Rocky Balboa

Happy December 26th, everyone! Or, as the Canadians, Aussies, and Brits would say, happy Boxing Day! Ha! Get it? Boxing Day? Rocky Balboa? (If you're groaning or wincing right now, I can't blame you, but I'll take any gimmicky excuse to watch a movie at this point; Christmas has massacred my backlog and I've got a lot of work to do if I have any chance of netting any progress on the year in my movie count.) If you pay attention to this blog with regularity, you'll recall that I watched the second, third, fourth, and fifth Rocky movies in a three-day span last September. The devolution and degradation of the franchise were slow and steady but very total; between '80s robots and over-the-top anti-Sovietism and, well, Rocky V, the series ended on a note that must have been an utter embarrassment to its Oscar-winning roots. At least, that's the way the situation stood for sixteen years. And then Rocky Balboa came along and saved the franchise's legacy. The Rocky we see here today has endured several key changes in his life and returned to simpler means in an unassuming Philadelphia home. He runs a restaurant. He's still a proud man, but he knows his glory days are far behind him, and he almost seems happier that way. - at least until he decides to go for broke and compete in one last boxing match. I give Stallone all kinds of credit for this one. No one at all was calling for a continuation of the Rocky franchise in 2006, and during its production the project was an easy target for ridicule and lampooning. But he wrote and directed a pretty good movie all the same. And the guy also got ripped all over again - at sixty years of age, no less - and put on a great performance to boot. I enjoyed this movie and the good news is that you don't even need to see any of the first five flicks to appreciate this one just fine.

Halo: Reach

I know, it’s been forever. I told myself at the beginning of December, “Trevor, this is the month. Regardless of how busy you think you are, we’re getting shit done! End of story.”

Hardly.

Joining the mainstream here, I have recently completed Halo: Reach. Having only beaten two of the previous (following?) four games, Halo and Halo 3, I won’t praise myself as a Halo expert, but I didn’t understand lick of what was going on in this game. Ok, prior knowledge of this epic tells me of the war between the Covenant and humans as they race across the galaxy to activate the Halo rings, which are in turn suppose to be a weapon used to destroy the Flood - those damn pesky parasite-creatures that can apparently wipe out the whole world if not properly contained. So after playing most of the trilogy I think I’ve got a fair grasp on this storyline, but Bungie and Microsoft can’t leave well-enough alone. Not when there’s money to be made.

Let’s rewind the clock. Before the discovery of Halo. Before Master Chief is awoken. A simpler time. We enter Reach.

What is Reach? I have no fucking clue. Once again, regardless of what I knew from the trilogy, none of this seemed to apply. The only thing I’m sure of is that the human’s are losing this war against the Covenant... and the Spartans’ suits looked a lot cooler in the past. But wait, why is there a war against the Covenants? I find myself pondering. Who knows? Once again, no idea of what’s going on.

Now, I realize there are answers to these questions. That there is a coherent storyline that - I’m sure - many people were able to follow, easily. But I guess my lack of understanding doesn’t strain from a convoluted plot, it’s from a boring plot. I could barely keep my attention through half of the cut scenes in the game. Oh, we’re getting chase from point A to point B again? Oh, we have to destroy this _________ to make another stand against the Covenant? This is all new and refreshing. How innovated, I can’t imaging my brain wandering away from these captivating dilemmas that all mirror each other.

The Halo franchise is a great FPS, and I have just as much fun with it as the next guy, but do you have to beat the story to death. What was wrong with the trilogy? The story was over, wasn’t it? Did we have to reopen it again for just another few million dollars?

Oh, wait. I see your point.

Ok, well... if there’s anything else I have to say about the game is that the ending sucked. I can’t say anything for Halo II, but the first and third games all have incredible endings where you drove out on your Warthog as disaster nipped at your exhaust pipe. It was awesome, both times. However, the ending with this guy was pretty anti-climatic. Jumped into a big gun and shot down shit. Wasn’t even that hard and it was over in the blink of an eye. You’d figure if the makers were going to recycle the same damn game again, they would at least make sure to include the best part. Guess not. Eh, lame.

