly designed with lots of choke points and tricky places to hold during a horde rush, and the enemies were lethal in the right combination. The versus play emphasized all of this even more, with some truly diabolical combination ambushes being possible with just two hunters, a smoker and a boomer.

Needless to say, it was hugely popular online, and because of this I thought that Valve was trying to pull a cash grab by releasing a full-priced sequel instead of incremental DLC packages, as they promised. When the demo, consisting of one half of a campaign, was released, my fears were solidified as we played through two levels of essentially new maps, new weapons, and new bad guys. There was no innovation in the gameplay aside from a couple new powerups, just more of the same.

Thankfully, the demo did not do the game justice. The final version is an evolutionary step, not quite revolutionary, with some very exciting new features and remixes of the old formula. It all begins with the co-op campaigns, which have been heavily rethought and restructured to provide some new compelling gameplay and strategy. The levels are still basically a run-and-gun from the starting point to the safe room, but along the way the developers have added some new twists, such as incorporating some basic scavenging missions like running to get a rooftop sniper some much-needed Coke so he can clear a path for your exit, and a particularly compelling sequence at the end of one campaign that requires you to gather gas cans to fill up your getaway car all while fighting off the last-stand hordes and tanks. Then another campaign requires you to clear and then backtrack through three relatively short levels and ration out your health packs because they don't replenish on your return trip. To add difficulty, the second time through many areas of the levels have been flooded out by heavy rain and are treacherous to pass so you are forced to find alternate routes.

Formula remixes like this are a welcome change, as are some fun new weapons and powerups that add a lot of diversity to the strategic element. In addition to the old tier 1 and 2 weapons, there are now a variety of assault rifles and shotguns with different statistics, such as rate of fire, stopping power, buckshot spread, as well as a grenade launcher. A magnum pistol (my personal favorite) is also available that replaces your standard dual-wielded sidearms with incredible stopping power and accuracy for a pistol. I also enjoy the AK-47, with a slower rate of fire than the M-16 but much more stopping power so conserving ammo with single taps is much easier and you waste far less ammo taking out a throng of zombies. You also have a variety of melee weapons like fireaxes and samurai swords that replace your secondary weapon, and deliver surprisingly damaging blows to the zombies. Then there are defib paddles that can revive fallen teammates, adrenaline shots that increase the speed of everything you do (including healing), incendiary and explosive ammo to ratchet up your weapon effectiveness, and canisters of boomer bile that you can use to lure the horde away or attack a tank. The additional weapons and powerups are lots of fun and add lots of depth to the gameplay, but the sheer number of them can be bewildering at times, and you can only carry one item of a class a time, i.e. ammo powerups and defib paddles take the place of your health kit, adrenaline shots take the place of pills, and boomer bile is another grenade type.

The new infected types are another welcome addition that really mix up the enemy bestiary, ensuring that you won't easily tire of the same old attack patterns from the boomers, smokers, and hunters. We now have chargers, which will run at you and pin you to a wall, jockeys that will grab a hold of you and steer you away from the team, and spitters that deploy a lethal pool of acid on the ground that quickly eats away your health. The new attack types are interesting and keep the encounters more spontaneous-feeling simply because there's more variety. These transfer well to the versus mode too, and provide even more deadly combinations to ambush the survivors with.. i.e., using a jockey to guide a survivor into a pool of spitter acid while you wait for a charger to build up speed and pummel them.

The alternate play modes versus and survival return, along with two new types, Scavenge and Realism. Scavenge mimicks the gas tank collection scene mentioned earlier and requires the survivors to retrieve a set number of gas tanks and pour them into a generator while fending off waves of zombies. Realism ratchets up the difficult of a standard campaign by removing the glowing outlines of teammates and pickups, while disabling the respawn closets and increasing the zombie resiliency to your weapons. With five campaigns and five different play modes, the sheer amount of gameplay has been drastically increased since the last game.

All of this added up accounts for a significant improvement, in my opinion, and I think justifies the "sequel" worthiness of the title, even though the game mechanics and graphics engine are largely the same. This is definitely not a cash grab, but it's unfortunate that Valve has waited this long to release the first major update to the game, especially since they were promising from day one that there would be regular updates to the original game. I would have much rather had regular monthly or bi-monthly updates to the old game to keep it fresh and interesting throughout its life than one major annual update. Also, considering the amount of content and depth in a game like Fallout 3 or Borderlands, I have a hard time justifying the full $50 for a game like this. If they would have included the original plus L4D2 in a bundle for $50, I think that would more readily justify the cost. Alternatively, if they were to add the five original campaigns from L4D1 to this game as downloadable content, that would instantly add tremendous value.

All in all, I think the game is a must-play for diehard and casual fans alike, because it basically offers more of the same plus a lot of new twists to keep things interesting. The price is a little steep, considering the first game also cost $50, so you could potentially be paying up to $100 for the complete Left 4 Dead experience. But if you get the 1+2 bundle for $70 or a 4 pack for $35 each ($23 each for L4D1), it's a much better deal.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game(s).

2009-11-12T12:38:00.000-06:00

The next game on my list to complete is ostensibly "Ghostbusters: The Video Game" (you can probably guess at the length of my gaming backlog, considering this game came out almost six months ago). I say "ostensibly" because the game exists on multiple platforms and is, in fact, two completely different games, depending on what platforms you play them on. At first glance, the two versions appear to be purely cosmetic.. we have a cartoony, brightly-colored version on the Wii and the PS2 and PSP, and a darker, more film-realistic version on the PS3, X360, and the PC. They are, in fact, two completely different games with different play mechanics and even storylines that make both worthy playing separately, especially if you're a big Ghostbusters fan like me.

The two version do share a lot in common, though.. each feature fantastic writing and dialogue written by the original writers themselves, Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, who also reprise their roles along with Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson in providing the voicework for the game. The performances are mostly great, and hit all the right vibes that they had in the movies. It's great fun to hear them banter on during the gameplay, and it lightens the experience enough to push this from a semi-serious encounter into a more comedic romp, just like the movies. Both also reuse incidental music and cues lifted right from the first movie, and use them to such perfect effect that you swear the music was written for the game specifically. It's details like this, along with the exquisite modeling of the characters and proton packs and Ecto-1 (at least in the PC/X360/PS3 version) that makes the game feel like the real thing, and not a cheap knock-off game like has been done so often in the past.

In both versions you play a new recruit to the team, and you get to live one of my favorite childhood fantasies (and probably one shared by many a Ghostbusters fan), being able to run along with the four Ghostbusters on ghostbusting missions, laying waste to everything in your path with the ridiculously overpowered and unpredictable Ghostbusting equipment like the Proton Pack, boson darts, slime thrower, etc. The feeling of comeraderie between you and your four employers and the hilarious unpredictability and chaotically dangerous nature of your equipment makes this a real "blast" to experience, as you destroy whole rooms in an effort to catch one ghost. As you grab one in your capture stream and slam it all around the room to weaken them down so they can be trapped, the lightshow that entails is over the top, at times incoherent, and violent. You definitely get the "mad scientist" vibe from this experience, that doesn't quite feel like science but more like art. Of course, you get Egon and Stantz constantly spouting off technical jargon and explanations for what's happening and it all sounds very impressive but sufficiently bewildering too. So you and your in-game protagonist are simultaneously mesmerized simply by working with this crew and this equipment.

Whereas both versions hit all the right notes with the texture/characters/props/music/setting/writing, both have wildly different gameplay mechanics and even story differences that accentuate the two different platforms. The Wii version's controls are vastly simplified, and consist mostly of you waving the wiimote at the screen in various motions to mime the motions of blasting and wrangling the ghosts. There are also times where you'll need to use the capture stream on the proton pack to pick up objects and move them around to solve some simple puzzles and item fetching sequences. The story also takes you down a path that involves more lightweight action like this, less intense ghost encounters, and more enclosed interior environments that take better advantage of the Wii's lesser graphics capability.

The PC version, on the other hand, has much more technical controls, including a feature to manually vent the heat from your proton pack, switching between different beam modes, alternating between a blast stream and capture stream, using the infrared goggles in conjunction with the PKE meter to scan ghosts and artifacts, and a more abstract "slamming" command than actually waving the controller in the right directions. The ghost also come more rapidly and in greater numbers, pushing this version into more of a shooter than a puzzle solver. You also have to keep track of your teammates and revive them if they get knocked down and incapacitated by the ghosts too many times, otherwise the game ends and you have to restart from the last checkpoint. So on the PC version there's more emphasis on reflexes and skill and managing your team than the Wii version, which is definitely a lighter weight, less technical, more accessible gameplay, which I think goes nicely hand-in-hand with the more cartooney graphical style.

These are my impressions at maybe a quarter to a third of the way through the game. I'm sure there's more in store before I reach the end, but so far I'm very satisfied and sucked into this game, because it just feels so right, and it's everything that I thought a Ghostbusters game should be, from the writing to the musical cues to the visuals to the chaotic fun of trapping a ghost and holding it indefinitely. It really feels like you're busting some heads, in a spiritual sense of course.

MW2 on the PC doesn't bode well.

2009-11-05T17:43:00.001-06:00

There's lots of buzz lately about the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, and how the developer has hamstrung a lot of the features that make PC games superior to console games. A lot of this came out of a Q&A session with the developers hosted by Best Buy earlier this week.

