Sometimes I have some really unusual dreams that I'd like to remember, but unfortunately forget by the end of the day. So I'd figure I write them down when the chance strikes.
I had a dream where I was with a group of people in some kind of building, and from what I could recall from small details, it was probably some kind of dinner party or a dress-up event held at night. Apparently, we were the last few remaining, and just as we were about to leave, a group of armed, masked people were attempting to kidnap us, maybe for ransom or something. We managed to seal ourselves off in a certain area of the building, but it was inevitable: they were going to get to us eventually. One woman tried to make an escape through a small window in a... bathroom (probably intended to be the restroom, but, you know, dreams), but one of the masked men were waiting outside, and even held her away by pouring a can of gasoline on the bathtub.
Afterwards, the scene changes, and we as a group are being moved away, outside, by gunpoint, towards a black car in an alley. I contemplated escaping through a different alley, but since they supposedly all had guns... and it was a long alley, I just went in the car.
Scene changes again, and it's daylight, dunno if it's the following day or a few days later. I'm being driven around by one of my captures, and from the way he carried himself, probably even the boss. He was driving me somewhere, and it seemed like I was kidnapped for this purpose, whatever it was. Anyway, he got hungry, and parked in front of a hot dog-related fast food restaurant, and he wanted ME to go out, alone, and get him something to eat. Of course, I used this as an opportunity to escape, even if it meant they would hunt me down somewhere down the line. For some reason, too, I asked if I could use the restroom, possibly to give me some extra time, just in case he was wondering why I was gone for too long, and he was fine with it, oddly. So I went, and I couldn't find a restroom inside the restaurant, so I exited the building, in plain view of my kidnapper, and entered the connected building, a bank.
The empty bank had a ginormous window in, again, plain sight of my parked kidnapper, and at this point, I reconsidered running away. Here, I almost gave up, and slowly walked out of the bank, but then I had a change of heart. I marched back into the bank to see if there was an alternative exit, and there was: a stairway/escalator down to an underground mall center. I ran down the somewhat packed facility, and looked every which way for an exit that lead to an opposite end to where my kidnapper was. Dunno why I didn't just find security or called the cops at this point... After what felt like an eternity of searching, I was starting to panic, because I couldn't find an exit! Finally, however, I made my way into a huge clothing store, I think, and made my way to a certain segment in a corner.
This is where things got a bit odd.
In this corner of the store, I found a tiny elevator, enough to fit one person and it was, how should I say... flapped-based? You know how with escalators, the steps appear one after another, because it's tread-based? This elevator was like that, except it went directly up and down on what looked like black, unstable flaps. I asked a nearby person, who didn't even look like he worked there, if this elevator was even usable, despite the fact it was functioning on its own. He said it was fine, and that it lead to "the towers", but weirdly, it was a two-man system: one person had to press a button on the outside, and one person had to press one on the inside for it to start moving again. So we went ahead and did that, and eventually the elevator started moving up. Well, at least I assumed it was up.
As I was standing inside the flapped-based, one-man elevator, though, it eventually, after a few scene changes, became a cargo-style elevator that was made out of steel-like surroundings. Here I waited... for a very, very, very, very long time. It was a lengthy elevator ride, and at some point, I questioned whether it was moving at all due to a lack of noise. Eventually, the elevator made its stop, but the door didn't even open for the next few seconds, which made me worried, due to the earlier two-man system. Though, it opened on its own, and I entered into the following dimly-lit condensed room. There was no exit, just a yellow-plastered advertisement on the wall in front of me. I think it was a door shutter, however, since the wall had ridges on it. After some time passing, an announcement over some kind of speaker said something to the effect of, "This area is/has been closed off for some time", to my disappointment and surprise.
I mean, why have a functioning elevator lead to a directly-closed area? It was weird. So I stood there and thought about what to do next, whether to take the long ride back down and look for another way out, or wait... and hope that a worker would come up and find me, which is an admittedly creepy thing to gamble on. I also feared that, if I waited up there, that I would be found by my captures, through the guy that helped me earlier, and gunned down on the spot. Since it was a secluded area and all. And while I was thinking on my next move...
I woke up.
I guess I wanted to write about this mainly for the elevator ride sequence, since the whole thing came off super weird. Notable was how the elevator ride actually took a long time to experience in-dream; there was no cutaways or scenes that jumped forward... I was actually, really waiting on a dimly-lit elevator that led to a dimly-lit dead end.
