Posts

Posted on

Shmee Picks Dr. Strange!

dr-strange

It has been awhile since I have cast a movie, so I decided to help Marvel out by picking Dr. Strange.  According to people in the know, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, and Jared Leto are the front runners for this film, and they are good choices, but I thought I would give them some more options!  Here they are in reverse order:

5: Jon Hamm

Jon-Hamm

Jon Hamm is fit, and he is funny.  Have him grow out his hair a little bit, and he would look the part.  He has never done anything action oriented, but Dr. Strange really only needs to be able to concentrate well.  I tried to make Hamm Batman at one point, but Dr. Strange is still a good role for him.

4: Aidan Gillen

aidan-gillen

Aidan Gillen makes my skin crawl, but that is because he is such a talented actor, and he brings to life the slimy Littlefinger on Game of Thrones so perfectly.  As you can see above he looks great in a beard, and I think that he that he would fit in well with the rest of the Avengers.

3: Joe Manganiello

joe-manganiello

If Jon Hamm is fit, Joe Manganiello makes him look like a weakling.  This guy was made to be an action hero, and he looks like Dr. Strange to boot!  This is the perfect role for this guy now that True Blood is over.

2: Viggo Mortensen

viggo-mortensen

Viggo was made to play strange dudes, so why not play a dude with “Strange” in the title?  It is time Viggo came back to the mainstream, and there is nothing more mainstream than the Avengers.  If anyone can bring magic to the Marvel Movie Universe it is Viggo Mortensen!

1: Kit Harington

kit-harington

I know it is another Game of Throne actor, and he is a little young, but I think he would be a perfect fit for the movie version of Dr. Strange.  For one, he is young, so they could lock him in for a few quite a few movies, and he is how Zoolander says “So hot right now”!  Since he is already on a fantasy show, why not have him bring fantasy to the Marvel Movie Universe?

There are my top five picks.  Who would you like to see play the Master Magician?

Posted on

Shmee Puts His Dirty Hands On Battlefield: Hardline!

battlefield-hardline

One of EA’s big E3 announcements this year was Battlefield: Hardline.  It is the large open-world combat that you have come to know and love from Battlefield, but now you are playing as Cops and Robbers.  It is like someone at EA saw how well the Payday franchise was doing and decided to modify Battlefield 4 to corner that part of the market.  Besides just announcing Hardline, they also allowed people with PCs and PS4s to download it and try it out.  Since I don’t have a PS4, I had to go with the PC option (poor me I know).

It is pretty much Battlefield 4.  Which means it is fun, and the combat is intense, but it didn’t wow me with how new and original it is.  It feels like a really well done expansion pack from the good ol’ days before monthly DLC, or even a good looking total conversion mod from a talented group of individuals, but even though it looks different it still plays the same.

The modes are kind of new.  One is called Blood Money, where both sides run to central location and grab cash to bring back to their vaults.  It is like center capture the flag except you can attack the other side’s base.  Heist is a game-type where the criminals need to steal money out of the Police’s armored cars, so it is pretty much assault.

Like I have said throughout this, whatever it is, Battlefield: Hardline is fun.  It plays well, and it is well balanced, but it just doesn’t differentiate itself enough for me to get really excited about it.  Especially since I already own Battlefield 4 (which is a great game).  This is just the beta though, so maybe they can sell me on it more in the months to come.  It comes out this year on October 21st.

 

Posted on

Shmee Travels To The Days Of Future Past!

x_men_days_of_future_past_by_vgwallpapers-d6fe550

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!

 

 

Posted on

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

xmen

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!

Posted on

Cool Down With The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo!

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.