Monday's Report | The Return

The Tradition Returns!

Oh, how I missed you, Monday's Report... A weekly trend that always brought me so much joy around the otherwise dank and empty corridors of the Bannendrome. I'm glad to have you back, old friend. Of course, today's not Monday, it's Wednesday - but Monday was Memorial Day and I was busy firing up the grill for some of my famous burgers and slaving away while putting together patio furniture that was most certainly engineered in Hell. I still have that glow of new home-ownership, and finally putting a nice set of table and chairs on a patio that was wasted last summer does nothing but make me absolutely thrilled. All I need to do now is throw a fire pit in the back yard and I'm golden. I could have also put together a Monday's Report on Tuesday, but frankly I was busy playing inFAMOUS all day - which, by the way, is possibly the greatest reason to own a PS3 since Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Expect me to throw up a Reviewish on the topic later this week. Simply put, it still may not be the one magical system-seller Sony has been searching for (Pro-Tip For Sony: God of War III), but it's easily one of the most enjoyable open-world-type games I've played, and while there's no popular hero license in sight, it might be one of the very best superhero games on the market...ever. Oh yeah, that's hyperbole all over your face, bitches. Now all I need to do is see if Prototype can live up to this level of quality. Let's just say I have my doubts.

In terms of movies, I think I've turned some kind of corner as a consumer and as someone who once took great pride in my ability to "shut my brain off" during a movie so long as I was rewarded with things exploding in new and exciting ways. Now, I'm not saying I've become a snob by any means - Star Trek was sweet. But other big name "blockbusters" that have come up so far in the last months or so I've had almost no desire to see, and for me it's weird to think thoughts like "I'll catch Terminator: Salvation on DVD" or "That Wolverine movie is garbage" - and yet here I am, having not seen Wolverine and in no real hurry to see the Future War unfold in front of my eyes. Let me tangent here a bit and say that if McG really would like to earn some sort of respect as a director, a nice place to start would be moving past the age of really dumb nicknames. McG is fond of thinking his moniker is a self-imposed scarlet letter to rise above - but reality is that it's goofy shit that audiences are swiftly starting to turn away from. Not that his name is by any means the complete reason a new Terminator film was bested by a Ben Stiller family flick opening weekend, but I doubt it helped in any regard. To think that not even Christian Bale, fresh off of the monsterous pop culture juggernaut that was The Dark Knight, could help make it that smashing success that Warner Bros. was hoping to build two more films upon... Tell me that Michael Bay, Stephen Sommers or maybe even Brett Ratner directed T4 and it stands a far better chance of getting a firm hold of my $9.00 - I take that back, Brett Ratner sucks. But let's all watch and see the crazy money that Transformers 2 effortlessly earns... All in all, the reviews for T4 aren't great and I have to wonder if this franchise is really and truly dead, if not just put on the shelf for six years until a complete reboot is considered. Modern Hollywood, you've got to love it.

The Ghostbusters video game is finally just three weeks away and I'm doing just about everything I can to distract myself. To think that it was almost a year ago that I completely lost my mind when Activision dropped the game... Oh, the memories! Reviews are slowly trickling in, and so far they at least seem positive - 8's and 9's out of 10 aren't bad by any means - though between you and me, even if the game came with a sticker on the front that read "This Game Is Shit", I'd still happily buy it... And with the game's hype mixing lovingly with the 25th anniversary of the original movie's release this summer (damn I feel so old), it has brought up a flurry of discussion over the long-talked-about Ghostbusters 3 movie actually becoming something resembling reality. Dan Aykroyd has certainly said some crazy, crazy things - including discussion of troops of "boys and girls" learning the ropes and mastering equipment that allows them to travel interdimensionally - it makes me so happy that Harold Ramis is around to shake his head "No" and bring Dan down to something resembling reality. Do you have any idea how screwed up Ghostbusters would have been had Ramis not been brought in to take the whole concept from Aykroyd and boil it down to what we know today? Kiss just about every thing you hold dear about the movie goodbye... The firehouse, the Ecto-1, the Proton Pack, Venkman, etc - all gone. I must admit that the idea of a GB3 is something I've dreamed of since I walked out of the theater in 1989, fresh off the high from my third viewing of Ghostbusters II - but it's been two decades and I was much easier to please then. Can Ghostbusters 3 manage to learn lessons that GB2 taught, namely that the movie should be less about gimmicks like rivers of neon-colored slime and more about the inter-personal relationships and banter? We'll have to see, I guess, though I've long since held the rule that I will not even begin to get my hopes up about a third movie until I see an actual trailor in the theaters. Until then, it's all evil internet-fueled lies and I'll have no part of them...