Like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise this Vin Diesel racing franchise has been milked liked it has never been milked before. While it hasn’t reached the level of the Saw series this action-racing film series is definitely getting up there.
What started as Hollywood’s look and attempt to show underground street racing has become a joke amongst those who actually race for real. There’s a term for people who began to trick out their rides with elaborate color schemes, flames shooting out of exhaust pipes, body kits that changed the looks of the car right down to computerized control panels. Those people were going “fast and furious” and that wasn’t a compliment.
Real racers try to lighten a car and add horsepower instead of adding so much crap the way the people in the films do. They got the right cars to use whether it’s the so called “ricers” like Nissan Skyline to Subara Imprezas to Honda Civics or American classic muscle cars like the Dodge Charger R/T to Plymouth GTO’s. Everything else in terms of racing in this series are laughable, but entertaining and to Hollywood that is all that matters.
The last film in the series, Fast and Furious, has begun to move the franchise away from underground racing and into the realm of an action-thriller except with people racing cars. I’m fine with that and this latest entry in the franchise looks to move it even further from it’s roots. Plus, it has Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson playing another role to move him away from his Disney-fied roles of the past five years.
From the look of the trailer I think I will enjoy this flick. It’s not trying to reinvent anything plus it has Gal Gadot in it and that to me spells win.
I’m a big Captain Jack Sparrow fan and I really enjoyed the first film, but the two films which went after it were a tad disappointing. Depp’s performances in both sequels were pretty good as always and most of the supporting cast as well, but the characters played by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley were so boring that they nearly sunk both sequels. Luckily, Depp’s Sparrow was too much for even those two bores to fully sink.
Everyone thought that At World’s End was the last in the franchise, but despite lackluster reviews it still made Disney a pirate’s treasure of a profit once all the box-office was tabulated. So, out goes original director of the franchise in Gore Verbinski and in to replace him is one Rob Marshall who now starts up a new trilogy for the franchise with some new faces in addition to some welcome old ones.
Penelope Cruz comes in as a woman from Jack’s past and Ian McShane takes on the role of the pirate of all pirates: Edward “Blackbeard” Teach. Just the mention of the one and only Ian Swearingen as Blackbeard was enough to raise my hopes that this milking of the franchise will at least be entertaining and that maybe new blood in the cast will keep it from being boring.
Ok, first we get the debut trailer for Mass Effect 3 which will consume my life and time when it comes out. Now I find out that the one game series which has also consumed my life and time in the past is also coming out around the same time as the aforementioned title.
What do I speak of?
I speak of the game which, in my very honestful and truthiness opinion, is the Lord of the Rings of fantasy gaming rpgs. It is The Elder Scrolls series and this game marks the 5th entry in the series which will followed other entries in the franchise like Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion. This franchise has spanned over a decade in gaming history and I expect nothing less than a new game from this series eating up close to 1000 hours of my life before I finally stop playing it to try something else.
And just like it sci-fi epic cousin in the Mass Effect series it is I who will be savior of the realms and kingdoms from whence this fantasy franchise lives in. While I may not be saving the galaxy it’s still no easy feat to save a fantasy kingdom full of lovely maidens and grateful millions.
Sidenote: Lisa Marie must be wondering what the hell I’m talking about with these last two blog entries.
The one game which I am willing to kill for to get my hands on the moment it comes out in time for the 2011 holidays is from video game developer BioWare. BioWare created a scifi-rpg franchise four years ago which has consumed my life everytime a new one in the series comes out. First there was Mass Effect then just this past January was it’s bigger follow-up Mass Effect 2. It looks like Mass Effect 3 will once again consume my time and life in the end of 2011.
From the look of the trailer the foreboding scenes in the end of the last game will culminate in the extra-galactic terror machines called “The Reapers” heading for Earth to once and for all stop the race who spawned the one man who dared challenge it’s millenia-long cyclical harvesting of all organic life from the galaxy. The fact that I am that human who stops them has no bearing on just how awesome this game franchise has been.
