Movie Review: Inception

I should probably start off my saying that before Inception, Christopher Nolan was already one of my favorite writer/directors. Having seen only four of his movies (the lesser-known but intriguing Following, the fantastic Memento, and of course his famed renditions of my favorite super hero, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight), I was already enamored with his style and his storytelling. I'm thrilled to say that Inception has only solidified my adoration of Mr. Nolan.

I do want to say that I think people need to go into the movie with the right expectations. I do not consider this movie to be primarily a philosophical movie - while it deals with some philosophy elements, I much prefer to think of it as a psychological action thriller. It has a really cool plot, a clever and mostly-believable mythology, some great acting, and a few really cool characters. Many of the critiques I've seen are that the philosophy isn't all that great - and as long as you're not expecting it to be then it won't be a problem.

Is the movie perfect? Not at all. There are a few major plot holes and occasionally characters act kinda dumb. There's too much gun-fighting that feels out of place and unneeded. Perhaps most annoying, at least to those of us who notice, for a movie so obsessed with timing there are cases where it falls into the stereotypical "let's have 10 seconds take 60 seconds of screen time" thing that irks me.

All that said, I was enthralled throughout the entire movie. While not earth-shattering philosophy, it does engage your mind throughout and feels much more interactive than most movies just because of how twisted and deep the mythology is. It's a sci-fi movie that isn't entirely believable, but it just doesn't matter - it's pretty to look at, has a great plot, and is beautifully executed.

Also, I have to say, I have tremendous respect for Leonardo DiCaprio, who turned himself from teen pop idol doing bad movies to a consistently excellent actor in his adult years. Ellen Page is also one of my favorite young actors of today and she does a fine job in this movie as well, as does the rest of the cast.

This might sound like a very vague review that says almost nothing about the movie, and that's very intentional - I don't want to give anything away. I managed to walk into the movie knowing almost nothing about the plot (a feat I also pulled off with The Matrix) and I'm much happier for it. So, if you like cerebral action movies, or Christopher Nolan, or really just movies in general, go see it. Go into it expecting a fun, intriguing story that isn't a dissertation on existentialism and I think you'll really enjoy it.

CellCraft is Out!

Just a quick announcement for my 10s of readers, about 3 of which won't have heard this from the other social sites I've posted this to, but...

CellCraft is out! W00t!

You can play it online at Kongregate, or you can go to the Official CellCraft Website to download a free copy for yourself or to host at your own website.

Even more amazing, the game has been ridonkulously well received, going toe-to-toe with some incredibly good, non-educational games on these gaming websites. It's so exciting to see everyone's reactions to it!

Some initial thoughts on the iPod Touch

Oi...February? Really? That was my last post? How sad. Well, I just got back from an amazing vacation in the Dominican Republic, and I've started up a more professional blog (Pec's Games), plus we've finished CellCraft (awaiting sponsorship terms before release) and I'm looking at a new, unannounced game project. So, lots going on.

Oh, I also got an iPod Touch in March, and wanted to do a little ranting and raving.

First off, this is a slick piece of hardware. It runs very smoothly, the touch screen is beautiful and responsive, and in terms of a portable media device it works absolutely fantastically. The games are surprisingly good (I'm rarely picking up my DS these days) and have nailed a pricing scheme that has caused me to spend more on games than I had originally intended. Had all games been in the $5 - $10 range, I probably would have bought 1 or 2. But at $1 - $2 (with tons of free ones if you're diligent), well, let's just say I think I have a problem.

Which brings me to...

Rant number one: Limits to pages of apps. Why do we need an arbitrary maximum, especially one as small as 11 pages (meaning only 176 apps, including the default ones, plus 4 at the bottom for 180 total)? I hit this maximum within a few weeks of owning the iPod. I suppose some readers will point out that this isn't really reasonable, and that I clearly have a problem if I hit 11 pages that quickly. To be fair, they weren't full - I was using pages to sort types of apps and genres of games. Which leads into...

Rant number two: Lack of ability to organize apps on the iPod. Even with the limit of 180 apps, you have no way to categorize, label, or do any legitimate sorting of apps. I attempted to use the pages as a sort method, but this cut down on the number of apps I could use. Admittedly, this will be somewhat fixed with the next version of iOS, which will allow you to put apps, up to 16 at a time, into folders. This will certainly help, and will drastically increase the maximum number of apps to over 2000, but would it really kill them to just add a vertical scroll to pages so we're not constrained to 16 each?

