Author: Jonathan

For me, starting up the latest installment in the Monkey Island series was akin to Ted Danson walking back into the Cheers bar. The first Monkey Island game was life changing to me as an 11 year old swapping floppy disks on his dad’s old PC. I had played through Loom and was starting to mess around with Sierra games but up to that point no game fully resonated with me in the way that the original Secret of Monkey Island did in 1990. The characters, the puzzles, the humor, the storyline… everything seemed to work in unison to flip a creative switch in my brain. For the first time, I thought that someone had actually made a video game that spoke only to me!

Obviously, I was wrong. The Monkey Island series spoke to a lot of people… and, over the course of the next 10 years, three additional sequels worked to expand the universe of the Monkey Island games for an entire generation of PC gamers. But by the time that the fourth game arrived, the gaming landscape had completely changed from the early days of 1990. Google and the internet were now in every gamer’s home, and with them came an avalanche of game FAQs. No longer did adventure gamers have to work through puzzles patiently or use their wits to beat games. They could just look for answers online. Coupled with the rise of competitive social gaming, brought on by an onslaught of first person shooters like Doom and Golden Eye, real gaming cred no longer meant being the only one among your friends who knew the answers to the latest adventure game. With a little Googling, everyone knew the answers! And so, by the end of 2001, adventure gaming’s pulse had completely flatlined. I boxed up my old copies of Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island games and said goodbye to my old childhood friends. I honestly never expected to see any of them ever again.

Enter Tell Tale Games almost a decade later and their line of Sam and Max and Wallace and Gromit adventures. Enter the Wii and the DS, brand new consoles that brought with them a new influx of casual gaming to counteract the adrenaline culture of Halo that had taken my friends with it. Enter the downloadable episodic game, that allowed for quicker, more immediate content delivery and smaller development budgets and schedules. All of these elements came together to deliver a new pulse to the return of adventure gaming. The heart had long since gone cold, but one the eve of E3 a new pulse started to beat again. What more appropriate a means of bringing adventure gaming to a brand new generation than with my old friend Guybrush Threepwood and Tell Tales’ Tales of Monkey Island?

This past Saturday morning, while Laura was at work, I used her PC to download the press copy of the first chapter of the new Tales of Monkey Island adventure. It’s called The Launch of the Screaming Narwhal and promised about 4 hours of gameplay. I couldn’t contain my excitement as the title screen came up and I clicked to start a new game. I honestly couldn’t believe that after almost a decade, and after burying my dreams of ever playing a Monkey Island game again, I was moments away from experiencing a brand new adventure. I almost couldn’t contain myself.

The game starts out with a familiar scene: Guybrush’s wife Elaine has been kidnapped by the ghost pirate LeChuck who is on the verge of unleashing a mystical curse that promises to make him all powerful. Things seem helpless when a familiar voice cuts the air: Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate! Right off the bat, it’s obvious that Tell Tale is going about things the right way. They’ve involved some of the original Monkey Island creators, gone to lengths of getting all of the original voice talent back and the writing is both familiar and fresh. Sure enough, after some puzzle solving, Guybrush has LeChuck right where he wants him and has run him through with an enchanted sabre… that he didn’t quite enchant the right way. The spell goes haywire, some barrels of gunpowder on the ship ignite and everything goes KABLAM! That’s when the game cuts to a wide shot of the exploding ship, floating in front of a Caribbean island, as Guybrush is thrown into the air and the boat overturns and starts to sink. Above the scene, the Tales of Monkey Island title comes up, the music starts to play and your truly starts to tear up.

Yeah. So what? I almost cried. It was an emotional moment for me. But I couldn’t in the end! You know why? Because there was still a whole lot of game to play. My adventure had just begun. And the game is solid. If anyone experienced the Monkey Island of old, Tell Tale has done a commendable job of making a game that fits perfectly in line with the first four installments. There are old characters that will bring you back and new characters that will spark your interest. Hell, there are even a couple of Murray references that had me laughing out loud. But regardless of how familiar everything feels, there is nothing in Tales of Monkey Island that should scare of brand new players. The story clips along steadily and the puzzles are pretty well spread out with the locations to keep players clicking and exploring brand new things. Like with the very best adventure games, sometimes I just found myself clicking on parts of the environment that I knew wouldn’t do anything important just so I could experience the characters’ responses. I found myself trying out items on the most senseless objects just to see what would happen. Before I knew it, I was adventuring again!

That’s not to say that Tales of Monkey Island is without it’s bumps. It took me a while, on Laura’s stripped down work PC, to get the proper settings running. I had been so spoiled by console gaming that the idea of having to adjust settings like the resolution size and the amount of detail was almost completely alien to me. Seriously, before you download the game, check out the requirements. I had to play this game on a quality setting of 1 (but once I made the change the game was seriously cruising!).

This brings me to my next critique: the artwork. Before I get too into it, it should be known that Tell Tales has only been working on the game for a few months. The writing, the audio, the gameplay are all fun and top notch. If anything, the constricted development time has mainly effected the character animation and 3D artwork. While the environments are pretty to look at and the fact that you can move Guybrush in all directions is amazing, it hurts to see some of the amazing voice acting come out of characters that don’t appear as visually fleshed out or rendered in the same amount of detail as the story. Some of the mouth syncing is sloppy and the flatness of some of the character modeling distract from just how engaging the characters are. If these problems could have been cleared up with a little bit more time spent on the final product or a bigger product download, sign me up for the special edition retail package. I don’t know how much of the detail suffered from my playing through the game at a quality level of 1 (hopefully a lot!) but I thought it was distracting at times.

The final critique I have really doesn’t have much to do with the game or Tell Tale Games’ work at all. It has to do with the fact that I waited almost 10 years to see my friends again and the entire experience was over in less than 4 hours. Now, I know that there are still four chapters left to download in the coming months, and I’m excited to experience all four chapters for myself in full, but the profound feeling of loss that I felt upon completing the chapter completely derailed my entire weekend and sent me into an emotional tailspin from which I have yet to fully recover. Those 4 hours that I spent trying to get Guybrush off of Flotsam Island (where he’d been stranded after blowing up LeChuck’s ship) so that he could go back to fixing the curse and rescuing Elaine was like 4 hours spent with some of my closest friends before saying goodbye for who knows how long a stretch of time. I almost started to cry all over again! I mean, this must be what a heroin addict feels like when he runs out of hits and is forced to go sober for a stretch!

Luckily, the re-skin of the original Secret of Monkey Island is arriving on PC and XBox Live next week. I’m pretty excited to relive those adventures and say hello to my old friends all over again. I wonder how much of the game (from 19 years ago!) I still remember. But will it be enough to get me through the next few weeks, or months, until the second installment of Tales of Monkey Island hits? Well, laddies, at least I can take refuge in knowing that that will be an adventure that all of us will have to experience together!

The video gaming equivalent to the question “if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a noise” roughly translates to “if an awesome game comes out and nobody plays it, is it any good?”. As successful as the Wii is with the non-gamers, the problem that this creates for people looking for a game worth playing is a giant amount of shovel-ware targeted towards the larger, uninformed purchasing public. It’s hard to go into a GameStop or Best Buy and navigate the racks of Wii titles without giving up from the barrage of cooking, pet raising and brain-banging shovel ware on the shelves. For every good game that’s released on the Wii, there seems to be about 150 crappy party games  and awesome games get lost in the avalanche of garbage all the time. So when Nintendo released their Wii Ware program for independent studios to take part in, this same ratio seemed to only make a digital translation. To date, the only game that I had downloaded from Wii Ware and enjoyed was the incredible little treat of a game called Lost Winds.

Enter Romino Games this past June with their comedic side-scrolling strategy game Swords & Soldiers! Romino Games is a young developer, formed in late 2007, by the original creators of the fun platformer “de Blob”, released on the Wii by THQ this past spring. In Swords & Soldiers, Romino has taken their comedically original approach to normal gaming genres and tackled the strategy, resource building game. When I was offered the chance to download the title a few days ago I was skeptical at first (especially not being an avid strategy gamer and being double weary of Wii (shovel)Ware) but I figured “hey, they’re sending me the game for free and if it sucks, I’ll just delete it!”

Wait. Is that an Aztec statue shooting lazers at Vikings? HOLY $H!*! BEST GAME EVER!?!?

Well, the game doesn’t suck. In fact, Swords & Soldiers is completely hilarious and awesome. Romino made one huge mistake: I would have totally paid for this game! If you are a PSP gamer who loves Patapon, you should have downloaded this game YESTERDAY. If you’re a non PSP gamer who is interested in Patapon but have a Wii, Swords & Soldiers is the perfect game for you. I love Patapon. It’s a fun side scrolling strategy game and I know Swords & Soldiers is going to get compared to it (and possibly the classic game from my childhood Lemmings) a lot. But at the end of the day, Patapon has a rhythm and RPG element to it while Swords & Soldiers plays more as a straight forward resource building strategy game.

And the game is hilarious. In story mode, the goal of the game is to chase your enemy across the globe and wipe them off the face of the map. You start out playing as a Viking horde but can jump ahead to play as Asian forces or an Aztec army. Each group comes with specific types of warriors, gathers and magicians that you take with you on your globe conquering pursuits. The characters are depicted in a loud, comic strip-style and the instructional dialogue is informative and hilarious (and gets more ridiculous as the storylines get further and further along and you add more and more ridiculous soldiers). Remember when Gilmore went and visited the set of The Deadliest Warrior and they were wondering who would win in a fight between William Wallace and Shaka Zulu? With Swords & Soldiers, players can play out those battles in ridiculous fashion as they toss stink bombs, ice hammers and spells at each other. But as cartoony as the game is, hardcore strategy fans can find satisfaction in the mass amounts of choices you have to tackle each scenario.

When Thor talks, you listen! “More gold, Gold Diggers!” Yes, that IS their character name.

There is a lot to do in this very cleanly constructed game. The on screen menu is super simple to navigate and the icons are obvious and easy to select quickly in the heat of battle without taking away any strategic depth. You WILL find yourself using all of your abilities and options pretty evenly in order to win. You can upgrade soldiers, heal your troops and pick various paths for them to follow as they move from left to right to pillage  resources, defeat the enemy and destroy their stronghold. The variations in strategy shouldn’t intimidate you though. Swords & Soldiers is extremely easy and quick to learn. The game adds new abilities at a friendly pace and the challenges grow steadily but never to a point of frustrating the player too much.

I remember having trouble crossing the desert in the original Patapon because of my inability to hit the right rhythms. It was more frustrating for me than fun. Playing through Swords & Soldiers, with the fluid ease provided by the Wii remote, I never experienced anything close to that. If my army was defeated, the battles were always quick and fun enough for me to feel good about clicking to get right back in there and try it another way. In fact, Swords & Soldiers in the epitome of what I think the Wii does better than the other two systems. If you want to spend all day beating through a game, you’ll never get bored of Swords & Soldiers. But if you just want to pick up and play it for 10 minutes, it has that appeal as well. You never  feel like you’re NOT accomplishing something, no matter how long you play it.

So much global genocide… so little time.

Which brings us to some features that I found additionally exciting about the game. The first is achievements. You can always go back and play previous missions and depending on how you accomplish certain tasks, you can unlock different game elements. Even though there are no gamer points to be had on the Wii, this feature definitely appealed to the completion obsessed nature of myself and most of my gaming friends.

Another awesome feature is split screen versus mode. Now, while Laura wasn’t feeling the game while she watched me play it (it IS pretty loud, in your face and ridiculous), I can see how having a friend over for a battle to see who can destroy each other’s forces and castles can achieve a Mario Kart level of fun and competitiveness. The character animations are flashy and entertaining to watch (and listen to… unless you’re Laura) but never get too complicated or distracting. You can clearly see what’s going on at all times and it gives you just enough ridiculous attitude to fuel any trash talking with your friend. When you see a Native American tribesman get tossed across the screen by a swipe from a Solar-powered leopard god… it’s pretty damn funny (unless your the tomahawk wielding Native American who went up against the stone statue come to life)!

Skeleton Tribesmen versus Ice Vikings? That’s an achievement in its own right!

The final feature I really enjoyed was a type of survival mode that you unlock by proceeding through the game. This mode tasks players with keeping a single soldier alive as they traverse across a battlefield littered with enemies. The player is only given a limited amount of spells, mana and upgrades to spend and is graded on how far their little warrior can go before being ultimately killed. It provides a fun quick challenge that breaks up the intensity of the story and versus modes pretty well.

Someone’s gonna complain about the political correctness of this one…

So there you have it: my unabashed love letter review to the awesome guys at Romino and their Wii Ware game Swords & Soldiers. I’m not sure that you can play versus mode online with friends but that would be an incredible incentive to getting all of you to get your own copy. Regardless, if you own a Wii and are looking for something fun to play while you wait for another game featuring Mario, Link or Samus, Swords & Soldiers is absolutely a must buy download. It offers various levels of player investment appealing to everyone from passive strategy gamers to hardcore completion-ists and is also an entertaining way to completely butcher a history lesson with it’s irreverently inaccurate (and insulting?) depictions of legendary armies. If you need justification for keeping your Wii in the living room, Swords & Soldiers comes highly recommended. I was both completely surprised and blown away.

“Aztec Zombie Horde… ATTACK!”

I’ll be honest with you right off the bat: I don’t own an iPhone. In fact, the thought that I can easily drag my addiction to e-mail, Facebook and Geekscape out of the house and into the other parts of my life terrifies me. Most days, when I get home from running errands or taking meetings, I look forward to checking my e-mail like a kid on Christmas.

But all this might soon change. Every week, it seems as though more and more iPhone games and apps are hitting the market and calling for me to take my vices off of the desktop and partake in them with the outside world. And this week, that vice is my addiction to Showtime’s Dexter. Earlier this week, I got a chance to sit down and check out a hands on demo of the Dexter iPhone game coming out later this summer. I’d been hearing about the game, developed by Marc Ecko Entertainment, for a few months now and was interested but not quite fully invested. But after spending the better part of an hour dragging, poking, tilting and slashing through the opening scenes, I might just be changing my tune permanently.

“Olly olly oxen free!”

First off, the game is an incredibly detailed story reenactment of the first season. The game is launching later this summer with the first of 4 episodic downloads. Over the course of all 4 episodes, players will follow Dexter through the Ice Truck Killer storyline from the first season. If this seems like a tall order, to accurately convey all of the story details and twists and turns from that season, just know that the first downloadable episode clocks in at 6 to 10 hours of gameplay with each of the 3 subsequent episodes taking 4 to 6 hours to complete each. That’s a lot of game time. And it should be, because there’s a lot of ground to cover.

Matsuka’s probably saying something perverted right now…

The first scene in the Dexter game is the exact same opening scene from Season One. Dexter finds himself stalking a choir instructor who has been killing the children he is in charge of and burying them in shallow graves. The graphics and rendering are pretty good for an iPhone game and Michael C. Hall has provided an original voice over that takes you through the actions and cut scenes. Now in Dexter’s shoes, players are tasked with collecting “evidence” towards the suspect by first acquiring a shovel and then searching around the barren yard for fresh graves to dig up. You have a choice in how you move Dexter. There’s a drag area on the left for your left thumb to move Dexter in various directions and one for your right thumb to move around his point of view. This works a lot like dual analog sticks. You can also eschew the right thumb dragging for the tilting of the iPhone to look around. Either way, movement is pretty straight forward (even if I was quickly identified as someone who obviously “doesn’t play a lot of iPhone games”).

When you get close enough to an object that Dexter can interact with, like the shovel, you can click a command to take it. Approaching fresh graves will trigger a cue to dig that leads to a rhythm tapping mini-game for digging. Accomplishing these tasks not only provide evidence towards a suspects guilt (Dexter will only kill a suspect he finds 100% guilty), it also provides points towards Dex’s “Mask Bar”. The Mask Bar fills for accomplishing tasks successfully, avoiding suspicious activity and interacting with other characters in a friendly manner. If you act more aggressively or fail mini-games, Dexter’s Mask Bar depletes and he is found guilty.

Doakes is still pissed about that last bowling score.

The other variable bar to keep track of is Dexter’s “Dark Passenger” bar. In moments of the show, like when Dexter lashes out at Rita’s ex-husband Paul or gets violent with his convicted victims, Dexter is taken over by a his Dark Passenger. The Dark Passenger wasn’t completely explained in the demo but I’m sure it does something to effect other character’s suspicion of you and your Mask Bar. Still, it’s pretty fun to let the sicko’s have it or give an angry reaction to another character’s question.

Make sure to kick the tires before you buy it used!

Once Dexter has collected enough evidence through searching and completing mini-games, it’s time to put the pieces together for a perfect kill. This first involves preparing the “kill room” by dressing it in plastic, cleaning it up and checking for tears that might give you away to detectives like Doakes. After setting the room up, it’s time to hunt. In the demo I played, I waited for the Choir Instructor as he left his building and headed to a band stand down the street. Similar to following people in GTA, if you get too close or don’t duck and hide at the right times, you will get caught. Using the dual analog control scheme, you have to successfully follow the suspect to a certain area within a given time limit where a cutscene of the kidnapping will take place. Upon finishing the cutscene, you start a series of mini-games in the kill room where you select a grisly murder weapon, interrogate the prisoner until he admits his guilt and then trace slashes with your finger across the screen to simulate the cutting (don’t worry if you’re timid about the violence like me… you’re tracing directions over a censored black screen while leaving blood splatters behind). Upon successful completion, you are awarded Mask points and your Dark Passenger is effected. Congratulations! You’ve just performed your first kill!

So many choices…

Now that our first scene from the show is behind us, the rest of Dexter’s world opens up. You can click on Dexter’s journal menu to keep track of your other suspects, search locations or meet with other characters. Your sister Deb might have information that will add to your suspect files so meeting with her is beneficial if you can successfully navigate the conversation. Similarly, taking Rita out on a date (yay!) puts you near where Angel is discovering the latest victim of The Ice Truck Killer. You can talk to Angel, but don’t make Rita suspicious, and vice versa. Luckily, taking Rita out to eat crabs opens up another fun mini-game: Crab Smashing! This is a pretty simple touch game where you gain points for tapping the craps and lose them for letting crabs escape. It effects your Mask and Dark Passenger so games like this are important throughout the story.

Deb showing off her “sassy pose”.

So there you have: my first moments as an iPhone killer! Again, the game comes out later this summer and is being offered at what I’m told is a “Premium Game” price. Those of you with more experience in the iPhone store will know where that puts us financially but I have some high hopes for the game. The controls, which I found a little tough (but again, I’m not iPro) are supposedly close to done while the build of the game is also nearing completion. All in all, the animations are nice, the size of the story is impressive and the mini-games are numerous and challenging enough to keep things interesting. Hopefully, by the end of summer we’ll all have something to help tie us over until Dexter Season 4 premieres! That is, unless you’re completely iPhone challenged like myself!

As a kid, there may not have been a more pleasing sound to my ears than the light ring of the word “Sega” upon striking up Sonic the Hedgehog on my old Genesis. As much as I loved playing the original NES with my brothers and the Sega Master System with my neighbor David, the Sega Genesis was the first console that was 100% mine. I have fond memories of playing endlessly through both the Genesis and Sega CD versions of all the Sonic games, Kid Chameleon, Mickey Mouse’s House of Illusion, Quackshot and countless other Genesis titles. Even when the Super NES hit the scene, the Genesis was still my system and the sweet sound of that Sega chime brought happiness to my ears. But the years move on, whether you want them to or not, and soon the relationship with my beloved Sega would fade like all of those memories of playing stickball in the abandoned lot near our house.

During high school, I became much more of a computer gamer, but I still revisited the Genesis, Game Boy and Super NES titles now and then. The girlfriend that I had senior year had a younger brother with a Sega Saturn and I remember playing through Nights a few times with him. The visuals were incredible and the game moved at a speed that reminded me a lot of those early Sonic years. Then I went to college and all of my gaming was on the PC. I remember a classmate ducking out of class so he could play more Final Fantasy VII and a friend going nuts for Metal Gear Solid, but I honesty don’t think I touched a Dreamcast until senior year. This junior girl from The Hollywood Club (yes, I was a member of something called The Hollywood Club) invited me over to her dorm room and being the naïve “I guess she just wants to hang out” guy I was (am?) I ended up playing tennis on her Dreamcast until I picked up on the tension in the room, realized I had a girlfriend and left. Dreamcast, I never really got a chance to know you, but I thank you for getting me out of that room before I did something I regretted (like playing Seaman… run with that reference however you want).

