Movie Review - Sully

   Alright, time for another film review. Airplane movies are cool. Let's try that. This time I watched Sully, a film about the real life US Airways flight 1549 that crash landed on the Hudson River without any loss of life. Is it any good?

   It's directed by Clint Eastwood and it stars Tom Hanks. What do you think?

   Our plot follows Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger, an experienced airline pilot who gained fame after successfully ditching a loaded passenger jet on a river in New York City in 2009. Despite his success, he is plagued by flashbacks and nightmares of his experience. What's more, Sullenberger and his copilot, Jeffrey Skiles, are under investigation by the NTSB who believe that the flight could have successfully landed at another airport and that the loss of the airplane was avoidable. There are moments where Sully gets fairly technical about the field of aviation, but it's far from unwatchable. The crash landing scenes – yes, they do play it out twice – are a thrill to watch, even though we already know how they turn out. Still, plotwise, this is a film that offers few surprises. This is probably the reason why the movie can sometimes feel like it's longer than just 96 minutes. In fact the only real thing that surprised me about this film is that it didn't end with a scene of Sully reuniting with his wife and kids (who we see talking to him on the phone several times). Instead it ends with a joke from Skiles. Dropped the ball there.

   As I said before, Clint Eastwood is in the director's chair, and his trademarks are clearly visible: charming/inspiring feel-good moments mixed with a bunch of US flags. Not overly stylistic, but capable nonetheless. The CG effects were good. At least they were better than the baby from American Sniper, right?

   The acting is all-round rather well done, especially from Hanks (Sullenberger) and Aaron Eckhart (Skiles) who portray pretty much the only three-dimensional characters in this film. It's not as if Sully really needed a multitude of characters to portray an event that lasted a few minutes.

   I have a feeling that the writers were really stretching for ideas here. While Sully's posters promised us “The untold story behind the Miracle on the Hudson”, I doubt there's much new stuff to be discovered from here. But on the whole, Sully is enjoyable enough. It isn't exceptionally good, but still pretty good.

Grade: three and a half stars out of five.

Movie Review Repost - After Earth (2013)

Hey guys. Sorry it's been so long since my last current movie review. I've just started another semester of school AND I'm moving to a new place in a few days and have been packing everything up. So yeah, I've been pretty busy lately. Hopefully it won;t be too long until my next review. For now let's take a look at my thoughts on a film that's been on my mind a bit for the past while (for some reason): After Earth. Easily the worst movie I saw in 2013 (even worse than Lone Ranger), this thing has a very haphazard feel to it (especially the writing). It's also downright laughable at times. So let's look back and have a good laugh, shall we?

   After Earth: if you've ever wanted a movie to fall asleep to, then this is it. It's one of the more dull movies that I've seen in a while.

   Need proof? Just look at Will Smith's acting (or sleep-acting rather). He plays Cypher, a man without fear. Apparently having no fear turns you into an emotionless, monotone person who almost never changes his facial expression and is a heartless, terrible father. Will Smith is usually one of those actors who just gives it his all in whatever role he plays, but After Earth's script has forced him to become a stone-faced automaton of a man (the very thing he tried to destroy in I, Robot. You've let me down, Will.). He spends the majority of the movie sitting in a chair, sometimes looking/speaking directly to the camera. Wow.

   But our main character is actually Cypher's son Kitai, played by Will Smith's son Jaden Smith. Like the Karate Kid remake a few years ago, After Earth is supposed to be a showcase for Jaden's acting, which isn't terrible. But there is a limit as to how well one can portray a somewhat-whiny kid who makes dumb decisions, disobeys orders, and spontaneously quotes Moby Dick for no reason. He also falls asleep no less than five times throughout the film. But this actually makes sense, seeing as how the viewer will feel like falling asleep by the end of the movie.

   Oh yeah, I guess I should talk about the plot. This movie takes place in the far distant future in which mankind has been forced to leave Earth and settle on other hostile planets. Humanity is protected by the fearless Rangers who are led by General Cypher. Cypher takes his cadet son Kitai on a routine mission which runs into trouble. They crash land on a long-since abandoned Earth and must now find a way to survive and escape whilst developing their father-son relationship.

   This particular adventure, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is one involving lots of awkward transitions, non sequitur flashbacks, boring monologues, nonchalant narrations, and cheap-looking sets. As one might expect, this film relies heavily on CGI, but a lot of it isn't done very well (especially the animals). This film could have been more intriguing if the viewer got to learn more about the universe it takes place in. Instead the viewer is left wondering why soldiers in the future use spears instead of guns. What kind of accent is everyone speaking in? And what was up with the whole “Earth's gravity is stronger than home” thing? It's mentioned once in the film's beginning, never brought up again, and seems to have no effect on Kitai's movement or stamina.

