Update
Well where to begin. Its been 3 months since I've posted but even then I was writing little of consequence. In the past this page has mostly been a space for me to tell people my opinion on various pieces of pop culture and then as a page usually to complain about anything that I wanted to complain about usually relating to doctors or the stupidity of various bureaucracies. Now I've watched a ton of movies since my last review and haven't really posted about any of them. Beth and I have watched a ton of TV too. I rarely feel the need to rant about things on a public forum. Part of this is because my readership has fallen off markedly. If only a few people are going to read something it almost feels like I can handle any updates in an e-mail or by phone calls.
So I guess I'll go in a sort of general fashion and update randomly assuming someone who knows very little about my life.
Rachel is making a lot of progress lately. Her autism has become more obvious in that people who don't live with her can now see the odd behavior but to me she has overcome a lot of her porblems and is showing improvement in various areas, which makes me happy. A lot of the repetition that we use to explain things to her or to guide her is showing up now where she'll say "sorry" for things or use "please" and "thank you". Autism isn't so bad once you learn to make a lot of the "need for routine" to work for you.
Beth is doing alright. Her knee continues to bother her even after the knee surgery so that will likely never be complete again. She gave me a really nice gift for our anniversary by creating a 3rd Doctor costume for me. I've idly mentioned cosplaying the 3rd Doctor in the past and now I can. I'm still debating whether I'll go to Chicago TARDIS. I'd like to but only one of the guests is someone that I'd like to meet. The others are kinda blah, mostly fans of some note who have done something to get promoted to guest status and then one guy associated with one of the new series spinoffs. Never having been to one of the Chicago TARDIS cons in the past, I'm a bit leery and I'd prefer if there were a lot of big name draws for my first time so that even if the con sucks I can at least be happy at meeting the people I want to meet.
In literature news I finally finished the Doctor Who paperback books that existed while the series was off the air. The early ones were good but as things wended on they got worse and worse, mostly through lack of imagination and through stupid "event driven" books rather than good writing, basically encountering the same problems as a comic book but magnified since each book was written by a different author. The editorial control was just never there once the BBC started publishing the books in-house. Anyhow, the accomplishment is a pretty big one since thats something like 300 or so books all-told.
What I used to do is alternate a Doctor Who book with another book. In the really old days the non-Who book could be anything. Now what I try to do is read through an entire series because I don't read as often so when I'm reading a series I need to keep up with it since it could be months or more until I read the next one in the sequence. I think from now on I'm going to set up a new sequence. Basically I've fallen way behind on my Star Wars reading so that I'm slightly over a decade behind. I think that I'll do Star Wars like I used to do with Doctor Who and alternate that with another series. Currently the "other series" is Dune. Then with that, I'm alternating fiction with non-fiction. Right now I've been reading several books on the history of video games with several different slants and opinions and I've found it fascinating. I'm not sure what I'll move on to after that.
Years ago I read the original Dune and all 6 books in the Dune series. I was annoyed at the ending for Chapterhouse: Dune which wasn't much of an ending. It was clear that Frank Herbert had intended for there to be more but his death made that impossible. Recently new books were put out by Herbert's son teamed with Kevin J Anderson. They put out 6 prequal books and then put out 2 sequal books which finish the story started in Chapterhouse: Dune. Now, in the search for more money, they're putting out books between the books of the original series. They've already done one between Dune and Dune Messiah and then one between Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. I think that the next one is between Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune and I think that there may be more than one in that gap (especially since it spans something like 1000 years). I just finished the first prequal trilogy. It was fair. It was definitely fine as a popcorn light-reading sci-fi advenuture story. The problem is that Dune was always more than that. Dune was about politics, science, philosophy, religion, psychology, sociology and the interplay between all these things. The Dune books always tried to broach a higher subject, so in a way these new books don't feel as if they're in the same genre. From a continuity perspective most of it makes sense but there are a few things that feel forced or unnecessary. Then there are a few out-and-out continuity errors. Honestly, when you only have to keep your new books consistent with 6 books you'd think that they could do that but they didn't. They even screw up a few things, blatantly contradicting things stated in the first book of the original series at least. I guess they didn't expect their readers to re-read the original series before delving into the new books but even though these were prequals I basically expected that they'd be written for an audience familiar with the other books so I decided to re-read those first.
