Reviews at Geek Skillz

[Review] Mozy Remote Backup

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:49:00 EST

Tags: Reviews, Software, Web

Geek Skillz, this green and white blog that has somehow caught your attention, is just one of my websites that I run as a hobby. I've got four websites running on an old IBM ThinkCentre box sitting on my desk. Why pay a monthly fee when I can run my own server? Until recently, there has been one problem with my setup: backups. Yes, I've been taking regular backups of the websites and the databases, but those backups have been sitting in a hard drive only one foot away from the server itself. So if my place were to burn down, both the server and the backups would be gone. If someone robbed me, they would probably take the server and the backup drive. What good are backups if they're in the same building as the source computer? Not very good at all, I say.

A few weeks ago, I discovered Mozy.

Mozy is an online remote backup service that gives you up to 2 GB of space on their servers for FREE where you can backup your files. Even better, it will keep the backups up-to-date automatically, similar to the way Mac OS X's Time Machine works. I'm a huge fan of Time Machine, and wish that Windows had something as elegant. Mozy comes close. Instead of keeping a huge archive of backups like Time Machine, Mozy keeps a backup of only the latest versions of files. This will probably be good enough for most users' needs.

If you need more than 2 GB of space for your backups, Mozy offers monthly and yearly payment plans for as low as US$4.95 a month. For businesses, there are Mozy Pro plans. I've been more than happy with the MozyHome free plan, so give that a try before deciding whether a monthly plan is for you.

How Does It Work?

To start backing up, you need to first install the Mozy software, which is available for both Mac and Windows. Once installed, the easy-to-use interface lets you choose which files you want to backup on the Mozy servers. There are some predefined backup sets that you can choose to let Mozy decide how to do it. For example, if you want your e-mail to be backed up, choose the Outlook or Apple Mail backup set. Other sets include Firefox Favorites, IE Favorites, Word Processing Documents, iCal, Keynote Presentations, and many others. Backup sets make it easy, as Mozy will figure out which files need to be backed up for you.

The backup sets aren't good enough for me, as I want to backup the code for my websites and my database backup files. Mozy lets you choose any files and directories on your computer easily. Click on the screenshot to the left showing my backup configuration on my Mac, where my Ruby on Rails code resides. I checked the "rails" folder and a few of the subfolders underneath.

Once you tell Mozy which files and directories you want backed up, you can set a schedule for how often Mozy will send backups to its servers. Or you can let Mozy perform the backups whenever your computer is idle. Note that Mozy will only backup changes to your files. It won't waste time by uploading files that haven't changed since the last backup. Nice.

Mozy allows you to include more than one computer in your account. I've got my server, which runs Windows, and my laptop, which is a Mac. Mozy backs up the database backups from the server, and my website code from my laptop. Both the Mozy website and the Mozy client software keep track of how much data is being stored from each computer. The website will even tell you when each machine was last backed up, so you don't need to log in to each computer to check the status of your backups. It's a simple feature that's makes the service even more convenient to use!

What Doesn't Mozy Do?

Mozy is not a "file archive" service. It is a remote backup service. What's the difference? A file archive service lets you upload files where they will be stored and never changed unless you change them yourself. A backup service like Mozy will keep backups of the latest versions of your files. If you delete a file from your computer that Mozy had been backing up, then Mozy assumes that you don't need it anymore. From their FAQ: "If you delete the working copy on your machine and then run a backup, Mozy will assume that you no longer need a backup copy, since you got rid of the working copy, and will mark the file to be removed from our system in 30 days. (We keep it on file for 30 days, just in case you change your mind.) After 30 days, you cannot get these files back."

So, you can't upload all your vacation pictures to Mozy and then delete them from your hard drive. If that's the kind of service you're looking for, then Mozy isn't going to help.

Also, you can't share files with others. You can't backup a file to Mozy and tell your friends to download it.

Let Mozy Do What You Should Have Been Doing All Along

Mozy is a backup system for your files. If your computer gets stolen, or your hard drive goes up in smoke, or a meteor crashes into your house, Mozy will be there to restore your files to the way they were a few days or hours before tragedy struck. That's what Mozy does, and it does it automatically. Tell Mozy what to backup, and it will do it all by itself, without asking you to do anything. Set it and forget it.

