Resident Evil and 3D

Alright, let me just make one thing clear to you, people who made Resident Evil: Afterlife. If you have, at the end of the last movie, introduced a very large number of clones of the now superpowered protagonist, it is considered a cheap fucking cop out to start the next movie with a short and storywise rather redundant scene in which ten or twelve of them show up to murder some dudes, before blowing them all up, conveniently forgetting that there were another 80 or so, never mention them again and subsequently rob the real one of all her superpowers. If you also forget that she does not have superpowers for the rest of the movie, then you will not only look like incompetent writers, but also tremendously stupid.

Right. As you may have surmised, we went to see the new Resident Evil tonight. It has, as Yahtzee would put it, full 3D up the arse, but I'll get to that later. I had read a few of the reviews printed about this movie, but I rather felt they all missed the point. It seems a bit unfair to mark down a Resident Evil movie by a lot because the story is bad, while also remarking on the great effects and awesome fight-scenes. Story has never been a very strong point in the RE-movie franchise, and they have really only had effects and violence to sell. This one did this pretty well, although it was a bit hampered by the new and improved 3D.

There are of course several situations where people get to hold the idiot ball. Let me list a couple:
1. If you spend time, effort, bullets and a life to get into an armory stocked full of military grade weapons, do not, I repeat, do not leave the room bringing nothing but three pistols, some explosives and one sub-machine gun. Especially not if you are there to get weapons for eight people against a horde of thousands of zombies. Bring automatic weapons for everyone.
2. If you are holding a motivational speech in front of roughly 20 helicopters, each stacked with roughly 20 armed and armored soldiers, and you use the phrase "This will be the fight of your lives", you had better make sure you are not talking about them fighting about a hundred people standing about on top of a cargo ship, if those hundred people have two pistols and a pair of sawn-off shotguns to go around. It will not be the fight of anyone's life. It will not be a fight.

Now, for the 3D aspect. I personally felt that it was nice when it was not doing anything spectacular. I liked it when it was just subtly showing distance between characters in a crowd or some similar neat little effect. Whenever it did it's gimmicky bullshit of making someone point a gun at the audience, just so we would remember that we are watching a 3D movie, I felt that it broke the immersion. Even more so when I had to turn my head to look straight at the edge of the screen to make the 3D work properly over there. You don't want to remind people that they are watching this through a medium, you want to immerse people in what you are showing them.
Not to mention the times the 3D just plain didn't work properly, although that was thankfully rather rare. More common was 3D where there was no reason for there to possibly be 3D, like on the monitor of a guy in a security station. How exactly is his job made any easier by the fact that the face of the guy he is talking to is 30 cm further away from his face than the rest of the screen, where all the vital blocks of information is? Why does this feature exist in his workplace?

Right, while we are on the subject of effects: It would actually be nice if there was one single moving organism in the entire movie that was not either 1: One of the few surviving uninfected humans, or 2: A very large boss-type character showing up, fight without splitting it's face open. Seriously, every single zombie did this. They looked a lot like the bloodsuckers from S.T.A.L.K.E.R, which got old really fast. I'm sure there are things doing this in the games, but why couldn't you have some of the normal zombies from the first three movies? What was wrong with them? Did they all die?

Conclusively, I can't say that 3D was worth it, really. It had a few neat, subtle things about it, but the times it didn't work or overworked itself pretty much undid it all by breaking the immersion.

Oh, right, I almost forgot. It was a fun, but pretty strange, touch to have the guy sitting locked up in prison claiming not to be a criminal, and having a fully hatched plan to break out of it, be played by Wentworth Miller.

Boll and Quality?

Uwe Boll made a good movie?
A good movie by Uwe Boll?
Uwe movie Boll good?
Boll good movie Uwe?
Movie Uwe Good Boll?
...
My mind fell off.

Star Wars Holiday Special and DEATH!

GAAH! FUCK! EVERYONE MUST DIE! JUST DIE! MAKE IT STOP! SHOOT EVERYTHING!

Storygnomes and Payne

Let me just get this one thing straight with all of you movie-producers who regularly read this blog:
If you take a game and make a movie out of it, and upon looking back at your work realize that you have managed to make the story and the characters worse than they were in the game, you have failed miserably. This is much more evident if the game you took only gives the player three ways to interact with things: Jumping over them in slow-motion, punching buttons/cabinets/doors, or shooting them in the face. How you managed to take this, on the surface rather simplistic premise, and ruin the otherwise actually surprisingly good story, is beyond me.
What was your intention, really? You take an archetypal anti-hero who shoots more or less everyone he sees, while wearing a smug grin and tossing around dark city noir poetry made up on the fly, and make sure he has virtually no discernible personality, who only starts killing people for real after he almost ODs on some superdrug? How is this in any way an improvement?