   So who would like this movie? If you're a Will Smith fan and you don't want to have your heart broken, then don't bother with this. If you're a sci-fi action movie fan with low standards then you could probably meet this movie halfway. Just remind someone to wake you up when it's over.

Rating: one and a half stars out of five.

Video Game Glitches Part 3 - Getting Stuck

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the final part of my video game glitches series: Getting Stuck. Pretty much all video games have this problem. Sometimes it can be game-breaking, other times it can be pretty funny and cause some wonky physics problems. Here's the instances of getting stuck that I happened to catch on camera.

Like Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Alpha Protocol (2010) is a buggy game that often has that unfinished feel to it. It's not uncommon at all to see people glide around, jitter back and forth, and get stuck. Here's a picture of a guy whose corpse is saw get stuck in a wall. His head and right arm were inside the wall and his body was jiggling around as it moved higher and higher up the wall. Needless to say, it was pretty funny. Trust me.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway (2008) is a fairly solid game. I haven't seen many glitches there with the main exception being this one. On one of the final missions I was leading my squad in attacking a German position near a windmill. I looked at my map and was confused when it told me my assault team wasn't following me even though they appeared to be at my side. Then I learned why: one guy – Zanovich, I think – had his head stuck in a bridge. Thanks, game. With him out of action... oh who am I kidding? The level was still pretty easy.

And again, for the third time, we have Gears of War 2. Like I said before, I played tons of GoW2's multiplayer so I saw all sorts of insane things. This includes people getting stuck. A lot of people getting stuck. Amusingly, this often included people becoming trapped in the ground, like Dizzy and Carmine here. At least Dizzy was able to still defend himself. Carmine, on the other hand, is only able to occupy the hill and wait for a locust to headshot him eventually.

Finally we have a rare glitch from the original Splinter Cell (2002). This was at the end of one of the Chinese Embassy missions. To exfiltrate, you need to climb over a wall and then enter this van. The problem was that I was spotted by the guards as I was climbing the wall and I took damage from their shots. Just as I was approaching the van, the alarm went off. For some reason, this made Sam want to climb onto the rear bumper and just stay squating there. I had no choice but to reload my last checkpoint and try it again. Thanks a lot, Sam.

And thank you guys for reading this series of mine. Hope you enjoyed it. Game on.

Video Game Glitches Part 2 - Bad Drivers, Headless Apparitions, Etc.

Welcome to part two of my three part series on video game glitches/oddities that I just happened to catch on camera. Last week we looked at some amusing death poses. This week's theme will be glitchy behaviour, glitchy appearances, and some random bits of trivia I've come across. Let's go!

It's no secret that the NPCs in Far Cry 3 are terrible drivers. I've seen them drive off cliffs, I've seen them flip over and die, I've seen them run allies over, I've been run over by them a couple times. I've seen two opposing NPCs drive in circles around eachother in a pathetic attempt at a demolition derby. In this example here I liberated an outpost which is usually followed by a car full of friendlies showing up to secure the place. Except in this instance I guess the driver didn't brake hard enough so the jeep drove straight into the water. Apparently NPCs in this game can't swim, so after being buggily ejected from the car (once it ground to a halt) they all immediately started shouting and drowning. After a brief struggle, their lifeless bodies floated for a moment before sinking to the seabed. I laughed so hard that I cried.

Here's another from Far Cry 3. Cassowaries are predators that will attack anyone near them. But not here. While in the process of liberating this outpost I shot open the animal's cage expecting it to raise hell before I made my move inside. Unfortunately for me – yet fortunately for the bad guys – the cassowary just didn't feel up to fighting privateers, I guess. What's more, the bad guy in front of it didn't even take notice. He simply continued sitting at the fire, not doing anything. So that means that there's two fails going on at once.

Did you know that the man with the world's longest fingers served in the Canadian Army during the Second World War. It's true. I learned it from Call of Duty 3. For some reason when he crouched his Bren gun stayed at waist level and his fingertips were stuck to it so they stretched way out. Ew.

Here we see Lt. Minh Young Kim getting his face broken – literally – by a Theron Guard in Gears of War 2's multiplayer. I've only ever seen this happen to Kim and (especially) Dizzy – Dizzy's face is really buggy, probably due to how it's supposed to twitch. But yeah, it was pretty funny to see Minh's nose and jaw broken.

