There are new gaming consoles on the horizon, perhaps even as early as next year (given that Infinity Ward [revision 2] is developing the next-gen title, keeping in mind the annual release schedule for this heavily milked series), and one of the debates about which will come out on top is on the controller.
One of the biggest game genres these days, unfortunately, is the first-person shooter. You know what I mean; Halo, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Resistance, Half-Life, Doom, etc., are all FPS names that we can all recognize. The consoles were not remiss in their supply of this genre, but they were very much in contention with one another as to the question, "which console is better for shooting games?" The Xbox 360 generally comes out on top for this question.
As a Playstation 3 owner myself, who also owns an Xbox 360 Controller S for Windows (Wired), I feel like levying some accolades (represented as a "+") & complaints (preceded with a "-") towards both. A note to anyone reading this post: I am FAR more used to the PS3 controller than with the latter, which I hardly ever use on my PC, so I'm speaking out of bias in some places.
Let's start with the Sony side:
+ Lightweight controller helps to prevent my hands from getting sore.
+ The D-Pad is precise and feels better to use.
+ The Start/Select buttons are easy and quick to access, without being too small, either.
+ No button jamming of any kind has ever occurred.
+ Good R1/L1 buttons, little resistance when actually pressing means less effort on the hand muscles (which get sore quite easily).
+ I can wrap my hands around the controller a bit more easily than the other controller, so this helps for comfort.
+ USB 2.0 interface allows for far more flexible cord options.
+ Six-Axis is innovative, and when used right, feels neat...
- DREADFUL R2/L2 buttons. You have to push too much in order to press them, they're clunky, and don't work for the few shooters that, idiotically, relied on them for the main command most players will use them for; shooting/throwing grenades. Unfortunately enough, they're hardly any good for any other game genre, either.
- Analog sticks are too loose.
- Analog sticks have little grip, even with the rigid texture.
- Battery is built-in, so if your controller's battery ever fails to the point of no return, you have to buy a new controller outright. Bad move for the consumer, Sony.
- Getting more controllers on your system is a hassle, as it requires going through the XMB dashboard to assign a controller to a slot. Plus, only two controllers can be plugged in at any one time on most models of the system.
- You have to tilt the controller slightly to see what port your controller is assigned to.
- ...Six-Axis is also a gimmick more than it is a useful feature.
Now with the Mickeysoft side:
+ Feels more solid.
+ Much more grip with the analog sticks.
+ Analog sticks aren't loose, so they feel right. Plus, they seem to have more of an angle of movement.
+ The controller assignment process is crazy easy, and efficient. You just plug in your wired or wireless controller to the numbered ports, press the Xbox 360 button on your controller, and the system finds the controller in a breeze (lights up a number on the face of your controller, too).
+ Excellent shoulder buttons that feel like they're made for shooters.
+ Battery packs on Wireless controllers can be replaced and managed by the user if need be.
- A bit on the heavy side. My hand gets sore far more easily and far sooner.
- D-Pad is awful on the original 360 controller. It's too imprecise, and many a time I've, by accident, done something I didn't want to do in the heat of a moment in a game (Resident Evil 5 comes to mind. It makes all the difference when you want to quick-select a hand-cannon to stop an instant killing monster in its tracks).
- The shoulder buttons are good for shooters, but hardly good for any other genre which doesn't really need them.
- Too much resistance on the bumper buttons, and they don't feel right at all.
- TINY start & select buttons, and they're too far from your thumbs 99% of the time.
- From experience, buttons jammed far too often for my liking. I hardly ever use my 360 Controller S for Windows and some of my buttons are jammed right now.
- Can't wrap my hands around the controller because it's too big, and unshapely. This helps for comfort, people!
- When accessories are plugged in, they can get in the way.
+/- No controller feature that is comparable to the Six-Axis of the PS3 controller. But this is neither a plus or a negative.
Take it or leave it. That's my rundown of the pros & cons of either controller. This is not about the systems themselves, as that would take a whole day to cover, so I won't bother going into it.
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Thursday, May 31, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
Fury - Final Chapter Listing
It's been revised once again, but I'm sticking with this. By the way, I haven't made any progress for quite some time, but since I have too much free time on my hands these days, I think I'll get back into the project.
So here are the chapters for one last time:
So here are the chapters for one last time:
1) The Pride and Joy
2) The Unfazed Guardian
3) The Deathly Scream
4) The Trail of Blood
5) The War Cry
6) The Embodiment
7) The Demon’s Card
8) The Pace of Vengeance
9) The Snarling Wolf
10) The Wicked Roots Wither
11) The Sorrow it Wrought
12) The Cry for Help
13) The Sworn Oath
14) The Act of Vengeance
15) The Setting of Justice
16) The Fading Flame
17) The Impassible Slope
18) The Well is Poisoned
19) The Wolf's Anguished Howl
20) The Would Be
Thursday, May 17, 2012
M.Night Shyamalan's "Signs" Review
It could have been a good alien flick, but numerous plot elements, the blase performances, stupid & uncreative aliens, and a terrible twist all bring it down.
M. Night Shyamalan did relatively good on The Sixth Sense, but in spite of a few more arguably decent films after that, this film seemingly began his downfall. His camera-work is undeniably of high quality, but there's nothing else really that was all that redeeming about this flick. The Sixth Sense did so well because of the twist and the original idea about a kid who sees and interacts with spirits, which no one could say was underwhelming. In this film, the twist basically ends up being a big non-coincidence, a test from God to test Mr. Hess' faith. That's stupid, fuck you Shyamalan.
