Due to unexpected good fortune your protagonists were able to see a sneak preview of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World on Tuesday, here’s what Tony thought:

One sentence summary for folks who haven’t read the comics: Canadian slacker/rocker Scott Pilgrim falls for Ramona Flowers but discovers he must defeat the league of Ramona’s Seven Evil Exes if he is to date her.  (Maybe you’d like to watch the trailer.)

Is Scott Pilgrim vs. The World a good movie and/or a good adaptation of a comic? I have a hard time thinking about the movie without dissecting the choices Edgar Wright makes in adapting the six volume graphic novel series to a 2 hour movie. I knew going into it that the movie would have to make some tricky choices about pacing and cutting scenes and characters. The graphic novels chronicling the ups and downs of a year in Scott Pilgrim’s life work fine as discrete chapters but would probably feel awkward as movie. So the movie takes place over a few weeks (time passes oddly in Toronto) with Ramona’s exes coming at Scott fast and furiously. The backstories of Ramona’s exes are heavily condensed or basically not explored at all in some cases. Scott’s relationship with his drummer and girlfriend Kim Pine, a source of ongoing tension and slow reveal in the comic, is more or less gone in the movie.  A variety of secondary characters are omitted or make only token appearances (we never see The Clash at Demonhead’s cyborg drummer in action for example.) Also worth noting: the movie was completed before Bryan Lee O’Malley finished the sixth book in the series, so though they clearly knew how he was planning to end the series it won’t be exactly the same. Balancing out for the adjustments to characters (and some plot points) fans of the comic will be happy to see a surprising number of scenes recreated shot for shot with the original dialogue in place.

So after you finish obsessing on all the little adjustments and tweaks to the plot and characters how is it at a movie? Pretty good I’d say. Consistently funny and amusing with great visuals it was fun the whole way through. The music of Scott’s Band Sex Bob-omb (provided by Beck) adds a lot to the experience that obviously wasn’t there in the comics, and works as a great example of how adapting a comic means you can do a lot more than just filming it shot for shot. The actors were all fine and the degree to which they looked like their comic counterparts is uncanny in places. Overall Scott Pilgrim vs. The World does a great job of faithful adapting much of the source material while also being fun and creative.

Reading other reviews of the movie which criticize the surreal elements of the story suggest to me that unsurprisingly the people who wouldn’t have enjoyed the comic wouldn’t enjoy the movie. I particularly like how one critic derided the movie as un-appealing to anyone who didn’t grow up with Nintendo (or as I call them, super old people.)

I liked Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and I hope you will too.

The new series from David Simon (The Wire) is good stuff for people looking for something out there in TV with some actual meat on the bone. If you’re expecting “The Wire: New Orleans Edition” (as Dick Wolf would have titled it) you’ll be a bit disappointed. The Wire was an exploration of crime, corruption, the nature of life in an American city, and the institutions we ally ourselves with (be they the police, unions, gangs, schools, etc.), Treme is almost a love story about New Orleans and music.

Set three month after Katrina you can be sure Simon will include plenty of swipes at FEMA and Bush-era politicians, but Treme seeks to tell a story not of institutional failures, but of the lives of several musicians living in the New Orleans neighborhood of Treme. Given that most of the major character are musicians, music unsurprisingly plays a major role in Treme, and even a musically illiterate person such as myself can enjoy what they offer the viewer. In some ways Treme lacks some of the punch of the Wire, whereas Simon burned with a love/hate relationship with Baltimore, it almost feels like he might not be much more than a New Orleans fanboy. On the other hand, I find some of the of the storytelling is much richer and more interesting. Many of the stories focus on the lives of the characters and their families, a motif that was pretty lacking in The Wire except for examples of failed families. I also enjoy that the over arching story is still interesting without the tension and conflict of the active case from each season of The Wire.

So, I’d watch anything David Simon puts his name on, but I’d recommend Treme as being more accessible and closer to The Wire than his other post-Wire piece: Generation Kill.

The Old West! Or at least the end of the old west! (1911 according to back of the game box.) Dan had me really worried when he said there was a car is the opening cut scene, but rest assured that it was an appropriately old timey car and not the Honda Civic I envisioned. Also as far as I can tell you don’t ever have to chance to steal said car.