As we all know, that was the last of the Sega consoles. Today, the Sonic games are harsh mockeries of their former glories and most of Sega’s offerings have been relegated to games we pass over at the local GameStop in search of games we’ve actually heard something positive about. Then came Sega’s latest push on the Wii with their “hardcore” initiative of publishing both MadWorld (which rules) and House of the Dead Overkill (which I honestly have yet to play). The soon to be released Conduit looks like a game that will give the few hardcore gamers that didn’t sell their Wiis reason to celebrate. Reactions are generally positive about these titles, and say what you will about the Wii as a system, but I think most gamers will agree that Sega’s new approach in 2009 has been both brave and promising. So with that promise still fresh in my mind, I approached E3’s series of Sega game demos with a mix of excitement and trepidation. What version of the fabled game publisher will we see in the three games represented? Well, let’s take them one at a time:

Going into this presentation, I knew NOTHING about Alpha Protocol except that someone in the media room had mumbled that it would be that year’s Mass Effect. I never played Mass Effect. I took one look at how long the game would take to complete and said “no thank you… that looks like it would bankrupt all of my human relationships if I got addicted to that!” Well, after sitting through Sega’s presentation of Alpha Protocol, I can safely say that I now want to play Mass Effect if it is anything like what I witnessed. This game easily surprised me the most out of any of the titles in the presentation.

I’m on the right. Jake108 is on the left… again.

Set in the world of global espionage, Alpha Protocol goes to enormous lengths of making the world as dependent on the player’s choices as possible. The branching system in this game, and the countless ways in which you can upgrade your weapons, armor and character’s abilities bring a whole new meaning to the term “immersive experience”. If I was afraid of getting addicted to Mass Effect, a shooter with loads of RPG aspects and customizability, then Alpha Protocol is the biggest nightmare I’ll ever face. I could definitely get lost in this game and never come out.

First off, the game looks and sounds great. The graphics are sharp, the NPCs all have their own unique personalities and voices and the action is fast and quick. I get worn out in games like Hitman and the earlier Metal Gear Solid games when you spend a few minutes waiting for a bad guy sentry to turn the corner, or for a camera to rotate. In Alpha Protocol, if you want to tackle each mission guns blazing, you can level up your character and his abilities to be that kind of player. Or, if you want to go the stealth and intelligence route, you can play that game as well. Just know that every trait, piece of armor or weapon that you customize to outfit yourself with has its own specific level of detail. If you armor up with heavy body armor, the clay plates in the bullet-proofing might alert nearby enemies. If you go the stealth route, other NPC characters may trigger scenarios in the mission ahead of when you want them to occur.

Jake The Snake taught me well!

Available missions and NPC interactions can be handled in whatever order the player likes. Should you interrogate someone before taking on a mission, which might reveal clues, a new objective or tip off an enemy? Or should you go in, get the job done and see what their reaction is afterwards? Even the player’s approach to the NPC interactions effect the almost limitless branching of the storyline. Being overly aggressive with some characters might make them reveal entirely different information while being too nice with others might be the way to go. Every NPC is different and as you interact with them, you will see their level of trust in you going up and down. During one play through of Alpha Protocol, your enemies could end up being your allies during a completely different play through. It all comes down to how you choose to handle each interaction, especially knowing that in the small game of government espionage, each of the NPCs are also working against each other. As you meet and work with more characters in the story, you fill out their specific intel file. Some characters may give you information on others that will also help inform you to the best approach to dealing with others. Then again, how do you know they aren’t just playing you towards their own interests?

This guy seems nice enough… I choose “Draw Gun”

The missions in the game are solid and varied and almost every situation can be handled in a varied number of ways. The environments are fully manipulative so a scenario where snipers are shooting at you from atop a water tower can be handled by simply sniping back at them through a broken window or by lobing an explosive towards the base of the tower and bringing them all crashing down. Even the ease of your targeting and shots can be manipulated by leveling your character’s abilities in certain directions. It really just depends on how you want to move through the missions and the storyline.

I wonder if I can knock that tree onto him…

At the end of the mission that we saw, the attempted theft of some explosives in a train yard, the option came up once reaching our objective of taking the weapons for yourself to sell on the black market, or rerouting the train to a number of different locations, each with different effects in the NPC characters watching your actions. A computer monitor comes up for a hacking mini-game, and based on how well you’ve leveled up your tech abilities, or manufactures certain gadgets, these mini-games (which are numerous and varied through out the game based on the different objectives) can be either very simple or hard. It all depends on the handling of your character. Even the boss battle at the end of the mission can be talked through and avoided or can be handled in a violent fashion, depending on the type of message you wish to send to the rest of world in the game or the types of allies and enemies you choose to make.

“I just want to reconnect my satellite TV!”

In the end, Alpha Protocol went from a murky area of semi-interest to being one of the top 5 games I saw at E3. It completely floored me with its level of detail and involvement and despite what it would undoubtedly do to the wrest of my life, I’m very interested in seeing the finished product once it comes out.

We didn’t get a whole lot of explanation on the Bayonetta game because the game’s producer spoke Japanese through a translator. This could be the reason the game didn’t get a whole lot of explanation… or it could be that Bayonetta didn’t NEED a whole lot of explanation! Everyone loves to throw the “God of War style” description on a lot of games that follow a ¾ perspective of a third person bad ass cutting up a lot of bad guys in a lot of spectacular methods. I agree that that’s a pretty accurate assessment of most of these types of games. But I’ll take it one step forward and add what those games don’t have: speed. If you can take a “God of War style” game and add to it the speed of the above mentioned Nights (or the perspective bending levels of Sin and Punishment) then you’re a lot closer to what makes Bayonetta so original. As much as the game feels like it could be in a God of War style… it moves in just too crazy of a fashion to be properly pigeonholed into that category of imitators.

Okay… what does the trumpet have to do with ANYTHING!?!

The lead character looks like a sexy Librarian gone bad who wields multiple six shooters that sometimes doubles as her high heels (I’ll wait for you to read that again). During the game play that we saw, she ran, shot and destroy pieces of the environment and multiply bad guys at a pretty breakneck speed. The entire time, she ran through buildings, up buildings and jumped across the environment as all of it came crashing down (you see, she was being chased by a river of lava). Does it sound insane? It IS insane. And it might have been too much but for the awesome sense of humor that the game has. During the various battles, there are opportunities to bust out spells and combos using pieces of your environment or your magic abilities. After going through a button combo system, you unleash some of the most insane kills I’ve ever seen in a game. By pulling the wheel off of a broken nearby wagon, you can make it sprout spikes and then send it spinning through the body of your enemies. The entire time, your main character is laughing and spouting off one-liners. This is all going on at a breakneck speed. It’s like playing Burnout as a 3rd person brawler: the more chaos and speed, the better.

I told you this game was insane…

The one boss battle that we witnessed started in a giant windowed cathedral. Suddenly, through a wall of tinted glass, a giant dragon’s head smashes through and snaps at our main character. You battle at the head using fast spells and combos and the camera pulls in and out of the action (which is pretty huge… you ARE fighting a dragon). Out of nowhere, once you’ve delivered enough hits, the dragon yanks the entire cathedral out of the ground and takes to the sky. Now the perspective goes nuts as the entire piece of the building is flying through the air around the dragon’s neck (and of course he’s still trying to eat you). The camera pulls back to another insane distance to reveal… the dragon has another head! So now you are flying through the air, in a crumbling cathedral, looped around a two-headed dragon’s head, as both heads try and eat you. This game is complete manic insanity! I had relegated this game to just being another big breasted exploitation game but after seeing it in motion I am beyond excited to try my hand at flying through these levels. And if the combo system seems a bit too much for you (there are WAY more combos and spells than in the God of War games), you can practice your button combos during the load screens, a nice touch that keeps the player involved throughout the crazy ordeal.

Was I the only one not excited by the prospect of another Aliens VS Predator game? Like the cinema franchise, I was ready to put both the Alien and the Predator to bed after cutting my losses and pretending that the only products that existed were the first Predator and first two Alien films. Everything else just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Luckily, someone else had a different opinion. Enter Aliens VS Predator (VS Colonial Marine, right?).

The game takes place on an earth colony where the Colonial Marines have been called in to answer a distress call. It seems that someone (I’m not pointing fingers) discovered a batch of aliens in an old Predator temple and now the hunt is on. The aliens are coming for the colonists and the Predators are on their way to do some… predator-ing. So that’s the story, simple enough, and all three storylines, regardless of whether you play as a Colonial Marine, an Alien or a Predator, all run alongside each other during the storyline portion of the game (and of course there will be multiplayer).

Wanna catch some tail? No, thanks.

At E3, the presentation we witnessed showed us some of the opening moments of the game from the perspective of a Colonial Marine. The first thing that hits you in this game (and it should) is atmosphere. You are 100% in the middle of what appears to be James Cameron’s Aliens. The hallways, the sounds, the beeping radar… get ready for some “game over, man”. The introduction to the scenario, in your first person perspective, is paced very cinematically and you’ll feel as immersed in this world as you would playing a Valve style of game like Half Life. There are tons of hints, from the acid burn marks on the walls, to the distant gun fire and injured survivors crying for help, that tell you that things are going to soon go from bad to worse. And of course they do when a group of Aliens get through the sentry guns and work their way through the walls. The combat is fast and scary as your radar goes nuts. The aliens attack quick, in a testing manner, trying to find your weaknesses. When you shoot them up a bit, they’ll retreat to the shadows and go silent from your radar… but you can still hear them hissing at you somewhere. You’d better get ready to defend yourself because they’re coming right back.

Does the game look hard? Yes. But that’s what makes it more believable. In the demo we saw, our game producer was killed pretty quickly and some of the NPCs he could have saved all got taken out. Supposedly, every time the game is played, the AI is shifted a bit in a Left 4 Dead fashion, to throw different things at the player. Taking a page from Valves book is a good thing as far as I’m concerned and putting that kind of immersive experience in an Alien VS Predator game is the kind of cinematic experience we’ve been wanting from Hollywood for over two decades.

“The guy on the left is dead in 3… 2…”

But what about evening the odds a little and playing as one of the other two marquee characters? Well, the show floor only had the Predator on display and the entire HUD is different (as it should be!). You can work in different levels of vision as well, depending on whether or not you wanted to hunt using plane vision, targeting or infra-red. This feels very much like you are the hunter, using various techniques to seek out your prey and put an end to them. The Predator also has the most bad ass range weapons as well and up close melee combat. I witnessed a first person perspective of drawing your two arm claws, taking a man’s head off (watching his eyes go lifeless) and then stroking the side of his head. As sick as it was, it was 100% Predator and the level of detail made it obvious that the game developers weren’t messing around. From what I witnessed, they were taking all of their cues from the proper source materials and leaving the bad stuff out of it.

“I aint got’cho money, I swear!”

So there you have it: Sega’s presentation demos at E3. Am I excited? Definitely. Alpha Protocol seems like the most immersive single player experience I’ve ever witnessed and fans of RPG-laced shooters have a new standard (we’ll see what you’ve got Mass Effect 2!). Bayonetta just looks like insane, fast paced fun and Aliens VS Predator looks like the cinematic experience we’ve been wanting for so long but now we get to take our friends along for the ride (I call Predator!). So regardless of whatever promises were made in the past, rest easy that Sega has heard your cries and that the fall of 2009 and months of 2010 look like a brand new day for the publisher and its fans.

Spring is here! And for those of us who don’t live in Southern California where the temperature freakishly stays the same all year round, that means it’s starting to get warm. I say celebrate the return of bikini weather by showing some skin—more specifically, movie skin. Yup, that’s right, kiddos, let’s explore the glamorous world of movie strippers together. Since making fun of things is infinitely more entertaining than praising them, I’ve narrowed it down to the top five worst movie strippers. Don’t agree with me? Well, how does it feel to be wrong, jackass?

 

Jenna Jameson as Kat in Zombie Strippers
Zombie Strippers is one of those new-wave bad movies that is so “clever” and “smart” that it actually knows it’s bad. As if you couldn’t tell, those air quotes represent how much I want to physically stab movies like this. If you know what you’re making is bad, then what’s the point of even doing it? It’s my inherent problem with Grindhouse and other films of this ilk.

Back to the topic at hand…as the title of this movie suggests it’s about some kind of virus that escapes into a strip club and turns all the strippers into zombies. The main stripper is Kat, played by none other than porn star Jenna Jameson. We know that Kat’s interesting and unique because in the opening scene she is shown reading the collective works of Nietzsche. *Points index finger at temple and pulls thumb trigger*

It’s not necessarily that Jameson makes a terrible stripper, it’s just that we’ve seen her naked so many times that at this point it’s about as thrilling as watching a 2 hour marathon of C-SPAN Senate coverage. Overall, this makes for a very dull movie. Plus, she’s decaying through most of it and that’s just hard to get behind (unless you’re a necrophiliac or a goth kid). In the end, Zombie Strippers is like porn that you can’t get off to and that’s about as stupid as watching Baywatch for the erudite storytelling.

Lindsay Lohan as Dakota Moss in I Know Who Killed Me
It pains me to reveal I actually watched this entire movie. I literally sat down on my couch, made some popcorn, and watched the whole f-ing thing. Granted, I was just hoping to get a glimpse of Lohan’s boobs (I’m sick, people), but watching this film may just be the most regretful two hours that I have spent in the last few years.

Li Lo (as I call her) plays two characters/personalities—the troubled teen Aubrey Fleming and the renegade bad girl Dakota Moss. I could get into the intricacies of the plot, but frankly I just don’t care and neither do you. I do remember that there’s something about a serial killer and mutilation in there somewhere. The point is all this double personality/two person mumbo jumbo gives the filmmakers the excuse to have Lohan moonlight as a stripper. Normally, I’d be all for nonsensical plot devices that somehow lead to nudity, but in this case the movie is so badly written, directed, shot, and paced that it makes you wonder if they were paying the filmmakers in heroin instead of actual money. To top it off, Lohan doesn’t actually strip, instead opting for the “walk-in-a-bikini-while-awkwardly-swaying-to-the-music” technique. She looks about as sexy as an epileptic burn victim.

Natalie Portman as Alice in Closer
Natalie Portman may be obscenely cute, but at the same time she does have the body of an anorexic 13 year-old boy. That’s usually not a good attribute when it comes to the exotic dancing profession. So, while in theory the 2004 film Closer—which feature’s Ms. Portman as a stripper—might seem like the greatest movie ever made, it is an actuality both disappointing and somewhat annoying, much like new episodes of Saturday Night Live. 

Just as Lohan did in I Know Who Killed Me, Portman chooses to follow the annoying methodology of “I’m-gonna-strip-but-not-get-naked.” Pardon my French, but that’s a load of crap. We get it, Natalie, you’re a serious actress who doesn’t want to be objectified on screen. Well, quite frankly, don’t take a role as a stripper! In fact, the whole movie is filled with tons of foul-mouthed people only talking about very dirty and disgusting topics. I imagine it’s what porn must be like for blind people. Well, Ms. Portman, they have a word for strippers who dance around in bikinis and keep their hands over their chest: fired.

Salma Hayek as Santanico Pandemonium from Dusk till Dawn
Salma Hayek’s strip scene in from Dusk til Dawn starts out all peachy. Ms. Hayek (who’s absolutely gorgeous) dances around in an awesome bikini with a snake wrapped around her. At that moment, it seems that things can’t really get much more perfect. But, just as you begin to…um…enjoy the show, all heck breaks loose and she turns into a hideous, blood sucking vampire. Basically, it’s what I envision sex with Angelina Jolie to be like. While Hayek has the perfect physique for stripping, the whole “I’m actually an undead demon” thing really sways the tide against her. Thus, she earns a spot on this list. I will say, however, I do wish that Salma Hayek would play with my snake. *nudges guy next to him with elbow* Gnome what I’m saying, boyz?!

Elizabeth Berkley as Nomi Malone in Showgirls
At this point, making fun of Showgirls is like picking on the fat kid who sits in the back of the school bus—it’s been done so many times that it actually feels a little pathetic. But, considering I lack a true moral compass, I thought I’d lay yet another storm of insults on this infamous 90’s camp classic.

Without a doubt, this movie is just crap. Saved by the Bell’s Elizabeth Berkley stars as Nomi Malone, a young and hot drifter trying to make it in the fast-paced and seedy Las Vegas scene. Sure, this film is full of nudity and awesomely awkward sex, but in the end it’s almost as if Showgirls isn’t so much a movie as it is an elaborate exercise in bad taste. Therefore, Ms. Berkley takes the top spot on this list. Now, if only they could have gotten Kelly Kapowski to star. Then, this movie would have been art.

Any writer knows the old adage “write what you know”. If it wasn’t such a sound piece of advice, it would be easily dismissed, but, like many clichés, it exists for a reason. And as much as it works for an individual storyteller, it works magic on a collective audience. With his recent film Adventureland, writer/director Greg Mottola (Superbad, The Daytrippers), gives audiences an accurate portrayal of those lost summers wandering between your adolescence and your years of establishment. Even more poignantly and heartfelt, Mottola really nails the directionless passion that occurs during those fleeting, amorphous times that ended up defining us more than we could ever guess. Everything was magnified and Shakespearean. That crush you let go of was the love of your life. That friend that betrayed you became your sworn enemy. Looking at it now, how could so much of life have gone on while sitting on your ass at a dead end job?

After family economics keep him from being able to spend a summer backpacking through Europe, recent college graduate James (Jesse Eisenberg) is forced to take a summer job. Ending up at the local run down theme park Adventureland, James soon meets the characters that will define his coming of age summer. There are the exuberant park managers Bobby and Paulette (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig), the philosophical game booth worker Joel (Martin Starr), the cool and experienced maintenance man Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds) and of course, the girl that defined that entire summer for James, Em (Kristen Stewart). Upon meeting, James’ inexperience with the opposite sex gives way to curiosity towards Em’s damaged damsel in emotional distress. Suddenly, a dead end summer job doesn’t seem so bad.

Audience members expecting a Superbad helping of laughs will be pretty disappointed in what Adventureland has to offer. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its share of funny scenes. Eisenberg does a good job of being a sympathetic lead who slips now and then into the Ben-Stiller-like, socially oblivious, nice guy that gets run through the ringer trying to get that first kiss. Hader and Wiig deliver what they’re known to deliver as the comic duo running the park and as possible Ghosts of Jobs Future for any employees that dare to stay on past summer. There are bits where the movie relates really funny, possibly biographical, moments about growing up in the mid-80s and working a summer job. But the heart of Adventureland lies in how Mottola and his cast carefully put together a spot on picture of that intense moment in someone’s life. Sadly, the movie spends so much time painting this picture in detail that it suffers nearly fatal pacing issues. As much as I think Adventureland nails the depiction of one of the hardest-yo-define times in someone’s life, it doesn’t give us enough of a compelling story or direction to lead us all the way to the end instead of the exit.

The centerpiece to the drama in Adventureland is Kristen Stewart’s Em. Remember those girls you went after, who may have let you get a kiss or two, who made you work so hard to figure them out in the hopes that maybe you could make them your girlfriend while deep down inside you knew that it was never going to happen? I have a past littered with girls like that. I think most guys hanging out on this site do too and Jesse Eisenberg’s James definitely does. And with Em, James gets closer than any of us did. But still, the problems that she battles behind closed doors keep her just outside of his comfortable reach. The married Mike Connell becomes a more experienced and imposing romantic rival that James has no idea he’s competing with. As she deals with her intensely emotional family issues, Em bounces back and forth, putting our poor hero James through the ringer in the process. They’re going steady, but he never really feels like she’s his.

Surely, we’ve all been there. There are a few women that I’m friends with on Facebook right now who I can hit up on charges of past emotional distress. Looking back at those moments in my life, the girl who worked next door to my first job, the brunette from summer camp, the countless “just friends”, they all seem like silly memories. But when those memories were actual people inciting emotions in me? It was high drama!

I recently went through bins of photographs from my summer camp years. I wrote those kids for months into the fall and winter (maybe even spring!) and they wrote me! I found that I couldn’t recall a single one of their names. The letters and photos ended up in a trash bin. I was briefly hit with sadness at having lost touch with the feelings that those frozen faces had drawn up in me, but without any real relationships to hold on to, keeping mementos around seemed pretty pointless.

With all the time that it takes to get us from Point A to Point B story-wise, Adventureland does do an incredible job of depicting and injecting me without those same strong emotions. As much as I found James to be too much of a gullible doormat to even be likeable at times, I saw so much of myself in the situations he put himself in. As hard as I wanted to deck Mike Connell for knowingly sleeping with “my girl” behind my back, I knew ultimately that he was a nice guy making the wrong decisions out of his own broken self esteem. And as much as I wanted to turn my back on Em and protect myself from her mountain of emotional baggage, I found myself coming right back, more out of a sense of romantic nobility than libido. Em was the real lesson learned that summer. She was the real job that was worth undertaking, and quitting on that erases every lesson learned to that point.

