The A-Team

I’m old enough to remember the show when it ran in the 80s, and I was a big fan then. Still, when I see reruns on the television I’ll stop changing the channel trying to remember what the episode was about or at least wait until I hear BA pity a fool, or Hannibal love it when a plan comes together. One of the reasons that I looked forward to the movie was to see who they would get to play whom.

The series was essentially character driven representing the cliches from almost every action movie prior to the eighties. You had the cool confident commander, the pretty boy ladies’ man, the tough guy, and the crazy person. The action, when viewing the show now, actually seems secondary to the characters since the characters are all former Special Forces the violence is part of their character. The actors need to portray a group of people that trust and love each other, but also can’t stand each other from time to time.

The movie did this extremely well especially with the casting of Liam Neeson as Col. John “Hannibal” Smith. Liam Neeson as an actor must have gotten tired of the heavy dramas a few years ago, I’m willing to bet that it started with The Phantom Menace that he realized I could actually have fun in an action movie. Even in deadly serious action movies like Taken, where his acting alone saved what was a pretty cliched movie, you can kind of see that he is being entertained as well. Bradley Cooper played Face very well and the dynamic between the two was well played, reminiscent of the relationship between George Peppard and Dirk Benedict. While it still worked well, the other two characters weren’t that memorable. The man who took over for Mr. T, Quinten Jackson, seemed to be laughing through his lines too much but he had the expressive anger that Mr. T brought to BA Baracus, the same can almost be said for Sharlto Copley as Howling Mad Murdock. The issue with Murdock is that you can take the character one of two ways: you can go the over the top comic relief crazy as the show did with Dwight Schultz or you can take a reserved subtle crazy. The movie ops for a middle ground instead treating the character as someone that is more of an adrenaline junky with a death wish and poor impulse control.

Reservations aside the characters work together and that is what is the most important thing about capturing the essence of the A-Team. The only thing really missing from the movie was a character named “Decker.” Jessica Biel is also in the movie playing “hot female” but largely is inconsequential to the plot. Normally this type of thing is annoying but if you remember the show correctly, the lead female was either a damsel in distress or fulfilled this role. Here, she’s an army intelligence officer seeking to arrest the A-Team for stealing a bunch of hundred dollar printing plates, which is the set up for the whole movie. This is the famous “crime they didn’t commit,” which is an actual improvement over the show because in the show they actually committed the crime they were arrested for.*

Basically the whole movie revolves around the team trying to retrieve the printing plates to clear their names. With a whole bunch of explosions fit in between. What do you expect? It’s an action movie based on an action television show, the plot is more of a vehicle for the gun fights. It’s a good thing too, because were this movie a serious investigation into the theft of missing printing plates I would have a problem with it. The plates themselves originated in Iran before the fall of the Shah in the 70s. For some reason the Iranians had the ability to print US $100 bills. I don’t feel like looking this up, but it’s certainly plausible. The plates were then captured at some point during the Iran-Iraq war and in the possession of the Iraqis when the US toppled Saddam. Again, plausible. What isn’t, is how these plates are in any way useful. In the mid 90s the design of the Franklin bill changed drastically. Aside from using the money to buy things in Somalia the money can’t be used.

“Hot Female” at one point describes the team as “specializing in the ridiculous,” and nothing better summarizes the movie than this one phrase. The movie is full of the cartoonish violence that accompanied the series but the movie never takes itself so seriously as to make itself absurd. It seems that everyone in the movie is having fun at the expense of what is going on. From Hot Female’s explanation that the team is trying to “fly a tank” to a mercenary’s plea to his CIA captor that he not get executed by a particularly inept agent, it’s a fun movie that perfectly interprets the series for the big screen.
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*In the eighties show the crime they were accused of was robbing the bank of Hanoi to defund the North Vietnamese and bring an end to the war. However the orders that sent them there were burned and the commanding officer killed by the VC, so it looked like they did it on their own accord. Still, they did actually rob that bank. It’s unclear to me how robbing the bank of an enemy during a war would cause you to get arrested by the army, but whatever.

The Moon Voyage

Like “The Mysterious Island” I picked up “The Moon Voyage” out of a sense of curiosity. Jules Verne’s writings are known for a certain prophetic aspect, his Nautilus semi-predicted submarines. I say “semi-predicted” as they had been used with moderate success in warfare at the time of his writings and his foresight is actually based on their merging with other technologies still at their infancy during his time. Where “The Moon Voyage” exceeds this writing is notably in his setting the moon launch in Florida by a team of Americans. All of this is pretty extraordinary but perhaps even more so when he gives his justification for that location.

The story itself surrounds an American gun club based in Baltimore led by President Barbicane (president of the Gun Club not the United States). The club itself is in a state of decline with the end of the US Civil War the membership of the club is comprised of men who designed and used artillery during the war. Without that war they feel themselves to be useless relegated to waiting for another war, or perhaps as one of them proposes to actually lobby for the beginning of another war. Barbicane has other designs, he proposes that instead of building more and deadlier weapons he proposes that the club apply itself to building a gun that could propel a projectile to the moon.

Instead of skepticism the club, and the country, embraces the idea in what Verne calls the spirit of American ingenuity. The dimensions of the weapon, the projectile, and the amount of propellent needed are well calculated. The time of launch is determined with help from the British, and the location itself as well. Here’s where we get to his prescience. Florida is chosen but it’s not random and this is also where Verne’s strength as a writer excels. Other writers might have just picked a place randomly or perhaps based their location on proximity to a major city or industrial center for obvious reasons. Verne chooses Florida for purely scientific reasons. According to the British the Moon is closest to the Earth between certain Latitudes and only two places in the US are within that constriction: areas of Florida and Texas.

Florida won because the location they picked is remote and with few cities in Florida at the time, there would be no jealousy among them as there would have been in Texas. There would also be no confusion or controversy over appropriating land for the project as their might be in the more densely populated Texas. The initial project’s purpose is to see if it can be done, that’s it. It was nothing more than an exercise of the industry of a uniquely industrious and ingenious people. Then it is proposed that the projectile be occupied and thus the project is undertaken to change the shell to a capsule.

There is no decision made in this book that is not accompanied by a reason for that decision and then a detailed explanation of how that goal was carried through. Everything seems to be based on the science of the time, which although somewhat inaccurate has the reading of a logical proof and the absolute faith of the characters in that science. What gets forgotten amid the correctness of the Florida location are three other predictions that eventually would come true.

