Zombie Column: Watch Dogs

Contrary to popular belief, Watch Dogs is not about canine time-telling devices. Phooey. However, it is the latest game from Ubisoft, who you probably don't know as the makers of Assassin's Creed and a particular dopey version of DRM called Uplay that they force down their PC users’ throats (Dear Ubisoft, I use Steam, which already has DRM. Well built DRM. Useful DRM, not shoehorned into games DRM. DRM that many, many people have gotten used to. Please, just let me play your games without this extra wrench in the gears, mucking things up. Thanks).

I have been told that Watch Dogs is much like Assassins Creed with hacking, or similar to Grand Theft Auto (the game, not the activity) with hacking. I wouldn't know, as I haven't tried either (the games, not the activities. Though come to think of it, I haven't tried those activities either). But the gameplay does have a lot of hacking. As well as driving, shooting, and hitting people in the noggin with a collapsible baton.

The story centers around Aiden Pearce (the character player). 11 months ago, he and his partner, Damien Brenks, were pulling a hacking job in the Merlaut Hotel. Aiden was in the hotel, hooking up to the wireless, while Damien was offsite, doing the actual hacking. After they got about $140,000, another hacker broke in. The police started to converge, and after Aiden sees a blurry image of ... something, he bails. However, the blurry image is enough to get a hit put on him that results in the death of his six year old niece. Now 11 months later, he finds the hitman who cause the car crash.

The story is kind of weird. You'd think information from the hitman would lead somewhere, but it doesn't. During the tutorial, you give the hitman (Maurice) to Jordi, a fixer you're familiar with and have paid a lot of money to. Jordi's job (besides watching your back occasionally) is to torture Maurice to give up information, but it doesn't really work. Instead, a second plot intrudes and takes up most of the game. That eventually branches off to a third plot (mostly conspiracy) that actually settles the first plot, while dealing with the last of the second plot ends the game.

Aiden himself is pretty good at hacking, but it turns out he's also good at driving, good at shooting, good at sneaking, good at everything needed to accomplish this game. And it's not just because I was in control of him (in fact, I was pretty bad at driving, until I got the hang of it. Even then, I wasn't that great). Aiden is recognized in game as good at this stuff. How did he get so good at it? Most games give an excuse as to why the player character is great at the stuff in the game. Shepard was part of N7 (Navy SEALS in space). Adam Jensen was ex-SWAT. Aiden? He's just a guy who's excellent at everything.

Gameplay mostly consists of hacking things, driving things, shooting people, and hitting people. Hacking is most common, and easy to use. Simply hold 'Q' for half a second, and you hack whatever your cursor is pointed near. Point it at someone’s phone, and you can hear their conversation, or see their text messages, or simply just a display of their bank information (which you can then steal at the nearest ATM). Hacking traffic lights causes green lights at every intersection, and everyone pulls out, causing pile-ups. Every. Single. Time. Hacking cameras allows you to look for things you wouldn't be able to see from your vantage point, even other cameras. A few missions (both main and side) require you to hack a chain of cameras. Later, you gain the ability to start and stop the trains, explode transformers or just any boxes marked 'Explode', street bumpers, road spikes, and even steam pipes under roads, causing massive explosions. It's one of the better ways of getting people off your back if their tailing your vehicle, shooting at you. And of course, one of the very fun things to do is hack the grenades in peoples' pockets. Sometimes they get it out, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they get it out, just in time to fling it in the general direction of somebody else. Whoops.

Most of the game is divided up into missions, either main missions or side missions. The rest of the game is sort extraneous stuff. The side missions consist of a bit of variety. Sometimes there'll be gang hideouts, in which I have to sneak in and knock out the head of the gang (not kill him, for some reason). Some of them consist of Convoys, in which I have to knock out someone who's travelling with two other cars, and all of them are usually filled with people who are shooting at me. I didn't do any of those, because I failed about six times at the one I tried. Four times I died, and twice I accidentally killed the guy I was only supposed to knock out.

There's also Fixer Contracts, which usually involve stealing cars. Sometimes it's to provide a distractions, leading to long car chases along a fixed route. Sometimes it's just to provide a nice car to someone for free, so it involves driving carefully (i.e. slowly) so the car doesn't get too dinged.

