The Good Ol' Days...

So nearly 5 years ago, I had a movie journal that I kept where I essentially wrote little mini-reviews or impressions about whatever I had just watched.  It was a kind of private blog stored in a word doc.  I recently uncovered it and thought 'hey, why not throw it on here?  People like to pry into private writings on the internet!'  So I'll be throwing on sections of it periodically until I either reach the end or lose interest.

So here's about half of September for those with any interest.  Feel free to post comments if you have any interest to see more.  In particular, I kinda would like to post the section where I essentially took on the challenge of watching a horror movie for every day of October in the spirit of Halloween.  If anyone cares enough, I'll post it after September.

9/6/04

 

Collateral

I’m not incredibly familiar with Michael Mann’s work.  I have seen Manhunter, and thought it was decided unsuspenseful for a suspense thriller about a serial killer.  Perhaps because it was primarily shot in daylight, it never worked for me.  Collateral on the other hand, is almost entirely filmed at night, and it works very well.  First of all, I want to mention how surprised I was by Jamie Foxx’s acting.  Before this, he usually just played morons or playas.  He actually felt like a real person in this one.  Even Tom Cruise isn’t as grating as he once was.  Perhaps his worst days are behind him.  The movie had a strong sense of atmosphere, like a quiet cool with intense violence simmering just beneath the surface.  The scene in the jazz club is a great example of this.

 

Stepford Wives

This was an entertaining way to spend an hour and a half.  Frank Oz, the director, has decided to play this one for laughs instead of attempting to drum up any kind of suspense as the book and the first film did.  I’m pretty certain this choice was made based on the fact that the ending was hardly a surprise to most people by this point.  The very term ‘Stepford wife’ has a very specific meaning for most people and the phrase has literally entered the general lexicon.  Basically, I was prepared for a few good laughs and some modest entertainment, and that’s exact what I got.  It did throw in a good batch of social commentary to make the film more relevant, but the signals became a little mixed (so is being a high-powered, stressed out female a good or bad thing?).  The only other problem I had was the gaping plot hole the film provided.  It couldn’t seem to decide whether the Stepford wives were robots or just brainwashed via microchips in their brains.

 

‘It’

I picked this up in a sale, completely as a blind buy since I knew little to nothing about Clara Bow other than she was a film star in the silent era.  After watching ‘It’, it’s very apparent why she was a star.  She had a nature charisma that carried the film.  The plot of the film was a fairly common one by today’s standards (girl pretends to like one guy so she can get close to his friend), but in its day, ‘It’ was a fairly revelatory film.  Clara Bow actively sought and manipulated men with a sex appeal that no one had seen in a film star at that point.  The best thing that can be said about a silent film is that when you watch it, you forget that its silent and you know only that you are watching a movie.  That’s precisely how I felt with ‘It’.  At a brisk 75 minutes, the action and charm flies by at a breakneck pace.  By the end, you feel a general happiness for no apparent reason.  That’s right; it’s a “feel-good” movie.  And I enjoyed it.

 

9/7/04

 

Touching the Void

I was pretty certain I never wanted to go mountain climbing.  This movie only cements that fact further.  It was a very fascinating film about survival.  It did seem less suspenseful since the people being represented in the narrative were obviously healthy and safely telling the story themselves.  You knew how it was going to end.  Nonetheless, it was still a very intriguing journey.  I just have to wonder at the sheer determination it took for Joe to keep going on.  I also thought it was bizarre toward the end when the film took on a more drug-induced air with jump cuts, odd camera angles and all sorts of other camera trickery.  The effect of the song getting stuck in his head was particularly singular in how odd it was.

 

9/8/04

 

The Prowler

I found this to be a very workman-like, competent effort into the slasher genre with some very good gore effects courtesy of Tom Savini.  Little touches like the opening with the newsreel and letter in black and white struck and giving it a little more appeal than most generic slasher films like The Burning.  Another thing I liked about it was the identity of the killer and the way it didn’t really explain to the characters his motivation for doing it.  Most of these sorts of films feel an obligation to throw in some aggrandizing speech wherein the villain explains the mental anguish he had gone through and why he must kill.  This one doesn’t.  I just wonder if this was a conscious decision on the part of the filmmakers or if they were just too lazy to throw in such a scene.

