WEP '12, Day 6 - There's Something Odd About Holmes

This is more of a state of the site post rather than something topical.  We'll return to current events tomorrow.

I was looking over my page views recently, and I noticed something interesting.  My review of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows has some 241 pageviews.  That's more than ten times what I normally get on a good post, and beats the 153 pageviews I got on my most read work for Yahoo, the AMC Randhurst review. I assume that's more a reflection of the popularity of the film than it is anything I did, and it was probably helped by another reviewer who posted a comment, but it remains a minor feather in my cap.

Speaking of comments, it occurs to me that the problem with having some of the commentary here, some on Facebook, and the rest on Google+ is that no one ever ends up speaking to one another.  It's pretty much just me replying to you.  I suppose that's fine, but perhaps we'd be best served just putting our comments here so that everyone can play?  Just a thought.

Overall, I've mostly managed to maintain the pattern of getting my WEP posts up fairly early in the day.  Day two almost got me, as I didn't get the post up before we started playing Old Republic that night, but I managed to find a gap in our run while the other player was finishing off a Class Quest to finish the post and get it up before midnight.  It was a close thing, though.

So far, the most viewed post in 2012 was my Chicago Bears post, which was a surprise.  I guess there are more Bears fans than movie or Old Republic fans on my Facebook and Google+ feeds.

In other news, my patience was rewarded.  I managed to get a coupon through Impulse that let me finally buy the much-maligned Sword of the Stars II for only $10.  With luck, the constant patching has made the game actually playable, which was not the case when it first came out back in October.  I suppose I deserved to be disappointed, as the last game that I was following with as much anticipation was Master of Orion III, and that didn't work out either.  I don't know if it still works, but here's the link to the coupon if you want to give it a try.

So, we're most of a week in and things are rolling nicely.  I thank you for your patronage, and here's hoping the other 51 weeks go as smoothly as the first one did!

WEP '12, Day 5 - "X-Men: First Class" Blu-ray Review

I caught X-Men: First Class on Blu-Ray at my brother's place last night.  This was the second time I'd seen the film, having caught it in the theaters after all the good reviews came in.  One line review: This is a good  movie that's made by Michael Fassbender's performance as Magneto.

The thing to remember about X-Men: First Class is that Fox has the rights to the X-Men franchise in perpetuity...unless they stop making X-Men movies.  With Disney having bought out Marvel, losing the rights to the X-Men no longer means having another rival bid a ton of cash to get the rights themselves, it means letting Disney start making their own X-Men movies, or perhaps worse, integrating the X-Men into the Avengers movies.  So Fox slammed together First Class on the cheap and in a hurry, just to keep their hands on the license.  That also meant that they didn't particularly expect First Class to do all that well, and so didn't interfere with the production process all that much, allowing director Micheal Vaughn to do pretty much whatever he wanted.  Which is good, because the script passed through something like seven people's hands before it was done, including blending in the abandoned X-Men Origins: Magneto script that had been dumped after X-Men Origins: Wolverine flopped.  Given that some of the early X-Men: First Class scenes about Magneto were my favorite parts of the movie, it's a shame that the Magneto movie never got off the ground.

It is also a shame that the film is so rushed.  Not only in its actual production, which saw Vaughn only barely getting the film out at all, but in the way the story develops.  For all that this is a good movie that I did enjoy, I can't help but feel that a redistribution of priorities, which I'll discuss in detail in the spoiler section below, could have made X-Men: First Class a great film.

As it is, however, it remains one of the better superhero movies overall, and probably the best of the ones that came out in 2011.  Presuming you're a fan of the superhero action movie, you should probably seek this one out on disc or through your preferred method of digital distribution and give it a try.

SPOILERS follow!

I can't read your mind.  If you want to avoid SPOILERS, you have to act for yourself.

