The Negotiator (1998)
directed by F. Gary Gray
The Negotiator is about a police negotiator who normally deals with hostage situations, but who, due to a small scale conspiracy in his own department, is forced to take hostages himself. To deal with the situation and clear himself of false accusations, he demands an outsider, another negotiator.
Samuel’s portray of Danny Roman, the negotiator turned hostage taker, is very believable, a character who projects strength to people around him, but who’s at heart a sensitive and even vulnerable character. The outside negotiator Chris Sabian is quite the opposite. At first he’s shown with his family, all nice and cuddly, but later you’ll realize that this hides a core of pure steel. As this is a movie about negotiation first and foremost, the action is sparse, but despite that the tension is very high throughout the whole movie, as neither the viewer nor Samuel’s character know who exactly is part of the conspiracy. This is what drives the movie until the final scenes. Overall a well done mix of drama and some action.
Rating: 5/5
Amon Saga (1986)
directed by Shunji Oga
Amon Saga is standard fantasy fare. A lone, silent hero bent on revenge on some generic fantasy villain. There’s also a princess involved, who needs saving and doesn’t do much apart from standing around and looking gorgeous. That said, it’s not a bad movie, just a tad too generic to make much of an impression. The most interesting thing are some of the visuals, for example the fortress of the villain is located on the back of a gigantic turtle, which indeed looks impressive.
Rating: 3/5
Highlander: The Source (2007)
directed by Brett Leonard
H:tS leaves the same kind of bad taste behind, that every piece of really bad fan fiction does. It has all the typical elements of any Highlander movie (save for Lambert, who mercifully got killed off in the last part): sword fights, rolling heads, dying immortals, and yet everything feels slightly off. It’s about some mystical source, for which the immortals quest. Some guardian of said source has also awakened and is out to kill the remaining immortals.
Where to start? The look seems inspired by the hyper-stylized look that became all so common in the wake of the Matrix, but done with a TV movie budget. The plot has holes the size of the grand canyon and is riddled with rampant stupidity, the new characters cannot act and look ridiculous, especially the immortal priest and the evil guardian (who looks like a cheap man’s Marilyn Manson). The locations were everything takes place are puzzling at best, everything feels artificial and slightly unreal, bereft of humans, as if they had not enough money for extras. I really felt sorry for some of the guys from the TV series. I’ve seen them act, at least good enough to entertain and make their roles believable. Here, most of them just felt misplaced, out of sync with their original performances. Only Adrian Paul has some good moments, but they are lost admit the awful rest.
As movie two to four have already shown, there can be only one (cliched, but true). Part five is no exception, beating a dead horse even more. Hopefully this is the end of the road for the franchise.
Rating: 1/5
Dark Skies (1996-1997)
created by Bryce Zabel
I seem to have taken a liking to TV series that get killed after their first season, but maybe it’s just that I remember them more fondly than series that I once liked until they atrophied by stretching them out past their normal lifetime. Point in case are the X-Files, which was probably the major reason for Dark Skies taking off in the first place. Imagine a series where the conspiracy isn’t just made up as the series goes along, but were there’s a plan from the start, a big concept. Everything is connected, everything makes sense. It’s like the alien conspiracy elements of the X-Files distilled down until nothing else remains and then mixed with a heavy dose of US history. We even had a Mulder (John Loengard) and a Smoking Man (Frank Bach), but not far into the series they left their templates behind and developed a character all of their own.
The strange relationship between those two was one faszinating aspect of the show, among many others, like the devastating effects that secrecy has on everyone involved, especially those that uphold the secrecy. Unlike the later, similar series Threshold, the usefulness and justification for secrecy is questioned much more thoroughly (even if at times in a rather subtle way) and shown to be the reason for the biggest failure of the conspiracy. Because of that Dark Skies was much more political than other, similar series, not just because of the inclusion of all that history stuff.
Again, not unlike the later Threshold, it gives some kind of closure in the last episode of the first season, but I really would have liked to see how everything played out. At least they made one excellent season.
Rating: 5/5
Halting State (2007)
by Charles Stross
Halting State scratches the same itch as Accelerando and Glasshouse did, even if it’s so much near future that it feels like being right around the corner. Just blink for a second and its future will have arrived. It’s the novel Rainbows Ends wanted to be, but failed to be, or to say it another way, if William Gibson would be still writing science fiction, he might have written it. It’s the most relevant near future SF book I’ve read for some time.
It’s a world of heavily augmented realities and multiplayer online games invading everyday-reality to the point that both can’t be neatly separated anymore. Those technologies have changed the future as deeply as the internet and mobile phones have the present, even if those changes wouldn’t be apparent to some time traveler from an earlier century (the book explains this at some point very nicely) and thus makes an important observation. Real change is often not something big and flashy, like flying cars or strange clothes, but something that doesn’t look like much, but runs deep.
Apart from all the geek/high-tech buzzword bingo Stross rolls out to woe the audience that already liked Accelerando and Glasshouse, one of the main strengths is that he makes characters you can care about. Despite all the high-tech geekery, despite all the smart observation about change and brilliant ideas like tapping a ubiquitous source (multiplayer online games) for real world purposes, it’s the characters that make the heart of the novel and propel the reader from start to finish.
It’s also a SF novel where the transition from being immensely relevant to very much completely out-dated will happen sooner than later (compared to other SF). It’ll be fun to see how much he got right and how much he got wrong.
Rating: 5/5
Castlevania: Sonata in Red (2007)
by Hardle . (Download)
plays fine on both Wine and Vbox on Linux
Castlevania SiR is a magnificent rendition of a Castlvania game (of the SotN-kind) as an old-school jRPG. It sports the same addictive gameplay as it’s 2d-cousins, the-one-more-room-and-then-I-stop-playing syndrome that makes you play until night has fallen and sleep deprivation set in. But what fun. There’s the ingenious level design (the game has around 21 levels) that isn’t fulled by a linear succession of different areas, but by a complex maze of interwoven areas. This is combined with a level-up-system that forces you to explore, since you can only level-up once in each area, after you’ve beaten a certain number of enemies.
While fighting (in short: grinding) is very much essential to the game, without it you won’t get the strength to beat the many bosses, there are no random battles that are part of so many jRPGs and can be quite annoying. You see enemies wander around and can confront them (or not) at will.
Another lovely aspect of the game are the countless secrets, for example there’s a boss rush mode whose final boss is much harder to beat than the final boss of the game. There are certain passages under water, for which you need an item to dive indefinitely. The sub-weapons you can collect and other stuff. Backtracking areas you’ve already traversed is essential to find everything, but that’s made easier by a teleport system. Another well done aspect, the story, is told in small pieces here and there and fits neatly with the whole Castlevania-canon of the official games.
All in all, an excellent game that perfectly captures the atmosphere of Castlevania games. Heartily recommended.
Rating: 5/5
Jumper (2008)
directed by Doug Liman
The first time I saw the trailer, I thought: This could be good. Really good. I haven’t read the original novel by Gould, so no previous bias from that one. But as it turned out, it was just a mediocre movie. The first stupid thing is how the main plot gets rolling. So your main hero is just suddenly attacked by some people with technology that can stop him from teleporting and he narrowly escapes from them. What’s the first thing he does? Go back to his hometown to see an old friend he hasn’t seen in years. That’s not just normal stupidity, that’s a whole new level of dumb. The rest of the plot is mostly okay, but that was just beyond daft.
Another big problem is how generic the villains were, some organization that hunts Jumpers since the middle ages. While I can put my suspension of disbelief at work when it comes to the Paladins (the evil dudes) deploying their futuristic tech in the modern age to catch Jumpers, I have a hard time believing how they could have been any threat centuries ago and why the Jumpers did not wipe them out when they had the chance. Also their motivation for hunting the Jumpers (they turn bad) is a bit too generic. This makes the whole movie feel a bit shallow. Secret agencies hunting Jumpers down to get their hands on their abilities would have made sense, but this ages old secret organization was bloody stupid.
Overall, some neat action scenes coupled with teleporting sequences that made me think that they are ready to film The Stars My Destination, but do I really want that?
Rating: 3/5
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)
directed by Mamoru Hosoda
A very neat movie that utilizes time travel to tell a very lovely romance that goes right to your emotional jugular. It goes like this: a girl somehow gains the ability to travel in time and uses it mostly to correct simple, everyday mistakes or just have fun. Mostly she hangs out with two guys (no love triangle there, thank god) and we follow her exploiting her time travel ability. When she realizes that her actions actually have consequences, and escaping her own mistakes makes someone else pay, the movie turns a shade darker and serious in tone, which makes it easier to address the romance angle. While the romance aspect is important for the movie, it’s not overwhelming and most of the time the movie retains a slice of life feeling, which helps getting to like the main heroine on her own terms and not just as some gooey-eyed girl from some schmaltzy romance.
I thought the ending was nice, but I do wonder how many people realized how pyrrhic it actually was, since when they meet again there might be some kind of age difference.
Rating: 5/5
Atmospherics (2002)
by Warren Ellis, Art by Ken Meyer, Jr.
This reminds me of one issue of Fell that is structured similarly: a dialog between two characters and that’s it. The whole thing is relatively short and only there to illustrate an idea by Ellis, one of many possible reason for aliens coming to Earth. As such it’s only a one-note story, you might read and, depending on your taste, snicker about it or wondering whether this was worth your money, but won’t look at it a second time.
What I really liked was Ellis’s afterword, which explained how he came up with the idea and connected stuff. It’s a hilarious read and much more interesting than the rest of the comic. And it reminded me how well UFO: Enemy Unknown used cattle mutilations and other UFO-stupidity to make a tremendously fun game.
Rating: 3/5
303 (2007)
by Garth Ennis, Art by Jacen Burrows
TPB collects issue 1-6 (2004-2005)
A group of russian soldiers that is in search for a crashed US plane in Afghanistan meets heavy resistance by another group of soldiers. From there things start to spiral out of control.
Despite being a mini-series whose central conceit is that the War on Terror is a big conspiracy by the US government to get financial gains in the middle east, Ennis never falls into the trap of preaching to the reader. The whole critical stance is always secondary to the narrative, there are no awkward moments when the writer is breaching the flow of the story to deliver a sermon. Everything is told from the perspective of the characters, and they are hardly interested in indoctrination. All they do is follow their own imperatives.
That said, I don’t think you’ll like 303, when you don’t already think that the War on Terror is one big clusterfuck. Such a theme is too polarizing as not to rouse people who are emotionally invested in it, and these days most people probably are. But objectively speaking, I think it’s a fine piece of storytelling with excellent characterization. The scene where the doctor tells the sheriff that he fears for him, man, that really went under my skin.
Rating: 5/5
