The Expendables may have the most pressure on it of any movie ever, just look at the cast list

Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crewes, Mickey Rourke, Stone Cold Steve Austin and cameo’s by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  It’s cast are all legends and almost all of them are used to headlining  their own movies.

Question:How can you possibly live up to that?

Answer: With some  good fights, lethal knife usage for brutal kills, lots of guns and a ludicrous amount of explosions.  The only thing Expendable about this is the plot which is vintage 80s storytelling (i.e. the story is more of an excuse than an actual plot and you know that’s deliberate here).  Oh and Charisma Carpenter has a small role in it and is still hotter than all of the explosions in the film combined.

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I never wanted the A-Team movie to be made, you could not better the TV series cast, each and everyone one of them nailed their character to perfection.  With that said, this may suprise you, I really enjoyed the new A-Team movie.  It was a fun no-brainer popcorn film, and even with my love of the original clouding my opinion, I was still able to enjoy it and want to give some credit where it’s due.  Of course there are plenty of things I disagree with and I’ll get to those later but the film gets a fair amount of things right too and everyone should give it a watch.

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It is no exaggeration to say the film “Akira” changed me. It must have been about the end of 1993 and Nikobe brought it round my house on VHS tape (we really did have them).

Now I was not totally new to Manga, I had seen some before but never really knew it was a specific genre all its own. Things like “Battle of the Planet” and others had been on TV and I had always loved that Japanese style. But don’t forget this was before the Internet, there was no way of finding out any of this stuff. Looking back at it now I wonder how I ever managed… but you had what you had, and I was luckier than most.

As it turns out I had seen the Studio Ghibli classic “Castle in the Sky” year before and loved it. But with no way of ever really finding out anything about it, other than its name and the fact I loved that style. If I had seen “Totoro” or “Spirited Away” at that age I would have been forced to find out more about these amazing films.

But I digress, just looking at the cover I knew I had to watch it!

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Normally I research new games before buying them, be it reviews or wait for friends to try them. I didn’t actually pay attention to the words of the previews or reviews of White Knight Chronicles, any game with good looking anime-style graphics where you can transform into a giant knight to hack up giant trolls and ogres is going to be my kind of game. If there’s one thing I’d like to do in Dragon Age Origins, it would be exactly that (turning into a bear or spider doesn’t count – not big enough and doesn’t use a sword). For the record using the white knight is fun, not using it and getting trampled on sucks. Transforming, to a cry of VERTO (Latin for Transform because English isn’t cool enough) you turn the tide of a battle in an instant, give passive buffs to your team, crush man sized scorpions with a single strike then go toe-to-toe with whatever golem or dragon was giving you grief – marvellous.

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Computer animation must be a very hard field to be in. There is one company that dominates it and everything you do will be held up in comparison and rejected as not being good enough. Not because your work is bad, it is probably amazing. But compared to what Pixar do, it’s worthless.

Out now is “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs”, the latest home release from Dreamworks Sony/Columbia. Their work keeps getting better and better, the last film (Monsters vs Aliens) is probably the best they have done. But there very best just does not compare to the standard set. Gaff-tastic: My fault! I even laughed out loud when they showed the classic Columbia title screen that has brought me so much joy over the years, should have remembered that.

Cloudy is a great film, we all laughed out loud at various bits. The voice acting is top notch, the story is a lot of fun, the animation is excellent. But somehow its missing something… Read more

Up until two weeks ago my favourite game of 2009 was definitely, and without doubt Batman: Arkham Asylum. This is the Batman game I have been waiting twenty years to play. It has absolutely everything you can want in a Batman game and the best production of a game you can hope for. All of the artistic elements are there that make Batman a thoughtful super hero, as well as some of the best voice acting I have ever heard in a game. All that before we even get onto the game play and story.

All of these things should make this the best games? Until two weeks ago you were right and I was ready to fight to preserve it as the best game I played all year. But all that has changed. While it is still the high point for me in terms of stealth/action/super hero games there is now one game that does all of that, but only much better. Read more

For Humans Only

Over the weekend I got the chance to see “District 9” but what I can’t tell you is whether I enjoyed it?

