District 9

The first time I saw this movie I absolutely loved it. I saw it a second time tonight and I loved it just as much as the first time. This is probably the most believable sci-fi I’ve ever seen. The acting is brilliant, the dialogue (largely improvised) isn’t fake in the slightest, and the visuals are outstanding.

The coolest part of it I think is the pseudo-documentary style in which about half of it is filmed. It makes everything seem so real and part of the actual world. The South African setting is brilliant, and the accents really help to take the edge off of any leftover hints that this didn’t actually happen (at least for me, maybe not for South Africans). The docu-style eases off a lot during the second half due to the plot advancement, but it’s still wonderfully filmed and the composition of the CG elements is astounding.

One thing that is both a boon and a detriment to the film is that is based quite heavily on apartheid and real events that occurred in that area. The aliens (usually referred to as Prawn) take the place of black communities that were relocated against their will in order to maintain separation. This takes away a little of the originality of the film, but it also gives it great emotional backbone and adds a lot of power to the story.

It’s quite a violent movie. I’m entirely cool with that. I suppose I’ve been a bit desensitized to this sort of thing but it didn’t seem gruesome to the point of un-watch-ability by any means, and it was all just very impressive, especially the alien weapons (e.g. pig-throwing gun).

Much like a lot of my favorite movies and shows, a lot is left to speculation; like why did the aliens come to Earth, where are they from, etc. Some of these holes might be considered plot holes, but the speculation part can pretty much cover that. Exposition ruins things.

So yeah. Probably the best new movie I’ve seen this year.

Inglourious Basterds

It was long and sometimes entertaining.

That’s it I guess. To be honest I didn’t like it all that much. The action was pretty okay and it was nice to look at, but Tarantino’s tendency for epic dialogue scenes begun to bloat a bit too much. In previous films he’s put down some really snappy and interesting scripts that make you want to go back a watch again. This one just has lots and lots of pretty dreary expositional stuff peppered with a few moments of the usual brilliance. There wasn’t much in the way of characterization that I was hoping for; only a few of the characters were really interesting, maybe three. Most were just faces.

Brad Pitt did a pretty good job and got the most laughs. Mike Myer’s cameo was pretty pointless. I was hoping BJ Novak’s part would be fun to watch, but it really wasn’t.

If it had been pared down to two hours I guess it would have been alright, it just dragged a lot. Yeah that’s all I have to say about it.

 

EDIT: Ooh ooh I know why it wasn’t great, Sam Jackson wasn’t in it! Big mistake Quentin. Big mistake.

The Goon

The Goon is awesome. It is also a comic by Eric Powell, and the main protagonist thereof. I just read it. Well, most of it, since its still ongoing presumably. Also there’s gonna be a movie.

It’s a sort of mobster-noir thing with zombies and a lot of rather sick humor. The art is often stellar, and the stories can often be quite emotionally gripping. The amount of character in the characters is pretty great. The Goon himself is a hulking semi-superhuman with a thinly disguised moral compass and an emotionally torn past. His buddy Frank is a loud-mouth crazy weirdo with a lot of loyalty to his friend. Together they help defend a town from hordes of zombies (they call them “slack-jaws”) brought by a mysterious, nameless man that goes by The Priest. Other odd villains show up from time to time, usually with hilarious beatings resulting.

It’s not always funny. There is some serious emotional stuff too. One part of the story was written as a graphic novel called “Chinatown and the Mystery of Mister Wicker” which ties in with the general storyline while flashing back to a significant part of Goon’s past. There are no laughs in the entire book; it’s pretty heavy. One of the first pages is simply black with big nasty letters saying “This Ain’t Funny.”

Still, it’s all extremely entertaining and loads of fun. I’m most certainly looking forward to seeing the dreadful duo on the big screen.

Six Feet Under

So, I’ve gone from my longest watch straight to my proportionately shortest watch. This show has five seasons at 12 or 13 hour-long episodes each, and I’ve stayed up late and angered my parents by sitting around in my room in order to finish it in about nine days. I watched Breaking Bad’s first season  in pretty much a single seating, but that was just seven episodes. No big deal. The reason for that was that it was a fantastic show, and it holds true for this one as well.

Six Feet Under revolves around a family-owned funeral home somewhere in California. That is, it centers on the family and their relationships with each other and their friends/enemies/loves/etc. In fact, all of these traits are often present in the same person. Everyone in the show is flawed to varying degrees, which sometimes made it difficult for me to like them depending on the flaw. I guess a show this close to my pessimistic view of reality just makes me mad.

Of course, there are good times along with the bad, which makes it watchable. The actors is superb, the writing is great, and it doesn’t rely on cliff-hangers nearly as much as most other dramas I’ve seen. A pretty cool trick they use extensively is the dream sequence, which almost always includes a conversation with a deceased loved-one. It’ usually made obvious that it’s not some mystical communication with the dead; rather, it’s all in the mind of the dreamer and a product of their emotional state. These mind-ghosts are a great way to get inside the heads of the characters without crappy voiceovers or whatever. Sometimes they’re funny and sometimes they’re pretty horrifying, but they always get their point across.