I continue my quest back into the 8-bit era. I've procured an Atari 7800. I've often been nostalgic for the old Atari 2600 games and the 7800 is fully backwards compatible as well as having some unique games of its own. I also picked up a Sega Master System, giving me the complete run of the 8-bit era. I know that I end up seeming like a crazy collector but so what. Everyone's got their hobby and even though I don't seem to be able to play my games as fast as I can pick them up, they are cheap. I just think it'll be awesome to play through all the games of that era. At the same time I'm trying to learn what I can about the hardware and software of those classic game systems. There are thriving homebrew communities for both new games for old systems and new hardware add-ons for those systems. That sounds like a neat hobby for me and I'd love to do something new. My current goal is to design a hand-held Atari 2600. Its been done before but by taking the existing console and chopping up the pieces and putting them into a handheld housing. I'd like to try it by utilizing new components so that the original console is note destroyed in the process of creating the handheld. I've got ahold of some schematics, which helps immensely. We'll see how I do and I'll probably have to start with a smaller project first but that's the ultimate goal. From there I may proceed to more complicated systems. With programming I'd probably start with making a 2600 game first before seeing if I could make something for a more complex system.
I'm also playing some classic computer games and I'm playing through the King's Quest collection. I beat the first game and I was really impressed with how complicated a game from 1981 was. My only real gripe is that there were certain things that if you didn't do them right, you could never beat the game but the game never indicates to you that you hit a certain point so you can play forever figuring out why you can't progress past a certain thing only to discover that you have to restart the game from scratch. I'm going through King's Quest 2 now.
Meanwhile I've also been doing a little bit with my writing and I've been doing a lot of world building. There's nothing that I want to talk about in huge depth yet but I'm keeping the skill alive.
So does it sound like I'm spread pretty thin? Yup. At some point I really need to decide where my priorities lie and concentrate on one thing. Unfortunately I'm bad at that and tend to do lots of things that interest me but then make little progress. Its somewhat frustrating.
With TV shows we're kind of at a loss. We have no more live-action TV shows although some people have given us some ideas of where to go next for that. I've also thought about getting Blake's 7 from England. For some reason they refuse to release it on DVD here but now that I've hacked my DVD player so that it plays all regions I could always import it. That's a good classic sci-fi series and Beth has really taken to sci-fi. With American animated series of the 90's we still have plenty to watch. Beth and I are about midway through the 90's X-Men series so we'll definitely finish that up and we have plenty of anime to watch.
Now for the obligatory TV/movie stuff:
Heroes: Wow, I loved this series for the first season. I don't even think that the second season was all that bad except for the last two episodes. I will always remember how it would have gone if they'd been able to get a whole season out of that. Season 3 was just horrible. I realize that the second half was better than the first half but even that continued to retcon things and try to contradict things that we knew previously. Plus the decision to make our human identification characters - Mohinder and Ando into superpowered beings was flawed. I was also annoyed that they made sure to kill off or otherwise get rid of everyone introduced in season 2. I realize that fan reaction to season 2 was poor but I'd rather see someone try and take the season 2 revelations and build on them, rather than just kill off all the new characters so that you can close your eyes and pretend the season never happened. Ultimately though, the reason why Heroes sucks is because the name isn't true. No one really acts heroic in the show. Its all about the petty lives of people with super powers. If anything it should be called Powers. Frankly by the third season I'd expected at least some of them to have started to do something positive like fighting crime with their powers.
