Zombie Column: Olympus has Fallen

This past Saturday, I got a sudden invite to see Olympus has Fallen, and I'm not one to turn that kind of thing down. Not when such a cinematic masterpiece is being offered (alright, enough sarcasm). I went with some of the same people as last week (GI Joe), and it had enough of the same audience that I thought we were going to get the same trailers. Nope. I can't really remember which ones they are, except that The Internship was one of them, and that they were pretty much all movies that I would pass on.

In case you didn't know, Olympus Has Fallen is one of two movies released this spring in which the White House is taken over. The second one is called White House Down (so Olympus definitely won the battle of the names) and comes out in June. That one was Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx, while this one has Aaron Eckhart and Gerard Butler. I'm not quite sure who I'd give the casting nod to, but I'm going with Olympus, since even thought Channing is red hot right now, Olympus has Morgan Freeman and can afford to have Ashley Judd cameo after her TV version of Taken set in the Amazon didn't pan out.

Anyway, this movie opens sometime right before Christmas (possibly Eve) up at Camp David, as the first family is getting ready to go to a fundraiser or event of some sort. It's quite snowy outside, and the motorcade spins out on a bridge (because of course it does). Mike Banning (Butler, and let me say what a great action name Mike Banning is. I'm pretty sure it's the best hero name ever. I mean, we're all attached to John McClane, but that might just be because Die Hard was so good it coloured our perceptions. If Die Hard had had a detective Banning, Hans Gruber would've given up on the spot. There's just no fighting a guy like that) pulls the president to safety just as the limo plunges into the icy waters below, carrying the First Lady with it (good-bye, Ashley Judd. Thanks for coming out. Now you have more time to cheer on Kentucky. Or Kansas. Or whichever College Basketball team you're wildly overrated to cheer for).

18 months later, Banning has been reassigned to the treasury building (fun fact: The Secret Service is under control of the treasury. I don't know why, that's just the way it is. That means that threats to the president get even more jurisdictional, since you now have the treasury involved, the justice department involved, Homeland security, possibly the military, and whoever the CIA and NSA answer to. The state department, maybe? I don't actually know that one) where the desk job is slowly driving him insane. Let me tell you, Banning, I have a desk job and it's actually pretty awesome. But I'm not used to throwing my body in front of bullets, so I gather that cubicles might be kind of boring for you.

There's a South Korean delegation that's meeting with the president to discuss the rising threat of North Korea (wow, the standard of movie villains has really fallen off. First we had Nazis, who were legitimately terrifying, since they were winning World War Two and one point. They gave way to the Russians, who were smart and resourceful, not to mention big, but had also had a lot of shoddy business practices. And they gave way to North Korea, whose people are starving and only credible threat is a nuclear weapon or two. We could glass the entire country several times over. You know, if we didn't care about the civilian population or anything. So that's why we don't do that. Anyway, if NK isn't the main enemy, it's terrorists, who can be counted on to strike anywhere, but can't really maintain a sizeable standing army).

During the meeting a plane enters the no-fly zone around the white house and shoots down the jets sent to intercept it. Then it starts randomly shooting people on the ground before it's shot down as well. The president and the SK delegation have been hustled to the Presidential Security Bunker, where it turns out the SK delegation was made up mostly of terrorists, who kill everyone they want to and take the president and some high-ranking cabinet members hostage, thus forcing the military to back off instead of retaking the White House, which has been taken over by those same terrorists posing as tourists with a rather cool strategy, actually. Mind you, there's a lot you can accomplish when all your followers are ready to die. The secret service puts up a valiant fight, but they get overwhelmed (fun fact: the Secret Service employs less than 1000 people, most of whom are deployed elsewhere, or at home in their off time. It's not like you can have all your employees working around the clock, every day). Banning hears the devastation from the plane and then sees the invasion going down. He fights through it from the rear, eventually making it into the White House, where he runs and guns with the terrorists for the rest of the movie.

I liked this movie. Not as much as I could have, maybe, but enough. It's not a great movie by any means, nor a fantastic example of what a mindless movie can be (last week's was much better). But it's competent, and has a lot of action, and even some humor. Yes, there's a scene specifically inserted so that Banning can be proven right and a four star general proven wrong (because nothing makes a hero as heroic as having the opportunity to say "I told you so", especially when people's lives are on the line). So, some problems, including a baffling nuclear decision that I want to rant about, but realize that this post is long enough as it is, without getting into the nuclear nonsense of the past two weeks.

Maybe that'll come next week. All in all, I think it's a blu-Ray movie. Almost a theatre quality movie, but I think they just left something on the table, even if I can't point my finger at it. Too many unfired Chekhov's guns, maybe. Still, good movie. Now, let's see about that one in June.

Zombie Column: GI Joe: Retaliation

I saw GI Joe: Retaliation this Good Friday, because nothing says Solemn Religious Occasion like an action-fest. I went with a group of friends, so it was me, Steve, Rich, Jay and Brian. We went to the best theatre in town (probably). It's a little more expensive, but it huge, and loud, and you can reserve seats ahead of time, and we got in for free because I have a SCENE card and it's awesome.

