TV review: True Blood season 1

Near future, vampires had made their presence known to society and a young girl starts a relationship with one of them.

Certainly there must be a space for an adult version of Twilight. The problem is how to distinguish it from the young girl’s favorite movie when the base love story is factually identical. Of course you could employs good writers and simply do a compelling and realistic story but why bother with all of that when you are HBO and so you can simply add tons of steamy sex.

In every single episode there is some sex, and I’m not taking about your simple missionary position style, here we go from S & M moments with chains and handcuffs all the way to virtual sex while high after a dose of vampire blood, V.

Now I imagine that the creators of this stuff wanted it to be edgy but after the first moments, when is slightly off putting, it becomes terribly fun in a campy sort of way. Like when David Caruso on CSI Miami takes off his sunglasses while pretending to be really cool but in reality he is so so terrible.

The sex aside this series is actually fairly interesting. The setting, rural Louisiana is a breath of fresh air compared to the countless times that we saw Los Angeles and his ilk.

The only stand out character is the flamboyant homosexual Lafayette while the rest of the cast is either too bland or simply unlikable. For something about vampires we really don’t see a lot about their world, a part from a very good sequence at the vampire tribunal. Actually the whole season looks like a long introduction, with a lot of plot lines that meander without really going anywhere.

At least is entertaining, we’ll see how the second season will shape up.

Anime review: Nabari

Young Miharu got embroiled in the secret world of ninjas.

This 26 episodes anime series from 2008 nominally is about a secret world of ninjas which coexist alongside our own, modern, one. In theory the protagonist is saddled with the most powerful secret ninja art in the world, with whom he can literally do anything he wants, and he must learn to control it because all the others ninja in the world want to steal it from him.

Sadly this synopsis, while true, doesn’t really reflect what this anime is about. See, in reality this is a story about teen angst and gay love, a lot of gay love. The beginning is terrible, I’m not against man love in any shape and form but when a running gag is that our protagonist, who is a young school boy, pretends that his ninja teacher, a grown man, is trying to have sex with him the pedophiliac subtext becomes so big that it’s impossible to gloss over it.

Probably the author realized that too because this relationship quickly sour while our depressed hero find solace with another young ninja, still slightly older than him, who is even more nihilistic than him and literally wants to erase himself.

Now of course this is a boy anime so they never spell out what the whole relationship is about. They simply pretend that this is an incredibly angsty form of bromance, one where they walk literally hand in hand while tears flow liberally.

Nothing bad per se but the end result is that a fairly promising story deteriorates in that Japanese evergreen of the young boy who in reality could be incredible but can’t be bothered because life is without any sense for him. They go around and gather a bunch of secret ninja arts which are all in the end useless to the final resolution of the story. The fights are all sub par and the story in the end is so hijacked by the “bromance” that the final chapter is all about that while everybody seems to forget the famous uber powerful secret art.

Maybe if I were an angry teenager I would have at least partially related with this story but as it is I only wanted to slap some sense in the various protagonists.

Manteinance

I'm sick so no new content for today, regular service will hopefully resume soon.

Book Review: Excession

A mysterious black sphere appears in deep space; it’s impervious to any analysis and with his unfathomability challenges the most advanced intelligences of the galaxy.

This is hard sci-fi, very hard sci-fi.

Iain M. Banks novels are all set in the “Culture” universe. Just the premise is very complicated. A “post scarcity” universe where everything that you could wish for or just imagine is common place thanks to an incredibly advanced science. Kilometers long ships are inhabited by hundreds of millions, there are incredibly sophisticated artificial minds who govern an extremely peculiar society where human like being coexist with aliens and droids and everybody, from the normal human to all kinds of AI, is a citizen of the “culture”. Actually this universe is so peculiar that it would merit an essay just for itself but is not the case to go into too many details here so let’s just say that this is as advanced as it gets.

