Potential Buffy Film ... Sans Whedon

What with vampires and franchise relaunches suddenly all the rage, plans for a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie have inevitably come to pass, with the rights holders of the franchise announcing plans for a new Sunnydale-set film.

But there is a catch.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film, which will neither be a sequel nor prequel but a relaunch, is moving ahead with absolutely no involvement from film and series mastermind Joss Whedon. It will also fail to feature TV's Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and will in fact have no connection to the long-running series—meaning Angel, Willow, Xander and Spike will also be MIA.

-- Buffy Relaunching Without Whedon, Gellar...Regard for Fans?

Trying to think of a better recipe for disaster, but oddly none comes to mind.

Get Brutal With Tim Schafer

EA is holding a Twitter event with Tim Schafer, the man behind the potentially most awesomest game Brutal Legend (if not the most awesome, most likely to have the biggest hair at least).

The event coincides with E3 and EA has a site online (http://e3.brutallegend.com) with details on how to get in the action.

Urban Retro's 8-Bit Wallet

Urban Retro sends word of this product, The 8-Bit Wallet, which is I guess more or less what is advertised...

Game Play: Flashback (iPhone)

I remember the original Flashback on the Amiga, and I remember it fondly.

I don't remember it so fondly when the game has horrible touch controls tossed on top of it. Honestly, by the time I had a) fallen to spot and b) spent ten minutes struggling to get to the right place to handle the flashy cube thing ... I was ready to delete app from the phone.

Total fail for me.

Game Play: MadWorld

As the Wii's substantial user base becomes even more substantial, publishers and developers are trying to figure out how to best get their games on the system. Many seems to making fairly generic franchise decisions (in other words, can we make a light gun game out of this). So hat goes off to Sega and Platinum Games for making a fresh title with a unique look and feel.

MadWorld is rendered in sharply contrasted black and white with splashes of red (for the large amounts of blood) and a few other choice colors. You play Jack, an ultraviolent kind of guy with a fancy chainsaw in his arm, in an ultraviolent part of town where such fancy chainsaw really comes in handy. The gameplay is a mix of Smash TV (Jack's grim cityview is the backdrop for such a television program) and God of War, where combos earn you cash and eventually you'll get a boss fight with a pretty decent handle of how quick time events should work (i.e. I didn't want to throw the controller).

I've made it through a few bosses now and the only real complaint I have is that the game can get repetitive despite many attempts by the developers to avoid it. I'm not sure if it is because once the visual style settles in, there's less eye candy about on a level by level or what - but the distractions made out of mini games (such as man darts - toss enemies into a massive dartboard), cutscenes and boss fights only marginally makes up for the fact that 90% of the residents in the game seem to just be waiting to be chopped to bits.

Recommended, but probably only as a rental.

Peter Asaro And The Terminator

H+ sat down with robot genius philosopher Peter Asaro:

I think we are now starting to see robots that are capable of taking morally significant actions, and we're beginning to see the design of systems that choose these actions based on moral reasoning. In this sense, they are moral, but not really autonomous because they are not coming up with the morality themselves... or for themselves.

They are a long way from being Kantian moral agents –- like some humans –- who are asserting and engaging their moral autonomy through their moral deliberations and choices. [Philosopher Immanuel Kant's “categorical imperative” is the standard of rationality from which moral requirements are derived.]

We might be able to design robotic soldiers that could be more ethical than human soldiers.

Robots might be better at distinguishing civilians from combatants; or at choosing targets with lower risk of collateral damage, or understanding the implications of their actions. Or they might even be programmed with cultural or linguistic knowledge that is impractical to train every human soldier to understand.

-- Can "Terminators" Actually be our Salvation?

Peter is my pledgefather and just one of the most insanely smartest people I've ever known. Last I saw him he was secretly wondering how to apply military AI software to video games, but I'm pretty certain he's contractually obligated to try and rule the world with giant robots now. Congrats Pete, great article.

