HouseOfNerd on: First Dates

Me: Just don't get murdered.

T: He owns a TKD dojo, so no guarantees.

Me: Get inside his reach and crush his groin or trachea. If you can take out the knees, he's screwed.

T: Quite possibly the best first date advice ever

Me: I'm a helper!

Case Study in Bad Directing: Haywire

            Cinematography, music selection, and direction go a very long way in setting up a good movie. Haywire fails in all of these aspects and succeeds in making international espionage completely boring. Its especially interesting that its coming from Steven Sodenbergh, the director of Ocean’s Eleven remake. On the other hand, he made Ocean’s 12 and 13, so maybe that’s been sapping away at his talent.

            Gina Carano plays Mallory Kane, a field agent for a private espionage firm consulting with the government who gets burned by her handlers. Standard faire for producing chases, gunfights and fist fights, with tense situations about as the spies try to outmaneuver each other.

            Sound: almost none of the build-up to tense scenes feature any music whatsoever, it usually just involves standing or walking. The action happens suddenly, but its still broadcast without any surprise. The other music is haphazardly chosen and placed in random scenes. The soundtrack sounds like something taken from a quiet cheesy 70s B movie. Its boring, and its used as a backdrop behind boring flat conversations.

            Cinematography: the shots are extremely static, often using a wide shot, with no movement at all and only a few angles during the fight scene. One shootout between police SUVs uses only a single wide shot that shows almost none of the action and makes the scene look exceptionally fake. I’ve seen 10 year olds on the playground act better shootouts.

            Direction: This is Gina Carano’s first major film, after a career as a female MMA fighter, so no one is expecting a particularly nuanced performance out of her, but what is surprising is how flat everyone else is in this film. Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas and Channing Tatum all act like they’ve just finished the first script read-through and they’re still reading the lines as if written on cue cards in front of them. There is zero emotional investment, and even when the characters are in danger, none of them seem particularly troubled, scared, or particularly agitated.

            Granted, Ocean’s Eleven dialogue comes off as flat, but the movie benefited from quick cuts, multiple scenes occurring at once, and George Clooney being able to say his lines with a certain amount of quirky charm that he always possesses. This film comes off as a guy who wants to make slow paced “indie” films but got stuck making an action film.

            The single redeeming quality of the film is the actual fighting. It is refreshing to see a female actress who clearly knows how to fight. Her MMA skills are on clear display as a no-frills brutal style featuring Muay Thai and Brazilian Jujitsu amongst other elements.

            There are plenty of bad action and spy films, and they can be enjoying in their own way. Hell, I’ve been to Bad Movie clubs were terrible action films reign supreme (I’m looking at you Crack 2). But Sodenbergh committed the gravest sin of directing a spy or action movie; he made it boring.

 I will say though, for a woman who could kill you without breaking a sweat,

Gina Carano is very pretty.

They Live

A: Bleh! Enough of this. We are gonna do great on Step 1!!

Me: Yeah! I'm here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum.

Me: And they won't let me take gum into the test center anyways

 Roddy Piper Approved

Review - Invincible: Ultimate Collection 1

            While I am not blessed with an overabundance of free time, I always take 20-30 minutes to read for fun before sleep in order to decompress. One of the styles of literature that I found works very well with this system is the graphic novel. I spend time catching up on collected volumes of books like The Walking Dead and the Goon.

            The series that I’ve most enjoyed starting however, is another Kirkman project: Invincible. The story follows the titular Invincible, the teen son of the world’s greatest superhero Omni-man, the Superman of this universe. Invincible enters a world filled with superheroes and high expectations. All the while he juggles high school, college searches and interacting with the superheroes of his generation.

            While Invincible’s story hits every beat of standard origin story, at least at first, it’s the situations around him that are fascinating. One of the issues spends the entire time setting up the universe’s equivalent of the Justice League, complete with an Amazonian, speedster, batman stand-in (Darkwing), fishman, martian, an green energy user. After spending all that time fleshing out all these characters, they are savagely murdered in a single page. The fallout from this event spurs on Invincible’s story as he is forced to step up to cover for the vacuum of heroes.

            One of the strengths of the book is that it adds a realism to superheroes. When people as strong as Superman clash, mountains are leveled, city blocks are destroyed, and despite best intentions, thousands are hurt and killed. And when two nigh invincible beings clash, the only way to win is for one to brutally and swiftly end the other.

            By the end of the volume, the big reveal changes everything previously established and separates itself from the DC comics archetypes it had followed thus far. It also makes it a far deeper story than the standard superhero fare. Betrayal, loyalty and duty all weigh heavily in Invincible’s mind as his duty to the Earth becomes personal.

            Invincible is a series I would recommend to experienced graphic novel readers and those new to the genre. It offers an excellent introduction to those who are interested in superhero stories, but find the horribly convoluted continuity of Marvel’s and DC’s respective universes far too daunting to tackle. Invincible uses the genre archetypes as the springboard to create a fully realized world that twists the preconceived ideas about the people behind the masks and capes.

Review: Ready Player One

Ready Player One is a novel by Ernest Cline detailing a mad scavenger hunt quest in a dystopian near future where societal decay has pushed everyone to escape reality by plugging into a massive multiplayer life simulation called OASIS. OASIS is a combination of World of Warcraft, Second Life and every internet connected game in between. The economy of the world is now based upon token in-game, as it is the most stable currency in the world. People work in the game as technicians, store clerks, grinding enemies for loot or as celebrities in Player versus Player battles, to name a few. OASIS’s creator James Halliday was like a cross between Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and a 12 year old playing video games all day. He was also easily the wealthiest man on the planet, valued at a quarter of a trillion dollars. Upon his death, a video he made announced that his fortune would go to whoever found all the items (3 keys and 3 gates) leading to his easter egg left hidden somewhere in his sprawling virtual world. All of these clues are related to his obsessions: 80s culture, television and movies, science fiction, and old school arcade games.

Years passed with no one even coming close, until a high schooler named Wade (AKA Parzival) finds the first key – and immediately launches the contest into overdrive. He finds himself competing against high level players, internet celebrities (including his online crush Art3mis), and a corporation that will do anything, even murder IRL, to gain control of OASIS for its own corporate greed.

Ready Player One is a fascinating book for anyone a fan of sci-fi, 80s culture, video games, or the culture that has grown up amongst the internet. The humor is incisive to those with appropriate background, and the references are hugely varied. The scavenger hunt itself is eminently solvable if you have the appropriate knowledge. I understood the first clue within seconds of reading it. The rest were significantly more difficult, but the ride was better for it. The book also illustrates beautifully the pros and cons of anonymity and freedoms of the internet. Deception, for both good and bad, abounds amongst OASIS. The antagonist corporation is sufficiently menacing even in the virtual world. They cheat with modified rigs, throw their economic might to purchase in-game artifacts of immense powers, spy on priority users, and if necessary, dispose of anyone deemed a threat through corporate indenturement or even murder. It feels like there are real stakes to the story even though the majority of it plays out in an MMO.

Not that the book is without flaws, there are some seriously heavy exposition sections that would have been better spent showing rather than telling, especially about the major characters like Art3mis, Aech and several other prominent avatars hunting for the prize. There is often some major lulls inbetween the flurry of action when clues are unraveled. But overall this is a fantastic book I’d recommend to any sci-fi fan.