Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Seems like ages since I played Assassin's Creed II. In general, I've always enjoy this franchise. I mean, other than Mirror's Edge - another game I intend on finishing - this is one of the only "parkour" style games. Scrambling around your city's buildings as you make your way to your next kill. Well, the sequel definitely satisfied me. Then, a few months after its release, this guy comes out. No, it's not the official third installment, but rather an add-on to Ezio's story from the second game. I'm sure there are plenty that became excited at its unveiling. Me, no so much. It looked as though this was just an overpriced DLC that really should have been included with the original game. Just another way to make some extra cash on this already massively successful franchise. With all that in mind, my prejudice caused me to shy away. That is until the third game came out...

Regardless of some of the negative reviews Assassin's Creed III has already received, I'm very much interested in playing it. It wasn't until fellow blogger Sween mention Brotherhood to me that I game the game my consideration. Not only did he explain the game was actually fairly good, but he also enlighten me on the franchise's main story arc. With that in mind, it became clear that no matter how much I wanted to delve into the third official release, if I wanted the full picture of the narrative developing in the present day I was going to have to experience every game in this series.

Bravo, Ubisoft... you brilliant, marketing bastards.

Brotherhood is an excellent game, just as Assassin's Creed II is an excellent game. Although there was a significant gap between my experience with each game, the two do kind of blur together. Not necessarily in a bad way, but nothing stands out as a brilliant accomplishment on Brotherhood's part. All I will say in the game's benefit I became addicted to building up the city of Rome. I become quick and easy to start buying up property, which then allows you to earn more and more money. Can you do a whole lot with that money? Meh, not much. I mean, it didn't seem to take too much time before I had bought pretty much all that I wanted to buy. Then, all the cash that I was receiving was entirely unnecessary. Still, I praise the games ability to make me become addicted to this need to purchase all these buildings and landmarks as if my life depended on it. I got some sick joy from it all.

Oh, and another - albeit - small accomplishment was the very simple fact that you're able to get the final, specialized armor a good deal before the game ends. This is something that should definitely be applauded. I mean, if you spend the time and energy jumping through the hoops and hurdles to get this crap, at least allow me some fair playtime to enjoy it. Many games fail at this, providing you with their super-duper power-ups mere moments before the game ends. Thanks for correcting this problem here. 

Other than those two points, the game - like I said early - feels like a carbon copy of the first. The story - from what I understood - wasn't gripping, nor was it bad. Gameplay was satisfying, but nothing original. Weapon system allowed for some fair leveling and growth, but still seemed somewhat limited. 

More than anything, I believe I'm treating these games now as a means to an end. I just want to see and understand the main, over-arcing plot as I near Assassin's Creed III. Hopefully the next game, Revelations (I believe), will provide me with  more satisfaction, but after reading the reviews, that doesn't seem like it's going to happen.

Sigh... 

The Wire Season 3

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Those are my feelings about the Wire season 3. I wasn't a huge fan of Season 2. It took the characters I new and loved (yo what up String) and put them in the background to dock workers. It was still good, but it wasn't the greatness that season 1 was. 

Season 3, despite taking me longer to watch, was as good if not better than season 1. It takes drugs and adds some political turmoil. Stringer Bell has turned the drug war into a business. Avon, his brotha from anotha motha, may get released from jail. Avon is a little more gangsta than Stringer through and has a different way to run the business. There are turf wars with new character Marlow, who despite looking 15 is actually 22 and a pretty accomplished drug lord. One police man, Bunny, takes cleaning up the West Side into his own hands. One politician, Little Finger, wants to shake things up on the political scene. One group of rag tag cops (same group as before!) are still going after the Avon/Stringer drug crew with some good ol' wire taps. One guy is happy to go to jail just to get away from his crazy girlfriend.

And McNutty and Bunk still get drunk a lot. 

Great season. BUT I'M REALLY ANGRY. 

Hide

Lisa Gardner has long been one of my favorite thriller writers. She only published three books this year (looking at you James Patterson). Fortunately, her books are filled with quality and intrigue. I believe she also writes them herself. Novel concept, I know.

This book is about a murder. Shocker! The police find bodies of young girls and a hidey hole on an abandoned mental institution. This hidey hole is major deja vu for our main character Bobby Dodge. Bobby is a former special teams sniper now homicide detective. He sort of killed the husband of an almost murder victim that he was dating. I think that was against policy. Anyway, this hidey hole was a throw back to an old case with this almost murder victim that was kept in a hole for a long time. Are they connected? Maybe. One of the dead girls pops up alive in the beginning of the book. Aint that confusing. Turns out she has been alive the entire time but changing her name because her dad was paranoid. Turns out, her dad wasn't that paranoid because now the killer is after her.

Drama ensues. Good guys win. I should start reading better books.

Arrested Development Season 2

This took me a long time to get through. I posted season 1 last Christmas Break when I was on vacation and powered through that season. One year later, I have finally finished season 2. And Steve is not happy! He thinks I don't like the show, which isn't true. It's a really funny clever show. The problem is I don't think funny clever shows are "must sees". There is nothing the draws me to a comedy. No real story line. No real drama. Just small story arcs infused with humor. I get why Arrested is beloved. The jokes that reference one another through the entire series. The subtle references to the actual tv show. The hilarious and incredibly unlikeable characters (what up mrs. featherbottom?) Buster gets a hook. Literally. In this season his arms get ripped off by a seal and he gets a hook as an arm. "I'M A MONSTER!" quoted by some as a favorite line of the series was very funny. But for some reason, I just can't bring myself to watch this show quickly. I'm never like "hot damn, do I wanna watch Arrested".

I'm going to go watch Revenge now.

Captain America

Captain America is just a boy. A skinny boy looking to join the army and defend the U S of A. Unfortunately, the army doesn't take skinny boys with asthma. Thankfully, he has a lot of heart. And because he has a lot of heart he is picked for a crazy science project. This crazy science project turns him into a super hero of sorts. I'm unlcear the extent of his abilities. He can run far and fast and for long distances. He is super strong. He has great accuracy when throwing circular objects. All these things combined together make Cap'n 'Merica!

This is another good backstory detailing how our beloved hero got to where he was today. Literally today, because at the end of the book he wakes up in present time. Which is sort of weird and I don't think I understand.

