Tuesday, November 30, 2010

WoW: The most "Fun" new Cooking Daily...

For the moment? Weeeelllll.... read the text for Rock Lobster...


Yeah... beware the Sharks.... the Level 85 Sharks...


Unless you can self heal, have a raider's wad of Hit, and it certainly doesn't hurt to have a personal off tank, watch your back and keep a wide berth. If you do pull one, prioritize DoTs and reactive damage because a lot of strikes are gonna miss but once you get those on the sucker it's going to take consistent damage and slow die as long as you can stay ahead of the damage it does to you. At least it makes running up cooking tokens for Cat interesting...

Monday, November 29, 2010

WoW: Stormwind Dwarven District Parkour



Start the new zones up already... the prep work is done and I'm now just finding silly stuff like this to do...

Sunday, November 28, 2010

RftP: Love and Other Drugs

Love and Other Drugs is your prototypical "two broken people find true love with each other" dramedy with the caveat that it's got lots of sex scenes and nudity. In that sense, it's perhaps the world's most optimum date flick because you're going to get lots of opportunity to check out Anne Hathaway or Jake Gyllenhaal in their birthday suits depending on your personal preference. Or not, depending on how competitive/possessive/puritanical you or your SO are.

There's some good scenes here and, even when they're laying around naked just talking, Hathaway and Gyllenhaal play off each other well but the funniest thing is just how much the PR has avoided the fact that, when you go to see this, you're going to see naked people. You are. While groins stay effectively covered, everything else is in play at some point during this film as we get plenty of, well, "tasteful" at least (post-)coital nudity. Best be prepared for that.

Getting back to the plot, our broken people are a combo of an early onset Parkinson's patient (Hathaway), and the family underachiever (Gyllenhaal), with the former trying to simply get through life now that she believes normalcy is gone and the later burning out gloriously working sales jobs - his latest being as a Pharmaceutical Rep - whilst fucking his way through the staff/clientele as a means to get ahead - or simply off. So, we also get some commentary on Parkinson's treatment/life and "Big Pharma" sales tactics as we cruise though the plot.

Otherwise, it sticks to the genre conventions and doesn't really do anything you can't see coming down the pipe if you've ever seen any other movie of it's type. It's a movie you see to score points with the significant other as long as they're not the type who's going to ream you out as soon as the breasts/abs come out.

There's some other stuff out this weekend I wanna see but will have to wait until the week for me to catch up with.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

WoW: Thats... um... a BIG Bear....


Found wandering near Dun Garok (OMG, the Dwarves... they're all dead...), in Hillsbrad Foothills, all the Vicious Black Bears were that big. Not sure if that's intended or a graphical bug.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

WoW: Apparently...

Tomorow... Tomorrow... New quest zones... minus the Worgen and Goblins... Tomorrow...

It's only a daaaaaaaaaaaaayyy awayyyyyyyyy....

Friday, November 19, 2010

RftP: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

... reaffirms the reality that David Yates can't direct for shit and/or Steve Kloves should've been tossed on the heap a long time ago in favour of someone more suited to a long form adaptation.

In being given two films to deal with the last book - thus being deprived of the excuse that there's too much material - the weaknesses of that director/writer combo are simply given twice the opportunity to jump up on screen. The script is abysmal at short-handing in things suddenly deemed important (My favourite: "Hi Harry, I'm Domhnall Gleeson. I'll be your Bill Weasley today. Because we didn't shoot the actual last act of the prior book, I'm contractually obligated to mention Fenrir Greyback caused this scar the makeup department spent an hour putting on my face at some point when no one was looking. Oh, and I'm marrying Fleur - you all remember Fleur right?"), and the direction is technically sound but completely and totally emotionally bereft. How do I know this? Because we're not watching a Jackie Chan movie and the audience is laughing their heads off at the end of your snake chase and again when the characters are trying to be emotional because you can't find the proper line between drama and laughable level melodrama.

The combo then goes on to remove things for what becomes pretty obvious as simply budget concerns and appearance sake ("Hi Harry... err... it's Domhnall again... Ron won't be hiding out at Shell Cottage because someone thought it would make him look weak... oh, and, um, when you run from the Malfoy's... Fleur and I won't be there because then they'd have to pay us... Hell, it's probably Dad's summer cottage now... you'll find out in part two), which gets kinda annoying when you also read that they spent money to try and 3D'ize this - failing miserably - in order to charge you an extra $2.50 but couldn't be arsed to pay for the actors to do things "right". So, much like the last HP flic these two brought to the table you end up with a disjointed mess of a film that jumps from scene to scene while looking pretty.

