[ARMY OF MEDIA] Debaser's Scattershot Reviews

[Debaser]

So, hey Jolt Country, it's been a couple weeks. I don't want to say I've been busy because, well, I haven't. What I have been, is doing other things. Mostly crappy other things, but here's a series of reviews of stuff I've seen, read, done, and/or tried in or around the month or so gap between stints of making cracks about statutory rape on these boards:

Name: Kill Bill, Volume I
Category: Film
Background: I walked in to the 1:30 showing of this flick on a Saturday.
Review: The Supreme Court defines obscene material as follows: (a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Roth, supra, at 489, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Kill Bill, Volume 1 features numerous scenes of women beating the shit out of each other, two guys who regularly have sex with coma victims in a hospital, and a seventeen year old Japanese girl in a school uniform bleeding from the eyes after a board with some nails sticking out of it is driven into her head. There are no highminded English 101 themes, no political allegories; there is no reason for this film to exist other than for its pervasive, over the top, girl on girl violence. It's a vile, unclean thing, but absolutely brilliant. It's kind of a comedy, and probably funnier to people who have seen all the movies Tarantino's channeling, but mostly it's the movie Hollywood's been desperately trying to put out since Dirty Harry, done by someone who knows what he's doing. Uma Thurman - as an aside I've seen both the Avengers and Batman and Robin more than once apiece, so that should give you some idea of my lust for this woman - is incredible here. While Go Go Yubari is probably the most memorable bit in the movie, the conversation between the Bride and Vernita Green near the beginning is nearly as cool.
Status: RECOMMENDED!!!

Name: City of Secrets
Category: Interactive Fiction
Background: In an effort to get back into my own work, I thought I'd play a little IF. CoS seemed like the next "big thing", and similar in enough ways to what I was trying to do to be worthwhile.
Review: Well, it's better than most IF, I'll give it that. And I can definitely appreciate how much work Emily put into it. I don't know, maybe the novelty's beginning to wear off for me with these things. It's starts off well enough, with a cool urban setting, a mysterious mystery, and the like. But, well, for one, there's just not much in the way of characters here. There's a love interest and a villain, and you kind of get a sidekick for a little while, but there's really not much to any of them. The most memorable character is the Escape Artist, who I really liked but only plays a very minor part in the game. There's some effort to characterize the player in the beginning and a couple of other places as kind of a workaday drudge who awakens to life and magic and stuff over the course of the game, and I can see where she was going, but most of the time he comes across like any other Myst style everyman you're likely to see in these types of games. And things really kind of start to fall apart in the second half of the game, where you begin just kind of exploring for exploring sake, whereas everything previous had been well motivated. The themes, mood, atmoshphere, and the like were the classic/cliche stuff that's been popular since Graham Nelson's heydey. You know, finding "the magic". I know it sounds like I absolutely loathed this game, but I didn't, really. I liked the early portions, and the Escape Artist, and how Emily clued the game winning command early on without getting "meta". But, really, the PK Girl was better. Fresher. Every couple days I go back and stare at my code and add a couple lines, changes a couple descriptions, rework some dialogue, and worry if I'm ripping Robb off too much. I really need to find some new authors.
Status: NOT RECOMMENDED!!!

Name: The Rundown
Category: Film
Background: What can I say? This got the big ad blitz, and I've watched enough TV in the last ten years that it was pretty much inevitable that some of it would wind up being wrestling. So when we hit the theatres to see School of Rock and realized the next showing was either a half-hour ago or an hour from now, this wound up being the backup.
Review: Hey, I know a lot of you have read When Gravity Fails. You know how Marid can't bring himself to fight Friedlander Bey because he has this weird captivating charisma that is given some italicized Muslim name? Well, Duane "The Rock" Johnson's got that. Even if you can't stand this type of movie, I can't imagine anyone walking out of it not being impressed with the guy. His character is interesting, not because it's original in any way, but because it's ripped off an older time when action heroes were supposed to be likeable, rather than brooding, unkillable forces of bloody nature. A big deal's been made of Arnold's "passing the torch" cameo in the beginning, but I'd say that Rocky owes a bit more to, say, Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Sean William Scott is pretty much Sean William Scott. He knows how to deliver a funny line, and how to just generally be a funny guy, but doesn't yet realize his talents lie more towards delivering funny lines funnily than in Adam Sandler style broad silliness. So he's good in parts, and obnoxious in other parts. Rosario Dawson struggles valiantly with a Portugese accent, but looks convincing enough holding an assault rifle. Christopher Walken does his best Christopher Walken impersonation. All in all it's pretty fun, if that's what you're looking for in a movie.
Status: RECOMMENDED!!!

