Thoughts on The Wolverine (2013)

Why does a man with built-in blades need a sword?

This review will be brief. Regardless, it still contains at least one spoiler. So, if you don't like spoiled things, read elsewhere for a moment.

I figured after my articles on V: Graphite, the energy drink tie-in with The Wolverine, and  5 Gum Adamantium, that I should at least make an effort to see and assess the movie.

The Wolverine. It was alright.

Wolverine, as a character, does not work very well solo. He works well as part of an ensemble, with the rest of his mutant teammates to bounce his personality off. Without having established characters around, he's a bit flat. There's no one to offer a predictable response, or to provoke him in a predictable way. I'm in favour of trying new things, but sometimes a little bit of familiarity can go a long way.

Also, does every film these days need a giant robot?

Once a nerd: Clarisworks flashback

I've recently started playing around with software emulation of old Mac operating systems. One of my first Macs was a Quadra knock-off* running System 7.5, so I was pretty happy to fire up Basilisk II and see what it could do. While my primary objective was to play Prince of Persia and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I ended up booting up Clarisworks 3.0 for a bit of nostalgic desktop publishing.

When I was 14, I took it upon myself to publish a magazine/newspaper thing. It was a financial disaster, and it certainly did my social life no favours, but hey. It was something to do. Most of it, such as it was, was made in Clarisworks. Yay, Clarisworks.

* When I say "Quadra knock-off", it was a Performa 580CD. It was a weird model that sat in-between the standard Quadras (the "real" Macs of the time) and the utterly bizarre Macintosh TV. The Macintosh TV was meant to be a kind of bridge between the personal computer and home entertainment, kind of like the AppleTV would eventually become, but it was a total failure. It was even designed with a black casing, to give the illusion that it's an appliance, and not a beige computer. The Performa 580CD had the same casing as the Macintosh TV, but in standard beige, and somewhat similar AV capabilities (no built-in TV tuner, just AV inputs). Unfortunately, it had sod all processing power and storage space, so it was pretty useless at anything involving AV. Its video input capabilities were limited to 320x240 pixel footage at a stonkingly low frame rate.

Loopy: Thoughts on Looper (2012)

Loopy doopy.

Much like a refrigerator that isn't set properly, this article will probably spoil things. If you don't like spoilers, don't read it. Simples.

Looper is a time travel story. I'm a sucker for time travel stories. I'm a sucker, especially, for original time travel stories. Looper, unfortunately, isn't really one of them.

Well, it is. And it isn't. It's original in that there's a high-concept, back-of-a-napkin, one-sentence elevator pitch storyline. It's not original in that the plot devices and events of the film are largely lifted from other sources. None of this is surprising when you discover the film was based on a story originally developed as a short, which was then greenlit as a feature film.

It's not, though, in the sense that most of the supporting plotline seems to have been borrowed from elsewhere. I don't have a problem with writers pilfering things from other writers. All of the best stories are built upon the stories that came before them. As a great many people have supposedly said, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal", and so be it.

Some specific parts of Looper that I felt were extremely reminiscent of other works:

• man from future returns to kill child who will grow into future significant figure (The Terminator series, fitting as Garret Dillahunt from The Sarah Connor Chronicles appears as one of the Loopers)
• time travel in weird, claustrophobic capsule (The Jacket)
• Bruce Willis in peculiar time travel story (12 Monkeys)
• character levitated by telekinesis, then exploded (one of the X-Men films, cannot recall which one)

There is one scene which is very original, quite gruesome, and ultimately completely illogical. In the scene, the future version of Seth, played by Paul Dano, who has traveled back in time to the present, attempts to reach his younger self, who is being tortured. As he approaches his junior, who is having parts of his body amputated, the elder Seth's limbs begin to disappear, leaving him a crippled, useless hulk at the door to the building. While the scene is effective and disturbing, it makes very little sense upon consideration. Each change to the younger character should affect the entire timeline of the older version. Old Seth may have lead a very similar life to this point without -- say -- a finger, but it's unlikely that he'd have survived for 30 years, travelled back in time, and made it to the door of the building without both legs, though.

