Three movie reviews!

So I now have all the movie channels on my cable, so you get to hear my reviews of newer movies. Two terrible movies, and one good movie.

The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.
Pretty bad. Constant bursting into song without the previous scenario of the chipmunks performing for an audience. It's like they have tourettes but their verbal tic is singing. The entire concept is retarded. The chipmunks get lifted away from a cruise ship on a kite, then Dave & Ian get lifted away on a hand-glider.
Then for some unexplained reason the cruise ship doesn't follow normal nautical procedure for a man overboard. They make it to an island, meet a crazy person, and sing some more. I actually enjoyed the first two chipmunk movies, this one was garbage.

Breaking Dawn Part 1
I have no idea why I watched this. I think I vaguely wanted to see Bella finally as a vampire. But apparently that's in part 2. Part one was just awful. The acting was terrible, the plot was pointless, and everything wrapped itself nicely in a bow for no apparent reason. I regret watching this movie.

Rock of Ages
I really enjoyed this movie. It's a rock & roll musical using all the classic rock anthems from the 80's. The two leads were excellent no-name actors. Great singers and great performances. The Big name stars (Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, etc) were all great. I actually watched this twice over two days, hell, I'll probably watch it again tomorrow. If you are a fan of musicals, I greatly recommend this one. Alot of movie musicals kinda fall on their face (Looking at you Les Miserable) but this one actually did well. And it's not just a re-hashed version of a broadway production like most of the other successful ones. In the last five years I can only name two movies that did well as original musicals. This movie and The Muppets. Ironically, both movies used the song "We built this city".
So yeah, if you love musicals, watch this movie. If you don't, you should probably skip it.

SPOILERS



Best moments:
-Russell Brand and Alec Baldwin having a love song together then making out.

-Tom Cruise's pet ape "Hey Man"

-Russell Brand pulling a Fonzie with a PAR can.

-"We built this city"/ "We're not gonna take it" Mashup.

The Hangover Part 3 is terrible

Ok, so I finally broke down and watched this movie.

I own the first two, I had hopes that the last movie of the trilogy would be a pleasant send-off to the franchise.

I was terribly wrong.

Firstly, it breaks the previously established formula, in a bad way. In the previous two movies all of the action took place the day after a blackout bender where the three members of the "Wolfpack" try to piece together what it was they did the previous night, while trying to find their lost fourth member.

In Part 3 there is no blackout hangover. Instead there is a ridiculous criminal conspiracy. For no logical reason. The wolfpack gets sucked into the conspiracy because apparently all mobsters are criminally inept.

So the plot has more in common with Ocean's 11 than it does The Hangover.

But the major problem with The Hangover 3 is that it wasn't at all fun.
The first two were hilarious because of the mystery and discovering at each new clue exactly how ridiculously drunk the boys were the previous night. The classic ending to the first two movies being a slideshow of recovered camera photos from the bender.

This third movie had no slideshow. Because there was no bender. There was no awesome experience that they wish they could remember. Just a bunch of awful interactions with criminals that they wish they could forget.

The filmmakers received alot of flak for making part 2 just a ramped up version of part 1. But after seeing three, they really should have stuck to the formula.


And as a bonus, I'm also reviewing Warm Bodies:

Ok, so this one I'm much more pleased with. It's not a great movie, but it's very cute. Somewhere, someone had the bright idea "Hey, why don't we combine Romeo & Juliet with Zombies?"

Honestly, I wouldn't have done it. There are other Shakespearean plays that much more easily lend themselves to a zombie apocalypse. But it had cute romance and vicious zombie horror.
Which is my one major complaint. It's like they tried to make the perfect "Date movie" that had romance for girls and action for guys. The problem is that they both detract from the other. The romance reduced the suspense of Zombie horror, and the Horror added anxiety to the romance.

So they tried to do two things at once, and ended up being ok at both. The Zombie Horror wasn't all that scary, and the Romance was a bit off-putting. But it worked out, kinda.

I'd watch it again, but not sure I'd recommend it to anyone.

Reviewing two terrible movies.

It's that time again. Your lovable Jester suffers through awful movies, and then makes fun of them.
On tonight's Menu:
Win a date with Tad Hamilton.
&
Catwoman.

Yeah, I really suffered for you all this week.

Ok, Wadwth. This is a pretty awful movie. It's the typical Cyrano-esque love triangle where two guys are into one girl, one guy is smart, the other is good looking.
But the "Smart" guy is Topher Grace.
I'm not sure who decided that Eric Foreman deserved a movie career, but he really needs to go back to TV.