The story centers on an “outside context problem”. The definition given by Banks himself is so good that is worth putting it again here, “is the kind of problem most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.". Banks conceived it while playing Civilization, the computer game. In the game you could develop your little country and go around in your little wooden vessels and then be extremely surprised when another civilization comes along and they’ve been so technologically advanced that they have the battleship, which in Civilization term is like saying that they are invincible. This, apart from confirming that the battleship is the coolest troop ever in Civ, it’s also the protagonist of my favorite personal experience with the game, means that an “outside context problem” is just that, something that comes from beyond the horizon and is so big that you can’t even conceive it.

Applying this kind of problem to the culture is very interesting because the culture is as advanced as something could possibly be and there a lot of very interesting implications for Banks to explore.

He is also a difficult writer, he likes to explore and experiment but in the end it’s worth it because he gives us a really unique experience.

DVD review: Valentine's Day

Many different love stories all happening during Valentine’s Day.

I can see the reasoning in the producers mind, every A list actor bring his share of fans who will go to see him everywhere regardless of the nature of the movie so if we pile up as many famous actors as we can we can make good money…

Judging by the box office they were right piling seventeen famous actors, and one country singer, net a very satisfying 200 million dollars.

The whole movie is driven by this be inclusive drive. There is a love story for the elderly with Shirley Maclaine and Hector Helizondo, also known as the hotel manager in Pretty Woman and director Garry Marshall perennial lucky charm. There are two love stories for the teenagers and even one starring a ten years old little boy. They even managed to make a love story for the people who hate Valentine’s Day with Jamie Fox and Jessica Biel.

Sadly all this stuff left the movie very insubstantial. There is not a lot of comedy and the majority of the romantic elements are forced and trite.

The main love story should be the one with Ashton Kutcher and Jennifer Garner but he lacks the easy charm of his earlier works and the whole affair is so melodramatic that it gets a little bit silly.

Maybe the best one in the bunch is the one with Anne Hathaway. I say maybe because there is the distinct possibility that this simply the one that is aimed at me, in the thirty something age bracket.

In the end is hard the skip this one, if you don’t like at least one member of the enormous ensemble cast probably you are immune to romantic comedies altogether.

Mission statement

It’s a review free day so it’s a good moment to see where we are and what we are about.

Something that they don’t tell us at school is that to learn something, to really learn it, we simply have to do it, over and over again, till we are good at it. Therefore when I realized that I was terrible at writing in English, and I still am by the way, I decided that I had to exercise.

But why write on a public blog I can hear you ask? It’s because of the funny ways my mind work. See I have problems with exercising for the sake of exercising, I hate running the treadmill and stuff like that. I’m perfectly fine with walking 10 miles to get somewhere but if I have to do it while standing still and watching the wall I fell like slashing my wrists.

I learned to drive in the last few years. I already had a driving license of course but that is just the start of course. I could drive around the block for one hour every day but it would have been retarted. Instead I started driving my girlfriend to work every day, in the morning and in the evening. Obviously I was also trying to be nice but I also needed an excuse to drive regularly. So 20 minutes in the morning, another 20 in the evening is 40 minute a day, 200 a week, 10400 minutes or 173 hours a year minimum of training.

Yes, I got better at driving, even if I think that I can still improve myself.

So back to the writing, I could have done it in my private spaces but again, I need an objective, a purpose, I needed to do something and so here is the blog where any random person could stumble guided by the mysterious hand of google. *waves hand

For now I’ll try to continue with this timetable of updates, posting a review of something daily for the foreseeable future. Then when, and if, I get better maybe we’ll move to something else, only time will tell.

See you tomorrow with more stuff.

Cinema Review: The Troll Hunter

A group of students while doing a documentary about poaching discover the secret world of trolls.

Incredibly hyped this is certainly an original proposition. Vampires are so 2010! Now we have trolls.

This movie is very smart. The filmmaker went around the limitation of independent cinema by basically filming pretty normal stuff and pretending is something else. A fallen tree? Trolls did it. Power outage? Troll did it. A slavine? You know the drill by now.

Then there the trolls which are incredibly well realized for a independent production and could give a run for their money to most big budget movies. We need to go back to Cloverfield to get a creature so well realized.

