Oh, I could have used this a few days ago - "Best Warren Ellis Stories Ever"

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2010/05/10/the-greatest-warren-ellis-stories-ever-told/

What am I playing? Bioshock 2

I held off on this game until I could get a ‘good price’. A week or so ago it came up as an Amazon Gold Box special for $30 bucks and my brother owed me a bunch of money, so I had him order it for me.

I was so impressed with the opening for the first Bioshock. It was cool enough to the point that I actually showed it to Lauren and others so she could experience it. Hell, it was the game who’s demo blew me away to the point that I finally upgraded past my AMD 3200+ single core processor because it churned my loins so well.

After getting the sequel I was really interested in how cool the opening could be, since the game was supposed to take place about a decade after the first.

Pretty much, you can’t appreciate the opening for Bioshock 2 without having played the first game, so don’t even try. There is none of the splendor of descending down into Rapture for the first time. You just start there and shoot yourself in the head. Literally.

Sure, you get a few moments of a clean Rapture before the civil war in the opening cinematic, but it is so fleetingly brief. Then you’re just inserted into post Bioshock 1 Rapture without context or back story. Sadness.

I hope to play through the game this week, but damn if that opening wasn’t a let down..

Of course, the multiplayer could be the real blowaway part of this game for me as it is supposed to be the civil war in Rapture itself, so you get to see it before the true decay sets in.

Will have more assessment after getting into the game further, but just the opening is a good benchmark, I think.

Iron Man is Tron 2

I would love the first Iron Man movie so much more if it were just Tron 2 and Jeff Bridges' character is still Flynn but old and busted, trying to ride the coattails of Tony Stark in the meatverse.

Although I could live with it if the movie retained the Uruguay title - El hombre de hierro

What am I watching? GI Joe:Resolute

I’ll put it right out there – I haven’t watched a GI Joe cartoon since, probably, the late 80s. It never quite obtained that position in my heart that robots in disguise appeared to fit perfectly. I did end up renting that live action GI Joe movie and, while it was definitely another product(toy) placement movie, it felt like it captured the flavor of what I remembered.

On the other hand, since I was a child, I’ve definitely read a lot of crap(as a unit of measurement) by Warren Ellis. At this point he’s been a surprisingly prolific writer. True, he’s no Brian M Bendis, but I believe that Bendis may be a hive mind of writers to be able to helm so many titles simultaneously. Ellis is responsible for one of my favorite Iron Man story arcs – Extremis. His Desolation Jones has left me desolate over its unfortunate demise mid-arc at issue #7. I may be one of the only people to have enjoyed Global Frequency. He’s even one of the main writers for the game Dead Space. That’s all not even considering the massive oversights in my reading experience – Planetary and Transmetropolitan. So, yeah, Warren Ellis. He’s a guy that knows how to bring the weird and bring the brutal storylines.

I had heard the title GI Joe: Resolute previously, but it’s just GI Joe, right? It wasn’t until I recently heard it was actually Warren Ellis was responsible for the series and the fact that people die instead of being seemingly invincible and laserproof that really grabbed my attention. (bring up browser.. netflix.. search resolute.. queue..)

Confusingly, Resolute was 11 episodes, but is only an hour long. It kicks off letting you know the animation is solid – more Cowboy Bebop level than 80s toy commercial level. There’s even the anime feel from the whole package in a few recognizable voice actors coupled with that modern animation. I’d be willing to put money on the same studio animating this as The Animatrix – The Second Renaissance.

Having just finished watching it, it was a nice, tight hour of action. It feels like what I remember the gist of the show being and the action was definitely a little more adult – the opening shot is of the body of a major character, dead. Snake Eyes left a trail of bodies and they were not shy about showing the kills. The storyline was appropriately epic and there were definitely a few cities wiped off the map during the course of the story.

I’m not sure that I really detected Warren Ellis’ fingerprints on the writing. The writing was tight, but not really out there aside from a high comfort level with blowing entire cities off the planet.. It did happen to capture the GI Joe theme pretty well for a non-American who wasn’t even familiar with the source material. We’ll call the writer a neutral aspect.