The other thing that comes up are imminent crimes. While scanning other people (everyone's profile will pop up with a random fact about them), I'll get a notice pointing me to a location where a crime is about to take place. If I go there and look around, I'll eventually spot a potential victim or perpetrator (their faces will be in a yellow boxes. Most people are white boxes, hackable phones people will be blue, and enemies are red). If I wait out of sight, eventually the crime will start to take place. At this point, I can intervene and clobber the perp on the head, increasing my reputation. Reputation is nice, because it stops people from calling the cops when they see me. Reputation can be lowered by injuring or killing civilians, something that happened with alarming frequency whenever I was involved in a car chase, so I was always going to the crimes and intervening so I could raise my rep.

A lot of the extraneous stuff is heading to specific locations and hacking whatever's there. Mostly it's usually a CTOS box (CTOS is the system Chicago hooked everything up to so it runs right) that I hack into, but sometimes it's a door. Usually doors are locked, and I have a white line I follow around varying obstacles until I find the switch to hack. Sometimes CTOS boxes are locked like that too, so I end up wandering into the neighbor's yard to hack a switch on the back of their house, allowing me to open the garage three doors down. How does that work? Hacking cameras is very useful here, because sometimes the switch is somewhere I can't see. I might have to platform a bit to get there, as well. Once I've hacked in, occasionally I'll have to play a "Connect the signal" minigame where I rotate pieces of electronics (or code?) until it connects to where it needs to go. Anyway, if it's a box I've hacked, usually it just shows something from a camera in someone's apartment. Some of these scenes are funny. Some are perverted (nothing explicit is ever shown, just implied). Some are sad. Some are creepy. Mind you, I guess the fact I'm watching it also creepy.

The main story missions are usually made up of these types of things too. Go here, hack this. Go here, knock out this person, hack their phone. Go here, knock out this convoy. If you're good at the side missions, you'll be good at the main game. Of course, there are also some completely random extraneous stuff too. You can play poker (and cheat by hacking cameras, or analyzing biometrics), you can play chess, you can play AR games, or even drinking games. There was a drinking game as part of the main story missions, but that was the only one I did.

Most of the game is pretty good, but there are a few bad things about it. Firstly, the cops. Police are incredibly annoying and persistent. In most chases, they'll bring in cars and a helicopter. If I outrun the cars, there's still the helicopter around. If I step out of the car to hack the helicopter (because the camera won't pan up that far in a vehicle, and sometimes not on foot), disabling it for a few seconds, then the cars catch up. By the time I've outrun them, the chopper is back up and running. If I'm not in the fastest cars, the cops are just fast enough to catch up to me (but not get in front of me) and run me off the road, usually into a tree (which stops me dead, unlike lamp posts or streetlights, which simply fall over while denting my car. Too much denting and my car handles badly. Even more, and it'll give up the ghost). So escaping from the police is a rather frustrating experience, usually dependent on luck rather than skill.

Secondly, the knocking people out thing. If the target is stationary (like gang hideouts), it's possible to sneak up on them, or at least pick off enough other gang-members elsewhere that the final confrontation isn't too bad. If they're part of a convoy, though, there's eight people shooting at me while I try to run up and knock out person out.

Games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dishonored have ranged non-lethal options. DE:HR even as a tranq Rifle, for extra range. But in Watch Dogs, you need to be right up next to the person, which often means they and their cohorts are putting many bullets into you as you try to get that close (hint: Aiden does not survive many bullets).

Thirdly are the bodies. You can’t really do anything with them. Either unconscious or as corpses, bodies stay where they drop, which is annoying, because if anyone comes across them, they get freaked out. Civilians may call the police (or take pictures with their phones), but gangs will be put on alert. I hate to keep harping on what other games do better, but DE:HR let you drag bodies around to hide them in closets, and Dishonored actually had the body fall into your arms by default if you snuck up behind someone and knocked them out, letting you easily hide them in … well, more closets. In both games, guards patrol a lot, but they really should check the closets. I can imagine a tidal wave of bodies falling out on top of the poor sap who opened the door. Creating another body, I supposed.

Lastly are the save points. This game goes by checkpoints with no saving. A lot of other games do that too, but it can get annoying if I’ve perfectly cleared out a level of a parking garage, alerting no one. It’d be a great time to save, lest I set of the alarm one floor up and wind up in another shootout. Unlike Jesus, I can’t save, so if the shootout goes sideways, I’ll have to restart the whole parking garage again. And yes, this totally happened, and nearly put me off gang hideouts for the rest of the game.

Other than that, the only other annoyance I found was story related. Near the end of the game, one of the main characters dies for what the writers thought was a good reason, and for what I thought was a pretty stupid one. I guess the writers thought that someone should die for the emotional gutpunch, but I just though “there was figuratively no reason for that to happen.”