Anyway, previews were for The Fast and the Furious 6 (Aww Yeah!), Star Trek: Into Darkness (Aww Yeah!), Iron Man 3 (which Steve and I tied on, and also Aww Yeah!) and World War Z, which I lost to some guy in the row behind me and a few seats over. Well played, sir. Well played.

The movie had four company screens, but the last one was for Hasbro, which I'm sure brought a lot of smiles to faces in the theatres. They can go on making movies, as far as I'm concerned, and I will happily pay money for whatever blockbusters they put out.

The movie opens in the North Korean DMZ, with our heroes starting a mission to retrieve a prisoner. So they cut the chain link fence, create a diversion and extract the prisoner, who's conveniently jailed a mere 20 meters from the border. I don't think North Korea is inept enough to put anything in the DMZ except for watch towers, let alone prison cells within spitting distance of South Korea, but whatever. Anyway, one of the Joes goes a little independent and raises the Joe flag on the NK flag pole, but no harm came from it, and it was all in good fun and no one got hurt.

Next, we get to see Duke (Channing Tatum) and Roadblock (Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson) bonding, and it's hilarious. I know 21 Jump Street proved Tatum had comedic chops, but it's always nice when he adds in a little extra humour.

From there, the Joes get sent to Pakistan to secure some nuclear weapons, and the plot kicks off. I won't spoil it for you, even though it barely matters, because GI JOE! Whoo! Explosions! Guns! Martial Arts! Fights while rappelling down the side of a mountain! That sequence was actually fairly lengthly, and also awesome. More movies need to do that. Sword fighting while running along the sides of cliffs? Yes please!

Besides that, the rest of the action scenes were pretty good as well. I didn't mind the short cuts and chaotic action as much as I usually do. Maybe I'm willing to cut GI Joe a bit more slack, or maybe I'm just getting used to it, but they were all awesome. Ridiculous, but awesome.

My only quibbles with this movie are small. There are accusations that the movie was delayed so that more Channing Tatum could be written in. Turns out, those accusations are unfounded, so the only reason to delay it for 9 months was to put in the 3D. And while most of the 3D was good, there were some curious camera placements choices. We had an over the shoulder shot of one guy speaking, except the blurry shoulder was still in the shot. Normally this isn't a problem, except it was in 3D, so the blurry shoulder jumped out at us. That's just poor cinematography, and I know my cinematography, having studied it not at all.

Also, the music was merely alright. Some of it was pretty good, and some of it wasn't. All in all, it balanced out to okay, but I want more than okay in my bombastic soundtracks. I want epic themes of heroism and saving the world from global catastrophe.

But those niggling problems aside, this movie is fantastic. Don't get me wrong, you'll need to turn your brain off before you get inside. But once you do, prepare for the awesome! It's a theatre movie for me, and probably the best movie I've seen this year (not that that helps much).

Zombie Column: Movie-pocalypse

IM IN YOUR CITEE, WATCHIN UR MOVYS

Or at least, I was last weekend, when I went to visit Evan and Mel in their new home. I was lucky to get very nice weather for the weekend. In fact, we got to spend the morning on Saturday walking their dog Mikah on the beach. Fun times.

I got in on Thursday evening and left on Sunday at noon. Over the course of Friday and Saturday, we went to see six (!) movies, alternating between theatres and Video on Demand (VOD). They were, in order of when we saw them:

1) Jack the Giant Slayer (In theatres)

2) Wreck-it Ralph (on VOD)

3) Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (In theatres)

4) Red Dawn (on VOD)

5) A Good Day to Die Hard (in theatres)

6) Taken 2 (on VOD)

All those in the course of about 2 pm on Friday afternoon to maybe 10 pm on Saturday. Six movies in 30 hours. We haven't had that density of movies since we did the Harry Potter marathon way back in the fall of 2011.

I took the preview game, both individually and aggregately. For Jack, I got GI Joe (even calling it as the first preview as we walked into the theatre), Evan got Ironman 3, and I finished up with the next three (I think they were Burt Wonderstone, Oblivion, and Man of Steel, but I can’t really remember). Hansel and Gretel was shown at a cheap theatre, so I got the preview game with Jack the Giant Slayer after we tied on Oz the Great andPowerful. Finally, Evan took the preview game for A Good Day to Die Hard with Olympushas Fallen (we both whiffed on The Heat and After Earth). All told, I got two games out of three, with the aggregate score of five to three, with one tie.

