Star Wars Battlefield – EA press conference

Not an accident that.

Don’t get me wrong my dick was out in my hand the whole entire time but I’m a skeptic.

The land of Hoth, in all it’s white crispness, was gorgeous. I wanted to see Endor but we’re pre-alpha and trees are harder to draw than snow. Fair play.

The flight looked very easy, perhaps when in canyons some steering is done for you, keeping you immersed Maybe it’s done for you completely and you just shoot? I hope for the former, I expect the latter sadly.

The character models, and the races are flawless.

The action of it however, feels like Battlefield with skin and sound mods if I’m perfectly honest. But if it aint broke (is it okay now??) don’t fix it right?

More lightsabers please. When I played the first Battlefront I put it down because of the severe lack of. The second one however was beautiful.

However… a game of this supposed caliber –  on next gen equipment –  better fucking wow me when it comes to the control and feel of the magical lazer phallus we and all covet so dearly. If the strokes can be controlled perfectly then I’m a happy guy, however for the sony boys and girls out there.

So yeah I’m excited no doubt, but it will feel verrrry familiar.

Touchpad saber duels please?

Jake Gyllenhaal terrifies me now because of Nightcrawler

Seriously. I went into this film knowing virtually nothing. What I was told was; Jake Gyllenhaal is an unemployed rake in L.A. who somehow stumbles into the realm of freelance Crime Journalism.

This is of course what happens, but nobody told me how Amazing Gyllenhaal is in the film. I used the word rake two lines up. That was deliberate. the man looks like he has done literally nothing but lie down and smoke cigarettes for a year.

End of watch was the last film I saw him in, and he wasn’t exactly a hulk back then, but he had muscles and looked as though he had eaten in the last four days. In Nightcrawler he is almost skeletal, the transformation is staggering. He has lost everything. But what amazed me most was the performance he put in. It’s truly harrowing at times.

At the very start of the film he is shown to be a petty crook, a swindler, and a witty, tenacious salesman.  From this he evolves into a Nightcrawler; which is essentially a cameraman roaming the streets poking his nose into police affairs and selling the footage to the highest bidder.

When Lou (Gyllenhaal, I forgot to mention) hires his intern Rick, It’s through the conversations they share, we see the subtleties of his not-quite-rightness. Of course this can be credited to both the screenplay and the direction of Dan Gilroy, who has truly put together a remarkable film, but the credit really goes to Jakey boy. His posture is hunched and the mannerisms he has developed  will leave you wondering how far along the autistic spectrum he’s decided his character is.

As you progress further into the film it goes way beyond that and you’re left having much more concerned thoughts about Lou. Believe me, you will be scared and uncomfortable

Back to Gilroy’s directing however; It is  a strong film, but I can’t help remark that the most attractive shot of the whole film is actually on Lou’s Viewfinder. Considering it’s a film set in L.A. you actually don’t see very much of it, but it does make the film feel very intimate. perhaps a deliberate move. The editing is fine throughout, but certain music choices feel really weird and cheesey, it pulls you right out of the immersion that every other part of the film has worked hard to achieve.

Renee Russo is also in the film as His colleague / Love victim. (His way of chatting up women is practically criminal) Honestly I didn’t really even register that it was Russo in the film She looks a hell of a lot different, But as a cold, story hungry boss lady. she’s fantastic.

The story is intriguing, if not ever so slightly predictable in parts.

The cast are perfect.

Jake Gyllenhaal is another man completely, and I couldn’t be more impressed

The film overall, is pretty solid, immersive and will leave you very, very shocked.

Watch it.

22 Flump Street

Forgive the awful title of this review but I am feeling somewhat disenfranchised.
If you read my last review on the Age of Ultron  you’ll know that I am quite critical of trailers… Now.

I Should have been critical of the trailer for this film, seeing Channing Tatum do his very finest Borat impression whilst standing next to Jonah Chavez didn’t really impress me much at the time, so why didn’t I tell myself “Don’t bother, it’s a sequel it’ll be shit.”

So your first film was good, but have you still got the touch?

The answer sadly is no.

The film has sadly become a parody of itself and no amount of jokes (lots) that even recognise this fact can make recompense.

21 jump street left some very large shoes to fill and this film needs about 6 sets of insoles.

The formula is exactly the same, except this time the boys have been sent to college, obviously.
I feel I could end here quite happily.

