DVD review: The expendables

A group of elite mercenaries on a mission against a ruthless dictator.

Stallone continues is comeback story with another successful movie. This time is one of those “I can’t believe they never did it” ideas. An ensemble movie that reunites most of the major players of the eighties action scene, like “Ocean eleven” but on steroids.

Stallone is apparently well liked enough by his peers that he manages to get a lot of big names. Jet Li, Statham, Rourke and Mixed Martial Artist Randy Couture are all members of the expendables. Stone Cold Steve Austin is the main henchman of the bad guys while Willis and Schwarzenegger come for a very funny but too brief cameo. The big absentee is Van Damme who said that the movie was underwritten only to publicly regret it after it came out.

At the beginning is all very funny with famous stars popping everywhere but after a while we realized that Van Damme was probably right. The plot is really not very good. It’s serviceable stuff that reminds me of the countless straight to TV action stuff that killed the genre in the Eighties. It tries to be deep and to establish motivations for our heroes but fails terribly at it and anyway we really don’t watch movie like this for character stuff.

As an action movie there are funny moments and some of the stunts are interesting but in the end they lack that spark of imagination and creativity that makes good explosions fun to watch. Is nice to see retro action eighties style but after a while I had trouble not dozing off.

Let’s hope better for the sequel.

DVD review: Shutter Island

U.S. Marshall Edward Daniels investigates a sinister criminal asylum on a forlorn island.

Finally Martin Scorsese directs a film that I actually enjoy. I know that he is supposed to be the best living director but I think the majority of his recent output has been insufferable and preposterous. He is certainly very good; I can’t deny that, the problem is that he got no restraints. His movies go and go and go, they are never ending and so even when he got a good one he outstays his welcome and leave me physically fatigued.

Shutter Island is no short either running slightly more than tow hour but he left me a general impression of stuff that was happening and time well spent.

Probably a lot of this is thanks to the genre. Here Scorsese pays homage to Hitchcock and all of Hitchcock production was plot driven, he even invented the concept of the Macguffin!

Is not immune to his moment of fatigue, all his so ominous and dour with an ever growing tension that I wished at times for him to get to the point, but the scene are all very strong and engaging. Above everything the dream sequences are little masterpieces with deliberate continuity errors and their saturated colors. There is something about his deliberate, almost self conscious, style as a director that makes him particularly good for genre pictures.

The cast is serviceable if not good with strong performances from every major player.

The plot is somewhat meandering and can be divided in three parts. The first one is very interesting with a series of disjointed elements that had us debating all kind of theories about was going on and wanting for more. The second one, among a lot of plot twists, steers the movie in a much unexpected direction but then more shocking plot twists give the whole story an extremely different meaning.

In the end I must say that, even with a plot that complicated, everything fits and works perfectly and I appreciated it a lot. Lately we got a lot of movies with more plot holes than holes so seeing one where everything flows so nicely in the end is very refreshing and is a sign of respect from the filmmakers to the audience.

Cinema Review: Horrible Bosses

Three friends decide to murder their respective horrible bosses.

Lately there’s been this frustrating trend in American comedies, very cool, original ideas that failed in the execution, that didn’t bring a lot of laugh. This is really the case study of that trend.

The ides is wonderful, original and poignant. In this times of recession a comedy about our jobs, about our fear to lose time and about the not so very nice stuff that a lot of us need to do to get some money at the of the month is as topical as it can be. So bigger is the failure in delivery, the three writers of this comedy don’t manage to follow up the original plot point, not even slightly. Indeed this is not a comedy about three horrible bosses; this is mainly a comedy about three idiots trying to murder somebody.

Now nothing against that of course, is perfectly serviceable plot that gives us some laugh, but it completely misses the point and is so much weaker than the original pitch.

The beginning, where they establish the three protagonists and the three antagonists, is also dreadful, incredibly slow and devoid of anything funny. We just see how miserable they are and how the three bosses deserve to die. Is the set up for a payback that never materialize.

There is another very annoying trend in recent American comedies. The protagonists act in an incredibly stupid and contrived way just to get into dangerous and awkward situations that should generate funniness.