Two surprising things about spending that much time in theatres. One, apparently Chevrolet has paid a ton of money to Cineplex, and now they're allowed to show ads during the previews. What? After the first preview, there's a Chevrolet ad, and then more previews (yes, this is even after the cinematic introducing the previews). I am not a fan, but can't quite summon the level of outrage I think I should have for this kind of blatant commercialism. Secondly, in some BC and Ontario theatres, there's an onscreen game called Timeplay. You download a mobile phone app and answer questions, competing against the other players in the theatre. After three quick questions, it's over, and there's a reminder to turn off your phone. Both Jack and Die Hard played in those theatres, and Evan beat me in those both times, although we were the top two in both theatres. We won token prizes (free drink with popcorn purchase), and now I'd kinda like it if Alberta theatres had that.

Anyway, on with the show. Because six movies in two days tends to mash the experiences together, I'll try and jot down some quick thoughts about each. And if giants somehow wind up in Die Hard, please excuse me while I rearrange my memories.

Jack the Giant Slayer

Another in the line of gritty-fied fairy tales, this one taking Jack and the Beanstalk and making it PG-13. It opens with the standard Fee Fi Fo Fumm (technically, they're the names of Giant Generals) rhyme, which is the start of a story being told to Jack by his father, as well as the Princess Isabelle by her mother. One thing I like about this movie was how the managed to intertwine what was happening to Jack and Isabelle when they were in two different places. I guess they were meant to end up together, because everyone else already had a sidekick. Seriously. The evil human villain had a sidekick. The King (Isabelle's father) had a sidekick. Ewan McGregor (Isabelle's bodyguard) had a sidekick, and no, it wasn't his awesomely-flouffed hair. It's like they had a surplus of characters who tended to agree with the most powerful person around them, so they had to parcel them out to all the important people. Only Jack and Isabelle didn't get one because they needed to be together.

After the story opens, it skips forward ten years, where Jack's father and Isabelle's mother have died, and both of them are looking for adventure. I'm sure everyone would have been a lot safer if only people took Hobbits' advice and stayed away from adventures. Anyway, Jack and Isabelle have a brief encounter when Jack stands up for Isabelle's honour, and then she runs away from the castle to have an adventure, and be out and about (because the King, though nice, wants to keep her safe inside the castle with no going out). She ends up at Jack's house/hut just as the beanstalk grows up to the land of giants, and is thrust up there alone.

The king assembles a team to climb the beanstalk and go after her, and Jack volunteers because ... well, Adventure! And the plot demands it, I supposed.

Anyway, things go from there, and I won't spoil it. But I will relay Evan's review, which was that it was "Surprisingly not half bad." Now there's a poster blurb if I ever heard one. I enjoyed it. It wasn't a great movie, but I think it was good for what I needed it to be. Fun time, good action, funny, nice special effects. Although Jack seemed far too happy-go-lucky for the life threatening situations he was put through. How can you be smiling and joking and have all that witty banter when you're about to be eaten? Also, the last minute of the movie was the worst ending I have ever seen. Atrocious. Completely spoils the flavour of the movie. If you can leave those minor aspects aside, I think it's a solid Blu-Ray movie.

Wreck-it Ralph

Wreck-it Ralph is essentially a Pixar movie done by Disney. And that's not a bad thing, as Disney has a lot of good people working for them. They've essentially nailed the Pixar formula. Loveable characters, additions for the adults (usually it's humour aimed at them, in this case it's video game cameos), and even the part before the climax where the two main protagonists have a falling out and little kids get a hug from their moms.

The movie centres on Ralph, who's the bad guy in a video game called Fix-it Felix. No one likes Ralph because he's the bad guy, which could easily lead to Then Let Me Be Evil, even though he's clearly a Punch-Clock Villain (almost literally). Instead, he tries to prove he's not such a bad guy after all, which leads to all manner of hijinks but also introduces him to Vanellope, a glitch in the racing game near Fix-it Felix's arcade stand.

Because it hews so close to the Pixar formula, it also gets the Pixar quality. This is a good movie. Funny, sweet, hilariously detailed video game animations (the tenants in the building Ralph demolishes move like eight-bit characters, even outside the video game). Even though it was aimed at a much younger audience than me (well, maybe a slightly lesser maturity than me, but not by much), I still liked it a lot. Definitely a theatre movie.

Hansel and Gretel: Which Hunters

We had to drive for about 45 minutes to get to the only theatre that was still playing Hansel and Gretel. It was called Hollywood 3, and the preview for the latest movie was released that day. So yeah, cheap, slightly sketchy. Oh yeah, and late at night, because 9:45 pm is the only time it was showing, and really late for old farts like us.

The movie opens with two kids being led into the woods by their father, who leaves them there. He doesn't come back, so they search for him, eventually stumbling across a cabin made of candy. They shout for help, and the door opens ... by itself. Man, those safety lessons in school were a lot different back then. Anyway, they meet a really creepy witch, who chains Gretel and locks up Hansel, making him eat by threatening Gretel. She eventually picks the lock to her chains just as Hansel's about to be cooked, and the siblings knock the witch into the oven, roasting her alive. As Jeremy Renner's voiceover explains, it's a solid way of killing a witch.

