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June 23rd, 2014 – 4:52pm – Whatever Happened To…

…Some of the great actors of the 80’s and 90’s?  (And even before in some cases?)  Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed several formerly A-list stars showing up in really crappy movies.  And not crappy as in they just flopped at the box office, but crappy as in blatant B-movies.

• Al Pacino and Ray Liotta in The Son of No One – What a boring and inept film.
• Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore in Freedomland – Insipid garbage.
• Christian Slater in everything he’s been in for at least 3 or 4 years; Dolan’s Cadillac, Alone in the Dark, etc. – He was always kind of a sleazeball, but he managed to find decent roles.  Now he’s leaving a legacy as a garbage movie vet.
• Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger – Ok, clearly not a B-movie, but he used to be great in edgy roles…he still does weird stuff but it’s like it’s always got some kind of sickening goofy spin on it.
• Demi Moore in LOL – Fucking seriously, have you seen this?  Miley Cyrus is her daughter.
• Nicolas Cage in everything he’s been in for the past few years – Again, not necessarily B-movies, but even the premise of most of his recent films sounds bad.  They couldn’t have picked a worse Ghost Rider.  Oh god, and there was that “Sorcer’s” thing too…
• Brad Pitt in The Counselor and Killing Them Softly – You know, on the surface, both of these looked like throwbacks to the gritty hyper-violent Tarantinoism of the 90’s that got copied left and right.  Both of these got off to decent starts, putting themselves in a position to turn into something memorable, and then both fell completely flat.

What happened to these folks?  Why are they taking these roles?  Is this me getting old?  Do people 10 years younger than me think of these people as “big stars,” or do they rail off people like Chris Evans, and Channing Tatum, and Ashley Green, and Megan Fox?  When I think of big stars, I think of Hanks, Cruise, Willis, Freeman, Roberts, DiCaprio, Travolta, Deniro…but I guess they’re starting to age out…

June 22nd, 2014 – 1:42am – 300: Rise of an Empire – Necessary, or Nonsense?

Much to my surprise, I found a copy of 300: Rise of an Empire a few weeks back while browsing torrents.  I was excited that I’d get to see it before it hit DVD, but I forgot about it and was only reminded of it from recent commercials.  Oh well.  But I absolutely LOVE 300, so I was really excited to see the sequel.

300 is one of the finest films ever made in my opinion.  I don’t just “like it” in the way that I like Rambo or The Descent or Dredd; I think it’s a goddamn modern-day classic that will be remembered and studied, and 100 years from now when the subject of late 20th and early 21st century film is debated, 300 will be right up there alongside the Matrix trilogy, Vanilla Sky, Memento, Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers, and…well you get the point.  It’s one of my most memorable film watching experiences and beyond its brief pop culture appeal, I believe it to be an excellent exercise in filmmaking, storytelling, visual effects, historical renditions, and comic adaptations.  Gerard Butler’s extremely convincing performance holds it all together despite the cast having few familiar faces.  With that said, I knew I should probably make a slight adjustment to my expectations before moving into Rise of an Empire, but I remained hopeful nonetheless.

300: Rise of an Empire gets an A for effort (okay, maybe a B) but it fails because it tries both too hard to imitate the original 300 and too hard to emerge as a standalone work.  Our main character, Themistocles, portrayed by no-name Sullivan Stapleton, is woefully inadequate at capturing the audience as either a character or an actor.  As a character, he’s nothing but an ideal, a walking, talking, propaganda machine, with little semblance of humanity.  No family, no background, just a guy that really fucking loves Greece.  As such, it’s hard to give a shit about him.  It’s difficult to connect to a main character who exists solely to drive the plot.  This Stapleton guy sleepwalks through the role, which doesn’t help either.  Granted, Butler’s performance was a lot to live up to, but instead of trying to play a watered down version of Leonidas, they should’ve given him a whole different personality.  For all I know, the guy could be a brilliant actor and the script is 100% responsible for the failure to develop an interesting focal point for the film.