The first is the fact that the three travelers in the capsule once launched would experience no weight. While scientists of the time new that gravity was based on mass (a fact keenly and repeatedly stressed during the book) what wasn’t accepted as a scientific theory at the time was that in space that gravity would diminish and that passing a certain point would mean that the travelers would be weightless. When the travelers do hit weightlessness they are completely “stupefied” finding “weight wanting in their bodies.” Given Verne’s scientific researches into everything else that went into the book, including some rather lengthy discourses on the geography of the Moon, it stands to reason that he stumbled across some monograph on the subject but again, this was not an accepted theory at the time merely a hypothesis.

Secondly he also predicts that other objects in space also have gravity. Now the moon having gravity is one thing, that was something accepted such an object’s mass would have attraction. What Verne predicts though is that a passing comet not only has gravity but also enough gravity that it pulls the capsule off course. Not by much of course, but enough so that the journey is put into peril when the travelers realize that they have no landed on the moon when they should have.

Thirdly is the burying of the Moon Gun. This is based on common sense given the enormity of the cannon and the amount of fuel being used but it has been tried twice in history. Hitler’s V3 project, an attempt to build artillery cannons that could be fired from France and hit London with no warning compared to the the V1 and V2 missiles were also proposed to have been buried in the ground…although this probably had more to do with being hidden from British and American bombers as well. Then there was Saddam Hussein’s attempt at building an atmosphere capable artillery gun that had much the same construction. Although that project was “cancelled” by Mossad agents (allegedly) when the lead engineer was found dead in an Iraqi hotel from two gun shots to the head.

The Moon Voyage is an interesting read if only to learn of the fascination with the moon and the science thereof in the late 19th century. Verne’s strength is also causes his writing to drag as the various aspects of the moon are presented in great detail as well as a history of astronomy and selenography which slow the story down. However overall the story is about a scientific project and the execution of which by learned and ambitious men who are willing to risk everything just for the accomplishment of it. This, Verne says, is a uniquely American state of mind.

Oh yeah, the first capsule to actually land on the moon was called “Columbia,” but Verne labels his “Columbiad”–I guess you can’t be right all of the time.

“Among the Truthers”–Jonathan Kay

To be interested in Conspiracy as a flight of fancy is one thing, but to truly believe in a conspiracy theory is more akin to really believing in the various stories surrounding religion. While this may be deemed offensive to some (on either side of that comparison) the parallels are pretty numerous. First and foremost is the belief that world events are not random, they are controlled or at least guided in much the same way that believers in God will explain the path of a tornado that rips through a town and kills very few people. This belief though is opposite in tone than the religious, whereas the faithful will ascribe events that spare human life as the result of God’s hand, Conspirators believe that events which claim human lives are the result of a master plan. There is also the notion of belief in something despite the lack of evidence, i.e. that of faith.

Jonathan Kay’s book, “Among the Truthers” is an examination not of conspiracy beliefs but of the people that believe in conspiracies. Focusing on the most prevalent of modern conspiracies, that of the theory that the September 11th attacks on NYC and the Pentagon were an inside job (most theories either ignore the Pennsylvania plane or have a different theory to cover it: that it was shot down by US Planes is the most common). This choice of focus is obvious as it allows the author to immerse himself in a world that is still living and still growing. Despite the fact that most people believe that the single shooter of JFK is a dubious idea, the theory is pretty stagnant relegated to once a year repeated specials on the History Channel.

It should be noted that the author does not believe in the theory, accepting the events according to the 9/11 commission’s report, and the numerous scientific studies that have proven the collapse happened the way it did from the cause of the plane’s collision. Kay, also ignores the temptation to include a chapter or two on why the alternative theories presented are wrong. He claims that this was advised by his editor who said that there would be no market for such a book. Believers in the theory would claim that he was a puppet while people accepting the official explanation would have no need to read it. There are numerous web pages on the internet devoted to both.

Which is one explanation that he offers for the spread of this theory. The development of the internet not only allowed people formerly regarded as crackpots to disseminate their beliefs but it did something else, something much more important than just giving them an outlet: it gave them encouragement. Where once they might have wrote about their theory and then forgotten about it. The internet could now give them instant feedback and compel them to continue. The theories became compartmentalized much like modern political discourse into an echo chamber where theorists only hear support for their beliefs and are thus more and more convinced of the “truth” of it. Is not this the exact opposite of the dream of Web in the mid-1990s? What once was supposed to be access to the world of divergent opinions and information instead has became a collection of cliques that only speak to each other.

The causes of conspiracism are varied. It’s propagation is not only based on the web but also in the atmosphere as well. The book goes to great strains to explain that while people on the right or left would like to blame the other side for these ideas, the genera of conspiracy is actually the fault of both. While the right wing has had more prevalence lately in the dissemination of conspiracy theories, the left wing has had its time before. Whenever one group is in power it is the other group that will have among itself a fringe element that sees conspiracy. The difference we see now is that conspiracy theory was given public air by Glenn Beck, whom Kay categorizes in the book as a conspiracy theorist for which I have to agree (his threading of Soros as a liberal puppet master should suffice as evidence). On the left though there have been Noam Chomsky and Jacques Derrida. What has to be decided is which is worse: a political pundit on the number one cable news channel or two well respected PhDs? These enablers lend legitimacy to the odd theories and give them main stream acceptance.

The point is made though, that we cannot ascribe to one side of the political debate responsibility for conspiracy, only specific theories that often have origins in some surprising source. For instance, it was the KGB that first implanted the idea that AIDS was genetically engineered. Or, although not mentioned in the book, “Birtherism” first appeared not in the GOP or its followers but in supporters of Hillary Clinton’s nomination bid.

The most damning indictment though, and deservedly, goes toward left-wing academics. The era of political correctness has basically necessitated that America is the evil empire in the world and academics adhering to a false model of Marxism have portrayed the United States as hegemonic in its goals. Belief that “the great engine of evil in the world is American hegemony–and so every epic tragedy the world suffers must somehow be laid at Washington’s doorstep.” This era of PC has also given the general population the reluctance to criticize people for holding certain opinions. Forcing relativism on people who would otherwise know better. Medical conspiracies including the vaccination conspiracies rest on theories that just “feel right” to people like Jenny McCarthy despite the united opposition of Pediatricians in both the US and for most of the world.

Another important facet that Kay concentrates on is to make a differentiation between people who are conspirators and the genuine insane. Most conspirators are not insane, he mentions, but some are. Despite the fact that someone with mental problems might be a conspiracy believer is the exception. The line is whether or not the person believes themselves to be involved in the conspiracy, usually this involvement is in hiding from the guiding hand of the world events. Most “truthers” don’t think someone is out to silence them.

