X-Men: First Badass

My wife surprised me by taking me to Ruby Tuesday (had a coupon) and the movies for Father’s Day.  Yes Father’s Day…what, do you think we’re waiting for next week when everything will be unbearably busy?

The movie that she chose to go to didn’t really surprise me TOO entirely much considering one of the men on her “list” was in it, Mr. James McAvoy: “X-men: First Class”.

I remember back when the first “X-men” came out as it was a VERY different time than it is now.  Superhero movies in the late 90’s weren’t a dime a dozen as they are today and comic book fans were anticipating the release of the adaptation with much skepticism.  We wanted our X-men to be as close to what made us fall in love with the comic to begin with, but we didn’t feel from the trailers that we would get it.  There was no spandex, Rogue was too young, Jean was too old, and Wolverine was too tall.  Professor X was ok though.

While not perfect, the X-men movie ended up being rather good and the sequel was an even better experience.

I want you, for a moment, to forget that the previous X-men movies existed.  Forget about the good and bad.  I want you to forget about the comic book that came before it.  

Can you do that?  Because I did.  SPOILERIFFIC REVIEW:

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS

I don’t want to dive, head first into a sea of hyperbole, but I can’t help it.  Not with this movie.

This is the X-men movie that we should have gotten in 1999.

There.  I’ve said it.  

The issues that I have with the first four movies in the series (“X-men”, “X2”, “X-men: The Last Stand”, and “X-men Origins: Wolverine”) were finally completely clear to me after watching “First Class”.  They were too safe, the performances were stilted, the dialogue was horrid, the action was poorly executed, and everything looked too new and sterile.  It was as if no one lived in the world that they were in as the sets were obviously brand new.

“X-men: First Class” falls victim to none of that.

The film starts out where the original does in Poland during the holocaust, but doesn’t stop there.  We learn so much more to what made Magneto the villain that he became.  In the context of this movie, typing that Magneto is a villain seems wrong.  I know why he feels the way he does and in many ways, you sympathize and agree to an extent.   Magneto didn’t become Magneto because he was a bad guy, but because he has seen the full extent of human evil and he can never forgive our race for what we had put him and others like him through.

This obviously has many undertones that are obvious as he is essentially writing every human being off as an enemy due to his experience and his turning point in the finale when he declares that he will never be subject to people “just following orders” is chilling and satisfying.  You understand, but it doesn’t make it right.

Xavier, who has become close friends with Erik over the months of working to prevent nuclear war, tried so hard to tie everyone together as a team, makes the ultimate sacrifice trying to save the very people who fear and mean to kill all of his kind, is just as sympathetic, but differs in his ideology.

Xavier, played by the fantastic James McAvoy, wants nothing more than to live in peace with normal men.  He can literally sense the good in mankind wants to share his gifts and hopefully convince those in power that he wants nothing more than to help.  In the heartbreaking final moments, he runs through the most emotional turmoil as he experiences the pain, the joy, and the futility of life and it is handled through the masterful performance with the kind of subtlety that makes me hope he is remember for an Oscar.

I feel that the performance is that good.

I know that I only touched on the performances and journeys of two characters, but they were the most important ones.  I think that FOX, with all of its idiotic ideas from movies past, has finally “gotten it”.  It truly saddens me that it isn’t making as much money as the other X movies.

“X-men First Class” doesn’t seem like a proper prequel for the X-men films because of all of the liberties that it takes with the continuity.  Sure, there are a lot of things that they do to explain the reality that they have created in this flick in relation to the existing X-Men movie cannon, but there is just enough where it wouldn’t make sense either.

The movie isn’t a retelling of any specific X-men story from the comics either.  A lot of back story is wrong, the characters are wrong, and the time frame is all wrong.

The truth of the matter is if you are a stickler for any of the above, or some sort of unreasonable fanboy who can’t handle change in any form, or even a nitpicker who will freak out at some of the choices being made, then you will hate this movie.

That, and you have no soul.

5 out of 5 X Genes

E3 Special Report: Nintendo- Now You're Playing With POWER!

Anyone who is around my age can remember a time that when you were playing video games, no matter what you owned, you were “playing Nintendo” in much the same way you Xerox a copy and drink a Coke.  Those days are behind us, but this era dropped a small amount of the fanboy seed for Nintendo in you. 

