ROFLCHAIR: SETH MACFARLANE'S COMEDY CAVALCADE

If you haven't seen Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy by now, you should definitely check it out. They're animated shorts that could pass for unused cutaways in Family Guy episodes, but honestly it's what the man does best and he shows it well here. He even makes the animated commercials that precede each clip enticing and hilarious as well.

I was perusing through some of his newer stuff when I found this little gem. Enjoy!

-BR13N

RAGEFACE: THOUGHTS ON "MOVIE" BOB

Seriously though I have to wonder how this guy keeps his job with the shit that he pulls.

If you're not familiar he is the house movie critic over at The Escapist.

Now I enjoyed his review on The Watchmen, and whole-heartedly agreed with it.

And I hated his review on Avatar and disagreed with pretty much everything he said (not to mention his smug little intro calling out people for stealing South Park's criticism of the movie as if it's really that hard to reach such a conclusion on your own).

No real problem there; to each his own and all that and I had to respect the guy for giving Watchmen a thumbs up after the harsh backlash it received from most critics.

Where I DO have a problem is that he criticizes Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland FOR THE EXACT SAME REASONS HE TOLD US NOT TO HATE AVATAR.

His defense of Avatar was that it was an "experience" and visually enticing and to not pay too much mind to the recycled story.

His thoughts on Alice? That it's a recycled story with nice visuals as its only redeeming quality.

Umm...WTF?!?

This would bother me less if it weren't for his smugass introductions to every review and his little side notes to inform audiences of things such as Martin Scorsese's background in Hollywood as one of the Movie Brats or Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Does your audience REALLY need to know about these things in order to understand what the movie is about, Bob?

Or do you REALLY just need them to realize how S-M-R-T you are by reading the summary of any related Wikipedia page?

His Shutter Island review only pisses me off further after the bottom line he gave us to check the movie out was "it's Scorsese" while failing to realize that its obviously one of his weakest films, especially compared to his previous three.

He noted that the movie's visuals and tone were enough to make up for the obvious twist and lack of depth while also failing to realize the choppy editing and horrendously bad special effects (and normally special effects don't mean much to me but we're in the year 2010 here and Shutter honestly looks like its trapped about a decade behind).

Yet all he can tell us is "it's Scorsese".

Now I liked Shutter Island a lot, but it's a textbook psych thriller with enough flaws to put it beneath classics like Fight Club, American Psycho, and Memento, and Scorsese or not, there's enough reason for the average moviegoer to not see it, let alone their only motivation being a critic's insistence that the director is incapable of making a bad film (see: Avatar).

Normally I don't let things like this get to me, but this really is just too much. The thing that makes it most unbearable is that I have a slight feeling that Robert thinks he can get away with all this because he's on The Escapist, home of the popular "Zero Punctuation" game review series. What he fails to realize this time is that Yahtzee can get away with being smug and unfairly cruel to the releases he reviews because HE'S FUCKING HILARIOUS AND INGENIOUSLY CLEVER, two things Bob is most certainly not.

So please Robby, for the love of all things cinema do us all a favor and keep your half-assed bullshit reviews to yourself and find a job you're actually good at.

Like James Cameron's personal fluffer.

I hear he's always looking for more of those.

-Brien

By the way I do realize that it's the dopes at The Escapist I should be blaming for hiring a guy like this in the first place, but this is a rant, and the last thing I want in my rant is accurate blame.

NEW KID CUDI VIDEO

So yeah, big fan of the Cudi.
I never saw the first video for "Pursuit of Happiness", but apparently it was a bomb.
So they made a new one.
And it makes my head spin.
I've been on that couch many times before and i gotta say i love, love, LOVE this video.



Here's the original for comparison.



I gotta say I prefer the new one. I can definitely dig the high-concept vision over the typical party-video idea.




On another note 100th POST!!!

I'm not really sure what to put here.....but it feels like some kind of accomplishment.

To celebrate, "Mayhem of the Music Meister" from the series Batman: The Brave & The Bold starring Neil Patrick Harris as said Music Meister. ENJOY! And thanks to everyone who's been reading (and NOT commenting...jerks) all this time.

-BR13N

NERDGASM: THOUGHTS ON PORTAL 2

So all this Portal nonsense has got my brain whirling about what Valve has up their faucet. With the next game set "hundreds of years in the future" I have to wonder about the time travel factor. At the end of Episode 2 we saw (SPOILERZ) the Borealis, a ship thought lost for years, appear out of nowhere. Maybe Chell has something to do with its reappearance. With that of course, comes the possibility that Alex comes up with the crazy idea to go back in time to save Eli. With that comes the even crazier idea to go back further and stop the events at Black Mesa from ever happening. Of course, this would all be thwarted by control-freak G-Man who attempts to teach Gordon a lesson about changing the past, only to have Freeman do something stupid anyway, causing a cataclysmic temporal paradox that would set up a new environment for HL3.

While playing through Black Mesa in the past and likely encountering Past Gordon and Shepard, I really do hate time travel and completely doubt that Valve would do anything that drastic. Honestly, I think their biggest setback with release dates is story. There are giant, gaping holes in the entire Half Life story already, and when they added Portal into the mix it likely changed what little of it they had mapped out. The series really does have the most engaging plot I've ever played through, but with so little known, and such large amounts of time between releases, things get frustrating. During all this time, crazy fanatics like myself spend their hours posting their thoughts and revelations about the unknown in the Half Life universe on the internet. Valve gets wind of this, maybe somebody hit a little too close to home, and due to their incessant need to SURPRISE EVERYONE, it's back to the drawing board. They simply CAN'T release a PREDICTABLE game. And while I appreciate this to the fullest, it really does take a toll on a lonely nerd's heart and soul.