One of the plot elements is that crop circles are forming on a family farm. No one likes that because crops are destroyed when those are made, so the family from that farm gets bothered by that. The family in question, the Hess family, was broken by the loss of their matriarch in a horrific car accident, as shown in the film opener. They are being terrorized, I guess, by the makers of those crop circles; aliens. As the film continues, it becomes apparent that there's more aliens around, many more. In fact, there's a world-wide invasion imminent where so many people will die. Whoop-de-doo, because everyone is seemingly detached from what, you'd think, would be a dark and uncertain time. I'd be busy getting prepared, armed, and whatever else for such an attack, incensed and scared along the way. But these people are bored, borderline-cynical at all times, depressing, and rather uninteresting. Plus, there's no chemistry to be had with ANYBODY.
Another plot element is that there are some character traits that turn out to be integral to the family's well-being in the end, for some stupid reason. Towards the end, the patriarch of the family reminisces about what his wife said in her last moments; "tell Meryl, swing away!" You're an idiot, Shyamalan. Was this a premonition, let alone a prediction on her part? If so, why didn't she just say, "aliens are going to invade the planet and attack you as well, get ready for that!" The little girl is obsessive-compulsive with drinking water and by the end of the movie there's dozens upon dozens of nigh-full glasses of water peppering the entire house. Though it would've killed most of the movie's stupid points to have her sent to a psychiatrist for such behavior, I guess the writers of the movie stuck with it. And the Caulkin kid has asthma and it manages to be the only sensible 'coincidence' in the plot.
The aliens are amongst the most disappointing in film history. Sure, you could call the 50's sci-fi flick aliens dreadful in comparison, but those were lighthearted efforts in film-making; this Shyamalan idiot took the project seriously, though. The aliens to be found here amount to big green men with somewhat rugged features, naked as the day they were born, somehow being such a grave threat to humanity. Oh, and it's revealed that although they wish to attack humanity en masse, they don't want to use any of their weaponry against us because they somehow know of our nukes and think we'll resort to using them on their plentiful supply of flying saucers. We first get a good glance at one of them in a scene-in-a-movie where one of them walks across a pathway into the bushes, with amateur child actors screaming and insanely ranting in Spanish or Portuguese or who cares. That scene apparently took place in a rainforest. Keep note of this observation because it plays a fucking stupid role in their fucking stupid design later. Or maybe you can put on a tinfoil hat like little Caulkin does in one scene (as well as Phoenix & whoever the little girl is) and forget it.
Said aliens are also terrorizing the Hess family, as has been established already. Though it does takes a while for them to actually realize this (Mr. Hess figures it out last, must've been praying too hard to care). They can leap at least a dozen feet into the air onto the roof of their house and stuff, Olympians can apparently do the same thing too as one minor character states, and play cat & mouse games with them, scaring everybody and click-talking to each other while being snooped on by our protagonists with...baby monitors. Nothing else seems to detect their communications but these devices with focused radio frequencies (this was discovered by these passive-aggressive kids filling roles of protagonists of all people). Further, no one else on Earth seems to have mastered eavesdropping on these aliens speaking to each other like these kids do, not even the military full of highly trained adults, who you'd think would have achieved even better results. Well, moving on, the patriarch later kind of runs into one of them one-on-one, behind a closed door. Earlier, he stupidly went on journey through his corn-field trying to get a drop on just who or what is tinkering with his food supply, without ANY defenses whatsoever, and ends up running away scared. Shyamalan made a cameo in this film, and his boring character locked one behind said door as it tried to kill him. It doesn't make much sense but who cares, right? Anyway, Hess ends up casually going into Shyamalan's messy house and goes to that door (which leads to a pantry), kneels down, tries to get a glimpse of it, but the alien unsurprisingly lashes a clawed hand out at him from under the door. In panic, and since he was brandishing a knife of all things to try and get some sight of the thing, he cuts off the fingers of the alien. Why it doesn't just break down that damn door is beyond all sense since it can otherwise leap fairly high into the air, but whatever, it screamed in pain and he went back home so this scene can finish justly.
Just before that scene, though, was described the aliens' Achilles Heel, their kryptonite. Well, is it fire? Is it very high sound frequencies? Is it light? Cold? A pop singer's non-auto-tuned singing voice? A mother's constant nagging? No, it's none of those sensibly fatal things. It's only one of the most abundant compounds within the biosphere of our planet that's what; WATER. Yes, water hurts them, burns at their skin and is poisonous and the whole she-bang. They apparently "try to avoid places near water" as an uncharismatic Shyamalan tells us, although basic logic paints virtually every location in the biosphere as being QUITE NEAR water, so why the aliens would even try to invade the world butt-fucking-naked is beyond understanding. Did Shyamalan and the other buffoons writing this just throw out all notion of basic chemistry with this shit? Or did they think there's a significant difference between the water that is in vapor form (think humidity) and water that is in liquid form? There is none. All of the elements are there! WHY DOES A COMBINATION OF ELEMENTS IN LIQUID FORM HURT THEM WHEN THE SAME COMBINATION OF ELEMENTS IN GASEOUS FORM DOESN'T? This should have kept these retards in green skin from even going near the rainforest areas of South America and the Northwest Pacific region of North America (amongst many other high-humidity regions across this water planet), but for the sake of this stupid, half-assed alien invasion movie intended as a subtle conversion method to continue so that we can have a climax at all, they were able to survive just fine with the high humidity of such regions, even brushing up against plants that collect water in liquid form. Shyamalan and anybody else responsible for this plot element must've been high at best, one-hundred percent ignorant at worst, but regardless either-way ended up insulting the audience with such trifling attempts at portraying an enemy's weakness.