Wolverine: Words just don't describe how bad this movie was. They threw Gambit in just to have Gambit because they'd always wanted to throw him into an X-Men movie but never had a good place for him to go. As Blade 3 taught us, sticking things into a movie that are leftovers from previous films is never a good idea and their Gambit was horrid. We also get a laughable Deadpool and the one thing that the movie could have done - explain the Sabertooth/Wolverine rivalry - it failed at since they end up working together at the end of the film and the reason why Wolverine hated Sabertooth was shown to have not happened. It suffered highly from prequalitis though in that basically the movie spent so much time doing the things that we knew from X-Men 2 that it would have to do so it was almost like watching paint dry. Nothing interesting happened and even in the places where they could have introduced a twist they decided to go with the most boring path from A-B. Honestly if they'd wanted to make a Wolverine solo movie, it should have been set post X-Men 3. Wolverine was the one character that made it out of X-Men 3 with his cool points intact so that would have been fine.
Star Trek: My main quote for this is "never has so much genius been married to so much crap". It was a better movie than it had any right being and I liked the conceit of setting it in the same universe but having time travel change history so that you can do a prequal that isn't really a prequal. It was a clever and Trekkish way of trying to have your cake and eat it too. There are loads of continuity errors even provided that you allow for history changing. A lot of the movie aped Wrath of Khan. While I understand this as being the best movie of yesteryear, I found some of the similarities to be over-the-top and lazy. My core problem with the movie though is that its not a Star Trek movie. It has some of the trappings but Star Trek was always more cerebral. Also, even with a reboot, I want the respective relationships of the characters to be the same. I want the core to be the same. In the series, Kirk was always the middle road between Bones' humanity, and Spock's logic. In this, McCoy is marginalized and Kirk is the "look before you leap" type and goes head-to-head against Spock's logic rather than their forming the triumvirate like in the original series. In the end, this is a fan summer blockbuster action flick, but its basically a poor man's Star Wars. Trek as a series is over.
Terminator Salvation: Another ok action movie that suffered from prequalitis. Since we know so little of the future this could have easily had a lot of twists and turns. Unfortunately as with Wolverine, anywhere that they could have introduced a twist that would have preserved continuity but had it happen in a different manner than what we'd expect they decided to go with the most boring and cliched manner. Even Christian Bale couldn't save this one.
Dragon Quest: I'd actually hoped this was based on the video game Dragon Quest series, released in America as Dragon Warrior. If you're ever curious, it isn't. The only watchable thing about this film is Marc (The Beastmaster) Singer who appears to realize that he's stuck in a movie that sucks and decides to ham up his acting so bad that he's the most enjoyable thing in the film.
Dragonball Evolution: I was to curious about this not to watch it. In the end, I agree with all the critics. This movie was horrible, do not waste your time. They took the basic trappings of Dragonball and turned into a teeny-bopper coming of age story set in modern-day Earth. They didn't even have interesting fights. This was a total waste of time.
Balls of Fury: When I'd initially seen the previews for this, I was hoping that it would be an irreverant spoof of a pathetic sport, ala Dodgeball. While the movie is nothing like Dodgeball, it manages to be just as funny as that movie, so much so that we purchased this one. Go see it if you haven't. Its hilarious.
Push: Chris Evans...in a superhero movie. This is the movie I tell people to watch to understand why I don't want him as Captain America. In the end, this was a pretty blah-bland movie.
Love Guru: Mike Myers has such a crazy dichotomy. He either creates genius like Austin Powers or Wayne's World, or he creates something unwatchable like So I married an Axe Murderer. This movie is in the So I Married an Axe Murderer camp. Wow it was bad. Don't watch.
GI Joe: This was a pretty bad movie but it still happened to be a lot better than Transformers and more faithful, although the idea of GI Joe being a multi-national taskforce rather than "Real American Heroes" was kind of hard for me to swallow. No multinational taskforce is going to call their organization "GI Joe". Oh well, America is evil now so we can't have American heroes. We're all trying to get blood for oil or something. This was another summer blockbuster popcorn action flick and it worked for that. My one real gripe is that the original song wasn't put on the end credits like the Star Trek reboot did, but Transformers also made this mistake as well.