It will be the final game in this series as announced by BioWare, but I won’t be surprised if the universe created by this franchise continues on using a different name with a new set of heroes and villains. In the end, this game and any that follow it up will have one thing in common. A galaxy to save, a game as close to cinematic as we’ve ever seen and me as it’s savior.
I’ll outright say and admit that one of my favorite filmmakers has to be British-filmmaker Neil Marshall who burst into the scene almost a decade ago with his genre mash-up werewolf film, Dog Soldiers. Since then he has come out with a film every couple years which follows what’s becoming a trademark style of his.He would take a well-worn and used genre and mash it together with a few others to create a film that’s wholly his own. He did this with his follow-up films in The Descent and Doomsday. Now it’s 2010 and we have his latest film and it follows his usual style. Centurion is an adventure, chase and men on a mission film that doesn’t reinvent the genres it’s smashing together but instead embraces their traditions and creates a rip-roaring yarn which moves at a frenetic pace with characters who grow and expose their motivations as the film progresses to it’s bittersweet finale.
Neil Marshall will always be known to fanboys and the action crowd even if the elites of the film industry continues to dismiss the man as nothing more than competent filmmaker. In Centurion he shows that he could work within a traditional sword and sandal story and still show his signature style. We have it’s main character of Roman centurion Quintus Dias (played with a subdued and introspective seriousness by Michael Fassbender) who gets captured by the Picts of Britain during Rome’s occupation of the island. Unlike most Romans captured by the guerilla-warfare conducting Picts, Quintus has learned to speak Pict thus has become a valuable capture. But his loyalty to his Empire and its people dashes the hopes of the Picts ever learning anything from Quintus and decides to play some sport with him as the hunted prey.
It’s during the hunt for Quintus by a band of Pict warriors that he stumbles upon the Roman Ninth Legion led by General Titus Flavius Virilus (Dominic West). Once freed from his captors and hunters, Quintus is more than happy to rejoin his fellow Roman centurions in their hunt to once and for all destroy Pict leader Gorlacon (Urlich Thomsen) and his Pict army. To aid them in their search for this enemy army is the mute Brigantes scout, Etain (played with silent fury by Olga Kurylenko), who knows the lands where the Picts hide and do their hit-and-run raids.
It’s once the whole Ninth Legion has been led into the thick forests by Etain that the trap was sprung with Etain herself the catalyst for what amounts to as the massacre of the Legion. It’s this event which Marshall in his own way tries to explain one of history’s mysteries: The mysterious fate of the Roman Ninth Legion. Historians have never agreed as to why the Legion disappeared from Roman and historical records and Marshall’s film is one theory.
The rest of the film has the handful of the Legion who has survived trying, at first, to free their general from Pict captivity and when that mission fails with deadly results the remaining men who has chosen to follow Quintus try to make a run back to Roman lines. On their heels like a she-wolf leading a pack of wolves is Etain whose thirst for vengeance for what the Romans did to her (raped her as a young child and cut out her tongue in addition to wiping out her family and tribe) pushes her to get these Romans with near-supernatural drive. It’s rare to find a film where the main villain is a woman, but one whose abilities surpasses that of the men she’s hunting and whose motivations make her more than a tad sympathetic to her cause.
Centurion does action well with sequences involving a jump off of a steep cliff and into the river below to last stand inside an abandoned Roman fort. Marshall knows how to stage and shoot these scenes so we never lose sight of where the participants are. Most filmmakers nowadays try to hide their inability to choreography action sequences by using quick cut editing, hand-held camera jittery viewpoints and, at times, just shooting it from a distance. Neil Marshall doesn’t do anyone of these gimmicks and tricks which just shows that while his hybrid style in terms of storytelling might be new and refreshing he still embraces the traditional ways if it serves his films properly.
