The Billionty-Oneth Geek: Older Than 8 Since 1991

I shit you not, this is actually a movie and that is actually its title. The 41 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It is a DTV parody movie similar in vein to Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th which was really the cheaper DTV version of Scary Movie released the same year. In T41YOVWKUSMAFSAI (abbreviated title), as the title would suggest, it's a parody of Judd Apatow's brand of comedy movies. The movie was shit, don't get me wrong, but it did get me to laugh twice I think and all things considered, that should be considered a success. The problem with the movie (and there are lots) is that it was set up to fail. Parody movies by themselves are tough enough to pull off, relying 99% on sight gags and slapstick humour. Scary Movie , for example, I thought was good moreso for how well it weaved in several horror plot lines together rather than just rely on the gags. And if we're talking about gags, then Top Secret! w...

Following the success of DC's Fifty-Two weekly series, they released a series called Countdown immediately after Fifty-Two concluded. Countdown was also a weekly series used as a precursor towards the big summer crossover event called Final Crisis which would take place the following year (2008). I'm learning to love DC more and more with each passing series, at least as far as crossovers go. But with Countdown , I think they went to the well one too many times. Much like Fifty-Two , in Countdown , several different stories carry on simultaneously, giving us a perspective of the DC Universe. The story arcs ranged from zany (you had Jimmy Olsen become akin to a God... really, Jimmy) to useless (Harley Quinn, from the Batman series, joining the amazons) to boring (the story of the Monitors). With so many storylines, you'd think that at least one would stand out as being awesome, alas, none were found. On top of that, with so many convoluted subplots, the main story arc...

The summer blockbuster season might be a bust, if Shrek 4 is any indication of things to come. So it's a perfect time to look at movies from the recent past. The movie takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, after a global war that saw all forms of art, literature and antiquities destroyed. It follows a man named Eli (Denzel Washington) who is carrying a mysterious book across America. He fends off all sorts of miscreants before landing in a town controlled by a power hungry man named Carnegie (Gary Oldman). It turns out that Carnegie has been searching for that very book as he believes it can be used as a source of power and control over people. He knows that there is only one copy left in the world and when he discovers that it is in Eli's possession, he sends his cronies after him to retrieve it. So the book in question is none other than the good ol' Bible, but for some reason they never refer it to that, opting to call it "the book" in conversations, even t...

I'm always skeptical of Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes' remakes/reboots of horror movies which seems to be all they live on. Frankly, they have produced a lot of crap, but they did make ones where for the most part I enjoyed ( Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake would be one, Friday the 13th would be another). I understand from a business standpoint why movie studios would make these, but from the perspective of a fanboy, it makes no sense. Why play with history? Why recreate the wheel? Now, I enjoyed the original Nightmare on Elm Street but I can't say that I was the hugest fan of the series. I was exposed to the series later on in life (during my teen years) whereas I was introduced to Friday the 13th at a more young and impressionable age. For that reason, Jason Voorhees was always a more lasting (and life scarring) figure than Freddy Krueger. The movie follows a bunch of teens as they unravel a mystery surrounding the grisly deaths of a group of teenagers in town. Th...

It's not about me and women. Earlier tonight, I was at Starbucks catching up on this month's issue of Esquire (note 1: the one with Christina Hendricks on the cover) (note 2: Starbucks AND Esquire... but I swear I'm not a yuppie). It was an interesting issue as just about the whole thing was focused on women. The standout feature they had in this issue was a survey they conducted on American women. They polled 10,000 women on all types of issues, ranging from politics to religion to sex. The women were asked if they believed in God — 61% responded 'Yes' while 39% for 'No'. Interestingly, the follow-up asked whether they prayed — 45% said 'Yes' with the remaining 'No'. There was also a series of questions related to cheating in their relationships. Asked whether they ever had an affair — a quarter of them responded 'Yes'. Yet, when asked whether they would still cheat if they wouldn't be caught — only 16% responded 'Yes' w...

Having finished this game about a year ago, I was just going to leave it review-less because I didn't have much good things (or interesting things) to say about it. This week I finished Red Faction: Guerilla and I thought it would be folly on my part to not review Crackdown first since they are both very similar games. But whereas Red Faction brought a sense of joy in the destruction you created, Crackdown at best brought a feeling of disinterest. Crackdown is a sandbox game that places you in the distant future at a fictional city called Pacific City, and like any other game that's based in the future, the city is overrun by gangs and crime lords. You play as a futuristic cop imbued with superhuman strength and agility, where the strength helps you hit hard and lift heavy objects while the agility allows you to leap at great heights and run with great speed. As the top cop in the city, you're charged with taking down the 7 crime lords that own the city scattered in 3 ...

