Out for Summer

Just thought I’d let you guys know, I’m going to be gone for most of the summer, so I don’t know if I’ll have any time to do complete reviews for a while.

Buuuut…

Please enjoy these Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IKgBpzsm7c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky2Pc5XNtrw

Bye! Enjoy the Summer. 

Batman: Arkham City Review

Overall Rating: 9.8/10

Graphics: 9.5/10

Gameplay: 10/10

Story: 10/10

Dialogue/voice acting: 10/10

Bruce Wayne is imprisoned in the new super-prison, Arkham city, along with the rest of the criminals from Arkham asylum. Bruce wayne’s secret is still safe, no one except Hugo Strange knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman, but everyone may be in danger due to Strange’s secret program “Protocal 10.” It’s up to Batman to stop Hugo Strange, and the rest of the criminals in Arkham city. 

    

This game is friggin awesome. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Batman: Arkham City, the sequel to Batman: Arkham Asylum, and has received positive reviews from everyone, mostly because it’s hard to find something wrong with this game. Firstly, I’d like to talk about the story. It’s really involving, especially if you really like the Batman universe. There are a lot of references to different characters, events and places in the universe, even if they’re not central to the game. At most points in the game you’ll have an objective to go to, but along the way you have access to various side quests as you encounter them, which can vary from finding titan containers for Bane, to helping prisoners on the street. These side quests make the game feel full, and add a lot of depth to Arkham city. It’s full of cool plot twists, and they fully exploit the Batman universe. I don’t want to give away too much about the story, but if you like Batman, play this game.

Characters

Batman Arkham City brings back a lot of characters from the first game, like Bane, The Joker, Harley Quinn, Zsasz, Killer Croc, and Poison Ivy. In a departure from the first game players can even play interludes as Catwoman. Other differences include more free roaming, lots of new gadgets, and way more uses for gliding. Riddler trophies are also more integrated into the game. You can also expect more side quests than before.

***Spoilers***

They bring in a lot of new villains, Like Penguin, as a sort of mob boss in an area of Arkham city. His base of operation is in a museum, where he’s trying to turn his enemies in to a real life wax museum. And two-face makes an appearance, playing a small role in the beginning, where he’s captured Cat Woman.

Mr. Freeze is involved in a storyline involving the Joker, and you’ll need to break him out of Penguin’s Museum. There’s an awesome side Quest with the Mad Hatter, starting with a crazy tea party that leads you down  a rabbit hole!  

***End of spoilers****

Side Quests

Now I’d like to Talk about the side quests. The Riddler plays a big part In this game, which requires you to run around finding Riddler trophies for the entire game.  Solving a certain amount of riddles, and finding his trophies helps to reveal the location of his hostages, and culminates in a final showdown. You’ll have the chance to run into Bane, where he’ll tell you to destroy six crates of titan (the drug that makes him bane) Hush has a side quest, you run into the mad hatter, dead shot, Clayface, and Killer Crock has a cameo (if you can find him.) The reason why I’m focusing on these is because they add so much to the game, making the player really feel immersed in the universe. 

    

Challenge maps

The Game also features Challenge maps. These are little maps where you can fight  AI opponents for points, outside the narrative of the game. Though some of these maps do have plots or stories, but if you ever feel like beating the hell out of everyone for like 10 minutes try it out.

DLC

There is a lot of DLC for this game, and there will probably be more to come. The downloadable content ranges from new Batman suits, to challenge maps, and even story missions. I’d like to talk about Harley quinn’s revenge, which came out recently. This mission is really cool because you get to play as Robin in a story environment, whereas in the rest of the game you can only use him in challenge maps. You also play as Batman in this mission, but you can find out more by playing it. 

Sequel? ***Spoilers***

Bring it on. In Arkham city, there’s a huge amount of foreshadowing which could mean a sequel. For starters, You can find scarecrow’s mask in a hay bale ontop of the bridge, which is strange, since killer crock was supposed to have killed him in the first game. Perhaps we will see him again? You might also run across Harley Quinn’s positive pregnancy test in the steel mill, which is where the Joker’s hideout was. Joker baby? There’s a skyline of Gotham City reflected in a puddle. The puddle is inside a building,  where there is no skyline.

If you like Batman, you should get this game. It is by far one of the best super hero games, that has been made so far. Pow!

Tropic Thunder Review

Quick Description:

Tropic thunder is a really funny comedy that brings together Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downy Jr., and Tom Cruise, Just to name a few. They play the role of actors acting in a movie, that’s behind schedule, and there’s a risk that it’s going to be cancelled. Their stereotypical actor attitudes aren’t making things easier. The director decides that it would be a good idea to throw them into the jungle, and film them with a handheld camera. Things don’t go as planned, and the actors are soon trying to fight their way out of the jungle. 

Quick Review:

9.5/10 Tivos.

Tropic thunder is a friggin’ hilarious movie. For starters, how often do you get to see Robert Downey Jr dressed as a black man, or as he puts it, a dude, playing a dude, disguised as another dude. If it wasn’t funny enough to see that, there’s also Jack black playing a B-list comedian trying to break into serious cinema, Ben stiller as a washed up action star, and let’s not forget Tom Cruise… but I don’t want to spoil it. Jay Baruchel plays an up and coming actor, while Brandon T. Jackson does a really good job portraying a rapper-turned-actor.

The movie mercilessly taunts the film industry, from distraught directors to, premadonna actors, to crazy casting agents trying to get their actors Tivo. “You want the Tivo? I got the Tivo.” They make fun of actors peddling energy drinks, super forced product placement, and drug addicted actors. We’ve all seen comedies that are just too much, too over the top. Although this one has over the top moments, they’re handled well. When this movie does have over the top moments it’s usually to make fun of those kind of movies.

Detailed analysis

**Spoiler alert?**

This is a funny movie. It doesn’t need analysis. But there are some overall things I thought I’d talk about. For instance half of this movie was improvised, which is kind of impressive, bro. And check out how awesome these prosthetics are:

Aren't they cool?

Also, the fake trailers at the beginning. They’re funny because they’re true. This movie came out at a good time for making fun of Hollywood:

Stop releasing these before the world explodes please.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Review

Quick Description:

Tinker Tailor solider spy is a confusing spy movie where you have to pay a lot of attention, or you will not understand what is happening. The Circus (A British intelligence agency) has discovered a mole in it’s midst, and it’s up to George Smiley (Gary Oldman) to find out who it is. The plot twists and folds as we discover each character’s part in the story. The movie features actors like Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Collin Firth, John Hurt, and those are only a few of the huge crowd of characters that you can’t keep track of. Good luck.  

Quick Review:

Rating: 65/92½ main characters.

Firstly, I didn’t actually dislike this movie, I just didn’t really understand it because I haven’t read the book. After watching the movie I don’t think I will read the book. The biggest problem with this movie is that the story is too big to fit into a two hour movie. It’s not even because the basic story is complicated, but because of all the other stuff they throw in on top of it. In addition, they didn’t choose a style of film making that’s good for conveying ideas clearly. They kind of pass by important details, and fail to focus on important things. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not very clear. So watch the movie a couple times, and you’ll have a better chance of understanding.

Analysis:  ***Spoiler alert***

This movie does not do a good job of using flashbacks correctly. They make no distinction between flashbacks and scene changes, which gets pretty confusing. Let’s say we have two characters sitting in a car. Then a flash back happens. Usually we expect to return to the scene in the car after. Instead, we’ll often return to present day, but in a completely different scene. In a movie that’s already complicated this does not help. They obviously wanted the story to be non linear, but more care should have gone into ordering the scenes and flashbacks for clarity.

The movie also features characters who are barley developed, and little used, such as John Hurt’s character, and others. Gary Oldman’s Character, George Smiley, had pretty strong character development, and he did a good job playing the character, but all the other characters feel under used. Granted, this is a movie about emotionless cold war spies. The actors pull this off very well, but I think it would have been a good choice to develop them further. Without doing that, I find it hard to care one way or another about these people.

The Writing for the actual dialogue and production of the movie are very good. The overall feel of the movie is genuinely period appropriate, and the somewhat drab and monotone adds to a really neat feel. Tom Hardy in particular did some really good acting, and his character also livened things up a bit. By keeping most of the movie calm surprising events feel very exciting, and carry a stronger impact. So was this movie worth watching? Yes. But I’d suggest reading the book first (which I did not do.)

Mission impossible: Ghost Protocol Review

Quick description.

Everyone’s favorite secret agent, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is back for some more impossible missions. He’s out to foil “Cobalt” who is looking for nuclear launch codes, and he’s brought his team of… More secret agents. Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, and Jeremy Renner, join tom cruise in the search to stop Cobalt, but things get complicated when Ghost protocol is enacted. What’s Ghost protocol? Well watch the movie.  

Quick Review.