The religious analogy also applies to the various sects of conspiracism. Within each there are hierarchies, schisms, and outcasts. Getting the “story” straight is often difficult for them, and people who do not ascribe to the “official” story proposed by the conspiracists are often shunned or labelled crackpots. The irony of this is that they themselves deride the mainstream press and government officials for doing just the same.

Ultimately though the conspiracist movement is full of ironies and contradictions. Professional Academic journals have thus far not accepted the movement’s ideas as having any truth (although there are Academics who are truthers) and thus are called “ignorant” or “puppets” by members of the movement. Yet, those very same people seem to crave such acceptance to the point where they have set up their own academic sounding journal “Journal of 9/11 Truth.” The same with the media, while You Tube videos abound with truther confrontations these amount to no more than pranks. The media is “in on it” but then upon meeting journalists those that don’t specifically dismiss them often seek to get their ideas mentioned in it. This lends itself to the idea that substratum for a good deal of conspiracism activists is stardom in one fashion or the other. They deride the mainstream academics and media as being worthless then brag about how their theories and intelligence make them outliers but in the next breath they are seeking the approval of the mainstream.

Ultimately the contradiction inherent in the 9/11 truth is that the truth for them is unfulfillable. If we assume them to be correct, and that a group of people (or aliens) were able to manipulate the entire world into believing what happened on 9/11 was the real thing, then what kind of independent investigation could escape their grasp? The invisible hand is suddenly unable to direct a second investigation? It would seem that what the most vocal people espousing these theories really want is to lead the investigation.

Kay’s book is gripping, especially for people who may not be familiar with this world. His only fault is in his writing style, which is journalistic in origin. That’s not a problem so much as his constant need to cite earlier and later passages in the book, as if we were reading a series of articles in a newspaper. It gets quite distracting to the point where i was noticing that he couldn’t go three pages without making a reference to the past or the future. Much like the flow chart of a conspiracy theorist explaining how the Bildergergers were really the puppet of the Tri-Lateral commission or something.

The Mysterious Island

You can download it here.

I was first made aware of this book when viewing Tron: Legacy over the winter. It popped up as a rather obvious reference, especially when they openly displayed the book and had one character explain that it was her favorite. I was intrigued, but not enthusiastic since I didn’t completely enjoy the movie to begin with. Yet Jules Verne, is one of those science fiction writers who is so prescient that it wouldn’t surprise me if we find a vault in France one day with one of his books that describes a picture phone. This is the guy who predicted that people would be weightless in space long before anyone was able to actually confirm it. I could go on about Verne and his predictions, especially his view of the modern submarine and the existence of the giant Kraken.

I assumed that since Tron:Legacy was a huge science fiction movie and Jules Verne was a science fiction writer there would be something in common betwixt them in “The Mysterious Island.” The story centers on four men and a dog who escape the confines of the Confederate Richmond in a hot air balloon in 1862 only to be blown away by a Hurricane where three of them land on a small islet in the Pacific. A search of the surrounding area reveals the Islet to be connected to a larger Island made of Basalt and Granite with lush vegetation as they search for their fourth comrade. These four are Gideon Spillett, Pencroft, Neb, and Brown. Spillett is a journalist, Neb is a freed slave, Pencroft a sailor, and Brown is Pencroft’s young protege adopted by Pencroft.

These four are in danger because they have not the tools to survive. In fact one of them even remarks that unlike Robinson Crusoe, they were shipwrecked with nothing and would have to fend for themselves. They search awhile for their fifth member, an engineer named Harding and it is in the engineer that they place their salvation believing that this man of science could construct for them everything that they would need for survival and deliverance from the island. While initially they feared that he had drown in the sea he turns up inland on a beach and is nursed back to health along with some assistance from his dog Top.

From this point the five castaways begin constructing their lives on the island fearing that there may be some time before they are rescued. The faith in the engineer is validated by his seeming omniscience in the fields of chemistry, physics, and mechanical engineering. His first feat is to construct fire using a water lens. Which he built out of two watch faces and filled them with water. Then things a get a bit deus ex machina as he is able to forge iron tools, derive glass, and create pyroxite and nitroglycerin for use as explosives. I suppose all of this is possible but where Crusoe had to make do without certain things these castaways are lacking nothing as long as the base materials exist. How one derives nitroglycerin without a labratory and not blow themselves up is quite astonishing given how unstable the chemical is.

The Island is abundant in life, all kinds of animals live there from Jaguars to seals to kangaroos and all sorts of birds. This leaves them not wanting for food, although for some reason they do begin to lack clothing. Why the engineer can construct chemical explosives but not a rudimentary tannery seems to be his only limitation, even though all of the materials are there. You may object telling me that, “the internet says that you would need battery acid or something equivalent for the tanning of hides, lol rofl.” That may be the case but not only is nitric acid a principle part of the making of nitroglycerin (the word “nitro” is right in there) but also the engineer makes batteries and a telegraph machine. That’s a minor quibble. After excavating an underground cave of Granite with explosives the survivors move into “Granite House” which is quite impregnable from the outside and after rescuing a man named Aryton from an island about a hundred miles away (in a sloop which they constructed for the purposes of sailing around the island…although a Viking Longboat would have been a better idea), they live in relative harmony.

The title of the book refers to a series of actual deus ex machina instances which can be explained by no one in the book. The first is the rescue of Harding. He was the last in the balloon that disappeared into the sea yet he was found hundreds of yards up the beach with no recollection of how he got there. The second is that the dog Top is saved from a dugong whose throat was mysterious cut. A crate of supplies mysteriously appears in the water furnishing the five with guns and new clothes, the message indicating the sixth person on the nearby island and finally the sudden explosion of an invading pirate ship which Harding explains came from an underwater explosive device, a torpedo (which at the time of the civil war was a term used for any underwater explosive device).

They search the island to and fro seeking out their elusive benefactor, all the while Pencroft commenting that he will never be found unless he wishes it so. Finally the man behind the curtain contacts them and sends them to an underwater cavern in which he lives. It turns out to be.[spoiler warning but you've had like a hundred years to read this book]…Captain Nemo and the Nautilus! It was he that rescued everyone, somehow, left the supplies [more probable], blew up the pirates [extremely probable], and then killed the surviving pirates [with his ray gun--which fits in with 20,000 leagues under the sea]. Nemo is dying and in the bottom of the cave the Nautilus is his final tomb.

The book doesn’t end there but I will end the synopsis. The book is driven by the suspense of the mysterious force of the island and the ingenuity of the survivors. It’s not that character driven at all, in fact several times while reading, even toward the end, I had to remind myself who was who. Only Neb, the freed slave, and Harding, the engineer come off as being remarkable if only for the fact that the former becomes the cook and the latter is utterly so important. The rest occupy a middle ground of obscurity. Also lacking is the despair of Crusoe that they would never see home again. Crusoe was driven by internal struggle which he resolved by appealing to god. Perhaps this was because of the isoloation on his island but where these five have companions that resolution is unnecessary.