Quite literally, without Nintendo, there is a really good chance that video games wouldn’t be the powerhouse industry that it now is.  This is especially ironic in that Nintendo could also be equated as a company who would innovate, but refuse to change with today’s gaming trends. 

Between the company releasing the Wii with outdated specs, deciding not to add HD capability to the machine, and using the much maligned “Friend Code” process, it is interesting to see what the big “N” is doing to keep in step with it’s much more powerful competitors.

Watching the live tweets of the Nintendo conference is not the same as actually being there, I’m sure and I am in the poor position of having not even seen Nintendo’s new console in action, but I’m going to attempt to anyways.

Continuing my trend of not really “getting” what makes other gamers excited, I sat through the game announcements of new “Zelda” games and whatnot and was completely bored, especially since most of these announcements were for 3DS games and I couldn’t be less excited about that thing.  I played one for a total of five minutes and my head hurt, but I can say that my head problems weren’t as bad as they were when the Virtual Boy attempted the same many years ago.

Then Nintendo showed their new console…or more accurately, the controller for the new console, and they called it “Wii U”.

Pronounced just like it looks (as if it was a European police siren), the new Wii U controller is the size of a small E-reader and has face buttons, shoulder buttons, motion tracking, and a 6 inch touch screen in the center.  Quite honestly, I can’t see myself playing games with this thing, but to be fair, I said the same thing when I saw the original Wii controls. 

A few tech demos were showed and the single most impressive thing I heard of was a golf game where you place the controller on the ground and you swing at a ball on the screen and it flies on-screen down the fairway.

You can also have the game stream to the controller if someone wants to commandeer your TV, but only for a few feet as it requires the console to power the game.

I am rather skeptical about this whole thing.  They say that the console is a modern machine with graphical capabilities comparable to the other current-gen consoles and will output 1080p; however, many of the visuals shown during the conference were on those other consoles and not native to the Wii U.  Like I said earlier, the controller looks unwieldy.  I recall people throwing their Wii remotes when it first came out and I can only imagine the potential damage this thing could be capable of.  The controller also looks as if it could cost around $100.  If my guess is right, then how on earth could I hope to play multiplayer?

Nintendo; however, is showing initiative and had the most interesting showing of E3 in my opinion.  Nintendo frequently takes chances and when they pay off, it does in droves.  I can’t wait to see what they have in mind for this thing and the kind of experiences we’re in for.

E3 Special Report: Sony, Livin' La Vita Loca

To be fair, I have to give a little bit of full disclosure with this one.  I do not own, nor have I ever had a lengthy play session with the PlayStation 3.  

There are a few reasons for this, but the most prominent is that I am, in fact, a broke nerd.  I can really only afford to buy games for and accessorize one console at a time and this time around it is the Xbox.

So with this said, I felt that the Sony conference was pretty forgettable, but only because I pretty much don’t care about the PS3 and the games associated with it.

That statement is going to get me a lot of flack with the gaming community, but I need to explain it further.

During the announcements, Sony started announcing big exclusive after big exclusive that everyone was hyped for in the crowd.  Me?  I’ve never really played the games that these sequels were for.  

As an old school Sony fan, I was pleased to hear some of the more classic titles getting new installments, like Twisted Metal, but I was lost on some of the newer ones.

Sony’s biggest two announcements were a 24’ starter 3DTV that I didn’t get a price for that is PlayStation branded.  This seems a little odd as I don’t think I’d want to experience 3D on a smaller screen.  Sony understood that the reason why 3D isn’t so widely accepted at home yet is due to the expense, but what they aren’t counting on is that I don’t want a crappy experience either.  I’m not saying that 3D on a smaller screen can’t work, anyone with a 3DS would argue that fact, but I’m just saying that if I decide that I was going to be jumping into the 3D TV bandwagon, I would do it full-hog.  

Second is the portable gaming system, the Vita.  With a touch screen, a touch pad, dual analog sticks, and a powerful gaming system inside.  

Now I’ve already was a huge fan of the PSP when it first came out and I took it everywhere.  I remember watching “Kill Bill” while waiting in line to see “Star Wars”, playing “Hot Shots Golf” on the way to Disney World, and hacking the firmware to do all the neat things that Sony didn’t want me to do.  Before the system could really take off, my brother broke it and as you know, I couldn’t afford to replace it.

With this in mind, I am quite excited about the Vita, silly name aside.  Of course I’ll never be able to afford it at $250 for the WiFi version and $299 for the 3G with AT&T service inside.