Red Dead Redemption is lots of fun. I went right from playing the GTA4 DLC “Ballad of Gay Tony” into starting this so it was hard for me not to feel at first that this was basically GTA4 with a better cover system, and you know, horseys instead of cars. As I started putting several hours into RRD, it quickly grew on me. My first reaction was how weird it was that a game set in a desolate, sparsely populated dessert, could feel so rich and engrossing compared to Rockstar’s previous metropolis based games. There is just a ton to do: strangers to help out, animals to hunt, bounties to collect, poker to play, bandit hideouts to decimate, and of course the story missions. The variety of experiences and different ways situations can play out results in some unique experiences; friends I talked to who’d only played the first hour of the game described experiences and adventures I had yet to encounter hours into it. Every night I played the game would leave me with a story about some act of virtual heroism, botched rescue mission, or case of mistaken identity that resulted in a gunfight (some of the sheriffs are dressed rather nondescriptly.) The story is surprisingly better than Rockstar’s previous fare: John Marston’s tale of vengeance (or “Redemption”) is good by video game standards with the details revealed very slowly over the course of many conversations. Your first mission does a good job of setting up the rest of the story. Whereas previous Rockstar main characters have either been silent protagonists, unredeeming psychopaths, or just unbelievable, Marston’s bloody path of murder seems to work a lot better. Part of this may be the setting (murder being slightly more acceptable in the old West than on the streets of New York), the other part of it may be that Marston simply seems more than willing to admit his many faults and misdeeds (compared to GTA4′s Nico Bellic who will murder 50 cops on his way to having tea with a Russian Mafia widow to talk about the plight of immigrants.) I even like how Marston seems to rather quickly get frustrated with the assorted creeps and losers he must run errands for to advance the story whereas previous protagonists seemed willing to commit acts of terrorism on behalf of people they just met before stopping to consider their intentions.

Red Dead Redemption is fun, though it is far from free of faults. Penny Arcade’s Tycho is spot on with the failures of the multiplayer in terms of how empty the multiplayer world feels and that one quickly runs out of things to do. Other will critique how much time you spend riding horses from place to place. This is certainly true, I’m about 20 hours in and you ride horses a lot in the old west. The scenery and music do make for an ok experience (this game does landscapes, skies, and sunsets like no other game), plus there are “random encounter” style interaction with wild animals and various people in need of help (or out to get you) that one can either engage in, or just keep riding.

So far Red Dead Redemption is a great game, and a strong contender for game of the year. We should ride horses together sometime, particularly now that the co-op mission pack (Free!) was released on yesterday.

In our continued charge of giving you the most up to date news on the availability of Hoverboards we thought it important to share with you this video of a working Hoverboard created by French artist Nils Guadagnin. The device uses an electromagnetic system (in the board and the pedestal it is on) combined with a laser system for stabilization.

HOVERBOARD – NILS GUADAGNIN from nils guadagnin on Vimeo.

I can’t think about Whiteout without remembering how I had to buy the graphic novel twice because my original copy was stolen when Dan’s car got broken into many years back. (Also stolen: my graphing calculator, a frisbee, and a ridiculously clunky pre-ipod CD player that could handle MP3 CDs.)

So, Whiteout is the film based on Grek Rucka’s graphic novel about a U.S. Marshal solving a murder mystery in Antarctica(!) I enjoyed the comic but I passed on seeing this in the theatre due the weak reviews it received from critics. Unfortunately I should probably have passed on Netflixing it. It’s that lame.

Rucka’s underlying story is still mostly there, but the pacing of the film is so awful that it’s just crippled in the adaptation. All of the character that seemed quirky or mysterious in the comics come across as bland and uninteresting in the film. It also suffers from a glut of Hollywood/committee style dumbing down with elements like flashbacks (because the audience couldn’t possibly remember what we showed them 25 minutes ago), complete removal of any discussion of the history/politics of Antarcita (that are critical to why solving the murder is so hard in the comic), and the gender switch out of a major character, I guess to serve as possible love interest where that didn’t exist before? (Also we wouldn’t want to market a movie with two strong female leads, right?) Also sad: the comic ends with a cool Mexican standoff that resolves unexpectedly, the film has a silly extended fight sequence that didn’t quite make sense.

So yeah, really not worth your time even if you like the source material. Antarctica is a pretty sweet setting for a story though, go reread the comic, or if you want to see a movie set there rewatch John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing.