Rant number three: Lack of ability to organize apps in iTunes. As much as rant number two annoys me, this one really kills me. I don't have much of a problem trading apps in and out of my active rotation on my device, as long as I have a good way to track which games I want to put back in. But no - iTunes somehow gives you even fewer sorting options than the iPod itself. In fact, all you can do is change the sort order of the giant list, or search by name. No categories, folders, labels...nothing. I can (somewhat) understand limited options on the device, but in iTunes, a full-fledged OSX app with all the bells and whistles? It's just ridiculous.

Rant number four: The iTunes store is just plain stupid. I can't help but feel that no one at Apple has ever made a purchase from Amazon.com in their life. Because surely if they had, they would understand the benefits of labels, recommendations, flexible searches, and, above everything else, user scores. Yes yes, they have user scores, but they're hidden, especially in the iTunes version of the store. For reasons beyond my understanding, you can't view any user scores when browsing the app store in iTunes (but even more inexplicably you can when browsing with the iPod app store). The "most popular" lists are useless, and there's no way to sort by highest user rating (which is the single most common sort I use when shopping online for things). It is embarrassingly bad design and functionality from a company who prides itself on those two things above everything else.

My best guess is that the app store popularity took Apple entirely by surprise. It seems like many of their tools were written expecting to have maybe 1000 apps available. Instead, we have many times more than that and tools that seem entirely incapable of helping the user sift through the crap to find the gems. I have to rely on external game review sites (of which there are surprisingly few decent ones - SlideToPlay being the only one I really use much thanks to their excellent genre sort/filter options). But this would only explain an initial oversight - why updates haven't been made since then I don't know. Perhaps they can't climb over the mountains of money in their offices to get to the keyboard to make some changes.

In any case, I do love my iPod Touch - it is an amazing device with a fantastic collection of software. I just wish they could make a few simple, and entirely reasonable, adjustments to really make the experience much better.

Do I get a discount if he's colicky?

I feel that this one is self-explanatory:

Not only did I get a double take at the announcement of a sale of babies, but reading on there's actually no clarification to contradict my first interpretation. Their entire stock of babies is up to 50% off!? Well, gosh - I think I'll just get two then!

Movie Review: Ink

Recently, my wife and I settled down for a movie night. Not wanting to head out, we booted up the 360 and loaded Netflix to see what I had in the queue. This one movie, Ink, stood out as an unknown but fairly highly rated film (with a surprising consistency of 3.4 / 5.0 on Netflix and 6.8 / 10.0 on imdb.com). It wasn't rated on Metacritic since the movie was never actually released by a publisher. Apparently no one wanted the script, but the director decided to go for it anyway. With glowing written reviews, we decided to brave the unknown and check it out.

Sadly, I now worry that my wife won't trust me to pick out movies she hasn't heard of any more.

First off, it's excruciatingly, painfully obvious that this was a low-budget movie. Most of this comes from terrible cinematography and some extremely weak acting. There were a few genuinely good special effects and character designs (mostly with the villains in the movie - the heroes seemed to wear whatever they had in their closets at home), but these were often obscured immediately by shoddy work elsewhere. This was all slightly surprising since the opening of the movie was rather solid, with an excellent opening 2 minutes and a perfectly reasonable plot setup following. But then things went downhill very quickly.

The general idea behind the movie is that there are two factions of beings who provide dreams to people - the Storytellers (good dreams) and the Incubi (nightmares). They are apparently at odds with eachother, rather than working in any sort of symbiosis. There are also other beings who are part of neither side, and the titular character is one of these. He steals the...soul, I guess...of a girl in her sleep in order to try to become an Incubus. The plot then follows Ink as he attempts to reach his final goal, all the while the Storytellers track him down and try to stop him.

There's an additional side plot about the girl's father, who has become a workaholic and isn't really a part of her life any more. It's some nice family drama to add to the story I suppose, though isn't necessarily all that believable. Which brings us to the truly damning quality of this movie: the writing is weak.