A little earlier in the film, the whole thing about there "being no coincidences" is shoved RIGHT IN YOUR FACE, and Gibson is the weapon for this task. Allusions are made about the incident displayed at the beginning of this stinker film where, you know, maybe Mrs. Hess was hinting at something while dying and all that because God wills it of course! So is Shyamalan trying to push his beliefs onto his audience with this tripe? Or is it a clever plot piece that will dazzle us in the end? Are the aliens in fact demons from hell and his immediate family angels from heaven? Is this one person's struggle to maintain his faith in god the only important thing to him rather than trying to help save the world, and should the viewers care? Should I just stop talking about this plot element that makes this film a deceptive & pretentious moral lesson in film form and because it is completely unimportant for entertainment and escapism value? Okay, I will do that then.
The invasion begins on the family a while after he gets home. Before that, they have a nice meal where they pray and everyone starts crying, on depression overdrive since throughout the film's entirety everyone is depressed (except for the little girl of course), and Hess Sr. tries to get everyone to stop crying and they all embrace in the end. Aw, so touching! Anyway, with the only real smart decision they've ever made at this point in the film, they figure that maybe they should huddle inside of the house, keeping the aliens out with barricades built over windows & doors as best as possible. When the aliens start trying to make their way inside to kill everybody with their naked selves without any laser cannons or whatever, Mr. Hess realizes he forgot to board up the attic and all that. Nice going, Slim! You pretty much doomed your family even though because this is a movie you're predictably going to live anyway so this doesn't matter at all! Anyway, they figure they have little time to get to the last safe part of the house before getting killed, so they descend to the basement. There's no barricade to be made so they use an axe. Yeah, that's right, a mere axe does the trick against aliens that may or may not be strong enough to bust down the old looking door (that's definitely not oak). That and they shove their body-weight up to the door to hopefully keep the stupid green things outside from getting in to kill these stupid humans we're supposed to care about. No one thinks that perhaps there's nothing wrong with using that axe to defend themselves, but then this movie would approach cliche territory wouldn't it? In spite of their efforts, those idiotic, naked green aliens manage to partially get in anyway, through a fireplace conveniently built inside of this pitch dark and dirty basement. But it doesn't matter since the aliens seem to give up trying that way, in spite of being able to grope the Caulkin kid and make them knock out their only light source in a panic. Fuck alternative measures to kill stupid humans! Well, eventually this meager attempt at an intense action scene (coupled with the boy having an asthma attack to keep the audience interested with emotional appeal) fades out, the aliens have clearly given up despite having traveled billions of light-years for this shit, and daylight breaks. The aliens are nowhere to be found so they go outside confident that there's no more threat, and then that confidence is soon broken by just one lone alien holding lil' Caulkin. It's the same one who Mr. Hess butchered earlier in the film. Payback time!
The little girl's obsessive-compulsive habits of leaving nearly-full glasses of water EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE allow Meryl's propensity to "swing away" (remember, Shyamalan is trying to tell you that NONE OF THIS IS A COINCIDENCE and that this is scary shit), showing the possibly dumbfounded audience that these aliens are dangerously sensitive to fucking water, of all things, and it won't fight back against this bored Joaquin Phoenix, either. It just snarls at him and takes each long-delayed swing of Meryl's wooden bat like a retarded oaf, a completely naked bondage-loving masochist. Even when he's clearly going to swing away like the dying woman at the beginning movie said he would, twirling his bat like a giddy minor league kid would, the alien at most strafes around doing nothing otherwise. And when it finally dies, breathing its last stupid breaths since it and its race felt that using weaponry against humans would make us stupidly use nuclear weapons against them (the Caulkin kid somehow knew this bit of detail just by watching the news all the time and killed any hope of the film making sense later on) making their efforts somehow made useless after such a result, but no one gives a shit. It fucking dies and the Caulkin kid is asleep pretending to be unconscious.
The alien managed to poison the kid with some kind of gas (which it didn't use at all in any previous frame of this turd, could have been useful for them) before this stupid scene, but the poison doesn't actually work because he conveniently got hit by an asthma attack that very moment, so his lungs were closed, effectively saying "fuck you" to any reason for the audience to care. While there was no struggle on his part to get some air like a (depressed) fish out of water, he's stone-cold knocked out and completely motionless and of course no one wants a little boy to die in a movie in this sensitive culture of ours, especially a relative to Macaulay Caulkin! So Mr. Hess holds him in his arms desperate for reprieve and he eventually wakes up just in time. It's a miracle! He doesn't die, relief washes over Gibson's melodramatic face, and lil' Caulkin asks what happened and bla-bla-bla, and the girl named Bo goes to get another drink and waste the town's supply of fresh water like a typical brat would. People are crying at this point like Gibson always does and we're left to wonder, "anything else?" The film fades out for a second, comes back, and it's winter-time, snow all 'round. Gibson's character is donning preacher garb again since he regained his faith in god for some reason and that's all folks, so much for signs popping up, there were no coincidences as you were forced to hear, and maybe he'll marry again and maybe we don't care.
That twist wasn't even invigorating and no one could conceivably give a shit about anybody in the film. It's a popcorn flick and that's where the film's quality ends. The music was one of the only redeemable qualities of the film, while the content we're supposed to care about was bland and uninspired. It's like only the technicalities of the film (audio & visual) were the good parts, while the ideas conceived by the kindergarten-level idiots (water hurts aliens, my god) writing this shit were severe misses. That's definitely NOT the result a filmmaker should shoot for, but it was done this way regardless. Shyamalan's camera skills couldn't even make up for everything wrong with this movie, which is nearly everything we're supposed to be entertained by. And I'm not scared or thrilled by aliens stupid enough to attack a water-abundant planet in spite of their deadly weakness to said compound, naked and without any body protection, never using anything remotely resembling weaponry, since you know, they can achieve interstellar travel and complete cloaking of their flying saucers. They're the most incompetent space-traveling warmongers ever conceived.