I should make specific mention of the soundtrack to the game. Occasionally, you can hack peoples’ phones and snag a song off of them, which can then be selected when you’re driving. There’s an achievement for getting 23, but there are actually a lot more songs than that. Not all of them were to my taste, but the breadth of selection means there’s something for everyone. I hadn’t heard “Invisible Man” by anyone but Ghoti Hook, so it was cool to see the original done by The Vindictives.

So, I was all prepared to give this game an 8 on 10, because of the annoyances. But then I played the last two missions, which were chock full of police, and so frustrating I had to knock it down to a 7. There’s a difference between challenging (like a good math problem) and a just plain difficult (like a terrible math problem that you don’t understand, because the teacher didn’t explain the concepts to you, and you’re actually a sociology major, and are in the wrong class. Whoops). It’s not a bad thing to put frustrating things in your game (well, okay, it is), provided they are optional. They should not be jam-packed into the climax of the game.

So, 7 out of 10. Pretty good game, full of things to do, but be prepared for some frustrating experiences, with excellent music to soothe you through the hard times.

Zombie Column: Superb Sequels – A Doubleheader

This week, I took in two movies in a doubleheader. And it’s fitting I went to two, because both are sequels (if you hadn’t guessed from the title or anything). I went downtown, because that was convenient for seeing it after work, and not many theatres were playing the second movie I went to. In order, they were Captain America:The Winter Soldier, and The Raid II.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

This is the sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger. Apparently it’s impossible to name these things without a colon somewhere in there. Iron Man got off lucky with numbered sequels and Thor at least managed one before he had subtitles amended to his movies, but the Captain gets colons wherever he goes.

Anyway, the movie starts with the Captain storming a SHIELD freighter that’s been taken over by pirates. These are not Captain Phillips pirates, these are Marvel pirates, so they’re all white (no racial implications for you) and led by a guy played by George St Pierre (the MMA fighter). He and Cap throw down and Cap wins, because St Pierre is not playing a super soldier. After rescuing the hostages, Cap finds Natasha Romanov downloading files from the freighter computer on Nick Fury’s orders, and he’s a little pissed about that, since the mission was supposed to be about saving people, not information.

Back at the base, he and Fury get into it about trust and compartmentalization and all that, and there’s a lot of talking for an action movie. However, it does raise one of the central plots of the movie, which is the balance between freedom and security, in which freedom is always portrayed as right, because this is America, and it’s not like we have metal detectors at the airports or speed limits on roads. Oh wait, we totally do. Still, debate! Depth! Discussion!

We also get The Winter Soldier. Who is he? What is he? Sadly, I had this spoiled by the IMDB page, and also the Cineplex magazine in the theatre, which actually says who he is. Dude, spoilers. Also in the spoiler vein, we get a new technology that neatly steals the plot of Transcendence and packs it into about 10 minutes. I think most people would just accept this new technology and move on, but I’m not sure how many people really understood the mindblowing implications of it. Also, I’m not sure if the film makers understood how limited 70’s era storage technology was. Still, those 10 minutes explain who the bad guys were (these guys again?) and how they came to be.

The Raid II

In case you didn’t know, The Raid was an Indonesian film about a team of police invading a 15-floor apartment building in the slums of Jakarta to take down the mobster that owned the place. So, cops versus criminals in a building. Cool? Cool.

The Raid II takes place afterwards, and has a lot of time skipping back and forth at the beginning. Sorting it all out: right after the first film, Rama (the hero of the first film) meets with an Internal Affairs agent who wants him to go undercover. The first film villain was only a small fish, but the big fish are paying off cops, and the IA officer wants proof. Rama declines, because he has a pregnant wife. However, a few months later his brother is killed by one of the gangs (mobsters, really), so he goes to the IA officer and accepts. He gets himself arrested because the son of one of the mobsters is in jail. They become friends, and two years later (once Rama is released), he goes to work for them as the son’s shadow.

However, there is a new guy in town who wants a piece of the pie. Previously, the pie had only had two pieces – one for a local gang (the one Rama now works for), and one for a Japanese one. The new guy wants to induce a war between the two, edge out the Japanese, and split his remains with the local gang. All of this takes a lot of talking, which is why The Raid II is 2.5 hours long.

Also, it’s long because the director (Gareth Evans) really likes to linger on shots he finds cool. He could’ve cut about 15 minutes if he’d hired a ruthless editor, but no, we get to cut back and forth for a minute between a fair that doesn’t have anything to do with anything, and a field of very tall grass, which is eventually sprayed with blood before we pan over to which body previously held said blood. We get that you like that shot, but maybe you shouldn’t use it in an action movie, Mr. Evans.

