0 True Grit - Read it! - Wed 20 July 2011

True Grit by Charles Portis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Most enjoyable - I love Mattie's forward manner and take-no-nonsense attitude. This book even brought a tear to my eye towards the end. Highly recommended.



View all my reviews

0 Edgar Allan Poe is my homeboy - Fri 6 May 2011

Yes, I know. It has been a month since I posted anything on my blog, but that happens when one is on holidays (from my place of employment only, not from actual work :( ), moving house, dealing with family and generally being a misery guts! Time flies even when you're not having fun.


However, one good thing has come from the (un)joy of moving, and that is finding the material for today's post. It is a poem I wrote about five years ago expressing my undying love for Edgar Allan Poe, written in a similar poetic metre to Poe's "The Raven". I found it in a box in the cupboard. Enjoy.

An Ode to Edgar Allan Poe 


or


How I long to one day be known as the female Edgar Allan Poe of the 21st century








To this day I still remember, that dry and warm November
when I first walked to the shop to buy a book to call my own.
I was happy and excited, most whole-heartedly delighted
that my parents felt incited to give me a 10-buck loan.


I could barely quell my passion, in my young and childish fashion,
face lit red instead of ashen, looking for a 10-buck book.
Through the store I did a-wander, rabidly I tried to ponder,
with the money set to squander, round the literature I looked.


Then I saw just what I wanted, sitting there like it was haunted,
from the bookshelf, yes, it taunted, begging me to take it home.
As I picked it up I shivered, the front cover was so vivid,
a picture of a man so livid, that I knew I'd love this tome.


I could sense its ghoulish content from the cover picture's torment,
yet I knew I would but love the work I found inside its folds.
So with undignified elation, I took "Tales of Mystery and Imagination"
with me home past the train station, keeping it tight within my hold.


When at last I got to reading, yes, my dark soul, it was feeding
from the brilliant prose and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe
and I wondered if I ever, could but hope to be as clever
as him, most brilliant author that the world shall ever know.


To this day I still find pleasure, while I'm reading at my leisure
through the most macabre and chilling stories ever written down.
Though we are facing a new age where violent video games are the rage,
nothing ever can compare to Mister Poe, of most renown.

1 Movie Review - Grandma's Boy - Sat 5 Mar 2011

Grandma's Boy (2006)


My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Grandma's Boy, a comedy from Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, follows Alex (Allen Covert) a 35 year old game tester, who is evicted from his rental home after his room-mate spends all the rent money on "exotic massage therapists".


After staying at a friend's house and disgracing himself, Alex realises he'll have to stay with his Grandma Lily (played by Everybody Loves Raymond's Doris Roberts), a lovely old woman with two kooky room-mates.


Things start to get difficult when the deadline for testing "Eternal Death Slayer 3" looms and Alex's new room-mates keep him from working by giving him innumerable chores and hogging the only television set in the house.


Joel David Moore gives a fantastic performance as J.P., a prodigy game designer with a penchant for pleather and aspirations of becoming a robot. Coincidentally, you can find Moore in another game-referencing movie, playing Norm Spellman in James Cameron's 2009 blockbuster Avatar.


There are also cool cameo performances by Jonah Hill (best known for his roles in Superbad and Knocked Up)  and Nick Swardson (Jon Heder's stalker in Blades of Glory), who plays Alex's boyish friend Jeff. There's even a couple of blink-and-you'll-miss-it scenes with Rob Schneider playing a Russian landlord and David Spade as a short-tempered vegan waiter named Shiloh.


Covert is likeable as the hard-done-by protagonist Alex, and his group of co-workers are all good fun, even if they are a little stereotyped. My favourite scenes include Alex beating the other testers at "Frog Bog" and Jeff meeting his "Silver Fox".


I really enjoyed this film with its fictional gaming references and gamer in-jokes, and if I weren't a Librarian, I'd LOVE to work at Brainasium! 


If you love gaming, love a good laugh and you're not easily offended by drug-fuelled toilet humour, then Grandma's Boy is the film for you.


Still not convinced? Here's the YouTube trailer:

1 Movie Review - Gamer - Thu 6 Jan 2011

Movie Review - Gamer (2009)


My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Gamer is set in a world where you can either be the player or the played - where real people are used as avatars in two real-life video games - Society and Slayers.


Society is much like the real "game" Second Life, where you control an avatar, making them go anywhere in the game and do anything you please. The difference here is that Society’s avatars are real human beings - usually people down on their luck, who have agreed to be “played” as a way of earning money.


