Road to Paloma (2014)

“Road to Paloma,” a leisurely drama about family, brotherhood and Native American rights, plays out on the dusty highways and barren landscapes of an American West that seems frozen in time. Using that quality to powerful effect, the director, Jason Momoa, and his cinematographer, Brian Andrew Mendoza, shore up a simple plot with a richly atmospheric palette of coppery light and caramel sunsets that makes even urgent events seem almost soothing.

This laid-back attitude extends to Wolf (Mr. Momoa), a Native American who seems in no hurry to evade the dogged F.B.I. agent (Lance Henriksen) on his tail. Tooling along on his motorcycle, he hooks up with a scrappy musician (Robert Homer Mollohan) and pauses to dally with a sexy woman (Mr. Momoa’s wife, Lisa Bonet) in an Airstream. None of this is riveting, but the film’s loose naturalism and strong acting — Chris Browning, as a liaison between the F.B.I. and the reservation, is especially enjoyable — are slyly seductive.

Backed by a perfectly chosen folk-rock soundtrack featuring artists like Shovels & Rope and Molly Gunner, Wolf’s journey may rest on a weighty issue (the poor policing of crimes on Indian reservations), but it never feels didactic. As he does on the excellent Sundance Channel drama “The Red Road” (recently renewed for a second season), Mr. Momoa softens his striking physical appearance with a restrained, sometimes playful performance. He seems determined to stretch beyond the warrior roles that have been his bread and butter, and so far the evidence looks promising. But he’ll have to do more than shave his beard to make us forget Khal Drogo.

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The Face of Love (2013)

Love can be a terrible thing. Sharing a life with someone, building a home together, getting married, having children and merging identities to near incongruous levels are all part of the sacrificing and lifetime decision-making one does when finding “the one.” Imagine being so entwined with your better half for years, only to suddenly lose them forever. The waves of shock and horror must be overwhelming because you didn't just lose the love of your life, your partner and your lover. You've also lost a big part of yourself and you somehow have to find the courage to pick up the pieces, move on and decide how to lock up your memories in the dusty drawers of your mind without throwing away the key. Arie Posin's "The Face Of Love" starring Annette Bening, Ed Harris and Robin Williams dives into the psychological consequences of this harsh side of love, and while the concept is full of deep potential, more often than not, this attempt fails to rise to the occasion.
The film opens to the sound of waves, and the shadowed figure of Nikki (Bening) reliving the horror of losing her husband Garret (Harris) during their recent vacation in Mexico. Through quick flashes of dialogue, talk of pot-smoking and tequila drinking, it becomes clear in a few minutes that Garret was the daring adventurer and Nikki his loyal companion. Soon we are met with beach scenes and a disheveled Nikki looking for her husband, only to find him washed up on the shore, drowned and gone forever from her life. Later by the poolside with Nikki, she begins to pace her house like a caged bird; the lighting and score working together to build up an unnerving vibe of suspense. Jump to five years later, and Nikki is seeing-off her grown daughter (Jess Weixler) and giving advice about her current rocky relationship with a guy who sounds no good for her at all. When the daughter reminds her that getting hurt is unavoidable in relationships, Nikki agrees with a sigh. While she did get rid of most of Garret's things, we quickly come to the realization that after five years, Nikki is still very much chained to her past life.

During a visit to the museum Nikki has an incredible moment when she sees her late husband's exact double. The resemblance is uncanny and Nikki tells her good friend and neighbor Roger (Williams) about it, who can only mutter “creepy” as response. She says the fateful words “it felt like being alive again” and becomes obsessed with finding this man. After visiting the same bench where she saw him so frequently that she know's the schedule of the sprinkler system and is on a first name basis with the staff, she finally tracks him down. Tom Young (Harris again) is an art teacher in a local college. The two meet, and she wheedles him into giving her private art lessons. It isn't long before Tom realizes that Nikki has no interest in art, but after picking up some major hints, Tom gets the courage to ask her out on a date. We find out that Tom hasn't been with anyone serious for 10 years, since his ex-wife left him for another guy. Nikki pretends that her ex-husband also left her, with the vague “he's gone” remark that makes her feel better for not straight-up lying. From that point onwards the story takes off like a determined swimmer only to end up drowned and lifeless like Nikki's ex-husband.
"The Face Of Love" is infuriating for all the reasons that should have made it the exact opposite. To begin with the story itself, Posin has a heartfelt attachment to this concept because his own mother had a very similar inconceivable moment; being taken aback byseeing a man who was the spitting image of her late husband (and Posin's dad). While the story wasn't nearly as dramatic as it's presented in the movie, it stuck with Posin and inspired him to write a screenplay about it with co-writer Matthew McDuffie. The concept is kind of brilliant on paper, but it keeps falling short of truly grabbing you in the movie. You're left frustrated, wondering why, until the mid-point, when it hits you that it's written with the depth of a television soap opera. From Tom's credibility as an art teacher (“Painting is seeing”), to his own secret that he doesn't share with Nikki for reasons unknown (unless it could possibly be because he doesn't want to “spoil it” as he tells his ex-wife, which is just lazy writing) and a scene in the car when he professes that he doesn't “want to let her go,” it feels like the character of Tom is not taken seriously, leaving you with a sense of injustice to the story told. While Nikki is clearly the anchor and the focus of it all, Tom would need to have more personality than a newspaper cutout in order to strike some much needed balance. Nikki's character dominates, and what should have been a fascinating progression to the edge of madness is rendered innocuous and mawkish to the point of parody, thanks to the screenplay's insipidness.

The caliber of actors that Posin managed to round up for this picture is something else that ends up being a frustration. Both Bening and Harris are as great as the script allows them to be, but seeing their massive talents constantly stifled by conventional dialogue or abrupt acts of staged emotion is something that becomes a bit of a pain by the end. It's in the silent moments when both actors shine, and it's a testament to their natural gifts that they are able to pull off the kind of chemistry which makes you root for such an unhealthy relationship. Robin Williams' entrance (where he only says “hey!”) is one of the comedic highlights for all the wrong reasons. As the friendly neighbor who is in love with Nikki but never stood a chance, Roger exists solely for emotional manipulation, but he also reminds us that Robin Williams is still around as Hollywood's harmless neighbour.
"The Face Of Love" has splashes of brilliance without and within its overtly saccharine story. Thanks to the initial concept and the psychological consequences of forcing yourself to be attracted to your true love's doppelgänger, it's a compelling watch based on synopsis alone. When heavyweights like Bening and Harris are the leads, the shoddy writing sounds way more profound that it deserves to be. Yet the film ultimately leaves you with an exasperated feeling of watching two Olympic swimmers splash around in the kiddie pool. The suspenseful music evoking a sense of dread is a clever method of keeping the interest but the poor writing and, in crucial moments, rushed editing, are dreadful reminders that we're watching a story full of promise downtrodden by banality. The terrible burden that unhealthy love can play in a person's life is a subject matter as deep as the deepest ocean. Unwittingly and unfortunately, Posin took it as far as the shallow end of a swimming pool.

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An Adventure in Space and Time (2013)

 
We’ve been talking a lot about the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who lately; God knows I have. In most of it, though many are mentioning the previous Doctors, a lot of our discourse has been about “The Day of the Doctor,” and quite rightly; it’s going to be a multi-Doctor-splosion with (at least) three Doctors teaming up for the first official time since 1983. But, it’s also important to look back at the very beginning, because let’s face it: Without the beginning, there’d be no 50 years later. This is why the BBC docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time, which tells of the creation and first three years of the series, feels like a breath of fresh yet familiar air.
Written by uberfan of the series Mark Gatiss, the drama focuses mainly on the first man to play the mysterious “Dr. Who,” William Hartnell, and his relationship with the series’ first producer, Verity Lambert, who was also the youngest and first female producer at the BBC. Also important are the Head of Drama at BBC at the time, Canadian Sydney Newman, and the show’s first director, the young Indian director Waris Hussein. The four of them are depicted as the most important people in the show’s history, and in a great many ways they were the most atypical creators of British television in history.



