The Fretless Bass Reviews: The Dark Knight Rieses

...Wow, time sure got the better of me over the past few months.  If anyone had asked me why I wasn't blogging, I might have said I didn't have time, but that's not true, so I guess I was just lazy.

I wanted to write again, and I couldn't think of a better way to get back into the game than with the new Batman movie.  Now, I know that the Colorado shooting may taint the subject, but I don't want to get into that, if you want to talk about it in person, I do have strong opinions on the subject.  However, for this review, I will criticize the movie the way I saw it, untainted by the horrible events in Colorado, because I saw TDKR at 7:30 on the night before it officially opened, as part of a BU alumni program. (My dad went there.)

Where to start?  I liked the movie a lot, and there are a lot of things they did right, but they also did a few things incredibly wrong, and those are the things I'm going to articulate better.

First of all, TDKR did a very good job at building anxiety, it isn't until about a half hour into the movie that Bruce Wayne dons the cowl and does some serious violence.  During the interlude before, we are introduced to an organized-crime free Gotham, but for some reason, everyone thinks "there's a storm coming."  When I heard that, the first thing I thought was, "how could you tell?"  Phrases like "there's a storm coming" piss me off, because they're a cop-out method of introducing anticipation.  Commissioner Gordon and Selina Kyle seem sure that the $#!^ is going to hit the fan, but looking back, I can't see how they could be so sure, given that there hadn't been a violent crime in Gotham in 8 years.

Next, a guy named Bane shows up and starts raising an army in the Gotham Sewers.  Bane himself is really cool, and about as faithful as cinema can be to the original character, he's strong, evil, and a brilliant strategist.  To top it all off, he has a mysterious background.

Then five minutes after you see him for the first time, Alfred casually mentions that Bane used to be a member of the League of Shadows. (The organization that Ra's Al Gul headed in Batman Begins.)  This upset me, they took an opportunity to make a giant plot twist, and made it about as important as Alfred telling Bruce that Bane's favorite color is Beige.

Then Bane takes over the city and what not, I don't want to go into details, because it's actually pretty awesome.  The Cops, (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Gary Oldman) lead a resistance against the freed criminals while desperately awaiting Batman's return.

That's as far as I want to go with the plot, a lot more happens, but it's too exciting to ruin while reading some guy's blog.

Of the new characters that were introduced, I liked both of them, Anne Hathaway is always good, and her character was layered and interesting, the only problem with Catwoman was that she only did one thing to advance the plot, and then she's just kinda hanging around, showing off her butt, until the end when she does a few more things.  However, Hathaway did a fabulous job with the part.  Overall, very good.

Officer John Blake is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who I like to call, "the franchise expander," and I'm not going to explain that, because it would spoil the movie, just go see it, I hear it's good.

Blake overall does more to advance the plot than Catwoman, and succeeds in being very interesting, this combined with the fact that Joseph Gordon-Levitt could desecrate the Wonder Woman movie franchise's grave and I'd still love him, gives the character Mickey's seal of approval.

Now for the fundamental problems, before I dive into the sea of foaming-mouth-loathing-from-the-bad-side-of-the-river-styx-even-for-Hades, I would like to assure people that I recommend TDKR, and it did more things right than it did wrong.  In fact, the only things keeping it from being the best movie of the summer, are below.

First, the twist was terrible, I don't want to get into details, (because it's the friggin' twist) but it made Bane seem infinitely less cool.

Then, they killed Bane, oh don't give me that, you could have predicted that the bad guy would die at the end of a gritty super-hero movie, but don't read the next two paragraphs if you don't want some spoilers that couldn't be avoided.

It's not that Bane dies that I hate, it's how they killed him, he died in a bafflingly anti-climactic way, he just gets shot, and they even try to make it comedic, which only made it worse.  Later in the movie, I found myself thinking, "hey, what happened to Bane?.... oh yeah," which is a terrible thought to have during a movie.  Also take in mind that this is after the plot twist made Bane the president of Wussconsin, the wussiest place to ever have a total wuss as a president.

Bane should have died by getting his mask ripped off or getting kicked into a vat of boiling something.

Anyway, if it weren't for those two major flaws, I would have actually rated TDKR above the Avengers, but it made those mistakes.  Also, while i'm on the subject, hey interwebz!  The Avengers and TDKR are both good, so shut up, because you, and the guy you met in a Reddit chat-room are both right.

Also, we know why most people wanted to see the movie anyway,




















Just sayin'

Sneak peaks suck

Today, I watched the sneak peak of the next half of The Walking Dead: season 2. In said clip, two male characters walk into a bar occupied by Rick and Hershel , and say, "Goddamn, you're alive." Rick and Hershel then look at each other like they've seen a ghost.

