Shmee.Me

June 30, 2015

The Paladin wants off Fury

Fury came out in 2014, starring Brad Pitt, motivational speaker Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, and Jon “Shane” Bernthal as the tank crew of the Sherman Battle Tank FURY. I’ll cut to the chase… I didn’t like it. Fury when it is an actual war movie is tense and brutal. Fury when it is being introspective is awful and stupid. The fighting is done in the new style of Hollywood war films – brutal, bloody, and dirty. This makes the climatic set piece, the part we suffer through the rest of the movie to get to, really quite good. The battle is intense, swinging from hope to despair and then back again with each attack. It’s that desperate Alamo-like last stand we just love in ’MERICA!!! The rest of the movie is the standard Hollywood post-Vietnam war movie that makes every effort to suck the heroism and even humanity out of the soldiers the movie is portraying. Except for Lerman’s wide-eyed clerk turned machine gunner, the rest of the crew of Fury are terrible people. Even the soldiers around and intertwined with the events of the film are terrible people. I don’t doubt that American soldiers killed prisoners in World War 2, but I find fault with the movie’s depiction of soldiers reveling in it.

To me the film was trying to show how war changes those who fight in it, but it does it without us seeing who the men were before the war. For all we know they were all terrible people, the Army just gave them license to kill. So we don’t see the loving family man, the idealistic college student, the friendly mechanic, or the pride of the family go off to war and have their lives forever changed. HBO’s Band of Brothers and American Sniper do a much better job at showing how war changes lives, without glorifying war or wrapping war up in an idealistic American flag.

June 12, 2015June 12, 2015

Microsoft Hedging Its Bets With Oculus Rift!

It is clear Microsoft is unsure about the possibilities of true virtual reality gaming. On one hand VR has been dreamed of for years as the ultimate immersive gaming experience, and on the other hand everything that has come out up to now has been pretty gimmicky. Sony is all in with Project Morpheus as is Valve with Vive, but Microsoft’s approach has been wait and see. Their headset HoloLens is augmented reality not virtual reality, so announcing a partnership with Oculus Rift makes a lot of sense. It means they get to do nothing while appearing to be in the game.

Facebook will get a major partner, and Microsoft will be able to say, “hey we got a VR headset too!” True the integration is just streaming of current Xbox games, so they will still be 2D, but just on what seems to be a massive screen. It will be a nice option if you pick up an Oculus Rift and have an Xbox One, and if it becomes super popular they can always further the integration and start to develop games specifically for it.

It looks like 1.6% stake Microsoft bought of Facebook is paying off. It got them on Facebook’s board, and it lets them play with Facebook’s toys. Still if VR takes off it looks like Sony is the best setup to take advantage since everyone with a PS4 has compatible hardware. Vive and Oculus Rift have some pretty steep computer requirements spec wise, so only the hardcore end of the computer gaming population will be able to run them. Though if Microsoft makes the Oculus Rift work natively with Xbox One that could level the playing field a bit.

The VR game is shaping up to be an interesting fight. It has a lot of major players involved, but there still hasn’t been a proven demand for the product. This is one of those fights that no matter who wins, everyone looses. Which given Microsoft’s limited investment would probably be alright with them.

May 15, 2015May 15, 2015

Marvel Is Going Too Far With Their Fox Feud!

Things between Marvel and Fox have gotten tense, if rumors are to be believed, but there has been some recent events to prove this. In the new issue of Uncanny Avengers #4 we learn the new history of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver: They aren’t mutants anymore, they are genetically engineered. So their long history of being Magneto’s kids is now void. Now there are two reasons for this: One it makes it hard on Fox to use Quicksilver in their X-Men movies because now he is not a mutant, and two in Marvel’s mind it makes it easier for people who are new to the comics to correlate the characters in the comics to the ones on screen. That is garbage though.

The movies aren’t driving people to the comics, a good comic book sales number is a little over a hundred thousand, but most are in the tens of the thousands, so for the most part their isn’t any confusion, and just because Fox is making money off their characters and isn’t running to Marvel for help like Sony doesn’t mean they should start changing all of Fox’s good characters to non-mutants just to screw with them. I mean where does that stop, “Oh it looks like Wolverine was really just a bioweapon created by the Canadian Government, so he is not an X-Man anymore! Welcome to the Avengers!”

I get with the current movie deal Marvel had to create a new backstory for the Maximoff twins because they can’t use the word “Mutant” in relation to their characters, and that is hard to work with, but changing decades of backstory in the comic books is just kind of lame. They at least could have just re-launched the characters as part of the Secret Wars event so that the old stories would have held up, but instead they chose a sloppy retcon. I am not sure Disney’s hard lock on their comic books is going to end well, and I am starting to appreciate DC’s much more loose grip.

May 14, 2015May 14, 2015

We Get To See Supergirl In Action!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm46-envrHo

I wasn’t going to talk about trailers all this week, but that terrible Jem and the Holograms trailer yesterday forced my hand, and now CBS released their trailer for their new show Supergirl.

The first thing I thought when watching this trailer was that you can tell it is being made by the same people making The Flash. Same light tone and crazy action, so I was surprised by all the hate it was getting on social media. Yeah it is not perfect, pilots rarely are, and it is clear that she is the female version of Clark Kent, and not the spunky teen cheerleader Linda Lee Danvers from the comic books, but that is fine. It is what people are familiar with when a person named ‘Super’ is around.

The only thing I wasn’t a big fan of was the Devil Wears Prada rip-off with Calista Flockhart as her annoying boss. If they can retool that part of the show before it launches next year that would help out a lot. I am looking forward to it, and besides The Flash she will definitely be the biggest superhero on TV. With all the superhero TV shows on the air now, there will not be a lot of time for shows not based off a comic books. It is a hard time to be a geek. There is just too much stuff to watch.

May 13, 2015

I Can’t Believe I Am Going To Say This … We Need To Talk About The Jem And The Holograms Trailer!

So what the heck was that?! It wasn’t Jem and the Holograms! There was no supercomputer named Synergy. No crazy super earrings. This a was just a terrible looking Disney Channel movie. No wait, I take that back. Disney probably would have made a rock and roll superhero movie, but they would have modernized it, still bad, but not this. This has the 80’s glam but none of the superhero antics. <sigh> Speaking of antics, where are the Misfits? Who is supposed to be trying to throw these girls off a cliff to become the number one band in the world even though they are in a completely different genre of music? No one? Just bad teenage relationship angst? No thanks.

Universal could have had a fun crazy superhero movie targeted to young girls. The first one that I have heard of. They could have owned that market, but they blew it, and instead they made a generic looking bore fest. Jem and the Holograms deserved better. Watch the old cartoon it is bound to be more fun than this looks.