• In the Beginning...
• Yar Me Hearties...
• Damn You Belloch
• Geekdom Calls you
• I Don't Keep it Loaded Son
• Burnin' down the house
• Honey... This is the Wrong Finger
• No Mr. Bond... I expect you to die!
• Sorry... I don't speak Crazy Bitch!
• Die! Bart, Die!
• Why is the Rum Gone?
• First Time Pluggin' a guy?
• If you love her, Buy her a gun!
• I'm Makin' This Up As I Go!
• I'm Goin After That Truck
• This is a Really Shit Idea
• There be Monsters Here!
• Fear Is The Mindkiller
• Year End Craziness Pt. 1
• Year End Craziness Pt. 2
• Year End Epilogue
• You are not put on this world to GET IT!
• Well Miami sucks! But the cops are kinda nice!
• We Must Have Waffles! We Must have Waffles Forthwith!
• "Have another one Paddy!..."RIP Fred O'Keefe
• "Geez i'm Goin Crazy Out There At The Lake"
• Trade Secrets My Son
• "If We're Not Back by Dawn, Call the President!"
• "Is That a Fish Tank?"

STEVE'S DVD COLLECTION DVD VERDICT
IMDB.COM
JEFF GREENE
ALLMUSIC
YOJOE.COM
NOTANYWHERELAND_3
IRON MAIDEN
LONELY GUY IN NY
MONDO MISCELLANEA
BMWRACER'S RAMBLINGS
DREW'S SCRIPT-O-RAMA
GREEN IMP
PENNY ARCADE
ANIME ON DVD
WING KONG EXCHANGE
INDIANA JONES
LONELY GUY IN NEW YORK INDYFAN.COM
CASTLEVANIA DUNGEON
BRUCE CAMPBELL
THE SHEAVY FAN PAGE
PEARL JAM
SAM ROBERTS
DAILY REVIEWS
I LIVE IN A GIANT BUCKET
THE TEA PARTY
GNARLY CUE BALL
TACTICAL ACTION HERO
A HIGHER BROW BLOG
TWENTY-6

SEE THIS FREAKIN' MOVIE!

"There are things which go bump in the night... and we are the ones who bump back!"

Hellboy is the latest project from director Guillermo Del Toro (Blade II). Based on a comic book character created by Mike Mignola. The story opens in the 1940's, as Hitler's forces conduct secret rituals in the hopes of turning the tide of the war... A group of American soldiers disrupts one such ritual in one of the coolest opening sequences ever filmed. In the aftermath, a baby is discovered, bearing horns, a tail, red skin, a huge stone hand, and a pencheant for Baby Ruth bars. Flash foreward to now, Hellboy, as he was called, has been raised as an agent of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, duking it out with trhe lovecraftian creatures of the night, and kept under wraps by the US government. Also in the group, the fish-man Abe Sapien (voiced by Fraiser's David Hyde-Pierce - a fave of mine) and Liz Sherman (Salma Blair), pyrokinetic, who bursts into cool looking blue flame capable of mass destruction whenever she gets riled. Their teacher and mentor, Broom, is played by the great John Hurt, and newcomer to the fold, plain old FBI graduate John Meyers(Rupert Evans). The man who steals the show is Ron Pearlman, who just plain embodies Hellboy!

The fun all begins when an ancient beast, Samael, the hound of ressurection, makes an appearance and is promptly put down by big red in a great fight sequence, and our crew discovers that Rasputin (yes, THAT Rasputin) is back, and once again, like in the '40's, wants to destroy the planet by opening a doorway for the seven lords of chaos (Lovecraft styled Cuthulu-type elder gods).

What ensues in a true adventure yarn in the spirit of Indiana Jones or The Mummy (the '99 re-make), with a hint of X-Men thrown in for good measure. While preposterous as hell in the plot department, what makes the film so damned enjoyable is the incredible cast. The chemisty here is fantastic! We feel the connection these characters share, and the work of the actors is nothing shy of brilliant! The direction shines as well, with kinetic fight scenes that never get too chaotic or rapid fire to follow (Thank You Guillermo, you know how to film an action scene!). While the feel of the film might be somewhat colder than this sort of film typically is (all the earthy tones are replaced with cold blues and greys), the style definitely fits, and shines! The villians are your typical comic book fare, but they transcend the medium, and somehow manage to truely become something special (Kroenen, a kind of "clockwork assassin", is truely chilling!)

This film was quite simply everything that "League of Extraordinary sucktitude" should have been, and ranks right up there with Indy and Pirates of the Caribbean in the adventure film hall of fame... if this is the kind of quality i have to look foreward to this summer, then bring it on!