And the crop circles seen in the film were unimaginative. People are still making crop circles in the real world and they look absolutely insane and creative in comparison. Fuck Shyamalan, his most recent boring efforts only prove that he's a one-hit-wonder.
M. Night Shyamalan did relatively good on The Sixth Sense, but in spite of a few more arguably decent films after that, this film seemingly began his downfall. His camera-work is undeniably of high quality, but there's nothing else really that was all that redeeming about this flick. The Sixth Sense did so well because of the twist and the original idea about a kid who sees and interacts with spirits, which no one could say was underwhelming. In this film, the twist basically ends up being a big non-coincidence, a test from God to test Mr. Hess' faith. That's stupid, fuck you Shyamalan.
One of the plot elements is that crop circles are forming on a family farm. No one likes that because crops are destroyed when those are made, so the family from that farm gets bothered by that. The family in question, the Hess family, was broken by the loss of their matriarch in a horrific car accident, as shown in the film opener. They are being terrorized, I guess, by the makers of those crop circles; aliens. As the film continues, it becomes apparent that there's more aliens around, many more. In fact, there's a world-wide invasion imminent where so many people will die. Whoop-de-doo, because everyone is seemingly detached from what, you'd think, would be a dark and uncertain time. I'd be busy getting prepared, armed, and whatever else for such an attack, incensed and scared along the way. But these people are bored, borderline-cynical at all times, depressing, and rather uninteresting. Plus, there's no chemistry to be had with ANYBODY.
Another plot element is that there are some character traits that turn out to be integral to the family's well-being in the end, for some stupid reason. Towards the end, the patriarch of the family reminisces about what his wife said in her last moments; "tell Meryl, swing away!" You're an idiot, Shyamalan. Was this a premonition, let alone a prediction on her part? If so, why didn't she just say, "aliens are going to invade the planet and attack you as well, get ready for that!" The little girl is obsessive-compulsive with drinking water and by the end of the movie there's dozens upon dozens of nigh-full glasses of water peppering the entire house. Though it would've killed most of the movie's stupid points to have her sent to a psychiatrist for such behavior, I guess the writers of the movie stuck with it. And the Caulkin kid has asthma and it manages to be the only sensible 'coincidence' in the plot.
The aliens are amongst the most disappointing in film history. Sure, you could call the 50's sci-fi flick aliens dreadful in comparison, but those were lighthearted efforts in film-making; this Shyamalan idiot took the project seriously, though. The aliens to be found here amount to big green men with somewhat rugged features, naked as the day they were born, somehow being such a grave threat to humanity. Oh, and it's revealed that although they wish to attack humanity en masse, they don't want to use any of their weaponry against us because they somehow know of our nukes and think we'll resort to using them on their plentiful supply of flying saucers. We first get a good glance at one of them in a scene-in-a-movie where one of them walks across a pathway into the bushes, with amateur child actors screaming and insanely ranting in Spanish or Portuguese or who cares. That scene apparently took place in a rainforest. Keep note of this observation because it plays a fucking stupid role in their fucking stupid design later. Or maybe you can put on a tinfoil hat like little Caulkin does in one scene (as well as Phoenix & whoever the little girl is) and forget it.
Said aliens are also terrorizing the Hess family, as has been established already. Though it does takes a while for them to actually realize this (Mr. Hess figures it out last, must've been praying too hard to care). They can leap at least a dozen feet into the air onto the roof of their house and stuff, Olympians can apparently do the same thing too as one minor character states, and play cat & mouse games with them, scaring everybody and click-talking to each other while being snooped on by our protagonists with...baby monitors. Nothing else seems to detect their communications but these devices with focused radio frequencies (this was discovered by these passive-aggressive kids filling roles of protagonists of all people). Further, no one else on Earth seems to have mastered eavesdropping on these aliens speaking to each other like these kids do, not even the military full of highly trained adults, who you'd think would have achieved even better results. Well, moving on, the patriarch later kind of runs into one of them one-on-one, behind a closed door. Earlier, he stupidly went on journey through his corn-field trying to get a drop on just who or what is tinkering with his food supply, without ANY defenses whatsoever, and ends up running away scared. Shyamalan made a cameo in this film, and his boring character locked one behind said door as it tried to kill him. It doesn't make much sense but who cares, right? Anyway, Hess ends up casually going into Shyamalan's messy house and goes to that door (which leads to a pantry), kneels down, tries to get a glimpse of it, but the alien unsurprisingly lashes a clawed hand out at him from under the door. In panic, and since he was brandishing a knife of all things to try and get some sight of the thing, he cuts off the fingers of the alien. Why it doesn't just break down that damn door is beyond all sense since it can otherwise leap fairly high into the air, but whatever, it screamed in pain and he went back home so this scene can finish justly.
