WAKE UP MR. FREEMAN AND SMELL THE The PATRóN

And my most badass wallpaper ever award goes to...

Fix your lame-o desktop with some Freeman freshness.

-br13n

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY

The Old Testament, (Deuteronomy 25:11-12) states the following:

When men fight with one another, and the wife of the one approaches to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes his genitals, you shall sever her hand; you shall have no compassion.

word.

- br13n

Sick-ass beat-boxing cello player beat boxes while also playing cello at the same time

Boss: noun; see below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwFRyebKOVw

-br13n

TSFR: THE DAMNED THINGS

So yea, haven't written shit in a long, long time. Also thinking about jumping ship to Tumblr like the rest of the blogosphere.

Anyway this is the reason we're here today.

Keith Buckley is doing something cool.

Not that Keith Buckley ever does things that aren't cool, but this is like -- really really really cool.

The frontman of the greatest band in the world has joined forces with the remains of the now defunct Fallout Boy and Anthrax to form...

Yea. The Damned Things. And that's exactly what they sound like. Dirty, filthy rock and roll that you found under your uncle's bed.

They only have rough mixes of a couple songs out right now, but they sound great and I eagerly anticipate the full album due out in the Fall.

With filthy guitar riffs and Buffalo's favorite son screaming out obscenities at the top of his hairy lungs, THIS SHIT FUCKING ROCKS.

Every Time I Die + Fallout Boy + Anthrax = THE DAMNED THINGS.

Enjoy! (the video also has a download link if you're into free shit)

YouTube - The Damned Things - We've Got A Situation Here (HQ) Download!

-br13n

RIP GARY COLEMAN

It's official.

The legend known best for his role as Arnold Jackson on Diff'rent Strokes dies today at the early age of 42.

Coleman suffered many medical and personal difficulties throughout his life and is now finally at peace.

First Dio, now this. 2010 isn't looking much better than '09 at this point.

Here's a tribute to them both.

Gary Coleman takes shit from NO ONE.

Dio RIDES THE FUCKING TIGER. \m/

-br13n

BBBBBBONUS:

LONG LIVE THE DIO

Back in Stadiums as Shady Spits His Flow

So yea, I'm a little late on this.

New song from Eminem's upcoming album, Recovery.

I'm pretty pumped. He's going back to his old style and dropping all that silly accent nonsense.

He even calls himself out on the whole Relapse debacle.

I've been really impressed with his work on "Forever", "Drop the World", and "Despicable" and can't wait for this shit to drop.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Best Rapper Alive.

Eminem - "Not Afraid"

-br13n

Just Wondering...

If you're in on the hype.

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

---------

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.

TSFR: The Protomen

Long time no blog.
School, work, yadayada.

Anyway here's a truly epic band I came across today.
They go by the name of The Protomen and are a theatrical blend of Queen, Johnny Cash, and Metallica, but with synthesizers.
Strange enough, their songs make up an ass kicking rock opera about Mega Man. Yes, Mega Man, the video game.
Now I've never really played the games, but I love love LOVE the music. Apparently they take a hint from Daft Punk in wearing costumes and concealing their identities from the public and press.
They're kind of like a cross between HORSE the Band and Valient Thorr and the aforementioned Super Duo.

Here's the video for their song "Hope Rides Alone". Enjoy!

With cowboy riffs, spacey synths, and an epic tale that puts certain pop punk acts to shame, THIS SHIT FUCKING ROCKS.






http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGvqMXYhYhU

BONUS:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y36A--oPAY

Out of all the sentences I've read today...

This one is the best:

"The Predator's blood is made from a combination of the liquid out of glow sticks mixed with K-Y Jelly."

Oh, Wikipedia.


Which reminds me,



of this.


-Brien

I really have to wonder how the HELL this happened...

courtesy of the newly resurrected 4scrape


Sincerely confusted,

-Brien

SICKNESS

New Iron Man 2 poster out.
Let's just say it's not a good idea for me to stand up right now.

Between Holmes and this Downey's probably gonna make me start an annual award ceremony on this blog just so I can name him BAMF of the year.




-Brien

I'd just like to say...

I fucking CALLED this shit.

Fall Out Boy is taking an indefinite hiatus for a while.
Catch the detailed story at UG.

But what matters here is, I was right. Again. As always.




Thanks,

-Brien

NEW 3OH!3 VIDEO W/ mp3

So Colorodo's crunktronic duo 3oh!3 has a new video out for their new and improved version of "Starstrukk" featuring Katy Perry. The new mix is 100x better than the old one, but the video is just as lacking as their previous ones (except for the bridge, whistle whistle!). It's the usual girls chasing after the band intercut with them doing random shit like mountain climbing with chopsticks. I guess it's supposed to be based on this movie or something. Here's the video courtesy of MTV, and I even threw an mp3 link at the bottom for you crazy kids. Enjoy!

3Oh!3 - New Music - More Music Videos

http://www.mtv.com/videos/3oh3/444698/starstrukk-feat-katy-perry.jhtml



mp3.



-Brien






How do people get jobs like this???

WE WERE ONCE A FAIRYTALE

What apparently started off as a music video turned into a short film when director Spike Jonez teamed up with Kanye "IMMA LET YOU FINISH" West turned into this crazy, beautful, bizarre, and just plain awesome short film entitled We Were Once A Fairytale. Mad props to those crazy cats.





-Brien

FPS SYNDROME

So I've noticed through my my vast exposure to violent video games, that whenever I see a movie or TV show where somebody makes it out it alive from a shootout, I can't get my head around WHY they'd just leave all those beautiful guns lying around. Goldeneye, Nightfire, Red Faction, Halo, Black, Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto, The Suffering, Time-Splitters, Hitman -- What all these games have taught me over the years is that when you shoot somebody that has a gun, YOU TAKE THEIR SHIT AFTER YOU KILL THEM.


James Bond kills his captors, armed with two Destroyer pistols. An AK-47 lies waiting on the ground to be picked up when the firefight is finished.

To demonstrate my point, here's a clip from Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.In this scene, our protagonist, Bennie, is confronted by the family of Alfredo Garcia, whose severed head is in his possession. Obviously, this group is none too happy about their kin's grave being desecrated and his cabeza stolen, so they come armed with plenty of firearms to secure its return. When all seems lost, the men Bennie is retrieving the head for show up. Mayhem ensues.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KzeRTFrQDU

Now after all is shot and done and Bennie is the last man standing (well, almost) he has all these fine weapons laying around - rifles, semi-autos, another pistol - all quite superior to what he's been holding, yet all he takes is a wallet?? WTF?!? If he had done this in his previous altercations he probably wouldn't have even been in this sticky a situation. Of course our protagonist here is suffering some mental deterioration assisted by rampant alcohol abuse, but you see my point.

Seeing this scene drove me up a wall and I suppose have video games to thank for that. I don't know whether this means we'll be seeing it reflected more in future films directed by people like me from my generation or whether I'm just an oddball, but dammit, if I ever have a gunfight in one of my stories (almost definitely), there will be absolutely NO precious boomsticks left on the ground by the end of it.

And that's all I have to say about that.



-Brien




Also, here's the vid I nicked the title of this post from.

fps syndrome
Uploaded by gbraul8. - Click for more console and PC gaming videos.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9oe9j_fps-syndrome_videogames