Fanboys: This movie was genius. I don't think that anything has ever so totally captured the idea of being a fan of a large fandom like this movie did. It was almost entirely hilarious and the cameos were well done. The ending was perfect. Even Beth loved it, which surprised me a lot. It just shows how far I've gone in converting her I guess.
Iron Man 2: This was a good movie in the same spirit as the first one. There were four problems, one: the final battle is just basically a retread of the final battle from the first film except with two iron men. Two, they lift their helmets way to much. I know a lot of directors think that you need to see the actor's face to empathize with them but this just doesn't make sense when people are in battle. Besides, a decent actor can make us empathize with body language and voice. Three, the kiss with Pepper was wrong. If this had been the end of the first movie then it would have worked. In this movie there was no romance between them at all and in fact he'd spent the whole movie alienating her. Putting it in this movie was a bone thrown to everyone who wanted it in the first one but felt forced here. Four, there have only been three movies in the "Avengers Arc" so far - Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2, so there isn't a whole lot of continuity to keep track of. Yet they've already screwed up. Tony shows up at the end of the Hulk movie to tell General Ross that he's putting a team together, yet Iron Man 2 says that they've never given Tony any real information about the Avengers Initiative and that they're probably not even going to bring him in as anything more than an advisor (I'm guessing a contract fell through). If they can't even keep track of 3 movies then I'm worried about the continuation of the Avengers arc which in the end will have at least 6 movies and probably more.
Mega Man: For a fan film this was fantastic. I would have preferred more elaborate fight scenes and I think that the story demands a 2-hour treatment but for a guy doing this on his own time with $5000 I realize that time is money and this was a fantastic amount of bang-for-buck. Give this guy $100,000 and I bet he'd beat even the greatest Hollywood blockbusters. Anyhow, the movie was good and the director knew his limitations so he concentrated on character and story rather than action. The fight scenes could have been a lot better but when this is a fan project made with $5000 I am ok with that being my only real gripe about the movie. I have one other minor gripe but its tied to a spoiler so I won't discuss that here.
Anyhow that should catch everyone up with the movie viewing. Beth and I are desperately trying to see A-Team but looks like we won't be able to during the vacation. Hopefully I'll update this space more often now with what's going on and my thoughts about things. Until next time...
Excelsior!
So I guess I'll go in a sort of general fashion and update randomly assuming someone who knows very little about my life.
Rachel is making a lot of progress lately. Her autism has become more obvious in that people who don't live with her can now see the odd behavior but to me she has overcome a lot of her porblems and is showing improvement in various areas, which makes me happy. A lot of the repetition that we use to explain things to her or to guide her is showing up now where she'll say "sorry" for things or use "please" and "thank you". Autism isn't so bad once you learn to make a lot of the "need for routine" to work for you.
Beth is doing alright. Her knee continues to bother her even after the knee surgery so that will likely never be complete again. She gave me a really nice gift for our anniversary by creating a 3rd Doctor costume for me. I've idly mentioned cosplaying the 3rd Doctor in the past and now I can. I'm still debating whether I'll go to Chicago TARDIS. I'd like to but only one of the guests is someone that I'd like to meet. The others are kinda blah, mostly fans of some note who have done something to get promoted to guest status and then one guy associated with one of the new series spinoffs. Never having been to one of the Chicago TARDIS cons in the past, I'm a bit leery and I'd prefer if there were a lot of big name draws for my first time so that even if the con sucks I can at least be happy at meeting the people I want to meet.
In literature news I finally finished the Doctor Who paperback books that existed while the series was off the air. The early ones were good but as things wended on they got worse and worse, mostly through lack of imagination and through stupid "event driven" books rather than good writing, basically encountering the same problems as a comic book but magnified since each book was written by a different author. The editorial control was just never there once the BBC started publishing the books in-house. Anyhow, the accomplishment is a pretty big one since thats something like 300 or so books all-told.