Movie Watch: Seven Pounds

I would best call this movie a "Will Smith Oscar attempt". Seven Pounds follows an IRS agent who is not actually an IRS agent trying to help the lives of others he finds mildly attractive or good, preferrably with some kind of failing organ. The premise is a bit half baked, but worse is that it broadcasts itself so clearly at the beginning of the movie. You just know Smith isn't really who says he is, but worse you can quickly guess who he actually is, which makes a lot of scenes later in movie lose its strength. Especially since some of the moments the movie builds up towards seem to get very little attention towards the end.

The movie was advertised as something of a mystery, but the structure provides little mystery except to the completely obvlivious viewer. What's left is a kind of awkward romance plot whose only saving grace is Rosario Dawson as an attractive woman with a failing heart.

And rest assured, the movie mines that metaphor for much, much more than it is worth.

Not recommended, unless you're just a serious Will Smith fan.

Movie Watch: The Spirit

The Spirit is a completely ridiculous comic movie, shot in a similar vein as Sin City. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. Where Sin City forces you into a cruel and harsh landscape, The Spirit feels downright cartoonish at times.

I can only imagine what moviegoers thought when they saw this film, which was heavily advertised as a Sin City follow up, complete with Frank "Dark Knight" Miller on board. It's easy to write the film off as simply bad, with the hackey and often forced dialogue, but I think any movie that goes out of its way to point out that hitting someone with a toilet is funny knew it wasn't hitting from the same ball park.

Instead, the film is one of those destined to be cult offerings - too campy for its own good and too buried in its own campiness to do anything else with it. But when a guy gets hit with a kitchen sink, you're supposed to laugh. The movie is easily more comedy than action.

Miller's directing works well on a visual level, but it does feel like he was struggling with his actors at times (who may have been having a similar cognitive dissonance as the audience). Even at a cult level, the movie stumbles from time to time.

I can't say I recommend it, but The Girl and I laughed through most of it. If you watch it, just know what you're getting into.

TV Watch: Dollhouse, Season 1 Finale

We finally got all caught up on Dollhouse - and for the watchful eyes we did it by forking over $3 per episode, so don't blame any financial issues on us (though, more on that to the bottom).

What follows is spoiler free, but comments may contain them.

Dollhouse has been pretty great, riding a line for me in between early Angel and Firefly (as in better than, but not as good as...). As I've said before, Whedon's team is mining the premise early and well, better perhaps than in previous shows. They waste no time getting to core questions and issues posed by the Dollhouse - what makes us who we are and what if we could easily be something else?

One of the things that is odd, in a likeable way, is that I'm actually that fond of Caroline, our erstwhile college econut - but I do like Echo ... who isn't really a character in the classic sense. This is in part, I think, because Echo is what was done to Caroline, not Caroline - and there lies the more interesting story.

I don't know if Whedon fans could have asked for much more out of the finale, except perhaps if Hannigan had somehow been "Wendy" (seriously, though, my brain might have exploded). It sounds like rumors of the show's death were previously exaggerated, though, as it appears season two is a go with 13 episodes contracted. This is the same number of episodes this season, but it sounds like Fox is holding the 13th from this season, 'Epiteth', for the DVD release.

Movie Watch: S. Darko, A Donnie Darko Tale

Beware of a movie that so wants you to realize it is a sequel that it practically repeats the title.

So, obviously, S. Darko is the direct to video sequel to Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko - without Richard Kelly's involvement. The film did manage to have Daveigh Chase reprise her role as Samantha, and you'll see Elizabeth Berkely pop in as a minor character as well.

While visually interesting at times, the film is more or less a poor study of the first film and overburdened by that movie's themes and imagery. You'll get quite tired of the forcibly induced bunny scenes by the end and the apocalyptic time travel plot has a stitched together from crib notes kind of feel.

