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In Turok, players are encouraged to create "meat fountains." When you shoot a large dinosaur with a rocket or bomb, it explodes into a couple of big, gory pieces. These chunks fly high in the air before landing on the ground with a wet, heavy thud. If you approach the carnage for a closer look, you'll notice that the bloody slabs are still discernible. Think: 'Hey, the raptor's leg is over here! And there's part of its face!' What, ultimately, do meat fountains add to Turok, beyond shock value and visceral thrills? Well, nothing. But perhaps that's a stupid question.
Turok puts you in the role of the title character, who first appeared in comic books as early as the 1950s and arrived on video game consoles in 1997 with Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for the Nintendo 64. Turok is a Native American, and like so many of his brethren, he sports a Mohawk, loves the rugged outdoors, and is mean with a bow and arrow (he's also comfortable with flamethrowers and plasma rifles). The game's story follows Turok and a band of intergalactic commandos who have been sent to a remote planet to capture an escaped war criminal. Upon entering the atmosphere, their ship is shot down and they find that the jungle planet is crawling with hostile soldiers and genetically engineered dinosaurs. Turok must slay everything in sight in order to survive. There's a little more to it (a very little), but that's the basis for this action packed first-person shooter.
Frequent and beautifully animated cut sequences give the game a cinematic quality and advance the plot. They depict Turok and the other camouflaged testosterone freaks in-fighting and shouting taunts like "Why don't you grow a pair!" These videos don't slow down the action, but act as quick, welcome transitions between the various stages and objectives. And while in some games there's a jarring disconnect between story clips and playable action, Turok blends the two almost seamlessly, due to its uniform, excellent graphics. The lush jungle, the explosions, and of course, the dinosaurs, all look great. It makes one wish there was more innovation and variation in the character and level designs; the enemy soldiers all look identical, and the settings--a cave, a futuristic military bunker--while very pretty, are all things you've seen rendered in 3D before.
The action is typical of a first-person shooter. You choose from an assortment of weapons (a balanced array, but, unfortunately, the guns aren't quite as ridiculous as in previous installments), and have to determine which ones are most effective in a given circumstance. Similarly, you're forced to weigh your strategy depending on the number of enemies and their positioning: occasionally you use stealth to sneak up on your prey, while other times you duck behind cover and pop up to shoot during a pause in enemy fire; and when in doubt, you can always just run in with guns blazing. The enemy A.I. for the soldiers (not so much the dinosaurs) is very high--they, too, can judge when to hide and when to take their shots, and this makes for a more challenging, enjoyable experience.
Turok lands in a crowded field of first-person shooters, and lacks the depth and fine-tuning of premiere titles like Bioshock, Halo 3, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. There's really not much going on here beyond running around shooting guys and knifing dinosaurs with a massive blade; the game forgoes even the most rudimentary puzzles in favor of non-stop action. And sometimes that's enough. Turok is a fun, mindless action game with great graphics, solid controls, and buckets of gore. Where else can you find a meat fountain?
In the first five minutes of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," we see a robot from the future track Sarah and John Connor and try to murder them with a shotgun and a couple of Uzis. He mows down a slew of cops in the process. Terminator fans will no doubt be happy to see that the television show is loyal to its source material.
Set after the events in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (the show ignores the third movie), it begins with mother and son running from the law because of the mayhem they caused in that film. Hunting them is the FBI, which we quickly learn has been infiltrated by a terminator. John (Thomas Dekker), yearning for a normal teenage life, is resentful of his Messianic status as the future savior of mankind from the machines, but he's a pretty good sport about it all. Lena Headey plays Sarah, and while she never makes you forget Linda Hamilton, she's appropriately intense and efficient. The two of them manage to be kind of cute together, despite the fact that Sarah is usually shouting (justifiably paranoid) lines at John like, "No one is ever safe!"
John is just settling in at the latest in a long string of high schools when his teacher pulls a handgun out of his robotic leg and starts busting caps. Fortunately the cute girl sitting next to John is also a terminator, and she's here to protect him. From there the basic premise mirrors that of T2: a "good" terminator protects Sarah and John from a "bad" one (here a couple of bad ones). But instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger, we get Summer Glau, the wide-eyed girl next door, sporting lip gloss and mini-skirts. In contrast to Arnold's unwavering voice, Glau's hushed tones feel timid and confused. She's actually more believable when she's kicking ass. Then again, she's attractive enough that most fan boys won't care about her acting chops; and terminators are always kind of aloof, anyway.
Fans should enjoy references to the films peppered throughout the show, from quotes ("Come with me if you want to live"), to secondary characters (the Dyson family, the arms hoarder Enrique), to visual homage (the rolling highway, the lonely swing set). The show puts clever spins on the films' established time travel mechanism. It also shares its predecessors' penchant for cheesy (and generally amusing) one-liners.