In my opinion, Mozy does what computers should do for us. Why should I have to worry about such mundane tasks as keeping backups of my files, keeping track of which files have changed recently, and finding a safe place to store my backups? Our computers need to be more autonomous, making decisions for us. Even the most tech savvy computer users make bad decisions when using and maintaining their computers. It's about time that software starts doing these things for us, and Mozy is one of those products that does that for me. MozyHome is free, so give it a try.

Confession: Yes, the links in this article are referral links! I can make a few dimes and nickels by recommending Mozy to you. Nevertheless, my opinions are sincere. Managing data is a nerdy thrill for me, so Mozy is an exciting service because it's an elegant solution to an important problem. Anything that manages data automatically for me is awesome! Mozy was recommended by Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times and PC Magazine, so my glowing praise is hardly original.

[Review] The Lies of Locke Lamora

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:43:00 EST

Tags: Books, Reviews

I just finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, and let's just say that I'm impressed! February in Canada is a great time to curl up under a blanket and lose yourself in a great book set in a warmer place. Lies, the first novel by Lynch, was more than capable of helping me escape February! I haven't been this excited about an author since I discovered George R. R. Martin, whose recommendation led me to discover Lynch.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is set in a fantasy city similar to Venice, except with a lot more sharks. Locke Lamora is a con artist, who robs from the rich and... well, has some good times afterwards. The story is a fast-paced series of cons, robberies, shark battles, fancy-dress parties, assassinations, sword fights, back-stabbing, and all kinds of swashbuckling goodness.

Even though this is the first in a long series of forthcoming books, Lies isn't just setting things up for a future climax (*cough* Robert Jordan *cough*). It's a complete novel in every sense. All plot threads are concluded by the end. Lynch doesn't string the reader along. Instead, he does everything he can to delight and amaze! In a genre that has recently been encouraging bloated, aimless fantasy series of huge tomes (I'm looking at you, Steven Erikson!), it's refreshing to find a new fantasy author who writes a briskly paced story with the reader's enjoyment in mind.

Check out the following interview with Scott Lynch to find out how his blog helped him get his book published and launched his career as a writer. Yes, his blog got him published!

Crazy!

I know!

That's what I said!

Crazy!

He speaks like a role-playing gamer.
Don't ask me what that means. It's just true.

Go get The Lies of Locke Lamora. Seriously, it's great.

[Review] JPod, TV Series Premiere

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:24:00 EST

Tags: Books, Reviews, TV

I’ve been a Douglas Coupland fan since my brother loaned me his copy of Shampoo Planet many years ago. Since then I’ve discovered Microserfs, easily in my top 10 favorite books of all time, and now JPod, which I’m currently reading. When I found out that JPod has been turned into a TV series, I was thrilled! Microserfs and JPod are books about my mysterious caste of professionals: software developers, a.k.a. programmers. No one knows what we really do, and no one understands how we spend our days. Maybe JPod can enlighten and inform. I just finished watching the series premiere on CBC, so I’ll give my thoughts on it.

The first thing I noticed (with a gasp!) is that the theme song is one of my favorite Bonobo songs, and the episode featured a second Bonobo tune. The show automatically gets 3 stars! It’s like Douglas Coupland stole my vinyl collection!

Next, I noticed that the JPod cubicles are ridiculously hip and cool, in an office setting I would kill for. It seems like the show creators have obviously never spent any time in a real programmer’s work area, a world of beige, dust, and white noise. If only work was as fun as JPod makes it look! However, I must admit that HR sometimes puts people anywhere they can fit a desk or cubicle, like telephone rooms and the wasted space around structural pillars. True story. So, the JPod is not an entirely impossible setting.

The acting overall was good, with some great laugh out loud moments. Cowboy gave me some good laughs, especially when he tried to deny frequenting a website about hugging. Alan Thicke is a bit awkward as the father. I hope he can ease up on the fromage in future episodes. David W. Kopp was great as Ethan, suitably average but with geek flair orbiting him at all times. He plays the straight man in contrast to the abundance of comic relief, being the island of sanity in an otherwise absurd show.

The pop art interludes are a nice touch, being visual (and in my opinion better) versions of the ones in the book. After Kaitlin reveals that she’s from Florida, an interlude appears showing a Florida orange with snow falling on it, alluding to how frosty Kaitlin is to the other reluctant members of JPod. Cute.