What is also cool is the integration with other Avengers story lines. Tony Stark's dad is in this as the brainy but cool defense contractor. Apparently his story line takes a turn for the worst if you have seen Iron Man.

I'm also sad for Captain America because he doesn't get to go on a date with his lady love.

Thor

Have I mentioned that I'm awful at timely blogging? There are from the past two months if you were wondering. Have I also mentioned that I have a thing for handsome manly men with long blond hair? Well I do, and I love Thor! After seeing the Avengers this summer I decided I should see Thor because he was awesome. And it was real good.

1. Natalie Portman is in it. I had no clue because she wasn't in the Avengers. Apparently she is his mere human physicist lady love.

2. Stringer Bell is in it as an awesome "gate" keeper. Yo, what up String?

3. Loki is in it. Apparently he is the bad guy in Avengers but I forgot that. Now I get to find out what drove him to evil.

Overall, it was an entertaining action and humor filled movie that followed Thor from spoiled strong man to humble strong man.

Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

Yes, we do! The badass terrorist villain that is both doctor and ninja returns in this book to carry out a murderous plot. However, before we meet her again, Alex Cross needs to get interrupted on Christmas with his family to go help a crazy man who is threatening to shoot his family in his home. Alex Cross is so awesome at his job that he both talks the man off the cliff AND saves the guy from being sniped. Wowzers! Finally getting home to spend Christmas with his family, he gets ANOTHER phone call. Can you believe these guys? Calling Alex Cross on Christmas? Jerks. Anywho, crazy terrorist lady is in the train station and threatening to do bad things. I bet you can guess how the story ends.

This is the 19th book! I thought it was the 20th, but who's keeping count? Apparently it was only 100 pages in paperback. So not only has he stopped writing these books, but has has also stopped generating complicated ideas for them. He released twelve books this year. That is a lot if you want them to be quality filled. I guess that's not a problem for him. He is releasing the 20th Alex Cross book next year. Maybe I will boycott it? Also, if you were keeping track, the FINAL Maximum Ride book was released this year. Bird People!

Kill Alex Cross

It wouldn't be year end, if I didn't have a few James Patterson Alex Cross books to post about. I actually just found out he doesn't actually write the stories. He uses a ghost writer and gives them an extensive plot line. I think that's pretty lame. Just because you've reached a point in your success that you want to publish 10 books a year doesn't make it ok to stop writing. I can come up with stories. Does that make me a writer? Nope. So James Patterson, booooo.

Anyway, this is a "typical" Cross thriller. The president's son and daughter are kidnapped. (Been there done that.)A radical terrorist organization has poisoned the water supply and trying to create mass havoc (24 anyone?). Surprise, Alex Cross is called in to help because he is a police/FBI/profiling genius. Alex Cross wins. There is a pretty bad ass female character in this book that escapes at the end. Will we see her again?

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Recently Jose Saramago threw me for a bit of a loop when I read one of his novels and it turned out to be one giant reference to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, a story I was at the time completely unfamiliar with. I still enjoyed Saramago's The Cave quite a bit, but knowledge of this bit of meta-commentary seems like it would have helped my understanding of the book as I was reading it. Unfortunately, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis was so heavily loaded with similar meta-references that I was pretty much hopeless and couldn't enjoy that book nearly as much as The Cave. The Year of the Death starts out well enough- I actually was liking it plenty for the first 3/5 or so- a simple drama about a man  (the titular Ricardo Reis) who returns to a pre-WWII Portugal from post-revolution Brazil and attempts to start up some romance with a few women and catch up with an old friend named Fernando who might not be alive. The big problem here is that it turns out the potentially dead friend was actually a real person in history- Fernando Pessoa was a real author who actually existed, and not only that, but Ricardo Reis was the 'character'- created by Fernando in the first place! Saramago was writing a 'sequel' to some other guy's wacky ideas- so meta! Not only that, but throughout the novel Ricardo Reis periodically reads through sections of a book called 'The God of the Labyrinth' by fictional author Herbert Quain. You better believe this is meta- as all fuck too. Yes, that fictional book and fictional author are really references to very real author Jorge Luis Borges, a guy I've been meaning to get to reading at some point. Borges made up Herbert Quain and that novel, so Saramago tosses the fake book and author into his story about fictional/nonfictional authors who may or may not be dead. Wow! It's surprising that most of the book is actually pretty straightforward. But while some research beforehand may have helped my understanding (I'll probably give the rest of Saramago's books a cursory Wikipedia check from now on), I doubt it would have made me like the book that much better- as I said before, I actually liked The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis for a bit past its first half, but it turned into a slog of historical fiction towards the end as I just ended up wanting Ricardo to hurry up and die already. Sure, the final scene ended things on a nice note, but I was ready for Ricardo Reis to be done. Three more Saramago novels (and one surprise novella!) remain in the backlog.

The Legend of Zelda

As with so many classics from the days of the NES, playing the original Legend of Zelda 26 years after the fact makes it feel incredibly dated. I do have vague memories of being a young gamer (like, 6 years old) running around and killing things in Hyrule, and I'm pretty sure I accidentally stumbled upon the final level by accident and the creepy music gave me quite a scare, but I never actually got too far with the original Legend of Zelda. This all ended... about a month ago, when I finished that last sentence. Oh god, I've put off this entry for quite a while. It's no knock on the game, merely the fact that I've kept myself busy in the month of December. Not even logging, but holy crap has Halo 4 multi-player taken up a lot of my time. Anyway, Zelda. It's the original, and it's hard to ignore how revolutionary this game was. A lengthy adventure game like this didn't really exist at the time and it's made with such high quality that it's still playable today. Not particularly fun anymore, but playable. It's completely bare-bones Zelda- a 'plot' that exists in a sentence or two, tons of exploring and finding items, stumbling onto dungeons, and such. I played this as a downloadable title on my 3DS, and as such was able to take advantage of an emulator-like save feature that lets you save at literally any moment in the game, no matter what is happening, which made this significantly easier than normal- you could save after each enemy kill in particularly hard areas. Still I found the game pretty tough- the old NES controls are pretty unforgiving. I'm happy I got the original Legend of Zelda out of the way for completion's sake, but I won't be returning to this first installment again.

That '70s Show: Season 5

Five down, three to go. Only one of which is currently in the backlog.

How familiar was I with the season's various episodes?