The real problem for the book is that Harding is too ingenious. The book settles into a groove we know they are going to survive, but the only question is how. And the how is often answered with the most unlikely answer. “How can we communicate with the corral?” Answer: “I’ll build a telegraphy machine with iron wires (five miles of iron wire).” It gets unlikely to the point of ridiculousness. As a reader I became like the character Sawyer on Lost, just accepting whatever was happening because thinking anything to be improbable at any point was not to believe that it couldn’t happen.

Which brings me to the final point: I have no idea what the writers of Tron were thinking when they used this book in their movie. There is nothing in common between the two. For the two plots to even have the slightest resemblance the movie would have to have spent 75% of its time before revealing Jeff Bridges outside the grid. This book has more in common with the first season of Lost, a group of survivors struggling on an island with some strange occurrences. In this respect it works, and works very well. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that one of the books Sawyer read on the beach was this one.

It’s not as strong as Robinson Crusoe, but it is entertaining. If you are a huge 20,000 Leagues fan I would recommend the book if only to learn the final fate of Nemo. 

LG Quantum

My last post indicated that we had switched off of Verizon for AT&T, the only choice left was what phone to purchase. I did the research necessary attempting to find a smart phone that would work for me and was relatively inexpensive. What I did not realize before I started looking was that the price of these devices had dropped significantly. This is due to the market competition between operating systems, up until recently there was only one, the blackberry marketed primarily to business people. I don’t know if this is because the company figured that the average person would have no need for it or…I can’t figure a different reason actually. Then came the iOS on the apple iPhone. Google entered the fray with the short lived Nexus but then quickly teamed up with Motorola (who rode the success wave with the Razr far too long) to produce the Droid and the Android OS. The late comer to the game was Microsoft. Microsoft had previously worked with Windows Mobile, which primarily existed on PDAs (remember those?) but integrated roughly on some phones. It wasn’t a cash cow, so they revamped the OS to produce windows phone 7.

Each of the operating systems has its advantage and disadvantage, the iPhone trades a lot on the reputation of Apple products and what people understand from the iPod. The iPod is an interesting case for a marketing/business student because it wasn’t the first portable mp3 player (that honor goes to this) but it was the most marketable. Even HP had the rights to “iPod” before Apple started really pushing them. Android does the same with brand recognition, relying on people’s perception of Google and the biggest advantage of being completely customizable. Blackberry is a legacy thing, people I know who use blackberry products do so because they have always been using them. It helps to be the first into the pool, provided you know how to swim. Windows 7 Phone is wholly new and I’m not sure how they are advertising it, in fact I pretty much was unaware of the system itself until I went to shop for the phones. Ultimately I settled on that for a couple reasons.

The first was that for some reason Gwen was able to use it pretty flawlessly at the store, the first time that she (or I) had ever seen it. The second reason was that when I used it the default home screen just made alot of sense. Everything was clear and labelled in big bright tiles that were common sense labelled. I worried a bit about customization and the basic color pattern wasn’t to my aesthetic taste (being a color I label “Microsoft Blue”). A different display model at Best Buy showed the tiles in a Green which made me realize that I could change that color, a definite plus. This was the operating system I decided I would get. I ruled out iOS because of adherence to the ITune store which I have a funny feeling about. I also possess a strain of “anti-Mac” which was definitely a factor to be completely honest. The plus part in their column was that iPhone 3 was only 50 bucks at AT&T, but a sales person explained that the recent update slowed the phone down (although subsequent conversations with people who have the phone has made me realize the phone is just fine, perhaps the person who talked to me is a virulent mac-hater). Droid OS seems to geeky to me, by this I mean that it makes me think of Linux. Complete customization is great when you want to go through completely customizing something, and though I like the idea of customizing every single thing I don’t want to have to do it. People I know have bragged about how long they spent setting up their droids before they used them and that kind of turned me off. I’ve played with the droid phones and the default for them seems alright but there is a certain level of customization that I know would give me the “oh screw it, I’m not going to bother.” Blackberry I just plain don’t like. My brother had a Blackberry storm and I couldn’t figure out how to change background screens or do anything on it without needing a password (Laura’s short lived experience with the Blackberry Torch would prove this frustration was warranted).

I took the windows 7, specifically the LG Quantum. There were three WP7s to choose from an HTC, Samsung, and the Quantum. The HTC received bad reviews and the only real feature on it was that the back slid open to reveal surround speakers, which I don’t know about you but if I need surround on a video I’ll watch it on the big screen of my laptop or television. The advantage of the Samsung was that it had a memory card port. I don’t see why this is a feature at all, every phone ought to have the micro SD slot thereby expanding the memory to infinite but that seems to be against the grain now. Plus, my experiences with Samsung phones has been miserable. The LG was the last left and its advantage was that it had a real keyboard. I like this feature because virtual keyboards suck you can’t type while looking at something else, and you lose half of the screen when you do need to write something. I settled on that phone after making sure the phone’s camera was a step up (it was I went from a 1.2mp to a 5mp). With that rather large preamble taken care of I will now review the phone.

The very first thing I noticed with the phone was its weight. It weighs a little over 6oz, which isn’t much but with a 3.5 inch screen it feels considerably heavier than other phones (the iPhone 4 weighs just under 5oz). The weight, although it takes some getting used to coming from a person used to the 5oz Voyager and the 3.5oz Chocolate, actually makes the phone feel solid. At first I wasn’t sure that I would adjust to it, but once I did it’s hard for me to hold a different cell phone and not think its a flimsy piece of shit.

The slide out keyboard snaps out with a satisfying “thunk” and functions well. The individual keys are a little bigger than they are on other phones and are soft plastic which, again, takes some getting used to. This doesn’t take away from the phone itself, that would be like docking a computer a couple of points because the keys are slightly different than your old one. The real trouble with the keyboard are the function and shift keys. Instead of making these buttons like the rest of them the engineers decided that they would make them recessed circles on the side. They are little too hard to press and the location of them makes no sense.

The 5mp camera works great, it’s not an instant take camera, but its pretty close (this is the delay between when you hit the shutter button and the time it takes to actually record the image, the voyager it was easily half a second). The worst thing about the camera is that you can’t change the settings permanently. Everytime you open the camera it’s on the factory default, this is a software issue that might possible be settled in an update but I do wish I could turn off the camera noise (it’s wholly unneeded). The nicest phone feature is that I don’t have to have the phone screen on to take a picture, I just have to hold the button down for a couple of seconds (although it’s difficult to actually figure out what I’m taking since there is no view finder.