The episode flew by at a fast pace, like most of Coupland’s books, and the closing scene left me wanting more. Finally, I’ve got something to watch on Tuesday nights! I recommend JPod to all geeks and programmers, and their family and friends who want a glimpse of what we do. It’s good enough to pull me away from my laptop for an hour, and that’s saying a lot!

(Confession: I had my laptop on my lap throughout the entire episode. I have no editor, so I'm not changing that last line.)

Now, time to play some Bonobo records.

[Review] Hellgate: London

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:55:00 EST

Tags: Games, Hellgate: London, Rants, Reviews

Hellgate: London was a game I got excited about when I first heard about it, and then lost interest when I heard more about it, and then got excited about it again for some reason I can't remember. Feeling the urge to get a new game in early November, I picked up Hellgate: London, thinking it could be that game that would replace my current favorite games, or at least be a contender for my attention. Getting a new game is a thrilling experience for gamer geeks like me. Going to the game store, rushing home with the box in hand, putting the disk in the drive, watching the installer status bar inch towards 100%, and then hitting the "Play" button. Thrilling, I tell you!

That was the high point of Hellgate for me. Actually, for the first few hours playing the game, I was still having fun. But things went downhill real fast and it didn't take long for that sinking feeling of disappointment to ruin it all.

At its core, somewhere deep and buried, is a good Diablo-style action-RPG. Random magic items, supposedly random levels, lots of loot, endless monsters to kill, fast action, and everything else you expect from the Diablo formula. But you have to overlook a lot of flaws if you want to relive the endless fun of Diablo.

I'll start by listing the things about Hellgate that I enjoyed, because it's proper to say nice things about something before insulting the crap out of it.

The Good:

The Marksman: Playing the marksman class is great fun. Marksmen get to use many types of guns that are truly unique and can change the feel of gameplay a great deal. Using the Firefox (yes, Firefox) launcher is nothing like using a machine gun, and the option of using one small gun in each hand lets you have two different gun effects going off at the same time. I often chose to use two guns just because it was fun, even if it might have done less damage (which is hard to say... see later). The marksman doesn't suffer from the annoyances, bugs, and quirks of the other classes because you're just firing guns and shooting grenades. That's basically all there is to the class.

Weapon Sets: Hellgate lets you create three weapon sets that you can switch between using F1, F2, and F3. So, you can equip your machine gun on F1, equip two one-handed weapons on F2, and equip a sniper rifle on F3. This makes it feasible to switch between different weapons effortlessly so that you can use fire damage on monsters weak to fire, then switch to electrical damage for another monster, go into sniper mode with your sniper rifle, and so on. Setting up my arsenal of weapon slots was definitely fun, I'll give Hellgate that.

The Bad:

The Story: Wow, the story in this game is a stinker. I can hear some people protesting, claiming that Diablo's story wasn't very impressive either, and that no one plays an action-RPG for its story. But Hellgate's story is so bad it can't be ignored. I just can't bear the thought of playing through the last act again because it is so unbelievably stupid and painful to experience. The story is complete nonsense. I would say that the story was written while someone was on drugs, but I don't want to insult drugs like that. None of it made sense. None of it. The ending consists of fighting a demon who appears on the front of the game box, with very little explanation. Most disappointing villain ever. Diablo at least set up Diablo as this terrible demon who needed to be stopped. But the demon at the end of Hellgate has no history or story at all. Is it really so hard to foreshadow the end boss as a big bad guy?

The Writing: Ok, "writing" and "story" are basically the same thing, but I really hated this aspect of the game, so I'm including it in two sections. It's my blog and I can do what I want to! The writing is terrible. NPC dialog tries to be funny, but falls flat, and it gives very little information. Every NPC is a clown, cracking jokes or talking nonsense in a sad, sad effort to get a chuckle. Even worse is that some of the jokes are voice-acted so that you have to listen to them every time you want to sell your loot. It's ok for games to have humour, but it should be suitable in some way. Hellgate does a good job of creating a dark, post-apocalyptic atmosphere, but it is often ruined because all the NPCs are total buffoons. For the benefit of the Hellgate writers, here's the definition of "Toon" from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website:

Toon. A comic relief character generally intended to be recognized as such -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are toons (most of Shakespeare's comic relief characters are toons). Toons have a limited place in fiction; an excess of them can render an otherwise serious work trivial. (CSFW: David Smith)

Cinematics: The cinematics in between each act are nonsense, much like the rest of the story. Without spoiling anything, they show a floating book. To accompany the floating book is a narrator who makes no sense at all. He just babbles some cliches and random words. Why even bother with cinematics if the writers have no content for them? Awful.