All time travel movies have their paradoxes, though.

While it had a very slow and borderline b-grade start, Looper soon picked up pace and ended up a pretty cool movie. The makeup on Joseph Gordon-Levitt, applied to give him a more Bruce Willis-like appearance, was frankly disturbing, though.

Be more Pacific: Thoughts on Pacific Rim

I shall summarise: It's awesome. This probably contains spoilers. If you're not into having things spoiled, then, uh, stop reading. Or don't. Your choice.

It's like Real Steel meets Transformers meets The Abyss meets Cloverfield meets other stuff.

Pacific Rim is one of those films that takes an utterly ridiculous premise and puts all its chips in, producing something completely enjoyable. The premise, such as it is, is that there are a bunch of gigantic electric dinosaurs emerging from a hole at the bottom of the ocean, and man has built a bunch of enormous robots to fight them with. Because nothing else worked. Because there can't possibly be a simpler solution than gigantic super-complex machines that mimic the human form. It's a bit like The Core in this regard, in that it takes something ludicrous and plays it for all it's got.

I think the entire film can be summed up in one scene from the trailer: The giant robot walks calmly out of the ocean into the streets of Hong Kong, dragging behind it an ocean liner, whilst the enemy dinosaur grins at it from the far end of the street. After raising the ship like a baseball bat, the robot then swings the boat at the dinosaur's face -- all of this occurs to the film's theme music (all six notes of it), and they properly chose to play it, for the only time in the movie*, on guitar. Proper, old school, heavy-ass guitar. This is robot violence porn at its finest.

Everything about the film is massive, awesome and fun. It goes boom, and it goes boom a lot. There're explosions, missiles, electricity, dinosaurs, alien entrails and whacky scientists. The heroes are appropriately heroic, and the villains are massive and hideous.

I thoroughly enjoyed the film.

I feel bad, but I can't help it. It's expected of me. I have a couple of nitpicks. They're not big deals, though.

Hollywood is currently drowning in Australian actors. Everyone who's ever appeared in Home and Away or Neighbours seems to currently be starring in a superhero franchise (except Alf Stewart, who should be). Somehow, the creators of Pacific Rim couldn't find any actual Australians to play their Australian characters, so they settled for an American and an Englishman, both of which proceed with the most embarrassingly atrocious attempts at the Australian accent I've heard in a long while. There's also an "Australian" newsreader and interviewee, both of which sound terrible. Surely it wouldn't have been too hard to cast a couple of Australians as the Australians.

I also found the two whacky scientists were a bit too whacky for my liking. A good comedy duo has an idiot and a straight man, but these two were both the idiot. Sorry.

Also, the bends apparently don't occur in the future.

* until the end credits, but y'know.

Underrated NES games: Ufouria - The Saga

Ufouria (or U•four•ia, as the packaging insists it should be punctuated) is an acid trippy Japanese video game converted for English-speaking markets.

The original game, Hebereke (which means 'drunk' in Japanese) is virtually identical to Ufouria, with a few cosmetic changes and some alterations to the storyline as part of the translation. For now, we'll discuss the English version, and I'll show you a few of the changes in a little while.

You begin the game as Bop Louie, a white snowman-like character with a blue beanie hat. He can walk, jump, and squash enemies if you hold the down button while he's above them. He can't swim, and falls over every three steps if he tries to walk on snow and ice. Over time, he develops a couple of additional bizarre abilities, including his secret power of launching his head on a spring towards enemies, and the skill of suction-cupping up vertical surfaces.

All of the characters are able to throw little face-ball things that appear on occasions when you squash an enemy. They can be used as projectiles against other enemies, and are often the only weapons that will have any effect on the bosses, when you encounter them.

