Sam Kahn’s glorious return to the blogosphere
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a steaming pile of shit that stinks as much as this movie. This isn’t even laughably bad like the Wicker Man remake… it was just straight up bad. As cool as the concept of an army of dragons fighting helicopters and tanks might be, it doesn’t save this movie.
If you want to see a Korean monster flick, skip this and watch The Host instead.
I ended up bored with this movie. The action felt hollow, the main character wasn’t interesting, and the narrative was dull. I hated the writing; it’s full of really bad one-liners that aren’t bad in a good way, and I think Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti were wasted in this film. The movie fetishizes guns to the point of stupidity… I know that was the point, but it’s just too overt.
Check it out on DVD, if you must.
Death Wish for the Lifetime crowd.
I saw Neil Jordan’s latest with Pat and Lannice yesterday. In The Brave One, Jodie Foster plays a radio talk show host whose life is shattered when she and her fiancé are mugged — he is beaten to death and she goes into a coma for three weeks. Foster buys a gun to feel safe on the street, and ends up becoming a vigilante who begins to question her morals as she befriends the detective (Terrence Howard) investigating her.
Overall, the movie is above average. While it’s not a meditation on violence on par with the level of something like A History of Violence, it has a bit more pathos than your average revenge flick. It does, however, also lack the inventiveness of Oldboy, which I saw again recently.
The highlights of the movie were the dialogue exchanges between Terrence Howard and Nicky Katt, playing two NYPD detectives. Foster’s performance was good, but Howard is really a joy to watch.
My cousin Daniel visited this weekend from Berkeley, and brought down Super Mario Strikers Charged.
Overall, the game is very fun. It’s played differently than any other soccer game I’ve ever played; the pace is much, much faster, and there’s a huge emphasis on fouling. More accurately, you can’t foul in the game — you’re encouraged to attack players on the other team. The only penalty is the other team will occasionally be awarded an item if you foul hard enough.
Each team only has 5 players, one of which is the goalie, who you only control when he’s holding the ball. The field is also small. These things, along with item attacks, plus character offensive/defensive moves, and the superhuman force of some of the kicks, make the game play blazingly fast. One charged strike from the team captain can almost instantly score 6 goals.
The only weak part of the game is the controls. I didn’t like the button layout. Having to constantly switch thumb placement from the A button to the Wiimote’s D-Pad simply isn’t very comfortable. The game has exactly three Wiimote specific motion controls. The first two are gestural, flicking the Wiimote to hit a player and flicking the nunchuck to switch items, and the third is using the Wiimote as a pointer to block the soccer balls that come at you when defending from a captain’s charged strike move. Really, the game would have been far better suited to a standard Cube controller or the Wii’s Classic controller.
The game is also exceedingly difficult in single player, but multiplayer is a blast, whether playing VS or co-op.
My favorite part of the game by far is the animations for all the characters after they score, and the animations for the team captains when their team is either winning or losing. Each captain also has his/her own theme music in a unique style, which is awesome. My favorite so far is probably Luigi’s flamenco music.
You can see animations for a bunch of the other characters at Roliation’s YouTube gallery.
So I remembered why I got bored last time playing Pokemon for the Game Boy as I began getting bored yesterday playing Pearl for the DS. The game simply doesn’t have very much depth. Nintendo’s idea of adding depth to the game is adding more Pokemon. They do a dual battle thing occasionally, where you control two Pokemon fighting two others, but it doesn’t happen often enough.
The story is almost non-existent, the world isn’t very interesting, and there’s no engaging characters of any sort. If I’m expected to slog through RPG grinding, I need those three things.
On that note, off Pokemon Pearl goes to eBay, and off I go to play more Bioshock.
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