Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Movies based on books have a lot to live up to. When it comes to translating a well-loved series to the screen, it compounds the issue. Many fans want the films to be 6 hour events with every detail included, every line of dialogue included and Hermione's dress to be the right color just like it was on page 183. Needless to say, several people just aren't going to be pleased no matter what. I've become a loyal fan of the books (a "Potterhead" as a friend likes to say) and I was very pleased with this movie. It isn't everything it could've been, but it was very good. It might've benefitted from an extra hour, but the same is true for most page-to-screen adaptations.

Victor Krum and the titular Goblet of Fire.

The 4th installment in the series brings the prestigous Triwizard Tournament to Hogwart's. This tournament is a large scale, highly dangerous event with participants from Hogwart's as well as 2 other wizarding schools. These events overshadow some dark happenings in the wizarding world, this film is the darkest one yet which I like. The film is pretty loyal to the book, moreso than Prisoner of Azkaban was anyways, and while there are some characters and points left out (nary a house elf in sight) the good stuff is pretty much in tact. The pacing is a little fast for me though, it sometimes has the feeling of rushing from major plot point to major plot point. The appearance of the Dark Mark didn't have the impact it did in book, nor did the presence of Rita Skeeter. Again, I suppose it's the price one pays for adapting from a book.

Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe in Goblet of Fire.

There is quite a lot of action, as well some humor that actually worked this time (they included the wonderful ferret scene.) The failed attempts at humor really brought the 3rd film down for me. There is some teenage drama, but that's to be expected; the characters are 14-15 years old. The acting is mostly solid. I thought Emma Watson was overacting a bit, but I'm guessing she was directed that way. Newcomer Brendan Gleeson does a fine job as Mad-Eye Moody, the school's 4th Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in as many years. Ralph Fiennes plays an excellent Voldemort and I look forward to seeing him get more screen time in upcoming installments. And Alan Rickman simply is Professor Snape. My only real complaint is with Michael Gambon as Professor Dumbledore. Richard Harris had presence, he brought authority, sensitivity, humor and class to the role. Gambon's Dumbledore is too intense and not warm enough. I'm afraid that the character's relationship with Harry which is so prominent in the books will suffer because of this. It already has.

All told, I really enjoyed Goblet of Fire. I think most reasonable fans of the books will appreciate it as well. The series is moving in a more adult direction, the young actors are continuing to grow into their characters. I'm really looking forward to Order of the Phoenix, my favorite book in the series. The books will always be better than the films, but don't let that keep you from Goblet of Fire.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire earns 3.5 Mad-Eye Moodys out of 4

Crash

On the surface, Crash is a movie about racism. Everyone in the film says, does, or thinks something racially motivated at some point during the movie. It is also about how racism, violence and hatred are so prevalent in our lives that they can become second nature. At one point on of the characters reflects "I wake up everyday feeling angry and I have no idea why."

An important scene in Crash.

This is the movie that Magnolia should have been. The events of Crash take place over a 24 hour period in the melting pot that is LA. Several characters lives and stories play out here and they intertwine frequently. It's a sometimes violent film, but it's more about the terrible things we say and think about each other and how isolated we can become. There are no clear cut heroes in this film; evil is not so easily defined. This is one of the film's best achievments. It'll have you hating characters one minute then wondering about them the next. It isn't very often I get to see a movie where my heroes and villains aren't neatly packaged and labelled for me. I enjoyed it.

Among the characters are a white cop (Matt Dillon) who pulls a couple over not so much because they're 'having a little adult fun' while driving but because the driver is black and his light skinned wife is mistaken for white. The cop then proceeds to humiliate and violate the couple in front of his shocked partner (Ryan Phillippe.) There is the black TV sitcom director who is told that one of his actors doesn't sound 'black enough.' Problem is, the director himself doesn't 'sound black' either. There's the rich, white housewife who insists to her husband that they have their locks changed again in the morning when she sees that the man changing their locks is a young hispanic man with tattoos and a shaved head. "Could you please ask them not to send a gang member next time?" she says. Whether or not he is a gang member isn't the relevant question. There's the pair of young black men who complain about how they're looked at and treated but eventually their behavior perpetuates that discrimination. He complains that the black waitress gave them bad service because she knows black people don't tip for shit. "Oh yeah? What kind of tip did you leave?" to which his friend replies "...I'm not tipping for that kind of service."

It's nice to see Sandra Bullock in a dramatic role. She plays her part well.

Every character in the story is both guilty of racism and a victim of it. Kudos to Paul Haggis for making a powerful film about racism that is neither preachy nor sappy. Crash is a powerful, effective piece of entertainment which will make most viewers think about themselves and the world around them. I wholly reccomend this movie.

