Electric Dreamstate

This list is fairly mutable. Next week I might rank another movie in a different slot based on my mood. I also haven't seen the following movies: Gone Baby Gone, The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford, Into the Wild and Knocked Up. Any of these might end up slotted in somewhere. Additionally, I walked out of the room about halfway into my room mate watching Hairspray.


Honourable Mention 4 - Beowulf
I'm not sure that I would put this on a "top" list, but it hangs together fairly well and the final fight between the dragon and Beowulf was the best spectacle scene in a year of spectacle. I don't know how this will look without the big screen and 3D though.

Honourable Mention 3 - Juno
The movie just seems to be a bit to pleased with itself to really slot into a top spot, but I did enjoy the movie for all the reasons that everyone else did. The film is already being hurt by its own success and it has already become cool to dislike it for its forced quirkiness. I might also just be putting it here just because my list below is so dude-centric.

Honourable Mention 2 - Wristcutters: A Love Story
You know how much money IMDB says Wristcutters made after it was "released" in theatres in November? $231,551. It was getting good reviews coming out of Sundance. In 2006. I have no idea why this quirky comedy about love after suicide couldn't find its way on the indie scene, and I wish it luck on the DVD circuit.

Honourable Mention 1 - Charlie Wilson's War
This breezy (in a good way) movie is about a real senator who was integral in getting the US to supply the mujahadin against the Soviets. It stars Tom Hanks, was directed by Mike Nichols and was written by Aaron Sorkin. It was also a good ending away from being my top film of 2007. As it is it's not quite good enough to get into my top five.

5 - The Bourne Ultimatum
The best threequel in a year of threequels, the third Bourne movie still somehow maintains the series's trademark of tense action and intelligent thought. Personally, I liked the fact that almost two movies later, Bourne is still messed up by his girlfriend getting killed. The thing does lose a bit of the realistic mayhem that the previous movies got so right (it ended up being quasi-realistic mayhem), but I think that's okay as the series built to its conclusion.

4 - Hot Fuzz
About two-thirds of the way into Hot Fuzz I didn't know if I was sold on it. It seemed less like a parody of a cop/buddy movie and more of a weird quasi-comic remake of The Wicker Man. Then everything paid off in one of the most hilarious and over-the-top sequences I've seen in years. I want to see it again right now.

3 - There Will Be Blood
There are problems with There Will Be Blood (the final few scenes with the son seemed a bit off to me), but the movie is relentless. This is mostly because of the central performance by Daniel Day Lewis as a man who's obsession with succeeding over all others feeds his seething hatred of humanity.

2 - Zodiac
This is the only movie that I can remember seeing on home video where I was captivated as if I was watching it on the big screen. It's a weird movie that stands between a fictionalized account and a straight-up reenactment of events. It's long and meanders, but damn if I didn't get absolutely caught up in the slice of history presented here. It's too bad this came out in March and no one saw it.

1 - No Country for Old Men
The first note of music in No Country for Old Men comes quietly and ominously as the end credits begin to roll, and it feels like the movie is finally allowing you to let out the breath that you've been holding in for the whole two hour running time. The Coen Brothers' last couple movies have been disappointments, but the filmmaking here is so confident and outright perfect that it's almost impossible not to become enraptured by it. Some people have poo-pooed the ending of No Country, but the more that I thought about it the more that I couldn't see it any other way.

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The word "read" is in quotation marks because I actually listened to most of these via audio book. They were universally unabridged versions though, so it isn't like I missed anything.

In chronological order the books that I finished in the time between when I left Edmonton on April 27 until now.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

In the audio book version of Fragile Things Neil Gaiman narrates superbly. So well, in fact, that it makes you hate him a little bit. He's good at that too? The story collection itself is a mixed bag (as most story collections are) and flits from being engrossingly fantastic to disturbingly psycho-sexual. Enjoyable if you're a fan of his work, but not a great place to start if you haven't read him before.