David Bradley portrays Hartnell, a grumpy character actor relegated to shouty military roles in movies and TV. He begins the narrative embittered and gruff towards his granddaughter, but that would change. Brian Cox plays Newman as the slick, fast-talking showman from Canada who has big ideas but leaves them to other people to realize. He created The Avengers, you know (the British TV show, not the comic books), for BBC rival ITV. He needed a 25 minute program to span a gap in programming on Saturday evenings and came up with the basic premise of a science fiction show called Doctor Who. His one mandate was: no bug-eyed aliens or men in rubber suits. That was kind of it.
He hired a former assistant, Lambert (Jessica Raine), to take control of it and shape it into something they could put on the air. Verity didn’t get taken seriously, as she was a young Jewish woman and the BBC was a middle-aged man’s world, but she has an ally in director Hussein (Sacha Dhawan), a young, gay Indian man. Their goal was to find the right lead actor for the tricky but iconic role and going through many applicants, they decided Hartnell is the best choice, though he took some convincing.
Naturally with a story like this, which did feature many, many other people who were either not mentioned, barely mentioned, or absorbed into another historical person, you’re going to have to simplify things. Gatiss does a really admirable job of focusing the film on the core relationships while still getting the overall gist of some of the other parts. For instance, Delia Derbyshire and her amazing work arranging the theme tune with the Radiophonic Workshop could be a movie unto itself, but here is a mere cutaway.



The film is at its best when it focuses on these relationships, specifically the bond between Lambert and Hartnell. While he’s very unsure about whether or not he should take the part at the beginning, Hartnell is ultimately convinced by Lambert’s positive attitude and sheer force of will, even though she’s anything but supremely confident in reality.
From the disastrous pilot taping to the show nearly getting the ax after the first four episodes to the introduction of the Daleks and the beginning of the cultural phenomenon they became (Terry Nation is mentioned but never seen), An Adventure in Space and Time, sort of only grazes the surface of the timeline, and I wish we could have somehow gotten more into the 90 minute feature, because I just wanted more of it.
At a certain point, the film which we thought was about Verity Lambert becomes about William Hartnell, in the best of ways. With Doctor Who, Hartnell experienced his first instance of real fame and really felt compelled to keep going, even as Hussein and eventually Lambert decide to embark on different careers. He felt the pressure of being the Doctor and of keeping Doctor Who going, though he simply could no longer memorize the lines or take the long hours.
One very moving scene occurs when a very gruff and stroppy Hartnell begins berating the new staff of the show as they set up for the next shot around the TARDIS console. He doesn’t like the new director and it seems like no one really cares about the show the way they once did. His final straw comes when he has to be the one to turn on the console mechanism because no one else knows. At that moment, he is the man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and Bradley assaying that role is perfect.



As much as the film celebrates the beginning of the little show that could, it also bittersweetly eulogizes the man who was the definite article. Amid all the winking nods to fan-known futures or characters espousing things said in episodes not yet made, the movie focuses on a man’s realization that he’ll never again be what he once was and the fame he’ll no longer have. It’s very moving, and the special cameo during the filming of the first regeneration only served to bring more of a glisten to the eye. It’s a show we all love, but no one loved it more first than its original star.

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The Bachelor Weekend (2013)

It makes sense that, given the overwhelming financial success of "The Hangover" franchise, other films would take that formula (of a bachelor party weekend spun wildly out of control) and try to put their unique stamp on the situation. So far we've already had "21 and Over" ("The Hangover" in college), "Last Vegas" ("The Hangover" with old dudes) and, of course, the cream of the crop, "Bridesmaids" ("The Hangover" from the bride's side). What makes "The Bachelor Weekend" originally titled "The Stag" in Ireland) work, is that it is not content to merely replicate "The Hangover" formula with a slight alternation, but rather seeks to actively dismantle and the already established conventions, forging its own sweetly subversive path. 

The differences between "The Hangover" and "The Bachelor Weekend" are noticeable from the get-go: the bride-to-be Ruth (Amy Huberman) visits the best man Davin (Andrew Scott aka Moriarty from BBC's "Sherlock") and begs him to take her fiancé Fionnan (Hugh O'Conor) on a weekend outing before his obsessive fussing over the wedding leads to some kind of meltdown. Davin agrees, even though neither he nor Fionnan nor any of their buddies are exactly the type that would spend a weekend away with other dudes, engaging in outlandish behavior and the kind of male bonding that usually ends with someone in the hospital, having their stomach pumped.

Still, Davin agrees and sells Fionnan and the rest of the groom's buddies on the idea. They'll go out into the Irish countryside and camp and reconnect with the land and each other. But Ruth throws the lads a pretty severe curve ball: they must include her brother, an oafish lump of a man with the menacing nickname The Machine (Peter McDonald, the movie's co-screenwriter), in the bachelor weekend plans. The other dudes are appalled, given The Machine's reputation and their general foppishness (there's a great montage where they're picking out camping equipment and failing miserably), and try to avoid The Machine at every turn.

Unfortunately, The Machine catches up with them on the first leg of their journey, and inserts himself predictably into the scenario, causing chaos at nearly every turn. What's nice about The Machine, both as a character and a plot device within the framework of "The Bachelor Party," is that he is able to disrupt the action in ways that feel organic and create legitimate conflict, while also giving the characters the opportunity to open up about themselves and reveal details that otherwise wouldn't have come out (at least in this kind of event-driven scenario). What makes The Machine also work so well as a character is that he isn't just a towering douche bag—he's a towering douche bag with layers, and the ways that the characters react to him often say profound things about who they are.

While on the bachelor party, out in the misty fields of Ireland (the Irish tourism board is probably not going to use clips from the movie in upcoming promotional campaigns), the men squabble and bark against a backdrop that is harsh and ancient. (The movie is full of mossy hues and autumnal colors.) The cosmology of the group is so different from movies like "The Hangover" that it's almost beyond belief: not only is there a gay couple (The Kevins!), but there's a character in dire financial straits (in a way that seems genuine and heartbreaking instead of merely superficial) and, of course, a collection of Irishmen who are at home literally anywhere else but the wilderness. Occasionally, the film veers too far into cartoonish territory, but the movie mostly keeps a keenly level approach to the comedy, with equal parts humanistic character stuff and wacky slapstick comedy.

Part of the reason the comedy works so well is that director John Butler plays everything pretty much with a straight face. Things may get oversized, particularly towards the end of the movie where you see more bare man-ass than in "Magic Mike," but for the most part Butler seems to encourage the actors to treat everything, more or less, seriously. There's a looseness to the performances that Butler also encourages, one that thankfully never tips, precariously, into the land of the endless improvisation. This is a tighter, more controlled exercise than most modern comedies, which seem to flounder in excessive, Apatow-ian indulgence. O'Conor and McDonald commit to the roles beautifully, as two opposite sides of the same coin, since they're both men who absolutely love Ruth, but for different reasons (and with two entirely separate approaches). But the real breakout of "The Bachelor Party" is Scott, who plays such a devilish villain on "Sherlock" but here illuminates a softer side that is equal parts hilarious and sometimes quite sad (his character has a great reveal later in the movie).

While "The Bachelor Weekend" might not please fans of "The Hangover" and its ilk because it doesn't trade in the kind of gross-out humor that forms the bedrock for those movies (although there is a pretty good masturbation gag; it's short and heavy on implied naughtiness and very low on the real stuff), the comedy is going for something different, something more relatable and more emotional than those movies. It's refreshing to see the filmmakers take this approach, and its sweetness might be the most subversive thing about it. For all the hemming and hawing and male bonding, "The Bachelor Weekend" is, first and foremost, utterly adorable

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The Hooligan Factory (2014)

Dex, Danny and The Hooligan Factory travel the length of the country on a mission to re-establish their firm’s glory days. However, the police are closing in and we get a sense that the Hooligan Factory’s best days may be behind them, but with Danny on their side, and Dex finding his old form who knows where this may lead. After all… Its a funny old game.

