Shmee.Me

June 23, 2014June 23, 2014

Shmee Travels To The Days Of Future Past!

So it took a month, but I was finally able to watch the movie I was most excited for this year: X-Men: Days of Future Past! It is the return of Bryan Singer as not only the writer and producer, but as the director as well, and it is official, he should be the only one allowed to make these movies. X-Men: Days of Future Past was fantastic. It fixed all the problems created by X-Men: The Last Stand, and it opened up exciting new possibilities for the future.

Due to the time travel aspect of the film, it takes place a few years after The Wolverine, and a few years after X-Men: First Class. The X-Men of the future are battling super Sentinels that can adapt to the mutants powers to kill them, so the only course of action is to have Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) send someone’s mind in to the past to try and stop this from happening. They decide the only mutant that could survive this is Wolverine (Hugh Jackman).

The writing in the movie is great. They manage to tell a time travel story that does not confuse anyone, and while they are at it clean up all the messes that Brett Ratner caused with X-Men: The Last Stand. The character interactions are believable and gripping, and they all seem to make decisions that appear logical. They also manage to explain everything with boring everyone to death.

Most of the actors have played their parts before, so it should be no surprise that they are wonderful, especially Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. He is the heart and soul of this franchise now. I was very happy with new comer Evan Peters as Quicksilver as well. He is only in this movie for a short time, but he steals the show. I hope he turns up in the next film.

Bryan Singer directs this movie perfectly. He films the action in exciting ways that lets the mutants’ powers take center stage, meanwhile keeping it all in focus letting you take it all in. Quicksilver’s super-speed “fight” scene is particularly incredible. It was one of the most fun superhero action sequences I have seen in a long time.

I love X2, but Days of Future Past may have just become my favorite X-Men movie, and it is close to the top of my favorite superhero movies of all time. This movie proves that only Bryan Singer should be allowed to produce this franchise from now on, so I hope he is able to sort out his legal troubles because I am pumped-up for the next movie X-Men: Apocalypse!

June 20, 2014June 20, 2014

X-Men Six Pack Mega (Mega Mega) Review!

I am getting ready to watch X-Men: Days of Future Past this weekend, so to prepare I have re-watched all six of the previous X-Men/Wolverine movies, and I thought I would give some quick thoughts!

X-Men:

X-Men is really the first superhero movie of the modern era. Without its breakout success we wouldn’t be where we are today with at least three superhero movies a year. It is easy to see why it was so successful, Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen were all perfectly cast, and director Bryan Singer knew how to use them. The movie can be slow at times as it introduces the cast, and the special effects don’t hold up, but it is an entertaining film that brought the X-Men universe to life.

X2: X-Men United:

This movie builds on the first one in just about every way. The relationships between the characters are believable, the action is top notch, and the story of the mutants living in fear of society while society is afraid of them is gripping. Bryan Singer really understands what it takes to make a great movie first, and then apply that understanding to superhero films. If the first movie is responsible for the modern era superhero flick, X2 made it a full fledged genre, and a genre worth watching at that! X2 is one of the better superhero movies ever made.

X-Men: The Last Stand:

If X2 is everything that is good about superhero movies then X-Men: The Last Stand is everything that is wrong with superhero movies. First they replaced Bryan Singer with Brett Ratner who is nowhere near as good as a director, and the script they wrote is awful. All the characters that were so carefully written in the second movie are all now dumb as dirt, and their motivations are almost unexplained. It is like Ratner was in way over his head, so to try to make up for it he started killing characters off, and not in good ways. I mean Cyclops dies in the first fifteen minutes, OFF SCREEN! It is just terrible, and the ending fight seen may be one of the worst big budget action sequences ever put to film. It is almost unwatchable. It consists of Mutants hanging upside down and getting shot, and then the Phoenix gets stabbed by Wolverine. Ugg! I don’t think I will ever watch this movie again.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine:

Since Ratner killed off the X-Men, Fox decided to make some prequels instead, and the first of what was going to be series of Origins films was X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This film is sooo close to being good. It has some great action scenes, and the Weapon-X story line is interesting, but what kills this movie for me is what they do to Deadpool. I have been hard on Ryan Reynolds in the past, but this movie is not his fault. He would have made a great jerky dude in a red suit, but no, the writers decide to sew his lips shut and turn him in to robot! It makes me shake in anger. This film also features my favorite X-Man, Gambit, but he is only Gambit-y for like five minutes, and then he flies a plane for the rest if it. If this movie would have had one more script rewrite it could have been pretty good.

X-Men: First Class:

After two bad movies in a row Fox thankfully learned its lesson, and deiced to get Bryan Singer back to make this prequel. He was only the writer and producer, but when watching it you can tell that his steady hand is leading this film. The director Mathew Vaughn is no slouch himself. It is amazing that when you pay talented people to make movies that they seem to turn out better. The story of how the X-Men become the X-Men is wonderfully told, and they got a great cast to play all the younger heroes. You can’t go wrong with James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence. Watching this movie makes me dislike the previous two movies even more because it shows how good they could have been.