Heavy, right? Not like Superbad, but at times, maybe like the Daytrippers (although it’s been a decade since I saw it at SXSW as a college student). Going in, don’t expect Superbad. Expect almost a group of character studies. Expect to pity, hate and finally relate to almost all of the characters. And yes, expect to have a few laughs here and there.  I think that the film is an accomplishment in some areas and a let down in others. But as much as I’m left with a mixed bag, at least it has some really interesting work going on in it with both the writing and young cast and I know that a simple rehash of Superbad wouldn’t have satisfied me nearly as much.  If you really want to see the film, prepare yourself for a similar experience as you drudge through some of your post-adolescent past while waiting for the laughs to come.  Focusing your enjoyment on the familiar depictions of one individual’s unique experiences over the slapstick humor is a good place to start enjoying this film. With Adventureland, Mottola wrote what he knew. It turns out in the end that we’ve all been there before, for both good and bad.

Bob Barker and his demented Japanese lover have brought you The Answer.  Wrapped up in the compact package that is your Nintendo DS, Peggle Dual Shot is the gift that keeps on giving whenever your tiny mind asks the question, “How can I efficiently murder the rest of this afternoon?”

Know not you this game, Peggle?  It’s simple, really.  Take the best parts of puzzle games, pachinko (or let’s say The Price is Right‘s ‘Plinko’), and wide-eyed cartoon animals, and blend until frothy.  Simple.  Essentially, your job is tto ake your limited number of balls, and fire them around a puzzle board in an attempt to knock out all of the orange-colored pegs.  Simple, minus the fact that there are other colored pegs that laugh at you and maniacally stand in the way of your vailant little ball’s virtuous flight path.  On top of that, you’ve got other sorts of pegs that multiply your score or give your ball magical powers, courtesy of your kooky-eyed animal ‘teachers.’

If any of this sounds confusing, it’s really not.  Trust us.  The beauty of Peggle is its complete simplicity.  Peggle is nearer to a pure videogame than any in recent memory.  At least, the purest that hits that sweet spot of simplicity-meets-bells-and-whistles.  And this is where Peggle Dual Shot comes in.  Being the first truly portable version of the game, it’s also the most complete.  Peggle Dual Shot gives you literally every piece of Peggle goodness released thus far.  Included in the game are the full versions of the PC’s Peggle and its sequel Peggle Nights.  That’s over fifty levels of bouncing per game; not to mention the numerous extra features: there’s a challenge mode, there are extra levels designed by the DS developer, and a two-player mode (sadly not playable via system link).  So, yeah, that’s a lot of bounce for your buck.  Publisher PopCap has set out to give you a hefty serving of gaming goodness here, and Dual Shot delivers.

The only real downside of this new version is, understandably, what also makes it great: it’s portable.  The game has begged to be made available to portable systems, as it’s perfectly suited to quick sessions of on-the-go gaming.  What suffers a bit, then, is the original PC version’s bright and clean sugar-rush visuals, which were actually presented quite attractively when all was said and done.  The DS’s smaller size puts a bit of a damper on that, but not in a way that truly distracts.

All in all, Peggle Dual Shot is Peggle, only portable.  The best ‘pick-up-and-play’ game of the past decade is in your pocket, and there’s hours and hours of it.  What’s not to like?  You’d be a fool not to give it a shot!

You do understand that this is the way it had to end. After over twenty years of rumor, false starts and struggle to get the iconic Watchmen up on screen, this is the way that it had to end: with a Hollywood adaptation that follows the original source tightly but never completely allows itself to be brought down by the original comic book’s elitist-creating density.

I’ll say it right now so that you can get right to the slings and arrows: Zack Snyder’s Watchmen isn’t just an unabashed love letter to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s much lauded limited series… it’s an improvement. It’s okay. I know that some of you were at least thinking it, and I’ll go ahead and put it in print: the movie that I saw on screen Friday night is better than the original trade paperback.

Let’s face facts. Watchmen is great. It deserves all of the praise it receives. But as far as popular storytelling goes, fans of Watchmen are in a pretty exclusive club. In addition to the already massive challenge of being a FUNNY BOOK, Watchmen has the audacity of being extremely layered and dense! When I first picked it up in middle school, I had no idea what the hell the big deal was! As my comic book knowledge grew, I reread Watchmen and grew to love it. I then started recommending it to others! And that’s when I discovered Watchmen’s biggest weakness: for every person that I recommended the trade paperback to that LOVED it, there were TWO people who tried reading it and found that it wasn’t for them!

Wait a minute. How could the most beloved comic series of all time stop so many people in their tracks or keep them from plowing through to the end? Why do I have to read it over and over again to build my love for the book further? It’s because in the last two decades, the appreciation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen has become the widely accepted magic password into an exclusive club of comic book and literary elitists who actually DO believe each other’s own hype. Yes, the book is great, but is it the say all and end all masterpiece for the entire comic book medium?

Using that framework really limits the narrative art form to the strict confines of the superhero commentary on society. If you’re ready to treat things like that, why don’t you use Watchmen as the medium’s epitaph and clearly state that comic books will never be anything MORE than superhero stories as social commentary when you and I know that they are so much more? For the past two decades, I’d argue that the careful placement of Watchmen at the top of all things superhero has done just as much to HURT the readership of comics as it has done to exemplify everything it can aspire to be (with the promise of more). Sooner or later, we’ve got to move beyond Watchmen.

What do we tell the people who heard about Watchmen being so great, who then picked it up, didn’t get it and thought lesser of the comic book medium because of it? Comic book elitists in their postered-up windowed club houses might LIKE that their prime choice of entertainment has become a bit more exclusive. But for Geekscapists like you and myself, who enjoy sharing the stories that we love with as many people as possible, giving them a book that had as big a chance of losing them as turning them further onto comics just will not do.

Thank god that Zack Snyder came along and made a version of Watchmen for people to enjoy. This version of Watchmen is the way that the long and winding road to the big screen had to end: with a focus on the story’s characters playing first and foremost against the backdrop of societal Armageddon. The movie is told so clearly that some audience members no doubt found it too slow. Only Jeffrey Lyons seems to have found the plot to be too complicated (as he warned audiences in his televised review).

“Hey, Jeffrey Lyons! You’re a fucktard! There’s something on your face!”

From the first frame of this film until the very last, I was completely in love with everything that I experienced. Yes, the makeup on Nixon and the older Silk Specter is noticeable… but listen to the things that they are saying and putting into motion! Yes, Malin Akerman’s first bits of dialogue land a bit flat and expositional after all of the textured work we’d seen in the film so far… but there’s a six story BLUE GUY STANDING RIGHT THERE (and her acting and characterization are absolutely spot on the rest of the way)! Yes, the music is a presence in the film, but I challenge any and all haters to try and conjure up any alternatives that would have handled these complicated moments so well (and Flight of the Valkyries plays a roll in Hollis Mason’s “Under The Hood” from the original book so seeing it here was a nice touch). Is the sex scene awkward? It’s SUPPOSED to be awkward! It’s two completely inadequate individuals finding solace in each other after years of loneliness! Who CAN’T relate to that? Did you want something out of The Red Shoe Diaries to get you hot? In addition, even with a similar screen time, Watchmen doesn’t have the 4th Act that The Dark Knight does where you’re watching the citizens of Gotham decide whether or not to blow each other up in a game of Battleship while the Joker and Batman trade punches that have zero influence on the resolution of the scene blocks away from the tension.

This is the Watchmen that I experienced as a kid and that I would not be afraid to recommend to people. I actually stopped recommending the comic book version about ten years ago. Every humanizing character flaw and monstrous act present in the book is present here but elaborated on clearly. We don’t just HINT that The Comedian shot JFK… we see it. Every act of physical violence is up close and personal and does as much to define the instigator as it does the victim. The through line of the murder mystery from the comic series is now truncated to focus exclusively on the central characters’ involvement without turning their struggles into high concept action set pieces. We don’t spend the time following the criminal psychologist home in the movie like we do in the book. Everything that we need to know in order to care about these characters is given to us in an economic and compelling way. This is indeed the way that the decades old Church of Watchmen Snobbery had to end. It had to be truncated and popularized.

And the ending to the movie is a complete improvement. Ozymandias’ final act isn’t just horrific… it completely destroys Dr. Manhattan and ties into the actions of every character involved in the plot. The Giant Squid from the alternate dimension that landed only on New York is fine for the four colored version, but having the destruction of major cities around the globe blamed completely on your friend in order to get him out of the way? This makes interpersonal actions at the end of the film are almost as horrific as the mass murdering of millions. Tying everything into the central characters’ stories is a complete streamlining and improvement on something that in the comic version always felt a bit too left field at the end of a story that paid so much attention to narrative detail.

This is a grand stage that Snyder is working on and the balancing act between character and action set pieces that he layers carefully throughout the movie builds to what I think is one of the most satisfying climaxes I’ve seen in any movie, superhero or otherwise. When Jon explodes Rorschach… that’s it. There is no going back. Dr. Manhattan is not going to try and fix what Ozymandias has put forward. He is not going to work with Dan or console Laurie about the realization that The Comedian is her father. More so than the destruction of cities around the planet or the final fight scene in Ozymandias’ chamber, that act is the ultimate climax of the character arcs woven throughout the film. Rorschach has done all he can by sending his journal to the news publication. He is now the embodiment of a discreditable loose end. He HAS to make Jon kill him for him to win. He HAS to remove Jon and himself from the equation. And Jon (who can see the future, don’t forget) knows this. If Rorschach lives, Ozymandias still has a chance at winning. He has to force Jon to remove him from the board. The shot that Snyder added, that is NOT in the comic book, of Rorschach’s exploded body splayed out on the snow like a final ink-blot is a complete master stroke and the signature on Rorschach’s final crime solved. Remember the opening piece where the police officer finds the Rorschach test as a calling card for the masked vigilante? This shot is that final calling card. Rorschach has struck again for the last time. Now the movie can wrap up and not even Ozymandias will try and stop it.

This shit literally WAS the bomb.

You know what? I don’t know what to say to people who don’t like this film. I can only imagine that it’s similar to what people found when they couldn’t access the comic series. I have to imagine that not everyone is going to love this movie as completely as I did. And it’s unfair of me to tell them to put in the repeat viewings necessary to “appreciate” the movie in the same way many of us gave the trade paperback repeat readings.  Stories should always work well from the first telling and become great in the revisiting.

If anything, I can take comfort in the fact that Zack Snyder and company created a film that can be as widely debated as the original source material. I know that I haven’t even come close to scratching the surface of this film and I can’t wait to experience repeat viewings (and the addition of the supplementary materials Under the Hood and The Black Freighter!). I can’t wait to talk about it further with all of you. So knowing that this movie now exists in this final form, after all of the work that went into trying to get it made over the past twenty years, and having it land so closely to the original product, I tell you again: this is exactly the way that its journey had to end, with the spark that will leave us debating it for another twenty years.

Much like your monthly herpes flare-ups, I’m back bi-otches! This week I return with yet another indisputable top five. What better way to celebrate my glorious resurrection than with a list that reveals the top five greatest sequels? I mean, seriously, honest to blog…

*As a side note, you will notice that movies from trilogies and series’ (i.e. any franchise with more than two movies) are immediately disqualified from this list. That means no Star Wars, no Godfather, no Lord of the Rings, no Die Hard, etc. Got a problem with that? You can take it up with my fists. They’re made of steel and justice.

Adams Family Values
For some reason, everyone and their mother hates this movie. I have no idea why. It’s actually a pretty awesome sequel that manages to keep all the humor and wit of the first (and yes, I’m aware that sounds like a lame quote found on the back of the VHS box). Does this movie do anything new? Absolutely not. But, Will Smith has been playing the same part for the past 10 years and nobody seems to pick on him, so why mess with the Adams Family? Not to mention, this flick has an awesome cast: Raul “M. Bison” Julia, Christopher “Great Scott” Lloyd, Anjelica Huston, Carol Kane, and Joan “Seriously, I’m not my brother” Cusack just to list a few. It’s like a collection of people that you recognize  but don’t really know their names–sort of like when you go to the local Wal-Mart over Christmas break and see people you went to high school with. Final plus of this movie? Remembering what Christina Ricci looked like when she was still all cute and innocent and not chained to Samuel L. Jackson’s radiator. 
*cue police sirens in the background*

Kill Bill Volume 2
Yeah, yeah…Quentin Tarrantino may be a verbose, hyper-active coke addict with poor spelling skills and an obsessive foot fetish, but the dude makes cool looking movies. Kill Bill Volume 2 is certainly no different. Whereas the first Kill Bill is a little bit too in love with its style, volume “deux” is toned down somewhat. That means less Japanese blood spurting/limb impalement and more storytelling with better dialogue. Plus, the whole Pai Mei training sequence is pretty cool and who doesn’t enjoy a good high speed eye removal every now and then (complete with a finishing kill by a Black Mamba in a desert mobile home)? Hmm…wait a minute…Black Mamba in a desert mobile home? Now if that’s not a name for a bad indie rock band from Connecticut, I don’t know what is. Playing at your local skating rink this Friday night…

Before Sunset
The sequel to the acclaimed indie darling Before Sunrise, Before Sunset is what all romantic comedies should be minus all the annoying clichés (i.e. no fat, quirky best friend, no sliding down walls while crying, no makeover montages, no running through airports). Directed by Richard Linklater, the sequel stars the same two leads from the first movie–Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy–as the two star-crossed would be lovers Jesse and Celine. Events pickup as the duo meets nine years after their first magical encounter and we watch as they meander through Paris, talking profoundly about life and love. In other words, it’s the type of conversation that is really interesting in movies, but is annoying as hell in real life. Regardless, the film is pretty solid in an artsy fartsy kind of way. My only complaint is that Linklater couldn’t somehow work the main kid from Dazed and Confused in there somewhere. That dude could grab the bridge of his nose and put his hair behind his ears like no other…

Toy Story 2*
I remember heading in to Toy Story 2 as the ultimate skeptic. How could Pixar trump what is arguably the greatest animated film of all time? “Blasphemy!” I cried. But, once I actually watched this sucker I realized that Pixar can pretty much do no wrong. Seriously, they could market crack to kids and I would still give them a hearty pat on the back and an encouraging thumbs up. Toy Story 2 builds on the great characters of the first and adds even deeper themes concerning age, the need to be loved, and the fleeting nature of childhood. It’s one of the few sequels that manages to both capture the magic of the first and still pave new ground. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure it’s the last socially acceptable thing Tim Allen has been a part of. Movies like this make you wonder how Pixar can continually kick so much ass. My guess is that it either has something to do with robots or lots of hallucinogenic drugs. John Lasseter turns to story team: “Dudes, I swear the cowboy doll was talking to me…”

*This footnote goes out to the smart alec with the glasses in the third row. Yes, buddy, I know that Toy Story 3 is currently in development and is tentatively set to be released in 2010. But, since the movie hasn’t hit theaters yet, the Toy Story “franchise” is still technically eligible to make this esteemed list.  Got that, buddy? Don’t you have some Star Trek fan fiction to write? Now, stop bothering me…ass

Wayne’s World II
Many, many years ago there was a time when Mike Myers was still funny and Dana Carvey didn’t make crappy movies while dressed as a turtle. Wayne’s World II came from this glorious period of history. The Wayne’s World movies are true pieces of art filled with so many memorable quotes that I practically have the scripts memorized. The sequel was kind enough to give us the character of Dell Preston, an insane roadie who delivers one of the greatest monologues in all of cinematic history. The Wayne’s World series represents something very special. You see, kids, there was a time when comedies could be both smart and hilarious. A time when satire was subtle and didn’t involve Carmen Electra running in slow motion in a bathing suit. Back in my day, we would watch these movies in theaters without air-conditioning while drinking flat coke, walking uphill both ways to get there…in two feet of snow…in the middle of July. Huh? What? Where was I? For the last time, you damn kids get off my lawn!

Until next time…

Ivan Kander is the handsome and debonair cohost of his very own video podcast. Check it out at www.lucky9studios.com/worstmovieever. He watches Speed 2: Cruise Control at least once a week.

DEAD SNOW
Review from Sundance 2009
By Georg Kallert

Country: Norway / Subtitles
Director: Tommy Wirkola
Screenwriters: Tommy Wirkola, Stig Frode Henriksen
Producers: Terje Strømstad, Tomas Evjen
Cast: Vegard Hoel, Stig Frode Henriksen, Charlotte Frogner, Jenny Skavlan, Jeppe Beck Laursen, Lasse Valdal

Nazi Zombies – lots of them that can run very fast in the snow.  From the opening shots, “Dead Snow” is a wild ride through beautiful snowy landscapes and incredible gore, we are talking intestines & chainsaws.  The movie should really be called ‘red snow.’ 

A snowy cabin in the mountains of Norway with a separate outhouse and tool shed is the ideal canvas for this massive home-invasion story. A spooky hiker and WWII tale start the rollercoaster.  The likable cast gives a good performance as eight medical students who get plenty of hands-on anatomy lessons while on a ski vacation. In the Q&A the director mentioned 450 liters of fake blood were used during filming.  Due to the cold weather on set, some shots even needed digital blood enhancement, as the fake blood had frozen.

This fun mix of scares, laughs, and blood with homages to the films of John Carpenter and Sam Raimi is good entertainment. 

Best Weapon: Snowmobile
Best Kill Spot: Outhouse
Best Attack: Running charge with chainsaw  

THE CLONE RETURNS HOME
Review from Sundance 2009
By Anna A.

Country: Japan / Subtitles
Director: Kanji Nakajima
Screenwriter: Kanji Nakajima
Producers: Kiyoshi Inoue, Rie Yamamoto, Yoshiaki Tago
Cast: Mitsuhiro Oikawa, Eri Ishida, Hiromi Nagasaku

The Clone Returns Home – is a story of an astronaut who agrees to be a part of a cloning program.  Unlike most Sci-Fi fare, the movie is mostly set on earth, rather than in outer space.  Giving away any more of the plot would take away from the beautiful unraveling of the film’s main themes of ethical responsibility and spirituality.  The storytelling and cinematographic artistry of the film, make it akin to a poem.  It is usually unfair to categorize a culture, but in this case it helps explain the film to say The Clone Returns Home is very Japanese.  The dialogue is minimalist and to the point, the film is introspective, both on the part of the characters, and in its ultimate goal of forcing the audience to become introspective.  The lines between the metaphors and reality are blurred, and blurred on purpose.  During the Q&A, the director, Kanji Nakajima, specifically avoided answering direct questions on the exact meaning of a particular scene or prop, and rightfully so.  A large part of the beauty of the film was the discovery of an individual meaning for each member of the audience.  Nakajima, pays homage to Tarkovsky (original Solaris), though through different meaning and subject matter. 

The Clone Returns Home takes into account certain beliefs common in several religions as well as Japanese culture in general.  At times it is so slow moving that it crawls to halt, yet it is in those times that you hear yourself think the loudest about your views on the matter.  Often the visuals are so powerful that you don’t even realize that there is no audio, just silence, for entire scenes.  Eri Ishida, the astronaut’s mother, gives a lovely performance in her short but meaningful part.  Those who enjoy a slow progression and introspective characters along with a futuristic and ultimately existential subject matter will adore this film.  Those seeking fast-paced action and exact purpose in the ultimate meaning of the film, will literally fall asleep.

SPREAD
Review from Sundance 2009
By Anna A.

Director: David Mackenzie
Screenwriter: Jason Dean Hall
Producers: Ashton Kutcher, Jason Goldberg, Peter Morgan
Cast: Ashton Kutcher, Anne Heche, Margarita Levieva, Rachel Blanchard, Sebastian Stan, Sonia Rockwell

In Spread, Ashton Kutcher plays Nikki, a “kept man”, who lives off older women, whom he easily seduces, since he has his game down to a science.  As a result, he has no apartment, car, or bank account for that matter.  The film develops from these initial circumstances and to say more, would be giving away the few enjoyable plot twists.  Spread, which showcases Nikki’s numerous love affairs with women, is essentially Ashton Kutcher’s love affair with himself.  Kutcher tries hard to showcase his acting talent, which was certainly better showcased in films like Butterfly Effect… during the Q&A Ashton alluded to being attracted to the part because he saw a challenge – the truth is we’ve seen this character in Ashton’s repertoire before: entitlement, arrogance, egotism, interlaced with small doses of humor.  At the very end Ashton’s character does show a small dose of being humble, but inaptly missing is the turn in the character development.  Anne Heche, who plays one of Nikki’s older sugar mamas, has a standout performance.  Notably, the preponderance of T&A in the first 50 minutes, has caused some to compare a few of the sex scenes to soft-porn on ‘Skin-a-Max’…  And it is likely that Heche could have been achieved the same performance with less full frontals of her awesome body.  For some, it is that first 50 minutes, that will make the film worthwhile, and believe me, T&A in the case of Spread is taken seriously: you even see Ashton’s derrière.  The last character worth mentioning is Los Angeles itself.  According to the film 30,000 good looking and ambitious youths arrive in the city every month looking for a fast, pretty, easy life.  In essence, the story being told could not have occurred anywhere else, because the city itself is almost like a drug that pushes people to covet a glamorous lifestyle. The film plays homage to Shampoo and American Gigolo, but may not have such iconic status in 20 years.  In the end, the movie is just OK, and those who liked it and those who didn’t care for it, completely agree on the film’s shortcomings.

