Grand Theft Auto 5

I can sum this game up in one word: Fuckin' really, really brilliant and awesome and amazing. Oops. I guess I went overboard and threw in a little too much detail, but then again, so did Rockstar when they developed this game. Long story short: This is the best GTA game yet, which automatically makes it front runner for best game ever.

Bascially, it's just fun. A lot of fun, in fact, and in ways the earlier GTA games lacked. Every GTA game has been fun, of course, but they've all lacked something or had some kind of odd control quirk that was just frustrating enough to be a constant annoyance. The earliest couple games were amazing, but the top down perspective was really hard to master and never really felt comfortable. The first few 3D versions had some terribly stiff control, making the characters feel ripped out of a Resident Evil game. And GTA IV, as brilliant as it was,  had a really floaty camera in the driving sections that made it hard to see where you were going, especially when you had to turn a corner. But this game pretty much perfected all that, and it's the first entry in the series about which I can honestly say every aspect is fun, from walking to driving to fighting to shooting. As a shooter this isn't going to compare to Gears of War, but it's the first time the series has been fun and not maddeningly frustrating whenever you are forced into a huge fire fight.

Another interesting aspect is the three character structure, opposed to how every other GTA game followed only one main playable character. When I first heard about this, I'll admit I was skeptical because it sounded needlessly complicated, since these games already had story structures that were notoriously hard to follow... but it works. In fact, having three characters to switch between at your leisure made things somehow less complicated, since you're able to take a break from one character's storyline while you play around with another one. Of course, there are also moments where the game forces you to play as one character or the other, often after one goes into "hiding" after a big heist, but the best moments are when all three characters team up on a mission and the game has you seamlessly switching between all three.

Here's one example of how this works: There is one mission where your trio has to abduct a guy from an office in a skyscraper. One character flies a helicopter, another repels down the side of the building, while the last one is on a nearby rooftop with a sniper rifle. After the cops come, you alternate between all three characters, flying the chopper, hanging from a rope with a machine gun, and across the way picking off the police with a rifle, and yet it somehow never got confusing or frustrating. It was just fun and exhilarating.

Or there's the mission where one character has to shoot down a jet with a bazooka, then another has to chase after the crashing plane on a dirt bike.

I'll admit that storywise the three character structure doesn't always work, if only because the writers never seemed completely clear on the dynamics between the three characters. Trevor, the psycho member of the team who is also the most fun and memorable, alternates between hating the other characters and professing his friendship. But who plays GTA games for the stories or characters? I don't. I play for the mayhem and fun, and that's where this game excels.

There's also an online game, which just recently launched and is nearly impossible to access at this point, but the couple times I did make it in didn't thrill me. But then again, I'm a loner, a rebel, and I don't play well with others. That's maybe why I like Grand Theft Auto.

Gangster Squad

 

I liked this one.

Anytime I see a trailer that makes me think, "that looks like fun," but then I skip it because the critics tore it apart, I always inevitably end up renting it and think, "that was fun." Long story short: This movie was fun. It wasn't amazing. It didn't do anything a couple dozen other movies didn't already do already, and probably better. It isn't going to change your life or offer a new way to look at the human condition. It won't even teach you much about real life gangster Mickey Cohen or the L.A.P.D. officers who took him down, since this was mostly a work of total fantasy.

 But it was fun, and it will entertain you for a few hours. Who could ever ask for more than that?

Well, critics, I guess. They don't go to movies for fun, but because it's their job. If I was assigned with the task of seeing and writing about every movie that came out every week, I might crack a little too and take it out on otherwise harmless movies that usually only fail in not being better... if that makes any sense. Gangster Squad is the kind of movie about which there is little more to say than "that was fun," so I think it's the kind of movies that critics pan because writing a bad review is easier and more fun than writing a positive review.

But we were talking about Gangster Squad: It was fun. Great cast, solid script, and some truly exception action sequences. Between this film and Zombieland, director Ruben Fleischer proves he knows how to put together one hell of an action sequence, since some of the set pieces in this movie were off the hook, especially the jailbreak scene midway through the movie, and the show-stopping shootout at the end. Great stuff. He's let down a bit by his script, which is mostly just a bunch of cliches strung together into a film: Showing how evil the bad guy is, assembling the team of heroes, the inevitable death of a colleague, the big showdown, etc. One of the reasons a film like, say, the Untouchables is so great is because there wasn't a single member of the team that the audience didn't care about, so when Sean Connery and that little account finally got murdered (SPOILERS!!), both deaths were truly heartbreaking. When some of the team dies in this film, meh.

The cast did their best, however, and helped the director elevate the mostly mediocre script. Josh Brolin was our lead, and he's never been bad. Sean Penn chews the scenery as Mickey Cohen, and proves that he must've taken some acting lessons from Al Pacino or something. I don't know if I'd call his performance nuanced or even all that great, but he sure was fun to watch. Portrayals of Mickey Cohen on film have always been that of an old, fat, nebbishy Jew, so it was kind of fun to see him as a spectacularly scary psychopath. Don't ask me which portrayal was more historically accurate.