Murders and Births

An impromptu C-Section performed by an unschooled pit fighter/murderer, with a pocketknife, on his murdered wife, next to the dying body of the man who just killed both the wife and the husband, and who was in turn killed by the husband, and all to the tunes of "You are my sunshine".
I think that is just about the most disturbing scene I have ever seen in any movie.
It was awesome.

Warstriders and Spoilerfest

I'm not sure if there's anyone reading this blog who hasn't seen Transformers: Revenge of The 9-Year-Old, but if there are, then avert your eyes.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first. The fight scene in the forest reminded me once again of why we really need to have a proper Warstriderbattle in Exalted, because "duh".

Now, for everything else. First of all, it seems Michael Bay found a magical well of youth, because he must be at least 35 years younger than he is supposed to be. The supposed jokes of the movie are not really of the kind aimed at nine-year-olds, as much as the kind thought up by nine-year-olds. Why do the Retard-Bots have huge ears and buck-teeth? In fact, why are there Retard-Bots? It is pretty clear we are supposed to hate these guys, everyone in the movie does. The only moments of their screen time that I liked was when one of them was shot, and the other eaten. Sadly, it didn't stick. At least Bumblebee beat them a bit.
Why does the huge And-I'll-Form-The-Head-Bot have balls? It was pretty clear they didn't have a purpose.
Why did they steal an antagonist from "Terminator 36: We Ran Out Of Cool Shit Ages Ago"? The Look-Like-A-Girl-Bot was useless, stupid, and broke the point of the Transformers.
Why did they try to fool people into thinking they were making a properly bad teen-movie out of it, just to ignore everything that happened during that part, except for the useless sidekick? Why did they bring the useless sidekick?
Why did the original Primes sacrifice themselves to make a prison, if said prison could be shot apart by a single blast from an, as far as I know, not very combat-focused Autobot?
And why the fucking hell can't Michael Bay think up a plausible goal for the antagonist? What the hell? I mean, Megatron still seemed to be in it for the energy, to revive their planet, but the Fallen mostly seemed to like demolishing suns. Meh.
I had more things to add, and I might remember them later.
As a final note: Fuck You Translator. Fuck You.

On movies. And beards.

I'm going to write a bit about movies, because I'm bored and I don't have anyone to rant at.
I watched Get Rich or Die Tryin' yesterday, because a friend told me it was pretty good a while back.
This is not a phrase I use regularly, but Jesus Fucking Christ did it suck!
I was expecting something similar to 8 Mile, a movie that I actually liked, but damn. Throughout the entire movie, I was waiting for him to learn to sing properly, or at least write proper lyrics, but no. The lyrics are just as horrible when he's 12 as when he's grown up. And that's just one of the problems. I checked on IMDB, and, apparently, it's worth 3.5 stars. I really can't see why, there are just no good things about this movie. At all.
Moving on:

SAW IV.
I want it. Gief.

I watched Kiss of Death the other day. Cage is, as always, badass and awesome. Only this time he's got a beard as well. It also had Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson, and the main character's last name is "Kilmartin". I rest my case.

8MM was good, Cage again. Less badass, less beard, more morality. Better movie, all in all. Peter Stormare had a beard this time. It's all good.

Saw Casino the other day as well, haven't seen that one since I was 11 or so. Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, both awesome. No good beards, though.

I've suddenly decided to stop boring people with whatever movies I've seen recently.
I should go buy stamps, but that's about as fun as listening to 50 cent, only it takes longer. And the weather is boring. Bah. I updated the Video of the Now, but apparently it lags a bit. Nevermind, the song is still good.
And that, my friends, is the end of the news.

EDIT: Ok, never mind that I decided to stop boring people, I have Got to post this. This is Important. It is also rather spoiler-heavy, not that anyone should care.
I have just seen the hands down Manliest movie have ever seen. Possibly the manliest movie in all of human history. The title is manly: Shoot 'Em Up. The main plot is about guns. It has awesome one-liners. The main character doesn't even have a real name, he just calls himself Smith. He kills people with carrots. He shoots people. He shoots people, using carrots. He even shoots a guy five times, without even using a gun. He keeps telling everyone what he really hates. He crashes cars, he beats people up, he jumps from bridges and airplanes, he creates makeshift traps of death, and he delivers a baby while shooting people, and telling the mother that he hates guys in ponytails.
I am in awe. I didn't realize it was possible to create something this manly.
Go see it. Right now. No, you don't have a valid excuse, just go.