RUDO Y CURSI
Review from Sundance 2009
By Anna A.

Director: Carlos Cuarón
Screenwriter: Carlos Cuarón
Producers: Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, Frida Torresblanco, Tita Lomabardo
Cast: Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, Guillermo Fracella

Rudo y Crusi – was created by the Dream Team of Mexican cinema and it shows.  It is one of the best films we have seen at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.  It tells a story of two brothers, Rudo (Diego Luna) and Cursi (Gabriel Garcia Bernal), from a lower middle class family who by a fluke chance are given an opportunity to improve their lives and the lives of their families through soccer.  From then on there is competition, jealousy, and of course the hope for success and an even better life.  But unlike other soccer movies, it is not really a story of the game of soccer, but rather a story of the constant presence of our passions and our demons throughout all stages of our lives.  Soccer parallels life and life parallels soccer.  In fact, the story is not even told through the action on the soccer field, but rather by showing the reactions to the plays by the people in the bleachers.  It is a film that tries and succeeds at showcasing the fact that we find ourselves most often in failure and loose ourselves in success.  What makes this largely tragic story so interesting to watch, is the ease with which it is told, the wonderful acting, and the constant presence of laughter, which makes it feel like a comedy.  Having Mexico City as the backdrop for much of the story is fitting to the main themes of the film.  In the Q&A, Carlos Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro explained that the elements of the brother’s fictional climb to success are the real-life opportunities and obstacles the country of Mexico faces as a whole. 

The acting by both Gabriel Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna is phenomenal and their long-time friendship off camera contributes a great deal to their relationship as brothers on screen. Guillermo Fracella’s voice as the narrator and his performance as the brothers’ agent is amazing – Ari Gold watch out.  Notably, the film has a strong beginning, middle and end, and doesn’t become banal even through the last kick.

I wanted to take this chance to quickly reflect on the last two years of Geekscape and to say thank you for being with us, however long your stay has been. Am I the only one hanging out on the Geekscape site this morning, picking through old threads and reading old articles? I woke up this Christmas morning and couldn’t think of anywhere else I needed to be.

By 6am, Laura was at work. My brother is in New Mexico visiting my mom and my dad and step-mom are overseas. I’m spending a large part of January shooting so decided a few months ago to stay in Los Angeles and collect myself during the holiday break. This morning, after dropping Vijay off at the airport, I found myself in a McDonald’s treating myself to a guilty breakfast when I realized that for the first time in my life I had Christmas Day all to myself.  But because of you all, I was far from alone.

Over the last two years, Geekscape has grown into a large family and I couldn’t be prouder of the direction it’s headed. A year ago, we didn’t have a website (did we even have forums or were we “down” again?). Two years ago, we barely had our first show. And today we have a bustling little community, with new members joining up every day and taking part in the show, the site and the forums. I have a direction for where I want us to be in year from now but you guys usually find a way to surprise me so I’ll just reserve myself to steering the boat and see where you guys take things.

After the demise of Geekdrome, I made the decision to not pitch a new show to Revision 3. David and Jay were nice enough about seeing what other ideas I had but in all honesty, I didn’t move out to Los Angeles to do podcasting. My interest was (and is) in narrative storytelling. Even when I was on college radio, Kevin McCaffrey and I spent more time making up characters and telling stories than we did spinning CDs and talking like human beings. It’s always been the goal. But what I found in the community that had been built around Geekdrome was a kind of safe haven for people like myself, where no matter how much rejection I put up with in that fledgling “storyteller career” (I was delivering packages in a uniform for a lot of Geekdrome’s run), I had a place where I could go to interact with people of a shared passion. The last thing I wanted was for it to end.

So it won’t. During our time at Revision 3 (even though everyone was very nice and cool), I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was standing in the corner at someone else’s party where I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t have anything else to talk about. It was very much a place for tech-minded geeks. I grew up reading Fangoria, X-Men and Nintendo Power. That’s the kind of geek that I’ve always been. So the first chance I got to start my own party, I took it.

Thank you for coming to the party and hanging out with me. It really is the best gift I could have received during these past Christmases. Yeah, sometimes we got shut down over the course of the last two years. That happens to parties. But with the support that everyone has shown, we’ve kept the party going and growing. We’ve only missed one week of shows (the Comic Con 2-week shows are responsible for the other discrepancy in the 52 episodes a year numbering) and there’s new content on the front page of the site every single day. There are a few things I wanted to get done in the last year that need to wait till next year and a few goals that were accomplished that were pleasant surprises completely. Together, we’ve done some pretty cool things and are prepared to do a few more in the next year.

In counting my thanks, I have to give some up to a few individuals. Thanks to the Christmas Elf Brian Gilmore for continuously annoying me to do better and for putting together a fantastic experience on the Geekscape site (and in the weekly show). Thanks to Martin Scherer for continuing to trouble shoot the site and helping me in any way possible to keep this boat afloat. It’s sailing really well now, thanks to him. Thanks to my producer Georg Kallert, for supporting me in Geekscape when I’m not working for him on set. It looks like 2009 is the year that we do a lot of both. Thanks to Benjamin Dunn for helping me book some of the best guests of the last year (including Chris and Brock and Felicia Day) and doing a solid job on our “on location” segments. Thanks to Vijay for being “cool” with shooting the show “whenever”. Thanks to our website guru Jarrett for putting together a functional site and popping it up there for you all back in April. Thanks to our rogues gallery of writers for putting up weekly content that really is a pleasure to read: Jacob 108 Lopez, Connor Che, Eric Diaz, Ivan Kander, Faye Hoerauf, William Bibbiani, Nick Gregorio, Noel Nocciolo, Brandon Bales, our “house band” of Anthony Tedesco and Clark Crozer and everyone else who contributed this past year.

All of you have shaped this place up to be defined more by you than me and that has been the goal from the beginning. I’m just one man with a bevy of limitations. You are a community with a growing voice and no limits to how far you can take things. Already, 2009 looks to be much bigger and better by leaps and bounds. As I told Eric Diaz and Hong at the recent Geekscape party, I just happen to be the guy who does the podcast and pushes some buttons. I’m definitely not Geekscape.

So thanks to you for being Geekscape. On a day like today, it’s meant and done more for me than anything that could have fit under even the biggest tree this year.

It’s that time of year boys and girls!!!

Witness: The taping of Geekscapes landmarked 100th EPISODE!
Experience: The mindblowing effects of Mana Energy drinks at 4am while watching the worst movies imaginable!
Participate: In Rock Band inspired insanity!
Feel: Gilmore’s hand slowly creeping down your lower back!

Come join us for the Geekscape Holiday Party!!!

Info below!

Where:

If the internet has taught me anything, it’s that everyone is a critic. Well that and the fact that midgets do porn…with clowns. Regardless, when it comes to the crazy world of the interweb, people love to ruthlessly bash movies through the anonymity of their keyboards (guilty as charged). To turn things around a bit, the following list is for those movies that have been unfairly picked upon—the unsung heroes that have taken a heinous critical and public beating. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the day when the punishment stops. It’s the time when the movies fight back—when they prove that they will not go quietly into the night. This is their Independence Day!

Josie and the Pussy Cats
Okay…maybe this movie isn’t as much “unfairly bashed” as it is just plain underrated. Unfortunately, Josie and the Pussy Cats got lumped in with Scooby-Doo, the other Hanna-Barbera cartoon adaptation that hit theaters around the same time. However, whereas Scooby-Doo and its sequel are cinematic abominations that might be signs of the apocalypse, Josie and the Pussy Cats is actually a funny satire of pop-culture and the music industry. Seriously, I genuinely think this movie is hilarious. I swear that isn’t just my unhealthy, and altogether creepy, crush on Rachel Leigh Cook doing the talking.

I think the reason that this movie failed is that it’s blatantly making fun of consumer culture and the ignorance of young consumers. Last time I checked, it’s probably not a good idea to blatantly insult your target demographic. That’s like me trying to pick up women with a bottle of chloroform in one hand and a dirty rag in the other. Women just love it when you play rough…

Elizabethtown
Alright. I admit it—this movie isn’t great and it certainly doesn’t hold up to other Cameron Crowe classics like “Say Anything” or “Almost Famous”, but Elizabethtown isn’t nearly as bad as many people would have you believe. Granted, I understand the criticisms—it’s too long, it gets a little sappy, Orlando Bloom isn’t a great leading man, etc. Yet, at the end of the day, I feel as if this movie got an unfair critical tongue-lashing when it came out a couple years back (maybe Cameron Crowe spit in their Venti coffees or something). There’s a lot of good stuff in here—the joy of new love, coming to terms with the death of a relative, learning to cope in the shadow failure. Any movie that’s attempting to say something about all that stuff gets some points in my book. Amazingly, I don’t even hate Kirsten Dunst in this (and I’m of the opinion that she’s a fucking hobgoblin). So, yeah…Elizabethown. Give it another shot. If you still hate it, well….Aliens vs. Predator is probably on Spike TV right about now. That may be more your speed, champ.

The Rainmaker
Ever since The Godfather: Part III, Francis Ford Coppola seems destined to direct either artistic schlock that nobody sees (hello, Youth without Youth) or movies so bad that they’re borderline offensive (why, nice to see you too, Jack). However, in 1997 he made The Rainmaker—the story of an idealistic young lawyer who suddenly finds himself head to head with a corrupt insurance company— and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s actually pretty good. This movie took a bashing from critics and a collective apathetic shoulder shrug from the general population. I say don’t listen to those lemmings. Is The Rainmaker formulaic? Hell yes. Is it super action-packed? No. Is it entertaining? You’re goddamn right it is. The performances from Matt Damon and Danny DeVito are solid. The camerawork is simple, yet effective. I mean, so what if Jon Voight over-acts the entire time? I mean, let’s face it, his career at this point is like watching a retarded person eat oatmeal—funny, but for all the wrong reasons.

Jersey Girl
I genuinely feel bad for Kevin Smith. The dude’s made a name for himself making raunchy, foul-mouthed comedies. So, whenever he tries to stray from that particular niche, people get all pissy and say he’s gone soft. Welcome to the rock-in-a-hard-place situation I like to call Jersey Girl—Smith’s failed 2004 attempt to crossover to the mainstream. This movie was hated by critics, vilified by the hardcore geek fan base, and ignored by the public. Frankly, that’s just not fair. At its core, Jersey Girl is actually pretty damned good. Sure, the story meanders into sappiness at times, but all of Kevin Smith’s movies do that—it’s just that this time we don’t get as many dick jokes to balance it out.

It’s kind of sad that Jersey Girl was so universally reviled—especially when Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg are still out there making profitable movies. To make matters worse for Jersey Girl, at the time it was released Smith had to contend with the whole “Bennifer” fiasco. I’m pretty sure that a person has a greater chance of surviving a shot in the head than making it through that kind of P.R. fiasco unscathed. Poor Ben Affleck…

Hook
Much like I’m never going to quite understand the incomprehensible popularity of Dane Cook, I just don’t get the critical reception of Steven Spielberg’s Hook. When this movie came out, critics hated it. I mean, FUCKING hated it. It was maligned as being childish and stupid, goofy and badly written…Spielberg’s worst! Well, those fancy-schmancy critics can shove it. Let me tell you, as a kid this movie had it all—awesome visuals, great score, intense swashbuckling and a fat black kid rolling down ramps like a cannonball.

I mean, sure, there’s a random Korean dude with a red Mohawk, but can’t we cut Spielberg some slack? He set out to make an entertaining, family-friendly adventure movie and that’s exactly what we got. What kid out there hasn’t wanted to travel to Neverland and eat mountains of multi-colored gobs of decorative frosting? I just don’t get why this movie is so reviled. So, to all those naysayers out there, I only have one thing to say: BANGARANG PETER!

There you have it—the top five movies that have been unfairly bashed. Alright everybody, time for a group hug. Let the healing begin!

Ivan Kander is the handsome and debonair cohost of his very own video podcast. Check it out at www.lucky9studios.com/worstmovieever. He himself is also very underrated…in bed.

Today I received a blurb from a little casting birdy that revealed the casting breakdown for Iron Man 2. This is the first casting breakdown that has been released for the film and it reveals a few things that lend themselves to strong theory.

It goes without saying that SPOILERS FOLLOW!

BEWARE! THE SPOILERS COULD BE HUGE!

I’M SERIOUS!

OKAY? STOP READING IF YOU DON’T WANT A HINT OF IRON MAN 2 BADGUYNESS!

But it’s obvious that you do… so here goes, copied from the original casting breakdown:

[MALE LEAD] 30s, Eastern European, brilliant, gritty…

[FEMALE LEAD] 20s, beautiful, speaks several languages fluently and is 
equally proficient in martial arts…

[BRUISER] Russian, 20s or 30s, at least 6’2″, able to perform own 
stunts, has the build of a MMA fighter…

Okay… does the role of BRUISER officially confirm the inclusion of The Crimson Dynamo?

It’s a safe bet that we will see this guy laying some MMA/robot suit smackdown on Tony. But what about the other two characters?

The recent Invincible Iron Man written by Matt Fraction had a pretty cool storyline involving suicide bombers with Obadiah Stane’s son Ezekiel Stane targeting Stark Enterprises for revenge. Obviously, this run could work really well as a sequel to the first Iron Man because Obadiah’s kid would definitely have reason for getting revenge on Stark (maybe you should have kept that identity secret after all, Tony) and in the Fraction series, Ezekiel IS aided by a female Asian tech tech specialist.

But Ezekiel Stane is NOT an Eastern European. He’s a bio-engineered freak, having performed many techno-upgrades to his own body until he is less man than machine. Are we going to see elements of this in the new Iron Man 2 villain? Maybe. It definitely doesn’t sound like The Mandarin to me.

The techno-suicide bombing storyline is in line with the terrorist/Mandarin subplot of the first film. Imagine an updated Mandarin, with the 10 rings being different terrorist factions. What other modern day enemy could an ex-arms manufacturer like Tony Stark ask for? It’s like Rocky in Rocky 2 having to put the gloves back on to fight all over again. So far, I definitely approve and am excited.

But those are only my initial geek thoughts. Now it’s your turn. What do you guys think? Did you love the original as much as I did?

When I was a junior in college I wrote a screenplay for a movie with Jean Claude Van Damme in it. It was shortly after his movie Universal Soldier 2: The Return had come out to not so much box office and critical success and all I could think to myself was “this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be”. As an admitted long time fan of Van Damme’s movies, the rapid slipping of one of my favorite action icon’s careers was something that I took personally. I knew that his movies were never award level fare… but as his career at the turn of the century started going the way of straight to video, I found myself a part of a rapidly shrinking group of Jean Claude loyalists. And I was going to do something about it.

The script was terrible. In my post Pulp Fiction, John Woo, Robert Rodriguez loving haze, I thought that there was only one way to really bring Van Damme back: make him kick more ass, harder, for longer. I had it all planned out. He would play the secondary character in the script to someone like, uh, who was hot then? Affleck? Bruce Willis? Yeah. And everything would be going well with the action and the bad guys and everything until BOOM. A-list lead actor gets killed. Hard. Like “that dude is dead and there is no way he is coming back and the bad guys are gonna win” dead. It was a pretty obvious shock. But the bad guys DON’T win. Because Van Damme’s character steps up, does something badass to save the President/Foreign Dignitary/Alien (?) and takes control of the movie. By the time the credits role, any audience that had a brain would be forced to stand up and cheer for their brand new recycled hero. Again, that script was probably one of the worst things ever written.

That can’t be said about JCVD, opening today in New York and making its way across the country in limited engagements. The fictional biopic stars Jean Claude Van Damme as himself and is one of the most interesting movies I’ve seen all year. Directed (and co-written) by French filmmaker Mebrouk El Mechri, JCVD follows a down on his luck (but not humorously so), Jean Claude Van Damme as he comes home to Brussels from Los Angeles to recoup from the wear and tear of being a 47 year old action star and possibly losing his daughter in an expensive custody battle. In order to pay his lawyers to continue the case, he borrows money from a friend. When he steps into a local post office to receive the wire he accidentally becomes a celebrity hostage in an in-progress hold up. For better or worse, this plot line seems like the set up for a pretty high concept action film. I can honestly tell you that it is not in any way.

JCVD is very much a foreign film. There’s no escaping it. If you are hoping for an American friendly narrative or structure, you’ll be fairly disappointed. And if you want high action, you might want to wait for Universal Soldier 3 (which Van Damme has confirmed participation in). This is something different. JCVD a film about a foreign dreamer who came to Hollywood as a young man to pursue his childhood dreams. What he found was a star driven Hollywood system that ended up seducing him and breaking him down over nearly twenty years. The Jean Claude Van Damme that we see in JCVD is a desperate survivor nearing the end of the road, with the only thing he can hold on to is the perception of those around him that he is more than just a regular man. This perception empowers him and becomes his biggest barrier.

The film is told in four parts and is partially out of sequence. We get to the hostage crisis very early and then return to the myriad of events leading up to it. The major players of the hostage stand off are introduced and then we experience the different perspectives through their eyes in various retellings. Again, I can’t stress how different this is to what you might be expecting. Is it bad? No, it’s actually rewarding. It’s refreshing. El Mechri is pretty talented as a storyteller. He presents the movie like a puzzle and asks the viewer to take a look at it from all sides. The one shot intro to the film starts you off with Van Damme as you’ve known him his whole career and then takes that person apart, asking you to look at him in a fresh way. Because of the way that he has repositioned this story and placed someone that we are very familiar with in the middle of it, we are forced to rework our perceptions of him.

Van Damme is great to watch here. He is funny. He is sad. He is very likeable. And he is honest. This is a very accurate depiction of the downward slide of a once respected action star. Where does he go from here? How does he even begin to get that respect back? How does he deal with his public perception as an ex-drug addict or bland actor? I won’t spoil the best parts of the film for you but he completely takes each of these perceptions on headfirst. JCVD is Jean Claude Van Damme putting everything out on the table in front of you and telling you “this is what happened. This is how things got this way. And now I’m stuck.” So how is he going to get out? How will he persevere? WILL he persevere? These are the themes running through the movie. Have you caught on to the fitting symbolism of the hostage crisis?

The film’s pacing does stretch in a few places. When you are accustomed to seeing this guy kicking ass and busting heads, it sometimes becomes difficult to watch him helpless with a gun to his head. But this is part of the stripping away that JCVD does so well. It takes familiar pieces and rearranges them for you to put back together. There are portions of the film where you will have to sit and watch patiently for things to fit into place. But the rewards are there if you wait and look for them, especially in a scene about 3/4s of the way through the film. I had read about the scene in earlier reports about the movie and I have to say that it didn’t disappoint. Try not to roll your eyes, but Van Damme’s monologue to the audience in this movie is one of my favorite performance scenes in a movie. It stuck with me for the rest of the day and is the turning point in the film where everything is laid out in front of you. He doesn’t pull any stops and you’ll be pretty surprised that the guy who delivered all of those flat one-liners while he was spin-kicking bad guys can deliver a performance on this level.

So it turns out that I don’t have to brush off my terrible script now. With this film, Jean Claude Van Damme has succeeded in reinventing himself, but he’s done it in an unexpected way. Again, I can’t stress how different this movie is to the Van Damme stuff that we are used to. If you go in wanting that kind of a film you are going to be extremely disappointed. This is a European film that will appeal to more of an art house audience. It might end up being too much of a strange dichotomy to appeal to much of anybody. But it’s also the most interesting and successful experiment that I have seen this year and it rewards you for your open-mindedness. It really turned me on my ear as a fan and I can’t think of a better reward for my years of loyal fandom than to see Jean Claude Van Damme reinvent himself in this way. I’m excited to see it again.

JCVD opens tonight in New York City. For a screening schedule and full list of locations, check out the film’s official website.

I think that we can all talk openly here about our mutual love of all things Bruce Campbell. I can still remember where I was when I first saw the box art for Evil Dead 2 and tried to conjure ways of convincing my parents to let me rent the film. Years later, it would be that same film that drove me to enroll in film school and that opened a door to a million other geek interests. It’s pretty clear that there would be no Geekscape without the Evil Dead films. And there would be no Evil Dead without Bruce Campbell.

Campbell has appeared in countless films since those early horror films and pubished two best selling books. Today, his latest directorial effort (in which he also stars as himself), My Name Is Bruce, hits theaters in its months-long tour across the United States. I’ll be seeing the film here in Los Angeles when it arrives in December, but earlier this week, Bruce was nice enough to take a few minutes of his time and answer some of our eargent questions. Enjoy.

So Bruce, why don’t you tell us about this movie you’ve got coming out: My Name Is Bruce? You’re directing this one too right?