What I used to do is alternate a Doctor Who book with another book. In the really old days the non-Who book could be anything. Now what I try to do is read through an entire series because I don't read as often so when I'm reading a series I need to keep up with it since it could be months or more until I read the next one in the sequence. I think from now on I'm going to set up a new sequence. Basically I've fallen way behind on my Star Wars reading so that I'm slightly over a decade behind. I think that I'll do Star Wars like I used to do with Doctor Who and alternate that with another series. Currently the "other series" is Dune. Then with that, I'm alternating fiction with non-fiction. Right now I've been reading several books on the history of video games with several different slants and opinions and I've found it fascinating. I'm not sure what I'll move on to after that.
Years ago I read the original Dune and all 6 books in the Dune series. I was annoyed at the ending for Chapterhouse: Dune which wasn't much of an ending. It was clear that Frank Herbert had intended for there to be more but his death made that impossible. Recently new books were put out by Herbert's son teamed with Kevin J Anderson. They put out 6 prequal books and then put out 2 sequal books which finish the story started in Chapterhouse: Dune. Now, in the search for more money, they're putting out books between the books of the original series. They've already done one between Dune and Dune Messiah and then one between Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. I think that the next one is between Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune and I think that there may be more than one in that gap (especially since it spans something like 1000 years). I just finished the first prequal trilogy. It was fair. It was definitely fine as a popcorn light-reading sci-fi advenuture story. The problem is that Dune was always more than that. Dune was about politics, science, philosophy, religion, psychology, sociology and the interplay between all these things. The Dune books always tried to broach a higher subject, so in a way these new books don't feel as if they're in the same genre. From a continuity perspective most of it makes sense but there are a few things that feel forced or unnecessary. Then there are a few out-and-out continuity errors. Honestly, when you only have to keep your new books consistent with 6 books you'd think that they could do that but they didn't. They even screw up a few things, blatantly contradicting things stated in the first book of the original series at least. I guess they didn't expect their readers to re-read the original series before delving into the new books but even though these were prequals I basically expected that they'd be written for an audience familiar with the other books so I decided to re-read those first.
I continue my quest back into the 8-bit era. I've procured an Atari 7800. I've often been nostalgic for the old Atari 2600 games and the 7800 is fully backwards compatible as well as having some unique games of its own. I also picked up a Sega Master System, giving me the complete run of the 8-bit era. I know that I end up seeming like a crazy collector but so what. Everyone's got their hobby and even though I don't seem to be able to play my games as fast as I can pick them up, they are cheap. I just think it'll be awesome to play through all the games of that era. At the same time I'm trying to learn what I can about the hardware and software of those classic game systems. There are thriving homebrew communities for both new games for old systems and new hardware add-ons for those systems. That sounds like a neat hobby for me and I'd love to do something new. My current goal is to design a hand-held Atari 2600. Its been done before but by taking the existing console and chopping up the pieces and putting them into a handheld housing. I'd like to try it by utilizing new components so that the original console is note destroyed in the process of creating the handheld. I've got ahold of some schematics, which helps immensely. We'll see how I do and I'll probably have to start with a smaller project first but that's the ultimate goal. From there I may proceed to more complicated systems. With programming I'd probably start with making a 2600 game first before seeing if I could make something for a more complex system.
I'm also playing some classic computer games and I'm playing through the King's Quest collection. I beat the first game and I was really impressed with how complicated a game from 1981 was. My only real gripe is that there were certain things that if you didn't do them right, you could never beat the game but the game never indicates to you that you hit a certain point so you can play forever figuring out why you can't progress past a certain thing only to discover that you have to restart the game from scratch. I'm going through King's Quest 2 now.
Meanwhile I've also been doing a little bit with my writing and I've been doing a lot of world building. There's nothing that I want to talk about in huge depth yet but I'm keeping the skill alive.
So does it sound like I'm spread pretty thin? Yup. At some point I really need to decide where my priorities lie and concentrate on one thing. Unfortunately I'm bad at that and tend to do lots of things that interest me but then make little progress. Its somewhat frustrating.
