Category: Reviews

When I get up in the morning, one of my first thoughts is usually along the lines of how good that alarm clock would look when smashed into a million pieces. Given this is the case, I tend to sleep as late as I can and still get to work on time. Doing this does not give me a lot of time in the morning for breakfast. I try to make up for this by eating a cup of yogurt as my first breakfast and then later in the morning I get a granola bar as second breakfast.

Additionally, I don’t like to waste money1 so I tend to buy whatever yogurt is on sale. When I did this Tuesday, the grocery store had Dannon yogurt on sale at 20 cups for $10 or 50¢ a cup. This makes them just barely cheaper than the store brand yogurt. I thought I’d give them a try and picked up 10 cups in a variety of flavors.

Yesterday, I cracked open my first cup of the Dannon yogurt and had selected 7 Benefits All Natural Coffee Yogurt. Once I had the foil cover off the cup of yogurt I knew this was not going to be good. The color of the yogurt reminded me of things I’d blown out of my nose, last time I had a bad sinus infection. For extra unpleasantness, there was a thing layer of oil or maybe water on top. I mixed the yogurt up with my spoon, starting by smashing it straight down into the yogurt. To my mind some of the yogurt should have stuck to the spoon when I lifted it out of the cup. Also, the yogurt should have moved together to fill in the holes where I’d stabbed down into it with my spoon. Alas, neither of these events transpired. Then I did a more traditional mixing2 and prepared to take my first bite.

*horrified shudder*

Imagine if you will the worst office coffee you’ve ever had. With extra creamer. Gone all cold and solidified. Now add in an unhealthy dollop of chalkiness and you’ll almost understand what it tasted like. Of course, that’s not the worst part of this story. The worst part is I have another cup of it in my fridge and I’ll be eating it in the next week or so. Yes I know I will hate it, but if I just throw it away then it’s wasting money. *sigh*

1 Some people would say I’m cheap.
2 Swirling the yogurt around in a circular fashion using my spoon.

X-Men: The Last Stand (Original Motion Picture)

X-Men: The Last Stand
My rating: 2.75 out of 5.

Yesterday, the wife and I headed out to watch a matinee of X-Men: The Last Stand. I was planning on writing up a review of it for MovieComment1. But when I got over to the site I found; I found he’d already written his own review. And not surprisingly2, we have completely different opinions on both the current X-Men movie and the prior ones.

Brett Ratner was selected as the director for X-men: The Last Stand as Bryan Singer was busy working on Superman Returns. Unfortunately, this means the 3 part of the X-men series attempts to focus on the action/battle sequences rather than the character development which made the movies interesting. Mr. Ratner even went so far as to make the battles flow as much like a comic book battle as he could. This was a horrible mistake as the differences in the two mediums do not allow the flow of a comic book battle to work well on the screen. In a comic book, the audience accepts that the artist cannot draw every detail of a battle and they fill in all of the details they need/want with their imagination. With movies, we have a long history of war movies which show that the filmmaker can show significantly more detail. So when we have multiple scenes in the middle of battles where nothing is happening; it’s just boring (e.g. dozens of mutants supposedly leaping to the attack and all we get is them leaping over the rubble).

Additionally, I have to take issue with MovieComment’s claim that Storm looks especially good in the action sequences. Her *quote* flying *quote* scenes are without argument the worst special effects in the movie. I haven’t seen wire work that awful since John Cleese played Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and at least he was intended to look stupid swinging around on that rope. Then there’s the whole “wheee! I can spin!” crap they came up with for Storm. For crying out loud, this character is theoretically supposed to be the human mutant equivalent of Mother Nature and they’ve got her spinning around like a f’ing top! Still some of the other actions sequences weren’t too bad. Pretty much, any of them focusing on Wolverine were good. The bit with Kitty Pryde (aka Shadowcat) and the Juggernaut was really good (the end of that sequence was particularly funny).

The addition of other characters to the team in this film was both good and bad. Good in that they picked Shadowcat and Colossus3. Bad in that they did not really do anything with their characters and they failed to continue developing some of the other characters from the previous movies. Most notably, Rogue’s storyline was pretty much dropped and converted into a weird, teenage angsty thing which didn’t play well on the screen.

