I think however it also reflects to a certain extent a change in, if not my gaming tastes, then at least my gaming habits. Whilst I’m not in any way suggesting that I don’t still spend a lot of time playing games, I find that I don’t seem to want to put in the epic session that I used to. Having finally broken free of the lure of the Warcraft, I am no longer tempted to sit down and spend an entire day playing the same game. And whilst I’m still looking for a decent narrative arc, I don’t want it to take me upwards of 40 hours to experience it.

• The Fifth Bear Jasper Fforde
• Fragile Things Neil Gaiman
• Peter Pan in Scarlet Geraldine McCaughrean
• Black Swan Green David Mitchell
• The End Lemony Snickett
• The Bullet Trick Louise Welsh
• The Half Life of Stars Louise Wener
• The QI Book of General Ignorance John Lloyd & John Mitchinson

In other book related news I received a mail shot this morning with an offer to join the Folio Society, which I have to admit is reasonably tempting. I think my new salary may be going to my head a little …

Top 5 Films:

• Good Night, and Good Luck - George Clooney making proper films for grown-ups: what are the chances? Incidentally almost entirely responsible for my affection for Keith Olbermann.
• Brick - easily the best noir made in the last decade. Makes the list on the merits of the scene in the car park on its own “There’s a thesaurus in the library - you’ll find “yeah” under Y. I can wait.”
• Thank You For Smoking - criminally overlooked satire, in which Aaron Eckhart gives perhaps the most gloriously amoral performance since Gordon Gecko.
• A Scanner Darkly - the rotoscoping added just the right about of psychodelia, and Keanu ’s trademark slightly-confused-dude performance found a perfect home.
• Stranger Than Fiction - attracted admirable comparisons to Eternal Sunshine (for both its slightly offbeat premise, and its comedian-in-a-straight-role lead), with sterling support from Messrs. Thompson & Hoffman.

Top 5 Albums:

• Inside In/Inside Out The Kooks - simple guitar driven melodic indie rock. Nice lads too, even if the lead singer looks a little too much like Simon Amstell for comfort.
• Liberation Transmission Lostprophets - the boys from the valleys are sounding more and more American with each release, firmly targeting that lucrative Emo market. Not that this is a bad thing of course …
• Kill Your Own Hundred Reasons - by contrast, the Reasons are firmly of the “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” school of thought, turning out their third quality album.
• Dusk and Summer Dashboard Confessional - arguably the best thing Carrabba has done, even going so far as to suggest that he might finally be getting over the girl who did whatever it was she did to him (just because even he has doesn’t mean I should by the way).
• Sam’s Town The Killers - apparently nothing can stop The Killer’s inevitable world domination. I for one welcome our new synth rock overlords.

Top 5 Games

• Shadow of the Colossus - the “video games as art” argument can now officially be settled thanks to SCE. A worthy successor to ICO (and coming from me, that’s high praise indeed).
• Kingdom Hearts II - needed more Roxas and fewer original songs written for the Little Mermaid missions, but otherwise universally excellent. The theme song is still on my ipod.
• Gears of War - ZOMG how pretty? I mean seriously, check out the smoke haze over the muzzle of my gun …
• Lego Star Wars II - there is nothing about this game which isn’t completely awesome. Included purely on the merits of the fact that Leia’s melee attack is a slap.
• DEFCON - Simple, elegant and terrifying beyond all reason. Like it says on the tin, Everybody Dies.

Having been really quite poor of late at making any kind of updates, I am officially declaring this weekend “Blog Update Weekend 2006″. I’m got some things I wrote but never got around to posting to put up, along with some things I meant to write but never got around to doing I may approach as well.

Of course what’s actually going to happen is I’m going to get distracted by a Baron run, but it’s the thought that counts, right? Right?

Fundamentally however, it just fails to live up to the original. Despite being in some places practically a shot for shot copy (especially in some of the better set pieces), it somehow manages to clock in at nearly an extra 50 minutes in length, making the second reel drag and the whole thing unnecessarily bloated. In the central performances, which are the bedrock of the original, Matt Damon is no Andy Lau, and as good as he is Di Caprio lacks the class and sheer presence of Tony Leung.

I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it, because I did, but on leaving the cinema I just ended up wanting to watch Infernal Affairs again…

]]> http://idiotjed.co.uk/2006/10/13/the-departed/feed/ http://idiotjed.co.uk/2006/06/28/ultraviolet/ http://idiotjed.co.uk/2006/06/28/ultraviolet/#comments Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:22:27 +0000 jed Reviews http://idiotjed.co.uk/2006/06/28/ultraviolet/ For reasons passing understanding, back in the day Benny and I went to see Dungeons & Dragons when it was originally released. In our defence it was a rainy Sunday in Reading, but I’m sure there must have been something better we could have done with our time - even in Reading. In the intervening 6 years I have seen many bad films, but D&D has managed to remain the worst film I’ve ever seen in the cinema. Until now.

Ultraviolet is a film with no redeeming features whatsoever - I went in with absolutely no expectations, and it failed even to meet them. You know how bad Resident Evil: Apocalypse was? By comparison it’s a towering work of cinematic genius - and that has the Toxic Avengers’ slightly less convincing younger brother as the main bad guy. The storyline appears to want to be a cross between V for Vendetta and X-Men 3, but sacrifices any kind of convincing motivation or character development for the sake of terrible, terrible one-liners “Are you mental?” and poorly choreographed fight sequences that seem to exist purely to showcase the fact that Milla Jovovich’s costume changes colour when she gets into a fight. There are, admittedly, a couple of entertaining moments, but these seem so out of context when set against the po-faced seriousness of the rest of the film that you are too busy trying to work out whether they were deliberate touches, or happy accidents that somehow managed to stay off the cutting room floor to actually appreciate them.

Apparently the studio didn’t like the director’s original cut, and so took it out of his hands entirely and re-edited it, trimming some 30 odd minutes from the running time transforming it from an R to a PG-13 in the process. In all honesty I’m not entirely sure how much better the original cut could have been, but I can pretty much guarantee that it couldn’t possibly have been any worse …

… it’s like a tradition, y’know?

The good news is that it has finally dawned on me that I really only have two choices - 1) continue to mope around, bemoaning the fact that all of my friends are much better off than me, and railing against the inequities of fate that have dealt with me so cruelly; or - 2) get up off my sorry ass and do something about it.

The bad news is that I haven’t quite worked out which of these options I currently find the more attractive …