I don’t know when it was decided that comic book movie blockbusters were required to have multiple villains in them; I’m guessing it was during pre-production of Batman Returns when someone realized that more people would pay to see Michelle Pfeiffer in a leather catsuit than would be willing to see Danny DeVito dressed like a penguin. Good call there, but it set a bad precedent, and they really need to cut that shit out.

The biggest problem with Spider-Man 3 — there are way more characters than the movie can handle — is so obvious I can’t believe that they just didn’t realize it during the production. It’s more likely that somebody at Sony-Columbia or Marvel (or maybe it was even Sam Raimi himself) decided that there was so much money riding on the movie, they’d better cram as much as they could into it. Of course, the end result is a muddled mess that’s getting pummeled in the reviews.

It’s actually kind of a shame the movie’s getting such bad word of mouth, because it’s really not that bad. Or at least, for every bad thing it does (emo Peter Parker, hyperactive pacing, and it’s about an hour too long); it does something else well (disco Peter Parker, Bruce Campbell and Stan Lee’s cameos, and insistence on keeping the goofy character-development stuff). The action scenes are really well thought out and choreographed and are suitably over the top. But the editing is confusing and the effects seem rushed, so it all cancels out. I actually liked the big team-up scenes during the finale, but it took such a long time to set them up, it robbed them of any emotional value. Everything seems like it was better in concept than it is in execution.

For all the big movie franchise bloat, it definitely still feels like a Sam Raimi movie, and a Marvel comic (for better or worse). I don’t want to contradict Kirsten Dunst or anything, but the person keeping these things from being total flops is Sam Raimi. I don’t buy into the whole auteur theory, but the scenes that really work in the Spider-Man franchise are the ones that have the mark of Raimi’s style. In Spider-Man 2, it was Doc Octopus’s awakening in the hospital, filmed in full-on Evil Dead-style.

And in this one, it’s the insistence that Peter Parker is, above everything else, a total nerd. I know enough about Marvel comics to know the story about the black suit and the alien symbiote, and I’d read reports that Spider-Man 3 has a subplot (one of 1000, as it turns out) where Parker starts acting like a total dick while under the influence of the suit. I was fearing the worst, but as it turns out, those are some of the best moments of the movie. Simply because Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire are completely unafraid of looking stupid. So he takes advantage of women by insisting they make him milk and cookies, he sasses back to his professor, he struts down New York streets to a funk soundtrack only he can hear, and the worst offense of all — he steals the spotlight from Mary Jane by using his spider powers for an elaborate jazz dance routine. I’m sure if I were a 12-year-old who’d been looking forward to a big action movie, I would’ve thought it was “lame” or even “gay,” but I was loving it.

Clearly, there was a force fighting to keep the good, goofy fun in the movie. So why couldn’t they have fought to save Venom for part 4, and keep this movie down to a manageable cast? If you need to sell cool black-suit action figures, one of my friends had the perfect suggestion — introduce that stuff for the final showdown against Sandman, and then save the full story for the (inevitable) sequel.

Ah well, maybe the sequel will just focus on the Lizard, since they’ve had the guy sitting around for two movies now. If they’ve got to add somebody else, I vote for Kraven the Hunter, just because of the costume. Who wouldn’t want to see somebody having to wear that in a live action movie? I respectfully suggest Bruce Campbell to play him.

And my favorite line of Spider-Man 3: when the cops first spot Thomas Hayden Church as Sandman, and one of them says, “Hey, that’s that guy from the prison break.” Just because it sets up the obvious response: “No, that’s that guy from the ‘Wings.’ ‘Prison Break’ is a different show.”

You’d have to be pretty cynical, or have already given up on the series altogether, not to think that this week’s episode of “Lost” was pretty damn cool. The guys behind the show have admitted to being big fans of Stephen King, which probably explains why this couldn’t have been a better TV adaptation of a Stephen King story unless it’d actually been based on a Stephen King story.