Crash earns 4 wombats out of 4.

Game Review: Indigo Prophecy

Platform: Playstation 2, XBox, PC

From the early eighties to mid nineties, some of the best video games were adventure games. As video games became more and more mainstream entertainment featuring increasingly shiny graphics, adventure games have become a dying breed. Games such as Maniac Mansion, Grim Fandango, Myst and Shadowgate have been replaced by Halo, World of Warcraft and Madden football. Every now and again a fine adventure game rears its head and sells barely well enough to keep the struggling genre viable. The last such game was The Longest Journey. Indigo Prophecy is another such game.

Indigo Prophecy has a beautiful, melancholy atmosphere.

Indigo Prophecy has generally recieved positive reviews and has sold decently enough, though it is not on par with the other adventure games I mentioned. This is a sad fact, as it had the potential to be the best of the bunch. After the first couple of hours I was absolutely enamoured with this game, but the game's niggling little drawbacks kept picking at me until the game's end. The bad points certainly did add up, though the game has its good points, originality being chief among them.

First the good: The game opens on a brutal murder in the dirty bathroom in a small diner as the snow pours down outside the windows. You control the murderer who awakens as if from a trance to find a bloody knife in his hands and a dead body at his feet. Some 20 yards away, a cop sits at the counter nursing his coffee. You must find a way to get out of the diner without giving yourself away, and you must do so before anyone else enters the bathroom. After quicky cleaning things up as best I could, I calmly left the bathroom, left the payment for the bill on the table, walked out the door then took off like a bat out of hell down the street. My job was to avoid capture while trying to find out why this happened.

If you commit a murder, the first thing you should do is try to stuff the body down the toilet.

The game then puts you in control of the 2 investigators who come to check out the crime scene and look for clues. It's neat to see what you missed and what you gave away (my silly ass moved the body, washed my hands, mopped the blood up then left the bloody murder weapon on the floor for the cops to find.) The game has several options for interacting with your environments, as well as several dialogue options which are times and cannot be initiated more than once. There are many instances where a botched puzzle or boneheaded conversation simply alters the story rather than making the player redo it by trial and error. This is a wonderful game mechanic and it gives the feeling of being a part of a real, interactive world rather than a static one. The idea of playing both the criminal and his pursuers is likewise very well done and it creates sympathy for both sides. The game has some interesting minigames as well as some intriguing decisions to be made that give the game replay value. For example, you see a child fall into an icy river. No one else sees this, but you see two cops (including the one from the diner) approaching. Do you save the child and risk capture or do you save your hide and leave the child for dead?

Now for the bad: The game is a fine interactive experience, and if they'd left it as strictly a dialogue/moral decisions/ solve puzzles adventure game, it would've been great. Instead, the game is full of on screen prompts which you have to mimic to advance through several areas of the game, almost constantly in fact. It is basically the equivalent of Dance Dance Revolution performed with 2 analog sticks. The other common one requires you to button mash the L1 and R1 buttons alternately. This sort of thing is simply irritating to have in an adventure game, it seemed like th game designers decided to arbitrarily throw in some fast paced button pushing to keep us from getting bored. Some areas it fits in context with the onscreen action (tapping the analog sticks to dodge things being thrown at you for example) but other times these onscreen prompts come up during dialogue or flashbacks. I was staring at the symbols on the screen and tapping my analog rather than being able to concentrate on the story and setting. This is unforgivable in a game that is all about immersion and story.

Cop and killer meet face to face for the first time.

Some of the minigames also seem forced. A basketball game? A boxing match? Two fucking STEALTH missions??? When I buy an adventure game, that's exactly what I want. Madden owners don't have side-scrolling action combat levels thrown in. Gran Turismo owners don't have to shoot terrorists during the course of the game. Give me what I paid for. Variety is good. Mixing genres isn't. Also, the story that starts out with so much promise eventually deteriorates into standard sci-fi crap, and the closer it gets to the end, the more the train goes off the track.

Indigo Prophecy is a unique, imaginitive, flawed game. This game makes me excited that there is still the possibility for art and imagination in the increasingly stagnant video game market. If Quantic Dream can build on this game and eliminate the negative points, they will give gamers something to be excited about. For the time being, however, Indigo Prophecy is a beautiful game with a lot of squandered potential.

Note: Indigo Prophecy is a fairly short game that could be finished in a weekend. I absolutely reccomend it as a rental.

Indigo Prophecy earns 2.5 wombats out of 4

The Assassination of Richard Nixon

Was Nixon assassinated? Nope. This movie tells us the true story of a man who tried. The main character, played by Sean Penn, is Sam Bicke. Sam Bicke is a furniture salesman. He is a moral, honest man who despises liars and dishonesty. Yes, he is in the wrong profession. At one point in the movie, he goes off on a tangent about how his boss was asking his salesmen to LIE by telling the customers that cutting 15% off the sales price was the absolute rock bottom price when in fact the markup was 30%. Scandal!!