There's a reason that I picked the poster I did for my spoiler break.  There are, after all, a number of different posters available that highlight all the X-Men, as well as ones that show all the good guys and bad guys together, all looking cool.  But those images all miss the point, which, alas, X-Men: First Class does as well.   X-Men: First Class is at its best when dealing with the relationship between Charles Xavier and Eric Lensherr.  If the movie had been mostly, perhaps even exclusively, about how those two met, worked together, became friends, then grew apart, that would have been the great movie I mentioned above.  Unfortunately, we don't get as much of that as we would like, because the movie's too busy rushing around introducing the other mutants and setting up the "Thirteen Days...but with Mutants" plot.

(Speaking of which, you should probably go see Thirteen Days if you haven't already.  They never say so explicitly in the film, as far as I remember, but every time the screen goes from color to black & white, you're seeing the actors play out actual taped dialogue from the Kennedy Tapes.  It's an excellent blend of history and fiction that works very well.  Granted, Costner's character gets more focus on him than I would like, but overall the film does a fine job recreating the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I recommend it.)

The shame of it is, as my brother pointed out in our post-film debrief, that they didn't need to rush Magneto from ally to villain so quickly.  They could have kept the team intact at the end of First Class, then shown his descent into darkness in the sequel, and had it blow up into a full on Mutant on Mutant war in the third film.  Unfortunately it feels like Vaughn didn't think he was going to get two more movies, despite having the major cast locked up for three films, so he rushed to the obvious conclusion in First Class, and the film suffers for it.

But we have to take the film as it exists, not as how we wish it existed.  And under those terms, it remains a decent film that has some okay superheroic action, and an interesting story that mixes with the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It has some great scenes with Michael Fassbender's Magneto, both alone and with David McAvoy's Charles Xavier, and it's fun.  

While I could wish for more, I have to admit I enjoyed what we did get, and as such, I recommend X-Men: First Class.

WEP '12, Day 4 - Chicago Bears 2011-12

With Michele Bachman having decided to quit...and Rick Perry deciding to stick around...it was tempting to talk about the results in Iowa, but I think I'll let that simmer a bit longer.  Instead, let's look at the Chicago Bears'  2011-12 season.

After three seasons, we finally have a good read on how valuable Jay Cutler is to the Bears.  He was valuable enough that losing him ruined the Bears' playoff hopes and cost Jerry Angelo his job.  It turns out that having a crap backup quarterback is a fireable offense when your starting quarterback goes down and the guy you have in as the backup loses your season for you.

So what happened?  Well, the Bears really had three seasons.  In the beginning, they were a middle of the road team that went 2-3.  They could beat the weaker teams on the schedule but struggled against tougher teams like New Orleans and Green Bay.  Then came the golden age.  Offensive Coordinator Mike Martz finally bowed to pressure to adjust his precious system to account for the fact that the Bear's offensive line couldn't handle the system as he designed.  Then the Bears suddenly had a offense!  They went 5-0 for the next stretch of games, putting them at 7-3 and near locks to make the playoffs as a Wildcard team.

Alas, it was not to be.  As mentioned, Jay Cutler got hurt, and his replacement, Caleb Haney, went 0-4.  Haney's replacement, Josh McCown, went 1-1.  Thus ended the 2011 Bears with a perfectly mediocre 8-8 record.  It also ended Mike Martz's time with the team, as he resigned over "philosophical differences" the same day that GM Jerry Angelo was fired.  Word online has it that both Martz and Angelo were pushed out the door, with Martz choosing to "resign" while Angelo had to be fired.

So where does that leave us?

The defense was decent, but given its age, tended to wear down in games leading to high opponent scores when we couldn't hang onto the ball.  That defense will be a year older come September, and Brian Urlacher got hurt in the last game of the season, so who knows if he'll be as good as he was this year?

The offense will depend on whomever's running it next season.  Safe money is that the Bears will just promote Offensive Line Coach, and former Vikings Head Coach, Mike Tice to the position.  If he gets the job he'll probably have a system that calls for quicker passes and more reliance on the run, which benefits the defense if you can play it that way.