Speaking of all this GO GREECE, GREECE FTW speech that pervades Rise of an Empire, let’s touch on historical accuracy for a moment.  Now I don’t care to nitpick about what kind of sandals they were wearing, and I am extremely forgiving of inaccuracies that result in a more complete and entertaining movie-watching experience.  The stuff from 300 that was flubbed, misrepresented, or outright fabricated were all in good fun and in the name of entertainment; for example the Persians as fucking monsters or the fact that our heroes were running around in close combat with long, flowing, obstructive capes.  In Rise of an Empire, however, every 3rd sentence has to do with uniting Greece.  It’s not even a minor thing, it’s a major, recurring thread throughout the film.  What the filmmakers blatantly ignore is that the concept of nationalism as we know it didn’t really start developing until the mid-Middle Ages, and even then it took it hundreds of years to mature into something we’d recognize today.

“Greece,” when referring to the time period portrayed in the movie, is a loose concept that historians and educators have applied to that general area back then.  These guys would’ve never though of themselves as loose affiliates in this “country” called “Greece.”  The city-states made alliances with each other out of necessity and benefit, but to them, a Corinthian and an Athenian and a Spartan were just as different as an American, a Briton, and an Australian are to us.  They shared a language, but that was about it.  Hell, the city-states warred with each other much like countries would!  Why the writers decided to inject large amounts of the concept of a “unified Greece” into Rise of an Empire is beyond me.

The simple truth is that the Persian army was out to conquer, and these city-states realized that if one fell, the Persians would be at their door next, so they banded together to defeat a greater threat.  Simple as that.  And once they (finally) won, there was still no unified Greece.  I can see where the average person might make the error.  Oftentimes “Ancient Rome” and “Ancient Greece” are referred to in tandem or at least as similar entities.  Most people are aware that a thing called the “Roman Empire” existed, and I think naturally equate a similar status to “Greece.”  But it was never the case.  But why would the writers ignore this?  I don’t know, but it’s a much more egregious error than putting stirrups on a horse in Europe too early; they manage to change the entire motivation of the Greek city-states.

So yes, hearing GREECE GREASE GREECE GREECE GODDAMNIT did drive me half-crazy (as did the constant mention of Leonidas despite Butler’s lack of involvement), but if Rise of an Empire had been more kick-ass in other ways, I could’ve maybe dealt with it better.  In 300, we’re introduced to the Spartans, the most badass badasses that ever lived.  Their entire society was structured around the military, and even though 9 year old boys may not have been out fighting werewolves with a stick in their underwear during the dead of winter, it was a harsh society that celebrated the rewards consistent with brute force.  In fact, the other city-states regarded Sparta as somewhat backwards and barbaric, while the Spartans looked at their philosophy and art with a mistrustful eye.  So for almost an hour and a half, we get to see the most badass dudes kick ass.  Now, we have another film where we watch less-adept soldiers kick ass, sometimes.  The combat doesn’t have the impact that it could, because we’ve already seen the best of the best in action.  For the riveting sequel we get to watch….less awesome battles?  It makes the battles feel completely pointless.

It feels the same way with regards to the villain.  Spartans vs the God King is followed by Athenian boy-lovers vs. a (fucking twisted) girl.  Where’s the excitement and adrenaline?  300 packed as much testosterone as the balls of Swayze, Stallone, and John Fucking Locke all swingin’ around the ankles of Col. Kilgore during a napalm drop at a 1983 Metallica concert, so how the hell is this “pritteh goud far eh bansh a’ fahmahs, eh?” (that’s “pretty good for a bunch of farmers, eh?” for those of you unaccustomed to nondescript-Eurotalk) supposed to be anything resembling badassery?  It can’t.  It can’t fucking touch it.

Ok ok, to scale back the criticism a little, I did like the direction that the naval battles were going in.  We don’t get to see much ancient world naval warfare, so I did enjoy that to an extent.  I do not, however, understand the logistics of ramming Persian ships while the GREEKS FREE GREEKS stood unsupported on the plank that passed for a ship’s deck.  Furthermore, the sequence near the end where they’re jumping all around broken ships like fucking Mario is laughable and a bit too much of a stretch.

