The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
I love the cast of this film. Sadly, they put less effort into writing than they casting. It's the standard "there's life after 60!" pap with very few twists. Mind you, it's well acted pap done by a pretty awesome group of actors.
Female Trouble
I love this movie. Taffy! Divine! John Waters! Gah. So much fun! So disgusting! So great! Shit. I need to sleep so I can learn to use punctuation other than exclamation points.
Sir Apropos of Nothing Peter David
When I was 13 wizards, knights, and heroic figures were really cool. Then around 13, I got really burnt out on the black and white-ishness of so much fantasy. Sure heroes can help people learn to hope again but they honestly seem a bit stupid and vapid after the fourth or fifth bloated novel in which you know their virtue shall conquer the dark. Peter David deftly parodies all that by having a very flawed human being perform the standard great tasks for decidedly un-heroic reasons. End result is a more believable fantasy realm chock full of some great dark humor.
Melinda & Melinda
Woody Allen tells the same story twice from two different perspectives utilizing two fairly delightful casts. Don't find serious Will Ferrell as annoyingly over-earnest as Jim Carrey, but he's close. Of course, I also found Larry David similarly clunky in the only other Woody Allen film I ever saw so maybe that's a directorial decision? Assuming this is a Woody Allen film? Really only watched it because it was of interest to the wife. Not bad but far from something I'll go back to soon.
The Man Who Loved Children Christina Stead
Wow. Sam Politt may be the least likable character I've ever run across in fiction. The way he treated others, his views on everything, all were so repugnant I had to skip some of his dialogue to avoid punching the library's brittle copy of the book in the equivalent of its face. Calling it all a bleak portrayal of American family life at its worse is an understatement. When a character died, I felt jealousy at escaping Sam and not sorrow for their survivors. Well written, fascinating text.
Paper Mario N64 via 1964 ultrafast for Windows
The missus got herself the recent sequel for her 3DS. As the battery on that thing won't allow for both of us to play, I decided to go back in time a bit and try the first game to bear the Paper moniker. It turned out my N64 goodies were split between the retro-gaming cabinet and random box storage hell upstairs so it seemed a good time to bust out the ROM and see how far emulation had progressed in five or so years. I went with 1964 Ultrafast because the idea of fast forwarding in what was essentially a turn based RPG was freaking sexy. Truth be told, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of performance. With default plugins on a laptop pushing six years, I only had one persistent graphical glitch and application crashing rendering complication. Otherwise, I seem to recall cracked walls appearing a bit more visibly cracked but bear in mind that was on a 52" TV. Any other bugs were the result of my idiocy. If I didn't fire up the interface for my PS3 controller ahead of time, the mapping got weird. Trying to ALT+TAB out of Fullscreen caused 1964 to sit atop everything else until I managed to force a system restart. Both understandable issues that shouldn't have happened.
As for the game itself, I'm glad Nintendo decided to go with a hybrid platform/RPG presentation. The jumping around compensated for the repetition of turn based combat nicely. Well, for awhile. By Crystal Palace, I had to remind myself it was basically castle 7 of 8 and quitting now would mean watching the ending on Youtube. Bear in mind that I have the attention span of a kitten and am about as strategic. My not quitting to go piss someone off by senselessly smashing buttons in a network-capable fighter is a testament to the charm of the game. Which of course, it has in spades. I honestly would've preferred things be a bit closer to flat out ludicrous like Super Paper Mario on the Wii but there were still some decent gags present. All in all, I don't see myself playing this one again very soon but will probably encourage others more patient than I to do so.
Die Hard Arcade Sega Saturn via SSF for Windows
Seeing N64 emulation run fairly smoothly on my old P. O. S. made me wonder if any progress had been made with the Sega Saturn. I still remember when Yabuse got the system ID to pop up at an extremely jerky frame-rate and select segments of the Internet began jumping around like monkeys before a monolith. There are some major limitations on resolution and very few features beyond gamepad support and RAM cart emulation but video and audio reproduction were quite nice and there were no stability concerns. It's not as slick as 1964 with its cheat integration and capability to retain controller mappings or documentation explaining how to make it run but it's also far from obscure and there are some very friendly/helpful users kicking around emulation forums.
I'm really glad SSF didn't require much work to get running as Die Hard Arcade is far from something I'd kill to play again. The game is fun. It does a better job adapting the old Streets of Rage/Final Fight formula to 3D than Fighting Force. The excellent foley work on crotchshots alone makes it imminently playable. However, the thing has all of five levels which fly along at a breakneck pace. When my skills are anywhere near refined, the thing takes me half an hour to play through with kitten cuddling breaks. Mind you, if there's another player around there's a pretty good chance of multiple playthroughs. It's fun on my own but seriously begs for a buddy to beat the crap out of blocky baddies with. Sadly I don't see that happening as, while the franchise is blatantly tagged on, this is a Kevin Smith household and we pretty much banned Bruce Willis out of solidarity.
As a note for future blogs, the last Who Watch entry was most likely my final one. My library system simply can't provide the remaining serials. So rather than doing something sensible like starting in on the reboot via Netflix so I can watch the first half of series 7 on DVR and join in on live Who blogging, I'm going to integrate Who entries with everything else. I mean the other option might get me an actual audience so once I am off unemployment and my seven reviews per week reduce to 1 or 2 per month then there'd be someone to feel disappointed.
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