Hitman was actually much better than I expected based on the wide range of negative reviews I saw when it was in theaters. I would even go so far as to say this is one of the better video game adaptations I have seen and that many of the criticisms of the movie would apply directly to the source material as well.

I have played through and generally enjoyed all of the Hitman games, but the plots of the games frequently don’t quite make sense and do have you following an emotionless cloned assassin. This translates to a movie that has some plot holes and weird turns with a main character who is emotionless and somewhat uninteresting. That said I think Timothy Olyphant does a good job and was a pretty good fit for the stern and introverted Agent 47. The plot fits with the plots of several of the games: 47 assassinates someone, it turns out he has been set up by a conspiracy there is a conspiracy that is now out to eliminate him, 47 must kills more people and the assassins sent to dispatch him to resolve things. I enjoy how the movie kind of fits with the different ways a person might choose to play through the games: sometimes 47 eliminates people with stealth and subtlety, sometimes he mows them down in elaborate gun fights. I thought this was nice in reflecting the different aspects of the game, but in a movie it basically makes the character feel inconsistent and poorly developed.

Overall not nearly as bad as I had expected and pretty good as far as video game adaptations go.

I’m willing to give vampire/zombie movies a lot of slack, but 30 Days of Night was pretty lame. The premise of the original comic is maintained but many new characters and plot points are added. The pacing frequently feels awkward with the introduction of minor characters to see them killed off soon after. Any zombie/vampire movie will have the requisite scene in which one of the good guys is forced to “save” a friend by executing them before they completely transform into a monster. 30 Days of Night has 3-4 of these scenes except the good guy finds it necessary to decapitate his friends with an axe, usually requiring multiple swings to finish the job, instead of a the more traditional sympathy bullet to the head. (Note to friends: should it ever be necessary to stop my transformation into a creature of the night I would much prefer a shot to the head over being bludgeoned to death with an axe…) The comic included an interesting sub plot with in-fighting between the vampires with regard to the safety of such a wide scale attack on humans, that is removed altogether in the movie and the vampires lack really any character. They do occasionally exchange quips in subtitled “vampire language” but mainly they just shriek at each other which is more annoying than frightening. The final fight is relatively anticlimactic which was rather disappointing. Last but not least for a movie that is supposed to take place at night a lot of the exterior shots are pretty bright and well lit.

All together an awkwardly put together movie that is missing a lot of the polish and many of the points of interest present in the graphic novel.

(Still working my way through a backlog of cheap xbox games.)

After getting continually stuck in Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth (the next save point seems to corrupt my save file and the save point after that is too far away), I decided to try out TimeSplitters Future Perfect, the third game in the TimeSeries series.

After playing so many game that require careful use of stealth, or at least cover, to eliminate hostile forces it felt strange to play a game where your character is capable of mowing down endless series of henchmen with no regard for your personal safety. The gameplay was very reminiscent of the N64’s GoldenEye 007, so it was not too big a surprise when I discovered that the developers, Free Radical, were primarily former programmers from that game. As such the gameplay (kill henchmen over and over) can be a bit repetitive, but the settings for the gameplay (locations throughout time) add some novelty to that experience. TimeSplitters greatest strength over other FPSs would be its use of humor and the joy of a game that features time loops and other time travel silliness. I was more or less sold on the game when upon encountering a locked door a future version of my self yells to me from a grate in the ceiling and passes me the key, a situation for which you must act out the other side of later in the level. Also one of the later levels has steampunk robots!

A fun game in general; folks with current generation consoles might wish to keep an eye on the new titles Free Radical has launching soon: Haze and TimeSplitters 4.

Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series has been one of my favorite comics of recent years. The story of a Canadian slacker who must battle the league of ex-boyfriends of his true love is packed with so much joy, zannieness, and oddball video game references that each volume has been a treat to read.

Today’s news from the Hollywood Reporter (via Jeremy) is that a movie based on the series is moving forward with Edgar Wright (Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) attached to direct and Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Superbad, Juno) to pay the title character.

Seem like a fun match up, though it will be interesting to see how much of Brian Lee O’Malley’s story will make the transition to movie and to something marketable to mainstream audiences. In the meantime fans of Michael Cera should make sure to check out his web series Clark and Michael.

(No specific plot related spoilers.)

The Wire has been my favorite show of recent, and though the last season has felt somewhat rushed and some of the newer characters less believable, I have still thoroughly enjoyed it up to the end. I read a review of the last episode on CNN.com in which the reviewers were disappointed with the ending but I think it the ending is appropriate and is very consistent with the message that David Simon is trying to send throughout the 5 seasons. Some characters stories feel more concluded than others, and some are more “just” than others, but the overall message is that life continues, Baltimore will still be Baltimore, and the institutions that make up our world will stay on their respective courses.

Despite efforts to the contrary I am still trapped in the “last generation” of hardware console games and have taken some free time to play games for the GameCube, Xbox, and PS2 that were purchased long ago but never fully explored.

Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth (original Xbox or PC) is a fun and interesting game that was, as far as I can tell, a commercial flop. Basically what they have done is grafted an adventure game into the a first person shooter engine, with some survival horror elements. The game is a loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s Shadows Over Innsmouth, perhaps my favorite of all Lovecraft’s stories, and I would consider it a highly successful adaptation of a short story to the video game format (though I don’t have much to compare it to.) The story is well implemented, with appropriate considerations for building a spooky experience through great use of audio and ok graphics (given when the game was made.) The “interface” is one most striking elements of the game; where as most first person shooters would present a “Heads Up Display” to show weapon/health related status, Dark Corners of the Earth presents all such information in not-entirely-quantifiable adjustments to the visuals. The game tracks both health and sanity(!) and indicates the status of these by blurring vision, slowing the game down, and using the controller to simulate frantic heart rate (I thought this would be stupid but it is well done.) These way of controlling the experience combined with the exploration of nicely rendered Lovecraftian environments (ruins, old mansions, collapsed townships etc.) work well togehter. I don’t think I have been this successfully creeped out by the experience of playing a game since exploring a haunted mine in “Thief: the Dark Project” (circa 1999.)

The best part of the game (to me) is that it is a first person shooter in which one does not actually engage in much combat for about the first 6 hours of the game. I am huge fan of the adventure game genre so it is interesting to me to see how that type of gameplay can merged with the more popular genres such as a shooter. You explore a decaying town, solve light puzzles, engage in some “stealth action” style scenarios and such, all of which I think work well to present the environment for a “horror” game more successfully than simply advancing through rooms shooting adversaries. I am about 10 hours in at this point and now have a collection of handguns and the requisite shot gun with which I must now dispatch the good folk of Innsmouth, but the game seems to slow down and not really feel any different from any other shooter once the combat stage is reached. The story is interesting (more so than most FPSs) so I am compelled to play more but defeating zombies can only hold you for so long.

If you are looking for a short list of old Xbox games to check out I would probably put this on it. Though the graphics are dated this game stands out to me as being part of small set of games for the xbox that did particularly original things insofar as the gameplay/story experience. Other original xbox games I am particularly fond of that I don’t think got around much include Republic Commando, Psychonauts, and Chronicles of Riddick (don’t laugh).

Shoot ‘Em Up is ridiculous. Never has an action movie been so much about action at the expense of being a movie. At only 86 minutes the movie doesn’t even really have time to fit much pretense of a story between the gun fights. Clive Owen and and Paul Giamatti manage to squeeze in some banter which is nice but it is ultimately about guns, guns, and guns. Clive Owen’s character Mr. Smith does manage to kill TWO baddies with a vegetable, as well as engaging in a gun battles both while delivering a baby and having sex (separate occasions.) Shoot ‘Em Up opens ridiculous and grows from there which is a dedication to being ridiculous that not enough action movies are brave enough to embrace.

Cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch and 200 students at Kansas State University created a video about students in today’s college classrooms. It is an example of “digital storytelling” with an interesting mix of low tech (words on paper, chalkboard and walls) and high tech (time-lapse footage of a Google Doc being edited by the 200 students). It doesn’t offer any concrete solutions, but rather poses some though-provoking questions for anyone trying to reach 21st centurty students in a 19th century setting.

Live Free or Die Hard is not nearly as good an action movie as the original but it is still a great deal of fun. It has several great action sequences, a few great lines of dialogue, and a relatively thin plot with a lot of holes. I think most of the entertainment value comes from the technology element in the story, in which an renegade ex-NSA hacker (played by the menacing Timothy Olyphant) is trying to take down the government and the internet to teach them a lesson. There are also ninja hackers and a villain skilled in parkour, which is apparently a requirement in post-Casino Royale action movies.

In short this Penny Arcade comic tells you most of what you need to know about the movie. Basically Die Hard it has a lot of the technological ridiculousness that made Hackers funny, plus a lot of explosions and gun fights. By Tony reasoning that makes this movie worth about 3.5 Hackers (converting this to a unit of measure that is useful to you is left as an exercise for the reader.)

I checked out Tarantino and Rodriquez’s Grindhouse last night. I can say that it is definitely geared for a certain “type” of viewer. Of the compatriots I saw it with, some very definitely fit this “type” and some very much did not and had a rather unpleasant experience. The trailers should pretty much set any expectations you might have perfectly. The movies are extremely entertaining, provided you can be entertained by ludicrous helpings of violence, sexuality, and gore. Going into it I had heard that Quentin Tarantino’s muscle car/slasher movie Death Proof was the superior to Robert Rodriguez’s zombie blood bath Planet Terrror, but that wasn’t really my experience. Planet Terror is packed with wanton violence and over the top gore that made it a lot sillier to watch. Death Proof has some cool car case scenes but you have to watch a lot of extended scenes of what I considered uninteresting dialogue to get to them. After the approximately 2 hours of non-stop carnage that precede the start of Death Proof the shift of gears in pace is perhaps far to noticeable, especially given that you’re now getting into the “slow” movie well after midnight. To be fair, Death Proof is probably a much better “movie” but I thought Planet Terror was a better experience. I’m certainly biased in that I generally like Rodriguez’s stuff and find Tarantino’s material to be grating at times (his extended introduction he added to the American distribution of Chungking Express, “I didn’t make this movie, but I really really like it” makes me furious), and this is not him at his best. It is also worth noting that I like zombies way more than muscle cars so your experience may be different from mine.