Slayers is much darker. The avatars in Slayers are death-row inmates that have opted to become a part of the game in the hope that they may actually survive and not be put to death. If they are able to make it alive through 30 games, they are pardoned and set free. Suffice to say, it has never happened.


Enter John Tillman a.k.a Kable (played by the handsome Gerard Butler), who has made it successfully through 27 games, and is looking to be the first avatar ever to be set free. Kable has become a global celebrity, with almost everyone wanting him to make it through, except for Ken Castle, the creator of Slayers (played by TV’s Dexter, Michael C. Hall), who has other things in mind.


I love the concept of this film. It is both original and imaginative, and really makes you think about the ethics of life, death and self-control, but alas, it is poorly executed. The plot is too erratic, and to match this, the cinematography is so frenetic it could send a healthy person into seizures. All at once, it’s colourful and noisy before going dark and quiet, and so many blink-and-you’ll-miss-it images are flashed at you over and over again that it’s hard to work out what is actually happening.


Butler is handsome, but that’s about it. He’s a cardboard cutout with a heartbeat. I guess that’s to be expected given the nature of his role, which is a character being controlled by a 17 year old boy.


The movie’s saving grace is the performance of exquisitely evil Michael C. Hall, who does psychotic oh so well. He is both likeable and detestable - managing to reel you in quickly with comedy before suddenly pushing you away with his sub-human indifference. My favourite scene would have to be Hall’s choreographed rendition of “I’ve got you under my skin”. Given that it’s towards the end, it makes having watched that much of the movie seem almost worth it. 


This film could quite possibly appeal to Gen Y viewers who supposedly love the frenetic - but for me, it was just too surreal.

Here's the movie trailer on Youtube (if you work where I do, you won't be able to see the embedded video below, but you can check it out at home):

0 Book Review - Fallen

Fallen by Lauren Kate

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This one PROVES you should never judge a book by its cover!

Unfortunately it wasn't worth the time it took to read - the characters are bland and under-developed, making it hard to invest any real interest in their plight.

The first 300 pages are basically a waste of paper. They should have been used to develop some semblance of plot and to make the reader care about the characters - instead whole chapters are wasted on poor attempts at emo-pleasing simile and pointless pockets of dialogue.

If you're looking at this book thinking "Gee, I'd like to read that", go read Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzgerald instead.

You can find Fallen on the City of Gosnells' Library catalogue here.

Better yet, you can find Hush Hush on the City of Gosnells' Library catalogue here.

View all my reviews

5 Warriors AND Women

Meet Violet. This is my avatar in the game Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout is quite possibly my favourite game of all time (although, remember I’m a bit of a noob, and haven’t yet played a HUGE number of games to compare). 

There are many, many reasons why I love this game - far too many to go into right now - but one of the main reasons is that you can play a female character of your own design. Of course, as in most video games, the design choices are limited - she is still generally young, she is heavily made up and has a figure I could only dream of - but at least she is dressed for her environment (as opposed to being half-naked), and if I wanted to, I could make her older (but alas not fatter).  

When I think of the (roughly twelve) Playstation games I have played so far in my noobtastic career, I can think of two where you could actually choose to have a female avatar, and two more where you could kind of play as a female, while the main emphasis still remained on the male characters (think Madison Paige in Heavy Rain). 

Now, if we think about the statistics I quoted in my first post, the fact that there are more games with male avatar choices than females makes sense - the game developers want to appeal to a male-dominated (only just!) market. 

But why, oh why, does the majority (of this minority) of female characters have to be the half-naked, anatomical equivalents of Barbie™? Is it because male gamers won’t play a game where the female characters aren’t “hot”?

If you’re up for a bit of heavy reading, you should check out this “feature” by Shaylyn Hamm (which is actually part of her thesis on the aesthetics of female video game characters). In this “feature”, Hamm talks about the wide variety of male characters (in terms of body shape, clothing and facial structure) and the limited design of female characters over a number of different games. 

As a part of her thesis, Hamm designed two new female characters for the multiplayer game Team Fortress 2, based on the male characters already in the game (the Medic and the Heavy Weapons guy). You can see her female characters here. 

I love them.

Neither of them are “pretty” or “ugly” and they are both dressed for their environment (i.e. fully clothed!). To me, they look like real women just doing their job, and I can honestly say if given the choice, I’d rather play as these women than the Barbie doll doppelgangers of most video games today. 

What do you think of Shaylyn Hamm’s designs? If you’re a guy and the option was there to have either a male or female avatar, would you ever choose to play as a girl? Let me know! :)