With TV shows we're kind of at a loss. We have no more live-action TV shows although some people have given us some ideas of where to go next for that. I've also thought about getting Blake's 7 from England. For some reason they refuse to release it on DVD here but now that I've hacked my DVD player so that it plays all regions I could always import it. That's a good classic sci-fi series and Beth has really taken to sci-fi. With American animated series of the 90's we still have plenty to watch. Beth and I are about midway through the 90's X-Men series so we'll definitely finish that up and we have plenty of anime to watch.
Now for the obligatory TV/movie stuff:
Heroes: Wow, I loved this series for the first season. I don't even think that the second season was all that bad except for the last two episodes. I will always remember how it would have gone if they'd been able to get a whole season out of that. Season 3 was just horrible. I realize that the second half was better than the first half but even that continued to retcon things and try to contradict things that we knew previously. Plus the decision to make our human identification characters - Mohinder and Ando into superpowered beings was flawed. I was also annoyed that they made sure to kill off or otherwise get rid of everyone introduced in season 2. I realize that fan reaction to season 2 was poor but I'd rather see someone try and take the season 2 revelations and build on them, rather than just kill off all the new characters so that you can close your eyes and pretend the season never happened. Ultimately though, the reason why Heroes sucks is because the name isn't true. No one really acts heroic in the show. Its all about the petty lives of people with super powers. If anything it should be called Powers. Frankly by the third season I'd expected at least some of them to have started to do something positive like fighting crime with their powers.
Wolverine: Words just don't describe how bad this movie was. They threw Gambit in just to have Gambit because they'd always wanted to throw him into an X-Men movie but never had a good place for him to go. As Blade 3 taught us, sticking things into a movie that are leftovers from previous films is never a good idea and their Gambit was horrid. We also get a laughable Deadpool and the one thing that the movie could have done - explain the Sabertooth/Wolverine rivalry - it failed at since they end up working together at the end of the film and the reason why Wolverine hated Sabertooth was shown to have not happened. It suffered highly from prequalitis though in that basically the movie spent so much time doing the things that we knew from X-Men 2 that it would have to do so it was almost like watching paint dry. Nothing interesting happened and even in the places where they could have introduced a twist they decided to go with the most boring path from A-B. Honestly if they'd wanted to make a Wolverine solo movie, it should have been set post X-Men 3. Wolverine was the one character that made it out of X-Men 3 with his cool points intact so that would have been fine.
Star Trek: My main quote for this is "never has so much genius been married to so much crap". It was a better movie than it had any right being and I liked the conceit of setting it in the same universe but having time travel change history so that you can do a prequal that isn't really a prequal. It was a clever and Trekkish way of trying to have your cake and eat it too. There are loads of continuity errors even provided that you allow for history changing. A lot of the movie aped Wrath of Khan. While I understand this as being the best movie of yesteryear, I found some of the similarities to be over-the-top and lazy. My core problem with the movie though is that its not a Star Trek movie. It has some of the trappings but Star Trek was always more cerebral. Also, even with a reboot, I want the respective relationships of the characters to be the same. I want the core to be the same. In the series, Kirk was always the middle road between Bones' humanity, and Spock's logic. In this, McCoy is marginalized and Kirk is the "look before you leap" type and goes head-to-head against Spock's logic rather than their forming the triumvirate like in the original series. In the end, this is a fan summer blockbuster action flick, but its basically a poor man's Star Wars. Trek as a series is over.
Terminator Salvation: Another ok action movie that suffered from prequalitis. Since we know so little of the future this could have easily had a lot of twists and turns. Unfortunately as with Wolverine, anywhere that they could have introduced a twist that would have preserved continuity but had it happen in a different manner than what we'd expect they decided to go with the most boring and cliched manner. Even Christian Bale couldn't save this one.
Dragon Quest: I'd actually hoped this was based on the video game Dragon Quest series, released in America as Dragon Warrior. If you're ever curious, it isn't. The only watchable thing about this film is Marc (The Beastmaster) Singer who appears to realize that he's stuck in a movie that sucks and decides to ham up his acting so bad that he's the most enjoyable thing in the film.