Yes. I directed it, produced it. The whole thing. I’m a one stop shop. It’s a movie that was brought to me by, the concept was brought to me by Mike Richardson of Dark Horse Comics and his writer buddy Mark Verheiden and I’ve worked with both these guys through comics and stuff a little bit in the past and we never did a movie together. And Mike knew that I wanted to direct, you know, low budget movies, and so they pitched the idea and I jumped all over it.

What was it like to have Mark and Mike come to you and say “listen, we’re going to make a movie about you and your movie career” knowing that it pokes fun at the b-movie stuff that you talk about in your books?

I encouraged it. I eventually got my hands on the script and made it worse!  After Mark did his job on it, you know, as a filmmaker I had to do a production pass to adjust it to reality. Then I just did another pass as a “Bruce” pass of sort of making it more of how I would do it; how I would say stuff. You know all the stuff with making my stuff look bad, that’s a partnership between all of us. We’ve all teamed up to make my stuff look terrible.

And you’ve known Mike over at Dark Horse for a long time because of your work on Screaming Brain and those projects. What’s the relationship like.

He’s much taller than I am.

Yeah. I’ve seen him. He’s a pretty tall guy.

He’s a very tall man, yes. Mike is a lover of movies. He’s a fan of movies and it’s great to work with a guy who is your partner. He put the deal together.  He got the money. And to have a guy like that who can get money who you can have a rational conversation with is a real treat.  I may be hanging onto Mike’s pants for a little while.

Well, Guillermo Del Toro’s going to do the Hobbit. Maybe you should start asking him for Hellboy.

[laughs] I think Hellboy can be Hellboy. I’ll let them do Hellboy.

You don’t wanna direct it?

No, thank you. Those movies have too many special effects. You’re not really directing.  You’re sort of storyboarding.

We talked to Mike Mignola and he agreed: you for Lobster Johnson would be an okay choice. Are you familiar with any of the comics?

Not enough to comment on it.

Do you read any comics at all?

You know, when I was a kid I did and I didn’t read Spider-Man or any of those. I read Archie comics. I never got into the crazy weird comic world. I’ll leave that to Mike and Mark. I bring a dose of reality to these projecs.

We’ve got a couple fans who’ve asked a couple questions. One of them is that they enjoy your books and you’ve got two out, right? Is there anything on the horizon that isn’t a movie that you have coming up?

I have another idea for a book but it’s too much of a nebulous idea. It’s not really worth talking about but I am noodling about a new idea that eventually I will get around to.

We’ve got another fan asking about the possibility of Bubba Ho Tep 2 and the possibility of seeing you and Don Cascarrelli put that together.

Nope. It’s dead. It’s dead in the water. Only ‘cuz Don and I could not agree on what to do.  He had a certain take that I didn’t agree with and I had a certain take that he didn’t agree with. And we thought ‘let’s not fight it out. Let’s not jeopardize any kind of a friendship. Let’s just let it go.’ So that’s what we did.

Any chance of you guys working together on something that isn’t related to Bubba Ho Tep?

That’s more likely. I think Don’s a really good filmmaker and I wish him all the best. It’s entirely possible. Because I like him. I like him as a filmmaker too. So something new might be fun.

What about working with Mark again? Our audience is pretty familiar with him because of the Battlestar Gallactica stuff.

I’d work with Mark again in a second. We’ve got a couple more ideas that we want to get around to and Mark’s a pretty good go to guy so I think that’s pretty likely.

He’s making a name for himself in TV. Any chance because we haven’t seen the finale of Battlestar Gallactica that you might pop your head up in an episode as a cylon or something?

No. Not a chance. [laughs] Hey, look. It has nothing to do with the show. I’m just busy doing other stuff.

I think they’ve shot every episode as well, so if it hasn’t happened by now… it’s not gonna happen.

Yeah. And I’ve got my own TV show. So I’m fine.

How’s Burn Notice going?

Going well. We just got picked up for a third seasons.

Wow. Congratulations.

So I’ll be going back to Miami in March to do that.

Who would actually win in a fight, because  of the similarities of the shows: the characters from Burn Notice or The Equalizer? There’s a similarity there. It’s kind of the appeal of Burn Notice; it’s a lot like those earlier shows in character and structure but it’s really modernized and fun.

We would kick any of those guys’ asses. We’re spies, man! We’d kick anyone’s ass! We can do anything!

So when I first moved to Hollywood, I got a job working for [telefilm production company] Von Zernick Sertner. And I remember you were in a film for them called Tornado.

Yeah. Yeah. They made like twenty in a year at one point. And they don’t- I had script notes that I wanted to address and they were like “what? Why would you want to talk about the script?” They gave me a Tiffany pen. They were hoping to just shut me up with a Tiffany pen. They gave all the actors Tiffany pens. I’m like “dude, if you’d only taken that pen and written a script, then you’d have something.”

One of the things I did when I was working there was I had to mail out [broadcast announcement] postcards to everyone.

Oh, you were the one responsible for me getting all those damn postcards!

Well, for a period of a few months probably. But I remember writing a note to you on one of the postcards. [They both laugh] And the only other actor I did that to was Fred Savage. And the postcard got returned! So I thought I’d gotten away with it. And I remember being called into the office and they’re standing there with my postcard written to Fred Savage with the note. I don’t think he got as nice a note as you did. [Bruce laughs] I just remember thinking I was gonna get canned! That was one of the first Hollywood experiences was sending you that postcard from VZS.

Wonderfully obscure!

That’s really the Hollywood experience isn’t it? Sometimes you go between big projects and obscure projects. How do you balance that kind of work? Something high profile like the Spider-Man stuff that you’re a part of and Sam’s a part of and then stuff that’s maybe more of the fringe stuff where maybe you get a little more control and you get to have a lot more fun?

Well, that’s exactly it.  And that’s why I’ll never leave the low budget independent world. It’s too much fun and it’s too much independence. I don’t like a lot of shit. I don’t like having to reshoot stuff because some jackass executive doesn’t like something. I’m like “tough. Let’s let the audience decide. This is a world I enjoy. Whether I’ll succeed in this world, I don’t know. But I like flying under the radar. It’s just a better way to go in my opinion.

You get weirder fans though, don’t you?

Um, no. just more loyal. I’m using “loyal” rather than “weird.

Anything that’s the weirdest they’ve ever asked you to sign?

It’s a lot of boobies. You sign a lot of boobies.

They do feel a kinship with you. They do feel pretty close to you. Any moments you’ve ever been worried?

No… but occasionally you get a woman, a very goth-type woman, will come up to a signing and one time she came up and she gave me this book of poetry and she goes “here’s some poetry you’ll really like” thinking that you are this person. Or thinking that you make horror movies so you must LOVE horror movies. And the poetry was so offensive! I read one paragraph and I threw it out! It was like torture porn kind of stuff. I was like “man, I appreciate you thinking that I like this but no thanks!” You really get caught by the persona sometimes. That’s really what the premise of My Name is Bruce is. It’s messing with persona, because people have a persona of me. And I’ve got my own version of myself. So My Name is Bruce is a completely new one to confuse everybody!

It’s a working formula. We’ve got The Three Amigos and films like that but you’ve taken it and you really play up that unique persona that you’ve made over the past twenty to twenty five years. Is there a next project that you think might work to break some of that or might work in line with that?

You know. It’s funny. If you try and do something different or serious, they don’t always follow it. They go “why don’t you make something fun again?” And then you make something fun again and they go “you know, you should do something that people will take more seriously.” You can’t really win. That’s why when our movies are done we don’t show previews. We don’t do focus groups. We just make the movie and just put it out. And I think it’s the best way to go. Filmmakers need to just make movies and get ‘em out. And if people like ‘em, great. If they don’t, that’s okay too.

But it keeps you working. You keep having fun by your own rules.

Yeah, and look, I like this type of material.  Whether everyone likes it, no, they don’t. But I think enough people like it to keep me employed. That’s all I need. I don’t need. I don’t need to make an A-list movie.

One more from the audience and then I’ll let you go. In all your career, what was the best practical joke that you pulled on someone or someone pulled on you?

I pulled one on a friend of mine but it’s too long to explain. It’s a gag that took months and months to set up. I basically tried to get a buddy of mine extradited to Wyoming for abandoning a car. It was a long, convoluted setup and it took months to prepare special police documents, lawyers got involved. It was really a big, big deal. And I did it to a good friend of mine, David Goodman. And you can always do it to people who are gullible. Practical jokes only work on people who panic easily. And I knew this guy would. And so I followed up about ten years later by getting him arrested in Bulgaria. Or thinking he was being deported from Bulgaria. There are times when I’ve done some gags but they were pretty complicated.

I guess the payoff was well worth it though.

Oh yeah! The first gag, the payoff was massive. I got to sit and watch him open the letter that I had sent to him that set everything into motion. I asked to be there when he opened it so it was a good thing.

I’ll let you go, Bruce. Thanks a lot for answering our questions.

Alrighty. Thank you!

My Name Is Bruce opens today in New York City. The entire schedule for the My Name Is Bruce Tour is below. Check local listings for times and locations.

Friday, October 31st – New York, NY
Wednesday, November 5th – Philadelphia, PA
Friday, November 7th  – Boston, MA
Friday, November 7th – Hartford, CT
Wednesday, November 12th – New Haven, CT
Friday, November 14th – Baltimore, MD
Friday, November 14th  – Washington, DC
Wednesday, November 19th – Columbus, OH
Wednesday, November 19th – Toledo, OH
Friday, November 21st – Detroit, MI
Friday, November 28th – Chicago, IL
Friday, December 5th – Minneapolis, MN
Friday, December 12th – Seattle, WA
Friday, December 12th – Portland, OR
Wednesday, December 17th – San Francisco, CA
Wednesday, December 17th – Berkeley, CA
Friday, December 19th – Los Angeles, CA

For about a year during college (oh, man, that is sadness) I could have been considered a closet Pokemaniac. I was about 20 years old and single, in college, and I had two mewtews. Wait for it. Do you know what this meant back in the simple days of Pokemon Red, Blue and (ultimately) Yellow? With two Mewtews… I was a god. Throw in my Gyrados and my Pokemon game was nasty. Real nasty. Or it would have been… had there been anyone else my age to play with besides my buddy Kevin.

I was a lonely, college-aged Pokemaniac. Sometimes, I’ll catch myself longing for those days, wondering what might have been had they released Pokemon ten years earlier, when I was in the grip of another portable addiction: Tetris Fever. Could I have ever caught them all? Or was I doomed to always act my age?

This is why I was so excited this July when Disney Interactive sat me down to show a press build of their DS monster-collecting, sci fi game Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals. The game reminded me a bit of Phantasy Star from the old Sega Master System but it had Pokemon, monster collecting aspects and life action RPG elements. For someone with a deeply hidden hunger for monster collecting, action based RPGs and frequent DS mini-games, this second game in the original Spectrobes universe held a lot of promise. I couldn’t wait to run around multiple planets, Metroid style, and collect and battle my Spectrobes, all the while uncovering mysteries, playing mini-games and trying to build the best team!

I bugged Gilmore for weeks about getting a copy of the game. Weeks turned into months. Then finally, last week, the game arrived. Yeah. My mothafuckin’ Spectrobes. Hell yeah. I swore that I would wait until the weekend to fire it up. But I couldn’t. I barely lasted 24 hours before I was switching on the DS to see what lay in store. Could this be the road to monster ranching redemption I had been waiting almost a decade for?

To get right to the point: no. Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is NOT the ultimate monster collecting experience I had secretly wanted all these years. Now, having logged almost five hours worth of playtime on the game, I can’t even guarantee that it’s much more than an excessive amount of tutorials and frustratingly endless dialogue scenes. I have literally only killed about 40 bad guys. In FIVE hours. This game, like my road to redemption, has proven elusively slooooow.

On top of the fact that it’s hard to get into a rhythm with this game while constantly being interrupted by tutorials and prolonged character interactions, I feel like I have yet to really crack into the story of the game. Keep reminding yourself that I’m five hours into the game. Even with the long game intro to Twilight Princess two years ago, within five hours you were knocking on the door of your first temple. I have yet to feel like there’s a bigger goal out there for me.
The action and game play are as truncated as the flow of the story. A with other games with a similar mold, the player in Spectrobes is tasked with finding items or unlocking switches and basically following points A to B while unlocking other areas of the universe to explore. It’s pretty standard adventure and RPG stuff. Where this game falls flat though is in both its combat sequences and its over-world encounters. In games as old as Dragon Warrior and right up to current RPGs (including the Pokemon games), over-world encounters were always handled at random. There were times, while running low on health and items, that I was afraid to take another step in Final Fantasy Legends out of fear that the next random battle would be my last. Even in Pokemon, your walking around, grinding your monsters up several levels, and part of the fun was in hunting the other types of creatures that were out there, waiting to be discovered. There was a clear risk and a clear reward. In Spectrobes, you SEE the bad guys coming. They show up as giant swirling tornadoes that are just as easy to avoid as they are easy to overcome. You can probably work through the whole game without hitting one.

But of course you want to, otherwise your baby spectrobes will never level up to become full-on powerful spectrobes. This is where the game battles come in. And they aren’t turn based like a lot of RPGs. No way. These sequences are full on action… for about 20 seconds. It’s crazy. You know the sense of accomplishment that you get in other battle based encounters when you’re down to your last hit points, your potions have all been exhausted and THEN you land that final blow? Well, if you ever get to that point in Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals, you’re officially the worst videogame player on the planet. These battles are easy and they are quick. Strategy here doesn’t extend beyond a simple iteration of rock, paper and scissors that has been done several times better in other games. In reminding myself that I’m probably too old for this kind of material, I can’t help but feel that someone 20 years younger than I would still feel apathetic towards the game play. There’s really no work involved in winning, and after a few encounters you find yourself just wanting to skip as many as you can to move the story forward. But when moving the story forward involves running your character headfirst into the next invasive tutorial or mind numbing dialogue exchange, you really just find yourself wanting to turn the whole thing off and play something a little more immediately satisfying.

Are there positives to the game? Yes. The graphics and animations are some of the best I’ve seen on the DS. I was blown away by the work in last year’s Phantom Hourglass and the level of visual design work is at least as good here. Just wandering around the game is entertaining, but you grow weary of running into character interactions about as much as you would running into bad guys with a depleted party in another RPG. Some of the mini-games are worth trying as well and sometimes I found myself excavating minerals and fossils (a huge part of the game if you want to find new spectrobes) for an extended period of time just to work on my experience and score. Some of the mini-game pieces do feel like they’ve been thrown in just for the sake of being there but for the most part, these sequences do help to break up the monotonous story and uneventful game play while still using the touch screen and microphone features of the DS effectively. On a technological level, Spectrobes is a pretty impressive game.

Still, at the end of the day, it appears that my hunt for redemption must continue. Like Kane from Kung Fu, I must continue my journey, in search of balance. Maybe it’s something that I am way too old to ever be able to attain. Are there 30 year olds who collect monsters in portable games who are satisfied with themselves? Is it an impossible contradiction? Is it the very NATURE of these types of games to NEVER be satisfied with your current roster of monsters and ALWAYS be hunting for more? What is it about these monster-collecting games that promise to fill the holes in our lives? Regardless of the questions, I am sad to say that the answers, whatever they may ultimately be, are not found in Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals. If anything, you will only find yourself desperately wanting more.

I still remember driving East on the 134 in Burbank and talking to Jarrett Seltzer from the band Houston Calls about their upcoming video for “Exit Emergency”. I’d had an idea for a video for a while and it involved shootting pro wrestling in black and white like Raging Bull. It had probably been in my head for about two years and here I was, in the middle of a courier job, on the phone with a band I’d never met, convincing them that, if we just changed the wrestling to underground fighting, we could probably make the video for cheap. And they were into it. I don’t know why, but they wanted to make the video. Flash forward almost five years, and it’s not hard to believe that the band and I are still friends. I still can’t believe I got someone to agree to that video.

Today the band releases their second album, titled The End of an Error. Drama seeking internet trolls have already attributed endless connotations to the meaning of the album title. Is it the end of the band? Are the members unhappy with their current label situation? Are they feeling relief at finally releasing an album so long in the making? I’m of the simple belief that the guys just think it’s a funny name for an album. But maybe I’m also waiting for them to call me up and end our friendship, a mistake the band probably should have never started.

Projected endings aside, The End of an Error is a turning point in the band’s history and sound. Those of you who were fans of Houston Calls A Collection of Short Stories won’t be so quick to find your favorite tracks on The End of an Error. There are no clear cut pop rock bounce tracks like Exit Emergency or easy to identify romantic dance songs like Bob and Bonnie this time around. This album might take a few extra spins to get used to for anyone simply expecting ANOTHER Collection of Short Stories. If I had to give you guys a similar metaphor, I would say that The End of an Error is “Insomniac” to A Collection of Short Stories “Dookie”. The songs this time around are a little heavier, seem to have been more carefully put together and are a bit less accessible at first listen than the earlier release.

But the band has made us wait this long for a new album so be patient and you’ll definitely be rewarded. I can still listen to Green Day’s “Stuart and the Avenue” a million times more than anything on Green Day’s first hit record. The songs that will jump out at you first are the ones closest to resembling Houston Calls’ earlier outing. Modest Manifesto, the first track, has the similar drum beats and back up vocals. If The End of an Error were a swimming pool for the earlier fans, Modest Manifesto is the trick that you tell yourself to jump right into the deep end rather than braving the cold with your big toe.

Life Won’t Wait… you can tell this song is going to be different from the slow crawl of the opening vocals. The chorus is poppy and enthusiastic but the verses are the first sign on the album that the band is trying something different this time around. “I’ve got four controllers and four good friends. We keep it real until our lives all end. Whatever was I thinking? The best times of our life are just beginning.” Life Won’t Wait works as a “get off the couch” call to arms to those of us who might be trading in the advancement of our dreams for another week of comfortable arrested development. This is a song that might resonate quite well with the Geekscape crowd. A Shot in the Dark is the other song on The End of an Error that seems closest to Life Won’t Wait as far as appealing to the uninitiated Houston Calls fan. It’s fast, clean and radio friendly. If you’re going to go out, with the intention of hooking up, this is probably the song you want to get you pumped and ready to lay it all on black.

Stay With Me Tonight is where The End of an Error starts to take its turn. A slow building ballad, it’s more disciplined than anything the band has done previously and shows the most progression. Even with it’s careful pacing, it only clocks in at a hair over four minutes so this isn’t a song that’s going to test your patience or squeeze in a redundant chorus just to milk the emotions. Behind the Gun has a similar hook-laced chorus and another patience rewarding rhythm. The last half of Error is where it becomes apparent that the band has taken what they learned over the last few years of playing tracks off of Short Stories and pointed those lessons in a different direction. This album takes the familiar and pushes the listener to hear those sounds in a new way. Tom’s voice is complimented pretty well by Okie and newcomer Jose does a pretty good job of taking over for Short Stories’ Kenny, the only band member to depart after that album’s release. On some of the tracks, Jose gets a chance to shine a bit and it helps to throw some fresh energy into what you’re hearing.

You Can’t Simi always makes me think of our Geekscape listener DivaDawg. She lives out in Simi Valley and I’m always comparing it to the distance it would take to get to the moon. This song’s open makes you believe that your going to hear another slower paced ballad but around the 40 second mark it breaks into an up tempo song that keeps things rolling a bit. Jose also gets some showcase time during the bridge. This is one of my favorite songs on the album, simply because it has so many pieces crammed into its simple structure.

The Oaks on Prince St., the last proper song on the album (there is a hidden track), is probably the one that best epitomizes what Houston Calls is offering with The End of an Error. It’s got a heavier and more stretched out rhythm to it and delays the payoff the longest. But the rewards are there. I’ll be honest, when I first listened through Error, it took me a few listens to figure out what the band was doing. As the last surviving band from Drive Thru Record’s sister label Rushmore, it seemed like they had taken all of the good karma that they had built up with A Collection of Short Stories and asked too much of an audience already waiting patiently for a follow up. I wasn’t convinced that the slower, more careful pace of the album was working for me. But did I really want another release of their debut album? The name of the game with The End of an Error IS patience and carefully picking through the songs on repeat. This isn’t the highschool graduation party soundtrack that the previous album was. This is four years later, and however you take my metaphor as it relates to the album title, End of an Error works best as a quiet, personal reflection on the day after college graduation, when you walk through an empty campus and collect your things, preparing for the next step in your life. It takes longer in getting there, but the rewards are things you’ll keep with you forever. When I put the album in that context, it makes perfect sense to me and the band’s current statement becomes clear. The end of an Error sets them up perfectly for what comes next.

The members of Houston Calls were guests on Geekscape Episode 70. Their new album The End of an Error is available on iTunes, online and in most record stores across the country.

The band is currently on tour in the UK with You Me At Six and Farewell.

