Up In The Air

George Clooney is one of the actors who I think can basically do no wrong. He picks great movies to be in, and while his performances are usually all basically a minor variation on a theme, that theme and those variations are usually just so damn good I can't fault him for it.

Such is the case with Up In The Air, a film about a man who lives most days of the year traveling around the country and firing people for a living. It's an extremely relevant film considering the economy, and one of the film's big pluses is the recruitment of actual people who lost their jobs giving their reactions to being told they were fired. It adds a somber tone to a movie that fluctuates between sadness and happiness in a fluid way that feels very real to life despite the kind of surreal life Clooney's character builds for himself.

This movie is all about contradictions: between being surrounded yet being lonely, constantly flying yet always feeling at home, giving hope and despair at the same time, and the dynamic between love and commitment. It takes a clear vision and a great script to effectively manage all these ideas without losing focus or meandering between philosophies, and this movie certainly had both.

The actors are also more than competent in their roles, especially Clooney's main competitors Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick who steal the movie right out from under him, which is no easy task. Farmiga wonderfully carries out the role of a woman much like Clooney's character ("but with a vagina") who seems to carry an instant bond with him, and Kendrick's youthful inexperience and indoctrination into Clooney's world is hilarious but also sadly revealing about just how out of touch the older people are with the world at hand.

It's a touching commentary on the world we live in, and what we carry with us. It may not be happy, but at least it tells the truth.

Up In The Air gets a 9/10.

Sherlock Holmes

Fans of the original Sherlock Holmes character may not be pleased with this Hollywoodized, styled up version, most notably because he actually likes a woman. However, I believe this movie should be viewed in the mindset that it's a Hollywood bastardization and as such will suffer in translation, because as a Hollywood action/mystery flick, it's pretty good.

The casting, for one, is spot on. Robert Downey Jr. as a drunken, witty, and tortured yet brilliant mind is wonderful, and Jude Law as his basically better half (though still not without his own issues) couldn't have done better. Rachel McAdams as the main love interest obviously has some fun fighting right along with the boys and tricking Holmes as often as she can. The rest of the supporting cast fill their roles well.

Unfortunately the script just isn't up to their caliber. The art styling, sets, and costumes are great and convey a deathly gloom, the fights are a bit too fast paced but still carry impact and action, and the cast is certainly up to snuff...but the script unfortunately makes little use of all the right components.

The plot involves a member of a secret magical society murdering people to gain the power of the dark arts and then using that magic to gain control of the world. Holmes steps in right at the beginning and in stops him, he gets hanged, and then revives from the grave. Holmes is then left to hunt him down and stop his nefarious plans. Meanwhile an old flame, a thief who has outsmarted him twice, shows up with plans of her own and working for a mysterious professor, thus walking the fine line between helping Holmes and helping herself. And all the while poor Watson just tries to get married. It certainly isn't a dense plot, and the ending (and subsequent explanation of all the "magic") can be easily guessed at since it follows the tradition of a standard mystery plot. Of course, there are some things that only Holmes can figure out (unless you know the chemical properties of rhododendron) but they feel a little cheap and not the result of some masterful deduction.

But of course, it would be able to get away with that if the characters were likable. Like Star Trek, not the best plot but the characters gave it a humor and depth that made it great. Unfortunately the script doesn't exactly give the wonderful actors in Sherlock Holmes much to work with. It tries too hard to find the line between being a serious mystery with a seriously flawed protagonist, and a light-hearted witty comedy and as such falls short of both. The few scenes we are given where Holmes is basically a drunken, drugged mess it's unclear as to whether they're trying to give him depth or make us laugh at him. The comedy itself is great in places, but all too often the wit is just not that witty. There certainly are many laugh out loud moments, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it just could've been so much better in the hands of a more adept screenwriter.

However, the movie carries a nice charm to it that the actors deliver despite the limitations of the script, and if there's a sequel, as there will most assuredly be, I'll be there to see it.

Sherlock Holmes gets a 7.5/10.