Essentially it sounds like they're dumbing down the PC version to the point where it's essentially a port from the consoles. The big one that jumps out at me is the lack of developer console, which prevents you from tweaking stuff like field of view (FOV), something that I've done with most games ever since the Quake 3 days. I like to have more peripheral vision, but it looks like MW2 is going to lock you in at 65 degrees, which makes games feel molasses-slow. Sure this may have an effect of unbalancing the game in favor of enthusiasts as they tweak the game to their preferences, but knowledge is power... and it teaches people to be resourceful. This stuff is not difficult to figure out and accomplish. And the timid can always just stick to the single player campaign.

The other point of contention is the lack of dedicated servers, and in its place they've implemented a dubious peer-to-peer hosting system where PC's are chosen to host the game in progress. Coming from a background of administering my share of private game servers, this sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen, as systems with poor asymmetric internet connections and misconfigured firewalls try to host a multiplayer game. I guess that's why they're limiting game sizes to 9v9 only. My question is, is the typical client-server model that every other game uses so unusably broken that they have to reinvent it? Or is this another way for them to control the experience end to end, by quashing the ability to run your own server?

The rest of the features present in COD4 that were seemingly axed from the PC version of MW2 are listed in a pretty concise spreadsheet... and they include such surprises as not being able to kick misbehaving players, no mods, no custom maps, no recording, etc... basically all the reasons why PC games are usually more feature-rich than their console counterparts. In most cases extra maps and similar add-ons are considered DLC on console games and Microsoft/Sony see fit to charge you for such niceties, whereas they're usually free on the PC version. Not any more, they're simply not present in MW2. And other stuff like recording and kicking players have always been boons for more enthusiastic gamers that want to push the gaming experience above and beyond.

This is all being done in the name of "balancing the game" as the developers see fit. I guess we'll just need to wait for the hacking community to step in and restore the proper balance. And as typically happens, the hacked version will be superior to the official version, and not just because of lack of DRM this time... it will most likely have the features that PC gamers actually want.

Resident Evil 5.

2009-11-04T17:12:00.000-06:00

I'm just pouring through the games lately. Seriously, I have a to-do list of games to finish sitting on my desktop. And just in time for the November glut of new games to descend on us (although honestly, besides Modern Warfare 2 and Super Mario Bros. Wii, there's not much that's appealing to me right now. BioShock 2 is due out after the first of the year, I think that's the next big one for me)... I just can't seem to get ahead.

But Resident Evil 5 is easily worth spending some time on, and thankfully it's a pretty short game with lots of replay value and unlockables to chip away at. Which means I can run through it fast and get it off my list and still enjoy probably 75% of what the game has to offer, and then come back to it as the mood strikes.

And that's where pretty much all the Resident Evil games shine, is the replay value and the unlockables. Starting even with RE1 and expanded greatly upon with RE2 (oh, the amount of time spent with the dreaded Third Survivor minigame, playing as Tofu, unlocking all the weapons, etc... such a great game. Such great memories), there has always been a plethora of weapons, characters, special play modes, outfits, difficulty levels, etc to open up. RE5 is no different, but this time with a huge array of weapons with different attributes each, different costumes, backstories, even alternate animation filters to uncover, all unlockable based on the number of medallions you find in the various levels, the ratings you achieve, etc etc etc. It's a great game purely on storyline and production quality and overall fun, but to have these little extras that motivate you to play through the game again while retaining all your weapons you've amassed and upgraded, is a real treat.

The weapon upgrades are another boon for inventory hoarding junkies like myself, and allows you to buy a huge array of pistols, shotguns, magnums, SMG's, rifles, and other implements of zombie destruction. The upgrade system on each, which lets you boost firepower, magazine size, reload speed, and other special attributes, is tantalyzing and sufficiently expensive that it makes choosing what weapon to upgrade agonizing at times, yet so satisfying when you get to try out your purchases on a hoard of zombies in the next level.

But all of this is just an end to itself, an indulgence for RE junkies.. it starts with a great looking game with a very decent story and voice acting that is sufficiently over the top at times that it breaks that suspension of disbelief just enough to be fun. The storyline is typical RE fare, with lots of callbacks to characters and events in the lore, a really great supervillain in a returning Albert Wesker, the typical doublecrosses and surprise reveals, and a fantastic partnership between the two protagonists, Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar. Sheva is a newcomer to the Resident Evil story, and she holds her own as a strong character and an ally that you begin to rely on. The story sufficiently builds tension throughout with lots of good set pieces and tense showdowns, nice backstory elements that tie the plot to previous events in RE lore and ends with a final sequence that is one of the more preposterous settings I've seen in a video game for a while, but it sort of hearkens back to simpler games that frequently hyperbolized the endgame and pays service to the genre as a whole.

The setting is a little controversial, and takes a cue from movies like Blood Diamond and takes you on a tour of Africa to various villages, towns, quasi-industrial areas, and finally to the standard end-game biology lab/fortress conglomeration that every RE game has had. The enemies are mostly carryovers from RE4, namely not-exactly-zombies that tend to morph into grotesque creatures after taking damage, some heavy weapons characters that require more lead to take down, and a couple biohazard monsters. The controversial bit involves a trek through a native village, complete with villagers wearing loincloths and tribal masks that harkens a bit too much to Dark Africa movies from the 50's, but thankfully it doesn't last long.

Along the way we have a few nostalgic puzzles that involve hitting the right switches or pulling levers or evading traps in a very nicely done Ruins level, some sharply drawn gunplay sequences using a servicable cover-and-fire system, more than a fair share of team-based puzzles requiring your partner to perform one action while you do another, a couple fantastic on-rails shooting sections, and some great boss battles.

The graphics themselves are beautiful and the character models are wonderfully detailed and animated, especially facial expressions. Lip sync is perfect, expressions are believable, and movement is mostly natural and realistic (except for Wesker, who seems to be a bit too stiff and mechanical at times). If you run it on a PC at 1080p or higher, it's truly a beautiful looking game.

And the PC is definitely the platform to play this game on. I'm sure it handles perfectly well on the 360 and the PS3, but I've never been a fan of playing a shooter with thumbsticks because it feels like I'm controlling a tank instead of a person, but on the PC it's a beautiful playing experience. Mouse and Keyboard work great for aiming, and the frequent quicktime events make good use of awkward and alternating keyboard combinations to keep you guessing and more involved in the cutscenes. I just can't get enough of the aiming though.. using the mouse to aim the gun feels so fast and so accurate, I'm sure it takes a lot of the burden out of playing the game on a console.

So overall, great graphics and sound coupled with a good story that keeps you intrigued throughout, fun characters to play and satisfying enemies to conquer, unlocks galore and addicting weapons to purchase and upgrade, and typical Resident Evil bombast, this is a great game that's lots of fun to play. I highly recommend it.

Cold/flu/infection/misc illness sucks.

2009-10-29T22:19:00.000-05:00

I've been out of the office for the past two days with miserable flu-like symptoms. Aches, pains, fatigue that keeps me bedridden. A cough that makes me feel like someone's pounding into my chest with a meat mallet. 800mg of Ibuprofen staggers the pain for a few hours but then it comes back.

I usually let these things ride themselves out, but my girlfriend finally convinced me to go to the express care clinic today or otherwise she wouldn't come visit this weekend. I go in, and they make me wash my hands with the antibacterial hand sanitizer (which does nothing for viral diseases, but whatever), and wear one of those surgical masks. So I tie the mask on, recalling an episode or two of House when the team has to go see a patient that is so bad off that they have to sit in a clean room with no contact to any kind of foreign particles. I sit in the corner of the waiting room feeling like a leper or some kind of undesirable while kids and elderly people come in for flu shots, perfectly healthy. Everyone stares. Little kids laugh in my direction.. but that might be because I'm sitting under the TV and there's a Clifford the Big Red Dog program playing.

I'm there for an hour waiting while people file in and out. Finally I get called in, then more waiting while the PA comes in. He's a nice looking little Jewish guy with the respectable name Joel ***man. He seems nervous somehow, like he's not exactly sure what to say. As a result I feel this weird dynamic shift in our conversation, where he's trying to be the authority but he's not sure how exactly to do it... and it takes me back to when I first started working on people's computers at the repair shop in Taylorville. I've never been the best speaker and I find myself stumbing over words more often than not... and I was still in college and I was dealing with customers that were a lot older than me. Not necessarily better spoken (this was Taylorville after all). But it took me back I kinda sympathized with the guy. He seemed nice enough.

He gives me all the standard checkup stuff.. listen to the breathing, check the nodes, look down the throat and up the nose. I get the sense that this isn't all that difficult to do, giving people a standard checkup. You just need to know what to look for and what to listen for. But I'm sure this guy makes more bank than I probably ever will, and he's just starting out. He leaves, tells me a nurse will be in to do a nasal swab. The nurse comes in, a tall blonde dude in a surgical mask, a foot long cotton swab, and a terrible sense of humor. "I'm gonna stick this up your nose! Har har har!" A rather invasive few seconds later, and the test is done, and he leaves. Another hour passes. Joel comes back and tells me the flu test is negative, and all I've got is some upper respiratory infection. A week of Z-PAK, Clarinex, and pushing fluids to get the little buggers out of my system.