Some of the sequences could have used a little decompression and the short ‘episode format’ made the combined product feel a little disjointed with the cliffhanger type moments coming every five minutes or so. They also seemed to keep the instances to a minimum of the “20 guys firing full auto at one or two Joes standing there and apparently firing blanks”, but I still needed to reach for a beer during those points.

I’d say if you ever bought a GI Joe toy, you’re ripe for spending a good hour with this movie. I wouldn’t have the patience for this if it were a series, but as a nicely portioned chunk of updated nostalgia, you’re not going to go wrong. Considering that most of the fans of the original series are at least in their 30s now, the update is well targeted.

Be careful with the extra on the DVD where they interview three of the creators. Those are some gushing fanboys to the extent that I was kind of uncomfortable on their behalf.

Now, if they could do something like this for Transformers instead of those abominable movies..

What am I working on? Reading, watching, interviewing.

Stuff on my plate to watch -> GI Joe:Resolute, Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Oklahoma

Stuff on my plate to read -> Stuff, Bone Omnibus, Watership Down

Stuff on my plate to actually listen to -> She & Him Vol. 2

Stuff on my plate to play -> Dead Space, Bioshock 2

Will be writing on most of these. Resolute is almost done.

Aside from that I mostly have job interviews for the next week. Will have plenty of time for media binging.

Sometimes I remember that burning fire in me that wanted to own a Theremin.

Hot damn, Nymphoid Barbarians!

So random that I encountered this, but the shlock (non)classic Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell is on Hulu. Produced, funded, and distributed by Troma - the director resented Lloyd Kaufman with all of his being - in part due to the titling that was forced on him. Much like Chopping Mall has no chopping, Nymphoid Barbarian holds no nymphoids or sexual content whatsoever. Sadly this Hulu presentation does not have the director commentary, which is the true diamond in the rough that the DVD holds.

What am I watching? Chopping Mall!

Context!

Chopping Mall, aka Killbots - released in 1985, the same year as Short Circuit, one year before Robocop and giving neither movie a run for their money. Jim Wynorski, a director mired in crap 80s horror schlock, destined to make even worse exploitation flicks like “The Bare Wench Project”. I’ve only seen the third in that series, but.. oh.. dear god.. there aren’t enough bare wenches in the world to make that crap watchable.

This was one of those movies that were always forbidden fruit. I’d look at the box art in West Coast Video as I was thinking about what computer game I wanted to rent, dreaming about what it could be about. Cursed to never know what laid on that magnetic tape!

The budget is nowhere near allowing convincing miniatures or full sized animatronics. Apparently these ‘killbots’ consist of moving treads and three points of articulation in a rotating head, rotating torso, and clacking claw. What a far cry from the remote control masterpiece of Johnny 5 (although all the different aspects of Johnny 5 probably belonged to discrete animatronics used for different scenes).

The acting? Not horrible. After catching some stinkers like The Room, and Troll 2, this, in its adequacy, is almost Shakespeare in comparison. Nobody is chewing on the scenery or hamming it up too much.

Things I love about the movie:
- The sporting goods store is well stocked with shotguns, M-14s, Magnums, and plenty of easy access ammo.
- Iranian lessons that sexuality and promiscuity lead, not to earthquakes, but murderous robots that want to set you on fire. A common theme of 80s slasher films, but true all the same.
- This is essentially every Michael Crichton story writ small. Technology is going to turn on us and we’re all going to die! This would have been pretty amusing if it were dinosaurs running amok in the mall.
- Mom jeans used to be in fashion!

Disappointment in this movie:
- No chopping.

The plot doesn’t matter too much. It opens with a demonstration of the state of the art in mall security – “This will be the safest mall in the country!” Although who knows what kind of crime spree must be going on that mall security needs lasers, C4, tasers, and claws. Lightning hits the building and apparently turns the bots ED-209 lethal instead of Johnny 5 loveable. Isn’t this kind of how Robo Rally started?