I sound like a broken record at this point, but once again, I was very familiar with this season's episodes. I mean, I had no idea going into this little section of my backlog that I'd already seen at least a hundred episodes of this silly little show, but I had definitely seen almost all of the first five seasons in their entirety. How? In an age before DVR or On Demand or Internet streaming, I have no idea.

Were there any key ways in which this season was different from previous seasons?

This season finally addresses the fact that the kids are still in high school by making them contemplate colleges and graduate from high school. Hooray! Donna also spends most of it in a school girl outfit, which lent itself to an immediately tired running gag wherein all of the guys would howl and cheer when they saw her do simple things in said uniform such as crossing her legs or bending over to pick up fallen objects. On the bright side, this season more than any before it showed some significant character growth. Jackie, especially, kind of grew up a little bit after spending most of the previous seasons as the shallowest and most one-note of the main characters aside from Fez. The constant power struggle between Eric and his dad also came to a head for a lengthy arc. Oh, and Hyde had a beard briefly.

Any particular highlights or lowlights worth singling out?

First and foremost, 2003 Jessica Simpson. Not current mother-of-two Jessica Simpson. Not "mom jeans" failed country singer Jessica Simpson. We're talking Daisy Duke-wearing Newlyweds-era cover-of-Rolling Stone Jessica Simpson, who 14-year-old me thought was the most gorgeous woman on the planet at the time. To be honest, 24-year-old me revisiting her in 2012 wasn't nearly as blown away - but then, what 24-year-old is as blown away by any woman as any 15-year-old? Point is, Jessica Simpson - who has ironically long since been overtaken in the famously good looks department by That '70s Show alumna Mila Kunis (and probably even Laura Prepon too at this point) - was still one of the season's biggest highlights for me this season in her three-episode stint. That doesn't mean the rest of the season was loaded with lowlights. I can't even come up with a single lowlight, actually. It just means the season was even-keeled enough - par for the course, if you will - for 2003 Jessica Simpson to still be one of its highlights. Even in 24-year-old me's eyes.

Final thoughts on anything else relating to the season or series as a whole?

Something - my gut, my shady memory, I dunno - is telling me that this pretty decent fifth season is the last good one. I know Season 8 lacks both Kelso and Eric, and I know somewhere in Seasons 6 and 7 there are points where Fez dates Jackie, where Kelso has a baby with someone (Shannon Elizabeth?), and where Eric and Donna - despite ending Season 5 engaged and ready to move in together - break up again.

And that was Season 5, an enjoyable and light-hearted set of 25 episodes I'm glad I revisited.

Homeland: Season 1

A bipolar CIA agent, hiding her mental condition from her coworkers and superiors, suspects that a recently rescued American prisoner of war has been indoctrinated into a terrorist organization during his time in captivity. Where the nation sees a war hero, she sees a suspicious character and a potential terrorist. Meanwhile, said war hero and potential terrorist struggles to return to civilian life and to his family. His wife's been banging another guy for years now and he barely recognizes his own children. Is his occasionally odd behavior a sign of his intentions to commit heinous acts of terrorism, or is it an understandable byproduct of his remarkable journey through hell and back? Back at the CIA, our heroine is absolutely convinced that this guy is a terrorist, and wants anyone at all to just hear her out. She's abrasive and domineering, though, and short on allies at the workplace. No one believes her. Should they, or is her manic suspicion just a sign of the obsessive nature that comes with her condition after all? Oh, and to complicate the matter just a bit, the CIA agent begins to develop an attraction to the war hero, and before long the two of them meet in person and begin a relationship of sorts.

This is the basic premise of the first season of Homeland, the show that took award season by storm last year with all kinds of buzz and acclaim and accolades. In less capable hands, the plot I've just described would come across as flimsy and convoluted. The easy way to stretch the mystery into a full season would be with a series of various psych-outs. The cheap way to do it would be with an ever-deepening web of conspiracies. But Homeland did things the honest way, and more impressively, it worked. It worked beautifully. There are twists to be had, for sure, and plenty of episodes end on great little moments where we the audience are given new pieces of information about what happened to the war hero during his time as a prisoner of war, but the show manages to string together twelve episodes in a row without any bait-and-switch techniques or "just kidding" misdirects. This kind of crap plagued 24, especially in its later seasons, and helped undermine that show's integrity (along with all kinds of physical impossibilities and plot holes, to be sure). Homeland, on the other hand, feels about as honest as a show about the CIA and terrorism possibly could. Anchored by two phenomenal lead performances from Claire Danes and Damian Lewis, this show just churns along confidently, dropping the occasional information nugget along the way and resisting the urge to reveal too much too soon (or to reveal non-truths disguised as answers only to pull back the curtain a few episodes later). It is both character-driven and plot-driven in a way that so few other shows are. Even though Homeland reveals the answer to the "is he a terrorist or isn't he" question with several episodes left in the season, those final few episodes are just as tense and suspense-laden as the first few.

I really, really enjoyed the first season of Homeland and I'll be sure to catch up on the second before the third one premieres next fall.

Mario Kart 7

Ooh baby, Stan's got himself a 3DS! An XL model, to be precise, and one that came with Mario Kart 7 pre-installed. I've dumped several hours into this game over the past few nights, winning gold on all eight cups in both the 50cc and 100cc game modes. I figure this constitutes beating the game, but I'll certainly spend some time finishing off the 150cc and "mirror mode" cups as well for completion's sake.

The Mario Kart series is about as formulaic as can be at this point, and this isn't a bad thing. Going into the game, I knew I could expect sixteen new tracks and sixteen remade tracks from earlier games in the series. I knew this because that's exactly how the last two games in the series - DS and Wii - worked. I also knew that the last two races in the special cup would be Bowser's Castle and Rainbow Road because that's what the last two races have always been in Mario Kart. Gameplay-wise, I could jump straight into my first set of races without any tutorial or peek into the instruction manual, knowing exactly how to drift and hop and get boosts and such. I was able to do all of this because Mario Kart 7 remains essentially the exact same game that Mario Kart DS was, with the graphical quirk of being in 3D and a couple of gameplay additions like driving underwater or gliding through the air after large jumps. There's also a new item, the raccoon tail, which gives you a temporary rear defense against shells and such.

