This morning I felt like I wanted to try something new, so I installed Flock, the plugged-in, oh-so-social spin-off of the Firefox browser. Flock is basically the same as Firefox, but with integrated support for Flickr, Photobucket, del.icio.us, Shadows and most popular blogging software. Lotsa whiz-bang fancy shit going on.

After installing, I went through the setup and hooked Flock into my Flickr and del.icio.us accounts as well as this blog (typing that word makes me feel dirty… go figure). Currently, I’m typing this post using Flock’s built-in editor. I write the post, click publish and the post should go live, I guess, we’ll see.

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A few days ago, after spending a wretched day renewing my ID at the hell that is the Brooklyn DMV, I picked up a copy of “Shadow of the Colossus” for the PS2 to brighten my day. I had no idea what it was about, but chose it because somewhere at some point I’d glanced at a review that raved about it. This is basically how I buy all games as I’ve a decided lack of patience to read gamer sites and magazines. I usually will subscribe to an RSS feed and scan the photos and titles. Games that get a bunch of posts, stick in my memory and usually end up getting purchased in moments of consumer weakness, which is often.

The format of your run-of-the-mill action game is: fight, fight, fight…boss scene. Fight the boss and then it’s back to fight, fight, fight til the next boss scene and the game eventually ends. Nothing wrong with it, I suppose but the boss fights have historically always been my least favorite parts. Give me a room with twenty little baddies that I have to kill á la God of War and I am one happy fucking camper. Games that are boss-heavy usually begin to collect dust shortly after purchase.

SotC is all bosses. There’s nothing else to the game, unless you count running from point A to B. There’s not baddies in between to slay. You go from one boss monster to another and while normally this would have me hating this game, I find myself hooked. SotC doesn’t have just any old bosses. These bastards are HUGE, gorgeously rendered behemoths that combine action, puzzle-solving and strategy to beat. The graphics, scenery and feel are hot shit. Strange, mysterious and moody. There’s little or no dialog in the game so the huge dream-like world sprawled out before you, unoccupied but for the mountainous beasts reminiscent of something out of HP Lovecraft is simply there to wonder about.

The hero of the game is this dinky little fucker, armed with only a sword and bow and a horse to ride. Pitted against giants literally fifty times larger, the little dude has to expose and attack the monster’s weak points. This is accomplished by figuring out how and managing to climb the boss, get to his weak spots and stab the fuck out of them before you lose your grip and fall. Tense shit.

There’s something to be said about a game revolving around my least enjoyed facet of the action genre that manages to completely entertain me. SotC is a great game on so many levels, from the concept to the anime-like look. It’s a short game, there being only sixteen bosses to battle, which sucks since this is a game that keeps you wanting to see more. More bosses, more areas, more everything.

Last night I watched King Kong. I’ve read a lot of reviews calling it the best movie of the year — some practically drooling over the film. Maybe it’s something they’re smoking or perhaps it’s an all around dumbing of the senses from having a career reviewing American mainstream films, but I found the flick to be a serious steaming pile of shit, much like something a 25 foot tall gorilla might excrete and then fling in protest at having been subjected to such lame drivel.

As you may already have been warned, the movie is about three hours long. The first hour is a tortuous drag of unconvincing stage sets, bad acting and even worse dialog. I’m talking about lines so shitty, I was tempted to rupture my eardrums with my house keys to avoid listening to it and only the knowledge that according to everything I read, the movie was going to get better if I could just survive till the island scenes kept me seated when normally I definitely would have walked out.

King Kong does have some good points to it. Once the ape appears and the action kicked in, I found myself thinking of that much abused cliché that critics use when praising such films — a rollercoaster ride. For once, I think it’s an appropriate analogy. The effects are the best I think I’ve ever seen and the action choreography (primarily involving CGI characters) is mind-boggling. On these merits, I think the movie is worth seeing in the theater, especially to get the full effect from the sound. Kong makes some pretty bad-ass noise.

The other positive thing that struck me later, after leaving the theater was that at no point in the film did I look at Kong and think of him as a CGI animation. His movements, expressions, detail and above all, sounds were utterly convincing. I didn’t see the result of many hours of wireframe animation and texture-mapping. I saw a solid, real character, interacting flawlessly with real-life actors. Think Gollum to the third power.

