"Cabin In The Woods" (2012) dir. Drew Goddard

whoooooooaaaaa

Okay, so I have no interest in actually reviewing this movie because if you like horror movies you should just go fucking see it. Like, right now. I can't believe I waited 2 weeks and still managed to remain mostly spoiler-free. Finally, I'd had enough radio silence and I set out to go see the movie on a Saturday at 1:20 in the afternoon, something I rarely do. Especially since it was beautiful sunny day in Seattle AND the Mariners were playing a day game. I'd normally watch that, but it was against the White Sox and who gives a shit about them? Not me.

So, I went to a dark movie theater on a sunny day and proceeded to have my dick throughly kicked in by an absolute madman of a movie. It plays on lots of classic cliches and horror movie tropes, but in a really awesome way. I'm really glad that my dawg Keith just told me to go into it with the mindset of a "Scream" movie. That's a great way to look at it. It is just a totally ridiculous, darkly hilarious blast of a movie.

During the movie, my phone was blowing up. I get out and my dad had texted me "Perfect game?" I was like, there is no god damn way that Blake Beaven is throwing a perfect game right now against the White Sox. Get right out of town. So I called him and he said, "No, it's the other guy. Phil Humber. He's a half-inning away from a perfect game.

Well, shit.

The Mariners offense has been terrible for years now and they were overdue for at least a no-hitter, but holy god damn. The 21st perfect game ever thrown. No hits, no walks, no runs. Absolute domination.

So I walked out of a supremely warped movie and into the reality that the Mariners just got perfect game'd. Pretty weird day. Sorry for the lack of an actual review, but if you're still reading this and you haven't seen it or been spoiled on it, I highly recommend this flick. Also, lol mariners.

The Raid: Redemption (2012) dir Gareth Evans

Soooo many machetes in this flick!

Around 2000 or so, I got super obsessed with all forms of Asian action cinema. I'd already seen the few Jackie Chan flicks that starting making it to US theaters from the mid-90s on and then I saw John Woo's "The Killer" and "Hard Boiled" and it was game fucking on. Didn't matter if it was martial arts, yakuzas, triads, assassins, samurais or ridiculous wire-work kung-fu. If it was made by someone from an Asian country, I was down to party. I've seen so many of these stupid movies that they've mostly all bled together in my mind as one massive action set piece with Jet Li cranekicking Chow Yun-Fat in slow motion while Jackie Chan speaks broken English and pulls some 3 Stooges shit on an unamused Andy Lau. What I'm trying to say here, friends and internet randos, is that I know my shit. Or at least I used to. I rarely watch these kinds of flicks anymore because most of them suck and I'm perfectly content with hanging on to the cream of the crop, such as the aforementioned Woo movies, "Fist of Legend," "Ong-Bak," the "Lone Wolf and Cub" series and so on and so forth.

That was a really long introduction to talk about a movie that I really don't have much to say about. It's totally buck wild, but it didn't really wow me like I had hoped. I will say it's the best Asian action movie I've seen since "Ong-Bak" and "The Protector," though.

"The Raid: Redemption" rode a critical tsunami of hype across the Pacific into American theaters (ed. note: really, dude?) and it mostly delivers on it's promise. Set in Indonesia, which is quite unique for these kinds of flicks, a SWAT team is dispatched to clean out a crime lord from his project apartment building, shit goes wrong of course, and utter mayhem ensues. I saw it with my friend Keith and we were both hoping for just a little something more overall, but you can't really argue with some of the major fight scenes in this flick. There's one towards in the end in particular that basically amounts to a final boss stage in a video game that felt like it went on for like 15 fucking minutes. Pure madness.

It's a pretty low budget affair, but oddly Welsh director Evans does throw in a few funky camera tricks and extended shots. They added the "Redemption" part of the title after the movie started getting hyped and sequels are now in the works. Hopefully they throw some big money at it and there are more cool extended shots in the sequel and other bells and whistles. I could see the next installment dwarfing the first if the budget starts getting equal with maker's ambition.

Wrath of Con: ECCC 2012 Recap

Just wanted to post an overdue recap on my awesome nerd weekend from 2 weeks ago. Here are some highlights:

Kind of a harsh vibe here, guys.