I think this trend was started by “the hangover” which did it in a way that was functional to the plot and didn’t make us watch while they did it. Also in this “Horrible Bosses” is a case study. Our heroes are literally idiots, they manage to accomplish something only inspector Clouseau style and therefore is impossible to relate to them. They are too much cringe worthy to be funny, I felt uncomfortable watching them doing mistake after mistake.

The main good thing in the movie is a Kevin Spacey in top form that has clearly a lot of fun playing the most horrible of the horrible bosses. Colin Farrel is less entertaining but for once he actually plays a character that is not a thinly disguised version of himself and this is certainly a good thing. Sadly Jennifer Aniston is not only saddled with the worst role, she is saddled with the hardest one to pull off and so her really small acting talent literally disappears leaving behind the husk of a performance.

What a waste of talent.

Book Review: The king of Ys: Roma Mater

The start of a new regular feature, book reviews!

A roman soldier becomes the king of the eldritch city of Ys.

Poul Anderson is one of the all time great fantasy authors and it’s a shame that in the little fantasy revival his work has been mostly forgotten. He is not only a very good writer; he actually pioneered a grittier and very detailed style of fantasy that is fundamental for the evolution of the genre as a whole.

The king of Ys: Roma Mater is the first volume of the saga and is from the later period of his career, 1986.

It’s an extremely detailed and researched book. The mythic city of Ys is a real Celtic myth, we could call her the Celtic Atlantis and Anderson, with his wife Karen who get co authorship on this saga, create a very interesting historical equivalent to the fabled city. Everything is so carefully researched with the city, so carefully connected with a late Roman empire, so realistic that you could be forgiven for wanting to go in Bretagne to visit the real place.

The setting has been so carefully shaped that in the end it became the undoing of the book. Anderson became so enamored with the certainly fascinating setting that he researched and created that we spend 100 pages before getting to the actual city and countless more pages describing his inner working, his most important places and a very extensive cast that comprise the entire government body.

In the end we can partially forgive him, the government of Ys is extremely peculiar and therefore it certainly require a lot of explanation but not the less it takes too much time to get to the fun stuff.

Probably the point of most interest in this book is how unusual the story is. There are the usual tropes of the genre but the main point is the culture clash between our roman hero, a follower of Mithras, and Ys with her strange deities and her nine queen priestesses. The climax of the book is actually a religious ritual!

In the end it left me wanting for more and certainly I’ll get the remaining books of the saga.

DVD review: Walk The Line

The life and loves of Johnny Cash.

Ah the big musical biopic, it just keeps coming back every few years and I can understand the reasons. Popular musicians are already larger than life figures; they are idolized and envied by millions. Their life stories are also easily filmable; at their core there is always a rag to riches tale which is maybe the most popular kind of tale around.

The actual viewing was kinda strange to me. I missed this movie at the time (2005) because I knew practically nothing about Johnny Cash. I even managed to see the Parody, “Walk Hard: the story of Dewey Cox”, before seeing the original. In spite of this I actually quite enjoyed the movie, I even think that my enjoyment was heightened by the fact that I had no idea what was going to happen and what happened to Cash in the end, I watched it as a pure story and I can say that it is a good one.

The plot is a stock musical biopic plot with a lot of booze, drug issues and general angst but luckily we get one of these only every few year so it didn’t feel too much contrived, even if I must say that I would like to see, just for once, a movie about a musician who become famous without doing hard drugs, dumping his sweetheart and being a moron.

Where the concept is a little bit repetitive (but is not really right to tinker with the life of somebody) the direction was very good and the acting was nothing short of exceptional. Joachim Phoenix literally inhabits Johnny Cash using a thousand mannerisms, he even sings himself! This is the performance that catapulted him the stardom, which he strangely squandered in a Kauffmanlike fake doc.

Reese Witherspoon also gives a very fine performance, with a deserved Oscar nod for actress in a leading role, and reminds us why she got that superstar status that seems to elude many of her colleagues. Her face is so lively and she can transmit so many emotions where the majority of the starlets today know only how to pout.

A little nagging point about the story. Even if this is nominally Johnny Cash bio it is not really that interested in his life and music. This is more the love story between him and June Carter and even touchy subjects like his relationship with his father are not really resolved. This doesn’t means that the movie is worse, quite the contrary indeed because it acquire a focus that most biopic are lacking, just that it’s a slightly misleading one and that if you are more interested in his music you should probably buy his records.

