Lower than the ocean floor

In the latest round of 'aquatic monster', we have Dinoshark. ...oh dear gods...

These have never been good, but this is terrible. The dinoshark is released from thawing ice, and comes south to Mexico to terrorise people and take part in a water polo contest or something. Frankly, the story is horrendous, the dialogue is deplorable, the delivery is stilted, every take is the first one, and the dinoshark is so obviously superimposed on the shots that a cut-out held up in front of the camera would be more realistic!

And it takes four minutes until the first death, unforgivable!

I really hope the actors are doing this purely for the money. Eric Balfour actually did something decent back in the day, and they even got Roger Corman to be in front of the camera! Iva Hasperger has... not been in anything noteworthy, but does seem happy to take off her top when she sees a crude drawing of a dinoshark on her computer screen. (Really, it's an odd moment in the scene, she's researching Dinoshark, then suddenly she takes her top off (wearing a bra underneath, no Pirahna 3D nudity here!) and then the scene changes... what the?)

(Secret note: I wrote this entry half-way during watching this. If anything interesting happens, I'll bother to amend this entry...)

Why, Syfy? Why?

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70 minutes

So, I watched two examples of what can be done with 70 minutes of time.

Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control: Set during the events of the Get Smart movie (with very weak links), this chronicles the adventures of the two gadget makers Bruce and Lloyd trying to get one of their inventions out from the hands of bad guys. And watch them hook up with women. This is clearly an amazingly callous piece of film-making, attempting to cash in on the big movie... and it is extremely terrible. No actual humour, despite many attempts at jokes, and the characterisation of all the characters varies from line to line (and indeed there seem to be a few scenes missing as well). A complete waste of time.

Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms: Japanese folklore comes into play as two demons, Thunder and Lightning, make an effort to become freed from a sword they were trapped in. Hellboy is the one to save the sword, and the others have to deal with the real world impacts. Ron Pearlman, Selma Blair and Doug Jones return to lend their voices to the characters, and the story is entertaining and the animation is fitting. (How like Mike Mignola's comic it is, I'm not qualified to comment.) Nice wee movie.

What is telling is that I cranked up the speed on Bruce and Lloyd to get through it quicker. Not so for Hellboy. Two takes on using 70 minutes to tell a story... two completely different outcomes...

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How to Convert your Dragon

A while ago, either earlier this year or last year, can't remember, I saw How To Train Your Dragon. Recently, I listened to the audio book of How, as read by David Tennant...

Um... now I've read original books that movies are based on (the Die Hard series is usually 'loosely' based), but this one was very different indeed...

What's in common is the name 'Berk' (the place) and Hiccup... and there are dragons... however... in the book, the vikings use dragons as pets (more or less). Er, that's pretty much completely in opposition to the movie. And the dragons speak (Dragonese). And Hiccup has a common, not rare, dragon...

Now, people will say that there's a Hollywood process, however... to completely change nearly everything about the story, how do you get 'dragons are menace' from 'dragons are pets'? Can it really be considered the same story for naming rights?

(I did consider going off on a spiel of naming a book, then suggesting a movie with everything reversed but... frankly... you can do that yourself.)

Now, the book is a good book (and I've listened to the next two), and the movie is a good movie, but as an adaptation the movie... isn't.

Just goes to show that if you like the book/movie, you might not like the movie/book.

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Super?

The obvious way to describe this movie is 'Kickass adult style'. And while I am wondering if this movie would have been made had Kickass never happened, it isn't the same style.

This is a real-world superhero movie, with Frank D'abo receiving a vision of being touched by god and so becomes a superhero to take back his wife from the drug lord. On some level, Kickass was still comic in style, not so here. This has real world consequences Kickass didn't touch. The villain does become rather more scaled down from the king-pin figure in Kickass, the drug lord here is more of a thug with delusions of grandeur. And the violence is also more real world, and the Crimson Bolt makes mistakes. And as for Boltie...

But while being more real, this movie wants to be a super-hero movie, and be more comedic. However... this movie wants to be a lot better than it is. The humour fails on several levels, and the 'real world moments' come across as 'this is how it should be in the story' rather than as a natural part of the story. Not so much forced as just obviously scripted.