Any screenwriting lecturer will tell you that if you want to break into the UK film market, pen yourself a script about football hooliganism. The reason for this is because there is a huge demand for it, they’re cheap to make and, like zombie movies, they can sit loud and proud on the bottom shelves of ASDA. Nick Nevern is a man who has featured in a few of these hooligan movies but rather than go tread the same steps as other writers, he went in a different direction – he went for comedy.
The Hooligan Factory does for hooligan movies what Scary Movie did for horror or Airplane! did for disaster films. It might not be as funny as either of those, but it certainly tries and it succeeds more than it fails.
Danny (Jason Maza, himself no stranger to the genre) is a young lad who wants to be as respected as his old man, a legend in the football hooligan scene. He is taken in by famous hooligan Dex who has just gotten out of prison and together they attempt to re-establish The Hooligan Factory with the likes of Midnight (the only black hooligan), Bullet (a nutter), Trumpet (a coke head obsessed with hooligan movies) and Old Bill (an undercover cop).
Like some spoof movies, the more you’ve seen of the genre the more you will get out of it. If you have sat through all of the hooligan movies of the last decade then The Hooligan Factory will hit all the right notes for you. It pitches itself against the likes of Rise of the Footsolider and The Film with pinpoint precision and it parodies them incredibly well. Nevern and Michael Lindley are men who really understand and “get” this genre which then helps create perfect jibes against them.
That’s not to say you have to be a fan of these movies to get all the laughs from The Hooligan Factory, far from it. Nevern and Lindley make sure that there is enough humour outside of the direct spoofs in the movie to ensure it never singles out audience members who are none the wiser. Jokes like Trumpet being “the new breed” of hooligan and undercover cop Old Bill are funny enough for everyone to get. Old Bill in particular is a real highlight of the movie.
But it’s really Nevern and Maza who are the stars of the picture. The pair have incredible comic timing and play to the spoof genre brilliantly. Nevern is outstanding as Dex and he balances the straight and comedic lines perfectly. Maza is given the straight man character which gives us a great ‘in’ as the audience and he excels in the role. They have a great dynamic together and their relationship feels genuine, even for a spoof. Everyone plays their roles brilliantly, but its Nevern and Maza who carry the movie.
Sadly though, The Hooligan Factory is not entirely brilliant. Despite some clever writing and great performances, The Hooligan Factory just isn’t that funny. It’s not laugh-free and it’s better than the likes of Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans, but it won’t be looked back on in years to come with much reverence. It’s a simple case of some jokes working while others don’t. To give it credit, there is a lot of effort put forth and it pays off for the most part, it just sadly falls flat in a few places and it almost feels a bit too niche.
It may not be “laugh out loud hilarious”, but The Hooligan Factory will certainly please an audience. Not many people could have pulled this off and in the hands of lesser filmmakers it could have been unwatchable. Thankfully, The Hooligan Factory has a great cast and some good laughs. If you’re a fan of the hooligan genre, this will have you rolling in the aisles but if not, then it will easily raise a chuckle and a smile – which is more than can be said for a lot of spoof movies.

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A Long Way Down (2014)

Oh dear.. Sort of tempted to leave the review at that, to be honest, but what would the internet do with all of that white space? So here is a bunch more words about it, and no matter how haphazardly they’re arranged we can take some comfort in the fact that it’s with seemingly more care than went into a certain screenplay. Because the problems with “A Long Way Down,” from director Pascal Chaumeil (of 2010’s French-language “Heartbreaker”) which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival this week, go deep — like archaeologically deep. Based on Nick Hornby’s bestseller, which we have to believe, is infinitely better than the film version if we’re to retain any faith in the book-buying public, the story of four suicidal strangers coming round to choosing life would need incredible insight and sensitivity to convince at all, let alone to work as a comedy. But neither of those qualities are anywhere in evidence in this utterly oblivious, tone-deaf and borderline offensive film, which seems to posit that potentially life-ending issues can be addressed by a holiday in the sun and a couple of trite, random displays of Being There For Each Other. Yay, everybody! The solution to suicide is hijinks!
Martin Sharp (Pierce Brosnan) is an ex-morning show TV star disgraced and sent briefly to prison for a liaison with a 15-year-old (who, in the first of a million FFS moments, he claims to have thought looked, not simply legal, not simply older than she was, but twenty-five.) In any case the scandal, which has uncomfortable real-life parallels to recent revelations about an institutionalized culture of sexual abuse of minors at the BBC in decades past, ruins his marriage and his relationship with his kid, makes him unemployable and widely hated. This makes him sad. So he is about to throw himself off a building when Maureen (Toni Collette) shows up and hesitantly asks him if he’s going to take long about it. This is the first encounter of the film, and the first time two characters engage in a conversation the like of which no one in the history of spoken communication between humans has ever had; it won’t be the last. Maureen is a mousy square who winces at swearwords and is discovered to be mother to a grown son suffering from cerebral palsy who requires constant, round-the-clock care. They are joined on the roof by Jess (Imogen Poots), Queen Pixie of the Manic Dreamgirl Brigade: London Chapter, a politician’s daughter, who is driven to impulsively attempt to terminate her life in reaction to being dumped by the unprepossessing Chaz who, once he fulfills an early narrative purpose, is never referred to again. Finally, pizza delivery boy JJ (Aaron Paul) shows up, slits their throats and bursts into flames, riding to hell on a motorbike...sorry no, we only wished we were watching something of “Ghost Rider” quality. JJ is the shy, quiet, emo one, but when prompted early on, tells them he has inoperable brain cancer and that’s why he was going to do away with himself.

In one of many blindsiding leaps in logic and character coherence, after about five minutes of acquaintance, which makes them all instant experts on each other’s personalities, they all decide to sign a pact to remain alive until Valentine’s Day; this is what it looks like when people in films make decisions based wholly on where the plot has to go. Not pretty. However the papers get wind of the story, made appetizing by Martin’s notoriety and also by Jess’s MP father (Sam Neill), not to mention another totally undeveloped plot strand involving her sister who disappeared without a trace some years before. To escape their unwanted newfound fame, the four go on a beach holiday where some things happen, then return home where some other things happen.

We’ve mentioned just how awkward and unfortunate the thematic glibness around the issue of suicide is, but we shouldn’t forget that the film is also structurally in complete shambles, nominally divided into four parts in which the narration duties are taken over by each successive player. But if these first-person voiceovers are supposed to provide a little extra personal insight into their lives, their reasons for wishing to end it all, and their reasons for not doing so, they fail miserably, reading more like swathes of poppily written prose lifted wholesale from the book at random, because maybe someone thought it sounded neat. Peppered with a kind of cynical wit that we suppose is meant to come across as acerbic, worldly, and self-aware, all too often entire sequence seems to exist solely to give Poots, for example, the opportunity to F-bomb prettily or to say something “outrageous” because EDGY.

Pinging between obvious cliché and contrivance, the characters bounce around like pinballs until, in an unearned conclusion that could have happened at literally any other juncture in this “story” and made precisely as much sense as it does here, suddenly everything is A-OK, peachy fine and will be forever and ever, because these four poor individuals haven’t even realized that they’re not people at all, just wobbly, makeshift, flesh-covered assemblages of tics and bloodless tropes. Which is almost a good thing; otherwise the pat resolution on offer would be a real slap in the face to any actual real live person who may have faced any of the myriad issues the film raises and then twirls its hair at.
But you know what the worst thing is? The film is awful, but it is not unwatchable. The camera is in general pointed in the direction of the actors —all of whom have faces we've enjoyed looking at before. The costumes (especially Poot’s enviable London Look wardrobe) are nice, the photography competent and in general the whole package has the sort of gloss that means that with the sound off you could mistake it for the fluffy comedy it thinks it is. That level of professional competence is what saves it from a failing grade, but it is also somehow extra galling to think of all that time and effort and talent being put to waste on a project as lacking in merit as this one. Tempting though it might be to conclude with a comparing-this-movie-to-suicide gag, we’re not going to because a) we’d be guilty of exactly the trivialization we accuse the movie of and b) “A Long Way Down” is simply not worth the time it would take to craft a pun.

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Castlevania - Lords of Shadow 2 [PC Game]

Castlevania: Lords of Shadows is occasionally beautiful, occasionally exciting, and occasionally rewarding. However, to fully enjoy its best parts, you must endure a handful of drab settings and boring stealth puzzles along the way. At times, it's enough to make you want to put the controller down. But stick around until the end, and you'll enjoy a satisfying reward of eye-catching boss fights and a satisfying conclusion that ultimately diminishes the negative impact of the game's earlier issues. Lords of Shadow 2's story should resonate with anyone with a continuing interest in the series' narrative, and even though the ending won't hit newcomers as hard, the occasionally fantastic environments and monsters create a worthwhile experience that stands tall on its own by the end of the tale.
You're in a tough position at the start of Lords of Shadow 2. You, Dracula, awake from centuries of rest in a cathedral, smack in the middle of a modern metropolis. Your archnemesis from the first game, Zobek, is your first real contact. Despite your hatred for the traitor, you enter into an agreement with him. Help Zobek defeat Satan so that he may conquer the earth in his place, and he'll free you from immortality once and for all. To do this, you must take on Satan's devoted acolytes, who've implanted themselves into key positions in society.

This all comes after a rousing prologue, which sees Dracula at full strength battling righteous warriors in and around his unholy castle. For all the excitement offered there, the true start to Lords of Shadow 2's plot with Zobek is relatively deflating. Your motivation, to hunt someone else's enemies, doesn't inspire much excitement. Plus, you're immediately thrust into one of the most bland and uninspiring settings to be found: an industrial scientific complex replete with sheet metal, red pipes, and security guards. Memories of the first game in the series are filled with fantastic vistas and monumental architecture; apart from the prologue, Lords of Shadow 2 frustratingly avoids them early on.

..the start of the game proper effectively hits the snooze button, and begins to feel more like a pale mix of Gears of War's art style and every sneaky-stealth game from the last 20 years.

It would be one thing if the boring start to the central plot quickly gave way to combat, which is the real reason worth playing Lords of Shadow 2, but instead you're forced into tedious and questionable stealth missions almost immediately after your reunion with Zobek. It's not inherently bad, but Lords of Shadow 2's stealth puzzles offer no room for creativity and unnecessarily slow the pacing while offering little in return. The prologue teaches you that this is a game about dark castles, fearless knights, and heavy combat, then it hits the snooze button. Unfortunately, it's throwaway content that gets in the way of the good stuff periodically throughout the game, but thankfully, it doesn't dominate the experience.
Lords of Shadow 2 eventually returns to what it does best: gothic action adventure. Throughout the story, Dracula finds himself back in time, though it's not immediately clear whether this is actual or imagined, but it brings the game back to its roots. Combat and fantastic environments take center stage, and with the game's new free-moving camera and an emphasis on exploration, both aspects feel fresh and new. Thanks to the flexible vantage, you're able to dash and leap during battle with greater accuracy than before. Throw in multiple new and diverse skill sets, and Dracula accurately feels like a powerful evolution of his former self, Lords of Shadow's Gabriel Belmont. This time around, there are a few new tools to play with, including a new weapon class that's capable of breaking down fortified enemy defenses, but the biggest changes (apart from the camera system) are the skill mastery system and the weapon-dependent move lists.

You're not alone, guy. I despise this boring, industrial setting too.

In Lords of Shadow 2, you learn skills for each weapon--shadow whip, void sword, and chaos claws--independently. Skills are learned by spending experience points granted during combat, and each has a gauge that fills with use. Once the gauge is full, this experience can be transferred into the given weapon, increasing its mastery level and effectiveness. The fragmentation of the move lists delays your effectiveness in battle somewhat, but it also allows you to focus on customization, opening the game up to different types of combat strategies.
When you aren't fighting, you spend quite a lot of time exploring and clambering about your environment. By default, your objective is often highlighted on the map, but unlike in the linear Lords of Shadow, it's up to you to find your way there. It's usually clear where to go; hint-like swarms of bats tip you off to handholds for climbing and ledges for leaping. However, unlike in the first game, there are many alternate paths to explore in search of treasure. While not game-changing, the openness feels appropriate given the wide world around you. Apart from some occasionally frustrating pathfinding inadequacies, it's the map that ultimately stands in your way. Unlike older, exploration-heavy Castlevania games, Lords of Shadow 2 employs a map that is only ever displayed on a piece-by-piece basis. Plus, the "world map" is just an illustration with names and numbers attached. It doesn't hurt the moment-to-moment poking around, but it doesn't entice you to backtrack either. If you can't easily see things you've missed, or more importantly, places you haven't been, returning to previous locales becomes an unappealing prospect.

Of course, there's also the fact that halfway through the game, the narrative and frequency of impressive set pieces begin to steamroll ahead, and the last thing you want to do is look back. Zobek eventually takes a sideline to Dracula's ambitions, and you begin to understand why you're going to such great lengths to thwart Satan. With the emphasis on Dracula and the memories of his family, you feel compelled to move ahead. In this way, Lords of Shadow 2 is a late bloomer. It takes a while for the story to show its true colors, but it eventually blossoms into an engaging tale filled a few clever surprises that should thrill anyone who's familiar with the series.
Much of the latter half takes place amidst sublime examples of gothic architecture, with nearby storms raging as you hop along rooftops, adding to the drama. Boss fights become a much more frequent occurrence, pitting you against gruesome monstrosities befitting of Castlevania's legacy. Their appearances can be quite striking, bringing to mind some of the best designs from film director Guillermo del Toro's work. They're evil, expertly crafted, and offer a variety of challenges that test your abilities with every weapon in many different ways. They require fast reflexes and deep knowledge of your move list, and the creativity on display is nothing short of captivating.
It's a pleasing change of pace after slogging through boring environments, waiting for things to happen, and you finally get a chance to take advantage of the time spent buffing up your skills in combat. The contrast between the two halves of the game is hard to ignore, and even though you have to force your way through mediocrity to get to the good stuff, the conclusion and the last hours leading up to it justify the time spent steeped in boredom and frustration.

Lords of Shadow 2 is at its best when it sticks to its strong suit: great enemy encounters and environment design.

Lords of Shadow 2 should have been a much shorter game. Still, though the game's stealth sections and drab modern settings represent the worst elements of the three-part saga, the tail end of the game contains the best of every aspect that the series is currently known for. It's the stuff you expect Castlevania to be made of, and after contending with forced stealth gameplay and a weak narrative at the start, it feels good to be home. Even better, the final act wraps up the Lords of Shadow trilogy with authority, and the game's final moments leave you both gasping for air and sighing in relief. It may not strike newcomers to the Lords of Shadow tale with such force, but it's nonetheless a surprising and fulfilling conclusion to Lords of Shadow 2's distinct plot. Regardless of your experience with the saga, if you have the patience to get through the rough start, you'll discover a much better game waiting for you on the other side.

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The Double (2013)

With "The Double," English writer/director and sometimes-comedian Richard Ayoade establishes himself as more than just the Wes Anderson acolyte we first met with his quirky 2010 directorial debut feature "Submarine."

Set somewhere outside of time, "The Double," which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and just screened at Mexico's Riviera Maya Film Festival, stars Jesse Eisenberg as Simon James, a joyless, virtually invisible data clerk whose life is but an endless chain of hours, shuttling back and forth between a dead-end desk job, where he's mostly ignored, and his spartan apartment in a cluttered industrial tenement. His coworkers regard him as "a bit of a nonperson," but something like life sparks within him when he spies Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), on his morning commute -- and again at night, from the handy vantage point of his window via telescope.