Anime review: Freedom

Planet earth is in shambles while a colony survives on the moon. Three guys from the colony discover the true nature of their world.

This confirms what has been happening in the last decade. To get good scifi we need to go to Japan.

This series of seven OAV (Original Animation Video) is a long heartfelt homage to moon exploration and the Apollo program. We start in the moon colony, with old earth seemingly destroyed, when our hero discover that, maybe, there is still somebody round here and so set off to do what the Apollo astronauts have done in the 60s, but this time in reverse.

The mecha design, all the technological bits, is wonderful, extremely detailed and lovingly crafted. We felt like we were watching the real thing.

On the other side the story and the characters sadly aren’t that good. The idea is very interesting to say the least but the execution often feel contrived or fall flat altogether. This is an interesting problem. As viewers we often complain when the writers of our favorite show invent stuff on the fly just to “keep going”. On the other side when they so clearly decide beforehand what is going to happen in very single episode they can have trouble finding things to fill them. Case in point, in very single episode of freedom something happens, which is good, but often is not enough to fill an entire episode and so we were left fidgeting while the protagonists did what amounted story wise to nothing.

The characters also lack in subtlety and feel Manichean without being engaging. The morale of the story is spelled right from the mouth of the main heroine.

In the end this is very interesting for space exploration lovers but other persons can stay away.

On a related note there is an interesting case of product placement. Nissin Cup noodle financed “Freedom” for his anniversary and in every single episode we can see our characters eating Cup noodles and declaring them to be delicious. Just like in a live action movie!

I know that it sounds terrible but if I get more interesting animation honestly I don’t care. If I can live with James Bond telling us how wonderful is his latest watch I can certainly live with this.

Anime review: Submarine 707r

Submarine warfare in the near future.

This Japanese Animation is really a mixed bag. The base concept is relatively realistic but the execution makes for a glaring style clash. On the namesake sub, the 707, there are little kids who are employed as pilots of “mini subs”. I know that this kind of stuff happens all the time in Japanese animation and that actually the majority of giant robots pilots are teenager but in a realistic setting with sonar torpedoes they look really out of place.

The big submarine battle in the end is kinda nice. Probably the main attraction of this kind of setting is the chance to play this kind of battle like an underwater version of chess with the two captains out scheming each other at every turn.

The main bad guy is also depicted in an interesting way, contrary to what countless other villain have done before him he keeps his cool to the very end and is certainly the coolest character around.

It’s a shame therefore that this anime take forever to go to the final battle which, by the way, is not really final. I suspect that they were planning sequels down the road.

All the characters also are really dull and unengaging so, in the end, this is one to skip.

Cinema review: Harry Potter and the deathly hallows part 2

Harry Potter final battle against the forces of evil.

And so it ends. Looking back to the rest of the series this is certainly a remarkable achievement. Eight movies, a decade, without a significant drop in quality, we can even say that as the series progressed they got better.

This is certainly the case with this one. After the first movies with journeymen directors coming one after the other they got in what is arguably a continuous production mode, practically one extremely long movie. It’s significant that they are keeping the same guy, David Yates, at the helm of the last four movies, they want to reward continuity and I can’t blame them. Why reinvent the wheel every time when they already have a bunch of guys who knows what they are doing?

Is also remarkable how the original three child actors blossomed in three fairly good professionals without giving us the terrible stint of rehabs that made Lindsay Lohan and her friends so famous. I start to wonder that maybe Hollywood is not that bad and that the fault lies in some studios. It is fascinating to note that most of the child actor turned drug abuser sex addict seems to come from Disney…

Anyway lets go back to the movie.

Of course there is the half a movie problem. This is part two of a story, we jump straight in the action and so it can be fairly difficult to follow, all the explanation was in part one! Add to it that this is the last part of a long and fairly complicated saga with references to many different past movies and the poor spectator is often left scratching his head.

The tone is also strange. With all the buildup confined to the other movie here we practically start the final battle after a mere twenty minutes and do it for a couple of hours. Because of this we practically have no character development and character moments at all, everybody is too busy shooting things.