One for the Money by Janet Evanovich

Fun and forgettable. The story of a messed up girl who becomes a bail bondsman. A true airport book.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Unfortunately I never saw the movie, but the book is quite a nice little read. It isn't especially heavy and it has a very pre-Tolkien vibe to its fantasy. Unlike Fragile Things, this is a good place to begin if you want to start reading Neil Gaiman. One could also say that it's like the Princess Bride, except that it really isn't anything like the Princess Bride except that it's more like it than anything else that I can think of.

Illium by Dan Simmons

This one is sort of a cheat since I read the first half back in Edmonton, and then read the second half in spurts while doing my laundry after I got here. It's essentially about a group of technologically advanced post-humans recreating the battle of Troy on Mars. Sort-of. The book is dense and a bit imposing, for example there is a chapter which entirely consists of robots from the moons of the gas giants considering the finer points of Shakespeare's sonnets as they compare to the writing of Proust. However, it's worth picking up and giving a glance through to see if it's your thing. Simmons' earlier series of books (starting with Hyperion) is perhaps a bit more welcoming and emotionally satisfying though.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Yes another Neil Gaiman book. This one follows two brothers who are the sons of Mr Nancy (also known as the god Anansi the trickster and storyteller) and their trials as they find their place in the world. It is tangentially related to American Gods which had Mr Nancy as a side character. The book has a sense of playfulness that befits the trickster nature of Anansi although there is rarely a true sense of danger. Again a fine read, but probably not a great place to start reading Neil Gaiman.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The last Gaiman book I promise. This was the second time that I read American Gods and it was still an excellent book the second time around. It's a fine merger of folklore, genre fiction and the modern literary novel*. In fact, this second time around made me realize that the genre fiction stuff was really subdued here, and that Gaiman is just one book about his mid-life crisis and wanting to bang Katie Holmes away from a Pulitzer. Also the book has zombie sex in it. Kind of.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clark

A strange alien vessel enters the solar system and some astronauts go and check it out. The documentation of their perplexing and unknowable findings takes up most of the book. The novel is notable for two reasons: First, like most eastern European Sci-Fi (and especially Stanislav Lem) one of the main themes of the book is the unknowability of the alien. Second, the characters are all astronauts who confront the unknowable and don't go crazy, or turn on each other or otherwise act so unprofessionally that you wonder how they got trained. It's quite nice actually.

Ringworld by Larry Niven

I read this when I was 16 and I loved it. Reading it now, I can see what I liked (the amazing world building), but a lot of new issues popped up. First off, the prose is ... underwhelming. I didn't think that the overuse and misuse of "presently" could irk me so much. And then there is the underlying (and most likely unintentional) dismissal of female characters. Still a fun read, but not the borderline hard Sci-Fi that I remember.

The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven

A classic unnecessary sequel, The Ringworld Engineers is like the first book only not quite as good. The healthy doses of retcons don't really detract from the first book too much, but the introduction of the concept of "rishathra" which is ... well lets just say that the writers on Futurama had to get the idea for "snu-snu" from somewhere. I didn't read the third or fourth in the series.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

by J K Rowling

I listened to all of these back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. I think I'll talk about them in a future post.

Dune by Frank Herbert

A fun little number about a guy taking LSD and then taking over the Universe. Dune is another novel that I read when I was 16 and it holds up much better than Ringworld. In fact I don't think I really liked Dune back then. The novel drops you into a foreign culture and then assumes you can fill in the blanks. The use of full third-person unlimited omniscient narration is a change from most genre novels and gives the book an almost psychedelic feel.

Yup done.

*You can tell these books because they say "a novel" on the front, and the cover is usually textured in eggshell. Also the cover is usually something abstract or takes a picture of a person and makes it austere. Sometimes this differentiation between literary novel and genre novel is a bit strained such as in the case of books like The Time Traveler's Wife which is marketed as a literary novel but could have easily been sold as either a sci-fi novel or a romance novel. Also the movie version of the Time Traveller's Wife is shooting about a block from my apartment.