As for possible reasons on why I had the dream, for the past few days, I've been reading up on The Twilight Zone, its history, some of its episode descriptions, and viewed its openings on YouTube. I even watched one episode, The Obsolete Man. A day before the dream, I was playing Metroid II, a game notable for its atmosphere, among other things. Prior to falling asleep, too, I watched the first three episodes of Ultra Q on DVD, the first series in the Ultraman franchise. However, as the first in the series, it didn't have Ultraman, and was more influenced by The Twilight Zone/The Outer Limits. The opening and closing narrations even reflected this.
Now I gotta go back to sleep after writing this up, since I gotta be at work in a few hours. So who knows what I might dream of next.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Movie Review: A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)
I was very hesitant to watch Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth movie in the franchise released in 2007, for the first time a few years back. Considering the huge time gap between 3 and 4, I was concerned it wasn't going to capture the same spirit that made the first three movies fun action fests. So color me surprised when it turned out to be a rock solid entry, and I'll even say Die Hard 4 is BETTER than 2 and 3. So with that in mind, I was so willing to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth film, despite all the negative reaction it got.
The first 30-some minutes put me in a state of worry and semi-panic, as the movie was doing a bunch of things I wasn't thrilled to see in a Die Hard film: John McClane's bizarre lack of screen presence and lines, a weird, stylized opening credits, and shaky cam! Sooooooo much shaky cam! The destructive chase scene that engulfs the opening act could have been so much better if the cam wasn't shaking every damn chance it got. To add insult to injury, the camera sometimes zooms in and out, apparently to give a sense of tension or whatever. It didn't work. It just added to the overall embarrassment to how the chase scene was handled, camera-wise.
But I still had hope, hope that the rest of the movie would still be a fun fest like Die Hard 4. Instead, I was welcomed to an ABSURD amount of padding whenever possible, dragging a surprisingly short Die Hard movie (98 minutes) out as long as possible. It's almost like, when it was time to make Die Hard 5, they only thought about the chase scene at the beginning, and started filming based on that. Once they finished those scenes, the crew was probably like, "Oh, wait... we gotta make 68 more minutes?" And from there, I saw nothing but pointless scene after pointless scene with next to zero tension, drama, or action. There's an "action" sequence during the mid-point, but it really involves both McClanes (oh yeah, his son's in this) hiding behind a bar, getting captured, followed by a long, boring torture scene, and then running from a helicopter for two seconds. They don't even TRY to fight it.
The most horrible thing about this movie is that John McClane doesn't even feel like the main character. For the first 60-some minutes of the film, John McClane is normally just standing in the background, usually asking something to the equivalent of, "What's going on? Huh? Who's this? Huhhh??", which is then followed by some person immediately telling him to shut his mouth. Sure, McClane has always played the unwanted underdog by stupid police chiefs or other officials in previous films, but they take it to the extreme here. And when McClane actually does something productive, the way it's presented feels like he's on auto pilot. When a Swat-esque team comes barging in a room, McClane doesn't dive for cover and spout a bunch of wise-ass comments, he stands completely still, picks up a rapid-fire weapon, and kills everyone while screaming, "I'm on vacation!!". Ugh. It truly feels like Die Hard 5 GUEST STARRING Bruce Willis.
Die Hard 5 also tries too hard to be more of a thriller than a straight action movie. Yeah, other Die Hards had a lair of mystery to the bad guy's motives, but Die Hard 5 wants you to keep guessing. Except this hurts the movie because you don't have a damn clue who the main baddy is, so you don't know who to root to be killed off. There's this old guy who doesn't have enough screen time.... but then there's this other guy!... who doesn't have much screen time. But wait! There's this woman! Except she doesn't have much screen time and her inner villainy isn't that great. But, but then! And that's EXACTLY what's wrong with this structure. By the time we know who the main bad guy is, I couldn't help but think, "I don't care... just end the movie in a respectable way."
The climax of A Good Day to Die Hard is filled with even more padding, with McClanes sneaking around and clocking guards behind there backs, followed by half-assed gunfights against people we don't care about because the movie doesn't allow these people to flesh out to a degree for us to care about. John McClane shouts "I'm on vacation!" one more time, the main bad guy falls off a building in slow motion, supposedly to mimic the iconic moment from the first film, and a helicopter crashes in a nice special effects sequence. Both McClanes survive, hugs and kisses for all those involved, I guess, and the credits roll with a Rolling Stones song...
After Die Hard 4, I thought it was impossible to make a BAD Die Hard movie, but I guess Die Hard 5 proved me wrong with its endless amounts of shallowness. If Die Hard 6 is really going to be Bruce Willis' final film in the series, then whoever writes and directs that movie will have to blow me the hell away after this amazing waste of time. In fact, I refuse A Good Day to Die Hard as an official sequel, and have instead replaced it with 2010's Red as Die Hard 5. If you didn't like THAT movie, then that's a good indicator of how dreadful A Good Day to Die Hard is.