Just before that scene, though, was described the aliens' Achilles Heel, their kryptonite. Well, is it fire? Is it very high sound frequencies? Is it light? Cold? A pop singer's non-auto-tuned singing voice? A mother's constant nagging? No, it's none of those sensibly fatal things. It's only one of the most abundant compounds within the biosphere of our planet that's what; WATER. Yes, water hurts them, burns at their skin and is poisonous and the whole she-bang. They apparently "try to avoid places near water" as an uncharismatic Shyamalan tells us, although basic logic paints virtually every location in the biosphere as being QUITE NEAR water, so why the aliens would even try to invade the world butt-fucking-naked is beyond understanding. Did Shyamalan and the other buffoons writing this just throw out all notion of basic chemistry with this shit? Or did they think there's a significant difference between the water that is in vapor form (think humidity) and water that is in liquid form? There is none. All of the elements are there! WHY DOES A COMBINATION OF ELEMENTS IN LIQUID FORM HURT THEM WHEN THE SAME COMBINATION OF ELEMENTS IN GASEOUS FORM DOESN'T? This should have kept these retards in green skin from even going near the rainforest areas of South America and the Northwest Pacific region of North America (amongst many other high-humidity regions across this water planet), but for the sake of this stupid, half-assed alien invasion movie intended as a subtle conversion method to continue so that we can have a climax at all, they were able to survive just fine with the high humidity of such regions, even brushing up against plants that collect water in liquid form. Shyamalan and anybody else responsible for this plot element must've been high at best, one-hundred percent ignorant at worst, but regardless either-way ended up insulting the audience with such trifling attempts at portraying an enemy's weakness.
A little earlier in the film, the whole thing about there "being no coincidences" is shoved RIGHT IN YOUR FACE, and Gibson is the weapon for this task. Allusions are made about the incident displayed at the beginning of this stinker film where, you know, maybe Mrs. Hess was hinting at something while dying and all that because God wills it of course! So is Shyamalan trying to push his beliefs onto his audience with this tripe? Or is it a clever plot piece that will dazzle us in the end? Are the aliens in fact demons from hell and his immediate family angels from heaven? Is this one person's struggle to maintain his faith in god the only important thing to him rather than trying to help save the world, and should the viewers care? Should I just stop talking about this plot element that makes this film a deceptive & pretentious moral lesson in film form and because it is completely unimportant for entertainment and escapism value? Okay, I will do that then.
The invasion begins on the family a while after he gets home. Before that, they have a nice meal where they pray and everyone starts crying, on depression overdrive since throughout the film's entirety everyone is depressed (except for the little girl of course), and Hess Sr. tries to get everyone to stop crying and they all embrace in the end. Aw, so touching! Anyway, with the only real smart decision they've ever made at this point in the film, they figure that maybe they should huddle inside of the house, keeping the aliens out with barricades built over windows & doors as best as possible. When the aliens start trying to make their way inside to kill everybody with their naked selves without any laser cannons or whatever, Mr. Hess realizes he forgot to board up the attic and all that. Nice going, Slim! You pretty much doomed your family even though because this is a movie you're predictably going to live anyway so this doesn't matter at all! Anyway, they figure they have little time to get to the last safe part of the house before getting killed, so they descend to the basement. There's no barricade to be made so they use an axe. Yeah, that's right, a mere axe does the trick against aliens that may or may not be strong enough to bust down the old looking door (that's definitely not oak). That and they shove their body-weight up to the door to hopefully keep the stupid green things outside from getting in to kill these stupid humans we're supposed to care about. No one thinks that perhaps there's nothing wrong with using that axe to defend themselves, but then this movie would approach cliche territory wouldn't it? In spite of their efforts, those idiotic, naked green aliens manage to partially get in anyway, through a fireplace conveniently built inside of this pitch dark and dirty basement. But it doesn't matter since the aliens seem to give up trying that way, in spite of being able to grope the Caulkin kid and make them knock out their only light source in a panic. Fuck alternative measures to kill stupid humans! Well, eventually this meager attempt at an intense action scene (coupled with the boy having an asthma attack to keep the audience interested with emotional appeal) fades out, the aliens have clearly given up despite having traveled billions of light-years for this shit, and daylight breaks. The aliens are nowhere to be found so they go outside confident that there's no more threat, and then that confidence is soon broken by just one lone alien holding lil' Caulkin. It's the same one who Mr. Hess butchered earlier in the film. Payback time!
The little girl's obsessive-compulsive habits of leaving nearly-full glasses of water EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE allow Meryl's propensity to "swing away" (remember, Shyamalan is trying to tell you that NONE OF THIS IS A COINCIDENCE and that this is scary shit), showing the possibly dumbfounded audience that these aliens are dangerously sensitive to fucking water, of all things, and it won't fight back against this bored Joaquin Phoenix, either. It just snarls at him and takes each long-delayed swing of Meryl's wooden bat like a retarded oaf, a completely naked bondage-loving masochist. Even when he's clearly going to swing away like the dying woman at the beginning movie said he would, twirling his bat like a giddy minor league kid would, the alien at most strafes around doing nothing otherwise. And when it finally dies, breathing its last stupid breaths since it and its race felt that using weaponry against humans would make us stupidly use nuclear weapons against them (the Caulkin kid somehow knew this bit of detail just by watching the news all the time and killed any hope of the film making sense later on) making their efforts somehow made useless after such a result, but no one gives a shit. It fucking dies and the Caulkin kid is asleep pretending to be unconscious.
The alien managed to poison the kid with some kind of gas (which it didn't use at all in any previous frame of this turd, could have been useful for them) before this stupid scene, but the poison doesn't actually work because he conveniently got hit by an asthma attack that very moment, so his lungs were closed, effectively saying "fuck you" to any reason for the audience to care. While there was no struggle on his part to get some air like a (depressed) fish out of water, he's stone-cold knocked out and completely motionless and of course no one wants a little boy to die in a movie in this sensitive culture of ours, especially a relative to Macaulay Caulkin! So Mr. Hess holds him in his arms desperate for reprieve and he eventually wakes up just in time. It's a miracle! He doesn't die, relief washes over Gibson's melodramatic face, and lil' Caulkin asks what happened and bla-bla-bla, and the girl named Bo goes to get another drink and waste the town's supply of fresh water like a typical brat would. People are crying at this point like Gibson always does and we're left to wonder, "anything else?" The film fades out for a second, comes back, and it's winter-time, snow all 'round. Gibson's character is donning preacher garb again since he regained his faith in god for some reason and that's all folks, so much for signs popping up, there were no coincidences as you were forced to hear, and maybe he'll marry again and maybe we don't care.
