“Well, Dave… really, I appreciate your Dungeons and Dragons approach to office management, but I left my twelve-sided dice at home…”

broderic on September 27, 2007

D-War or Dragon Wars or whatever?!

Lookit, the stars have aligned and it seems my NewsRadio quote matches something I want to blog about. Hooray!

Anywhoo.

D-Wars is the movie that Uwe Bolle wants to make. Pretentious, but bad. Really. Really. Bad. I know that I say don’t follow what other reviewers are saying, but in this case I saw it and it is bad.

First, the actors. I don’t know who the actors are that inhabit the main characters, but I hope that they can still find some work in Tinseltown. If not, there’s always Vancouver. It’s not that they are terrible, but I assume the Korean language barrier made it difficult for them to know what was to be conveyed in a scene so they acted like they were baffled. Certainly seemed to be the case.

Another baffling things is continuity. I joke about Vancouver, but they leading lady was supposedly 19, almost 20, but her friend takes her to a bar to drown her sorrows. Is the drinking age 18 in Canada? Are they even in the US? Wasn’t this supposed to be taking place in LA?

The final showdown took place in Mordor. Suddenly everyone was there. How did they get there? Where is there? Hunh? And tell me, after vanquishing the evil dragon, how is the hero going to get back?

Too many questions.

At least the fight over LA was kind of neat. Kind of. Really.

1 of 5 stars.

“I did get an 800 on my math SATs.”

broderic on September 26, 2007

3:10 to Yuma.

All story short, it’s a western. Like all westerns, there’s the good guy as portrayed by Christian Bale who must make his son believe that he is a man. And there’s the bad guy, Russell Crowe, being as charming and benevolent as evil can be to lure Christian Bale’s son to the dark side.

Is it an allegory of growing up and admiring your pa? Or is it one about the goodness in us all?

It’s set up to be just the good guy delivering the bad guy to the train station to be taken to jail. That is all.

Not bad. It’s hard to say that the bad guy (and his henchmen) who so remorseless kills people can have the change of heart he experiences in the last 10 minutes of the film. Other than that it was a nice, neat little oater that brings back the western genre of cowboys, indians, horses, cattle and ranches to the cinema screen. Not the best of the genre just another of its films that comprise the American experience.

“We need more complaint cards.”

broderic on September 26, 2007

Amazon has released their online music store. MP3s for $0.89. Whole albums for as low as $5.00.

Apple should be worried.

No pernicious DRM to keep you from moving the files to and from wherever. Works with the iPod. And cheaper too.

They even have a download manager that’ll copy it to iTunes for you.

Competition has just arrived.

“And this one, ‘I have doobie in my funk,’ which I assume is some sort of reference to the Parliament Funkadelic song, ‘Chocolate City.'”

broderic on September 26, 2007

The Seed gets a Mac Mini hoping to get his mom all excited about the future.

Good luck to that.

I doubt that Tita Mina will ever want to get the hang of computers. Why should she? She’s got The Seed in the basement to do that for her.

My mom is almost computer savvy. She can do email, and surf the web. But get her to do something like post her pictures online and that won’t happen. She knows about computers. She’ll only know as much as needed. She doesn’t even know the difference of quitting a program and closing a window. She lives in the Windows world. O, well, at least she’s online.

Know if only I wasn’t tech support.

“Woa, woa, woa, what is this? The Ellen DeGeneres Show?”

broderic on September 20, 2007

Adventures from my Netflix Queue: Arizona

It seems that it’s been nothing but westerns. I caught 3:10 To Yuma last week (someday I’ll be reviewing it). My Netflix queue has been filled with the old timey stuff. And I totally loved Miss Stanwyck in Forty Guns. It’s an all-american genre, and it has some great movies to love. And it is good to look at some decent work in that genre outside of the major, important films.

Arizona could be one of them. It may not be memorable, but it has a lasting impression on the western genre. Columbia Studios built a fascimile of old Tucson, and it has been used since for other westerns.

Jean Arthur stars as Phoebe Titus, a gal stuck in Arizona making a go of it. She is ambitous and she plots to finally own the largest ranch in the Arizona territories. As her fortunes rise so does the prosperity of Tucson. She has a rival, a suave gentleman named Carteret, who acts nice but is duplicitous. He constantly is sweet to her all the while planning for her downfall. She has suitor. William Holden as Peter Muncie swept into Tucson at the head of a wagon train, courted Ms. Titus with a banjo, goes to California for some shade, comes back a soldier, gets her 500 head of cattle and finally marries her. He also has to settle the Phoebe’s score with cateret as her husband/man of the house.

It’s a sweeping movie. Epic in proportions. Filmed in 1940, you could say this was in reaction to the success of Gone With The Wind. Or you could say that it’s one in the long line of westerns. It makes due with the genre’s conventions, and churns out a solid effort of a movie.

Yet, there were some hilarious things. Ms. Titus made her living selling pies. Yes, pies. I loved that. She goes from selling pies to being the cattle baroness of Tucson. Hilarious. And everyone loved her pies. Muncie especially.

Jean Arthur is another favorite. Actually, I couldn’t stand her at first. Her melodious voice grew on me, and now I own several DVDs of movies she’s been in. Strange that.

3 of 5 stars.