For a brief moment I thought this movie might be going somewhere interesting. The "Wise Bartender" played by Kathyrn Hahn, is probably the character in the movie with the most depth. She's the real Cyrano in this story. She's in love with Topher Grace's character who is in love with yet another woman who is herself in love with a movie star.
Yeah, got that?
But here's the amazing part. The bartender advises the man she loves to go chase after the woman he loves, after confessing her love to him. She tells him that his happiness is more important to her than her getting her way.
That's amazingly self-sacrificing.
But of course he ditches the amazing bartender and gets the girl he wanted after she breaks up with the movie star.
The end of the movie is Topher Grace and the female lead dancing in the middle of a road after they finally decide to be together.

Totally boring ending, I'm actually kinda glad the bartender didn't get with him, he's a schmuck.

Then there was Catwoman. Or "Halle Berry attempting to turn her X-Men success into a solo action-star success."

This movie was dreadful.

The character of Catwoman is like a weird letter to Playboy. She's bizarrely hyper-sexual, and completely filled with cat-like behaviors. She purrs, hisses, claws people, licks people, and she's afraid of the rain.

So already really dumb.

Then apparently they couldn't figure a way to do any of the stunts that they wanted Catwoman to do, so they just did her as CGI for half the movie. Every action scene only included Halle Berry on close-up shots or when she was posing between ninja backflips.

So this movie is ridiculous, but it's also terrible. The hero is completely unsympathetic, the "Final villain" is the abused wife of the initial villain. So her change from abused wife to psychopath appears totally random. She's a helpful victim for the first 3/4 of the movie then for the last 1/4 she turns psycho super-villain. Makes no sense, and completely idiotic.
Highlight: Alex Borstein as the ditzy best friend. She was probably the only enjoyable part of the movie.

Final thoughts:
Avoid both of these movies. They were mistakes that they were even made.
Wadwth had a production cost of $22 Million (Probably around $44 million if you include marketing) and it's only made $21 million world-wide to-date.
Catwoman had a production budget of $100 million ($200 mil after marketing) and it only made $82 million world-wide.
So both movies lost money, Catwoman lost alot of money.

Compared to "John Carter" Disney's biggest marketing (or lack thereof) failure. It cost $250 million to make (with minimal marketing added on) and it made $282 million world wide. That movie killed Taylor Kitsch's career, but compared to Catwoman, he actually did pretty well.
I'm amazed that Halle Berry can still find work at all these days after a blunder that big. It's well-established that she's "Hollywood poison" with a Q-rating of "Zero" (even with her Oscar). But dear god, she should have a negative score after Catwoman.

The truth of the internet

So recently I discovered that my blog post from back in 2012 making fun of Doctor Who has been picking up steam in the Whovian crowd.
Amusingly I wrote an earlier post making fun of Harry Potter and nobody seemed to notice.

But one blogger in particular felt the need to yell at me and condemn me for not citing sources or having evidence to back up my claims.

I have a simple response to that:
This is the internet, I don't have to.

More specifically, this is a opinion blog. I'm writing for free, whenever I feel like it. I have no editors to respond to, no deadlines, and no need to cite sources.
The only source I have most of the time is my own opinion.
The reader can choose to believe me, or they can believe that I'm completely full of shit. Both are entirely possible. Hell, I will freely admit that sometimes the things I post are complete bullshit.
In the earlier version of this blog, back when it was just a spare Livejournal account, I posted a bunch of guides to dating back before I had any real experience in the dating world. Well, I had some, but not enough to stand as any sort of authority on the subject. I later revisted one of those posts and took apart my own writing to see what had changed in my perspective.

But here is the real point:
Things you read on the internet are not facts. They are opinions.
It's all a matter of whose opinions you trust.
People often cite wikipedia as the infallible source of all knowledge. And in truth, it is largely accurate. But not 100% of the time.
As a birthday gift one of my former roommates edited wikipedia so that my other roommate's boyfriend was listed as the lead singer of the band White Lion.
We all had a good laugh, but the page stayed that way for over a month before somebody fixed it.

So, not always accurate.

Furthermore, you need to always question when someone lists something as "Fact". That's one major difference between the older generations and the younger ones. The older generations are convinced that they truly know many details about the world. Hell, if you asked them how many planets there are in the solar system they would automatically respond with "Nine".
Depending on how much they keep up with the world around them they might remember and change their answer, but they were trained from birth to believe that there are exactly nine planets in the solar system. This is a fact.