As I'm writing this I'm definitely feeling better, partially because of the medication but also because I know I dodged the H1N1 insanity. But really, people.. it's just the flu. And it's been around before.

So yeah, the doctor's visit today was just about as anticlimactic as this update probably is. Sorry for stringing you along. But I thought it was kind of amusing along the way.

Borderlands.

2009-10-27T11:00:00.000-05:00

Three friends and I started "Borderlands" tonight. I can characterize it mostly as a four-player Fallout 3 with a loot system gone mad. There is an endless amount of handguns, SMG's, rifles, sniper rifles, and shotguns, all with different attributes like firing rate, firepower, magazine size, zoom level, accuracy, and then some have special attributes like +30 incendiary damage or +100% melee damage. It's a bewildering assortment, but then you include things like healing shields versus guerilla shields, grenades, sticky bombs, ammo upgrades, and it quickly becomes overwhelming. And in typical fashion, Jason jumps in feet first and is an instant arms dealer expert on every weapon, able to differentiate the wheat from the chaff at first glance while the rest of us spend whole minutes mulling over the decision to sell the rifle we just looted or to keep it. But its the obsessing over details like this that really captivate me for some reason. The game is addicting to inventory management junkies like myself that are always looking for the next best gun to pick up or buy. Like I said, it's like Fallout 3's inventory system taken to the next level.

I wasn't sure about how I'd feel about the cell-shading aspect of the art design, but it comes across as a pretty arbitrary choice... it's no better or worse for it, but it does make it more distinctive. And the desert locales make it work well in that whymsical, Roadrunner and Coyote type way. So far I'm a little disappointed in the bestiary, there's only a handful of enemies that you run into during the first six hours or so of the game, and mainly consist of various small to medium sized animals and bandits wearing goofy Roadwarrior costumes complete with hockey masks and leather straps. The art direction as a whole isn't quite as sharply realized as Fallout 3, which I think sublimely harnessed the 50's propaganda style and contorted it into sharp satire and jarring irony. The post apocalyptic cyberpunk motif of Borderlands doesn't work quite as coherently, but it's still entertaining and kitschy in its own way.

The quests feel a little on the generic side but they're sufficiently varied to keep you interested. The vehicular combat is fun but a little clunky because you use the mouse cursor to steer. The buying and selling system works but weapons seem to lose a startling amount of value after you buy them.. sometimes losing as much as 75 to 90% of their value, but maybe that's realistic given the game's setting.

Which brings me to another point, the story mostly seems arbitrary and nonessential, it's all about going out and clearing areas of enemies, looting, and upgrading your equipment. I don't get the sense, at least 6 hours into the game, that many of the quests are connected or continue any kind of narrative, which Fallout 3 did so well. Also the character building and skill trees fall short of the dizzying array of attributes, perks, and skills that flesh out your character in Fallout 3.

They are obviously two very different games but it's the closest thing to Borderlands that I've ever played, so I keep falling back on comparing the two experiences I've had with them. After all, when a masterpiece like Fallout 3 is released, what else can you do but use it as a standard for games that come after? To that end, I think Borderlands is a satisfying scavenger hunt of a game that you can spend a lot of fun time with, especially if you enjoy multiplayer with friends and if you're looking for a change of pace and less heady storytelling after coming off a Fallout 3 runthrough like I have.

Changeling.

2009-10-26T12:30:00.000-05:00

I sat down and watched Changeling (incidentally, one of the more strangely-named movies I've ever seen) yesterday.. usually not the type of film I jump at, but there was some buzz about it last year during the Oscars and Ebert liked it, and I agree with him more often than I don't. And since Clint Eastwood directs, it's a little more interesting to watch than the average thriller. Unfortunately it ended up being a mixed bag for me.. a strong story with some good acting muddled with some strange choices and poor execution that makes the overall experience very middling.

The story is the strongest aspect, so I'll start there. The crux is the 1920's LAPD, which is corrupt and underhandedly self-serving in some ways as various quick montages and a John Malkovich voiceover testify, and shockingly inept and arrogant in others. This is more strongly demonstrated in their mishandling of a missing child case that victimizes Angelina Jolie's character, a young single mother who works as a supervisor at the local telephone switchboard and lives alone with her young son. Unfortunately the movie doesn't give us much backstory into their lives beyond a few quick scenes of her at work rollerskating around the telephone operator room coolly and efficiently, and disappointing her son by breaking her promise of an afternoon at the movies to fill in for a busy day the office. She arrives home after work to find her son is gone. She desperately files a missing child report, and the police or or less brush her off, saying that the little runaway will probably eventually come back home. Flash forward five months, and the police call with heartlifting news that her son has been found. She meets them at the train station, to discover that, while the boy shares the same name as her missing child, he doesn't even remotely resemble him.

What follows is a series of unbelievable aggravations by the LAPD as they try to convince her that this is really indeed her son, that she doesn't remember him correctly or that he's changed somehow while he was missing. Bizarre explanations by "medical experts" for height discrepancies and other physical differences are flung at the wall, and a few stick but they're all dubious explanations at best. Turns out the LAPD doesn't like to make mistakes, and are willing to do anything to prevent their reputation from being tarnished. Even if it involves sending the mother to the mental institution because she obviously doesn't remember her son correctly. Meanwhile they're wasting time by not looking for the real boy and instead trying to find more reasons why the mother might be delusional.

The story is compelling, but it's not handled very well. The whole affair seems rushed, and it's complicated by a side-story involving one good detective in a sea of corrupt ones, and a disturbing ranch outside of town where abducted boys are taken to be murdered by a deranged serial killer. We don't get hardly any exploration of the killer's character other than he's crazy and evil and likes to keep boys cooped up on his ranch before he kills them. Back in LA, Angelina Jolie's character is befriended by the local Presbyterian priest played by John Malkovich (who seems to be mostly wasting his time with this material and clearly shows it in an uninspiring performance that's mostly read, not acted) who is trying to shine the light of day on the dark underbelly of the LAPD through various dramatic speeches throughout the movie. Before we know it, the mother is condemned as being a lunatic who can't keep her story straight and is thrown in the mental hospital.

Like I said, the story is engaging and inspires a lot of anger and frustration in the viewer as they sympathize with this poor woman, whom society has apparently little respect for. It's an interesting social statement on the kind of adversity women, especially single women, experienced in those days, and the fact that the story is based on true events makes it even more surreal. But the execution is weak. The pacing is bad, dialog is unmoving and uninspired, and backstory is almost nonexistent.

Aside from a waste of John Malkovich's talent, we've got some good, strong performances. Angelina Jolie is strong-willed yet cowering in the face of masculine intimidation, with lots of very strong scenes (notably near the end when she confronts the serial killer in jail, she is particularly startling to watch). Jeffrey Donovan is heartless and cold as the police captain that values his reputation and pride above all else. Jason Butler Harner is sufficiently crazy and deranged as the serial killer. The rest of the supporting cast is solid and believable.

But then we have the music. Clint Eastwood likes to score his own movies for some reason, unfortunately he just doesn't have the chops to do it well. His scores often sound like he spent all of five minutes plunking away on a piano, finding a serene little 5 or 6 note phrase, and building the entire soundtrack around it by having various instruments play a version of it. The music is completely inappropriate in almost every scene, it's repetitive and amateurish. Good music can make a great movie even better (see "The Dark Knight"), and in cases like this it can make a mess of a mediocre movie. If you want to see Clint Eastwood's musical stylings at their worst, watch "Gran Torino" and try sitting through the closing credits as he hoarses his way through the laughably shallow lyrics of the movie's theme song, which he wrote himself.

So overall, a strong, yet mishandled story, above average performances, and a half-hearted soundtrack that stumbles from one scene to the next drags this movie out until it collapses twenty minutes past the two hour mark. Oscar material it ain't.. if you want to see a 20's period noir there are plenty others that are way better.

I'm moving, pardon my dust.

2009-10-26T11:41:00.000-05:00

I've decided to move my blog out of Wordpress. Why? What's the sense in building and administering something if it's already been done, honestly. Path of least resistance. Instead of endlessly applying patches to Wordpress as more and more vulnerabilities are found, more ways are found for spammers to ruin your blog, why not just let someone else worry about it. And my domain still works, you just have to redirect it.

Now I have to deal with backporting all my old posts though. Again. So you see, as they said in all my computer science classes, we're starting with zero. Again.

Get Smart.

2008-07-26T14:00:00.001-05:00

Classic television fans rejoice, here is probably the best example of the recent Hollywood flirtation with remaking old TV shows. Licking the heels of recent revisits of Starsky and Hutch, The Dukes of Hazzard, Bewitched, Miami Vice, Lost in Space, and many others, Get Smart successfully breathes new life into the 40 year old franchise with remarkable style, wit, technical excellence, and above all, spot-on casting.