“infiltrate the dealer, find the supplier” Says Ice Cube, whose office, according to channing Tatum is actually a cube of ice. That, admittedly was funny, and don’t get me wrong there are funny bits throughout. The montage where they first enter their new collegiate realm and reveal to us all the things that will proove to their new peers that they are true to life fake college adults was pretty swell indeed.

Throughout the film however, they are constantly being berated for their aged visages, but I don’t find that running gag all that funny as to be honest they both look like kids still, perhaps if Mel Gibson and Danny Glover we’re playing the roles instead this would make sense.

The plot as I said before is essentially the same, the love interest of Jonah hill this time feels a little more thought out and well developed and does lead to a surprising climax in which Channing Tatum takes Great pleasure of ripping Jonah Hill to absolute pieces,

As you will have seen in the Trailer the Dave Franko and Ron Riggle reprise their roles… In jail. Many jokes about Mr Walters being Eric’s Bitch.

None of which are funny.

Even the scene where Schmidt gets face hugged by an octopus left me feeling very little, and that’s saying something considering that is literally my greatest fear.

At the end of the film the trailers role with movie posters highlighting the future plots of 56 jump Street and so on.

It goes on for a for a long time, I hope to god this franchise doesn’t. Overall the return of Schmidt and Jenko was an extremely average effort. The first film was triumph, something fresh in a sea of couples comedies. This was stale. Watch the first one again, save yourself the disappointment. You have been warned.

Avengers : The Age of Ultron. Yeah? And..?

Is it just me or were you left feeling a little underwhelmed?

Joss Wheden is still in the chair, great…
Marc Ruffalo still goes fully green, great…

Then there’s the new characters and I’m not so sure.

The scarlet witch (who I know virtually nothing about) and quicksilver who I know slightly more but still very little about are our guest appearances for our mornings “OMGATRAYLERR” entertainment. I’m like a level one comic book nerd, I know a fair amount but not enough to really bro down and throw punches against the elitists, that being said these guys are certified avengers, they are also the kids of magneto (cameo anyone?) I just get the impression these are two kids who got caught up in a mess, they’ll no doubt contribute in some magical way but to me at the moment they just feel thrown in.

Let’s move on to the baddie shall we? He’s a robot, I think, with lots of robots. It kinda feels like Iron man 3.5 to me.

The locales don’t seem as impressive, in fact nothing does, the trailer indicates we’re going dark, á la Thor : The Dark World (which I enjoyed immensely don’t get me wrong). It’s going to be gritty and desolate, but this is a sequel, and being a sequel it’s gotta top the first and I’m failing to see how it can do that without an expansive backdrop such as I don’t know… Manhattan?

We’re talking the avengers here. You gotta go big man,

The biggest thing I saw was the hulk buster armor, which for the true fans I say hooray!
But for the average Joe I just can’t see it being enough to one up the hulk punching a flying alien metal worm snake in the face.

Thor topless in water for the ladies, and Captain America’s shield split in half, one to intrigue me.

I’m not impressed.

Yet.

I Can Finally Review Driveclub!

Now that the online is working that is.

well sort of… I got to race one match. but it was brilliant.

I warn you now a few of comparisons will be made to the Racedriver Grid  series as to be perfectly honest I see them as a very important benchmark.

Driveclub is so much better online. but we’ll get to that. (What’s another 5 minutes wait huh?)

From the outset you know this game is trying to impress you visually. The first few races deliberately showcase the games stunning graphical prowess. The scenery is beautiful, the cars are beautiful, everything is gorgeous, but what really stands out in the opening drives is the lighting.

You’d hope so the amount the went on about it pre release. One race takes you on a sunset spin through  some looping mountain roads and it creates a real challenge as you are literally blinded by the sun trying to navigate the bends. I forgot I was playing a game and looked towards my curtains.

Other races take place in the dead of night and really test your ability to drive by following little red lights.

It’s tense, more so if you navigate the options and switch the race music on. I implore you to do so as this is a welcome feature in a racing games, that I feel has been missing for some time. The options menu is important, explore it, customise the HUD and you can tailor the game to create a truly amazing immersive experience.

The gameplay it’s self is pretty much perfect, the controls feel familiar and easy to access without being copied from any other game. It’s not too much of a sim, but conversely it doesn’t feel like a slip and slide arcade game. The game takes you from hatchback to hyper car. in that order. The further you get the faster you go.

The Game (like Grid) lets you customise liveries for your car so you can create your own racing brand.

The customisation however does look almost identical to the one we know from Grid 2. Seriously the boxes with patterns seem identical to me. But, how original can you possibly be with a system so standard.
You can even customise the little man or woman who drives the cars for you, it’s arbitrary but it’s a nice touch.