Jacob’s cabin was hella creepy, the kind of potential for surreal scares the show has been hinting at ever since the pilot episode. (But rarely delivering on). I could tell that this season has made me gunshy — when Ben was standing at the door and saying, “once you go through here, you can never go back,” I knew the ending credits were about to start. But hey, we were only 40 minutes into the show! They actually set something up and delivered on it!

More than that, though, is the fact that they’re finally showing signs they understand the balance between creeps and revelations you have to maintain to live up to the potential of the series. It feels less like a lot of hand-waving and “Ooh, look, isn’t that spooky?!? Really cool stuff is coming up later, we promise!” and more like they’ve finally got the balls to put their cards on the table and start coming to conclusions.

Of course, despite everything we were shown, there wasn’t actually a lot of brand-new stuff revealed tonight. Most of it just confirmed what we’d already seen or already suspected. The trick is in the presentation; seeing it from a different perspective made everything seem new and more significant. It’s easy to assume that Ben’s visions of his mother are from the same source as Eko’s visions of his brother (or Jack’s visions of his dad, and Kate’s horse). We finally get some confirmation that the Dharma Initiative is a different group than “the Others,” and we see what form the fight between them took. The whole business with the van and Roger Workman was too pat and contrived, but at least they snipped off another loose end.

Which hints at something clever, but frustrating, about what they did with this episode — by repeating some of the stuff that we already knew, they’re saying that these are the questions they want you to be thinking about. They’ve built up a ton of dangling plot threads over the years, and I suspect they’ve realized it’s going to be impossible to tie up every single detail the internets have speculated about. So they’re repeating the questions they have answers to, and telling us to just forget about the rest. The episode is called “The Man Behind the Curtain,” after all.

There were only two big new things in the episode: meeting Jacob, and meeting Nestor Carbonell’s character 40 years ago. (The cliffhanger was new too, of course, and I thought it was pretty well done). Again, the trick was in the presentation. The scene in the cabin was given a big build-up and made the focus, and it paid off.

The other meeting was just as significant for the questions it raised — obviously, why hasn’t he aged, but also, why isn’t he the leader since he’s been on the island for longer — but was treated a lot more casually. To me, that’s the surest sign the show’s getting back on track, when you can have a conversation that’s significant, but it doesn’t spend the entire time giving you music cues letting you know that it’s significant. It’s a sign that they’re confident they have enough story to tell, and they’re not forced to drag out every new minor plot element to make it last an entire hour.

And of course, the castaways are talking to each other again, for whatever good it does. Having them share what they know only solves half the problem; they’ve got to actually do something about it. And I tell you that Jack and Juliet better have one hell of a master plan cooking to warrant all the nonsense they’ve been doing for the past four episodes. The only time you see a couple of people being more annoyingly coy and smugly withholding information is when you listen to the “Lost” podcasts with the exec producers.

In robotics (and increasingly used in talking about CGI), the term “Uncanny Valley” refers to the point at which the attempt to make an artificial character more human-like backfires, and the character becomes more repulsive and disturbing than realistic.

Scott McCloud gives a simple, easily understandable explanation for why this happens in Understanding Comics: humans naturally look for patterns, and we want to anthropomorphize inanimate objects to better relate to them. So we turn power outlets into faces, and simple combinations of lines and circles into living, breathing people. In fact, the tendency is so hard-wired that once we recognize a face in something, it’s difficult not to see it anymore. Your brain wants to fill in the missing detail.

But once that extra detail is supplied for you, your brain stops trying to turn it into a human and instead starts to focus on the details that make it not human. The glassy, unfocused stare, or the eyes that don’t blink, or the way the mouth doesn’t move quite right. And as a result, a bunch of simple shapes can seem more like a person than the real thing. Or the simple, stylized dwarves in Snow White are more convincing and relatable than the rotoscoped human characters.