And you have to start there, with the actors that recaptured the magic of these classic Mel Brooks creations. Steve Carell is pitch perfect as a bumbling, oblivious, bookish Maxwell Smart that still manages to complete his mission in spite of himself. But the writers and Carell find new depth in the decidedly shallow character from the show and make him into a competently intelligent, if anal-retentive analyst type that’s been thrown into field work when he really wasn’t ready for it. He knows how all the gadgets operate, he understands the basic idea of spywork and occasionally even knows what hunches to follow, although his coordiation and physical prowess are grossly mismatched for his assignment. Anne Hathaway is beautiful, sophisticated, and charismatic as Agent 99, a perfect modernization of the original Barbara Feldon performance. Alan Arkin really nails The Chief too, but again creates a more nuanced character than the perpetually irritated Chief that Ed Platt played in the original series. Here Arkin plays The Chief as more of a nostalgic, fatherly figure that tries to find reasons to trust Smart instead of rolling his eyes at every antic. David Koechner is very funny as Larabee and Patrick Warburton (David Puddy from “Seinfeld”) is about as perfect an actor as you can find for the stone-faced Hymie the android agent. We even get great, small performances by James Caan as the President and Bill Murray as a pigeonholed agent that is assigned surveillance duty in a tree hollow. The only performances I didn’t quite agree with were Terence Stamp as Siegfried and Ken Davitian as Shtarker, who play their characters a little too seriously and a little too straight in my opinion.

But playing it straight is the name of the game when it comes to the screenplay, and it’s a good choice, I think. The campiness of the original show is lifted, and in its place a halfway plausible plotline involving the production of nuclear (or “nuckular” as President Caan “Bush”es) weapons in a soviet bakery, which provides for a very funny yellowcake uranium / yellow birthday cake sight gag. The story spoofs a typical Bond plot and takes 86 and 99 on a globe-trotting escapade from one hairy situation to the next, including spygame touchstones like the infiltration of a black-tie ballroom dance, navigating the invisible laserbeam field, espionage at a seedy Russian watering hole through a very funny extended urinal joke, the obligatory ejection from a plane without a parachute, a hilariously convoluted highway chase, and the attempted bombing of a Presidential function in Los Angeles with a preposterous detonation trigger that requires Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to be played to completion by the orchestra.

The humor effectively punctuates the action, with lots of great revisits of the classic Smart lines like “Missed it by that much!”, “Ah, the old (….) trick”, and of course, “Sorry about that, Chief.” The writers ingeniously find believable ways to get Smart and 99 into one goofy but harrowing situation after another, and the result is a sublimely comedic romp through the spygame genre that tips its hat to its conventions as much as it skewers them.

Special effects, stuntwork, gunplay, and camerawork are all in great form, and give the film a classy, Grade-A feel. The classic soundtrack is revisted and updated, along with tight incidental music that simultaneously heightens the tension while winking its eye at how ridiculous those incidents are. You really walk away from the film believing that the crew gave the film an honest effort and respected the material probably more than it deserves. The film looks and sounds about as good as you’d expect a straight entry in the Bond series to look, and I think it works well to drive home the premise that Smart is really a bumbling but endearing character that’s caught in a situation that’s more dangerous and serious than he probably realizes.

So overall, it’s a remarkable achievement that grows the franchise beyond its original incarnation. In just about every aspect, it’s made better, smarter, more stylish, more nuanced, and funnier. Yet it’s accessible to new fans; the only thing they’re going to miss out on are the little in-jokes and one-liner references to the original show. Considering how great the original series was, it’s quite an accomplishment.

The Dark Knight.

2008-07-26T14:00:00.000-05:00

Simply put, The Dark Knight is as realistic a vision of a comic book as I’ve ever seen. It contains scenes and developments are at times a little far-fetched, but as much as it is possible to believe in a comic book story set in real life, this would be it.

The breakthrough in this film is Heath Ledger’s Joker, so let’s just start there. Never before have I seen a performance of a comic book character that was as nuanced, studied, detailed, spontaneous, natural, and disturbing. It’s astounding how Ledger can evoke such quirkiness and invention in the character while maintaining a consistent delivery of madness. He’s constantly fidgeting around or finding something goofy to do with his face or his voice, yet there’s a poetry to his vocal delivery that’s amusing and frightening simultaneously. The writers also gave more than an honest effort into crafting motivation and characterization for the Joker, turning him into an agent of chaos and a true “wild card” in every sense. He has a tortured past that may either be true or simply an obscene farce on which to blame his insanity. He has no grand vision or scheme, he simply wants to throw a monkey wrench in the works and see what happens. Everything is an interesting game or a cruel joke to him. He’s perpetually coming up with little morality tests and devious puzzles for his victims to hash out, and there’s no great outcome to them beyond the ensuing chaos and mayhem; he’s an anarchist and terrorist in the truest sense of the word. He has a great scene with Batman, seated across an interrogation table in the police station where he rationalizes his behavior, and it’s an unblinking, honest, realistic look into the mind of a madman who’s insanity is so complete, it is an end unto itself. Yet Ledger’s Joker is not simply insane, he’s also a keen observer of human behavior, and perhaps understands the evil nature of man better than do his opponents on the other side of the law. To call the Joker’s character in this film a work of art is a gross understatement, and Ledger is deserving of a posthumous Oscar for this revelation of a performance.

There are lots of great performances in the film, but the other one of note is Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne. He hits every note perfectly as the solitary hero, masking his identity as Batman with another mask of a pompus, patronizing, arrogant billionaire playboy that makes a grand entrance at every turn and indulges himself selfishly in privileged behavior. Yet behind his mask as the billionare asshole and the mask as the mysterious, solitary crimefighter, the true Bruce Wayne is a lonely soul with no one but Alfred to talk to. His obsession with Rachel Dawes that he clings to like a crutch is another interesting dimension to his character. His struggle with the morality of not doing the just thing, but doing what needs to be done and having to live with the consequences, makes him a troubled, sometimes reluctant hero; heavy is the head that wears the cowl. During the course of the film, he comes face to face with the realization that his actions in Gotham have created a new kind of villain, one that simply delights in being evil and chaotic. In the same interrogation room scene, The Joker mutters pedantically to Batman, “You complete me”, and while it sounds lame on paper, in the appropriate context it has an air of eery logic. However, if there’s a weak part to his performance, I think it’s Batman’s voice. He seems a little too growl-y and forced at times, and the effect gets a little tiring at times.

As I mentioned earlier, there are great performances surrounding the two leads. Michael Caine is a patient, nurturing, but clever Alfred Pennyworth, the best we’ve had yet. Aaron Eckhart is ambitious, charming, and geniune as Harvey Dent, a richly detailed character who will one day become Harvey Two Face. Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon is a quiet, brilliant performance that does not upstage but sneaks its way into your conscience as the film progresses and has a powerful scene near the end of the film when his family hangs in the balance of cruelty and chance. Maggie Gyllenhal is a good replacement for Katie Holmes as a more average, plainly attractive love interest between Dent and Wayne who doesn’t draw attention to herself. Morgan Freeman is dependable yet unobtrusive as Lucius Fox, a great choice there.

These characters inhabit a story that’s very much a modern tragedy. There’s a fair amount of busyness to the plot with threads involving money distribution to organized crime and an overly ambitious criminal accountant from China as well as Dent’s and Gordon’s crusade to end it, but it really is background noise to the real plot that’s more concerned with the morality of Batman. The film explores in extraordinary depth the plight of a vigilante hero in a city that cannot be adequately policed by lawful means. Through the Joker’s treacherous dealings, Batman’s very existence causes death and anguish every day, yet if Batman turns himself in, things will be even worse off. Chaos even cruelly intrudes into Wayne’s personal life,and Alfred wisely counsels “You spat in the face of every criminal in Gotham City. What did you expect to happen?” At the end of the film, a difficult choice is made and a sickening realization is reached, and plot wraps up elegantly with Batman fleeing into the night. It is for all intents and purposes a microcosm of the tragedy of Batman and a city in the throes of corruption.

The excellence in casting, acting, and writing is complemented by a high-class production that’s light on CGI and heavy on real, old-fashioned stuntwork. We get a white-knuckle car chase that lasts just the right length of time, stunning pyrotechnics, vertigo-inducing leaps and bat gliding, satisfying fist fights, and wild gunplay. The soundtrack is brooding, dark, and beautiful. My only complaint is the cinematography gets a little showy at times. There’s lots of dizzying 360-degree Brian DePalma type shots that seem superfluous, and it tends to dwell on the cityscape shots a bit too long.

But all in all, it’s a great film and handily the best comic book movie yet. With a thoughtful and reverential plot, brilliant casting, relevatory performances, and top-notch technical greatness, it rises above the source material to the level of high art and master craft. I highly recommend it.

Indy 4.

2008-05-25T14:00:00.000-05:00

Indy’s back, and he’s mostly in great form. My biggest complaint about the film is, while it’s basically more of the same as are all of the Indy movies, the fact that they waited this long to make part 4 made me want this to be a big blowout comeback movie, and it really isn’t.

One of the things that I respected the most about the movie is production design that gives this the look and feel of the previous three so that it stands shoulder-to-shoulder. Aside from the stepped up special effects, this movie looks like something that came out of the 80’s (or maybe more appropriately, from the pages of Amazing Stories). Everything from the color choices to the lighting to the over-the-top punching sound effects to the camera angles to the ubiquitous red line connecting the dots on the map really drives it home as a worthy addition to the series and a kindred film production in almost every regard.