Comic book adaptations of popular videogames have a long but not so storied history ranging back to the middle of the 8-bit era when Nintendo heavies like Mario, Link and Donkey Kong could be found in everything from TV shows to cereal boxes. For two decades, the most consistent of the comic book titles have been relegated to kiddie-fare, the Sonic the Hedgehog series of comics being the video game to comics translations biggest success story. But are videogame to comic book adaptations doomed to always be treated as child’s play?

Marvel Comics made a bold move two years ago when they announced that the creative team behind their most successful Daredevil run in years would be putting out a four issue comic series bridging the gap between Halo 2 and Halo 3. Today, over a year since Halo 3’s release, the four issue series not only has yet to conclude… it’s almost too boring to follow, Master Chief’s gun-blazing heroics almost an afterthought to the story’s drawn out and aimless main tale. On this week’s Geekscape, I’ll be talking about the recent release of Wild Storm’s Gears of War adaptation, a book that surprisingly succeeds by giving us exactly what we’d expect and nothing more: a clearly narrated story with action, gore and Marcus Fenix in a central role. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, but it definitely gets the job done if you’re a Gears of War fan looking to get into comics. These new books, based on more hardcore gamer fare, present a conscious effort by the comic book industry to get serious gamers to pick up their titles. And after experiencing both titles, I’m still on the fence, but know that deep down that we’re only going to see more in the years to come.

With that, the Prince of Persia graphic novel, released by First Second books, lands on my desk for review. I gotta say, I was looking forward to cracking it open. Prince of Persia is one of those platform games that you remember fondly from its inception and one of the few survival stories of the constant console reinventions (that seem to have left even Sonic the Hedgehog in the dust). My first memories of the original revolve around playing the game with my brother Paul and marveling at the fluid animations in the character design. It was revolutionary. Then, when Sands of Time hit on the PS2, we had another familiar platformer, this time in 3D, but with a similar revolutionary element. The franchise had stayed fresh for over 10 years.

With revolutionary approaches the strength between each Prince of Persia outing, it shouldn’t have been surprising that First Second would take a chance on a new way of presenting the familiar Prince of Persia story to comic book audiences. With a story by game creator Jordan Mechner, a script by A.B. Sina, and art by the husband wife team of LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland, Prince of Persia The Graphic Novel looks and feels a lot more like a European graphic novel than an Americanized version. The artwork is more similar to expressive brush and pen strokes than the careful pencil and inkwork of American books and sometimes the character’s forms and consistent looks are traded in for fluidity and movement. Story wise, the Western three act hero story we’ve become accustomed to in our weekly comic book stories is replaced by two parallel tales about similar princes living 400 years apart. The book takes its time exploring themes of time, identity and reincarnation. And neither of these princes are ones that we have met before in the Prince of Persia titles.

Is the book successful as a videogame to graphic novel translation? I would say no. The effort is admirable, but too much of what make the games successful never shows up in this story. We don’t have any clearly defined goals for our hero and the story wanders back and forth searching for a through line you can follow. The characters are also thinly sketched so you don’t find yourself really married to anyone in any time. Would I be crazy to think that all I wanted from a Prince of Persia graphic novel is the same action and suspense that I receive when playing the game? Half of this book is spent wondering whether what you’re reading is a physical story you can follow or a collection of fever dreams painted out for us by the book’s creators. With a property that built a huge audience using accessible, high concept storytelling, it seems counterproductive to offer a product that eschews all of those conventions.

With no end in sight to videogame comic book adaptations, and with videogames only increasing in popularity, it appears that the time is right for this lesson to be learned by future creators: Don’t stray too far from the well. What I wanted was a Prince of Persia graphic novel. What I got was something unrecognizable to me. In the war for audiences’ attention spans, and with videogames pummeling comic book readership, graphic creators need to realize that some lessons can definitely be learned from the digital new kids on the block. The Prince of Persia Graphic Novel should definitely be notched up as a missed opportunity to give readers as exhilarating an experience as the Prince of Persia games have done consistently.

Last summer, Dave and Yogi from the Austin Texas rock band Cruiserweight graced the Geekscape couch with their opinions on Michael Bay’s Transformers movie. Actually, they graced our very own Ben Dunn’s couch, which was handily fitting in for the (regular at the time) Girlfriend’s couch. The band was in Los Angeles for a month holed up in a Korea Town recording studio putting down tracks for their upcoming album Big Bold Letters, released this week by Doghouse Records (the home of label mates Say Anything, Limbeck and The All-American Rejects).

I’ve been listening to the songs on Big Bold Letters for a little over a week and the first thing that jumps out at me is the complete feeling of the album. Although I really liked the majority of 2005’s Sweet Weaponry, those songs were written over a long period of time and by the album’s release were no longer representative of the band’s sound. With Big Bold Letters, Cruiserweight has released a more accurate depiction of the current band’s style with an emphasis on consistent song writing. The 13 song album starts off with a lullaby, ends with a desperate plea and kicks all sorts of nonstop ass in between. I’ve known the band for a very long time and this is the album I’ve always wanted them to release.

Cruiserweight is made up of singer Stella Maxwell and her brothers Urny (guitar) and Yogi (drums). David Hawkins, who shared the Geekscape couch with Yogi, plays bass and is often mistaken as a fourth sibling. The songs on Big Bold Letters work together seamlessly in the same way that the band members compliment each other musically. The lyrics that would be familiar to you from past Cruiserweight albums are similarly written here but seem to work more fluidly with the melodies and guitar riffs this time around. The words don’t exist in push and pull conflict with the songs’ rhythms as they did at times in the past. Here, Stella’s voice really gets showcased in perfect fluidity with the music and even though those past songs might have worked to make the vocals stand out, here they actually become more memorable because everything works in wonderful unison. Fitting that the album is called Big Bold Letters.

There are a couple songs that are highlights on an already consistently strong album. Balboa, the second track, might be my favorite Cruiserweight song ever written. It’s the most sing along friendly on the album and after the quiet lullaby of the first introductory track, hits with the most force. It’s familiar Cruiserweight but with the kind of new shine that will embrace new listeners. Lyrics mention “new coat” and “new day”s and I think that’s appropriate. This is Cruiserweight with an upgrade. Distraction has some pretty cool voice work and a consistently hitting rhythm. The breakdowns also seem like something the band has perfected over the past decade and they give way to running choruses at just the right time. Spread Like Fingers is the requisite mid-album slow ballad and it clocks in at just the right length of time. “And I’m pulling my hair when it’s like pulling teeth for you”. The band has had slower ballads in the past but this one is the most mature and well orchestrated by far. It builds in all the right places and reflects all the proper emotions at the right times. Save this one for a late night drive home when everyone else in the car is asleep. Slack is a fun kickstart into the last half of the album. Coming on the tail end of the ballad, it’s the kind of fast running song that you want to see and sing along to live. You Were Right is about as much fun as an admission of guilt mixed with a cry for help can be. The vocals do a good job of exploring this juxtaposition with lyrics like “If you want I will drive but my autopilot’s only good for a while/can you help me think of something” while the song runs along at an up-tempo beat. It’s the sweetest way I could imagine admitting that you were wrong and asking for help in return.

The songs on Big Bold Letters personify the kind of open honesty that the band has always showcased but here they do it in the cleanest and most direct way yet. It worries me that a band that has worked this hard for this long has finally accomplished the kind of breakthrough album that I always knew that they were capable of but may see potential listeners pass them by because of the current state of the music industry. Big Bold Letters deserves to be heard. Don’t allow unfamiliarity to keep you away from one of my favorite bands of all time. You’ve already met Dave and Yogi through the vastness of the Geekscape. Take that extra step and discover the best album that the band has released to date.

Cruiserweight is currently on tour with The Pink Spiders. Dates are available here.

Big Bold Letters is available in most record stores nationwide, as well as on iTunes and the Doghouse Records website.

Gilmore, this show is on NICK JR! Why are we reviewing it for a movie, videogame and comic book website? You high? You KNOW this kind of stuff freaks me out. I didn’t trust Barney. I saw that crazy Teletubbies stuff coming a mile away. And The Wiggles!?! Tell me those guys aren’t scary as hell!

So why did you make me pop in and review the DVD for Wow Wow Wubbzy? I’ll tell you why: because you’re the son of the devil. Straight up. And one day I’ll be sending you back to hell.

Wow Wow Wubbzy is crazy. I only watched two episodes before a gate to hell started coalescing in my room and I had to turn it off. If you’re a little kid watching Nick Jr., Wow Wow Wubbzy would probably have the same effect as the Silver Shamrock masks in Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. You watch this stuff enough and your head will split open and beetles and centipedes will come out to kill your parents.

Wubbzy is like this yellow cat bear thing with a long crooked tail. In the first adventure, A Tale of Tails, the crazy bastard is a victim of all SORTS of hate crimes and shit talking from the other animals because his tail is all crooked. Wubbzy is pretty embarrassed of it so he tries all sorts of stuff like putting leaves on it and pretending it’s a branch (coming out of his ass?) or straightening it out. But it doesn’t work, and the hateful little bigots just laugh harder at him. What would I have done? I would have used my tail to choke each of those little bastards to death. I hate ‘em all! But what does Wubbzy do? He learns to love his differences and ultimately learns that he can use his tail to make a spring with it to bounce on, a jump rope, whatever. It’s straight up crazy up in this shit. Lucky for those bitches who were laughing earlier, Wubbzy didn’t learn how to turn his tail into a mothafuckin’ machine gun, ‘cuz those bitches be dead!

The second episode I watched had a lot more of Wubbzy’s two friends in it. I like his friends. One is a female rabbit who likes to build stuff, but like all womenz, you know that’s only going to lead to trouble. The other one of Wubbzy’s homies is this smart ass purple bear with glasses and a shirt but no pants. He’s pretty smart. No wonder Wubbzy had such low self-esteem. I make it a point to only hang out with dumb ass people so I can feel like I’m really smart and tell them what to do all the time. And if I was that smart bear, I’d get the hell away from Wubbzy, because you know sooner or later he’s gonna start some trouble. And no sooner can you say trouble, then trouble shows up in this episode, called Special Delivery, in which Walden (smarty bear guy) gets a package.

But Walden isn’t home when the box shows up. So what does Widget the builder rabbit who’s nothing but trouble do? She and Wubbzy open the motherfucker hoping that there’s a Real Doll or some sick ass shit in there! Whaaaaat!?! Wait a minute… WHAAAAAAT!?! You stupid animals! You can’t be opening up other people’s mail! That’s a federal M-Fing offense! I don’t care if you DO live in some cartoon magic kingdom! Some green cartoon snake or red crab or something with a badge should come along and lock BOTH of you assholes up!

Good thing what you get is even worse: a damn lesson! There’s a toy train in the box and the two dummies start it up and the thing takes off like it’s on freakin’ crack! This train goes all over the place all out of control! WHHUUUUUM!!! WHUUUUM!!! Wubbzy and Widget are freaking out like crazy and trying all sorts of stuff to stop that train but it aint workin’! They’re probably shittin’ their pants thinkin’ “if Walden gets home and we been going through his shit he’s gonna shoot us with his space calculator or something’. We better catch that train!” Well, too bad, ‘cuz Walden DOES come home. Yup. And he’s gonna whup some ass as soon as he stops that train. But since Walden is smart and these other two mothafuckas are dumb, he just walks over to the box and picks up the remote control inside and stops the train by turning it off. Man, I bet Wubbzy and Widget felt like real dumbasses after that one. They learned their lesson, but I still think they should go to jail and get taught an even more serious lesson, like you shower with your back to a wall and make sure you join the right gang or you’ll go to sleep one night and never wake up.

So yeah. That’s as far as I got before I had to get out of Crazy Town for good. This DVD is out now, but I don’t know why you would watch it unless you were high or you had kids and you wanted their heads to split open like Halloween 3 and have snakes and shit come out and kill you. If I was a kid, I’d probably want that to happen to some people I didn’t like, but not to me and my mom and dad.

Well, hot dang. I just got a great idea that might just solve this whole Gilmore thing once and for all… but first I gotta catch him, strap him down and get him in front of some Wow Wow Wubbzy… aka The Last Face of Evil You Will Ever See.

Last week, Gilmore and I were in the Geekscape offices planning the E for All weekend and it turned out that I had last Saturday to myself without a Geekscape taping to schedule around and with Ben and Brian handling E for All by themselves. Laura usually works on Saturday, so I pretty much had the whole day to do whatever I wanted. Multiple times.

Knowing this, I asked Gilmore “hey man, you got any videos I can watch while Laura’s gone on Saturday?”

“You wanna watch Enemy Mine? It never gets old.” No, Gilmore. I did not want to watch Enemy Mine for the millionth time even though it doesn’t get old. I wanted to watch something you can only watch when your girlfriend’s gone. Catch my drift?

“I do have this one movie… Soccer Mom.” Yeah. Now THAT sounded closer to what I was looking for… Soccer Mom.

When the video was dropped off at my house the next day, I realized that I’d been duped. Soccer Mom wasn’t porn. Even with the catchphrase “One mom will do anything to win” I knew that this movie was going to fall way short of the mark. And what’s this? The Ladies Home Journal produced it? I was screwed. But with time running out on my “free time”, I didn’t have a choice. I popped the DVD in.

I can see why Soccer Mom is in Gilmore’s “stash”. Emily Osment, who looks a lot like her older brother Haley Joel Osment from Forrest Gump and The Sixth Sense, plays Rebecca, the main character. She’s a young girl who loves playing soccer, but she’s having trouble adjusting after the death of her previous coach: her father. While Rebecca’s mom Wendy, played by Missi Pyle, works an extra job and takes care of the house, Rebecca is left without the reason to keep playing soccer. That is, until banned Italian soccer star Lorenzo mothafuckin’ Vincenzo is called to coach the team by the interim coach.

Too bad the interim coach was lying. Lorenzo mothafuckin’ Vincenzo, played by MTV Sports’ (and Demolition Man’s) Dan Cortese, is a total asshole. He has zero intention of coaching the team, which Wendy quickly discovers. So what’s the team going to do without a superstar coach to lead them to victory over the snobby Malibu champs?

Wendy dresses up like a man in order to coach the team. Not any man either. She dresses up like Lorenzo mothafuckin’ Vincenzo. And it’s creepy as hell. In this Ms. Doubtfire style twice, the resulting makeup fx on mother Wendy are almost convincing… if you squint. Missi Pyle spends the majority of the movie dressed as a man who appears to have had about seventeen facelifts from an illegal Mexican doctor. It’s creepy as hell.

I don’t know Missi Pyle personally, but if we were both single I bet I could get her. She seems funny and that’s attractive, right? And she’s a little older than me and that’s hot. But after seeing her spend over half of Soccer Mom dressed like a wax statue version of Dan Cortese doing an Italian impersonation straight out of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show? There was no way I was going to get any satisfaction out of this movie or Missi Pyle again (although Dan Cortese is now hot to me for some reason). Whatever. This movie had way too many underage girls in it anyways.

You know how this one ends. The mom’s façade falls apart when the REAL Lorenzo mothafuckin’ Vincenzo shows up as a celebrity guest at the team’s biggest game against… yup… the Malibu rivals (who are made up of about 3 hot girls and 12 men with girl parts). Becca discovers just how much her mother cared about her soccer. Momma Wendy discovers how hard it is to put a family back together and Lorenzo mothafuckin’ Vincenzo discovers that it’s okay to be nice to people sometimes.

Everyone is smiling in the end, just like the Ladies Home Journal planned, and there’re even some nice remarks from the men with girl parts on the other team. I gotta say, after the first 30 seconds, I wasn’t going to smack it to Soccer Mom in any way, even when Wendy’s soccer mom friend accidentally kisses her thinking she’s the real life Lorenzo mothafuckin’ Vincenzo. Not even that accidental lesbo action was going to do it for me. But as a movie that you would see on ABC Family, Soccer Mom is almost completely watchable if you sleep through a large portion of it, and watching Dan Cortese play a stereotype of an Italian is honestly pretty damn funny. Imagine it in your head for a second. But as mid-Saturday porn… it’s very, very bad.

Which leads me to ask, “why was this in Gilmore’s collection?”

The first person that e-mails jonathan@geekscape.net for a copy of Soccer Mom, gets this Not Porn movie on DVD and a punch in the face. Soccer Mom is available now on DVD… at a store you probably don’t go to.

Earlier today I went to Target to look for a Galactus Mighty Mugg for my friend Gilmore. Supposedly this Mighty Mugg is VERY hard to find so I was happy when I found it and quickly bought it. I was walking out of the parking lot, Mighty Mugg in hand, when I was hit from behind by a speeding car. When I woke up, I was being helped but the Mighty Mugg was gone!

Then I got home and found THIS in the Geekscape inbox:

If anyone has a way to contact S.A.M., PLEASE do not hesitate! The safety of Gilmore’s Mighty Mugg collection is in your hands!

S.A.M.! HELP US!!!

But isn’t it sweet that I got hit by a car and totally am okay? Unrelated but not kinda?

Appaloosa, the western that expanded to over a thousand screens this past weekend, follows the story of two lawmen-for-hire, played by director and co-writer Ed Harris (Virgil Cole) and Vigo Mortensen (Everett Hitch) as they are hired with the clean up of the small New Mexico settlement of Appaloosa.  The town is being terrorized by a local rancher named Randall Bragg and his group of thugs, culminating with the murder of Appaloosa’s sheriff and deputies in the film’s opening scene. So there’s our setup: Cole and Hitch, the two fastest no nonsense guns for hire that can be found, are brought into town to enforce the laws and protect the innocent from Bragg and his men.

The movie clips along for a solid fifteen minutes before things are complicated by the arrival of widower Allie French, played be Renée Zellweger. There’s a great showdown scene between Irons and Harris after the two lawmen have shot three of Bragg’s men in order to set an example of the new way things are going to be done. After that initial meeting, there’s a lot of good guys versus bad guys tension going on in the film that gets derailed a bit by the addition of Zellweger’s character. Sheriff Cole and Deputy Hitch begin to have slight differences between themselves, with Cole falling in love with French and deciding to build a home with her. Hitch can only stand and watch as the fastest, most emotionless gun he has ever seen (as well as his best friend) begins to lose his edge. This new change in his friend is not going to end well and might just be the opportunity that Bragg needs to get rid of the two lawmen and reclaim the town.

Based on Robert B. Parker’s 2005 western of the same name, the script for Appaloosa does a lot of things right. In classic western fashion, it sets up the archetypes and the world of the 1880s west very economically, where fifteen minutes in the story is ready to roll. What it does in the hands of Harris and co-writer Robert Knott, which may or may not be part of the novel, is take this set up and methodically lumbers along at a disciplined pace. This is not last year’s 3:10 to Yuma or Young Guns where action scenes drove the narrative. This is very much an actor’s western, with layered performances from Harris and Mortensen as their relationship weathers the slow pace of the film and the multiple plot-twists. Mortensen rocks as the loyal but weary Hitch and Ed Harris does a solid job as the tough and ultimately remorseful Cole. We’ve all seen Irons play the bad guy and he does it as well as anyone else and is great to watch here. But in an actor’s film, the biggest distraction is the inclusion of Renée Zellweger. As a viewer, you never really get used to seeing her onscreen alongside these tough guys playing tough guys. She just comes off as… not enough. She’s not enough of a presence on screen to believably justify all of the wreckage that her character leaves in on screen.

Like some of the internal beats that the actors are working through in the quieter than normal script, Harris’ visual directing in some scenes seems better tailored to the stage. There’s a staged flatness to a lot of the blocking and camera work and the majority of the movie is played pretty close to the belt. It would have been nice to see some more visual flare and crescendos firing in a film with such a steady visual beat but in the end you’re left with a carefully drawn picture of two men at silent odds over the future of their relationship. Appaloosa is worth watching on video or on demand if you’re a western fan, and there were pieces of the movie’s character work that reminded me of the failing relationship between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River. Unlike that seminal film, however, with Appaloosa there’s a lot of distance that could have been travelled but not enough energy in the story or direction to get it all the way there.

An hour down at E for All and here is what I’ve got. We’ve known for months that E for All was starting to look like a Ghost Town when game publishers announced that they were skipping the event in lieu of going to Tokyo to watch NINTENDO KICK THEIR ASSES. You saw that trailer for Punch Out Wii. It slapped you around and made you King Hippos biznizinitch.

So what are we left with if we live in L.A. and don’t speak Japanese? We’ve got E for All, which looked pretty empty at 10:30am when I walked in the front doors. I made a b-line for our friends Eli and Aaron with the Mana Energy Booth, determined not to drink 3 more of their demon vials in quick succession and put myself in the damn hospital. I ditched my jacket and headed to the most promising place I could imagine: the IndieCade area.

Indiecade.com is a place for independent game developers to get noticed by bigger publishers who might show an interest in putting out their game and moving them out of their parent’s homes. Without too many big game companies showing up, and because I played Cave Story for an hour last night when I should have been sleeping, I was excited to see some indie stuff.

