Sunday!
Having the house to myself and Friday night yawning before me, I figured that I should totally watch that copy of Max Payne that I happened to pick up used for $4.
I regret that decision.
There were several kinda cool things about the film, mind. You saw that the cinematographer was having the time of his life actually getting to do all of the fun tricks that he’d been daydreaming about doing ever since he saw “Light and Shadow Workshop” on that flyer oh so many years ago.
There were *SHOTS* in the movie that were downright breathtaking. Heck, if you looked at the cast list, you’d say “holy cow! She’s great! And I know that guy! And how’d they get *THAT* guy? And I remember him! And jeez! Whatever happened to him that he’d agree to be in this thing?”
Unfortunately, the direction was a hair dry. The script was more based on a babelfish translation of a translation of a synopsis of the video game written by a person who had heard about it from a teenager whose significant other was playing it in the next room. The special effects were done better in The Matrix (which might be ironic if the script was any good at all).
And so I’m back to saying that the best video game movie of all time remains Mortal Kombat.
And I think that every single other one is crapola.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
(Featured Image is “Edison’s Telephonoscope” by George du Maurier from Punch Almanack for 1879)
Just saw a movie on Netflix last night, I’ve a review in the works for whenever we find a place for it in our schedule, so stay tuned.
Continuing to work my way through the confessions and diaries of early California criminals that I picked up at #LeagueFest2016. They start to sound a bit alike after a while: there seemed to be a lot of drifting around, with crooks kind of wandering about the land, joining and separating from gangs kind of organically. There’s also an artificial quality to their narrations, coming as they do from court records and proceedings, so law enforcement and vigilantes and other sorts have probably “assisted” with the telling of the tales. Still, it’s a glimpse back into a time when people had to pretty much make their own law as they went, because there just wasn’t as much to California’s state apparatus as there was to its economy back in the 1850’s.Report
Similarly, I’m reading through a history of the early porn industry, told entirely through interviews with the people who were there (Harry Reems, Marilyn Chambers, Linda Lovelace, Al Goldstein…). Literally. As in, it’s just straight sound bites strung together one after another with no narrative, no narrator and no authorial voice. It’s like the book-of-a-movie for a really talky documentary.
There’s some interesting stuff in all the drivel, and the movie it’s a novelization of might be quite interesting in its own way, but I can only take a few minutes of it at a time. Which is why it will stay in the smallest room for quite a while considering how many pages I have yet to go.Report
Is that the Legs McNeil book? He did a similar treatment of the early CBGB punk era. I found it quite good, but a little repetitive.Report
I’ve had a lot else going on, but I did read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child this week, as well as a slender but powerful book called Tender Points (a poet’s experience of fibromyalgia and the trauma that caused it).
Watching a lot of arrow.Report
My curious relationship with this film franchise comes to an end in January.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbtmW3ydOkU
(Note that it is the Final Chapter for Milla’s involvement with the series. The series itself….)Report
I’m about two-thirds of the way through the second of the Laundry Files books. This one is kinda like an occultic/Lovecraftian meta-Bond-spoof set in the Bahamas and thus far has featured, among other things, zombie seagulls, weaponized Powerpoint presentations and an Avon-ladies-by-way-of-Elizabeth-Bathory panopticon. Yeah, these books are weird in all the best ways…Report