I really enjoyed this rendition of Mario Kart just as I have enjoyed them all. As I sat there playing my new 3DS late into the night, it occurred to me that Mario Kart 7 was the perfect game to come pre-installed on the 3DS. "Hey, here's something you're probably very, very familiar with. Check out what it feels like in 3D. Neat, huh?" Anyway, I was a big fan and I look forward to completing those 150cc and mirror mode cups. I also look forward to plenty of great titles on the 3DS. Acquiring a new game system is a great way to increase your backlog, but it's also pretty damn fun, so whatever.

Halo 4

I've been playing Halo 4 for over a month now, but only just recently bothered to check out the single player campaign. It wasn't bad. Previous Halo titles have struggled at times to offer a diverse enough set of levels to prevent me from yawning with boredom. I'll give Halo 4 this much - it was rarely repetitive or annoyingly dull. There were only eight different missions and for the most part each one took place in its own environment and had its own objective. While much of the game certainly did involve that bland old "get from A to B while mowing down whoever stands in your way" mentality, there was just enough going on to keep things fresh, I thought. The story picks up after the events of Halo 3, which left Master Chief floating aimlessly through space, literally. His ship approaches some Forerunner planet, then crashes, and then all of a sudden it's off to the races once more. There's an emotional story shoehorned into the mix this time, with sentient artificial intelligence unit Cortana coming down with some sort of software Alzheimer's and Master Chief promising to "fix" her. I won't lie; watching a barely human killing machine vowing to help out a piece of code gussied up as a naked blue chick was more surreal than emotionally stirring, but early on in the game I at least bought into it. By game's end though, when Cortana was downloading her software failure into an entire spaceship, and Master Chief was detonating nuclear weapons held against his chest but still surviving unscathed, I was scowling with every muscle in my face at all the bullshit that somehow passed for "writing" back at 343 Industries at one point. Blech. If this was really the "best Halo story ever" - and it actually might be - then there's been no bar set at all.

But I don't play Halo for its single-player mode. I'm all about the multiplayer aspect. Therefore, even though the campaign itself was a messy pile of dogshit that was often fun enough to slog through, I can still comfortably and confidently call Halo 4 an extremely enjoyable game thanks to its multiplayer mode. Hooray!

Skeleton Crew

I've read hundreds and hundreds of books in my life, but not a single one of them was written by Stephen King, easily one of the most popular and successful authors of all time. Until now. With so many other blog members posting about Stephen King left and right, I knew I had to jump in somewhere. But where? King's bibliography is massive and his body of work is diverse enough for portions of it, I'm sure, to appeal to just about anyone. Would I enter on the ground floor and tackle some of his earliest and most popular stories? Would I begin with something contemporary like Under the Dome? O how about that Dark Tower series that so many people seem to love, arguably his magnum opus? Hell, why not start with something that had already been turned into a movie I'd seen, like The Shining? Ultimately, I settled on Skeleton Crew, a 1985 collection of a novella and several short stories published in magazines and horror story anthologies between 1968 and 1985. It was a varied set of stuff, to say the least, spanning the genre gambit from speculative science fiction to gruesome horror to quirky tales about supernatural phenomena. The stories inside were as brief as four or five pages and as long as fifty. The novella, The Mist - now a feature film! - was 150 pages itself. All told, there were 22 separate works in here spanning 565 pages, and I've had more than an appropriate introduction to King's many different styles, quirks, and capabilities. I can't possibly talk about each and every story in here, so I'll just focus on The Mist and a few other highlights.

The Mist

This wasn't just the longest Stephen King piece I read; it was also the first. It begins with a severe storm that knocks out the power and several trees in a rustic little Maine town and it ends with a monster-plagued apocalypse throughout New England (at least). The bulk of the tale is told from inside a grocery store where several townspeople have barricaded themselves indoors to escape from giant spiders and carnivorous tentacles. The whole thing felt a tiny bit cheesy and B-movie-ish, but King acknowledged in a notes section of the book that he had intended for it to feel that way, as if you were watching the events of the book unfold at a drive-in theater. What impressed me here was King's ability to start with a totally normal situation - a big storm knocks the power out - and have his characters react in totally relatable and normal ways, only to escalate the situation (rather quickly) into a horrible spectacle of gruesome monster attacks. The end felt like a bit of an open-ended cop-out - a trick King would pull multiple times over the course of this collection - but, again, at least he acknowledged that his ending wasn't really an ending at all. This served as a great introduction to Stephen King and his storytelling capabilities and left me looking forward to seeing what he could do in a full-length novel. This was shameless schlocky horror at its best.

The Rest

Honestly, what followed was a mixed bag. Very few stories, if any, could be called "bad" or "boring," but I'm struggling to single out more than a few as being truly memorable in any way. No discussion of Skeleton Crew would be complete without mentioning "Survivor Type," a gruesome story about an experienced surgeon who survives a shipwreck with no food and a bag full of heroin. After messing up his ankle, the narrator and sole character decides to amputate his foot, using heroin (for the first time) to numb the pain. And since he has nothing else to eat... Yeah. Suffice it to say, the story plays itself out to its natural conclusion. My favorite story in the bunch - and I can't really say why - was "The Raft," another short horror story. In that one, four college friends decide to drive up to a remote lake after class one weekday for just one last swim in the lake before the autumn chill sets in. They swim out to a raft in the center of the lake and, well, not all of them make it back to the shore. There were all sorts of well-developed examples of friendship and jealousy and lust all over this one, and there was also an extraordinary amount of brutal gory detail. I was a huge fan. What else can I talk about? The story that lends itself to the original book cover image, "The Monkey," was pretty bland and disappointing; in that one, one of those grinning toy monkeys with cymbals wreaks psychological horror on a man. "The Jaunt" and "Beachworld" were futuristic sci-fi tales I enjoyed. "Cain Rose Up" was a disturbing quick story about a twisted college kid who goes on a shooting spree with a sniper rifle. I read it before the Sandy Hook tragedy occurred, and even still, it just sat with me the wrong way. I could go on and on. Again, none of these stories were particularly notable but very few were awful. Some were rather lazy and some were undercooked. One or two were even an excerpt from a planned novel about a serial killer milkman that just never panned out, I guess. Oh, and the book' final story - "The Reach" - was a nice little tale about an old woman dying and reuniting with old loved ones.

In the end, this book was all over the place, and it felt long even for a 565-page collection. I enjoyed my time here, but I'm glad it's over all the same. No longer a Stephen King virgin, I look forward to the many possibilities ahead.

