Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Well Crap

I started watching Lost... I am forcing myself to only watch one episode (or two sometimes) a day because I tend to watch all the episodes of a series all at once. I have only watched 5 episodes of 100, but I was hooked after the first one. It is definitely one of the best shows I've ever seen, up there with the greats like The Walking Dead, Sherlock, Community, Medabots, Pokem- I mean yeah. It definitely holds a lot of mystery within the story but I did make one huge mistake. I thought I recognized one of the actors and looked up the show on IMDB to find out what other movies he was in and saw a couple of the characters' episode numbers (how many episodes they are in) so I know that some people could die before others... I'm trying to forget about who's who in that list to maintain some level of innocence when I watch the show.

Anywho if you haven't seen it, watch it, if you have seen it, watch it again. If you have seen it again, go watch The Walking Dead, Sherlock and Community. Then once you finish those, go watch Medabots, it's freaking awesome. Seriously, Mr Referee is a hero.

That's all for now, you may continue with your lives.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

So... Bears n' Stuff

So I finally started watching Lost and holy crap I need to force myself to sleep now instead of watching it all night. In short, is REALLY good! The very first scene of episode 1 is one of the best scenes I've ever seen in a TV show. I won't spoil anything if you're reading this and haven't seen it, but even if you don't intend to watch the show, just watch the first bit, it's totally worth it. You can watch the entire series on Netflix (and Hulu I believe) but I'm sure you can watch that first bit on YouTube.

I still haven't seen any new movies recently but as this starts to shape up I'll do a couple of pre-marked spoiler review/hype posts, so watch for those as I progress in the series.

Alas it is now sleepy-time so I'll leave you with thoughts of islands and bears.

Toodloo.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

No Seriously, Nothing...

Nothing has been going on lately. I haven't blogged about anything recently because I have had 0 things to blog about. I've watched a lot of TV... I'm considering watching Lost (finally, I know)... I played Minecraft today... So yeah, pretty much nothing. However, tomorrow marks the beginning of a new week and as dreadful as that is, it also gives the opportunity for something to actually happen though, so we'll see.

This is me, signing off now, good day and good night.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

And The Winner Is...

Tonight I attended the first annual ElkFest film festival, having submitted 2 videos for it, I of course had a personal interest. I went 1 for 2 on winning, so I'm pretty chuffed with myself.

I don't know what else to say, so I'm just going to leave it at that I think. I'll have a link to both the winning and non-winning films shortly, until then, cheers.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Times Like These

It's times like these when I ask myself: why am I awake at 12:30am playing the batman theme on the GarageBand app? Leave it to me to procrastinate sleep, the thing that requires the absolute least amount of energy to do...

That is all, you may resume your life now.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

YEG Filmmakers Live

Tonight I was at a local film event called YEG Filmmakers Live where a whole crew of people involved in the CineCoup film accelerator all came and presented their movie trailers, and answered a bunch of audience questions.

I ran into someone there who invited me along to take part in a short film she's doing this May, so that was pretty cool. It's definitely great to finally be getting in contact with all of these film people who actually really enjoy filmmaking as much as I do, I'll definitely be hanging around these people a lot more if I can help it.

There shall be more posts on this type of thing. Farewell for now lads.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Film Review - Jack the Giant Slayer

I know I said I would do a spoiler version of the last review I did (Bioshock Infinite) but I just saw Jack the Giant Slayer and I wanted to get this down while everything was still fresh.

Jack is your typical country boy living in the middle ages.  So that means that he didn't own much of anything, he was brought up to work the land, but he was still relatively happy living under a good King.  Jack's father was a good man who raised him well, but unforeseen circumstances lead to his father's death.  Now being raised by his uncle, all Jack has left to remember his father by, and one of his few possessions, was a book, a story of a great King from long ago who was forced to wage war on giants who descended from their land above the clouds to attack humanity.  The story tells of the lengths the King went to in order to protect his people, and in the end he was victorious.  Eventually, the tale became a legend, the details lost in time, and the legend became a myth.  Fast forward ten years and Jack is eighteen years old, still living and working with his uncle on the same land his father had owned, a ways outside the walls of the castle.  Jack is sent into the town by his uncle to sell their horse and carriage and if you know the story of Jack and the Beanstalk at all, you have an idea of what happened next.  The story does take an unexpected twist on the original story, however that is best left for you to find out when you see the movie.

