Blizzard Entertainment put Diablo III into open beta to stress test the servers over the past weekend, giving everyone an opportunity to play the new game for the first time before being released on May 15, 2012. I wasn’t impressed. If you played Diablo I and/or Diablo II, you’re playing the same game. As a [...]
The new “Your Highness” movie has all the makings of a classic sword-and-sorcery movie that we haven’t seen much of since the early 1980s. A younger prince being resentful of his big brother’s claim to good looks and quest fame. The older prince comes home with his soldiers from yet another challenging quest and a [...]
When Battle: Los Angeles came out last week, it was several days after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. Which was extremely ironic considering that the first place the mysterious meteorites fell from the sky was off the coast of Japan. I went into the movie theater knowing only one thing about this movie: Michelle Rodriguez. [...]
I don’t remember much of the original movie beyond Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) being sucked into the system and the special effects that were pretty cool back in the early 1980s when computer animation was still in its infancy. The original movie is no longer available on DVD or even Netflix Instant for viewing. That will [...]
When my friend and I arrived to see “Pandorum” at the Century 24 last week, the parking lot was empty. This is the place where bad movies open to die an unwatched death. For a science fiction movie, good or bad, this wasn’t a bad situation. We were horrified to find a bevy of pre-teen girls [...]
When my friend and I arrived at the Winchester 23 to see “Jennifer’s Body” last week, the parking lot was empty. We thought were at the Century 24 down the street, where bad movies open to die an unwatched death. A few more people arrived after we settled down inside the theater, including a couple who [...]
When I saw “Extract” this past weekend, I expected a movie about seemingly normal people caught up in situations that leads to morally compromising choices that no one in their right mind would entertain and someone dropping dead for no good reason. I wasn’t disappointed. This is a Hollywood genre that I like to call [...]
I read the reviews from the The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle describing the new “Ice Age: Dawn of The Dinosaurs”movie as being scientifically inaccurate because the last great ice age occurred after the dinosaurs been wiped out by a meteor. Funny. I thought this was entertainment rather than a documentary. Or maybe the reviewers are scientifically stupid? [...]
A new graphic novel by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, “A Drifting Life,” is a semi-fictional autobiography of the post-World War 2 manga scene, and perhaps the thickest (856 pages) I have ever read. Bracketed between the end of World War II in 1945 and the Peace Treaty in 1960, this story is about Hiroshi Katsumi learning to become a manga artist, [...]
On Saturday, 2/28/2009, my friend and I had a grand adventure. We spent all day at WonderCon 2009 in San Francisco, and saw the 10:00PM performance of Cheech & Chong in Santa Rosa. By the time I got home on Sunday morning at 2:30AM, I been awake for 20 hours straight and had driven 230 miles. Driving [...]