OS wise, the windows 7 works extremely well. The phone integrates the contact list with facebook, which meant I didn’t have to manually transfer names and numbers to the new phone (I hope most of my friends realize their numbers were available on facebook). The people tile takes care of my need to check facebook and the like, it’s nice because it integrates anything I need it to, it would be even nicer if I had anything else aside from facebook to actually integrate but I can see the appeal regardless of my complete lack of exploiting the tile.

The biggest perceived lack that the WP7 possesses as opposed to android or iOS is the number of applications available. Initially I was a bit hesitant but once I had the phone I realized that this lack really exists only in appearance. Any website worth having as an application is going to make an app for the phone. For instance facebook (although unnecessary given the people tile), amazon, ebay, bbc, wsj, fox news, cnn, etc. already have it. What I realized is that while android commercials trump up the fact that they have 100 million applications (or whatever) most of them are crap. The same goes for the relatively smaller number here. A good number of them are either re-skinned versions of others, or outright copies. There may not be an angry birds for WP7 but there are enough clones that it doesn’t matter. If someone could show me what the real variety is for the other OS’s I might be more impressed but as it stands I have compared the application selection on my phone to my wife’s iPhone and there isn’t anything that I really can’t find either the same thing for or at least something so completely similar that it might as well be the same thing.

Two big advantages in application is the Xbox Live application, where all of t gheames are located but it also syncs up with my Xbox 360. I can check my account and make updates to my profile through the phone. I can also play music, movies, and view pictures stored on my phone through the Xbox (although there are some connection issues but this is with my local network and not the phone). The next is that I have access to windows office on the phone. This isn’t a stripped down version either it’s full word, powerpoint, excel, and onenote (which I have never used and cannot figure its purpose). I’ve used the word for storing some documents and am currently trying to figure out how to use the phone as a remote for power point presentations but my limited technical know how hasn’t supplied me with that ability yet.

The disadvantages of the OS are rather arbitrary based on engineering decisions which are strange. For instance the tiles are permanently oriented vertically, or portrait style. If you tip the phone on its side the tiles don’t change orientation. Most of the applications do, but the home screen does not. This is strange but the designers justify it by saying that their research showed that people only used landscape mode for things like writing text messages or browsing the internet, not for general selection of applications. While this may be the case it makes using the phone a bit strange since you have to read some of the tiles on their side. The other problem is the volume. This phone has a low ringer and notification volume level, really low and even at the highest setting its only audible with little competing noise. Finally the video camera is a bit dark. Brightly lit rooms appear to be dimly lit, while I’m used to this with my last phone it wasn’t something I was anticipating with this one.

In all I’m very happy with the phone, and some of the problems can be fixed with a software update that is supposed to be coming in the late summer. Despite some people’s reservations with Microsoft as a corporation I think the system works extremely well and this particular phone works well with it.

Assassin’s Creed II.1 Brotherhood

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood picks up literally right where Assassin’s Creed II ended: in the basement of St. Peter’s in Rome where a ghostly image of Minerva explains to Ezio Auditore of an impending doom facing the planet. Gone is the body of Pope Alexander VI, having survived the fight with Ezio. From there we follow Ezio’s uncle to his fortress town of Montenegro and the past story begins. The present story has Desmond and the fugitive Assassin organization still looking for the pieces of Eden to thwart the Abstergo corporation only this time they’ve also made it to modern day Montenegro where they are using Rebecca’s Animus to hunt for clues in Desmond’s ancestor’s past.

This is the setup for our story. I should warn here that spoilers follow, not just for the game but also for fans of the Showtime series “The Borgias” as historical personages and some events that take place are actual. While the previous game took place in the cities of Florence, Venice, Tuscany, and the Romagna this game takes place entirely in the Eternal City of Rome and the surrounding country side. This makes the game somewhat smaller in area but it is no less diminished by this as Rome has the enough hidden nooks and crannies to make the smaller location seem more varied. I remarked in my review of the previous game that it seemed odd that it would introduce Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) and then omit his infamous children Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, this game amends that omission. As well as the omission of having introduced people such as Niccolo Machaivelli and Caterina Sforza and then dropping them almost immediately is also amended. No longer are we dealing with the plots of banking families, now Ezio is fighting to free Rome from the grip of a tyrannical Pope and his son who is seeking to become the king of all Italy.

Ezio, is also older in this game. Typically a video game starts with a young gun happy and naive hero. Here, Ezio is wisened by his previous struggle and whose character acts as a seasoned veteran. This is a nice change from the cliche. The game also handles the character ability growth as well. Let me explain that: as a character moves through a game they typically gain health and more abilities, so that by the end of the story they are a much more advanced person than they were in the beginning. This game having begun at the end of the previous game faced a difficult problem in that reducing Ezio’s abilities would have to be done with care or else seem capricious thus breaking immersion. The problem is solved as the previous game placed all of Ezio’s abilities into the equipment he was carrying viz. his health was specifically tied to what kind of armor he was wearing. After a sexual encounter with Caterina Sforza a Borgia cannonball destroys Ezio’s equipment, thus reducing his health and power to almost nothing. It’s a clever device that solves the dilemma that I call the “Doom II problem*.”

The missions themselves in this game closely follow the types introduced in the very first Assassin’s Creed and then refined in the second. Retrieve something, follow someone, kill another, infiltrate this building, etc. The variety is a bit lacking but the different methods in which you go about it rescue them from tedium. What is more concentrated on here is stealth. Many of the missions require you to remain undetected or else the mission is failed.

There some new additions to the game that improve it upon the previous installment. The first are the Leonardo missions. Leonardo has been drafted into constructing weapons for the Borgia family’s wars in Italy (this actually happened), and this was against Leonardo’s will, he conscripts Ezio into destroying these weapons so that Cesare Borgia will be left without them. These are examples of the stealth missions alluded to before, if you get caught locating one (they take place in isolated towns outside Rome) the mission is failed. However once the blueprints are burned you get to take them for a spin. These missions were delightful then, because the inventions aren’t new cannons or Leonardo’s modified siege towers they are the tanks, glider (we saw in the previous game although this time it’s armed), and machine gun that appear in his notebooks based on his actual sketches and engineered by the developers to how they could have worked. The tank is the most fun.

The hidden messages have also returned. Although they have become much more complicated, giving two puzzles per message as well as a chess game that you have to pick one move per message for. Hint to actual chess players, don’t pick the move you would do, just pick the move hinted at by the clue otherwise it’s infuriating.

