Chris Botti – Do you like jazz? You might enjoy this little musing. If not, then I suggest you 1. Go on Spotify to see if you’d enjoy this sort of music or 2. Go away and let me talk about my music in peace.
Category: Monday Update
The Fifth Estate – From a standpoint of purely objective analysis, the story of WikiLeaks remains a fascinating window into the advent of the Internet – or, as I like to call it, “The New Wild West”. A lawless place owned by no nation-state or particular group, world governments try their best to regulate it every day and fail miserably. Information flows freely and without distortion, for both good (in the case of peaceful revolutionary movements) and bad (releasing the names of undercover agents throughout the world). If it weren’t for Julian Assange and his associates, we wouldn’t know how much power the World Wide Web holds. People can leak documents without ever being seen or discovered as a whistleblower, unless they reveal themselves. If solely for that, we should be thankful.
It’s also the only thing that lets me run a website about Christianity and video games, coincidentally. That’s a story for another day, however…
The Lone Ranger – Barring any prolonged discussion about Johnny Depp reinvigorating Indian stereotypes in films (yes, we know your great-great grandmother was Apache or something) or the strange historical inaccuracies (railroads in Texas during 1869? Definitely not!), the Lone Ranger still manages to present one of the strangest blockbuster movies of recent memory. American critics hated it with a passion far too heated for such a low simmering movie, and the budget far exceeds anything that actually comes the viewer’s eyeballs. Honestly, it’s quirky enough in both style and pacing that, barring the heritage of big-budget Western bombs, it felt like no surprise to see The Lone Ranger’s ultimate failure.
But does this mean it’s a bad film? Not in my estimation. Rather, I see it as a different take on the action-adventure formula made famous by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio in the more recent Zorro and Pirates of the Caribbean series, They write exciting films with double crosses, weird tonal shifts from comedy to drama and then back again, and a seeming billion subplots that sometimes go somewhere (but often feel self-indulgent). That they fit this all within two and half hours will either exhaust your audience (as proved with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and our titular subject) or function as both crowd-pleaser and intelligent plotline. In sum, they make “acquired taste” films that actually improve over several viewings.
Redbelt is a really strange film. Advertised as some sort of karate/martial arts spectacular (seriously, just go look at the trailers and advertising campaign for proof, even the poster contains spoilers), all of that smoke and mirrors obscures a movie with rather complex themes and ideas. In other words, if you like mixed martial arts, then please avoid this little experience. It definitely does not like that spectacle at all.
Savant: Ascent lies in that style of game that I would call the “Robotron shooter”. For those who don’t remember Robotron: 2084, this two-dimensional shooter involves shooting dozens and dozens of evil robots that came in increasingly larger waves. You can move freely around the space provided, but touching an enemy or enemy shot will cause instant death. In that sense, there’s no way to “win” Robotron – only to gain a high score that’s higher than anyone else by pure survival skills and familiarity with its mechanical depths.