Naturally, there are ways in which "Sarah Connor Chronicles" suffers as a result of its medium. Sarah was working through emotional scars ten years after her first brush with a terminator; here she has to maintain her sanity while outrunning an android every week. And the special effects obviously can't compete with those in a big-budget James Cameron film. But as far as television sci-fi action romps go, this is really not bad; it's about as good as one could reasonably hope for a Terminator t.v. show to be.
Things that go bump in the night. The big haunted house. Demonic children. And a creepy clown mask. The Orphanage, the directorial debut from Juan Antonia Bayona, relies on these and other classic horror staples to create its numerous scares. Though the film is less than innovative, its use of suspense and impeccable sound editing--and not violence or special effects--give it the welcome feeling of a throwback in this moment when gory torture porns continue to flood the box office.
The Orphanage tells the story of Laura (Belen Rueda), who moves to the Spanish countryside with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and young, adopted son Simon. There she aims to start a home for disabled children in the former orphanage where she was raised 30 year ago. Simon, played by Roger Princeps, who captures the sincere curiosity of a child in a beautiful, understated performance, is HIV positive and Laura lives with the constant fear of losing her beloved boy. Her nightmare comes early when Simon suddenly disappears and from there Rueda's gutsy, charged performance propels the film. Searching desperately for answers, Laura comes to believe that children's spirits inhabiting her home have taken Simon, and a kooky medium (Is there any other kind?), played by Geraldine Chaplin, validates her suspicions.
The film has been compared with Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. While both films share the theme of the thin line between fantasy (and the supernatural) and reality, the association likely has more to do with Del Toro's producing credit The Orphanage. Whereas Pan's Labyrinth exploded with singular creative vision, The Orphanage often feels like well worn territory, despite its uniqueness in today's horror field. It borrows liberally from its inspirations (The Others, The Innocents, and numerous others) without ever commenting on them, and never transcends its status as a genre film, albeit a very good one.
After suffering a massive stroke at age 43, Jean-Dominique Bauby awoke with "locked-in syndrome." He retained full mental capacities but was paralyzed, unable to speak or move, save the blinking of his left eye. That eyelid became Bauby's voice. His doctors devised a system wherein they read aloud the alphabet to Bauby and he would blink to signify a given letter; slowly he assembled words and sentences. In this manner, he dictated an entire book about his experiences after the stroke. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the film from Paul Schnabel which takes its name from that remarkable memoir, captures the monotony and frustration of life with locked-in syndrome; it is perhaps only natural that the film becomes an exercise in tedium.
A series of flashbacks help flesh out Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), but rather than endear the character to the audience, these curiously chosen scenes depict a moody man whose new girlfriend and sports car scream midlife crisis. Bauby's lack of agency doesn't help; a passive, unsympathetic protagonist is not an inherently strong one. We pull for him because his affliction is so tragic and because the dedicated, loving people around him want desperately for his condition to improve. These include a couple of gorgeous female doctors, his two young children, and their charming mother (whom Bauby forsakes, via blinks, in the film's most powerful, wrenching scene).
Schnabel uses interior monologue and point-of-view shots to take us inside Bauby's world, and these visual techniques, especially, comprise the film's most effective and creative elements. In one particularly grisly, memorable shot, we see Bauby's right eye sewn shut from inside. But mostly we watch Bauby sit and blink, and listen to him work through pity and self-loathing with the help of his attendees and memoir. Bauby occasionally uses his imagination to escape the dull, confined spaces of the hospital. These scenes, in which Bauby lives out fantasies of fine food and beautiful women, evince the film's gentle sense of humor. They act as moments of respite, not only for Bauby, but for the audience, who may welcome a break from the dreary oppressiveness of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
It's been a rough couple of years for Phil Anselmo. The singer was hooked on methadone following the 2003 breakup of heavy metal giants Pantera, after 15 years together. While touring with the short lived and poorly received Superjoint Ritual, Anselmo publicly lambasted his former bandmates from the stage, to the dismay of the group's loyal fans. In 2004, disaster struck: Pantera guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott was shot and killed while performing with a new band, prompting Anselmo to rescind his recent comments about the fallen musician. "He's like a brother to me," Anselmo said, changing his tune in lieu of the tragedy. Then in 2005, Anselmo's New Orleans home was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. On III-Over the Under, the third album from long-running New Orleans metal collaboration Down (their first in five years), Anselmo tries to come to grips with his missteps and misfortunes and, perhaps, push forward.
With Down, Anselmo's strained, soulful delivery taps into a sorrow rarely heard in his other bands, where unbridled rage took center stage. Now reportedly clean, he evinces frustration about his former drug habits on "Never Try" and "N.O.D.," admitting, "L.S.D. ain't what it used to be for me." Gone is the chest-thumping bravado; in fact, Pantera is never channeled here, lyrically or musically. Rather, the sludgy, often bluesy, mid-tempo songs are evocative of the primary bands of Down guitarists Pepper Keenan and Kirk Weinstein, who play for Corrosion of Conformity and Crowbar, respectively.
