Today's episode was brought to you by the number 9

At this time of year, I don't ask for much from movies. Have an interesting plot OR a cool effect. Have a pretty actress OR a cool ending. I don't expect anything to cover more than one base. 9 doesn't do everything right, but it does so much right that I am simply amazed.

The movie is right in my wheelhouse, a cool sci fi flick about automatons trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world all done in state of the art CGI. You'd have to tie me down to keep me away. All I wanted was for it not to be lame. The movie itself is gorgeous. The visuals look like the best stop motion animation you've ever seen, which is a step up from the glib slickness of most off the shelf computer generated films. You know it's not live action, but it's also not Madagascar. But aside from art direction, which is astonishing, the movie moves well. Action is well shot and paced and is more exciting than anything in Transformers 2. That's not a cheap slap at the latest Bay Blast. While I enjoyed TF2, a session in well choreographed action it was not. Here you are close up with the characters, and get to see each of them doing their part, often in slo-mo, harkening back to the thrilling moments of 300.

If you read the cast list, it's seems pretty safe. Need a crazy guy? Call Crispin “Creepy Thin Man” Glover. Need a sensitive youngster for a quest? Call Elijah “Frodo” Wood. Gruff leader? Christopher “Edelweiss” Plummer's your man. But in concert, they all work so well together. Highlights are John C. Reilly's ultimate sidekick character, and the uncredited, but household favorite, Kevin Michael Murphy's over eager bodyguard with a fetish for magnets. Each of them do a lot with a little, which leads into the central problem of the film.

Slight spoilers here, but we learn that each of the numbered golems, are not in fact whole people, but each is an aspect of the same original person. This way they each represent one primary emotion or goal from their creator. This is clever, but leaves each of them as incomplete. It ties into the overall theme, but still leaves the characters a bit, ahem, threadbare. The same goes for the story. The only knock against the movie would be the plotting. It's very primary colors. The group starts from A, travels to B, then back to A, then to B again and finally returns to A for the finale. And all of this takes place in about a mile square. Toy Story did show us that much can be done when the small world is seen as big, but it does feel small scale and thus makes the stakes seem equally low. This has a twofold effect of thin characters in a thin storyline making the movie feel lighter than the events would have you believe.

But oh those visuals. Having glimpsed the opposite in theaters, that being Delgo, I'll take this mix any day. Movies are predominately a visual medium after all, all that other stuff got added later. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who was interested in it. While the blockbusters this year have been either dumb, dull or entirely predicable, it is these little movies, smaller budgets and more creativity that has renewed my faith in the medium. Let's hope a couple more can sneak through before we're deluged with heavy historical dramas, poignant movies about adultery and my personal windmill, rich white people with problems. Here's to a small check and a big idea.

Rest In Peace, Patrick Swayze.

And now you want me to WHAT?

I have been ticked off, and so I turn to my ever trusty and ever ready blog to vent. Video gaming, like any other medium, is constantly evolving. It might be doing so at a faster pace but much like comics or TV or movies, it has to change with the times. What is hip and awesome one day is old and tired the next. You must incorporate the amazing new feature your competitor implemented in his last game or you run the risk of being behind the times. This can be a frustrating thing for developers. The video game industry is more dependent on sequels than most other art forms, and they must skate the razor's edge of innovating while not alienating.

As consoles age, games advance and looking back can sometimes make us wince at what we put up with. For me, the best thing to die off was the timer. Why can I only stay in a level for a set amount of time? Besides exploring, maybe I need some more time to master that tricky jump? I was happy when that hit the dust bin of history. Same thing with lives, like picking up 1UP mushrooms. I was shocked and saddened when after being gone for almost a decade, Super Mario Galaxy decided to resurrect the concept with all the ensuing aggravation. Another of these terrible trends has resurfaced, one I hoped had gone extinct.

I remember playing through and loving Sly Cooper. It was a staple on the PS2, a cel shaded platformer about a raccoon thief. It was funny and clever and kept you on your toes. In most levels, the object was not to destroy your enemies, but to sneak through the levels undetected and make off with the object of desire. By the end of the game, I was a ninja, swinging above the heads of the guards, hiding in potted plants and never tripping an alarm. I had mastered my skills and so I charged into the final battle ready to best the boss. And I found out I had to fight him in a jetpack, flying over the city.

I'm sorry, what?

