Arguments and Complaints

I like to watch sports. Not all sports (I'm not that fond of hockey, and baseball can get a little slow), but some – especially football. My team is the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League. They were 5 - 13 last year, so I didn't like watching them as much as I usually do.

When watching football, often the announcers will hesitate to criticize any player. That may be because they may lose access to that player if they slam them too much, or it might be that announcers believe you can't criticize without playing the sports yourself (which doesn't make sense for announcers who have played the sport, but I think they think they're part of some sort of fraternity and have to stick up for members of it, even if they do play poorly).

Now, that excuse doesn't really fly in sports, because we have a lot of points of comparison. We can use statistic to find average quarterbacks, and measure poor ones by that. Obviously, we can't make the plays they do, but if a bad quarterback is not doing a good job, we can pretty much prove it, and thus have a valid point of complaint.

However, the announcers do make a good point when you talk about things outside of sports. We should try to make an effort to at least understand things before we go off ranting about them.

I like Mass Effect 3. I like the whole Mass Effect universe, actually, and if they made an MMO, I'm pretty sure I'd get fired for not showing up to work. But Mass Effect 3 has gotten a lot of flack for having a bad ending. Which is alright. I think they went high concept, and nobody really got it. Or they finally reached such a large audience that it included people who weren't unabashed Bioware fanboys (In complete honesty, I am an unabashed Bioware fanboy).

But people then started complaining about other things as well. One that stuck in my mind was someone furious that all the aliens were humanoid. Which is a pretty dumb complaint to make after Mass Effect 3. You probably should have spoken up two games ago, bud.

Anyway, I'd like to take a moment to explain why most aliens are humanoid. It's a similar reason why aliens on TV are very human as well. It's because you can slap makeup or prosthetics on a human and have them be alien, while still having an actor underneath it. In computer games, you can take the human skeleton and body movements, and just reskin it to get different aliens. Play with sliders to get fat aliens, thin aliens, tall aliens, short aliens. The point is that the company can re-use large chunks of code, which allows them to concentrate on other things. Starships, space stations, cool alien planets.

We really can't complain much about how these games are put together until we've actually seen the goings on behind the scenes. How can we justify criticizing an AAA game if we have no idea how it's made? We need to learn more about them before we blow up, or our rants will just make us look stupid.

As another example, take the RIAA (Recording Industry Artist of America). They represent pretty much everyone in the USA that makes recorded music professionally, or holds a music copyright. They've made news in the past decade suing little old ladies who accidentally downloaded music. Which is a bad tactic from a PR department (maybe you should go after the big pirates who look worse, guys), but there may be more going on behind the scenes than we know about.

Copyright law is a tricky, finicky thing. It can be argued (by good lawyers who know their stuff) that if you don't protect your copyright, you can lose it. Which is one of the reasons Nintendo sues anyone who tries to put Mario in anything. If they didn't, and a little mom & pop shop used him as a ringtone, Sony or Microsoft could swoop down and start putting him in all their games. So Nintendo scours the planet, ready to serve anyone who tries to use their trademarks without their permission.

The same can be said about the RIAA. By suing people who're illegally downloading music, they're proving that they are protecting their interest holders (in this case, all the artists they represent). If they didn’t sue, people could start using their music all willy-nilly without paying a cent. Not only that, but the artist they represent would probably end up suing for breach of contract (the RIAA, in this scenario, would not have protected the rights of the people they represent). So they'd get hammered in court, with no source of income.

Yes, some artists want to release music for free (Radiohead's example of In Rainbows comes to mind, but two thirds of people paid nothing for it, so what does that tell you), but I would be willing to wager small amounts of money that they want to get paid for what they do, seeing as how it's their job.

No, copyright infringement isn't theft. Stealing a car is way worse (Seeing as how you're depriving somebody of a car, not the manufacturer of a car sale). But there's more going on with the RIAA than we give it credit for.

So keep in mind, whenever we complain or argue, maybe we should look at what's really going on, before we open our mouths and insert our feet. Remember "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool that to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Lockout

Not many of you will have heard of Lockout. It popped up on my radar as a thriller, but it’s more of an action movie. It’s from France (from the mind of Luc Besson, who’s either a genius or Hollywood hack, depending on if you ask a normal person or if you ask a film critic), and it didn’t get a wide release here – same theatres as last week actually. We saw it in the same place as The Raid, actually.