Alas not everything is perfect. This is one of those movies who could benefit from a more stringent cut. First we wait forever to get to the troll hunting part which I assume would come to the surprise of no one considering the title. Then we lose a lot of filming time on trivial situation. Endless shots of our heroes getting in and out of the cars bring nothing to our experience.

I must also add that the Shaky Cam effect is in full swing and while Cloverfield managed to keep it under control and give us a pleasurable experience here we got a vague sense of sea sickness and a lot of confusion because it wasn’t possible to understand what’s going on.

The tone of the movie is strange. We expected a much more serious affair but instead we got a lot of dark humor. This made the movie very interesting and satirical, I’ll never forget the troll termination form, but in the end it was mostly missing in pathos, even during the last battle with the biggest troll. Speaking of which I honestly couldn’t understand the ending and therefore I left the cinema puzzled and slightly annoyed but maybe it’s just me.

A must see just for the sheer originality.

DVD review: From Paris with love

Paris, young employee of the American Embassy team up with a veteran spy.

The plot makes completely no sense, there is no characterization and I’m not really sure what happened in this movie…

But in end I don’t really care because it was such fun. Luc Besson established a strange industry down there in France. He, and his collaborators, regularly churns out action movie after action movie. The quality often is not there but they have such an ease with the right scenes and the witty one liner. I think that nowadays they are unparalleled in this particular field.

This one is only written by Besson while the Director is Taken’s Pierre Morel. As a whole it’s worse than Taken, it’s less gritty and misses the unifying driving force that was Liam Neeson “Save the daughter” plot, but on the other side is much funnier and overtly over the top.

Travolta is still good as the main action hero; he had to shave his head for the part but none the less is impressive that a 57 years old man is still credible as an ass kicking machine.

The intention was the start a new movie franchise with titles like “From London with love”, “From Prague with love” etc. Considering that the box office result has been tepid I don’t know it’ll happen but we can still hope because Besson and Co. brought back the fun in the action movie department.

DVD review: Away We Go

A couple goes on a trip around the USA looking for a new place to live.

This movie confirms what we suspected all along. If you put an artsy director on a rom-com lite movie in the end you get the same old same old recycled and obvious stuff.

Sam Mendes is a critics’ darling. Starting from the depressing American beauty, then with the bleak “Road to Perdition” and ending with the even more depressing “Revolutionary Road” he established himself as the king of “serious” cinema.

Now we get to this movie which he actually conceived as a companion piece to “Revolutionary Road”, but where “Revolutionary Road” was utterly depressing this is supposed to be upbeat and quirky with a couple that stays in love from the beginning till the end.

It is strange then that after the movie we got a sense of foreboding and depression even superior to “Revolutionary Road”. I don’t know how, maybe because in the former movie they actually inflicted all the angst upon themselves while here they are clearly good intentioned, and they remain in love by the way, for the whole movie which is nice and surprising. Anyway here they are clearly good intentioned but they meet so much bleakness, so much unhappiness that really the end message seem to be, they are happy “for now” but in the end the pressure of society will drive them apart, one way or another.

So in the end it looks like Sam Mendes is utterly unable to make an upbeat movie, he got a few chuckles out of us but in the end his cynical viewpoint is unrelenting.

I’ll skip it if I were you, go and rent a dumb rom com, is better for your general well being.

DVD review: Open Graves

A group of friends plays with a demonic board game.

We live in a strange world. This is without doubt the worst movie of the year, it has a terrible and predictable plot, stupid characters and even the big death set pieces, arguably the main selling point of the movie, are cheap and silly.

They spent 8 million dollars on it. 8 millions! I really can’t fathom where they did go, I don’t think Eliza Dushku can be that expensive, and I really wonder what she was thinking when she signed for this one.

I could go on and pinpoint all the terrible stuff but I don’t like to shoot fish in a barrel.

Stay away from this movie.

Dvd review: I Love you Philip Morris

While in prison a con man fall in love with a fellow inmate, he will do anything to be with him.

This movie is a strange proposition. At his heart is a rom com with just one key distinctive factor, the main couple is composed by two men and here lies the problem, not with the concept of an homosexual rom com of course, but with the execution.