Well, at least Bungie claimed - while the credit scene begins to roll - that this is the end to the franchise. I don’t know that I necessarily believe them, but I am somewhat relieve. Let’s see something new. I know you guys can do it... I think? At least think of it like this: You’ve done your big blockbuster and made heaping globs of cash. Now it’s time to do something risky, avant-garde. Sure, you may fall flat on your face and disgrace yourself totally, but at least you’ll be making a stab at trying to bring something new and fresh into the world - something that and can captivate audiences as they bare witness to your stunning creation.

And if all else fails, I’m sure a prequel to the prequel is long overdue.

Young Frankenstein

Unable to sleep due to a horrible bout of indigestion, I decided to log another movie late last night. This time I turned to the 1974 Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein. This is the fifth or sixth Mel Brooks movie I've seen, and his works have ranged from memorably excellent (Blazing Saddles) to frustratingly subpar (Robin Hood: Men in Tights). I'm happy to say that this was one of Mel's better movies, not just in my opinion but in the general consensus opinion as well, it seems. Filmed entirely in black and white, it very accurately parodies the old Frankenstein movies both stylistically and thematically. I need to give recognition specifically to Gene Wilder, who impresses me more and more each time I see him in a movie role. With all the (deserved) attention being given to the late Leslie Nielsen for his deadpan performances during silly and outlandish circumstances, I want to at least point out that Gene Wilder is a similarly talented buffoon. The rest of this cast was pitch-perfect as well and the whole movie really did seem like an enjoyable experience for Wilder and Brooks, who claimed that this was his personal favorite of all his movies. My favorite is still Blazing Saddles, but this one is right up there too. If you tend to like Mel Brooks flicks, this one seems like one of the better ones. Enjoy!

X-Men Arcade

The year was 1992 and I was five. So neither did I play or remember when this game came out. But as I grew older and Fox Kids started airing X-Men the Animated Series, did I notice Nightcrawler and Colossus on the side of arcade cabinets. Then my quarters disappeared.

This Xbox Live and PSN game made by Konami was polished and released by Backbone Entertainment. It is the same game you'll fine in the dusty corner of any forgotten arcade, but made for the stay at home gamer; which helps and hinders the game play. First of all, if you want to beat the arcade game, you're going to need more than $20 and at least five friends. Both were hard to come by at a young age. So this download game is $10 and has multiplayer online so every one can enjoy the full game. Choice given are difficulty, four or six player and which style you want to play. The styles are USA and Japanese. After playing the Japanese game, I realize that American arcades really were just a place to loose money.

In the American X-Men arcade game you had 3 lives, a ten hit health bar and two orbs which represented uses of your super powers. If you use your super powers, you lose life until you're down to your last hit. Then you start using the orbs. So if you even want any help fighting the Blob or the White Queen, just do it like a normal person with punches and kicks. You're just throwing your life away using super powers apparently.

In the Japanese version, which for some reason still is all in English, with just a smattering of Japanese subtitles, the game is much more designed for playing at home on a console. You still have the same health bar and orbs, except you use the orbs first and then you start tapping into your life force for your powers (which isn't canon, but nothing from this game really is.) This means you can at least blow up everything on screen then get your punches in afterwards. The single best reason to play the Japanese version is that it has drop items! Something that would save too many quarters in America, you can pick up extra health and extra orbs for powers. This version makes playing the whole game a much more enjoyable experience.

Now playing and beating the game isn't hard. You don't rack up points, you rack up continues. So if you do well, you can keep on going after you die. But its not like you get 2 or 3 continues each level. No, you get about 100 each time you punch the air. So the game loses any kind of challenge right away. Can't fight Nimrod? Then just die one thousand times and maybe you can finally get a punch in. Even in Expert mode, where you need those 100 lives to get past the first level, no one has to use any kind of strategy. Just power spam until your life is used up, then die and get them all back. It is really the only depressing part of the game, that there isn't anything stopping you from beating this once epic monster of challenge in less than 25 mins. (Which is a trophy.) The only incentive really is to beat it fast with little death to end up on the online leaderboards.

The real treasure is that is a great port from the arcade, includes wonder mutants which any X-Men fan enjoys, yes even Dazzler, so any one a fan of beat-em-ups, X-Men or only spending $10 on the arcade game ever again, this is a fun download that can be beaten a few times with friends.