Friday aka "IT HAS BEGUUUNNN," the first of many "Mortal Kombat" references from the weekend

• Walked to the Con from work, met up with bros Keith, Joey O and Tyler (his comics blog!) at the nearby perennial grub spot Cyber Dogs. They did not have the tuna melt or chicken melt, which prompted a "No 'Stairway'?!?! Denied!" reaction from Keith and me. Compromises were made and stomachs were filled. I was ready to stomp all over that Con.
• Hit the main floor, immediately noticed the gigantic tower of t-shirts. Sentence overheard when walking by said tower, "Umm, yes, one 'This is my boomstick' shirt please."
• We split up to cover more ground, as this was Joe and Tyler's only day at the Con and Keith and I were in it for the long haul. I strolled through the writers and artists area. Found Greg Rucka and had him sign a few copies of his new Punisher book, chatted a bit. Then found "Any Empire" writer/artist Nate Powell and picked up a few of his other books, proving I'm still a bit of a sucker for those damn wimpy indie comics. (Editor's note: he means "comix")
• Reconvened with the dudes for a final sweep before the Con closed for the night. Tyler thought former Spawn/current Batman artist Greg Capullo was at his booth finally, with no line to boot! Tyler ran over to him with childlike glee, but it was only Brett from my comic shop, Arcane Comics, standing behind Capullo's booth for some unknown reason. Tyler was crestfallen.
• After the con, we decided to get dinner at Cedar's indian restaurant in the U-district. Joe was literally on a hunger strike (insert obvious Temple of the Dog joke here), so he was pretty bummed at our gluttony. 

Dat Naan!

• Joe and Tyler headed back up to Bellingham and Keith posted up on my couch for the weekend, which for the record, is his favorite couch. He probably wanted to tweet "SANFORD'S COUCH, I AM IN YOU #WINNING" but restrained himself. Many episodes of "Game of Thrones" were watched. Jon Snow 4 prez.

More after the jump...

ECCC 2012

"Hold on a second, dude. I DON'T HAVE YOUR FUCKING RING, MAN!*"

I pretty much summed up all the reasons why I love going to the Emerald City Comicon in this post last year. Well, the time has come yet again for Con-life and I am friggin' PUMPED.

Highlights this year will hopefully include, but will not be limited to:

• DC's new 52 panel
• The 20th anniversary "Batman: The Animated Series" panel with Bruce Timm and Kevin Conroy
• George Takei's panel
• Wil Wheaton's panel, of course
• Edward James Olmos' panel and hopefully some "Blade Runner" stories
• "Firefly" and "Serenity" panels for Summer Glau and Adam Baldwin (pushes up glasses)
• Resisting the urge to throw something at Robert Kirkman

Stoked to hang with my bro Keith and hopefully some other Bellingham dudes, eat some good food, maybe peep some movies and just generally be a goon all weekend. Git 'er done.

*Yeah, that's a corny BASEketball/LOTR combo joke, bro. Deal with it.

Sometimes you don't realize how badly you want something until the option is taken away.

The 2012 Seattle Mariners

The 2011 Seattle Mariners fell just short of 100 losses last year. The fact that I see this a semi-positive thing is definitive proof of the abusive relationship this team has with my heart. I don't have many rational reasons for optimism for the 2012 Mariners, but I've got a few irrational ones so that's good enough for me.

The big offseason move was trading Michael Pineda to the Yankees for catcher/DH Jesus Montero and pitcher Hector Noesi. I'm sad to see Pineda go because he is already awesome and will probably only get better if he stays healthy. Seeing his Safeco debut and a few of his other starts in person were some of my only positive memories of last season. Assuming Yankees fans and New York media don't eat him alive for no good reason, he'll be a star. Or maybe this will be like the Jay Buhner trade and there will be jokes on Seinfeld about it some day.

As I write this, we're about 12 hours away from the Mariners opening the season against the Oakland Athletics for 2 games in Japan. MLB has done this with other teams in the past, but none of those teams had Ichiro so no one cared. Now, I'm sure Japanese folks are stoked, but literally no one outside of Seattle and Oakland gives a shit about the AL West's 2 worst teams playing games that will air live at 3:10 am PST. On one hand, I understand. Come August or so, watching the Mariners play the stupid A's will seem about as appealing as a warm Bud Light. But, then again, it's Felix Day! Er, morning. Same thing. I do so love watching Felix pitch. Then we go back to a few days of meaningless spring training games before the season starts for everyone else around April 4th. MLB seems logistically-challenged to me, but whatever.