The acting in this film was quite good from not just its leads in Fassbender and Kurylenko but from everyone. This film’s ensemble cast includes veteran British actors just as Liam Cunningham, Paul Freeman and David Morrissey. Other supporting players such as Imogen Poots, Urlich Thomsen and Dominic West do a great job in the limited roles they’re given. The fact that Kurylenko utters not one word in her scenes yet commands each and everyone she’s in shows just how well Marshall can direct not just action pieces but how to direct his actors in doing their jobs.
This film doesn’t do anything to reinvent the action genre that is it’s foundation, but what it does is show that action films sometimes could be just as good when it’s filmmaker leans on practices from traditions past. Outside of the CGI-blood used to show the brutality of the fights and deaths this film is quite lacking in the CG department. Shot on location in the highlands of Scotland and studios near and around London, Centurion is quite a throwback to the sword and sandal films which dominated the film industry during the late 50’s and most of the 60’s. Marshall’s latest will not win any mainstream awards, but the genre crowd will definitely embrace it as something that will entertain and thus welcome it with cult status.
First we get the first official Thor poster and now just a day later we finally have the first official trailer (just a teaser, but still a trailer) for this film which looks to be one of the most-awaited films for 2011’s summer blockbuster season.
The teaser looks to be a shorter version of the sizzle reel shown at this past summer’s San Diego Comic-Con. We get to see Thor in his Asgard and human form and boy did Hemsworth look like he worked out to fit the role. Dude looks yoked. There’s some scenes of the Destroyer doing its destroying things deal that wasn’t in the Con footage and we get a bit more Loki scenes even if they’re just a tad fleeting.
The trailer has just increased my need to see this film and it looks like Thor will explore the more epic and outrageous side of the Marvel Universe with the Asgard’s advanced tech seeming to act and look like magic to those on Midgard (Earth). Here’s to hoping Kenneth Branagh was up to task in adding some gravitas and his penchant for working well with Shakespearean themes into what is just a comic book film.
Finally! We now have the first official poster from Marvel Studios in regards to one of their tentpole 2011 summer films.
Thor looks to continue building the Marvel Universe live-action world which began with the first Iron Man then followed up by both The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2. This film will finally put the Asgardian Thunder God on the big-screen with Chris Hemsworth (played Captain Kirk’s father in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot) in the title role with British filmmaker Kenneth Branagh in the director’s chair.
The film sports quite a cast with Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Idris Elba, Tadanobu Asano, Tom Hiddleston and Stellan Skarsgard brought in to support Hemsworth. This film will be one of the films to usher in the 2011 summer blockbuster season as it gets a May 2011 release. A sizzle reel of some finished footage was shown in this past summer’s San Diego Comic-Con and reaction was mostly positive though there was a vocal minority who moaned that the look of the film looked to be too corny or just plain awful.
One must take such reactions, both in the positive end and the negative end with a grain of salt as the crowd in the audience are the hardcore of the hardcore fans. It’s not surprising that the reactions would be extreme on both ends.
Thor is either doing some final reshoots of scenes or has already completed them with post-production work now in gear to get the film ready for it’s May 2011 release date. Hopefully, part of said post-production is to fine-tune the 3-D process for the film so as to avoid any Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender 3-D debacles which has given 3-D a bad name after a great showing with James Cameron’s Avatar.
I, for one, cannot wait to finally sit in that darkened theater to see Thor with his mighty hammer, Mjolnir, smiting foes both Asgardian and technological. It is with guarded optimism that this film continues what has been and still is an ambitious project by Marvel Studios to tie-in all their films together to create an epic and ever-growing universe on film.
Well, what is there to say about the Transformers franchise other than it is what it is. A special-effects heavy flick about a Hasbro toyline from the 80’s that has become a sensation (a good first film with a sub-par follow-up) that’s made millions worldwide. The fact that Michael Bay (who I tend to believe as only a step above Uwe Boll in his talent as a filmmaker) is the filmmaker in charge of the franchise almost guarantees that each film will be a hit no matter what critics say.