A teenage after hours party at the mattress store starts to go wrong as the partiers are taken out one by one. Eventually the only ones left are the nerdy new couple that just met that night! To spoil the ending – who survives? THE GUY AND GIRL WHO DIDN’T PUT OUT. This movie has to be huge in Iran.

I feel like I’ve crossed one thing off my bucket list after having seen this. Aside from that there’s pretty much no reason for anybody to watch this movie. Ever.. Ooh, wait! Director and writer commentary! Guess who’s watching this again!

BONUS CONTENT:
Jim Wynorski, the director of this flick has gone on to the fresh new millennium with what have to be a series of further morality plays:
- The Bare Wench Project
- Busty Cops
- The Witches of Breastwick
- Cleavagefield
- Para-Knockers Activity

And a documentary - Popatopolis - made about Wynorski while filming Witches of Breastwick:

What am I playing? The Pinball (Mac, iPhone)

Pinball, the ancient and mystical art! Some would say it requires a deep and innate relationship with the table to truly do well. After all, how else could a deaf, dumb, and blind kid play such a mean pinball?

I love pinball and have even when the skill involved was completely beyond my grasp, as well as the buttons. Hard for a little guy on a milk crate to reach both buttons! I have even made pilgrimages to what has to be the current pinball Mecca – The Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

It’s within that context that I can comfortably blame any dislike on my part towards ‘The Pinball’ to be related to the qualities inherent in the game and not any misunderstanding of the medium myself.

Gameprom has apparently made a name for themselves with three fully 3d, full physics pinball boards on the iPhone. I’ve seen countless rave reviews of these boards to the extent that I was convinced to purchase each of them even after I tried and was not impressed by the Wild West board. Sure, the physics are realistic, but the boards are uninteresting, provide no clear progression of game states, and boring flow.

Gameprom came up with a concept that really excited me at first. They released software for OSX that provided a full screen, full power rendition of their boards. That in itself, not so interesting, but the fact that the game was controlled by an iPod touch or iPhone.. That’s interesting!

While trying out the software I sadly was driven to ask myself ‘why am I doing this?’ I look down in my hands and I have this little interface that I’m mashing the hell out of to play some Wild West pinball, but all I could feel is that I wanted something else. I wanted to reach for the keyboard. I wanted to go to my Xbox to play some Williams Hall of Fame – arguably the best pinball simulator in existence. Instead I’m stuck with the requirement of using an external device for this pinball for a perfectly arbitrary reason.

It may stand to argue that they’re tying the experience through the iPhone app so that all of the board purchases can be handled through the pre-existing payment infrastructure. I can appreciate that. Kind of. But allow untethering after the board purchase!

It boils down to the boards. The free one – Wild West – remains uninteresting, even at higher resolutions. I know the others available aren't that hot either. In the end – try the free board out for the novelty, but don’t get sucked in. Too much hardware required for too little gameplay. Pinball can be magic, but this is almost as far from that as possible.

What am I watching? ESTATE OF PANIC!!

Estate of Panic! A throwback to when Sci-Fi channel hadn’t decided to get all edgy as SyFy. It’s like Fear Factor meets all those fun kids gameshows from the 80s and 90s like Finders Keepers, Double Dare, GUTS, and Fun House. It’s not anything you need to watch, but it’s fun to watch. I also for some reason snagged the six eps made off of iTunes when they were on sale at some point.

That’s about it. There’s 6 people at the start of the episode, tasked with entering environments and hunting for cash as the environments get more and more hostile. They can all spend as long as they like in there but the last person doesn’t get let out of the environment and the person that makes it out with the least cash is eliminated. Fun way to spend 42 minutes watching people deal with hydrophobia, arachnophobia, snakeophobia, electrocution, and rooms slowly closing in on them.

What am I playing? Zombie Driver

Oh, Zombies. Is there any situation you’re not good for?

Zombie Driver is an overhead drivearound, shoot-em-up game for the PC. Imagine the original Grand Theft Auto with 3d graphics and gore combined with Crazy Taxi and Night of the Living Dead.

Final verdict first? It’s a 10 dollar game, which sounds cheap, but not worth it. I picked it up at a promotional rate of 2.50 back when Steam was having their crazy sales in December.

The game is pretty for what it is – there is even some nice limb physics as zombies are mown down. There’s a nice progression of vehicles and a selection of weapons to choose from for taking out zombies. There’s some challenge in completing some of the secondary objectives.

However, the camera is just not all that great. It’s essentially a guess on how you actually get to your objectives. There’s no overhead map to help you or even any kind of gps system to show you good routes to take.

The combat is cool in theory, but only theory. In order to pick people up you need to kill all the zombies in a certain radius around the building they’re in. Sadly the combat boils down to accelerating through the crowd of zombies, then deciding if you’re just going to back through the crowd again or turn around to get up more speed. No real sense of skill adding to the possibilities.

17 missions gives the game some legs, but the ending is pretty throwaway. No conclusion to the ‘story’ and you forgot how horrid the opening art of the game was because you don’t see it again until the end. What I was really looking forward to was going back to the earlier missions with my souped up cars and seeing how much better I could do at them, but beating the game RESETS ALL OF YOUR PROGRESS. Failure..

What is it that's wrong with me?

My internet is disappearing!

All of my favorite things that populated my feeds have apparently been disappearing..  So between my pruning down to a small number of feeds, my existing ones have decayed.  And I am bored with the internet..

Or maybe I have too much time to plow through the feeds I have?

But digg and recommended links are not as good anymore, either..

This will take cogitating, pondering, and braining to sort out.

What am I watching? Drop Dead Fred

Oh, Netflix streaming.. You've taken the place of all the late night or off hour movie filler that tv used supply in spades.

Trying to watch through Drop Dead Fred partially because Phoebe Cates was really really cute and partially because the movie is bizarre(I've only seen her in Gremlins 1,2 previously).  Sadly, it's also freaking annoying.  At least the first half.  That's about where I had to turn it off the first time through.  It's just too screwball comedy except that everything can't just be cleared up with a simple explanation between the parties involved.  Phoebe's character actually *tries* to explain what is happening, it's just ridiculous.  Ah, well.  I can make it through.  I can be strong.  It's not as bad as Armageddon.

Weird part of the movie?  The younger version of the main character is a spitting image for my wife at the same age.

Random factoid when reading back on Phoebe Cates - she married Kevin Kline when she was 26 and he was 40.  Good god!  What an age difference!  No slight on either of them, I just can't imagine being married to what would, with the same relative age for me, be a 15 year old.

Yadda yadda.  The beat goes on.  And so it goes.

Still debating what I'm going to rate this movie.

Multi-touch support for middle mouse clicks.

If you're like me, you hate having to two-hand it on your macbook to middle click and open a link in a new tab.

Enter MIDDLECLICK - http://clement.beffa.org/labs/projects/middleclick/

The world is magical again.  Now I just need to figure out how to get it to open on boot.

To commemorate that I just realized it's been 10 years since Boris the Sprinkler's last album.

When I was in college I had this silly experience that can only happen in those teen years.  I had just started working at the radio station at Elmhurst College and I was dropping anything into the disc player to check out.  I had found this awesome band on a Mentos music sampler - Boris the Sprinkler - with the track Weird Lookin' Woman.  It really fit in with the Church of the SubGenius vibe I was digging those days.  Rant of the underman.  Are we not men?  We are Devo! 

At the time there was a nice little eco-system of used and new music around oak park.  There was Music Recyclery in North Riverside.  Disc-Go-Round outside of the mall.  2nd Hand Tunes on Oak Park Avenue.  Some random little place on Roosevelt near the Game Stop.  Val's Halla on South Boulevard.  A lot of options that I made the rounds of.  Napster was still 2 years away.

I didn't find Boris the Sprinkler at any of those places.