On the other side having what is practically one long fight scene got his perks. The action is relentless, carefully staged with state of the art CGI. The battle of Hogwarts clearly benefits from more breathing space and gives a palpable crescendo in the movie.

Filming clear battle scenes remain an elusive art and so is often not very easy to understand to understand what is going on but we can’t dismiss the pure adrenalinic power of those scenes.

Another positive aspect of such a long series is the inherent pathos that it gives to his ending. This is not monster of the week territory; this is Voldemort the guy whose name was ushered in whispered tones since the very beginning. Then of course Voldemort is played by Ralph Fiennes, a very good actor who really seems to come into its own when playing villains. Purely by his acting wits he manages to make an extremely cheesy villain work.

The plot comes straight from the book and is a really satisfying resolution to this long saga. The main plotline like in most of the other books is basically a well oiled mystery with a lot of stuff to find and things to guess. As far as character stuff I’m still not convinced by the various revelations near the ending. Is the kind of stuff that kinda makes sense when you are watching it but after a mere five minutes you realize it really doesn’t. But this isn’t really that important, Harry Potter in the end succeeds at what is really important for a popcorn movie, entertain us.

DVD review: Capitalism a love story

Michael Moore is back and is time is lambasting capitalism.

Moore’s “Documentaries” are strange beasts, I’m not even sure they should be called so. They usually attract a lot of criticism about how they present data and even their factual accuracy.

Limiting us to “Capitalism: a love story” there is a big one at the core of the movie. Moore present the house crisis like a sinister plot made by the banks to get the houses of the poor American people while, in reality, when the banks get those houses they are losing money and therefore they don’t really want them.

I’m simplifying things a little bit here but in the end the house crisis started because the banks where lending money to people who couldn’t repay them using an over inflated values of their houses as the base mortgage value. That’s the reason they are called subprime, because they are sub optimal. I’m not saying this to defend the banks but is stupid to pretend that they are run by twisting moustache villains, reality is much more sad, they are run by idiots who devised a system that simply couldn’t work.

That’s how Moore fails in a pretty spectacular way to get to the origin of the crisis.

He also fails, in my opinion, to give the right amount of attention to the incredible bonuses that the big executives were and are still getting. He instead devotes an inordinate amount of time to practices like the “Dead Peasant” insurance that, while certainly not very ethical, is not that evil as he paints it.

Now far for me to say that this Documentary is full of lies. He actually gets most of the other stuff right and he raises a lot of good points about the folly of a culture based on greed and on how they insist on pretending that this is actually a very religious thing to do.

It is still Moore of course, he got his opinions and he is not afraid to show them, quite the opposite indeed. He actively manipulates the movie to give more strength to his point of view. A lot of people don’t like it; they feel like he is pulling them in a direction to blatantly. In this case I honestly did find it refreshing; where other documentaries are very underhanded in their tactics in his case I could see his footprints everywhere.

He is honest about it, those are his views and you can see them in plain sight, knowing it beforehand is easy to enjoy his movies.

DVD review: Percy Jackson and the lightning thief

The young American Percy Jackson in reality is the son of a Greek god and a mortal woman.

Ah, the Harry Potter rip off. I honestly don’t know if the books were specifically written to be the American Harry Potter but we know for certain that the guys at Fox were looking for a new Potter like franchise, they even hired the same director who kick started the original, Chris Columbus! I still think that his Potter movies are the worst iterations of that franchise and I can’t change my mind watching this one. Is not like this is actively bad but is just a competent effort made no spark of imagination or creativity.

The main problem anyway is not the director, is the base material. I haven’t read the original books and therefore I must admit that maybe an incredible misunderstanding happened when they wrote the screenplay but really the material is terribly derivative.

Of course the Potterverse is also full to the brim with second hand stuff but at least there was a little bit more work on it. Case in point where Harry Potter gets a magical train that start from Platform nine and three quarter to arrive to a huge castle in Scotland Percy simply drives his car to “camp Half Blood”, basically a stupider version of a Boy Scout camp. There he nominally follows the lessons of the centaur Chiron but in practice they do a live action capture the flag and he becomes all kind of awesome after five minutes. Before dinner he even start his own personal quest with a plan so poorly conceived that even in the movie they acknowledge it.