The younger generations are more cautious when using the word "fact". We know that facts aren't always facts. They are beliefs, theories, assumptions, but unless you have personally witnessed it yourself, it is not a fact.
I know that I am wearing black shoes today. That is a fact for me. But for you, it is an assumption. You are assuming that I am telling the truth. I could be lying, my shoes could be brown, I might have decided to go barefoot all day. You don't know because you didn't witness it yourself.

So don't use the word fact unless you witnessed something for yourself. Everything else is just your belief that the source that is providing the information to you is doing so correctly.

History is a great example of this. If you look at the history of many major events, the story is very different depending on which side you are on. The American Civil war is a great example of this. In K-12 school they tell you that it was a war over slavery. In college they explain that it was a war over economics (like most wars.). But if you look at the documentation at the time they were painting two more different pictures. The south claimed to be fighting for the sovereign rights of the individual states, while the north claimed to be fighting to protect the country as a whole. Four different versions of the same event.
Which one was right?
Who knows? We weren't there. All we have are assumptions based on what documentation we can find from the period.

Big lesson:
Don't get butt-hurt over someone's opinion on the internet. It's an opinion, not a fact. Facts directly affect you, opinions directly affect them.

I could say that it's my opinion that the sky is actually purple. That wouldn't change the fact that it looks blue to you.

The future of Dungeons & Dragons

Ok, this is going to be a nerdy/technical column. So if you aren't a gamer, you may want to skip this one.

Ok, so currently Wizards of the Coast are Playtesting their new system "D&D Next". It's usual NDA stuff, so I can't discuss specifics, but what I can do is talk about what went wrong with D&D 4.0 and what should have been done to fix it.

Ok, firstly, let me state that D&D 4.0 was a combination of the last version of 3.5 (commonly referred to as 3.75) and World of Warcraft. Some things were great changes, others were terrible.

1. Stop with the power creep in every additional book they release. Happened in 3.5 and 4rth. If you didn't own all of the latest books there was absolutely no way to compete with those who did. The Core books should be all you need to play, the splat books should be for additional flavor, NOT increased power.

2. @will and Encounter abilities were a good idea. Run with those. Daily abilities of any kind are a terrible idea. We hated them in 3.5, we hated them in 4rth. Just stop it already. We want our characters to go to sleep when we start getting to exhaustion penalties, Not when we run out of Daily spells or heals. Healing surges were a great idea, but just give a per-encounter limit, not a per-day limit. Daily limits break the logical flow of the experience are insanely frustrating. Most parties just pump out their daily abilities as quick as possible, then go to sleep to recharge them. It's stupid.

3. Make utility powers @will rather than encounter or daily. It makes zero sense for a party to go searching for random squirrels to kill so they can get more uses of their encounter powers.

4. Make the Paragon & Epic paths more significant. They were useful, but there should be a significant power jump when a character reaches level 10 and 20. Those are significant numbers, make the upgrades significant.

5. Make fewer magic items, make them scale automatically, and make them more generalized. The Adventurer's vaults contained entire books filled with multiple versions of the exact same item but scaled for different levels and worded differently for each class. That's stupid, just make them generalized and make them scale.

6. Make @will attacks scale faster. There is a large number of levels in 4rth where you absolutely only use your @will powers when you are completely out of encounter or daily spells. Make them a more viable option.

7. Give more and more interesting utility powers. 3.5 got this right. There were a million utility powers and most of them were awesome. They made you feel much more super-hero-like when you used them. In 4rth damn near every power was combat-only, which meant that when you were outside of combat your character was basically a normal guy. Which is not the image you want for high-fantasy roleplaying.

8. Get rid of racial bonus stats. In 3.5 & 4rth the large majority of players picked the race that gave them the statistical advantage. That's not how you should be encouraging your players to play. Their race should be for RP reasons, not stats.

9. Shift the combat focus away from encounter/daily abilities and more towards @will abilities. 3.5 made the great decision of allowing characters like Warblades and Warlocks access to their primary attacks for the majority of the combat. 4rth made the @will abilities mostly worthless and focused on abilities with long cooldowns. This is a bad game design. Players want to always be able to do their primary attacks, they don't want to have to wait to be effective.

10. Ongoing condition saves. This is a stupid system, it added a weird random factor to every battle. Just give the conditions a set duration, not "lasts until a successful check". It drags out combat entirely too long.

