Request: Kung Fu Panda 2

Kung Fu Panda 2

Kung Fu Panda became a pretty big hit for DreamWorks back in 2008. It was a fun little movie with some really nice martial arts and a likable main character voiced by Jack Black. It was one of the few times that I've seen a panda used as a main characters in a movie and it works. People love pandas... maybe a little bit too much since we are always worried about their sex life. But I digress, Po is a character that people initially liked because he was always out of his element and still managed to do whatever he sets out to do. Whether it is becoming one of the Furious Five as the legendary Dragon Warrior or being able to live up to his master Sifu's expectations. He is basically the perennial normal good guy that ends up saving everyone. I felt that this sequel lost some of the charm that made the first one so much fun.

I have a big gripe with this one more than the last one, but it applies to both movies. Po is supposed to be part of a team. We hardly get anything from his team other than Tigress (Angelina Jolie). Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Lui, David Cross and even Dustin Hoffman (my favorite character in the first movie) are hardly in this damn thing. Shen (Gary Oldman) is, to me, a weak antagonist. Sure, he has done some terrible things and all of that jazz, but Tai Lung was a better bad ass. A peacock is not very scary. By the way, talking about misuse of characters... Master Ox and Master Croc are the biggest pussies I've ever seen. Criminally misused.

"I might look cool, but my kung fu is weak."

Now, I have to give props where props are due. The first fight scene at the music place was one of the most entertaining and creative martial arts scenes I have seen in a long time. The music playing hand on hand with the fight. Every time a blow hit, it would become part of the music. It is really something to see. The last "fight" scene with Po and the fireworks is also really good. The visuals throughout this movie were fantastic.

I thought the plot was mostly good. The idea of the old versus the new, industry versus the classical way of doing things, technology versus culture was very well done. The fear for the old ways and the ways of kung fu are really felt by the watcher as you see the carnage that Shen's weapon unleashes. The biggest problem I had with it though is that a cannon is not very useful when you are fighting against one agile martial artist. For a battle against a bunch of people, then fine. This sort of reminded me of the final battle in The Last Samurai where the samurai that are left ride against the mini-gun.

My biggest gripe with the film was the whole Po back story angle. In the first movie it was funny that a goose had a panda as a son. The fact that he was adopted and all of that wasn't touched on that I remember. This time they attach this lame and cliched 'your parents were killed by the bad guy because of a prophecy' crap that we have seen in a million other movies and discover when they first have the nightmare. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to put it together, but they drag this on forever. They could have done something more creative and not wasted so much time on this. What happened was that the main story was sort of lost in the shuffle and characters never develop. Might as well call his team Furious Five Member #3 and so forth. Tigress is the only one that gets some development but only for like 5 seconds.

At the end of the day, this is a fun although darker (why is it that everything has to be darker all the time??) sequel which has some of the charm but never fully realizes its potential. The martial arts are awesome and there are some really cool scenes, but the lack of any character development (even for Shen) except for Po really hurts this film. Is it a bad movie? Not by any means. It's just not that great.

6 out of 10

July is Final Fantasy History Month. Yes, I did just make it up.

So, due to unfortunate circumstances, I have been stuck in my house for the whole summer. On the one hand, boo for me. On the other, it has given me plenty time to appreciate all these video games I have at my disposal. Being the huge RPG nerd that I am, I decided to play through the first 6 Final Fantasies and see how they stacked up nowadays.

First up: Final Fantasy, the one that started it all.

Hold on to your long-johns, we're about to get retro up in this bitch.

I decided to play the updated PSP version, since the original had a horrible five cast limit per spell level, and that shit don't roll with me.

First up, the graphics. Naturally, the original graphics would not stack up very well nowadays, but back then, this was pretty damn cool:

Mind blowing.

And now, for the latest, and what I presume will be the last update, they look like this:

Pretty.

So, for what essentially set the ground for every other JRPG out there, the graphics are a-okay.

Next up is the music. It's naturally nothing too fancy, just your usual string orchestra crap which I must admit, is quite catchy when you get lost on the map and have no damn clue where to go next. The game also comes with the bonus dungeons that have bosses from the other final fantasies and their theme music also gets a nice tech bump, which makes these bonus battles all the more exciting (Gilgamesh, anyone?). So the music is par for the course in a FF game, fun and fitting, but ultimately forgettable unless you're a fanboy (like me!).