Avatar

10 years and 300 million dollars later and we get...an okay movie with some VERY pretty graphics.

James Cameron's triumphant return to the screen after Titanic comes as an ode to the future of motion capture, special effects, and 3-D. Even if the plot and script were as bad as Transformers 2, I'd probably still give this movie a solid 5/10 (instead of 1/10) just for the incredible epic quality to every little graphical detail in this movie. Trust me. See it in 3-D. Don't worry about IMAX since it appeared they just projected a normal screen size onto the IMAX screen (top, bottom and sides all had sizable black margins). For all those who looked at the trailers and were skeptical, don't bother with anything less than was intended, which is a full 3-D experience.

Cause otherwise...let's just say I hope they didn't spend most of those 10 years working on the script. If they did, wow did they waste their money. It's a paint-by-numbers plot of the evil human invaders conquering a less powerful race, with the race then rebelling with the help of truly good humans and conquering the invading force. There's also a routine love story thrown in there for good measure.

Basically the only new bit is that instead of just being normal good humans who help, they're humans who mentally inhabit specially grown bodies (avatars) that look like the alien inhabitants.

The first half hour or so that sets all this up is frankly boring and derivative. It's also easily forgotten once we are finally exposed to the lush world of the Na'vi. Every single scene is breathtaking. The motion capture and graphical detailing is so lifelike and vivid that you often forget that every single thing you're looking at on screen was generated by a computer. The traipsing through the jungle, finding curious and interesting lifeforms that do funny things, the Na'vi themselves, and the flying...oh god, the flying. Once they started soaring around on tons of awesome looking birds, that was enough to seal the deal and make me like this movie despite its faults.

When the final battle rolled around I was mesmerized and on the edge of my seat. It didn't matter that everything was completely predictable, it didn't matter that they blatantly bashed Bush (you should never mimic George Lucas' star wars prequels in any way), it didn't matter that the dialogue was mostly trite and filled with cliches, it didn't matter that the Na'vi were basically all black people in blue bodies and I think all but one of the invaders were white. The pure spectacle of that last battle was jaw dropping, as was all the spectacle before it, and that can't be denied.

Honestly, this movie should've been made in less than a decade, since I doubt the graphics took that long to perfect, and that means the rest of it was script writing or bureaucracy and that's really sad. However, even the bad stuff isn't terrible, it's just kind of average, and the technological feats of this movie more than make up for it. It's an achievement that will be hard to top for quite some time.

Avatar gets an 8/10.

EDIT: The more and more I think about this movie, and have settled down from the initial awe of the effects, the more I have realized that honestly I shouldn't have given as much credit to it as I did. Even writing this review I knew that much of it simply wasn't that great, but because of the effects I could be forgiving. But now that it's up for Best Picture I simply feel it's my duty to calm down, clear my head, and rethink my review. With that in mind, the average story, average to below average acting, below average script and above average spectacle/graphics add up to just an average movie.

Avatar gets a 7/10.

Bayonetta Demo

Since I'm reviewing demos now I thought I'd add my two cents on the Bayonetta demo as well.

Scanning the amazon forums I found many review saying Dante's Inferno was totally badass and amazing and people couldn't wait to get their hands on it while Bayonetta is a Devil May Cry clone that was too frenetic and not fun at all.

Perhaps my brain works differently. Perhaps my view that complexity in a game makes it better is completely wrong. But until then I will just have to take it that everyone on amazon is insane and blind.

First off, yes, Bayonetta is a Devil May Cry clone. It's made by the same people, and why change a formula that works? For those unfamiliar with the series, the gameplay is managed mostly through very flashy and very frantic gameplay with lots of hard-to-do combos on hard-to-beat enemies. You gain experience beating enemies and then use that experience to gain new combos that do more damage or upgrade health, etc. There's nothing new, at least in the demo, except for a special "Witch Time" feature that slows down enemies when you dodge an attack at the right time. Oh, and the nudity. Basically Bayonetta uses her hair as clothes so when she summons a badass hair monster from the aether to chomp on a boss baddy...she basically gets naked, though mostly covered by strategically swirling hair. There's also a new feature where in certain areas you get to walk on the walls. While this provides some interesting thought processes about how to fight, it mostly is just a pain trying to locate an enemy that's flying around on other walls as well.

