Rage on PC (5/10)

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Oh, how the mighty have fallen. This game is the epitome of bland first person shooters and Id Software should know better. They still seem not to know that there are colors beyond brown. There are no attempts at originality here. The post-apocalyptic setting is like a colorless, un-fun Borderlands. The barely-there plot is a rehash of the Fallout fish out of water structure. The driving sections are a bore and you are forced to do win all these tedious races. I guess the shooting and A.I. is acceptable but you are constantly back tracking to the main hub to get new missions. This game is not worth the five dollar sale price I paid.

The Last Jedi (8/10)

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I went into this having avoided the trailers or anything that could potentially spoil this for me. Despite its flaws I really liked The Force Awakens and was excited to see the story continue. For the most part I enjoyed The Last Jedi, but the plot was extremely clunky. There’s a whole section where Fin and annoying girl go to space Monte Carlo and rescue space horses. The entire fin plotline could be removed from the movie without consequence. The Ren/Ray stuff was good, and Mark Hamill didn’t embarrass himself. Overall good, but the tone was drifting a tad into prequel territory at times… like that final scene… barf.

To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter by Vladimir Bukovsky (7/10)

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A memoir of what living in The Soviet Union was like in the 60s and 70s. Bukovsky spent most of that time in prison camps and mental institutions. His big contribution was exposing the use of psychiatric evaluations to label dissenters as mentally unfit for trial. Despite being the harrowing nature of his predicaments, he makes it seem like routine daily life in the U.S.S.R.

Free Fire (7/10)

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This was a movie that I really wanted to see. It’s directed by Ben Wheatley, who made the gangster-hybrid stunner, Kill List. The premise is great: a gun deal goes bad in the first fifteen minutes of the film and what follows is one gigantic standoff with bullets flying and dialogue shouted from behind cover. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite live up to expectations. The characters aren’t particularly interesting and neither is their cross-talk. In the hands of Tarantino this could have been a masterpiece. As it is, it’s fairly entertaining but the direction gets confusing and there’s no sense of the tiny space in which the action takes place. You never really can tell who’s shooting from where.

Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back (6/10)

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This would have been much better if it were just a cartoon instead of this live-action/CGI mess. There are tons of original visual ideas but the execution just looks stupid. Why in Buddha’s name would you CGI a monkey face when a rubber mask would look a zillion times more realistic? Still, there are some fun moments between the incoherent plot points. Nothing will match the opening twenty minutes of the first Journey to the West.