Name: The Opera Browser
Category: Internet Browser
Background: I've always avoided the Opera browser, because I figure it's cool to know about computers to a point, and I think that points comes when you stop being proficient with Microsoft products and start scouring the net for shit coded by four coffee-guzzling guys clad only in flannel and condescension for the general computer using public. Not that I know how many guys it took to create the Opera Browser, how much coffee they drink, what they wear, or, really, anything else about them, but you get my point. The breaking point came, however, when Google stopped working for me. So I broke down, finally got some virus protection software, and switched browsers.
Review: I gots to say, I like it. There are some adjustments, certainly, but I'm not facing raging compatibility issues with my favorite webpages or anything. The wierdest thing, I guess, is how the browser is self contained. While IE, of course, just pops up new webpages willy nilly as independant operations, everything in Opera is part of a single GUI that can be closed, moved, or minimized all at once. While this can be annoying like when you click in the corner to close a single page and accidentally turn off the entire internet, it does make "pop-behinds" less obnoxious, since they don't occupy taskbar space. Plus, having access to search engines integrated into the browser itself is nice (I used to have the Google taskbar, but lost it somehow and never bothered to redownload it). And unloaded pictures look a hell of a lot better in Opera than in IE.
Status: RECOMMENDED!!!

Name: Saving Silverman
Category: Movie
Background: It was on Comedy Central the other day.
Review: For those of you who don't remember, this movie came out a couple years ago, during that post High Fidelity era when Tenacious D put out their CD and Jack Black was in like every single crappy comedy to come out. It stars him, Steve Zahn, and That Piefucking Kid as members of a Niel Diamond tribute band who get broken up when Piefucker starts dating the Nietzschien Uberbitch, as played by Amanda Peet. While Piefucker was still high off of American Pie and hadn't yet commited career suicide by starring in films like... well, like Saving Silverman and Jack Black was obviously the future of movie comedy as far as Hollywood was concerned, Zahn and Peet probably had the biggest roles here. Peet definitely fared the better of the two, carrying herself in such a way so as to get laughs where the script really hadn't earned any. Perhaps the best moment in the movie is when she gets slugged in the face and spits out her tooth with a glower that suggests she's either going to kill the guy who just hit her and eat him for lunch, or just eat him for lunch if you catch the entendre. Zahn's pretty bland as a guy who's stupid, but is in charge because he's not quite as stupid as his buddies. Jack does some funny stuff with a fairly marginal role, and Piefucker had played the same bumbling, ineffectual romantic in so many movies by this point he pretty much has it down to a science here. R. Lee Ermey comes in for a couple scenes playing a character who obviously is funny, but is never around long enough to actually say or do anything particularly amusing. Amanda Demeter plays a girl who's defining characteristic is SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH. Given the fact that Peet's character is a kickboxing hellcat I figured a catfight scene between the two was ineveitable, but maybe Comedy Central cut that part or something. All in all not the worst movie I've ever seen, but not in any real way good or anything.
Status: NOT RECOMMENDED!!!

Name: TV
Category: TV
Background: My old reliable, as it were. This guy who got fired from where I'm working now insisted he owned a TV but never watched anything but the Discovery channel on occasion. I was happy when he got fired. In any event, it's the new fall season, and the major networks are showing nothing but reality shows and the FINAL SEASON OF FRIENDS. But there's still other stuff on, I guess.
Review: Let's see, the Man Show's got new hosts. I never cared for Joe Rogan, but I never had anything against him either. The other guy, Doug something or another, is funnier. He's probably as good as Carolla, but inferior to Kimmel. Still, either they've changed writers or these two simply don't have "the magic". Doug's mom reviewing porn is cute, and when that doctor Phil impersonater sent some girl sprinting from the bookstore in tears I laughed, but the rest of it ranges from dull to midget in blue paint. On the complete other side of the spectrum, the WB's managed to squeeze Angel and Smallville into a two-hour block on Wednesdays in between weepy dramas about teenagers in nontraditional families learning to cope with growing up and life's lessons. Which isn't to say that Smallville isn't a weepy drama about a teenager in a nontraditional family learning to cope with growing up and life's lessons. Really, the fact that I continue to watch that show is testament to the fact that I need more hobbies. Angel is now sporting like half of the old Buffy writing team and manages to capture a bit of that old "magic" (and I promise that's the last Freddy reference in this post). It's been pretty consistently funny and thankfuly not as self-consciously weighty as a lot of the last couple of seasons of Buffy was. What's left after that? Justice League's got some new episodes which are pretty decent if you like that sort of thing. Teen Titans captures a lot of the frenetic, crazy fun of that breed of anime which falls into neither the "women turned into exploding meat puppets on the ends of ravaging tentacles" genre nor the portentious, faux-insightful melodrama of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the like without anime's typically shoddy production values, but it's all shackled to a very "Saturday morning cartoon" storytelling style that's aimed squarely at the children's market. I know there are some people my age or a few years younger who can still sit through episodes of Pokemon or the new He-Man, or that one with the hamster, and they'll probably love Titans. I'm guessing if you're interested in animation in and of itself, Titans might be interesting for you, too, as I suspect a lot of cartoons are going to look like it in a few years.
Status: RECOMMENDED???