Most of the game follows a Metroid-like approach, wherein you can't progress to another area of the expansive world map without completing the right task and collecting the right item, allowing you to progress. Often, the item you need to obtain is one of the other three characters:

• Shades is a ghost with a purple wing cap that can leap long distances, and gains the bizarre ability to bash himself in the back of the head with a hammer, causing his eyeballs to chase enemies around the screen. (Seriously. I'm not making that up.)
• Gil is a kind of lumbering salamander creature that can't walk very well and can't jump very high, but can sink into water, and swim, y'know, properly. Eventually, he can cough up bombs. Because bombs.

He thinks he's found his friend, but he's wrong.

The enemies range from walking squirts of whipped cream, through birds that drop weights, strange little oriental creatures, wiggling green blobs, statues of frogs and strange grubs. There's not a lot of variety, but the general enemies don't really pose much of a threat, as the majority of the point of the game is problem solving.

The bosses are rather cool. The mid-bosses tend to be gigantic Homer Simpson creatures. Each one is more peculiar than the last, one with its head popping off mid-fight and flying around on a propellor, another in outer space, another underwater. A range of giant-sized cat bosses also exist, including one in a suit of armor, and a puzzler of a boss with a cat in a tube and a strange orbiting white orb. The remaining bosses are, of course, your friends. You must fight each one as you progress in order to knock some sense back into them, ultimately gaining them as playable characters after you've "won" the fight.

One of my favourite elements of the game is the animation. The overall quality of the graphics is so good, they could easily be from an early Super NES game. The only graphical glitch is a column of graphical blocks that flicker on the far leading side of the screen, depending on the direction you're heading, but they're easy to ignore, and not a fault unique to this game.

Speaking of faults, if I must name a few: The game is quite short, and it seems that certain gameplay elements have been tailored (poorly) to make it a bit longer. The characters don't move very quickly, meaning that you simply can't complete the game as quickly as you'd probably like. I feel the game could have benefited from a Super Mario Bros style "run" function when the B button is held down, but I understand that this mechanism would have probably wiped 20% off of the game's duration.

The music in Ufouria is astonishingly awesome, and is full of earworms that'll stick in your head for months. The main overworld theme and boss music are particularly great, but all of the atmospheric music is perfect and suits the game splendidly.

I mentioned earlier that the game was translated from a Japanese game, Hebereke. Here's what they changed:

Shades was known as Sukezaemon, but didn't undergo any changes in appearance. Gil didn't change looks either, but his name was originally........Jennifer.

The only remaining change, and undoubtedly the single most important, significant and life-altering:

I love Ufouria. Ufouria is awesome. It's not easy, but it's not hard. It's about an hour of play all told, so it's a manageable game to bust up any time you feel like completing something in its entirety.

Thoughts on The Lone Ranger (2013)

Lone, lone on the range(r).

This may contain spoilers. Your mileage may vary. You've been warned, I guess. Don't get me wrong, I like Johnny Depp. Unfortunately for The Lone Ranger, there are times when he can ruin a movie. Mr. Depp has a well-known history of playing weird and whacky characters, from Edward Scissorhands to Willy Wonka to Jack Sparrow to the Mad Hatter. They're all much of a muchness, it's Johnny with a painted face and a twitchy personality. You could interchange them, and no one would notice. He's not a bad actor. He's a scene stealer.

In The Lone Ranger, Depp's Tonto thoroughly overshadows Armie Hammer's titular ranger -- admittedly by intention, as the story is based more around Tonto's history than Lone's -- unfortunately leaving the rest of the cast gasping for recognition. Among those you might not have noticed: Tom Wilkinson, William Fichtner and Helena Bonham Carter. A personal favourite underrated actor appears also, Leon Rippy as an ageing ranger.

I found the film enjoyable, but suffering from confusion as to what it intended to be. Parts of it are flat-out, blatant and hilarious slapstick. Some are built around fairly blunt insult humour. Certain scenes divulge into basic toilet humour. Others are thinly veiled commentary on racism and the treatment of the Native American people. Surrounding all of this is a simple story rooted in some pretty serious drama.