Probably this movie got at me the wrong way also because I happen to know something about the originals myths so seeing mount Olympus on top of the Empire State Building really grates me, and I could make many more examples. It is depressing that getting a deep and meaningful myth and making a shallow modernized version of it is a road to a bestseller and a blockbuster.

Cinema Review: Tangled

The young Rapunzel has been imprisoned all her life in a tower with no doors, the only way in is using her incredibly long hairs as a rope. Her sad isolation ends when Dashing thief Flynn Rider get in the tower.

After a long time I finally managed to see this one thanks to a morning screening (with a lot of thankfully well behaved kids).

Disney appears to have perfected his classic formula. The leads are both engaging and sympathetic, the action is still breathtaking but now it is done in such an effortless way, spotlessly integrated in the movie, the musical moments unobtrusive and engaging. They really made an art out of it.

The animation is yet again wonderful. It’s not hand drawn like last year “The princess and the frog” and I really hope that the return to hand drawn animation is not dead already but it still looks gorgeous. They did their best to get over the limits of CGI and drew a lot of inspiration from classical painting from the Rococo era.

Like a lot of these animated features this movie is a rare beast that manages to be both funny and engaging at the same time. Point to a villain that manages to be really scary without using any dark art. Actually adult viewers could appreciate a lot of stuff that will probably fly above the heads of the children watching.

I think is safe to say it. Disney animation is enjoying another new renaissance and this is a wonderful time to be a fan.

Cinema Review: Bridesmaids

Annie (Kristen Wiig) is the maid of honor of her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) but among the others bridesmaids there is the incredibly perfect Helen (Rose Byrne) with whom she develop an incredible rivalry.

Ah, the Uber Chick Flick! You must understand that the ordinary chick flick in the Hollywood argot is simply the romantic comedy and anything that got romance in it while his opposite aimed at men are those with explosions and lewd humor. The obvious problem of this is that of course many men enjoy shedding a tear every now and then while many women enjoy the sound of explosives (who doesn’t?).

The Uber Chick Flick instead is aimed squarely at the gentler sex with little to no place for us. Bridesmaids even got a token male role (a funny Chris O’Dowd) which is the relative equivalent of the token female role of dozens of guy movies.

I always thought that being a bridesmaid (like all other wedding related stuff) must be a nightmare and this movie mines this surprisingly virgin concept for all that is worth. Of course I knew nothing about that stuff beforehand so watching the movie felt at time like watching a documentary on the discovery channel about the mating of lions but like all good movies this wasn’t a problem. The dialogue in particular is brilliant and is probably what attracted the female movie goers in such a huge number. It’s extremely well written, smart and funny with a couple of show stopping moments. It’s also typically feminine, it showed that this movie had to have an all female cast, with guys it simply wouldn’t be the same.

The story is fairly obvious in his unveiling with characters that are all a little bit stereotyped but a fair amount of funny moments makes this girlie movie a movie for everybody.

DVD review: The book of Eli

Eli (Denzel Washington) wanders post apocalyptic America guarding a mysterious book. The lord of one of the few surviving town Carnegie (Gary Oldman) will do everything to get it.

This is actually a fun movie even if it saddled with an unbelievable premise.

The action is solid with good fighting scenes that for once don’t look recycled from the Matrix. The movie is nice to watch and entertaining with a lot of nice little touches that make the experience more enjoyable.

It also looks like the writer put some thought into the creation of this society and a there are a lot of nice interesting touches like, for example, the extreme scarcity of bullets but this doesn’t bog down the brisk pace of the movie that keeps going in unexpected direction leaving us thoroughly entertained.

The whole movie is powered up by a villainous Gary Oldman who manages to make a great role out of a b movie villain. Really it looks like all you need to make a good movie is to cast Gary Oldman as the main villain. He is that good.

It’s a shame that the movie didn’t manage to convince me of the premise. I can’t believe that there is only one copy left of the most printed book in history and anyway the whole concept leaves an air of old school bigotry to an otherwise pleasant experience.