“Heroes” is getting precariously close to the edge of the uncanny valley. When it started out, it was “the show you hate to love”: filled with corny attempts at symbolism, clunky performances, sub-par dialogue, but still completely engaging. If only for the promise of seeing somebody getting the top of his head sawed off, or a still-living person splayed out on an autopsy table, or a guy escaping kidnappers by leaping into the air and taking off like a fighter jet.

But apparently somebody at NBC just couldn’t leave well enough alone, because they started trying to make it into a genuinely good series. They’ve still got the gross-out shots and the stunt casting and the improbable plot twists, and are adding signs that they might actually be starting to understand what they’re doing. Annoying and unnecessary characters are being weeded out, or made less annoying. The show is spending less time marveling at itself, presenting super powers we’ve already seen as if they were these amazing and novel concepts that will just blow your mind; now, they’re actually fleshing out the characters and showing them using their powers.

The twists and revelations are actually getting pretty interesting. For a while it looked like Isaac’s power was just to paint like Tim Sale, but they added a great twist of having the supervillain’s paintings come out heavily stylized and demented. Last night, they did a genuinely creepy and effective scene that revealed the new villain’s power isn’t shapeshifting, but making people see whatever she wants them to see. And they also put an interesting twist on their main villain, having him kill people all season but horrified to discover that he may be responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

And one of the episodes that aired a while back, “Company Man,” has been getting a lot of praise for being a turning point in the series — it had the hokey twists and the big climax with the cheerleader having her flesh burned off by a nuclear blast, but also added real characterization and a surprisingly moving ending.

The problem is that as “Heroes” approaches a Real Live TV Show, you stop filling over the plot holes and ignoring the clunky dialogue, and start to notice its flaws. I shouldn’t have to care that the characters are able to recognize the Nuclear Man from drawings that don’t look remotely like him. I shouldn’t be thinking that the plot has gotten so convoluted that there’s absolutely no sense of cause and effect anymore; things just happen randomly. It shouldn’t bother me that people just pop in and out of scenes, often in locations hundreds of miles apart from each other, only to deliver a couple of lines of dialogue that don’t amount to much of anything. And it was somehow more fun when you got the sense nobody involved knew much about comic books; now, the references to Jack Kirby and The Watchmen seem forced.

None of that stuff used to matter, back when the show was just a cartoon. But they’re going to have to come to a decision at some point — the whole bomb in Manhattan thing is so convoluted and overblown at this point, that I couldn’t really care less about it. The real explosion is coming when the show gets to take itself so seriously that it collapses under the weight of its own hype.

Word on the street is that Blizzard is going to be announcing a Starcraft-themed massively multiplayer game at an upcoming event in South Korea. (For people who don’t know videogames, but are still reading this for some reason: Starcraft was a real-time strategy game released back in 1998. There was one expansion pack, but there’ve been no sequels, other than a spin-off game that was in development but never released. Even now, almost 10 years later, the game is ridiculously popular, especially in South Korea.)

The Penny Arcade guys make a good argument that the rumor is believable. Every time a person on the internet claims that Blizzard would be cannibalizing sales from its own World of Warcraft by releasing a competing massively multiplayer game, one of the Vivendi executives swimming through the corporate money bin lets out a derisive chuckle. And then asks his manservant for some more lotion, because the newer 100 bills can chafe.

Now, I didn’t like the original Starcraft, as much as I tried to. In fact, it’s a perfect example of My Real-Time Strategy Problem. It seems so much like a game I should like, especially because it has spaceships and lasers. But every time I attempt to play, it just ends in sadness. It’s not that I suck at the game, it’s just that it’s ultimately unsatisfying.

On top of that, I’ve canceled my World of Warcraft account out of frustration with the game and the simple fact I wasn’t having any fun with it. That game quickly lost any semblance of storytelling and just devolved into grinding levels and dealing with obnoxious people hopelessly fixated on increasing their damage per second by .1. And Starcraft devotees are even more hard-core than that; people “playing” that game get downright scary.