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I saw Live Free or Die Hard tonight and I'm of confused by it. It isn't Die Hard 4. It's not really a Die Hard movie at all. It's as if the Die Hard movies were translated into an internet meme and then reconstructed into a movie. Just like Chuck Norris' never really was like the persona that embodies Chuck Norris jokes, neither did John McClain ever act like the unbeatable super-hero shown in LFoDH. John McClain is the guy who gets his feet all cut up by glass and then bleeds everywhere and limps into the final showdown. Not the guy who jumps out of a moving car at 50mph and then shows no ill effects five minutes later.

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I purchased a Hard Drive for my Xbox 360 and downloaded some games over the last couple of weeks. I also downloaded Ninja Gaiden for the NES on the Wii.

Ninja Gaiden on the Wii Virtual Console

Still as bloody hard as I remember it being way back in the day, the game is helped immensely by the fact that the Wii allows you to turn off your game and save your progress. Although it's frustrating in a few ways that it's sequels aren't (the fact that you can grab onto most walls but can't climb them leads to situations where you just postpone your inevitable death), the platforming action is tight and when you do succeed it feels like you've accomplished something. Worth $5.

Settlers of Catan on Xbox Live Arcade

This is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the hit German board game Settlers of Catan. I've heard Settlers mentioned on numerous video game websites as being a "hard core" game, which confuses me a bit. As far as board games go, it's really more of an entry level game designed to ease people into games more complicated than Sorry. Something like Risk is more complicated (though not better designed) than Settlers. Compared to the even the most basic multiplayer online-game it's actually amazingly simple and new player friendly.

As for the port itself, the game is given more audio and visual fidelity than I think it really needs, but I'm not complaining. The trade interface is elegant and the A.I. is actually amazingly smart, although it's sometimes annoying when an A.I. won't trade with you from the very beginning of the game (that happens with real people too though). If you're going to play the game online and not in Real Life this is the best version by far. The game flow plays elegantly and you never feel like you're waiting around for other people too much. Anyone who likes board games and has Xbox Live gold should get this game.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on Xbox Live Arcade

This was an excellent game when it came out on the PS1 ten years ago and it's an excellent game now. In fact, I would have gladly paid two or three times the amount the asking price for it.

The game is, quite simply, a copy of Super Metroid with a Castlevaina skin pulled over it and some light RPG elements added in. It never achieves quite the level of absolute excellence that Super Metroid did, but that isn't especially surprising because Super Metriod is one of the best games ever made. However, C:SotN is one of the best games for the PS1, and is better than most of the Xbox 360's full priced library.

The negatives: 1) the game is still a bit short (but for the price it's actually quite long), 2) the graphics are the best 2D that 1997 could offer, so they are excellent, but a bit dated and 3) The game really feels like it should have more than 200 Achievement Points.

If you have a 360 and a Hard Drive, you should download Symphony of the Night.

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Yesterday I caught a preview screening of eragon. It's the new fantasy FX-fest that's coming out today. It's also based on a book written by a sixteen-year-old. Additionally, it's probably one of the most derivatively made movies I've ever seen.

First off, you know how Star Wars, especially the first one (A New Hope), is really based so much on other movies and archetypes that it would be almost impossible to call anyone out on ripping it off with a straight face? Yeah, eragon impresses in this regard, because it straight up rips off the entire story of the first Star Wars almost scene by scene. Yes, they do mix it up a bit: for example when LukeEragon is going into the analogue for the Death Star, it looks like Jabba's palace in Jedi. And at the end when they get to the rebel base it looks like Faramir's camp from The Two Towers. And in the middle somewhere, they take the scene from Empire Strikes Back where Vader kills an Admiral and promotes his underling and play it out almost word-for-word. Oh yeah, and there is a scene where this Shade character is asking all of his minions who look like Urk-Hai (Saruman's minions in Lord of the Rings) who they serve and I was sure they were going to bust out a SA-RU-MAN!

That isn't to say that eragon just steals the entire plot and character set from Star Wars, the look and feel of Lord of the Rings, and then plays it out in a hackneyed and over-obvious way. No sir, they seem to get a whole lot of Dungeons & Dragons vibe as well, though I think that was unintentional stealing. Shittyness by association if you will.