But all this seat-of-your-pants action can’t make a three hour movie bearable, especially when more than half of it is dialog and not involving apes, dinosaurs and giant insects. The acting is just terrible. Jack Black is almost embarrassing to watch and Naomi Watts was straight-up retarded. As usual, I felt myself wanting to magically leap into the film and kick the living shit out of Adrien Brody, mainly just for being who he is. He has the kind of face that make me want to disfigure it.

The lines are at times so lousy, as to be laughable when it’s obvious that the intended response was supposed to be tears. It’s a brainless, Bazooka gum wrapper script. In my opinion, things would’ve have been much better if they cut it all out and just showed me an hour and a half of Kong kicking the shit out off stuff.

If you’re going to see it, see it in the theaters, but show up about an hour and twenty minutes late. You’ll save yourself a lot of mind-numbing moments and save yourself from feeling too cheated after you get out all stiff-legged from sitting too long.

It’s possible that I’m being a bit too nit-picky, but the one thing that really bothers me now that I think back on what I saw was this: The movie is about a twenty-five foot tall gorilla. He’s real looking, running around, bellowing and ripping the tongues out of big, mean dinosaurs, yet he has no genitals.

If he’s twenty-five feet, there should be something like a five-foot johnson, swaying in the wind. His balls alone should be knocking down small trees, but for some reason, they’re just not there. WTF? Is he a eunuch? Does this explain why he’s the only ape on the island? Is this why he’s so pissed off all the time? I’d be pretty mad, if I were him.

Thees murneeng, vheele-a I ves perooseeng thruoogh edduns.muzeella.oorg und sloorpeeng doon cuffffee-a in bleery fug ierned frum steyeeng up vey tuu lete-a, I nuticed a Fureffux ixtenseeun celled Bork Bork Bork! vreettee by Unthuny Hooe-a thet elloos yuoo tu trunslete-a zee text ooff uny veb pege-a intu bork-speek, in oozeer vurds tu meke-a it reed leeke-a it ves vreettee by zee Svedeesh Cheff frum zee Mooppet Shoo feme-a.

Zee Svedeesh Cheff hefeeng beeeng my ell-time-a fefureete-a mooppet, I ves cumpelled tu instell it immedeeetely und seence-a zeen hefe-a beee borkeeng ell murneeng lung in geeddy deleeght. Thees ixtenseeun rooles. Bork Bork Bork!

Translation:

This morning, while I was perusing through addons.mozilla.org and slurping down coffee in bleary fog earned from staying up way too late, I noticed a Firefox extension called Bork Bork Bork! written by Anthony Howe that allows you to translate the text of any web page into bork-speak, in other words to make it read like it was written by the Swedish Chef from the Muppet show fame.

The Swedish Chef having being my all-time favorite muppet, I was compelled to install it immediately and since then have been borking all morning long in giddy delight. This extension rules.

Am I the first person to notice that Sith is an anagram for shit?

I went to a matinee of “Revenge of the Sith” yesterday, fully expecting, after all the input via word of mouth and print that if I didn’t outright love this movie, I’d at least be pleased and see it as an improvement over the previous installments and a nice job at wrapping things up.

I didn’t like it. I fucking hated it.

I actually started falling asleep at one point (mind you, it’s only 3-something in the afternoon). Honestly, I feel worse for having seen it. So, I’ll take a deep breath and tell you why I hated it when, for all intents and purposes, I should have loved it. C’mon, it’s Star Fucking Wars and Yoda’s all hopping around and kicking ass and it’s got fucking Chewy, people! It has been ordained by GOD to be good.