The first 30-some minutes put me in a state of worry and semi-panic, as the movie was doing a bunch of things I wasn't thrilled to see in a Die Hard film: John McClane's bizarre lack of screen presence and lines, a weird, stylized opening credits, and shaky cam! Sooooooo much shaky cam! The destructive chase scene that engulfs the opening act could have been so much better if the cam wasn't shaking every damn chance it got. To add insult to injury, the camera sometimes zooms in and out, apparently to give a sense of tension or whatever. It didn't work. It just added to the overall embarrassment to how the chase scene was handled, camera-wise.
But I still had hope, hope that the rest of the movie would still be a fun fest like Die Hard 4. Instead, I was welcomed to an ABSURD amount of padding whenever possible, dragging a surprisingly short Die Hard movie (98 minutes) out as long as possible. It's almost like, when it was time to make Die Hard 5, they only thought about the chase scene at the beginning, and started filming based on that. Once they finished those scenes, the crew was probably like, "Oh, wait... we gotta make 68 more minutes?" And from there, I saw nothing but pointless scene after pointless scene with next to zero tension, drama, or action. There's an "action" sequence during the mid-point, but it really involves both McClanes (oh yeah, his son's in this) hiding behind a bar, getting captured, followed by a long, boring torture scene, and then running from a helicopter for two seconds. They don't even TRY to fight it.
The most horrible thing about this movie is that John McClane doesn't even feel like the main character. For the first 60-some minutes of the film, John McClane is normally just standing in the background, usually asking something to the equivalent of, "What's going on? Huh? Who's this? Huhhh??", which is then followed by some person immediately telling him to shut his mouth. Sure, McClane has always played the unwanted underdog by stupid police chiefs or other officials in previous films, but they take it to the extreme here. And when McClane actually does something productive, the way it's presented feels like he's on auto pilot. When a Swat-esque team comes barging in a room, McClane doesn't dive for cover and spout a bunch of wise-ass comments, he stands completely still, picks up a rapid-fire weapon, and kills everyone while screaming, "I'm on vacation!!". Ugh. It truly feels like Die Hard 5 GUEST STARRING Bruce Willis.
Die Hard 5 also tries too hard to be more of a thriller than a straight action movie. Yeah, other Die Hards had a lair of mystery to the bad guy's motives, but Die Hard 5 wants you to keep guessing. Except this hurts the movie because you don't have a damn clue who the main baddy is, so you don't know who to root to be killed off. There's this old guy who doesn't have enough screen time.... but then there's this other guy!... who doesn't have much screen time. But wait! There's this woman! Except she doesn't have much screen time and her inner villainy isn't that great. But, but then! And that's EXACTLY what's wrong with this structure. By the time we know who the main bad guy is, I couldn't help but think, "I don't care... just end the movie in a respectable way."
The climax of A Good Day to Die Hard is filled with even more padding, with McClanes sneaking around and clocking guards behind there backs, followed by half-assed gunfights against people we don't care about because the movie doesn't allow these people to flesh out to a degree for us to care about. John McClane shouts "I'm on vacation!" one more time, the main bad guy falls off a building in slow motion, supposedly to mimic the iconic moment from the first film, and a helicopter crashes in a nice special effects sequence. Both McClanes survive, hugs and kisses for all those involved, I guess, and the credits roll with a Rolling Stones song...
After Die Hard 4, I thought it was impossible to make a BAD Die Hard movie, but I guess Die Hard 5 proved me wrong with its endless amounts of shallowness. If Die Hard 6 is really going to be Bruce Willis' final film in the series, then whoever writes and directs that movie will have to blow me the hell away after this amazing waste of time. In fact, I refuse A Good Day to Die Hard as an official sequel, and have instead replaced it with 2010's Red as Die Hard 5. If you didn't like THAT movie, then that's a good indicator of how dreadful A Good Day to Die Hard is.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Shame of the Week - A Video Game Review Incident
Hey, I finally posted something new! I actually wanted to express my feelings on something that's been happening for the past few days, and it felt like this was the only place I can think of to spill it at the moment.
I like Thunderbolt, I think the website has a bunch of interesting articles and reviews, and I like frequenting its forums because its users normally have interesting things to say about the current state of gaming. One of the things I always find the most amusing, though, is reading the comments section for certain reviews, due to how silly some of the complaints are. A recent example can be seen in this BioShock Infinite review, where two comments (as of this writing) trash the review because of the 8/10 score. "The score you guys give this game is sickening." "Oh come on. 8 out of 10? It’s sad when some don’t realise the importance of this game claim to be an authority on video game quality. Gamers aren’t all 13 year old boys." Priceless. Some reviews get a stronger reaction than others, and I always took the Thunderbolt's staff lack of response to these comments as a sign of the obvious: that these comments are amazingly stupid.