The set designs this time around were particularly engrossing… There’s lots of crawling through cobweb-encrusted passages, hidden levers, lightning strikes illuminating a midnight raid of a gravesite, torches that cast a wild glow in the eyes of the adventurers as they uncover the treasure, and of course chambers filled with dusty artifacts. As usual, it’s just more of the same but little motifs like these are the nuts and bolts of what make up the consistent greatness of the Indiana Jones series.

Another motif that returns in great form is the action sequences, which are just one darn thing after another. Aside from a poor misstep early in the film involving a nuclear test site and a trip in a refridgerator, the action sequences are real dazzlers. We get a tip of the fedora to Last Crusade with a visceral motorcycle chase scene where Indy is the reluctant passenger this time around, and dizzying car chases along a precarious cliff in the jungle that includes an unbelievable swordfight atop moving cars as well as a laughable vine swinging sequence through the jungle that feels like it was lifted right out of an adventure comic book from the 50’s. Along the way is the dry sand pit trap, man-eating fireants, lots of burly Russians that never seem to fall, and too many narrow escapes to count.

But what really drives the movie home is the man, Harrison Ford. When we finally get to see him in the Fedora, leather jacket, bullwhip at the side, artifact bag slung over his shoulder, and week-old scruff, it’s the first great taste of what we’ve been missing these past 20 years, and it’s oh so good. The dry one-liners are back in great form, the stunts are as good as they’ve ever been, and the no-nonsense performance by Ford again turns the character into the film’s fulcrum for the action instead of the sole focus. We also get some great performances by Shia LeBeouf as the plucky sidekick and Kate Blanchett as the Russian femme fatale with an over-the-top accent and sword as her preferred weapon. Karen Allen makes a return as Marion Ravenwood in a very serviceable but ultimately uninteresting performance. Even John Hurt is along for the ride as the wise old professor that’s been brainwashed by supernatural forces and delivers a good performance with what limited material he’s given.

The only negative points I can count are the nuclear test site scene that really falls flat and seems out of place, and a bit of a letdown at the very end. The grand revealing of the mystery isn’t very satisfying, especially after the rollercoaster ride that led up to it.

Overall, it’s definitely worthy of the legacy. It’s one of the weaker films but in my opinion they are all so close in quality that I can’t call it disappointing. It’s big cheesy fun just like you were hoping for.

Argentinian steaks.

2008-02-12T14:00:00.000-06:00

Argentinian beef is some good shit, gaddamn… If you’re in South Beach any time soon, you owe it to yourself to try Rancho Argentino on Washington Ave. Say hi to Salvo if he’s there, he’s an awesome waiter.

Miami isn't a bad place to visit.

2008-02-11T14:00:00.000-06:00

I’m in South Beach for a conference on Millikin’s dime. It’s not a bad place to visit, I recommend it if you get the chance. The weather is fantastic for the middle of February.. it was around 4 degrees when we left on Sunday and it’s in the low 70’s now with a slight breeze.

The streets go on forever, lined with beach fashion stores, little knick-knack shops, body piercing places, and tiny restaurants. Most of the shops seems to be mostly deserted with a couple proprietors leaning back in chairs hugging the back wall. There are lots of little pizza places with formica tables and roundbar chairs, a surprising number of chinese and italian places, some sushi bars, three Irish Pubs so far with that same edgy/bulbous font on the signs that you see at every Irish pub, and an Argentinian goucho steakhouse that I’ll probably checking out tomorrow. People seem to stay out all night and nothing closes much before 11 at night.

All the hotels have that white stone block art deco look with 50’s font styling on the signs and palm trees swaying out front. Kinda makes me think of Grim Fandango for some reason.

Cloverfield.

2008-02-08T14:00:00.000-06:00

My headache is almost subsided, and I’m left with a greater appreciation for Cloverfield than I had while I was watching it. The reports are true, if you try to concentrate too hard on the screen you’ll end up with a headache in the least, and possibly motion sickness if you’re weak stomached. The camerawork is dizzying, disorienting, and hectic. Of course it makes sense in context, but it does make for a hard film to watch. If you can hack it for the 85 minutes though, I highly recommend seeing it on the big screen; this is a unique film experience.

The biggest impression I came away from the film with is the amount of sheer technical skill and craft with which the film was put together. Everything looks and sounds so real, from the unearthly roars in the distance to the deafening thuds of the monster’s footsteps, to the crack of military rifle fire and pounding of tank blasts, to the sight of the Statue of Liberty head bowling down the street. To say it’s a visceral experience is to not give the effects justice. A disaster has never been filmed so chaotically or effectively.

Of course the story takes a back seat to the mayhem, but we are treated to some very convincing acting and characterization. The film begins with a going away party for one of the principles, where the camera makes its way around the room to tape the various friends giving their farewells. It’s a pretty ingenious setup that has amazing sponteneity and authenticism that really draws you in. A fake home movie is hard to pull off without making it seem, well, fake… but the director really accomplishes it here. I’m reminded of the short cinematic masterstroke in Death Sentence, released earlier this year, that had similar home movie footage montaged over the credits. When the chaos ensues during the party, we tag along with a small group of friends on a fairly linear adventure that takes us through a bewildering flight to safety, sickening discovery that someone is still left behind, a harrowing attack in the subway tunnels by some of the most disturbing creatures I’ve seen in the movies, and an extremely ill-advised rescue in a toppled building. The list of principle characters is kept short but sharply drawn and acted, the dialog sparse but totally authentic, and the plot simple but engaging.

There’s an awful lot happening onscreen all the time, and you could easily watch the movie repeatedly and pick up new little nuances each time, but all the plot points really necessary are showed or implied obviously enough. You’re not going to gain any profound realizations or insight by watching this movie, it is an experience I liken more to a rollercoaster ride or a fireworks display. The biggest appreciation I have for Cloverfield is it really is something new that hasn’t been tried before (The Blair Witch Project is sort of along the same lines but the sheer scale and production values of this movie daunt anything that even remotely compares to it) and it succeeds in what it sets out to do: to make a convincing spectator-level monster movie. For those reasons alone it’s an experience that lives up to the hype and should not be missed.

No Country for Old Men.

2007-11-21T14:00:00.000-06:00

After a couple stumbles in screwball comedy land, the Coens are back. No Country For Old Men harkens to their more serious works like Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing, shrugging off the typical zany Coen characters and pitch-black humor. It’s a film of incredible restraint, patience, observation, understanding, and familiarity.

The performances of every character, from the leads to the supporting roles, are as good as I’ve seen for a long time. Tommy Lee Jones especially conjures up a genuine, unique character in Sheriff Ed Tom Bell who strides through the film with world-weariness and can’t quite believe the atrocities that are happening around him. He thinks about the old days when his father and grandfather were lawmen, and wonders how we got here, what’s to come, and how to put any sense to it all. His sparse dialog, dialect, expressions, and demeanor are honed to perfection by Jones… we can see the years of this man behind those sunken eyes and hear the weight of the world in his words. On the other side of the story is Anton Chigurh, the wide-eyed, unblinking psychotic killer that has a chilling lack of respect for life. He lives by his own moral code that somehow follows a disturbing logic and matter-of-factness in his twisted mind. In the middle is Llewelyn Moss, a resourceful, clever trailerpark dweller gets caught when he loots a Mexican standoff over money and drugs. In one dialog-absent scene after another, he narrowly escapes capture with remarkable wit and determination. Chigurh is after the money and will kill anyone in his way. Sheriff Bell is constantly one or two steps behind Chigurh, and pieces together the aftermath with the accuracy and skill of an old-school lawman that’s seen more than his share of crime and human nature. It’s fascinating watching these three characters operate; we’re not insulted by expository dialog, instead their actions speak for themselves.

The cinematography puts the action together deliberately, coherently, chillingly. Here we delve into more familiar Coen territory where jarring scenes of brutal violence explode from the most placid scenes. It’s just as effective as it ever was in Fargo, capturing the bizarre, incomprehensible atrocity of cold-blooded murder as it happens. Simultaneously we’re treated to the sparse beauty of west Texas, the dust and rocks blinding in the sun and big-sky sunsets evoking that feeling of isolation. The deliberate pacing sucks you in as the camera meanders from one setpiece scene to the next. Once again, little explanation is offered of what you’re seeing, the movie always lays everything out in plain sight for you to discover as the characters do. It’s an exhilirating and rewarding experience.

There is virtually no soundtrack or incidental music in the movie, perfectly matching the desolate and unforgiving setting. It makes the visuals even more effective and the mood even more disturbing.. a great touch by the directors. I love hearing the little textures of sound instead… the crunch of dust and rocks under the boots, the click-hum of someone picking up a telephone, boards creaking in the hallway as you-know-who makes his way to the room where we hide along with Llewelyn, the scraping sound of him unscrewing the lightbulb in the hallway, the faint hiss of compressed air as he opens the valve on his air gun.

It all adds up to a engrossing experience that seems to fly by. Like all great movies, it doesn’t seem long enough. The ending isn’t very neat or tidy, but I think that’s part of the effect. By the time the movie is over, we’ve witnessed senseless violence and there doesn’t seem to be much payoff or benefit, no great realization or retribution. It’s just how things are; no explanation needed. No ride into the sunset as the theme song reprises, no hero kissing the girl, no dry quips of the victorious. This film is reality, in all its harshness.

