Self-portrait

Not mine, my daughter's.

Leaving Liberty City

OK, call me a wimp, call me a sucky game player, call me Ishmael, whatever. I've decided I'm going to probably give up on finishing Grand Theft Auto IV. I'd really like to finish it, but I just can't spend the time to do so given how its save system works.

Basically, the game auto-saves after you finish a mission, and you can drive to a safehouse and save the game. That's it for saving.

The problem is with missions like the one that killed it for me, "Deconstruction for Beginners." Since I've saved at the safehouse after finishing the previous mission, I have to do the following:

• Get a car
• Drive from Queens to Manhattan (takes a while)
• Talk to Playboy X (at least you can skip cut scenes)
• Get into a car
• Drive a long way to somewhere else in Manhattan (takes a long while)
  
• Ride an elevator to the top of a tall building (takes a while)
• Snipe three guards (hard to locate)
• Ride back down to ground level (takes a while)
• Shoot many people at a construction site (takes a while if you're being careful)
• Kill the boss before he escapes

So, if you fail anywhere along the way (like you get shot, or you fall, or the boss escapes), you get to start all over from the beginning. If I could skip the driving it would be fine. Maybe there's a way to skip the driving. Anyhow, I need something that I can save at any point and drop out of the game, due to sleep or running out of time or whatever. And it doesn't look like GTA is that game, unfortunately.

The Dark Knight

Got a chance to see it last night. Have to leave in about 10 minutes to get the kids at camp so this won't be exhaustive, and of course it will be spoiler-free.

The movie was very good, probably the best of the comic book movies this summer. Iron Man was more fun certainly, but this was more thought-provoking, way better directed, well-written, and very well acted. Heath Ledger deserves all the praise he's gotten for his turn as The Joker and then some. I can see why some reviews have said the movie kind of falls flat when he's not on the screen. I liked Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent where some reviews have not. Maggie Gyllenhaal (I'm sure that's not spelled right) has kind of a thankless role but does a good job with it.

Issues? It really is kinda long. To its credit, it doesn't drag nearly as much as Hellboy 2 did, even with a 25% longer runtime. But even so, it's long. I will also have to revisit Batman Begins to hear what is up with Batman's voice. I didn't much like it in this one; granted, Bruce Wayne is trying to disguise his voice and sound tough to instill fear etc., but it still sounded odd.

I'll definitely try to see it again, hopefully at an IMAX theater.

Wanted review

We were in NYC this weekend, and by the time we finished dinner all the Dark Knight showings were sold out until 10:30 or 11:00. Since that's way past our bedtime, our options were the new X-Files movie (which has gotten soundly trashed by the critics) and Wanted (which apparently has a 70% favorable rating on RottenTomatoes).

I didn't want to be disappointed by the X-Files movie, so we saw Wanted instead.

Big mistake.

I really hated Wanted. It wanted soooo badly to be clever with its direction and cinematography, or cool like The Matrix. In fact it's such an obvious Matrix ripoff (unbelieving neo-phyte, too-cool black group leader, super-hot female ass-kicker/love interest, many guns) I'm shocked it wasn't immediately dismissed by reviewers because of it. Unlike The Matrix, though, it had stupid juvenile dialog and an absolutely moronic plot. "The Loom of Fate"? Excuse me? The friggin' LOOM of friggin' FATE?!?! Oooh, and the secret code? It's BINARY! Ooooh! Binary code! How high-tech and cool and stuff!

Only redeeming points to this movie? 1) Set in Chicago. 2) It was rated R so you actually got to see and hear adult things, instead of obligatory PG-13-level sex and violence. 3) Angelina Jolie was of course hot, although she could use a good turkey sandwich with a side of cranberry sauce.

Movie Catsup

No, ketchup. Catch-up, sorry, CATCH-UP.

Saw Hellboy 2 last weekend while everyone else was going to see The Dark Knight. I believe that I was a victim of both high expectations and poor image quality. There had been so many raves for the movie, and I was such a big fan of the first one, that I was really thinking good things for the sequel. To be sure, there were some good things about it and some funny lines, and Guillermo Del Toro is wonderfully inventive. It just didn't really win me over completely, and inexplicably seemed to drag quite a bit in spots. And yes, the projection seemed dark, and some scenes had that telltale digital-film-not-real-film blurriness.

