Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

I love strippers. The whole concept is wonderful. When I think about the low lights and the bumping bass and constant motion of a strip club I smile. Maybe it is just because I am a guy but the idea of a dozen or so women in various states of undress writhing and grinding in wanting ways for just my arousal is one of the top five things I can picture for any days plans. I really love strippers. But outside of dating a few in my early twenties, I never really stopped to think about the mental landscape they must live in. Then I read Searching for Suzi by Nancy Stohlman.

This book is a fast firing flash fiction about womanhood, sexuality, exploitation, emotional evolution and the world of stripping. It is the tale of Natalie, a thirty something mother who retraces the steps of teenaged beauty pageantry and stripping to search for the first woman she slept with. The trail takes the reader on a ride through time that reveals a life of emotional abuse, squalor and eroticism.

It makes the reader think about the lives of strippers and the esteem issues inflicted on women in a world that tells them that they have to be beautiful. It asks serious questions about the effects our sexuality has on our lives.

Without becoming porn, this book looks truthfully at the world of strippers and gets quite saucy. The shifting point of view keeps the reader feeling like they are flowing in and out of the consciences of the narrator. It forces you to wonder how you would feel if you were 17 and your high school principal just walked into the strip club you work at. It keeps a dark subject light in the right places by reviewing stripper tips, like stripper tip #6: underarm deodorant glows under black light or stripper tip #11: smoking pot in the bathroom only makes the night drag on forever.

Sure there are plenty of dirty words to keep your attention and at least two sex scenes that will make you look around to make sure you are alone while you read it, but better than that is the underlying understanding of the story. It is a story about the scars sexuality can leave on us, and how those scars shape us into the sexy little beasts we become. It is also about the connections that you make in life and how things change over time. It is a story about real life and I am glad I read it.

Ghosts and Saw movies never scared me. I always thought they were more of a gore factor than scary. Alien abduction movies have always frightened me, but never have I seen a more realistic horror movie than “Fourth Kind.”

The direction the movie takes is not only original but is what makes the movie as terrifying as it is. The way the director splices in original footage from therapy sessions adds to the element of realism that can be lost when cutting from scene to scene.

Another interesting way the director shoots the movie is the strange focusing he uses. He focuses on certain objects in some scenes rather than the people. This is so you focus on the audio.

Even writing this, I still feel the chills as characters stumble upon the truth about Nome, Alaska, which has the most reported sightings and abductions in Alaska and possibly the United States.

The dramatization of real events gives you enough information to make sense of the story but also keep you in the dark about the truth. There are a few plot twists that are easy to guess, and once you figure them out, you want to make sure you’re right by never taking your eyes off the scene.

Tying the small history lesson in with the abduction story makes for a better case. Let’s just say I never want to hear anything speak Swahili again.

The creepiest part of the movie is the main characters first hand interview about the events that took place. The videos shown of her before the events make her look like a sane and normal woman. Then, as they show her two years later she looks like a woman that has never slept in her life, her big eyes staring into the camera piercing your minding and testing your truths.

“The Fourth Kind” should go into the record books for originality. There is little to no blood and as a matter of fact, there is some gore censored out early in the film.
It’s rare these days to come across a director that doesn’t have to use gore to make a good movie. All he needed was a good story, some original footage and a creepy woman who may or may not be insane.

By the end of the film you are asking yourself, “If our psychologists go insane, who do I go to when I go insane?”

There are a certain class of gamers out there in the wide world of the Web that are not driven by games that are based solely on rapid reflexes and gratuitous grinding. These people still seek stimulation when it comes to surfing the Internet. They seek a challenge to their intellectual process, a certain something to sharpen their strategic skills and fine-tune their resource management abilities. These people are the ones that are into strategy games. For people like this, building and managing a kingdom is where it is at. And it is at Evony.com.

What might be the best browser game out there ends up being free. Evony has picked 5 million users since April of this year. I have been tending to my bonsai tree of browser games faithfully since that time. I have already lost two cities and relocated twice, but I keep working to build up my horde of cavalry and ballista so that Lord Donan can lay waste to all of Server 3. It really is a bonsai. Step by step becoming a tiny work of art.

The game is easy to figure out with a series of quests meant to train the user on how to tend to their kingdom, collecting taxes and winning loyalty, all the while defending your peoples from any number of martial incursions. You can build up to ten cities; I prefer just tending the one.