Name: The Matrix: Reloaded
Category: Film
Background: I don't know what Rube Goldberg style sequence of events lead me to a seat in front of a television attached to a DVD player currently spinning a disc upon which was written the code for this movie, but there I was<s>, reliving "the magic"</s>.
Review: It's actually a bit better the second time around. For lack of anything better to do, I forced myself to pay closer attention to all the obnoxiously weighty dialogue that seemed specifically written for teenager's internet .sig files, and I kinda sorta got where they were trying to go with this. If you remember my take on the first movie, I saw it basically as an indictment of modern American life as ruled by consumerism and the corporate employment world. Reloaded seems to suggest that, even when you've freed yourself from these things, you're still a slave to determinism and human nature, and consequently this leads to a need to find a purpose in life. Moving from the simple desire of freedom from control for it's own sake, comes the question of what to do with that freedom. This is pretty high-minded stuff for a movie starring Keanu Reeves, and certainly "better" philosphy than was found in the original, I don't think the brothers ever really manage to integrate it into the movie well. Whereas the first movie worked as an action/scifi flick for the most part, the "surface" level of this movie, by which I mean the plot and characterization, is awful. Whereas the first movie kind of integrated it's message with the rest of its elements, Reloaded falls into a pattern of exposition, pointless fight scene, Philo lesson, second pointless fight scene, repeat. Plus a lot of the "deep" dialogue kind of gets away. The scene with the oracle for instance, eventually devolves into her speaking in meaningless Zen koans while Neo offers monosyllabic responses. Still, whereas I would have originally given this movie an F+ all around, now I'll at least assign it an A for effort. Color me at least a little interested in the finale.
Status: RECOMMENDED???

[Jethro Q. Walrustitty]

After an incredibly lengthy message like this, I'll keep this quick.

Re: KB Vol1: I doubt anyone has seen all the movies referenced. Just take Go Go's character: Played by an actress famous for Battle Royale, using her weapon in the same way as Jackie Chan used a horseshoe on a rope in Shanghai Noon, which is the same way Michelle Yeoh used sometime on a rope in Magnificent Warriors, which is probably from earlier stuff, too. The stuff popping out of Go Go's mace seems like a clear nod towards the Phantasm series, too - believable, as Tarantino is a big horror movie fan, too.

Re: Opera. Try Mozilla - better, and free. Anything is better than IE.

Re: ML. Don't fall the "teh hype" - the only A for effort that turd deserves is the effort given to making itself into a really trendy religion. As a movie, it's pretty much unwatchable.

The trailer for Revolutions, as shown before KB Vol1, wasn't very inspiring. Now Neo teams up with the Architect in order to destroy the common threat of Agent Smith? Huh? And it's really, really turning into a bad-comic-book-fan's jerk-off fantasy, with hundreds of "mech" robots piloted by "the resistance", looking like the loaders from Aliens with giant guns mounted on them. I thought that the resistance was a poorly-funded ragtag group of survivors? Apparently, not only can they do one mother of a rave, they have weapons R&D departments to shame anything currently in existance.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

After two months with no updates for the main page, I know have three (V's, Worms and now this).

I proclaim OCTOBER to be THE MERRY MONTH OF CONTENT!

[Vitriola]

I'm sorry, October is already taken.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I'm sorry, October is already taken.

Er...

Code: Select all

To the racists and women-haters,
    To the gay-bashers and welfare slashers
      To the prison builders and executioners,
        We say: THE FUTURE IS NOT YOURS!

Why are prison builders on that list? They are just carpenters and plumbers!