Then the opening credits come, and then we get to a town that has a witch problem, who are also behind the kidnapping children problem. The Mayor hires Hansel and Gretel, now grown up and played by Renner and Gemma Arterton, to find the children and kill the witches. After that follows a ton of action, funny jokes, gory action, bloody jokes, the occasional f-bomb, and Gretel continually waking up in new locations after being knocked out (seriously, count the times she gets knocked out. It's a drinking game).

Did I love it? Of course I loved it! It's a whole lot of fun. Keep in mind that my taste in movies is terrible, but it's probably the best movie I saw last weekend. Action, comedy, plot-twists, action, comedy, Gemma Arterton. What's not to like? Theatre movie, and I can't believe it didn't do better.

By the way, Jeremy Renner is creeping up our Mindless Movie Power Rankings. He's been in this one, The Bourne Legacy, The Avengers, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and cameo’d in Thor. Led two, starred in two more, appeared in a fifth? Coming up on Jason Statham territory (for the record, Statham has led three - Safe, Killer Elite, and The Mechanic - and starred in two more - The Expendables 1 and 2).

Red Dawn

This remake has been on the shelf for a while, possibly so the original Chinese antagonists could be turned into North Korean antagonists. Not realizing China could be a major market for movies? Pretty dumb. Mind you, dumb was kind of the modus operandi on this film, so it's perfect for us.

It opens with a football game in which an older brother watches a younger brother quarterback a football team to a loss. The younger brother proves he's not much of a team player by constantly running, which puts them just outside of field goal distance, so the kicker misses. Then the younger brother leaves with his girlfriend while the older brother sleeps on his father's couch, since he just showed up out of the blue while on leave from the marines. Got it?

The next morning, North Korea invades Spokane, Washington (where this movie is set) and the boys barely escape with some friends and the adults are pretty much all left behind. Older brother uses his marine skillz and size to take charge (seriously, he's got six inches on all the other actors) and teaches the others how to fight (it's time for a montage) and then they do operations in Occupied Spokane. I have no idea if there are actually sensitive military targets in Spokane, but we can pretend. I think the original was set in Denver, which actually has a nuclear something-or-other and NORAD, so there's that.

This movie is decent. Not great, but not bad. Enough stupid action to make me happy. A bit too much shaky-cam for my tastes. Even in quite moments, close-ups on faces would be done in shaky-cam. Usually that stuff's reserved for action scenes, but they went all Friday Night Lights on us (by the way, I might be the only guy who preferred Studio 60 over FNL, but I guess I preferred a soap opera masquerading as a TV show over a soap opera masquerading as football). Anyway, I think this is a blu-ray movie. All the characters were so generic that we kept on calling them by nicknames instead of their actual names (Big Bro, Little Bro, Girlfriend, Older Black Kid, Younger Black Kid, Latino Girl, Manly Kid). And if the characters are that generic, the movie's just not memorable enough to be a theatre movie.

A Good Day to Die Hard

This was pretty much the entire reason I visited. All the other movies were picked on the fly, but this movie we picked out in advance when we knew the dates of my visit. And I gotta say, I'm a little disappointed.

The movie opens with the assassination of someone by Jack McClain, who looks a bit like Sam Worthington. He gets arrested, and offers a plea deal. Meanwhile, his father (John McClain, pushing 60) finds out and flies over to Russia to deal with it. Once there, he's generally a stubborn pain in the ass until about haflway through the movie. Seriously. Which is very annoying, because I don't like stubborn pains in the asses (being one myself), and not liking John McClain is a very disorienting experience.

Anyway, there is a lot of explosions and action, and a plot twist (it turns out, the bad guy is just a thief, like every other bad guy in the Die Hard franchise, except for 2), and very cool shot at the end. That does not make up for the fact that I spent half the movie resenting John McClain for his mere presence. Idiot Ball, much? Blu-Ray movie, but I can't go higher, and that makes me sad.

Taken 2

This time around, there are no awesome speeches to put on the poster, but Liam Neeson still has the skills acquired over a very long career. These let him Liam Neeson his way across Istanbul with the help of his daughter (Kim), who initially has to break him out confinement. Then he gets around to the shooting and neck-punching that made up so much of the first Taken.

Kim is very brave to help out, but is also very scared. I like how she's pretty much what a normal person would be in an action movie - on the verge of panic the entire time. It's only her father's influence that gets her through.

It's a theatre movie for me. Quite a bit of action, not much humour, Liam Neeson laying the smack down. One thing that blew my mind while watching it is when Evan told me Neeson was probably working so much because his wife died. How did I not know that? It suddenly explained why he's popped up in so many of our movies - Taken 2, The Dark Knight Rises, Battleship, Wrathof the Titans, The A-Team, and Clash of the Titans. He's by no means led or starred in all of them (only three, by my count), but that's still a fairly impressive resume for less than three years.

And that about wraps it up for my trip out west. Great weather that I missed because we spent most of it indoors, frying our minds and popping out our eyeballs.