There were a few different screens set up with offerings that were and weren’t working that well. With indie games, even when they ARE working, you’re not sure that they are or that you are doing what you should be. I was devastated that the game JoJo’s Fashion Show wasn’t working… but you KNOW I’m determined to play it today!!!!

Some of these games were rough, but here are some of my impressions.

Mushroom Men (getting published soon on the Wii) by Redfly Studios/Gamecock. – This game reminded me a ton of Jak and Dexter with the 3D platforming and missions setup. I wasn’t blown away by the game. Like Jak and Dexter, it looks pretty dark, the camera doesn’t always work well and other characters sometimes fill the frame when they are talking to you. Sorry to kill your buzz. I wasn’t down.

Offroad Velociraptor Safari by Flashbang Studios – I shit you not. I drove around dragging a chain with a spiked ball on it running over feather velociraptors for points. Extra points for sandwiching them into a wall with your jeep or landing on them. Once I got a chance to drag a dead one around when it got impaled on the ball. Go play the game now at www.raptorsafari.com if you want to blow some time. It’s mindless but whatever.

Rooms: The Main Building by Hand Made Games – This game looked pretty damn cool. It’s a slider puzzle style game that looks like the menu to Braid with your character navigating the rooms. But each room slides up and down like a slider game. You can only slide the room you’re in and you can only change rooms using a doorway or a wardrobe. There is live video in the game as you navigate an Asian Harry Potter looking actor around the different rooms looking for keys and unlocking more doors in order to progress through the mansion. It’s beautiful and different and reminded me of snakes and ladders.

I flipped when I saw a little sizzle reel for Telltale Games’ upcoming Bone: The Great Cow Race videogame. I almost wanted to buy a PC when I saw it… but I’ll wait for the Wii port like everybody else. Still, you guys know I love Bone like Gilmore loves bone so I was pretty excited. Check out these pictures:

I caught this one dude playing a game called Synaesthete from Digipen University. It looks like a ¾ top down SmashTV style of game set in a Tron-looking universe with hot disco lighting floating in space. You’re a little Bloom Block looking dude navigating a map and taking on various challenges, but the way you battle these bad guys in each mission is original: it’s a rhythm game like Guitar Hero. In fact, the color scheme looks like DDRs moving prompts. Your success in the rhythm game leads to success in your attacks as you move around SmachTV style killing enemies. The dude offered to let me play but it just looked like it would fry my brain. I needed JoJo there for back up if I was going to try it.

The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom by The Odd Gentlemen – This game has a black and white, 1920s German Expressionist look, film grain and all that moves like Braid. It’s a puzzle platformer that involves pulling switches and timing your jumps as you move along rooftops and complete the story. I didn’t get a chance to play but it looked pretty cool nonetheless. I’d be excited to see this get released so I could give it a try.

A student from USC introduced himself to me and told me that his professor had a game on the IndieCade floor. It’s called Meanwhile (by USC professor Peter Brinson) and at first look it wasn’t too impressive. You followed a Mr. Game and Watch style character from left to right in a platformer similar to N+. If you fall off the platforms, you die and start over, the goal being to complete the level in a certain time. The game has a gravity element with switches the move the game’s gravity up or down. Bad guys run around trying to flip the switches and send up plummeting upwards or downwards into digital hell. Pretty simple right? Not completely…

What impressed me was that this 10 level game is actually a single player MMO. You can play it with various inputs (we used a 360 controller) and while you’re completing levels, other players are as well. If they finish the levels in the allotted time, they get to change the attributes of YOUR character in REAL TIME as YOU ARE PLAYING! They can slow down your speed, weaken your jump or slow down the regeneration time it takes for you to refill these abilities. They can fuck up your game AS you play! And if you’re good, you can salt their game by crippling their character as he’s trying to leap an abyss or beat the bad guys to a switch. Pretty cool, in my opinion.

So those are my first impressions from the Indie section of the almost vacant floor. It feels like Comic Cons Preview Night 5 years ago when no one was crowding the space.

EA has a large area with ho hum games to play like Bloom Blox, Mercs 2, Facebreaker, Tiger Woods 09 and Battlefield: Bad Company. Aren’t all these games out yet?

THAT KID ON THE RIGHT IS BOOOOOORED.

Xbox Live has a similar set up with Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, Lego Batman and Grid. Of course they are also pimping Castle Crashers and Braid but these stations only worked to make me miss Giraffey that much more. Come back Giraffey… please?

Intel has a place where you can play WoW, Unreal 2 and race around to win some digital power thing… a new processor… yeah yeah. Get out of my face, fool!

THE FOOL IS IN WHITE

Target has a MONSTER of a setup that is building to a Guitar Hero 2 championship. No gracias. But check out the picture. The kidz do want thems Guitar Hero 2 World Tour Backstage Bang Bus Special Edition. Yawn.

JOIN US… WE’RE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE…

It’ll be like The Wizard… except lamer. And with nobody watching.

I’m heading to Denny’s. Updates to come.

Update Time – 2:00pm

Denny’s was pretty good. I got a hamburger. I also decided to make a visual representation of my E for All Experience so far:

The Tokyo Game Show

E for All

Here’s another one of the two together:

One is full and one is empty. Notice I’m drinking from the empty one.

But my brother called excited that he was in the upcoming Raw VS SmackDown 2009 and that made things better.

“Dude. I wrote the lines for that section of the game. I told you you were in the game months ago.”

“Really? I don’t remember.”

“I definitely told you.”

“Cool. It’s good money.”

If that’s all it means to him, I should have tried to put in some embarrassing dialogue and see if it would geo past THQ and WWE.

I returned to the show and went straight for THIS thing:

Gee… I wonder why everyone in the room was there?

I guess WCG is one of the 7 pro gaming companies on the floor. They had a bunch of stations that looked like this:

These guys must be good. Too bad my attention was drawn to THIS:

Gears of War 2. They had a few stations set up where people were playing against each other in waves. You had to wipe out wave after wave of COG or Horde opponents.

Immediately I noticed a few things. The game mechanics are way better. It moves easier, you’re character doesn’t jump into certain hiding spots as automatically and so it’s a bit more fluid than Gears 1. The other thing I noticed was how much more destructible the environments are. This game looks a LOT better than the original Gears. The details are fantastic. Call of Duty 4 level of detail in a Gears game. Everything is a lot clearer.

And you definitely want to have that extra detail… BECAUSE NOW YOU’VE GOT A FLAMETHROWER, MOTHAFUCKAS!!! YEAH!!! You thought this was fun in GTA? Now you can walk around torching people in Gears of War! These people don’t panic and run around like in Liberty City. They try and fight through their burning skin before they crumble.

And when you DO down an enemy… IT’S HUMAN (or Locust in this case) SHIELD TIME!!! HAHAHA!!! I had flashbacks to the human shielf stair case scene in Total Recall when I picked up my downed Locust and used him as a shield to approach his friends and shoot at them. It was pretty damn satisfying. I mean, just look what they did to my beautiful plaza!

The game is going to rock when I’m carrying Gilmore helplessly as a shield while coming up on Jake108 to deliver a shot to his head… “I’m bringing you a present, Jake… Gilmore’s lifeless husk!” BLAM! I’ve got it all planned in my head.

From there, I wandered over to a RTS MMO called Beyond Protocol. The space battle that was playing out on the screen in front of my looked like Starcraft meets Battlestar Gallactica, but is definitely a RTS. The guys who were fighting each other had been going at it for hours and pieces of the hundreds of dead ships they had wrecked were laying all over the map. NPC Pirates were coming in and scavenging the wreckage for new weapons and technology. Something a player could do if they weren’t busy shooting at each other.

PC strategy enthusiasts might like the game a lot. You can also play it on a Mac with a Windows emulator. If you’re interested in the game, Dark Sky Entertainment was nice enough to offer Geekscape visitors access to the Beta. Just go to www.beyondprotocol.com and use the password EForALL087h6axsg  When you’re shooting lasers into the enemy ships, tell them SAM sent you.

The next place I stopped by was Entropia Universe. This is the Second Life style online world that uses REAL currency in the game. Someone in Europe bought an asteroid for $100,000 real world dollars a few years ago and made the money back within a year by building a mall on it, apartments and hunting ranges and renting out space and hunting expeditions. It’s pretty impressive if you have that videogame entrepeneurial attitude and don’t want to sell WoW weapons or characters off on eBay and get busted by the cops. It has a real world ATM card that works with real cash and game cash and all of the prices in the game are determined by the marketplace. Here’s a mall:

This dude I was talking to finds costumes in the game that you can make and sell to players to wear in the game.

And then he makes them for real and sells them to people who want to act like the real world IS the game. Check it out:

It’s like The Matrix meets Project Runway. But you get beat up for this.

Finally, I found a frisbee and a wristband. The frisbee is for my dogs and the wristband is for Gilmore’s sweaty palms/girlfriend.

I’m going to run back to the floor now so I can try and play some JoJo’s Fashion Show.

Final update: 4:15pm

Okay, so there’s not a whole lot left on the floor and JoJo’s fashion show ended up not being very much fun. Tomorow, Ben, Gilmore and Jake are coming to check things out with a camera and scheduled interviews, so that’ll be a lot meatier. I’ll be busy in Orange County at Pugtoberfest, where Hank, Cheese and I pursue the ever elusive costume contest title. We’ve got a Peter Pan theme going on this year and I’m pretty confident that the title will be ours.

Coming back to the show, I saw a Nintendo Wii Fit contest set up like Double Dare, where two contestants had to race to Wii Fit stations through tires, a balance beam and a ball pit. I stuck around for a bit, waiting for the two goobers to break one of their ankles but was foiled by the fact that when your bones are mostly made of Slurpee, its hard to snap. It was a pretty big dissapointment for me, all around.

There was a Rock Band competition where you could perform with your “band” for prizes. Man, did it sound terrible. Here’s a picture of a band that I’m PRETTY SURE didn’t win…

Where’s Jiminy on guitar when you need him?

I ran into an employee of Nexon and he introduced me to their game Combat Arms, a PC FPS that is free to play online… if you want to lose. The game makes money by charging players to upgrade their weapons, armor, etc. It’s a COD4 style miitary game and looks like a lot of fun, but if I’m gonna be losing money online, I want the chance of making it back. So maybe I’ll stick to selling merkins on Entropia Online.

Still, the game looks pretty cool:

The rest of the floor was pretty ho hum. Here’s a guy playing a flight simulator.

He wasn’t shooting at anything so I was like “this is a game?” Then I realized that the company makes these really lifelike piloting controls with switches and stuff. Great. Now people can learn how to give tours from the comfort of their homes. Or terrorists don’t even have to move to the US to learn how to pilot commercial planes. Good thing we have a ton of fake looking games that teach you how to shoot them down with lazer guns or alien spaceships. I can only hope that the terrorists fall asleep before they figure out all of the controls… and there are lots of them.

Of course, you’ve got your needless tie ins:

No me gusta.

And you have this thing:

It professes to make you the hero in your very own game. It takes your picture, gives you some stats… and then:

“BLAH! I NO HERO! I DEVIL COME TO KILL YOU!!!”

This poor Chinese kid probably THOUGHT he was gonna be the hero when it took his picture. Instead, it turned him into the little troll guy and the hot hero girl and buff hero dude are going to kick his ass. Look at the kid! He’s in fucking PAIN! THE GAME LIED! IT DOWNRIGHT LIED! AND NOW HIS VIDEO GAME ASS IS GOING TO GET KICKED! THRICE!

So how can I recover? Is there any hope left for a cool game after Gears of War 2?

Yes. There is JoJo’s Fashion Show! Let’s go! I must have my E for All experience saved!

On the way, I actually DID discover a cool game:

Machinarium by Amanita Design, is a pretty cool adventure puzzle game where you try and navigate a ChibiRobo looking tin man through an environment using the mouse. It reminds me a bit of Zack and Wiki for the Wii and had a pretty good sense of humor. That, and the artwork was gorgeous. I don’t know much about this independent game, but I hope it finds a publisher and we can all play it one day. It was pretty cool to check out.

Here’s the robot after falling into this room. How does he get out?

So now it’s time for the final test, the last game I wanted to play at E for All…

JoJo’s Fashion Show

Hit that:

“Yes! A new sexy gazelle in the office! A new challenge… for Weird Name Flamboyant Guy!”

Dudes, this game sucked. You literally had to work in an office and click though text forever. I don’t even know if there WAS a fashion show involved, because I was so damn bored clicking through retarded text like “Yes! A new sexy gazelle in the office!” that I wanted to shoot myself in the face. Notice that the office looks like a startup bomb shelter. Way to go, JoJo. You’re game officially sucks.

So, that’s my time at E for All. We’ll see what Ben, Brian and Jake-mothafuckin’-108 can bring us from tomorrow. It’s been fun writing this up for you… but only because I got to flamethrower a Locust and use him as a shield against his friends.

Humboldt County, the independent film brought to you by they writing/directing team of Darren Grodsky and actor Danny Jacobs, expands to theaters this week from their initial release in just three cities. For some of you, that puts the film within a commutable distance and I urge you to make the trek, especially the film students out there in the Geekscape audience. What you’ll find is a very mature and well-crafted film that doesn’t sacrifice its story or characters in the service of plot gimmicks or a forced visual style. For many independent films, this kind of “hey, look at me!” filmmaking is a regular means of breaking from the pack. But what Humboldt County pulls off so well is a complete about face: a film with a quiet, patient confidence in what it is and the knowledge that, by the last scene, all of the various characters’ internal opponents will be met and wrestled with, win or lose.

Humboldt County centers on Peter, a repressed UCLA medical student, played by Jeremy Strong, who from his IMDB page, appears to have had more experience as a set PA or personal assistant in Hollywood than an actor. But that only gives me more reason to celebrate Mr. Strong for what he and the team behind this film accomplished at what appears to be largely their first time out. Humboldt County is a movie that in many ways is the modern day The Graduate, and there’s no way that I would say that lightly. More so on a thematic and internal level than a plot one, Humboldt County follows Peter as he stumbles out of his last graduate exam, has to plead with his professor (who is also his father) to give him a passing grade so that he can move on to the next rung of his scripted life and in his frustration he meets a girl. On a whim, he accompanies her home to Humboldt County in Northern California, very much a stranger stranded in a strange land and she takes off, leaving him there. And Peter, with his scripted pressured life (and overbearing father) waiting for him back in Los Angeles, eventually decides to stay.

Like Ben in The Graduate, Peter finds himself at an agonizing crossroads: follow the script that has been written for the rest of your life or actually find a life worth living. It helps that the characters in both are drawn into indecision by attractive women. In this case, the woman is Fairuza Balk, who is really alluring in this movie in that certain mysterious way. Peter’s father is played by Peter Bogdonavich, who Geekscape listeners may or may not know I drove around for a week in Hollywood as part of an early job upon moving to Los Angeles. In addition to this personal note, the job I was at where I was driving around Peter B (as we called him)? It also involved a coworker who spent his college years in Humboldt, growing and selling weed. He would tell me the craziest stories about the marijuana industry in Humboldt County: the Feds, the farms out in the woods, the theft and rampant vandalism of rival crops. It would have made a great movie. Luckily, it did. Humboldt County IS that movie.

Apologies to my previous coworker, but Grodsky and Jacobs not only beat you to the punch, they did such a thorough job of painting a beautiful picture that anything else would have trouble standing next to it. What Peter finds in Humboldt County is a completely different world. It’s a fresh canvas. But fearing change, he fights with it at first. And why not? Max, played by Six Feet Under’s, Chris Messina, is antagonistic towards him. He’s stranded in Chucky’s house (or Jack, played by Child’s Play and Lord of the Rings actor Brad Dourif). And everything is new to him.

Yes, the world of the movie involves a lot weed. There is a lot of weed smoking. There are tons of scenes involving the growing of weed. But the script is not Cheech and Chong. It’s also not an advocating of legalization. The script is a window into a way of life, a small section of the world that exists in quiet separation. And it’s a beautiful view. There’s a great scene in the film in which Jack’s wife Rosie laments to Peter, while watching Jack and Max talk outdoors about the need for leashes on dogs to protect them from things in this world that weren’t made for it to begin with. The dialogue is realistic, smart but not self-aware. The film really gives you a complete picture, not to mention that the cinematography and camera work is intimate and exhilarating at the same time. Watching it play out, with the sun peaking through treetops and fog resting on beachfronts, you begin to feel as Peter does. You never want to leave.

The film is not boring and does not lack a through point. In the end, there are some high concept pieces to the film. Max has a plan to grow big and sell high in order to get out once and for all, despite the Federal Government’s increasing presence in the region. Jack struggles with losing Max as a son while bringing Peter in to his home. And Peter has to face the decision of returning to a life that he may now find not worth returning to. The issues may seem internal but the external conflicts that rise from them are exciting and unpredictable to watch play out. The script may seem very simple but the layers hidden within it cause the viewer to constantly reevaluate the story and characters as each one is uncovered.

I don’t want to spoil any of the small details in this movie, and it is a picture made up of many small details. But I have to urge the film students in the audience to seek out this movie and watch it, if ultimately on DVD. Many of us spend our time thinking about our first feature and how revolutionary it has to be both visually and on the page. Humboldt County, in its conservative running time and economic use of story and character, prove that your head might be in the wrong place. Maybe it’s better to tell a simple plot well and clear on the page but let the details come out in the honest way that the audience receives the information. I have never witnessed a movie that more closely resembles the emotions brought out by Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, but Humboldt County does it consistently in its own special, and sometimes surprising, way.

On this morning’s Howard Stern Show, Iron Man director John Favreau called in to promote the recent DVD and Blue Ray release of the film. When talking about the casting of Robert Downey Jr., Favreau was pressed by Howard to reveal who else Marvel had been considering early on.

The two names that Favreau revealed, stressing that these were just two ideas out of many initial ones and that no official offers were close to being made were:

Clive Owen and Sam Rockwell – two pretty damn good actors in their own right.

Again, Robert Downey Jr. was pretty much the unanimous choice once his name was thrown in and he had auditioned but these two names DO leave you wondering “What if?” Somewhere, in an alternate dimension of the Geekscape, Iron Man is being played by the guy from Shoot ‘Em Up or the older brother from Clown House (old school Victor Salva reference in the house!). Who else could have been bandied about in these meetings?

The conversation was short and nothing new was really revealed for the fanboys out there. One highlight was when Howard made a point to throw his name into the hat to be considered as The Mandarin. When Favreau countered that he was an Asian character, Howard responded comically with “Herro, Iwon Man!”

Maybe, somewhere in an alternate universe, that possibility is ALSO being played out before moviegoers!

Only our buddy Uatu knows for sure.

I’m just going to cut to the quick instead of rambling on and on about the importance of Watchmen as the most important limited series in comic book history or about the boiling point-reaching anticipation/dread harbored by fanboys everywhere at the thought of Zack Snyder’s big screen anticipation.

Today I got a chance to watch a few scenes from the upcoming Watchmen film and listen to Zack Snyder speak at a Warner Brothers hosted press event. And put your worries to rest. In the imagined words of Frank Miller’s All Star Batman: you’re getting your goddam Watchmen film, so shut up already. Is it awesome? Is it perfect? Is it everything we dreamed of? In the words of this Geekscapist: “yes” and “I don’t know”.

Zack Snyder was introduced by DC Comics’ Gregory Noveck, Senior Vice President of Creative Affairs. Noveck did a brief job of giving Watchmen it’s proper context in history for the assembled crowd of journalists and then introduced Zack, who I was really impressed by. Zack Snyder is a really charismatic speaker and did a great job of introducing the selected clips while answering questions and alleviating fears. And be assured, he shared many of the fears.

Why would anyone make Watchmen? Isn’t it “un-filmable”?  Snyder admitted that he “never considered or thought about making it. Thank god I didn’t have to think about it for a while.” He admitted that had he sat on the decision, he probably would have been scared off of doing the film. But he wasn’t just driven by impulse and quick decision-making. “A draft existed. For me that made it easier.” He was presented with the current draft of Watchmen. “Here’s Watchmen? Yeah… we’ll see…” he would respond suspiciously.

Snyder made it very clear that early on he approached the existing draft and the entire project with trepidation, followed by extreme care. The powers that be wanted to “update it”, make it about the War on Terror, have it feature an approximation of the current president and reference the modern world. And for all intensive purposes, it could have happened that way. But Zack missed the idea of having the character of President Nixon in the film. Maybe he would set the film in 1990? The script started inching back towards resembling the comic. Once that change had been approved, why not just put it back in 1985? “That’s how I slowly got the rest of the graphic novel back in. There’s a reason why the book works and is groundbreaking.” The director didn’t start there, but as he started to look for answers on tackling some of the bigger problems of bringing such a dense piece of storytelling to screen, he found the answers back at the source material.

And boy, did he trust in the source material.

BRACE YOURSELVES FOR SPOILERS… UNLESS YOU’VE READ THE BOOK, OF COURSE.