There are many comments that this is the most "dark" and "mature" Harry Potter to date but... not really... It's only "dark" and "mature" in the same sense that slapping black leather on your main character while adding some "fucks" and tits to your video game makes it "mature" - it's some elderly executive's idea of what's "naughty" which is why the audience was ROFL'ing during the much ado about nothing "naked Harry Potter/Hermione makeout" scene.

I honestly think your enjoyment of this mess is likely dependent on whether or not you've ever read the novels so that's your deciding factor here.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Link Storage: More indie music...

TheSixtyOne.com

That ought to keep you busy until I get around to updating my playlist....

Friday, November 12, 2010

RftP: Skyline

Normally I do a weekend roundup, but lets get this slug out of the way.

Ahhhh, Skyline. From the looks of things you didn't deem yourself worthy of preview copies for the reviewers. That means you don't get "no detail" immunity from me; a benefit I generally give because I get annoyed at reviewers who run down the entire script over the course of their article. Which is good, because you deserve to be SPOILED for the good of humanity.

Skyline's premise is outlined in the original trailer by the newscasters:


Yeah, aliens come. They kick our ass. We don't win. The President doesn't lead a victory squadron to everyone's rescue while Aerosmith blares. The rest is essentially Cloverfield without the shaky-cam. The number of people who left the theatre angry at this reality was amusingly large given the trailer was pretty honest about what was coming here but only topped by those annoyed when the movie tried to have it both ways in the last 5 minutes by breaking out the subplot in the dumbest possible way. We'll get back to this in a second.

Skyline was apparently an experiment by a CGI house to see if they could make a "Blockbuster" alien film for $10M*. The answer to that is a qualitative yes; as long as you accept shitty plotting, greyscale CGI with some occasional pixelation - especially in "bad blue light" scenes - and your film is a bottle show. Essentially The entire movie takes place in the LA apartment/condo building of the best friend of the male lead and focuses on the efforts of our lead, his buddy, their respective wives/girlfriends, and various building people to try and get the hell out while, for some reason, the Aliens seemingly focus on their lone building out of all of LA.

Think about that for a second. Aliens that can hoover up people by the 1000's are sitting on 5 people in a high rise.

Yeah. The rest of the film is similarly dumb and written in such a way as to basically ensure that our cast stays in its bottle while our aliens chase them for their brains; which are apparently a powersource/internal component of some sort. In the background is the subplot that, for some reason, when our male lead is exposed to the "bad blue light" early in the film he becomes "infected" by it: gaining increased strength when he gets angry enough to pull it out. Sooooo, you're sitting there waiting for him to Hulk out on an Alien but it never really comes.

Instead, BIG HONKING SPOILER
we get an epilogue to the world being conquered and everyone being captured where our lead's GF wakes up in the spaceship just in time to see him get harvested for his brain and for her to get hauled off to what passes for an alien birthing room because she's pregnant. Except her BF's brain isn't blue like all the good ones: it's blazing red, angry, and implanted into an alien battle brute who proceeds to beat the shit out of the others, kill the alien attempting to harvest the kid from his wife, and scoop her up to try and flee.

/BIG HONKING SPOILER

Which just goes to show that movie studios aren't the only ones who could use much better quality control systems. Wait for this one to show up on a Sci-Fi channel.

* The official budget is said to be $20 Million, 10 of that is stated to be paying for those posters you see all over the place.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

TLU: See movie, Hit movie...

Her: So, why'd you go see Unstoppable?
Me: Because it was on.
Her: No, no, no... How'd you decide to see that over everything else that was on?
Me: *shrugs* I didn't really give it that much thought.
Her: Come on, I know there's lots of movies on; I see the listings in the paper! Why'd you see this one?
Me: You know, treating every decision as if it were a complex one is probably why you're on those anxiety meds...

Sunday, November 7, 2010

LS: Because it Made me Laugh

"Listen: I’m not saying pandas aren’t cute. They’re very cute. They’re so cute that Newfoundlanders instinctively want to club them to death."

RftP: Megamind, Unstoppable, Due Date

Gonna be a busy weekend in which I manage to steal a glance at something from next week.