Zombie Column: The Last Stand

Last night, a few of us went to see The Last Stand. It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new movie, so of course we saw it (or more accurately, of course I saw it). If we had been doing this during the 80’s, we would have seen all of his movies. ALL OF THEM.

Preview for the week where The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (a movie about magic. With special effects and camera tricks, is there actually a point to filming magic anymore? It’s not like any of us will believe what’s portrayed onscreen is actually what’s happening on screen), GI Joe: Retaliation (I’m all in on this. I've been all in on this since it was supposed to be released last June. In fact, I've been all in on this since it was announced. Because hey, GI Joe), a horror flick I didn't get the name of (and really don’t need to) and Snitch (the next attempt by Dwayne Johnson to get into actual acting roles, no matter how many times I tell him not to. “Don’t do it” I scream at the screen whenever he tries. “You’re so good when you don’t!”)

The movie opens with a lot of exposition, which is probably not a good choice. Exposition is boring, and probably violates the writing rule of “Show, don’t tell.” But so many directors find it easier to tell and not show, and so there’s less action, and that makes me sad. If you need a lot of exposition to set up the story, at least have a nice action prologue, like Skyfall or The Expendables 2. The Dark Knight Rises can have a slow opening (even though it doesn't), because, well, it has so many other things going for it (like good acting, and insane fanboys).

Anyway, a very dangerous drug lord escapes from custody in Las Vegas, and steals a very fast, powerful car to make a break for the Mexican border. I thought going to Canada would be shorter, but apparently my knowledge of American Geography is way off. The Americans have smartly built a moat around their country, so the dangerous drug lord hires a team of mercenaries to build a bridge over it before he gets there, so he can simply zip over it where no authorities are looking. Unfortunately for him, there’s a town nearby, sherrifed by Arnold (who’s named the incredibly un-Austrian Ray Owens). Arnold finds out about the bridge and all that when he and his deputies are involved in a shootout near it, and from then on, it’s about setting up to stop the dangerous drug lord and the mercenaries (Now on tour in the Midwest!)

Most of the movie takes place over the course of a few hours. About as long as it takes to speed from Las Vegas to the border at 150 mph. Maybe a few minutes more to stop for gas. Any roadblock are taken care of, but it’s this part of the movie that really fails to love up to its potential. There could be a huge Death Race thing going on, with all sorts of obstacles and death traps. Or a Fast and the Furious thing, with a lot of chases. Instead there’s two roadblocks, and lots of close-ups of the very fast, powerful car shifting. As Steve pointed out “You’re on a highway. Why are you shifting?”

Besides Arnold, you may recognize some of the actors. The guy who plays Jerry is used to being in small towns, since he also played Matt Saracen in the Friday Night Lights tv show. He was the backup (then starting) QB for the Dillon Panthers. Also, there’s Jamie Alexander, who’s used to being the only woman on an otherwise male team from her time on Thor (she played Sif, of Sif and the Warriors Three).

The music is decent. More strings than I expected. Not great, but decent. Not quite up to Audiomachine. With strings in this kind of flick, you might expect something by Jack Trammell, but it was a lot more orchestral.

Humour wasn't too sparse. Johnny Knoxville was a nut, but he’s always a little off, and it wasn't that funny to begin with. However, there’s a hilarious scene with a shotgun-toting grandmother that more than makes up for it.

All told, I think it’s a theatre movie. The action isn't quite there, but it’s made up for by other things, including a surprisingly emotion scene in the middle. Usually there isn't this sort of scene in this sort of film, but they put it in, and gosh darn if it didn't work. So that’s in there, and the music’s in there, and the humour’s in there, all for a good movie. Ridiculous, but good.

Zombie Column: The Hobbit

These past Holidays, I've managed to watch a number of movies that I had missed out on. Luckily, on the last day I had off, I squeezed in The Hobbit with my nephew. He'd already seen it, but we had made plans a while ago (which I had kept putting off, first because I was sick, then because I was busy). We finally managed it yesterday (Yes, today I was at work. It's no fun, but a paycheck beats no paycheck with a stick).

I was pleasantly surprised where the movie started. Not the previews (Man of Steel, Oz: the Great and Powerful, Jack the Giant Slayer), but the actual movie itself. It brought back Elijah Wood and Ian Holm to reprise Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, the day of Bilbo's 111^th birthday party. In fact, after a brief flashback to the dwarves losing their city, it takes us right up to when Frodo leaves to go read a book and meet Gandalf. It also reuses some terrific musical cues from the original film (Concerning Hobbits).

Anyway, then the movie goes back 60 years ago, to when Ian Holm looked like Martin Freeman, and had no adventures, which is just how normal Hobbits like it. Young Bilbo meets Gandalf (who still looks like Sir Ian McKellen), and then he meets a bunch of dwarves, and after a rather long introductory sequence, they go off on an adventure together, normal Hobbit behavior be damned. Bilbo is part Took after all, and Tooks are somewhat odd Hobbits who don't really conform to normal Hobbit-ish conventions. Good for them! Being shackled by society's conventions is no fun, no matter how fictional that society may be. Stand up for yourselves! Go on adventures! Be back home for supper! Oh, um, maybe that's not how adventures work in Middle Earth.