Once again i am forced to endure pure utter garbage posing as film! This time, the guilty party is one high profile sequel, the guilty party is none other than:

Lets get this off my chest right away, i'm not a fan of The Matrix... I didn't buy into the hype, sure i saw the film twice in theatre, but for me it was never anything more than a clever action film cut together with some computing buzzwords to appeal to the whole Internet subculture that was taking over the globe in the late 90's. The key word though, was "clever". While it was hardly the second coming of Blade Runner (the fact that people even thought so was insulting to Rid's masterpiece), the first film definitely had a degree of skill and imagination. It succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, and became a pop-culture phenomenon, so naturally there was to be a sequal, and hey, since Lord of the Rings and Star Wars could do it, why not a trilogy? I'll tell you why... The Matrix suffers from what i call "Highlander syndrome", which is a film which is a completely self-sustained story, the plot is pretty well resolved ad infinitum, with little to no room for expansion without some creative jury-rigging. The Matrix ends with Neo as "the one" and we assume, the end of the machines... But nooo... the brothers Wachowski had to go back to the well and attempt to explain everything with bad sci-fi mumbo jumbo and philosophy major theorizing... What was the result, Matrix Reloaded, was a mixed bag of over the top overlong fisticuff scenes, one hell of an awesome 18-minute highway chase, and a load of tech speak mumbo jumbo leading up to an unsatisfying "to be continued..." The big problem was there were a dozen or more threads left hanging, only ONE of which is actually addressed in Revolutions... The machine invasion of Zion, one of the most overblown fight scenes ever filmed, where millions of robot squids fly around defying gravity while being shot at by giant mecha suits built out of PVC piping and conduit while grunts spew stereotypical War-movie cliches every 2.75 seconds... then there are the scenes featuring The Oracle, which explain absoutely nothing, but every second or third word is "choice" or some variation thereof. And of course who could forget Keanu... Who's in some kind of coma which lasts what seems like 5 seconds, then mopes about for an hour or so, and finally takes out Agent smith in the most ludicrous overdone fight scene since the last time you saw Dragon Ball Z! They fly around in the pouring rain making big swishes of CG water while they continuously bounce off of each other as though they were happy fun balls... The end is resolved suddenly and without any explenation, like someone just yelled "Cut!" mid-scene and called it a day... And then there's the fact that Neo (Keanu) spends the entire film with what looks like TARTAR SAUCE smeared over his chin... Avoid this steaming pile of garbage like the cinematic plague that it is!

Watched Mad Max 2 (aka: The Road Warrior) this past weekend... great flick. I probably don't need to tell people what this is about, if you haven't seen or heard of Mad Max you're either Omish or you're a corpse... Early Mel Gibson, post apocalypse Australia, lots of car chasing, action, blah blah blah... At any rate, i love when a film really goes that extra mile to realize the setting to the fullest extent, you know it when you watch a film and there seemes to be so much more going on outside the scope of the picture itself, like say Star Wars, where we hear references to planets and ships and organizations that we never see... yet make the whole thing feel lived in... Mad Max, the series, has that feeling, especially the third film (which far too many people just plain dismiss off hand). Great flicks for a big bowl of popcorn (or Nachos if you're like me and hate popcorn)and the adult beverage of choice...

Also, upon recommendation of one Judge Rob Lineberger over at DVD verdict, picked up the Samurai X OVA Collection, suffice it to say, this thing is incredible anime, like Jin-Roh/Ghost in the Shell/Akira incredible... truely top tier stuff... I really can't do it justice here, go read his review!

Listening to Sarah Maclachlan's latest offering, damn good CD, good enough to be on my "best of" for 2003... It's Sarah M though, hardly gonna attract any new fans i wouldn't imagine.

Back into Edges of Twighlight as well, which never seems to stay out of rotation for very long... god love The Tea Party... new album very soon! WOO!

Picked up the new Aerosmith CD for Sarah yesterday as well, she's a huge fan of the band and i love to feed her hobbies... Actually quite interesting, i may give it a listen myself... but what the hell is up with that title? Honkin' on Bobo??? uhhh... yeeeaaahhh....

Not much going on in gaming this week

Champions of Norrath is done... what a SHITTY ending... yet what did we do when we finished the damn thing? Jump right back in again on a harder difficulty setting, it's that kind of game, though it definitely suffers from "it's not the destination, it's the journey" syndrome, as that ending was about as unsatisfying as it gets...

Still playing splinter cell(s)... still loving em...

Also trying to make some headway with Onimusha 2 before the third installment releases in may... ah hell...

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