Most of the movie fun stuff amount to “See there are two grown men holding hands!” and stuff like that and even if I can admit that such a proposition is certainly edgy enough that in USA the movie only had a very limited distribution, it gets old really fast.

The romantic part also doesn’t work. Jim Carrey character is too unsympathetic with his endless and doomed get rich quick scheming and his constant lying.

I think that the filmmakers knew this and that’s why this movie got a voiceover which increases the detachment that we feel from the story making it feel like a dark fable.

There are funny bits I admit and the various ploy that Steven Russel, Jim Carrey character, uses to escape prison are ingenious and amazing, probably the best part of the movie especially considering that this a real life story and so he actually did all that stuff. An impressive tenacity indeed.

In the end is not that bad.

Videogame review: Little Big Planet 2

Sackboy goes to battle a new enemy.

Little Big Planet pushes the boundaries of what a game is. At his heart lies an incredibly sophisticated and flexible suite of creation tools with whom it’s possible to create entirely new games. With Little Big Planet 1 we were limited to platform levels but with this new title it’s possible to create virtually anything. If you don’t believe watch you a user recreated the historical grandfather of the FPS genre Wolfenstein during the beta.

Alas not everybody is gifted with such creativity and so we normal human being are limited to the play aspect of the game and here sadly they blundered a little bit.

See where the first one had an incredibly fascinating single player campaign with amazing backdrop and near perfect game play which introduced us seamlessly to Little Big Planet world this one had to introduce us to the extreme flexibility of the new editor. To do so a new tool and a new way of playing are introduced every couple of levels. There are hooks, guns, ships, all kind of stuff and therefore the play experience is fragmented and disjointed. The game often transform into a side scrolling shoot’em up.

Also many of these new features are kinda terrible to use. There is an awful mechanical rabbit that is very fiddly to control and also the hook is implemented in a very complicated way.

The amazing theatratical backdrops are ditched in favor of a more realistic approach and generally speaking the game is much less poetic.

Of course there are exceptions, mainly the green hippie level where all the old creators make cameo appearances as asylum inmates, but in the end it all felt fairly standard, not bad per se but neither really good.

Let’s hope that there are many hidden gems in the user created levels because on the strength of the single player experience I wouldn’t recommend this game.

Cinema review: Cowboys & Aliens

Cowboys vs aliens.

What a missed occasion. The real problem is not that this is not a serious quality movie of course; with that title we all knew it was a glorified b movie. The problem is that it is too long and also kinda boring which, for a movie like this, is a terrible thing.

The main fault lies in the screenplay. Too many cooks, five, have tried for a decade to make this work. I know that the top title inform us that this is an adaptation of a graphic novel with the same title but this is not really true.

A guy called Scott Mitchell Rosenberg created the concept, Cowboys vs aliens, in 1997 and sold the right to the movie when the comic was still in development stage and in end the whole comic part was just a way to establish copyright and get the ball rolling.

Only when Spielberg joked that an idea like this one could make a good movie then things really started to coalesce and the production went on.

Structurally “Cowboys & Aliens” is a western so it starts a disparate group going from point A to point B while meeting various challenges on the road. The alien bit is tackled mainly at the end. This is not bad per se, I honestly would have preferred an “anything goes attitude” with aliens popping everywhere and a crazier atmosphere but that’s just me, a somber affair can work. The problem lies in the fact this picture fails to deliver even as a western.

There is not enough characterization, most of the times the plot meander aimlessly and overall the movie is missing the epic quality of western classic like “Unforgiven”. By the way if you think I’m being disingenuous by comparing “Cowboys & Aliens” to “Unforgiven” the producers actually started doing it so it’s fair game.

The aliens have a very classic design that call back to the “Creature from the black lagoon” but alas their plot is totally unbelievable and stupid. We understand that they must underestimate the humans, if not there is no way we can win against such a technological advanced race, but their overall actions and motivation are beyond silliness.