Everybody knows how buggy Red Dead Redemption (2010) can be, but here's one I saw in Undead Nightmare (2010). I rode into Blackwater during a zombie attack and for some reason everyone's heads were missing. Only the humans though; the zombies still had their heads. The headless townsfolk were friendly and they could still talk, but on the radar they appeared as enemies, so I slaughtered them. After all, it could be contagious.

Here's a little curiosity I found while playing through Gears of War (2006) not long ago. Now I'm a pretty big fan of the Gears universe; I've played all the games and read all the books. And as anyone who has read the novels knows, days on the planet Sera are divided into 26 hours, not 24 as this sign seen in the game suggests. Well, let's give it the benefit of the doubt; maybe you are allowed to park here for two hours of the day... You're just not told which two hours those are.

And lastly we have this happy little scene from the end of my season campaign in NHL 2002 (2001). While I am a huge Canucks fan, I'm counting this as a glitch because I don't think this'll ever happen in real life.

Thanks for reading, and tune in next week for the Video Game Glitch series' conclusion.

Video Game Glitches Part 1 - Silly Death Poses

Video games are so cool in that they try either to create new worlds for the player to be a part of or to recreate the real world and allow the player to run amok and manipulate. This is what makes glitches in video games especially amusing; the immersion is broken by something outlandishly messed up. So I thought it would be fun to display some of the most amusing video game glitches/oddities that I've happened to catch on camera. Since there's so many I want to show you, this will be a series spanning 3 weeks. This week's theme is funny death poses.

Our first silly death pose comes from Call of Duty 3 (2006). This happened in the mission in which you're with the French resistance destroying German artillery. After dispatching the boches with a grenade I discovered this one dead guy standing like this. I guess the grenade went off while he was doing belgian squats. Either that or, judging by his hands' placement, he's trying to thrust his dick at you. Doesn't explain what his leg is doing back there, though.

It's too bad I didn't get this one on video, because this was a pretty weird one. This guy is one of those pyromaniac pirates found in Far Cry 3 (2012). As most gamers know, these guys can be set ablaze by sniping their molotov cocktails from afar, which is what I did. However, this guy appeared to survive the fire so I spent the next minute or so trying to headshot his ass, not understanding why it wasn't working. Eventually I crept over and noticed that he didn't react to me at all and the aiming reticle didn't turn red when pointed at him. He was technically dead, even though he was bouncing back and forth, waving his arms around, and shaking his head about, not unlike his idle (i.e. alive) animation. And then he blinked out of existence. Yeah...

Gears of War 2 (2008) was a game that I played a lot and so I found silly stuff all the time, including funny death poses. This would include everything from corpses hanging off of things to cadavers missing eyes. Fun stuff. Probably the best one I captured on film (or as a digital picture, whatever) was this one of Cole on his knees thrusting his chest out. All GoW players know how much Cole loves to show off and apparently this desire extends beyond the grave. The expression on his face tells you that while he didn't enjoy leaving this world behind he was satisfied with the way he'll be remembered. “Check out my pecs forever. Peace out.”

Gears of War: Judgement (2013) seems to be a much less buggy game than GoW2, but it can still be good for a laugh here and there. In between the two rooftop horde modes it seems that one of the locust drones I killed wanted to stick around and watch round two. He just stood there and never moved and after about 30 seconds or so of me amusedly walking through him he disappeared. Aw man. At least I took the picture at the perfect moment. Baird was right, the grubs did stop fighting.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is a pretty good game, but it can sometimes have that “unfinished” feel to it, you know? Case in point, I found a bunch of silly bugs in it. This one here shows what happened when I shot Miguel with a shotgun at point blank range. He died hanging by his (palm-up) hand, half-kneeling on the ground. I particularly love how he seems to staring at his hand as if to say “check this out, guys!” Hilarious.

Next up, also from R6V2, is a dead guy bent over a couch. I would say it's funny that he's doing the whole “my body is ready” pose, except that here he isn't even bent over on the couch. He's bent over on the air above the couch. I'm not quite sure how you do that.

Speaking of Rainbow Six, this next one comes from RS 3 (2003) in which Loiselle's corpse decided to practice the splits after dying. Either that or he was killed while he was stretching on the floor, which is really no surprise now is it?

And lastly we have this lovely spread from Splinter Cell: Blacklist (2013). I can't remember exactly how I KO'd/killed this guy, but it looks like Sam broke his spine across that bar. Or it could be that the guard just fell asleep while resting against it. I'd believe both.

And that's enough “what the--” for one week. Stay tuned next week for some more weird video game stuff.