Except, no. It blows my mom. Here’s why:

1. The acting is beyond sub-par.
   The actings not just bad, it’s non-existent. Video games have more emotion and depth to them these days. It is true that most of this film was shot in front of a green screen and substantial portions of the dialog features actors interacting with objects or beings that are computer generated but seriously, if such technology fosters such lousy acting, forget it, I’ll stick to the video game. Everyone is subdued, wooden and so obviously disassociated from the human drama that they’re supposed to be conveying that at times your thoughts just drift because such dialog, in a consistent disaffected monotone for such long stretches would put even the staunchest Wookie in an daze.
2. For a movie based so much on effects and the creating of “another world”, they sure don’t let you see much of it.
   Just about everything except the acting in this film is too fast. There’s a lot to see in this movie, huge space battles, Wookie wars, tons of great stuff you only dreamed about 20 years ago. The trouble is, you can’t see it. Lucas throws so much at you, so fast that the effect leaves you bombarded. You’re watching something and you think you’re following it, but honestly if someone pressed stop and issued a quick oral quiz on the state of the storyline at that point, you’d be pausing because all you can remember is shiny, blurry things moving across the screen really fast. Could of been the movie, might have been a flashback. Who knows? Everything’s so blurry and hard to focus on, you wonder, if it costs so damn much to make these amazing special effects, why can’t you slow the fucking thing down a bit so I can actually see it and appreciate it? There are a few scant moments, specifically towards the end where Lucas stops the swooshing about and soaring bird’s eye views and gives you a brief look at Coruscant at night and it’s beautiful. Really great stuff, down to the smallest details. But, before you know it, the cameras are once again shooting all over the place.
3. Darth Vader is so fucking gay it hurts.
   To think of all those years I looked forward to finally seeing why Darth Vader was the way he was. What would possess a good guy like Anakin Skywalker, Jedi prodigy to go from being cool and probably getting laid to the gayest thing in black leather and rubber in the galaxy. I guess maybe in the late 70’s, the Vader look was working, but these days, he looked like a joke. The LED board on his chest just looked pathetic. I get it, Lucas was keeping it real. Still, Vader was missing everything in the way of presence that he had in the first three films. Also, Having some big emotional scene, performed by a dude in a big, bulky mask with no moving parts looks incredibly stupid. Seeing him all leaning back, screaming “Nooooooooooooo…”, I just kept thinking that it almost seemed like some surreal parody of Star Wars movies.
4. Chewbacca is just a tall dude in a rubber hair suit..
   While this film earns some points for limiting my exposure to Jar-Jar Binks to only 2-3 seconds, it loses in oh, so many painfully cheeky, saccharine and blatant inclusions of gratuitous cutsiness. Fucking vomit. Seeing Yoda bust out a lightsaber and beat ass last installment was awesome. This time, it’s old news and way too much of it. I get it, he’s a pissy little green guy but I’ve seen it once and anything more than that becomes pointless because it’s shown too damn fast. When I heard that Chewbacca and his home planet of Kasshykk would be in this film, I was thinking it was going to be the coolest thing ever. Unfortunately, the actual business lasted only a couple of minutes and left me realizing that Wookie’s are just as lame a Ewoks. The moments with Chewbacca are lame and cheesy and I’m sorry, but you can’t evoke emotion through a rubber mask, especially when it’s covered with hair. It just seemed that whatever gave Chewbacca character was gone, as with most of all the returning characters in this movie. R2-D2 has several minor fight scenes shamelessly milking any sentimentality the audience might have left after Yoda. The plucky, human-like personalities of the robots were tolerable in the first three films, but in these new ones, all the robots talk and have attitude. It’s just not right. And it leaves you wondering whether you’re reading a script for Saturday morning cartoons. It’s just lame, not necessary and in no way helps the film.
5. General Grevious is stupid.
   General Grevious is the worst of all the villains Lucas has come up with. A hunched mostly robot cyborg, wheezing and coughing and commanding an army of robots with attitude. Unlike the first villain of the new series, he has no presence and for the most part, is just silly looking. Watching him on screen, I couldn’t help but wonder that if he’s a cyborg, why can’t they just replace his lungs? Why is this guy coughing? Who’s idea was this? How does this help?

The bottom line is this movie did not effect me in the slightest. I went in, watched, got sleepy and left. My pulse did not quicken, at no point was I amazed and never did I feel any emotion for any characters. I definitely think not seeing this movie and just reading the synopsis would have been better, because having seen it and knowing it’s the end, it leaves a sour feeling because the next one won’t be better and honestly, if this is what Lucas is turning out, Revenge of the Sith should be the last thing he does. Lucas should focus on his effects industry and produce for new directors because he’s used up and I feel like that $10.75 cents I paid went to finance a complete waste of time that should have been a good film.