A Kafkaesque rigamarole of petty bureaucracy and life's little obstacles set the tone for this eerie dark comedy: Simon can't get into his own building because the security guard doesn't recognize him, he's thrown out of an office party because rumor has it he doesn't even work there, and his own shrewish mother is off her rocker in a depressing nursing home. Gliding over all is a shadowy figure known as The Colonel, whose Orwellian PSAs remind the world, "There's no such thing as special people. Just people."

But things get even weirder when the new guy in the office is a man called James Simon, the mirror inverse of Simon's name and also his spitting likeness. Simon's doppelganger even wears the same drab, oversized suit, but what's worse is that James is far more charming and charismatic. He starts taking credit for Simon's work -- and whatever it is that he does, no one seems to know -- kissing the ass of his moody toad of a boss (Wallace Shawn) and even, oh the horror, making advances on Hannah, a lonesome waif desperate for a human touch. From anyone but Simon, that is, who she regards as "creepy" and a "snake."

The endless loop of coincidences and misunderstandings mount, as Simon and James try to one-up each other through one stunning set piece after the next. The visual tone of "The Double" is a little art deco, a little steampunk, a lot of noir, but also its own strange animal. I thought of Orson Welles' Kafka adaptation "The Trial," in which Anthony Perkins runs in place as the world around relentlessly persecutes him without explanation. And like that film, "The Double" also grounds its noirish premise of stolen identity in a spooky industrial landscape of malevolent smokestacks, creaking pipes, leaky faucets and rows of archaic machinery that produce endless reels of photocopies.

This isn't the first time an emerging punk auteur has adapted Fyodor Dostoevsky's little-read novella "The Double." In 1968, just before his breakout "The Conformist," Bernardo Bertolucci tackled this surreal tale about a lowly office worker's psychotic break in "Partner," starring the pretty French actor Pierre Clementi -- who actually looks quite like Eisenberg, whose terrific performance balances the easily frustrated neurosis of Simon with the smooth debonair of the smarmy James.

"The Double" also shares DNA with Denis Villeneuve's "Enemy." Coincidentally, that film also premiered at TIFF and with two doppelgänger thrillers at the fest, they may have cancelled each other out buzz-wise. While both deal in doubles and woman-troubles, Ayoade's singular vision more prominently brings to mind Gilliam's "Brazil," with its themes of dilapidated identity, and the bleakly gorgeous, almost handmade quality to the artful production design.

A tour de force of editing, lensed in vivid chiaroscuro by Erik Wilson -- and not to mention featuring a killer chamber score by Andrew Hewitt -- "The Double" is a cinematic swoon, certainly one of the most imaginative and riveting head trips to come along in some time.

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Oculus (2013)

It’s easy enough to jolt an audience into submission, but that’s not the same thing as getting under its skin. Recent horror movies ranging from the "Paranormal Activity" series to "The Conjuring" excel at the art of the jump scare, though no matter how expertly delivered, it’s a cheap gimmick at best.
"Oculus" is an exception. Appropriately being co-released by microbudget fear factory Blumhouse Production — its founder, Jason Blum, helped turn the scrappy productions "Paranormal Activity" and "The Purge" into profitable franchises — much of the new movie’s chilly atmosphere involves the experiences of two characters in a room with one very ominous mirror. As the haunted object plays tricks on its two would-be victims' minds, the audience falls prey to the ruse as well. Director Mike Flanagan turns the fragile nature of consciousness into a better fear tactic than any visceral shocks could possibly achieve.
"Oculus" certainly relies on a familiar toolbox, including the occasional clichéd moment when something scary materializes right behind an unsuspecting character. But the specifics of the scenario engender a fundamental state of dread that grows heavier with each murky twist. Flanagan’s script, co-written by Jeff Howard and based on an earlier short film, nimbly moves between events that transpired 11 years ago and their ramifications in the present: In the opening scenes, 21-year-old Tim (Brenton Thwaites) is released from a psychotherapy ward after years on lockdown and reunited with his sister, Kaylie (Karen Gillan). With a steely resolve, she announces that the pair must return to the childhood home and "kill it" — a declaration that immediately establishes a menacing supernatural presence that remains hard to define throughout the movie.
But Flanagan quickly fills in a few more pertinent details: The siblings’ youth was disrupted with the arrival of the mirror into the claustrophobic study where their father (Rory Cochrane) worked alone; at some point, maybe because of his own lapsing sanity or maybe because the mirror drove him mad, their ill-fated father murdered their mother (Katee Sackhoff), at which point young Tim shot him dead. Kaylie has been waiting for her brother to reemerge into society so the two of them can confront the bizarre ancient menace, which is apparently responsible for 48 deaths in 400 years. As soon as he’s free, she snatches up the mirror at a local auction and brings him back to the scene of the crime, with camcorders set up to capture their every move over the course of one isolated, dreary night. In short order, plenty of things go bump in the night, but it’s gradually clear that nothing happening can be taken for granted, including Kaylie and Tim’s own behaviors. At its best, "Oculus" is a tightly enacted chamber drama that just happens to include supernatural phenomena. The mirror is messing with them at every turn — and, by extension, it’s messing with us.

As the plot constantly shifts between modern day events and Kaylee and Tim’s childhood experiences as they witnessed their parents’ lapsing sanity, "Oculus"  becomes an effective allegory for the lingering trauma of familial dysfunction. The small ensemble meshes nicely with the sophisticated narrative approach: Thwaits, as the grown brother, maintains a credibly frightened demeanor as he worries that he might be going crazy all over again; Gillian, playing the Mulder to Thwaits’ Scully, continually strikes the calculated pose of a true believer even as her own insecurities slowly take over. Their collective fears of the unknown turn this rather basic premise into a sneakily profound meditation on more realistic concerns.
The first sign that "Oculus" has more on its mind arrives as the adult Tim attempts to shrug off his sister’s recollections of supernatural occurrences with the “fuzzy trace” theory of human psychology — essentially, false memories derived from inaccurate associations: In Tim’s view, their dad was an unfaithful lunatic — hence the cryptic presence of another woman in his study after hours — and eventually went ballistic on his wife as a result of their marital tensions. His kids’ convictions about the nature of these events, the thinking goes, suggest a history of mental illness in the family.
And who’s to say whether Tim has it right? As the duo creep around the house, evading passing shadows and lashing out blindly in the wrong directions, it’s never entirely clear if any given point of view holds ground. "Oculus" keeps digging further into their frightened state, thickening the dreary atmosphere at every turn, so that even while the outcome of the scenario is fairly predictable early on, it’s continually haunting as it maps out a path to get there. A truly contemporary horror movie, its eeriness stems from manipulated cell phone conversations and recorded data on the ubiquitous cameras that may or may not accurately represent events as they transpire. No matter how much technology they have on their side, nothing in certain.

The two-pronged progression doesn’t make things any easier. Past and present continue to merge as this pair of unreliable narrators wander through memories and attempt to act faster than the mirror can anticipate. The ongoing sense of ambiguity is distinctly cinematic, forcing viewers to question whether any given moment actually takes place. (One grisly bit, in which Kaylee bites into an apple and temporarily believes she’s chewing on a lightbulb by mistake, harkens back to the infamous "face peeling" hallucination in "Poltergeist.") The very act of watching movies calls into question the way we process reality; "Oculus," for all its familiar scares, expertly capitalizes on this fundamental power.
In recent years, few American genre films have managed the extreme spookiness found in many of their overseas brethren. Even while "Oculus" plays by the book in individual moments, it manages to invent a shrewder context for the events in question. It’s not the scenes that matter so much as the way they do (and don’t) fit together. It uses subjectivity like a weapon. By contrast, last year’s generally well-liked haunted house effort "The Conjuring" capably grappled with issues of faith, but failed to unite its bigger ideas with the rudimentary process for freaking us out.
In "Oculus," the horror is at once deceptively simple and rooted in a deep, primal uneasiness. Its scariest aspects are universally familiar: By witnessing the two leads fall prey to the ghastly object’s manipulation, we too become its victims. Reflecting the way our greatest fears lie within our own insecurities, the mirror is an ideal metaphor for the horror genre’s lasting potency

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

There are two post-credits sequences in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," and it would be useless and unwise for me to spoil either. One of them will make no sense to you until you've seen the film. The other made no sense to me and I HAVE seen the film. I couldn't explain it if I tried, because it is merely set-up for the next Marvel movie. The audience I was with seemed to know what was going on (there were gasps). Whatever it is, it must have been pretty damn good.