However, something of note has happened within the past few days, when a Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes review was posted on May 22. The days that followed the review's release has seen an influx of comments denouncing the review. No surprise there. BUT, I started taking real notice when the lot started complaining that the review was hurting the Metacritic score, and that they all started begging for the review to be either taken down or rewritten to accommodate a higher score, so that the Metacritic score wasn't "damaged". Just in case this review happens to disappear (I doubt it, but you can never tell with human nature), I took the liberty of capturing some choice comments on the matter:
The first time I read that comment in the first image, my jaw nearly dropped. REGARDLESS OF THE QUALITY OF THE REVIEW, for someone to tell a reviewer to change the score or remove a review just so a game can sell better is an amazing statement. He's not even trying to sugarcoat it. Also, "It's completely different from my experience playing the game." Really? You mean a completely different human being, with different tastes and views, happen to have a differing opinion of the same game than you? And he expresses this in a review, aka one guy's personal view of a product, AKA A REVIEW? So I figured the Thunderbolt staff was gonna do their usual silent treatment of the comments section, but the reviewer in question posted a few times, and actually took the comments like a champ. However, another staffer chimed in:
So that's it. You get a few nerd-tantrums from the Internet and you cave in. What, were you afraid of bad publicity, afraid that Metacritic is going to remove you? So much for sticking to your guns, and not to mention letting one of your writers out to hang like that. I don't know what the submission process is like over at Thunderbolt, but if one or two people oversee what gets put up.... then why was this put up in the first place if you feared such a "backlash" as the one demonstrated in the comments section? You let the whiners win, and from now on, every time there's a low-rated review on the site, they'll think that enough bickering is going to get the review removed or re-rated for the sake of a Metacritic score.
Damn you, Metacritic. You'll be the death of us!
I like Thunderbolt, I think the website has a bunch of interesting articles and reviews, and I like frequenting its forums because its users normally have interesting things to say about the current state of gaming. One of the things I always find the most amusing, though, is reading the comments section for certain reviews, due to how silly some of the complaints are. A recent example can be seen in this BioShock Infinite review, where two comments (as of this writing) trash the review because of the 8/10 score. "The score you guys give this game is sickening." "Oh come on. 8 out of 10? It’s sad when some don’t realise the importance of this game claim to be an authority on video game quality. Gamers aren’t all 13 year old boys." Priceless. Some reviews get a stronger reaction than others, and I always took the Thunderbolt's staff lack of response to these comments as a sign of the obvious: that these comments are amazingly stupid.
However, something of note has happened within the past few days, when a Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes review was posted on May 22. The days that followed the review's release has seen an influx of comments denouncing the review. No surprise there. BUT, I started taking real notice when the lot started complaining that the review was hurting the Metacritic score, and that they all started begging for the review to be either taken down or rewritten to accommodate a higher score, so that the Metacritic score wasn't "damaged". Just in case this review happens to disappear (I doubt it, but you can never tell with human nature), I took the liberty of capturing some choice comments on the matter:
The first time I read that comment in the first image, my jaw nearly dropped. REGARDLESS OF THE QUALITY OF THE REVIEW, for someone to tell a reviewer to change the score or remove a review just so a game can sell better is an amazing statement. He's not even trying to sugarcoat it. Also, "It's completely different from my experience playing the game." Really? You mean a completely different human being, with different tastes and views, happen to have a differing opinion of the same game than you? And he expresses this in a review, aka one guy's personal view of a product, AKA A REVIEW? So I figured the Thunderbolt staff was gonna do their usual silent treatment of the comments section, but the reviewer in question posted a few times, and actually took the comments like a champ. However, another staffer chimed in:
So that's it. You get a few nerd-tantrums from the Internet and you cave in. What, were you afraid of bad publicity, afraid that Metacritic is going to remove you? So much for sticking to your guns, and not to mention letting one of your writers out to hang like that. I don't know what the submission process is like over at Thunderbolt, but if one or two people oversee what gets put up.... then why was this put up in the first place if you feared such a "backlash" as the one demonstrated in the comments section? You let the whiners win, and from now on, every time there's a low-rated review on the site, they'll think that enough bickering is going to get the review removed or re-rated for the sake of a Metacritic score.
Damn you, Metacritic. You'll be the death of us!
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