[Movie Monday] Slumdog Millionaire

I saw Danny Boyle's latest yesterday, in the midst of all the post-Oscar hype, and as a fan of his previous work, I was prepared to like it a whole lot. Little did I know.

Holy crap, how overrated is this film? I don't mean to sound like the typical Internet critic douche, but come ON. Far from Boyle's finest, let alone the best film of 2008. Sure, it's better than the Beach, but what the Hell people.

My main gripe is the fact that it feels like there's a huge disconnect between the two parts of the movie, kind of a reverse La Vitta é Bella, in a sense. In this case, the first part is a gritty, dark and realistic drama, while the second part is something of a Bollywood farce with an old-Hollywood forced happy ending. But between the two, there's no real link, nothing that glues them together. Even the characters feel like completely different people.

I feel the need to emphasise just how forced the happy ending is. Of all the horrible clichés storytellers can use to pull their characters out of the shitholes they've dug for them, fate and predetermination are amongst the very worst. I don't mean to get all philosophical about the nature of choice and whether we are in control of our destinies, but as a storytelling technique alone, it's just lazy. It sends out the message that if you're meant to be awesome, you barely have to try. The right answer will come to you anyway. Of course, if it wasn't written that you'd be awesome, you're royally butt-fucked. Hooray!

Now, I don't mean to sound grumpy and imply that happy endings, especially forced ones, are necessarily bad. They work just fine in goofy movies such as A Life Less Ordinary (incidentally, another Boyle film) but in a gritty, realistic drama, ehhhh... that's asking too much from poor ol' Ms. Suspension of Disbelief.

Don't even get me started at the dancing scene at the end.

The Final Verdict:

2 out of 5 (Zelda) rupees.

TL;DR Version

Academy awards are becoming more and more like mercy fucks lately.

[WTF Monday] Oh Konami, where art thou?

I swear, if Konami were an actual person instead of a gaming company, right now I'd be thinking that somebody had kidnapped and replaced him with his evil alien cross-dressing clone.

What's the reason behind such a colorful remark, you ask? Quite simply, the fact that they've apparently decided to create a Castlevania fighting game (via Kotaku.com).

It was a real Death-Star-Destroying-Alderaan moment, as countless fans of the series held their collective breaths when heard that Konami would make a new Castlevania game for the home consoles... only to learn that it's not an arcade-adventure-RPG-platformer like the previous iterations, but rather a game in a genre that Konami hasn't touched in more than a decade. And that was probably a good thing.

Hell, I'd go as far as saying that Konami has only made two good fighters. Yi Ar Kung Fu, which came out more than 20 years ago and is not playable any longer (seriously, get over it), and this little gem:

This reminds me, I need to get a copy of this game again.

But I digress. On to the offender in this case, Castlevania: Judgement being its name, and the Nintendo Wii will be its home, if it ever gets one. The ugly little mutt. Truth be told, we don't know enough about the game yet to pass judgement on it, but... The whole thing reeks of Masters of Teras Kasi...ty. I'm not sure what's up with that pun.

At any rate, it feels like the exact same thing as MoTK. A half-assed attempt at milking a franchise, rather than trying something genuinely different. And to make matters worse, at least Star Wars: MoTK came out at a time when 3D fighters were still big in the market. Nowadays, people have moved on and the genre has lost its mainstream popularity, which is another reason why this move makes little to no sense. It's as if Namco decided to release a Tekken Point n' Click adventure. A good franchise and a good genre don't always make for a good combination.

Whatever Konami apologists will tell you, such a move does not promote progress or trying out new ideas. If the company was so sure they had a good fighting game engine in their hands, why not try out a new IP, instead of wrapping it around Castlevania characters*? It's not about making progress, it's about being lazy.

And speaking of lazy, you've probably heard already about Diablo 3. Not the most surprising of announcements, to be sure, but at least it was one that pleased all fans of the series. Undoubtedly, people are preparing their spreadsheets already in sheer glee. Me, that's not my cup of tea. I liked the original Diablo way back when, but I was a teenager back then, and much more impressionable, especially when it came to things that were gritty, dark and violent. I openly confess to playing Diablo 2 simply for the story, graphics but mostly those jaw-dropping cinematics. The game was... eh, but oh my gods, those cinematics were amazing.

I predict I'll play the same game for the exact same reasons, provided that my PC will be able to run it. I'm sure a lot of people will go nuts over its hack n'slash gameplay, and obsess over its items and whatnot, but I really can't bring myself to care about those things anymore.

Can't really blame Blizzard for giving people what they want, though. People have been bitching forever... I mean wishing that this game would be eventually released, so it's a win-win situation. The fans get what they want, D3, and Blizzard execs get what they want, i.e. huge piles of money.

Now if only somebody would think of what us disaffected and picky elitists want, we would finally get our Lost Vikings sequel on the Nintendo DS. One can only hope.

Until we get that, feel free to drool over D3's cinematic teaser, it's worth every drop of saliva:



I wanted to write a mini-review of Alone in the Dark, but this post is already too long. Something for next week, I guess.

* I refuse to mention the parallels with the Smash Bros franchise, since that's a discussion I don't want to get into.

TL;DR version:

Konami execs seem to have gone batshit insane, while the ones at Blizzard seem to be right on the money. Literally.

(Ha, ha. I doth slay me.)

Seriously though. The Lost Vikings DS. The Lost Vikings Touch. The Lost Vikings Whatever. Make it happen!