Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

Who here is a huge fan of the Mission Impossible series?

Oh... I don't see all that many hands.  I supposed somebody out there is a rabid fanboy of Mission Impossible, waiting happily for every single release.  I bet somewhere out there a whole gang of people debate all the films on line, and decide which one is the best, and whatever, but I don't see it.  There have been four Mission Impossible movies so far, and even though they've all been moderately successful films, its never felt like a franchise that has really caught the public's imagination.  It definitely never caught mine, every single time I see a new Mission Impossible film I can barely remember what the other ones have been like.  There isn't any deep mythology or complex characters with long histories or anything.  None of the movies even feel similar, they're all just the next Tom Cruise spy-action flick.  Mission Impossible movies are really only the James Bond movies we watch in-between the real James Bond movies.

"Mission Impossible 1" was really good, I thought it was a solidly decent action film.  It has exciting moments, has dark turns, but still was a lot of fun and is worth a rent.  And that's really been the height of the series in ambition and reaction, none of them are classics of the medium.  "Mission Impossible 2" was pretty and flashy, but it didn't feel like even the same franchise.  Inferior, but made exciting by director John Woo at his Woo-iest.  As for "Mission Impossible 3"... that sucked.  J.J. Abrams made a dreary humorless movie that ultimately was really boring.  It felt like Abrams was ramping up the emotions of the series, adding some level of completely flat dramatic relationships and a lot of false emotions, and in the end, the villain gets punked out in an amazing anticlimax.  "Mission Impossible 4:  Ghost Protocol" is yet another shift in tone, being a big huge action film, and that's about it.

So ultimately "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon" isn't all that monumental of a film.  Its an unambitious action movie and it isn't trying to be much more than that.  It is, however, Brad Bird's, Pixar master director of "The Incredibles", first live-action movie.  So its a solid action movie, good for a night at the movies and exactly not one more thing else.  The action scenes are impressive, the character banter is mildly humorous.  Brad Bird shoots straight down the line to exactly "good".

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

2011 had one final gift for me:  food poisoning.  So despite all the movies I need to review and all the posts I should be making about my new video games, I was instead in bed or almost in bed all week, and I don't feel much better now.  This is also putting the kaibosh on my dreams of getting ridiculously drunk tonight and completely failing to hit on girls.  But there was on light spot on my miserable week:

While thumbing through my room on Christmas Eve, I found the most magnificent thing:  a model one Game Boy.  This beautiful portable machine was the first ever true Nintendo handheld console, the beginning of a glorious tradition of great machines full of great games that has lasted over two decades.  Speaking of lasting two decades, this Game Boy itself has survived four Presidencies to see 2012, and its still working!  Nothing from 1989 still works, but this does, I love this machine.  Its an amazing find.  The Game Boy is the epitome of pure gaming praticality and engineering brilliance.  It is well-known to be completely indestructible, has impressive memory space for its cartridges, and most amazingly, perhaps unlimited battery life.  I've been playing this thing since Sunday on the batteries I found it with, and it is still running!  Not even the Wiimote will last that long!

The Game Boy really is singularly the most perfect example of pure gaming.  It was a system designed with only that in mind.  It didn't waste resources on graphics, it didn't waste resources on silly bells and whistles.  There's no touch screen, no Internet connection, no 3D, no microphone, no DLC, only the games doing what they do best:  gameplay.  Its spartan simplicity shows exactly what modern gaming has lost, purity.  The Game Boy wasn't made to show off Nintendo's so-called "revolutionary" control methods or 3D, it was just a handheld platform to play games, that's all it ever was and that's what it did better than anybody else.  One can't help but think that the Game Boy's great-great grandson has completely forgotten that philosophy.

And what a better way to show off the brilliance of the Game Boy than "The Legend of Zelda:  Link's Awakening"?  A game I never played until recently and beat just yesterday.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Part 3

TO PART 2.

I've basically stopped playing "Skyward Sword" at this point.  I didn't beat the game, I reached the Final Boss, and lost.  Clearly I need more little bottles with Potions, but I just don't care.  I don't, I'm at the bottom here.  I could go back up to Skyloft, go through the tedious and pointless flying segment, talk to all the shopkeepers with their needlessly long and stupid unskippable dialog, buy all the Potions.  Then I could wander the world and find all the bugs and stupid little bits of crafting items and upgrade the Potions, and maybe do a sidequest or two to get more bottles.  But... I don't care.  I've so wanted to love this game, so wanted to enjoy it.  I could probably finish the whole thing in about three hours with just a single determined push, but my will is sapped.  I'm beaten.  I think I need to finally face the very awful truth about "Skyward Sword":  this game sucks.  Its not fun.