Sam attempting to communicate with his wife Marie (played by Naomi Watts)

I was reminded over and over of the movie Falling Down. These two titles are very similar as are their main characters. The Assassination of Nixon is really about the American Dream which is, after all, a sales pitch. We see the events of Bicke's life unfold before him: He is a marginally talented salesman who is desperately trying to start his own business and to reunite with his estranged wife and children. It's obvious to the viewer that both attempts will fail, largely due to Bicke's bitterness in life. The more his life comes apart, the more resentful he becomes towards The System, the one that promised him the happy marriage, successful job, white picket fence and 2.4 kids. He gets caught in the trap of feeling that the world owes you a living, and the it's not doing its job of delivering. It doesn't help that the business he works in (or the boss he works for) is a microcosm of that false promise.

Where does Nixon fit into all of this? The story takes place in 1973, and it's interspersed with various television of Nixon's public addresses. Bicke's boss summed it up best: "You know who the world's best salesman is? Richard Nixon. In '68 he swore he'd end the war and we voted him in. What does he do? He sends more troops into Vietnam. In '72 what did he say? 'Re-elect me and I'll end the war.' And we made him president again. He made a promise, failed to deliver, promised us the same thing again and we believed him both times." In Bicke's mind, Nixon stands for dishonesty and the decline of morality and values in American life.

Assassination is not a fun or easy film to watch. Some viewers will be bored by it, as the film is heavy on character development and light on action and humor. It is the story of a man's descent into madness, bitterness and isolation. Some scenes are painful to watch such as when he gets his last big letdown in the film, we do not get a reaction of rage or fury, but the meek reaction of a man who has been defeated and cannot muster the will to lash out. Sean Penn is, as usual, outstanding. Don Cheadle and Jack Thompson turn in strong performances as well. If this sounds like your kind of movie, you'll probably enjoy it. If not, maybe not.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon recieves 3 wombats out of 4.

Constantine

The tagline for the film is "Hell wants him. Heaven won't take him. Earth needs him." That about sums it up. Constantine is based on the comic book series Hellblazer about a man who has been literally to hell and back. Keanu Reeves was cast in this role because he was Neo in the Matrix. His character here, John Constantine, is very similar but more hardened and less unsure.

HELLO. I AM JOHN CONSTANTINE. I AM TOUGH AND GRITTY. IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE ME, PLEASE NOTE MY CIGARETTE, LIQUOR BOTTLE AND HAGGARD EXPRESSION.

Constantine is about a man who sends demons back to hell when they overstep their boundaries here. You see, while god and the devil can't directly interfere with matters on earth, the planet is full of half-breeds (Half man/demon or half man/half angel) and if these people start unleashing their demons and killing people, John Constantine finds them and kicks their asses.

Constantine isn't a bad movie. It isn't a good movie either. It is a sci-fi action films about angels and demons, heaven and hell; it comes with exactly everything you'd expect. Some one-liners and special effects, the character who is a skeptic and finds out The Truth, a few surprises and plot twists and roll credits. Keanu Reeves is adequate in this role; Rachel Weisz is a notch above him as the skeptic cop.

Chances are, if you want to see Constantine you will probably like it. Like I said, it isn't really bad it's just not original and surprising in any way. If watching Keanu Reeves battling demons and speaking platitudes about heaven and hell sounds like your thing, by all means go rent Contantine. If not, maybe not.

Contantine earns 2.5 wombats out of 4

Game Review: God of War

God of War
System: Playstation 2
Publisher: Sony
Released: 2005
Players: 1

For you impatient ones out there, here is a two word review for God of War:

Fucking Awesome.

For everyone else, here's a review:

Though gaming has seen its fair share of iconic characters, few have been real badasses. Mario, Sonic and Link have always had humorous, fun sides to them. Dante from the Devil May Cry series was, until recently, the coolest, most ass-kickingest video game character I'd ever played as. Kratos, the main character in God of War is the nastiest, cruelest, most intimidating game character I've ever seen. Dante had a tongue in cheek sort of sense of style and coolness to his act. Kratos fucks shit up with no pretenses. There's no swagger, no smirk, no taunting. Just blood, blood and more blood.

One of the scenes that makes God of War a classic: An epic battle with a hydra aboard a ship.