This isn't to say that this movie won't play well to kids. Most sub-twelve-year-olds will probably love it, especially if they haven't seen Star Wars, and the final Dragon fight is pretty nice looking in a I'd-rather-be-playing-this-on-a-PS3 kind of way. Really, it's the kind of movie written for young children by trying to fool them into thinking it's a movie for older audiences. Sort of like Willow. But not as good. This is the opposite of movies that seem to be for children, but are actually for older audiences (like Labyrinth or Dark Crystal).

Anyway, if you're reading this blog, you probably won't enjoy eragon. Your 11-year-old sister might though.

Zelda review still coming

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I already posted how I got my Wii over in the comments of this post at the Crap Shack, but it's repeated below my review of the Wii hardware at the bottom of this post as well.

Just over two weeks ago Nintendo released its fifth system, the Wii, and I was able to snag one. As you probably know the Wii uses a controller that looks much like a remote control. The controller acts as a pointer on the screen as well as a motion tracker (with tilt, roll and yaw).

Also, you can attach a little dongle onto the bottom of the remote that looks like a nunchuck called, creatively enough, the nunchuck. It allows the use of an analog control stick. Most of the games are designed around the controller.

Here are some more info-bits.

• The graphics are like Nintendo's fourth console, the GameCube, but maybe a little bit better. If you really care about graphics this isn't the system for you. However, the graphics certainly aren't distracting.

• It seems the most fun when played in groups. The included game, Wii Sports, has an almost perfect recreation of bowling, and a fun recreation of tennis. They can lead to hours of fun in a group, though they get a little bit boring solo.

• The Zelda game that came out with the system is truly excellent, though a bit easy. If you haven't played a Zelda game since Ocarina of Time or even Link to the Past, this is a great game to try out, though it doesn't really use the Wii controls that creatively.

• The interface is very elegant and iPod like. In fact it's probably easier to use than most Apple products.

• The Virtual Console download service allows you to pay a small fee and download NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, and Turbo Graphix-16 games. You can play most of them by turning the controller sideways. The emulation is for the most part, excellent, better than almost anything you can get on a computer, and probably the best way to play old games on a newer TV.

• It generally seems to be the perfect system for people who haven't owned a Nintendo system since the Super Nintendo or NES days.

• If anyone else has specific questions about the system, I can answer them in the comments.


Here is the story of me getting the Wii.

People were lined up for the Nintendo Wii all night. Although they didn't need to be. Here's my story of getting one:

My friend and I went to Best Buy/Wal-mart/Superstore/Future Shop Sunday morning at around 1am to guestimate how early we would need to line up. The fact that there were almost 100 people at the Best Buy and almost as many at the Wal-Mart, but that other lines weren't full made us ballsy enough to decide that we didn't need to get anywhere until 8am. So, anyway, I went home and watched Battlestar Galactica and then went to bed at like 4am.

We got to the Superstore on Calgary Trail at 7:50 or so and there were only about 20 people waiting. Cha-Ching. Or so we thought. It turned out that there were only 12 units at the Superstore. So we went to the London Drugs on 51rst. No one was there. The lady at they door asked why we were lining up (at least 5 people from the Super Store came with us). We said we were waiting for the Nintendo Wii. She said "what's that?" and then went to see if they had gotten any. Now this place had gotten five PS3s so we were pretty certain that they would have Wiis. As it turns out that certainty was ill placed. They aren't carrying the Wii.

One of the guys in who was waiting there with us said that EB in Southgate might be getting extra units beyond the 15 they had set aside for pre-orders. We thought it was a long shot, but what the hell, it was only about 5 blocks away and the hard part wasn't waiting it was the getting up early and we had already done that. So we went to Southgate and went in the door (now this is key, since it was only about 8:20 at this point and every door to the mall was locked except for the one we tried, although we didn't know that at the time) and we made our way inside to the EB.

There were two guys waiting there already. They worked in the mall and had used an employee entrance. We sat down and started waiting. The EB manager showed up and told us that he didn't know how many units extra he had, but there were certainly enough for the four of us.

In the end they had 26 extra units and you could have gotten one if you had shown up at around 9:30 or so (although the line was full after that). Beyond that most of the waiting was waiting for the EB guys to get done ringing in the presales.

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