Yesterday I booted up "Wind Waker" for the Gamecube.  Immediately I was stunned by the amazing beautiful perfection of its art style, a true labor of love to make a gorgeous unique game.  "Wind Waker"'s entire experience is so charming, and the game is so warm and inviting to its player.  And then I started exploring an area of combat.  To no surprise at all, I found I did not miss the motion controls.  I was able to play this game, which is now almost ten years old, with a level of control balance and secure knowledge that the commands I give Link will be exactly what he'll do on screen in a way that "Skyward Sword"'s motion controls do not allow.  And there's a free-roaming camera!  I can spin the camera all around Link, what an idea!  Sailing is free and adventurous, you just want to keep on going to the ends of the universe on your little red boat.  I actually started to tear up, "Wind Waker" is so amazing and so lovely.  I want that feeling again in "Skyward Sword", but isn't there.  Why can't I love this game?  I want to love it so badly.  I loved every other Zelda game I played, this is the first one that is truly plain bad.

Now, I know nostalgia is clearly ruining my objectivity here, but there is a point to be made.  "Wind Waker" is a far more innovative and exciting game than "Skyward Sword" will ever be.  "Skyward Sword" is the same game as Nintendo has been making for ten years.  I've always believed that Nintendo can keep making the same game over and over again and it will be fine as long as its fun... but "Skyward Sword" isn't fun.  Maybe it is for you other people who enjoy the game, don't let me stop you.  As for me, however, its pretty clear that this game is a dead-end for the series.  This is the not the next big step forward for Zelda.  For the first time ever, this series has gotten stale.

Blackthorn

The Western movie might be an undead film genre, but that's certainly not stopping filmmakers from creating a great cowboy movie every so often.  2010 had the grandly memorable "True Grit", 2008 had "3:10 to Yuma".   2011 needed a great Western movie, and two movies came forward to answer the call.  One was "Cowboys & Aliens", an utterly forgettable silly SciFi movie with a gaggle of movie stars and a ridiculous budget.  The other was "Blackthorn", a slow beautiful movie that you've probably never heard of.  And that's a shame, because "Blackthorn" is easily one of the best movies I've seen all year, melancholic and gorgeous with the heart of a true classic.

"Blackthorn" is kind of an unofficial sequel to the famous Robert Redford-Paul Newman masterpiece "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid".  Bizarrely for somebody who pretends to be a film fan, I haven't seen that movie, but its sitting on my Netflix queue now.  The main concept between "Blackthorn" is that Butch Cassidy survived the famous outlaw duo's death and has been living quietly in Bolivia under the name of 'James Blackthorn' for twenty years.  During his attempt to travel home to America, he runs into a Spanish outlaw and goes on one final adventure in the fantastic wilderness of the Andes Mountains.  The plot may be a basic chase adventure, but the results are a stark movie that takes it time, builds a great atmosphere, and becomes a walking landscape painting.

All in all, I'd say that "Blackthorn" is arguably the most beautiful-looking movie of 2011.  This is the quintessential Western classic, all of which is made extremely unfortunate because I know for a fact you've never heard of this movie before.  Its a Spanish production (though shot 80% in English) that was released first on iTunes of all places, and got a minor theatrical run in October.  Even I missed it, which is a tragedy, because this is a great movie that deserved better.  So I guess its up to me, little 'ol me, to sing "Blackthorn"'s praises.  I'm not the singer this movie needs, my range is pitiful, and I'm frequently out of tune.  And I drive metaphorical conceits straight into the grave.  Let's hear the music.

Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows

"Sherlock Holmes 1" was easily one of the best movies of 2009.  "Sherlock Holmes 2" is one of the most okay movies of 2011.  For a year full of various disappointments and failures, to me 'pretty good' is the new great.  It was properly entertaining, not a new classic, not as good as the original, but certainly worth seeing.  Compared to many other movies with the number '2' in the title, "Sherlock Holmes:  A Game of Shadows" manages to keep the franchise fresh, entertaining, and fun enough for me to get happily excited for a "Sherlock Holmes 3".

At the start of this year, there were a lot of movies I was looking forward to:  "Rango", "Captain America", "Sucker Punch", "Harry Potter 7.5".  Are we noticing a pattern here?  These movies were all either mediocre or utterly horrible.  There have been lots of unhappy surprises this year, even now I still can't call it a good year for movies.  This is a year where there wasn't just a Transformers movie, there wasn't just a Twilight movie, but there was also "Jack and Jill".  Aside from a few bright spots like "Drive", "Winnie th Pooh", and "the Guard", 2011 generally sucked.  But now there are less than week left, and 2011 has to work overtime to convince me that it wasn't a complete disaster.  "Sherlock Holmes 2" is not a movie that will change my entire opinion of the year, but it was a pretty decent.  This is as good as any movie should be, movies should never get worse than this.

I actually went out last night with the initial plan of seeing "Hugo", but the universe didn't allow for that.  So instead I went to this.  The first "Sherlock Holmes" was clever, entertaining, exciting, and Robert Downey Jr-ey.  This one is much of the same, but I don't think director Guy Ritchie really knew how to make a sequel.  So he just ramped everything up, turned it all into an action movie, and stopped flirting with the idea of Holmes and Watson having sexual tension and turned them into forlorn gay lovers.  The results are clearly inferior, and if I were a crueler person, I wouldn't give it a pass.  But Robert Downey Jr.!  What am I to do?