That twist wasn't even invigorating and no one could conceivably give a shit about anybody in the film. It's a popcorn flick and that's where the film's quality ends. The music was one of the only redeemable qualities of the film, while the content we're supposed to care about was bland and uninspired. It's like only the technicalities of the film (audio & visual) were the good parts, while the ideas conceived by the kindergarten-level idiots (water hurts aliens, my god) writing this shit were severe misses. That's definitely NOT the result a filmmaker should shoot for, but it was done this way regardless. Shyamalan's camera skills couldn't even make up for everything wrong with this movie, which is nearly everything we're supposed to be entertained by. And I'm not scared or thrilled by aliens stupid enough to attack a water-abundant planet in spite of their deadly weakness to said compound, naked and without any body protection, never using anything remotely resembling weaponry, since you know, they can achieve interstellar travel and complete cloaking of their flying saucers. They're the most incompetent space-traveling warmongers ever conceived.
And the crop circles seen in the film were unimaginative. People are still making crop circles in the real world and they look absolutely insane and creative in comparison. Fuck Shyamalan, his most recent boring efforts only prove that he's a one-hit-wonder.
D
+ Has a good thriller soundtrack.
+ Good camerawork and high quality picture.
+ Mel Gibson does a fairly good job as usual.
- Retarded aliens, stupid design of said aliens, and the worst idea for an Achilles Heel ever.
- Boring
- Plot idea of "everything is a coincidence" is outdated and poorly executed in this film.
- Everyone is depressing, bordering monotonous, and low-key. We don't care for anybody, really.
- Overly generic crop circle designs. Look at the many photos of REAL crop circles and laugh at what this film presented.
- Not scary whatsoever.
- Cookie-cutter intro text.
- The wife should have said something useful instead of saying that one of the boring characters should "swing away."
Monday, February 13, 2012
Deepest Reaches/Dressed in Crimson
Where will the prayer reach when I seek its solace?
I've done the worst of deeds again today
When will the beak that utters an answer with wings
Break the pattern of my voracious stupor?
I'll just wish for a chance to stop
Her essence flows from my hands
I'll just call out my anguish to a non-audience
Her essence peppers the ground
And ye' I know, I took her life this day
Me in my power, and her awash in frailty (an angel if she were)
The visions cleared and ye', dressed were my hands in crimson
Any other way could I choose, I'd clothe them in ash
Where will the prayer I shout finally make way?
I've taken an irreplaceable spark so undeserving
When will the blind cycle of crimson thirst break?
I'm the harbinger of the reaper's soulless aim
Her form lies pale & motionless and I tear
My upward glance is my desperate heart's first chance
I'm reaching out to kill the killing switch
Her essence still peppers the ground
Ye' the mirror breaks as I stare at it red-eyed
Those tears have dried as the splotches on her dress
I still feel her words and I still bask in their meanings
And I stand here aside and urge with outreached red-dressed hands
Where will the prayer I utter ring a willing ear?
I've snuffed out a flame to her bright-burning light
When will I be put on the pedestal of karma?
I cannot forgive my deepest reaches no more
I've done the worst of deeds again today
When will the beak that utters an answer with wings
Break the pattern of my voracious stupor?
I'll just wish for a chance to stop
Her essence flows from my hands
I'll just call out my anguish to a non-audience
Her essence peppers the ground
And ye' I know, I took her life this day
Me in my power, and her awash in frailty (an angel if she were)
The visions cleared and ye', dressed were my hands in crimson
Any other way could I choose, I'd clothe them in ash
Where will the prayer I shout finally make way?
I've taken an irreplaceable spark so undeserving
When will the blind cycle of crimson thirst break?
I'm the harbinger of the reaper's soulless aim
Her form lies pale & motionless and I tear
My upward glance is my desperate heart's first chance
I'm reaching out to kill the killing switch
Her essence still peppers the ground
Ye' the mirror breaks as I stare at it red-eyed
Those tears have dried as the splotches on her dress
I still feel her words and I still bask in their meanings
And I stand here aside and urge with outreached red-dressed hands
Where will the prayer I utter ring a willing ear?
I've snuffed out a flame to her bright-burning light
When will I be put on the pedestal of karma?
I cannot forgive my deepest reaches no more
Monday, January 2, 2012
The Foundation of Fury
Fury
(placeholder text)
“I would see the world purged of life if it meant my daughter’s safety.”
Do not bring pain to those whom a man holds closest to his heart; for you will know the wrath of a world in him if you do.
1) The Pride and Joy
2) The Broken Lock
3) The Deathly Scream
4) The Trail of Blood
5) The War Cry
6) The Embodiment**
7) The Demon’s Card*
8) The Pace of Vengeance
9) The Snarling Wolf**
10) The Wicked Roots Wither
11) The Sorrow it Wrought***
12) The Cry for Help
13) The Sworn Oath
14) The Act of Vengeance
15) The Heel of a Titan
16) The Fading Flame
17) The Slowdown
18) The Long Walk Home
19) The Grateful
20) The Would Be****
The protagonist is so far unnamed.