All told, both movies are theatre movies. Both movies have car chases that aren’t spectacular, but we aren’t going to these movies for the car chases. We’re going for the fighting. Cap is surprisingly good at hand-to-hand, and The Raid II had martial arts in its car chases, because with a whole city as its set, why not find some inventive places to fight? Neither may live up to the incredible expectations placed on them (The Avengers is still my favourite Marvel Movie, and the Raid had a higher density of fighting, if not total amount). Still, both great movies if you want to see action.

Zombie Column: The Lego Movie

This week, a few friends and I went to see The Lego Movie. I’m trying to find words to describe it that don’t include Awesome, because of the theme. It’s uncannily ear-wormy. I mean, I have some songs I’m using to fend it off, but if it woke me up in the morning, I’d be hearing it all day. The movie makers used it fairly well, though. It’s the normal bubblegum pop for the opening bit. But then the movie eventually goes to an old west Lego Land, and there’s a honky tonk version being played on the piano. Then at the end of the movie, there’s an acoustic version (reminding me of Ted on Cougar Town), before it swings into a power ballad, like all the metal bands did in the 80’s to get on the radio. Oh wow, I got off track.

Anyway, I was excited to see the previews until I remembered (right before walking into the theatre) that this movie was rated G, and there would be no previews I recognized. There was an animated one for a dog that invents a time travel device, one for Rio 2, and one for possibly a documentary on the Lemurs in Madagascar. The kids in the theatre were delighted at their antics, so I’m sure they’ll drag their parents to see it if they can remember it after 5 minutes.

So, the movie opens with Emmet waking up. Emmet is a perfectly normal Lego guy who follows the instructions so perfectly that nobody really remembers him. He has no distinguishing features, unlike the guy who loves sausages, the guy who has bananas, the guy who laughs when you say his name, and the girl who’s perky. They all live in a large Lego city where everyone is supposed to follow the instructions. This is actually pretty brilliant, because when I get new Lego (and yes, I totally love getting new Lego. So what? I’m an adult, and I can spend money on what I feel like), I always follow the instructions too.

Emmet stumbles upon the mysterious Piece of Resistance, about which a prophecy is foretold that includes messianic figures and whatnot. Because of this piece, Emmet is soon engulfed in a conspiracy of Master Builders (people who can build without using instructions) who want to take down the evil President Business before he can end the world using his secret super weapon. The plot goes from there.

First of all, this movie is funny. Lots of gags, including in the casting. Cobie Smulders, (not-so) fresh of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, gets in to the DC Legotastic universe by voicing Wonder Woman (Paula Patton is in talks to play her should she get an actual movie). Billy Dee Williams plays Lego Lando Calrissian (so awesome!) and Anthony Daniels is C-3P0. Shaq plays Lego Shaq, because why not. And while not a stunt, Charlie Day plays a 1987 Space Man with a cracked helmet that looks suspiciously similar to how may cracked helmets I put on my old Lego Spacemen. He gets so excited about getting to build a spaceship that it could be a shoutout to Portal 2.

Secondly, the action is really good. It can get a little frenetic when guns are shooting, but the chase scenes are fantastic. Also, the way that Lego pieces get used as debris is excellent. Whenever something goes crashing into something else, bits of Lego go flying out. And they use a lot of the fire pieces that used to come out of the back of the engines of my spaceships (‘cause I get excited about spaceships too).

The CGI is incredible. This is a master class on how to use computers (and the occasional stop motion capture) to make a movie. And the sheer imagination of the way they used Lego is ridiculously impressive. I cannot say enough about that.

So, all in all, a theatre movie. Or, as other critics might say, Two plastic claw-handed thumbs up. In fact, everything was awesome (damn!)

Zombie Column: 47 Ronin

So, Evan was in town for the holidays, which meant we saw a movie, because that’s what we do. Also, it was unilaterally decided that I would be going to visit them soon for another weekend of movies. I had no say in this. On the plus side, they have Netflix, so if I get sick again (it happened last time), we can at least pack in several movies at their home.

There were three options of movies for us. First was the new Hobbit movie, but it seemed more like a family movie, in that Evan promised to take his wife, and I should probably take my nephew. Secondly was Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which seemed like a ripe case for Hangover 2 syndrome (a sequel to a massively successful comedy that rehashes the same jokes with little humour). Third was 47 Ronin which had the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of the three, so we went to that.