Skill Descriptions: Hellgate has skill trees like in Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft. Want to know what each skill does? You can try reading the skill descriptions, but they often won't help. To understand what most of the skills do, you need to spend precious skill points and try them. Since there's no way to get those skill points back, you'll end up wasting points on skills you don't like. The fix for this problem? Hire better technical writers. But you already know how I feel about the writing in this game... Unhelpful skill descriptions is just another symptom of a bigger problem with Hellgate. Alternatively, they could allow characters to "re-spec" (re-assign skill points any way you like), but I can understand why the game designers don't want to allow that.

Weapon Damage: Similar to the poor skill descriptions, it is very difficult to know whether one weapon is more powerful than another. All weapons have a number on them, but the meaning of that number is a mystery. It doesn't tell you how much damage you do, although that's what I assumed until finding a weapon with a much lower number that did a lot more damage than my current weapon. Most games now use the "damage per second" metric to tell you how much damage weapons will do, but Hellgate doesn't. Just like skills, the only way to tell the power of a weapon is to try it. Even then, it's hard to tell which weapons are more powerful most of the time.

Guide the Fist to Victory!: The quest "The Wall", where you must "Guide the Fist to Victory!" is a vomit-inducing stench of awful. It's unbelievable that someone at Flagship had played the quest, thought it was good, and decided to leave it in the game. This quest forces you to play a real-time strategy mission where you must control four useless soldiers from a top-down perspective and kill a boss somehow. The quest doesn't work well, and is completely broken in multi-player. If you do the quest in a party, every party member shares the same camera but controls different units. So, if you move north and your friend moves west, the camera can only show one person at a time, often oscillating between different viewpoints so that no one can see anything. Have no doubt, you and your friends will be yelling and screaming at each other in frustration. If you want your friendship to survive, you'd better start laughing about how bad the quest is. It's actually pretty funny. Flagship, what the hell? This quest is deplorable. And what's worse is that there is another quest like it closer to the end of the game. You will again need to control a unit in the same way (The Lightning), and it's just as bad.

Dismantle: The game has what I thought was a good feature at first. Instead of dropping items or carrying them back to town to sell, you have the option of dismantling loot to get small, stackable scraps that can later be used for crafting, upgrades, or selling. In theory, it's a great feature that improves on the Diablo formula. But soon you'll find that you're spending a good chunk of your time using the game's awkward interface to dismantle the hundreds of useless items that you picked up, one at a time. If you see your party members standing still instead of helping you in a fight, you can be sure that they are busy dismantling their items. In other games, you would suspect that they lost their internet connection or their computer crashed. But in Hellgate, they are dismantling items. This problem can be easily fixed with a "dismantle all" button or "dismantle all non-magic items". Titan Quest fixed this problem by giving you the option to ignore all non-magic and/or inferior items that drop. You won't even see them, so they'll never find their way into your inventory. Hellgate could easily add the same feature and it would go a long way to make the game more fun.

Levels: By themselves, I rather like most of the tile sets in the game. I especially like fighting in the London streets, the ruins of pubs, flats, and cars all around. The problem is that after you have been playing for a few hours, you have seen nearly all the level designs. After a few more hours, you will be dying to see some colours besides brown and grey. Set pieces like the British Museum and Piccadilly Circus are a welcome relief, and are very well done. Also, the game claims to be randomizing the levels, but I don't see it. Every street level looks the same to me. Every sewer, the same. Every basement, the same. Every hell citadel, the same. I'm sure there are slight variations, but the randomization is far too subtle to provide any variety. Also, since the game has the word "hell" in the title, you would think that hell would be an impressive place. Nope. Hellgate features the most boring, unimpressive rendition of hell I've ever seen. As for the hellgate itself, it provided the funniest moment in the game for me. When I first saw it, I thought I was looking at a rainbow. "Oh, isn't that pretty! Oh wait... that's the hellgate!? Mwahahaha!" If only the NPCs were that funny.