The rest of the cast included Giovanni Ribisi, Nick Nolte, Robert Patrick, Holt McCallany, Anthony Mackie, Michael Pena, and Emma Stone. Now, that's a cool list of actors, and they all did great work, especially Robert Patrick as an aging gunslinger. That guy's always good and he stole every scene he was in. But can somebody please explain to me the appeal of Ryan Gosling? That guy's a bad actor, right? At least he was bad in this, which might be the only film of his I've seen. He's certainly handsome and looks great in the 1950s era suits, but every line of dialogue sounded as though he was reading off a cue card. I'm not joking, that's how bad he was. Thankfully his character was stoic and laconic, so he wasn't able to completely derail the film, but lord knows he was pretty bad.

Anyway, this was a fun, albeit slight cops vs gangsters movie that I recommend for fans of the genre, provided you've already seen LA Confidential, The Untouchables, or maybe even Mullholland Falls.

Captain Picard's Sexy Sexy Flute Duo

Here's another:

Jean Luc Picard's Sexy Flute Solo

This is the best thing I've ever done:

Grand Theft Auto V

Here's my first impression of Grand Theft Auto 5: Spending twenty minutes (so far!) watching the mandatory install. Remember when you used to just buy a game and play it as soon as you got home?

Oblivion

Here's a movie I watched.

I actually watched this a couple weeks ago, I think, and couldn't remember if I had posted a review of it hear or not. That's probably because I barely remember watching it. I seem to remember Tom Cruise in a little space ship, a post apocalyptic Earth, and some naked chick in a swimming pool... but other than those fleeting images, it's mostly a blur.

Basically, if the producers wanted a quote from me to put on their movie poster, it would say something like, "Oblivion is a movie."

And, you know, it's a decent movie, so far as these things go. It had some neat ideas, some nice visuals, and a consistent mood and tone throughout. That mood was boring and the tone was bland, but at least it was consistently boring and bland. There were some good action set pieces here and there, a couple twists and turns to the story line, and some cool special effects... at least at the beginning of the film. Toward the end it looked as though the budget got cut or something and most of the CG effects looked like a bad videogame.

The story was about... I dunno. Tom Cruise and some woman who's name I can't remember (neither the actress nor the character) are assigned with the task of staying on Earth after a mass exodus after an alien invasion left the planet an irradiated wasteland. Their job is to maintain the drones that fly around killing the aliens still on the planet, and to fix any problems with the reactors that are terraforming the planet back to a state where it will be inhabitable again to humans.

Or something. That's the basic premise -- and it's a pretty cool one -- but there are twists and turns to the story that make it about more than just that. Although, to be honest, I had to look up the plot summary on Wikipedia to double check what actually happened toward the end of the film, because by that point I was lost. I honestly can't say if I was lost because I was too dumb to follow along, if the film was too poorly constructed to make its plot clear and easy to follow, or if I just wasn't paying attention. Probably mostly that last one, since I do remember getting bored after the first few hours and cleaning my apartment while keeping the movie on in the background. I'm pretty sure it's about six hours long, but that might be an exaggeration.

The cast was good. I like Tom Cruise and he did a good job. I also can't remember his character's name. I think maybe it was Jack Reacher or Maverick, but, again, I could be wrong about that. He spends most of the movie alone, flying around the abandoned planet, looking around forlornly at the scenery, occasionally shooting something, and even has a pretty cool fight scene later on. Tom Cruise is a very good actor, and he does a good job standing around looking thoughtful.

There were also other actors in the movie. There was the naked lady in the pool, who was quite lovely but her performance was intentionally cold and distant, so it was hard to care about her. There was another lady who did stuff, but I can't remember what, and she ultimately served no real purpose. Morgan Freeman also makes an appearance, and I know a lot of people who told me they kind of want to see it just for him, and I've told them all he's in the film for maybe ten minutes top. No joke. He was good, but he's not really a main player. Nor is that guy who plays Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones. He was in there for maybe five minutes.

So, anyway, that's Oblivion, which I give credit for being an attempt at a thoughtful, idea-driven sci-fi film. It's just too bad it wasn't that great, and was actually kind of boring. But if you like sci-fi movies, it's worth watching maybe. It was ok.

This was the most pointless review I've ever written.

Eric Roberts Autographs My Chest

I'll probably regret posting this... but I had the opportunity to meet the awesome actor Eric Roberts at the 2013 Meta Con in Minneapolis, and for some reason he ended up signing my chest. Anyway, great actor, and a very cool, funny guy:

The X-Files: Episodes 5-10

Gotta check in and report my progress on my attempt to finally watch every episode of the X-Files.

Episode 5: The Jersey Devil
Uh... Mulder and Scully find a cave woman, and she tries to sell them Geicko car insurance. Zing! Just kidding. Well, I was serious about the cave woman part. Not the best episode.