Trailers this time included I, Frankenstein (Evan pointed out the irony of titling it that. I guess I, Adam would have been lost on everyone. Although I, Daemon would have been pretty cool), Endless Love (about a shady guy who turned his life around, then fell in love with a good girl, whose dad looks into the guy's shady past. What the hell’s a love movie trailer doing in front of this movie?), Non-stop (Liam Neeson Neesoning his way through a plane mid-flight), and X-Men: Days of Future Past (in which Wolverine is sent back into the past to stop a war on mutants, because time travel has always worked out so well. Alright trailer with terrific music).

47 Ronin stars Keanu Reeves as Kai, a white guy in Ancient Japan (he’s actually the son of a British sailor and a Japanese woman, putting the time of the movie somewhere after the British had arrived, but before mythical creatures had died out). He hangs around the province of Arco, and is in love with Arco’s lord’s daughter, although he knows that her place is far above his in society. Arco hosts a tournament that the Emperor and the lord’s rival attend. Under the influence of witchcraft, the lord harms his rival. He’s permitted by the Emperor to commit Sepuku. The rival will take over the land by marrying the lord’s daughter. The lord’s samurai are forbidden to take revenge and cast out as Ronin. After one year of mourning, they team up with Kai and take revenge. Revenge with a side of honour, making it more Justice than Revenge.

The beginning of the movie states that those who understand the 47 Ronin understand Japan, but that’s not really true. Samurai are viewed a lot like knights. Back then, they were normal people who acted like normal people, with all their good qualities and bad. Much, much later, we look back at them with idealism as paragons of Honour, but they were not. Knights were kind of into the pillage/rape/murder thing, and I would wager small amounts of money that one of the reasons for the Crusades was so that the pillage/rape/murder could happen on foreign soil to the people of a religion Europe didn’t really care about.

Samurai were the same way. Some time later, important Japanese people got together and said “This is how Samurai acted, and so should you” regardless of whether or not Samurai actually acted that way. I’m sure some did, just as I’m sure some knights actually were knights in shining armour. But to say to understand the 47 Ronin is to undertand Japan is wrong. It’s actually understanding what Japan wishes it was. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We all idealise the past. All the founding fathers had foibles – they were people, after all. Nobody’s perfect. Anyway, I just wanted to state that.

So, the movie itself? Well, it looked great. They had $175 million for a budget, and they spent a lot of it on effects, and the rest on costumes so elaborate, they were ridiculously over the top. There wasn’t a lot of humour, but that’s okay in a serious movie like this, trying to get the point across that honour is worth dying for. The music is perfectly adequate.

The only real letdown, actually, is the action, which is kind of a big deal for me. There were only a couple of extended set pieces in the movie (there were some other very short ones). The first was good, the second was a battle in a flaming village that was a huge letdown because they went with the shaky-cam, short-cuts method instead of having awesome flaming fights, and the last was actually pretty good, and featured one of the better human vs dragon battles I’ve seen. In fact, I don’t really remember seeing anyone battle an Eastern-style dragon before. Still, the potential was there for so much more awesome, and they dropped the ball.

In conclusion, I’m going to have to give this a DVD rating. On the ride home, we compared it to Battleship, but upon further review, I think the scenery bumps it up a little. Not much.

On a final note, there’s a really nifty scene where (before the final battle) the remaining Ronin all sign their names on a piece of paper detailing their goal. Each signs their name, then draws their katana a few inches, presses their thumb against the blade, and leave a bloody thumbprint next to their name. I just thought that was pretty cool.

Zombie Column: Riddick

There are many, many people who are probably making the Riddick-ulous pun right now, so I won't be joining them (just standing beside them and pointing it out a lot). Unless, of course, I wasn't referring to the adjective, but instead the spell from Harry Potter, able to turn a bad movie into a good one. Sadly, my magic is just not that strong, and Riddick remained as it was.

We saw the movie up at CrossIron, although not in the fancy 3D UltraAVX theatre. Riddick wasn't in 3D, so I guess they didn't want to waste the extra money they could charge on it, or something. Still, good theatre. Previews for the week were Oldboy, Runner Runner, and 47 Ronin (which had a surprisingly long trailer). I could go for Oldboy (even though I know all the spoilers for the movie it remade) and 47 Ronin, because who doesn't like Keanu Reeves or Japanese martial arts movies with supernatural actions scenes?