Driveclub implements a points system, in which you can earn points for drifting, overtaking, clean sectors etc. etc,

You are also penalised for crashing into barriers and other drivers. this will lose you points.

Do it hard enough and your top speed is capped for a brief period of time.

Which is where the online driving really shone. It was clean and respectful. I don’t remember the last time I raced online and it felt fun but controlled at the same time. Codemasters turned collisions off but it still left you with a jarring, unsettled feeling as you drifted through other racers. A sort of shame of shame I guess, the kind ghosts must feel as they walk through humans and doors to gain your secrets. Driveclub just works.

It’s stunning, it’s fluid, it’s fast but above all else it’s fun. something games are kind of missing in the past few years.

Goon (or as I’ve Affectionately named it Doug.)

Is like Fight Club (yes you’ve heard that one before) on ice.

But slightly brain damaged.

Doug is the sweetest guy ever, he was also a brick shit house bouncer that could pull your head off for about 5 minutes at the very start of the film. Sean William Scott had put on a fair bit of weight for the role and with a fairly meaty beard he looks the part and plays it pretty damn well too. I’d find it hard to imagine that stifler could bludgeon anybody the way Doug goes, which goes to show that Scott has moved in a different direction, which is good.

The way Doug gets into Ice hockey is perfect. It’s just ridiculous enough for you to almost believe it to be true. I’m not telling you, just enjoy it for yourself.

A small clue is that Doug’s brother is the foul mouthed host of a local Hockey news show thing, whatever you want to call it.

Doug, from the outset of his puck slinging career is told not to actually sling pucks. He is purely there to beat the living crap out any body.

This happens a lot. I must say, it is cathartic, obviously there’s a love interest and she gets him in trouble, and she’s tortured blah blah blah. I’m sorry but I find no place for romance in a film with this much blood.
i appreciate that it is part of this new Roganesque era of comedy we’re in, and that’s cool. but this can totally be ripped out of the script.

Doug’s main competitor in the rink and the man he must defeat is Ross Rhea, (Liev Shreiber)  Sabretooth does a pretty good job and punching the shit out of people, so does Doug.

Conflict.

END.

I appreciate this film is not new, I appreciate that it is not a Oscar winner.

But I didn’t even know about it until this week, and maybe you didn’t either.Now that you do, you should watch it. because it’s brutal and hilarious.

Chuck Palahniuk…

Writes some very, very good books. I Have thus far read Fight Club (obviously), diary, damned, snuff, choke (the film adaptation of which was so shitty I actually plan to write my own), rant and now : Pygmy. 

What agitates me about Palahniuk books is that on the cover, or the blurb of a book that isn’t Fight Club, some critic will draw a comparison to Fight Club.

It’s not even his best one. Damned is.

And it’s definitely not Pygmy either I’m afraid.

Pygmy is written in the first person, as are all the others, but it is in broken english. It’s really charming for a while because you don’t know exactly where he’s from, so you can inflict upon him the accent of your choosing and read away. Pretty soon however, you’ll revert back to the voice inside your head, which of course, is yours, and it’s hard work. I read at a conversational, relaxed pace I guess, a friend of mine who reads at the speed of light agrees with me when I say that absorbing the words off of the page, translating them into english proper and then moving on is akin to throwing a dish cloth into a swimming pool and hoping for the best.

I appreciate that in every book he’s written, Mr Palahniuk has utilised a different structure or style to keep it all fresh and interesting.

But it’s all just a little bit like ice skating uphill at times, many a double take was necessary.

I read in bite size chunks on lunch breaks and what have you, and this does contribute greatly to the problem I have faced. Take this book on a long trip and it does start to flow and Pygmy is a loveable little shit. His verbose, bottomlessly varying and extremely hilarious manner of naming the people he interacts with and the persistent quoting of most glorious ruthless dictators such as the venerable Idi Amin really make you feel at home in a Palahniuk Novel.

A surprisingly low level of “what the fuck?” moments though.

And by that I mean only one yellow haired bully was sodomised. Pretty tame by old chucks standards if you ask me. It’s tameness in violence and sexual depravity are more than made up for in the brutally honest commentaries made upon the capitalist system  by our ethnically ambiguous thirteen year old quasi genius, trained in the martial arts with the intent to fulfil his mission entitled “operation havoc”.

The thing is, it’s all spot on, and all you can do is laugh at it until he hits a nerve and you really start to question the choices you’ve made in life.