And on top of all that, I’ve got issues with Blizzard as a company, since they kind of screwed over a bunch of my friends (who’ve all gone on to better jobs, but still). They still get points for their continued Mac OS support, which can’t make any financial sense. But apart from that, they seem to have sucked all the fun out of videogames and reduced it to money and stat-crunching.

But here’s the disturbing thing: if Blizzard does announce a Starcraft massively-multiplayer game, I’ll snatch it up without hesitation. An engine like WoW’s but with a couple of years of extra development, plus a setting that’s potentially much cooler than orcs and dwarves — they’d have to include space travel, right? And with all their faults, the one thing Blizzard gets right is the first impression; for the first week or so, WoW was fantastic. Diablo 2 was amazing the first couple of times as well. That obsession with a perfectly-balanced game mechanic may doom all their games to tedium, but it also means that the introductory period is a hell of a lot of fun.

Right now, since it exists as a Schrödinger’s Game, there’s infinite potential for it to be awesome. What if they broke from the WoW pattern and actually made a massively multiplayer game based on an RTS, instead of Diablo with orcs? What if there’s a chance for real cooperation and strategy between players to accomplish a goal, instead of just solo level grinding or dungeons that reset as soon as you leave? What if it were a truly epic interstellar trading game, taking as much from Star Control and Master of Orion as it did from Starcraft?

Based on my past history with the franchise and the company, there’s a 99.9% chance that I’ll open the box just to find another dead cat of a MMORPG. But fortunately for Blizzard and Vivendi, my purchases are driven solely by that .1% of potential radicalness.

And incidentally: what the hell is wrong with the internets these days? An energy drink called “Zergling Rush” is such an obvious non-joke I’d expected to see hundreds of variants on it out there. I shouldn’t be having to Photoshop this crap myself, people.

There was one movie I forgot to mention in my last post, Hot Fuzz. And the fact that I was talking about every movie I’ve seen in the last three months and forgot to mention it, pretty much says it all.

I’ve got to be one of the only internet nerds who wasn’t blown away by Shaun of the Dead. (I was interested in Hot Fuzz mostly because of the Grindhouse trailer for Don’t). It seemed like a great concept that lost steam as the filmmakers just gave up and fell back on the movies they already know how to make — zombie movies and romantic comedies. There’s nothing inherently wrong with “genre-busting,” but if you don’t do it right, it ends up being tedious and disjointed. When Shaun of the Dead reached the attack on the pub, it stopped being an innovative comedy or even a romantic comedy and just ended up being a mediocre zombie movie.

And Hot Fuzz follows the exact same formula, just replacing “zombie movie” with “buddy cop action movie” and “romantic comedy” with “English countryside murder mystery.” It hits exactly the same notes, right down to the plot-derailing climax and the fake-out wrap-up at the end. There’s nothing wrong with any individual part, and it’s actually pretty clever throughout and has plenty of genuinely funny moments. But apart from the hilariously over-the-top gore, there’s nothing that seems particularly inspired. (Impaling a guy on a church steeple was brilliant, though). (And I did like that the characters’ default exclamation was “By the power of Greyskull!”).

At about an hour and fifteen minutes in, I was ready for it to be over. But then I realized they were going to take every single set-up they’d done so far and wrap it up with a callback, and that was going to take another 45 minutes. A nerdy friend of mine described it as spending the last third of the movie just popping jokes off the stack. You could exactly predict what the next joke was going to be, just by going backwards through the movie in your head — now he’s going to call her a hag, now he’s going to fire his gun in the air and yell “Aaaaahhhh!”, and so on.