I cop to being in the dark about the minutiae of the Marvel Universe. Outside of Spider-Man, which I read as a kid, everything I know about superheroes I've learned from their movies. My problem with many of them is that they only preach to the choir, operating under the assumption that everyone in the audience knows all the hymns. It's a lot easier—and lazier—for a screenwriter to simply do a roll call of characters and events while letting fans fill in all the blanks. Sometimes the onscreen information is so sparse that the studio should pay you for doing all the work. Plus, the slavish devotion to lore sometimes comes at the expense of making a good movie.
With that said, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" is a very good movie, the rare film in this genre that serves as both entry point and continuation. For a change, you can walk in cold and you won't be too lost. The actors inject some welcome, unexpected emotion into their characters. Despite the fight sequences' occasional visits to the Jason Bourne/Cuisinart school of editing, the action scenes are suspenseful. And the story has a hint of the '70s era paranoia films that starred Robert Redford and Warren Beatty.
Speaking of Redford, he shows up in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" as the type of shady power figurehead he would have been running from in his Sydney Pollack movies. Alexander Pierce is a bigshot at S.H.I.E.L.D., in charge of a defense project that has more than a hint of "Minority Report" to it. Once launched, it has the ability to zap millions of potential and actual threats with the push of a button. Of course, this needs to fall into the wrong hands, and Pierce has no problems finding a few. Redford clearly relishes his villainy, but he makes the expert decision to underplay it even while shooting people in cold blood.
When S.H.I.E.L.D. becomes compromised, and it looks as if Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is behind it, Pierce sends out an amazing amount of firepower to kill him. The most impressive weapon in his arsenal is The Winter Soldier of the title, a Russian assassin with a metal arm and an intensity matched only by another of his targets, Captain America (Chris Evans). Avoid the IMDB if you don't want to know who The Winter Soldier is, but I expect you know already. I won't tell you anything except that the final showdown between hero and assassin is rife with a refreshing amount of fraternity and sacrifice.
"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" re-introduces Evans' nearly 100 year old character, Steve Rogers, as he is jogging around Washington D.C. Rogers runs his laps so quickly (after all, he IS a superhero) that he keeps passing Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) before Wilson can complete one of his. "To your left!" Rogers keeps yelling as he passes by, much to Wilson's bemused annoyance.
When the two officially meet, Mackie and Evans play the short scene in a manner that immediately suggests the start of a beautiful friendship. (This makes sense if you know who Sam Wilson really is.) Their chemistry allows us a more personal investment in their action sequences, some of which I'm almost ashamed to admit had me worried for the good guys.
What struck me most about how Mackie, Evans and Scarlett Johansson (who returns as Natasha Romanoff) interact is the way they look at each other. Watch their body language as they gently tease each other in their quiet scenes, and notice how directors Anthony and Joe Russo frame them. There's a genuine emotional shorthand at work, especially from Johansson, who is excellent here. Jackson's Nick Fury also has a good rapport with Evans, whose "aw shucks" boyishness is a perfect fit for a guy named "Captain America." Jackson does more with a line reading than some of his lines deserve.
Jackson's Fury also gets a good amount to do in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," including a leading role in the film's best action sequence, a demonstration of just how indestructible (or rather, destructible) Fury's motor vehicle is. He also gets one of those "Deep Blue Sea" moments you will not see coming, and a nod to "Pulp Fiction" that only eagle-eyed viewers will catch.
During its 136 minutes, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" unleashes a lot of what the MPAA refers to as "intense sequences of violence, gunplay and action." Every villain has a weapon that fires a gazillion rounds of ammo, yet nobody is as accurate as ScarJo with a pistol. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely keep the plot streamlined and the verbal interplay brisk. They find not only a great cameo for Marvel veteran Stan Lee, they also work the gag as an excuse for the superhero equivalent of a throwback jersey.
Of all the Avengers characters, Captain America is probably my favorite. Heed that when you notice my 3-1/2 star rating. It's his old-fashioned corniness that intrigues me. Though I liked two of his movies, Tony Stark is an R-rated, debauched smartass trapped in a PG-13 convention. The Hulk only works in small doses. And I never knew what to make of Thor, and judging from his movies, neither do the filmmakers. Captain America seems closest, at least in these movies, to a character whose human alter-ego doesn't seem canned and set in stone. There's a vulnerability to Steve Rogers; he has growth potential, both as a man and a hero.
This is the most fun I've had at one of these Marvel movies since the first "Captain America" movie. Take that with whatever grain of superhero salt you wish.

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Watch Dogs [PC Game]

If Watch Dogs is to be believed, then a shocking number of Chicago residents are delinquents. As you roam the city looking to both right what is wrong and make wrong what is right, you hack into its citizens' smartphones and listen in on their conversations, and even tap into their computers and catch a glimpse of them as they enjoy their deviations in the supposed privacy of their own homes. Some of these Chicagoans are chronic masturbators; others are criminals and cannibals, ordinary to look at should you pass them on the street, but far from ordinary when they think they are alone.
Aiden Pearce is also far from ordinary, but he understands that privacy is a myth. The city has installed a computer system called ctOS that knows everything, sees everything, and controls everything. Aiden is a hacker. By manipulating ctOS's systems, Aiden can steal from your bank account, gain access to surveillance cameras, and even discover your profession and learn where you went on vacation, or whether you're faithful to your spouse. Aiden's nefarious talents are valuable, and he once had no qualms about who he killed or robbed, as long as he delivered the information and earned his reward.

Do you think your identity is private? Aiden knows who you are and what you did.

You'd suppose, then, that information is your most powerful tool in Watch Dogs, but this open-world game's joys come not from voyeurism and information brokerage but from chaos and destruction. Combat encounters are structured like puzzles: Aiden hunkers down and you survey the area, choosing whether to dominate your enemies with firearms and grenades, press against cover and distract your enemies so that you can pass by without raising their suspicions, or settle on a compromise, silencing enemies with well-aimed headshots and taking them down from behind with a swift takedown maneuver. But whichever style best suits the occasion or your mood, you're likely to cause a few explosions and toy with your enemies' heads.
How do you create such chaos? By overloading circuit boards, setting off guards' grenades remotely, or forcing pipes to burst beneath your foes' feet. Such control, right at your fingertips; thanks ctOS! When I felt particularly evil, I threw a distraction lure toward a circuit board and detonated the board as a nearby guard approached. He cried out in agony, and I was grateful that I had one less obstacle between me and my destination. But this kind of evil could feel even more heinous if I happened to glance at my victim's personal information before annihilating him. Oh--he was recently married. Or perhaps he was on antipsychotic medication. Occasionally, I would hesitate to put a bullet in a guard's head if I knew his wife was expecting a child, but I rarely had reservations about murdering a prison escapee. I was deciding whose life had greater value, and I'm grateful that Watch Dogs, in its own subtle way, led me to ponder why I would prize one man over another. With one snap moral judgment, I might decide to let one man live and another die. Unless, of course, I was under fire from every direction, in which case all bets were off.

Rage against the machine!