Okay, with that covered, I've got a big spoiler alert for those who didn't notice. DANTE'S INFERNO IS GOD OF WAR. BUT LESS INTERESTING. At least in God of War you were required to kind of switch things up and use combinations of grabbing, light attacks, and heavy attacks, and they all flowed well together. Dante's Inferno says bugger that and massively overhauled the light attack and underhauled the heavy attack and introduced a long range attack (the beaming cross that shoots out of your hand) that can be spammed to your delight and gets rid of most stuff before it reaches you. Oh and there's magic too, but at least in the demo it's kind of useless.

Bayonetta, on the other hand, keeps much of the badassery in Devil May Cry and doesn't dumb it down for you. There is an easy mode where you can just press "attack" and it does the combos for you (kind of like Dante's Inferno on any difficulty) but otherwise there are some really fun moves you can pull off, and the more difficult ones are appropriately flashy and full of impact.

The one thing I can hand Dante's Inferno on a platter is the graphics. They're just plain beautiful. However, Bayonetta still carries its own style that, while not as detailed, is still nice to look at.

Finally, the really sad thing about Dante's Inferno is it's based off of such interesting characters who go through hell listening to other really interesting characters. The game decided that was rubbish, robbed them of any personality besides anger and sadness (or Vergil's just being mellow) and then let you go carnage-happy with a scythe. Bayonetta actually has a personality. In the little bit of gameplay we don't get to see much, but it's enough to tell that she's FUN. And a little sassy.

We'll see what these games are like come release day, but from what I've seen I know which game I'd rather sit down to.

The Bayonetta Demo gets a 7/10.

Dante's Inferno demo

Really? Really. Really? REALLY? Okay...

That was just about my reaction to playing through the recent demo release of Dante's Inferno.

Already the premise of Dante's Inferno being a video game is ridiculous. In the story he literally just goes around, looks at stuff, and talks to people about philosophy and politics. So turning that into a hack and slash rush through the 9 gates of hell is a little bit of a stretch.

Especially when you turn Dante into a Crusader in the 11th century.

Who stitches a cross for no apparent reason onto his bare skin.

Who then finds his wife dead (with exposed breast), and gets stabbed in the back.

Who then fights Death with a poleaxe.

And wins.

And then steals Death's scythe for himself and kills Death.

And then travels into hell with Virgil, a ghost of the poet, to find his wife and slay a couple thousand demons in the process.

This is button mashing at its normalest, with no reason to ever take your finger off the square (light attack) button except to do quicktime events (push the right buttons at the right times to kill the boss) or to jump to flying enemies.

The best thing about it are easily the graphics, which are frankly incredible. Otherwise, I expect this to be yet another hack and slash God of War clone with nothing new to bring to the table.

Dante's Inferno Demo gets a 4/10 (and most of that is for the graphics).

Folklore

After the blandness of Resistance I wanted to go back and look at one of the most original titles I've ever played: Folklore.

Set in the somber Doolin village, you play as either the young Ellen, who is looking for her long lost mother, or Keats, a reporter for an obscure occult magazine who is lured there when he gets a mysterious call for help. Both have separate storylines and play styles, and at the end of each chapter you get to decide if you want to continue with the character you've been playing or switch. Eventually, though, the game does force you to play through both before you can continue, so you can't just finish one character's story and then move on to the other. They are intertwined.

That being said, I found it highly rewarding to play through Ellen until I couldn't anymore and then move on to Keats. Keats is a very mysterious and bad-ass character whose motivations, especially if you don't play as him until you have to, are very unclear.

