Do Not Disturb the Kraken, and other mediocre re-imaginings

Seriously, keep the Kraken where it is. I know that sounds like something I'd say in the Captain's hot tub (possibly about that floating lobster) but it's still good advice: nobody needed to dislodge the Kraken this movie season. The Kraken looked like it was on a nice career swing in the last ten years after turning a cameo in Fellowship of the Ring into a feature role in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, and I know the Kraken's gotta eat, but it's still sad to to see so many talented people (Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Mads Mikkelsen and Polly Walker, amongst others) slumming it in a movie that's sold by one of the worst A-list actors working today... I think Sam Worthington is the new Keanu Reeves, doing for facial expressions what Keanu did for awkward line readings. On the other hand, bad as she is in this movie Gemma Arterton is still a delight to the eyes as a brunette (Strawberry Fields the oil-covered red-head secret agent was one of the highlights of Quantum of Solace). Honestly Hades was so bad in this movie I was sure he was played by William Hurt, like my brain wouldn't accept the idea of somebody as professional as Ralph Fiennes going that far over the top.

Studying Geography, sort of

Recently, I decided to further my education by expanding my knowledge of geography and climatology. I figured I'd pick up where I left off back in school, and start by playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?, which jogged my memory on a few things. One is that putting punctuation in a title is just stupid. I was also reminded of how well the early games that are only a few kilobytes still hold up in terms of actual game play, like they perfected the maze game in Pac-Man, and any improvement was just distracting from the purity of the original. But it was also good to learn a few things from Carmen San Diego about the geography of the Soviet Union, the importance of hitting the bank to change your currency before traveling from say Paris to Rome, and to learn a ridiculous amount about Comoros, which is a destination in about every god damned game. I was also interested to find that Carmen San Diego's organization V.I.L.E. has a significant presence in Iraq, and her henchmen always seem to pass through Baghdad after a heist. That got me anticipating News Corp releasing Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, where kids can learn about geography by deciphering clues about Osama bin Laden's travels they glean from interviewing people in various cities he's been to. Something like this:

Bank Teller:
He said something about visiting a stable democracy to congratulate the liberators. (Go to Baghdad)

Imam:
He left in a plane with a hammer and sickle flag on the wing. (Go to Nantucket Island)

People's Commissar Ted Kennedy:
All I know is he was looking forward to a free and fair election with no voting irregularities. (Go to Miami)

Then I thought I'd watch An Inconvenient Truth, and see what Al Gore's been up to for the last few years. Al Gore is surprisingly engaging, in a way he hasn't been since the night he took Ross Perot to school over NAFTA. He couldn't have done more to finish Ross Perot if he'd shoved his head in a bucket. It's also interesting to find that Al Gore, like President Bush, has an orthographical blind spot, and can't quite figure out how the word “arctic” is pronounced. Where President Bush adds extra vowels to nuclear, Gore will not suffer an inconvenient consonant, and has to just say “ardic” and hope nobody notices. Personally I think that warming up the oceans enough to cause a hurricane in the South Atlantic a good thing. A system of ocean currents that made it impossible for a hurricane to hit Florida but not Angola or Argentina was not equitable, and I think climate change should be Fair and Balanced. Glaciers melting in South America? Take your ski vacation in Colorado and quit whining about drinking water.

The video game movie trend is continuing, despite like none of them making any money unless they had Angelina Jolie in shorts (and even that got boring). There's supposedly a sequel to Doom coming out, even though eye candy like Rosamund Pike can only do so much to distract the audience from the dialogue. Take it from somebody who saw Bloodrayne, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, House of the Dead, Tomb Raider 1&2, Mortal Kombat 1&2, Resident Evil 1&2, Street Fighter, and Wing Commander, it's not often done well, and when it is, don't worry because they'll find a way to screw it up with a sequel.

What really stands out is the continuing struggle for Microsoft to find a way to lose even more money on the Xbox, which sells at a loss but makes it up on volume. The Halo movie had its projected budget creep up to $200m without entering production. A cocktail napkin estimate of how much this movie would need to earn is $600m, and I seriously have to wonder who would rent or buy it. No matter how popular it was, who would get a bunch of their buddies together to watch "Halo: The Movie" when they could just play the game instead? I would think if you take a date to this movie and all you're going to do later that night is play Halo in your bedroom by yourself. This movie is like an ad for the Xbox, and the Xbox is like a subsidized platform to keep people from buying anything from Sony. As I've noted before, Sony is also working that, so I'm not sure how much effort Microsoft needs to put into it.

All that being said, what I really found shocking was this: there's a Castlevania movie coming out next year. Castlevania? All I remember about that game is using the whip under the stairs to fight the giant bat that was the first level boss, 20 years ago on my nintendo in between thrilling games of Duck Hunt, which I believe was actually the original first person shooter. With his dreck coming up, I thought I might just stay out of theatres... until I saw the trailer for the Pac-Man movie.