The obvious implication is that the new guys are from Rick or Hershel's past, and that they are characters we think to be dead. I'm here to argue that this isn't so.

I've read the graphic novels which the series was based on, and new characters are introduced out of nowhere all the time, so my guess is that these two new guys walking into the bar aren't old fan favorites back from the dead, but entirely new characters, and by "goddamn, you're alive," they actually meant, "They're not zombies, but regular people."

This of course means that the sneak peak was intensionally misleading.

Which is why they suck

I'm not saying that the next half of season 2 isn't going to be amazing, I just wish they would be honest with us.

For good measure, here's the link.

....

I couldn't find it...

the fretless bass reviews: El Camino by The Black Keys

Over vacation, my brother gave me the Black Keys album: Attack And Release. It's awesome, but that's a different article. Because I enjoyed my present so much, I bought their latest album, El Camino, and it's review worthy.

El Camino is the Black Keys seventh studio album, and it is alternative at its best. The Black Keys are famous for their blues-rock fusion that they do so well, but I feel like this is the first album where the style reached it's full potential. The first song that serves as evidence for this claim is the first on the album, "Lonely Boy," which starts out with a hard rock guitar riff, and balances itself out with a pop oriented anthem. The next song on the album is "Gold on the Ceiling." This song exhibits the Black Key's classic repeated guitar riff style similar to a previous hit, "Holwin' for You." And finally, one of my personal favorites, "Run Right Back," which has an almost childish guitar anthem to start, but finishes with a great bluesy feel.

Interestingly enough, the car on the cover of the album isn't the "El Camino" Ford model, which sums up the album nicely, it's not what you expect from the Black Keys, it's better. They took their iconic style and milked it for everything it was worth, and it's worth about 10.99 on I-tunes.

Vlog #1 The Lion In winter

So, you just witnessed me, in a bathrobe, yelling about how cool I am for one minute and thirty three seconds. you will undoubtably want to know more than what I was able to sputter out through movie maker, so here's the link to where you buy tickets!

http://www.ccpops.org/tickets.html

Show dates:

12/2/11 7:00 pm at Concord Carlisle High School

12/3/11 7:00 pm

12/9/11 7:00 pm

12/10/11 7:00 pm

12/11/11 2:00 pm

the fretless bass reviews: Skyrim

I did something with Skyrim I have never done with a game before, I went to the midnight release, and then spent the next 24 hours playing it.

Skyrim is incredible, if you played Oblivion, then you know how good Bethesda is at making fantasy RPG's, and I'm happy to say that Skyrim improved on Oblivion in many ways.

In Oblivion, the combat system worked perfectly, If asked, I would have told Bethesda to change nothing, but they did, and it's awesome. In Skyrim, you can duel wield weapons and spells. This comes in handy when you're fighting off three undead Nords in a dungeon, steel sword in one hand, fire spell in the other. You can also do cool combinations like two spells, or duel swords. Throughout my time playing, I experimented with several different combinations. When you wield duel swords, you occasionally get what I call "cutscene kills," which are essentially one hit K.O.'s except really messy. A sword and a spell lets you capitalize on balencing your stamina and magika, when one runs out, you can switch to the other. When you wield a bow and arrow, that takes two hands, which stinks for me because that's my preferred weapon.

The other major difference I noticed was that there was no class system. At first, I was opposed to this change because without having a distinct class to be, the individualism that I value from playing RPG's is lost. However, I was swayed from this opinion when I realized that this let the player enhance any skill they wanted instead of being stuck in one class they may realize they don't like. For instance, in oblivion, I was a bard, this meant that I was predominantly a stealth fighter, and specialized in hand to hand combat and bows. But what if while on a quest, I discovered the sword of amazing penmanship? Well then because I wasn't skilled with a blade, I'd be stuck wielding the bow of two bit poems instead of writing review masterpieces.

Also, in Oblivion, whenever you talked to someone, it would zoom in on their face, and they'd creepily stare at you for the ten minutes you spent seducing them into telling you where they hid the teddy grams? They took that out, now you get a wide view of their body, and you can look around during conversation. The thing about speaking that they changed that I didn't like was getting rid of the conversation wheel. Every now and then in Oblivion, you would encounter a situation in which you had to get someone to tell you personal information, only you're an elf, and everyone in the game is racist, so they don't exactly draw you a map to the sword of amazing penmanship. So you would have to enter into a fun mini-game, where you tell jokes, threaten, coerce, and make small talk with the person until they trusted you enough to leave you alone in their house so you could steal all their sentimental heirlooms.