The most welcome addition for Brotherhood is the brotherhood itself. Ezio seeking to rebuild the Assassin’s Order begins recruiting followers from among the oppressed of Rome. When I initially read a preview of the game highlighting this feature I was less than thrilled. I figured that these would be worthless teammates ala Tie Fighter (and every other game you get wingmen in) that you would spend more time protecting than they would do helping. I was delighted to be wrong. The method for using them is this, you highlight an enemy or a group of enemies and then hit a button causing Ezio to whistle. Out of the nearest hiding spot (or if you are in an open field horses come riding in) your followers come and attack your targets using every ability that Ezio possesses. These are formidable allies and just watching them fight gives you the impression of what exactly it must be to be one of the Borgia soldiers facing you. Although I should say that you have to level them up at least to level 3 before you send them against more than one foe alone since they will only have their hidden blade at first. The other feature regarding them which was surprising is that if the enemy sees them they attack them rather than you. A couple of missions were remaining undetected was necessary were solved by having a group of my followers attack and kill guards out in the open while I snuck in around them. I’ve played plenty of games were if the guards catch your allies they’ve caught you. This not only adds to the gameplay but also to the immersion as these new assassin’s have their own existence.

All in all, fans of the previous game will eat up this version. It takes everything that was great about the Florentine adventure and expands upon it. The money system is re-worked so that you improve Rome itself rebuilding the aqueducts and various monuments, there are some sidequests. And you even get a bit into Machiavelli’s personality (a personal treat). This won’t make people who disliked the series thus far like it. But it will push those on the fence over. 
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*Doom II Problem: so our hero after beating back the hordes of Hell in Doom is now going to invade Hell. What does he arm himself with? A cestus and a pistol.

Tron: Legacy

The original Tron movie, released about three decades ago, was a childhood favorite of mine. As a kid it had everything that a movie needed, fancy effects, some excellent action scenes, lots of battles, none of that love story crap to get in the way, it was about video games before that automatically meant the movie would suck, and something about a plot or whatever. When I first heard that there was going to be a sequel to Tron, I was intrigued but not overly excited. The movie may have come out almost 30 years ago but I haven’t seen it in at least half of that time. Other childhood favorites have held up: I can’t bear to watch the Transformers movie now, nor any of the Ninja Turtles (no one thinks to buy a gun in those movies) movies, and for some reason finding Tron is difficult. The only movie from back then that really resonates still is Big Trouble in Little China, but being one of the greatest movies of all time isn’t really fair to the others, or more accurately at least that movie knew not to take itself seriously.

The original Tron was something the boys could talk about on the bus, without having to endure conversations with those cootie riddled girls sitting in the front.  A few years back I bumped into one of those cootie riddled girls at a bar, her name was Kelly and she was extremely gorgeous, ten minutes into our conversation I realized that she was as dumb as a brick but I couldn’t pry my eyes away from her. I talked to Kelly until I had to leave but to this day I couldn’t tell you what she was talking about.

Tron Legacy is just like Kelly. It’s Tron all grown up as insanely beautiful as possible but with noting beneath it. It’s mildly entertaining, and like my conversation with Kelly I don’t consider it a waste of time, but I’m honest that I like the view more than the conversation. Tron: Legacy is about as gorgeous as a movie can get. Every thing in the movie is polished to the point of unreality, it looks almost too good to be real, and by that I mean the images. We know the movie is fake, we know the grid doesn’t actually exist, but looking at the light bike races the grace and elegance of the images made me doubt what I was watching.

There’s some plot here but it’s pretty thin. The grid has been taken over by a fake Jeff Bridges called “Clu,” who is supposed to be designing the perfect system. Clu is a digital copy of the Bridges from the first movie and he looks fake, because he is fake. He’s a program not a user, but in his desire for perfection he’s adopted an iron hand in his drive forward. Ultimately Clu’s goal is to take his army to the portal in order to leave the Grid and enter into our world.

There’s also a story about the actual Bridges, Kevin Flynn who is trapped in the Grid for decades (which translates to hundreds of years inside the machine) and his son who abandoned in this world has to seek him out. There is also a fermenting revolution against Clu’s despotic control that is introduced and then quickly dropped. Add in some metaphors about how much people don’t like change, about genocide and purges; and there is the movie.

The trouble for the movie is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a father/son reuion movie, is it a movie about revolution, or what? There is also a new life form that spontaneously generated in the Grid which apparently holds the key solving all of the world’s dilemmas about disease, religion, philosophy, etc. This life form represented in the person of Olivia Wilde (formerly of House M.D.) is never explained as to how she is supposed to solve these problems.

The movie would have been great if it has just been about rescuing old Flynn by young Flynn from the Grid and the clutches of Clu. However the writers of the movie used too much of a heavy hand by putting in the Quasi-Zen philosophy essentially making the same mistake the Wachowski brothers did in the final Matrix movie. Being deep or philosophical in a movie requires nuance and subtlety, not a giant sign that states “deep message here.”

These are all the reasons to not like the movie. It is however an excellent exercise in style and effect over substance. As I have said earlier that movie looks beautiful, and if you can stomach the 3d movie experience* I’d recommend it simply for the light cycle races alone.

At the end of that night at the bar, I said goodnight to Kelly and walked out instantly forgetting everything we had talked about. This movie isn’t supposed to be more than the best eye candy I’ve ever seen on the screen, which makes it a perfect sequel because the first movie wasn’t anything deep either. I can’t recommend it any more than I can recommend going out with a gorgeous but vacuous woman (an easy tip is to ask them what that word means), sure it looks nice but in the end we get used to appearances and find them lacking. The movie is a beautiful illusion but it’s exceedingly pleasant to look at.

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*Which I learned makes me motion sick as well as giving me a headache.  

Halo: Reach (campaign review)

The final installment of the Bungie produced Halo series asks you, “to remember yesterday, when there was a tomorrow.” It’s a question with surprisingly philosophical implications especially for fans of David Hume for whom only yesterday was there ever a tomorrow.*

Planet Reach is the event that touched off humanity’s war with the Covenant, that strange mix of alien races united under a single religious banner bent on chewing their way through the galaxy in search of their salvation. The fall of planet Reach touched off the opening sequence of the very first game oh so many years ago, as the last Spartan-John 117 aka Master Chief-fled the Covenant and arrived at the Halo ring world. The fall of Reach has never been told, like the great Time War in the Dr. Who universe, it was always something that had happened in the past,** something that was definitely important but something that we would just have to imagine as happening. Reach, like Troy, will fall and it needs to fall because the rest of the story has already been written.