Anime review: Mao Dante

The life of young Ryo Utsugy and his sister Saori became entwined with a plot by a group of Satanists to resurrect the mightiest of the demons, Mao Dante. Horror ensues.
Go Nagai is one of the most important Manga artists ever. He single handedly created the giant robot genre and this alone could ensure him a place in the Anime Pantheon.
Something less well known is his role in creating the sub genre of Demon and Angel inspired animation (Honestly is demon most of the times). It actually all started with the first version of Mao Dante which he started in 1971. Apparently Go Nagai was very impressed by a “Divine Comedy” illustrated by Gustave Dorè and decided this was perfect material to use in a horror Manga, and looking I can blame him, there is a primordial energy about that stuff and is ironic that we needed somebody from outside our culture to point it out.
Anyway this, like the rest of Go Nagai seminal work, influenced dozens of other series and left a lasting impression on our subculture.
Watching this late anime adaptation (2002) some of it look dated of course but it still retain part of its primordial energy. Mao Dante is an imposing figure, is ugliness miles away from the ethereal beauty that is predominant in modern animation. Blood run aplenty and people dies, a lot of people dies, really more than you could think is possible.
There are a couple of nice ideas and the back story is actually clearer than the usual messy ones that seem to plague Japanese animation.
Sadly the animation is sub par and the pacing in the beginning of the story is dreadfully slow and this could drive away from the interesting, but depressing, story.

DVD review: Wall Street, Money Never Sleep

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is out of prison and, having reformed his way, is trying to reconnect with is daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan). She is romantically engaged to Jacob Moore (Shia Labeouf) an idealistic broker who gets in the way of the new bad guy Bretton James (Josh Brolin).

I can understand what drove Oliver Stone back. Wall Street is extremely topical and he needs to do something commercially viable every now and then so that he can keep doing the crazy stuff, like interviewing Fidel Castro which is the American equivalent of the devil I’m told.

Not the less this is not a very good screenplay, certainly inferior to those hand penned by Stone himself. I only have a very vague recollection of the first movie, 24 years is a lot of time, so I’m not making any comparison to that. Actually I think I enjoyed “good” Gordon Gekko more than the people who idolatrized his “Greed is good” speech.

The beginning is even interesting with a lot of plot and intrigue going on but after a while we get to two big problems.

The first one is that Jacob Moore is an idiot, a complete hopeless idiot. I understand that Hollywood need an Hollywood hero type at the center of all his movies but when we set it in something resembling real life really it doesn’t work. I can’t cheer somebody who starts uttering menacing threats to his boss; I only want to slap him. And I don’t really want to delve into all the lying and the illogical contrivances that exist only to advance the plot.

By the way I wonder why very single Shia LaBeouf character is a moron. Is he the go to guy when there is an idiot in a screenplay?

Anyway back to the movie. The second big problem is a contrived and stupid ending. I understand that “financial crisis” is not an easy enemy for an Hollywood movie but their solution to unravel it is both unrealistic and singularly depressing at the same time.

I don’t want to say that this movie is terrible. There is a lot of good craftsmanship here, mainly from Oliver Stone who is still one of the greatest ever. Add a couple of interesting ideas and a fine performance from Douglas and the end result is not that bad, just don’t go out of your way to see it.

DVD review: Stone

Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton) has already spent eight of his ten years stint in prison; he is eligible for parole but needs the approval of Officer Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro). To get it he ask his wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) to seduce him.

This is an extremely frustrating movie. There are great performances from all the leads, including Milla Jovovich who shows that actually when given the right material she is a surprisingly good actor.

There are also all the basis for a nice psychological drama with the quiet desperation of Mabry life and the radio forever tuned to a religious channel but then the film starts meandering and lose itself among a conversion to an incredibly bizarre religion (something about sound and silence) and a role reversal between De Niro and Norton that should be poignant and instead feels contrived.

Is like the writer started working on the plot and then stopped halfway. I can understand that sometimes an open ending is the best ending but really in this movie there is no ending at all, no resolution, nothing. The plot fades away and disappear, stuff happens but we don’t why, everybody put on a serious face like something important was happening in their life but we don’t know because the movie doesn’t tell us!

This is indeed a rare movie, such a waste of good actors delivering their a game is really rare.

Videogame review: Bioshock 2

The underwater city of Rapture, full of technological wonders, is still in deep trouble. Ten years passed since the first game and now Sofia Lamb and her cult like organization rule the city. There is also a new hero and this time is one of the Big Daddies from the first game, Subject Delta. He needs to save his little sister Eleanor, who is also Sofia Lamb daughter, from her crazy parent.