Instead, Skyrim takes a conversation lesson from Dragon Age, and just gives you options with (threaten), or (persuade) next to them, and you better hope you're character's skill level is high enough, because there's no playable way to control whether they take nicely to that, or introduce you to the business end of a very large axe.

Now for the plot, You're dragon-born, and you need to kill some dragons to save the world. That's really it, the story plot isn't what makes The Elder Scrolls good, it's the freedom. The freedom to rob a palace dry and then sell it back to the court blacksmith, the freedom to chose any side in any confrontation, and the freedom to be a freaking awesome game.

So at the end of the review, Skyrim is the coolest game of the year, and if you don't play it, you're missing out on the adventure of a lifetime.

the fretless bass reviews:Contagion

Alright, this certainly took a while, it's been a few days since I saw contagion, and several since most people who are interested in it will have, so this review might not be timely, but people like to either have a semi-professional agree with them, or have something to argue, so here goes nothing.

Contagion was good, it was like a zombie movie without zombies (which ironically, would have improved it a ton). It followed the outbreak of a deadly flu-like virus worldwide through the eyes of several different people. The closest the movie came to a main character was the dad who's wife was patient zero and who also turned out to be immune. He had to spend the rest of the movie defending his daughter, so all of the societal breakdown was told through his point of view. There was also the high-ranking doctor in the CDC to explain the virology behind it all, and the journalist, to give the perspective of the genius capitalist, making millions off of deaths.

The plot is really simple, disease enters public, and society almost collapses. The aspect in which the movie shines is suspense. You see, the nature of the virus is that you contract it by touching something a sick person touched. So throughout the movie, the camera would pan in on doorknobs and peanut jars, it's a mysophobic's ultimate nightmare.

There are many parts of the movie where the CDC's overreaction to swine-flu is brought up, which leads me to believe that this movie is essentially saying "THIS IS WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED!"

The other good point the movie makes is that fear is the most contagious disease. And that's true, there is no force on Earth that moves faster than sheer terror.

At the end of the day, Contagion is terrifying. Not in the same way that most other horror or thrillers are terrifying, but in a totally unique way that makes all other horror movies look like Care Bears. Contagion could happen, and this one, single, all-encompassing truth will rock you to the very core, and keep you up at night wondering about God. It is entirely possible that a disease could be introduced to the population that would wipe out one out of every twelve people on Earth. So don't see contagion if you don't like The Walking Dead (so essentially, if you don't like Contagion, you can't appreciate good suspense films, and should probably culture yourself).

the fretless bass reviews: All you need is love Quannapowitt playhouse

I had an awesome weekend. Three plays in as many days. The most important of which I feel is the original play that I saw in a room that was more suited for storage than theater (That's how you can tell it's indy.... indy? ). Anyway All You Need is Love is an original play written by the director, a Mr. James. J. Girgenti, and Composed, or in this case, rearranged by Mr. Mario Cruz. It is the story of the life of the director, focusing on his relationship with his mother, which as any man will tell you, is a pretty freakin' important relationship.

The play is told through Beatles songs that have been rearranged to suit the mood of the number. Now normally, when I hear a musical has been constructed by pre-written music, my first reaction is to start making hurtful jokes about the songs for my review. Because that usually doesn't work very well. When you have to base a plot around pre-existing songs that often have little or no relationship in content, it tends to get pretty haywire and out of control. AYNiL is an exception, a glorious, angelic exception that has re-defined the style for me.

You see, AYNiL was good, not just kinda good, like the infrequent SNL, but really good, as in I would buy you a ticket if I had the funds.

First of all, it's impressive, they rearranged almost every song they used to fit moods perfectly in ways I never would have done. "I Want to Hold Your Hand," for instance, it's a happy song, about a guy who is excited to be in love. In the play, they slowed it down and made it about a man comforting his dying mother.

Second, it was really entertaining, it was fun to watch, and probably fun to be in. One of my favorite parts of the show was "When I'm Sixty Four." That was just the young main character playing with his friends while the parents interjected lines like, "Play nice!"

Finally, it made me cry. I'm not ashamed of it, take any man that had a good relationship with his mother and stick 'em in that room for the last ten minutes, and you'll have an ocean in his lap before long. Not in a very long time have my emotions been so thoroughly manipulated.

You may notice that the picture in the upper left hand corner is not of the subject matter as it usually is, but of Anne Hathaway in a tuxedo, that's because this play is not heavily publicized, and may well not run again in a very long time, so see it, Google "Quannapowitt Playhouse" before 10/16 or you'll miss out on the play of a lifetime.