Gameplay-wise, the game follows the standard turn-based combat format. The higher your characters' speed stats are, the better your chances are of striking first and ending the battle without any major casualties. The magic system uses the more recent MP, uh, system instead of the original 'five casts per day' limit, which you had to use an inn or a tent to refill. This came as a big relief, since I like to cast the big, flashy spells on the grounds that they look fabulous and awesome. But as far as strategy goes, you can just make a team of physical attackers and just punch through the game in a heartbeat. Alternatively, you could take up the four white mage challenge and have fun until you reach the final boss, which is easily defeated by this setup. Naturally, game progression is as cryptic as can be, since there is no quest log or anything to remind you of where to go next unless you speak to every NPC to get vague hints, but I suppose that's half the fun of playing this game.
All in all, if you're not in the mood for this game, the gameplay can get to be a tad frustrating, so I can only say the fun that is had depends on the person playing it, but I'd give it a solid C+ considering it's a 20+ year-old game.

And finally, there's the 'story'. Technically, it has one, but since you have to piece it together from your tasks and whatever the NPCs tell you, it can be hard to make out. I'm not even going to say it's a spoiler, since it's such an effing old game. You start out accepting a quest to rescue a princess from a rogue knight, Garland, and eventually end up protecting the world from dying thanks to the work of the Four Fiends of Chaos, which are destroying the crystals that control the elements of the earth. After much hard work, you go back 2,000 years in the past to defeat... and this is what I consider to be quite the surprising plot twist, back when it was released, anyway... Garland! It appears he was summoned back to the past by the very Fiends you had destroyed earlier when you first defeated him and had trapped the heroes in an endless time loop and it is  up to you to end it by defeating him. Final battle happens, the loop is broken and all your hard work disappears, since technically, none of the previous events ever happened. Messed up shit, if you ask me.

So, my final verdict is the following: It's a game that is over 20 years old and is very fun to play on the go, hence all the mobile remakes. With all the little touch-ups it has received, it is more than bearable to play in this day and age. For the casual, non RPG hating, gamer, this means that it could be played and beaten with no major problems. For the RPG lover, it has more than enough bonus dungeons and difficult bosses to keep you entertained for the few days it'd take you to beat it. For the Final Fantasy fan, just get it, if you didn't already have it.

The Warrior of Light compels you to play this game.

Fefi's Personal Score: 8/10 (Actually, I love the damn thing)
Reasonable Score: 7/10

::REVIEW:: Torchwood: Miracle Day - Episode 1: The New World

I have a confession to make: I've never been a huge fan of Torchwood.

In fact, during my initial viewing of the previous 5-year run of Doctor Who under the guiding hands of former show-runner Russell T. Davies, my only interest in its spin-off series has been marginal, at best, having only watched a handful of episodes without much care.

Then, last year, as anticipation on anything Who-related mounted drastically with the release of the Series 5 Blu-Ray set and the coming Christmas Day Special, A Christmas Carol, was nearing its air-date, I found one curious, little tidbit of news that caught my attention: Torchwood was moving to Starz in 2011 with a new surname attached to it, Miracle Day, and a seemingly simple hook: one day, every person on Earth becomes incapable of dying. "Death is not an option."

Throughout filming I kept up with the production sporadically and soon, as the premiere got closer and closer, my interest began to pique. So last week, I decided to watch the preceding 5-part Series, Children of Earth, and it made me lose my entire faith in humankind as I fell head-over-heels for a show brimming with outstanding moral quandaries and ideas about the human race and the darkness that lies within all of us.

Needless to say, I was ready for Miracle Day. So how did it stack up in the end?

Brilliantly!

The show starts two years after the events of Children of Earth and the silent war with The 4-5-6. The Torchwood Institute is now nothing more than a myth; its ruins less than relics of a simpler, less complex time. Captain Jack Harkness, Torchwood's last commanding officer and an immortal from the 51st Century (played to perfection by the incredibly talented John Barrowman), is on a self-imposed exile from Earth after committing an unspeakably cruel and unforgivable act in order to save the planet from The 4-5-6. And Gwen Cooper, a former cop and Jack's second-in-command (played by the beautifully intense Eve Myles), is living in hiding with her husband Rhys and baby daughter Anwen, after the members of the institute were marked for death by the British government.

This is all you need to know prior to the beginning of Miracle Day regarding the characters and the first episode, aptly titled The New World, (three guesses as to where it's filmed) does a fantastic job of setting up the pieces across the board while building up the premise of a World without Death at a brisk and flashy pace. By the end of the first episode, the full implications of such a premise are laid plainly for our consideration and we're left salivating for the next installment.

New characters include Rex Matheson (played with fierce determination by Mekhi Phifer), the CIA's golden-boy, and his friend Esther Drummond (played by the wonderful Alexa Havins), a watch-analyst for the agency, who both get involved with Torchwood through circumstances beyond their control, yet it never seems like their integration feels forced. In fact, I was surprised by how well the script by RTD brought them all together and how truly genuine the chemistry felt between all of the actors.

And that, for me, is the most crucial element: the script.

