Movie Review - The Mechanic

When I went into this movie, I did not expect much from it.  I expected the basic action movie that thinks plot is that thing that you put in to kill time between brawls, shootouts, and explosions.  In this respect, I was pleasantly surprised when this movie's writers turned out to actually be able to write.  The movie had a legitimate plot that only gave way occasionally to holes and clichés.
The movie stars Jason Statham, the big guy who looks like a cross between a gym teacher I had in middle school and an egg who has been having a particularly bad day, as a "mechanic" a.k.a. hitman.  Now while most movies go for the the 'killer with a conscience' thing so you can sympathize with the lead, this film goes for the 'killer who doesn't have a conscience because he KILLS PEOPLE FOR A LIVING' character design because the writers probably noticed that if a hitman had a conscience, he would be a pretty terrible hitman.  It also co-stars Ben Foster as Statham's apprentice, who, from what I gathered, decided to become a hitman because he really didn't have anything better to do at the time.
The movie starts with Stathm preforming one of his assassinations, and then goes through a short montage of him putting away all his planning material away as he explains that he's a hitman and he kills people and he guesses thats kind of cool but who really cares, just in case the viewer didn't catch that because they spent the first 5 minutes of the movie in a coma.  The film then introduces Statham's one and only friend, who you don't see again until Statham kills him because this other guy said so and Statham, as we've already gone over, just has trouble giving a shit.  Later, Statham takes on Foster, his friend's son. on as an apprentice, because when someone really wants to get revenge on the guy that killed his father, and you're that man, the smartest idea is to teach him how to kill people.  I mean, he'll never figure it out and try to avenge his father's death by killing you right? riiiiiiiight.  They do a couple of assignments together, Statham giving lessons like 'revenge is never a good motivation' and 'never let them know you're coming', and then he finds out that his boss betrayed him by making him kill his friend, and Statham tells his boss that he is going to go kill him to get revenge.  He really is a front-runner for good decision-maker of the year.
Aside from that, Foster totally botches one of the missions and then they continue on because hey it's not like actions having consequences is a key component of the movies plot OH WAIT YES IT IS.  Still, this is one of the few movies that I can honestly say is worth the ticket price.  It's an action movie that remembered that it's a movie and not just an hour and a half long explosion/bullet-storm, and even though I spent most of the movie forecasting the end, I was still caught mildly off-guard when the actual ending came about.


tl;dr:

Plot: 7/10
Acting: 8/10
Soundtrack: 9/10
Effects: 9/10
Overall: 8.25/10

Video Game Forecast - February

Well earlier today i was overcome with a striking boredom so I decided to check up on what games were coming out this coming month and then immediately wished I had instead chosen to take something big and sharp  and shoved it into one of my eye sockets.  After I finished the list, I found my self arbitrarily shouting into space, and then had the startling realization "oh wait, I have a blog," so now you are graced with what is both a simple, scatterbrained hate spasm and the closest thing I've done to an actual review since this blog was in diapers, crying because i never felt like feeding it.
Now I'll be the first to admit I'm a tad preferential to console gaming, which already means I'm looking at the panorama of the gaming world through a three foot long lead pipe that I unceremoniously stapled to my own face.  On top of that I only really play the Xbox 360, since the PS3 is out of the question because i do not shit gold bricks, and, since I am not an infant that has been dropped on its head, I'm not really the Wii's target demographic.  But now that I've gotten the fact that I'm painfully unqualified and have no right to be any kind of pretentious, let the sea of pretension begin!
February opens with a Call of Duty: Black Ops DLC, which is what they refer to as a bad omen.  Call of Duty has always been an game I've taken issue with, but seeing as the displeasure I feel towards it would be enough to justify kicking a small orphan in the testicles, I'll shorten it to this: I actually bought Black Ops (and by bought I mean got as a gift to absolutely no expense on my part) in hopes that all my unfounded, biased hate may turn out to be just that and, as is usually the case, it wasn't.  At the very least, the story was interesting, or it would have been if it wasn't the next in a line of games made by people whose job it is to find things that they haven't yet blamed on the Russians and then proceed to blame on the Russians, and also written by people who seem to have nothing better to do than sit on their hands watching reruns of Lost.
Aside from that we have a fistful of sequels, which means a new lineup of games that have been either made worse or made increasingly worse by a bunch of men in suits who decided their wallets weren't quite fat enough yet, a Mario reboot because, hey it's been a whole five minutes since Nintendo released the last one, and a few PC titles who expose themselves to being ridiculously easy to judge based solely on the name and/or cover art.
However, the forecast is not completely bleak, because at the end of this horribly dismal month there's a little game called Until I'm Gone looming on the horizon.  Until I'm Gone is a third-person point and click horror/psychological thriller that looks like a game that has potential after you get past the whole needlessly-succumbing-to-every-cliché-ever bit.  That and the fact that after playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent, every other PC horror/psychological thriller game is going to be a bit like having someone piss in your mouth after you've enjoyed a nice glass of twenty-year-old black label scotch, or the equivalent beverage that makes your pants tighter.
Between it's lack of games and the fact that it is the single coldest bloody month of the entire year, February can go suck dick for all I care, and that's all I have to say about that.