The Great Outdoors

Color me unimpressed! A while back I watched (and posted about) Uncle Buck, a John Candy movie which I partially remembered from my childhood, and I was greatly disappointed. Sadly, the same applies to The Great Outdoors. This 1988 comedy definitely had a number of notably funny scenes and lines, but ultimately it felt like a very so-so movie. The Dan Aykroyd character just kind of bugged me the entire time. A subplot in which John Candy's teenage son woos a girl felt horribly cheap and lazy, right down to the fact that the same generic musical theme played every time their trite relationship was revisited. There were two red-headed twins that seemed to be there only to look weird and creepy. I'm not saying this movie was awful, but I am saying that it wasn't nearly as good as I seemed to remember it being. But I'm happy enough to be snowplowing through my movie backlog at a rate of a movie per night lately. After all, it's best to bail out as much backlog clutter as possible before the inevitable Christmas flood.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

The drought is over. Im posting for the first time in many weeks and I am happy to say it is a very rare post for me, a video game. I realized recently that I have played many of the Zelda games but I have not beaten one of my childhood favorites, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I remember playing it a lot as a child but I never managed to start it and play it all the way through till the end, so that is what I set out to do. I started in the middle of last week and I played the entire first section of the game, the light world, in about two hours. I was very pleased with myself and perhaps I forgot the length of the game but I went on to brag to several fellow posters about the fact that I had beat "half" the game. I was sorely mistaken in this statement, as I had completed in reality less than a quarter. Embarrassed and re-energized by my mistake I set out to complete the game in a timely but thorough fashion. I am proud to announce that I completed the game in less than a week and when I say completed I mean COMPLETED. I got every item, including all four bottles, the care of byrna, the magic cape and even all three magic coins.

The game play was much as I remembered as a child. The game, initially on SNES, has been, as I believe Sweeney has recently stated, "dated." The graphics were probably top of the line in its heyday but absolutely nothing to write home about today. I played a downloaded version on the wii and I felt that the game continually lagged and sometimes completely froze for a couple seconds. This did not hinder my game experience but it lead me to ask myself whether it was the downloaded version of the game that caused this problem or if the SNES version suffered from the same problem. I will add this to my list of questions I will probably never go far enough to actually research the answer to.

The game consists of three "temples" in the light world, a desert one, a water one and a woods one. Then it consisted of seven temples in the alternate dark world that the boss Gannon sucks you into after you defeat his alter ego the magician at the end of the light world segment. The first three temples are child's play in comparison to the seven dark world temples. The boss at the end of the first dark world temple took me seven tries and three or four controller throws to complete. After dying for the umpteenth time in the sixth dungeon I threw a temper tantrum, shut off the wii and walked away too cool off. only to realize later that I hadn't saved for quite a while before doing so and I ended up having to replay a good chunk of the game, a good punishment for my childish behavior.

Over all the game was fun and I am glad I played it all the way through. It was a staple of my childhood that I really needed to complete. Playing this game mostly reminded me that I have very little patience for video games and that I have a short temper with a tendency to announce to any innocent bystander that the makers of the game were assholes and that the inanimate bad guys were cheating. I threw a minimum of a dozen hissy fits and alienated most of my family. To them I am sorry, mostly because I have rejuvenated my desire to be a faithful and diligent addition to the back blog and that includes nailing down some other video games I have half played, including another member or two of the Zelda saga.

Hollywoodland

I watched this movie last night while wrapping up a shit ton of Christmas presents. I probably should have waited until I could pay close attention before watching a murder mystery movie like this one, but I mean, I had to watch something last night while wrapping Christmas presents. So be it - better Hollywoodland be the casualty than something more noteworthy like Lawrence of Arabia or Dog Day Afternoon. Because my eyes weren't on the screen for the entirety of the film, and because my brain wasn't processing every single line that my ears heard, I'm afraid to say I didn't appreciate this movie as much as I probably could have. But the good news is that I appreciated it a lot more than one might think I was able to. It was pretty slow-moving and dialogue-based, so I definitely got a feel for the caliber of the acting, writing, and direction. A quick Wikipedia visit has filled in the narrative gaps for me. It'd be totally absurd for me to still "recommend" this movie since, you know, I couldn't even bring myself to give 100% of my attention to it. But I will say that from what I saw and heard and followed, I did enjoy this movie and I bet the average movie fan would too. And really, that's as much as I can say.