Speaking of bits which didn’t play well on the screen, the climax of the movie with Jean Grey/Phoenix and Wolverine blew serious chunks. To anybody who liked this scene, I apologize but Famke Janssen’s performance just did not pull off the seriousness of the moment. Maybe with a better director she could have done it, but I guess we’ll never know. Hmm, maybe they can do some sort of director’s cut but bring back Bryan Singer to do it so we could get a decent movie. That could be very interesting. Overall, I’m glad I went to see the film (for the new characters) but I’m extremely glad we went to maintee and used some coupons we had. If I had to pay the full, evening ticket price; I would have been seriously pissed off.

Oh yeah, if you’re reading this review prior to watching the movie; stay in your seat until after the credits. There’s one more scene after the credits are over which you don’t want to miss.

1 A movie/dvd review site run by a friend of mine.
2 He has consistently stated he believes Dumb and Dumber is not only a good movie, but one of the funniest he’s ever seen. While I find that movie to be an abhorrent piece of utter excrement.
3 My particular favorites.

Old Man's War

Old Man’s War
My rating: 5 out of 5.

For a while now I’ve been despairing of finding new science fiction authors I like. I would go through my local bookstores and the only ones that didn’t seem like pure twaddle were either books I’ve read previously or by authors I was previously familiar with. Authors who usually are very old or already dead. Oddly this problem only seemed to be happening with science fiction. Fantasy, horror, mystery and so on all are fine right now. I just haven’t for the longest time been able to find any decent science fiction by an author who wasn’t all corpsified (or close to being so). This has concerned me as I misspent much of my youth blasting around the universe on the dread rocketship Imagination fueled by the works of many fine authors. I wish to continue to doing so, but the fifth or fifty-fifth time you read a book it does not always generate as much juice as the first time.

All that being said, I am pleased to say I have found a new science fiction author who writes something worth reading! A while back, I was reading Doug Stewart‘s blog and he mentioned getting a particular book for his birthday. Interestingly enough the author of Old Man’s War, John Scalzi, stopped by Doug’s blog and wished him a happy birthday. I thought that was pretty cool of him. Given that Doug described the book as a gift that should “warm any decent sci-fi fan’s hardened heart”; my interest in this book was peaked.

I followed the link from the author’s comment to his website and noticed he had a free, sample chapter of the book online. I read through the sample and quite enjoyed it, so I added the book to my list1. A few weeks later, the wife and I stopped in a Barnes & Noble to rest our weary feet and grab a coffee from their café. Before we went into the café, we looked around the store for some reading material. I still remembered wanting a better look at Old Man’s War, so I hunted around and found a copy of it. I thought the plan was to simply browse through the material while having our coffee but I was overruled and she bought the book with the coffees. As we sat down, I started to flip through the book but she wanted to look at it. Since she hadn’t found anything to look at and I actually had several books at home I was in the middle of; I let her have it. That turned out to be something of a mistake on my part, as I didn’t get it back until she finished it the next day. Since I didn’t get it back right away, I stuck it into my stack of books to read. I held off a couple of days before I broke down and yanked it out of the middle of my stack. I read it cover to cover in a single evening and loved it. I just read it again (since I’ve been home sick for a week) and still loved it. But enough about me, you probably want to know something about the book other than I loved it.

Right, Old Man’s War is set in the future. How far in the future is not explicitly stated but it seems to be the not-too-entirely-distant future. In this future, humanity is living and fighting amoung the stars. It turns out while there are numerous stars & planets out there; only so many of them are of any use to us and to the other races we’ve met. That’s right, there is alien life out there and it ain’t friendly. Human space is protected by the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) which boasts the oldest army ver fielded by man. The CDF’s infantry is entirely made up of the elderly. People, like the main character (John Perry), cannot even join the CDF until they turn 75. The elderly are joining up in droves because they all know the CDF must have someway to make them young again. After all at 75 years on Earth, humans are not exactly in the ideal condition for fighting a war.

The book starts with Mr. Perry visiting his wife’s grave and then joining the army. From there it’s a fast sprint through the rest of the story. Mr. Scalzi’s writing is easy to read, in part because he does not bog you down with tons of details about the new technologies used in the future. Also the characters are very likable and easy to relate to. But the book is not without its flaws.

The CDF is an independent entity from Earth and has more power than any goverment on Earth, but there’s nothing in the book telling us how this came about. Mr. Scalzi hints at it saying that the CDF isolated Earth from the rest of space2 and then used technologies it developed or stole from other races to maintain its monoply on humanity’s spaceflight. The actual details of how the CDF managed the initial isolation and how they continue to keep Earth from building more skip drives3 and sneaking off planet. Also the plot covering John Perry’s rescue by the Special Forces and subsequent interactions with his rescuers seems…. a bit too deus ex machina. Mind you it was fun to read but it stretches the believability more than just a little and no I won’t tell you exactly why as that would require me to reveal big spoilers of the plot. Hopefully some of this will be cleared up in the sequel, The Ghost Brigades (due out next week according to Amazon.com).