 

9/9/04

 

Comic Book Confidential

This was an interesting and entertaining documentary on comic books.  I would by no means recommend it as an all-encompassing history of comic books, (mainstream comics are all but abandoned by the 60’s portion) but it is an immensely enjoyable film.  It essentially splits the film into two sections.  The first half of the movie is involved primarily with an early history of comics, mainstream companies like DC and Marvel, and the eventual creation of the comic code in the wake of William Gaines deliciously demented EC Comics line.  The second half of the film is mostly concerned with the evolution of independent comics, giving ample screen time to figures such as R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar.  The end tries half heartedly to mention the darkening of mainstream comics with titles like The Dark Knight Returns, but it seems more tacked on than anything.  It may be just a result of the fact that the film was released in 1989, so the new dark, gritty movement was just getting going.  The best thing I liked about this film was the way in which they semi-animated the comics into sort of slideshows, adding sound effects and having the artists read them.  I thought it was a great way to bring the comics into film without full blown animation that may have possibly created an awkward experience.

 

9/10/04

 

Bubba Ho-Tep

I saw this when it came to the Galleria 10 theater in Birmingham.  I knew it was going to be something special the moment I heard about it.  The guy who did Phantasm gets the guy who was Ash to play Elvis, who isn’t really dead but in a nursing home because he switched places with an impersonator back in the day, and the old black guy who always plays old black guys to play JFK, or at least someone believing he is JFK who has been dyed black and has had his brain removed but kept alive in a government compound in Washington and replaced with a bag of sand?  Then they proceed to fight against an ancient Egyptian mummy who happened to stumble across some cowboy gear somewhere and who lives off the souls of the elderly by sucking them out their anuses?  And it also has a great soundtrack?  Sign me up cuz this flick was one of the best of the year.

 

Hotel Room

Originally conceived as the pilot of a new television series for David Lynch, the networks didn’t like what they saw, so the three episodes filmed were compiled into one movie in an anthology format.  The first and last vignettes were both directed by David Lynch and are definitely less mundane than the middle vignette.  The first story concerning Harry Dean Stanton, a prostitute, and an old, fat guy named Lou is probably the most entertaining of the bunch.  It features just the right amount of Lynchian weirdness that his fans have come to expect without going on too long.  The third vignette, with Crispin Glover as a husband and Alicia Witt as a wife making conversation while in a blackout, is at times very bizarre as well due to the wife’s mental illness caused by the death of her son, but it seems to suffer from being too long-winded for its own good.  This one goes on for nearly an hour and at times you really start to feel each minute tick by due to the fact that it really is almost entirely just one conversation between two individuals.  The second vignette was modestly entertaining and involves a woman discussing with her two friends about how she plans to dump her boyfriend, played by Griffin Dunne, because of his lack of commitment and his philandering ways.  But she is caught off guard when he arrives early and dumps her before she can dump him.  Naturally it ends in violence.  One final odd touch I thought I would mention is the fact that each vignette takes place in a different time period in the same room, 603, but the bellboy and maid are played by the same actor and actress in all three.  It really helps to add to the ageless feel of the hotel. 

 

Ikaruga (GCN) Review

How can something be so beautiful yet so mind-numbingly difficult at the same time? I absolutely love space shooters, particularly of the overhead vertical scrolling variety. Yet I am constantly tormented by the fact that I am just not very good at them. And when it comes to something like Ikaruga with it’s insane challenge yet hypnotically awesome gameplay and graphics, I feel even more hopelessly doomed to play something that I love yet know I will never beat, despite the fact that there are only 5 levels.