And it's that kind of suspense that drives this game. It's hard to capture Folklore into a specific style of video game, but it's best described as kind of two games in one. For a great deal of the game your character is stuck in Doolin, walking around, talking to people and trying to figure out what the hell is going on. When you first arrive in the village, you find a woman sitting at the edge of a cliff. Or, you think she's sitting there until she falls over obviously dead. Ellen thinks it's her mother, while Keats believes it's the woman who called him, and before they can find out the woman falls off the cliff into the water. You walk into the town and find it populated at night with mysterious creatures who come from the Netherworld, the land of the dead. It turns out that one night a year, the doorway between the real world and the Netherworld opens up, and you've just stumbled there on that day. For their own reasons, both Ellen and Keats enter the Netherworld, and in some awesome cutscenes both go through a tranformation, Ellen donning the cloak of the one who can walk between the worlds, and Keats turning into a demon-looking guardian. After meeting some faeries and dealing with some folk (which I'll get to soon), both return to the real world to find that real people are there during the daytime. As you progress further and further, trying to unravel the secrets surrounding the dead woman and the Netherworld, more and more of the townspeople start dying and revealing more and more of a tragic event that occurred 17 years before. So this part plays like a fantastic and oddly surreal point and click murder mystery adventure game.

Then you step into the Netherworld and things get real interesting. Upon entering you come across these monsters called folk, which suddenly attack you. You are saved by a traveling companion (a creepy scarecrow for Ellen and a sophisticated looking invisible man for Keats) who beats them up and then shows you that they have little red souls popping out of them. With your newfound transformation you are able to capture their souls (or "ids" as the game calls them) and use them. So the two folks who attacked you you are able to use as a basic short range attack and a shield. From then on each folk you get can be mapped to triangle, square, circle or x depending on how you arrange them. Each folk can then also be upgraded either through giving them specific items that drop randomly or by reaching a certain requirement like "Capture 5 of this folk" or "Kill 5 of X folk with this folk". So basically it's kind of like Pokemon except each one has only one move and you use 4 at a time (and can switch any of those out at any point). You use folk to beat up other folk and then capture their ids when they pop out. However, there's a huge variety of folk. You start off in the Faery Realm of the Netherworld, and move on to explore 4 other realms, each of which has something like 15 folk. As such, there are a huge variety of folk that can only be hurt by certain other types of folk. There are some that are only vulnerable to wind, for example. The way you find out difficult weaknesses are by collecting pages for picturebooks from each realm, which show you a vague picture of what you should be doing. Unfortunately many folk look very similar, so sometimes it's very hard to tell exactly what the picturebook is saying.

So you have a kind of slow paced murder mystery along with an action rpg. While the two are completely different and you wouldn't think they'd mesh well together, the styling of each keeps them coherent and working well together. Possibly the best thing about this game are the graphics and the style. There is literally nothing else like it. The atmosphere and buildings of Doolin are appropriately creepy, and then each realm is like walking through a lucid dream. The Faery Realm is forest themed, with vibrant colors and flowers everywhere, while the next realm, Warcadia, is appropriately drab and full of fire from battles. Each setting is amazingly detailed, creative, and artistic. Even just the folk themselves put other games to shame with their incredible diversity and style.

However, putting all the praise aside it has its problems. For one, the storyline is almost too complex/surreal/bizarre to make any sense of. Yes it's interesting, but by the time the final twist rolls around you might be too confused to make anything of it. Also, what could've been essentially double the gameplay by playing both Keats and Ellen turns out to have very much in common with each other. Both of them have unique folk that are specific to their style of fighting, but you end up fighting the same bosses in practically the same ways, and the stories are barely different in terms of where they go. This game also suffers from the unfortunate Pokemon conflict, which is that there are so many of them that it gets troublesome to try upgrading all of them, yet you never know which will be an asset in taking down future folk. There also isn't much replayability, as the odd kind of build your own labyrinth challenge mode unlocked at the end is just kind of...weird, and the story itself is very linear. There are extra quests/costumes that can be bought on PSN, but frankly they're probably not worth it.

Despite these problems it's a beautiful, interesting, and fun game that's got more substance and creativity to it than many games out there.