The best part of the movie is a curmudgeon Harrison Ford. I really love his new on screen persona, it is basically the same character from “Morning Glory”, and I can’t wait to see more roles like this one. He also got all the best lines and literally steals the show under Daniel Craig nose.

Olivia Wilde part is practically useless and doesn’t amount to more than the usual token female role, with the obligatory non sequitur kissing scene. I got nothing against her but she doesn’t have the charm to elevate this kind of stuff, she normally has such an icy demeanor, maybe she could go the Kate Beckingsale route and start slicing monsters?

Brownie points for bringing back the Kurgan from “Highlander”, Seeing Clancy Brown in a major role is wonderful and I hope that this is the start of many things to come for him.

Anyway an easily skippable experience.

Book review: Supergods

An history and an exploration of the superhero history and meaning.

For a fan of the superheroes this book is a must have and even for a mere sympathizer this is a recommended title.

Morrison demonstrates a surprisingly accurate knowledge of the genre, of course it’s not complete but, as the author himself says, a comprehensive history would have been three times longer.

More important than that it is an extremely readable book. While recounting the most obscure passages Morrison eases the narrative with witty one liners and a wonderful laid back attitude that reminds us that we shouldn’t take this stuff too seriously.

The book also doubles as an autobiography. Actually, and this is something a lot of those more serious reviewers didn’t understood, this is not a pure history of the superhero, this is an history of the superhero as Grant Morrison sees it and an history of his relationship with that concept.

Overall this makes the book far more interesting. Morrison has a lot of very interesting ideas about the superhero concept and what it does mean in the modern world and just those concept make this book worth reading.

DVD review: Ondine

A fisherman finds a mysterious girl in his net. Is she a normal girl or a creature from the sea?

Neil Jordan finally goes back to the world of myth and fables more than 26 years after the wonderful “The Company of Wolves” and again he deliver a masterpiece. Among his peers he is the best at this, he get the inner meaning of these stories and deliver them so perfectly in such an effortless way that he manages to pull of the best mermaid story ever without a single CGI shot.

The story, also written by Jordan, is tight and smart. The ambiguity about the true nature of Ondine, the aforementioned girl from the sea, is maintained till the very end. He manages to make all the characters are realistic and interesting without slowing the story a single bit, no slow introduction for them, we jump straight in and we learn to know them as the story unfold.

The setting, Cork County in Ireland, Is stunning and Jordan uses it the frame and enrich every shot. I know that it sounds obvious but his younger peers, Marshall in “Centurion” and Refn in “Walhalla Rising” somehow don’t understand this simple truth.

Strong performance from everybody involved. Collin Farrel finally starts to move away from the Character that he’s been virtually playing in every movie that he made in the last five years while the titular ondine, the polish Alicja Bachleda, and the child actress Dervla Kirwan establish themselves as name to watch closely.

In the end is amazing how Jordan manages to convey the inner meaning and significance of the myth, that he really conveys that is how you see your life that matters.

A masterpiece.

DVD review: I hate valentine's day

Genevieve really contrived ideas about romantic relationship are challenged.

Another day, another rom com.

This is the latest effort from Nia Vardalos who became an overnight sensation with “My big fat Greek weeding”, which she wrote and starred in, but then was never able to get back her mojo. All her subsequent efforts, including this one, bombed at the box office (Don’t cry for her, with the royalties from “My big fat Greek weeding” she’ll never be poor).

The premise is bizarre and convoluted and basically drags down the first thirty minutes of the movie, honestly only extreme tiredness stopped me from getting another movie considering that I didn’t even crack a smile in the first half hour, but then the movie switched gears and suddenly started being funny. This is still not a comic masterpiece but managed to entertain us in the end.

It is worth noticing that the movie started working when it moved to the classic rom com plot, even openly acknowledging it at time. It’s difficult to move in uncharted territory, I think that there are occasions when it’s better for writer to stick to more familiar territory.

The two protagonists are slightly miscast. They do their jobs but really this is a role for younger people. On the other side I understand that they wanted to do the “The two leads from My big fat Greek weeding are back together for the first time”, maybe with a better ad campaign about that they could have had a decent box office.