I'm not a big fan of Russell's tenure as Doctor Who head-writer. His only three episodes I genuinely love are The Parting of the Ways, Midnight and The Waters of Mars (which he co-wrote with Phil Ford and won, deservedly so, the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form). Out of 30 or so episodes he wrote from 2005 to 2009, these three are the créme-de-la-créme. The darkest, most vicious stories you're likely to find in a family show going on 48 years strong now, in which the eponymous hero faces his own potential for evil and how his very existence influences the lives of those around him and turns them into weapons, for good or ill. Powerful, thought-provoking storytelling befitting a more adult show, yet perfectly at home in the family-friendly world of The Doctor, The Oncoming Storm.

Which is why Davies shines all the more in Torchwood. Here he can cut lose and be as free as he wants with his vision. And what a brilliantly malicious and ambiguous vision it is! Russell excels in highlighting the worst attributes of the human spirit. His characters are highly flawed individuals who strive to be better with every breath they take. His stories are metaphors of the worst that is within us and how we, as human beings are prone to do, can easily do wrong, even when trying to do the right thing. A more cynical person would merely describe him as a nihilist, yet underneath that darkness, lies hope in that we strive to better ourselves for the sake of our future.

If the first episode of Miracle Day is any indication, we're in for a very special treat that doesn't come along very often in television.

I can't recommend this series enough.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon - A(nother) Review

I don't know where to really begin.

Maybe it's the fact that I hold a special place in my heart for "nigh-unwatchable" crap, hence my unadulterated love for Power Rangers: The Movie, Mortal Kombat, Super Mario Bros. and Batman and Robin (of which I remain unflinching in my conviction that it's the better one of the first four films). Maybe the movie just caught me at a particular point in time when my brain and all its sensibilities simply decided to skip town altogether and went off to have a torrid romance without me knowing about it. Maybe I was just looking for something dumb to keep my mind occupied after being bombarded consecutively with ideas and premises impossible to ignore from other media (Torchwood, I'm looking especially at you, you bastard). Or maybe it really was a fun movie.

Either way, I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.

It was ridiculous, childish, predictable, drawn-out, incredibly immature, somewhat misogynistic and it clearly wasn't shy about its total lack of character development. It's Michael Bay. It's pure Michael Bay. It's everything we've come to know, and sometimes even love, from him and he didn't disappoint by "phoning in" his performance. The man delivered on the expectations placed on his shoulders with aplomb and I commend him for it.

We knew exactly what we were getting with this movie whether we liked it or not, so I decided to leave my brain at the door and just go with it.

Truth be told, and since I'm well-aware how close to blasphemy this might come off as, I'm choosing my words very carefully, I had more fun watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon than I did during the entirety of X-Men: First Class.

Now, don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved that film. My unabashed love and adulation for Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender notwithstanding, I considered X-Men to be a very thought-provoking, fun, character-driven drama disguised as a 60's Cold-War spy thriller for ambience (i.e. Ian Flemming on crack). It is, by all accounts and considerations, my favorite movie of the Summer, so far (still waiting if Captain America will be the one that clinches it).

Yet, as much fun as it was, Transformers had absolutely no expectations of me as an audience member, and I had none for it as well. The movie went by in a breeze and while I do attest to the length of the final act to be overblown, it didn't bother me. All I cared at that moment was that I was laughing hysterically at every turn, the action sequences were much easier to follow than in the previous two films and that Leonard Nimoy got to pander to his Trekkie audience by spouting that one classic line of his from The Wrath of Khan (if you've seen that one, you'll know it's coming here because the screenwriters telegraphed it from a mile away).

My one, true gripe is the very end of the film. If this is supposed to be the end of this trilogy (though I highly doubt we've seen the last of this highly-profitable franchise), I wished more effort was put into their send-off. Instead of a few more minutes of little character moments so the audience can wave at them as they sail off into the sunset, the film ends almost as soon as the action ends. Optimus Prime gets to speechify a little like it's become tradition for the past two films but you almost get the feeling Master Bay originally wanted to end it with a bang and had to settle for a whimper. So, might as well make it a very short whimper.

Regardless, for there to be genuine character arc resolutions, I'm assuming that, at least, the characters have to be more than plain caricatures. Unfortunately, we don't have anything resembling more than just that in this film. Fortunately, that's exactly why it works.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is the very best-looking and loudest B-Movie you're likely to find anywhere on the market. The film looks fantastic, but it's dumber than every single plot of CSI: Miami put together. And I respect Bay for not even bothering to pretend to do otherwise.

I'd never buy it, and I'm sure I'm unlikely to watch it again, but I do recommend it. It's two-and-a-half solid hours of dumb fun. Leave your intellect at the door and enjoy the ride.

If you take a piece of shit, and make it large scale, it's just a large piece of shit: The Transformers 3 Review

I'm going to warn you, this review might contain more than my usual amount of profanity. You see, some people seem to enjoy saying "I told you so." But me, I'm the total opposite. It pisses me off when people don't listen to reason, and the fact that I warned them just irritates me, because I was right the whole time.