I don't wish to overstate Watch Dogs' social musings, however. The game sometimes pauses to grapple with quandaries about the trade-off between freedom and security in modern society, but rarely reaches any conclusions or digs very deeply. This is a game that allows you to hack into highway billboards and reveal age-old memes like "I can has cheezburger?" This is a game in which you eavesdrop on a man who couldn't ejaculate during a sexual encounter because his bladder was full. Such drastic tonal shifts prevent the story's early attempts at gravitas from sticking, leaving Aiden looking like a chump with little self-awareness, and leaving the player to wonder what really drives this vigilante, apart from the revenge quest that has him seeking to retaliate against unknown persons for the death of his niece. When his sister, Nicky, pleads with him to stop his pursuit, explaining that he's risking the safety of his remaining family, Aiden makes a promise he doesn't ultimately keep. Why he is so willing to seek vengeance while knowing he's putting his sister and nephew in peril is never sufficiently explored. Perhaps Aiden is addicted to the underground life he has come to lead, which has him staring at his smartphone's screen in the same way that I so often do, oblivious to what's happening around me.
I came to be more invested in the story once I'd assembled a small team of hackers and closed in on the conspiracy at the game's center. Watch Dogs' tale is at its best when it sticks to its Tom Clancy-style technospeak and leaves behind the revenge-story cliches that seem to power every tale about a man dealing with his anger over a female loved one. My devotion was not to Aiden, however, but to his friends Clara and T-Bone. One character describes Clara as a "punk-rock chick," but she's not so remarkable for her tattoos and knee-high boots as she is for her empathy toward Aiden and her patience for his stubbornness. And if Clara's type is punk-rock chick, then T-Bone is the Southern-fried genius, a down-home intellect who thankfully keeps the Hee Haw language to a minimum.

In Chicago, the mean streets are even meaner.

Aiden eventually matures, albeit too little and too late, and wonders aloud who should get to choose whose lives are less important than others. Shortly thereafter, that question still lingering, you decide if Aiden should be that person. By that point, it was clear to me what he must do, based on audio logs I'd found scattered across the city. I was glad I'd taken the time to learn what I did; finding those logs isn't required to finish the story, after all. And I was glad that Aiden at last was asking the same question I had many hours beforehand: Does the loss of one life justify mowing down dozens or hundreds of men, and risking my own sister's life in the process? If only he had pondered such obvious concerns hours before, I may have been more concerned about his ultimate fate.
Watch Dogs' narrative may win no awards, but as an open-world playground, the game rightfully deserves to be mentioned with heavyweights like Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. This playground isn't just loaded with stuff to do, as most such games are; it's loaded with lots of terrific stuff to do. I lost myself for an hour solving chess puzzles. Other times, I shot up aliens in several of Watch Dogs' augmented reality games. And still other times, I would locate remnants of QR codes painted on walls and overpasses, and hack from one camera to the next, looking for the angle that would let me view the entire code. Even the smallest activities are fully engaging. Not only are the chess puzzles clever, but I listened to two women converse about job woes as I solved them, which gave me an additional dose of entertainment. The alien shoot-'em-ups occur on Chicago's busy streets, where I got to witness car-crash victims gesticulate in anger at each other while I fired my holographic gun at virtual aliens. And like several of Watch Dogs' core activities, lining up QR codes kept my brain cells buzzing as I experimented with cameras and moved to different positions, hoping to merge those painted patterns into a cohesive barcode.

Some of these Chicagoans are chronic masturbators; others are criminals and cannibals, ordinary to look at should you pass them on the street, but far from ordinary when they think they are alone.

Moving from one activity to the next often involves summoning a vehicle to a nearby location, or simply nabbing one from the roadside or carjacking an innocent driver as she pulls up to a traffic light. Those drivers will not be happy--in fact, they may even call 911 and summon the cops--but it's worth getting on the po-po's bad side if it means racing through the streets in Watch Dogs' sizable collection of automobiles, or zooming through the canals in a speedboat if you happen to be near the water. Vehicles are rather bouncy, but the loose physics make for ecstatic moments, particularly during chases. As you speed along, you can trigger steam pipes beneath the streets to erupt and take down your foes, or cause jams by hacking into traffic lights. My favorite method of escape, however, was to raise a drawbridge as I approached it. I would fly up the first span, soar through the air, and land with a satisfying jounce on the other side; my pursuers would be left behind, blocked from entry. I could practically imagine the coppers throwing their caps on the pavement and cursing my keen driving abilities.
My favorite moments behind the wheel were those I shared online with competitors. Watch Dogs' single-player missions and multiplayer activities are merged into one experience, and the game frequently and annoyingly nags you with opportunities to engage with others should you not seek those activities for yourself. It's almost always worth accepting those offers, however, particularly should you be invited to an online race, or even better, invited into a decryption match.

Chicago should increase its police presence in canals. You can get away with murder out there!

Both modes are excellent ways to wreak havoc in the windy city. Online races offer plenty of ways to mess with your competitors. If you're trailing behind the leader and you approach a lowered blockade, raise it with the press of a button: your opponent bangs into it and snarls under her breath, and you cackle and rush into the lead. If you're crossing said blockade when another player raises it, you might bounce into the air and land on top of another racer. Should you activate the blockade too soon, you might end up obstructing your own vehicle with only yourself to blame. Open gates and close them behind you to throw off a tail, or hack a traffic signal and get him stuck in a jam. There are enough shortcuts, however, that there's no reason you can't gain ground after finding yourself on the wrong end of a blockade.
Decryption mode, in which two teams of four are confined to a portion of the city and seek to nab and hold on to sensitive data, is anarchy in its most captivating form. There are a few details that separate this mode from its capture-the-flag cousin, the most important of which is that you only have to remain within the data carrier's proximity for a certain amount of time to steal the data. This allows data to be passed around even when you are in vehicles, or without necessarily directly engaging a carrier hiding on a rooftop above. At one point, I rammed head-on into a carrier riding a motorcycle, and I watched his body fly above my windshield before it soared out of view and landed with a thud behind me. A teammate then leapt into my vehicle's passenger seat, and we zoomed away while my comrade fired his rifle at a pursuing ambulance. The action is constant--and constantly on the move--and the shooting is as sturdy as you'd expect in any given third-person shooter. Whether you're dealing death by shotgun or by cement truck, it's difficult not to be swept up in the pandemonium, cheering or groaning with each unexpected development.

Aiden Pearce is good at shooting, good at sneaking, and good at hacking. What a Renaissance man!

Online invasions are less explosive than other modes, and potentially more boring, depending on how the invasion goes. As the invader, you come close to your target, press a button to begin downloading her data, and wait. As the victim, you rush around or hack into nearby cameras, scanning the crowd for your invader. (You always see yourself as Aiden, but other players see you as a random Chicagoan.) Neither running around looking for your hacker nor avoiding her watchful eye is engaging on its own. But catching the data thief initiates a chase sequence that leads to Watch Dogs' special brand of pandemonium. Rolling over a sprinting invader with an ice cream truck is one kind of delight. My favorite experience in an invasion thus far, however, was leaping into the bed of my hacker's pickup truck as he drove off, planting an explosive, and detonating the explosive as I leapt to the ground. It wasn't a moment I planned--the stars simply aligned, giving me the chance to pull off a dramatic kill. Successfully completing an invasion earns you a currency called notoriety, but earning the skills related to notoriety is so easy that there's more reward in the chase than in the subterfuge.
You can simply ignore all these possibilities and remain a lone vigilante, of course, and doing so offers its own kinds of rewards. Infiltrating gang hideouts is much like performing many of the story missions: you search for a way into the danger zone and decide how best to proceed. The wonder of Watch Dogs is that any method is reasonable--and every method is enjoyable. The weak link is the shooting, not because the mechanics aren't great (they are), but because enemies are so quick to go limp--and even more so when you activate the game's unnecessary bullet time. But if, like me, you seek to express some creativity in your encounters, you'll enjoy piecing together a stealthy route and performing a hushed assassination when it proves necessary.