The antagonist, or antagonists rather, are named: Alistair, Hector, and Gillean. They are all blood-brothers. Alistair is the oldest, and is the schemer, the leader of the brothers. Hector is the middle-brother, he tends to get most of the action done, and fears little. Lastly, Gillean is the youngest and most mentally unhinged, easily manipulated into doing even the most heinous things by his elder brothers. They are all bloodthirsty, crafty, dangerous brothers. And yes, they are Scottish. Now you have another reason to want them all dead!
Kidding...of course.
But they will know pain, for they have crossed the protagonist in the worst way imaginable.
* Newly added. Desired chapter will involve a dog, bred to kill, being used to impede or even destroy the protagonist.
** Swapped with 'The Embodiment' because of pacing and story-placement issues.
*** Newly added. After a new development in his quest to rescue his daughter single-handedly, he begins to despair at his more extreme actions.
**** Newly added. This will be the true ending, an unconventional one at that.
(placeholder text)
“I would see the world purged of life if it meant my daughter’s safety.”
Do not bring pain to those whom a man holds closest to his heart; for you will know the wrath of a world in him if you do.
1) The Pride and Joy
2) The Broken Lock
3) The Deathly Scream
4) The Trail of Blood
5) The War Cry
6) The Embodiment**
7) The Demon’s Card*
8) The Pace of Vengeance
9) The Snarling Wolf**
10) The Wicked Roots Wither
11) The Sorrow it Wrought***
12) The Cry for Help
13) The Sworn Oath
14) The Act of Vengeance
15) The Heel of a Titan
16) The Fading Flame
17) The Slowdown
18) The Long Walk Home
19) The Grateful
20) The Would Be****
The protagonist is so far unnamed.
The antagonist, or antagonists rather, are named: Alistair, Hector, and Gillean. They are all blood-brothers. Alistair is the oldest, and is the schemer, the leader of the brothers. Hector is the middle-brother, he tends to get most of the action done, and fears little. Lastly, Gillean is the youngest and most mentally unhinged, easily manipulated into doing even the most heinous things by his elder brothers. They are all bloodthirsty, crafty, dangerous brothers. And yes, they are Scottish. Now you have another reason to want them all dead!
Kidding...of course.
But they will know pain, for they have crossed the protagonist in the worst way imaginable.
* Newly added. Desired chapter will involve a dog, bred to kill, being used to impede or even destroy the protagonist.
** Swapped with 'The Embodiment' because of pacing and story-placement issues.
*** Newly added. After a new development in his quest to rescue his daughter single-handedly, he begins to despair at his more extreme actions.
**** Newly added. This will be the true ending, an unconventional one at that.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Holiday or two, and long-needed progress on 'Fury'
Happy Holidays, readers (no matter the quantity).
2012 looms, and brings with it an unusually mild winter with surprisingly high temperatures. A turkey feast with a bi-annual meet & greet with some of my family members were par the course for Xmas. The new year is just a couple days away and new classes will become palpable on the ninth of the first month.
I've also made some necessary progress on my current project. It's not a whole lot, but it's a good way to get the ball rolling again. The progress I made includes editing a notably vague few sentences, adding of a chapter to the chapter list (since I felt it didn't describe a desired story element), and completing a subsequent chapter to what I left off.
So with that, I'm signing off. Just hope nobody, for their sake, gets hurt in the celebration of another year's passing.
2012 looms, and brings with it an unusually mild winter with surprisingly high temperatures. A turkey feast with a bi-annual meet & greet with some of my family members were par the course for Xmas. The new year is just a couple days away and new classes will become palpable on the ninth of the first month.
I've also made some necessary progress on my current project. It's not a whole lot, but it's a good way to get the ball rolling again. The progress I made includes editing a notably vague few sentences, adding of a chapter to the chapter list (since I felt it didn't describe a desired story element), and completing a subsequent chapter to what I left off.
So with that, I'm signing off. Just hope nobody, for their sake, gets hurt in the celebration of another year's passing.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
FURY, a new story project WITH SNEAK PEEK
Here's what I've been able to produce tonight. It's coming along nicely so far, with no visible errors to be seen (big bonus!). It's a new project I just began. It's a revenge story, and you'll get an idea of what kind of vengeance the main character seeks in this sneak-peek.
The Pride and Joy
Vivien is nine years old, has been for three weeks. Every day is a new one, and I’m always happy that she is there each time. She’s my pride and joy, and I’ll take any bullet or fang that threatens her well-being without hesitation.
What I like to do each birthday is to excite her with something totally new. I still remember her third birthday, where I bit the dust, in terms of finances, and managed to get her four hours of time at a horse ranch outside of town. It was all the worthwhile and it’s been a tradition that I have stood by since then. She’s been called spoiled and I guess there’s some merit to that, but it’s just a token of my appreciation.
That was six years ago, and things have changed only a little. With that in mind, I realized that rather than having the total innocence of a toddler, Vivien has the rambunctiousness of an almost-adolescent, curious and sometimes reckless. But I think my smarts were passed onto her, because she’s proven to be resourceful and thoughtful. The worst she’s experienced in her life has been just a stray nail, which didn’t amount to anything. She knows no true pain, and while it would prepare her for the reality of life to experience such, I won’t force anything on my girl. It’s always better to let your child experience such shaping things on their own, after all.
I was in a fantastic mood yesterday after dinner, and I announced to Clarissa and Vivien, with Vivien bearing the smile I’ve come to know and love, that deserts were in order. We had decadent chocolate sundaes at the finest restaurant in town, each and every one of us. When I tucked her into bed last night, just a few hours later, I heard her call to me as I was just walking out her room, door barely closed.
