Ammunition > Heroics

I'm back!
Not that I was ever gone.

But I am back to posting, you see.
At least for today. Hopefully I'll be able to get back into some kind of... routine... or whatever.


Now.
Last you knew (well, not really; only if you haven't been talking to me, and really, isn't that your fault? I'm only on MSNM/WLM almost all day) I was moving.
That took quite a bit of time and effort. But we're mostly moved in now (though I think my bedroom could use a bit of reorganization... and maybe some paint, as its walls are pink), and we have Internet hooked up as well.
The house is really big. Not quite big enough that I got my own room (how would that ever happen under any reasonable circumstances, anyway?), but I at least have somewhere to go where it's occasionally quiet. It's a "office" in what we have dubbed the boiler room in the basement. That is where I am right now.

Right, then.... Oh, an update on what I've been doing, I guess.
I'm working on a game; if I told you about it before (I may have posted about it here), it's the one with the purple jelly that... explodes. Heh.
Possibly even more than that, though, I've been making music. This time I'm doing something pretty different though.
I'm using this program called BoyScout. It emulates the sound chip used in the Gameboy Advance, which results in some pretty nifty "old-school" sounding video game-ish music. It's different than anything I've used before in that there are a lot of weird values you can adjust to get different sounds (one of the channels -- and there are only four, by the way -- lets you draw in the waveform for the sound manually).
I've done three things with it so far, and I'm pretty happy with them. I think if I do one or two more I'll upload them all in a zipped folder.

Alright, well. On to the actual subject here?


Right, well.
I saw Prince Caspian ages ago, and never got around to posting my thoughts.
I really enjoyed it overall. Everyone seems to be complaining about how it wasn't nearly as good as the first one, and how they threw in too much violence and made it too different from the books or something, but... I think those people need to:
A. Go read the book again. It was violent. It's about a war. Get over it.
and
B. Get a life.
Yes, there was a whole extra part they added where they stormed the castle and whatnot, but I actually thought that was brilliant. Possibly better than the way it was written originally; it really drives the main point home a lot better. Somehow having the battle fought on the enemies' front gives it an extra sense of risk and foolhardiness, I guess.
So, yeah. I think it may have even been better than the book in that respect. *gasp*
C.S. Lewis wasn't perfect. I'm saving this for whenever I do that post on him and J.K. Rowling (or maybe they will be two separate posts), though.
Anyway, there was some stuff that I thought was sort of weird, random, and/or overly silly... but I'm not sure I can come up with any good examples at this point.
So anyway. It probably wasn't better than the first film, but I wouldn't say it was significantly worse, either. That's a good sign, I think. It would be annoying if the movies declined into mediocrity as they went on.


I also saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (that was a little more recent). I really, really, really liked that one. True, it wasn't as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade, but it was definitely better than The Temple of Doom, and just because it's worse than two excellent movies doesn't mean it is not excellent itself.
The plot started out promising... Nazca lines, Conquistadors, El Dorado, crystal skulls... things I could understand. But suddenly, it turns out it has to do with advanced extra-terrestrial beings who passed on their knowledge to ancient mesoamerican cultures, and... Yeah. Weird. It just didn't work.
Also, there were some things that were totally over the top (early in the movie, Indiana survives a nuclear blast by climbing into a lead-lined refrigerator).
Anyway, it was really interesting to see how the world of Indiana Jones had aged (it takes place quite a bit later than the previous films). Also, amazing writing saved the not-so-great plot; there were lots of clever lines in the script.
I want to see it again!

That leaves one movie on my list-of-movies-I-want-to-see; The Dark Knight (yes, I still want to see it, and I still haven't).

Ooh, speaking of which, I recently saw Spider-Man 3. I guess it's a pretty old movie at this point, but I never got to see it until now. I think it was pretty good, though still nowhere near as good as the first, and not even as good as the second. So it was a little disappointing; I hope they shape up for the fourth movie.
I'm blaming most of the problems on their poor choice of villain / story. I think they should have just skipped over the whole Venom thing. Basically it's an alien parasite thing that makes Spider-Man stronger but also makes him more aggressive and eventually turns him into a person who's downright nasty. One of the biggest things about Spider-Man has always been how easy he is to relate to, but suddenly he's this nasty anti-hero sort of guy, and... yeah, it just never worked. It can be done right, though; in the Ultimate Spider-Man comic books (yes, I do read comic books... quite a lot, actually... yep, I'm a humungous nerd) they managed to pull it off pretty well. It's funny because the guy who wrote it has always hated Venom as well, but they figured "Hey, well... you're the perfect person to do it, then; do it so it's actually interesting!"


So, uhh... Oh! While we're on the subject of movies.
I wanted to ramble about two people I think are tremendously good actors and play certain roles exceptionally well (to the point where it almost makes me think the entire movies would be ruined if they weren't in them, even if they are by no means major characters):
J.K Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson in the aformentioned Spider-Man series
and
Richard Griffiths as Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter films

In short, they're both hilarious (Mr. Griffiths is particularly comical in the later movies), and I can't imagine how they could possibly have picked better people to play those parts.


Oh, and also speaking of acting: Some time when you're bored, you should look up the voice actors for some cartoon / video game / animated film you like. It's really interesting, because a lot of the good voice actors have had really varying careers, and you probably don't know their names like you would with "regular" movie actors.
As a random example, the person (I don't even remember her name) Shiki Misaki in The World Ends With You also did the voice of Ducky in the The Land Before Time movies.
Some time I want to look up that stuff more; I might post what I find out.


OK, I think I'm done.
Until next time (tomorrow?),
PM