Conclusion

Ok, I think I've pummeled Hellgate: London for long enough now. It's bruised and bleeding, and I almost feel bad about it. The game can be pretty fun to play, although I didn't enjoy most of the classes. As a marksman, I had some good times. Hellgate is not beyond hope, given another year or two of development.

I tried to play it a couple of times lately, but couldn't get back into it. I don't want to dismantle any more items! I don't want to guide the Fist to victory ever again! The final level with the guy on the cover of the box is torture and I don't want to do it! There are too many things in the game that aren't fun.

If you're looking for a good action-RPG released in the past few years, I highly recommend Titan Quest. I can't recommend Hellgate: London to anyone for any reason.

Fair Weather Friends

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:57:00 EST

Tags: Music, Reviews

Daedelus, one of my favorite experimental musicians, has released more stunning and surprising music for those of us who can't get enough of him, and those who haven't found him yet. The Fair Weather Friends - EP has five new tunes to blow your mind and make your feet tap-tap.

This one has a track that I will boldly claim (and then take back in a few weeks when I change my mind) is my favorite Daedelus track: El Subidon. It's a sublime, hypnotic, euphoric piece that is wearing out my speakers. Where do you get a volume knob that goes to eleven?

Daedelus claims to have three new LPs in the works, and if this EP is any indication of what he's up to these days, then colour me excited!

Here's a video for the title track from the EP:

"Fair Weather Friends" by Daedelus

Be sure to look for the video for "Sundown" on YouTube too. Good stuff.

Time For An Upgrade

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:49:00 EST

Tags: Elder Scrolls, Games, Geek Loot, Reviews

My big red Alienware PC is now about two years old. Seems like I just bought it. *sniff* As I mentioned earlier, I bought BioShock, the smash hit new game that doesn’t work. Well, this game really showed me how old my computer is. The graphics are still good, and oh-so shiny, but the framerate just isn’t high enough to allow me to react fast enough to the zombies... er, mutants... er, splicers? I don’t know, whatever they are. They’re zombies with a stupid name.

So, disappointed, I switched over to playing Oblivion again. I still love that game. Then I thought about making it run even better. I mean, eventually BioShock will get a much-needed patch (right?!) and then I’ll want to play it. So, I downloaded the Computer Internet to my hard disc driver, and found that video card prices have dropped delightfully! I was expecting to see the latest cards being sold for $300 or more (Canadian dollars), but found one of the recommended upgrade card (see Tom’s Hardware) for as low as $192! Wow, a PC upgrade that’s cheaper than an XBOX 360? Too good to be true.

The Tom’s Hardware upgrade guide I referenced describes my PC perfectly. It’s like they wrote it for me. But instead of following the advice strictly, I just bought the video card and ignored the CPU upgrade suggestion. Turns out it was a fine decision, because now I’m playing Oblivion with things turned up almost to max! BioShock looks better too, but still crashes all the time. So my “old” hardware wasn’t the problem. It really is just a broken game.

Much of my joy in Oblivion comes from my characters. I like to take lots of screenshots of them. And now they look so much better. I can now use the “self shadows” option, which means that their clothing, armor, weapons, and other body parts (arms, nose, cheek bones, etc.) cast shadows onto the character. I’m playing a character who is often sneaking through the shadows, so seeing him wearing a hood that cast shadows over his eyes is video game geek heaven! Skulking in the shadows is way more fun now!

Another advantage to this simple, cheap upgrade is how well it handles the dense, lush forests in the game. Combat in the grassy forests always brought my computer to a crawl with my old nVidia 6800GT, giving me about 5 to 10 frames per second, which was a bit frustrating. Now forest battles are glorious and gorgeous.

Self-shadows is still my favorite feature though. Seeing the shadow of my sword on the goblin’s face right as it’s coming down will never get old.

If your computer is in need of a quick fix, check out the 8600GTS. It seems to be a prime time to upgrade right now, and this card delivers a lot of power at a low cost.

Oh, and for fun, check out a realistic and hilarious review of BioShock. Apparently, I’m not the only one who noticed how much of Fallout was stolen... I mean, how inspirational Fallout was to BioShock. I can’t embed the video here, so you’ll have to check it out at The Escapist.