The first Bioshock was an extremely good game, a masterpiece First Person Shooter. The second one is still very good. They kept everything that made the first one so good and even added something.

The basic game play is virtually the same; there are slight differences with the weapons and the hacking system but noting of real importance. Being a Big Daddy adds only some random walks outside, on the ocean bottom, and the chance of adopt some little sister.

Those are two really cool things but honestly I was expecting a more radical experience out of playing a character so iconic.

This is actually the main problem of the game; this is basically just more of the same, so if you played the first one you got a feeling of “Been there, done that” while if you are new to the series you probably wanna start with the first one. I’m not saying that the developers didn’t do their job, the experience of fighting a big sister is incredible, just that this was a battle that they couldn’t win.

A big part of what made the first game so interesting was the sense of discovery. Exploring a new and interesting setting is something that, by definition, can be done only once. Going back there is bound to be a subpar experience.

Actually the developers of the original game understood this problem and so the next game of the series is not Bioshock 3, instead is Bioshock Infinite.

This is a daring move that I hope pays. There is a completely new setting and story but, at the same time, it looks very Bioshock to me. The flying city is another failed utopia in the vein of the underwater city of rapture. The overall design reminds me of rapture while being completely different. Is like watching a new painting from a favorite artist and recognizing the design.

This is the same reason every Final Fantasy, a Japanese Role playing game series, has a different story in a different world. When the same person get to save the world again and again all drama is lost, it gets silly, it became like princess Peach who got kidnapped by Bowser, I don’t know, on twenty different occasions?

Cinema Review: Transformers: Dark of the moon

Alien robots are still fighting on our planet…

It wasn’t my intention to see Transformers 3. The first one was bad, the second was worse so really I didn’t even want to see it at home. Then the trailer came and I thought “Those are good looking explosions, maybe I should have a look at it…” After this is a sliding slope, because to get the most out of this is really obligatory to go to the cinema, seeing it at home, and in 2d, is just not the same experience. Is a little unspoken reality that is possible to enjoy a good plot with proper actors even on a small screen where a dumb and stupid movie requires the big screen…

Anyway to the movie.

“Transformers: Dark of the moon” (I imagine Pink Floyd hold the trademark for the Dark side) is a bad movie. I’m not saying that it fails at stuff like plotting, pacing and characterization that we normally ask from movies. I’m saying that Transformers 3 fails at being the dumb, loud cinematic experience that it should be.

The most glaring problem is that for the first 90 minutes of this very long movie (It goes over two hours) nothing of importance happens. Is mainly Shia Labeouf character complaining about stuff. Now don’t get me wrong, Shia Labeouf is not that bad an actor, he actually embody an everyman average person quality that is mostly absent among his peers. The problem is that his character is a complete, absolute, moron! After a while I really wanted to slap him in the face, really hard, to get some sense in his thick head.

He is angry because he waited three full months to get a job while his impossibly hot girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) works for doctor McDreamy of Grey’s Anatomy’s fame? Try the real world for once Sam.

Speaking about the titular token female I don’t know if I should commend Michael Bay for being so upfront in her being simply a teenage wet dream or complain about the blatant sexism of it. Even forgetting it for a moment her character is way over the top. After watching the movie I still have no idea what she does for a living, but it apparently involves going around in skimpy dresses and high heels all the time (even in the middle of a battle with giants robots she keeps her high heels on).

Not everything is that bad of course. The CGI is state of the art, they spent a lot of money on it and it’s easy to see it. The battle of Chicago looks great and is also engaging. Sadly even here this movie has flaws, many flaws.

First of all the director keeps doing slapstick humor even in the most serious situations leading to a jarringly clash of styles where one minute the world is doomed and the next giant robots are slipping around.

A movie about giant alien robots obviously has to problem of giving the humans something meaningful to do. Here there is a vague attempt of making the humans do a low tech assault on the Decepticons (The evil robots) but they forgot to explain it on screen so making it very unclear what they were supposed to accomplish. Regarding that scene is also fascinating how a very awesome scene of a group of men using flight suits look like an afterthought because every spectator thinks that it must be all CGI while in this case they did it for real.