Adventures seems to be mostly the same, though, because I thought I saw this movie before, and it was called Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. A group of people traipse around a place that looks an awful lot like New Zealand, and fight off increasingly ugly creatures. They even go underground, where they have to fight off and escape from a horde of enemies, including one giant one.

On the other hand, just because I've seen the movie before, doesn't mean it's not a good movie. And this movie is good. It might not be quite up to par with the other LOTR movies, but I think that's just because it took too long to get going. Mind you, Return of the King took about 20 minutes before any action happened. This one goes quite a bit longer with only a chaotic scene of Smaug the Dragon devastating a town before capturing all of the wealth in a nearby mountain as an action scene amidst a series of talky shots.

So, all in all, it's a theatre movie. Takes a while to get going, but good music, good action, awesome scenery, good humour. Takes me back to the days of the Original Trilogy. And definitely better than that other Prequel Trilogy (which if I had my way, would be permanently erased from both reality and memory. Forever).

Gaming Experiment

I'm doing an interesting experiment at home. A few weeks ago, I got two RPG's, and I decided to play through both of them at once. A few days later, I got another RPG, but haven't played it much. And since, Mass Effect 3 put out another piece of DLC, I played through that as well. And World of Warcraft works its way into my daily routine fairly often. So I have a bout 5 games on the go at once (really, SWTOR is the only one I haven't played recently), but only the first two count. WoW I've played so much that's it's routine. I know pretty much exactly what I'm going to get. Mass Effect 3 doesn't count because I go full bore on it. I rarely stop to do anything else when I'm playing it (yes, it's just that awesome). And while King's Bounty: Warrior's of the North is in fact a new game, I've played both its predecessors, and so I know what I'm going to get - a solid strategy/RPG with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Plus, as I mentioned before, I haven't played it much.

So really, the two games I'm experimenting on are TheWitcher 2: Assassin of Kings, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Besides having colons in their names, they have a few other similarities. They're both Fantasy RPGs, so a lot of swords and sorcery, monster slaying, loot-finding, and plot-advancing goes on. Both have mainly weapons based combat with limited magic tossed in. Both are action RPGs, in that each press of a mouse button is a swing of a sword (or other weapon), so a lot of button mashing goes on. Both have crafting systems (so, you know, sticking close to the fantasy RPG guidebook). Both have experience points and levels that a character gain, advancing along different paths to maximize certain abilities. Both have inventory systems that have to be managed (occasionally micro-managed), but that's pretty standard. The only RPG's I know of without real inventory systems are Mass Effect 2 & 3 (which are more shooters that RPGs at this point), and Magicka, which stopped being fun and started being frustrating after about 2 hours. Which is why I no longer play Magicka.

Anyway, they're both two different games, by two different companies, so they have two completely different looks and two different feels. The biggest difference between the two games, however, is attitude. Kingdoms of Amalur (KoA) is very earnest. Its heroes are good, and do good things, simply because they're the right things to do. The bad guys are evil, and do bad things for the evulz. The character that really drove it home for me was a guardian of a small town (sheriff-like) who agonized over his inability to protect one of his citizens. He was all "Woe is me. I'm a terrible person because I couldn't stop this crime. Here, take my wonderful sword because you did such a better job than I did." ("well, thank you. Can I have your shield as well if I go kill those giant rats over there?" And yes, Giant rats were the first enemies you fight in the game, thus further solidifying that the game reads off the standard RPG tropes list we're all used to). It's like the developers read Lord of the Rings and said "I want to make a game of that."

The Witcher 2 is almost completely the opposite. Everything is very grey. Good people do bad things for the right reasons. Villains to good things for the wrong reasons. Most people are greedy, selfish bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling who constantly try to manipulate the people around them. Alliances and allegiances shift seemingly randomly, but I tried to stick with the people who were ... well, less evil most of the time. It didn't always work. It's like the designers read A Song of Ice and Fire and said "I want to make a game of that." Which they didn't, because the games are actually based on a series of Polish books and short stories about the hero of the game, Geralt of Rivia, and they take place about 5 years after the last book, with some convenient amnesia so players who haven't read the books can jump in without getting lost.

I got lost anyway. Actually, I got lost in both games. They both throw a lot of lore at you, but at least they both had the presence of mind to make the protagonists just as confused as the players. Geralt has amnesia from being killed, and presumably brought back to life. The hero of KoA (who we get to name ourselves, so I chose Mjolnir) has amnesia from being killed and definitely brought back to life. So, more similarities, I guess.