DVD review: A single man

(1967)A single day in the life of Professor Falconer who is mourning the loss of his 16 years partner, Jim.

I must admit that this movie is wonderfully shot. First time director Tom Ford, famous as the head designer for Gucci, really brings an aesthetic touch to movie making. Every scene, every moment is extremely pretty.

Some of his tricks are really unusual like an emotional use of colors. When something happens that lift the mood of our very depressed protagonist immediately the world colors get more saturated, more brilliant, before turning back a moment later.

Colin Firth is so good in the role that he got a deserved nomination for the best actor Oscar but he didn’t won it in the end. I kinda agree with the people from the academy, his performance is somewhat restrained by the heavy structure of this movie while Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart” flowed more naturally. Having said that is still a great acting job.

The subject is honestly very depressing and only the countless period details and the minutiae of gay lifestyle kept us watching till an ending that is ridiculously stupid and contrived. Here’s another reason why I’ll always be suspicious of artsy movies, I don’t pretend an Hollywood ending but this I feel like the filmmaker just played a joke on me.

DVD review: All About Steve

Eccentric cruciverbalist Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock) stalk a TV camera man.

This movie had been universaly panned by the critics, Sandra Bullock won the Razzie award for the worst actress, one day before winning the Oscar for the best actress thank to a role in a different movie, and even my beloved empire gave it only one star.

In my opinion they didn’t get it. They all lamented how annoying Bullock character is but that’s the whole point. Mary is the wacky sidekick that we see in every Rom Com promoted to a titular role. Moreover she is a nerd, I know that she doesn’t watch anime or use a computer obsessively but that is only the stereotypical description of a nerd while actually a lot of that stuff is actually going mainstream at the moment.

Mary is a nerd in the truer sense of the world. She is not very good with people, she is obsessive about her stuff, she cultivates strange interest and has a terrible fashion sense epitomized by her red boots. She is a nerd and she is supposed to be annoying just like the bearded guy from the hangover or Hugh Grant friend from “Notting Hill”. This is just the starting point but if we stuck with her till the end we see that she is actually not that bad and that a lot of her bad habits were only her attempts to be normal, to be accepted.

I really don’t understand how they could give Sandra Bullock the worst actress Razzie, which she actually accepted in person showing more sportsmanship that the majority of her colleagues. I think that she actually did a noteworthy job transforming herself into this hopeless nerd without resorting to ugly prosthesis or random disgusting acts, a la bearded guy from the hangover (Zach Galifianakis), and she still has the best comic timing in Hollywood.

Moreover this movie was actually funny. I know that this shouldn’t be noteworthy but after half a dozen Jennifer Aniston rom com where I didn’t even smile a fun dumb movie, because this is still a dumb movie even if it has a point, is like a breath of fresh air to a prisoner. It shouldn’t be that hard to write fun stuff but evidently too much of Hollywood recent output is written by a committee and therefore is as fun as actually going to a business meeting.

DVD review: Crazy Heart

Country singer Bad Blake was a great star once but now he had reached the bottom.

Another great musical biopic, the only difference this time is that this is all fiction, there is no real musician here, Bad Blake is a creation of pure imagination.

Now this is not really as bad as it sounds. The musical biopic, even when is firmly anchored to reality, was already an heavily stylized genre. They all share the same structure, in many case they even use the same shots so actually going for the fictious, gives the story a chance to be innovative.

We don’t actually follow Bad Blake whole life story, we see only a couple of years of his life and without the need to cramp a whole life story events flow so much better. We have a feeling of what his life was, of his many wives, of his estranged child, but we never see any of them.

Of course all of this would never have worked if the actor playing Bad Blake wasn’t able to pull it off, but then they got Jeff Bridges who actually manages a performance good even for his standards, which are really high already to start with.

He literally inhabits Bad Blake, he sings and plays his songs, he shows the various stages of alcohol intoxication with subtle, and less subtle, signs. In many moments we clearly see what’s going on in Bad Blake mind without him telling us.

He won an Oscar for this part and, in my book, he clearly deserved it.

The ending is a little underwhelming, certainly not depressing as it could be but probably years of Hollywood endings left us a little bit spoiled. Anyway this is a recommended viewing.

DVD Review: Micmacs

A group of homeless plot revenge against a weapon manufacturer.

Jean Pierre Jeunet is a visionary genius. There is a thin line that goes from him trough Terry Gilliam to the German expressionism of Fritz Lang’s “Nosferatu”.

What is so remarkable about him is how he manages to create a complete autonomous world. He goes beyond the simple and boring magic of special effects to a peculiar place where the whole movie is the special effect. He is pure cinema.

It’s really a shame then that the story, concocted as usual by Jeunet himself, doesn’t manage to hold everything together. The title “Micsmacs a Tire Larigot” translates to “non-stop shenanigans” and it is really a literal description of the movie. The whole film is an endless concatenation of shenanigans, incredible and amazing ones I must admit, but it’s missing the emotional heart of “Amelie” and “A very long engagement”. This is a big problem in a film like this because when everything is so artificial we need something to hold on, to follow.

This is still a good movie, but it could have been much better.

Videogame review: Heavy rain

The hunt for the origami killer.

If you are a “serious” gamer you are supposed to immediately dislike this game and possibly deride it. It’s astonishing the number of people who went online to say how bad this game is. Now this, as many internet things, is only vaguely related to reality considering that this game sold more than two million copies but it’s interesting to see why the “hardcores” so actively dislike it.

Now I don’t want to say like Paul W. S. Anderson of resident evil fame that in reality there are only 1000 people posting the same stuff over and over again over the internet but I think that in the digital world some ideas become “cool”, or “memes” if you prefer it, and start a process of self replication. The “meme” in question is the idea that a game gets better and better the more freedom there is for the player to roam and mess about. The standard of this is probably GTA where, according to his aficionados, is wonderful to go around this virtual city and just do random stuff like shooting at policemen and things like that.

So the plot, here goes the saying, is for wussies and real players just skip it as faster as they can to get to the next bit of virtual carnage.

This is of course ludicrous, but don’t tell them, they could get angry, in reality people can enjoy so many different things out of a game. Somebody could stop watching a wonderful scenery in World of Warcraft, another person could spent hours reading all the in game material of Dragon Age, yet another could spent weeks maximizing the stats of his Final Fantasy party, and I could go on and on.

And so we get to the people like us, who like to immerse ourselves in a story, who actually enjoy a cut scene, for us “Heavy Rain” is a masterpiece. The story, the atmosphere, the plot twists, everything is incredible. I saw a lot of movies with worse pacing and a sillier plot than this one and being actually in control, I participated enormously in all the vicissitudes of the various characters. The creator of the game, David Cage, called it an emotional experience and I can say that, at least for me, he succeeded.

The controls are similar to the dreaded QTE (Quick Time Events) made famous by God Of War. The idea of a QTE is that in particular situation, like when we need to finish an level boss, a cinematic scene start playing and we need to input a series of command that are prompted on the screen to complete it.

What makes “Heavy Rain” a much better experience is that the commands are not arbitrary. We actually use the same command to the same things over and over again during the game. I can’t speak about the normal controller but with the move they all feel very natural. To knock the door we raise the Move while the character raise the hand and then we push while the character knocks. I know that it sounds ludicrous but it actually contributes to put us there, in the scene.

When there is a strenuous situation the controls get complicated so that we can literally feel what is going on. We need to keep pushing some buttons to make our alter egos continue doing what they are doing, we need to do it slowly for frail stuff, fast if it’s something that requires speed, push it repeatedly if we need to exert ourselves.

This game is really a unique gaming experience, a glimpse of the future.

My only nitpick is that many chapters appeared to have only one way to complete them which is a shame and made me feeling slightly railroaded. When there is a window and some bricks are lying nearby it would have been nice to have the possibility to get inside breaking the window with a brick instead of spending five minutes looking for the entrance that the developer envisaged for us.

I say this is a nitpick because with more than twenty different ending and the actual possibility of losing some of our characters and continuing the game toward the end this game made me feel like I was in charge of the story.