Fortunately, Anselmo's melancholy themes never keep the album from rocking hard. It's on "I Scream," the album's most straightforward, blistering metal jam that he touches on his broken relationship with Dimebag in the month's prior to the guitarist's death: "Fallen leaves/from the same family tree/regret is all that's left," he sings.
In "On March The Saints," a beautiful, boozy slab of southern hard rock, he decides there's no sense to be made of Katrina and nothing to do but soldier on and start anew. Yet for all his talk of rebirth on Over the Under, Anselmo stops short of repentance. He prefers to see himself as a victim. "All scorn me," he snarls on "I Scream," bemoaning what he calls "witch hunt blame."
Down
III-Over the Under
Warner Music Group
The pleasure of watching Children of Men on dvd is hitting the pause button and trying to examine everything that's going on in the background. "Production design is it's own character in this movie," says a producer in the film's bonus features. And she's exactly right. Through superb attention to detail, director Alfonso Cuaron has created an eerily believable future dystopia in which women are infertile, the earth is ravaged by nuclear war, and, according to a television commercial, "Only Britain soldiers on." As London grows more like a police state, terrorist bombings become a common occurrence and immigrants await deportation in refugee camps throughout the city.
Part of the reason this world feels so realistic is that it's set in the near future, the year 2027. But more than that, it's the way it resembles what a prosperous nation might actually look like if, 20 years from now, it lost all hope for a future. Cuaron's London is devoid of the technological inventiveness and ornamentation found in films like Blade Runner and Brazil. The cars, just slight updates of the ones we have now, are all dirty and rundown. The whole country wants for upkeep and no one is talking about it. The characters don't sit around rehashing the events of the past two decades because for them it's an accepted reality. Since the dialogue eschews any inessential exposition, the graffiti, newspaper headlines ("Bombing of Saudi Pipeline Disrupts World's Oil Supply"), and government propaganda ("Avoiding Fertility Tests Is A Crime") which fill the background become that much more important--or at least intriguing--in understanding this future and how it got that way.
If the film's setting is often hyper-detailed, the plot is relatively simple. Disgruntled everyman Theo (Clive Owen) trudges through his days in a London office, drinking and occasionally seeking respite in the country home of his friend Jasper (Michael Caine), an old hippie and ex-political cartoonist who grows weed and listens to hip-hop. Theo is jarred from his stupor when Julian (Julianne Moore), a former lover, draws him into the work of her activist (or is it terrorist?) group, the Fishes. Soon he's forced to protect Kee, a young pregnant woman and humanity's last hope, from the Fishes, who hope to use her as leverage in advancing their political agenda. The film's second half chronicles his travails in transporting Kee to a rendezvous point where she can meet a mythical group that allegedly possesses the resources to use her child to create new life.
Along with a few brief deleted scenes, the bonus DVD includes a featurette in which a panel of experts with titles like "Anti-Globalization Activist" speak ham-handedly about the perils of mass migration and global warming, some of which connects with the film's political themes. But ultimately the bonus features deliver because they shed light on the filming of the breathtaking action sequences shot in long takes. Some lasting upwards of four minutes, these amazingly choreographed bits bring you deepest into the film's world, occurring at turning points in the plot and heightening the suspense of the action by working in real time. Cuaron manages to span the full range of human emotion in one shot. After seeing the incredible rig used in creating the car chase--and if you don't know what I'm talking about, you must go rent this--the already stunning scene feels like a landmark achievement. The film's visuals impress more with each viewing.
As much as Cuaron's London is covered in crime, Children of Men is a highly polished film. It reminds that a big budget thriller needn't be mindless popcorn fodder, not when paired with a talented director and a clever script. Children of Men uses its resources to create a world that's as absorbing as it is repellent.
Lara Croft has appeared in 10 games and two feature films since Tomb Raider debuted on the Playstation in 1996. At that time, 3D gaming was in its infancy, and Tomb Raider helped set the standard. But as much as Ms. Croft's blue tank-top and khaki booty shorts may be iconic in the eyes of fanboys, it's been years since a Tomb Raider title actually wowed the gaming public. Recent installments have shown improvements in the curvature of the heroine's breasts (she no longer appears to be wearing Madonna's old cone bra) and not much else. Now after a long line of missteps, publisher Eidos has gone back to the series' roots with Tomb Raider: Anniversary, a liberal remake of the original that marks a step-up from the franchise's recent output.