The general consensus of the reviews I’ve read says that it’s better than average, but falls just short of being great. And the concept of making fun/paying homage to over-the-top action movies isn’t as inspired as making a zombie romantic comedy. I’d pretty much agree with that, but I think it’s a better movie than Shaun of the Dead in a lot of ways. I just wish they’d shaken some things up some more, and had edited it down a lot. B+

Crunch mode or no, Netflix still keeps taking my money, so I’ve got to stay on top of the latest in years-old movies I never got around to seeing while they were still relevant. And if you’re horrified at the thought that I’ve been watching movies and not putting my opinions of them up on the internets, then you’ll be relieved to see this post. Although I hate to steal from Lore Sjöberg and Entertainment Weekly, I’ll give each of them a letter grade.

Halloween
I’d never actually seen this movie, so I used the Rifftrax as an excuse to watch it. I guess I must’ve missed the sell-by date, because I just don’t get how this movie spawned such a huge following. The Rifftrax guys try their best, but most of the jokes all come down to one fact: the movie’s just not that scary. I don’t even see how it was that scary in 1978, because there are plenty of scenes in Psycho and The Birds that are a lot worse on shock value alone, much less quality-of-filmmaking. Movie on its own: C. With Rifftrax: B.

The Wicker Man
Another one I watched because of Rifftrax. And I guess you have to give them credit for trying, but they still couldn’t make this pile of crap watchable. It really is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. You may get the impression from “Best Scenes from The Wicker Man“ that those scenes are just the tip of the iceberg, and the whole movie is full of so-bad-it’s-good laughs. Don’t be fooled! It’s incredibly stupid, tedious, and just a total waste of time. It’s not even made interesting by its misogyny; it’s more like being trapped in a long conversation with a boring, self-important guy who has issues with women. I don’t like to turn my opinion about a movie into a personal attack on the creators, but I really hope this ends Neil LaBute’s career. The movie: F-. With Rifftrax: F.

Clerks II
A lot of lame, a joke that seems like it has potential (Jay doing the Jame Gumb bit from Silence of the Lambs) until it goes too far (he does the full frontal bit — yeah, we got the joke like five minutes ago), then a lot more lame. And then one great, genuinely funny moment: “Oooh, cake!” And then more lame. So in other words, it’s another Kevin Smith movie.C

Stranger Than Fiction
Not bad. It’s not as good as I thought it was going to be, or as good as the concept promises, but it’s got plenty of nice moments. You get the sense that this was somebody’s dream project, since it went overkill on the casting and the special effects (gratuitous graphics that are neat but unnecessary). In the end, it’s just not quite as deep or meaningful as it makes itself out to be. B

School of Rock
You’ve got Jack Black and a bunch of child actors. That’s a great start, but there’s got to be a way to make your movie more annoying. Cast Sarah Silverman as the uptight authority figure villain. Good, keep going. Give it a plot cribbed from Meatballs and The Bad News Bears and about 1,000 other Hollywood take-on-the-establishment movies from the 70s and 80s. Getting warmer… Make it not funny enough that you can ignore the plot, but make the plot so vapid it makes the message of Disney features seem deep and insightful? Almost there, but keep at it! Have the lead go on about how kids today are completely ignorant of any art created more than 5 years ago, and then steal a joke from Annie Hall. Congratulations! You’ve just perfectly described a movie that’s so inessential, it’s downright offensive! D+

Little Miss Sunshine
This is an independent movie. From the Fox Searchlight opening, to the dysfunctional family dinner establishing scene, to the shots of blue sky through a freeway overpass, to having two characters giving a movie-summary dialogue on a pier overlooking the ocean — there’s not much more they could’ve done to assert their indie cred short of casting Parker Posey. It’s not bad, it’s just completely unsurprising and forgettable.