She felt nervous about something, but she couldn’t describe the reason for it. But I didn’t have to hear her say anything to know why she was nervous; her body was shaking. I know the language of the body fairly well, and her shaking spelled to me that she was in fear. I do know that she’s not afraid of the dark; she’s been past that phase since she was almost eight. So in response to her inability to verify the source of her fears, I reassured her that she would be alright.
That did the trick. She started closing her eyes right away, and to keep assurance still, I walked out of the room at a calm pace. Just as the door was about to shut, I peeked in and noticed that she had fallen asleep. The jewel of my life had lain there, peaceful and motionless.
Today we are going to the meadows, located only a few minutes from the house. We go there most days of the week in the better part of summer, because the temperature is just right and the air is pure, untainted, and perfect for enjoyment. I’m sure she’ll enjoy herself out there today, as she always does.
It turns out that she did. We played a few rounds of ultimate, relaxed on the lush green grass, the soil soft as a bed, and because she brought along the balloons that she got on her birthday, we blew them up and let them fly with the calm winds. There must’ve been as many as thirty of them, all in the sky. I could imagine a fleet of heated balloons embarking on a worldly adventure at that very moment I saw all those balloons. The sun was setting at that time, and we were spent.
As she was eating, she asked me to read her one of the books she received as a gift from Clarissa, just before she would fall asleep. I promised her I would do so; what kind of parent would I be to deny her that?
After a few chapters, she eased into slumber. Today was a great day, looking back on it, and I too took off to sleep. Just as easily, I shut my eyes and, with a few inane thoughts racing through at the pace of a burst of light, began to doze off. This will be a long night.
The Broken Lock
A menacingly slow twist of a safety pin, inserted in the front door, roused only squeaks of steel and wood. At the same moment, the window to Vivien’s room was being hoist open at a rate only a stealthy individual would produce. A figure now stood, hunched, on her window sill. One would only see this person as a shadow in the darkness and the dim moonlight from the outside, but they would still distinguish this figure as being male. Not a particularly tall one, either.
The front door had finally been rested open, but only to remain slightly ajar; this was not the main focus of the two men responsible for these breaches, for the window made entry for both of them. It’s not known why, then, the front door would be unlocked with such effort and left alone.
Both men were, whispering to each other, would have appeared to be murmuring indistinctly from only a few feet away. They were quiet, and methodical. It was obvious that Vivien was in danger.
The man who unlocked the door remained inside the room, just at the foot of Vivien’s bed. The other climbed outside, landed on the lawn below with a quiet thud, and walked towards a car parked at the curb only a stone’s throw away. He produced a sack, leather in composition, of large size.
Meanwhile, as the man was walking back to the house below Vivien’s window, the man in her room began to sweat. But he wasn’t nervous. He was Hector Buchanan, the front-runner, who loved to cause fear and shake things up. The man outside the window was Gillean, the depraved runt, who loved to trap and to maim. He stood there in anticipation, sweating more profusely than Hector was. He was also grinning, eyes wide open. He was embellished with sadistic glee, and this wasn’t the first time he and Hector had done something like this.
Hector, in a rapid movement, turned Vivien onto her stomach; this awoke her, but at the same time, he prevented her from screaming by sealing her mouth with his right hand. With the other, he swept her up out of the safety of her bed, dashed toward the window, and tossed Vivien down to Gillean. The latter’s eyes almost seemed to glow at that very instant.
The Deathly Scream
Vivien screamed. I’ve never heard her utter one like that in my life and I am not going to stall any longer to find out what is happening to her. Children scream like that for a reason.
I broke out in sweat, and Clarissa was also awake at the moment. She immediately clung to my right arm with a vice grip, begging me to check on Vivien. I ran to the closet, put on my comfort clothing, and ran out into the hall.
First thing that caught my attention was that the front door had been opened. I was descending the stairs to investigate when I heard the loud creaking of wood from Vivien’s room. I had no time to waste here, so I went back up the short flight of stairs I travelled with the pace of a rabbit, and found myself trapped behind Vivien’s door, which was locked.
I turned the door knob furiously, begging for a purchase beneath my nerve-wracked breaths. I was finding no such thing, even pushing violently on her door. That was when I could hear Vivien shout to me, but there was something wrong: she was outside. She shouted again, but her voice drowned out mid-note. At that moment, I gave up on her bedroom door and almost leapt down the stairs to the front door. Clarissa was rushing behind me, sounding appropriately distressed.
Right after I threw the door open, I spotted two men fleeing from the house, one was leading the other carrying a sack of some kind. It was writhing around and that was when I deduced that they had placed her in it. They were kidnapping my life, with their path interspersed with an idle car. A shadowy figure was waiting at the driver’s seat.
I screamed her name in rage and pain, pain at the sight of these animals stealing my child away from me like this, while I ran at full speed. The one who wasn’t holding Vivien in the sack turned quickly after hearing me, and threw something at me. At first nothing happened, and while I was still running at full speed towards them, I then felt a jolt of piercing pain in my right calf. It was enough to make me fall to the grass, soaked with morning dew and causing Clarissa just behind me to fall as well.
I was crying at that moment, terrified at what was happening. Both men had been in the car for a second now, and the car began to accelerate. The driver window had been rolled down, and the driver was pointing a gun at me, which I was able to discern because it reflected the moon light. I was getting up, just barely past the knees, when he fired three rounds in quick succession. Neither of them hit, but it was jarring nonetheless.
They were in full speed by then, and there I stood, paralyzed with fear. Some of the houses began to light up, but I was absolutely writhing with something I have never felt before. I fell to my knees, and cried out loud into the night.
I felt the fury of a thousand worlds.
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