Which leads us into the greatest difficulty that the story will have to overcome: we already know what is going to happen. Any time a story takes place where the ending is already known we are going to encounter this. Think of the expectation and then the disappointment surrounding the Star Wars prequels. A good story and good acting (in this case game-play) can overcome the utter lack of surprise at the finale. Lucas couldn’t do it, will Bungie be able to?

Plot wise the game needs to give you the feeling that you are fighting a war you can win, even though you know you are going to lose. It has to put you into the shoes of Leonidas’s Spartans marching toward Thermopylae to do battle against the Persians. Knowing that your character is going to die has to inspire you to fight more not less. If you knew you were going to die would you despair or embrace what little life you have left? More importantly can it successfully put you into the shoes of someone who is going to die, and at the same time make you sympathetic to the character while getting you to forget that hope is only the shadow that despair casts?

We can barely squeak out a yes to that question. The player assumes control of Noble 6, the last member of a six person detachment of Spartan soldiers. 6, is replacing a fallen comrade and is viewed with skepticism by the other members of the team. They are deployed to investigate the disruption of a communications facility on the far side of the planet which was performed by suspected terrorists against the Galactic Government. Which plays out like a mystery at first but quickly it is discovered that this is the work of the alien race known as the Covenant. Once first contact is made the first domino falls.

Most of the early game play missions involve attempts to stave off the invasion, however at a certain point it becomes clear that Reach is finished and your missions are about buying time for the mass exodus from the planet or making the Covenant’s victory as Pyrrhic as possible. This gives the game an overall grim atmosphere that suits it well. There is a sense of desperation and resignation in each of the characters as they attempt to do a job that only delays the inevitable. As one character asks, “I know we are losing, but have we lost?”

Atmosphere and mission variety are definite high points of the game. Gone is the portrayal of the alien grunts as clowns who goof it up and run for their lives. The entire Covenant is thrust back to a primal level, they have become vicious monsters bent on fulfilling their religious obligation. The high points are where it matters the most. Especially when so much care was put into writing a story that would be as immersive as this. Yet their are several direction cues that hamper this:

The first is making the main character “Noble 6″ an outcast. Why not make him/her (that aspect is customizable) a long term member of the team thus creating a stronger bond with the five other members? I get that all video games must exploit the lone warrior trope, but usually those people are by themselves. This person works within a team while at the same time seeming to not want to be on that team.

The second is some mysterious floating camera choices. Sometimes its clever to show the action through a detached security camera, but several times in the game you are watching a blurry video of the action through someone else’s eyes. All this does is serve to remind the player that they are playing a game. Who is watching the action that we are watching? Cortanna?

It’s called breaking the fourth wall, or maybe in this case it is the fifth. If I am supposed to be Noble 6, then if the wide shots with all six members of the team are questionable then certainly the shots of “me” picking up my helmet are.

In all the campaign experience is satisfying. Gone is the typical Halo franchise gimmick of making the player walk over the same board several times: the entire planet of Reach is the game. From the winter poles to the super cities you do get the experience of what it must be like to live through a planetary invasion. Some of the storytelling methods are questionable. Your team could have had more developed personalities in order to develop a relationship with them.

Control wise it is standard fare remaining largely true to Halo’s roots back on the original XBOX. The biggest problem here is that the game forces you to recruit NPC soldiers to fight with you but doesn’t give you any way to give them orders. This isn’t a new feature in the game either, the original Halo gave you people that you fought with. However in that game and this they were all doomed, at least in the previous games I didn’t have to know their names.

A recommended game, but it clearly doesn’t deserve the 5/5 ratings that its been getting from the video game reviewership. The campaign is too short, too easy, but is mitigated by a wide variety in missions and some new vehicles that were awfully fun to pilot. More on this later when I tackle the multiplayer and the new credit scheme.

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*In order to sum this up concisely: Hume’s skepticism forced him to only believe in such things that were logical necessities, all other things were out of habit and this included the idea of causation.

** I know how weird it is to describe the “Time-War” as happening in the past.

Footnotes

I realize a couple of things among the stuff that I read. The first is that among the non-fiction books I have an addiction to reading the notes that go along with the work, especially if it is a translation which is funny because I speak no foreign languages and wouldn’t know the subtleties of moving something from Greek to English without many more years of school. I just can’t help it reading them though.

I despise end notes, whether they are at the end of the chapter or the end of the book is inconsequential because it still involves me having to flip from the line I’m reading over to another section in order to find the corresponding note. It’s disruptive and a lot more time consuming than just glancing down at the bottom of the page without having to avert my head in any manner. I always prefer to use footnotes when I am writing, never end notes.

All of that being said I’m getting quite angry at footnotes while I am reading Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Granted there were a couple of things I could have done to avoid this, the first being most obvious: not read them. I explained before though that this is a little addiction of mine and unlike most of my other addictions this one only hurts myself. The problem is that the footnotes are spoiling the story.

I should note that as a matter of my personal knowledge I do know how this war turns out. It’s not the general result that I am most interested in but the small matters. It’s becoming more and more about the role of fortune in this war as Thucydides remarks too often about how the unforeseen chance plays the greatest role in determining the fates of man (he was against using supernatural explanations, which makes me often think about what the people at the time were thinking especially with the plague). That role of fortune: we’re possibly talking about a dissertation topic here so a book that I decided on a whim to read might just pay off.

The civil war following the Median (Persian conflict) is made up of numerous internal squabbles between the Athenians and their allies/subjects as well as the Spartans and their allies. That’s where the real tension in the story lies, I don’t know who wins these things, who the players are, and how they eventually panned out. It is in these things that repeatedly Donald Lateiner, who introduced the book and noted it for the Barnes and Noble Classics,* that is really starting to piss me off.

I mean that literally too, it’s pissing me off. I was angry enough today when I found out that Cleon was going to lose the argument he was making that I shut the book and left the place i was reading it. The Lesbians (from Lesbos) revolted from the Athenian empire, their capital city of Mytilene was central to the revolt as it tried to go over to the Spartans. As it turns out the Athenians win bringing the city of Mytilene under heel, but now what to do with those dastardly Lesbians?

One thought was to execute every male member of the city of Mytilene and enslave the women and children. A punishment, I am told, is common fare for cities/states that revolt from their alliances. The issue is that the revolt was suppressed not only with the military force of the Athenians but also by the Lesbians themselves. The Lesbian aristocracy were the ones leading the revolt and once they armed the commoners, the commoners wanted to negotiate their position.

