Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 13th, 2008
While nowhere does anyone actually say it, Caroline In The City is obviously inspired by/ripped off from the popular newspaper comic strip Cathy. Each episode, for a time anyway, would begin with an animated scene from one of the “Caroline” strips. The topic mostly deals with the pitfalls of being a single
Posted in: Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on August 13th, 2008
Gaming in the Olympics, Disgaea goes cheap, and the true reason why Final Fantasy is on Xbox 360 - Welcome to the column that is an Olympic gold medalist in Speed Snoring & Sarcasm (and did it with a broken friggin neck!) known as Dare to Play the Game.
Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. 52/27/??/??. That’s right. Two of my characters this week are currently doing the limbo dance. Talloween & Magkick. Magkick was the recipient of a doomed server from the start while Talloween has been on again / off again because it is very hard to solo a priest. These characters are going to be recreated. Magkick will go off the PVP server and be re-created on my usual Horde place over @ Killrogg. His professions will change from tailoring & skinning to tailoring & leatherworking. (My hunter will do the skinning for him) The priest will be recreated and on the same server. But on a different account with different professions (currently mining & jewelcrafting). This will enable him to play with my girlfriend’s characters and get a reliable buddy to quest & get gear with. My girlfriend will also be creating one or two characters on the new account @ Killrogg so she can go quest with my three characters over there. I’m kinda trying this on a trial basis and we’ll see how it plays out. I’m not deleting my mains (52 Troll Rogue / 27 Blood Elf Hunter) and neither is she (70 Draenei Hunter & a multitude of others). We are just trying out what would happen when we quest together. Let’s hope it goes smoothly.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 11th, 2008
There's much ado on the case's copy that this was a major inspiration for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the similarities are hard to miss. Like Ang Lee's film, this 1966 effort is a lush period piece with gorgeous, rich colours and elaborate wire work. And, as in the later film, the central character is a female warrior, in this case an officer of the law sent to rescue a kidnapped victim from a clan of ruthless (but not always terribly bright) bandits. There’s a male aid here, too, in the form of an apparent drunken bum who is, of course, in reality a martial arts master.
There is a lot of pleasure to be had here, and the film has considerable charm, though some viewers might be put off by the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of silly, knockabout comedy and harsh violence. Modern viewers might also be a bit disappointed in the fight scenes, which don’t have the grace of the later movie, and they can also be very brief. Nonetheless, a good time at the flicks.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on August 9th, 2008
Mario Bava is undergoing something of a revival of interest these days, what with Tim Lucas’ magisterial book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark and the recent Anchor Bay box sets. Over the last little bit, I’ve been re-watching some of Bava’s films, along with a friend who hasn’t seen them before, and I was struck by a comment he made about Blood and Black Lace: that this was the first horror film he’d seen where the victims had no existence other than as victims. This is true, and it made me think about some of the other things that distinguish Bava’s films from the films they would influence.
Released in 1964, Blood and Black Lace is an early giallo. Its Italian title translates as “Six Women for the Assassin,” which is an even more accurate description of what the film is all about. Allow me to quote Phil Hardy on the film: “Bava’s work operates almost exclusively on the level of cinematic style. His films are as plotless and scriptless as it is possible for non-avant-garde cinema to be, using the strict minimum necessary to motivate the mise-en-scène of lusciously flamboyant sado-voyeuristic operas. In this picture the audience is no longer asked to care about who gets killed – the title announces and summarizes the action – and the killer, in his featureless mask, is merely the faceless representative of the male spectator as he stalks, one after another, a series of women guilty of nothing less than provoking desire.”
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 8th, 2008
Why god must you do this? Why does Hollywood in all its limited wisdom try to remake any and everything with the hopes that it will be good, when it just winds up becoming another EPIC FAIL? They’ve done it with The Grudge, they’ve done it with The Eye, and now I hear they might be remaking Oldboy and The Host. We’re coming up on sacred cow territory here, and quite frankly, I don’t know why these films have to be “Americanized” to appeal to the unwashed masses; I thought the whole point of them was to be appreciated on their own merits. But sure enough, the horror film genre is guilty of cannibalizing product like anyone else. See what I did there?