The stylized violence and gore that 300 stylized oh so well was all but absent here, though a grotesque shadow seemed to linger.  Instead of the crayon-like blood spatter from the first film, we’re treated to gloppy, glossy, way-too-damn-digital bodily fluids.  It looked bad.  Just plain bad.  I was also bummed at the lack of wildly fantastic guitar driven episodes of unusual violence, such as the original film’s sequences with both the elephants and rhino.

If there’s one damn reason to watch Rise of an Empire, no matter how much I’ve already dissuaded you, it’s for Eva Green’s breas…er, sick and fucking twisted portrayal of Artemisia.  Unfortunately, the same level of depravity that makes this character so interesting to watch also produces a couple of the film’s most embarrassing moments.  By and large, it’s clear that Green really ran with the role, and even though Artemisia was a bit one-dimensional, she did manage to bring some intrigue and tragedy to the table.  Without a doubt though, her WEIRD AS HELL sex scene with Thermistocles was bizarre, unwarranted, and marked a point of no return with its gratuitous nature.  As the viewer, you completely understand the scene’s intent as soon as Thermometer grabs her and starts ramming his tongue in her mouth…so why does the scene drag on for another 2 minutes while he rams his rod in her ass?  Nonsensical.  And yes, with those facial expressions and all that squirming she was doing, it was definitely in her ass.  Clearly Thermidor isn’t the big dick motherfucker that Leonidas is/was, but he’s got to have someone going on down there after killing a fucking king on a boat from the shore with an arrow.  Seriously though, this is one raunchy scene, even topping all that useless sex that Starz throws into their period dramas.

I haven’t even gotten to the worst part yet.  As weird and as random as the sex is, it’s not until near the end that you realize what it was for: to set up the worst line of the century, spoken by Ms. Green herself – YOU FIGHT HARDER THAN YOU FUCK.  Or, in their indistinct vaguely European accents – YOU FAHIGHT HAHDA THON YOU FAHCK.  Once you finally manage to recover from that, you must then contend with the strong, stoic Queen Gorgo from the previous film leading the charge of Spartans a la Leonidas with the most forced and contrived bloodlust I’ve seen in a long time.

Well, that about sums it up.  Were it not the sequel to 300, it would be lumped in with the other ancient-era failures of the last few years; The Immortals, Clash of the Titans, Legend of Hercules, etc.  It’s not just the film’s silliness (which is what much of this ultimately equates to) that brings it down, it’s the lack of anything to connect with or focus on.  Without a standout lead to invest oneself in, one begins turning his or her attention towards every little detail and incident, and therefore what might be done in the name of “poetic license” quickly becomes absolute absurdity.  Sadly, movies like this will probably end up killing off period dramas and action flicks for the next 7 to 12 years, but you’d think after such a string of failures, Hollywood would learn their lesson by now:  find more Gerard “BIG NUTS” Butlers.

June 21st, 2014 – 6:44am – Obsession

I’ve gotten very little of my gaming “to-do list,” or much of anything else, done in the last few days.  I’ve become completely obsessed with typing out all 197 countries (currently recognized by the US) as quickly as possible over at http://www.sporcle.com/games/g/world .  I first found Sporcle a few years ago, and though I have fun doing the quizzes for the sake of entertainment, completing the Countries of the World map soon became a favorite activity.  Once I found that it was perfectly doable, I got into doing it as quickly as possible…and now the bug has bitten me again.  I’m not sure what kind of records I set 4 or 5 years ago, but so far my best time nowadays is 4 minutes and 21 seconds!

When I first re-learned and re-memorized all that I’d forgotten, I was coming around at about 7 minutes.  I was quickly able to knock that down to 5.5 to 6 minutes on average, and now I’m holding steady at about 4:35 – 4:50.  I’d like to eventually work my way down to 4 minutes; anything beyond that seems physically impossible.