Happy Blog Day

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:01:00 EST

Tags: Reviews, Web

Happy Blog Day, everyone! That’s right, there is such a thing as Blog Day! Today bloggers celebrate by recommending 5 blogs that are different than their own. I often read blogs that are different from my own. I write about nerdy stuff in my own blog, but I read about different topics on other blogs. Personal blogs, how-to blogs, political blogs, whatever. Here are my 5 recommendations to celebrate Blog Day 2007:

GBGames’ Blog has been in my bookmarks for... I don’t know how long. I found this blog when I thought I was going to be an independent game developer. I don’t work on my own game projects anymore, but GBGames (Gianfranco Berardi) was one writer who helped make me feel connected, less isolated. Even though I don’t share the same aspirations as him anymore, I still check out his progress and cheer him on. I didn’t make it, but I still hope that he does. I don’t comment much on his site anymore, but I still read. What makes Gianfranco really special is that he has a glass of orange juice attached to his face. I have never seen a picture of him without it. Stay strong, GB.

Gay Bipolar Guy by Staggo Lee, easily the top commenter here at Geek Skillz! His blog is a cabaret of visual art, poetry, humour, and politics, as well as being a deeply personal journal. Given the title of the blog, I don’t need to tell you that he holds nothing back. I admire the courage and honesty in the writing found here. This is a grassroots blog. It’s old school, and all that. It’s a blog the way blogs used to be before the time when people blogged about how to make money blogging, or how to be a more productive blogger, or how to write top 10 lists on your blog.

Astrona is a blog with pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. We all talk about it having a lot of pictures. It features science-fiction artwork, highlighting the work of different artists. Science fiction artists are much less appreciated than artists who paint mundane scenes. I hope they find Astrona and feel a little more important.

Johann The Dog is a blog by a dog, in case the title didn’t give that away. Johann can form sentences much better than most people on the internet. His spelling is almost perfect, and his grammar is impeccable. Good boy! His blog is probably more successful than mine.

Escape From Cubicle Nation, by Pamela Slim, is advice to those who want to escape cubicle life, or who want to be their own bosses. She did it herself, so she’s speaking from experience. Not only does she discuss how to be an entrepeneur, she also writes about the fears people need to deal with when making the switch from a “real job” to becoming self-employed. It’s motivating and insightful.

So, those are my Blog Day picks for 2007. I think it’s good for all bloggers to stretch outside of their niche to see what other people blog about, how they write, and how they try to reach their audiences. If you’re not a blogger, then I recommend it. It’s a fun and creative hobby. I think writing about ideas is a much better way to spend your time than absorbing ideas from your television.

BlogDay2007

[Review] Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 09:01:00 EST

Tags: Movies, Reviews

I saw the newest Harry Potter movie last night. As I've mentioned before, I haven't read the books, so each film is brand new for me. I enjoyed most of the previous movies, with the third film, Prisoner of Azkaban (directed by Alfonso Cuarón), being my favorite.

This chapter is much less a schoolyard story, thankfully. The bright gold and red colours of quidditch teams from the first two movies are gone here, replaced instead with black and white, and blue and green, and a hilarious touch of pink (played brilliantly by Imelda Staunton), resulting in a gritty visual feast. The movie is more focused on fewer characters and a more concise plot, with a sense of urgency throughout. There is a huge cast of characters which could have overburdened the movie. Instead, the film chose to give many of them brief cameos, which were effective and sufficient to support the story, which remained focused mostly on Harry. If any of the plot from the book was missing, I didn't notice.

Overall, I found that Phoenix was a much better wizard movie than the previous movies. All the magic was more powerful, and the locations were more fantastical and wondrous. I especially liked the locations of the wizards' headquarters, all done up with marble and lit by magical light and green flames. Now that's what I want to see in a Harry Potter movie! The film is well paced, leading to a great climax with powerful magic that I've always thought was lacking in earlier films. Battles between wizards should be powerful and epic, and finally we see the clash of mighty wizards dueling.

Go see it. There aren't very many fantasy movies that portray magic like this, so it's a rare treat. Good times.

[Review] Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:01:00 EST

Tags: Comics, Movies, Reviews

The more superhero movies, the better, I say. It’s great to have so many movies being made in my favorite genres, and I want to support them. But sometimes it seems that movie studios are just taking geeks for a ride by putting hot actors into superhero costumes and filling 90 minutes of our time.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was quite a ride, and I’ll borrow a tag line from the movie to summarize my review: It’s clobbering time.