So I was in Val's Halla, trying to find some new stuff.  The girl at the register happened to be pretty cute.  Val's was the only place that had any cute girls working there, but they were really expensive.  So I tried to save my 'impressive' purchases for when I was there so I could get a chance to talk about the weird or classic stuff I was buying.  Odd TMBG stuff, Devo, Pixies.  All of that.

I decided to bring up Boris the Sprinkler to see if they could order any for me - they're always aggressive with the fact they can order things.

Girl pulls out the distributor catalog.. "Boris.. Boris.. Boris.. OK, here they are, what disc are you looking for?"  "I dunno, what are the options?"  Here's where it gets awkward..  "There's.. uh.. Eight Testicled Pogo Machine.. or.. Mega Anal?  There's the… Drugs and Masturbation single?"

 "Uh." 

One syllable was all I could really get out. 

Needless to say, I didn't try that route any more at Val's.  Who knew you could get so burned at lame flirting attempts just asking for album names?

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
- George F. Will

Just unfinished thoughts on some random stuff I've consumed lately

The Room – Tommy Wiseau lives in some bizarre alternate reality.  I cannot conceive of the source of his accent.  I can’t comprehend how his worldview is compatible with the rest of the world, who are all pretty much agreed that his movie is a bizarre and unredeemable piece of shit.  How the hell does a guy like this scrape up seven million dollars to bank his own movie and decide that’s a good way to blow his money having NEVER DIRECTED ANYTHING EVER BEFORE.  Blah!  The Rifftrax kinda helped, but even they didn’t seem to know what to do with the numerous and overly long sex scenes between completely unattractive people.

D-Wars – I can see how this would have done great in South Korea in spite of it seeming to be a totally American movie.  One of the Korean mythologies takes form and fucks up Los Angeles?  No matter how crappy the script, I would be psyched about that as a South Korean.  I imagine in North Korea they would have maybe done this as a puppet show or cave paintings.  As an American, however, by the time the details of the mythology were needed, I had completely forgotten what I should even care about happening.  Movie best put on if you don’t plan to be in the room – then you can just wander in and out saying ‘oh, hey, those effects are pretty good.’  Rifftrax still not enough to mitigate the pain.

Alias Compendium – better reviewed along with Volume 1 – must reread all at once.  As a standalone – very excellent.  As complementary to Marvel Universe as a whole?  Very good in complementing Bendis’ run on Daredevil.  Good mesh between the two.

All Hail Megatron – apparently volumes 1 and 2 are the sum total of the All Hail Megatron story.  These two volumes are a collection of the relevant Spotlight issues and a collection of some, possibly unpublished, vignettes in, around, and after the events of AHM.  After reading these back to back I decided I really wasn’t sure what all happened in the total of the run of Transformers.  Consulted the Wikipedia page for the plot summaries and determined that it’s all just batshit crazy.  I mean, wow.  Even if all of these stories had been numbered in the proper reading order this is some truly nutty stuff to be trying to digest.  So many bots, so many stories to follow, so much that requires extensive background.  I enjoyed reading them, but am starting to rethink the idea of getting the collected hardcovers coming out that reprint the stories in chronological order.

(500) Days of Summer – I liked it.  A decent story is told about an ultimately doomed relationship.  It was all done from the point of view of the guy chasing Summer and I could totally see where he was coming from.  But I could also see where the people around him were coming from in questioning what the hell he was doing and why.  Sure, he wasn’t getting what he wanted, but he also was not being deprived of anything that was promised to him.  He ended up barging into the relationship and trying to dictate new terms when there were already very clearly defined terms.  I could also see it from the point of view of Summer.  She’s a really conflicted character with a lot of defense mechanisms.  She experimented and was lulled by the painting that the guy was painting of what things could be, but didn’t know how to handle it properly when she needed to pull the eject lever.  

The tubes are clear, captain. Ready to fire.

Oh, hey.  I don't even need to post my witticisms directly to Buzz.  THE MAGIC TUBES OF THE INTERWEBS REDIRECT THEM AUTOMATICALLY!