Moving on, The Eye is based on the 2002 Hong Kong film Gin gwai, but Tom Cruise’s CW Production studio bought the American rights, and Sebastian Gutierrez (Snakes on a Plane) adapted the screenplay for American audiences, in a film that David Moreau and Xavier Palud (Them) directed. Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba, The Love Guru) is a classically trained violinist who has been blind most of her life. Upon receiving a corneal transplant (the eyes people, work with me here), she starts to see visions that shock and terrify her. Her sister Helen (Parker Posey, Best In Show) doesn’t know what to do for her, and her doctor (Alessandro Nivola, Grace is Gone) thinks she’s crazy, even though she walks around with strange markings on her hands and arms. So she tries to find out where her donor eyes came from, and the person who had them before saw unimaginable horror, and those visions are transferred to Sydney.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 8th, 2008
"Space...The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 8th, 2008
For as much as I might viscerally disagree with the creation of a film or its sequel, I lay much of the blame at you, the viewer and movie-going public. You created the furor around the Step Up series of films. You all went in droves to the first film when it was released in August 2006, when movies were winding down in the blockbuster season and thus helped it make $65 million domestically and more than $110 worldwide. It’s your fault that another film was inevitable, so in the down-turn of this past February, we got a second one. That one made about the same domestically, but made $30 million or so more and almost brought in $150 million worldwide. Count on the fact that another 90-minute film about teens dancing will be made and that the Step Up trilogy (I threw up in my mouth a little when writing that) will be complete.
Step Up 2 was written by Toni Ann Johnson (Mean Father) and Karen Barna, which begs the overall question of why TWO people needed to write a movie about dancing, but I digress. John Chu (When The Kids Are Away) directed. Andie is played by Briana Evigan, and if the name is familiar to you, she’s the daughter of Greg Evigan of BJ and the Bear fame. Briana does not look like a chimp, for the record. She decides to become friends with Chase (Robert Hoffman, She’s the Man) at a school the two go to in Maryland. They try to join an exclusive dance crew named the 410 and are rejected, so they start their own dance crew to go against the 410 in a dance competition. That’s the story, but the main focus is on the film and the dancing. The dancing carries the film from beginning to end and is peppered excessively throughout, and that’s what people cared for and what people saw.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 8th, 2008
Family Ties is likely remembered most as the series that launched the career of Michael J. Fox. There’s no question that he owes a great debt to Alex Keaton. It’s almost a bit awkward now to watch him as this young, extremely conservative teenager after Fox has spent so much of his life as a liberal poster boy in the last couple of elections. Politics aside, it’s hard not to credit his performances in Family Ties and the Back To The Future films for launching him into a well deserved lucrative career. The Michael J. Fox issue, however, might hide some of the other assets the show had going for it in its time. For one of the first times parents were portrayed as humanly flawed, and families were not the perfectly functional institutions most of these shows described. Up until Family Ties, these households were either perfect little examples of American ideal or they were so dysfunctional that they could hardly be considered families at all. This show obviously went for a bit of realism.
Posted in: Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on August 6th, 2008
Death of Sierra, No Yoda vs Vader, and Pre-Owned Sales going extinct? - Welcome to the column that is about to start a rant the size of Barbara Streisand’s nose before the surgery known as Dare to Play the Game.
Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. 52/27/22/14. Every character this week in Warcraft with the exception of my hunter got some love. My troll rogue marched and hit level 52 with help from the Hinterlands and earned his first useable trinket. My blood elf mage stormed six levels and made his way into the Ghostlands. Even the dwarf priest who had not seen action for at least a month got some good shoulders & found his way questing again in Redridge. I think my major accomplishment this week was what I learned about spellcasters. I hit a point with my mage this week where I died about 5 times in one hour. It was around level 9 ½. No matter where I went, I was clearly overmatched. So again and again I met my WoW maker. Each time, I learned more about the character and then finally I hit 10. Level 10 for a mage is a big deal early on and opens up the playing field. Frost Nova became my new friend and I only died once for the rest of the weekend. I also made the decision right there to go Frost Spec. Yes, I know most mages go fire spec until they hit 70 but have you ever known me to do what everybody else does? Let’s see, Troll Rogue Combat Spec (most go Subtlety from what I’ve seen). A Hunter, Marksmanship build (everybody and their dog goes Beastmastery). The Priest? Discipline Spec (most go Shadow). So, it’s little wonder that a Mage for me would go Frostie. Mmmmm, Wendy’s anyone?
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on August 2nd, 2008
Flipping through the latest issue of Rue Morgue, I happened on a capsule review that mentioned how most grindhouse fare (whether actual or neo) rarely delivered on its promises. This is, of course, absolutely true, and I don’t for a moment pretend that this comes as news to anyone reading these words. I do want to consider this factor from two angles, though.
The first is that the fact that we all know this is in itself telling. Many film fans of my generation would have likely grown up knowing ONLY of the promises. We would see the posters and the ads in the paper, but whether because we were too young, or the movies weren’t playing nearby, or for a dozen other possible reasons, we would never actually get to see the movies themselves. Result: near-mythical status for these forbidden-fruit films. But now, thanks to the magical world of the DVD, just about every film we could ever imagine is now available in immaculate prints. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we can finally see these movies. On the other, seeing them invariably punctures the mythological bubble. Nonetheless, it is now easier than it has ever been before to see just about anything, anytime. How’s that for a golden age?
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