Now we have the third film in the series with the very Pink Floyd-ish title which I am sure Pink Floyd fans are none to happy about. The film is deep into its film schedule and the fact that there’s now a teaser trailer with still 7 months to go before its July 1, 2011 release tells me that pre-production on this project began either as soon as the second film premiered or while it was finishing post.
Gone in this third and, as Michael Bay announced earlier, final film in the series is Megan Fox thus Shia LeBouf’s character Sam Witwicky will have a new love interest in English model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Most of the cast from both previous films will return and so do most of the primary Transformers on both sides. With the Fallen having fallen in the second film this third entry will bring in one of the more popular Decepticons in Shockwave to act as the main villain. How they’ll work this part of the script into having Shockwave being the main heavy despite Megatron still appearing in the film will be interesting to see.
In the end, the film will have great special-effects courtesy of ILM with chaos and destruction as seen through the mad-eyes of Bay. The wild card is whether Bay has learned how to work the 3-D cameras used to film the project from beginning to end. Because no matter what people may think of James Cameron he seems to be the only one who has figured out how to properly create an immersive 3-D film and not lose out on the action end.
Will Bay’s hyper-kinetic and MTV-style editing be able to work well with 3-D or will this third film just end up making its entire audience nauseous and I don’t mean from the film’s plot. We’ll soon find out this coming July.
While most first-person shooter games tend to bore me there are a few which have caught my gaming fancy and continue to play to this day. Usually it’s either the latest game from Microsoft’s Halo franchise or Activision’s Call of Duty series. I tend to have less excitement over upcoming new FPS games and will wait until people who do love them actually give me a thumbs up or thumbs down on a particular title before I try it.
There’s one game which has caught my eye and part of it is due to the interesting story the game will be built around. A speculative fiction the game will revolve around and it’s the occupation of the US by a Greater Korean Republic in the year 2027.
Yes, you read that correctly. The US in this game will be invaded by a unified Korea (with the North in control) after many years of economic downturn has finally collapsed the US economy in addition to the world itself experiencing the first stages of post peak-oil. This setting has a major Red Dawn feel to it and it’s not surprising since the person who came up with the story for Homefront is none other than John Milius himself who wrote and directed the film.
While details on the gameplay looks to keep to the usual FPS gameplay standard the plot and some of the single-player campaign tweaks has made me decide that this game will be something I need to play. This time the player will play an American playing as a guerilla fighter in the Korean-occupied US. Civilians as collateral damage is suppose to play an integral part in how the game unfolds in the single-player campaign.
The multiplayer will include the usual point system earned to buy newer and better gear and weapons. Unlike the two franchises previously mentioned the points earned can also go towards bigger ticket items such as helicopters, tanks and other vehicles.
Here’s to hoping that there’s a fancy swag-edition of this game and that publisher THQ and the game’s developer KAOS Studios get creative with said limited swag-edition.
I am what you would call an avid gamer. I’ve been playing video games since I was a wee lad and marveled at the Atari 2600. I moved from that system through the many systems after it to my current one which is my Xbox 360.
I’m an equal opportunity gamer in that I will play any type of game at least once no matter the genre. In the end, the one genre which I will always gravitate towards and I consider my first gaming love are role-playing games. I especially have a special place in my heart for Japanese role-playing games. It’s music from one of those Japanese role-playing games where I have chosen the latest “song of the day”.
The latest song chosen is from the Konami-published role-playing game series called Suikoden. This particular song comes from the third game in the main series, Suikoden III, and is the opening theme for the game. The song’s title is “Transcending Love” and is one of my favorite piece of game music ever produced. The song even gets a well-animated anime opening sequence which shows characters and events from the game but doesn’t show too much about who they are and what the plot of the game is all about.
The song is part of a soundtrack which includes several Japanese game music composer that figuring out who was responsible for this particular song would be difficult to do. I’ve decided to just credit all of them for what I consider one of the best game opening themes and music ever composed.
Through the Shattered Lens 