Rating: 8.5 tom cruise sunglasses out of 10

Mission Impossible 4 is the best action movie out so far this year. Although there’s still half a year left to find out if it’s the best action movie of the year. Why? Because it has everything that an action movie needs: good chase scenes, nuclear missiles, intense music, and cool locations. If you’re looking for more, this might not be the movie for you, but if you want to see an archetypal action/spy movie, like Die hard, or Goldeneye, then Mission Impossible is the best choice for you. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Mission impossible 4, it’s probably the best one yet.

Detailed analysis

****Spoiler alert!****

Alright, although it doesn’t have the most creative story ever, it’s probably one of the better spy thrillers. Sure, at some points it feels like tom cruise has a batman utility belt, “Thank goodness we brought our slideable hall simulating hologram to fool the guard.” Whatever, it’s Mission Impossible. And I actually found some of their fancy gadgets more realistic than the ones they had in, like 1995, I have iPhone apps that do the same stuff their little machines were doing in this movie.

The story has some issues, in the fact that it’s exactly the same as any other action movie with nuclear missiles in it. Although with this one they pulled it off better than other movies, it is after all, Mission Impossible. It never fails to be entertaining, from Tom Cruise’s real stunts climbing up the tallest building in the world, to the cool ending fight scene in the crazy future parking garage. Speaking of which: the crazy future parking lot. They did a good job of showing actual injury (for the first time in the movie) but nonetheless Tom Cruise was limping around. It looked pretty intense to have them both limping around and trying to go from sliding moving platforms to their objective.

A few new characters are introduced in this movie, like Jane Carter. Her entrance was a little weird, because no one really knew who she was, and then they were like best friends. William Brandt is also a new character who seems to be some kind of lowly analyst, but turns out to be a secret agent. His backstory goes onto build some good tension between him and the test of the team, but it resolves pretty nicely towards the end of the film, where we get a couple cameo appearances. Ving Rhames character, Luther Stickell shows up, who by the way they could have called earlier in the film so many times that it’s not even funny. Then at the end he’s having drinks with tom cruise and I’m like “where were you.” Michelle Monaghan also has a brief cameo at the end, turns out her character is alive. But don’t read that last part if you haven’t seen the movie.

This message will now self destruct.

Apollo 18 Review

Quick description.

Apollo 17 was the last lunar mission? Not quite. Ben Anderson, Nate Walker, and John Grey are sent on a top secret lunar mission… To the moon. It’s name: Apollo 18. They’re setting up a lunar radar device to spy on the soviets. At least that’s what they were told. But they’re not alone on the moon.

Quick review

10/18 Apollo missions.

Apollo 18 is a found footage horror movie set on the moon. It follows two astronauts who land on the moon, and their pilot in orbit while they unwittingly uncover a mystery that forces them to wonder: Are we alone in the universe? From a production point of view they did a very good job of making the found footage look like it’s era-appropriate, filmed in a way that looks genuine, and the moon itself looks exactly like Apollo footage. The actors did an overall good job, however in some parts they react unrealistically to situations. Still there were astronauts. It was cool.

Real Niel

Fake

Detailed Analysis

**Spoiler alert**

So after watching this movie I hit up Wikipedia, and found out that premise of this movie involves real events, but not the events you may think. There was no 18^th Apollo mission, but 160 moon rocks have gone missing or have been destroyed, which should make total sense to you if you’ve seen the movie. If you haven’t you should totally leave this spoiler alert section. Seriously, stop reading. The movie only has one plot twist, It’s not worth watching if you find out now.

Anyway now that you’re gone, it turns out the rocks are aliens. Little crab/rock aliens. That’s the real reason we never went back. So how does that work for the premise of an entire movie? It was alright, I would have liked stronger character development scenes, and some of the found footage scenes are less believable than others. Although all in all it’s pretty cool to see astronauts fighting moon rocks. You never really get bored. If you’re in the mood to watch a good horror movie that doesn’t require much thinking, mainly because there isn’t much thinking that needs to be done (They go to the moon. There are rock aliens.) Then you’ll like this movie. They spend a few minutes at the beginning establishing a backstory for the astronauts, as part of the movie’s overall narrative that it’s the choice picks from footage found after the mission.

Some people have criticized the length of the movie, given the material they were using. But I think if they had added 10 minutes or so more character development throughout the movie, slower scenes might have seemed more exciting. Still, in faster scenes, they do an excellent job of conveying suspense, I particularly liked the scene where they were on their lunar rover, and they fall off. I know that sounds like a pretty lame favorite scene, but there are aliens. It’s interesting because we forget how dangerous space is, and even the slightest problems become major, especially if you can’t leave. 

Source Code Review

Quick Descriptions:

Source Code is a science fiction/action thing movie, Featuring Jake Gyllenhaal as a soldier participating in a mysterious science experiment and Michelle Monaghan as his love interest. It’s filled with questions, and the audience get’s to learn the answers as the main character does. If you want to watch this movie, expect it to be a little bit like inception, in that it’s dense with extreme plot twists, and keeps you guessing the whole time.

Quick Review:

8/8(minutes)

Jake Gyllenhaal (Colter Stevens) wakes up in a little pod and has to figure out what he’s doing there. It turns out that he’s been put there by a secret government/military operation, and his mission involves foiling a plot to bomb a train In Chicago, and Chicago itself. At first the main character seems disoriented and confused. Eventually the plot begins to reveal itself as he gets more and more information.

Analysis:

**Spoiler alert**

Source code is written in such a way so that you never really get bored by more informative scenes, because they’re balanced really well with action oriented scenes, and cool plot twists. Even the simplest scenes keep you guessing and excited. Though the writers worked with a really simple idea, they did a really good job of making it exciting, serious, suspenseful. Even though they show similar scenes over and over, (Repeating the same 8 minute window on a commuter train in Chicago) each one introduces a new idea, and makes you wonder what the next one will be like. Each one introduces a new idea, and makes you question what the next one will be like. Just as the novelty of this set of scenes on the train wares off, they start introducing new elements to the plot, and answering questions.

  

So, just because Jake Gyllenhaal, and some girl are on the cover doesn’t mean this is a romantic comedy or something (as you might have guessed from the title.) If you don’t like movies where you have to do a lot of thinking, or you get confused easily, you might not want to watch this movie. Although this doesn’t bother me, I have friends who were confused by Star Trek, who probably should not watch this movie. As far as something that’s legitimately bad about the movie itself, I don’t have much to say. Although it had a bit of an abrupt ending, it fit the tone of the movie. I don’t usually like quick endings (Contagion,) but this time it worked well, and made me wonder about the possibility of a sequel.

And this is my quick ending. Bye. 

Omg Dark knight!

The batman universe welcomes half the cast of inception to it’s ranks: Tom hardy, Joseph Gordon levitt, and Marion Cotillard. And now there’s football. I wonder what the name of gothams football team is was. Gotham bats? Gotham wing?

Be ready for summer 2012. 

Contagion review

Quick Description:

Contagion is about an outbreak of a new disease, and follows several characters as they try to adapt to the situation. It takes cues from real life, and takes advantage of the fears people have of disease and epidemics.  

Quick Review:

Rating: 14/18 Tacos.

Why? Well.

Contagion is a great movie, filled with lots of great actors, and they’re the kind of actors who are famous because they’re good, not good because they’re famous. It did a really good job of creating relatable characters, who responded to situations realistically, though at some points less realistically than at others. The Film-makers were invested in realistically portraying a pandemic, where no one is safe. This feeling is established early on, though for more on that you’ll have to read past the spoiler warning. Generally everything seemed really genuine. They really embraced the era we live in, With a character whose profession was a blogger, Characters are shown dealing with the legality around trying to save their families, and the compelling relationship between matt daemon and his daughter seemed very realistic and nowadays. So go and rent Contagion now, especially if you like… Movies.

Analysis:

**spoiler alert**

RIP Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the lady from Batman. This movie has an impressive A-list body count (not to mention countless others,) which brings me to my first point: Matt Daemon’s unemotional acting after his wife dies. His portrayal of grief never evolves past stunned, even though the movie’s timeline is like six months. But all in all he does a good job, would’ve been nice to see a tear or two.

First what the hell moment: Gwyneth Paltrow dies in the first five minutes. This was a great way to add tension, and make the disease seem very threatening. It’s pretty rare for main characters (or at least very famous ones) to die in a movie at all, much less in the first few minutes. It shows that anyone can die in this movie.

The movie features a cool flashback sequence showing where the disease might have come from, and how the outbreak moved from person to person. One jarring element however was how quickly they got rid of disease. Everything went from being the worst that it’s ever been to suddenly being amazing. This happens in movies a lot. And it really annoys me. Seems like they put a lot of effort into building up this crisis, and then just ended it really quickly. Seemed like an easy way out, I feel like even 10 more minutes of film for the portion where they find the cure would have been good.  

So if you’re watching Contagion on an airplane, be ready to feel vulnerable to diseases, if Contagion is any indication, you’ll get one. Try not to catch any diseases.

Blog you next time. 

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Hi there. You'll be able to come here to find reviews of popular movies and video games. Reviews are usually split into a quick breakdown without spoilers, maybe for when you're at the video store, and a detailed analyses for once you've watched it.

So come check out our reviews often... or uh... yeah.