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Reviews
Pitch Black (2000)
Yet another Sci-Fi B movie
Gosh, where to start? I felt like they were insulting our intelligence from the beginning. I have no problem suspending disbelief on Sci-Fi movies, but that goes only so far. There are a few things that made this movie really lame. First of all, they crash-land on a planet with three suns. This is simply impossible. If a planet orbited three suns, it would have one hell of a bizzarre looking orbit, not to mention some really screwed up gravity. Second, let's not even get into the odds of a nitrogen-based atmosphere way out in the galactical boonies. In other words, how could they breathe? Finally, I loved the wonderful "Soylent-Green"-esque camera tinting. Please, hollywood, or wherever these half-baked movies come from, stop. Put a little more work into the movie before you ask the average viewer to buy into this nonsense. If you don't, you insult our intelligence.
Fainaru fantajî VIII (1999)
The grandest disappointment in a year of disappointments....
Alright, I was horribly disappointed with this game, because I am a huge fan of the Final Fantasy line, I have played 6 out of the 8 total games. Perhaps I was expecting too much out of this one. That is what many people have told me. I don't think that they are right though. I mean, if consistently, 5 out of 7 games (probably all 7, but I wouldn't know) are great games worth playing multiple times, is it too much to expect the next in the series to fall under the same general formula for a game? I don't think that it is. I have not played the game all the way through yet, I have decided to stop on the third disc merely because if I play any more I might have to go out and shoot myself. After the character in Star Wars Episode 1 (star wars I am also a huge fan of) Jar-Jar Binks practically ruined the movie single handedly for me, only slightly helped by poor gunfighting and line delivery, this year has had two major disappointments. If you add to that the last half of my senior year of high school, where the only really interesting things that happened happened outside of school, and then upon arriving at college discovering it was not what i had hoped, this year has pretty much sucked. Oh yeah, Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun was pretty weak too, I had been waiting for that one for a while. Let's see. I don't think that there are any other things I am waiting for that will be coming out this year. Perhaps Chrono Cross, the sequel to Chrono Trigger will be a grand disappointment merely to add to the symmetry of it all.
Anyways, Back to the reasons why I didn't like this game. #1 The magic system is completely bastardized. I will say no more on the off chance that you haven't played the game yet and you came HERE of all places to read about the game. All I will say is that if you liked the old magic system, get ready to be disappointed. #2. The Story is very very weak. It is the weakest story in all of the games. The attempt this time to focus on the love story has only reduced the game to a shadow of what the game could have been. The character development is horribly weak, and all the wrong characters are developed in all the wrong ways. #3 There is no emotion felt for the main characters. I personally felt that they could all die off and i would be much happier ending the story myself.
I would like to finish by saying that Sakaguchi was a great game creator, he created perhaps what were the best games of all time. Especially Final Fantasy 7. Final Fantasy 7 is the greatest game of all time, In my humble opinion. Whatever magic Sakaguchi poured into the first 7, he left out of this one. For those of you who have played Final Fantasy 7, did you not actually feel something at the end of the first disc? For those who played both FF7 and FF8, did you ever feel anything like that for the characters in FF8? I did not. I think that Mr. Sakaguchi's time has came and gone, and it is now time for a new genius to take hold of the Squaresoft Dynasty of games, hopefully someone who will make a game which I would be glad to wait in line for, not the meaningless dribble that is FF8.
Mikan no taikyoku (1982)
Best foriegn film I have seen.
This movie is not my favorite movie, that would be the Shawshank Redemption. However, it is my favorite foreign film of all time. People in america hear plenty about the horrors that occured in the European Theater during World War 2. Unfortunately, the only thing that we all seem to know happened in Asia collectively is that we won by dropping the Atomic Bomb on hiroshima. In the 80's there was the brief publicity over the cancer victims of hiroshima. For the most part however, the Pacific Theater has been greatly ignored. This movie not only shows the brutality of the Japanese war machine both in Japan and in the land they conquered. It also gives a good picture of the atrocities that occurred in China as well.
Still. all that is nothing. It also ties all of that history in to the game of Go, a game revered in both cultures. It shows the differences between both cultures. If you are looking through the movie store one night, wondering what to rent. I recommend this.