Yes, for the final battle they introduced a whole new concept, one that had been absent from the rest of the game, and demanded you learn a whole new set of skills to beat the game. "Aggravating" does not cover it. All of the work I had done meant next to nothing. And this wasn't an isolated occurance. Halo, that celebrated series of first person shooters, ends their games with driving sequences. Bioshock, the moody atmospheric study of morality and society has you run in a circle and shoot a guy a bunch of times. I thought the game industry had moved on from this practice, but I was wrong.

To be fair, the game in question, Batman: Arkham Asylum, always had a strong combat element to it. Many places in the game, you had to fight your way through a bunch of guys to progress. But the game was about sneaking, detective work, not being seen and fighting your way out when you had to. I was good at all of these things, except combat. It's not that I was terrible, but I never got a rhythm for it, I always felt I was mashing buttons and hoping for the best no matter what combos I bought or upgrades I used. So I come to the end of the game, and what is it? They lock you in the room with a bunch of guys and you have to punch your way out. How very Batman?

And worse, you have to be pretty near perfect to do it. You get no help, no reprieves and no health regeneration. You have to take out wave after wave and do it on one health bar. Here I had gotten through the whole game, beat every boss, solved every riddle and I might not be able to beat the game because the one aspect I never mastered is the only one that ended up mattering. I don't hate the game. I've had a pretty fun time playing through it. But not being able to see the ending of a game I worked so hard on is pretty frustrating when it seems like the last part is out of character both for the game and for the universe it is set in. I won't go as far as BATMAN WOULDN'T DO THAT! but I do feel like the World's Greatest Detective is not really using his smarts. I know asking What Would Batman Do is ultimately pointless, but I'm pretty sure standing in a room full of thugs and punching them out one by one is not it.

Oh well, maybe they'll fix it in the sequel.

Inglorious Basterds

First off, it's a bad title. No, strike that. The title is fine, but inaccurate. That, plus the advertising, would lead you to believe that the movie is about this group of Nazi hunters, how they got together and showing you their early missions together, leading up to one great Dirty Dozen final mission. This is far from the truth. While the Basterds are a major part of the movie, they are only one part, I'd say, a third of the movie. We get to see their origin, the end of one of their missions and a big operation toward the end. But to suspect that this movie is all Brad Pitt and the boys killin' Nazis is wrong and could lead to disappointment.

Which would be a shame, because this movie is stunning. Like most Quentin Tarantino films, it does tend to have his obsessions writ large. Conversations tend to go on and on, even though seldom do they end up being boring. The reason I started this piece off with a warning is that going in thinking this movie is wall to wall action can be dangerous, because this is a different set of muscles QT is flexing. Instead of blistering violence, we have him showing us nerve twanging suspense. Double agents, false accents, hidden identities, you are enjoying the wonderful rhythms of QT's writing while at the same time asking, does he know about her? Did that mean anything? Do you think he noticed that slip-up? It sizzles, it crackles but only rarely does it explode.

From the long view, this movie ends up being a series of people sitting around tables talking. But in close up, each one is as intricately choreographed as a John Woo shootout, and as unique. I mean that both ways. If you'll permit me a bit of film school, the motifs tend to recur, like how every character has intense and diverse feelings about movies. Was this really what they were talking about in wartime? That leads to another point. Leave history at the door. This movie is no more accurate than any western. It touches on actual bits, but remixes it all. The War is the backdrop, not the subject of a History Channel special.

What it comes down to is character. Besides his fractured storytelling and his penchant for over the top violence, what QT excels at is creating three dimensional characters. And in setting this in the familiar backdrop of WWII, it allows him to work with larger character types. It's my opinion that in this movie, QT has found not only his Darth Vader but also his Darth Maul. He has created his iconic, gigantic bad guy who dominates and fascinates and oppositely the person that the fans will love who gets far too little screen time and leaves the film much too quickly. I've never wanted spinoffs and tie ins to a QT movie until now. It positively demands a 6 issue comic miniseries. Are you listening Boom Studios? Somebody buy Mark Waid a ticket.

The movie is not without its flaws. I found myself much more interested in the margins, in the things hinted at but not shown in several scenes. Rarely do you find a movie with so much story that it spills out into the cracks. It's got some pacing issues but never feels like it's almost 3 hour running time. While some scenes do drag, often their importance is revealed later. It was a much different movie than I expected, but I so rarely get surprised at the movies that it ended up being a pretty amazing time.