Folklore gets an 8.5/10

Resistance: Fall of Man

Along with Ratchet and Clank, I decided to grab the equally ridiculously low-priced Resistance. I had heard nothing but great reviews, it's a PS3 "classic", and I needed an FPS in my arsenal of games so I figured why not.

I have to say, I am severely disappointed.

Resistance is an alternate history scenario where instead of the Nazis ruining everything, a rogue alien force called the Chimera attack the world. From what I could understand it's essentially a virus that mutates humans into disfigured killing machines who need a cooling system attached by tubes to their back since it massively upgrades their metabolism and would normally cause them to combust. You play through the game as Nathan Hale, an American soldier sent over to Britain to help them defeat the infestation. After battling your way through several of them, a gigantic spire crashes into the ground, releasing tiny spores which infect and kill everyone...but you. Instead of mutating into a Chimeran, you simply gain the ability to regain portions of health over time and use the equivalent of Chimeran med packs. So you and your newfound abilities go out and wipe the Chimeran scourge from Britain.

While the premise is certainly interesting, almost nothing is done with it. This is one of the most typical first person shooters I've ever played, with no real innovations. There are some interesting alien weapons you can pick up, the most interesting of which is the Auger, which allows you to shoot through walls (and that increases in damage with each barrier it goes through). The first alien weapon you get, the bullseye, has the much required function of letting you "tag" enemies and then fire anywhere and still hit your target. Why required? Well let me tell you.

This game made the horrible mistake of trying to be a cover based game, with no cover controls. The only way you can dodge most things is to hide behind objects by ducking, and even then most enemy weapons will still catch you on the head. Yet the game likes to throw huge crowds of enemies at you and give you plenty of places to hide, but as soon as you pop your head out you get a nice huge volley of plasma in your face. Cause you don't just pop your head out. You can't. You have to move your entire body out from behind cover, get a few shots off, return to cover, heal after a few seconds, then rinse and repeat. It's a reaaaaally boring strategy, especially when many times you can just run into the crowd, toss some grenades, shoot like mad, and then find health packs and ammo refills right around the corner to recover. Only towards the end of the game does that not really work anymore.

There are some missions where you get to drive a tank, which you think would be awesome, until you try driving it. Instead of doing the normal thing and having the left stick be full movement with the right stick just swiveling the camera, they decided that the left stick is only used as acceleration in the up and down directions, and then you have to swivel the camera to where you want it to go. This creates endlessly frustrating situations where you would like to, say, move to the side while still shooting at big bad guys but have to turn the camera away from them, move, and then turn it back to fire. IT'S STUPID.

A couple "boss" fights happen along the way, though they're more sub-bosses that show up repeatedly as the game goes on. When they first showed up, I thought "ALL RIGHT, AWESOME, LET'S DO THIS!!!!" and then killed them rather quickly and kept killing them over and over as they kept showing up. The first boss you fight is a giant mechanical walker that is vulnerable at a point on its back, and you keep trying to get around it and let your little soldier buddies distract it long enough but EVERY FUCKING ENEMY has the amazing tendency to pick you out of a crowd and focus all their fire on you. Then you remember you have a gun that can shoot through anything and sure enough it gets the job done. Well at one point you face three of them in a row, along with a giant baddie that spews bio-mines at you or just claws you if you get too close. This was about the closest thing to an epic, hard, and awesome battle there was in the game. But what about the ending you ask? Isn't there some gigantic boss waiting for you at the end?

Nope. You get an improvement to the bullseye right before the final battle, which made me happy that I could start kicking more ass, but then you quickly realize that all the other enemies now have it and their health upgraded too. So basically...there is no point to it. It takes the same amount of time to kill them and the increased damage they do is negligible. So you're there in this ultimate Chimeran tower that is supposed to be the most heavily defended and impossible to destroy places in Britain, and all you have to do is kill some normal enemies and a miniboss to reach a button that opens these panels and expose these rods that you shoot and destroy while avoiding enemy fire. That's it. That's the end. You blow up some rods while you avoid getting killed. No huge epic monster, no nothing. It was one of the least satisfactory endings to a game ever.

