Cool Sounding Words...

I've always wanted to come up with a really cool sounding word. If I could find one that was totally unique, I'd probably use it as a permanent nickname or something. A word like Samurai. Just rolls out of the mouth and exudes power. You are correct in thinking I must have headed out to see The Last Samurai yesterday. This was quite a feature. I'll have to give it 6 M's out of 7, a pretty rare score. Speaking of score, that was possibly my favorite part of it. Whereas some scores are passive and some people think the best score is the one you don't notice, I disagree. The score of this movie took a very active role, and served to further the drama at every level. I've never had any problems with Cruise as an actor, which usually leads his movies to be at the top of the agreement list when heading out with a female to see something. I was over at the Regal Cinemas under the loop on Pat Booker, and was pretty impressed with the theater. The sound was pretty good, not an IMAX or anything, but at least the theater I was in was gigantic. Definitely the kind of place you want to see those rowdy crowd movies like LOTR or Star Wars. But anyway back to the movie, I really enjoyed the performances of all the actors. Cruise's love interest in particular did a tremendous job putting those non verbal looks on her face that let you feel yourself what she was feeling. The storyline itself had a couple hard to belief aspects, but had they been left out there would have been a lot less closure. This one jerked quite a few tears/sobs out of the audience, so be forewarned if that isn't your thing. Pesonally that's what I look forward to, movies that make you feel.

I also forgot to blog about The Life of David Gale which I got around to watching a few days ago. This was another superb movie, and who knows maybe I'm in a giving mood, but I'll have to give this one... well okay I won't I'll give it 5.5 M's. Only because it didn't have that extra oomph to get to 6. As crime whodunnit type movies go though, this one was great. I've always enjoyed Kevin Spacey, and Kate Winslet held her own as his counterpart. There were plenty of twists involved, and the only weak part of the movie is the final outcome is entirely predictable, although that's difficult to avoid. At any rate an interesting one to go see with someone on the other side of the death penalty issue as you. For conversation sake if nothing else. It shows some bias, but gives ammunition for both sides. So yeah, couple good films.

I should also mention that they showed the preview for Troy which was the most impressive I'd seen in a while. We're talking very large scale movie here, with some impressive panoramic scenes of just how gigantic the army that fought was. Yeah it's probably mostly computer generated, but what do you expect. Definitely one I'll go see for the effects side of things if nothing else.

On the other side of entertainment I also blew through Deus Ex - Invisible War a few days ago. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of good things to say about it. If you're a fan of the original by all means play it, but don't expect a higher level of entertainment. Unfortunately the engine requires a tremendous level of computing power, to the point my 1.7ghz gf3 system couldn't handle anything about 640x480. This is the first sign that it's soon finally going to be time to upgrade after over two solid years with this machine. I'll probably hold out for the hl2/doom3 era though. Back to the game, the inventory and gui are quite clumsy, and it's difficult to move between menus, so if you're instantly attacked it is unlikely you'll be able to turn on any biomods and pull out the most useful weapon at the same time before you're hit. The game is also entirely too easy, I had a ridiculous amount of credits at the end, and way too many extra biomod canisters and weapon mods, I could have upgraded everything multiple times over. This is a complete turnaround from the original game, where you really had to pick and choose your upgrades unless you abused the infinite credit bug during that one conversation. The game itself is much much shorter, with me finishing it in something like ten hours of gametime. It's one of those that keeps track as you go, so you can tell how bad your obsession with your computer is. It doesn't count all your loads after dying though, so in reality it's probably more like twelve. But the original was something ridiculous like thirty, and even then you hand't really done EVERYTHING due to the non-linearity. This one tries to be non-linear as well, but you really end up in the same places no matter what path you choose. There are four endings to play with, but I wasn't even interested enough to play through the other ones after choosing the one I did. There are some really cool lighting effects I'm sure, but my system couldn't handle them so they lost their luster at the lowest settings.

There was one really fun thing about the game though, and that was maxing out your strength biomod to the point you could pick up the body of a bad guy, and launch it about fifty feet in the air, and watch it slam up against a wall and crumple down to the ground. This type of realism with the body actually crumpling in a nonscripted motion is something I didn't expect to see until hl2, so it entertained me at various points in the game. Also interesting is the default is to play as a female character, and you actually have to change it to make it a male one. Just shows how creepy computer geeks would much rather watch a female barbie looking model running around taking guys out. I personally changed it to the one that looks most like me like I always do, but hey, that's narcissism for you.

Hm yeah think that's enough entertainment talk for the day. It's finally getting out of the 30s at night, so running in the early morning instead of midday should be doable.