1 The list of books in my head that I need to buy when I have the money and am in a bookshop. It fluctuates depending on how good my memory is, how empty my wallet is, how often I’m visiting any given bookshop and how big an impression a book or an author makes on me.
2 Due to an outbreak of an alien disease that sterialized all but 1/3 of Earth’s men.
3 The skip drive is the FTL drive in Mr. Scalzi’s universe.

Product Image: Deception Point

Deception Point
My rating: 2 out of 5.

This started off as a fun book and for a long time into it I was able to suspend my disbelief to enjoy it. It read something like a weak Tom Clancy novel. At least up until a certain point in during the climatic finale of the story. At that particular point in the story, my disbelief slipped into overdrive and suddenly I felt I like was reading a bad movie script. *sigh* And it was so looking better than

To avoid spoiling the book for those still interested, the scene in particular will only be described after cut. Even there, I will try to avoid spoilers as much as possible but if you wish to read the book completely spoiler free; go read it before you read the rest of this article.
(more…)

Today marks the completion of my third decade on this planet and I am quite pleased to be able to announce that I ain’t dead yet. 😀 But worry not gentle reader, I’ll not be subjecting you to some passé retrospective about my life. Instead, I’ll just recap today and today alone.

I was up playing Wild Arms 3 till about 3 am as I just couldn’t sleep. Most likely due to an excessive amount of munching on holiday goodies while downing glass, after glass of soda1. I found one monster to fight that took around an hour to defeat but it jumped my characters up 4-7 levels! *grin* Then when I eventually got to bed; I slept poorly. Our apartment is just too dry this time of year and our little humidifier stopped working. This causes me to keep waking up with sinus headaches and a terrible thrist. I got out of bed about 8:30 – 9 and went back to playing the video game a bit more. Shortly there after, Michelle got up and gave me my birthday present.

What’d she get me? A case of blue balls Bawls. Then after lazing around most of the day; we headed out to the local mall to meet some friends.

I’d foolishly asked a bunch of friends to join us in watching the Narina movie with a follow-up plan to eat dinner together. There was one point that I’d not factored in these plans. This year, my birthday fell on a Saturday. Just about the last Saturday before Christmas. Traffic was insane and people all around were grouchy, though we did run across some nice people that helped us get around the parking lot2. We went over to the mall a little early and bought a new humidifer and then headed down to the theater. We got tickets, met up with our friends and went in to watch the The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

*whew* What a movie! While not perfect, it was probably as good as we could hope for from a Hollywood production.
High points:

  • The actress playing Lucy was spot on. Most of the other actors cast in the movie were also quite good
  • The backgrounds were gorgeous.
  • The addition of the Nazi bombing run at the beginning of the movie really helped to give context to the time of the story.

Low points:

  • The costuming on the witch. Her outfits were ugly and just didn’t work with the imagery I have in my head for the character. Though I do have to admit the black , soulless eyes did work for me.
  • The witch was not nearly as afraid of Aslan as she should have been. In my memories of the book, the witch was terrified of Aslan but the movie seemed to put them on a more even footing.
  • Maugrim’s voice. The actor doing the voice did a fine job, but being the only character without a british accent really stuck out and annoyed me.

Overall, I’d say it was worth seeing in the theater and it is something I’ll be adding to our DVD collection when it becomes available.

After the movie was over, we headed to the restaurant. Oh, I should mention we had called earlier in the day to try making reservations but were told they don’t do that for parties of less than 8. And that they would have plenty of room for the 6 of us. When we got there; we were told it would be a 2 hour wait. We decided to switch to the Oyama Sushi restaurant. They seated us within minutes of our arrival (even though they were already pretty packed). Then they plied us with drinks until our food was ready3. We had a jolly time chatting and drinking (non-alcholic, for the most part) but all good things do come to an end and eventually we all headed home. It was a very good day and while I ain’t dead yet; I am a bit tired so good night, sleep tight and don’t let the space bugs bite!

1 a.k.a. pop to you heathens.
2 A few people threw their cars into reverse to open up bigger areas for us to drive through and things of that nature.
3 It turns out this weekend contains not only my birthday and practically the last weekend before Christmas but it’s also graduation weekend for the University! No wonder everything was so packed today! This also explains why it took so long for our food to arrive.