American Gangster.

2007-11-02T14:00:00.000-05:00

Let me preface by saying that this is one of the rare occasions where I actually enjoyed the trailer for a movie a lot more than the movie itself. Not that “American Gangster” was a bad movie, but the trailer was a real two minute cinematic masterstroke. The trailer made me imagine a chaotic, violent rise to power story in the league of Scarface, Goodfellas or The Godfather (indeed, some critics have called his movie “The Black Godfather”). It featured a montage of powerful scenes, killer dialog and some awesome cinematic effects that really drummed up excitement for the movie. What I experienced instead was a much more thoughtful, observant, but ultimately subdued crime story told from two sides of the law. It’s a very different rise-to-power movie than I’ve ever seen before.

You have to start with the performances. Denzel Washington is as great as he’s ever been, finding those neat little personality touches and quirks to make the character really come alive. For the most part his Frank Lucas is a straight-laced, business-minded, logical, supremely-motivated man that just happens to deal in an illegal substance. His goal is to corner the heroin market in Harlem by going directly to the supplier, cut out the middle man, and sell a purer product at a lower cost. He rallies his troops at home closely, recuriting his brothers and cousins to operate the distribution points. He follows a disciplined daily ritual, which includes taking his mother to church every Sunday and visiting one of two night clubs he owns every day, more likely to check up on his businesses than to enjoy himself. The fascinating part about Lucas is the way he insulates himself from the dirty aspects of his business… you never see him visiting his lab where the heroin is cut and packaged, he never uses his own product, and he never meets his customers. He deals strictly with his closed circle of family and keeps his hands clean, and maintains a clean-cut image that evokes an air of success. Only on rare occasions does he break out of his calm, calculating demeanor, and explodes into a surprising fit of brutal rage that appear to be just as surprising to himself as they are to those around him.

His antagonist is Richie Roberts, played convincingly by Russell Crowe, an equally moral cop studying for the bar at night school in his spare time, and in general is in a frazzled, short-on-sleep state for most of the movie. Early in the film he busts a crook with a million dollars cash in the trunk of his car, and Richie turns it into evidence, and earns the dismay of his fellow cops. His superiors recognize his skills and puts him in charge of a special drug task force under the authority of the State’s Attorney, where he similarly hand-picks his men and strategizes the takedown of the Harlem drug operation. Roberts is a resourceful cop, and realizes that their typical suspects, the Mafia, are not behind the operation, and eventually discovers Lucas’s involvement through straight detective work.. keeping his ear to the street, observing from plain sight, asking the right questions, making the right alliances with the local police, and above all, practicing patience. He systematically builds his case, and the ever-present tagboard filled with suspect photos gets lots of attention in the movie as he connects the dots. I didn’t have any complaints about Crowe’s performance, but it wasn’t overly impressive either… it was a no-frills, serviceable performance, definitely not in the same league as his work in 3:10 to Yuma or A Beautiful Mind. Still, I found myself rooting for the guy because he’s stacked up against insurmountable odds, tasked with a seemingly impossible puzzle to solve, surrounded by corrupt cops on the take, and lives a personal life that’s circling the drain. He finally pulls it together in the end and nabs Frank Lucas by the book, and we’re treated a thought-provoking last scene with him and Lucas across the table from each other, discussing the morality of each other’s situation.

The supporting cast does a good job as well.. Ted Levine turns in another interesting supporting role as Richie’s superior, and Cuba Gooding Jr is firey and simultaneously charismatic as usual as one of Lucas’s competitors. Armand Assante is a fairly token mob boss that is about what you’d expect. The rest of the cast is mostly rounded out by strong performances from young newcomers that hit the right notes.

The story follows an appropriately logical and calm progression, punctuated by few scenes of violence and conflict. Ridley Scott’s cinematography and direction are observant, understated, and unobtrusive; he allows the story to tell itself. There are a few scenes with artistic flair where Scott lets his skills as a visual stylist shine, but for the most part he dresses the movie in realism, period correctness, and subdued atmosphere. One scene stands out, the obligatory raid and shootout in the cutting shop, which is handled with a mastery that dazzles… I was reminded of the brutal opening scene of Hannibal and the unbelievable violence of Blackhawk Down, both also directed by Ridley Scott. The scene explodes with style and mayhem that is a fantastic visceral payoff to the film’s otherwise understated delivery. It’s the kind of brief indulgence that makes you applaud the director’s restraint, and even further amplifies the effect of that scene.

So overall, a refreshingly straightforward, well-put-together film… not quite what I was expecting but still worth checking out. Strong performances all around, but the real magic is in Denzel’s studied portayal of an all together different kind of crime boss. And, Ridley Scott definitely reasserts himself as the more restrained of the Scott brothers with a cinematic delivery that echoes the deliberate pacing of the story. This is another strong entry for this year of extraordinarly great films.

Metroid Prime 3.

2007-08-20T14:00:00.000-05:00

Ok, there have been a couple requests for a Metroid Prime 3 review, so I present my opinion on the conclusion to the Prime trilogy.

Overall, this is a worthy conclusion to a consistently great series of games. Unfortunately, the bar was set impossibly high by the first game, which so sublimely married the sensibilities of the old Metroid side-scrolling games with a engrossing 3D experience that has practically reinvented the series. Whereas some 3D outings of old 2D platformers more or less gave us a new perspective on old favorites (Mario 64, the 3D Sonic games), Metroid Prime was closer to Zelda 64, in that you almost can’t imagine Metroid not being played in 3D now. Some of the elements that made Prime 1 great, such as the goofy morphball puzzles, beautiful art direction, memorable boss fights, and sprawling level designs are here once again in abundance. New stuff like the controls and interplanetary travel are a revelation that obsolete those elements of the previous games. Unfortunately, this game does not reach the level of perfection that the first game did in other regards, but the story does rise above that of the second game, which I think was the weakest point in the series.

A review of Prime 3 wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of the new controls, and I think it is the game’s greatest feature. These are hands-down the best first person shooter controls on a console I’ve seen. I don’t think it quite beats out the old mouse-and-keyboard controls on PC shooters (credit to iD for developing a control scheme over ten years ago that still remains the defacto standard), but the Wiimote controls beat the dual analog approach and the Gamecube Metroid scheme hands-down. Aiming is fast and accurate on the advanced settings, and feels great after a few hours of experience. You do have to hold the controller very steady to keep the view from skewing off violently, so I found myself only being able to play for a few hours at a time at most before fatigue sets in. Using the Nunchuk to cast out the grappling beam is engaging and really draws you further into the game. Even little control panel interfaces like twisting a lock with the wiimote and welding damaged circuits with the plasma beam are cool and add that little extra bit of immersiveness.

The other new element, travelling between planets, is another revelation in gameplay that really makes this game feel that much more sprawling and epic. I never got tired of seeing the cutscenes of the gunship landing and taking off, and the multiple landing sites added a new dimension to the game.. suddenly backtracking isn’t as laborious as it used to be, now that you can pick the landing site closest to where you need to go, and remote control your ship to land at the site closest to where you are. Also, being able to control your ship and have it pick up objects made for some neat puzzles. Unfortunately, the designers drastically cut down on the number of save locations because of this, so you usually have to find your way back to a landing site to save now. And, the different areas seem significantly smaller than their counterparts in the previous games. When I think about the huge, expansive areas like the Phazon Mines and Phendrana Drifts in Prime 1, and the Torvus Bog with its underwater chambers in Prime 2, the levels feel tiny here. The only one that comes close is the Pirate Homeworld, with its tram systems that carry you to the different installations.

One new feature that I don’t think works as well is the more story-driven plot. To me, Metroid has alway been about open-ended exploration and deliberate pacing. In this game, the story is much more focused and urgent.. much of the time you’re feeling rushed to complete your next clearly-defined objective. There’s also a lot more dialog and character interaction, which I guess really aren’t either a benefit or detrement to the game, it’s just different. The item collection this time around is more story-driven and less arbitrary than in the first game, I think… the idea of collecting energy cells to use to unlock areas of the derelict ship works well as a plot device, moreso than collecting the Chozo artifacts in Prime 1.

The upgrade pickups, on the other hand, are a lot weaker this time around. We get the usual missile expansions and energy tanks, and new ones like the voltage grapple and ship grapple are pretty cool. But, all hypermode expansions have very limited, specific uses, and the ship missile expansions are completely unnecessary when you have all of three opportunities to use them, so you never are without ammunition for it. The beam upgrades are also pretty boring and unimaginative, plus they’re cumulative instead of selectable like they used to be in Prime 1 and 2, so the gameplay doesn’t feel as diverse. Comparatively I like the old standard power, wave, ice, and plasma beams, and having to switch back and forth between them depending on what enemies you were fighting. I also liked the old super beam powerups from the first game.. the super missile, wave buster, flame thrower, and ice spreader. I also found myself not using the missiles very often at all.. the beam weapons were more useful for most stuff, unless it involved freezing something.