I honestly don’t know what the plot is for this. I could look it up, but it really doesn’t matter. What truly matters is the hitch. What is it about this game that sets it apart from the hundreds of other space shooters besides just looking pretty? It’s fairly basic actually. The core mechanic of the game revolves around the juxtaposition of light and dark. Your ship has a polarizing shield around it at all times with either a dark or light polarity. Your weapons are the same. You have the ability to switch between polarities at any time to adapt to the environment around you. Light enemies suffer much more damage from dark gun fire than light and vice versa. Conversely, your shield, if set to light polarity, can block out light enemy fire and vice versa. So depending on the sort of enemy attacking you, you must make lightning fast decisions on switching your shields back and forth. And as the game progresses, I can assure you that you will be doing this pretty much constantly. You also use strategy to determine if you should set it to opposite polarity from enemy and hope to dodge them effectively or set it to the same polarity and do less damage but avoid being wasted by their wall of fire. Like many space shoot ‘em ups, there is little to no margin for error even in the earliest stages. Precision and memorization are key to this game even more than most shooters, and this coupled with its tricky game mechanic is what gives it the distinction of being one of the most difficult in the genre.

The game does include a Trial Mode to practice with, giving you unlimited lives but only allowing you to play through the first two missions. Since this game is made by Treasure, considered by many to be their crowning achievement, the boss fights are incredibly huge and epic. The bosses generally take up the entire screen and are multi-staged, meaning that when you take out the ten gun turrets firing at you from this massive airship, you still aren’t even close to beating this guy.

I mentioned the graphics earlier and how great they were. What impressed me is that with everything being light or dark, the graphics could have easily come out rather bland and unimpressive due to the lack of color palette, but instead the game is given a vibrancy and crispness to it that has few rivals in the realm of shooters.

Overall the game is very impressive. If you are a fan of space shoot ‘em ups and especially vertical scrollers, then you are most likely used to the ridiculous difficulty inherent in these types of games and need to own this game as a result. If you are a more timid folk that prefers the joviality and complete lack of challenge in, say, Animal Crossing, then Ikaruga should be at the absolute bottom of your video game shopping list with the likes of Battletoads and Gradius III. As for me, I shall weep tears of joy and gnash my teeth in frustration as I relish in the crazy yet addictive gameplay offered up by Ikaruga.

Jam Sessions (DS) Review

Have you ever looked at a DS and thought, “Gee, I wish I could play a guitar using this as my means by which to do so.” If so, then you have strangely grammatically correct thoughts. Beyond that, you also have an odd way of looking at a DS. Most likely to capitalize off the success of Guitar Hero, Ubisoft decided to port over from Japan this guitar simulation tool for the DS long before the crappy beast known as Guitar Hero: On Tour reared its ugly head. Of course, comparing this to Guitar Hero at all is a pretty unfair comparison since GH is essentially a rhythm game disguised as a musical tool, and Jam Sessions is a musical tool disguised as a rhythm game.

Jam Sessions has no real competitive game mode to speak of. It essentially gives you a couple of different modes to allow you to play with the core game mechanic, that being the ability to strum the DS touch pad like a guitar using the stylus as your pick and the DS buttons as a way to play different chords. If that sounds a little on the awkward side, you would be correct. Not as awkward as that attachment with the GH DS game though. That thing is just painful. The game comes pre-loaded with a couple dozen songs that you can play along to. Again though, you don’t really earn anything for performing them particularly well. You can unlock useless stuff like new backgrounds by playing through the songs in the main game mode, or you can hit up the Free Play and record and save compositions that you write yourself. Using the headphone jack of the DS, you can also hook up to an amp and rock out in true fashion. I think I might crap my pants though if I were to go to a concert only to find a dude strumming a DS up on stage.

For what it is, it’s actually pretty neat although it really doesn’t have very high replayability unless you are the sort that actually does want to jam out on a DS professionally. As far as being a cool little toy to pull out and play with for fifteen minutes every now and again, it does the job well.