11. Loosen the range and movement restrictions. 3.5 could be played entirely without a battle map. 4rth required a battle map for all combats. Find a happy middle ground. You shouldn't need a battle map to fight one opponent. You just need to remember how far away from them everyone is.

12. Fix the invisibility rules. Any opponent that could become invisible became a huge pain in the ass.

13. Reduce the number and complexity of all abilities that players have. Part of why combat took so long was because it took forever to pick the right ability, set up the placement, and then roll out all of the attacks and effects. Make it more streamlined so that combat doesn't last for three hours.

Things that worked in 4rth that the should keep or alter slightly.

1. Half level skill progressions. This gave everyone atleast some ability in every skill. But get rid of the trained only skills. It makes perfect sense for an adventurer to pick up minor ability in things they deal with every day. For a fighter to be unable to identify that zombie despite having killed hundreds of them before because they aren't trained in Knowledge Religion is just stupid.

2. 1 hit point minions. Low hit point minions make combat more interesting. But get rid of the rule where they are immune to AOE. AOE was designed for taking out low level mooks. Let them do their job.

3. Rituals. These were a great idea. It helps to add distance to the game for the party to require ten minutes to set up the teleport spell before teleporting. Plus it makes teleporting away from combat impossible.

11 O'Clock News

My girlfriend and I watched the 11pm news tonight, for the first time in many years. I must say, it's actually rather distressing when you look at it objectively.

When I was a child, the news had a fairly even balance. Bad news versus good news. Then I remember when The media started trying to be sensationalist about nonsense. "Killer Bees" became the buzzword. They started telling us how dangerous these Bees were going to be, how they were making their way towards our community and everyone was going to die.... From Bees.
Clearly they're full of shit, cause it's twenty years later and we're all still here.

Then 9/11 happened. And something change. We got so flooded with horrifying images that the whole country got desensitized to violence. It was horrible, but everyone was riveted to their TV's. And the media took notice. They realized that tragedy would bring in a larger audience than simply reporting the news. So instead of trying to improve everyone's moral they tried to hit us with even more tragedy.

Today when we turned on the news, every single story was a tragedy.

It's not the news anymore, it's a clip show celebrating all the worst things that happened recently. And they don't just report a tragedy once, they report it hundreds of times. They go behind the scenes and they interview the murderer's gardener and his pediatrician and damn near anyone they can find who ever met them.

Here's the truth:
We really don't want to get to know these murderers or terrorists. We want them stopped and we want their victims helped, rescued, or avenged.

But the media's fear-mongering has done more to help terrorists than any suicide bomber ever could.
They've spend years now campaigning for fear.

You want to really give a "Fuck you!" to terrorism?
Ignore them. They do what they do because:
A. We're doing something they don't like
B. We have something they want.
C. They want attention for their cause.
D. And they are batshit crazy.

Don't celebrate them.
Don't play their clips on the news.
Don't show their face.
Don't try to get their life's story.

Just stop them from doing it again, and move the fuck on.

It really irritates me that the NYC government dropped the ball at rebuilding the World Trade Center.
The best thing they could have done would have been to construct the buildings exactly as they were.
With a big-ass American flag in the courtyard.

Like saying to the world "Anything you destroy, we can rebuild. You're not stopping us. All you've done is piss us off."

Instead, with all the fear we get fed every day, the terrorists have won. We're scared. And the terrorists aren't even the cause. It's our own idiot media that's to blame.

The Fourth Estate has failed in it's duties.
It's not keeping the government honest, it's not even keeping itself honest. It's just one massive clusterfuck of skewed statistics and bullshit stories.

If you really want to hear the news, just watch the monologues of the latenight talk shows. They give you a concise digest of what's going on, but they keep it light hearted and brave. The Ruler of North Korea threatened to bomb us.
The media spread the story like wildfire and encouraged us to be afraid of this little man, with little bombs, in his little country.
The Late-night talk shows responded the proper way. They made fun of him. They pointed out how ridiculous the whole thing is.

We could turn that man's country into glass if he actually attacked us. But it's highly unlikely that he will, because he's on the opposite side of the world. He has much more danger from his neighbors to worry about. Attacking us would just be inviting his own destruction. But to remain safe from his neighbors he needs to look powerful. Which he apparently decided to do by trying to look intimidating to us.

And we let him. Our own stupid media backed the story and retold it constantly for weeks.

That's not news. There is always going to be some jackass saber rattling. If it's a real threat, tell us, but even then, it doesn't rate weeks of constant coverage. Cover the story then move onto the next story.