The previews were for The Raven, Safe, The Avengers, and one of those terrible ‘found footage’ horror movies, called The Chernobyl Diaries. Three guesses as to where it’s located, and the first two don’t count. Anyway, we ended up tying, so no one won the preview game.

The movie itself opens with Guy Pierce (Snow) in an interrogation room after a botched assignment. As the official asks him question, instead of answering, the movie flashes back to what really happened, with Snow giving flippant, sardonic remarks upon coming out of them.

He’s accused of killing a spy sent to bring back some secrets, but he says he didn’t do it. There’s a flashback to a big long action sequence where he’s chased by a bunch of agency types. Oh, I should probably mention that it’s 2079, so the pursuit involves one wheeled motorcycles, futuristic helicopter-harrier mashups, and insanely fast speeds. Eventually, Snow manages to toss a briefcase to an accomplice who gets away on a train, while Snow is arrested.

He’s sentenced to 30 years in prison, but he won’t experience it. He’s to be put in stasis. Rip Van Winkle?

Meanwhile, a team of humanitarians is taking a trip to outer space, where a prison resides. It’s an experimental facility (basically, a beta test) for evil people to be put in stasis until their sentence is up. The group has concerns that stasis has incredibly negative side effects, and the prisoners are being secretly tested to study the effects of stasis for the basis of long-term space travel. Oh yes, the team is led by the President’s daughter, Emilie (played by Maggie Grace, who’s been in two other Mindless Movies – Faster and Knight and Day).

While the team is there, Emilie interviews a psychotic inmate. He manages to get free and awakens all the rest of the inmates. Oops. Now only one man can save them. But he’s a rogue element, living on the edge. He’s Snow – Walking Cliché.

The movie takes off from there, with action, chase scenes, and enough one-liners to make Ahnold jealous. Pierce isn’t quite up to Ahnold’s legacy, but he’s definitely in the Bruce Willis mould (only with more hair).

The science is … iffy, at best. Ignore it, or it’ll bug you for a very long time. Just view this as the movie that science abandoned, and you should be all right. It’s all about fun, and it sure is a lot of fun. The lines are pretty good, although Pierce gets most of them. Grace gets in one or two, and there are some supporting characters that get the rest.

It’s a ridiculous movie. If you’re going to see it, remember to keep that in mind. Logic, out the window. It’s unashamedly pulp, and a whole lot of fun. I’d say it’s actually a theatre movie, but that’s because it was actually a lot funnier than I thought it would be. You may think differently, but once again, try not to get bogged down by all the small stuff. ALL the small stuff.

The Raid: Redemption

These past few years, action movies have come from more than just Hollywood. As long as your willing to look outside Europe and the Middle East (whose international releases tend to be quiet dramas) and start getting into Asia, you’ll find some superb films. And by superb, I mean awesome.

Martial Arts have been in the North American pop-culture consciousness ever since Bruce Lee came along and kicked everyone’s ass, but it wasn’t until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that we realized they can do more than just martial arts. They can also really ridiculously awesome martial arts. Jackie Chan and Jet Li continued the tradition, having a lot of movies released over here, and we have a growing awareness of some other actors as well (Donnie Yen, Jackie Wu).

But those were mostly Hong Kong productions. The other countries in that area have decided to get in the game, and so we’ve gotten awesome action movies from Japan, Thaliand (anything that Tony Jaa is in), and this past week, we got The Raid: Redemption, from Indonesia.

Evan and I saw this up at Empire Studio 16, because foreign movies might get a wider release than arthouse films, but they can’t make it into every theatre. For that matter, the movie itself has been around for a few months (it was simply called The Raid, but I’m betting it was appended with a colon so that the rights could be sold – and have been – and that movie could be called The Raid), so it’s not like it’s getting top-of-the-line treatment. Anyway, trailers for the movie consisted of Safe and Lockout, two movies that are also coming out in April. Maybe Empire is getting a little shortsighted, or just thinks its audience consists of morons. Whatever.

The movie opens with cuts between a guy praying (Muslim, I think, but I could be wrong) and working out. So peaceful, quiet scenes interspersed with punching and kicking a punching bag. He says good-bye to his pregnant wife (cliché alert!) and loads up with the rest of a police squad to take care of some business in an apartment building owned by a crime lord who uses the tenants as security in case of invasion.

They infiltrate the building stealthily, but an alarm is sounded when they get a few floors up, and the solid excrement soon hits the rotary air-conditioning device. The action goes balls to the wall, and then picks up again when the team splits up and Rama (the protagonist) has to take on roving bands of thugs armed with machetes with only his fists and skills. And it’s awesome!

Seriously, if you’re a fan of action, you need to see this movie, if only to support people continuing to make movies like this. The action is tremendous, and the few parts where someone isn’t getting shot, stabbed, punched, elbowed, kicked, or kneed are filled with tension, which the music does a tremendous job of ratcheting up. There are a few flaws, none of which I care about. This is most definitely a theatre movie, and I’ll do my best to make sure as many of you see it there as possible.

Wrath of the Titans

This week, we saw Wrath of the Titans. It's a sequel to Clash of the Titans, which we missed in theatres in 2010 because it came out a few months before The Mindless Movie Marathon was conceived. I'd like to say it's our first true sequel (because we caught it later on Blu-Ray), but I think both parts of The Deathly Hallows might count, especially when we watched them back to back (but not with the rest of our Harry Potter Marathon). We took Nadia with us, because she thought it would have a lot of action. Previews were a bit scattered, but included Prometheus, The Avengers, Dark Shadows, and The Raven.

Wrath has the bare bones of a really good plot. Break into Tartarus to free Zeus, then collect three weapons to stop Kronos. However, the actual movie seems like it's made by a committee, which was formed when people said "Clash of the Titans made money. Let's have a sequel" only no one could decide exactly what they should put in the sequel. So many lines were left unfinished, and set pieces were wedged in there like a kid trying to do a jigsaw puzzle, only getting fed up, jamming all the pieces in the wrong places, and going off to play video games.

Actually, this would have made an excellent video game. Probably for Link, if he wasn't busy saving Zelda all the time. It could have been a God of War clone, except it would have been exactly like God of War (only the gods in this one weren't as dickish. Well, maybe Ares. But when you're the God of War, you're probably big into war).

The movie starts of with Perseus being a good father, and Zeus not being a good father, brother, or ruler (for that matter). God Needs Prayer Badly, and all that. Hades has teemed up with Ares to free Kronos from Tartarus, because why not. I may have already mentioned this in my Immortals review, but in one interpretation, Tartarus is alive. So when someone ventures into its bowels, it could be taken literally. And when you eat Gods, that's got to be an interesting digestive process. Biggest bacteria ever!

Anyway, Ares and Hades trap Zeus to use his power for Kronos. Poseidon barely escapes, giving his trident to Perseus before he dies, and turns into a statue of sand, which blows away. Perseus then goes off to free Zeus and stop Hades, Ares, and Kronos.

This is a terrible, terrible movie. That's not to say I didn't like it, but if you go to see it, keep in mind that it's a terrible, terrible movie. It's in 3D, which enhances some special effects (mountains blowing up and raining debris around the viewers). It has the ingredients of awesomeness: Giant lava gods, lightning gods, huge Cyclopes, swords, armor, spears, Minotaurs, Sam Worthington, Rosamund Pike.

But it never manages to put it all together into a coherent movie. Things are kind of slapped together. The action may have been magnificent, but we couldn't really see it due to shaky-cam, smoke, and other budget-decreasing effects. There were some really cool computer-generated stuff, but it was mostly obscured.

This movie is a DVD movie for me. It’s lacks a lot, but there’s enough good action and effects to almost push into Blu-Ray territory. The bad parts really hold it back. There’s a heavy emphasis on family, which colors the already terrible language. Do you ever call your sibling Brother? Your kid Son? Or do you call them by their names or nicknames? But maybe that’s because you’re not part of the Greek Pantheon. Which is probably a good thing, because then your dad can’t banish you anywhere except your room.