So, in reality, it's anyone's guess as to what the hell's going on with the Half Life story, and that guess is most likely wrong.

I heard something about D.O.G. being turned into a weapon by the Combine. I think I'd like that. The whole G-Man-is-actually-future-Gordon thing is probably out the window by now seeing as eveyone's caught wind of the theory.

Time travel however, does still seem a highly viable option.

We still have to get the Combine's homeworld as well eventually.

Adrian Shepard is still M.I.A.

There's also THIS little all-too-revealing piece of information. Knowing Valve though, they might just be putting stuff out there too make us run in circles. Doesn't seem like them at all to put major plot details out in the open like that.

I think what we can count on though is that whatever happens at the end of Portal 2, it will have a major impact on the Half Life saga, and will likely tie the two series together finally. The only connection we really had before were subtle references to Black Mesa and GLaDOS's brief mention of "out there" and how she's "the only thing between us and them".

Whatever it is going to have to wait til Fall though, unless we're told otherwise on March 11th.

What say you, fair reader(s)?

-BR13N

REVIEW: BROOKLYN'S FINEST

So it's been a while since I've done a review of anything, and it's been never since I've done one on this blog, but I walk out of every movie with thoughts on why it's bad or good or horrible and this time I'd like to share them.

Going into Brooklyn's Finest I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew it was from "the director of Training Day", which I've never seen but realize to be a notable film, and had a pretty solid cast. I knew it was about cops. I knew these cops were of Brooklyn, New York City, NY. That's about it.

What I expected was a tragic drama about the ups and downs of being a cop in Brooklyn, and to some degree I got that. Ultimately what I got though, was disappointment. A huge steaming pile of it.

The movie starts off strong with Ethan Hawke chatting it up in a parked car next to a cemetery with an unnamed fat man about how he got a "get out of jail free" card on a DUI offense on account of "Righter and Wronger". It sets the tone and theme of the whole film and ends with an unexpected gunshot. Hawke grabs a bloody bag of money sitting on the fat man's lap and runs off.

It's a good start, but Finest quickly falls flat on its face. Somewhere between learning about Hawke's character's seemingly soap operatic myriad of problems and watching Richard Gere get a blowjob I lost interest in the story and characters and became completely obsessed with wondering how this screenplay actually got produced. Was it a chain of sexual favors? Did someone made a call to help their nephew out? Or is everyone at the associated studios just on meth?

Okay, that's a bit harsh. Finest isn't all that bad. It's strength's lie in the stellar performances from Gere, Hawke, Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, and the rest of the cast. Much of the film is presented through dialogue between the characters, usually involving some kind of spiel about good and evil, right and wrong, and all that. At times it gets a little preachy, but for the most part it works. Just when things seem to be getting a little too over-saturated with characters hopping up on the soap box, we get a nice break of action where a swat team will bust a drug dealer's hideout or Richard Gere will facepalm after one of his hot-shot rookie partners blows his first day on the job.

Brooklyn's Finest seems like an easy enough film to make. You have three main characters, each dealing with their own struggle of good and evil. They're all within the same precinct and are assigned to closely related problems. Towards the climax of the movie, each makes a drastic decision that will force them to act in the name of right or wrong. You can almost envision the Departed-esque ending where everyone collides and only one man will be left standing. Yet somehow the film never really comes together.

Even though our three protagonists are all on the same street, we don't get the kind of connection that brings their respective stories full circle into a cohesive whole. Instead it ends with a more indecisive and seemingly rushed conclusion. There are subtleties that allow the audience to tie things up in their own minds, but looking at the screen, things feel unfinished, unresolved, and empty - and that's not the good kind of unresolved that leaves you wanting more. No, rather it's the kind that leaves you saying "hey! what the hell just happened to the movie I've been sitting through for the past two hours?!"

Brooklyn's Finest isn't a total loss. It's a decent drama carried through by strong acting and great tension between the characters. It's flawed in that it seems to be dragging its feet the whole way through. Throughout the first hour and a half it's easy to tell that there's some grand scheme; some hidden architecture within each event, line, and subtle movement of Cheadle's eyes in an intense close up. You can almost feel the three loosely related storyline driving faster and faster towards each other. However things never really come together and I left that theater feeling unrewarded for the time and money I'd spent there.

While Finest may not be a complete waste of time, there is a reason it was released right after February ("where films go to die"), and a reason the cast had to be flooded with stars, and those reasons become very apparent about twenty minutes into the film.

2.5/5

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Now I hope to do more reviews soon on more movies, music, events, games, whatever. Who knows, maybe I'll actually work up to initiative to make actual pictures and associated values for my rating system instead of just a "2.5/5". It is rather boring don't you think? But what to use? I suppose I could just use stars, but that seems a bit bland. Maybe chairs? I could say "Simply Stunning! Four out of Five chairs!" That sounds catchy. What do you think, reader(s)?

Also plan to beef up blog a bit. Add some fancy HTML shit and whatnot. Maybe more widgets. Don't get too excited, I did say MAYBE.