The Social Network

I honestly don't know if this was a good film or not. Can you guys weigh in on this? Part of me wants to say it was dogshit and part of me wants to praise it for being "A BRILLIANT FILM". I dunno, but if half of it was true Mark Zuckerberg is a fuck. Anyway, I don't need to ever see this film again but I wouldn't mind reading more up on the creation of facebook. Maybe I would have liked it more if I saw it while I still liked facebook. Anyway, I plan on crushing more movies tomorrow. Let's get 400!

Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo

Hot ziggity! This remains the only PC game I have ever beaten and I beat it again on the plane on my iPhone. I promise to never blog an iOS game again, but this one deserves some praise for being one of my favorite games from childhood. You are Putt-Putt and are tasked by Mr. Baldini to bring animal chow to the zoo so Outback Al can feed the Zoo Animals before the grand opening of the Cartown Zoo. But, when you get to the zoo, Outback Al has somehow lost six baby animals and, rather than finding them himself, decides to con Putt-Putt into doing it for him. As Putt-Putt, you point and click your way through the zoo, discovering items to help you save the animals. Sounds silly and easy. It is. But, there are just a ton of animations/cutscenes that are INCREDIBLE. If you click on a monkey he puts on a little hat and tells some poetry. Anyway, the theme song of this game is damn catchy and I've been singing it since the first time I played this game 16 or so years ago. You all must play this game.

Elysium

Great premise. Great effects. But something about this movie didn't work for me. Parts of the story didn't make too much sense and characters often made decisions that made no sense in order to further it along. Matt Damon's character Max was just full of contradictions the whole time. But at the end of the day, I just didn't find much entertainment from a movie that looked damn entertaining. For me, this movie just suffered from a certain expectation of quality. It was okay, but nothing special.

The Purge

One night a year all crime is legal! Because of this, unemployment is apparently down to under 1% and violence is down tenfold. Sure. Anyway, if you saw a preview for this movie and were interested, then you will probably love the movie. If you thought it looked stupid, you won't. I fell in the former category. This movie was fucked up. Seriously. And it wasn't particularly well-written. But, it had a somewhat unique premise and extreme violence. Sometimes that's all I need. Ethan Hawke, ironically, makes millions selling home security specifically designed to safeguard families from being murdered in The Purge, only to have his house broken into. The rest of the movie takes place in and around his house. His family suffers, etc. Skip it.

Chronicle

Wow! What a great movie. I had seen a preview for this movie awhile back and was interested, but never got around to seeing it until finally on my flight home yesterday. After reading Trevor's review on it a few months ago, this became a must watch for me and it delivered. On everything. It's one of the best "found footage" movies I've ever seen and one of the coolest takes on a super hero movie I've ever seen. I expected the special effects to be somewhat lame, but they were actually pretty great. The story was interesting and Vince from Friday Night Lights was pretty SUPER in it! Get it? Anyway, I've got three other movies coming so I'm keeping this short. See it.

The IT Crowd: Season 4

The IT Crowd ended on a high note, saving three of its best episodes for last. It ended at the perfect time, leaving me wanting more after only twenty-four total episodes, which would amount to a single season of television in America. So, what's my takeaway at the end of it all? Where would The IT Crowd rank on a hypothetical list of all the TV shows I've ever seen? What's the legacy left behind here?

Meh.

Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed what I saw and would gladly watch more. They just made a series finale special that aired in Britain a few months ago, and I'll be sure to check it out at some point. The characters were memorable, the situations were absurd, and the jokes were more clever than the jokes I typically expect to get from a mutli-camera sitcom with a laugh track. I want to be clear here; I did not dislike The IT Crowd at all. But at the same time, it didn't turn out to be some hidden gem of British ingenuity up there with the likes of The Office. For my money, it's worth the twelve hours it takes to watch the series in its entirety, but by no means is it something you need to add to the top of your queue.

Alright. Workday over. Stan out!

The IT Crowd: Season 3

That's three! I'm flying through this show, which isn't exactly an unexpected outcome. Six half-hour episodes a season makes for a series that, overall, lasts a grand total of twelve hours. And really it's more like ten given that many of the half hours last for something more like twenty-four minutes. A more detailed write-up is forthcoming upon the completion of Season 4. This one was no better than Season 2, for my money, but that hardly matters with an episodic sitcom.

Timeline

So this movie is based on an early Michael Crichton book in which a company accidentally discovers time travel after trying to develop a 3D fax machine. Anyway, the cast is incredible. Paul Walker, Gerard Butler, Professor Lupin, Billy Connolly and that bad dude from Justified with those piercing blue eyes. They have to travel through time to rescue Paul Walker’s dad, Billy Connolly. Unfortunately for them, their timing could not be worse as they end up right in the middle of a battle between the French and English in 1357 AD. Paul Walker is just as good as he was in the original Fast and the Furious movie and his hair is in rare form. Anyway, this movie was awesome because of Paul Walker but it blows my mind that such a mediocre movie was made from good source material. Still, entertaining and it let me travel back in time myself to a time in which Paul was still with us. RIP.

Gerald's Game

So since I have a giant virtual stack of Stephen King books waiting to be read still, I figured for my next one I'd try out a book that I thought had no reputation at all. But since I've been reading a ton of King lately, I've done plenty of research and have some idea how liked or disliked most of his books are. Geraald's Game however was one I knew absolutely nothing about, so I went in with really no expectations. And really, it started pretty strong. A married couple looking to spice up their love life goes to their remote summer home deep in the woods of Maine for the weekend. The husband Gerald has convinced his wife Jessie to be handcuffed to the bed, but shortly after this Jessie starts having second thoughts and demands to be let out. Gerald refuses- he's gone too far already and assumes Jessie's protests are all a part of the game, so Jessie panics and lashes out, kicking Gerald square in the nuts so hard that it somehow causes a heart attack, and Gerald is down for the count right there in the introduction. So now we've got Jessie, naked and handcuffed to a bed in the middle of nowhere, with her likely dead husband slumped over in a pile, with no idea how the hell to get out of this situation. If that sounds like a boring premise to you, I guess I can understand, as almost the entire book takes place from Jessie's point of view on a bed, but I actually found the book to be for the most part pretty intense. While I was reading this I stumbled upon a list on GoodReads.com where people voted on their least favorite King books, and this came up as number one. Really? I mean I was closing in on the end and it wasn't fantastic or anything, but I'd say that it's at least better than Black House, Insomnia and Dark Tower I and VI. Maybe King just screwed up the ending horribly? Anyway I eventually read to the end and well Jessie's story actually ended very well, King did kinda screw things up with a very unnecessary epilogue. Let's just say something that happens to Jessie over the course of the novel, something weird and mysterious and scary but possibly just a hallucination, is completely overexplained which ruins the scare long after it happens. One of the few times King really has a great ending, and he has to screw it up by not realizing his story was already over. Oh well, I still liked it and if you just stop where the story seems to it makes for a good read.

The IT Crowd: Season 2

I'm starting to see why Sween and Trev made their respective IT Crowd posts on the entire series rather than on individual seasons. There's just not that much to glean from six episodes at a time, I guess. In my Season 1 post, I noted that I was already two episodes deep into Season 2 and that those were my favorite two episodes yet from this British series. Unfortunately, I think those remain my favorite two episodes ever. Which isn't to say that the other four were bad, at all. Just that this season started stronger than it ended. Anyway, Season 3 is already loaded up on my PS3 and ready for watching. Off I go.