The Wolverine:

Now that the X-Men series was back on track Fox decided to give another stand alone Wolverine movie a try. I reviewed this movie earlier, but that was the unrated version. This time around I watched the PG-13 film. It is not as good. They took out one of the better action sequences to get the PG-13 rating, but it is still enjoyable. Wolverine in Japan killing ninjas is always fun! This is a decent movie, and it cements the fact that Hugh Jackman is Wolverine.

Those are my thoughts on the first six movies, I will report back on how I feel about Days of Future past on Monday, so stay tuned!

June 19, 2014June 19, 2014

Cool Down With The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo!

Mrs. Shmee decided to help out my ongoing computer upgrade for Father’s Day, so she got me a new CPU fan. It is the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo. This fan fits a lot of chipsets, and it is reasonably priced, usually under $35, but is it any good? Well for my purposes it was well worth the price.

It is pretty much a large light weight aluminum heat-sync with four copper pipes running through it. It comes with one 120mm fan, but it has the brackets for one more if you decide that you need to move the air over your processor a little faster. The mounting brackets are adjustable so that you can put it on just about any CPU made, and it was perfect for my AMD FX-8320.

It is a little tall and the fan makes it kind of fat, but my Lian-Li PC-9F case was wide enough to fit it, and my low rise G.SKILL Ares RAM didn’t bump in to it. Though if you are going to buy one of these you definitely need to check out the dimensions of your case, and how your motherboard is laid out.

The 212 Evo is way quieter than the fan that came with the processor, and I was able to overclock the chip from 3.5GHz to 4GHz without increasing the voltage. Even with the overclock, my CPU is running cooler than with the stock fan. I could go probably go faster if I had a higher end motherboard, but 500MHz is nothing to sneeze at. I torture tested the CPU and fan using Prime95 for several hours to confirm that my overclock was stable, and it passed with flying colors. It was fun to see my chip run all eight cores flat out.

If your stock fan is not cutting it for your processer, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo is a great upgrade. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, but it will run quiet and even let you overclock your chip a little. I am quite happy with mine, and I think you will like it too.

June 18, 2014

The Paladin takes his life in his own hands with Safety Not Guaranteed

Time travel is hard; first there is the technological bits and bobs to work out and then consider the ramifications of your actions in the past and their ripple effect throughout time and space… tearing a hole in the fabric of human existence. Thankfully this movie really has nothing to do with that.

Safety Not Guaranteed is a character study. Darius Britt (Aubrey Plaza) is a woman adrift in her life in Seattle, working as an intern at Seattle Magazine. When Jeff Schwensen (Jake Johnson) a writer at Seattle Magazine wants to investigate a classified ad requesting a partner to travel back in time, Darius’ interest is piqued and she volunteers to go. We soon meet the man behind the ad, Kenneth Calloway (Mark Duplass) a jean jacket wearing, mulleted, youth trapped in an adult body. Darius is drawn to him and convinces Kenneth to take her on as his partner. As the two train together, preparing themselves for the “heat” through weapons training and martial arts, the attraction is obvious. However the question lingers throughout – did Kenneth really build a time machine?

The characters in the story are pretty great, although Jeff’s character is kind of a tragic waste who you want to like but can’t because he’s a tool. Mark Duplass plays Kenneth with a strange seriousness, one part adolescent and one part adult – balancing the absurd premise with a very human motivation. Aubrey Plaza is fantastic as the husk of a woman who finds life again as she gets rapped up in Kenneth’s world.

There is swearing, drinking, and carousing in this movie (pretty much all Jake Johnson’s character Jeff), so be aware and the ending for some reason fell a little flat for me. I think it showed too much, unlike the rest of the movie where things were vague and mysterious. Some ambiguity at the end would have worked great.

Should you watch Safety Not Guaranteed? I’d say, if you like Napoleon Dynamite or Cohen Brother’s films then you’ll probably enjoy this character driven comedy. Its quirky, its not necessary laugh out loud funny, but you will giggle a little.

June 17, 2014June 17, 2014

Westeros Keeps Getting Crazier In Game Of Thrones Season 4!

So season 4 of Game of Thrones has come to an end, and I am happy to say that unlike last year, this season went out with a bang. Everything is different after this finale. This is the type of episode the drives home the fact that no one is safe in Westeros, and that all the people that think they are good at playing the Game of Thrones, are not. It was also nice to see some feaking justice in this show for once! I am concerned that they are getting rid of all the interesting people, but at least for now they have me very excited to see what happens next.

This season as a whole has had a much better pace. It balanced out the action and the politics very well. They managed to cram a lot in to these ten episodes. If they do to much more they might have to start having longer seasons (only crazy people would complain about that). Though if the writers do that they may run out of material since George R. R. Martin hasn’t finished book six yet. I hope the show can keep up the momentum for next year, because if so this HBO subscriber is locked in until the series is done!