Movie Reviews - No Strings Attached

    No Strings Attached is an incredibly entertaining movie.  I had the pleasure of getting to go see it with my good friend Ian, which was actually a very good time.  No Strings Attached is actually almost as good a guy movie as it is a romantic comedy.  Not that i'm suggesting that if you and your bros are looking for a good film you should go see it, but if you need a good movie to take your girl to, this is a good choice.
   Natalie Portman plays Emma,  a young doctor who lives with her 3 friends, who are also doctors.  Emma is the RomCom archetype of the emotionally distant girl who inevitably falls in love with the hot male lead.  Expositionally speaking, Emma's one of those brainy girls from a brainy family who went to an Ivy League school before becoming a doctor.  Not really anything else I can do as far as in-depth character analysis, for fear of breaking the no spoilers rule.
 The "hot male lead" I referred to earlier is none other than Ashton Kutcher.  Now, Ashton is one of those actors I take a lot of shit for liking.  Him, and Keanu Reaves.  Ashton plays Adam, son of a television star, and who works on a TV series himself.  As an assistant.  So much for the typical hot AND successful male lead.  Adam's parents divorced when he was just a young lad, around the time he first met Emma, and it's the first thing they bond over.
    The movie starts when Adam and Emma first met, 15 years before the actual movie.  Once it gets to modern day, Adam and Emma become "sex friends" aka friends-with-benefits, and theres the plot.  Ugh I apologize for this weak review folks.  RomComs and my reviews never seem to be a good match.

tl;dr:

Plot: 8/10
Acting: 9/10
Soundtrack: 9.5/10
Effects: N/A
Overall: 8.83/10

Movie Review - The Green Hornet

Well it's that time again, time for me to review a film and compliment it excessively and treat it like its one of the greatest films ever made, per usual.  Which would be the case, had i not actually seen The Green Hornet.  Anyone who's seen The Green Hornet will agree with me, and if you haven't, congratulations to you, you lucky bastard.  Now, while it isn't one of the worst movies ever made, it is by no means a good movie, and is probably the worst I've seen in awhile.   For those of you who don't know, The Green Hornet is a continuation of the Green Hornet franchise, which started as a radio drama, was made into several comic book series, a television series, and a few movies.  The Green Hornet and Kato have been fighting crime together for almost 75 years.  With such a long run, and such well developed stories and characters, it couldn't have been too hard to piece together a pretty good movie, but that is exactly what failed to happen.
          Let's start with Seth Rogen, who also co-wrote the movie.  Rogen plays the Green Hornet, aka Britt Reid.  Reid is your typical partying playboy slash disappointing son whose father owns and operates a newspaper company.  Of course, then the father dies and Britt inherits the business and everything else.  Shortly after, due to a combination of resentment for his father, a really cool car, and alcohol, Britt Reid becomes the Green Hornet.  The character of Britt goes back and forth from annoying, whiny prick, to stereotypical playboy, to decent, noble human being, to his least common personality, actually funny.  I spent most of the movie desperately trying to like Britt, but it was made virtually impossible.  He had more lines than any other character in the movie, and even considering he was the main character, there were too few lines that had any kind of depth to them to justify all the talking he did.  Since Seth Rogen also co-wrote, I'm afraid I'm going to have to call him out on the writing to.  For starters, as I previously said, he gave himself an unnecessarily large amount of lines.  The movie is also rather poorly structures.  As I was watching, it felt as if they were making it up as they went along.  They'd try taking the movie in one direction, not like it, and change course mid-film.  It actually felt as if they'd done several different cuts of the movie, and then just stuck bits and pieces together, resulting in some kind of Frankenstein film.
        Jay Chou plays the role of Kato, right-hand man to both Britt Reid and the Green Hornet.  He starts off as an assistant to Britt's father, making his coffee and fixing his cars, and after Britt's father's death, goes on to do the same for Britt.  Apart from being an outstanding mechanic and engineer, Kato is also highly skilled in martial arts, and it is a combination of these two traits that gives Britt the idea of going out and fighting crime. Now, I'm not going to lie, Kato is the best thing about this movie.  Very few unnecessary lines, and good delivery of the lines he had.  The action scenes were also amazingly well done, although a little short.  They played out like a QTE, or Quick-Time Event for you non-gamers out there.  Simple, isolated actions, strung together in a bad-ass sequence that almost made the rest of this movie worth watching.
       Now, there were other characters in this movie, but honestly I don't feel any of the other performances were anything noteworthy.  All in all, this movie isn't worth the ticket price.