I can understand that maybe around the launch of the PS3 it was considered excellent since the other launch titles were crap, but by now I'm surprised so many people don't recognize it as nothing more than a standard FPS with a great premise and lackluster execution.

Resistance: Fall of Man gets a 6/10.

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

I'm a newcomer to the Ratchet and Clank series, but having heard such wonderful things about each and every game I figured there'd be no better time to get into it than when the game was on sale for a measly $15.

Knowing little to nothing about the characters, I started a new game and watched the hilarious opening cutscene. Turns out you play as the last member of a species known as the Lombax (Ratchet) and his small robotic companion (Clank). Both of them are immediately likeable, with Ratchet being a bull-headed techno whiz and Clank being the voice of moderation and sensibility. They get a message from the self-proclaimed hero of the galaxy, Captain Quark, that a heavily armed robotic force is attacking and he needs their help! They blast off, and through much hilarity and action, crash before they get there, leaving you to fight your way to the building. And with that, you're off to save the galaxy.

My first main frustration came at this point, and sprouted later, when I was basically thrust directly into the action without even being told what button was "shoot" until the enemies were on top of me. A recurring theme with this game was an assumption that you had played other Ratchet and Clank games before. Nonetheless, it's an easy hurdle to get over with a little trial and error. One of the nice things about this game was that you weren't punished too severely for dying. Which happened. A lot.

This game is of the dying breed known as platformers, and as such has plenty and puzzles, hidden items, and jumping about on...well...platforms. Despite the repetitive nature of the tasks you're doing, it never gets boring. Part of this is most likely due to the fact that there are an astounding 17 places to visit, including sections where you're flying your ship and shooting stuff in a traditional arcade-like fashion. With so many varied environments and so many ways to get around them (thanks to more gadgets like robotic wings) it never gets old. Even revisiting planets to try and find hidden treasure you missed is fun as the enemies are constantly engaging. And to deal with those enemies...

Of course the main attractor for this game, as implied in the title, are the weapons. And boy oh boy are there weapons. There are 15 "weapons", each of which can level up 5 levels by using them and are upgradeable using raritanium, which drops from some monsters and chests. They range from a standard rocket launcher to a post with insects that shoot out at enemies to a tornado launcher that you direct towards enemies with the sixaxis controls. Then there are 9 gadgets that don't upgrade, but do all sorts of fun stuff. My personal favorite was the groovitron, which forces every enemy around you to stop what they're doing...and dance. It's a giant disco ball that puts on a light show and spouts an old disco tune. I laughed so hard the first time I did it the enemies killed me once it wore off. Usually the gadgets are much more deadly/resourceful, and as such cost more to buy, drop less often in battle, and have very low ammo counts. With such variety comes varied enemy types that are vulnerable/more easily destroyed by some weapons more than others. Thankfully you can quickly pause the game with the push of a button and select the weapon you want, leading to some interesting strategic battles.

Boss battles play out much the same as normal battles, just with a bigger target. There are, of course, the standard attack patterns that you look out for, avoid, and then keep shooting, but overall they're nothing special.

What really keeps this game, and something tells me this franchise, afloat are the personalities and humor that the game constantly brings in. The evil overlord trying to kill you will pipe in comments over loudspeakers on some planets, and they're always funny. Captain Quark's meddling antics and complete cowardice make for a humorous mix between The Tick and Zapp Brannigan.

So was it worth the $15? Beating the game unlocks a challenge mode with harder enemies but you keep all your upgraded equipment, but there seems to be little replayability otherwise. Nonetheless there's a lot to this little game, and if you choose to go hunting all the hidden golden bolts, raritanium chests and unlocking every skill point there's certainly a lot more. Overall it's a fun way to play with a bunch of different ways to blow stuff up with some humor on the side, and you can't go wrong with that.

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction gets an 8/10.