The Dungeons & Dragons movie
isn’t a great movie, but despite the complaints you’ll hear about it, it’s certainly not the worst of a lackluster genre.
OK, the sound man should be flogged — I couldn’t understand a word in either the beginning or ending segments with the dragons — and the script needed to be something beyond a first draft, with recognizable motivations, less exposition and decent dialogue added. And someone wake Thora Birch up: She seems to have slipped into some sort of sleepwalking coma.
Having said that, the Dungeons & Dragons movie wasn’t as horrible as I’d heard it made out to be. It was surely better than Krull or The Sword and the Sorcerer. I’d rank it right below Willow and around the level of Dragonheart: amateurish, kind of cheesy, but not offensively so.
There was some neat stuff in the movie. Well, neatish. Many of the characters, most notably Ridley certainly looked the part, and the computer-generated capital city was pretty excellent in all the pointlessly fast flyby shots. And I thought the dungeon sequences were handled reasonably well.
Courtney Solomon put Dungeons & Dragons together without the benefit of a real grounding in film, other than “parents in the film industry,” which qualifies him to work at Starbucks, honestly. And it shows. But the film, if clumsy, also shows a real love of the source material that redeems most of its flaws.
You want to see a really bad fantasy movie? Check out First Knight. Compared to that, this is Shakespeare.
Worth renting for families looking for light entertainment, and maybe owning for someone REALLY passionate about the Dungeons & Dragons game.
Apparently, General Zod, in addition to being an authoritarian Kryptonian mass murderer and super-criminal, is also a lefty authoritarian Kryptonian mass murderer and super-criminal, and a little bit of a protectionist.
Universal health care. Even a criminal like myself is shocked that millions are not able to get health insurance and cannot pay for basic surgery. Who are these power brokers that allow the pigpen to become wormy and filthy? I demand your very lives, but I am not such an imbecile as to institutionalize suffering and poverty. You have my assurance that this shall change swiftly.
Corporate reform. You people have become disgusting minions to these things you call “corporations”. [sic] These things take your money and your land, put you into debt, send your jobs overseas, provide you with unsafe foods, and sue you when you say anything bad about them. Yet you people fatten them up at the ballot box. You give them free land, name your stadiums after them, allow them to telemarket you, and even sacrifice your own bankruptcy protections. Quite frankly it astonishes me. I will break this sickly codependency. It is I who shall be your ruler. I shall empower you with wealth to give me as tribute. A corporation cannot bow to me or give me tribute that comes from the heart.
You will buy U.S. made items. Why do you buy Chinese-made items when you know that it sells out the jobs of your family and friends? How will you buy those cheap things when you have no job? You are sending my wealth and tribute to foreign lands. I will not tolerate this.
Who knew?
On the other hand, I have it on good authority that Lex Luthor is a social conservative who favors free trade.
(Source.)
More information on Zod.
Yet more reason to go to BlizzCon:
We’re happy to announce that BlizzCon attendees will be able to go hands-on with a playable sneak peek of the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion. For those who won’t be able to attend BlizzCon, please note that gaming magazines hitting newsstands in different regions of the world around the time of the event will feature in-depth previews on the new content we have in store.
Attendees will also get a code to allow them entry into an upcoming Blizzard beta test, presumably the World of Warcraft one previewed.
Preach it, Brother Gabe!
Looking on the Internet, it appears there is no place “mangina” is defined that is both 1) accurate in how it’s used by MMORPG players and 2) safe for reading at work. In case the definition wasn’t clear after reading the Penny Arcade strip, it’s a slang term for a guy who prefers to run around as a woman in a roleplaying game. They claim there’s nothing unsavory about it, but Gabe and I know the truth.