I felt a little guilty starting a discount western shooter when I haven’t finished the Fallout DLC, or even started Mass Effect, but I’ll be honest: when I want to unwind, point allocation and managing inventories don’t immediately jump to mind, in fact that seems too much like work. (See also my critique of the Wii, sure it has fun party games, but who wants to relax by waving their arms around wildly? I mean that basically sounds like my job.) That’s right, when I want to relax I want to shoot at bad guys. With guns. Maybe as a cowboy. And possibly ride a horsey.

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I waited to borrow Batman Arkham Asylum from a friend rather than buying it myself, but I was only barely into it when it became clear that purchasing this would have been well justified. Arkham Asylum is a really solid game that combines platforming, combat, and light puzzle solving in ways that remind me of how awesome Prince of Persia was on the original xbox. Strong gameplay elements combined with a near fetishistic obsession with Batman trivia and voice acting by many of the folks who made the Batman Animated series make this an absolute joy for any Batman enthusiast. Countless hours into it and the combat is still fun, the pacing is solid, and the side quest style content still hold my attention. My one gripe is that the character designs are a little over the top; the attempts to make an “adult” Batman game with even-more gruesome villains and over-sexed vilenesses makes me feel like I’m playing “Todd McFarlane presents Batman.” Arkham Asylum is a fun game and one of the few non-co-op games I keep feeling motivated to come back to.

Borderlands has been out for four weeks now and I can only  assume that the reason neither myself, Jason, Dan, or Kai has written anything about it is because we’ve been too busy playing it. I don’t follow previews and game development news as much I used to, so Borderlands kind of came out of nowhere as a surprise hit for me. Usually I only buy games on release day if it is something I’ve been anticipating for months (Left 4 Dead, Halo ODST, etc.) but many of my friends were set on getting it when it came out and I made what turned out to be a wise decision to follow them.

The most efficient description I’ve heard of Borderlands is that it is Diablo meets Fallout 3. In longer form: Borderlands is a first person shooter meshed with a loot-and-level-style RPG set on a post apocalyptic alien world where you’ll enjoy shooting things, taking on quests, managing an inventory, and allocating points on a skill tree (every nerd loves point allocation!) Consistently fun game play, near endless weapon permutations, amusing dialogue, and a novel art style combine for an extremely solid game playing experience. I’ve played through roughly the first half of the game with each of the four character types and even playing through a battle for the forth time is still fun because of the neat environments and the variety of weapons and skills you can employ. The story feels a little thin, but so few games that allow co-op even consider the other players in the storytelling that I’m willing to be pretty forgiving (I’m looking at you Halo ODST, Rainbow Six, and HAWX.)

I’m not sure what Borderlands is like single player as I’ve been exclusively playing it with 1-3 other people. The drop-in-drop-out systems for multiplayer works well and even with players having some range in their levels or duplicate classes is still fun. I personally like playing the Solider and the Hunter the best, but my partners in crime seem to get plenty of enjoyment from the the Brick and the Siren.

Is there anything bad to say about Borderland? Well it might serve as a dangerous gate way drug that will subvert console gamers into addicted MMORPGers, but it is probably worth the chance.

I didn’t have high expectations for 2012 and was generally fearful that it might be pretty similar to the rather dreadful The Day After Tomorrow (notable for an extended sequence of characters being chased by a cold front.) I was pleasantly surprised to find it much closer to a movie close to my heart, The Core (notable for being awesome.)

2012 features your pretty standard disaster movie requirements: an array of scientific nonsense, depictions of your favorite landmarks dying fiery deaths, and more people-escaping-in-the-nick-of-time sequences than is worth counting. There are three separate scenes with airplanes taking off from runways being consumed by fire! Three! I was actually somewhat surprised at the array of characters they chose to follow throughout the movie and none of them particularly grated on me in that way most one dimensional action movie characters tend to. 2012 is generally fun and has some unexpected twists in the story toward the end, so if you haven’t seen a movie with lots of explosions and not much thinking this may fit the bill. Expect nothing intelligent about this movie and you’ll be fine.

I had the pleasure of being in the third row for this talk Lessig gave on copyright and culture last week. If you’ve read his books you’ll enjoy this, if you haven’t read any of his books yet you probably owe him the 60 minutes:

Someday when I’m free of certain professional entanglements I’ll write my book about my lifelong career in media piracy and how it provided me with key job skills I have today.