Usually I end off my movie reviews off with the trailer but with a movie as illustrious as The Human Centipede , I had little choice but to lead off with it. Yes, the movie is as eff'd up as the title would suggest. However, despite the B-movie status that such a movie would garner, while circulating around film festivals this past year, it received a lot of positive reviews. Such a movie would only appeal to a niche audience so the positive feedback was a surprise. The movie follows Lindsay and Jenny, two tourists in Germany doing some travelling. On one particular night, they head out to a club only to find themselves lost somewhere outside of the city. Unfortunately for them, one of their tires blow out and so they start searching the area for help. They get to the house of one Dr. Heiter, who at first seems reluctant to let them in, but after some thinking, succumbs to their request. This turns out to be the worst mistake of their lives. You see, Dr. Leiter is akin to a mad...

I was having a conversation with my brother the other day about this year's summer blockbuster movies. I concluded that there weren't many movies that I was hyped up for (but Inception and Predators are two of them). He brought up Iron Man 2 , but I just didn't feel as pumped as I was before I saw the first one. I guess because I've already seen him on the screen, it took a bit of the edge off. But I went to see it on opening day anyways. So how was it? The movie takes place a few months after the first one ended. We follow Tony Stark as he fully embraces being publicly known as the Iron Man. He showboats and galavants like the true star he made himself to be, famed for "privatizing peace" as he boldly claims. But not everyone is so enamored with Stark's swagger. The first is Ivan Vanko, a Russian who's father was Howard Stark/Tony's father's former partner. The two had a falling out, and Vanko the senior was deported while Howard receiv...

This April, whether you knew it or not, we had a Marvel VS DC movie war! But it was somewhat of a covert war. You had Kick-Ass earlier in the month from whose comic is released by Icon Studios, a Marvel Comics imprint, and then near the end of the month came The Losers , from DC's Vertigo imprint. It was as if Marvel and DC released their hounds on each other instead of raising their own fists. So after the smoke cleared, which one ended up as the better movie? I enjoy team-based action movies. It's pretty much why I enjoyed Ocean's 11-13 , Mission Impossible 3 , and to some extent, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra . I just like seeing how every member of the team is there for a certain reason; because of some technical skill, some management and leading skill, or for the main character, that well-rounded/jack-of-all-trades skill. For the same reason, I think that's why I enjoy games like Team Fortress 2 , because each player can play as a unique character with unique abi...

I had an urge to play old Game Boy games recently and so I went to one of my childhood favourites, Final Fantasy Legend II . If I recall correctly, I think my dad bought us the game when I was in grade 4 or maybe 5, so I was somewhere between 9 and 11. The game had such a lasting impact on me. It was an epic adventure filled with strange characters, unique combat and quite a memorable soundtrack. When you first load up the game, you're allowed to pick the character combinations for your party. There are humans. who are well-rounded fighters, mutants. who are adept at magic, robots. who are great with mechanical tools, and monsters. who have the ability to shapeshift after eating meat dropped by bad guys. The story is quite simple. There are pieces of magical fragments called MAGI scattered throughout the multiverse. You and your party traverse across all the different lands to recover these pieces of MAGI, to keep them away from the hands of evildoers. At the same time, you meet a...

I've always been a sucker for mob movies, I'm not quite sure why. The best reason I can come up with was that I was exposed to it at a very young age, much like I was with horror, yet horror always trumped everything. There must be something with death that I was intrigued with. In horror you had the over-the-top almost cartoony like deaths while in mob movies you had more ruthless and deaths that were more directly to the point. I guess the realism made it frightening. Gomorrah is that ruthless kind of a mob movie. The movie opens up with a scene at a tanning salon. We see a bunch of Italian men having a good time getting their tans. They are naked and in their most vulnerable state; a mistake in the mob world. It's not long before the whole gang gets executed. From the opening scene, you know shits going down. That pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the movie. But Gomorrah gives us more than straight up violence. The movie tells us five intertwining stories fro...