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Review: But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)

2007-09-09 03:37 -

I watched But I’m a Cheerleader tonight. It was pretty awesome, although the ending was kind of a bit contrived. Mmm, hot femme chicks. I definitely agree with the critics about the gay guys being excessively stereotypical, and there definitely wasn’t as much depiction of the relationship between Graham and Meghan as I would have liked. All in all, I’m really glad that I’ve started to have a pretty good sense of humor about gender stereotypes and movie quotes such as “we can’t allow you to live an unhealthy lifestyle under our roof” and “you’re choosing to cut us out of your life”. The scene in the film that resounded the most with me involved Meghan putting all of the pieces together about her orientation being different – the fact that she enjoys looking at the bodies of other women, that she’s very touchy-feeley with women, that she is revulsed by the idea of her boyfriend french-kissing her, and that she likes to keep photographs of women in her locker and bedroom.

I may need to go on a moviewatching binge and see some of the other LGBT themed movies out there that I’ve been missing out on.

Grade: B+

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Club Penguin (2006)

2006-03-19 22:31 -

Oh god. I do have a certain conflict of interest, given that they’re competing with Puzzle Pirates for miniclip.com downloads, but… geez, stupidity has no bounds. A game designed for extremely wee kiddies, with absolutely no depth whatsoever. Frankly, I don’t see how they expect to get parents to sign their kids up for subscriptions. I’m sure it’s 100% child-safe, etc., but there’s absolutely no point to it. The plusses: runs directly in-browser using Macromedia Flash, has a simple registration that gets you playing right away (except some flaws with forcing people to check their e-mail, and abandon their current tab, rather than smoothly accepting a code from the “thanks for registering” screen. The minuses: man, the engine sucks. Character movement lags on my 1.8 ghz laptop, and the games are just plain silly. In-game interactions are nearly meaningless, with every character looking identical except for color.

Rating: C-

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Waking Life (2001)

2006-02-25 18:44 -

Artistically brilliant with the use of rotoscope, but poorly executed in terms of coherency, or conveying anything meaningful. Use off long words for the sake of using them is silly. Put me to sleep, although that might be because of pre-existing sleepiness rather than anything about the movie per se. D+

In a way, this movie reminds me of why I decided that I didn’t like English – it seems that it’s intellectualism taken to an extreme so outrageous that it becomes trite and laughable. Meta^(n+1)=0, and this definitely jumped the shark for me – too much, over and over. Definitely would not watch again.

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The Ring (2002)

2006-02-21 12:12 -

Wow. A really great movie, but not as scary for me as it’s said to be for many people. Without giving away too much of the ending, it’s definitely classic, and has very unique twists and turns. Every moment in the movie, the audience is left trying to put together pieces of a constantly changing puzzle, yet terrified of what will happen when all the pieces fall into place. A-.

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Review: Rise of Nations (2003)

2005-12-26 23:23 -

An enjoyable RTS blending historical and strategic elements. I wouldn’t necessarily call it the most innovative in terms of gameplay (since RTS’s haven’t really changed that much since Starcraft or so, with units simply named different things and fancier graphics) – but the sides are very well balanced. The computers are hard. Suresh and I couldn’t even beat a single computer on Moderate, teamed up together. What is interesting about RoN is the multitude of resources that must be managed, and the intricacies of the tech upgrade tree – according to the manual, there are over 200 different types of units. Instead of opting to introduce extremely effective counters to masses of a single unit, the game designers have added an interesting price ramping scheme that linearly increases the cost for each type of unit for each of those units produced, which makes for interesting battles – if you have the resources, you’re able to mass more of an extremely powerful unit without very many effective counters, but usually resources will limit things. This also means that economic warfare plays a more important element in the game, as lack of a single resource can cripple unit production. Rating: A-.

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Review: King Kong (2005)

2005-12-23 22:14 -

A decent movie, but not as good as Lord of the Rings, and certainly not Peter Jackson’s finest work. I particularly felt that there was a lack of focus and attention on the emotional relationships between the characters, especially between Ann and King Kong – instead, the movie appeared to pander to special effects, horror, and creepie crawlies. I’ll probably expand later, but suffice it to say, the movie wasn’t what I expected coming into it. Grade: B-.

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Review: The Usual Suspects (1995)

2005-12-19 23:31 -

George and I watched The Usual Suspects a couple hours ago. It was a sound movie, and very entertaining, but not outstanding. The plot twists, at least seen from the perspective of someone who grew up on CSI, were fairly predictable, and nothing compared to those found in Se7en, which were much more original (but bloody and stomach-upsetting too). Rating: B.

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