During any given session, I find that my first 1 – 4 attempts find me fumbling through the first minute or so.  I’m not exactly slow, but I’m not quite going at an even automatic pace.  Sometimes I even get ahead of myself and type the first letter of the next country instead of the last letter of the country I’m on.  For example, I always type argentina followed by venezuela, and during those first few tries I make a lot of errors like “argentinve” where I don’t finish typing one word before moving to the next.

Once I get over that, I tend to zip a long really well for my next 3 to 5 attempts.  Minimal stumbles.  Beyond that, my fingers get fatigued and I guess I start thinking about it too hard and I’m making lots of errors that drag me down to the lower end of my average.  After that I have to hang it up for a bit.  Sometimes, after I’ve made maybe 2 or 3 attempts and then do something else for a few minutes (answer an email, change the channel, whatever) my fingers retain some sort of magic and generate some of my best times.

It could really be anything, not just countries.  I don’t look at the map, I don’t have them memorized in any geographically specific way other than by continent and count so I know if I’ve missed any, but this rarely happens anymore…I just GO.

Keep at it for a couple of weeks and report back to me with your best times!

June 17th, 2014 – 1:53am – Cube’s To-Do List

Still intent on photo-cataloging my entire collection, especially hardware.  It looks like I’ve got several projects/game on my plate…I can’t ever seem to get caught up!

• Finish Mirror of Fate so that I can move on to Lords of Shadow 2
• Burn Game Guru for the 3DO and cheat like hell
• Keep plugging away at several of these motion control games in an attempt to do some serious comparisons between the games and motion peripherals….been putting a lot of time recently into Kinect Sports Season Two, Wii Sports Resort, Kinect Sports Rivals, and also plan on getting down with Kinect Sports, Sports Champions, Wii Sports.  If only they’d go ahead about put the PS4’s PlayStation Camera to good use…
• Dig into the piles of Project Obscure material that I promised myself I’d get to.
• Catch up on some of the mounds of Kirby games I’ve been amassing.
• Finish up all the Castlevania games, including 2 for the PlayStation 2, 3 for the GBA, and 2 for the DS that I haven’t played.
• Start collecting the 10 North American Virtual Boy games I don’t yet have.
• Find and buy a Virtual Boy link cable…but there doesn’t seem to be any floating around.  However, there are a few pages out there with instructions on constructing a link cable, and I’m always down for a fun cable-related DIY project.
• At some point, I’d like to collect all of the 70ish Atari Lynx games.
• Perform a hypothetical pin replacement in the NES and write it up as a DIY project.
• Play Astal like I told David I would…

And all of that is in no particular order.  I did manage to get most of my previous list accomplished, even making a home for my PS3!  Let’s get started…

May 26th, 2014 – 8:06pm – The first pics from my attempts at chronicling my complete collection are coming in…

May 24th, 2014 – 10:33am – Pompeii’s Fireworks Lukewarm at Best

On the whole, I enjoy a lot of cinema’s “historical epics.”  Be it medieval, ancient, or some other time period, I dig watching these sorts of stories unfold and the special effects and production design are a big draw as well.  Even those that would focus more on mythological elements fall into the same boat for me, but the last few years have seen a string of losers:  The Immortals, the 2 recent Clash and Wrath of the Titans, the new Hercules film….none of this stuff has done it for me.  Add Pompeii to the list, even if it is a bit of a different film.

With an all-star cast of “oh-yeah-I-forgot-about-them” actors like Trinity, Mr. Eko, and creepy Dark City doctor, I thought I had a halfway decent flick on my hands.  The PG-13 warning should’ve tipped me off.  Don’t get me wrong, studios have been able to make the PG-13 rating work in some cases (Live Free or Die Hard, for instance), but it’s really limiting stuff that could otherwise be top notch.