The Bears have long had one of the premiere Special Teams units in the league.  Most of that credit goes to Dave Taub, who's probably the best Special Teams coach around.  Taub declined the Bears' offer of a long term contract, though, since the success of former Special Teams Coach John Harbaugh in Baltimore shows that you can go from Special Teams to Head Coach with success.  It'll be a dark day for the Bears if Taub gets a Head Coaching gig elsewhere, but it's hard to root against the success of a coach who clearly deserves to go to the next level.

As far as long term, the Bears upper management have already hamstrung their GM search by declaring that the new GM should be "in tune with Lovie's philosophies." and making it clear that Lovie Smith will be the head coach of the Bears in 2012.  Hard to see some of the high power GM candidates out there being thrilled about a job where they can't bring in their own head coach.

So, my guess is that Lovie has ascended to to the top of the Bears organization, and that we'll get a weak hand puppet GM to do the busy work of the job while Lovie picks the players.  And hell, that might even work out in the Bears' favor, because the Angelo-Smith war that divided Bears management into competing factions in the last few seasons certainly wasn't working.

Overall then, it was a disappointing season.  My father predicted that the Bears would go 7-9 this year.  I thought they'd do much better than that, as they were coming off a trip to the NFC Conference Game last year.  Turns out that I was right...until Cutler got hurt.  Then he was right.

I'm not overly optimistic about the Bears' chances in 2012, but this IS the Not For Long league.  Just look at the '49s quick return to relevance once they got Jim Harbaugh in as Head Coach, or at the rise of Tim Tebow.  Weird things happen in the NFL...a resurgent Bears in the playoffs next season wouldn't be the weirdest by a long shot.

WEP '12, Day 3 - Old Republic Log XII

Our healer called in sick last night and our attempt to do Hammer Station failed pretty early on without one.  So, since one player hadn't done The Esseles, and I hadn't done it with Kelynn, we did that instead.  Since 2/3 of the players were gong Dark Side, the story changed a little as we took the Dark Side shortcut by sacrificing some crewmen, but the Light Side prevailed in the final choice, which was a disappointment, since I'd like to see how the story changed.  We did have a slight Ninja problem which ended up with a Smuggler wearing Jedi robes, but hopefully we can work that out better next time.

Once we'd finished The Esseles, our Jedi logged out, so the Smuggler and I teamed up to do a couple of Heroic 2+ quests.  That went reasonably well, and I ended the night at level 16 with better gear than I'd started with, so that was good.  Hopefully we can get the whole team together next week and beat Hammer Station.

So here's how Kelynn started the night:

And here's how she looked at the end:

I kind of prefer the former, which feels more Trooper to me, then the latter, even if the backpack is reminiscent of the Rebel Troopers from Hoth.  But the second one has better stats, so that's what I'm looking like for the foreseeable future.

Tasia, Level 18 Sith Sorceress, Imperial Fleet

Kelynn, Level 16 Vanguard, Coruscant

Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Republic Fleet

WEP '12, Day 2 - Bad Movie Night

The interesting thing about a year long writing plan is that you become more aware about the amount of material you have available.  Three hundred and sixty five more entries is a lot of material, and it wouldn't do to spend what I've got saved up too early.

I could, for instance, do another Old Republic log since I spent much of yesterday getting ready for tonight's guild run.  But since I'll have even more to talk about after the run, I figure I'll just wait until tomorrow.  I could also discuss my thoughts and feelings about the end of the 2011 Chicago Bears season.   But that'll keep.  After all, the Bears aren't going anywhere, and neither are my thoughts on them.

So instead, I'll discuss the annual New Year's Eve Bad Movie Night Party.  Every year we gather to watch and heckle bad movies.  Normally we decide on a "winner" by which we mean the worst film of the night.