Riddick opens with the titular character abandoned on some desert world (a little more varied than Tatooine, but not much. More like Geonosis, actually). There, he battles the elements and the predatory native creatures, all of whom seem to want to kill him. And that's all he does for about the first third of the movie. It's boring. Wow, is it ever boring. There's a brief flashback to the Necromongers, and then it's back to camping on death world. Whoo.

After that, he goes exploring onto the slightly nicer part of the world. It's more of a tundra than a desert. He comes across a Merc station (put there by who knows to house and re-supply any mercenaries that need it). Then he sees a rainstorm and decides that enough's enough, time to get off this rock. The only problem is that the only way off involves being captured by bounty hunters, so Riddick calls them over from whatever planet they were on.

Two bounty hunter crews arrive, and there's a lot of setting up, and patrolling, and Riddick gaining intelligence by staying far away and staring at them. Then there's some offscreen killing, and some really lame action and then the movie ends.

So, this movie is terrible. The first part is slow, and the second part is slow, and the third part is slow and lame. I can understand now why it took so much trouble to produce (Evan was telling me Vin Diesel had to mortgage his house to get the necessary funds). I mean, who would have looked at this script and said "Yeah, I want to make this. It stars an action hero with cool powers in an action hero franchise, only this time, he doesn’t do any action!"?

Is there anything redeeming about this movie? Well, after this, they won't be able to make any more. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, since I liked Chronicles of Riddick (I'm the only one). So the chance for another one of those is gone. But if they wanted to make more movies like this one, then it's a good thing they won't be able to.

Other than that, there are one or two chuckles to be had. Also, for fans of Battlestar Galactica, Katee Sackhoff is in it, and it's always nice when TV actors get roles in movies. I mean, she's in a completely unnecessary topless scene, so maybe it's not so good either. The movie had already earned it's R-rating with topless scenes in the flashbacks, we don't need famous actors doing them just for funsies.

All in all, I'm ranking this as a Free on TV movie. Not the absolute worst we've seen (Hi, Last Airbender), but probably ranking somewhere between Wrath of the Titans and Faster.

The World's End

It's the end of the world! Or at least, The World's End. Which is the movie we saw on Sunday night before Labor Day. Evan's back in town for the week, so we put the word out and saw the movie with Jeff, Steve, and Norm.

Preview were for Don Jon, Machete Kills, Last Vegas (The Hangover with old people) and The Family, which was probably pitched as a comedy sequel to Goodfellas. The latter two have Robert De Niro, and Evan is in on both. If I want to see old people, I'd rather see Schwarzenegger and Stallone in Escape Plan, but I suppose I could be talked into The Family.

Anyway, The World's End is the capper to the Cornetto Trilogy, whose previous entrants were Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. All of them star Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, are directed by Edgar Wright, and are written by Pegg and Wright. All of them are also spoofs of genres. Shaun of the Dead spoofed zombies (and Romance!), Hot Fuzz spoofed action movies, and now The World's End spoofs Invasion of the Body Snatcher type movies.

It opens with a flashback to 1990, when a group of five kids graduated from school and got hammered, because that's what one does when one celebrates. The tried the in/famous Golden Mile, the feat of having a pint at each of the twelve local pubs. Now, British beer is kinda strong (or so I heard) and twelve pints is not an insignificant amount. Combine that with whatever available substances there are to smoke (illegal or not), and you've got the makings of a terrible hangover. Two friends had to drop out early, and the rest made it nine deep before winding up on a hillside watching the sunrise over their vomit stained shoes. Whee.

Flashforward to the present time, and we get the leader of the pack, Gary King, telling this to a support group of some kind. It might be AA, it might be a rehab centre, it might be some other kind of therapy. One of the other guests asks if he regrets not making it to all twelve. A plan is hatched.

Meanwhile, the rest of the friends are decently successful. They're all in jobs that require suits and ties, and they're all visited by King to make the trip home to undertake the Golden Mile again. A lot of cajoling later, they all agree. I doubt they actually want to go, but they seem like the type of people who are too polite to say no to an old friend, even if he's still acting like a teenager 20 years later.

So they all meet up at the train station and are picked up by King, who takes them on a road trip home in the same car they used to party in 20 years ago (nicknamed "The Beast", although I'm pretty sure guys don't name their cars). They check into a hotel and begin their quest, and things start to get weird. And progressively worse.

There are many times during the night when it would behoove them to turn tail and run back to London, but King won't let them. He's bound, bent, and determined to finish the Golden Mile. Come Hell or High Water. Mostly Hell.

