Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

“You’re programmed to be an asshole!”

Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 11:22 pm Comments (3)

And so, I’ve finished the Alien quadrology (I can’t help but laugh every time I hear that) with Alien Resurrection. It is better than Alien³ in a lot of ways, but it just came across as the least appealing film.

Ripley died in the last flick, but two hundred years later a new organisation clone her using a blood sample so they can extract the alien. Surprise surprise, that eventually goes tits-up, and Ripley, a scant few crew and a bunch of bounty hunters are trapped on the space station with them. That’s about as far as the plot goes, really.
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Rental night!

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 11:48 pm Comments Off on Rental night!

Paid another visit to Xtravision today, where I rented Transformers: War for Cybertron, Prince of Egypt, and Space Chimps. The last one was at my father’s choice. He’s got a thing for all things simian.

Just a head’s up – this entry’s gonna be looooong and largely about Transformers. Just a warning for the many folks who don’t give a damn about that little obsession.
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Wankers! In! Spaaaaaaaace!

Friday, March 18, 2011 at 12:06 pm Comments (6)

Watched Alien³ last night. I’d seen it once before years ago; it was actually the first movie in the Alien series I’d seen, but I couldn’t remember much about it besides the totally gratuitous deaths of everyone but Ripley from the previous movie – before the movie even begins! – and the ending, so I was looking forward to seeing it in full.

You’d need a lengthy list to detail all the ways it’s different in tone from the first two films, but the main point is that there’s only one alien, the place they’re trapped on has no useful working technology to fight the creature with, and for some reason, despite being set on a dingy prison planet in the ass-end of the universe, it’s probably the brightest of the first three movies. I can understand Aliens because it was on a ravaged human colony that about to blow up or something, but who’d thought a near-derelict prison would be lit well?

Yep, that’s a great comment to start the review off with.
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Battle for Originality

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 11:49 pm Comments (3)

Went to see Battle: Los Angeles, because that’s the kind of braindead movie one wants to watch after you’ve done nothing but feel ill and write code all day.

When I say braindead, I really do mean it. The movie is practically Military Movie 101, it throws in so many clichés. The first half hour is spent ‘getting to know’ the main players in the force, which is not only needless because their personalities are summed up in less than a minute, but also… well, let’s face it, they all end up looking the same in the heat of a battle. One guy is joked about by the others because he’s a virgin, but it’s difficult to see what other contribution he makes to the movie because it’s so damn hard to keep track of who’s who. We have emotional overreactions thrown about every ten minutes. The group find two adult civilians who provide one useful bit of support and then are made redundant. There are the kid civilians are there just for the marines to give inspirational speeches to. At one point there’s a helicopter with wounded soldiers (who are all given emotional good luck speeches from their comrades) that is blown up mere seconds after takeoff. There’s a rather needless scene where the hero and female civilian (who I guess is meant to be a love interest, but it sure isn’t developed!) muck about with an alien corpse and try to find its weak spot (which is to the right of where a human’s heart would be. Yeah, like you wouldn’t hit that eventually through regular fire). All the film needs is a dog that somehow survives all the hellish action until the end of the film and the aliens taking over a human’s body and that would nearly complete the set!
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Seriously awesome?

Monday, March 14, 2011 at 11:27 pm Comments Off on Seriously awesome?

Father roped me into watching A Serious Man. I sat through it to the end, and was able to wriggle my way out of stating what I thought by scoring it an interrobang out of ten, sending him rummaging through dictionaries to identify the word.

It’s an interesting film. I will wholeheartedly give it that.

It is not the kind of movie one wants to watch when you’re feeling unwell and just want to see a simple everything-makes-sense comedy where, I don’t know, people fall into bathtubs or something. When I’m unwell, I’m not exactly in the mood to watch a film exploring the injustices and justices of the world and how simple actions can warp the moral fabric of the universe and screw everyone over.

Maybe sometime I’ll be willing to analyse it, but at the moment I’d just like to go to bed each night knowing that I have something worth contributing to the cosmos around me.

I’m all alone (more or less)

Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 10:36 pm Comments (5)

Watched Aliens. I’d caught the final half hour of it while on holiday about five or six years ago, but otherwise can’t remember much about it. I know James Cameron did the directing and writing this time around, and I was curious to see how it would impact upon the style and setting. I still remember watching Rambo II; the first one was a fantastic movie that I still love, but as soon as I saw his credit during the opening of the sequel I knew that this time it’d just be a heartless action movie. I was right. Fun action movie, but no real soul to it, unlike the first one. Thankfully, Aliens is just as good as the original, in its own way.
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Ash is a goddamn robot!

Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 11:35 pm Comments (1)

I watched Alien five days ago. Yeah, I’m really dropping the ball on punctual blog entries these days.

Mind you, what is there to say that more professional, more qualified and more verbose people haven’t already said? It’s insanely atmospheric and lonely, and I love it. The first hour very much reminded me of Life Force (which you may recall me gushing about two years ago), with its very cold and lonely exploration of an alien ship, though Alien came first, of course. In a way I was almost disappointed when the alien started killing dudes full-time, not because it wasn’t entertaining, but because it had less time to explore the dank and desolate environment of space. I’m a total sucker for that kind of stuff.

I also watched The Hudsucker Proxy… half a month ago? Yeah, it was part of a Coen Brothers boxset and was one of the only two movies I was vaguely familiar with (the other being The Big Lebowski). I only became aware of the film through Platypus Comix’s very entertaining synopsis of the film with comments and other titbits of information – it’s a very good read. Also, hey, have I plugged the site before? I probably should!
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My curly moustache is in the making

Friday, February 25, 2011 at 12:28 am Comments (5)

I got vouchers for Xtravision around Christmas, and thought I’d be worthwhile actually making use of them, preferably to try other games that I’m interested in but unsure of buying, but hey, trying out movies I wouldn’t bother buying can’t hurt either. … can it?

We watched Outcast. I didn’t even read the blurb in detail, all I saw was a neat lookin’ Resident Evil style claw on the box along with a couple of beardy Irish actors on the images on the back, and I thought, “sold!” Having watched it, I can say it isn’t really my thing.

A mother and son move from their caravan to the inner city slums. The boy happens to turn into a monster at night. There’s two folks from a strange cult out to find the two and kill them. There’s a romance between the boy and a local girl. The mother is frighteningly overbearing. Misery ensues.
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You can take the panda out of the jungle…

Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 11:51 pm Comments (1)

It’s headlines like this that make me pay attention to the world around me. Thank you, Yahoo! News.

I wonder if I should ever bother with those “what have I been up to?” summaries when there’s a new entry after some absence, because lately it boils down to “bog all.” I’ve been playing Castlevania HD, Left 4 Dead, Pocket Bomberman, Doritos Crash Course, Panic Bomber and several other games. Yeah, but have I done anything productive? Well, er…

That reminds me, I did start work on two blog entries that didn’t go anywhere. I still have that unfinished Zebraman review sitting around (where I compare it to Jingle All The Way. It’ll all make sense when it’s published!) and I wrote a bit of a ramble on Pokémon Rumble, a strangely intriguing WiiWare game that’s probably just the way I want the series to be, if it weren’t for a number of letdowns and limitations (which I’ll probably write up as a General Writing sometime). I’m mostly spending my time redesigning and gathering resources for the Bomberman Shrine Place, which I hope will really expand the site in terms of gloriously nerdy information. I want it to be so nerdy that you start to feel embarrassed for me. If the redesigned Bomberman site doesn’t make you weep for the man who’s wasting his life researching obscure elements of the Bomberman mythos, then I’m doing it wrong.

Let me know if my attempt at hyping it up is working or not.
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CERVEAUUUU

Monday, January 17, 2011 at 10:13 pm Comments (7)

It’s hilarious at how terrible my productivity is. It’s one thing that I’m struggling to work on redesigning the site, but I can barely even work on anything else, and now I can barely even write a blog entry without stumbling over myself. I’ve been trying to compose my thoughts on Zebraman for nearly two weeks now and I still haven’t made my mind up! Surely I can’t botch up mere summaries of movies I’ve watched, right?

… right?

La Horde: A French zombie movie. French zombies – is there a more despicable combination known to man? (let’s see how long it takes for me to regret that remark! I’ve never even understood French bashing, personally, but I’m not the kind of person who lets a cheap joke pass by on the internet)

Crooked cops and multi-racial gangsters get into a scuffle at the top of an apartment building, only to realise, whoops, the city’s kind of falling apart and is stuffed full of zombies, and everyone that’s dead is coming back with a hunger for flesh! The three remaining cops and three remaining crooks reluctantly come to the conclusion that if they want to get out of there alive, they’ll need to join forces. The two groups are frequently in a bit of a tiff, to put it lightly, especially when a pervy ol’ fat guy joins up with them. Hijinks ensue.

Well, it’s a zombie flick, what are you going to expect? There’s violence. There’s profanity. The characters get uppity at each other a lot. Everyone totally beats the shit of zombies in hand-to-hand combat, and this is the only movie I’ve seen where headbutting a zombie never fails.
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