This year, there were five contenders, which we viewed in chronological order.  They were: Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), Hercules (1983), The Bride (1985), The Avengers (1998), and The Order (2002).  Time and energy expired before we could make it to a sixth movie, Conan the Barbarian (2011).


Manos: The Hands of Fate was featured in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  We didn't watch that version, though.  There were no funny robots or a lonely Minnesotan providing quips for this turkey.  No, we had to do that ourselves.  And there's a lot to quip about.  The movie tells he story of a family that gets lost in Texas and encounters and runs into a weird cult that worships Manos.  Even by the standards of 1966, the acting in Manos is wretched and the script is worse.  Every character is a one-note moron and there's virtually no plot.  Characters appear who have no purpose, including a couple whose only point in the plot was to make out in a car.  Of course, what else can you expect from a film that only exists because a guy bet how easy it was to make a movie?

Hercules is more professionally done, but still pretty bad.  It turns out there's a very good reason that Lou Ferrigno only grunted and roared on The Incredible Hulk.  He's simply not a very good actor.  Still, it was a definite step up from Manos.  That doesn't mean it was good, however.  The special effects were laughable, the acting mediocre at best, the action wasn't very interesting, the film quality was poor, and the main villain's definition of "science" was, at best, insulting.  Not a good film by any standpoint, but it wasn't epically bad the way Manos was.

If I didn't know the truth, I'd be hard pressed to believe that The Bride was made only two years after Hercules.  Honestly, if there was a single movie here that didn't qualify as bad, The Bride would be it.  The film quality's better, the actors are better, the script is better.  Alas, that still isn't the same as good.  The Bride is The Bride of Frankenstein crossed with My Fair Lady.  Doctor Frankenstein creates a reanimated bride for his monster, then pulls an Eliza Doolittle on her to make her a perfect lady.  Meanwhile, the original monster runs away from home and joins the circus.  The standout performance, and the reason it's a cut above the other films of the night, is the work of David Rappaport who plays the dwarf Rinaldo who befriends the monster and humanizes him on the road to join the circus.  Other than that, though, the film's a mess.  It's basically the Bride does something, the Monster does something, wash, rinse, repeat.  There's no cohesion in the film until the very end, and even then it doesn't feel like an evolution, just another thing that happens.  Though much better than the other films we watched, it still wasn't very good.

My own contribution to the pot was The Avengers, the 1998 adaptation of the '60s British TV show of the same name.  The movie's pretty unsatisfying.  The defeat of some of the villains is unsatisfying, the jokes often fall flat, and it has a degree of silliness to it that fails for most audiences, but was perfect for our purposes.  Worst of all, it makes a mockery of a classic TV show and fails to recreate its charm.  And for that, it deserves its place in Bad Movie night.

Finally, we watched Jean-Claude van Damm's The Order.  It...was everything you'd expect a crappy direct-to-video JCVD film to be.  Acting was bad, story was ridiculous, the fights not as cool as they ought to be.  Sadly, it was kind of a flop for me as far as Bad Movine Night went.  It was too bad to enjoy as a film straight up, but not bad enough to be really mockable.  It was just there.  Of course, since the last film is usually watched after midnight around the time that exhaustion is setting in, that could have something to do with it.

And that was Bad Movie Night '11-'12.  May the rest be as bad...and as fun.

Write Everyday Project '12, Day 1 - Introduction

I do hope everyone had a happy and safe New  Year's.  For me, it was spent at a friend's Bad Movie Night New Year's Eve Party.  Though watching that much concentrated bad may have damaged my soul, it was pretty safe physically, and the roads we're pretty quiet by the time I was driving home.  So my New Year was both safe and filled with laughter, which is about the best one can hope for.

New Year's pleasantries dispensed with, the time has come to begin the Write Everyday Project once again.  My goal is to write something here every single day in 2012 which, as a leap year, means going 366 consecutive entries.  It should be interesting to see how far I get, as the 2010 version went a mere 28 entries before getting shelved in favor of NaNoWriMo.