It's not that the movie is bad - the writing itself is competent, the acting is solid and the scenes generally look fairly good. The problem is that there is little here to satisfy Darko fans. The movie's big steps to expand any explanation of the first movie's events feel awkward and disconnected. There's no development of known characters outside of Samantha, and mostly she simply plays up the sullen teen routine. As the sign in the movie goes, this film is Frank's Echo.

So not bad outright, but very hard to recommend - even to the desired audience of Darko viewers.

TV Watch: Lost, The Incident

Spoilers obviously reside here.



Hands down my favorite moment from the two hour finale (which sadly, through absolutely no fault of its own but rather the same work week which has kept me off blogging for nearly a week - I struggled to stay awake through) was Miles wondering if maybe Jack wasn't setting up The Incident after all and maybe they should just go back and have tea with Bernard and Rose.

Honestly my only critique of the episode was the ease with which Jack convinced people that setting off a hydrogen bomb is at any time a good idea. And especially because most of the rationale seemed to be based around emotional relationship issues - not necessarily a thought out plan about time travel.

Still, it would have been hard to see an efficient workaround for the plot. Bomb had to be dropped somehow.

So we finally get a good long look at Jacob. Jacob appears to all of our Losties at random times around the plot of the entire show, including post island escape events. The encounters seem to always have some kind of kindly advice and apparently to the watchful (awake) observer, some kind of physical contact. He may have brought Locke back to life.

We also know that Jacob was the source of the lists, which clears up a lot of oddness about The Others from the early seasons. Jacob's clearly been busy, manipulating events on and off island for a long, long time (if the ship in the distance is indeed the Black Rock - before our entire known history of the island). Jacob is squared off with a mysterious stranger and the two of them seem to have the same ruleset as Ben and Widmore. They can't kill each other.

So Jacob is spending a lot of time bringing people to the island for some reason we don't entirely understand. Mysterious Stranger is against this because of the "corruption" it causes. While there is a lot of setup here, including shirt color, that Jacob is Good and MS is Bad - we should remember that Ben and Widmore reflect more of a grey area themselves.

If we draw back from the point that Locke is clearly not Locke (which The Girl predicted, and on reflection was a remarkably well broadcasted twisted for the show), but Mysterious Stranger and go backwards through the plot - it seems entirely possible that it is the stranger in the cabin, not Jacob. If the cabin at some point became the stranger's prison, it might explain a) how more people got to be on the island like DHARMA and the military and b) how the person in the cabin seems trapped (including the circle of ash) and yet Jacob seems to be quite free.

Mysterious Stranger might also explain some of the various ghosts and apparitions we've seen, although Jacob's dialogue with Hurley puts that in some ambiguity. It could be both - with MS being able to take the form of various people who have died on the island, and yet perhaps Jacob has a similar function as well.

It's hard to guess what The Incident and inverted logo will mean for us in the future. I have to say that my gut is that we will see the Losties in their non-Incident future/present at some point. I just hope we don't have a big plotline about "getting back to that other timeline" though, as it would echo way too much with "getting back to the island".

I'm guessing that if there's any material which might lead us into the final season, it may be Donnie Darko. We can't lose track, though, of all the broken connections someone has promised to fix. Clearly Jin, Sun, Claire, and Aaron are in that group - and perhaps Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Juliet as well.


Great episode, can't wait for the final season now.

The Case For An Apple Console

BNet details a pretty sound argument that Apple is cooking up something new, and recent rumors of an EA purchase help fuel the idea that the something new is at least some kind of a gaming console. Check out TUAW's take on it as well.

Something to factor in here: Gaming has been enormously profitable on the iPhone/iPod Touch - for Apple, big companies like EA and even some indie developers. Super Monkey Ball, a high visibility launch title, was a quick financial success for Sega.

Tan readers will remember we have discussed this before, although much of my argument was more on the basis that the Mac Mini could be a living room front for Apple (that was before the AppleTV was launched).