From a technical perspective the movie was almost flawless, especially on a single viewing like I had.  The acting was top notch, especially from Ewan Mcgregor, who pulled off his character extremely well.  There is one particular moment in the movie which is a clear Obi Wan Kenobi reference, but I'll let you find that one yourselves.  Continuing on, Nicholas Hoult does a particularly good job as well but who can really be surprised at this considering his movie record?  X-Men First Class, Clash of the Titans... this is a guy who has certainly been around the big leagues before, despite his limited experience.  Of course every good fairy tale needs a good damsel in distress and this damsel's name is Isabelle, or as she is known in the real world, Eleanor Tomlinson (you may recognise her from the 2010 Alice in Wonderland movie as Fiona Chattaway).  Although she may not have as much professional acting experience as Ewan Mcgregor or even Nicholas Hoult, she also does quite a good job for all the screen time she had.  There are always ways to improve a performance of course, but for someone so early in their career, Tomlinson does an excellent job.  As far as special effects go, and they go pretty far, Jack the Giant Slayer knocks it out of the park.  First of all, beanstalks.  The amount of detail put into the beanstalks themselves is simply amazing, and since it was a 3D movie, it made it very easy to immerse myself into the story.  Following that strand of thought, the giants were done so well that I'm pretty sure if I had been sitting any closer to the screen, I would have smelled them.  Of course this level of special effects has become the standard for a Hollywood film, but when the modeling and texturing technology is used in creative ways like in this movie I can't help but applaud the SFX teams behind it.

I could go into so many more details about the soundtrack and sound design, the massive environments, flowing water, all that jazz, but the fact is that to get the full experience you really have to see the movie for yourself.  I give Jack the Giant Slayer a solid overall score of 8.5 out of 10, and highly recommend it!

That'll be all for now folks, check back later for more reviews and any other faff that I might think to post on here; check by semi-regularly even to keep up to date on any running series of posts that I may have, we'll see.  In the meantime, cherio you lot.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Game Review - Bioshock Infinite

What to say about Bioshock Infinite...

You play as Booker DeWitt who, at the beginning of the game, you know nothing about, he's just some guy living in 1912 who is for one reason or another, sitting in a boat with a man and a woman, traveling through the ocean off the coast of Maine.

At some point a little later on, I will release a spoiler version of the review, but right now we'll stick to non-story information, or information available in the trailers.

As is consistent with Bioshock and Bioshock 2, Infinite features a powers system, previously referred to as "plasmids", now called "vigors". These work exactly the same as in the previous games, allowing Booker to cast interesting powers such as fire balls, water blasts, and my favourite: crows (yes you can cast a murder of crows from your hand), along with a few others. In addition to the vigors, the player can find different pieces of gear that affect gameplay. So the character's wardrobe could quite possibly win the game for you. As for weapons in the game, there are quite a few to stumble across throughout the levels including a sniper rifle, an RPG, a machine gun, a shotgun and several more. Of course each of these weapons can be put to good use in a variety of different situations, however the real rub comes in the fact that your character can only carry two weapons at once, so you have to choose carefully when selecting your arsenal for an up and coming firefight.
Another interesting gameplay element is the use of the transit system. In the lore of the game, people move about the city by tram cars that hang on rails that cover many of the areas of it. In the game, the player (and some NPC's) uses a hook-type apparatus to traverse the rails alone, hanging from them and able to change speed and direction at will. With this type of transportation implement in place (that doubles as a melee weapon), there are of course air assassinations which are superb if you ask me. There aren't many things more awesome that riding what is essentially a zip line, jumping off onto a building and punching a guy 50 feet away. The last thing I'll touch on is the control scheme. The controls for this game (I played it on Xbox 360 so the controls will reflect that) are a little bit strange to be perfectly honest, yet still streamlined with the standard right trigger to shoot and left trigger to use vigors being among the only really common controls. The A button remains as "jump" as it has in many-a-game as well. In the traditional Halo style, the right thumb stick (click) is mapped to zoom by default, with the left stick (click) set to sprint, and the left and right bumpers are set to switching vigors and weapons respectively. As for the rest of the lettered buttons, X is set to the general "use" or "pick up" function, the B button to changing rail directions, and Y to the melee attack. The start button still pauses the game.

There isn't much more I can say about the game that doesn't involve story elements and therefore spoilers so I'm bringing this version of the review to a close. I'm hoping to do my reviews like this from now on, probably for games and movies alike: technical, non-spoiler version, followed by the story focused spoiler edition.

Anyway, until next time lads (and lassies).