Decryption mode, in which two teams of four are confined to a portion of the city and seek to nab and hold on to sensitive data, is anarchy in its most captivating form.

Watch Dogs isn't a full-fledged stealth game in the usual sense; you can't hide bodies or tranquilize mafiosos. However, slinking from cover to cover is smooth and weighty, as if Aiden is Sam Fisher's bulkier cousin. I came to rely on a move I call "riding the cameras," hacking into one camera so that I might in turn hack into another until I was able to tag all of my enemies and devise ways of thinning the herd. Riding the cameras is also the primary way you hack into ctOS centers, each of which presents an environmental puzzle to solve so that you might reveal more hot spots on your map. Many of these puzzles are quite clever, though some story missions take the camera mechanics a few steps further, particularly a prison level in which you hack into guards' personal cameras and investigate from their perspectives.
One type of optional mission--the digital trip--deserves special mention. There are four digital trips in all, each one an expansive minigame explained away as an audio-induced hallucination. One of the trips is a fun bit of frippery in which you bounce from one giant flower to the next, remaining in the air as long as possible. The other three, however, could be fleshed out into full games in their own right, which is a testament to how good Watch Dogs' individual pieces are. In the best of these, you gain control of a humongous spider-bot, battering police cars and leaping up the sides of buildings from which you fire rockets at helicopters and pellet the authorities with machine-gun bullets. Games that have focused on wall-climbing have rarely made these acrobatics feel so intuitive, and I'd gladly see the spider-bot find its way into a game fully devoted to it. The other two digital trips--a stealth sequence in which robots seek you out, and a car combat game in which the highways are lousy with zombies--are almost as delightful, and all of them have their own skill progression trees. The trips are structurally simple, but their foundations are rock-solid and rich with possibilities.

You spend a lot of time looking through cameras. Luckily, there's often something creepy to find.

Watch Dogs does a lovely job of keeping its many interlocking systems from becoming overwhelming, though some systems ultimately feel superfluous. You can buy different outfits, but they all hew to the same basic style; you can buy new vehicles for ordering on demand, but fast cars are perfectly easy to find. As a result, the economy is never as meaningful as it might have been; apart from a sniper rifle and silenced pistol I purchased from an ammo shop, I rarely went shopping, simply because I rarely needed to. Even hacking scores of random passersby begins to feel excessive: when you have access to everything, no one person or piece of information is special anymore. Precious little of that information is actually a gateway to a human soul.
Aiden's soul is still locked away, too, even though I spent dozens of hours with him. But while I can't say who Aiden truly is, I can confidently say that Watch Dogs is a lushly produced and riotous game with an uncanny ability to push you from one task to the next, each of which is just as fun as the last. This version of Chicago is crawling with a hyperbolic number of degenerates, and I didn't mind squashing pyromaniacs and slavers under my tires as I plowed through the streets chasing after a hacker, hip-hop beats blasting from the radio. After all, the struggling mothers and homeless beggars wandering Chicago deserve some peace of mind, and doling out some street justice is a good first step.

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Rio 2 (2014)

These days, the potential for animated films is seemingly limitless. In the past few months, we've seen Disney's boldly contemporary fairy tale "Frozen" deservedly become the highest grossing animated movie of all time, while Hayao Miyazaki was able to delicately frame the story of a man who made war machines as a love letter to artistic pursuit with "The Wind Rises," and "The Lego Movie" transcended its commercial base to become a dazzlingly funny and heartfelt movie about the true power of imagination. So it's such a shame, then, that a movie like Blue Sky Studios' "Rio 2" comes along – a visually stunning, wholly empty experience that fails to conjure any emotion stronger than an impassive shrug.

"Rio 2" picks up where 2011's similarly unimpressive predecessor left off. Blu (Jesse Eisenberg) and Jewel (Anne Hathaway), a pair of ultra-rare Spix macaw parrots, are living comfortably in a sanctuary in Rio de Janeiro, under the watchful eye of Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) and Linda (Leslie Mann), their human owners. They now have three baby parrots (Amandla Stenberg, Pierce Gagnon and Rachel Crow), all of who are obnoxious and hard to differentiate. Tulio and Linda are away on an expedition in the Amazon when they notice another Spix macaw. It turns out they do exist in the wild! When Blu and Jewel see a television news report with Tulio and Linda, Jewel urges her nebbish bird husband to pack up the kids and go down to the rainforest in search of their fellow rare parrots.

Now, while it was probably a good idea to get the parrots back into the wild, the idea of a new colony of parrots being discovered totally takes away any of the tension or dramatic stakes of the first movie. The idea was that this family was the last of this particular breed of birds. Now there are countless birds. The other thing is that other characters from the first movie, including a couple of smaller birds played by Jamie Foxx and will.i.am, accompany them on their journey for no apparent reason. When these two characters, who look like they are better suited for an "Angry Birds" movie, announce their intention to tag along with the family, it took a lot of willpower for us to not yell "WHY???" at the screen. 

Kids movies obviously don't have to make a whole lot of sense, but what "Rio 2" fails to understand is that animated films can be way more streamlined than normal fare – it's all about making the narrative as tidy as possible, so that it can be told in bold visual strokes. Maybe it was because of the South American jungle setting, but the entire time we were watching "Rio 2," all we could think about was "Up," and that movie's superior simplicity. It was about a man who ties a bunch of balloons to his house and soars away to the South American jungle -- and that was pretty much it. Characters and situations grew organically, sometimes bizarrely, from that foundation, but that was the basic premise of the movie and it was a premise that was followed through on, spectacularly and in unexpectedly emotional ways. 

Instead, "Rio 2" piles on the subplots and unnecessary characters and busy set pieces, until the whole thing creaks and groans and eventually falls apart. Amongst the subplots that get trotted out for no apparent reason: the return of the supposedly dead villain from the first film, Nigel the cockatoo (Jermaine Clement), who teams up with a poison dart frog (Kristin Chenoweth) and a silent anteater to exact his revenge on the parrots who did him wrong; Jewel reconnecting with her father (Andy Garcia) and ex-flame (Bruno Mars); the birds looking to "cast" jungle animals in a new Amazon-inspired stage show (or something); and maybe most baffling of all, a storyline where an evil logging baron plots to kill the two human characters for exposing the parrot sanctuary and throwing his illegal logging operation into jeopardy. Just recounting all of these different, ill-fitting parts is enough to make you exhausted. 

It's not that "Rio 2" is uniformly horrible, because there are some fine moments, usually having to do with the movie's visuals that are genuinely wonderful. In the birds' flight to the Amazon is portrayed in a trippy, 2D pop-up book style that serves as more than a passing homage to Disney's "it's a small world" ride, and the characters themselves (especially the newly introduced ones), have a charming simplicity, looking like a Build-a-Bear character with too much stuffing. There's also a couple of rousing dance numbers that play like midair Busby Berkley productions and a pseudo-soccer game that is like a bird-world version of Quiddich.

Politically, though, the movie is even more problematic. A few months after the message of female empowerment in "Frozen," the attitude of the male characters in "Rio 2" towards their female counterparts is summed up by the phrase, "Happy wife, happy life." It would be bad enough if this condescending platitude was uttered once but it is said so many times that it becomes the movie's de facto mantra. (The thought of little kids repeating this after the movie is positively stomach churning.) Even worse is the movie's dangerous environmental message. When the loggers attempt to destroy a large portion of the rainforest in the movie's last act, the animals rise up, "Apocalypto"-style and beat them back. Except that the movie doesn't offer any kind of real world solution or tips for how to actually affect change. The animals beat back the humans and then that's it. The rainforest is safe forever. But that's not how this works. And like much of "Rio 2," it seems to be a moment staged for the visual spark of it all and not much more. You get the sense that "Rio 2" wasn't thought through as much as it was quickly cobbled together as it went along, with a simple, clearheaded goal in mind: just make it good enough to warrant a "Rio 3."

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