Inception

I saw Christopher Nolan's Inception the other day and was pleasantly surprised. The only problem I had with it was that it ran a little long (about 2 and a half hours). Then again, that is typical of any movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I guess he figures the longer the movie, the more he gets paid. Based on the previews, I thought the movie would be a lot harder to follow.

The idea of the movie was quite original, with the idea of planting ideas in people's heads via their subconcious through their dreams, which could be manipulated from the outside. The special effects were mind blowing (literally) and the plot was fairly interesting, especially with the dream within a dream within a dream sequences.

Like many directors, Christopher Nolan cast actors he was already familar with from his Batman franchise, including Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanbe, and Michael Caine. The only actress from the movie who I felt didn't add anything by their presence was Ellen Page. She is too young and innocent looking for this type of movie in my opinion.

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Predators

I just saw Predators and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of this entry in the Alien/Predator series of films. Then again, AVP: Requiem was not exactly hard to surpass. Both franchises had numerous failures, starting with Alien: Resurrection. Predators was reminiscent of a couple of movies: The Condemned (the stranded criminals/mercenaries angle, Predator (of course), Aliens (the second movie in the Alien franchise), and Alien vs. Predator.

I didn't expect Adrien Brody to be able to pull off the tough guy mercenary role as Arnold Schwarzenegger did in the original, but he managed, even managing to throw in the gruff Christian Bale Batman voice. Topher Grace was his usual annoying self with a touch of evil thrown in for good measure, taking his role as bad guy Eddie Brock/Venom from Spider-Man 3 a step further into villainy.

Predators was definitely a Robert Rodriguez kind of film, using his filming style, some of the same actors that he always uses (mainly Danny Trejo), and the same type of humor. He executive produced the film.

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Lego Video Games

I grew up playing with Legos like most kids and I always loved getting a new lego kit to put together. I still enjoy Legos to this day, but they are far

too expensive for me to continually invest money in.

The recent wave of Lego themed video games are some of the most addictive games I have ever played, namely Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman. They are so cute and fun and have hours and hours of gameplay with a high replay quotient.

Most games take me no more than a week or two to beat, but with the fun side missions including collecting all the coins, finding and collecting minikits and red blocks all while unlocking a vast amount of new characters and vehicles these games last a long time and I don't want to return them or trade them in for something better when I'm finished with them.

I'm definitely looking forward to playing Lego Harry Potter and to reexplore Lego Indiana Jones as I ran through it as fast as I could the first time around since it was a rental.

I Love Comic Books Again

Image via Wikipedia

When I was I kid I was into comics. I collected the action figures, watched the saturday morning cartoons, and read the comic books. This was in the early 90's when the X-Men cartoon was on Fox, so naturally I was a Marvel guy. The first comic I bought was Venom #1 and my friend who was with me at the time bought The Death of Superman, which I also read and which remains timeless despite his subsequent resurrection. Meanwhile, Venom #1 is slightly outdated.

Years passed and I stopped reading, collecting, and watching. With the new boom of comic book movies that started with Blade (which at the time I didn't even know was a comic book character) I got back into reading comics to see what had changed and where these movies were getting their inspiration from as most of them were quite good.

When Batman Begins came out in the theater I enjoyed it so much that I started reading Batman comics even though I had never gotten into DC Comics before. I liked the comics so much so that I started reading other DC titles such as Superman and JLA. Then I found DC's Vertigo Comics and got into Fables, Watchmen, and Transmetropolitan. Most recently I have started reading Wildstorm's Ex Machina.

In terms of reading the comics, I collect them in trade paperback form for the most part, which can become quite costly. The best thing to happen to negate this effect was the CD/DVD-ROM collections that Marvel used to put out, but recently stopped. I hve alway wished that DC would do something similar and allow me to read their entire archives for $50-$60

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