Recent movies watched and games played that nobody's interested in:- Arahan, an entertaining movie that's essentially a slightly inferior Kung Fu Hustle from Korea.
- The Edukators, a slightly slow clumsily idealistic movie from Germany (or maybe Austria), nonetheless entertaining in an "if Hollywood did this it would have Aston Kutcher in it" sort of way.
- Akumulator, a, er, comedy spiritualist sci-fi movie from the Czech Republic, well-paced and amusing, and not really as anti-TV as plot summaries might have you believe.
- Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, an alright game but not as good as its predecessor, Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within. Puzzles and plot weaker, length shorter, combat less varied, bosses more irritating. Still quite good, but it'd be silly to get it if you haven't played Warrior Within first, and then only if you liked WW quite a lot.
- Half Life 2, not yet done with it. Less fun than Half Life. The graphics are very compelling. The beginning section would make quite a good sci-fi movie if it weren't for the lengthy and frequent ad-breaks trying to sell some product called "Loading". The section not long later is overlong and dull, with no plot points or interesting fights or scenes, just a lot of "shoot someone at a distance before they shoot you" interspersed with "look at our exciting physics engine, we can make you pile objects onto a thing to tilt another thing", which, yes, is quite impressive at the speeds it's going at, but it's not really fun.
- Deadly Rooms of Death: Journey to Rooted Hold is quite the opposite - fairly crappy graphics (though very good for a shareware-like product), but a fun puzzle game, akin to Sokoban if Sokoban was fun instead of unbearably tedious.
And one more proper-length movie review, of sorts, for the Chronicles of Narnia movie that seems to be mostly not bothering with the Liony Witchy Furniture part of the title. I had tried to resist seeing it after the first review I saw included the word 'slow' - usually if someone other than me says slow it means I would say something more like "oh god this is boring I give up I'm not watching it any more". But in this instance, their slow turned out to be more akin to my slow, which is bearable.
The thing I discovered from this movie is that having been told about the Christianity allegory (which I wasn't aware of when I read the books or saw the 1988 UK TV version) does indeed totally ruin the story for me. But about half way through I made a further discovery - that trying to extend the allegory to places where it totally doesn't fit makes the story hilarious and awesome. Like that scene just after Jesus is killed by Satan, and one of his disciples, let's say Paul, leads an army to fight Satan's army, and he yells "FOR THE MIDDLE EAST, AND FOR JESUS!" to rally them. Or during the fight, just after Jesus gets resurrected, when John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene ride him to Satan's castle to get reinforcements. And then Judas breaks Satan's magic wand.
Without that game, Chronicles would be an okay movie that I wouldn't recommend bothering to see. Playing the Christianity allegory game from the very beginning, this may be the best movie I've seen all year.
[08:42]
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