I just finished Lars and the Real Girl, which Maria recommended to me. I really didn't like this movie at all. Maybe it made me uncomfortable since the lead character was clearly ill. But beyond that, his brother was very unlikeable, the general practitioner clearly overstepped her bounds in suggesting that everyone play along, and the premise of the film really wasn't set up very well. It was trying to be quirky and touching at the same time, and I just found it uncomfortable. Plus, dude, those dolls are like $7K. Where does Lars find that kind of scratch? Anyhow, the things I did like: Emily Mortimer (also the only thing I liked about the Pink Panther remake which I had the extreme misfortune to see last summer), Patricia Clarkson (always quite fetching), and the noose made out of a USB cable.

Font humor

Spent today in a class that reviewed for teachers when to use some fonts and when not to use others, so seeing this video today on Digg was timely. Although I have no idea why the hero to all the fonts is... well, can't spoil that. Anyhow, cute and good production values.

Edit: waaah, I was going to embed it but it's too wide. Darn artsy-fartsy widescreen videos. Here's the link instead.

E3 press conferences

Not like I went to E3, sadly. I watched the press conferences on G4TV. My quick comments:

Microsoft: Glad they're reworking the interface. Avatars are a total Mii-ripoff and is almost embarassing. It's cool that they're working with Netflix: I might actually use the "watch now" service. Love the idea of being able to purchase things for my Xbox via the website, as well as copying games over to the drive for convenience. Now if they'd just lower the 120GB drive's price down to ridiculously expensive instead of obscenely expensive. Will probably get Lips, will definitely get Viva Pinata 2 and Gears 2, less sure about the goofy EyeToy ripoff game or the latest SceneIt.

Nintendo: Kids are excited about Animal Crossing for Wii and new Pokemon Ranger. Other than that, snore. The Wiimote add-on for more precise tracking is interesting but it sounds like it's not backwards compatible, and another frisbee-catching-dog game isn't doing anything for me. And Wii Music? Ugh. Looks dumb dumb dumb. Just because Miyamoto created it doesn't make it good. (Edit: glad to see that Ars thinks the same thing, even after having played it)

Sony: I want Little Big Planet.

All three: My comment to a friend via email was "Man, they don't pay Steve Jobs enough money." I'm so used to seeing Stevenotes and how friggin' good they are, that I don't realize how abysmally horrible other companies' presentations are. Don Mattrick of Microsoft was awful. Reggie Fils-Aime (Nintendo) was arrogant, and Cammie Dunaway (Nintendo) couldn't even pronounce "Pokemon" correctly, and it's one of their A-list properties. Jack Tretton (Sony) was at least a little self-deprecating, but still boring on the whole.

Delta movie

I meant to blog this a while back.

Hadn't flown Delta Airlines anywhere in quite some time, but recently did so for work. Like the good little boy that I am, I watched the in-flight safety video. It was REALLY good. The lighting, the camera angles, the editing, the actors. Seriously, I can't believe I'm talking about an in-flight safety video either, but I really liked it.

WALL-E

Packed up the family and went to see WALL-E on Sunday. I'm not sure I was struck agog by it as the vast majority of critics have been (it's got something like a 96% positive rating over at Rotten Tomatoes), but it was very good and quite moving in spots. It owes an AWFUL lot to E.T., though: that took it down a peg or two in my book. On the plus side, it's wonderfully subversive: how many other movies can tell its (adult) audience "Hey, you're fat pigs that are trashing the earth and only exist to buy stuff at Wal-Mart!" And it's interesting to see how the kids reacted to this potential future.

The CGI was top-notch, as is to be expected at this point for a Pixar film. Loved the persistent nods to Apple, too: the iPod video and the Mac startup sound play an important part, and "Macintalk" got a credit for the voice of Otto.

As a very few people know, I love movies that start out with little to no dialog (e.g.: 2001, Once Upon a Time in the West), so that alone makes me partial to WALL-E. Not sure it's my favorite Pixar film but it's up there.