Mirror Mirror

[And so begins my Blaugust run... might be a day earlier than everyone else due to time difference though! Even my blog is in a different time zone than I am! :P]

I got to see this recently and boy does it take tacky to a new level. There are a few good moments and yes some good laughs too but the director saw fit to push everything to the ridiculously too far, especially towards the end making it far from the best rendition of the classic Snow White tale.

It was good to see Danny Woodburn on screen again. He and the (ethnically diverse?) dwarves are pretty cool as well as Nathan Lane's Brighton, a man servant to the Queen. Julia Roberts' evil queen is... hard to take seriously. She's broke for starters so she does not particularly make a fearsome foe. The "prince" is equally facepalm worthy. At least Lily Collins as Snow White was actually pretty decent. She certainly made a better Snow White than Kirsten Stewart in "Snow White and the Huntsman", which came out at near the same time. The latter movie is still better than this mess though.

All the king's men couldn't put it together again.

The crowning moment of crapiness for me is when the script saw fit to add in a bollywood number. Yeah. All the little things that were ok with the movie were totally flushed down the toilet with that. I'll give this one 1.5 apples out of 5, but you'd better just stay away as it's probably poisoned.

Blaugust Bonus: Part of the Belghast's challenge is to share some of myself in each blog, so I guess to start off with I will answer the question of why am I doing movie reviews? Other than I like watching movies, I actually have the time to watch them at the moment because I am currently unemployed. This is both scary and liberating at the same time.

Today I Smiled: Team Four Star DBZ Kai Parody

I've been watching Team Four Star's Dragonball Z "shortened" parodies for sometime now which shorten entire seasons of the show into a handful of episodes and they are always bloody hilarious. This time they get special mention because much like the original was redone into the "Kai" version which cuts out a LOT of filler, they've done the same to their own works and the result is a side spliting laughfest. Would you like to see the first two seasons of Dragonball Z in under 10 minutes? Now you can! :D

Team Four Star DBZ Kai Parody - Episode 1
Team Four Star DBZ Kai Parody - Episode 2

Blaugust Approaches

Belghast has set a big challenge to the blogging community to complete 31 days of blogging next month and for people to share more about their personal lives throughout. I know I've been a bit slack this month with my own posting so I thought I'd participate and see how it goes. Obviously there will be a bit of post spamming going on during this from many other bloggers so I can only imagine how much reading material is going to be popping up.

Honestly I'm not sure if I have the endurance for this task but what worries me more is the sharing part. I'm not so good with that but I suppose you will be learning a thing or two about me during the course of the event and that kinda scares me! Eep! >.<

In any case... you have been warned!

Today I Smiled: Wierd Al Yankovic

I've always been a fan of Wierd Al and his parody and polka songs so it's probably no surprise to anyone who has been on Youtube recently that he has a bunch of new music clips out, all of which made me smile. If your ear has a liking to his style too then here are the links in case you missed them!

Word Crimes - For all the writers out there, with pretty decent "word" animation!

Tacky - I'm impressed that this whole thing is one continual shot. Wonder how many takes it took?

Foil - my favourite of the bunch!

Hope all of you are having a great day! ^_^

Neverwinter Online: Fire up your Foundries!

For those who play Neverwinter Online, you have just under two weeks to enter the Cult of the Dragon Foundry contest that Cryptic is holding to celebrate the new module coming out next month "The Tyranny of Dragons". The requirements aren't that severe and while winning is decided by the community (so, we probably won't win) you still get a green level companion just for participating!

Well, this might come in handy...

This might be the time to give the foundry a try if you haven't already, and if you require help or knowledge then feel free to ask and I will try help to the best of my ability.

Just a quick run down on the main requirements:
-one entry per Author, must be new quest (easy)
-include the Cult of the Dragon (easy, just plan for them to be included)
-adhere to Foundry EULA (easy, just stick to D&D, don't add people from Star Trek or Warcraft etc. and don't make it too "sexual")
-average duration of 15 minutes or more

That last one will be what makes or breaks your adventure as a contender. The only way to get that time balance right is to play test a lot, which means actually having something to test BEFORE you submit your finished work to the official thread. Doing too much of one thing for 15 minutes will also lower the enjoyability so you'll need to be smart!

As a slight bonus: Your mission will get plays, even if it is just from other contestants gauging the opposition. That is one of the hardest things when making a mission - advertising and spruiking it, so it's best to take advantage of the official spotlight while you get the chance as foundry contests do not come about very often!

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

I only caught maybe the last half of the first movie which has the equally wordy title of Rise of the Planet of the Apes and that was enough to set the scene for me with this new release but have no fear, requiring to watch the first one is totally nullified with the informative script present here. For a movie full of monkeys, I found it pretty damn good! There are subtitles to be read for monkey sign language but that's not really a deterrent to me.

Most of the characters were pretty well developed and the acting pretty good, from the apes moreso than the humans surprisingly! Have to say that Gary Oldman is slightly wasted in his role, and probably would have been better as the "hero" human though that would mean changing the dynamics of some of the others. Most useless was the human "son", not really because of his ability but more because he wasn't given anything to do. You could have cut him out entirely or give his plot points to Kirk Acevedo's character. *shrug*

Don't mess with chimpanzee cavalry.

Andy Serkis as Caesar certainly steals the show though, and you'll definitely be looking forward to all scenes involving the chimp leader. I give it four and a half bananas out of five and think it is on the better end of the Planet of the Apes franchise (new and old). Surprisingly, I didn't see any bananas in the movie. Not sure I saw any real monkeys either! :P

Peggle Deluxe

I know this is an old game from Popcap, but I only just recently tried it out since it was free in the Origin game launcher. At its core it is a version of pinball with a slew of cute critters that help you get past all 55 levels to reach Peggle Mastery and for some reason this simple, casual and kid friendly game is insanely addictive.

Waaaaay too addictive...!

There are 75 challenges afterwards to reach grandmaster rank (of which I've done 48, they're getting tough!) so it's not like you will run out of things to do too quickly. If you're looking for an in betweener game or diversion then you might want to give Peggle a look. I give it four balls out of five, just from its addictiveness! >.<