Back to the crappy Mariners. As has been the case since like 2007 or so, literally EVERYTHING will need to go right for the Mariners to even win 70+ games. The rest of the AL West would need to die in simultaneous plane crashes in order for the Mariners to finish above .500 even. I'm excited to see if Montero can do some mashing in Safeco and I'm hoping for Ichiro to bounce back now that he'll be batting in the 3 spot instead of leading off. Ackley will be get to play his first full season and I'm sure he'll do great. If Smoak can maintain the power he showed during his hot start last year, it will be a huge boost to the lineup. And maybe known ginger Mike Carp will prove he's not destined to be a lifetime minor leaguer.

As usual, I'll be there at the home opener on April 13th with my dad. Bad baseball is better than no baseball.

"The Hunger Games" (2012) dir Gary Ross

Too much bad CG, not enough Temple of the Dog

Hollywood studios, like nature, abhor a vacuum. With the Harry Potter movie series dead and buried and the Twilight series coming to an end soon, a new young adult fiction series was needed to fill the gap for all the teeny-bopper PG-13 movie-goers. Luckily for them and kinda fortunate for the rest of us, Suzanne Collins wrote a trilogy of entry-level dystopian science fiction books complete with a strong female character and not terribly obnoxious love triangle. Since "The Hunger Games" demolished the weekend box office, we can rest assured that we'll be hearing about the movie, the books and the now guaranteed sequels for the next 4 or 5 years. It could be, and has been, a lot worse.

The movie itself is just okay in my opinion because I have absurdly high standards for this particular genre. Everyone has heard by now how liberally it borrows from pretty much every sci-fi movie/book ever made, but particularly from "Battle Royale," "Death Race 2000" and "The Running Man." Not that those 3 movies were the first stories to ever feature death matches between humans for society's entertainment, but it's worth noting when a huge cultural phenomenon has obvious predecessors. "Battle Royale" is actually a pretty awful flick and anyone who gets stoked to watch it because they heard it was like "The Hunger Games" will be pretty bummed out. "Death Race 2000" and "The Running Man," however, I cannot recommend highly enough. Classic stuff.

From a nerdy visual standpoint, I pretty much hated the way "The Hunger Games" was filmed. It embraced all the horrible trends of modern film making: rapid, ADHD-riddled editing, over-the-top shaky camerawork and SyFy channel movie-of-the-week caliber CG. When you're setting the scene of District 12 as looking like an Eastern Kentucky poor coal mining town, you really, REALLY don't need to edit it like a fucking Aphex Twin music video, okay? Let me soak in the visuals instead of making HUNGER GAMES: CRANK STYLE. Not to diss the "Crank" movies, as there is a time and place for such manic style, but dystopian sci-fi is not such a place. It basically made a movie with an estimated 100 million dollar budget look unfinished at times; like you're watching a rough cut. It's one visual saving grace is that the outdoor shots were filmed in North Carolina instead of overused British Columbia like most other Lions Gate productions. So the forests look more like "Last of the Mohicans" than "Twilight." Solid choice on that.

An instant red flag for me was when I noticed in an early, very positive review that this movie was 140 minutes long. Are you friggin' kidding me? You can speed read through the first book in less time than that if you're so inclined. This isn't "The Godfather", this is a young adult fiction adaptation. And yet many folks have remarked that it felt rushed, even at nearly 2 and a half hours long. The movie, as with the book, has 3 distinct sections: District 12, The Capitol/prepping for the games and then the games. My god, did that middle part drag. Should have been 10 minutes of screen time tops. Setting up Katniss' relationships in District 12 got shortchanged badly and even the games felt kind of rushed. They especially rushed the Katniss and Rue friendship, which I felt was the emotional highpoint of the book. So, the movie suffers greatly from being too enslaved to the source material when it could have cut out a ton of smaller things and really knocked it out of the park for the big moments instead of pulling punches.

Jennifer Lawrence deserves every single bit of praise she's getting for her role. Her performance in "Winter's Bone" was clearly not a fluke. She's the real deal. Due to the rapid pacing and editing, she had to do a lot of subtle quick non-verbal reaction shots and just kind of generally emote in order to make a lot of scenes work and for the most part she succeeds. In fact, the movie basically lives or dies by her performance in my opinion. Had they chosen a less experienced or talented lead, disaster may have ensued. But J-Law killed it and thus saved/created a successful franchise, so I guess blame her for kicking ass if y'all hate it.