With this in consideration the argument was how to punish them. Our footnote let me know that Cleon was going to lose, but it did so prior to him making his argument for his side and he was the first speaker. This also happened at the siege of Salamis where I was privy to the knowledge of an escape attempt before I knew there was an incarceration.

Maybe the whole book should be a footnote with the end result of the war as the main text…I should have read the Thomas Hobbes translation.

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*Aka: stuff with expired copyrights that don’t need royalty payments but can still cost 11.95 unless you want to read off your laptop screen.

The Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

I’m going to start this review by making a bold statement, one that may–in fact–get my kicked off the internet for the bold assertion of the truth in the statement, but here it goes anyway: Boondock Saints 2 is the worst sequel I have ever seen and I saw Batman and Robin the theater (i.e. I paid money for that piece of shit). Remember Batman and Robin is the movie that George Clooney apologized for, the one where Arnold says brilliant things like, “Freeze,” and “Everbody Chill” as Mr. Freeze, that movie was better than this one. I should note that I am a fan of the first movie. 

The reason: at least Joel Schumacher didn’t pretend to be profound while making a piece of shit where obviously more money went into the sound track than it did the writers. Then again, Joel Schumacher is at least honest about the movies he makes. Here’s the problem that I will argue with by analogy.

If you make a movie that has an underground following, one might get the idea that everything that comes out of your pen is liquid gold. One might also think that one might be infallible, one would greatly be mistaken in that assumption, just ask M. Night Symalan, but then again he as at least two movies that are really excellent. Troy Duffy doesn’t even have one.

The first Boondock Saints movie was a movie that was entertaining and fun because it appealed to an idea in every guy’s head about what a movie should be. It was an action movie with a nonsensical plot, over the top characters who couldn’t exist in real life, and lots and lots of gunfights (like the movie Shoot ‘Em Up, and at least that movie knew it was ridiculous). That makes the movie worth watching but it’s not going to be on anyone’s serious top ten list.

A follow up movie was almost inevitable. The problem with cult movies is that almost all of them are objectively bad. The following does nothing to add to its intrinsic value, which is why the sequels to these movies are always terrible. Sam Raimi had to remake Evil Dead so that we could get a proper sequel out of it, and even then those movies didn’t pretend to be high art. Troy Duffy’s problem was that he thought he was saying something profound, when in fact he was just rehashing revenge/vigilante fantasies that we all have when we hear about rampant or particularly vicious crimes.

Saints 2, takes place 8 years after the original, which drops us into the first problem with the plot. The end of the first movie led us to believe that the brothers were going to continue on their crusade to violently rid the world of violent crimes, instead they apparently left Boston to go raise sheep in Ireland. Ireland, an extradition country, that would be one of the most obvious places the trio would have run. After publicly murdering one person in a court room, and having been the leading suspects in over 50 crimes to say that the federal government would have been unable to find them in a place that was an obvious haven for them is ridiculous.

The story is set off with the murder of a priest that was done as mock up of their crimes in order to call them out. Which it does, but to what motive? Revenge by the Yakavetta mob family? That’s what the entire movie points at, but even this is not so, as a shadowy figure known only as “the old man” seems to be behind it all. If the movie had stuck with the revenge as the plot’s prime mover we might have had something. If the movie had just left the brothers continuing on their quest we still might have had something, but this is not the case. The plot becomes more convoluted and twisted as it goes on. Then there are the needless scenes that should have been left on the editor’s floor.

For example: we see glimpses of Il Duce’s (Brian Connoly) past and what led him to begin his crusade, which could have made an interesting movie itself but it mishmashes in with this story, and completely contradicts the set up for his character in the first film. In the original his character is portrayed as some super killer that was locked up to keep him from killing mobsters, but he worked for the mob as a person that cleans house, it’s clearly stated by the blind bathroom attendant. Yet this movie retcons all of that making him simply an older version of his two sons who sought out and killed criminals after watching his dad killed by gangsters.

The movie opens with Rocco walking down the street narrating!? This character was nothing more than the comic relief in the first and he died. This was obviously the result of some crush that Duffy had either on the character or the actor himself. It adds nothing except to slow down the plot. Even Peter Jackson knew that he had to cut Tom Bombadil from Lord of the Rings for that very reason. The extended dream sequence where Rocco monologues about not showing feelings and his emulation of John Wayne is hackneyed and cliche. Tony Soprano did it much better talking about Gary Cooper because he lamented and his character wasn’t dead either.

“Real men hide their feelings, you know why?” asks Rocco, “Because it’s none of your fuckin’ business!” Lines like this aren’t deep or profound. Being portrayed as such just makes them worse. To say nothing of the abruptness of an entire scene that if cut, would have changed the story in no discernible way.

The character of Eunice, the special agent who takes over for Willen Dafoe’s character, doesn’t bring the same type of eccentricity to the film that he did. I feel bad for the actress because she obviously tried but ask most of the actors from the Star Wars prequels, there’s only so much you can do when the script is shit. For some reason, she’s Southern, it makes no sense that she should be as she could have been from Milwaukee and the character would only change in accent…an accent that comes and goes. Her character seems to only exist for one scene where she is reconstructing a crime scene and is dressed in a sexy cowboy outfit. That’s the same motivation that puts Eliza Dushku in bondage gear every chance Whedon gets. It can be considered nothing but puerile.

I really could go on…

And I will for one more bite of this shit apple. The character of Romeo, the Mexican, was to the point of being offensive. It comes from a mindset that thinks, ‘I’ll make fun of this race, but I’m not racist so it’s ok.’ Which is the exact wrong mindset to have when making this type of character. Originally he’s portrayed as a martial artist type who beats up a frenchman while in handcuffs, as soon as he links up with the MacManus brothers, he’s nothing more than a silly sidekick who portrays every flashy latin-american stereotype. It’s worse than a Martin Lawrence cross dressing movie. Duffy racial humor was funny when it portrayed Irish characters making fun of Irish stereotypes but even then you could tell that there was a line that wasn’t going to be crossed. I thought I was going to get the same thing for the first five minutes of Romeo, but then it just became uncomfortable stupid.

The reason that this movie is worse than Batman and Robin, is because at least that movie didn’t erase any fondness that I had for the Burton movies (the only Burton movies that I like). All Saint’s Day completely erases any fond memories I had of the original Boondock Saints now that they have completely eviscerated several of the characters.

A closing question: How did the final villain get his assassin through customs in October of 2001? It’s a point raised by the cops and Eunice but then is completely dropped.

I could seriously go on for pages about how bad this movie was, but I’ll stop there and recommend that if you were a fan of the first don’t see this one lest you feel the desire to shred the dvd and deny ever knowing of that movie to begin with.