Shouting Grounds

So…Was I expecting more? I guess I was. After all, two awesome fucking games worth of story built the legend of Max Payne…how hard should it be to take just some of that and slap it on the big screen? Apparently too hard. While there were a few small alterations that I thought were forgivable, this movie was a giant turd sandwich. The worst part to me was it didn’t even bother to accurately follow the story from the first Payne, which could have EASILY been a great movie given the right director/writer combo to put it up. Instead, as usual, some shitstain has to “make the story his own” by changing things around. Either that or they didn’t think that the American movie audience would be able to follow the original plots.

Something else that made me upset, you had the fucking cast to do it! Max, Mona, BB, Lupino, Bravura…the bitch head of Aesir! The movie looked right too! The only thing missing was story story story. Fuck it…it’s not worth anymore of my time.

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Paul Fuckin Newman (bytheway) lost his battle with cancer last night.

When you’re drinking tonight, pour a little out for Butch.

Hey, it really works!

Holy shit!

WHEE! November 18th!

from digg.com

Well…Friday I waited in line for over 2 hours to finally give ‘ol Steve some of my hard-earned dosh. I’ve bought Apple products before, but unless I’ve given them as gifts, never kept the fucking thing. This is the first Apple product that I bought for MJS exclusively… I’ll recount the experience before I weigh in on my first 72 hours with the product.

The cats in Cupertino decreed that the new 3G iPhone could only be bought in Apple and AT&T stores starting at 8a on Friday. Guaranteed lines of zealots at the Apple stores…prompting me to think that I’d be safe arriving an hour early to an AT&T store mere miles from an Apple store. Not so much. At 7a there were 35 people in front of me…and every single fuck around me had an EDGE iPhone. I’m not exaggerating. Every goddamn person had a 1-year old, perfect-working-condition iPhone.

Now…I’m moving up from a Samsung a900 on Sprint, so the iPhone is whole milk to me. But I’ve spent some time with the EDGE iPhone and don’t find it to be incredibly handicapped compared to the 3G. The web access is faster, but all iPhones will get the 2.0 software…so we’ll be on a nearly-level playing field from what I can see. The most obvious advantage being that my phone was “only” $199, whereas the earliest adopters got horn-fucked last year.

Back to the lines. AT&T had deployed some Zealot Wranglers to keep the natives in czech, trained in the fine art of counter-intel. The agent for our portion of line was particularly vicious…claiming illogically that she was incapable of counting how many iPhones were available for purchase and beckoning everyone to eschew their jobs and stay in line no matter what happened. Luckily I was able to forward the trouble phone to my cell and remain away from the office until I had blown my wad…others were not so lucky. Two seething and sweaty IT pro’s in line behind me couldn’t handle the pressure and rolled out of the firing line mere minutes before I secured my prize.

With regards to the process, Apple screwed the pooch in my opinion. Last year some anti-zealots hacked their phones and whatever…so this year’s plan was to activate at the store on purchase. That plan will probably be fine after a few weeks…no so much on Friday. The entire central time zone was struggling to activate through iTunes starting at 8a. Case in point, it took the first guy in line over 30 minutes to reemerge with his activated phone. Luckily for us, the AT&T order-takers quickly decided to dump the activate procedure and I got my phone activation-free. And thus the activation process took about 3 minutes later on in the day.

So…you’re saying “MJS, how’s the fuckin phone?”

Pretty goddamn swell. I tried to give it a well rounded rinse over the weekend: making some long-distance calls, listening to a podcast (thousand cuts, y’all), watching a trailer, downloading some free apps from the new apps store, using google maps to find a Panera Bread, etc. Good shit. About half of my interweb browsing was done via my home wifi, but I was most impressed by how quickly the phone hopped from wifi to 3G to Edge when the signal strength demanded it. Definitely some quality there.

I’m impressed so far, and I’m certainly finding every reason to use the thing. However, I vow not to become the asshat zealot that will whip out the phone to counter a pilot when he claims our plane is delayed due to weather. Fuck him.