The Life of Pi

Before I get started, does anyone else take the time to make sure that the picture of whatever book they are posting matches the actual book they read? It's a question I have been meaning to ask.

Anyway, Dee and her little band of misfit friends have a book club that they refuse to let me join. Last I checked I was a better participant in reading the books than most of the members who are allowed to attend the meetings. Last week they had their impromptu book club meeting for The Life of Pi and I had to leave the room because I am not a member of their club and because I had already started reading Dee's copy and didn't want the ending spoiled for me.

This book was fantastic. It was one of those books that I picked up and mocked for being a huge hit assuming that it was stupid and that most readers are stupid. I was wrong. This book took a couple of pages to catch me but when it did I had a hard time putting it down. I read it in three sittings, several days apart, and even when I wasn't reading I was contemplating what was going to happen next. The bulk of the story takes place in the Pacific ocean, where a young Indian boy named Pi is the lone human survivor of a shipwreck. I specify human because the boat is also the refuge of a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker. The writing is amazingly detailed. I hate to say it but it's one of those books that give you the whole range of emotions. You laugh, you get nervous, you cry and you fall in love with the character. Read it!

Duma Key

Another Stephen King book down.

Picked this guy up during the end of the summer while in Hawaii. It was sitting on the condo's Take-A-Book, Leave-A-Book shelf; figured, why not give it a go? After staring at it for a couple of months, I finally cracked it open and was not disappointed by what I read.

Every's been jumping up and down about the rumors that King will be returning to horror again in his next novel (something along with a sequel to The Shining), which always lead me to believe that he's been focusing on other genres this whole time. Duma Key, published in 2008, is a horror story about a man moving to the Florida keys, recovering from a traumatic construction accident that leaves him without a right arm, and finding himself doing battle with an evil spirit that has reawaken and haunts the nearby waters. Like most of King's work, it succeeds at providing some quality entertainment. Also a reoccurrence in King's work, there are many moments that could probably be cut down or cut out to bring down this 600 page novel to a more standard length - although a fun read, it's not really until 2/3 of the way through that the excitement and suspense cranks up. 

The full jacket cover (what I have displayed up top) really intrigued me when I first picked up this book. Other than the fact that this guy was free for the taking - no, I didn't exchange this book with another - the abstract, incoherent artwork was really... I don't know... cool! It made no sense and offers no insight as to what this book could really be about, unlike his more recent novels: Under the Dome or 11/22/63. Going in with this fascination at not knowing what the fuck to expect, I was surprised and delighted for a really chilling tale about supernatural spirits manifesting themselves through one's own artwork.

I'll drop a quick breakdown of the plot. No spoilers here. You have Edgar Freemantle, moving to a secluded little community out in the middle of the Florida keys. He's recovering from a traumatic construction accident that's both cause some slight brain damage and the use of his right arm... all of which has resulted in a divorce with his wife and a separation from his two daughters up in Michigan or Minnesota... somewhere cold and depressing. As part of his healing and therapy, Edgar begins to paint. While painting, Edgar finds out that he's good. Really good. Possibly a new genius on the rise. More importantly than that, Edgar learns he can alter reality based on what he paints or ever see into the future. From there, a bunch of weird shit begins to take off, all of which alludes to the mysterious past of the island that Edgar is currently living on. As Edgar unpacks this mystery, he learns of an ancient evil spirit that haunts the region and that this spirit is capable of using his paintings far more sinister acts.

I feel as though my goal is to always get one King book read a year. I have no - outright - goal to read his entire work, but I do think his novels are a great source of entertainment. While there are still plenty of his novels I'm eying (Misery and Skeleton Crew), the next one on the chopping block will 11/22/63. I've heard nothing but great things so far. Can't wait.

And back onto these reflections of Duma Key, it's not his best work, but I had a lot of fun devouring this guy. Like I stated before, there are plenty of points that could have been cut out as they're a little slow or maybe scenes could have been condensed a tad to keep the pace running. All that aside, it's fun, it's entertaining... and near the end, shit gets pretty damn creepy. 

Looking forward to my next read of his. Until then, I'll think twice before swimming in the Florida Keys.   

Big Love: Season 1

Last Christmas, my future in-laws gave me all five seasons of Big Love, one of their favorite shows, on DVD. I'm embarrassed that it took me a whole year just to watch the first season, but here I am now with the first twelve of fifty-three episodes in the books. I'll say this for the series - it's very inviting and watchable. HBO has produced plenty of deeper and more important shows than Big Love, but several of those have required a ton of up-front effort on the viewer's end for full appreciation. The Wire is my favorite show of all time, and it took two and a half seasons - half the damn series - for me to even understand what its big picture was. Deadwood was a great show, but I'm dying to re-watch it because I know I missed all kinds of stuff my first time through. Carnivàle? Forget it; I was lost by the second episode and already unwilling to turn back for clarity's sake. Big Love isn't a thematically deep show and it can't possibly go down in television history as being anything important, so to speak, but it sure is an easy show to watch.

The premise is pretty simple. A plural family in Utah (read: one guy, three wives) struggles both collectively and as individuals in various conflicts with their polygamy-loving church, society's judgment, and most often of all one another. The first half of the season served as little more than an extended introduction to the characters and their complicated relationships. Patriarch Bill is a businessman with the stressful self-imposed task of supporting three families; first wife Barb is a super-mom and the anchor of the family, but she's grown fairly disenfranchised by her radical sect of Mormonism and embraces her 21st century opportunities; second wife Nikki is the most devoutly religious one in the family, but also the shadiest, often scheming against her husband and her sister-wives or at the very least complaining about their behavior; and Margie is the third wife, just twenty-one years old and already a mother of two, still trying to figure out her place in the polygamous family. I was impressed by how interesting the series was capable of making rather mundane tasks simply by putting the "three wives" spin on things like going to the grocery store, sharing cars, and arguing about wills. The three wives were easily the most entertaining part of the show; I really never gave two shits what Bill was doing, either at work or in church, and mostly just wanted to see the dramedy of the family's unique living situation. Again, not the deepest show, but pretty easy to just sit and watch.

There are four more seasons, and I have to imagine the series will grow more plot-driven in time, but this first season was successful based on its characters and situation-crafting in general.

Kirby Super Star Ultra

I bought this for Danielle because she remembered playing Kirby as a kid. What she got was a game she played for a grand total of 20 minutes.  What I got was a semi-fun, semi-confusing, one-sitting experience. There were 6? worlds in this game before I saw the closing credits, one of which was just a race with Dedede. Most worlds had around 6? levels. Most levels had 6? bosses. It was very colorful. There were tons of different abilities, but the only one I really liked was the hammer. Anyway, I guess this was a remake of the SNES version, and I am confident this is the superior version, but I can't say that I was inspired to play any other Kirby games.

The Beyonders: A world Without Heroes

Friday I went to see The Hobbit (part one) with a very pretty friend from college. We sat Lux level at the Showcase In Randolph and when we picked up the tickets they gave us 3D glasses, a mini poster of Gollum and a book. The book, the first in the Beyonders series by Brandon Mull, was the odd item out in this situation. I told my "pretty friend" that I was going to read the book and post it on a blog I contributed to. She laughed and I informed her I was serious. She said "I know." So without further adieu here is my post for the book, and yes I am going to send her a link to this post.

This book, in typical fantasy fashion, reminded me of almost every other fantasy book I have read in some fashion. At its core its mostly an amalgamation of LOTR, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. It's the story of an angst filled teenage boy, Jason, who accidentally stumbles upon a portal to another world (much like lion the witch and the wardrobe). The other world has some magical properties and an evil wizard king who rules with an iron fist. While trying to find a portal home Jason stumbles upon a forbidden book that contains the first syllable of a word that will unmake the wizard King, Maldor. The book turns out to be a spy for Maldor so now that Jason has read the passage he is forced to find the rest of the word as Maldor now assumes he is an enemy and is hunting him. The rest of the book focuses on Jason trying to find the rest of the word.

I wont spoil the ending but I will say that this book is the first of a trilogy. Once again I wish I had done some research before starting this book. Now that I have started this series I have to know how it ends. The second book is in stores now and the third wont come out for another couple months.  I should have expected that a free book would be part of a series. It's a smart move to trick you into reading the first one so you will buy the rest of the series. Expect a follow up post with the second book by the end of the year. I have a lot of things to log but its the end of the year so I want to finish strong and clear some stuff out before Christmas gifts add to my BackLog.

Sonic Colors

This is the first 2D Sonic game I have played in a really long time and the first one I have ever completed. Based on my past experience, this is more of the same but with the addition of power-ups. Despite skipping every cutscene and tutorial, I was able to catch some of the story. Sonic and Tails (you can only play as Sonic) are headed to Dr. Robotnik's (you never fight him) theme park for some reason. There are five worlds filled with roller coasters and stuff. Each world has 2 levels and a boss fight. Each world has a different color sprite you can use to give you different power-ups from becoming a rocket, to becoming light, to becoming a drill to becoming something else that works like the rocket but in a different color, to becoming a ghost. All these power-ups offer new ways to get through levels, but only half of them are necessary. This game was incredibly easy until the last world (I was unaware that I had less than unlimited lives until the second to last level of the game). At this point, it got much harder. Still, with only 10 levels and 6 bosses, this sudden increase in difficulty couldn't make this game last more than 5 hours. Anyway, despite all my complaining, I actually enjoyed it. By no means buy it, but, like a quarter, if you find it laying on the ground definitely pick it up.

Mario Kart DS

The problem I had with this game is that I have already played Mario Kart Wii, Mario Kart Double Dash and Mario Kart 7 extensively before playing this. By playing those three Mario Karts first, I had already experienced 75% of the tracks on this game. Because of that, nothing felt new or needed. Though I like that Mario Kart always has throwback tracks, it also makes going back and playing previous iterations somewhat redundant. Mario Kart 7 does everything this game does and it does it better from graphics to gameplay to tracks, there is nothing in Mario Kart DS that I found superior. I will probably never play this game again because I have Mario Kart 7. Still, all my gripes aren't really fair considering this game came out in 2005.

Elf

As much as I find Will Ferrell's act tired and boring, it fits so perfectly within the context of this movie. Everything that is annoying about Will Ferrell the human is endearing about Buddy the Elf. I wouldn't be surprised if this will be watched for years to come and go down as one of the all-time Christmas classics. Also, the casting for this movie is phenomenal... Peter Dinklage, Kyle Gass, the lady from Back to the Future III and Andy Richter... what more do we need?

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

In some ways, the best part of this movie is that it's a musical, making it easy for me to convince Danielle to watch it. Having not seen this movie in a really long time, I think it has aged pretty well. Despite the animation showing it's age, most of the jokes still made me laugh. My favorite joke remains the one in which Cartman apologizes to Kyle for calling him a dirty Jew and then assures him that he is not a Jew at all. When Kyle says he is a Jew, Cartman responds with "Don't be so hard on yourself." It's simple and offensive, just the way I like it. The songs are top notch, and even though the Satan and Sadam stuff is the weakest of the movie, Satan's "Up There" is one of the best song in the whole movie. I'm sure everyone on  here has seen this movie, but if not, definitely check it out. I would love another South Park movie but that is probably asking too much.

Ben-Hur (1959)

I read Lew Wallace's novel (subtitled "A Tale of the Christ") a year and a half ago, finding it to be way too verbose and also a little heavy on vengeance themes for an ostensibly Christian story that had been blessed by the Pope. The Charlton Heston movie version fixed one of these two major issues. That issue was not the length. Clocking in at nearly four hours, the film wasted no time to... waste tons of time. The opening credits weren't finished until about 17 minutes into the movie. There was a lengthy intermission where I even had to change the discs. In many respects, this was just Lawrence of Arabia all over again. But to this movie's credit, at least I could hear all of the dialogue. The movie's most famous scene is that of a chariot race, and while I loved its intensity and technical prowess, I did find myself wondering why it took nine minutes to depict, but I guess in a nearly four-hour movie, what's nine minutes? A lot of scenes in this film were really impressive, don't get me wrong, but I just don't think it needed to be nearly as long as it was. I blame excessive stage-acting and single-setting dialogue scenes just as I did with Lawrence of Arabia. The thing the movie did right that the book utterly failed to do was to actually contain a Christian sentiment or two; Charlton Heston's Judah Ben-Hur is inspired by Christ to forget about his quest for vengeance on an old rival. Lew Wallace's Judah Ben-Hur simply never took away that concept of forgiveness, one of the central tenets of Christianity itself. So while the book was lengthy, a bit boring, and thematically confused, the movie was merely lengthy and a bit boring. And so now I find myself done with the Golden Age of cinema in my backlog; the earliest movie remaining there is 1987's Evil Dead 2.

A Dance with Dragons

And here we are at last!

Dany and her dragons take center stage.
Also, Theon is back!
Nice to see Theon again!
Certainly an improvement over Book 4.
Exciting and interesting like the first three.

Why does it end prematurely though?
It ends right before so many conflicts come to a head.
That annoyed me, even though the book itself was enjoyable overall.
Here's hoping the sixth book comes out soon.

Does Dany come back to Westeros to
Reclaim the Iron Throne or what?
And what will happen to the
Greyjoys mounting a surprise attack?
Or to Stannis, trapped by snow?
No idea!
So excited to find out!

A Feast for Crows

A let down, to say the least.

Forget about this one.
Easily the worst book in the series so far.
Amazingly boring.
So many uneventful plot lines.
The Cersei chapters are the worst.

For some reason, all of the interesting characters are
Omitted from this book entirely.
Really not that interesting to read about Brienne.

Cool parts existed, I'm sure, but I can't even
Remember any of them.
Oh man, is this book terrible
When compared to the first three.
See you next time!

A Storm of Swords

Awesome book.

Seriously, I think this was easily
The best of the five books in this series so far.
Oh man, so many awesome things happened.
Ridiculous amounts of main characters were
Murdered in the final third of the book.

Overseas, Dany's story
Finally got interesting again too.

Steve says that HBO
Wasn't able to fit everything in this book into
One season, so they'll stretch it into two.
Red Wedding, you were so sad.
Dornish spear guy, you were awesome.
Sansa, good luck!

Alien

Thanks to the great deals that Amazon.co.uk occasionally has on Blu-rays, I own the entire Alien Quadrilogy (Posts on the other 3 will soon follow). Only seeing this once before (I downloaded illegally!), I remember not being a big fan. Having seen Aliens before ever seeing this, I expected an action-packed thrill ride. I was let down to say the least. However, this second time around, I had tempered my expectations accordingly. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this movie. It's more of a horror movie than an action movie and it really delivers some suspenseful moments. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of a found-footage movie. It's slow, but it works because it is always building to the climax. We don't see the Alien until over an hour into it. But when we do, it's pretty impressive. It's even more impressive when you consider this movie came out in 1979. The ending fell a little short and seeing the Alien in all it's glory was a little less impressive (looked like a dude in a suit with a badass Alien mask), but I can see why this movie is such a classic. It's certainly not as badass as Aliens, but it's a lot better than the other two I am going to have to sit through again. Also, my favorite part of this movie is that their on-board computer, affectionately known as "Mother", functions solely as a Magic 8-Ball. Here's just one paraphrased example of what I'm talking about: Dallas types in,"What are our chances of survival?" and Mother returns, "Ask again later."

The Muppet Christmas Carol

As a kid, this was my first introduction to The Christmas Carol story and it remains my favorite. Bias aside, what really makes this stand to me not only above other versions of the story but also above other Muppet Movies is Michael Caine as Scrooge. Despite what the cover might indicate, he is the main character and does a great job in making me believe his transformation from a hater of Muppets to a lover of Muppets. Speaking of Muppets, Gonzo (playing Charles Dickens) narrates the story while Rizzo hangs with him, but other than that and a few appearances by Kermit as Bob Cratchit, this really is all about Scrooge. The Ghost of Christmas Past is particularly creepy and somewhat out-of-place in  a Muppet movie  and might succeed in giving some younger children nightmares.  That aside, watching this is a great way to get in the Christmas spirit. Spoiler alert: Tiny Tim doesn't die.

Frozen (2010)

This was Open Water 2 on a ski lift.

Tempted as I am to let that one sentence be my entire review of this movie - because honestly, there's nothing more to it at all - I'll continue. There's just too much fun to be had here for me not to elaborate a little bit. But like I was saying, this is Open Water 2 on a ski lift. Three college kids, two bros and one's girlfriend, bribe a ski lift operator to take them up the mountain one last time even though an inclement storm is forcing the ski place to close early. There's some sort of miscommunication and no one knows that the three friends are still riding the lift up and all of a sudden, bam, the lift gets powered down and the lights go out and we get to spend an hour watching panic set in, and then despair, and then of course grizzly and comical death. But as is the case in any crappy situational thriller, it's not the deaths themselves that matter; it's the utter stupidity of the heroes. Keith went over this in length in his review of Open Water 2, and it's equally true here. Let's say you're stuck on a ski lift with some friends in freezing temperatures and you know you'll be stuck up there all week if you don't find a way to get free. (Suspend this much disbelief, at least.) Personally, I'd have the lightest and most capable person in the chair ditch his or her skis or snowboard, climb atop the chair, and rope crawl the length of the cable to the nearest pole, climb or slide down that pole, and then go get help at the bottom of the mountain. (This does actually happen in the movie, but it isn't until one guy dies, and it has all sorts of highly improbable ramifications. We'll get there.)

Anyway, what you probably wouldn't do is drop three stories or so onto the hard part of the track. One guy does this. Can you guess what happens next? That's right; both of his legs snap and he winds up sitting there with bones poking through each of his knees. Can you guess how he reacts to this? Somehow, he does not pass out from shock or bleed out right away. Instead, he screams in agony for a while. And then something amazing happens.

Wolves eat him.

A pack of man-eating wolves running around on a mountain that has been converted into a ski resort just kind of come out of nowhere and eat our noble but stupid wounded warrior. The two remaining friends in the chair just kind of hug each other in horror while it happens; once it's over though, they have almost no reaction to what must be a truly horrifying sight: their dead friend's half-eaten carcass just kind of sitting there below them. The camera, too, strategically avoids focusing on this whatsoever, and for the rest of the movie - which takes place in the same exact physical location - no such corpse is seen. Hey, whatever - maybe the wolves ate him bones and all? I guess it's a moot point; the rest of the movie contains all kinds of events that make you almost forget that a half-eaten body should be in most of the shots. Almost.