What promises to be essentially a disaster film set in ancient times gets off to a really weird start.  The story borrows heavily from Gladiator.  Our main character does the whole quick and efficient kill against multiple opponents in some dingy provincial arena, even throwing his sword down in similar fashion.  At one point he even throws a splintered staff at the senator, (Crowe almost does the same with a spear), and despite his scoffing at Rome, earns approval from the crowd.  On yeah, and at one point, the crowd even cheers “CELT CELT CELT”…doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “Spaniard,” does it?  Let’s not forget that his main buddy is an African slave, where they also refer to each other as “brother” and say shit like “I’ll see you again my brudduh.”  Mr. Eko even stabs the Commodus look-alike goon in the neck with a broken sword.  One of the gladiatorial bouts acts as a historical reenactment that’s supposed to be a slaughter of slaves by the military, but guess what?  Our protagonist leads the disorganized band, and despite being outnumbered and outmatched, surprise, they win!  Seriously, it’s like Anderson just watched Gladiator, sat down to figure out how Pompeii was going to play out, and completely forgot that all his ideas were coming from a film he’d just watched.  The love story has similarities as well, where it seems like the ultimatel bad guy and super good guy have ties to the same woman.  Everybody stole all that shit from Braveheart anyway.

What isn’t lifted from Gladiator borrows liberally from the Starz series Spartacus, itself one giant ripoff of 300.  The speaking patterns, our “hero’s” backstory, his vendetta against military commander-turned-politician, the early 3 scene rivalry between Mr.Eko and CELT…they did all of it, damn near word for word, in Spartacus’ 3 seasons.

What bothers me the most is how unnecessary all of this shit is.  At about an hour into the film we finally get to the eruption (despite an earlier fake out where Danny van Zandt the horse trainer gets swallowed by the earth), and I guess this whole gladiatorial/princess/evil senator backstory was just a mechanism to get us caring about what the fuck happens to these people.  It doesn’t work.  Nevermind that the backstory is completely unoriginal; Anderson just does not know how to create dramatic tension, likeable/relatable/3 dimensional characters.  His Resident Evil films, while flash and full of style, lack any sort of soul, as did his new-ish steampunk interpretation of The Three Musketeers.  

The eruption itself is pretty cool, and will probably manage to grab your attention since the first half will have long since left you to entertain yourself on your phone.  But apart from the special effects and the path of destruction, there’s nothing of value.  It feels just like a Roland Emmerich flick where he’s interested in showing you all this crazy shit but does bother to convey the experience meaningfully through characters that the audience can identify with.

Films like Pompeii remind me why I’ve gravitated towards horror over the last 10 or 15 years.  Anyone who thought action flicks from the 80’s and 90’s were brainless should realize that they were at least funny and soulful.  Today’s action films might be more plausible or realistic, but they lack soul.  Dramas nowadays are long, boring, sprawling slices-of-life without clear beginnings and endings, and now filmmakers who don’t know how to tell an actual story are regarded as “brilliant.”  At least I can stick to horror and know what I’m getting myself into.  At least, no matter what, horror can usually deliver on the visceral thrills.  At least horror tries to be entertaining, a trait I’m seriously wondering if Hollywood has forgotten about.

May 19th, 2014 – 5:35pm – It feels good to cheat.

As you may or may not know, I have no qualms about using cheat devices when it comes to video games.  Sure, I love the act of legitimately beating them as much as anyone, but sometimes I just want to see as much of the game as possible.  I frequently snatch up all the “game enhancers” that I can get my hands on when I don’t have some pricey game or obsolete piece of hardware to track down.  I’ve always lamented that many of the secondary systems lacked cheat device support: the 3DO, CD-i, Jaguar, TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo, etc.

However, late last night as I was looking up 3DO model numbers, I spotted something called the “Game Guru.”  Immediately this sparked connotations of the “Game Genie” in my mind.  After a few more seconds of digging, I discovered that it’s a cheat device actually made by 3DO with some incredible powers; it can even be unlocked to provide even more powerful shit via modifying its own internal config file or some shit!

Bad news:  The running rate, even for a used one, seems to be about $130.  You could probably score an FZ-1 3DO for that much, maybe even a little less.

Good news: It ain’t nothing but a CD so I can BURN IT!  (And the 3DO has like, zero copy protection shit going on so burned discs work fine, all the time, no strings attached.)

I have the file downloaded and am just waiting for the mood to hit me to try this out…I can’t wait!

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