That said... I fucking told you so!

Before I even begin, I need to point out that I found the first Transformers movie watchable. I mean, it was way overhyped, but even if it lacked character development at least the story was bearable the ending felt true to what I grew up watching.

Now (and this might sting a bit), the second movie is without a doubt in my top five pieces of shit I actually paid to see. First of all, it suffers from the worst case of what I like to call "Jar Jar Binks Syndrome" I've ever seen. There are almost as many comic relief characters in the movie than there are regular characters. And I'm not even going to go into robots with balls.

I'm saying next to nothing with this statement, but Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is a better movie than Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, if only because of the fewer Jar Jars, the slightly improved story and the better villain. But right there is probably my main problem with the two sequels; Megatron is and will forever be the main villain in Transformers, but in these two sequels he becomes nothing but a side character who enables the arrival of some "bigger threat" to the Autobots. He can't just be a side character, Megatron is supposed to at least be on equal footing as Optimus, he can't just get his ass handed to him every movie.

But not only is Megatron downgraded to a side character, but we get stuck with a whole bunch of generic gray and silver robots that are never even developed as characters. That's a huge problem. Look at it this way, the Trannies, much like G.I. Joe at the same time, were team based cartoons. We had the Autobots and the Decepticons, just like we had the Joes and Cobra. In both cases each member of each team was a genuine character, not just an extra standing around waiting to get killed off, and that's why it meant so much when one of them actually got killed off. You would never see Corporal John Smith fighting next to Duke and Snake Eyes, because he doesn't belong there. I'm just saying, if they spent more time elaborating other robot characters instead of focusing on Shia LePoop's relationship problems, his parents, his job hunt, his crappy car, and his gripes with the government we might actually care when a robot gets shot like we did with the cartoon.

Sometimes these extra bots get so generic it's hard to tell when they're good guys or bad guys. There's this one specific scene where four robots come off two buildings into an intersection and one of them yells "Well I guess we have ourselves a Mexican standoff", the only problem is you can't tell which ones are the good guys until we zoom in on their faces. Obviously the Decepticons are the ones with sharp teeth. Duh!

Then again, it is Michael Bay, a director who isn't really known for being subtle. But in this movie he just really takes that to new heights. It's like he really thinks his viewers are that dumb. Lets give an example: Rosie Huntington who plays the new girl who's name really doesn't matter gets a car from her boss, played by McDreamy from Grey's Anatomy (who pretends not to be a villain for the whole movie but everyone knows he is). Funny part is that when she gets the car, not only do we see it's a shiny new Mercedes, but LePoop proceeds to Google it, show us the website, recite the full name of the model (Mercedes SLS AMG 4500), we then stare at the damn thing for about five minutes, and then he starts a fight with the girl about it. Just saying, this is the mother of all product placements

Could it be?

Now, Mr. Bay, after this much build up for product placement, do you really expect me not to believe this thing is a fucking robot in disguise? If you guessed no, you probably loved this movie.

But like most action movies, it hinges on the final battle scene. It's just that in this case it's the most drawn out thing ever. I honestly thought the movie was almost over as they headed into Chicago, boy was I dead wrong. That "Chicago destruction scene" has been the selling point of the movie since the hype machine began in January. Except in this case it isn't much of a battle, we just get Shia and a bunch of army dudes running around like ants being chased by the magnifying glass.

With buildings collapsing and just mass destruction the best thing I could compare this sequence to was that city part in Uncharted 2 for the PS3. Except that Trannies does wrong what Uncharted does right. You see, Drake and his companions are likable characters, and when they're in a collapsing building you genuinely get nervous for their safety - meanwhile, by this point in the movie you're so tired and annoyed by these characters that you almost wish that a building would fall on them so you could just get up  and leave.

And there's my main point. Uncharted takes these characters that you like and care about and puts them in these larger than life, dangerous situations. But it's not the situations that get you into the story, it's the characters. Sure explosions and pretty effects help, but they won't do much if you're wishing death on the protagonists every time they're in danger. Putting things on a grand scale is fun when done right...

Remember the original Transformers Movie, the animated one with "Weird" Al Yankovic in the soundtrack? Well, Optimus Prime gets killed in the first twenty minutes of that children's cartoon. And honestly, that death overshadows everything done in this current franchise because it was well written and the characters mattered.

Trannies 3 isn't a horrible film. I really expected it to be much worse. It might just be me yearning for nostalgia, but I just can't help but think that with the direction of these movies they will never compare to the depth of some of the animated versions (not just the original). My advice that no one will listen to: Dump most of the human characters, the animated versions had one or two at most. Concentrate on what's in the title. The fucking robots.

4/10