The two remaining idiots fall asleep. Can you guess what greets them when they wake up the next morning? If you guessed "rescue," you'd be wrong. The correct answer is frostbite. Yeah. The girl's hand is stuck to the guardrail - did I forget to mention that she lost her glove lighting a cigarette the night before? - and a neat little square patch on one side of her face is a deep scabby purple. When she tries to tear her hand free from the metal bar, chunks of her skin get ripped off. The guy's hands are puffy and swollen and cut up. They play a little bit of the blame game and argue over whose fault it is that they're in this tight spot with their friend dead. They resolve nothing. Can you guess what happens next? I guarantee you, you cannot.

The girl pisses herself.

She just starts peeing. A close-up shot of her white-panted crotch shows the dampness spreading down her thighs. Then comes a puddle. Then some dripping off the edge of the seat. This plays no role going forward whatsoever. I just felt like mentioning it because, hey, someone felt like putting it into a gimmicky horror movie.

Okay, we're running out of time; there are only twenty minutes left in the movie and there are still two living people. Now the second guy can try my plan of shimmying down the lift cable to a pole, descending, and then running to retrieve help. Except that rather than swing his legs up and shimmy down the cable - an arduous but fairly non-demanding exercise - he just fucking swings his way down the cable hand over hand in what can only be considered an amazing feat of upper body strength for a guy who hasn't eaten in a day. But while he's doing this, slowly making his way toward the pole, something incredible happens. A real game-changer, if you will.

The bolts holding the chair onto the cable just kind of give way.

Seriously. No one has been putting added pressure or strain on those things. No one has been picking at them or unscrewing them. The chair simply starts to come loose from the cable. This is weird an unlikely for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that the chair is currently holding the weight of just the girl when this occurs, after having supported the weight of all three friends for hours. Anyway, this new development adds a bit of a time constraint to the guy's mission to get down the mountain. He gets to the pole, climbs down, and - WOLVES! Again! But unlike his buddy, this guy's got working legs and some ski poles; he swipes and stabs a few times and ultimately drives the wolves away before racing away, promising to get help.

Another night passes. Our girl - who has been dangling precariously all fucking night on that unscrewed chair, mind you - realizes she's not getting any help. She needs to get down herself, or she gonna straight up die. There are only ten minutes left in the movie now, so we really need some sort of deus ex machina to speed things up. We get exactly that when the chair finally falls from the cable, only to be caught in mid-air by the thin cable with which it was connected to the thick cable.

Wait. What? I'm positive that's not how chairlifts work. I'm confident that you don't attach the chairs to the larger cables with coiled up smaller cables. (I'm also confident that chairs don't simply "unscrew" and come loose from those bigger cables in the first place, but whatever.) At any rate, the result of this oddly designed chairlift just falling apart out of the blue is that our girl has now been lowered most of the way to the ground, and she's merely a small drop away from freedom.

Let me reiterate. What ends up saving the girl from the chairlift is the chairlift itself breaking and doing so in a very weird fashion. Honestly!

The girl belly-crawls down the slope. I don't know why - her legs work fine and if it's energy she's concerned with, well, she's got two perfectly good snowboards to use as sleds - but I no longer care. She passes the half-eaten corpse of the second guy. Yeah, turns out the wolves got him after all. And then she passes the wolves themselves. Again, she's crawling around on her stomach. But the wolves, for whatever reason, ignore her completely. If you ask me, I don't think the wolves were written with consistent character traits. The girl slip-slides her way down to a highway and just kind of passes out in the middle of the road where she is rescued and brought to a hospital and the movie ends. The utterly incompetent and frostbitten smoker who makes no real effort to save the group at any point in the movie ends up being the lone survivor because of course she does!

Wow!

Look, this was clearly always going to be a silly movie, and I hold no grudge against it in the least for being exactly what I figured it would be. To be honest, I even got a small sense of guilty pleasure out of this one; I figured, heading in, that someone would get awful frostbite and that someone would fall from the chairlift and break their legs. What I didn't count on was a murderous wolfpack; that part was just icing on the cake. You don't watch movies like this hoping for memorable characters or even a harrowing experience; you watch them for the plot holes and the idiocy of the main characters. In a weird way, watching such a dumb movie makes you feel better about your own intelligence. In that strange way, tis movie lived up to every single expectation I had and in some ways exceeded them all. And really, how many movies can you say that about? Don't take that as a recommendation though; don't see Frozen. Life is too short.

I'll leave you with the greatest line in the movie, spoken unironically and non-sarcastically by the skier when the snowboarder asks him if he'll ever make the transition to snowboarding: "Please. Snowboards are too emo for me."

A Clash of Kings

Anywho,

Cersei is a bitch
Loved by none.
Arya is a boy now.
Stannis and Renly
Hate each other like

Only brothers can.
For some reason I can't remember much of the plot here.

Kind of should have posted about it months ago.
I do remember loving Tyrion though.
No one is cooler than Jon Snow.
Go Robb!
Suck it Joffrey!

A Game of Thrones

Acrostic time!

Gosh, this was an
Awesome TV show.
My birthday present for Steve was
Each of the first four books in the series

Obviously, I wanted to read them too.
For realz.

This is the first one and it does an
Honorable job setting the stage for a
Really complicated war in a fantasy world.
Overall I really enjoyed it.
Ned Stark is a total badass!
Every Lannister can suck it!
Stay tuned for Book 2!

Community: Season 3

Season three is down and I'm now all caught up with the show... I am also deeply depressed. Both at the fact that the show is over - for the time being - and that there's only one more season left. If only I had caught onto the bandwagon earlier then maybe, maybe, the show would remain on the air fulfilling the #sixseasonandamovie prophecy. A man can dream, though... a man can dream.

This season is great. The show is really hitting its stride and there are a bunch of entertaining story lines and unique themes the show has embraced. The whole struggle to fight Chan and reclaim the school, the 16-bit videogame episode, and - my favorite - the alternate reality episode spawning the idea of the cast of evil doppelgangers. As in my previous post, there's really not much I can add in my review other than my overwhelming approval of the show... and my obvious dismay that the show is nearing its end.

On that note, I open the floor for discussion. Are there any other bits of information or hidden messages for this season that I have missed? (I'm mostly directing this at Stan here - considering he seems to appreciate extra commentary and DVD specials more than most - but I'm open for any interesting facts here.) Now only two months to the start of the end. Can't wait.