It's difficult to take a character like Tonto seriously when his dialogue switches from lighthearted conversations about the stupidity of a horse to lines like "Blood has been spilled, and the rivers will run red", all the while as he attempts to feed a dead bird some corn. This wouldn't be so bad, were it not for the scenes that set up his character's behaviour coming at least half way into the epic 149 minute running time.

There're also a few dischordant moments where an idea is set up to be quite sacred or respected, only to have the piss pulled out of it a few scenes later, usually by Depp's peculiar character. While it's hard to call any action "breaking character" for someone who's clearly not the full quid to begin with, it's a little awkward as a viewer to be fed what seems to be a subtle moral concept, then have it jerked away disrespectfully.

The Lone Ranger is enjoyable, chaotic, action-packed and a bit disjointed. It could certainly have been worse, and I don't feel like I wasted either my time or money by watching it.

Exotic, uh, gum: 5 Adamantium

And now for something completely different: 5 Adamantium gum.

Here's a follow-up to my previous article about V Graphite, the tie-in with the The Wolverine film, which is due to be released within a week or so.

I realise this isn't a beverage. I'm sorry. You'll survive. Deep breaths.

So many incomprehensible thoughts come to mind when one is presented with a chewing gum named after a superhero's fingernails.

This is Wrigley's 5 gum in Adamantium flavour with the byline "A rush of citrus".

I've often wondered if the creators of 5 gum took their marketing strategy from Lynx/Axe deodorant, in that they've branded the product with a slick, mostly black design and chosen totally non-descriptive flavour names. I realise trends are made to be bucked, but there's something to be said for giving your customers some idea of what they're paying for. (Particularly as neither the gum nor the deodorant are cheap products.)

The package design is cool, but it's got a head start considering the established design is already really neat. This one is silver.

The gum itself is wrapped in silver foil embossed with the 5 logo. The gum itself is yellowish beige.

When 5 was originally released back in 2009, Wrigley took the unique (and admittedly quite gimmicky) stance of leaving the flavours a total mystery. Nothing was printed on the wrapping, and the names of each flavour were deliberately cryptic. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the flavours are now printed on the outer plastic wrap. This one is "A rush of citrus", the "rush" being the addition of pear. I had no idea pear was considered a speedy fruit.

Based on a five minute perusal of the Wikipedia page for 5 gum, it strikes me that 5 Adamantium is quite likely a rebranding of 5 Evolution, a citrus and pear flavoured variation released in Europe, but not Australia.

It tastes like a fruity chewing gum. Nothing amazing to report. It doesn't taste like Hugh Jackman (unless Mr. Jackman has a flavour akin to artificial lemon sorbet with a pear in it).

Beware the pear.

The flavour lasts a remarkable length of time, but I believe that's a staple of all of the 5 gum range.

What can I say, it's alright. It's not remarkable. It's....alright.

Other things I've learned today: I had no idea that Schmackos are made by the same company that makes Mars Bars. (And 5 gum.) Something new. Every day.

Another old review: Pulse Live energy drink

Really cool looking bottle.

This is another energy drink review that I need to apologise for. Much like my review of Pimp Juice, this one is going to suffer from the fact that I didn't actually write anything down when I drank the damn thing several years ago. I took photos, though. That's something.

Pulse Live is as obscure as hell. I can't find much about it through googling, largely because it's completely obscured by Pulse, the more famous energy drink with vodka added. This drink doesn't seem to be affiliated with Pulse.

The bottle looks awesome. The label is transparent, and the artwork is really quite cool. It's a long-necked bottle unlike most bottles you find, so it stands out.

The drink itself is totally colourless. Not even a hint of yellow. (Although having said that, with age, it's turned slightly beige. I won't be drinking the out-of-date bottle any time soon.)

It smells and tastes exactly like lemonade.

That's about all I have to say about that.

Also, this is the last one of these stupid "I took photos five years ago, so now I'll write a review" reviews. I promise.

No colour whatsoever.

This is awkward - exotic beverage: Pimp Juice

One assumes they wrung a pimp out to make this.