Towards the end of the movie, we find out why in a surprisingly emotional scene. I shouldn't be surprised by now. Wright and Pegg always manage to slot in these one or two genuine moments into their comedies. In Shaun of the dead, it was the titular character refusing to shoot his friend, even after he had been turned. In Hot Fuzz, there was Angel desperately calling for Danny after the police station exploded, or when Angel is convinced Danny's a bad guy. These sudden heartfelt moments in the midst of comedy. I like them. Not long enough to drag the movie down, but it helps us get to know the characters and makes us like them more.

It's easy to like the four other characters, but King starts the movie off like a jerk, and doesn't really get better until near the end. But it's explained, and we actually like him at the end. Not like, say, A Good Day to Die Hard, where John McClane starts the movie off like a jackass and by the end, is still just a jackass. That's not explained, and really annoying, considering how much we liked him in the previous movies.

So this movie does a better job of character development. You know what else it does a good job of? Well, the comedy's there, but you should know that by now. But they did a really good job on the action. I was pleasantly surprised by how much action there was in this movie, and how good it was. I mean, there wasn't enough to fill an action movie, but it was definitely enough to bill it as an action-comedy, like The Other Guys. Great stuff.

The music wasn't really anything I notice. So pass on that. The ending went in a completely different direction than any of us were expecting. The last scene made sense, but none of us really like it. And finally, Rosamund Pike was in it, which is always a bonus. So it gets the Theatre Rating from me.

Massive Mindless Movie Mega Marathon

With some careful planning and luck with scheduling, I set off for the movie theatre on Saturday at about a quarter after 11 in the morning with two bottles of Boost (My eating habits are ... peculiar). $65, 13 hours, and one headache later, I returned home, having completed the rarely seen quintuple-header. I managed to pack in The Lone Ranger, R.I.P.D., Red 2, Pacific Rim, and This is the End. I thought I would share some quick thoughts on each of them, if I can separate them all out from the jumble of memories they seem to have conglomerated into.

Trailers were often repeated. I saw ones for The Wolverine, Kick Ass 2, and Thor: The Dark World multiple times, and remember at least one showing of Insidious: Chapter 2 and Saving Mr. Banks (I think that's the title. It's the story of how Walt Disney got the rights to Mary Poppins).

The Lone Ranger

The movie opens with a slightly different Jerry Bruckheimer title screen. Usually it zooms along a highway until the lightning hits the tree; this time it zooms along railroad tracks. Then it actually starts with a fair in San Francisco, which uses an Old West exhibit as a framing device for the story. It's also one of the reasons the movie takes two and a half hours. Framing devices add time, okay guys?

Anyway, Dan Reid (Armie Hammer) starts off the movie as an idealistic prosecutor, believing in Due Process of Law, and not believing in guns. By the end of the movie, he doesn't believe in Due Process of Law, and does believe in guns. Because this is America, Dammit, and guns can solve what the law can't! Or something like that. As an aside, four of the five movies I went to depicted violence as solving the main problem. Mind you, it could be that four of the five movies I went to were action movies, and action movies generally contain violence. Otherwise they'd just be labelled dramas, or romantic comedies, or real life (ugh, who wants that?)

In this version, Tonto is played by Johnny Depp, who tries to bring some of the off-kilterness of Jack Sparrow to the role, but also tries to treat Native Americans with respect. It doesn't really work that well, but the action and humour are enough to keep the movie going.

And the music too. The climax takes place aboard trains (duh) with Hans Zimmer writing a score based off the Lone Ranger theme (and as I have been informed by the internet, also the William Tell Overture. I thought that was something else), then spiraling off in all directions before coming back, then going off again. It's a tremendous sequence with tremendous music. Almost worth the price of admission (particularly a matinee admission), but not quite. Still the rest of the movie has just enough to be a theatre movie by my odd and increasingly pointless ratings system. Also, I like Armie Hammer. And his hat.

R.I.P.D.

If you've read anything about this movie, you've probably heard that it's terrible. And I can certainly see where that's coming from. I didn't think so, but then, I have a hard time thinking any movie is terrible (The Last Airbender and Star Wars: The Clone Wars aside).

It starts off with a ridiculously hot French woman making out with Ryan Reynolds (because that is that natural order of things, and you do not mess with the natural order of things). Soon, he's called onto a drug bust, where a shootout results in his death. Whoops. He wanders outside while everything is frozen, and then is sucked up into the sky. He's pulled into small office, where he's pretty much coerced into joining the R.I.P.D., whose job it is to make sure the dead don't go on living on Earth covertly (as they are wont to do).