As in the first game, Anniversary finds Lara traversing the caves of Peru, Greece and Egypt in search of a magical relic called the Scion of Atlantis. Absent are the vehicles and RPG (that's Role Playing Game, noobz) elements of the past few releases, and thus Anniversary is somewhat less ambitious in scope. This, however, focuses the action squarely on what Lara has always done best, naming scaling cave walls and gunning down wild animals. Anniversary's greatest strength is the fluidity of its controls, as Lara bounds from one ledge to the next like a nimble chimp. If only manipulating the camera was so easy--wrestling with the game for the best viewpoint quickly grows tedious.
Although the Playstation 2 can't compete with the graphics of the next-gen systems, Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a handsome game. The water and lighting effects are especially well done, as are the level designs. The tombs look fantastic and are expansive enough to allow for a great deal of exploration without overwhelming the player. Some locales from the original Tomb Raider have been lovingly recreated (longtime fans may wax nostalgic over the T-Rex battle in the Lost Valley), while others have been amalgamated or made from scratch. Music is used sparingly but to great dramatic effect, as it's cued suddenly when you enter a new area or are ambushed by enemies.
Lara has a few new abilities which enhance the gameplay, such as the use of a grappling hook, but the bulk of the action still lies very much in a methodical repetition of finding switches that open doors. The combat, too, is overly simplistic, with one button to target and another to fire. Loading times are another concern. Every time Lara plummets to her death (which is quite often) or is mauled by a bear, expect a good 30 second wait.
Nevertheless, these are fairly minor gripes with a fine tuned game. Anniversary is challenging but has a gradual learning curve. It features 20 hours of gameplay and considerably more for perfectionists hoping to discover all the well-hidden artifacts. Tomb Raider: Anniversary breaks little new ground, but is a worthy addition to the Playstation 2 library in its twilight years. What remains to be seen is whether Eidos can create a truly new Tomb Raider experience on the next generation consoles.
I went to see Bug expecting a gory, insect-infested shlockfest. Mutant cockroaches gnawing peoples' eyeballs and the like. After all, they "feed on your brain," promised the trailer, amid quick cuts of bloody mayhem. I was surprised to find something completely different, an arresting drama, a psychological thriller that actually probes the human psyche and asks questions about sanity, addiction, abandonment and paranoia. But I understand the studio's decision to sell Bug as a typical horror flick. For one, a movie this unorthodox must've been hell on a marketing team. And secondly, the film does succeed in giving quite a scare.
Bug tells the story of Agnes White (Ashley Judd), a crystal meth addict who lives in a rundown motel and waitresses at the local dive bar in middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma. Alone and depressed, Agnes fears the return of her abusive ex-husband, Goss (Harry Connick Jr.), an ex-convict fresh out of the pen. Goss is the father to her only child, a boy who disappeared 10 years ago in a grocery store when he was six years old. One night Agnes' friend introduces her to Peter Evans (Michael Shannon), a shy, stoic Gulf War veteran, who espouses a unique worldview and only gradually reveals the tendencies of a paranoid schizophrenic. "I like hearin' you talk," she tells him early on. They soon sleep together and from there it's a descent into madness for the bruised, vulnerable Agnes. Peter drags her into his delusional world, where government conspiracies lie everywhere--even in the bugs he claims have infested her hotel room.
The film is adapted from the Tracy Letts play of the same name (Letts also wrote the screenplay) and it still feels very much like a stage production. It takes place almost entirely in the motel room. It consists of a few lengthy scenes, mostly duologues between the two leads, and it relies heavily on the strengths of its very small cast. Judd and Shannon (reprising his role from the off Broadway production) are terrific as the unlikely lovers. Retreating into isolation and paranoid fantasies, Agnes and Peter enable one another's self-destruction by rejecting the few individuals who try to help them and reintroduce them to some semblance of reality.
Harry Connick Jr., too, is excellent, in an unexpected turn as Goss, a violent lowlife who turns out to be a voice of reason. People "try to control you, they try to force you to act a certain way," says Peter of Goss. "They can make you crazy, too." We understand Agnes' hatred of Goss--he is a brutal, ugly man, and the source of much of her anxiety. But it's ironic that he's trying to help Agnes while Peter is the one who finally drives her mad.
Bug finally builds to a conclusion which, if perhaps inevitable, is handled with a dose of melodrama that, up until that point, the film has been careful to avoid. The ending aside, however, director William Friedkin has crafted a riveting, claustrophobic film, meticulously paced to allow for a clean evolution of its characters, and superbly acted by a cast that truly inhabits its roles. Judd's Agnes is so alone and abused, so steeped in drug addiction, so desperate for hope and meaning that she seeks refuge in the arms of a very sick individual and never looks back. While Bug does have a few bloody, violent moments, it's these honest explorations of human need, malleability and fear which make the film genuinely unnerving and scarier than so much of the torture porn and gore-filled horror swill that comes down the pipeline.