The first clip we were shown was the first 12 minutes of the film: the murder of The Comedian and the opening credit sequence. The effects weren’t finished but as soon as you saw the Warner Brothers logo cast on familiar Watchmen yellow, you didn’t care. This was going to be a VERY immersive experience. And EVERY visual detail is spot on. Fine toothed comb spot on. It’s almost exhausting to watch the amount of detail in every shot. The casual moviegoers may only appreciate the complete world of the film, but this is Geekscape, where the true fanboys will have their brains scrambled by the level of dedication shown on screen.

The scene plays out with The Comedian pouring a drink and sitting down with a stogey in front of the TV to watch period television. A lot of the current history plays out but it never feels like exposition. The writing is very, very good and the editing and shot composition is sharp. There are no dropped balls here. As Nat King Cole’s Unforgettable plays, a stranger approaches the door, busts in and The Comedian and the unarmed stranger have at it. The fight is extremely physical and brutal, as it should be. The Comedian is Watchmen’s approximation of Sgt. Rock or The Punisher, a gun toting, tough guy who plays hard. Too bad the assailant (who is cast in shadow) plays harder. After most of a wall, a coffee table, a TV set, a mini-bar and the rest of the living room are torn to pieces, The Comedian is thrown out of his skyscraper apartment window and sent plummeting to the pavement below.

The movement and action of the scene is where Snyder puts in his familiar style. This movie looks nothing like 300, but the speed ramps and slow motion shots are in full effect here. You readers know that I didn’t enjoy 300. I thought the pacing was labored and the story played out like an arcade fighting game with wave after wave of increasingly badass villains. And were there 300 soldiers or 300 speed ramped shots? Both? I don’t know. After about the fifth slow down of a guy jumping up in the air or tossing an enemy, the effect was completely lost on me… and the redundancy hadn’t even started yet.

I think that this scene in Watchmen picks its spots a lot better than the excessiveness of 300. I’m not in love with the music video action, but it is intense. The use of slow motion has become a lost art in modern cinema and Snyder has no intention of playing conservationist in his action sequences. They lose their unique importance after a while and put the movie at risk of moving like pretty molasses (300). But let me tell you, when The Comedian is tossed out of that window (he might have taken diving lessons from the doomed Persian dignitary in the “This is Sparta!” scene), and you see shards of glass and the Watchmen happy face pin spinning mid-air, it is a pretty beautiful fanboy sight. And when the camera comes to rest on a close up of that pin, now at street level, as the crumbled Comedian’s blood runs down its yellow face, you’re ready for the entire ride. And we haven’t even gotten to the incredible credit sequence.

The intro credit sequence plays out under Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ (supposedly there are a total of three Dylan songs in the film) and it is breathtaking. We see the superhero-present history of the United States play out in front of us in moving stills. Here is some really strong slow motion work. The sequence is stunning and starts in the 1930s, with the golden age heroes from The Watchmen books and continues through to the early 80s. Each shot begins with a familiar historical composition but reveals itself to be effected by the presence of The Watchmen in this world. Some of the shots that stood out for me was the reveal of the young Rorschach, Andy Warhol presenting a painting of Owl Man, Dr. Manhattan shaking hands with President Kennedy, The Comedian revealed to be the second shooter in Dallas and Dr. Manhattan taking the photo of the first man on the moon. This sequence is spot on perfect and this fanboy has zero complaints as the lights come back up.

Explaining Dr. Manhattan’s origin to the audience, Snyder comments “it’s superhero lore or mythology… showing us a cliché.” If someone did get powers through radioactive means, like the Hulk or Spider-Man, what would really happen? This is what Alan Moore’s writing explored and one of the things included in the film. It references the medium heavily, exposing it for what it is, but never to the point of breaking the imagination of it. Snyder explained that he and Dr. Manhattan actor Billy Crudup talked about these questions and theories at length. What would happen if a Dr. Manhattan truly existed? “What does it do to religion? Or us as a race?” This is a different character to play than most completely CG created characters and Crudup’s performance left the animators excited for any big movements they could work with in the performance. Dr. Manhattan’s depiction is “not a bombastic CG character. It’s very subtle.” But relax. It’s incredible when you see it on screen… even the Little Dr. Manhattan that is present when the character is nude.

Snyder rolled into the origin of Dr. Manhattan clip. This sequence is completely heartbreaking. Almost completely narrated, we jump around in time, seeing different points in the story of Dr. Manhattan’s history: his normal life, the accident, his increasing detachment and use as a US super weapon. The writing here is powerful. There’s a moment where you see a normal Dr. Jon Osterman, trapped in the nuclear test room scared out of his mind, look down at his Swiss watch as the hairs on his arm start to stand up. There are five seconds left before he’s vaporized. We’ve seen this moment in the trailer by now. But what we HAVEN’T seen is the scene that it flashes to in this brief moment: a young Jon, at a work station looking at all of the pieces of the Swiss watch laid out before him on a table. His father encourages him to learn to put it together piece by piece. Then… wham. He’s vaporized, forced to put himself back together atom by atom over time. There is no deviation from the book. If anything, this sequence makes the book more accessible emotionally. This really is a profound tragedy playing out before us and it ends with Jon, alone on the surface of Mars, erecting his fortress of solitude. It’s jaw dropping.

The last sequence we were shown was of the second Silk Specter and Dan rescuing Rorschach from prison during a prison riot. This sequence was the one that I felt least spirited. By now, the movie is clicking, we know all of our major players and the situation and this is a pretty standard action scene. It’s a bit of the rescue scene from the first Matrix. You guessed it. Lots of slow mo kung fu. Mr. Snyder, when will the world have too much slow mo kung fu? Hopefully not by the end of Watchmen’s current 2 hour and 43 minute running time, which the director really hopes not to lose too much more of. Maybe if some of the shots weren’t in extreme slow mo, we could fit in some other cool stuff? No? Not going for it? Okay.

Seeing Rorschach’s moving inkblot mask was pretty damn cool and the characters are spot on, voices and all, but I wasn’t blown away by this sequence. It seemed the closest to what you would see in any other superhero film and was followed by a brief sizzle reel of some of the comic con and trailer footage. And you know that a modern rock hit from the late 90s was present over what we saw. That being said, watching Dr. Manhattan walking casually through Vietnam, frying enemy soldiers with his hands, will never get old to me, no matter how slow mo the slow mo gets. I’ll run that shot on a loop.

Following the clip there was a brief Q&A. Zack touched on the Black Freighter and how he purposefully filmed the shots that lead into and out of each Black Freighter sequence. Warner Premier will be releasing the animated Black Freighter around the release of the film along with a documentary called Under the Hood about Hollis Mason (the original Night Owl)’s writing of the biography on being a superhero. The show will play out like a news show and a small clip of it may be included in the film in the scene where The Comedian is watching TV prior to being murdered. Ultimately, Snyder hopes to release Watchmen at some point with the Tales of the Black Freighter sequences included in the cut of the film.

When talking about the film’s score, Snyder revealed that the music is “Blade Runnery” and has a techno-noir feel. There is also a Watchmen game in development although he is only giving notes on the project and not intensely involved in the process. On the subject of the actor’s contracts supposed sequels clause, Snyder exclaimed that there couldn’t be a sequel or prequel to Watchmen. “They might be able to find someone to do it but it won’t be me.”

He seems satisfied enough with what he is accomplishing this time around and the thematic similarity to the source material. Snyder views his film as a commentary on the superhero movie as much as the original Watchmen series was a commentary on superhero comics. And the time for a Watchmen movie is better now, with an audience well versed on superhero films, than it would have been at any time earlier. “You can’t make a superhero movie that is self aware that doesn’t acknowledge the marketplace of superhero movies.” And the film seems to be as dense with self-analysis and commentary as the Moore/Gibbons work was over two decades ago. “We worked really hard to make everything (in the film) mean something.” And, as I said before, the effort not only show, it is exhausting to witness.

So am I satisfied as a fanboy? I don’t know if I’m the proper judge. Because of its density, Watchmen is not a book that I recommend to comic book first timers. The first time that I read Watchmen, already pretty well versed in comic book history and appreciation, it dwarfed me. I didn’t get it. But the book gets better every time I read it. A new layer or detail is revealed with every fresh visitation. So will the movie give a similar feeling? I’m not sure. As impressed as I was by what I was seeing on a technical level, I was left a bit ambivalent. As loyal to the source material as the visuals were on screen, I found myself feeling guardedly apathetic to it all. It’s not the whole film. The pacing issues that I had with 300 seemed present in two of the three clips that I saw. The style over substance argument of 300 threatened to creep into the amazing pieces you watched right as the lights came up. I really want to see the finished film before I pass judgment because what I saw was incredible, but what I felt was detached.

If the film, as a whole, can match the quality of what I saw during the Dr. Manhattan sequence, we not only have a faithful comic book movie on our hands, we have an Oscar winner. Those five minutes moved me more than anything in this summer’s The Dark Knight. But if that sequence is an exceptional highlight in a film defined more by its strict visual faithfulness and slow mo kung fu than its cinematic pacing, we’re in for a pretty good movie that could have been great. Right now, I’m forecasting something along the lines of The English Patient of Superhero movies: admirably entertaining, but in the end, too long-winded and self-aware.  Nothing that I saw however, preemptively exempts Watchmen from possibly being something greater: The Citizen Kane of Superhero movies. And forget what you think. Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made.

Watchmen is being released nationwide by Warner Brothers on March, 6th 2009.

Neil Burger’s last film The Illusionist might be best remembered by readers of this site as “2006’s Magician Movie Not Directed By The Dark Knight Guy And Starring Wolverine vs Batman”. I myself never saw the film, starring Ed Norton and Paul Giamatti, but know that people enjoyed it and it was nominated for several big awards. Here in Hollywood, a lot of the film’s reputation centered over the fighting that occurred between the film’s producers during award season regarding the back end. 

If The Illusionist is at all as satisfying a film as The Lucky Ones, I would suggest that you quickly add it to your Netflix cues. Not necessarily the type of movie that Geekscape covers, The Lucky Ones tells the story of three soldiers returning home. Two of them, Colee and TK (played by Rachel McAdams and Michael Pena respectively) are young soldiers on thirty days injured leave. Cheever, played by Tim Robbins, is going home for good after suffering a back injury while working on the base.

After flying together to the States, the three soldiers are met with plane delays and decide to carpool as far as Cheever’s home in St. Louis. Each of these soldiers is wounded, Colee having been shot in the leg and TK having caught shrapnel in the groin, but the healing process has yet to really begin for any of them. During the course of their voyage, which takes them as far as Vegas, the physical injuries that they each carry give way to a shared realization that the homes that they left behind are not the ones that they’ve returned to.

The movie sounds good so far, but not anything that we haven’t seen before on Lifetime. And in the current national climate, a movie like this would be easy prey for falling towards the political left or right. But maybe what impressed me the most, with the strong performances being a very close second, is that Neil Burger and Dirk Wittenborn’s script doesn’t swerve to the left or right. Like the three passengers in the mini-van (the setting for the large majority of the film), The Lucky Ones cuts right through the middle of our country and plows straight ahead. When the voyage is about healing and finding common bonds between diverse individuals, there’s no energy wasted falling on one side of the aisle or the other.

The script and story go between funny moments and tense, emotional pieces very well and the cast works through each sequence handily. If you guys have yet to jump on the Michael Pena bandwagon, this movie should convince you that he’s one of the best young actors in Hollywood. Rachel McAdams gets some of the biggest laughs in the film but then handles the most heart wrenching sequence and biggest blow to her character. Tim Robbin’s Cheevers gets a giant wallop delivered to him early in the film but he comes out of it shaken (probably defeated if not for the help of his two new friends) but with a very focused direction and goal. Colee, when she ultimately gets smacked around in the film, doesn’t have the kind of perception or handle as Cheevers does at twice her age. And you see her take a crash course over the length of the scene while coming to terms with the way things are.

In the end, how does The Lucky Ones serve us, the Geekscapists? Well, I recommended the film to my parents and that’s a good first step. Another good application for the movie is as a non-threatening, relationship date film that will spark conversation that is less political in nature and more about the decisions you would make if caught in the midst of large, life decisions involving loyalty, duty and the family. This isn’t a first date movie but a relationship movie that puts a big focus on individuals thrown into the air by a political situation who search for a place to land on a runway that is unlit and unfamiliar. As they guide each other back onto their own feet, you find a movie that could have gone the familiar route of clichéd imagery and emotional manipulation to provoke a response but instead took the higher ground of unexpected but satisfying storytelling and carefully handled character work.

It’s not Wolverine vs Batman, but it does its job well.

Oh man. What the hell? I thought that they were going to bring Heroes back with a vengeance for Season 3?!? Everything we heard in advance was promising, right? “Villains”! That sounds cool! We get some Villains to counteract our Heroes this time around. Man, I couldn’t have been more excited to fall back into this show after a disappointing second season.

So why did I turn it off after just one hour of the two hour season premier event? To put it bluntly: it sucked. Not “Season 2 sucked” either. A whole new level of Not Good TV: The Season 3 Suck. It’s bad. And from what I can tell, it’s only getting worse.

When heroes first premiered, it was so promising, so engaging. “What would happen… (wait for it)… if REAL people… got superpowers!” What do you think? Huh? Huh? Well, for one season (or maybe just 3/4ths of one season) it worked to satisfy our collective curiosity.  But let’s all remember: this is TV. Sooner or later, “real people” are going to start acting like “stupid mothafuckin’ people”. Just look at The Real World. That show had “real people” for about 3 seasons. And then “stupid mothafuckin’ people” for about 40.

Heroes is no different. Things started going south for me well in advance of the unpopular Season 2. Peter “Little Nicky” Petrelli, early in Season 1, has visions of blowing up New York City as a human bomb. He doesn’t know what it means. But he knows it’s coming. All the signs point to it. So what does he do in his journey from Real Person to Stupid Mothafuckin’ Person as the season progresses? Well, I’ll tell you what he DOESN’T do… get his ass out of New York City! That season finale to Season 1 was freakin’ Ewoks, man. Ewoks! And for those of you who don’t know Geekscape Talk, here’s the listing in the Geekscape Dictionary:

• Ewoks (Adj.) – Warning sign that the current high level of quality is rapidly going to go down hill.

Yeah. The end of Season One was Ewoks. The Second Season was… I don’t know what it was. But at least it was only 11 episodes of I don’t know what it was. And hey, it ended on a cliffhanger: Nathan, Peter “Twitch” Petrelli’s politico brother, gets shot at the podium during a news conference.

So Season 3… Villains. I was so damn excited! Let’s start The Spoiler Warning. But trust me. This is beyond spoiling.

We start out with our first Villain in the opening moments: Evil Future Peter Petrelli from Season One’s best episodes (aka “We’ve never read Claremenont and Byrne’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” 2-parter) running through what is said to be 4 Years From Now and ending up at the other end of a gun being pointed at him by… FUCKING WAIT FOR IT! Dark Claire! How bad ass is that!?! Why would we ADD new “Villains” when we already are paying THESE guys!?! Well… because the audience is already WAY tired of “these guys”. Peter… well… I’m sorry, Milo. But the Little Nicky lip stretch and “the twitch” do not constitute either desperation or thought in this viewer’s eyes. They constitute epilepsy. If I saw someone on the street with mannerisms in any way close to what I’ve witnessed Peter doing since the beginning of Heroes… I’d call 911. Or I’d try and trap him in my magic Little Nicky flask. And this season, the promise is that you’ll be exposed to this twice, with normal Peter (who soon gets trapped in someone else’s body) and Bad Peter. I’ve got news: he’s been pretty bad all along.

What about nice, real American girl Claire? Where is she? Well, she’s spending the first third of the episode with a newly annoying single-note Sylar recreating (or actually just insulting the HELL out of) John Carpenter’s sequence from the first Halloween film. Yeah. She runs into a closet and ties it closed while clutching a butcher knife. “Hey! We did an homage to geek culture!” No. You hit Geek Culture over the head and tried to steal its lunch money. We hate you. Am I alone in wishing that Sylar had died at the end of Season One? Am I nuts in thinking how great an opportunity it would have been to inject the show with some new energy?

Tim Kring claims to not having read any comic books when developing the ideas in Heroes. Then why does it all seem so tired and derivative? Why is this show losing steam and viewers as fast as The Flash? Why are you punishing me? You want to hear stories about “real people getting powers”? Stan Lee and Jack Kirby beat you to it by over forty years. Peter Parker, Bruce Banner and Matt Murdock are real people given extraordinary powers. What the audience wants to see, especially after a summer featuring Iron Man and The Dark Knight, is something fresh. There was nothing fresh about where Heroes was headed last night.

Remember that in the current day, the time elapsed between Season Two and Season Three is the length of a single gunshot into Nathan Petrelli’s chest. We find out in the opening minutes that the shooter is Future Evil Peter, shooting his own brother before he can reveal the existence of super powered Heroes living among them, which would later cause their kind to go into hiding, persecuted by society. You’ve never read an X-Men comic book? REALLY!?! You’re setting yourself up for some serious backlash. Perhaps if Tim Kring had read a comic book, it would have helped him avoid the pitfalls that comic book storylines usually fall into, mainly long droughts of originality.

The silly just gets sillier as we catch up with our good buddy Mohinder and our favorite illegal immigrant Maya “The South of the Border Stink Eye” Herrera. Mohinder has just dropped Heroes Detector Molly (and the requirement of having an extra cast member in this already bloated cast) off and is ready to go back to experimenting in order to cure Maya of The Stink Eye. The good news is, in the length of time it took for Nathan Petrelli to get shot, Maya has already been cured of most of her accent and has discovered American Apparel. She’s decked out in it from head to toe. We might as well call her Tiffany Stink Eye from now on. She’s 100% Anglo, baby. And Mohinder’s such a good guy that Season One and Two’s moral compass, upon discovering a break through in the super power formula, not only ignores Maya’s request for a cure but INJECTS HIMSELF WITH IT LIKE A DRUG ADDICT TURNING HIMSELF INTO “DAVID CRONENBERG’S THE FLY-HINDER”! What is going on!?! Are you sick of this show yet!?!

But what about Hiro? Where’s our loveable racial stereotype? If Maya can be cured of her rich accent from Season Two, can Hiro be cured? Well, we don’t know, because he’s in Japan with Ando discovering his dead father’s locked away formula and then letting it get swiped from him by a brand new Villain. That’s right! We FINALLY get a brand new Villain! And she’s… ANNOYING AS HELL. She’s a Flash-style Speedster with the attitude and attire of a NYC bike messenger. It makes sense, right? Well, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet, Mr. Kring. Everyone wants to hit NYC bike messengers with their cars and hates them. And not in a “she’s a villain and you’re supposed to hate her” kind of way. More like in a “I just think everything about that person is forced and sucks and I would rather see their head go under my tire than continue to deal with them” kind of way. And what’s wrong with her neck? Why is she twitchy? This isn’t The 5th Element. Here, acting like that is just annoying.

With promise like this, I couldn’t wait for the rest of the Villains to show up. But by the end of the first episode, all we get is one of Ma Petrelli’s nightmare visions and Nathan finds God. Ugh. Did anyone else groan at the News Reporter saying “all over the news AND Youtube”? What the hell!?! NBC Universal, the makers of Heroes, owns Youtube, but when more people are watching Youtube than are watching this Ewok’ed-ass show, do you REALLY need to advertise here?!?

Lame duck all around, I say. The episode ends with a familiar style Mohinder narration. But this time around, the Ewoking has matured to full on Prequel and the writing is SO overdone that it’s almost unlistenable. It’s like a retarded kid riding a jackhammer trying to read a haiku off of a street sign a block away. I tried listening to it while watching images that didn’t evoke anything in me and all I got were phrases like “The Eagle Clam Chowder Sprays Power Down Deep In All Of Us While Getting Pleasure On The Matterhorn”. You laugh. But this phrase is actually BETTER, LESS OVERWRITTEN and MAKES MORE SENSE than anything in the actual voice over!

I think it was time to walk the dogs. But wait! They’re going to hit you in the head with a SECOND EPISODE now that you’re SO PUMPED from the lackluster first! And this episode… we really DO mean we’re going to give you Villains. Honestly. Check it out: all of the Sector 5 villains have escaped! Look at all, uh, four of them. No wait! Don’t go! One of them is Nicki! And she, in the time it took Nathan to get shot, went from being blown up in a house to being the lover of a rich socialite with a Southern accent! How CRAZY is that! That’s CRAZIER THAN THE MOST RANDOM THING YOU’VE EVER SEEN ON LOST, RIGHT? Wait! Come back! Another FULL hour of this pain!

I clicked off the TV set, and Heroes, for the final time and stepped out onto my street. My dogs’ eventual dumps were miniscule in comparison to what I’d just witnessed. All I could think, watching the little guys work them out, was that for some of you, it’s going to be a very long season. Just not for me.