Dragonball Evolution: I was to curious about this not to watch it. In the end, I agree with all the critics. This movie was horrible, do not waste your time. They took the basic trappings of Dragonball and turned into a teeny-bopper coming of age story set in modern-day Earth. They didn't even have interesting fights. This was a total waste of time.
Balls of Fury: When I'd initially seen the previews for this, I was hoping that it would be an irreverant spoof of a pathetic sport, ala Dodgeball. While the movie is nothing like Dodgeball, it manages to be just as funny as that movie, so much so that we purchased this one. Go see it if you haven't. Its hilarious.
Push: Chris Evans...in a superhero movie. This is the movie I tell people to watch to understand why I don't want him as Captain America. In the end, this was a pretty blah-bland movie.
Love Guru: Mike Myers has such a crazy dichotomy. He either creates genius like Austin Powers or Wayne's World, or he creates something unwatchable like So I married an Axe Murderer. This movie is in the So I Married an Axe Murderer camp. Wow it was bad. Don't watch.
GI Joe: This was a pretty bad movie but it still happened to be a lot better than Transformers and more faithful, although the idea of GI Joe being a multi-national taskforce rather than "Real American Heroes" was kind of hard for me to swallow. No multinational taskforce is going to call their organization "GI Joe". Oh well, America is evil now so we can't have American heroes. We're all trying to get blood for oil or something. This was another summer blockbuster popcorn action flick and it worked for that. My one real gripe is that the original song wasn't put on the end credits like the Star Trek reboot did, but Transformers also made this mistake as well.
Fanboys: This movie was genius. I don't think that anything has ever so totally captured the idea of being a fan of a large fandom like this movie did. It was almost entirely hilarious and the cameos were well done. The ending was perfect. Even Beth loved it, which surprised me a lot. It just shows how far I've gone in converting her I guess.
Iron Man 2: This was a good movie in the same spirit as the first one. There were four problems, one: the final battle is just basically a retread of the final battle from the first film except with two iron men. Two, they lift their helmets way to much. I know a lot of directors think that you need to see the actor's face to empathize with them but this just doesn't make sense when people are in battle. Besides, a decent actor can make us empathize with body language and voice. Three, the kiss with Pepper was wrong. If this had been the end of the first movie then it would have worked. In this movie there was no romance between them at all and in fact he'd spent the whole movie alienating her. Putting it in this movie was a bone thrown to everyone who wanted it in the first one but felt forced here. Four, there have only been three movies in the "Avengers Arc" so far - Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2, so there isn't a whole lot of continuity to keep track of. Yet they've already screwed up. Tony shows up at the end of the Hulk movie to tell General Ross that he's putting a team together, yet Iron Man 2 says that they've never given Tony any real information about the Avengers Initiative and that they're probably not even going to bring him in as anything more than an advisor (I'm guessing a contract fell through). If they can't even keep track of 3 movies then I'm worried about the continuation of the Avengers arc which in the end will have at least 6 movies and probably more.
Mega Man: For a fan film this was fantastic. I would have preferred more elaborate fight scenes and I think that the story demands a 2-hour treatment but for a guy doing this on his own time with $5000 I realize that time is money and this was a fantastic amount of bang-for-buck. Give this guy $100,000 and I bet he'd beat even the greatest Hollywood blockbusters. Anyhow, the movie was good and the director knew his limitations so he concentrated on character and story rather than action. The fight scenes could have been a lot better but when this is a fan project made with $5000 I am ok with that being my only real gripe about the movie. I have one other minor gripe but its tied to a spoiler so I won't discuss that here.
Anyhow that should catch everyone up with the movie viewing. Beth and I are desperately trying to see A-Team but looks like we won't be able to during the vacation. Hopefully I'll update this space more often now with what's going on and my thoughts about things. Until next time...
Excelsior!