Jaws (NES) Review

Back in the day, the NES was a breeding ground for terrible licensed games that were stupidly difficult bordering on unplayable (see my review of Platoon for an example). So it’s doubly surprising when I play a licensed game for a console that is neither completely awful nor impossibly challenging. Not to say that Jaws is an unfairly neglected hidden gem that has not received its proper due up until now. It is most definitely a flawed game in many aspects. It just isn’t horrible on the level that say almost every Simpsons licensed game or Ghostbusters 2 is perhaps.

The plot of the game of Jaws is pretty basic. You sail around in a boat hunting for the titular character of note. That’s pretty much it. The gameplay alternates between an overhead view and a side-static view. The overhead view is comprised of you sailing your boat around in search of Jaws. Periodically you will randomly come upon an area that will switch you into the side-static view. In this mode, you are a scuba diver that moves around the screen harpooning fish for a while until I guess you get bored. The screen does not scroll, hence the static modifier in its description. Occasionally in this view, you will strike upon Jaws, who is significantly bigger than the other fish with more erratic swimming behavior. Also Jaws has a life bar that you must deplete to take him down. I was pretty surprised when I hit upon Jaws within the first 15 minutes of playing the game. I thought they would have saved him as a final boss or something to that affect, but really, he just shows up to make you feel hopeless (much like Jason in the Friday the 13th NES game). You see, when you first meet up with him, you can’t possibly get even close to killing him, not with that puny harpoon gun you start with anyway. So basically when you meet upon with Jaws, you just have to not die for a while until he swims away. You fire harpoons at him until your face turns blue, but it depletes his life meter so little that the futility of it sets in pretty quickly. So how do you kill such a beast? Sail around and upgrade your harpoon, of course! After several iterations of this, you can eventually kill him. The end.

So gripes. Here we go. This game has mind-numbingly repetitive gameplay. Sail in a boat for a minute. Hit upon a cache of fish. Harpoon them to death for a while. Upgrade equipment. Repeat until you can kill Jaws. Also I’ve alluded to the fact that when you stumble upon the fish, there doesn’t seem to be an indicator of either how long or how many fish you kill before the fish hunting portion is over. It seems to be a few minutes, but I really don’t know. Also the graphics are pretty bland and the music and sound is forgettable.

So that sounds like a lot of negative. And as a game, Jaws is highly mediocre. But as a licensed NES game, see, that’s where it stands out as a cut above many of them. It’s playable with a reasonable difficulty curve and gameplay that is at least mildly amusing for a few minutes. The real question remains, is it worth your time? I would say that unless you just really want to play a non-wretched licensed game for the NES, then you are probably better off playing through Mario 3 again.

Wii Play Review

I’m fairly certain that 98% of the people that bought this game primarily purchased it because it came with a Wii Remote. The other 2% bought it for the cow racing.
Wii Play is basically a group of tech demos, and it shows. Comprised of nine mini-games (which given the games is pretty sparse even considering the free remote) with each one being unlocked by just playing the previous one (which I think is just a devious ploy to make me play the terrible table tennis game included), WP doesn’t really bring much to the ballgame in terms of content or substance.
The nine mini-games can be divided neatly into two categories: mild diversion for ten or fifteen minutes and total garbage. Let’s break them down one by one, shall we?