A final positive note, though, is the boss fights. Although a bit on the easy side (in my opinion, a welcome change from the obnoxious level of frustration in Prime 2), they all proved to be very inventive and actually pretty fun. The fight with Ridley near the end is probably the best ones we’ve had yet, with lots of grappling and x-ray action, barely edging out the one from Prime 1. The battles with the other hunters were mostly very good, aside from the shapeshifting hunter, which was just a rehash of the previous fights. The Dark Samus battle at the end was a little simplistic too, but the Aurora Unit fight made up for it with a pretty interesting battle. Not quite as fun as the Ridley battle but made for a nice last hurrah for the game. It didn’t quite feel as epic as the last battle in Prime 1 where you have to use all your beams, missiles, and then the hyperbeam at the very end to finish her off.

On a technical level this is the best looking and sounding Prime game so far. The game hums along at a steady 60FPS, as the game makes the best use of the Wii’s resources and minimizes its limitations. I.E., the limited video memory of the Wii doesn’t allow for very intricate textures but the polygon count is high, so objects and character models look great. The on-screen HUD also looks great, and has a neat reflection of Samus’s face whenever you turn on the scanning visor. The game also makes pretty liberal use of HDR (High dynamic range lighting) with light blooms and so forth that add some very realistic lighting effects. The game also sounds as good as ever, with an immersive Dolby ProLogic sound mix and crisp, realistic sound effects.

So overall, I thought Prime 3 was a bit of a mixed bag but overall a very good game and worthy of carrying the Metroid Prime name. The new stuff like the motion-sensitive controls and ship travel add some awesome facets to an already great platform. Most of the stuff that made Prime great is still here. But, there are some elements that have taken a dive.. the more focused storyline, the upgrade pickups, and levels are a bit on the weak side. All in all, this is still one of the must-have exclusive titles on the Wii.

Rubber Suit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie.

2007-04-03T14:00:00.000-05:00

Recently I had a chance to go back and watch that old live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie that came out in the 90’s. I had fond memories of that movie, of when I was young and impressionable, and when the Turtles were the coolest thing ever.

Some movies age like fine wine. I can go back and watch movies like Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Star Wars, Temple of Doom, Big Trouble in Little China, and Aliens, and find even more to like about those movies than I did when I would sit wide-eyed in front of the television set, reciting the movie line by line, never missing a beat.

But the rubber suit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie, dear readers, is not one of these films. I felt depressed, annoyed, insulted, and embarassed for actually liking this movie at one time. This is an awful, awful film. This is one of those movies that seems so much smaller, simpler, and derivative through 27 year old eyes.

There are a couple glimmering lights of hope in this movie, like Elias Koteas who played Casey Jones in a slightly over-the-top but humorous performance (he would later go on to play one of the cops in Zodiac, one of the best films of this year), and Sam Rockwell, not necessarily because he has such a great role in this movie but he immediately makes me think of the sublime silliness of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where he plays the endlessly entertaining Zaphod Beeblebrox, and I’m instantly transported to a happier place.

The rest of the movie is just terrible. Those awkward little scenes with Splinter the Puppet trying to resemble something more lifelike than a ventriloquist’s dummy. The clunky, cliched, trite dialog. The see-through plot. The amateur-hour costumes that Shredder and the Foot Clan wear. Shredder’s obviously overdubbed and oversampled voice. April O’Neil that looks more like a frazzled substitute gradeschool teacher. The interchangeable personalities of three of the four turtles (Raphael is the only one given more than one dimension, and even then he’s generalized and shallow). And those silly, silly fight scenes that are shamed by more capable martial arts movies… especially the last fight scene where Shredder basically throws each turtle aside one by one as they come at him. And the final showdown between Shredder and Splinter, which has all the dignity and mastery of a Three Stooges sketch.

This movie was so obviously a marketing tie-in, thrown together on a budget that was 90% spent on the turtle costumes and financed by Domino’s product placement.

I can’t believe I liked this movie way back then. I guess some memories are better left alone.

300.

2007-03-09T14:00:00.000-06:00

I want to go read the “300″ graphic novels now, just to see how close this movie is to the artwork. I get the feeling that, just like Sin City, you can find an accompanying panel for every shot in the film. Each one has that perfect framing, lighting, and composition that makes it feel like a graphic novel come to life. And on those grounds, as well as all the other technical qualities, the movie is a resounding success.

Let’s start with the visuals.. the screen drips with style. The dried out sepia tones that the majority of the movie is colored with makes it feel ancient and historic, like the images are leaping out of a parchment scroll. The Spartans’ capes are a deep, lucious crimson only matched by the constant blood splatters. The shields and helmets glisten in the harsh light with a rough, frosted texture that’s scraped and dented with old battle damage. The bare chests and arms of the soldiers look like they’re chiseled out of stone. The millions of flying Persian arrows fill the sky like a swarm of bees and blot out the sunlight. As the battle rages on, the bodies of slain enemies are stacked on top of one another and rise like a mountain range against the sky.

Then, there’s the fight choreography to accompany these striking visuals. Each one is perfectly executed as the 300 Spartans fight as a single entity. The camera angles are just perfect so you see the glint of their eyes in the darkness under their helmet. They wield swords and shields with a precision that harkens those ancient frescoes and sculptures of greek warriors captured in the heat of battle. Spear after spear sink into Persian flesh and Middle Eastern scimitars clash against Spartan shields. It’s a visceral experience, but my only complaint is the movie is a little too liberal with the slow motion. I would have loved to see more scenes kicked up to full speed.. but then we may have missed some of those perfect battle poses that were most likely lifted off the comic panels.

Visual details aside, we’re treated with some serviceable acting by a cast of little-known actors, which I think is a good choice. The characters seem fuller and more believable if you don’t recognize the face, but it’s also a compliment to the cast.. they do a great job of bringing fairly shallow and one dimensional characters to life. We have the fiercely noble, defiant-to-the-end warrior King Leonidas that you can’t help but cheer for; his stalwart second in command as the captain of the army that executes every command from his king with a boisterous enthusiasm; his beautiful and strong Queen Gorgo who is simultaneously regal and sensuous; and many faithful battle-hungry soldiers. On the other side of the battle we’re treated to a disturbing, exotic, gold-encrusted King Xerxes who has a demonic voice (that disappointingly sounds heavily overdubbed) and has proclaimed himself a god among men and dresses the part; his legion of soldiers, barbarians, slaves, and a horde of particularly fearsome masked elite soldiers called “The Immortals”. Each character proclaims those quasi-eloquent, grandstanding one-line phrases like “Tonight we dine in hell!” and “Immortals? Tonight their name will be tested!” In context they work, thanks to the conviction the actors have, but writing and dialog is not where this film is going to win any praise.

Similarly, the storyline and pacing are not great works, either. The story is told in flashback sequence, but the story doesn’t seem to arc very much. It’s essentially the story of 300 soldiers outlasting wave after wave of Persian forces, starting with the regular army, followed by barbarians, heavy horses, elephant battalions, and finally the Immortals. Again in style it may recall those epic poems by Homer but cinematically it doesn’t work very well. The 300 drive back each wave with very few losses each time. Predictability begins to set in as these seemingly flawless warriors continue the fight while the days roll by. Finally, a pretty weak, anticlimactic betrayal that opens up a second path for the Persian invaders brings the fight to a desparate conclusion. By the time minute 117 rolls by, you wish there was more. I would have loved to see that 10,000 strong Spartan army, inspired by the brave 300, crush the Persian invaders in one last great battle, but the film sadly cuts it off just as things get started.

On a visual and technical level, I think it barely edges out Sin City. It’s a fantastic looking and sounding film, and does an even better job than Sin City at bringing a graphic novel to stylized life. We get some choice historical-sounding dialog and some convincing acting that gets us closely involved. Beneath the surface, though, there’s not a whole lot here, and I think Sin City greatly surpasses it in storytelling. Still, it’s big, loud, violent entertainment that shouldn’t be missed on the big screen.

Zodiac.

2007-03-04T14:00:00.000-06:00

David Fincher continues to impress. Of all his movies… Alien 3 (highly underrated, in my opinion. I think it stands shoulder to shoulder with the two before it, the two that follow aren’t even worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence), Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, and Panic Room, this one is the most procedural and deliberate. It doesn’t have the gritty and foreboding atmosphere of Se7en (but then, how many movies do?), the tightrope suspense of The Game, or maddening compulsiveness of Fight Club. But it does have a smattering of all of it that seeps into this film and makes it so much more. In the hands of a different director, this would have been a straightforward police procedural. With Fincher at the helm, it rises above the ordinary and becomes everything that his previous movies were: a complete cinematic experience.

The most distinctive part of a Fincher movie is the visuals and atmosphere. He recreates a climate of fear and skepticism of a 1960’s through 1970’s northern California, caught in a stranglehold by an elusive mass murderer that has struck three separate towns over the span of months. Without modern-day conveniences like cell phones (and fax machines, demonstrated in one amusing scene in which San Fran police personnel must coordinate with three different local departments with the US mail the only apparent method of communication available), this is a much bigger place for a killer to hide. The SF Chronicle, decked out in goldenrod furniture and wood paneling, buzzes with activity as more and more cryptic letters from Zodiac arrive. Political cartoonist Robert Graysmith and stoned reported Paul Avery meet in dark, crowded bars and cramped coffee shops to exchange notes. The two SF inspectors assigned to the case prowl the streets dressed in tan trenchcoats and bowties and driving a mint-green dodge sedan. They’re all small details, but mixed together they evoke a definite time and place that is engrossing. It’s all shot with the skill, visceral energy, and detail that you’d expect from Fincher.