There are a couple of nice plot twist and turns that I honestly didn’t see coming but the movie as a whole is over bloated. Certainly it is better than “revenge of the fallen” but this wasn’t really that hard to do.

DVD review: Despicable me

Gru is a supervillain (Mad scientist type) who wants to steal the moon. In a complicated plot to do this he adopt three young girls but being a parent changes him in ways that he couldn’t imagine.

This movie is surprisingly good. I didn’t expect something from a new formed animation studio to be this good.

The animation is not incredibly detailed but the models and the sceneries show a flavor and a style often absent in bigger production.

The story is original and interesting, honestly much better than the similarly themed “Megamind” (Espionage in Hollywood must be really big lately). Where “Megamind” blatantly rip off Superman “Despicable me” goes in uncharted waters and is much more of a odd couple movie (with Gru and the girls as the couple).

Full of funny moments and pathos this a well rounded experience that is enjoyable also for adults (who will get the most out of “Bank of Evil formerly Lehman brothers”)

DVD review: The way back

During world war two a disparate group of prisoners escape from a gulag and walk to safety across Siberia, the Gobi desert and the Himalaya.

Even an average Peter Weir movie is still very very good. He is sometimes a cold director, his movies often missing a “spark”, a driving force. But he is extremely competent, with a sense of pace that is missing from most of his colleagues. The main problem is that the characters take a while to come through. While they are still in the prison they tend to fade away in the background and only during the long escape they slowly stand out as individual, but when they do the story finds it grove and became genuinely gripping.

Probably the story is not true but this is not really important. This is a story that works so well by itself that even if it’s not true it should be because it talks about some of the fundamental realities of being human.

DVD review: Machete

Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) and his three friends (Including Hothead Jem Coughlin (Jeremy Renner) from the derelict neighborhood of Charlestown (Is in Boston) successfully rob a bank while taking his director Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) hostage. Fearful that maybe she could recognize them he approach her. An unlikely romantic relationship blossoms among more heists while FBI agent Adam Frawley(Jon Hamm) tries to pin them down.

It’s official, “Gone baby gone” is not a lucky moment and Ben Affleck is a very competent director. Is a shame that he put himself as the protagonist of his second movie because as an actor he still has his limits and this is not the right role for him. He is still somewhat wooden in his delivery and doesn’t manage to put a spark of life in his character.

The movie in itself has very good action scenes, including one of the very best car chases of recent memory, but is somewhat formulaic. We saw countless times the “last heist then I’ll retire” that goes terribly wrong, the “hothead”, the “leader who tries to do the job without shooting a bullet” etc.

Affleck is more successful in his depiction of Charlestown and actually manages to establish the neighborhood as a character upon itself that cast a shadow over the whole movie. Doug only wants to go away while Jem embraces it as a part of his personality.

This is also the second last performance of the late Pete Postlethwaite. He was an incredibly gifted actor who never got top billing because he didn’t have the look.

DVD review: The town

Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) and his three friends (Including Hothead Jem Coughlin (Jeremy Renner) from the derelict neighborhood of Charlestown (Is in Boston) successfully rob a bank while taking his director Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) hostage. Fearful that maybe she could recognize them he approach her. An unlikely romantic relationship blossoms among more heists while FBI agent Adam Frawley(Jon Hamm) tries to pin them down.

It’s official, “Gone baby gone” is not a lucky moment and Ben Affleck is a very competent director. Is a shame that he put himself as the protagonist of his second movie because as an actor he still has his limits and this is not the right role for him. He is still somewhat wooden in his delivery and doesn’t manage to put a spark of life in his character.

The movie in itself has very good action scenes, including one of the very best car chases of recent memory, but is somewhat formulaic. We saw countless times the “last heist then I’ll retire” that goes terribly wrong, the “hothead”, the “leader who tries to do the job without shooting a bullet” etc.

Affleck is more successful in his depiction of Charlestown and actually manages to establish the neighborhood as a character upon itself that cast a shadow over the whole movie. Doug only wants to go away while Jem embraces it as a part of his personality.

This is also the second last performance of the late Pete Postlethwaite. He was an incredibly gifted actor who never got top billing because he didn’t have the look.