With a quick chat band it is easy to get tips from others that playing the game as well. The modular form of the cities does allow for some variation in the design of your city. You could build a city with three barracks for extra army growth or a city designed for commerce and then you can rule at the always active market place. You can hire and fire heroes to lead your people and you can gamble on the wheel of fortune. I just won an iron rake with an amulet I saved up.

The beauty of this game is that if you are the kind of person that is online a lot during the day, all you have to do is favorite it, and all day long you can pop in and out of your little perfect kingdom. In the morning you can start your scholars training in the academy, at coffee break you can start recruiting heroes, at lunch you are building your walls up and at dinner you are appointing a new mayor. By bedtime you are conquering a new city.

This game really does rock for those that are into this sort of thing. I wish more of my friends were. I guess if anyone reads this article, you can come find me in land of Bohemia, ruling over Gotham City, right next to the flag 420.

In the wonderful world of horror films, the Final Destination franchise has become the modern-day equivalent of the Friday the 13 series; watch horny teenagers get murdered in increasingly inventive, gruesome ways. Now, after a three-year absence, death returns in “The Final Destination,” which delivers the goods in glorious 3-D.

Following the formula set forth by the previous three films, Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo) sees a premonition while with friends at McKinley Speedway, warning him of imminent death. In the nick of time, the hero saves his friends and a handful of strangers including his girlfriend (Shantel VanSanten) and a security guard (Mykelti Williamson). Like his predecessors, Nick learns the hard way that the grim reaper doesn’t like losing and strikes out at the survivors, who are forced to band together and find a way to cheat death.

Let’s get this out of the way; “The Final Destination” is not interested in being a good movie. The script is devoid of anything resembling scares or three-dimensional characters. Furthermore, if you’ve seen the other films, then you can pretty much predict everything well in advance. For some, that makes it a bad movie not worthy of the $13 bucks required to see it. For the fans, however, it’s blissful.

Just like Friday the 13, Final Destination isn’t going for masterful storytelling. Within the first five minutes, it’s pretty clear that the filmmakers know what the fans want and aren’t afraid to give it to them. That fact alone makes this film a vast improvement over the muddled “Final Destination 3” and puts it on par with “Final Destination 2.” But what puts this film above the sequels is the 3-D experience.

Whereas other recent 3-D films have tried to downplay the gimmicky nature of 3-D, the new Final Destination fully embraces the technology and uses it to its advantage. Add in the return of “Final Destination 2” director David R. Ellis, well known for crafting insanely wicked kills, and the result is one of the most entertaining movies playing on the big screen this year.

“The Final Destination” also sports a solid cast of actors that make the most out of their underwritten characters. Campo and VanSanten, as lovers Nick and Lori, come off as the best couple in the series since Devon Sawa and Ali Larter in the original. Nick Zano, playing the requisite Jerk, chews away at the scenery while the rest of the cast deliver decent, albeit workmanlike performances. Special credit goes to Justin Welborn, who is a hoot as the drunken racist ballsy enough to throw out racial slurs that most actors tend to shy away from these days. If you dug Welborn as much as I did, then by all means seek out one of his previous films; the 2007 indie hit “The Signal,” undeniably the best horror movie since “The Blair Witch Project.”

Although great for pure entertainment value, there’s no denying that the script is bad. Some key character moments are a bit hard to swallow and, as stated before, it would’ve been nice if the filmmakers had tried to at least do something to make this one a little bit different from the others. However, the main problem comes with the ending. For its brisk 82 minute running time, the film wastes too much time with the ending, throwing premonitions on top of premonitions when it should’ve just got to the point. And yes, the film most likely wouldn’t be as effective in two dimensions.

In closing, “The Final Destination” is not a revolutionary horror film nor will it likely be remembered 10 years from now save for the 3-D effects. In the end, it doesn’t really matter though. Ellis and company knew exactly what both the diehard fans and casual audiences wanted to see: a gruesome but highly entertaining horror film to close out the summer. And in comparison to the more serious movies available in theatres right now, especially the vile abomination that is Rob Zombie’s “Halloween II,” “The Final Destination” deserves to be seen. By the way, I seriously doubt this will be the final entry. Death always finds a way.