As before, WEP '12 will consist of whatever comes to mind, be it sports, movies, TV, or video games.  Given that leap years are also presidential election years, I'll likely end up talking some politics, but only sparingly.  I'd expect some general life and writing discussion to continue as well.  I'm folding my existing Old Republic coverage into the WEP as well.  I may only end up playing the game for a couple of months, or maybe for the rest of the year.  It's hard to say with an MMO.  For the moment, though, it is my game-drug of choice and will occupy most of my video game head space for the foreseeable future.

So that's the plan.  At least one entry a day from January 1st through December 31st.  Let the writing commence!

Old Republic Log XI

I got Kelynn up to level 11 last night.  Originally I was going to say that since her new armor was identical to her old armor, I was just going to rotate her portrait so you could see her cyberware a little better.  But then I remembered that I had some Ord Mantell commendations to spend, and when I had, I ended up with Kelynn's shiny new suit.  Still, I had both pictures, so here they both are.

First, Kelynn's old armor and a better look at her implants, such as they are:

I'll give you Kelynn's new pic before the spoiler section.

Matt and I also got some Sith time in over Ventrillo.  We decided to give Hammer Station a try to see how it goes from the Imperial side before we do it Republic style on Monday.  Turns out that we couldn't get the big boss down with just the two of us and our companions.  Hopefully, we'll have better luck with the Midnight Runners, but I have my concerns.  After all, Tasia and Mal'drak are level 18 and 19 respectively, and we never did better than getting him down to half.  I'm hoping that people have time to level up before we hit Hammer Station, because I'm not sure four level 13 characters can get the job done.

For the rest of this entry, I'm going to talk about the Republic Trooper storyline, so I'll catch you on the other side for the spoilers.

Tasia, Level 18 Sith Sorceress, Imperial Fleet

Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Republic Fleet

Kelynn, Level 11 Vanguard, Ord Mantell

The following section is classified as SPOILERS.

If you are not cleared for SPOILERS stop reading now.

This was, of course, the second time I've been through this story.  The first time was in the beta, and really, not all that much changed, despite my going with pretty much all Dark Side choices.  The tale is that of a stolen Republic nuke.  They don't call it a nuke, but if it can blow up the whole island and is highly radioactive, it's a nuke.  For all that I said during the beta that it was a war story, on reflection after the second time through, it's sort of a military/spy hybrid.

That's because your main mission is to find the bomb.  And to do that, you do spy things.  You try to get information from a Republic agent and you coerce information out of Separatist sympathizers. You infiltrate enemy bases.  It's all James Bond type of spying where it always leads to a big firefight.  Except you're in plasteel armor and carrying an assault rifle rather than a tuxedo and Walther PPK.   

The side quests, on the other hand, are all out of the war story handbook.  There's quests involving a thief who took medical supplies to help the refugees.  There's the one with the war correspondent.  Several about purely military objectives like taking out a Separatist communications network or dealing with enemy missile launchers.

That dichotomy makes it less interesting than either of the Sith starting stories.  Too often I felt like I was being pulled away from something really important.  I mean, sure, there were side quests on Korriban.  But in those cases it made sense.  You're a dipshit little acolyte.  When a big name Inquisitor pulls you a side with a job, you do it or eat lightning!  It's all a matter of staying alive by serving everyone above you, while plotting your revenge, of course.

For the Trooper, though, it felt kind of off.  I'm searching for a fucking nuke in the hands of terrorists who might use it to kill thousands if not millions of people.  Do I really have time to fuck around looking for this lady's necklace, or that family's lost son?  And yet, if I don't do it, I won't have enough experience points or gear to actually storm the enemy base at the end!  It felt more "gamey" to me, and took me out of the story in a way that the Sith storylines did not.  

So now I've got a Vanguard on my way to the Republic Space Station and then to Coruscant as I try to level up in advance of our Guild game on Monday.  Let's see how far I can get.