Sure, it’s got better performances and a slightly smarter script than your “average Hollywood movie,” whatever that is. But do we really need yet another movie with the message to love your family despite their flaws and to be true to yourself? At this point, making a movie that says “don’t conform to other people’s expectations” is probably the most conformist thing you can do. If National Lampoon’s Vacation and Napoleon Dynamite didn’t already exist: B- Because they do: C-

Children of Men
I only saw one of the movies nominated for best picture last year (see above), but I can’t imagine any of them were better than Children of Men. On a pure technical level, it’s awe-inspiring. There hasn’t been another movie in recent memory that so consistently made me think, “I would never, ever be able to do anything like this.” Film students are always instructed to revere the long tracking shot at the opening of Touch of Evil, but Children of Men has at least four of them, and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. And they weave in and out of buildings, past explosions, in speeding cars attacked by guerilla fighters, and through apartment complexes in a barrage of gunfire.

It’s astounding, and what’s more, none of it is just movie wankery. Alfonso Cuarón says in one of the documentaries that he wanted the movie to be filmed in a realist style. That one decision meant an incredible amount of work, and it was the perfect decision. You’re never for one second given the chance to believe that what you’re seeing isn’t really happening. That clarity of vision goes through the whole movie; every decision made was the right one. And the real genius is knowing how and when to incorporate the surreal into the hyper-realism — the Pink Floyd pig floating above a factory, a deer wandering through an abandoned school, or a rowboat alone on a fog-covered ocean — those images stand out as if they’d been fired directly into your cerebral cortex.

The movie was so technically well-made, in fact, that it didn’t have to convey its message as well as it does. Even calling it a “message” sounds trite. It’s more of a feeling, a reminder that even in a world of horror and despair, a world where the dysfunction is so big and complex and omnipresent you believe there’s no way to fix it, there’s always hope. And it conveys this idea not with a crucial plot point, or a character’s monologue summing everything up 2/3 of the way through the movie before the final climax, but by putting you through hell and showing you the way out. If I were one of the Academy voting people, I would be downright ashamed not to have picked this as the best movie of last year. A+

I’ve been coming down to LA so often that I think I’ve finally reached an amicable relationship with the city. As a resident of San Francisco, I’m contractually obligated to hate LA, and I still do. But now that I’m not looking for the city to impress me anymore, and I’m just interested in the simpler things, we’ve come to a chilly but civil relationship. As part of our relationship therapy, I’m going to say two things I like about LA:

The KTLA morning show has Michaela Pereira, who was my favorite TechTV host. The multiple-host local morning news show format is about the most vapid thing possible, and I still would never go out of my way to watch this one. But waking up in a strange hotel and being greeted by Pereira makes a foreign city almost tolerable.

And this trip I wised up, instead of wandering around Glendale trying to find a tolerable dinner restaurant. I checked on yelp.com for a recommendation and ended up going to their top-recommended sushi place in Burbank, Sushi Dake. It was every bit as good as the reviews said, a tiny hole in the wall next to an aquarium in a strip mall that had better sushi than any place I’ve ever been. The magic of the internets in action.

So I guess the lesson is to set your sights lower. With this attitude, I could actually get to like Los Angeles.

The Settlers of Catan is the game I’ve been most looking forward to on Xbox Live, and it was finally released today. I played two games against the AI, and I totally won both of them.

My initial impression is that they did about as good a job of translating it to a console as possible. There are some hokey button combinations, and it can at times be hard to get an indication of the status of the game. I felt a little lost not having the cheat sheet of development costs visible at all times (you press the left trigger to get it). But at the same time, the setup is so much faster than the board game, that you can play more games in less time, meaning that it’s easier to remember the costs.

Since the game relies so heavily on trading between players, they’ve got a fancy interface for that, and it works pretty well. Giant arrows eliminate all the “Wait, you were asking for sheep? I thought you were offering!” that other players, never me are guilty of in the real game. I haven’t tried playing against humans yet, so I don’t know if the trade interface slows everything down.

So it’s highly recommended, if you’ve got an Xbox 360. Definitely if you’re a fan of the board game, but even if you’re just curious about it. Plus, you can play online against people in your friends list. If anyone wants to take me on, my GamerTag is ZombieGrundy. But be warned: I’m a master of the game and will totally own you..