And while you're at it, how about doing some real reporting? Currently all of the TV stations run the exact same national stories. Does nobody pay journalists anymore?
I understand we're in the digital age, but that doesn't mean that everyone should stop doing their own research.

Get the facts straight, and stop trying to scare us.

Review of Sci-Fi's Defiance.

I'll preface this post with this statement:
HUGE GODDAMN SPOILERS.

If you don't want the series premier spoiled, stop reading now, watch the show, then come back and keep reading. Go ahead, I'll wait right here.


Back now? Good.

Ok, first off, despite the negatives I'll be discussing about this show, I'm still interested to see what they will do with it. It has an insane amount of potential, I'm just worried that they won't do anything good with it. The series has a vastly interesting world, much like the Harry Potter series, and like HP the writer seems intently focused on the least interesting parts of the story.

Problem #1 with Defiance.
Dear god, soo many Tropes and Cliche's. It's like the writers went to TVtropes and hit random a bunch of times to decide on the themes of their show.
Listing off the tropes in no particular order, the wrong names, and with whatever evidence I feel like adding:

Gun-for-hire: The main character like Han Solo, Malcolm Reynolds, the crew of Cowboy Bebop, etc, is a wandering hired gun. This is a ridiculously common cliche.

Significant military marking: The main character has a tattoo that shows what famous military unit he was in. Just like Mal Reynolds, Han Solo, etc.

Let's visit the crappy town where I'm Famous: The main character randomly stumbles into town, not recognizing it. But apparently 15 years ago he fought a famous battle in this town and he is instantly popular because of it. Yet none of the residents recognize him, even though he's clearly important to them. This trope of course is famous in Harry Potter and Firefly.

Retired soldier: The main character is an ex-marine/military guy. Like Jake Sully in Avatar, Mal Reynolds, Han Solo, etc. Noticing a trend here?

Alien Side-kick:  Main character has an adopted alien daughter who is his accomplice in everything. Just like Chewbacca, Ney'tri, Ford Prefect, etc.

Side-kick is a kid: Just like in the first Indiana Jones movie, and Ed from Cowboy Bebop. I could list more but I'd have to look them up.

Romeo & Juliet: 30 minutes into the pilot episode it's revealed that there are two rival families and their children are of course in love.

You killed Tybalt!: The Romeo-esque character is accused of killing the Juliet-esque character's older brother. Who was an aggressive douchebag.

The Grand Vizer is always evil: An hour into the pilot it's revealed that the Mayor's aide/adviser is secretly evil and plotting her destruction.

Stop making me feel old: 1/2 hour into the pilot the ex-mayor makes a joke calling the new mayor "grasshopper". Which she doesn't understand (I guess grasshoppers went extinct?).

I was one week from retirement: The city sheriff gets killed and he's clearly really old.

Hooker with a heart of gold: The owner of the town brothel is the mayor's sister and one of the most blatantly obvious good-guys in the show.

The MacGuffin: Not only do they have the vaguely explained doomsday weapon that everybody wants, but's it's actually an Orb. How much more obvious can they get?

Reluctant lawman: After the sheriff is killed the main character reluctantly accepts the job. Just like Wyatt Earp.

I'm leaving you to die, just kidding: This happens twice. First the main character & sidekick leaves the town to be destroyed, then he has an attack of morals and returns with the MacGuffin but the sidekick leaves him to die. Then She has a whooping case of morality and she comes back at the last second with reinforcements who save the day and give the heroes enough time to activate the MacGuffin. This is most famously used in Star Wars a New Hope. Han Solo leaves the rebellion to die, then comes back at the last second, rescues Luke, who then blows up the Death Star.

I'm in it for the reward: Mal Reynolds and Han Solo own this trope. The main character promises to track down a murderer, as long as they pay him for it.

Jinkies!, It was that sneaky former ______ all along.: The villain who arranged most of the problems in the episode was the ex-mayor and mentor to the current mayor who is secretly a psychotic "evil plan for the benefit of all mankind" mastermind. The character was unmasked to the audience, but the protagonists remain clueless.

Problem #2
Please pick one plot and run with it.
The pilot episode had one A plot, which was a murder mystery that never gets solved but ends with a climactic battle. But it also had a dozen B plots, none of which went anywhere. I think they were trying to set up all of the A plots for all future episodes at once. Rather than doing the more standard formula of inserting the A plot for next week as the B or C plot for this week.

All of that being said, I'm still going to watch next week's episode. The writing is terrible, but the setting is amazing. I hope they some how figure out something good to do with it, but I kindof doubt it.