Where the Wild Things Are

In an homage to the original book that served as the basis for this movie, I will make this post nine sentences long. No, seriously, they made a 101-minute movie out of a nine-sentence kids' book. Spike Jonze is one of my favorite directors and the minute I heard that he was attached to this film adaptation, and that Dave Eggers was the writer, I knew it was one that I wanted to see. The most important distinction to make about the movie, as expressed by Jonze himself, is that this is not a movie "for children," but rather a movie "about childhood." I thought the character design for the Wild Things was utterly fantastic and I also loved the portrayal of Max as a lonely and fantastically imaginative rascal who acts out of line at home only out of a desperation for attention. The Wild Things - who are never explicitly implied to be extensions of Max's imagination - personified a lot of the emotions, thoughts, and fears that Max had. Jonze and Eggers were very effective in exposing and exploring childhood themes such as innocence, confusion, and frustration. A criticism I have is that the flow of the story was a bit abrupt and jagged at times, but I suppose that since most of it took place in Max's wild imagination, that only makes sense. All in all, I think this is a great expansion of the world and story first told and illustrated by Maurice Sendak way back in 1963.

Halo: Reach

The last Halo effort coming from Bungie before they move on to other things, Halo Reach is a prequel that according to most reviews righted all the wrongs of the maligned ODST. I thought ODST was decent if not overpriced, so I went into Reach with high hopes. And to be honest, they weren't really met (in the campaign only!). Reach tells the story of some major sacrafice that allowed Master Chief to do what he did in the first three games, something really brave and noble. The thing is, the game couldn't keep me interested long enough to actually know what that sacrafice was. The game's fantastic from a technical standpoint- it looks amazing, excellent voice talent, and probably my favorite music of the entire series. The shooting gameplay is as great as ever. But when it came to running through the actual missions, it just seemed like more of the same. "Run to point A! Kill everyone there until we tell you to move on! Now shoot this random thing til it explodes! Run away!" Nothing I felt like I hadn't done before. Aside from a surprise mission half-way through that introduces a fun new vehicle, only the graphics made it feel like anything new. However, that's not to say this is a bad game. A mediocre campaign to me was saved by the best online multi-player yet. I've only played it a few times at Stan's house, but the introduction of upgrades like sprint, jetpack, and my personal favorite hologram, all add a fresh new twist to the same great gameplay Halo's had all this time. And honestly, online play is what most people are going to buy this game for anyway. So yeah, single-player didn't do much for me, but don't let that scare you off.

The Simpsons Movie

Has it really been three and a half years since this movie came out? Where has the time gone? Actually, The Simpsons first aired three days shy of twenty-one years ago; the movie "only" took place one sixth of the show's lifetime ago, and perhaps that's why it feels so recent to me. Now, most shows that I watch with regularity are shows I own on DVD. And thus if I watch a series regularly, I'm more likely than not to have seen every episode. But I'm terrified of owning every season of The Simpsons on DVD. Absolutely petrified. Can you blame me? They're on their twenty-third season and only fourteen of them have come out on DVD (and one of those is Season 20 - go figure). Maybe someday. Anyway, my point is that I haven't seen all 473 episodes of The Simpsons. I probably haven't even seen half of them. Hell, 150 sounds like a stretch. And yet, I've watched it on and off - both new episodes and reruns - for something like fifteen years. I'm by no means a hardcore fan, but I'm certainly a long-time fan. So I was just as skeptical as anyone that The Simpsons Movie would finally be the straw that tapped the well completely dry. But it was a good movie. The focus was primarily on the Simpson family itself, where it belonged, rather than all the secondary and tertiary Springfield townspeople as has been the case with so many of the 473 episodes. It was funny from beginning to end with just the right amount of epic adventure and moving tale. In short, it was very well done. I would totally watch another Simpsons movie in theaters were Matt Groening to make one. (I had heard at one point that they'd try to make a total of three, with the third being the be-all end-all franchise ender, but that sounds a whole lot like fan speculation and Internet hearsay.) Anyway, because I won't be purchasing any Simpsons seasons for a long, long time, and because no second movie has even been confirmed, this is both the first and last time you'll hear me talk about The Simpsons on this blog.