Rainn Wilson tries hard to portray Frank, as does Ellen Page with her character, but they are fighting against the lack of well-drawn-ness their character fail to have. (There could be a lot of back story to Libby, but we never see why she is the way she is.) Liv Tyler and Kevin Bacon are just phoning it in. Not even Nathan Fillion is saving this.

I wanted to like this movie, but it's 'grounded in the real world' is holding it back. Something more could be done with that concept, but not this.

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Side Quests Go!

I am slowly reaching the end of Arcanum. I know this because I've been using the FAQs. Yeah, I admit it! On the other hand, I don't want to do the standard puzzle game ultimate technique of spamming every item up against every other item just to see if does something interesting.

This one quest involves seeing something in a room, going to another building in the town, then going to a different town (although there's no way of knowing you need to do this), before going to another town to get some plot information before heading back to the first town. Um? Really? That's not obvious. I don't care who you are, you aren't going to come up with that plot logic.

Let alone another quest which involves going to a set of places around the country in a particular order... and it takes a lot of work to find out the order, interpret it, find the places, what keys they need... sod that!

I'm interested in the story, not in randomly wandering around. Although there isn't much of that left. One last quest or two, and then I'm heading off on the last part, no going back... so I'm not going just yet. Time to start striking off those side quests... which will involve a lot of walking around, but at least I'm going to know where to go and what to do when there.

And I'm not seeing a lot of replay here. I've put a lot of hours into this and, after changing characters, it's been fun. But it's long, and I have other games to play. This does mean that I won't experience all the technological aspects or all the magical aspects (or any of the magical aspects). I've dumped all my points into my basic stats and skills. And even then, there's more I could pump up.

One more annoying thing about skills. In this game, you can be magical or technological inclined, but not both. And if you are one, then the other doesn't work. Simply picking skills like "disarm trap" makes me technological, so now the magical healing my party can do doesn't work on me. Nuts.

(An interesting cheat could be to pump up all the stats/skills/etc at the beginning, then seeing how quickly you can do a run through. Or possibly go through and kill everyone because... well, you can.)

Not that I have plans for the next game to get into. Possibly something without an isometric view, that's just annoying...

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DW: 6.1

Okay, going to need a while to process that... however, I'm fully aware this was written by Steven "Bootstrap Paradox" Moffat, so I'm not entirely believing what I'm seeing....


So this is America, is it? Aside from a bit of desert, could easily be a set in a studio. Never really thought of Mark Sheppard being the son of W. Morgan Sheppard. Makes it easy for them to play the same person, I suppose though.

Anyways, to the story. What the smeg? As I mention, I'm not entirely believing that we saw the Doctor die. Let alone for the meta reason that there'll be another actor along to play him long before that happens. And this easily could be another bootstrap paradox that Moffat loves so much.

Still, the episode runs along quite nicely until they get to the warehouse where it starts to slow down for a while. Have to say the Silence look good. Clearly a mask (I presume Paul Kasey is under there), but nicely made. A lot of explain there, tunnels under the planet, but since these are supposed to be the enemy of this series (I presume), they need a good build up and to actually be a threat. (So often they are built up big but then defeated with a mere twist of the wrist.)

I'm looking forward to seeing next week, if only because it'll help seeing the complete story.


Next week: Um...

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Life's a Be-ach

I haven't been around the past few days because... I've been up at the beach! My parents have a bach near Paraparaumu, so I thought I'd start off the long weekend (one of the few holidays this year) with some time out at the coast.

Started well with me losing my sunglasses on the train, so that was useful when out and about in the sun. And while I went up on the train, came back down on the bus (as no trains were running over the weekend). What a pain.

But yes, to skip to the question: I did go for a wade in the ocean. In April in New Zealand (ie middle of Autumn), with the temperatures that implies. Actually, the water itself wasn't too bad. Certainly not overly warm, and it may have been numbing from cold rather than be warm, but the water was fine. The waves as they splashed were on the shocking cold side, but the water was nice. Standing there, in sun, very peaceful.

I'd like to visit nearby Kapiti Island some time. This does involve forward planning, as you need to apply for a permit first. This does tie you in a bit... Still, be an interesting visit...

A more summary time might be more enjoyable in the ocean... however, this was nice too...

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