This is technically a very good film, the CG work is outstanding and the plot is good. The film is shot like a documentary at the start, talking about various events like the arrival of the ship 20 years earlier, and how once we eventually got inside they found it filled with aliens. A camp is created, and the aliens are basically left there. Coming back to the present the camp is almost a prison, squalid and over run with crime.

Various groups are exploiting the aliens for their own ends and we are introduced to Wikus, a mostly useless middle manager for the company in charge of looking after the aliens. The style continues as we follow him around the camp doing the dirty work of the corporation.

Thoughts

This is a very good film, I would recommend you go and see it. Did I really enjoy it.. I don’t know, it was not bad. I can see how it could become an important film in this genre. It did manage the most important thing which is to make you think, and discuss what you have seen.

I will see it again, but I don’t feel the need to to go the cinema to do it.

On Sideswipes recommendation, and to celebrate nikobe’s birthday we saw G.I. Joe. We all agreed Sideswipe was right, as long as you don’t think too hard its a great action-fest that is definitely worth checking out.

But if there is one thing better than that, its the Ballard of G.I. Joe

A treat of a film that you have to see

Just out (in the UK at least) is Watchmen on Blu-Ray. It is shameful to admit but I have never read the comic and I missed the film at the cinema (double shame.. I’m sorry) but I have been waiting for the release on Blu-Ray and I can tell you my wait was not in vein.

I’m not going to review the film, there are plenty of other sites out there who have done a great job. They know the story a lot better than me, so I will let them do it. All I will say is this is a great film, subtle and nuanced, that is more to do with the source than it is the quality of the production, but that is not a let down either. All in all a great film, very well done.

I wanted to look at the technical side of the release. What is included and how does the disk stack up in our new HD world. Read more

Due to friends with good contacts and one of the best Transformer websites  http://www.transformertoys.co.uk I was privileged to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at a special FDA screening at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square on Friday 12th June. I would have reviewed it sooner but this was an invite only screening and there was a blackout on mentioning it in public until today.

The film was more of the same, the stuff that made the first film awesome is all here and the weak points from the first film are all still here. I’m not going to go into much detail here but there will be some mild spoilers but nothing you probably couldn’t have guessed but don’t read on if you really don’t wanna know.

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I finished reading Bret Hitman Hart’s autobiography today.  As expected of The Excellence of Execution, it was excellent.  This book is full of so many great little stories that seem crazy but somehow all too believable. I’m probably too biased in favour of Bret to know if it’s him hyping himself when he talks of other wrestlers congratulating him on his work as a wrestler but from what I saw in my youth and in his DVD boxset, I can’t see why they wouldn’t.  I really recommend it to anyone interested in what life at the bottom and at the top of Wrestling used to be like.  His tours of all over the world make for excellent reading in a similar way to Chris Jericho’s book which may be more entertaining than this but lacked the amazing drama that went on during Bret’s career (no offense Chris, you are still my favourite wrestler of this generation and wrote a great book).  Anyway, you should know that this book is Highly recommended for anyone that grew up watching wrestling in the 80s or 90s.

As a child of the 80s, it was an amazing read for me as Bret was always one of my favourites. Read more

What can I say about the genesis of “Red Dwarf”?

In a strange way I am not at all surprised. I did not have very high hopes for this “series” and in a way they managed to hit the nail exactly where I thought they would. That is not to say there were not things to like.

It is just unfortunate that it fell so flat after so much hype. In case you have not seen it I wrote an article on my expectations for the new show a while back that caused some discussion.

If you intend to see the series please stop reading now. Go and watch it and make up your own mind. There might be spoilers in here, and I would not like you to hear it from me before you have seen it for yourself.

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This week the tinterweb has been alight with news of the new Shuffle from Apple. You have to hand it to Apple, they certainly think outside of the box. The new shuffle is tiny, but its much more notable for its lack of controls. They have been moved onto the headphone cable, so they are always in easy reach.

But all is not as it appears, this is not about giving there customers a new way to interact with the player. This is about making a grab for the after sales headphone market. I think Apple are setting a dangerous precedent, and should not be allowed to muscle in on a market where there obvious intention is to drive up prices and exclude competitors they don’t happen to like. Read more