So how was the Sony Conference?

To me, it seemed a little safe and the innovations behind the Move controller do not seem as incredible as what is happening with Kinect right now, but overall, it was about games and Microsoft seems to have lost that fact.

Tomorrow, I will attempt to give my lengthy first impressions of Nintendo’s newest console: Wii U.

E3 Special Report: Strange Things Afoot On the 360

So the big three have fired their collective shots across each others bow in this year’s E3 and I’ve learned something very important about myself.  I must not be a gamer anymore.

Let me clarify:  I love playing video games, but I don’t seem to be nearly as excited and genuinely dislike some of the more beloved franchises on each of the consoles.

Yesterday morning, Microsoft held their pre-E3 shin dig and announced new User Interface changes for the 360 to make the experience more in line with what we all thought we were getting when Kinect came out and everything will be controlled with gestures and voice if we so please.  The highlight of this part of the conference was “Xbox Bing” that allows you to search the Xbox universe using only your voice.  For example, if I were to say, “Xbox Bing Sesame Street”, everything related to “Sesame Street” would appear for me to peruse.

Also announced was a new app for using YouTube.  This is a great new addition to the social networking apps already available and in fact might become my favorite social networking app yet if it wasn’t for the data caps that are poised to start making me change the way I consume media, but I’ll get into that in more detail at a later date. 

 I really wish that the other apps would be updated to allow us to be able to see Twitpics or follow links since I feel that they are useless without that functionality.

Also announced was live television streaming to the Xbox, which looks interesting.

Microsoft also announced a few diversionary apps that make use of the Kinect technology that were made available immediately.  I downloaded a couple of them and played around with “Kinect Me” and “Buddy Creator”.   

“Kinect Me” (or is it “Me Kinect”?) is an app that would create an avatar by scanning your face and body and creating an avatar with your face and clothes.  It takes pictures of your doppelganger to share.  It works fairly well and it allows you to get some achievements, but it has a few shortcomings.  First thing that’s apparent is that there is not a way to edit your body type and thus, I looked nothing like myself.  I am a pretty big guy and the Avatar was skinnier than anyone I know, but at least I know what I’d look like if I were to lose an amazing amount of weight and bone density.  The second issue is the fact that you really can’t do anything with this thing except share it on Kinectshare.com, so there really isn’t a point.

“Buddy Creator” is a pretty exciting app, but it’s not because of its content, but because of the possibilities opened with the technology.  What it does is scan the front and back of an object, in my case a few plush animals I borrowed from my daughter, and inserts the object in the game space.  You create a personality for the character and provide a voice and it takes you to a rather lame game where you follow on screen directions asking you to do simple gestures.  The issues with this app is that after doing the gesturing, there really doesn’t seem to be much else you can do with the character but watch it do the bizarre action animations based on the role the app gives it.  For example, I scanned an Elmo plush and the app assigned it to a “clown” personality and this apparently means that he will walk around and poop balloons and  confetti.  The on-stage demo of this app showed 1:1 body tracking and I never could find where I could do this or where I would be able to hear my voice over work be used and I was REALLY looking forward to hearing that.  If anyone knows if there is something I’m missing, then please tell me as I love this idea, but the execution seems slapped together.  It’s pretty awesome to be able to use your own things in the game space as it was shown in the early Kinect trailers.  An interesting side bar is that I tried to scan my daughter into the game, but she came out as a deformed monster baby with my arm jutting out of her armpit.  The results were so disturbing; especially with the “Ninja” character profile, I had to delete her entirely.

There was a huge Kinect push this year from Microsoft for all of the other games announced with some really intuitive control schemes being planned for core games, like head tracking in “Forza 4” that allows you to look into turns, audible calling in “Madden 12”, and weapons training in “Ghost Recon” that looked rather impressive.

Of course there was a focus on casual games and this is why I made my previous statement.  I am not looking forward to anything but the casual games like “Kinect Sports: Second Season”, “Dance Central 2”, “Disneyland” and the like.  I mean, sure, I want to play “Halo 4” and the update of the original “Combat Evolved”, but there wasn’t much excitement behind it.

This wraps up the Xbox conference, for me anyways, as I really have no opinion about all of the stuff I don’t think I’ll ever play.  I’ll try to get my thoughts on Sony’s Conference (the Vita), and Nintendo (Wii U) tomorrow, but until then…party on dudes.