Episode 6: Shadows
A woman is maybe killing people using telekinesis, but then it turns out it's actually the ghost of her former boss who's trying to save her. Spoiler warning! Now you don't have to sit through this dumb episode.

Episode 7: Ghost in the Machine
An evil artificial intelligent computer that runs an office building becomes self-aware and murders people. That's a pretty dumb plot, but this episode was great fun. Loved it. The X-Files was always at its best when the plots were unapologetically stupid.

Episode 8: Ice
Classic. Mulder and Scully travel to the Arctic with a team of scientists to investigate the mysterious deaths of a group of researchers digging in the ice. Turns out those researchers uncovered an alien species that inhabits your body and makes you turn crazy and murderous. This episode is just a rip-off of The Thing, but it's so well done you'll forgive it. And the Thing was just a remake of an earlier film anyway, that was based on a book that was a riff on Lovecraft.

But, anyway, this one definitely ranks high on my list of best X-Files episodes ever.

Episode 9: Space
And then we have maybe the worst X-Files episode ever. Some ghost is disrupting shuttle launches... or something. It's basically just a bunch of stock footage of the space shuttle intercut into a terrible episode of the X-Files. Skip it.

Episode 10: Fallen Angel
Mulder thinks a government quarantine of a small town is actually a conspiracy to cover up an alien crash site... and he's right! Weird episode, but a lot of fun. The alien ones are always worth watching, because that's the show's main mythology.

In Memoriam: Elmore Leonard (1925 - 2013)

I don't have much to say about Elmore Leonard, the world's most respected, beloved, and prolific crime novelist, or at least not much to say that hundreds of thousands of other bloggers have already written about him. I just wanted to note his passing, and say that I was a fan.

Well, and also I wanted to say one thing that maybe most of those hundreds of thousands of bloggers might not say: Great crime novelist, sure, but an even better writer of Westerns, at least in my opinion. It was through his westerns that I first read Elmore Leonard, and they aren't just my favorite of his works, but some of my favorite of the entire genre.

He will be missed.

X-Files: Episodes 1-4

I have a confession to make: I've never actually watched the entire run of the X-Files, nor have I seen the films. Of course, most people haven't, but then again most people don't run a blog called "Blessed are the Geeks." I like the show, but I only ever made til.... I dunno. Season five or six maybe. I don't even remember. But I'm finally going to do it. I've been inspired by my buddy The Mugato who has spent the past couple years trying to watch every episode of every version of Star Trek for his blog, and my buddy Jester is also attempting to watch them all too.

Anyway, I thought it might be fun -- or, at least, help to keep me on track -- if I wrote up my thoughts on each episode.

So here are my thoughts on the four episodes I've watched over the past couple days:

Episode 1: Pilot
As pilots go, this was a great intro to the series. The characters are perfectly set up, as is the basic mythology of the show.

Here's the basic plot in case you've never watched the series: FBI special agent Fox Mulder works in the bureau's X-Files department, that details cases that are deemed to be unexplainable. Fellow special agent Dana Skully is assigned to work with him on the cases, in an effort to debunk his more ludicrous theories and assumptions. So it's a perfect odd couple pairing of the true believer and the skeptic. Of course, Mulder is always right and his most ludicrous theories always prove true.

Anyway, it's a fun gimmick and they milked 8 or 9 seasons out of it, and this intro is a bit dry in the story department, but David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are so good it doesn't matter.

Episode 2: Deep Throat
A military test pilot goes missing, and of course Mulder assumes it's because the military is testing aircraft based on UFO technology found at Roswell... or something. This is a classic X-Files plot that's a lot of fun, especially because of an early role by a very young but still very cool Seth Green.

Episode 3: Squeeze
This is where the X-Files actually becomes the X-Files, and distinguishes itself as not just sci-fi, but the scariest horror show on TV. This is also where they start there gimmicky "monster of the week" formula, but that doesn't matter because this was one of their best monsters. Doug Hutchinson plays Eugene Tooms, an immortal cannibal who eats peoples livers so he can prolong his life... or, and he can stretch and fold his body to fit through the mail slot of your front door. The whole thing makes no sense, but it's really fun and really creepy. There's also an early performance by Donal Logue as the FBI's biggest douchebag.

Episode 4: Conduit
Zzzzzzzzz... this episode was pretty boring. The plot was interesting, but nothing much happened. I literally just finished watching this one, and I can't even remember it. The sheriff is played by Michael Cavanaugh, who I originally thought was Frank Gorshin. That's all I have to say about this episode.

Michael Cavanaugh

Frank Gorshin

Wolverine vs. Predator

This is really well done. Why couldn't they do a costume this good in any of the "real" films?

Ed Wood vs. Ed Wood

Sometimes I edit together videos just because I want to watch them myself. I looked online the other day for a video that compared clips from Ed Wood's original films with the recreations from Tim Burton's Ed Wood. That video didn't exist, so I had to make it. Anyway, here it is: