Aside from the laugh-out-loud “twist” finale involving a cat, a bag and a car driving down a winding road, this was, overall, a pretty crappy Fulci film. There wasn’t even that much signature close-up gore to keep things interesting. The story felt like it would have been better served if it were simply a 22 minute Twilight Zone style tele-play rather than a full-length feature.
Another collection of analog synth laden songs from the members of Poster Children. This one feels a bit more focused and less sloppy than their debut EP. Still, these are loose, live feeling songs and not sequenced laptop tracks. I had always hoped that Poster Children would have incorporated more of this experimentation in their records too, but, alas, that never really happened. The CD includes a bunch of obsolete CD-ROM multimedia that crashes in a modern OS.
The Rutles make you realize just how unique, yet weirdly predictable the Beatles were. Although intended as a joke, the lyrics are not too far off the mark of actual Beatles songs. In fact, I may actually prefer most of these songs simply because they have a sense of humor about them. Stuff like, “Although I may not be a man of words, yeah, yeah” is just great. This CD makes me want to be a hair dresser, or two. I’d like to be two hair dressers.
Don’t Look Now is known mostly for Donald Sutherland’s naked gyrations. I was more impressed with his hobbit-y mop of hair. I thought the movie was overly long and boring. It’s supposed to be horror movie, but you would know that if left before the last four minutes. For the most part it is mostly just people walking around Venice and being dull.
I liked the original Dead Space well enough. The sequel is just more of the same endless dark hallways, jump scares, limb shooting and occasional weightless environment. This makes for some mindless fun, but, like the first game I was just yearning for a little variety.
The story is okay. Once again there’s that marker thingy that kills everyone but for some reason humans keep trying to rebuild it. I guess your job is to destroy it, or find out why you were hospitalized or find out why you keep seeing a ghost or something like that. It doesn’t really matter. Just shoot the arms and grab the ammo. Oh, and then there’s a Fulci-esque eye gouging scene that makes even less narrative sense an actual Fulci plot. If it’s any consolation, your character gets to speak a few lines of dialogue and we get to see what he looks like under that glowing knight’s helmet.
I am not usually a non-fiction reader outside of the occasional political tome, but I bought this after it was recommended by Virginia Postrel on her Twitter feed (and it was a 99¢ deal of the day on Amazon). To demonstrate how the brain’s chemical processes effect decision making, the author uses various real world examples like a quarterback picking a receiver, a pilot crash landing a plane and a world champion poker player. The anecdotes themselves are very interesting and on top of those there are quite a few examples of weird psychological studies. You know the sort: a patient’s brain is missing region X and because of this he can’t do Y. These are always fun to learn about but somewhat depressing when it begins to seem like everything we think, feel or do is because of some chemical fluctuation in our frontal lobe.
Like many one-hit-wonders, that one hit (in this instance “Never Say Never”) sounds completely different than the rest of the band’s songs. On most of the other tracks the screeching, insane saxophone is replaced with a more standard 80s smooth jazz sound—the kind of thing you would hear on a failed late night talk show’s theme song. I wonder if Romeo Void ever played on the Pat Sajak show? Anyhow, this isn’t to say the rest of CD is bad. It’s just less punk-y. The free-form poetic lyrics are still there and many of the tracks like “Charred Remains” and “White Sweater” have nice groovy bass lines to hang your hat on.
The third Discworld novel starts a completely new storyline with no crossover with the first two books. I actually liked this better than the other books because it hit on the sort of underdog themes that I always tend to find appealing: a young girl is trying to become the first female admitted into the school of wizardry. As with the other books in the series, this one is filled with vivid, interesting characters and silly anachronisms aplenty.
I guess the best way to describe Other M would be “disappointing.” Judging from screenshots of the game you would assume that this was simply a return to the 2-D side-scrolling roots of the franchise. That would have been a good thing. Instead, this is a weird third-person/first-person hybrid game that has you constantly flipping the Wiimote around to change views. This is not quite as awful as it sounds, but the game would be much better if they had just chosen to go one way or the other. As it stands, the 2-D sections of the game, which could have emphasized platforming and twitch skills, are dumbed down to “press right and hit fire… the auto-aim will do the rest.” The 3-D parts are equally disappointing. Unlike the Prime series, exploration and investigation don’t really play a role here. The first-person perspective is mostly used to charge up your super-missiles and lock on to targets.
On top of the awkward game mechanics is an equally awkward storyline. This is the first time the the Metroid series has been given a largely dialogue driven story with tons of long cut-scenes and voice acting. As bad as it was, I didn’t mind this too much. The problem for me was that it was overused. Most of the time a cut-scene would involve Samus sulking and simply restating what the player just saw happen two seconds ago. Rather than advancing the story, she’s just brooding like a fourteen year-old goth kid. In fact, I would have preferred if she simply recited some of her bad high school poetry every ten minutes or so.
This record fits nicely along side Virtual State. This is atmospheric electronica that the laptop kids probably have a specialized sub-sub-genre term they would use to describe it. To me it’s just a continuation in the evolution of Cabaret Voltaire with lots of eerie found sounds and the occasional world music sample.