The Witcher 2 follows the fracturing of several kingdoms after their kings are slain by a witcher. The opening cutscene shows one such assassination, and its petty cool. It also stars a heavily scarred witcher who could probably play linebacker in the NFL. He's BUILT!

Anyway, Witcher is actually a bit of misnomer. It's a neologism (even in Polish), but a better translation/description would probably be Hexer. Geralt can cast certain signs that do things. Light things on fire, trap things to the ground, blow things over (several months before Fus-Ro-Dah), provide protection, and one that should probably be called "Jedi MindTrick." You can convince people of things, from "Tell me what you know" to "Fight these people for me." Hilarity ensues.

KoA has a 'magic' system based on three different playstyles. So there are Might abilities (warrior stuff), finesse abilities (thief/rogue stuff), and sorcery (the actual magic stuff). The Might side has a spell that causes huge spikes to come out of the ground when you slam into it. A finesse spell would be to fling knives out in all directions (wait, why is that sound familiar?) and the sorcery side will have you shooting lightning at your foes. You cast them by choosing one from the hotbar to activate it, and right-clicking to cast it. Quickly hopping around the hotbar (and enough mana, the resource used to cast spell and abilities) can have you electrocuting your enemies, stunning them enough for you to impale them on giant spike from the ground, right before you lop of their heads with your sword (which is, as per standard RPG tropes, larger than you are).

The inventories are different, but similar to ones in other games. The Witcher 2 follows the Fallout/Elder Scrolls route and assigns pretty much everything a weight. Geralt can only carry 300 pounds worth of stuff, which would give anyone a workout, but seems strangely limited when you're trying to carry 87 pounds of iron ore and 136 pounds of timber around so you can make a bunch of knives later. KoA follows the standard Bioware path and makes everything take up one slot of space (although items that are the same - like mana potions - can be stacked into one slot). The amount of slots can be upgraded by buying backpacks from vendors, giving me flashbacks to Dragon Age. The one thing I really liked about the inventory system was how it handled crafting components. Most of the time, each crafting component was its own item, taking up one slot by itself, or stacking up to some arbitrary number. So picking azaleas would take up one slot, and picking rhododendrons would take up one slot, and picking roses would take one slot. In KoA, all the crafting components are held in a bag, which only takes up one slot for each craft. Fantastic! Every game should have this! Including The Witcher 2, where I may have wandered around with 12 pounds of tulips taking up valuable weight.

The crafting systems are different too. Sure, there's alchemy in both, but even that's widely different. In KoA, there are three professions: Blacksmithing, Alchemy, and Sagecraft. Blacksmithing is used to break down any gear you get into its component pieces, as well as a sort of core of the original item. So a sword might have a sword core, as well as a hilt, bindings, and rivets. Shields might have grips as well, which might also appear on daggers, but not on staves. You can make items by using the core and an increasing number of items, depending on your blacksmithing skill. So a crafted sword might only have a sword core and a hilt. Increasing blacksmithing will add bindings, then rivets, then grips, and various what-nots. The order depends on what you're trying to craft - weapons, or gear for each specific playstyle (again: Might, Finesse, and Sorcery).

Alchemy is made from ingredients picked from the world (plants that can be picked sparkle), although if your alchemy skill isn't high enough, you can fail at picking anything ("Oh man, I squished these petals again!"). These ingredients can be used in recipes bought from vendors, or can be used to experiment to try to find your own recipes.

Sagecraft is used to create gems, which can be added to weapons or armor to increase stats. Weapon gems can be put onto weapons, armor gems can be put into gems, and utility gems can be put onto either, provided that the gear has the slot for gems at all. Gems can also be sold for tons of money to vendors, so that's a nice boon when your gear isn't good enough to have slots (or you find gear without slots that's better than gear with slots. That happens to me a lot. 20 hours in, I've used maybe three gems. Mind you, I've also made a boatload of cash selling gems).

In The Witcher 2, Alchemy is made from materials from picking flowers and from parts of whatever monsters or animals you slay. There are dozens of different materials, but each one has one of eight ingredients, and it's the ingredients that matter. So there are a lot of different ways to make the same potion, while also making it possible to save the more valuable resources for more valuable things, like diagrams.

The other type of crafting is from diagrams, and those can't be used yourself. You take the exact materials (not ingredients) to a craftsman, and they make whatever it is for you for a fee. Usually more than you can sell it for, to prevent gold farming. Oren farming, actually, because the unit of money is called orens. Anyhow, I managed to pick up a few useful diagrams and got some sweet armor, as well as some sweet armor enhancements (basically gems) from diagrams.