tl;dr:

Plot: 5/10
Acting: 5/10
Soundtrack: 7/10
Effects: 8/10
Overall: 6.25/10

Games - Amnesia: The Dark Descent (aka an anatomically correct horror)

first things first:
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH OH GOD WHY WHY LORD THE HORROR MAKE IT STOP
      Amnesia: The Dark Descent is possibly the single most terrifying game I have played in my entire life, and I have played a good number of horror games.  It is a game that is impossible to play alone, because it will simply kill you. So I did the most logical thing, and played with a group.  There were four of us in total, and only one of us had the balls to play, and I am not ashamed to say it was NOT me.  We played for almost two hours, and it was the most gut-wrenching, intimidating, and traumatizing hour and 45 minutes of my life (given, I live a fairly white-collar existence).  The four of us all coped in our own unique ways, Teddy (the player) often paused to weep.  Jon just wept.  Avery, one of the most cool-headed and logically-minded people I've ever met, remained silent and frozen in fear.  I gave the occasional yelp, and spent the majority of the time in a cowering position.
        Now, in my experience, there are 3 types of horror games: the games where something jumps out at you around every corner; the games where several corners go by in which nothing jumps out at you, and then once you get nervous something jumps; and finally the games where every corner they build it up to something jumping at you, but nothing does.  Occasionally you'll see something, but it will disappear as opposed to come for you.  It gets to the point where you almost start hoping for things to come at you, so you can be sure it's actually there.  Amnesia is the third type of game.  It is, for starters, one of the darkest games I've ever played, speaking in terms of brightness.  There are two methods of illumination in the game, torches and your lantern.  Torches require tinderboxes to light, which you have to find around the game, and your lantern requires oil, which runs out at a decent speed and refills are much more scarce than tinderboxes.  Even with these, the areas of light they create are limited, and most of the game is almost of completely dark.
    The plot of the game is rather vague.  Your character, named Daniel, awakes in a hallway with amnesia (hence the title of the game).  The story is delivered entirely through occasional auditory flashbacks and journal pages you find scattered across the game, which thankfully go in chronological order.
    Did I mention the zombies?  Because there are zombies.  Amnesia is not one of those zombie games where there will be hordes of zombies, or even small crowds.  The zombies are always alone, and the encounters are spaced out.  Mainly because you have no weapons.  You entirely lack the ability of combat.  You can run, and you can hide, and to be perfectly honest you aren't even very good at those.  Zombies of course have the nasty habit of making their appearances right after you solve a puzzle, however this doesn't rule out the dreaded random encounter.  You'll just be going about your business, and you'll catch a glimpse of a form at the end of a hallway, or nearby in a side-room, or, in one extreme case, directly behind you, the direct result of which was our quitting.  After one puzzle, we were congratulated by a violent knocking on the only door out of the room, followed shortly by the sound of smashing wood, and finally our death.  Good times.
    The zombies aren't so bad.  Amnesia's true terror doesn't lie in what you see.  It lies in what you don't see, and what you hear.  Darkness, and absolute silence, punctuated only by disturbing moans and screams, and disconcerting dialogue through either flashbacks or characters who you can never seem to find.  To give you a feel for what it's like, it will get to the point where the zombies are the least scary thing there is.
    The game also features a sanity meter.  Sanity affects you're vision and the control you have over your character.  Your sanity decreases slowly as you spend time in the dark, and more rapidly when faced with monsters, including but not (to my knowledge) limited to the zombies.  As sanity decreases, the controls will get shakier and your vision will blur, both of which can become extreme and drastically inhibit game-play.  You can regenerate sanity by solving puzzles.
    All in all, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is an absolutely fulfilling game that will stick with you, even after playing.  We called it quits about a half-hour ago, and Avery is playing Mario Party while Teddy goes back and forth between that and functioning as my editor.  Mainly my editor, simply because Mario Party seemed to be too much of a challenge for him.  Jon has left himself to dividing his time between watching the game and watching me write.  The Mario Party came about as it seemed the only appropriate way to counteract the pure residual terror left over from our experience with Amnesia.  It has been QUITE the evening.

tl;dr:

Gameplay: 8.5/10
Presentation: 10/10
Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 9/10
Overall: 9/10