I didn’t become seriously depressed about it. Honest.

For all the ‘Murica bashing that goes on, some comments are made on the (i can assume) eastern practices of government and such forth. Cos’ y’know, objectivity an’ that?

I would urge to you to read this book, as I hope it’s just my caffeine dependency, poor quality of sleep and general illiteracy that are to be attributed to my struggles.

You’re probably slightly less broken than I am.

So… the Family Guy and The Simpsons crossover

Was as we all expected, a flaming ball of excrement. I will keep this brief, as not much can, and not much needs to be said.

The premise was exciting, this is true but it was doomed to fail from the start, the show from the outset even recognises this (one of the few half decent jokes cracked).

The execution was just a failure. The animation was fine, although it did make The Simpsons regress to a time before they drew shadows, and standing the two families together gave one faction in particular a very noticeable case of jaundice. This can’t be help obviously but it is just super weird.

It was the writing. The narrative got off to a good start and the set up was genuinely fantastic and it was looking like a pretty good episode of family guy was about to be enjoyed but then The Simpsons came in and the remaining 15 minutes was just a concentration  of catch phrases and characters doing things that make them who they are.

Lisa Simpson playing a saxophone, ooh please, more!

An actual story would have just been a treat is all I’m saying.

And oh god, the fight.

Enough with the hour long fights.

This film is old now, and so is the review, but… It’s a taste of things to come.

Pegg and Frost are back and haven’t lost the questionably homosexual tension. Seth Rogan joins the ride to add into the much loved gay jokes. Sausage.
Mash up is a word that’s been flying around a lot lately, mainly due to Glee, but this film is a mash-up of sorts. Imagine if Superbad and Shaun of the dead had a baby and it was then raised by a gay Sci-fi-con couple. You’d end up with Paul.
Full to the brim of Indiana Jones’ hat with pop culture references, this film follows Illustrator Graeme Willy (Pegg) and his comic writing friend Clive Gollings (Frost, of course) as they plan to take a road trip across the UFO hotspots of the USA and… Mexico. Does that count? I failed geography.
Graeme and Clive come to Comicon in san Diego CA (which I’m assured is every nerds wet dream) to meet their hero, Adam Shadowchild, which leads to an in-joke throughout the film which can leave you feeling excluded if you weren’t paying full attention, although you’re quickly appeased with “three tits, awesome!”
Enter Paul, the foul mouthed, rude, quick witted, sexual deviant. Essentially Seth Rogan in a little green mans’ body, which is Not a bad thing. The Mix of British Rom-Zom-Com humour we’ve come to love, with the American “I need to get laid, I’m pathetic.” style we’ve seen in Gregg Mottola’s Superbad, is like mixing French fries and Ice cream. It shouldn’t work but it does. Awesomely.
Paul crash landed to earth in 1947 on top of a dog (named Paul, you get the idea…) and was pulled from the wreckage by a small girl named Tara, Who when grown up is played by the elegant Focker-in-law Blyth Danner. The Main trio meet after Paul is fleeing from Special Agent Zoil, (Jason Bateman) under orders from “The Big Guy” and flips the car he was driving… badly. Graeme takes him aboard after Clive faints and pisses himself. A few nudity gags later and we meet Ruth, (Kristen Wiig) who believes that the earth is 4000 years old until Paul introduces Himself and essentially Mind fucks her with his hand, crushing her belief system, hurrah!
The Trio are then chased across the states by rednecks, Ruth’s overprotective father, and Zoil. The time this takes is filled brilliantly with Paul dressed as a cowboy, a little romance and more car chases. I found myself filled with a strange joy towards the end when I realised the twist was a good one. Not an M Night Shyahahamalalanamamam one or however you spell it. I don’t care. I haven’t seen one of his films since “the village” it would be an exercise in boredom. Ooh and by the way “the Big Guy” turns out to be a familiar face and leads to a beautiful one liner.
One of the few, and I mean few, downfalls of this film is the self referencing, however Pegg and Frost wrote this together and it’s becoming a trademark, it’s tricky at times to stay with, and I found myself talking during the film to try to differentiate between fiction in their world, and fiction in ours. It requires constant attention if you want to get every gag, references and poke at the genre’s to which it aspires. If you’re after a funny as balls movie with a sass talking alien, it does the job too and you can’t fault it for that.
“Are you going to probe us?”
“Why does everyone always assume that? What am I doing? What am I harvesting farts? How much can I possibly learn from an ass?”