Now that I've ruminated on the subject enough, I've found the biggest difference between The Witcher 2 and Kingdoms of Amalur. And that is this: while putting in equal hours into both, I've finished The Witcher 2. And while it was a good game, it just kind of stopped. Okay ... that's nice and all, but it means I'm going to have to shell out for The Witcher 3 (which was probably the point of so many sequel hooks). One or two things get wrapped up, but the overall plot is far from over, and that's really annoying. I have no idea how much more time KoA will require, but I'd hazard a guess I'm near halfway through. I've probably put about 20 hours into each, and while a 20 hour game would be a fantastic length for a first person shooter (because it has many more hours with the multi-player component), it tends to be a bit disappointing for an RPG. The big caveat to all this is that as an RPG, there's a lot of replay value. I suspect that if I made a few different choices, I'd wind up with an entirely different plot. So I might have to put in 20 more hours to find out what it is. You know, just as soon as I've finished Kingdoms of Amalur. And King's Bounty: Warriors of the North. And World of Warcraft. And Star Wars: The Old Republic. And whatever new piece of DLC is coming for Mass Effect 3. And maybe Dragon Age 2 again. So if you don't see me until May ... you'll know why.

Ha, just kidding (not really). Anyway, the point of this whole thing was to determine if I could play two games at once and not get too confused. Ultimately, the answer was yes. Certainly, there were times when I tried to click on things during KoA when I should have pressed F, or pressed F in The Witcher 2 when I wanted to pick something up, but by and large, the experiment was successful. What that says about me, I have no idea. Have I reached the tier of RPG gamers wherein I'm experienced enough to keep two concurrently played games completely straight in my head? Or does it just mean I spend too much time in my room?

Zombie Column: Multi-review

I got to a number of entertainment events in the past while (and strangely few Christmas parties, but that'll change soon enough). They had nothing to do with each other, so it's a multi-review instead of a mega-review. I'll start with the most recent and go in reverse chronological order, because why not. This past weekend, after much waiting and finding no one to go with, I finally went to see Skyfall. First, allow me a few 007 puns.

Headline after Daniel Craig was hired: Blond, James Blond.

What does he invest money in? Bonds, Savings Bonds.

How does he reconnect with distant kin? Bond, family bond.

At this point in time, we know what we're going to get with a Bond flick: He beds three women (one of them on the bad guys side), there's a vehicular chase of some kind (usually cars, but The World is Not Enough had boats), and gadgets that are unusually handy, but only once (although the recent movies have toned down the gadgets). This one sticks pretty close to the checklist, even if it takes things from other movies as well. I noticed influences from The Dark Knight, Live Free or Die Hard, and just about every episode of Burn Notice (including the shotgun shell light with light bulb bases. That's always a good homemade spy weapon).

Still, just because it's derivative doesn't mean it's not good. I liked those three I just listed, so put them all together and you'd get something good as well (just don't try this with ice cream and bacon. Seriously). The acting is good, the humour is funny, and the girls are pretty. Even if there were too many contrived coincidences (the villains plans were kind of built on them), it's still a theatre movie for me.

Oh, I should mention that previews included A Good Day toDie Hard (I'm all in on this. ALL IN!), Django Unchained (maybe. I still think Quentin Tarantino is wildly overrated, but I'm a Jamie Foxx fan), Gangster Squad (probably not) and Iron Man 3 (Yes. Duh).

Friday night I went to see Handel's Messiah with a few friends. I always have to remember to say Handel's as well, because if I tell people I'm just not that into The Messiah, they assume I'm an atheist. Thanks a lot, Handel! Way to ambiguously name your masterpiece. Anyway, I'm not that into Handel's Messiah, but I figured it would be healthy for me to take in cultural events and be with other people. Plus, it's fun to go with people for whom it's their favourite piece of music (at the moment, mine's probably Fireand Honor by Audiomachine). I may not have fallen asleep at any point, but there were definite moments where I was trying to do 3D trigonometry in my head (angles on Tetrahedrons are no fun without paper). Still, I stood up in the proper places (mainly because other people also stood up) and avoid laughing too obviously at the choral members who forgot their songbooks (two of them. Sitting there, without books. Surrounded by 130 people who remembered. Awk-ward). Whoops. And I didn't make too many jokes at the expense of the last song. It's the one with all those meandering Amens. Most Elaborate. Prayer. Ending. Ever.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of watching a two-man play called Twinkle. I kept getting confused if it was Twinkle or Tingle, and was relieved when I didn't portmanteau the words into Tinkle ("Yeah, I went to Tinkle at a friends house last night." "Um, what?"). It's an intergalactic interactive improvised Christmas trip through the stars, or something. It's small enough to be performed in a house, so a nifty place called the House of Commons hosted (no relation to the government). It's also a kid-friendly play, so we were encouraged to think like kids (It’s slightly alarming how easy that was for me). And yes, I got to participate, as did most other people. I got to wear a Darth Vader mask as a Darth Vader-like villain (I'm assuming for copywrite reasons). I discovered it's impossible to wear that mask and not talk like James Earl Jones. Fun times were had by all, and my only quibble is that I'm not sure how many kids would get the "Open the pod bay doors." reference. Mind you, I'm not sure how many adults would either.

So that's my recent entertainment activities. Christmas will be here soon, and I'm sure that will leave at least some time to watch movies, so look for more Zombie Columns soon!