Just about every Poster Children album has one weird, out-of-place song that either very poppy (“If You See Kay”) or takes a different musical approach (the rapping on “What’s Inside the Box”). In any event, Flower Plower is like an entire record of these one-off tracks. Admittedly, some of the songs just plain suck. But, along with the bad there are some near-classics too like “Eye” and “Dangerous Life.”
Mac McCaughan’s solo project sounds more or less like Superchunk with lower fidelity and lower fun. When I listen to it I think that it is a good record, but once it’s over, it’s completely forgotten. Definitely, lacking in the hooks department.
That title is quite a mouthful, ain’t it? I am continuing my recent excursion into econ-type books that are probably a bit over my head. This book is literally a line-by-line refutation of Keynes’ General Theory. It does a good job in laying out the main points of Keynesian economics before refuting them—relying very heavily on actual quotes and citations. Lewis then spends the rest of the book recapping and then refuting. The attack isn’t quite as devastating as the jacket quotes would lead you to believe, but by the end I was pretty well convinced of that Keynes was at the very least just a sloppy writer who was more or less just rambling about how he thought economics should behave.
This is a science fiction tale based on the premise that, sometime in the distant future, our planetary defense army would be comprised of elderly men and women who trade the last years of their lives on Earth for the prospect of getting genetically younger/modified bodies. The only catch is—as wars against technologically superior alien races tend to go—the vast majority of recruits die in their first year or so of service. An interesting concept but I feel like the fact that all these characters are supposedly wizened old folks doesn’t really effect how they behave. In fact, they all seem to talk in the same Bill Murray-esque, smart-allecky manner. One wise guy is enough, thank you. What we get is more of a standard military, band-of-brothers story that is for sure entertaining, but not as deep and probing as it could be.
After having read the comic a few months back I thought it would be a good time to finally watch this old TBS staple (along with The Beastmaster). Visually, this film is stunning in its art direction and fashion. That alone is reason enough to watch it. But, aside from the look of the film, there isn’t much else going for it. The plot is stupid and exists only to get us from one sexy spacey situation to the next. I guess the film is trying to be comedic but the only genuinely funny part was David Hemmings and his bumbling revolutionary character.
So, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working my way through F.E.A.R. and its two expansion packs: Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate. I think this was Monolith’s immediate follow-up to their near-perfect No One Lives Forever games. Just about everything that was so great about NOLF is missing here. There’s no humor, no variety in game play and the storyline is blah.
Still, F.E.A.R.managed to keep me somewhat engaged with it’s genuinely spine-tingling moments of horror. The other big horror games I have played lately, Dead Space and Doom 3, were only good at the occasional jump-scares. F.E.A.R. excels at just keeping it creepy by allowing the “monsters” appear in your peripheral vision or on snowy TV monitors. Sure, they are just ripping off the style of J-Horror movies like The Ring, but it’s very effective.
The ghostly imagery isn’t quite enough to carry the game. 90% of the game is repetitive gunfights against your typical video game super-soldiers. These battles are solid and use a nice bullet-time slo-mo mechanic, but after about the 30th encounter you will be longing for a good old-fashioned lava level or anything to add a little variety.
Woah! Joey Lawrence fights a sentient electricity monster. This is a lame made-for-TV quality film that takes forever to get rolling and isn’t quite bad enough to be laughable, but not good enough to keep you awake. Is there an example of a movie in which household technology attacks humans that is actually frightening? Maximum Overdrive? The only thing frightening about that movie was Stephen King’s crossed eyes on the “I’m gonna scare the hell out of you!” trailer.
A lot of nerds were really excited by the prospect of a Tron sequel. What they all seemed to fail to take in to account was that the original Tron was a horrible bore. The sequel is, of course, a much more “exciting” film (one could argue that the T.V. Guide channel is more exciting than the original Tron). It also has all the CGI improvements you would expect from a modern film . Every frame of the digital world is a beautifully composed neon painting. However, the story is flatter than something that’s really flat and the characters are equally dimensionless. I found myself unable to follow (or care about) the action sequences: all the baddies look the same and the environments look the same There is no way to know if our heroes are really in real jeopardy when faced with generic helmeted guy #12… oh wait, that’s Tron… the guy? Who cares.
This is a drawing from my sketchbook that I did when I probably should have been working. John “Cougar” Mellencamp as a vigilante hero. We went hunting for The Coug when we visited Bloomington, Indiana several years ago and spotted him zooming by in a convertible Porsche. A rare Coug sighting indeed.
After many months of playing I have finally finished all three of the games included in this excellent limited edition box-set. The game(s) come in a nice metal tin with a clear plastic outer sleeve. Normally, I don’t care too much about this sort of thing, but it was a nice surprise when I first opened the package to find that they put a little thought into the design. Apparently, this is out-of-print and now fetches prices near $100 on Amazon (when I got it, it was $25, new).
The set contains three games: Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime: Echoes and Metroid Prime: Corruption. The the first two are GameCube games that have been upgraded with Wiimote controls and widescreen graphics. The Prime games are first-person shooters with more emphasis on puzzle solving and exploration rather than the actual shooting part. The FPS mechanics work admirably on the Wii but are just wonky enough that I’m glad that they are not the focus here.
Of the three, I liked Corruption the best. This is probably because there was a plot in which you actively participated. This is as opposed to the optional (and dare I say boring) text pickups you needed to read in the first two games in order to follow the story. Granted, this is not even close to the narrative hooks of Half-Life 2 or most other PC FPS games, but the story isn’t the end-all in Metroid. What keeps you coming back is the beautifully designed worlds that you explore and the satisfying boss battles scattered throughout the game.