Many of the arguments remain the same, however. Nintendo more or less rules the living room right now and Sony and Microsoft are slugging it out like the juggernauts they are. As when it was rumored Sega would re-enter the hardware market, it is a very tight space to fit into.

At the same time, I don't think many people would have thought the iPhone to be such a DS competitor when it launched either. BNet's findings swarm around the combination of media and games. Apple has loved media for some time now, and now they also have a healthy appetite for games as well.

Also, it's been mumbled for some time that the Mac Mini was never a favorite of Steve Jobs and it exists mostly to fulfill the need for a low-end market. If Apple releases a netbook, that would also replace that need. Don't get me wrong, I love my Mac Mini to death - but if there's any truth to this rumor, I wouldn't expect the Mini, the AppleTV and a console to all share the same shelf space.

Let's remember - Apple is sneaky. They fight the battles they want to fight and it doesn't seem very Apple-like to replicate the Xbox strategy and take the gaming industry head on. Apple is very, very good at leveraging their existing assets. Looking it at that way, the path of least resistance is probably the AppleTV itself (which might, hopefully, spare the Mini). Apple will want a device which accesses iTunes for media, as the AppleTV does now - but potentially can also get games in the same style of the App Store.

It's a pretty short path. Add some decent GPU hardware to the AppleTV, design a controller that meets Apple standards, and open a new category to the App Store. AppleTV gaming - in your living room. They wouldn't necessarily being going after Nintendo's turf ... they can rely on the Cult of Mac to get things started.

It's not a huge risk for Apple. It adds a new platform for developers to sell games on, and hence another stream of App Store based revenue. If Apple bought EA, they would be insured a flock of quality first party titles. Even if they didn't, they already have good relationships with studios from the iPhone.

The case is looking pretty strong. This could be a very interesting E3.

For Sunday: Teach Your Kids About Zombies

Because it is never too early for them to learn. One of these kids totally kicks ass, I would completely trust him to have my back

Or at least be a brief distraction....



Via Chicagoist.

TV Watch: Lost, Follow The Leader

I didn't have a lot of high hopes for this episode since early previews made it appear to be a Jack heavy plot, and honestly Jack is just annoying the hell out of me right now.

So yeah, the bad - is it just me or does Jack get more idiotic as this season goes on? Any plan that includes detonating a hydrogen bomb probably needs to go through some more vetting than "that brainy guy said it was a good idea". Sayid's "this will either work or put us all out of our misery" wasn't exactly productive input either.

And was Sayid just waiting behind that tree for the last few episodes?

In general, I was kinda hoping the Smoke Monster would appear from the temple and devour that particular subplot whole. Maybe next episode.

The good - pretty much everything else. Hurley failing to answer Candle's questions was pure gold. Locke was brilliant, all the way up to that wonderful cliffhanger statement. I had a brief happy thought when it seemed like they might be setting up a Richard back story, but no such luck. Locke's whole angle seems like we'll finally get some juicy bits on Richard, Jacob and the island in general.

All in all a good episode.

Movie Watch: Timecrimes

Timecrimes is a Spanish time-travelling thriller. It takes some interesting twists on the normal time jaunt concept, with doses of nudity and surrealism tossed into the mix. It never quite escapes the geek scrutiny of time related plot issues, but if you can push those into the back of your head the movie is really quite enjoyable. What feels predictable about half way through the plot gets regularly challenged during the last half of the movie.

As a side note, we watched this off the Roku and it was inflicted with the dread audio problems that occur with some of Netflix's material (The Girl has a working theory that they don't test their foriegn stuff nearly as much as the domestic). Thankfully the plot was quite easy to follow using the subtitles, so we managed to make it through the end even if we were hearing music and dialogue from ten minutes prior. We love the Roku so far, but this inability of Netflix to encode correctly or at least fix it promptly is certainly a bit of a hitch.