I've been buying a lot of older DVDs for cheap at Blockbuster to help me through the lonely times up here, and thought I'd share some thoughts on here...
There Will Be Blood -- snoozerville; Big Oil in and out of bed with deranged evangelical Christians; no unity of character...Should have been title, "There Will Be Bored."
Igor -- A poor man's Nightmare Before Christmas meets the least funny parts of Shrek; kids might laugh at it; proves why narration is usually a bad idea in film; turned off after twenty-five minutes.
Balls of Fury -- What was I thinking? Jack Black wannabe in Wayne's World spin of a Mortal Kombat / Natural hybrid plot. Lame, crude humor fills in gaps between trailer's jokes. Also turned off after twenty-five minutes...and I never even got to see Christopher Walken.
Curse of the Golden Flower -- Toss in three scoops of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, a pinch of Return of the King, and two table spoons of Hamlet. Mix in absurdly low-cut period costumes. Cook for two hours for surprisingly entertaining melodrama with bleak social commentary, awesome spider ninjas, and unexpected plot twists.
Sin City -- Visually striking, if often obscene. Very depressing. Imagine the worst stories you possibly can, multiply that by your most recent nightmare, and varnish it with a layer of tragic film noir.
And on the video game front...I picked up some dirt cheap PS2 games in the last few weeks.
Midway Arcade Treasures 2 -- The arcade versions of Mortal Kombat are way too hard when playing against the computer. Multi-player games make you more lonely when two-thirds of the screen are left blank. It would be more fun if I was still at an age where "the guys came over." Mostly, this compilation had nostalgia value. MK3 and Primal Rage were huge when I was a freshman, and I always liked Xenophobe (although the play controls on the PS2 aren't intuitive). It's more fun to own this than to play it.
Dirge of Cerberus (Final Fantasy VII) -- A confusing melodramatic computer animated cartoon with characters you barely remember from FFVII, and some new characters you never heard of. Oh, and every now and then you get to shoot at something...usually the same trooper you killed four or five levels ago. Seriously, this thing is less of a video game with cutscenes than it is a confusing movie with brief interactive components. A disappointment. I was suckered in by the FF franchise...
Shadow of Colossus -- Freaky cool game consisting essentially of nothing against boss battles...with really, really big bosses. I know God of War has some big bosses, but you almost always beat them by punching in patterned codes...you don't have so much of a sense of playing the battles as you do just triggering animated sequences, a la Dragon's Lair. In Colossus, you actually have to control the player character as he climbs all over the bosses' gigantic bodies, and then grip their fur as he strikes their vulnerable points. (It did take me about an hour, though, to realize that the little guy has to take breaks or else he loses his grip.) I still have no idea why I'm killing these things...and I actually feel pretty bad whenever I do kill one...but I'm expecting the game will resolve this mystery eventually.
So...I really should have been working on my daily exegesis instead of writing this...daily exegeeksis?
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