Things take a turn for the worse when a plot to bring back all the dead people is revealed. Also, Reynolds' ex gets pulled into it, because love crosses over life boundaries and such. Now you're getting the picture of why so many people call it terrible. Plus, Jeff Bridges isn't great. I know he can do whatever he feels like post-Dude, but his shtick wears a bit thin here. Still, there are some good laughs, and some good action. Not quite enough to make it a theatre movie, but solidly in the Blu-Ray books.

RED 2

Oh look, it's Mary-Louise Parker again! She was in R.I.P.D. as well. This time she’s the love interest to an old guy ... wait, that was in R.I.P.D. as well (she and Jeff Bridges’ character used to have a thing, but he's a bit of an asshat, so it didn't go well). Anyway, in this installment of Red, Frank and his team are targets because of an operation from the 80's and ... wait, that was the same as the original Red as well. Man, things tend to repeat, don't they? Anyway, this version of Red sidegrades from Morgan Freeman to Anthony Hopkins (I respect Sir Anthony Hopkins a lot, but Freeman, played God and Visa).

So Frank and his team go on the lam, globetrotting around most of Europe this time while government agents from various countries try to kill them. Don't worry though. Frank is played by Bruce Willis, and it's commonly known that he can only die by nuclear explosion while in space (cool fact: Die Hard was a documentary). And John Malkovich plays a lovably paranoid lunatic, so he's pretty much safe (he'll be able to see everything cover). Neil McDonough takes over from Karl Urban as the government agent sent to track down the Frankettes, except this time he lacks the morals that Urban's agent had. So we get to see him kill a lot of government people. The American government: Adept at killing other members of the American Government!

Anyhow, we follow various shenanigans and plot twists, and get introduced to Catherine Zeta-Jones and her bangs. She's supposedly Frank's Kryptonite, which causes the romantic friction that is contractually obligated to happen in sequels to movies with love stories. Still it's quite funny (see: Malkovich, John) and the action is pretty good. It's always nice to see Helen Mirren holding massive weaponry, but I don't think it's enough to push it into theatre territory. I might need a second opinion, but I'm deeming it a Blu-Ray movie for now.

Pacific Rim

Giant Robots. Fighting. Giant Monsters. Aw. Yeah!

So this movie was about giant robots fighting giant monsters. There are more things I could say, like there's a love story that's implied, but never stated (we get a headbutt of love, but that's it). Or why they don't use bunker busters on the monsters (bunker busters are bombs meant to penetrate several yards of dirt before exploding, hopefully in the underground bunker of your enemy, and not in some civilian populated area that could cause massive collateral damage). Instead they designed giant robots to fight them, because apparently our governments are run by 13-year old boys. Not that I'm complaining. That's several orders of magnitude more mature than I would be if I ever found myself running a country ("five-day weekends! And free beer!").

But I will state the music is tremendous. Listen to that and tell me you wouldn't want to strap on 250-foot armor and go beat down giant aliens. It's by Ramin Djawadi, and if you don't recognize the name, don't worry - I didn't either. Then I looked at his wikipedia page and found out he also did the equally fantastic music for Person of Interest. Suffice it to say, I will be checking out more of his music.

Definitely a theatre movie. It does a great job of making everything seem huge, and putting us in the middle of the fights, staring up at these titanic creations and mutations duking it out in different locales, including the Technicolor battlefield that is Hong Kong at night. It. Was. Awesome!

This is the End

Appropriately titled for the last movie I saw in theatres that Saturday, it's the story of how celebrities deal with bad stuff. How do they deal with it? Not well. Not well at all. Mind you, since they tend to deal with good news by doing cocaine, it's not a stretch to imagine how poorly they'd do in the apocalypse (since there's a rapidly depleting supply of drugs). To be honest, that's actually not how all the celebrities dealt with the crises in the movie. Most of them died violently. The rest freaked out.

Anyway, while this movie is about dealing with incredibly bad times, it's also about friendship, and probably a little about the truth of being a celebrity (selling out, moving on from friends and making new ones), and strangely enough, it's actually about sacrifice. Who knew? There's also an incredibly large number of dirty jokes, filthy language, and disturbing spiritual imagery. So be warned before you go see it. I'm not sure how many people I know who would actually want to go see it, but I’m aware of enough of pop culture that I wanted to see most of it spoofed. And I did. And then the second half of the movie started. Not quite as funny as the first half, but with an actual, good (if misunderstood) message. So there's that. All in all, I think it's a Blu-Ray movie, but that might just be because that's when the headache started.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Mom!