Starting off, Megamind proceeds to tread much of the same ground as Despicable Me and, to be blunt, not do it as well. Replacing the cute little kids with a Lois Lane analogue and Jason Segel with Jonah Hill, the movie blows its load in the first act before proceeding to plod though an hour or so of love story and dated jokes (of all the video games you could reference - say... Pokemon or Mario - that kids and adults would currently identify with you instead dig out OG Donkey Kong?). It gives one more little burst of fun at the start of the last act then collapses under the weight of a pile of deus ex machina.

In fact, if there's no Heavy Metal song playing, you may as well break out a crossword puzzle while Will Ferrell verbally mugs for the camera in rather tired fashion and Tina Fey wonders why they bothered to cast a "comedic" actor for her role because those are the only times the animators get into the film too. Probably one of the quietest movie theatres I've been in this year and I caught an afternoon show full of kids. Maybe that's a good thing, but I doubt it. Also, yet another case of: "If you've seen the trailers, you've seen this film."

You have to have skipped Despicable Me or really be tied up into the conceit here to have fun with this. It's probably a "catch it on TV movie".

Speaking of fun, opening next week but I caught a sneak showing this Saturday at AMC, Unstoppable brings us Tony Scott in his element: fun and well paced action flicks with some decent character work. In fact, there's a word you could use a lot in a review for this: fun. Denzel Washington and Chris Pine carry the load and are clearly having fun playing off each other as the older train driver and comparative rookie conductor who find themselves and their train sharing a track with a runaway locomotive in this very loose adaption of the tale of Ohio's infamous Crazy 8888 train incident that amps up the drama, shifts locations for obvious storytelling purposes, and renames everything. Some of that is likely so no one can get sued but also it's also readily apparent no one wants to stop the fun train here and they're right not to.

This film isn't going to win any Oscars but anyone who sits down and says it's not a good little popcorn flick is wrongheaded and anti-fun. There's just enough swearing that I'd probably have to clear it through his dad first but my 11 year old train nut nephew would probably leave this grinning ear to ear.

Hell, even I had a stupid little one growing throughout.

Finally, Due Date is the latest in what's becoming a long line of "insane situation" comedies. Staring Robert Downey Jr. as the expectant father with anger issues and Zach Galifianakis as... well... the same role he plays in every comedy lately, it applies it's particular brand of insanity to the odd-couple road trip movie and comes out pretty well as long as you don't think about it too much.

That said, there's some solid laughs here and probably the best new comedy out this weekend, live action or otherwise.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

TotD: Apparently they make Men's Uggs..

... and some guys actually wear them?

Really?

Friday, November 5, 2010

Rant: Why I'd never want my kid to be a "Child Star"

Demi Lovato Enters Rehab because:

- she punched out a dancer.
- got busted for partying
- she is struggling with body issues and "cutting".
- like any sane teenage girl, she's totally ashamed to be dating Justin Bieber.
- she's really just seeing a psychiatrist.
- she's not getting along with her ex's GF... the same ex who apparently just used her for publicity.
- she's desperately trying to turn herself into her ex's new GF.
- whatever the reason, it's totally not Disney's fault.
- she's a Yandere... errr... sorry. Got caught up in the dumbness. There's your new word of the week folks.

But, that there is 3 days of the more sane gossip mongering about an 18 year old girl who's trying to figure out life and is making mistakes in a world where gossip is currency and having the best of it is a license to print money. Why the hell would I want to submit my kid to that? It's not even a female limited thing either. Quite possibly my most angering moment in history reading movie reviews was for Spy Kids 3 where more than one reviewer had the audacity to call Rodriguez on the carpet for scripting the movie around the male lead from the first two because he "isn't cute anymore". At 13/14 you're politely calling a kid out on his appearance? Fuck that shit.

Should I ever get around to participating in the birthing process and they decide this kinda thing is what they wanna do for a living, someone's gonna have to make a really good case for why I shouldn't encourage them to stay small/local, learn their craft, figure out who they are, and go for it when they're older and ready to deal with it.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

TyL: Why Phineas and Ferb is awesome...



While there's multiple levels of awesome in here, jump to 2:12 for a fine example of slipping a risque double-entendre in the script and completely getting away with it.

I'll let Wired explain to you further why this is the current generation's Spielburg Era Looney Toons.