Movie Review - How Do You Know

Why do I always wait until after midnight to review movies? who knows. all we know is he's called The Stig (if you get that joke you are awesome).  Now on to the review! Now, in my opinion, Romantic Comedies are a lot like Horror movies.  "He's crazy! Why do i read this mad man's reviews?" because, abstract reader who talks to themselves, you know i will explain this comparison for you!  Both Romantic Comedies and Horrors get very little respect from the cinematic community, and this is mainly because most of them are shit.  I apologize for that language.  It was uncalled for.  I simply meant to convey that many of them would be better off as an hour and a half long uninterrupted film of a pile of poo, as it sits on the floor being stinky and making everyone generally uncomfortable as they go about their lives. However, both Horror and Romantic Comedies can also be done outstandingly well, and when they are, they more than justify their positions as two of my favorite genres.
   Oh no oh no oh no the introduction is spilling over into the second paragraph why is this happening WHY I BE SO OPINIONATED anyway where was I... oh yes! How Do You Know, the new movie starring Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, and Reese Witherspoon.  To start with, I had to look up the name of this movie to write this.  because it is impossible to remember.  I bet you've already forgotten it.  See? told you.  And to those of you who said you remembered it, stop lying. I'm not judging you. I know you had to check. Its ok. so did I.  "When is he going to get to the review? and why did he give an entire paragraph to some nutty comparison?" well, talkative reader from the first paragraph, if you would stop interrupting me, i could get to it! Jeez... ok, reader has shut up, girlfriends gone to sleep, got another coke, The Black Keys are playing, it's review time.
   Now, as she is the female lead, it seems only appropriate to start with Reese Witherspoon.  Witherspoon plays the role of Lisa Jorgenson, who plays Softball for Team USA.  Now, I don't give away spoilers (or atleast I don't on purpose) so let's just say suddenly problem arises.  You know, one of those romantic comedy problems, where the girl gets all filled with self-doubt and worries about her future and yada yada yada.  Come to think of it, i can't really go any further than this because the entire plot of a Romantic Comedy is built around the interactions shared between characters.  Maybe this is why reviews don't like them! it all makes sense now... *staring off into the middle-distance* oh what? you're still here? The rest of the review? Oh yes. Of course.  No, I didn't forget!  Anyway, Reese's character is very well done, and it felt to me like many of the actions she takes in the movie are things people in her place would actually do, which was nice.  And while we're talking about Reese Witherspoon, I have a side note.  "This whole review has been a side note!" Reader whose name i've now decided is Steve, shut up (i apologize to any readers who are actually named steve, and talk to yourself. this isn't aimed at you. i promise).  Anyway, later this year, Reese Witherspoon is going to be in the film adaptation of Water For Elephants, an amazing book by Sara Gruen.  I highly recommend it, even though Robert Pattinson plays the lead.  Pattinson, if this goes well, I forgive Twilight.  Yes, I mean that.  Send your rage to benesdorritoan@gmail.com. i probably will read it and ignore it.
   Now Owen Wilson, a very funny man.  I enjoy all of his films.  Even the ones people say are terrible, which is, admittedly, about half of them.  But in this, he played a role that he always plays flawlessly: the funny, mildly egocentric, unintelligent guy.  He even managed to swing it so he played that role without being that stereotypical bad boyfriend the girl ends up leaving for the obviously better choice.  Like any actual human being, he has his pros and his cons. which is good, it leads to a strong, balanced character.  Also, he was hilarious. which was good. Due to the shallow nature of his character though, which i forget to mention is Matty Reynolds, an MLB pitcher, I can't do too much more with his character.
   Paul Rudd is both one of the funniest actors and also one of the best who is currently gracing the screen with their presence.  Now, most of you will probably say thats an exaggeration.  I prescribe one day of watching I Love You Man, The 40-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Role Models.  Then you will agree with me.  And yes, i am qualified to prescribe things.  You may now refer to me as Dr. Movies.  Or not, your choice.  Now, Rudd plays the typical attractive businessman with work troubles and a confusing love life.  Normally i consider Ryan Reynolds a favorite for this role, but Rudd does it just as good, nay, better.  He balances an appropriate amount of emotional distress with an innocent, idealistic sense of humor, and is much more down to earth than Reynolds (i.e. less flashy, muscle-y shirtless-ness).  Rudd does the role well and believably, and gives an overall great preformance.
    Also Jack Nicholson is in this movie.  I plan to spend no time on him.  Because he is Jack Nicholson.  He is amazing.  You don't need me to tell you that.  And that is all i'd tell you, because if i said anything bad about Nicholson he would murder me. In my sleep. With his mind. "Is this guy saying Jack Nicholson is a telepathic killer? i knew he was crazy! I'm going to go read webcomics" YES THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I'M SAYING. and good riddance, Steve. Never come back (he will probably come back).
   Hey. Guess what. Tony Shalhoub is in this movie.  Crazy, right? He has like one scene.  He plays a psychiatrist.  Which is funny, after all those years of seeing him on Monk. Heh. Made me chuckle.

tl;dr :

Plot: 7/10
Acting: 9.5/10
Soundtrack: 7/10
Effects: 9/10 (This hasn't really matters since Tron. but I am averse to change.)
Overall: 8.1/10


i think i need to revise my system. Tron was not better than this movie. Trust me. I've seen Tron 3 times.