The acting is equally top-notch. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Graysmith with subdued obsession that eventually spirals out of control into a compulsive frenzy as he chases after names, dates, times, locations, any clue that could bring him closer to solving the Zodiac puzzle. Robert Downey Jr plays Paul Avery in an deliriously sublime performance in which he disappears into the role of a stoned, smooth-talking reporter. Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards play the two cops on the case and bring a true sense of worn familiarity to their roles that makes you feel instantly at home with them helming the case as they overturn clue after clue that eventually leads them to what you’re convinced is the ultimate conclusion to the mystery. Aside from the leads, we have great small roles inhabited by the likes of Brian Cox, Philip Baker Hall, Adam Goldberg, and Donal Logue. And then there’s the prime suspect in the case, who enters the interrogation room and holds the audience in the grip of fear with one of the creepiest understated performances this side of Anthony Hopkin’s Hannibal Lecter.

And then there is the story, which I think should be a strong contender for best screenplay this year. The cops, reporters, and audience wade through a dizzying array of clues handled by four police departments in four separate towns, visit grisly crimescenes and many many other sharply-drawn locations, and even dip into some of the personal lives of the people involved to involve us with that obsession, fear, unrest, disappointment, and frustration that a mass murder investigation that spans the years gives us. A surreal storytelling device, the caption that tells us how many months and years have passed since the last scene, simultaneously breaks and rachets up the tension as the film navigates the sprawl of the investigation, marching deliberately towards the final conclusion.

By the time the 160 minutes roll by it’s a complete cinema, a work of pure craft in which great characters played by great actors present a compelling story in a memorable visual experience.

Little Miss Sunshine.

2007-03-02T14:00:00.000-06:00

Spoilers herein. You’ve been warned.

Ok, this one perplexed me. It was funny, well written, and well acted but Best Picture? I dunno.. the fact that it was nominated alongside The Departed for BP yet BORAT! was not nominated for anything besides Best Adapted Screenplay (itself a stretch, since it was based on previously created television show characters, not a book or play or anything like that) just doesn’t seem right.

And What The Hell, may I ask, is up with Alan Arkin winning Best Supporting Actor for this role? He was only in the movie for the first hour, and he had some nice choice dialog and a handful of funny scenes, but it’s nowhere near the masterful performance of Djimon Hounsou in Blood Diamond, one of the most frighteningly passionate performances I’ve ever seen.

Oscar complaints aside, I did enjoy the movie quite a bit. I do like me some road movies, because you’re never quite sure where you’re going to end up next, and in this movie it’s one zany setpiece after another, all starting with the family dinnertime around the fried chicken bucket on the formica kitchen table in a house that appears to consist entirely of wood paneling. A call comes in that the regional winner for the Little Miss Sunshine contest has to back out at the last minute, leaving the Olive the youngest, a pudgy, plain-looking girl with pair of eyeglasses half the size of her head, the soul representative for Albuquerque. She has a talent routine that the audience will not be able to enjoy till the last half hour of the movie (and in the fine tradition of Napoleon Dynamite, it’s a surprise dance routine that must not be missed), practiced up at the instruction of her profane, heroin-snorting grandfather. The always fidgety and stressed-out Greg Kinnear is the dad who’s trying to get a 9-step book to success published and can adapt any situation to a maxim on winners and losers. Steve Carrell is hilarious as Uncle Frank, at one time the top Proust scholar (huh?), who after a string of bad luck is home from a visit to the mental hospital due to an attempted suicide. Paul Dano is Dwayne, a disenfranchised teenager who’s taken a vow of silence while he reads Nietzsche and literally sits around waiting to become old enough to join the Air Force. Toni Collette is the kind of Roseanne-inspired mom that throws a box of popsicles on the table and proclaims “dessert.”

The movie is definitely all about the characters as they move from one hairbrained situation to another, packed like sardines in an aging yellow VW Microbus with a broken clutch as they traverse the desert towards California and the Little Miss Sunshine contest. The van provides a running joke in which the family has to push it up to 20mph before Dad can float the gears up to 3rd. Along the road, Frank will have a chance meeting with his former gay lover at a gas station while buying straight porn for Grandpa, the family will have to deal with the prospect of illegally transporting a dead body across state lines, Dad uses an unorthodox method to defuse a potentially disastrous traffic stop, and Dwayne suffers a complete breakdown when he learns that he’s colorblind and won’t be able to join the air force. All this before we get to the surreal fiasco that is the Little Miss Sunshine talent show itself.

All in all, a very different kind of comedy that’s skillfully directed, sharply written, and expertly acted. Good, but not BP material in my opinion.

The Departed.

2007-02-26T14:00:00.000-06:00

So, this is it… the quad-oscar winner, including best picture. It’s definitely worth the best editing, writing, and directing, but best picture? I’m not sure. Maybe of those nominated, but I haven’t seen the other nominees yet.

What it is, though, is an incredibly complex and nuanced story with a contrived amount of double agents, snitches, moles, and informants. Thanks to strong performances by Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio, I found myself reminding myself who was working for who, who had what agenda, and who was on what side of the thin blue line. Damon is a detective sergeant that snitches for the mob boss, and DiCaprio is an undercover cop that infiltrated his organization. We’ve seen these sorts of roles before, but this is the first time I’ve seen them inhabited by Damon and DiCaprio, and they handle them with precision and authenticity.. Damon is the clean-cut desk sergeant on the surface with a rotten core that connives and plots against those around him, and DiCaprio is the street-smart cop with a criminal family that has gotten him so deep undercover he doesn’t know which way is up. This is another entry in a spree of great performances from DiCaprio.. he’s been amazing in Blood Diamond, The Aviator, and Catch Me If You Can. He can definitely be counted in the list of the next generation great actors.

The other performances, on the other hand, aren’t quite as enjoyable. Mark Wahlberg turns in a foul-mouthed, comedic, but ultimately irrelevant performance that’s fun to laugh at but often just gets in the way… avoiding spoilers, though, perhaps it’s not entirely unnecessary after all. And then there’s Jack Nicholson… probably one of our most talented actors, has one goofball scene after another that parodies his previous work with a manic, overstated performance as the mob boss. In the presence of more careful and targeted acting in the film, it comes across as silly and decidedly not criminal mastermind-like. As much acting clout as Nicholson has, I don’t think he has enough to make this role work. And Alec Baldwin, who has become sort of a master of A-list cameos, is ultimately forgettable and somewhat wasted.

The stuff that does work aside from DiCaprio and Damon is all Scorsese… the long, complex, unbroken shots interspersed with the quick, dramatic still shots, the symmetrical framing of key scenes, the broad color strokes, and the classic rock soundtrack that underscores scenes of severe brutality and once again creates that bizarre juxtaposition that can only be called “Scorsesian.” It’s a triumph for him to be finally recognized with an oscar for direction, although ironically I don’t think this is his best film. The Aviator, Goodfellas, and Bringing Out the Dead all show an artist at the height and mastery of his craft.. this movie shows us that he can still handle a cops and mobbers movie better than anyone, but I kind of got a “been here, seen that” feeling throughout this movie. Not that it made it a bad film, I thoroughly enjoyed it.. it’s just surprising that this movie won him the oscar.

I highly recommend this one. One down, many more to go for this amazing year for movies.

Wow, I'm behind on movies.

2007-02-25T14:00:00.000-06:00

I’ve seen a lot of good movies this year… Borat, Pirates of the Caribbean, Miami Vice, Blood Diamond, Casino Royale, Flags of our Fathers, Idiocracy, even Snakes on a Plane. I enjoyed them all for different reasons; some made me think, some made me laugh my ass off, some were just a lot of fun and made me enjoy going to the movies again. But none of those were even on the best picture roster this year.

But now, post-Oscars, I’ve got a whole list of movies to watch now. I haven’t seen any of the best picture nominations, for example.. so now I need to go see Little Miss Sunshine, the Departed, Letters from Iwo Jima, and Babel. I’m really excited about The Last King of Scotland, too.. I’ve always admired Forest Whitaker in everything he’s done (he was especially menacing and formidable in his guest role on “The Shield” earlier this year), and I’ve read a lot about this new movie but I never got a chance to see it. Supposedly it’s some of the most powerful work he’s ever done, so I’m pretty excited to see that.

It’s good to see Martin Scorcese finally bag an Oscar after so many awesome movies.. I don’t know if The Departed will stack up to his previous ones or not, but I think he had uncannily bad luck in getting nominated during years when there were a ton of good movies and directors nominated. I think Djimon Hounsou got snubbed this year, though.. I’m sure Alan Arkin was good in Little Miss Sunshine but damn Djimon Hounsou turned in an amazing performance in Blood Diamond. He owned every scene he was in, and had many moments of frightingly powerful emotion during such chaotic happenings in that movie.

So, in the end, a very strong year for movies in my opinion.. I felt like I saw more movies in the theater than my usual, but I still managed to skip all the best picture nominees. I guess I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.