Every character in the show can be analyzed to hell. If I had the inclination I could probably write essays on them for quite some time, but I definitely don’t. The common theme for them is a seemingly self-imposed spiral to destruction. Everyone makes bad decisions over and over. Usually everything looks great for a little while and then just goes to crap. Cue the next disaster cycle. Repeat until the sappy montage at the end of the series. It was good to have a positive resolution.

It was a good watch, and I’m glad I watched it. Now I’ll be quite happy to find something light-hearted to enjoy.

Angel

This one might take the cake as the show that took me the longest to watch (aside from those that I watched while they were still airing). I think I started it about a year ago, although the majority of that time was spent not watching it. The first and second seasons really didn’t make me want to keep going. That’s the thing with this series; unlike Buffy, which for me had a pretty much constant hook, this show started out mostly bland and later turned into a completely awesome piece of entertainment.

As has been observed by people more observant than I, Joss Whedon works best with a big cast of core characters. The show started out with just three, and then stuck with four for quite a while. It was really boring. By the end this number had pretty much doubled, although it changed pretty frequently. There were also more fringe characters who stepped in once in a while.

Of course, even with the big cast the show didn’t really step up until season 4, when it finally transitioned from an almost purely episodic feature to a cohesive storyline for most of the season. Watching episodes back to back is a lot more fun this way; I tend to think it would be even cooler week by week, with all the anticipation from cliffhangers and whatnot.

The final season is really where everything shone the brightest. There was another epic storyline (several really, they all just worked together) that made continuing the marathon Angel sessions fun, a bunch of sultry babes, and lots of really good acting and dialogue. Joss was able to contribute much more to the show since he had no other projects at the time, and it shows.

It’s really a shame the show was canceled; apparently it happened due to Joss’ impatience with WB’s bureaucratic BS. He called them up for an early renewal, putting them on the spot, which prompted them to get all pissy and moronic. No more Angel on the screen.

Thankfully (sort of) the stories for both Buffy and Angel are being continued in comic form. I’ve checked out some of them and have been very confused, but I figure I’ll give them another shot soon. I like comics.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

A few years ago a friend of mine introduced me to The Curse of Monkey Island, the third game in the Monkey Island series of adventure games by LucasArts. It looked really fun, so I got a hold of the game and  have since played through it several times. A bit later I played the first game, The Secret of Monkey Island. It was very dated, as it was one of the first games LucasArts developed using their SCUMM engine; lots of chunky pixels and minimal sound. It was still quite fun, if maybe a little more difficult than number three.

Now, 19 years after the release of the cornerstone of this popular series, the classic has been given a new face. It’s still very much the same game, although the size in bytes has increased by a few factors of 10; new crisp artwork and sound overlays the original animation code to keep the feel of the game while making it seem much more current. The voices are the same as those in The Curse, which I’m pretty happy about.

The only difference in gameplay is the omission of the actions and inventory screens from normal play. In the original, they were always present, making interacting with the puzzles pretty easy, barring somewhat confusing pixels. Now you have to hit keys to bring up the two panes, although the actions can be accessed individually using keystrokes. Still, there is at least one point in the game that switching to the old interface (an awesome thing to be able to do) is pretty much necessary in order to solve a puzzle, since the new inventory screen always closes whenever you use an action on an item, no matter what. It’s a little annoying, but it makes room for the beautiful new art.

Even after playing it before, I still had to consult a walkthrough once in a while to get through it. Some of the solutions are just too clever for my feeble mind to conjure. Anyway, massive props to LucasArts for refreshing this classic. Go pick it up on the Steam platform  for a mere 10 smackers.

Public Enemies

So. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Can’t go very wrong there, can you? Not really.

This is a good movie. It is not a great movie. There’s a good amount of tasty gun fighting and some rather odd romance, and Depp is a great character actor as usual. Bale plays his part well, although it’s something of a lame part most of the time. The story is based on truth as far as I know, so that’s pretty neat.

However. The thing most people seem to be focusing on, including myself, is the use of new digital cameras in the filming. It is extremely noticeable. The frame-rate is much higher (at least it seemed so) than usual, so everything looked very real. You’d think this would be a good thing, and it’s probably what the cinematographers were going for; but it takes something away from the movie. It loses some of the fluidity that motion-blur brings to the big screen. This, coupled with a lot of the increasingly popular shaky-cam technique gave the movie an almost soap-opera look. A few sudden transitions and a bit of nasty sound editing also detracted from the experience.

Again, it’s a good movie. It probably would have been better if it weren’t one of the first films to use this new technology and had the resources to make it look good.

I’m looking forward to seeing Depp in the new Gilliam movie The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, including the late-great Heath Ledger in his final role.