God of War is rated 'M' and with good reason. This game is on par with a very R rated film, definitely not for kids. It's truly a game for adults, much more so than Grand Theft Auto (cursing, lockerroom jokes and handguns don't make you a grownup.) GoW is definitely not for the squeamish, as you'll see blood spraying everywhere during cutscenes and gameplay. The game's excellent story puts the violence into context though. This is a game of battle and greek gods. Kratos is a spartan warrior who sold his soul to Ares, the God of War, in exchange for victory on the field of battle. As is typical in greek mythology, the price was higher than Kratos was willing to pay. This is a tale of a mortal's vengeance against a god. In his travels, Kratos will also meet up with Zeus, Posiedon, Athena and others.

Beat him to death with your bare hands? Tear him in half? Ram your sword through his chest? Decisions, decisions....

You begin the game with little knowledge of Kratos, only that he is a heartless, bloodthirsty, vicious bastard. The game slowly feeds you Kratos' story through cutscenes. The story is powerful, the battle is exhilirating and the puzzles are well distributed. Kratos really feels like a one man army, and it's easy to get in character during the game. Walking into a room full of enemies and what should be overwhelming odds, I was simply determined and confident that I'd tear every last one of them apart. The combat is fast and intense, and before long you'll be stringing together combos and tearing your foes apart with Kratos' Blades of Chaos - these were his 'gift' from Ares: twin blades at the end of chains which are soldered onto his flesh. Kratos can literally tear his foes in two.

The game starts out on a ship which is being attacked by a massive hydra. This first stage sets the tone for the game very well. Along the way you'll visit Athens, Hades and eventually the Temple of Pandora to retrieve Pandora's box. The temple was built by an architect who slaved for the gods and everntually went insane. Pandora's Box is the stuff of legend, and its retrieval is a suitably monumental task in the game. The game definitely has its share of memorable moments. The first time I laid eyes on Ares was one of those 'holy shit' moments for me. "I have to kill HIM?!?" Pandora's temple is chock full of traps, puzzles and general unpleasantness. One such area has Kratos running down a hallway while huge flaming boulders are rolling at him. My fiance' was cheering and gasping as I dodged the flaming rocks. It was like watching Indiana Jones or something.

Kratos handling crowd control.

The overall presentation of the game is splendid: from graphics to music to narration the game really has an epic feel to it. God of War is simply an incredible experience all around. A few of the jumping puzzles had me cursing a bit, but none of them were impossible. Some just took 10 or 15 tries. God of War is one of the finest action/adventure games ever made. Or a better way to put would be "Oh my fucking god, this game is awesome!"

4 big Kratos heads out of 4

Magnolia

HOLY FUCKING HELL.

I heard stories of how great this movie was. It sounded like my kind of movie - deep and meaningful, artfully done. It was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson who directed Punch Drunk Love. Mr X loves that guy.

Mistake #1: Expectations were high.

I haven't seen it until now because anytime I see it for sale, it's always more than $20. I bargain shop for my movies, and $20 is way too much to spend on a movie I've never seen. So when I found it on sale in the used section at Gamestop, I danced a jig and snagged it.

Mistake #2: Putting the disc in the DVD player.

Magnolia opens with some interesting little snippets about amazing coincidences throughout history, talking about how these things can't really be just coincidences. For example, it talks about a triple hanging in a small town named Greenberry Hill. The three contestants, guilty of murder, had the last names Green, Berry and Hill. Wacky shit. On to the movie. The movie consists of the stories of nine people whose lives are all in some way intertwined. There were two characters in the film I didn't hate. For me, this movie was little more than a long exercise in misery. The characters have terrible things happening to them. They ruin the lives of others. The fact that they were all intertwined didn't really impress me. There were no neat little revelations where I looked at the screen, nodded and said "Oh! That's the guy from the game show! It all makes sense now!"

The acting was great (especially Tom Cruise) but good god, the fucker is 3 hours long. I kept wondering where it was all going. Around the 2 hour mark, I started wishing death upon the characters. I started thinking "Ok. I hate these fucking people. Do I really care what happens to them?" As it turns out, it wasn't going anywhere. Hooray.

SPOILER:

So anyways, something big did happen near the end of the movie. But it didn't mean anything. It fucking rained frogs. Fucking frogs. Yes, I realize this is a phenomenon that really happens. That doesn't make it a solid way to tie a story together. Spontaneous combustion happens too. Raining frogs is quite nuts, and in most movies I'd be ok with it. I wanted some sort of resolution here though.

END SPOILER

This movie is supposed to be about forgiveness, not there was much forgiveness in the movie. Maybe it's supposed to be about fucking ugly and terrible life can be. Maybe it's true, but I don't need to watch 3 hours of it to remind me. So, this is me working on forgiveness for pt Anderson for making this movie, and forgiveness for the people who said it was the second coming. It was unique, which is good. But it was also shit, which is bad.