I’ll have to admit that this was better than the first movie. It had more interesting special effects, slightly better acting, and a story with more depth, but it was often painful to watch. The movie attempts to be campy, but induces groans instead of laughs.

The jokes are not funny. Not on paper, and certainly not in spoken dialog. The movie is full of unoriginal jokes that we’ve all heard before. For example, The Thing encounters a bear in a forest, and the best line the writers could give him was, “Overgrown fur ball.” Come on. Try a little harder than that! If you can’t think of dialog for a scene, then cut it, or make it a deleted scene on the DVD.

One scene has the Invisible Woman trying to understand why the Silver Surfer says he has no choice but to destroy the Earth. Jessica Alba delivers the worst line of the movie with equally awful acting skill: “You’ve always got a choice!” The horror of this scene was so shocking that I turned my head away from the screen, groaned, and then said “Oh shut up!” a little too loudly. Alba’s performance throughout was embarrassing, but this scene was especially amateur. We can’t blame Alba alone for the horrible scene she had to work with. Shame goes to the writers and director, and maybe to the editor who could have deleted all trace of this scene to spare us the horror.

Ioan Gruffudd’s (Mr. Fantastic) performance was also weak. This was disappointing, since I know he can act. Time to watch some Horatio Hornblower again. The personality of Mr. Fantastic was muddled and inconsistent. He was supposed to be a nerd, a genius, and a leader, while delivering bad puns and lame jokes. Gruffudd did a passable job when he was allowed to play the leader, but failed as the dancing, elastic, comical nerd. Why does every character have to crack jokes and perform visual gags throughout the movie? I would like to see Mr. Fantastic played as the straight man in future iterations of this franchise, if it’s allowed to continue.

However, even when he wasn’t cracking jokes, he was given plenty of crappy lines. For example, he used the term “cross-reference” too many times, and it doesn’t seem like the writers even know what that term means. Mr. Fantastic’s scientific computers were flashy and showed nonsense. All of his science talk was laughable. No effort was made to do research.

The Thing’s performance is worse than Alba’s, in my opinion. I attribute this to the rubber suit and disgusting synthesized voice with which actor Michael Chiklis had to deliver his (bad) lines. He looks like a cheddar cheese creature. That suit looks nothing like stone. Who looked at that suit and said, “Yes, that is what The Thing looks like.” Idiots. It looks like a big, delicious cheese man.

Chris Evans (Human Torch) gave the only good performance of the movie. His character was well-defined and he played it well. He could actually deliver the bad lines without inducing a groan or even a flinch. That’s a skill that is much needed in geek genre movies, like fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero. If you can’t deliver awkward, campy lines, then you shouldn’t be in geek movies.

The Silver Surfer was well done, and grabbed my interest enough so that I look forward to the Silver Surfer movie which is being written by J. Michael Straczynski, the mastermind behind Babylon 5. With a good script and a decent superhero, we might have a good movie on our hands. The Surfer was the only guy in the movie who wasn’t delivering bad jokes, so that’s probably why I liked him. Let’s hope that doesn’t change.

See Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer if you can stomach bad dialog delivered badly. The special effects are good enough to get you through this 90 minute film, but not good enough to forget that you’re being taken for a ride, and not the good kind.

[Review] Evil Dead: The Musical

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:01:00 EST

Tags: Horror, Reviews, Theater

I had the great pleasure to see Evil Dead: The Musical on Friday, June 15. We had seats in the second row of tables, which is near the splatter zone. Yes, this is a musical with a splatter zone!

This is a bloody, gory, vulgar musical that was written especially for horror fans, and it kicked ass! The actors obviously have a lot of fun getting into character as demons and demon slayers. The show is excellent throughout, unlike many musicals that fall apart in the second act. In fact, the first act of Evil Dead is just a taste of the comedy, violence, and blood splatter that the show has in store.

Come the second act, the front rows of the audience were cheering as the blood sprayed all over them. The second act was more funny, had more dancing, more violence, and everything else that the audience craved. This was a show that built up to a glorious, bloody climax! You'll want to become a demon yourself so that you can join in and dance the Necronomicon too. Highly recommended!

Evil Dead is playing at the Diesel Playhouse in Toronto. It has been extended to August 4th, so get your tickets immediately!

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