WEBLOG:
I’ve been thinking long and hard about what long-term personal project to commit my time to next, and it’s really hard to decide. I have so many unfinished novels, screenplays, short films, paintings, graphic novels, music…etc and only one lifetime. I try not to judge the personal projects according to their commercial appeal, as my past experience have taught me that unless you enjoy it and do it for the love, you’ll never truly feel fulfilled. But the problem is that each project appeals to different sides of me, and when I enjoy them all equally, it’s not hard to see how it can be curse as much as it is a blessing. Maybe I need to sit down with the people I trust and pitch all of these different personal projects to them and see if they vote for a particular one more than others, and then dedicate the next few years of my life to complete just that one project.
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I personally cannot stand games that don’t allow you to save whenever you need to save–especially when there’s a long stretch of combat and if you die towards the end you’ll have to start the mission all over again. I’m in the middle of such nonsense with Mass Effect right now and it’s driving me nuts, so I took a break and started on Fallout 3. I picked Fallout 3 as the game to tackle after Dead Space because it’s the highest rated Xbox 360 game to date, and remember I had mentioned in the past that sometimes I feel like an alien among humans because my taste just seems so different from everyone else–well, I really wanted to love Fallout 3, but ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! How can a game that has one of the most laughably bad animation, voice acting, and writing I’ve witnessed in a game in years rank so high on the critic’s list of top Xbox 360 games? Talk about cognitive dissonance! The ridiculously high scores in the reviews absolutely did not reflect the game I’ve been playing several hours into–not even close. If I wasn’t the type to believe that game publishers actually have enough power and money to buy off all the game review sites, I’d think that’s exactly what’s happened. I’m going to give the game a little bit more time, but I just don’t see what’s so great about it.
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Quickie movie reviews:
Vicky Christina Barcelona – If there’s one thing I can say for sure about Woody Allen films is that they are at the very least entertaining and smarter than the average films out there. This one was OK, but not great. The one thing that I cannot get over while watching the film was that to date, I’ve seen plenty of movies with Scarlett Johanson in them, but the only film I’ve ever liked her acting in was Lost In Translation (which happens to be one of my favorite films). Other than that one film, she seems to behave in that same sterile, slightly wooden manner in all the other films.