When you're going to tout your movie as the great screenplay that no one was willing to pick up but you decided to make anyway, you had better have some great dialog and a truly compelling and original plot. Instead, the dialog is often silly, characters are shallow and at times completely undeveloped, and the plot left neither my wife nor I surprised, or even really guessing (confused, but obscurity doesn't substitute for clever plot development). For a film with extremely low production values, the entire experience rests on acting and writing, and sadly those just aren't solid here either.

A quick bit of credit does go to the blind Pathfinder character. While his introduction was over-acted and poorly written (with the actor sounding like he was being naughty by saying a few swear words), the character himself had a few funny lines and was genuinely fairly interesting. Also, I recall the music being decent throughout, so good job to the composer.

In any case, it's clear that the writer wanted to have the next Matrix movie (complete with alternate dimensions, a modern good/evil mythology, lots of special effects, multiple fight scenes, etc.), but unfortunately it really doesn't get even close. I've been going back and re-reading reviews written of the movie trying to figure out what people saw in this movie, and I still don't understand it. If anyone has seen it and would like to leave a comment explaining why I'm wrong, please do. But as it stands, I can't give it better than a 4/10. If you like low-budget cult-classic movies, you can download it (apparently it's big on the torrents and the film-makers are cool with it) or stream it if you want, but definitely don't spend money on this movie.

The LHC has nothing in WinXP

I just saw this confirmation message while using Windows XP:

I fear that if I hit "yes" the universe will implode.

This came as a result of accidentally dragging my recycling bin icon to the quick-launch bar. Attempting to remove the link yielded this window. I suppose it makes sense, but the lack of any indication that the first one is a link is rather confusing.

Enemy, mine?

If you talk to anyone who really knows me, most of them will tell you, and probably everyone would agree with the fact, that I am honest, kind, and trusting almost to a fault. I tell the truth when I shouldn't, I help people out when I can, and I actually wrote "gullible" on a ceiling in a college class room just so once in a while it'd be true when I looked up.

So it is absolutely shocking to me that I apparently have someone who hates my guts. My neighbor for some reason has decided that my wife and I are evil, and I'm really not sure why. I'm aware of one incident where she thinks our dog pooped in her garden - something she'd rightfully be upset about, although we're rather certain it didn't happen. (For the record, the dog did indeed run into the yard, my wife yelled at the dog to come back, and the dog cowered and trembled slightly, which very feasibly looked to an outside observer like she was fertilizing the garden) Even if it did happen, it was absolutely not intentional and is not something we let happen in other people's yards, especially in something like her cute little garden.

Since then, I've had numerous other, completely false, accusations thrown my way. Apparently we've been scratching her car door (she parks next to us, but to my knowledge I've never bumped her car) and are making our car alarm beep (which it does beep annoying sometimes when we lock it - we can't control this though) just to show off our security system. On top of that, one evening I noticed her gas door was open on her car and I closed it. Apparently she was watching me from her doorway at the time (this was around midnight, by the way) and stepped outside angrily telling me to never touch her car. I explained that the gas door was open and she called me a liar. Great.

Now she regularly stands in her doorway, watching me. Even just tonight, I got back from the grocery story at 11:30pm, and when I got out of my car her door opened up and she stood there, watching me - which was what lead me to come inside and write this post.

At this point, I don't know what to do. I'd love to sit down and talk with her, but it seems like she has no interest in listening. I thought of leaving flowers on her door one day, but figured she'd probably just hate me more for it. I tried smiling and waiving to her for months and was rewarded with silent scowls. The thought of someone thinking I'm some evil villain haunts me and deeply disturbs me, but I have no idea how to fix it.

Sometimes I try telling myself she's crazy, but she seems so normal and interacts with other neighbors perfectly fine. She has a cute dog and a nice garden and even was the first person we talked with when we were considering moving into the neighborhood (at which time she was very helpful and cordial). Could this one dog-poo-related misunderstanding really set off such a huge hate-fest? Should I try to mend things, or just continue ignoring it and feeling sad and guilty every single time I walk by her door, despite having done nothing wrong? I know I probably need to just not care what people think of me, at least in some cases, but it's hard when you're confronted with it on a near daily basis. Perhaps I've just lead a sheltered life. Perhaps being nice to everyone for so long has left me defenseless against such focused anger towards me. If nothing else, I hope that writing this down and putting it out there will at least be therapeutic, for a little while.

Argh.