• Table Tennis: Total and absolute garbage. When I first heard table tennis, I thought “Cool! It’s another game like the Wii Sports Tennis but on a smaller scale.” No dice. Instead we get a glorified Pong clone with poor control responsiveness. Bleh.
• Fishing: This is less a fishing simulation and more a simulation of one of those fishing carnival games where you dip a fake plastic pole into a cardboard hole and someone attaches a toy prize to it. There is absolutely no skill to this and the only people I’ve heard from that enjoy it are less than seven years old.
• Find Mii: Meh. It’s like Where’s Waldo with Miis. If you are the sort of person that enjoys those grocery store picture puzzles in the 99 cent rack of puzzle books, then you might find this mildly entertaining.
• Pose Mii: A surprisingly tricky twitch puzzle game where you have to twist your remote around to correspond with the actions the Mii is performing on the screen. It’s a sort of fast-paced Simon-esque game that may provide a mild diversion for puzzle addicts but get too difficult for less patient people.
• Tanks!: This reminds of an old Atari game I once played where you and another player drive little tanks around shooting each other with them. This works a little differently in that you and the person you’re playing with are actually competing to destroy more enemy tanks than each other. I think of the few times I played this multiplayer it basically devolved into the other guy and I just shooting each other a lot since it does allow friendly fire. Bottom line: If you have a friend hanging around bored, this isn’t a bad way to waste 15 minutes. So there you go.
• Laser Hockey: This is some sort of crazy Tron-esque version of laser hockey decorated with intense neon lighting to give it an edge over other competing laser hockey games (the thousands of them available out there, har har). I found this one to be fairly entertaining and is one of the few games in this pack I’ve actually played more than once. The controls are a little imprecise but aren’t so bad that the game is unplayable.
• Charge!: Yea, it’s cow racing. You sit on a yarn-based cow and race it to the finish line in a 3rd person perspective, jumping hurdles and what not on your way to victory. The concept is pretty stupid and cheesy, but some people seem to love this one. I thought it was decent but, like every game in this set, lacking in depth.
• Billiards: I felt this to be one of the strongest games in the set, being a fairly straightforward but acceptable rendition of 9-ball. The controls are responsive and the graphics and music understated but fitting. I had no real complaints with this one other than just the lack of features. Given that it’s a tech demo, I feel it does what it seeks to do well. Would’ve been nice to have a Snooker feature or at least other variations on 9-ball though.
• Shooting Range: This game feels the most fleshed out despite the fact that it’s still not very long and will most likely keep you entertaining for 15 or 20 minutes max. It is essentially several levels with various targets like soda cans and balloons, culminating in a shootout with some UFOs trying to capture your Miis. As a nice little reference, you can also shoot down ducks a la Duck Hunt. I personally would have preferred just a straight up remake of Duck Hunt though for nostalgia’s sake with one stipulation – that you can actually shoot the dog.

So overall, given the hodge podge quality of Wii Play, I don’t know if I could recommend the game in good conscience unless you need an extra Wii Remote.

Viewtiful Joe

Playing Viewtiful Joe is like getting punched in the face by a dinosaur wearing sunglasses. It hurts, and it will most likely leaving you wondering what you did to deserve such punishment. But the very idea of it is just so awesome.
The plot, as it were, involves Joe and his date going to see a movie at the theater. All is well until the villain of the film decides to hop out of the picture and snatch up Joe’s girl. Well, Joe apparently has no recourse but to follow him into the flick, turning into a superhero in the process.
Coming from Clover Studios, the guys behind the gorgeous Okami and the totally sweet God Hand, Viewtiful Joe plays like an old school beat ‘em up, Final Fight-style. The only difference is that rather than an isometric 3rd person view it’s a straight up side-scroller. The game has an incredible visual style, as excepted of Clover, with vibrant, fast-paced action set up like you are progressing through a film, similar to what Comix Zone did with making it like an interactive comic book back in the Sega Genesis days. You basically punch, kick and destroy your way through wave after wave of enemies until you reach the boss at the end. The difficulty in general is fairly punishing even on the lighter settings, relegating the game to the persistent and hardcore only. Given its cartoonish, hyperactive visual style and the tie-in cartoon series made after its release, one would think the developers would have made it more kid friendly. Somehow though, I feel it would have taken away from the sense of accomplishment you get after defeating the bosses. As you progress you learn new abilities that become integral in beating back the swarms of enemies, culminating in an old-school-style “beat every boss you’ve already beaten before getting to the big enchilada” finale.
I highly recommend this game for its striking graphical style as well as its humor and sheer fun factor. Although a warning to the timid gamers among you who don’t remember the days when platformers and beat ‘em ups were maddeningly difficult and rewarded perseverance and skill, this game is not for you unless you only like to see the first level of a game. For the serious gamers out there, this is a no-brainer purchase.