This is awkward not only because this drink is endorsed by Nelly, and is called "Pimp Juice". It'll also be awkward because I drank the damn thing four years ago. I was thoughtful enough to take photos, but evidently not thoughtful enough to make notes. You'd think I'd have known better.

Regardless, I shall press on.

While searching for any residue of a review I may have written when I sipped the stuff, the only text I can find on my computer relating to Pimpjuice is part of an IRC chat transcript from 2008:

Datazoid: I bought another three energy drinks whilst in Adelaide.
Datazoid: I shall add them to the pile of thirty or so I've yet to sample.
Datazoid: Most of which are rapidly exceeding their use-by dates.
Chubbs: Datazoid: will it make any difference
GremZzz: It might even improve them.
GremZzz: The sugar content will ferment and you'll get wasted.
Datazoid obtained "Hiro Vitality", which contains essence of brocolli, alfalfa and celery.
Datazoid: It's bound to taste of ass.
Datazoid: I also located Pimpjuice.
Datazoid: I had to ask for it by name over a counter.
Datazoid: "Please can I have some, uh, pimpjuice please."

Apart from that, here's what I can tell you: It's green. The can art is quite nice, if you're in to bling and all that.

The Pimp Juice website is horrible. It makes noises when you point to the menu items. It contains way too much Nelly. I have learned that the drink is apparently still being made, and now comes in a purple colour.

The green one was supposedly berry flavoured, but I have some memory of it tasting largely like water and vitamin B, with some sugary horridness overtop.

I believe this drink's sole redeeming factor is that it's GREEN.

I still have a full can of this stuff in storage, but as it's at least four years old there is no way known I intend to drink it. I'll leave that job to someone else.

Exotic beverage: V Graphite

Graphite!

Update, July 12, 2013: I'm getting loads of hits on this article (by loads I mean literally tens), so I'm going to put the killer question up front for those who're asking:

What does V Graphite taste like? It tastes like spectacularly artificial chocolate.

Now, back to the original article:

This energy drink is a tie-in with The Wolverine, which opens in July, 2013. I found a review on Lifehacker which claims the drink has a similar flavour to Mother, which I'm afraid has tainted my opinion of the drink before I've even tried it. I'm pleased to report, though, that I don't agree with this assessment.

The Lifehacker comments address an obvious question: Why "Graphite" and not "Adamantium" if this is a tie-in with The Wolverine? Logical answers are provided: Graphite was an existing flavour in New Zealand, newly introduced to Australia. Also, 5 gum has already staked claim to an adamantium flavour.

The can art is cool, but nothing outrageous. Wolverine appears in black and white. The "V" logo floats over a red patch. I guess they would have had to tread carefully, and would not have been able to include the usual torn slashes from Wolverine's claws, as they'd look a lot like to logo for Monster Energy.

The bizarre ingredient in this drink is and extract from the maca root (lepidium meyenii), which you can read about in tedious detail on Wikipedia. Among its more outrageous claims to fame, maca has been known to create and/or worsen goiters (don't click on that if you're eating), and to act as male aphrodisiac. I've seen female aphrodisiacs in energy drinks (Naughty Girl), and a generic aphrodisiac in Red Eye Passion (not yet reviewed, but it tastes like champagne).

The drink is brown. It's not as dark as cola, and it's a warmer brown than you'd expect. It's kind of like tea. It's well carbonated.

It tastes like chocolate. At least, it tastes like chocolate in the sense that the Lynx/Axe Dark Temptation body spray smells like chocolate. It's a totally artificial-tasting flavour. It's fifty percent really cheap chocolate (the powdery white kind), and fifty percent as though someone was given the job of simulating the flavour of chocolate from a barrage of completely unrelated chemicals. All told, though, it's quite palatable. Unlike V Black, which is supposed to be coffee-based but tastes largely like arse, V Graphite seems to be a fairly pleasant drink.

Oh, and it's had no effect on my libido thus far. Sorry.