14 Apr 2008
When it comes to martial arts, Jet Li’s Fearless delivers, but everything else is just blah, blah, blah. I realize that these movies aren’t really about the plot… but is it that hard to make it engaging? Fearless is the story of a prodigy’s reckless youth, the (self-inflicted) tragedy that causes him to go into exile and think hard about his life, and then his return with transcending maturity and eventual martyrdom. In no way does the younger character feel connected to the older one. It might be me applying Western expectations to an Eastern story, but I like to see a character grow instead of be replaced. We’re an individualist culture, and like to see the soul of a character persist through a transformation. Jet Li’s character’s change isn’t properly explained. It’s like you take trauma followed by a breath of fresh air and out pops perfection. Formula for success. Maybe I just demand a few more flaws from my hero characters.
Anyway, Jet Li kicks butt ‘n stuff, and it’s all very pretty. No nearly as pretty as Hero or Crouching Tiger, but still pretty. The film was marketed as being Jet Li’s last epic martial arts film, which made me very confused when I recently saw ads on a bus for The Forbidden Kingdom with Jet Li and Jackie Chan. Not that I’m complaining: that sounds like a great idea. It could be spectacularly awful (the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of a teenage boy… again?), but the match-up will no doubt be incredible.
Anyway, you won’t be wasting your time with Fearless; it’s entertaining. But it left me feeling a little empty.
11 Apr 2008
Played on Xbox360
If you’ve played one Katamari game, you’ve played them all. There have been some small variations on the core formula, but it hasn’t strayed too far from “roll up stuff and get big.” Which is good, because that simple thing is so entertaining. If you’ve spent a lot of hours on the PS2 Katamari games, there’s not much new to play around with in Beautiful Katamari on the Xbox 360. But if you’ve never experienced the joy of rolling up huge balls of crap, Beautiful Katamari delivers. You’ll grow from the size of a penny to be bigger than the sun, all while listening to crazy J-Pop.
Every time you roll into another size class it’s an epic moment. It’s like leveling up in an RPG and going back to squash all the baddies that gave you trouble before. It’s extremely entertaining the first time, but after you’ve seen the whole progression it does lose a little of its bite. And unfortunately you can only get so big before there’s no more content in the game for you to roll up. Actually, the more I think about it the more I realize that Katamari is an RPG.
I really enjoyed Beautiful Katamari, but I can’t help but be a bit disappointed. I’m ready for something new. Later in Beautiful Katamari you find yourself rolling up all these famous monuments from different civilizations, like Egypt or China. It’d be really fun to start out in different locales like that. They can’t really raise the size limit anymore (you’re already sucking up black holes by the end), so they way to improve the game is to add variety in the existing spectrum. Although… it could be possible to take it smaller. I could totally see Katamari at the molecular level… or cellular like Innerspace or Osmosis Jones… or rolling on the surface of a dog picking up fleas and hairs. Really, the game writes itself. Picking up sumo wrestlers is fun and all, but I think this series is ready for a scenery change.
11 Apr 2008
It seems like bad form to criticize a man’s peak performance so closely after his death. I didn’t plan it that way; the disc was already on its way back to Netflix when the news hit. And I know if I don’t write down my thoughts now I’ll have promptly forgot them a month from now. So, um, sorry for the bad timing?
Bun Hur is a widely recognized classic. It won like a bajillion Academy Awards in 1960 (more specifically, 14), including Best Actor for Mr. Heston. But let me tell you, it has not aged well. The legendary chariot scene holds up, but the rest is… meh. The characters are paper thin, Charlton Heston is the super cheese, the naval combat scene is laughably bad, and the whole thing is long and pretentious. The only reason to watch Ben Hur is to check it off your list of “movies I’m supposed to see for historical significance.” But your time is really better spent doing anything else.
The film labels itself as “a tale of the Christ.” It’s not; it’s a tale of revenge, with a bit of Jesus bolted on after the real climax of the movie. For part of the movie I thought they were going to handle the Christ thing well. I seemed like they were going to subtly interweave the story of Jesus with Ben Hur’s story to give more context to both. It could have been really thoughtful and classy. But all that goes out the window when Jesus’ death is met with stormy weather and instantly healed lepers across the land. The whole thing would have been much more interesting if there was a chance Biblical connection that was a side note in the life of Jesus (healing lepers ‘n stuff) but huge for Ben Hur. But this is not a movie of subtlety. It’s a big mess of dress up (how do those Romans get their whites so white?) and play acting. Skip it.