Mickey's Adventure In Numberland Review

I find it depressing that this edutainment tool aimed at grade school children is probably more fun than about 50% of NES games out there. It’s less a testament to the awesomeness of this game and more an example of how terrible a great many NES games were.
Plot? Nah. I’m not going to bother. Mickey has adventures in Numberland. It’s there in the title. That’s it. So basically you select from an overworld map what level to play. It then goes into the primary mode of gameplay which involves Mickey in a side-scrolling environment in which he is in search of a number to solve the math problem given on the screen. The math problems are generally very easy as is the platforming. In fact, one could probably play through this game in 30 minutes if one were so inclined. I’ve never understood why NES games were either impossibly difficult like Ghostbusters 2 or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or impossibly easy like Where’s Waldo or this game.
The graphics are actually pretty decent for the NES and features fairly bright and cheerful animations to enliven the attention of an eight-year-old pretty well. The sound has the typical blips and bloops of any random NES game not made by Capcom but isn’t terrible to the point of distraction.
So is this game worth digging up and playing? Unless you are vaguely curious and have it for an emulator or are a completist that feels inclined to purchased every hard-to-find NES game you come across (like myself), you are probably better off just watching old Mickey Mouse cartoons or playing the excellent Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse game for the SNES.

The Darkness Review

Apparently I have been misled on the behavior of black holes. I was under the impression that black holes had a gravitational pull so great that even light could not escape. If this game is to be believed, black holes have a pretty small radius in which things will get sucked into them, and after a few seconds the things will come falling back out of them again. Dead perhaps, but certainly not disintegrated, torn apart molecule by molecule, as your grandaddy would have you believe. Regardless, I guess they seem pretty effective at killing gangsters.
The Darkness is based on a comic book about a hitman who apparently inherits some sort of demon that allows him to create black holes, shoot guns (because you need demonic powers for this), whip people with tentacles, summon little demons known as darklings to do his bidding and send out little snake guys to rip people's hearts out. The storyline is actually one of the game's strongest points, involving traveling between the real world, a seedy city full of gangsters and corrupt cops trying to kill you, and the Darkness world, a twisted vintage war zone full of zombies and dead relatives. You travel back and forth between these two worlds on a quest of revenge and to attempt to reign in your Darkness powers which perpetually seek to overpower and control you.
The game does a fairly good job of balancing the cool, crazy, creepy world of The Darkness with the more drab city world. I personally would have liked more Darkness world and less city, especially less of the "hunt this, fetch that"-style missions that became repetitive and dull pretty quickly and did nothing to drive the plot forward. Aside from that, the game does a good job of slowly introducing new Darkness powers and providing a good mix of action and atmosphere. The controls are generally pretty responsive for a console first person shooter and some of the unique mechanics of the game such as the little snake guys you can send out on reconnaissance missions to eat the hearts of more evil men than you controlled as well as could be expected for such an unusual feature. They do occasionally get stuck on random bumps in streets or walls or even seemingly invisible barriers of some kind but those incidents are infrequent enough that it doesn’t create a serious issue.
The graphics and sound I felt were appropriate for the game. As the title would suggest, the game is very dark. In fact, you spend a sizeable portion of the game shooting out lights since your powers thrive in darkness. It's an interesting game mechanic that works pretty well. The game offers no meter to gauge how much darkness energy you have but does a sufficient job showing it through the snake guys and how excited or bummed out they look. I would like to mention from a sound point that I felt the majority of the voice acting in the game ranged from pretty good to amazing. Mike Patton, in particular, as The Darkness was an inspired choice, Patton capable of careening from crazed terror to feeble panic all within the span of seconds. Based on his impressively wide range of musical projects exploring the dark and the bizarre, he seems an ideal fit for the game.
Overall I think Starbreeze has done a very good job with representing the comic in video game form (despite the fact that it veers wildly from the source's storyline). In using the light/dark mechanic of their previous Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, they've created a great game full of atmosphere and intensity that succeeds despite its flaws.