In order for the human spirit to endure, failure, at least occasionally, must be tempered with success.
-PTJ

$19.99 is a small price to pay for so much joy

Watch this:
One of the 7 Wonders of Video Games:

Now go here and read this:
Perhaps the Funniest Video Game Article Ever

Golly, I can't wait to get my grubby little mits on this game.
It really is the little things.

'The Wolfman' Slaughters

I Just saw "The Wolfman" and loved it. It has an incredible amount of respect for its history and echos at least as much Hammer as it does the classic Universal horror film. All the hate for it is befuddling to me. It's a gothic horror melodrama. It's not Saw or the Mummy Returns, thank God, but a wonderful return to the golden age of horror and owes almost as much to Hitchcock's telling of 'Rebecca' as it does to it's 1941 original.

The movie is not without it's flaws. The CG while generally good is too obvious sometimes. A Disingenuous and forced moment ( S P O I L E R A L E R T ) when our hero and heroine kiss betrays the tragedy of the story. It also feels inappropriate. There should be no peace or moments of stolen rest for our heroes. Only tragedy. The kiss feels like a Hollywood annoyance.

The Wolf Man switches back and forth between running on two legs and running on all fours. The latter method of transportation doesn't work and is a feeble attempt bringing a new angle to the monster.
While the absence of the above flaws would make the film more seamless they ultimately don't detract from the escape into 'anything's possible' world of the Victorian horror monster.

Where The Howling and An American Werewolf in London brought the werewolf movie to new, modern heights, big film disappointments like An American in Paris, The Curse, the vomit inducing Van Helsing and the 'werewolf as action star' driven Underworld series have reduced the lycanthropic legend to a silly puddle of its former self.

Joe Johnston's, at times gleefully violent, entry is not a modernization but a retelling with the modern tools of filmmaking at his disposal. The script is very faithful to the original version's screenplay by German emigre Curt Siodmak.

Rick Baker is a God for returning the look of the actual wolf man to his former glory. Not in almost 30 years has the creature looked this good. To me, always old school, a wolf man is a just that, a cross between a wolf and a man. not a wolf wolf.
I have pined for the days when a wolf man still has his clothes on after his transformation. My days of pining are over.

In honor of Avatar hitting finishing it's 6th week at #1...Here are some reviews that echo my own feelings about the movie

Avatar is quickly on it's way to being the highest grossing movie of all time. This is deceptive because ticket prices are so much higher now than they were even 10 years ago. In actuality half the number of people have seen Avatar than saw Titanic. In adjusted dollars Star Wars is still way ahead of Avatar. So is Gone With the Wind, I believe.

Why rant on this you ask? Because I have to hear about it and see it all the time. It's EVERYWHERE, which means I get to vent my total bewilderment at the success of this film.

Here are some reviews which echo my own feelings about the movie (taken from Rotten Tomatoes):

- "Cameron’s signature achievement may have been to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the oldest of all Hollywood maxims: all the money in the world is no substitute for fresh ideas and a solid script."

- "...everything about the story, the setting, the dialog, and the parts that aren't purely visual is awful."

- "Avatar is overlong, dramatically two-dimensional, smug and simplistic."

- "Breaks technological ground with stunning visuals, but disappoints on story and characters - which still do matter."

- "Adjectives such as "beautiful" and "breathtaking" have been thrown at Avatar, and they're apt. But I'll throw in a third B: Boring."

- "... a largely humorless movie that plays like the sensitive white man-goes-native saga, Dances with Wolves in Outer Space."

- "It's impossible to fully consider James Cameron's long-in-the-making eco-opus Avatar without examining the film's technological wonders and storytelling blunders separately."

- "At times it's wince-inducingly weak, and no amount of lush visuals can disguise that. Nor can they disguise how second-hand everything feels."

- "There's just not enough here to make a complete and satisfying movie experience."

- "The technical wizardry is at the service of a recycled plot and a script rife with cardboard characters...and dialogue that sounds as though it had been lifted from the pages of a third-rate comic book."

BULLET POINTS: Unchartered 2 and God of War 3 - My first PS3 Post!

The only Playstation I've owned is the PS1. The most significant time I've spent on a PS3 is at Best Buy. I really haven't been all that impressed. I haven't disliked any of it, it's just that the 360 is more generally suited to my taste.
I have also had no genuine interest in the exclusives the Sony has had to offer for the PS3.

The other night I went over to my friend James and Mary's house. They have a PS3 (and a 360). I spent a little bit of time with Unchartered 2 and thought it wasn't a bad game but was so underwhelmed by the graphics that I actually forgot I was playing the sequel and, for a minute, thought I was playing the first game. James then asked me if I wanted to play the God Of War demo. I said sure.

(Here come the Bullet Points!)

* The graphics for Unchartered 2 - Meh.

* The graphics for God of War III - Outstanding.

The character design, environments and scale of GoW3 is phenomenal. Now, I haven't played the first two GoW's and my friend tells me that GoW2 and GoW33 aren't all that far apart similar in style and play. This is the first one for me and I still haven't gotten over it. For the very first time this console generation I have a little tugging in my tummy that wants me to get a PS3 so I can play GoW3 (will not happen due to finances).

On a side note:
Here's a comparison, from GamingBolt showing screens for Alan Wake (360) and Heavy Rain (PS3) both look good and they both look better than Unchartered 2:

Click Here for the Alan Wake and Heavy Rain Screenshot Comparison

I don't really care whether or not I'm playing a game with hyper realistic graphics (which it seems that neither game really does). Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, for my money is the best execution of photo realism I've seen in a game. I tend to enjoy stylized, artistic graphics like Bioshock, Arkham Asylum, Street Fighter IV, Fallout 3, and now(!) God of War 3. Hyper realism is also great for driving games. I think it's cool to see the attempts being made and to see the evolution of graphics playing out before us (I love this longer console cycle)but the particular style of graphics to me aren't as important as the care and expertise put into them. And, if Unchartered 2 is any indication, they still have a while to go before human characters start looking real.

The Death of My Father

My father died. He was the greatest person I ever knew. The smartest, sweetest, most compassionate, old school, open to knew things, always there for you like a rock kind of man. He brought as much of Brighton Beach Brooklyn to Los Angeles as he could. I'm honored to carry the light lilt of the accent I got from him. It goes largely unnoticed but it's a testament to him and his time when someone asks me "are you from N.Y.?" I am his legacy. My sister and I. Charles Gordon was his name, I called him dad or chuck and his good buddies called him Charly, I wish I had called Him Charly. When he went into the hospital I only called him Daddy.



He lived and workd only a couple of miles from where I lived. We had coffee together often (Black regular coffee with 1 Sweet and Low - he was an old school sacherinne drinker, shooting the shit, talking about politcs and culture and family and movies and me and him and us together. What he did wrong in raising me and what I did wrong in growing up. These conversations, though sometimes heavy, mostly took on a tone of amusement. What we always came to. time and time again was that we loved each other dearly. unconditionally. we were bonded to each other by our connection as father and son and a very powerful, capt. marvel lightning bolt-like bond.

I miss going to the movies with him so much. to say it like that makes it sound as if I can't find my remote control. The thought of never being able to see another movie with him, to never walk in the the hallowed halls with the perfume of popcorn permeating the place, to sit in a darkened theatre and share that experience, sometimes good, sometimes not with him - that's something that will never stop hurting on a level deeper than I previously knew existed.

Here are some of the movies we've seen together:
The Sound of Music
Revenge of the Creature from the Black Lagoon
King Kong
Earthquake
The Towering Inferno
The Kids are Alright
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Midway
The Man Who Would Be King
The 3D version of Creature from the Black Lagoon
Countless James Bond movies.
Outland
Futureworld
Jabberwocky
Rocky
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Fun with Dick and Jane
2001: A Space Odyssey (at the Cinerama Dome when I was 12 no less)
Harold and Maude
Kagemshua

In seeing Public Enemies, I was again reminded that I will never see a nother movie with my Dad, Charly. This is a picture we would have loved watching together. I cried watching it. I miss my daddy.

I Just Got My Third 360 - Second One Takes An E74 Dump

Today at approximately 5pm pacific standard time, I started my umpteenth try at defeating the 3rd stage boss in Ninja Gaiden II. A silvery, railroad trainy, electriky organic, machine-o-death kind of thingy.

And then all of a sudden, like a flash from some kind of Max Headroom-like nightmare my screen fills with vertical lines. Hmm. Bad game disk? (I thought). I could still navigate my way around my 360, but only through a haze of vertical lines. Well, there it was on my Xbox Live menu as well. While wishfully thinking I restarted the machine and there it was. An E74 error message and a blinking red light on the front of my console. Not the dreaded red ring of death ok? But still I knew this was gonna suck. So it tells me to go to the Xbox support site. I do. On the site I find a completely useless page that tells me to unplug everything and replug it back in. I do. Nothing. The page on the support site says that if none of the above solves the problem then I should call tech support. I do. The perfectly pleasant tech support guy tells me he's going to have to start a repair order; that I'm going to have to send in my 360 to be repaired. That's what my $60.00 best buy warranty is for I told him in so many words.

My 360 is my crack cocaine. Throughout the course of my life I've given up almost every vice that a human being could possibly live for. Coke, weed, pills, booze, hallucinogens; and last year, the piece DE resistance, my mind saving sanity preserver: Cigarettes. In order to deal with giving up smokes I took up a previous video game addiction. I figured it's better for me than nicotine. It is. So I can't handle having to wait while Microshit sends me a coffin so I can send them my beloved 360 so I can wait while they basterdize it and send it back to me. No fucking way! I will go on a fucking shooting spree if I have to wait 6 to 8 weeks. So, that's why I got the Best Buy 2 year warranty. I just popped on over to Best Buy and BOOM! No questions asked they brought down a brand new glossy 360 box. And even better? It now comes with Forza 2 (and Marvel Ultimate Alliance) so I get that as sort of a great consolation prize for giving up my game saves which I should have asked If I could swap hard drives cause they would have done it 'cause my buddy LIBERTINA GR1M on Xbox Lve told me I probably could so I drove down there again with my new 120 gig hard drive to swap it for my old one and they said sure but doesn't it figure that my old broken down 360 is no long in the store? In the hour and a half since I swapped, the truck came and swept my old broken down 360 away. You know what? I don't really give a shit. So what if I have to start Ninja Gaiden II over again. Actually I'll be starting Bioshock over for the third time; I'm not all too happy about that. But whatever, I didn't think of swapping hard drives when I initially traded out. I won't make that mistake again because you KNOW that eventually, at some point in time this 360 will take a dump just like my other two did. I have no faith whatsoever in Microsoft as a hardware maker. Two previous consoles; both of 'em died. No faith whatsoever. At least I still have my "prestige".