P.S. Next year, hire less over the top actors M$.  They made the games look dumb.

You Do Hulu?

I haven’t had cable television since 1999.  My family went without for about a month in the late 90’s, so as a working man in my household, I decided to sign up for satellite service.  It was glorious when it wasn’t raining …so, you know, the winter.

 After the WCW was purchased and completely dismantled by what was the WWF, I decided that it wasn’t worth paying for any more, so I got rid of it.

I was at a point in my life where entertainment was easy to come by.  Video games, the newfangled DVDs, and over the air TV got me through until the weekend, when I would go to the theater and watch one or more movies.

The digital age beckoned and with it the promise of crystal clear television reception with the help of HD tuners.  For whatever reason, these tuners never worked well with any of the televisions I owned, even the new Vizio 1080p HDTV that I currently use, so I was pretty much out of luck when it came to network television.

As a reaction, my wife and I subscribed to the Blockbuster rental service and we were able to see as many movies as we wanted to as long as we drove to Blockbuster and got them.

Being broke necessitated that a change be made.  Blockbuster had decided to raise the rates on the rental subscriptions, so we decided to try out the lower cost option of Netflix.  

Netflix proved to be good enough for the price and we went exclusively with them for our DVD rentals.

A few months later, Netflix became an app on the Xbox 360 so that I could stream some videos directly to my TV without having to wait for the physical disk to get to me.

 

This pleased me greatly.

At first there wasn’t too much content and it wasn’t a very intuitive experience, but with each Xbox update, the app was improved.

During this whole time frame, there has been a supplemental experience that I was using to see the latest network and cable TV that I wasn’t getting through Netflix, and that was Hulu.

At the peak of me using the computer based site, I was using Hulu frequently to catch up on “The Simpsons”, “Ghost Hunters”, and “Hell’s Kitchen”.  Ever since the inclusion of “Hulu Plus”, I decided not to use it any more as the frequency of the commercials had gotten pretty bad and the backlog of episodes available to basic users had shrunk.

When Microsoft allowed Xbox users to try out the “Plus” app for free, I jumped at the chance and was excited to dig into my old shows again.

The problem with this idea is that when I searched for “Ghost Hunters”, it advised me that I could only watch it at a computer.

What?  Why the heck would you split up the content available for your product?  The idea that I would be paying extra so that I could use a gimped version of Hulu on my TV is absolutely ludicrous to me.

I figured that this was some sort of fluke, so I continued searching.

“Hell’s Kitchen”, online only.

“The Simpsons”, online only.

Wow.  What is wrong with these people at Hulu?  Why can’t I watch the content that I want to watch WHERE I want to watch?  I’m sure that this has to do with the licensing and it wouldn’t be that big of an issue if they told you about it before signing up.  

What kind of pitch meeting could that have been?

-“Hey, I have an idea on how to make more money off of this Hulu thing!”

-“Great, give it to me!”

-“Alright, now picture this: Have customers pay a monthly fee to watch our content on their TVs!”

-“Genius! We can develop the apps in a few weeks!  We just have to get all of the shows to…”

-“Oh, no…not ALL of the shows!  Just the programs that are available online for free anyway from other sources.”

-“Ok…I guess that would work and I suppose we won’t have commercials, so we have to…”

-“Oh, no, there would be commercials…”

-“sigh”

That’s right.  Not only can I not watch all of the shows available, but we also have to sit through commercials.  Even broadcast television allows you to skip commercials nowadays, but here we are paying extra to watch these shows, most of which are already free online in other places, network TV you can get over the air, or available on Netflix sans commercials.

The worst part of the whole thing is the fact that it’s about the same price as a subscription to Netflix.  So you get less content, more restrictions, and commercials for the same cost as your closest competitor. 

Remarkable.

To be fair, there are a lot of good points with Hulu as well.  The picture quality is top notch, the sorting is easy to understand, and you get a lot of shows the day after broadcast.  

These good qualities are unfortunately underscored with the fact that there are only a few shows WORTH the expense of seeing it the day after, like “Bones”, and “Glee” (shush, I like it).  

I would have mentioned “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” as I was enjoying them quite a bit while I was under the free trial; however, when I tried to watch “The Daily Show” this morning, all I got was ,”Available Online Only”.

Sigh.

NOTE: In Hulu's defense, The Daily Show eventually allowed me to stream it once more.