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Usually, I’m bigass cynical bastard when it comes to network TV…just ask Redscape. But a review from someone whose opinion I trust, and seeing that the show has made it into season two does something to peak my interest. And ho! The show in question features one of the greatest actors of all time, Bruce “Fucking” Campbell!

The quick and dirty from IMDb: “A spy recently disavowed by the US Government uses his Special Ops training to help others in trouble.”

Okay, so the show is topped with the typical network shredded cheese. There’s some annoying characters surrounding our hero meant to develop his humanity, etc. Every ep features a short sequence or two where Michael (hero) needs to create a small spy device or something from commonly available items in the classic McGyver style. Each episode tells a self-contained story, wrapped in a larger (and more interesting) arc.

On the whole, Burn Notice is not much more than an updated Knight Rider without the sweet eightiesmobile with a thin spray of McGyver over top. The show does have a pretty great style, and the femme primero is a hawtie that Redscape might recognize as a friend of Col. Frank Slade.

Honestly, I think I’m just looking for something to watch now that BSG is on another retardedly-long break, and FX doesn’t know when the fuck they’re going to continue the second and third best network TV shows (The Shield and Rescue Me)… Sometimes the cheese starts to stink, but like I said…it’s got a cool style and is mostly fun to watch. Bruce Campbell’s great as always.

MagicJohnStone for “Burn Notice” -

Whilst on the road for work this week, I decided to torture myself a little by watching John Rambo, or First Blood: Part II, or just Rambo if you like. Don’t bother.

First thought: Sly is grotesque. He’s already publicly admitted to using steroids and HGH, even recommending that older, living action figures like himself turn to horse meds to make themselves titans. Someone should nudge him and tell him he’s starting to look like Jabba the Hut.

Before (circa Rambo III) & After (now)

C’mon right? How does he not start to wonder if he made the right decision when he has to have his t-shirt’s tailored to have a 44″ collar? When he talks it looks like he’s got a mouth full of peanut butter!

Back to the movie, 3% decent, 97% dogshit. While I’m all about gruesome deaths, this movie was just comical. They had to have used Bryan Brown and Brian Dennehy to do the gore effects, as every single one jumped off the screen as obvious CG. The fucks didn’t even try to blend the CG into the scene to make it look realistic, making any CG look more like cell-shaded art ala Roger Rabbit.

The story was silly, some righteous missionaries try to teach the Burmese the missionary position and end up getting captured, having already been warned by Rambo (who’s still wallowing in Thailand, fishing for the locals) not to bother in Burma. Rambo leaps to action and kills everyone. Yawn.

The 3% good came in when they actually tried to tie into the magic of the first movie. One of the missionistas actually manages to get more than just a moan and a stare from Rambo with some questions, and tries to talk him into going home to AZ, USA, to visit his family finally (do they still think he’s in Nam?). Tacked onto the end, he’s actually done it and returned to America. Wearing the same giddup and carrying the same duffel from when Dennehy started the whole shit off with him in the 80’s. Walking Bruce Bixby-style to his home. Too bad they didn’t expand this 3% to offset the shit that made up the rest of the movie.

So,
Magic John Stone for Rambo:

yay!

yay! It’s been a long time since I posted, so I figured this would be a good post to get back on the wagon with.

It was pretty badass to run through the Soldier Field concourse and through the actual gate that the Bears use on gameday, onto the grass and out to the 50.The adrenaline rush was unparalleled.

And with that, I’m buttoning up my distance running for the summer. I still plan to run for fitness and such, but no more training for long distance this year. Gonna focus on other things.

again…yay!

Fresh off the press from our favorite fear-machine! CNN has a new ‘feature’ called “CNN T-Shirt“. If you czech out the headlines under “Latest News”, you’ll see some of the stories have the little camera icon next to them, sure to deliver about 90 seconds of commercials and 30 seconds of news. Nothing new right? Well today I see a little t-shirt icon next to that one. Clicked on it and get this Total Bullshit (TM) new idea…CNN T-Shirt. Apparently you can order a shirt in your choice of size, color and sex…with the headline and the timestamp of when it happened.

Okay…are you really fucking kidding me? Try this one on, dumbshits: