Author: Adam (Page 137 of 224)

Panic Room

Good acting and pacing, a creeping sense of dread in the first half, fun camerawork – and an incredibly cool title sequence. But nothing in David Fincher’s home invasion thriller raises it above the average good scary movie. I enjoyed it on that basis. But since Fincher directed “Seven” and, most notably, the masterpiece “Fight Club,” I expected more of a fresh twist on this genre picture.

Still, it’ll probably be Fincher’s most lucrative effort, since it’s safe and marketable in The Age of Ron Howard. Maybe that will give him the momentum he needs to keep surprising and thrilling us in the future.

Dan of Hivelogic reminded me of how much I was fascinated by the bald, gorgeous Persis Khambatta in the otherwise execrable “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” She was Miss India of 1965 (when she was 15!), she wrote a coffee table book called “Pride of India,” and she wasn’t actually bald. Sadly, she died of a heart attack in 1998.

She was definitely the only reason to watch that movie, and I remember thinking she had the coolest name ever. Persis Khambatta. Say it out loud a few times and you’ll understand what I mean.

My name is Adam, and I still play video games.

[Hello, Adam.]

See, the thing is, I’ve been playing video and computer games for a long time. A long time. (I played PacMan on an Atari 2600, just to give you the idea.) I don’t know if a 36-year-old man should still be playing video games. But I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of them over the years.

Lately, though, I get more frustration out of games (both video and computer) than I do enjoyment. I never was that obsessed with “finishing” a game, like the hard-core players do, and lately it’s escalated to my trying a game, being entertained by the graphics etc. for a while, but soon getting so frustrated it’s not fun any more. I love the wacked-out sensibility of “Alice,” the cinematic atmosphere of “Max Payne,” the sense of speed in racing games like “Vanishing Point” on the Dreamcast. But when my old-man reflexes cause me to have to repeat the same area over and over just to advance, I start to want to turn on “old-man mode” so I can just wander around and explore, without dying every two minutes.

With all this amazing technology in games today, I think at least some designers should concentrate on open-ended worlds – sort of “holodeck”-style games. I know that’s supposedly the focus of online games like Dark Age of Camelot, but aside from the intimidation factor of jumping into the fray with lots of more experienced players, they seem still too focused on relentlessly moving up, slaying monsters and gaining powers. I just want to explore a detailed, alternate universe.

After all, old men deserve to have fun too.

Fascinating pop culture fact of the week

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are not identical twins. (They’re fraternal twins.) Of course, this doesn’t make them less evil.

I just watched “Donnie Darko.”

Can someone explain it to me?

(Or maybe I wasn’t meant to understand.)

Some quite interesting talk on MetaFilter recently about the terms “black” and “African-American.”

At lunch today my brother described a recent fishing trip where he struggled with a 100-pound fish for an hour and a half. Since the fish was too big to mount, and not good to eat, once it’s given up and you could haul it into the boat, instead you let it go.

Somebody please explain to me why this is fun. (It’s certainly not too fun for the fish.) At least with traditional hunting, you either get some meat or a trophy to hang on the wall – or at least a creepy photo of you holding up the dead deer’s head by its antlers. Fishing, especially the kind my brother described, still baffles me totally.

I’ve been thinking a lot about political labels recently. Not that I relish agreeing with Politically Incorrect’s Bill Maher, but I agree with what he said recently about hate crimes – people should be prosecuted for their actions, not their thoughts. If someone is assaulted or killed, prosecute them on that basis – not on the basis of why they did it, if we can even presume to understand that.

So I guess I agree with conservatives on that point.

But I’m also agree with libertarians about the so-called “drug war”: I think all drugs (all) should be legalized and regulated. Don’t fill up prisons with drug offenders, who only become more likely to commit other crimes after they emerge from prison. It’s just bad public policy, whatever stern moral view we may take about drug abuse.

I think political labels sometimes stop us from considering each issue on its own merits – not to mention the complexity of other people’s opinions. Do you consider yourself a conservative, liberal, libertarian, or something else? And why?

Tonight “The West Wing” hit it out of the park again with another fantastic episode. It’s the best show on TV right now, and I challenge anyone to come up with a better one. They manage a delicate balance between character, comedy, tragedy and policy that’s amazing to watch. I also enjoyed watching the fictional brainiac president Bartlet deride his potential Republican opponent (a conservative governor from a southern state, no less) for being an intellectual lightweight.

“If he’s going to be in charge of making policy, we think he should at least understand it,” says Josh Lyman.

On top of everything else, they get top-flight guest stars like Laura Dern tonight, who gave an Emmy-worthy performance as the U.S. Poet Laureate.

This show is why we shouldn’t all chuck our TVs out the window.

So I was going to write this post about the woman who stood in front of me in line at the grocery store for about 10 minutes (it was the express line, of course), then watched as her three items were scanned, then chatted with the clerk, then fished through two, not one but two, purses to find her checkbook, then laboriously wrote out a check, asking the name of the freaking store she was standing in in order to fill it out, and didn’t realize her luck that I didn’t take a can of soup and beat her to death with it.

But then I thought, the world doesn’t need another fake-Seinfeld weblog post about grocery store lines. So I’ve moved on.